http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/shakespeare_20alarm_20clock#1056301200 Now, see, this one I love.  How about an alarm clock that wakes you up by reciting Shakespeare?  Even better, though I don’t see anyone saying it in the comments, would be if it also played appropriate quote when you hit the snooze button.

5:58…5:59….6:00 “O now be gone, more light and light it grows!” *snooze* “It was the nightingale, and not the lark, that pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear.  Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day.”

Yes, I deliberately switched up those quotes. The problem with the whole concept of, well, a concept alarm clock is that it has to be the best at so many things.  It has to be a good radio (these days, perhaps, an MP3 player).  It has to be a good clock (some people like well lit LED, some people like traditional analog, some people like large digits, some have it broadcast onto the ceiling…)  You can’t just take a single idea like “Have the alarm be Shakespeare” and have the rest just work itself out. A long time ago as part of a brainstorming exercise, myself and some other engineers were trying to dream up the perfect alarm clock.  The idea that I had was an alarm clock that immediately started reading the news to you, so you could stay in bed with your eyes closed for a few minutes while still being productive.  It would be voice controlled so you could say things like “Sports!” and have it jump to sports, skipping over Traffic.  If you said nothing it would just go through all its stories in a row, like the local news.  But unlike the local news, for any given story you might say “More” or “Pause” or “Repeat” to focus on something in particular. These days I know exactly how I’d build that, almost.  It’s basically a podcast receiver, sitting on your nightstand, with voice control.  You program it with some news/sports/local related RSS feeds, it refreshes them as fast as it can, and then it reads them to you.  At the time I saw two problems – true local news feeds were never up to date so you couldn’t get a good traffic or weather feed.  Second, you’d have to rely on text-to-speech since the freshness of the data would preclude having somebody actually record and post an audio file.  I think the first is pretty well solved at this point (Twitter, even?) but the second is still a bit tricky. Ok, you Shakespeare geeks don’t care about tech stuff like that.  The idea just brought back memories.   I may take this over to my other geeky blog and continue it there.

Where do I find this stuff?  I stumbled across a repository of “half baked ideas” where people post the start of something, and then others help them decide whether it’s a good idea, whether’s already been done, and so on.  So naturally, like I always do, I find the search button and type Shakespeare.  What do I find? Exploding Shakespeare

When I was in High School, I hated every minute of the school produced Shakespearean plays we were forced to sit through. Imagine, though, that instead of committing suicide, Romeo and Juliet blow up. Just like that. Damn, what a great play.

It does give you a sampling of the quality of ideas in the directory, but some of the commentary is pretty funny.

BOTTOM
There are things in this comedy of Pyramus and Thisbe that will never please. First, Pyramus must draw a sword to kill himself; which the ladies cannot abide. How answer you that?

SNOUT
By’r lakin, a parlous fear!

STARVELING
I believe we must leave the killing out, when all is done.

BOTTOM
Not a whit: I have a device to make all well.
*BOOM*

I see so many random Shakespeare references all day long that I’ve learned to ignore most of them.  Then again, sometimes they’re funny enough to merit a report.  Here we have a seemingly innocuous story about Verizon and Google getting together to create an iPad rival tablet.  What’s this I see in the middle of the article?

Best Case

Google’s ready to prove its tablet mettle, and Verizon wants an answer to AT&T’s iPad. It’s Shakespearean, almost, kind of! Within months, AT&T and Verizon will fall deeply in love, and commit suicide due to an easily avoidable misunderstanding. No, wait, wrong play. I wanted the one where EVERYONE FIGHTS EVERYONE, AND IT IS AWESOME.

You see, people?  Make your Shakespeare references funnier and I’ll link them more :).  I’m looking at you, Huffington Post.

http://www.marionette.com/ I don’t really know what this is.  It doesn’t appear to be a store (there is no catalog, and no prices), but there’s not nearly enough material for it to be a gallery.  It’s Shakespeare marionettes, which is cool – Macbeth, Bottom, the witches, etc…. But it’s also paintings, in a similar style.  Perhaps they paint it first and then make the marionette? Either way, it’s some neat stuff to look at that I’d not seen, and I’ve been scanning the net for Shakespeare links for a long long time.

Thanks to everybody that took part in my little survey.  I’m happy to see that “merchandise” was beating all the other choices pretty soundly (although "tip jar" made enough of a showing that you’ll notice one over in the left margin, in case you have enough t-shirts and bumper stickers … )
I’ve actually had a store set up for quite some time, but after consulting with some folks that make their living at such things I realized how out of my league I was.  I had ideas for a handful of slogans, and they’re telling me to have a minimum of 100 products before I open my doors. Holy cow.
But that presents a problem, since I don’t know what people want.  So, I’m going for it.  Please feel to check out what I’ve got so far and see if you like.  Give me some feedback?  Be gentle, it’s a work in progress.
Thanks! UPDATED: Peak? Did I really title this post Sneak Peak last night? I’m going to plead sleep stupidity on that one, I’m normally a very good speler. 😉