As we sit here in the northeast part of the country trying to stay out of the 100degree temperatures (that’d be USA, and Fahrenheit, for my international readers ;)) I can’t help but be reminded of the lesson I once tried to give my daughter in what Sonnet 18 means. 

Shakespeare wonders whether comparing someone to a summer’s day would be nice. After all, people like summer. It’s nice outside, you play in the sunshine.  But then again, sometimes summer’s not so great.  Sometimes rough winds shake the trees.  And sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines.  Know what that means?  The eye of heaven? That’s the sun – that big eye-looking thing up in the sky.  Sometimes it’s just too darned hot.

Kind of like…today.  When Shakespeare said “too hot the eye of Heaven shines”, this is exactly the kind of weather he was talking about. 

I would be beyond thrilled if I heard my local weatherman break out a reference like that, but I’m not expecting it. 🙂

I feel bad that I dropped the ball on this one, but Woot! just held one of it’s derby contests and the subject was Shakespeare.  That’s right, dozens upon dozens of Shakespeare t-shirts to vote on and choose from.  Alas, since this is Woot after all, each design was only up for a day.  Reader Matt had his design, “Read the Whole Book!” place 3rd – congratulations to Matt!  I’m not sure the rules but he apparently gets several more days up on the site (though not on the regular shirt.woot.com front page).  So if you’re not crazy about the shirts I’ve been cranking out and want something a little more graphic intensive (the Woot rules required that it be a graphic design, not just text), go check out Matt’s entry and help a fellow geek out!

I’d heard that Senator Robert Byrd, who passed away recently at the age of 92, liked to quote Shakespeare on the Senate floor (though, surprisingly, I can find no reference of ever having blogged that). What I did not know is how often or how well he did it.  This NY Times article has come indeed to bury Byrd, not to praise him, and pulls no punches in citing Byrd’s mistakes (“the evil that men do lives after them” comes up), but credit is given where it is due.  The man knew his stuff.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/opinion/04marche.html

Anybody familiar with this book, and/or the upcoming movie?  Check out the description that caught my eye:

Meet Oskar Schell, an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player,
Shakespearean actor, jeweler, pacifist, correspondent with Stephen
Hawking and Ringo Starr. He is nine years old. And he is on an urgent,
secret search through the five boroughs of New York. His mission is to
find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who
died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Of course, the Shakespearean bit could be all of about 2 lines of dialogue in the introduction of the character.  But I prefer to imagine something more along the lines of “Searching for Bobby Fischer”, where the kid just exudes this sort of genius for everything he does.

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=64738