Month: November 2010

For those who don’t follow the comments, I figure I’d promote this interesting question because it’s a real head scratcher:
There were certainly guns in Shakespeare’s time. But in any of the plays, did Shakespeare ever write a stage direction requiring that one be fired? We can’t find one. Why would that be? If it’s a simple matter of safety – they didn’t have prop guns and you didn’t want to fire a gun in a closed theatre – then the next logical question would be, Did any of his contemporaries write in shooting stage directions?
(*) Chekhov’s Gun is the literary rule that says, “If you hung a pistol over the fireplace in act 1, you need to fire it in act 2.” Shakespeare apparently never fired them, so did he bring them on stage at least?

So if you saw a list called The 50 Most Hated Characters in Literary History, and you knew it was tagged Shakespeare, who would you expect to find?
I suppose we could debate what exactly hate means, and for that matter what exactly literary history means, for that matter – but for the purposes of this list lets just call it “characters that audiences love to hate.”
Did you guess Iago? That was easy.
Well Shakespeare shows up in 3 spots, so what are the other two? I have to admit, I wouldn’t have guessed. I don’t think I’m particularly surprised, but those aren’t the ones I would have picked.

So, somebody sends me a link on Twitter yesterday, and I see that it’s a video of bikini girls reciting Shakespeare while eating popcorn. Declaring it a bit NSFW I save it for later.
I come back later, only to discover that it’s been taken down for a “spam/scam/deceptive” complaint. No idea what that means, I’ve never even seen YouTube use that excuse. Made me sad. If there’s one person that needs to see this, it’s me. For science, you understand. Research.
Good news, though! It’s back. Check it out, and I’ll see you in a couple of minutes.

Every now and then you think that the universe is so small that somebody’s on the other side of it, creating something solely for you, you know? Somebody out there loves me :). It is so corny (popcorny, even! ha!) it’s stupid. But that’s sort of the point. You should see me here on the couch, watching the video with my wife sitting next to me, cringing and screaming every time they mispronounce a word while alternately commenting that this one’s got no hips, and that one’s got a fake rack.

The gimmick appears to be something to do with The Apprentice tv show for the Popcorn, Indiana product. If you don’t feel like watching the video, by the way, the girls keep pausing in their soliloquoy to wolf down handfuls of popcorn. Oh, and their bikini tops are made out of popcorn. 🙂

Now the only thing that makes me sad is that it’s clearly labelled “1 of 4” and I can’t find the other 3 parts. :)! Maybe it’s going to be a series? A geek can dream. Can I put in a request that for the next one they do the mudwrestling scene between Hermia and Helena from Midsummer?

[ Well, that was annoying. See updated post for the real story. ]

These names – Romeo and Brittney – kept coming up on my newsfeeds over the last couple of days. Given how overused the name Romeo is these days, and attaching no special significance to the name Brittney, I skipped them. Most of them.
Turns out that Romeo and Brittney is to be a new “literate teen comedy” in the style of Ten Things I Hate About You (which, as we know, was based on Shrew – and was also quite a success, spinning off it’s own tv show).

Karen Gillan has landed a lead role as a time-travelling Juliet in David Baddiel’s directorial debut, Romeo And Brittney.

The Scottish beauty, best known for playing Doctor Who’s feisty companion Amy Pond, will play a high school teenager from New Jersey who finds herself travelling back in time to “mythical 13th-century Verona” in William Shakespeare’s Romeo And Juliet, reported Deadline.

That could be cool. I love the whole Dr. Who connection, what with David Tennant and all.