Steve Jobs may no longer be with us, but this new Apple commercial had my jaw on the floor for every word, before I even knew what it was a commercial for:

I heard Robin Williams say, “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race,” and thought, “Well holy sh*t that’s going on the blog.” Ask me again why Shakespeare is relevant. Go on, ask me. Because I know what my answer is going to be.

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” Answer. That you are here – that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

Working on a post over on Reddit, I just came up with this idea for a game. No, not a #hashtag game, an actual physical game that teachers can use in the classroom:

I call it Death Bingo.  Let’s say that you’re studying Hamlet.  There are … 21? characters if you count Yorick and the Ghost.  So maybe we just do a 4×4 grid. That leaves enough variety that each card will leave a few characters off.

Each grid is randomly populated with character names.  If you get Ghost or Yorick, free space! Woe to you if you see names like Voltimand, Cornelius and Reynaldo.

Now start working your way through the play. Every time a character dies, put a big red X through his or her space.

Whoever gets 4 in a row first wins!

Does not work well with the comedies.

I just learned that one of the Ancestry.com sites (the UK version) is going to be putting a million documents up online, including William Shakespeare’s.

When I first heard that Marion Cotillard would replace Natalie Portman as Lady MacBeth in the upcoming Scottish movie, I was disappointed. I don’t really know anything about Ms. Cotillard, and I don’t really care all that much about acting ability(*) – I just think that Natalie Portman’s presence tends to bring a very large young adult male following into the theatres, and I thought Macbeth would be a good place to do that.