This probably won’t work, but what have I got to lose? It’s my site after all :).
My 8yr old is doing the Girl Scout Cookie thing, and as every parent knows the days of door-to-door are long gone, and we’re the ones who are pestered to hit up our coworkers and such. Over the years the Girl Scouts have really turned this into a science, though, I’ll give them that. They’ve even started really pushing the “Donate My Cookies To The Troops” option, so every coworker who says “I’d love to but I can’t, I’m on a diet” no longer has that excuse – you can still buy some cookies and send them to our boys overseas.
So, anybody wanna buy some cookies for the troops? 🙂 (I’m not even going to pretend that I can ship you cookies.) They’re $4/box. Here’s how we make it work – email me that you’re interested, I’ll get your details and then you can PayPal me the money. If I had Shakespeare-related rewards to offer I would do so, but right now I don’t know what that would be exactly so I can’t promise anything.
This depends entirely on you trusting me, of course, which is why in any normal circumstance I would never even bother. But I think at this point I’ve got a fairly loyal enough readership that at least some of you know perfectly well that you can trust me, I haven’t screwed anybody yet. It may still flop, but that won’t be because you don’t trust me, it’ll be because you don’t love America. 🙂 <— smiley clearly pointed out, for the humor impaired.
So, consider it an experiment. If you want to support the site by helping my kid reach whatever the next milestone is in her “If I sell 50 boxes I get a stuffed animal but if I sell 80 boxes I get a bigger stuffed animal!” quest, and make some soldiers fat in the process :), let’s try it and see if we can make it work.
If you think it’s a stupid idea and you’re annoyed at me for bringing it up, then move on, nothing to see, won’t happen again.

First Leslie Nielsen, now Anne Francis. Immortalized in the theme song to Rocky Horror Picture Show ( “See androids fighting Brad and Janet….Anne Francis stars in, Forbidden Planet….”), Anne Francis has followed Leslie Nielsen up to that great sound studio in the sky, passing away from complications related to pancreatic cancer.
If you want a walk down memory lane, go read Ms. Francis’ IMDB page. She was in, and I’m being very literal about this, everything:
Rawhide. Route 66. Dr. Kildare. Twilight Zone. Ben Casey. Man from UNCLE. The Fugitive. Mission: Impossible. My Three Sons. Gunsmoke. Columbo. Ironside. Kung Fu. Barnaby Jones. SWAT. Wonder Woman. Hawaii Five-O. CHiPs. Trapper John MD. Love Boat. Fantasy Island. Hardcastle and McCormack. Jake and the Fatman. Matlock. Golden Girls. Murder She Wrote. Quincy. Vega$.Charlie’s Angels. Dallas. Police Woman.
That’s just the ones I recognize. That’s a small portion of her appearances. Woman was everywhere.

If you know me in real life, you’ll know that my computers tend to go where I do. 8 years ago when my wife and I went away to the Cayman Islands I had my laptop, and would sneak out to sit by the pool and hack code while the sun came up. Even when we had our first child and she was still in the pack-n-play portable crib we’d cart with us on vacation, I’d still manage to sit out on the balcony while wife and baby slept and get in some Zen time. Bliss.
As the kids have gotten older it’s become less likely that I’ll get such time. Last time I tried it, in fact, they ganged up on me and told me that – I am not kidding – my hitting the space bar was keeping everybody awake. :-/
So when we ran out this Thursday for a quick night away at a local hotel/waterpark, I decided not to take my computer. After all I’ve got an iPhone so I check email regularly (not to mention Twitter), and I’ve just gotten a new Kindle for Christmas, so if I do get any downtime I can enjoy a nice book.
Off we go and enjoy a nice day at the water park, dinner, the whole works. It’s getting on 8pm or so, the kids have watched Charlie Brown’s Happy New Year, and the hotel room is dark and quiet. I bring up Twitter, and discover a message from Cass that “I think Stanley Wells needs to hear about your book!” Written, I notice, at 10am that morning.
It seems that Professor Wells has written a post on the subject of what Shakespeare quotes would be appropriate to use at a wedding, because his daughter’s been invited to do a reading.
You know, like, the exact same topic I spent half of last year compiling into a book? And me without my computer.
(Remember those discussions we had a few weeks back about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Shakespeare? If an authority on your topic writes on a subject where you’ve got value to add, you darned sure want to do whatever you can to get associated with that post. Preferably with a link, such as in the comments section. And I mean come on, that’s not even spam, that’s my opportunity to answer his thinking-aloud query on the topic!)
I try desperately to craft a comment using the browser on my iPhone, but it fails miserably. So miserably, in fact, that I end up running out of battery. I do manage to send an “Argh!” back to Cass, and send a direct note to Stanley, but am unable to get a comment posted on the blog. I give up.
Battery dead on the iPhone now, I turn to my Kindle. Kindle has a very rudimentary browser, with which I’m able to bring up my email. What’s waiting for me? A note from Bardfilm saying “Hey, did you see Stanley’s post? I’m travelling but I’ll try to hit the comments when I get back.” I try writing him back as well to say “I’m out of commission”, but am unable to make it happen.
The next morning I explain the situation to my wife, who suggests I try to hotel’s business center, something I had not considered. Of course it was approaching 9pm when the problem started and it’s about 6am now so I’m not sure whether it would have been open either time. But the urgency of the matter has subsided, I’m not as freaked, and I pass. Although I do tell her that the computer’s coming with me every time we travel from now on :).
When I get back to civilization (and by that I of course mean, my computers :)) I go online to see that Bardfilm has gotten a comment on the post – thank you! I put up a comment of my own, but I notice that it’s not made it through the moderators so perhaps they felt it was too self-promotional, which is unfortunate since that’s really the only medium I have for holding a discussion with the posts’s author, but hey, every site has their own rules.
As I tell people that story, not only has every person said “Did you try the hotel’s business center?” but several have said “Did you just drive home?” We were, at most, 30-45 minutes from home. Good point. Well, given that the moderator never actually posted my comment I guess that in hindsight I didn’t miss much opportunity after all :). Had this been something more live/real-time, like “They’re doing a live webcast about Shakespeare use in weddings!” then yeah, perhaps a mad scramble for online access by any means necessary would have been in order. In this particular instance, it just makes for a funny story. 🙂
Oh, and if you happen to be listening, Professor Wells? I’ll happily send you a free copy of my book if you’d like. I just need to know where to send it!

If you don’t recognize the name you’ll recognize the face – Sir Peter Postlethwaite has died at the age of 64 following a long battle with cancer.

Sir Pete had two well-known Shakespeare roles – he played Father Laurence to Leonardo DiCaprio and Clare Danes in the 1996 Romeo+Juliet, but he also played the Player King in Mel Gibson’s 1990 Hamlet.

Updated: Obviously the man had much more Shakespeare to his credit than I’ve…well, given him credit for.

Here’s a snippet of his King Lear. Terrible video, but you can hear his delivery.

Here’s his Prospero. Much better video, although the costuming is unusual – he seems to have just walked on stage in his bathrobe and little else.

Ok, with a little (lotta!) help from Bardfilm we did Shakespeare’s New Year’s Resolutions. So how about some of our own? I’ll start.
I will:

• speak publicly on the topic of Shakespeare. Not sure how, exactly, but it’s a goal. Take it to the real world.
• use my experience in publishing my first book, Hear My Soul Speak, to try a second.
• expand my empire by turning on some of the Shakespeare-related domains I’ve been sitting on for awhile now.
• make more concerted effort to see Shakespeare productions. I’m always up for a local, high-quality Hamlet or Lear, of course. But if you told me tomorrow that King John was playing in Somerville in some dinky little local community theatre, I’d typically pass. Got to get better at that. Saw a high school production of Winter’s Tale last year, that’s a good start. And hiking it into Boston by myself so I wouldn’t miss the Tempest movie was a step in the right direction as well.

On a related note, I learned something recently about motivation. The traditional reasoning I’ve always heard goes like this — announce your intentions publicly, that way you feel accountable for actually doing them. Makes sense. Recently, though, I heard the exact opposite. Namely that those people who announce their intentions are the least likely to actually achieve them. Has something to do with the fact that if you keep it to yourself, then whether or not you do it is driven entirely by whether or not you want it enough, but if you announce it, then you have more of a burden on your shoulders that you feel like you have to do it. Plus, now you’ve opened up the door psychologically that “Talking about how close I am to my goals is kind of like getting closer toward them.” Which is, of course, a gigantic error.
And oh hey look! Shakespeare had something to say on the topic, who’d have guessed?
Talkers are no good doers: be assured

We come to use our hands and not our tongues.