[ Context : Messing With Geeklet. ]
Although I’m sure she didn’t do this on purpose, I can’t help but note the timing given that I was messing with her head at dinner last night.
It’s time to run off to school, which among other things means the mad scramble to make sure that we’ve signed her homework. She never says “Checked my homework and seen that I did it”, she just always says “Sign.” So I inevitably say, “I haven’t seen that you did it, go get it.” I’m supposed sign in this organizer book that they call a “reminder binder”. Cute.
Anyway, while I’m waiting for her to get it I notice that in the tip of the day cartoon there’s a man looking through binoculars made up of two big overlapping circles, and is a Venn Diagram reference. As geeklet comes back in the room I say, “Wait, you’re doing Venn Diagrams already? Really?”
“What?” she says, pulling down the book to look. “Oh, yeah. Last year. But Daddy, look what it says? ‘To Venn or Not To Venn, That Is The Question.’ Shakespeare.”
So now they’re pointing out Shakespeare references to me???

Well, now that I realize my post had no body, Alexi’s comment makes much more sense. Let’s try that again, shall we?
Over dinner, the 8yr old is telling me about her day. “Daddy, guess what? We read a book at school today called The Woman With A Dead Bird On Her Head. And guess what genre it was?” Apparently they’ve just learned about genres, and she’s digging this idea.
“Historical?” I ask.
“Nope,” she says.
“Pastoral comical?” I try.
“No.”
“Tragical historical comical pastoral?”
“No!”
“I give up.”
🙂 I’d like to think that somewhere around high school when she finally gets around to reading Hamlet in the original, she’s going to get to Polonius’ introduction of the players and finally get that. 😉

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?