I’m actually going to be travelling on Monday, so I thought I’d post something now.  Shakespeare’s birthday is widely considered to be April 23, which happens to coincide with the day that he died(*).  The only similar occurence of which I’m familiar is the famous Mark Twain / Halley’s Comet connection, where he “came in and went out with it”, in Twain’s own words.  It wasn’t the same day, though.  But still a neat bit of trivia.  While I’m on Twain I might as well link to Is Shakespeare Dead? by Mr. Twain himself. Anyway, back to the Bard.  I wish I lived someplace where they celebrate his birthday with parades! (*) Records indicate his baptism as April 26, and at the time Christenings were done 3 days after the birth.  So April 23 is a convenient guess, like much of his biography.

In tribute to Kurt Vonnegut, TimeTravelerShow podcast has an audio of this Vonnegut story about “population control.”  Posting here because of the obvious Shakespeare reference, and because Vonnegut was awesome.  So it goes. [Found via boingboing.net]  

I’ve been contacted by the marketing agency for AccessMyLibrary.com, a “library advocacy site featuring the Thomson Gale’s online content.”  I have no idea what this means, but when he said “The Shakespeare Collection” my ears went up.  It’s National Library Week (April 15-21) and they’re highlighting this “free search engine that is all Shakespeare, all the time.”    You do have to register, but you can just put in random characters for email and phone, it won’t check. I did cruise around briefly, and I wish I had more time to take this sort of stuff in.  I browsed through a prompt book from Romeo and Juliet circa 1841.  Those are always neat, since you get to see handwritten notes about the actual production.  This one included diagrams of how the scenes would be staged. The only caveat I can find is that I’m not fully sure what parts are free all the time, and which parts are going to stop being free after National Library Week.  It does say that the Shakespeare collection is free all the time, so that’s good.  

So I just did famous last words.  It’s only appropriate (I wonder if this person saw the same post I did?) then to look at cases where the last words of a figure weren’t exactly something to write home about.  Last lines that, in the author’s opinion, end up making the character sound like a tool. http://pntl.muzzy.org/?p=403 I think he cheaps out with the Pyramus reference, since that wasn’t a real character death.  But I agree with Paris, he was a bit flowery for me, even when dying.