Emphasis on “Geek”, Apparently

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

I mentioned last week in Decorating Your Life that I’ve got a new job, new desk new computer new office new people, and I’ve been paying more attention with adding some outward signs of Shakespeare.

Today I was looking at my screen saver. I don’t usually bother with one, but I’m hooked up to a big monitor so you can see it from across the room. It’s a brand new computer without much on it, so I defaulted to the usual floating picture slide show, using pictures from National Geographic.

Until today. Why can’t I have Shakespeare images?

I have a Dropbox cloud account where I’ve collected all my images over the years.  Cartoons, original art, screen shots from my app, various headshots of Mr. Shakespeare, and so on.  The only problem with using that is that it’s become a real catch-all for literally all Shakespeare-ish image content, and I have no true idea the extent of what’s in there. It would be bad in a new office environment to flash up on the monitor something that could be considered offensive.  Better safe than sorry!

But!  I have a source of almost a thousand images, better known as the First Folio. I don’t know about you, but I consider old literature to be very much like art, and I enjoy looking at HD images of book pages, especially the most beautiful book in the world.  I had a bookmark button to one of the searchable sites, because I went there so often to get screenshots and things whenever I needed an original FF reference. At one point I had managed to scrape it and make myself a directory of images, but alas I do not have that directory on this new machine.

Why should that stop me?

The site in question is SCETI. The interface is made to jump right to the work you want to look at, but if you look under the covers a bit you discover that the pages are sequentially numbered (even though the images are not).

Again, why should that stop me? This is my thing. This is what I do all day anyway. Heck, it’s practically like work experience.  Keeping the skills sharp.

So I wrote a little scraper to hit that site and pull down 10 random images, which I then use as my screen saver (and, while I’m at it, desktop wallpaper).  There’s 900+ pages, but you don’t want to be a bad web neighbor and kill people’s bandwidth.  Every time I run the script it’ll just go grab me 10 more images. It’s not like I need them all.  I was just looking for decorations.

Upstart Crow : A Shakespeare Sitcom?!

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

This sounds exciting, and I hope I can get access to it!

Upstart Crow is set in 1592, at the beginning of Shakespeare’s extraordinary career, and suggests where he might have got his ideas from. 

Also announced in the cast today are Paula Wilcox as Will’s mum; Liza Tarbuck as his wife Anne Hathaway; and Mark Heap as Sir Robert Greene, Will’s nemesis. 

It also features some familiar names from the comedy circuit including Rob Rouse as Shakespeare’s servant Bottom, The Herbert creator Spencer Jones as a thespian, and Gemma Whelan, who also plays Asha Greyly in Game of Thrones, as the writer’s friend Kate.

I don’t know any of those names. At all. But I’m always excited about the potential of original Shakespeare content with Shakespeare as an actual character.  Shakespeare in Love was pretty good, after all!

Harry Enfield joins Shakespeare comedy
http://www.chortle.co.uk/news/2015/12/07/23751/harry_enfield_joins_shakespeare_comedy

Decorating Your Life

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

Here’s a question that’s on my mind lately, now that I’ve got a new office and all kinds of new people to meet.  How do you decorate your life with Shakespeare?  What I mean is, if somebody meets you for the first time, or comes into your space, what about you says Shakespeare?


I don’t have much, surprisingly.  Downstairs I’ve got some nice framed One Page posters. Upstairs on a little wall shelf I’ve got a small bust of Shakespeare.  People who snoop around a bit will be sure to find my collection of action figures, wind-up toys and finger puppets. And then there’s the books. I’ve deliberately limited myself to one shelf on the bookcase upstairs, so I pick carefully and showcase only my favorite editions.

I christened my new office with one of my action figures, but then bought myself a present to really set the tone properly.  Now I want to decorate my company computer, so a couple of these are already on the way from Amazon.

…you know, when I list it like that I suppose I do have more than a little. I was going to say, “That’s all in my home/work, I don’t carry stuff around with me.”  But then there’s the Shakespeare air freshener in my car. 🙂

How about you? How can strangers tell you’re a Shakespeare geek as soon as they see you?

Ever Met an Oxfordian?

~ duane ~ 6 Comments

Recently I started a new job. The last time I had a new job, the place was small enough at the next company meeting new hires were encouraged to stand up and be introduced and talk a little about themselves. Naturally, at the time, I talked about Shakespeare.

So I prepared myself for something similar here.  Only, it’s a bigger company.  Call it maybe 50-100 people?  I wasn’t sure if they still do such things. They are still small enough that the CEO calls together everybody for a quarterly update meeting, so who knew.  I imagined saying something about Shakespeare (since it came up in my interviews), and then anticipated what I would do if somebody asked me my opinion on authorship? Because, and I don’t know about you, but I’ve found that it’s often one of the first questions people ask (it’s a tie with “What’s your favorite play?”)

I thought of all kinds of snappy answers.  Then I thought, “You will have just met these people, and you have no idea who you’ll offend. For all you know there might actually be Oxfordians working here.”  I decided that my answer would be, “I’d rather discuss politics or religion.” And I’m completely serious about that.

At this particular time, however, nobody has asked. There is no “stand up and be introduced” moment, because they’re simply hiring people too fast. Which is fine. It’s more fun to meet people individually over time, anyway.

But it brings up an interesting question.  Have you ever met an Oxfordian (or other Shakespeare denier) in person?  How’d it go?  We all know that thing we do on the Internet where distance and anonymity make us bold, but honestly and truly if you found yourself in a situation where you were going to see a person on a regular basis (such as a new coworker), and discovered that this person has a deep and fundamental disagreement about something so important to you, what would you do? I wonder.

Wait, William The Conqueror Really Did Come First?

~ duane ~ 1 Comment

Many of the geeks out there have heard the old story about Richard Burbage (playing Richard III at the time) arranging a late night encounter with a female fan, only to have Shakespeare get there first and deliver the famous line, “William the Conqueror came before Richard III!”

I always assumed it was just an apocryphal story.  So I was surprised to see the story circulating this week, because apparently we’ve got a diary from 1602 that is the source of the story.
Really?  Things like this don’t just pop up, so naturally I figured that this is a known document.  I wasn’t too pleased with this “on display to the public for the first time ever” stuff.
The Diary of John Manningham  Page 39.  You’re welcome.  I still figure it’s an urban legend, but at least now I know that it comes from a source at the time and wasn’t created a few hundred years after both men were dead.  Today I learned!