Personally I don’t know who this gentleman is, I had to go look him up on IMDB. Seems he’s done mostly work on UK rather than US features. Fair enough.  He popped up in my newsfeed this morning for a Shakespeare mention, and here’s what he had to say:

Mastermind specialist subject
Shakespeare. When I watch Pointless and there are any Shakespeare questions I nearly always get them all, and I feel like I’d probably know more about Shakespeare than I do about anything else, as a sort of general knowledge thing. So yeah, it would be Shakespeare, but I’d have to read all 36 plays again.

Anybody else notice something odd right at the end, there?  36? I hear 37 most often, and sometimes 38, but I can’t remember the last time I heard 36. When somebody says that, which play are they not counting? Henry VIII?

As a lifelong computer geek, and a student of the history of my industry, I am disappointed in myself that I’ve never heard this story.  Credit to Walter Isaacson’s Innovators for setting me straight.

Once upon a time (1989 to be precise), the inventors of the internet got together and threw a party. I’m not talking about Al Gore and the other talking heads of what the modern generation knows about the net, I’m talking about the academic, government and military minds working under the covers to build the protocols that went into allowing the net to exist in the first place.

You know what these guys did when they partied? They read poetry. Because once upon a time, the smartest people in the world thought that they were creating technology in order to help them pursue the humanities. I think I would have liked these guys.

Anyway, Vint Cerf (who went on to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005) got up a read a poem.  What he read, was this:

ROSENCRANTZ AND ETHERNET
             by
         Vint Cerf
All the world's a net!  And all the data in it merely packets
come to store-and-forward in the queues a while and then are
heard no more.  'Tis a network waiting to be switched!

To switch or not to switch?  That is the question.  Whether
'tis wiser in the net to suffer the store and forward of
stochastic networks or to raise up circuits against a sea
of packets and, by dedication, serve them.

To net, to switch.  To switch, perchance to slip!
Aye, there's the rub.  For in that choice of switch,
what loops may lurk, when we have shuffled through
this Banyan net?  Puzzles the will, initiates symposia,
stirs endless debate and gives rise to uncontrolled
flights of poetry beyond recompense!

You probably have to be a computer geek to get most of that, but when I heard it come through my headphones I knew I had to post it!

The following post contains insights into my subconscious that could be considered TMI.  You have been warned.

I love it when I dream in Shakespeare, if even a little bit. The annoying thing about my dreams, though – and this goes way way back to when I was a kid – I can’t *do* anything. Whenever a situation arises that would normally have me thinking, “Yup, I got this” something equivalent to that “running through molasses while being chased” feeling kicks in and I can’t accomplish what I thought I could. When I was in high school I studied karate for a long time, but whenever karate came up in a dream and I thought “Ok I’m going to crush this with my best side kick” I’d end up moving in slow motion and glancing my target. You know that feeling? The same thing happens with reading and writing. I can pick up a book in my dream where I know the book, but when I try to read it my brain goes all “nope, you have no memory of these pages”. It’s not that they are blank, or blurry, it’s that I literally am conscious of thinking, “Why am I unable to read this book?”

I’m not sure where we were.  It was a job interview, or a contest of some sort. There was me and another guy, and somebody who was clearly a host/announcer of some sort that made me think maybe this was a game show. But we were back stage, competing for who got to go on.  The category was Shakespeare, and I remember thinking “I got this”, thinking that there’d be some sort of identify the play or where the quote came from question coming next.

The question was, in that garbled sort of dream speak where you only get bits and pieces, “In the following quote,  “…and the hey and the ho and the holly” what mistake needs to be corrected? Is it a) there is a word missing, b) the H’s need to be capitalized or c) the quote is correct.”

Yikes. I recognize the quote, it’s the song from As You Like It, but of course this being a dream it never goes easy for me and I don’t have to identify it, I have to remember it perfectly? And yes, he really did read a quote out loud and then ask about capitalized words. This no doubt comes from helping my elementary school children with their homework and seeing how often a word is marked wrong because they should have used a capital letter, and didn’t.

My dream self goes for capital letters, B.  Why, I can’t exactly remember. It’s wrong of course, but technically they’re all wrong.

The actual quote is, “then heigh-ho, the holly.” Depending on who you ask, apparently, it’s also pronounced “hi” rather than “hey”. I’m not sure which is correct, I just know that the dwarf song from the Snow White movie is officially called “Heigh-ho” even though they clearly sing “hi”.

By the way, I know why it was that quote, too.  Check out this snippet of IM conversation with Bardfilm from … 10 days ago:

That’s it. Had to share this brief glimpse into my psyche.  Happy Halloween!