(Well no, not that author, he’s kinda dead.) I’m talking about regular Shakespeare Geek contributor Carl Atkins, who also happens to be the author of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: With Three Hundred Years of Commentary.   It’s no secret to regular readers that every time the sonnets come up, Carl’s up for some research and discussion.I’ve always wondered if I eventually write a post about all 154 sonnets, Carl will end up cutting and pasting his entire book here in the comments :). Anyway, for awhile now I’ve been promising Carl a “meet the author” segment where we do a more detailed interview.  Instead of me coming up with a list of questions I’m interested in, though, I thought it might be fun to get some from the audience as well.  What’s most interesting to you?  The Dark Lady?  Homosexual undertones?  How Mr.Thorpe got his hands on the sonnets in the first place?  Whether they were ever intended for publication? Send me your questions, either via email to duane@shakespearegeek.com or Twitter message.  No fun posting them here for Carl to see and spoiling the surprise.  When I get a bunch I’ll send them along and compile Carl’s answers into the promised “Meet the Author” segment. Note :  I have no idea how many questions I’ll get, so I do have to say that I can’t promise every question will get answered.  We’ll try, but I don’t want anybody to feel left out if I get 50 different questions and can’t use them all.  Both Carl and I have full time day jobs, after all – and he’s a doctor!

http://abcfamily.go.com/abcfamily/path/section_Shows+10-Things-I-Hate-About-You/page_Detail Ok, so, ABC Family is turning 10 Things I Hate About You into a series.  You remember this movie, right?  It’s famous for two things – being one of the more popular modern teen Shakespeare adaptations (Taming of the Shrew), but also as the introduction of a certain Heath Ledger, who went on to fame recently when he died too young.   So what do we think about a series?  I expect that there’ll be no effort at all expended in trying to make the occasional Shakespeare reference, although we geeks would get a kick out of occasionally having one of the kids mention their need to work on certain English homework assignments. Think it’ll be any good?  Without the appeal of Shakespeare anymore, and with the baggage of “Yes but Heath Ledger is dead now” hanging over it, I don’t think it’ll be anything more than average.

http://www.casasugar.com/3228410 As noted in the link, this story itself isn’t new – it was publicized a few months ago that for the right price you could have at least part of your wedding on Juliet’s balcony in Verona, Italy. Today we can see pictures from the first couple to officially do it. Lucky ducks.

It’s not often that a new search engine comes along to challenge Google.  Or rather, that happens all the time, but none of them make a go of it.  Who remembers Cuil?  More specifically, who uses it? Well there’s a new kid on the block getting some love, called Bing.  Catchy name, makes me think of turkey timers .  Bing!  Search is done.  Needs a little sound effect.  Instead of googling yourself you can bing…or perhaps bong yourself. I thought I’d mention it because the results seem to do something better than Google.  Namely, they seem ordered around the concept of a person or organization (such as yours truly) and not just use of those words together in sequence.  There’s a difference between the person known as Shakespeare Geek, and places where people put those two words together, as in “I am a big Shakespeare geek”. As somebody trying to build some brand, I appreciate the difference.

http://bardfilm.blogspot.com/2009/06/juliet-at-darmok.html No, not a link to a generic list of Shakespeare references in Star Trek that’s been going around the net since we were all using ftp and gopher. No, BardFilm is actually digging up video of Startrekkian (ha!) Shakespeare references, and then discussing them in context of the story.  He’s been doing it for quite a little while, so if you enjoy the linked post (I’m a language geek so I found this one particularly interesting), be sure to check out the rest of the series.