No, I’m not talking about Mr. Obama and Martin Luther King, I’m talking about hearing my 2.5yr old son quote Shakespeare :). As regular readers are bored of hearing, my 4 and 6 yr old girls are both familiar with “Shall I Compare Three” as a bedtime lullaby, and have been since they were 3 and 5. Now I can almost but not quite add the boy to my growing army of geeklets:  check it out .  He still needs a little coaxing, but give him time, the boy isn’t out of diapers yet. 🙂

Today, as you may have noticed, is a pretty big day here in the United States.  It’s a day that many people thought would never come, at least not in their lifetimes.  It’s a day that I remember hearing about in school as a sort of “Maybe one day…” thing, something in the future, not the present.  I’m speaking, of course, about the swearing in of our first Hawaiian president. As I tried to explain to my 6yr old this morning, “There are times in your life when people will ask ‘Where were you?’  Where were you when we landed on the moon, where were you when 9/11 happened?” “I wasn’t alive for either of those things, Daddy.” “I know, sweetie.  But you know what?  Years from now, when you’re Daddy’s age and you have kids your age, people are going to ask you Where were you when they swore in the first Hawaiian president.” So, I’m asking all my readers, on all my blogs:  Where were you? Me, personally, I’m at work.  My kids are at their grandmother’s house, because the power went out at about 6:30am.  Which stinks, because there’s pretty much no way I will be able to DVR the ceremonies on television if I have no television :).  But I will be watching on line as best I can. Where are you? Anybody got a good Shakespeare quote?  Did our boy write any actual good leaders, positive about the future, that people liked?  It doesn’t seem like the time for Henry V quotes.  Surely somebody’s gotta have one.

http://www.mahalo.com/member/shakespearegeek Don’t know if you’re heard about “Mahalo Answers” yet, but I’m having fun with it.  Much like Yahoo Answers it is a “human search engine” where people post questions, then answers are rated on quality to achieve a theoretical “best answer.”  Mahalo adds the twist of tipping (real money!) so if a question is important to you, you can offer a couple of bucks encouraging people to provide quality answers and not waste everybody’s time. When something like this crops up I almost always try to carve out a little ShakespeareGeek niche.  Never hurts to build brand.  I want to achieve a point where people associate “Shakespeare Geek” as an entity, and can type it into a search engine and find me. 🙂 There’s not much Shakespeare content in there, although they do have a section for Shakespeare questions.  Most of them, I think, are posed by me to drum up some conversation.  Stop by if you get a sec, it’s fun.

Hurray, I love book giveaways! My friends over at Harper Collins wrote to let me know that Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare : The World As Stage is now available in paperback and asked if I would like to review it. “Already did!” I happily responded.  “Loved it.  Recommend it to all my friends.  But I’ll happily give some away.” They agreed, and we came up with a contest.  Since I originally described the book as one of the few (only?) Shakespeare books that I have let non-Shakespearey friends borrow, I proposed a “One to keep, one to share” contest.  Three winners will be chosen at random to receive *TWO* copies of Bryson’s book, in paperback.  One for you, and one for you to giveaway to someone.    (You can also buy the book directly from these retailers if you really have to have it!) To enter, all you need to do is comment on this post and tell us who you’d give the book to, and why.  A friend, a relative?  Donate it to a school?  Something else?  BONUS!  Continuing on the sharing theme, let’s say that you get an entry in the drawing for the comment you leave, and also for any other friends you can get to come enter the contest and let us know who sent them.  Got that?  So let’s say that user catkins posts a comment and says “I’d donate a copy to the local library.”  And then Angela comes along and says, ‘”Catkins sent me.  I’d give a copy to my coworker Rebekah.”  Angela gets an entry for her comment, and Catkins gets two – one for his comment, one for introducing a friend to the contest. (Got it?  Too complicated?  You can do it, I have faith.  Don’t hate me for trying to draw some new traffic 😉 If I’ve left anything unclear in the rules please let me know ASAP so I can update this text, thanks!)   Contest ends Jan 31, so  you’ve got two weeks to get your friends to play along.  NOTE that in order to win I’ll need to a) reach you to let you know you’ve won, and b) get a mailing address where to send the book.  Certainly we can’t enforce that you really give away the second copy, that’s up to you.  Please also note that the books will be coming directly from the publisher, Harper Collins.   Thanks again to Danny from Harper Collins for the offer, and helping me work out the rules of the contest.  With that, let’s get started and spread some Shakespeare love around!

http://www.curriculum.org/app/searchEval.tcl?BID5=8342&SID5=2000658&COMP5=&SELF5=&rawSearch2=&searchListType=fullrecord&lang=0&dev=&grade=G3&subject_code=all&age=all&resource_type=Classroom%20Resource&resOrigin=TDR My freshman year in college (engineering school, no less) I was taking a humanities course, final quarter, and the professor told us that we had to go and see a play at New Voices, the amateur festival put on by the college.  New Voices, at the time #6, was a week long opportunity for the students to write, direct, produce and star in original plays.  I had a great time. Something about the experience stuck with me, and I started writing plays.  No training, and I’m not a theatre major either.  But I did have plays in NV#7, 9, 10 and 11.  So that brings me back to the link above, to a classroom resource ebook entitled Move Over Shakespeare and appears to be for teaching students how to write a play.  In general I don’t love Shakespeare being lumped in with every other playwright in the known universe, but I can live with it.