Funny exchange at work the other day.  Not technically Shakespeare related, but it could just as easily have been:
“You’re a better man than I am.”

“By the living god that made me?”

“…”

“Kipling?  Gunga Din?”

“I recognize it, yes, you just caught me off guard.”

“I remember that bit, but I can’t remember how it starts….though I’ve batted and I’ve brayed you?  By the living god that made you, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.”

“Sounds familiar, but you’re way beyond me.”

[Google google google]  “Ah!  Though I’ve belted you and flayed you…”

“That makes more sense.”

“You know, I’m happy that I had that wrong, because if I’d seriously managed to pull a frickin Gunga Din reference out of thin air, and done so accurately, I would have been impossible to live with.”

“Yes, I can imagine that would be true.”

Today at work, through a bizarre series of non-sequiturs, I ended up discussing with my employee the Shakespearean meaning of “anon”, and whether it specifically means “in a minute” (i.e., an expectation of shortly, like “I come anon!”), or if it generally means “sometime soon”, like “I will speak with you anon”.  Is there a difference?  Perhaps the word means the same thing, and it is the delivery that determines the difference.

http://gamecareerguide.com/features/559/results_from_game_design_.php Fascinating stuff.  Design a game based on Hamlet.  Here’s some of the Best Entries:
* The player arrives at Elsinore after all the events of Hamlet have taken place and moves through rooms to solve puzzles; each puzzle uses a prop or other reference to the play. * The player is Horatio in this game and has to perform tasks to protect and help Hamlet. ….For example, before the play within the play starts, Horatio’s task is to quickly reposition the audience members so that Claudius and Gertrude are in the middle where they can easily see the play. * Using a new Wii microphone (to be developed), friends join together to act out the play. Dialogue appears on the screen as if it were karaoke. AI characters fill in when not enough players are available. And when there’s fencing, pull our your Wiimote. En garde!   Cool stuff!

http://parlancer.blogspot.com/2008/06/morbid-thoughts.html Morbid indeed – the post is about suicide, including several documentaries on the subject.  Linked to Shakespeare via the book Or Not To Be, a collection of suicide notes. Also speaks of the “bystander effect” (and references Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point) which is a “universe is small” moment for me because I’m listening to that very audio book and just covered that chapter over the weekend.  Basically the bystander effect is the idea that the *fewer* people witness an incident (such as a suicide attempt), the more likely they are to help.  The more people witness, the less actually do anything, because “Someone else will do it.”  Seen most famously in the Kitty Genovese case when something like 30 neighbors heard the woman being attacked and murdered over the span of half an hour, and yet no one did anything.

http://wongablog.co.uk/2008/06/17/falstaff-fat/ A brief and cute story about “the fat Shakespeare character whose name begins with F.”