The Effing Librarian muses on how Shakespeare could liven up a game of Scrabble.  Because he made up words when he needed them, you see.  I like it.  It’s short, it’s funny, go read it.  “There, now it’s a word.  Triple word score.  I win.  I’m Shakespeare, motherf**ker!”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xwHdTPwm3U It’s short, but cute.  And I think she gets the quote wrong in the middle, it sounds like she says “and no longer be a Capulet.”

About a year ago I blogged excitedly about a virtual Shakespeare world by Edward Castronova.  Who am I kidding, I immediately wrote to them and begged to be a beta tester.  I couldn’t get in :(. I see an update on the blog, but alas it’s not great news:  they’re out of funding.  So he has no idea when there will be any new milestones to report.  Which means I shouldn’t hold my breath for a public beta?    Oh well.  I would love to see this project reach completion.  Even though he manages expectations by saying to “expect small Dungeons and Dragons world with a Shakespeare layer” rather than “World of Warcraft with Hamlet”, I say, “Who cares, I’ll take it!”  If it’s an academic project and he’s out of funding, I wonder if he has any open source options?  He could put key portions up in Creative Commons license, I’m sure that there’s more than one Shakespeare geek out there that would love to dig in and help generate some content.  

http://www.oomsa.com/node/412 I was going to roll right past this picture of a plain old “Everytime you see a 2B you’re obligated to mention Or Not 2B” joke, until I thought about the paradox.  It’s graffiti.  Deliberately vandalizing the property of someone else.  With a quote from Shakespeare.  I’m curious about the sort of brain that is both capable of holding knowledge about Shakespeare and somehow lacking the bit that says “Don’t do that.”  I suppose the answer is that the whole to be or not to be thing is just so darned generic at this point that you don’t need a brain in your head to recognize it as Shakespeare.  Whoever wrote it probably didn’t even know what he was quoting, just heard it someplace.

At my other site, Diego found an old post of mine entitled, Iambic Pentameter – What Is It?  He asked a good question.  He’s wondering if anybody has a good source on tape that teaches you what iambic pentameter sounds like.  I figure somebody here might know.  Anybody?  I don’t know of specific lessons, per se, but I have to assume that somebody out there has an audio sample of how iambic pentameter is supposed to be spoken.