Today I heard my 5 yr old singing at the lunch table.  Soon, her 3 yr old sister joined her.  This is a common occurence. What they were singing, however, caught my attention.  They were singing “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”. I said, “Katherine, what did you just say?” so fast that she thought she was in trouble.  “It wasn’t bad, sweetie, it was a good thing.  I wanted to hear you say it again.” “I was singing Shall I compare thee,” she said like she didn’t fully understand the significance.  Because, well she doesn’t.  🙂 They know that line because it is the ringtone on my phone.  My 3yr old calls it “The song your phone sings”.  My 5yr old knows it as Shakespeare.  I am anxiously awaiting the day that they can recite even more of it.  I realize the words mean nothing to them, but the memorization is a powerful tool.  After all, they can both do the Catholic Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary, even though most of the words are gibberish to them. If one of them manages a full stanza, I’ll make sure to record and post it for posterity :). Anybody needs me, I’ll be over here beside myself.

http://www.smokyglass.com/2007/08/27/books/the-10-most-expensive-books-of-2006/trackback/ This would be books sold at auction, in case you were curious, and the lowest price on the list is over $400k.  So dear Mr. Potter doesn’t get to crack this top ten.  But guess who got the #1 spot?  Gee, how hard can it be to guess, I mean, really, what blog am I posting to?

http://blogs.forbes.com/digitalrules/2007/08/only-the-bad-ne.html Forbes magazine offers, via Jerry Bowyer, the “Much Ado About Nothing Analytical Tool” for reading the business news.  It goes like this:

1. Make two columns on your piece of paper.
2. For everything you find that is factual, like “Hero is faithful”, write it in the left column.
3. For everything that is more about feelings and perceptions, like “Claudio thinks Hero is not faithful”, write it in the right column.
4. Then when you’re done, read the columns separately.

Extended out to the business news, the left shows you a picture of how the world really is, while the right shows you how the people perceive it.  Bonus points to the article for recognizing that it’s a matter of time for the right to catch up with the left.  In other words, eventually the facts do come out and people stop fooling themselves.  At least, about that set :).  By that time, a whole new set of facts has emerged for people to fool themselves.

http://bookology.wordpress.com/2007/08/24/starring-mr-rogers-as-macbeth/ The above post has so much Shakespeare goodness that I don’t have the time to summarize it all.  Go read.  Right on the money that Shakespeare may be a master, but that doesn’t mean that he’s above a little poking fun.  I have not yet checked out the media files, but as they say in the geek circles, “dugg for the Branagh reference at the end.” 🙂  Enjoy!

http://sarsaparillablog.net/?p=592 Ages ago, I remember it well, I was a front end manager at the neighborhood supermarket during my freshman year of college.  The woman who worked the night shift me was a retired English professor.  We got to talking about Shakespeare (shows how long my geekery goes back, I guess) and King Lear came up.  She said, and it’s always stuck with me:  “If the entirety of human civilization were to die out tomorrow, all evidence of its existence erased save one thing, that one thing should be King Lear.”  I found it a powerful endorsement, to say the least. Allison Croggon’s review of Peter Brooks’ King lear is damned near art all by itself:  “…it seems to me that when I say something is a masterpiece, I mean that its achievement is not that it rises into some lofty empyrean sphere where history no longer exists. It’s a masterpiece because it does the opposite: because it makes a gesture so potent that it seems to draw all human experience into its gravity, because it reaches deep into individual and collective memory and hauls experience, naked and bloody, into the present.”   Go read the whole thing, you won’t regret it.