Ok, I’ve known about Shakespeare the Meerkat for awhile, but never really saw any reason to post since I don’t follow the show.  For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, the Animal Planet television channel has a show called “Meerkat Manor” which is some sort of animal reality show.  They follow around like 40 meerkats and try to produce the documentary style footage up as dramatically as they can, like a mother meerkat defending the babies from predators, and so on.  One of them is named Shakespeare.  He’s apparently quite popular, with more than a few blogs on the subject.   Well now there’s something to post about.  Apparently season two of Meerkat Manor has started, and Shakespeare is missing.  Even the Today show picked up the story, but they don’t have a link up yet.  People are very upset.  The producers are being realistic about it – they’ve said themselves that they just don’t know what happened to him.  I think people forget that this is a show about animals tracked in the wild, so simply losing one is actually quite possible.  The producers assume that Shakespeare is dead and that they just haven’t found the body.

Anybody want to play a murder mystery Flash game based on Shakespeare?  BBC has one up called Seven Noble Kinsmen.  I don’t have time to play it in much depth, but I did get through the long intro (which is completely non interactive, just keep hitting Next) and eventually you end up in the mansion in the classic “Reclusive and potentially evil genius has invited all of his enemies to his mansion for revenge” plot.  Somebody play it through and tell me if it’s worth it :).  

Want a travel agent’s view of Shakespeare’s World?  For a change of pace from talking about politics and religion of the day, why not look around the actual geography of the time?  This Internet WebQuest was created by a junior high school student named Hugh Peebles (at least I think he’s a student, I assume he could be the teacher) and plays itself out like a game : ask the team a question (“What, in your opinion, caused a middle-class English boy to become one of the world’s greatest writers?”) and then turn them loose on the Internet to go research things like Holy Trinity Church, Stratford on Avon, The Globe, and so on.  

I don’t know what Supergun Cinema is, exactly, but I’m fascinated by these posts that keep popping up in my regular reading.  It appears to be the blog of somebody who is writing a screenplay about people writing a screenplay based on Shakespeare’s works, which is in turn modelled after Shakespeare’s works.  Got that?    Apparently his previous movie was called “Macbeth 3000” so Shakespeare figures prominently in his work.   The image caption in one of the related blog posts says “Macbeth + light sabers + Batman + snow + car chases + Super Dave + an Iraqi chemical weapons plant + a pedophile + Star Trek = comedy gold…”   I’m intrigued.  

This looks interesting.  University of Washington’s “Educational Outreach” program is offering free courses over the net.  Interesting to us, that is, because they have two Shakespeare offerings:  Hamlet and Shakespeare’s Comedies. Haven’t had time to read them in depth yet, but I’ve got them bookmarked.   Something like this I wish came in a PDF, I find that I’m more likely to read things like this if I can print them out all nicely formatted.  I don’t like reading web pages for too long.