Mention the word “aglet” to children of a certain age (and their parents) and they’ll all point to the Phineas and Ferb episode that drilled the word into our heads forever:

If you have no idea, and don’t feel like clicking that, an aglet is the name of that hard little thing at the end of your shoelace that keeps it from fraying, allowing it to easily thread through the holes.

So why, I wondered, was there a post saved in my newsfeeds this morning entitled “This Post Will Change Your Life” and featuring a picture of aglets? I have several automatic services that search for Shakespeare references and save links so it’s not unusual to see random things in my newsfeed, but this was a new one.

I assume that it’s a throwaway reference that’s just noise, like how every time somebody mentions Gwynneth Paltrow they inevitably say “Academy Award-winning Shakespeare in Love actress” but I click anyway and see this:

Before the invention of buttons, they were used on the ends of the ribbons used to fasten clothing together. Sometimes they were formed into small figures. Shakespeare calls this type of figure an “aglet baby” in The Taming of the Shrew.

Wait, what?  Now I’m thinking this is a humor piece and that’s a joke, praising the eternal usefulness of the aglet.

But we check these things, and, would you look at that…

GRUMIO

Nay, look you, sir, he tells you flatly what his
mind is: Why give him gold enough and marry him to
a puppet or an aglet-baby; or an old trot with ne’er
a tooth in her head, though she have as many diseases
as two and fifty horses: why, nothing comes amiss,
so money comes withal.

Learn something new every day.  In all the years I’ve been reading that play I never made the connection.  Now I can just picture kids in high school being forced to read Shakespeare, glossary in hand, and thinking, “Aglet baby?  That sounds like that thing on the end of your shoelace. THAT can’t be right.”

Here’s a funny story that provides a glimpse into my daily life.

I’m sitting at work in the kitchen and we’re discussing just how good Google has become at predicting what you’ll search next.  We’re playing a game where we click a few links deep into something, then announce what we want to look up next, then start typing a search term one letter at a time and see how many letters you get until Google guesses it (for my examples it seemed to average 3).

Cut to a separate conversation about Star Wars and how Disney basically turned space nazis into merchandise.  I noted this is especially true in episode seven, “the one where that Weasley brother is standing up in front of them all losing his mind.”

None of us can remember which Weasley, though, so I google.  I type D…O….M…. and then laugh and announce to my coworkers, “I guess google knows me too well, do we want to see him in Romeo and Juliet or Midsummer Night’s Dream?  Actually I never knew he’d done either, so thank you google, that’s a blog post right there.  Have to come back to that. Let’s see, Dominic Dromgoole, IMDB…”

“Domhnall Gleeson is his name,” a coworker corrects me.

I knew that, once he said it. But at DOM Google had assumed I meant Dominic Dromgoole, former artistic director for Shakespeare’s Globe. I didn’t even notice when I clicked through.  Score one for Google.

 

 

[This is old – but WordPress tells me that it “missed schedule” and never got posted.]

You may have seen the surprise announcement by now that Gary Kurtz (who produced several Star Wars movies) is attached to a still-untitled movie project about the life of Christopher Marlowe.

Interesting?  Has potential.  But my first question is, “How much of Marlowe’s life is documented, and how much is it going to be fictionalized?”  I’ll admit I’m kind of exciting to see the “great reckoning in a little room” played out before me.  We don’t get a lot of scenes from Shakespeare’s life where we know exactly where he was and what happened, but we have a pretty good idea of how Marlowe met his end.

My second question is who is this Greg Hall that is attached to direct? I went through his bio to find a credit I could reference, but all I see is one of these dudes who wrote/produced/directed all of his own features.  When I see that my first thought is not, “I bet this dude is the next Orson Welles,” I can tell you that.

Multiple people on Twitter said, “I’d rather have a Ben Jonson movie.”  Tough crowd.  You’d think Marlowe’s story would be scandalous enough to draw a modern movie crowd (not to mention the man was ridiculously good looking).  Just please don’t cast Johnny Depp to play him.

 

 

So I was at the liquor store the older day and the first thing about this particular brand that caught my eye was the how many digits were in the price! There was a whole top row of the special good stuff and take a look at what I found:

“Oh cool!” I thought, “I’ve got to make a Falstaff reference out of that.”

But like I do for most of my references I had to double check and make sure that it was in fact “plump Jack” that appears in the quote and not something else. And then it got even cooler, because I discovered that not only does the PlumpJack winery have a membership program called the Falstaff Society, the membership tiers are:  Hamnet, Hathaway and Muse.

I think I’d like to hang out with these people.  Then I look at the price of the wine and think maybe I’d be out of my league. 🙂