Intelligence, design and Shakespeare

I love this article on intelligence, design and Shakespeare, een if I’m not sure I understand it.
It starts out talking about the holidays, and then with a quick “here’s the rub” (nice!) slides quickly into using words like “big bang cosmology” and “particle accelerators.” The story, of course is about “intelligent design” and whether it should be taught in biology courses as an alternate theory to Darwinian evolution. Fair enough. It brings up Newsweek’s position on the subject, where they noted that Darwin carried the Bible with him on his travels.
But then we get the Stephen Hawking quote that ends “for then we would know the mind of God,” rapidly moving on to “What, after all, do we really know?” and then to “Engineers design routinely. they examine the design of others….”
(Meanwhile I’m scanning and thinking “Where’s the Shakespeare?”)
To close the article, the author circles back around to the “frozen” variety of human speech – writing. And then asks a bizarre question – “Why is the play called Julius Caesar, when he dies in Act III? Shouldn’t it have been called Brutus?” He then gets all philosophical about whether Shakespeare had a reason for doing that, and if he showed us and we simply haven’t realized it.
I’m going to have to come back and read this one a couple of times, it’s making my head hurt.

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Shakespeare My Butt

Ok, this is different. This morning in my Google news I saw a reference to the Canadian band Lowest of the Low whose album “Shakespeare My Butt” is ranked #10 in Top 100 Candian Albums of All Time. Not bad when you consider that Neil Young is on there at #7.
But then, upon googling for more references, I found
Shakespeare My Butt!: From ‘Marsupial Elvis’ to ‘No Place’… on the Trail of the Pointless Quest by John Donoghue which appears to be a completely unrelated book project.

Weird.

 

What’s on your Shakespeare Wish List?

Tis the season, as they say, and I don’t have any time for political correctness. So let’s just assume that you’re going to soon celebrate some holiday that is traditionally a gift-giving occasion. Is there “Shakespeare stuff” on your list? Like what? Last year I got three books about Shakespeare — Garber, Greenblatt and Bloom. I’m still working my way through them :), so no books for me. Movies? Other geeky gadgety stuff? I have a bust of Shakespeare on my bookshelf.
So what other sort of Shakespeare stuff have you got, or do you want?

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Guesswork about Shakespeare beats TV ‘Science” Any Day

The Herald has this article that appears to be about Shakespeare, but I’ll be darned if I can figure out what the heck the man is talking about. Although it starts with a discussion about analyzing Shakespeare, it actually appears to be a review of three different BBC television shows – none of which appear to have been about him. Maybe the first one, but I have no idea. Who is William Boyd? Who is Rupert Graves?

Anybody want to translate for me?

Technorati Tags: Shakespeare