“Shakespeare Puppies Appeal bags some cash,” the headline read.  Now what am I supposed to do with that?

Turns out to be a fundraiser for a project that, are you ready for this, “aims to provide 25 guide dogs, each of which will be named after a Shakespeare character.” They’ve already started with Juliet and hope to follow with Hamlet, Titus, Troilus, Othello…

On the one hand I love this idea.  Whenever the task of naming something comes up, I always start with “Can I name it from Shakespeare?”  (Remind me to tell you a funny story about that later in this post.)  So I love the idea of dogs named for Shakespeare.  I’m usually outvoted in my own personal life, otherwise I’d be surrounded by such things.

But…doesn’t the ultimate owner of a guide dog get to name it?  Maybe I don’t understand, but that seems unusual.  When we got our dog we didn’t ask what her name already was. We named her.

And how about the choices they rattled off in the article?  How about adoption day for the poor guy that gets Troilus?  “I can’t wait, this is so cool, I love the idea that my dog is going to be named from Shakespeare, maybe I’ll get Iago or Hamlet or Brutus…..wha….who the heck is Troilus?”

(*) When you install new Unix machines on a network you have to give them a name. Sometimes there is already a naming scheme in place, sometimes you get to start one.  This was a new team with all new computers, and I had two to install which I named Macbeth and Macduff.  As new machines came up I continued naming from Shakespeare – Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Iago…  Well eventually we hired dedicated IT people to do this, and the chief IT guy who had a sense of humor on him decided that the original naming scheme was actually “mac-” words.  So he began naming machines “macncheese”, “macgruff”, “macfly”, “macjagger” and so on (yes, he was playing fast and loose with the mac/mc thing).  Then another IT guy got in on the act decided that “macfly” was really supposed to be “80’s movie catch phrases” and named a machine “bueller”.  I wish I could remember all the different directions it spun from there.

Steve Jobs may no longer be with us, but this new Apple commercial had my jaw on the floor for every word, before I even knew what it was a commercial for:

I heard Robin Williams say, “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race,” and thought, “Well holy sh*t that’s going on the blog.” Ask me again why Shakespeare is relevant. Go on, ask me. Because I know what my answer is going to be.

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” Answer. That you are here – that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

Working on a post over on Reddit, I just came up with this idea for a game. No, not a #hashtag game, an actual physical game that teachers can use in the classroom:

I call it Death Bingo.  Let’s say that you’re studying Hamlet.  There are … 21? characters if you count Yorick and the Ghost.  So maybe we just do a 4×4 grid. That leaves enough variety that each card will leave a few characters off.

Each grid is randomly populated with character names.  If you get Ghost or Yorick, free space! Woe to you if you see names like Voltimand, Cornelius and Reynaldo.

Now start working your way through the play. Every time a character dies, put a big red X through his or her space.

Whoever gets 4 in a row first wins!

Does not work well with the comedies.

[Spotted in Reddit this morning on the “Boy Meets World” forum because I track all things Shakespeare.]

Was there a single television sitcom that involved high school kids that didn’t do a Shakespeare episode? The Brady Bunch, Cosby, Head of the Class, Welcome Back Kotter and those are just the ones I specifically remember.  Even Sanford and Son did one with their all adult cast.

Boy Meets World was just a little after my time, starting in 1993 when I was already out of college. So I think I missed this episode they did on Much Ado About Nothing:

[Video removed because it was defaulting to autoplay and driving me crazy!]

[Link here in case the embedding causes trouble, I’m not familiar with the particular service on which I found this clip.]

I always appreciate when a show branched out and did something other than what we’ll call the “high school staples.”  It’s almost always Romeo & Juliet or Hamlet for easy name recognition.  Or, if you go for the “character has Shakespeare homework” storyline you’d often get Julius Caesar or Macbeth (thank you Dr. Cosby!)

On that note, here’s a clip of Boy Meets World doing Hamlet, because I think the accent is funny.

I just learned that one of the Ancestry.com sites (the UK version) is going to be putting a million documents up online, including William Shakespeare’s.