Tuesday, October 30, 2012

What's Your Favorite Sonnet?

I've asked on Twitter, I've asked on Facebook (* so if you've answered there no need to answer again :)) so now I'm asking here for people that only read the blog:

What's your favorite sonnet?  The catch : you can't answer 18, 29, 116 or 130. 
Everybody and their mother has been inundated with those particular sonnets over the years.  What I'm looking for is the next group, the ones that the Shakespeare geeks love that, with a little more exposure, we can get the rest of the world to acknowledge.

So, hit me.  Other than those famous four, what's your favorite sonnet, and why?  To make the results the most objective, try to come up with your answer before you look at the comments, otherwise you'll never be able to tell if your vote was swayed.


Friday, October 26, 2012

Theme Song Shakespeare : All (But Him) In The Family

Ok, I've been busy.  But Bardfilm's been doing double duty, manning both his own blog as well as queuing up the quirky stuff for my return.  May I happily present you the Return of Theme Song Shakespeare?

All (but Him) in the Family

My name is Brabantio.
Where’d my Desdemona go?
She eloped with O-thell-o.
This is that play.
I’ll allow no buts or ifs—
Nor those crazy handkerchiefs.
Senate, we could use a man
Like Cassius as Ensign.
But Othello sure was great—
Did some service to the state—
Now he’s certain of his fate:
This is that play.
(For those youngsters that need a hint, click ........ here. )

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Shakespeare App Idea

My list of projects is already so long that it's not terribly useful for me to keep adding ideas to it.  So every now and then I'll just post them, and maybe somebody else runs with it.

Shakespeare Meme Generator


  1. Get a collection of Shakespeare quotes.  Easy peasy.  Could be romantic, motivational, funny - your choice.
  2. Get a collection of Shakespeare-related images.  Harder by definition, but not impossible.  Screen shots from well known movies?  Flickr tags?  Couple different ideas.
  3. Combine random quote with random image to make a new shareable/pinnable thing.
  4. Show it to the user.  Offer user options of generating a new one, or sharing/pinning/tweeting this one.
  5. Keep track of how popular each one is.  Set up a link to a gallery to reinforce browsing through them (thus making them even more popular).
Could work as a web app or a native app (although it's a little light for a native app).  Almost certain that similar "put a piece of text on a desired image" sites exist, though I don't have a pointer to one.  The work would be in creating the database of quotes and images.

UPDATE Something like this, but not this.  This is "Here's a database of images, put whatever text you want on it."  If anything I'm thinking of more the opposite - it's the words that are important, and it's really a matter of taste what image you use.