If you are one of the many readers of this site who live in Fairbanks, Alaska, the Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre is in the middle of a Bard-a-thon, a non-stop reading of the complete works of Shakespeare, ending this Sunday, January 28.

If you’re reading this and are not in Alaska, you can listen to a live broadcast, playable on iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc.

Right now, it sounds like school students reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At noon (Alaska Standard Time), the FST players are scheduled to start Henry V.

A full schedule, details, and photographs can be found on the FST Bard-a-thon website.

Real life or parody? Sometimes, I can’t tell the difference anymore.

Below are two headlines from CNN and two headlines from The Onion. Can you spot which are the real headlines and which are the fakes?

1. Bush rushing to get nation in order before Hu Jintao’s visit
2. Golfing parakeet gains fame on Web
3. Northeast stunned by freak January snowfall
4. Senator on more troops: ‘We better be damn sure’

Note: CNN Headlines taken from front page; headline of actual story may differ. Capitalization on the Onion headlines changed to match CNN.

Answers: Story 1, Story 2, Story 3, Story 4

How did you do?

When you think about it, this is really a revolutionary technology.

Before the Internet, all of the mass media of the 20th century required a great deal of wealth to buy into. Whether it was the national newspaper, the radio, the moving picture, broadcast television, or cable television, only those who were in control of vast sums of wealth could afford to get their message out, which, not surprisingly, favored the interests of wealth. So for a long time, that was the only message that most people were getting.

But with the Internet, anybody can freely post their opinions. Now we truly can move toward an open and democratic exchange of political ideas without the corporate filter defining the terms of acceptable discourse. Even I can have my little piece of real estate and post anything I choose.

I choose to post a video of some guys reenacting the Death Star trench scene from Star Wars with their hands.