Well, this is exciting for me. It’s my first link from someone I don’t know personally. It’s from Such Shakespeare Stuff, a blog dedicated entirely to Shakespeare:

Link for ShakespeareTeacher.com because I like the domain and hope to hear good things from him. It doesn’t appear to be a blog devoted to Shakespeare, though, so it should be interesting to see how much relevant content we get.

This blog isn’t exclusively about Shakespeare, no. Instead, it is approached with the philosophy that a love of Shakespeare is only the beginning of a life of examination and discovery. This is a blog that documents that journey, and tries to have some fun along the way. The title, I think, has more to do with the author than with the intended audience at the moment.

Having said that, I would have expected to be blogging more on Shakespeare than I have been so far. I only just started this blog, and I seem to be writing more about Genghis Khan, the new Congress, and about blogging itself than I am about Shakespeare. Still, you can expect to see a lot more relevant content here in the coming months than there is now. Also, this domain may eventually house more than just the blog, but perhaps I’ve said too much already.

So, thanks to SSS for the link. And for those of you who came to this site by other means and were looking for a Shakespeare-only site, you can quell your disappointment by visiting Such Shakespeare Stuff, where you will find plenty of Shakespeare-related content and commentary. I expect to become a regular visitor myself.

Every year, the Edge Foundation poses a question to some of the world’s top minds. This year, the question was: “What are you optimistic about?” See what leading thinkers had to say and feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments section below.

I’ll go first. I am optimistic about the long-term potential that the Internet has in breaking down all kinds of barriers, but particularly those of class. For a very long time now, all mass media has come from wealth and power, and people just accepted that because there had never been any other way. But the Internet makes possible the creation of networks between people, and the construction of meaning from a variety of perspectives. Even in the infancy of the World Wide Web, we’ve seen such user-driven communication tools as message boards, peer-to-peer file sharing, weblogging, podcasting, video posting, and social networking websites. As the current generation of technology-savvy children become the developers and thinkers of the adult world, society itself will be reshaped in the image of this most democratic medium.

I’m not filing this under Predictions. As I said, I’m particularly optimistic about this one.

What are you optimistic about?

Remember Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Democrat who was elected to the House of Representatives in 2006? As the first Muslim elected to Congress, he naturally wanted to be sworn in on the Quran. This caused an uproar among such champions of liberty as Dennis Prager and Representative Virgil Goode (R-VA) who felt that people of all religions should be sworn in on the Christian Bible.

Well, the story flared up for a bit and then seemed to fade away. But when the time came, Ellison ended up being sworn in on a Quran that had been owned by Thomas Jefferson:

“It demonstrates that from the very beginning of our country, we had people who were visionary, who were religiously tolerant, who believed that knowledge and wisdom could be gleamed from any number of sources, including the Quran,” Ellison said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

“A visionary like Thomas Jefferson was not afraid of a different belief system,” Ellison said. “This just shows that religious tolerance is the bedrock of our country, and religious differences are nothing to be afraid of.”

What do you get when you cross an iPod and a cell phone, and then throw a web browser into the mix? The Apple iPhone, of course, available in June.

They are also introducing a video player, called Apple TV that can download digital content from the Internet and play it on a television.

Steve Jobs announced the new products at the MacWorld expo.

My prediction – the iPhone will be a huge hit. It’s exactly the easy-to-use, all-in-one device that the market has been hungry for. The Apple TV, not so much. I think between Tivo, DVR, Netflix, Video On Demand, and people just generally being busier than they used to be, the market for more video content is over-saturated. iTunes videos probably sell specifically because they can play on portable computers and iPods, not because people can’t find anything to watch on their televisions. Bottom line: Apple TV, no; iPhone, oh yes.

But however it turns out, Bravo to Apple for once again pushing the envelope and moving us to the next level.

This was the actual front page of the “liberal” New York Times on Friday:

The headline about “Jubilant Democrats” is sitting atop a picture of Nancy Pelosi presiding over a gaggle of small children. The implication here, whether the reader is aware of it on a conscious level or not, is that the “Jubilant Democrats” are just children compared to their predecessors, reinforcing the ridiculous canard that the Republicans are the party of grown-ups.

These things really do matter. And this is the New York Times. We have a right to expect better.

At work, we’re preparing to roll out our new unit on Civil Rights, and I’ve been catching up on all of those things I should have learned in school but, for whatever reason, didn’t. Today, I learned something new about Emmett Till.

What I knew was that Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old African American child who was brutally murdered for the crime of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi in 1955. The two killers were acquitted by an all-white jury who either thought the killing was justified, or just couldn’t be bothered to care that it wasn’t.

What I learned today was that the two killers later gave a full confession to Look magazine, which published their account of the killing. The article is being used as a part of our Civil Rights unit, and is available on the PBS website.

I’m not going to quote from it; you really have to read the whole thing. Then, you have to click on the link at the top that says “Letters to the Editor” and read those, because they are even more chilling than the article, in terms of understanding what the times were like.

The cumulative effect of studying myriad injustices across several different civil rights movements in such a short period of time has been sobering. But the most staggering element of all of it is just how recently most of this happened. When you look at all of the injustices in the world today, it’s easy to forget how much progress we’ve actually made. So, it’s been both depressing and inspiring at the same time. I’m curious to see how the kids will take to it all.

By the way, the PBS website is the best website on the entire Internet. Just thought you’d like to know. For more on this story, you can visit their Emmett Till page. If you’re an educator, you’ll want to set aside a weekend to explore their Teacher Source. They also have a page for kids. And there’s much, much more worth checking out, whatever your particular interests may be.

Answer: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Rudy Guiliani, John McCain, and Barack Obama.

Question: Who are four people who are not going to be elected president in 2008?

Ignore the polls. At this early stage, the name recognition factor is always going to skew the results. As new faces emerge and old stalwarts define themselves anew, you’re going to be hearing a lot more names than just those four.

Note: The prediction above does not pertain to party nominations, vice-presidential selections, or future presidential elections. Nor does it predict who is going to be elected president. Right now, a Biden vs. Romney contest seems not entirely out of the question. Pataki had an unusually prominent spot in the 2004 Republican Convention, which is usually a tell. And Gore, if he decides to run, will likely be the automatic front runner among Democrats who are still sore from the 2000 election, and would be helped in the general election by swing voters with buyer’s remorse. Plus, he’s a movie star now, and we all know how helpful that can be.

But my whole point is that it’s way too early for this kind of speculation. All I can tell you right now is that none of the first four people I mentioned will be our next president. That’s my prediction, and I’m putting it in the blog.

I’ll also add a new category “Predictions” so if this blog lasts longer than next Wednesday, we can track my predictions and see how I’m doing.

It appears that Washington D.C. just started a six-month Shakespeare festival.

From the looks of it, it promises to be quite something:

The “Shakespeare in Washington” festival, conceived two years ago by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company (STC), kicks off with a free reading of “Twelfth Night.” It will include more than 500 performances, ensuring that every week will be packed with shows and exhibitions – paintings, music, dance, film, opera and theater – either written or inspired by one of the world’s most famous playwrights.

I’m starting to get jealous, but just a bit, since New York City is hardly a slouch in the Shakespeare department. All the same, I guess I’ll have to plan a trip to D.C. sometime in the next six months.

Well, as long as I’m already being blocked by the filter, I may as well share this with you.

It’s an eight-minute adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour starring Ernie and Bert from Sesame Street. What more needs to be said?

(Warning: Adult Language and Content)

This film was shown at Sundance in 2002 to great acclaim, but Sesame Workshop’s lawyers put the kibosh on it, and it was pulled from release.

For another fascinating story about Bert, check out the Bert Is Evil page of one of my all-time favorite websites, Snopes.com, to find out how Bert accidentally ended up at an anti-American protest rally in Bangladesh:

The Osama bin Laden poster – with the muppet – was displayed at rallies by pro-bin Laden protesters and appeared in photographs carried by news agencies such as Reuters and Associated Press.

The technology of today has an incredible potential to make the physical distances between us much less of a barrier. Other distances between us may take some more time.

I’m learning something new about blogging every day! My last post quoted an article from The Onion that mentioned Vanderbilt University. Next thing I know, there’s a trackback from Vanderbilt. It must be some kind of spider searching the blogs for the school’s name and automatically linking to it. The University of Texas trackback was probably the same thing. I wonder if other schools have that. Like, say, Stanford University. Or the University of Notre Dame. Or New York University. Or the Ohio State University. Or the University of California Los Angeles. Or Northwestern University. Or the University of Wisconsin Madison. Or Arizona State University. Or the University of Pennsylvania. Or the Pennsylvania State University, better known as Penn State. Yes, I do wonder…

Well, there are better ways to get linked up. I just registered this blog with Technorati, an online blog directory. Shakespeare Teacher is currently ranked 2,431,865 out of all of the Technorati blogs. I don’t think they make giant foam hands with that many fingers, but hey, I’m just getting started. However, if you do a search for Genghis Khan Theme Park, my blog comes up second only to a re-posting of the article I was originally citing. So, who’s obscure now?

I tried to access the blog from a Department of Education site yesterday, but it wouldn’t load in fully. The filter said that the page had exceeded the number of “questionable words.” Now, I think I do a pretty good job of keeping it clean here. Any thoughts on what words or phrases in my first week of posts might have given the filter pause?