Best Biography of the Bard?

There are probably a bazillion Shakespeare biographies out there. (Amazon lists 2,311 books if you search "Shakespeare biography). Some are super scholarly, some are meant for children and some split the difference by being engaging as well as literate. One of the best I've read is Peter Ackroyd's Shakespeare: The Biography.  Ackroyd is a novelist as well as a biographer (he has chronicled the lives of Sir Thomas More, Charles Dickens, T. S. Eliot, William Blake, and Chaucer), Ackroyd writes uniquely immersive books. If you're interested in the man's world as well as the man, Ackroyd's bio is a great place to start.

Happy 100th Birthday Julia Child

Is it just me or does anyone else think today's Google Doodle celebrating Julia Child's birthday is really ... lame.

Touchstone--Another Shakespeare Resource

Touchstone is a resource nexus for Shakespeare studies and it's noted that it is pat of the BLCPP project, which is nowhere defined. (There's a logo for the British Library and also one for the University of Birmingham, but on the welcome page it says, "The site is currently maintained by the Shakespeare Institute Library, in partnership with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and Birmingham Central Library."
The site has a lot of the usual links you would expect from a study site but it also has links to all the Shakespeare productions being planned throughout the UK, a searchable database of previous productions, links to societies and organizations, and a way to submit questions to Shakespeare experts.  
That searchable database, by the way, is incredibly inclusive. Here's how they describe it:  The scope includes professional and amateur productions, 'straight’ versions, ballets, operas, puppet versions, adaptations for children, apocrypha, plays which include Shakespeare as a character, plays which use Shakespearean themes.  The slightest connection with Shakespeare warrants inclusion. 
I particularly celebrate the inclusion of puppet shows! If you're going to be in the UK and fancy a hit of Shakespeare, this site should be part of your travel plans.

Shakespeare's invented words

The most common complaints my English teacher friends hear when they start a new unit on Shakespeare in their classes is that their students don't understand the words he used in his plays. And it's true, a lot of the words--for better or worse--are no longer used.  (Seriously, how did ZOUNDS go out of favor? It's a most excellent word.)
The thing is, though, that for every archaic and discarded word you'll find in Shakespeare, you'll find hundreds more that Shakespeare invented, words that are still used today.
Words like--accused, bandit, bedroom, blushing.  According to Shakespeare online, the bard invented 700 modern words (ode, Olympian, grovel, tranquil, thoughtless).  If you like words, check out their page on the subject here.

R.I.P Helen Gurley Brown

It's been a bad couple of months for feminists. Helen Gurley Brown, the woman who wrote Sex and the Single Girl and turned Cosmo into the bible for a generation of women, has died at the age of 90. She was a self-made woman and proud of it. “How could any woman not be a feminist?" she famously asked. Go here to see a "top ten" of her quotes. 

I will steal your dreams

Sometimes a story comes to me fully formed.
Usually the story is kindled by an image, and I have gotten used to having pictures haunt me until I figure out how to tell their stories. (I have been wanting to tell a ghost story inspired by wreckage from the tsunami floating ashore on the West Coast ever since seeing the first wave of that salt-crusted, rust-corroded flotsam.)
Tonight though, a friend told me a dream he's been having after taking heavy-duty pain meds. It was a horrifying story that made my scalp prickle. And he'd hardly finished telling me when a story flashed into my head--complete and entire.
Two hours later I'd finished writing it down, and had edited and proofed it.
I'm going to reread it tomorrow and then send it out into the world.
I told my friend I was doing this because it isn't nice to steal someone's dream and just ... re-use it for your own purposes.
And although what I have written is only about 25 percent inspired by his account of his nightmare, the broad outline of the tale is his.
He never would have written it.
And it was just too good a story to waste.
Like most writers, I use bits and pieces of my own life in my stories. I mine my memories and comb through my past, and I did not experience those memories in isolation, or live that past alone. So sometimes, there are bits and pieces of other people's lives in my stories.
I change things to protect the innocent and guilty alike.
But still there are traces of reality that can be used like forensic evidence to identify the source of a story if someone is interested enough.
I can't be the only one who does this.

Dying is easy; comedy is hard

I have a very dear friend who frequently sends me links to YouTube videos he thinks are hilarious. And I almost never laugh. (The most recent offering was for some product Jerry Stiller was hawking and I thought the commercial was like bad vaudeville.)  I was thinking about that in relationship to Shakespeare and his comedies. Or more precisely, Shakespeare and his comic characters. Comedy relies so much on context--on the joke teller and the audience "being on the same page" that it's a wonder a single sitcom can manage it, much less a playwright who lived centuries ago in a world that was different from ours today that any account of it might as well begin with "Once Upon a Time."
A lot of Shakespeare's comic relief characters do not work for me, not even in performance when an actor (and the comic relief characters are mostly male, aren't they?) can bring the comedy to a level I can relate to.
I have never enjoyed Falstaff, for instance. He appears in his "jolly" incarnation in three plays, Henry IV, pt. 1, Henry IV, pt. 2, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. For more about Falstaff, check out the post here. Mabillard, Amanda. Shakespeare: General Q & A Shakespeare Online. 20 Aug. 2000. (August 12, 2012) < http://www.shakespeare-online.com/faq/falstaff.html>.
I also hate Dogberry from Much Ado About Nothing. Every time he steps upon the stage, the energy of the play drops for me. The malapropisms just lie flat for me.
But I know both these opinions are minority ones, and that by general regard, Falstaff is Shakespeare's greatest comic creation. 
If I had to pick, though, my favorite Shakespeare clown would be Bottom from A Midsummer Night's Dream, with the Tempest's Stefano a close second.