Jodie Foster on celebrity culture

I admire Jodie Foster as an actress. I remember seeing her in Freaky Friday (later remade with Lindsay Lohan) and being amazed at what she could do with just a look. And she was, I think, around 11 at the time. She's written an interesting piece on celebrity culture. Read it at the Daily Beast.

Lightspeed on Film

Sometimes, when the news is just generally awful, I feel despair for the species. And then I see a story like this one--technology has allowed a camera to capture the motion of light as it moves around the world. There is a video and what you see is taking place in LESS THAN A NANO-SECOND. In the video you can see that the bottle is an empty coke bottle, but the logo has been obscured for the "official" photo.
Science is amazing. This is called "femto photography."
We might survive after all!  (Or as William Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, perhaps "Man will not merely endure, he will prevail."

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.