April 23rd marks William Shakespeare’s 423rd bday. For the sake of this chat, however, let’s just say it’s his 4-20th birthday. Because the question of the day is “Did Shakespeare smoke weed?” Doobie, or not doobie? That is the question asked by anthropologist Francis Thackeray.
Our son’s maternal grandmother was a kindergarten teacher, consequently we’ve inherited children’s books spanning both the decades of her career and those of her own child-rearing. We’ve inherited a library dating back to the 70s with many gems and as many that seem to be cultural artefacts form a parallel universe. Among the my son’s…
In her aptly named tome, Literary Hoaxes: An Eye Opening History of Famous Frauds, Melissa Katsoulis recounts the bold and bizarre history of William Ireland, whose literary legacy puts the “dung” in bildungsroman (bah dum dum). Born into 18th century London, the teenaged Ireland was long thought an idiot by his father who was an…
April 23 marks both the birth and death day of The Bard. No one has enjoyed as much literary fame in the English language as William Shakespeare, despite being alive for a mere 52 years (and dead for nearly 400). For that matter, no author has also endured so much scrutiny as to the authorship…
Whomever was vetting potential veep Paul Ryan for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, overlooked one very important bit of vice presidential trivia. Every vice president whose given and surnames were both “first names? by contemporary standards, saw their president die in office. Could doubly-named Paul Ryan be lethal to a (gasp!) President Romney? Mind you,…
With NASA about to scuttle the shuttle, Richard Branson’s plans to shoot the moon with tourists and SpaceX having its own venture-capitalized space race, the final frontier clearly still captures the American imagination ??but will it capture ticket sales? The Weinstein Company seems to thinks so, at least that’s what one might infer from their…
