Happy 450th Birthday (within Two or Three Days), William Shakespeare!

If William Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be 450 years old, probably senile as hell, and stuck with a blinking “12:00” on his VCR. Why not celebrate this by reading something that will make you smarter and more aware of the rich, deep, wonderful world around you?

For some of us, that could be accomplished by reading the side of a cereal box, a grocery-store receipt, or a thirty-year-old back issue of Ranger Rick. For almost everybody, though, you can get smarter by reading something awesome by William Shakespeare, that guy we mentioned in the first paragraph!

What’s that, you say? Which play should I read? We’re sorry, but we’re not interested in doing all your work for you. Make a decision yourself, why don’t you? Or at the very least, make the decision to look at the nifty flow chart below and let it do the thinking for you.

It should expand and actually be readable if you click on it. If not, you can find it at Goodreads, where the folks are much more internet-savvy than we apparently are.

Irony, Illustrated

What we like about this photo is that the two signs—the one endorsing English and the other butchering English—were quite clearly written by the same hand. Presumably the little girl’s.

This Just In!

For centuries, mystics and con men the world around have sold the hopeful and the gullible on their own pie-in-the-sky version of life before death. This sensationalist article notwithstanding, we don’t see any reason to believe in life before death, for Princess Diana or anybody else, without being presented with incontrovertible proof.