08 December 2006

Hal's Friday Evening Blog Review #10: Shakespeare Quest

Not in the best of moods tonight, but then you'd expect it from a man who's just spent half an hour using Blogger to find a random blog to review, only to be greeted by a selection of corporate advertising, porn, and irrelevant drivel... sometimes all in the same blog.

Finally I stumbled on something half worth looking at with Shakespeare Quest. It is early days indeed for this blog, with only two posts so far, both dated today. However as me old mate Lao Tzu said the other millennium, "a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step", and who is to say that a few years from now, this won't be one of the web's foremost hotbeds of Shakespearean research and discussion? Admittedly, from the grammatical structure of the opening announcement, there's a long way to go:

This is a site to learn the language of Shakespeare and the works of his. It is an strange language that will interest anyone who is courious [sic] and wishes to learn more of the works and ways of the Elizabethan ways.


but then, Shakespearean English looks a bit odd to the modern reader, too. It is not, as the website admits further down, "everyday grammer [sic]". At the moment, the blog concludes with a couple of pictures of an 'Italian doublet' and 'typical German gown'. I guess if the Shakespeare thing fails to take off they can always relaunch it as a medieval fashion blog.

On an irrelevant but amusing note (and because there isn't much more to say about this blog at present), I found out today about a distribution of Linux called Ichthux which has pre-installed tools for Christians such as "Christian emoticons" and Bible study software. I haven't managed to find a Linux distro with the complete works of Shakespeare embedded, but I feel it could help the person who runs Shakespeare Quest if there were such a concoction. If you have an even weirder Linux distro than Ichthux please do leave a link in the comments page...

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