I’m in the airport. It’s two hours before my flight leaves. I got to wondering if I could post a blog entry from my iPhone.

I guess I can.

Well, I’m heading out to Barcelona for a week. I’m very excited, since I’ve never been there before.

So blogging should be light this week, though there will be Internet access there and I should be able to check in. Maybe I’ll be able to blog about my trip while I’m there.

While I’m gone, feel free to check out the posts in the Active category. There are still some unsolved puzzles, and I’ve re-activated some old Questions of the Week to re-ignite the discussions.

Have a great week!

This blog just reached 10,000 hits. Huzzah! Huzzah! That’s 20,000 eyeballs! I guess it’s time to break out the cake and SiteMeter counter.

For the record, the 10,000th hit came in at 1:22pm today via a link from an English teacher’s webpage at Xavier High School, right here in New York City. The teacher is a former graduate student of mine. So here’s a big shout out to Mr. Cambras and his 9th and 10th grade students who I see are studying Romeo & Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. (…and some other good stuff, too.) Welcome to all.

If this blog teaches you nothing else, it’s that studying great works of literature will allow you to take the letters from passages in those great works of literature, mix them around, and form new pieces of writing that kind of relate back to the original passage. And if you do that, then eventually 10,000 people will come to see them.

I can’t believe I’ve gone almost eleven months without a blogger feud. Let’s do this.

Nonny Nu (nonnynu dot blogspot dot com), a blogger who writes mainly about her cats, decides to throw some stones.

First, she uses a picture of my King Lear cake on a Happy Birthday posting on her blog, which is totally fine with me. But then she ends with this:

P.S. That isn’t the birthday cake. That’s just some photo I found on the web. But, can you believe some people are so serious and hoity toity as to quote Shakespeare on a birthday cake? No doubt, they will be having wine with it. *eyes*

Serious and hoity toity? I rather thought I was being whimsical and hoity toity. And what’s wrong with a little wine on your birthday?

That’s it, Crazy Cat Lady, I’m calling you out. Don’t you know it’s not nice to taunt a fellow blogger? Especially not one whom you have given temporary control over the image at the top of your blog? I just replaced it with this picture and you should just be glad I didn’t get all goatse.cx on you. (To my readers: If you don’t know what that is, just let it go.)

Let this be a warning to others. Rule number one: you do NOT mock the Shakespeare Teacher.

UPDATE: She’s got it fixed now, but for about eight hours today, her site looked like this.

UPDATE II: I just read through her comments, and she posted this image of a cake that has such a delicious self-referential paradox that even W.V.O. Quine would ask for seconds. (Who’s hoity toity now?) I think I’ll head over and offer a truce.

UPDATE III: The truce has been accepted, and what must be the shortest feud in Internet history has come to an end.

UPDATE IV: The one-day feud has now been immortalized in an anagram.

A reader and fellow blogger writes in to ask how much of this blog is me and how much is WordPress.

The content is all me. The WordPress team keeps sending me Shakespeare anagrams, but I have not published any yet. Frankly, they aren’t very good.

The tech is all them. Do you have any idea how hard it is to create and manage a MySQL database? Neither do I, and I don’t need to. There is some minor tech stuff you need to do to get set up, but I was fortunate to have veteran blogger Ro of Pensive Musings as a personal tutor, and was able to get it set up without a problem.

The design is a combination of me and them. WordPress uses a technology called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that allows you to use a pre-made design to format the information in your MySQL database. I used this one, though obviously I made a lot of modifications. I made the font bigger and darker, removed the buttons from the top, created a new title banner, changed the picture, changed the quote box, etc. A lot of this was trial and error, and thanks to readers who gave me feedback, and to my visually-gifted sister who checked the blog after each update and reported by phone how each change looked from remote.

But the credit for the real heart of this blog goes to you, the reader. To those of you who answer the Questions of the Week and the Thursday Morning Riddles. To the Conundrum solvers and the Francis Bacon linkers. To the silly and the serious, to the friends and strangers, and to the anonymous posters too. To DeLisa and Annalisa and Andrew and Brian and Neel Mehta and K-Lyn and UnixMan and Susan and Lee and Bronx Richie and DB and Duane and Kenneth W. Davis and Ro and to everyone else who has posted here. And to the those of you who read along silently too. Without all of your visits and contributions, there would be very little reason for me to continue to do this.

Shakespeare Teacher will turn eleven months on Saturday.

My friend DeLisa White is the queen of telling me things I’d rather not know. Usually it leads to me no longer being able to use a particular product or patronize a particular business because they’re – I don’t know – torturing kittens in the rainforest or something. But I trust her, so I paid close attention when she included me in this e-mailing about the writers strike, reprinted here with permission from the author.

(By the way, when I told DeLisa I was going to put her writing online and not pay her for it, she said “Wow, I feel like an official Guild member!”)

Dear Friends,

The studios, networks and producers of The Office made $13.9 million dollars last year on iTunes downloads of the show alone.

Amount the writers, directors, and actors got of that?

Zero percent.

While among the Writers Guild’s 12,000 members there are television writer-producers like Shonda Rhimes, the creator of “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Private Practice,” who take home up to $5 million a year, on the other extreme are junior writers who – if they work at all – make $50,000 or less (just like the rest of Americans.) Furthermore, about 48 percent of West Coast members are unemployed, according to guild statistics, and rely on residuals to do things like, well, eat.

IMHO, I think this is a thoroughly just cause – I support the writers and their creative colleagues completely. I was sick at heart to discover that the shows and movies I’ve downloaded from iTunes did not compensate the people who created them, without whom my joy in them wouldn’t exist. This should have been automatically addressed by producers and studios. It’s egregiously unethical for them not to have done so and that they continue to resist is unconscionable to me.

I have just read and signed the online petition:

“In support of the WGA strike”

hosted on the web by PetitionOnline.com, the free online petition service, at:

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/WGA/

I personally agree with what this petition says, and I think you might agree, too. If you can spare a moment, please take a look, and consider signing yourself.

Very best wishes,

DeLisa :-)

I don’t think I need to belabour the point. After all, the people who come to this site are here because of their adoration and admiration for an individual writer, and his tremendous contribution to our culture and language. But enough about me.

Let’s do what we can to support the writers who have brought so much joy to our lives, and who deserve to benefit from the fruits of their talent and hard work.

Posting has been light this weekend, but I’ve been at the NCTE conference. Perhaps I’ll blog about the conference later in the week. For now, enjoy this video of Weird Al as Obi-Wan Kenobi recounting the entire plot of The Phantom Menace to the tune of American Pie by Don McLean.

In the 1950’s, Alan Turing suggested that artificial intelligence would not truly exist until a machine could pass a particular test, which we today call a “Turing Test.” It goes like this: a human examiner poses a question to two unseen participants, who return typewritten responses. The examiner knows that one of the participants is human and the other is a machine, but does not know which is which. The examiner must determine which is the human and which is the machine based on the responses returned. If the machine can fool the human examiner, it passes the Turing Test.

Today, however, it’s the machines who have much more of a need to make this determination. With automated spam-bots trolling the Internet, many Web 2.0 sites and blogs have had to adopt automated mechanisms for determining if the contributor is a live human being or not. One common method is a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), which shows an OCR-proof graphic image of letters and asks the would-be contributor to type those letters out. Spam-bots can’t read graphic images, at least not yet.

But, as in any arms race, the opposition hasn’t given up just yet. Some enterprising young hacker has put together a program to lure humans into helping crack CAPTCHA codes in the guise of a strip tease program. Type in the correct CAPTCHA code and “Melissa” takes off another article of clothing. Never mind that you’ve just helped give an automated program human bona fides.

Hoping to harness the same energies for good rather than evil, a group working out of Carnegie Mellon has released a program called reCAPTCHA, which has the user demonstrate humanity while also contributing to it. When encountering a reCAPTCHA, the user will enter the text of a word that OCR technology wasn’t able to read, which is meant to speed up the ongoing effort to digitize print books. A known word is included as well, as a human-check.

That sounds like a worthwhile cause, except then the user has twice as much to type to contribute a comment. I haven’t put any CAPTCHA on this blog, yet, because I want to encourage people to post comments freely. But I have to say that I do spend a good amount of time deleting spam, and so when I’m ready to go Turing, maybe reCAPTCHA is the way to go.

The whole reCAPTCHA idea reminds me of the ESP Game, in that it allows users across the Web to contribute to a piece of a mostly automated project that only humans can do. Actually, both of these schemes remind me of the ESP game, except that one is good and one is evil.

And I hope we need no Turing Test to tell us which is which.

First, read the rules of the game.

For some reason, this week saw an unprecedented number of visitors to the blog. It seems that there was a combination of words that matched common search terms. People may have come here for a variety of reasons, but some chose to stay, and I’m glad they did. I’m about to reach 7,000 hits, which last week seemed like a goal to shoot for by the end of December.

But while I’m glad for all of the new traffic, I’m not going to suddenly adjust the content of the blog to pander to the masses in a pathetic attempt to snag the random passerby. That’s not what this blog is about.

Anyway, this week’s challenge is actress Jessica Alba.

Jessica Alba has managed to maintain a professional career at a young age, without getting herself into trouble, unlike such stars as Vanessa Hudgens, Lindsay Lohan, or Britney Spears. Perhaps one day we will see her playing Texas Hold ‘Em on television, or on Dancing with the Stars. If I had to invest in the stock market of the famous, I’d go with the World Series champ of celebrities, Jessica Alba.

Well, that ought to do it.

Ringtones!

Okay, I’m done now.

I actually was able to link Jessica Alba to Sir Francis Bacon in six degrees or fewer, though that shouldn’t stop you from posting a longer response, or looking for a shorter one. Entries will be accepted until midnight on Thursday, November 1.

Good luck!

And congratulations to Neel Mehta for winning last week’s challenge by linking Sir Karl Popper to Sir Francis Bacon in three degrees:

Sir Karl Popper > Bertrand Russell > Georg Cantor > Sir Francis Bacon

Sir Karl Popper addressed the problem of induction in a way that was commented on by Bertrand Russell, who studied the work of Georg Cantor, who believed in the Shakespearean authorship of Sir Francis Bacon.

This blog has recieved an unprecedented amount of traffic over the last 48 hours (about 200 hits), despite the fact that nobody new seems to have linked here. So this week’s question is this:

How did you find this blog?