Answer: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Rudy Guiliani, John McCain, and Barack Obama.

Question: Who are four people who are not going to be elected president in 2008?

Ignore the polls. At this early stage, the name recognition factor is always going to skew the results. As new faces emerge and old stalwarts define themselves anew, you’re going to be hearing a lot more names than just those four.

Note: The prediction above does not pertain to party nominations, vice-presidential selections, or future presidential elections. Nor does it predict who is going to be elected president. Right now, a Biden vs. Romney contest seems not entirely out of the question. Pataki had an unusually prominent spot in the 2004 Republican Convention, which is usually a tell. And Gore, if he decides to run, will likely be the automatic front runner among Democrats who are still sore from the 2000 election, and would be helped in the general election by swing voters with buyer’s remorse. Plus, he’s a movie star now, and we all know how helpful that can be.

But my whole point is that it’s way too early for this kind of speculation. All I can tell you right now is that none of the first four people I mentioned will be our next president. That’s my prediction, and I’m putting it in the blog.

I’ll also add a new category “Predictions” so if this blog lasts longer than next Wednesday, we can track my predictions and see how I’m doing.

It appears that Washington D.C. just started a six-month Shakespeare festival.

From the looks of it, it promises to be quite something:

The “Shakespeare in Washington” festival, conceived two years ago by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre Company (STC), kicks off with a free reading of “Twelfth Night.” It will include more than 500 performances, ensuring that every week will be packed with shows and exhibitions – paintings, music, dance, film, opera and theater – either written or inspired by one of the world’s most famous playwrights.

I’m starting to get jealous, but just a bit, since New York City is hardly a slouch in the Shakespeare department. All the same, I guess I’ll have to plan a trip to D.C. sometime in the next six months.

Well, as long as I’m already being blocked by the filter, I may as well share this with you.

It’s an eight-minute adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour starring Ernie and Bert from Sesame Street. What more needs to be said?

(Warning: Adult Language and Content)

This film was shown at Sundance in 2002 to great acclaim, but Sesame Workshop’s lawyers put the kibosh on it, and it was pulled from release.

For another fascinating story about Bert, check out the Bert Is Evil page of one of my all-time favorite websites, Snopes.com, to find out how Bert accidentally ended up at an anti-American protest rally in Bangladesh:

The Osama bin Laden poster – with the muppet – was displayed at rallies by pro-bin Laden protesters and appeared in photographs carried by news agencies such as Reuters and Associated Press.

The technology of today has an incredible potential to make the physical distances between us much less of a barrier. Other distances between us may take some more time.

I’m learning something new about blogging every day! My last post quoted an article from The Onion that mentioned Vanderbilt University. Next thing I know, there’s a trackback from Vanderbilt. It must be some kind of spider searching the blogs for the school’s name and automatically linking to it. The University of Texas trackback was probably the same thing. I wonder if other schools have that. Like, say, Stanford University. Or the University of Notre Dame. Or New York University. Or the Ohio State University. Or the University of California Los Angeles. Or Northwestern University. Or the University of Wisconsin Madison. Or Arizona State University. Or the University of Pennsylvania. Or the Pennsylvania State University, better known as Penn State. Yes, I do wonder…

Well, there are better ways to get linked up. I just registered this blog with Technorati, an online blog directory. Shakespeare Teacher is currently ranked 2,431,865 out of all of the Technorati blogs. I don’t think they make giant foam hands with that many fingers, but hey, I’m just getting started. However, if you do a search for Genghis Khan Theme Park, my blog comes up second only to a re-posting of the article I was originally citing. So, who’s obscure now?

I tried to access the blog from a Department of Education site yesterday, but it wouldn’t load in fully. The filter said that the page had exceeded the number of “questionable words.” Now, I think I do a pretty good job of keeping it clean here. Any thoughts on what words or phrases in my first week of posts might have given the filter pause?