I haven’t had much time for the blog this week, since I’ve been working at the Teaching Shakespeare Institute, a week-long intensive study course for teachers of Shakespeare. Shakespeare teachers, if you will.

I’m really exhausted, so I’ll just say for now that my fellow instructors are all extremely talented and professional, and the teachers taking the course are passionate and dedicated. It’s been such an incredible pleasure to work with them all this week.

And I see that Shakespeare Teacher Special Feature II has been almost entirely completed in my absence. Most excellent. The STSF was supposed to replace the weekly features, but now that it’s solved, I may decide to post a new riddle tomorrow morning anyway.

But for now, I’m going to bed.

Well, I’m off to the Shakespeare Teacher institute. I’m very excited about being a part of this, but it means that I may have to step away from the blog for a few days. I’ll post when I can, but I’ll probably be more interested in blogging about the institute than in keeping up with my regular features.

But what if I could once again leave behind just one post that combines my most popular regular features for the week? Why, we’d just have to call that Shakespeare Teacher Special Feature II: The Magic Word! Here’s how it breaks down:

• I. Thursday Morning Riddle: Please find below four brand-new riddles. Each riddle is numbered. Once you’ve solved the riddles, replace each number in the Venn Diagram below with the answer to the riddle that has that number.
• II. Shakespeare Anagram: Once the numbers have been replaced by the riddle answers, the letters in each circle of the Venn Diagram can be anagrammed into the title of a Shakespeare play. However, this can only be done after the question mark in the center section is replaced by a magic word. What is the magic word? And what are the three play titles?

(Actually, the letters that form the magic word can form several words, but only one of the combinations will make sense to fill in the blank below.)

• III. Conundrum: Last week’s challenge was to come up with 26 words, plurals commonly used in English, each of which had a different final letter. This week’s challenge is to come up with 26 words, any words commonly used in English, each of which has a different ______ letter. (Fill in the blank with the magic word from the center section of the Venn Diagram.)

Use the comments section below to register any and all answers, discussion, and comments. I won’t be around much the next couple of days to moderate this, so please work together. If someone posts an answer you think is right, go ahead and say so and offer some words of encouragement. Also, feel free to pass this along to anyone you think may be interested. Here is the direct link.

The Riddles:

1. I’m a town or a bar where they might serve a sling;
The condition of clothing you might need to wring;
I’m a nurse that gives milk to another’s offspring;
And I’m slippery roads as Bon Jovi might sing.

Who am I? (3 letters)

2. Elementary I, eighty-eight on the table;
In the dorm or the lab, I’m a student who’s able;
I’m the god of the sun in Egyptians’ old fable;
And you say me three times when you hope your team’s stable.

Who am I? (2 letters)

3. I am found in Gerardo’s distinct greatest hit;
In a fifty-first state we may someday admit;
I am laws for when businessmen aren’t legit;
And a player in Just Cause who’s violent a bit.

Who am I? (4 letters)

4. I’m a poet Romantic and Mary’s fond spouse;
I am Ratcliffe’s own dog in a film by the Mouse;
I’m where Arafat’s death watch caused many to grouse;
And I’m surname to Hotspur – Northumberland’s house.

Who am I? (5 letters)

So the solutions to this feature are four riddle answers, one magic word, three play titles, and up to 26 Conundrum words.

Good luck!

UPDATE: Riddles 1-4, Circles A, B, C, and the magic word all solved by Annalisa. Conundrum answers provided by Annalisa (15) and me (5). See comments for answers. 6 letters still open.

So, the New York Times says leave Iraq now.

At a time when PollingReport.com shows that President Bush has a 70% disapproval rate on Iraq, when the American Research Group is reporting that 45% of American adults favor the impeachment of President Bush and 54% favor the impeachment of Cheney, and The Onion is reporting that 73% of Americans can’t believe this shit, it seems very easy to be against the war now.

It’s sad that this supposedly liberal paper was so willing to carry the Bush administration’s water in the months leading up to the war. It’s like Colin Powell now saying he tried to talk President Bush out of the war:

The former American secretary of state Colin Powell has revealed that he spent 2½ hours vainly trying to persuade President George W Bush not to invade Iraq and believes today’s conflict cannot be resolved by US forces.

“I tried to avoid this war,” Powell said at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado. “I took him through the consequences of going into an Arab country and becoming the occupiers.”

Two and a half hours. I didn’t realize the President had that kind of attention span.

Hey, you know what’s a cool word? Ombudsman. Ombudsman is a cool word. Here’s what the ombudsman for the New York Times had to say today:

Why Bush and the military are emphasizing Al Qaeda to the virtual exclusion of other sources of violence in Iraq is an important story. So is the question of how well their version of events squares with the facts of a murky and rapidly changing situation on the ground.

But these are stories you haven’t been reading in The Times in recent weeks as the newspaper has slipped into a routine of quoting the president and the military uncritically about Al Qaeda’s role in Iraq – and sometimes citing the group itself without attribution.

And in using the language of the administration, the newspaper has also failed at times to distinguish between Al Qaeda, the group that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an Iraqi group that didn’t even exist until after the American invasion.

There is plenty of evidence that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is but one of the challenges facing the United States military and that overemphasizing it distorts the true picture of what is happening there. While a president running out of time and policy options may want to talk about a single enemy that Americans hate and fear in the hope of uniting the country behind him, journalists have the obligation to ask tough questions about the accuracy of his statements.

Middle East experts with whom I talked in recent days said that the heavy focus on Al Qaeda obscures a much more complicated situation on the ground – and perhaps a much more dangerous one around the world.

“Nobody knows how many different Islamist extremist groups make up the insurgency” in Iraq, said Anthony H. Cordesman of the bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Even when you talk about Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the idea of somehow it is the center of the insurgency is almost absurd.”

See, I told you it was a cool word. I’m going to have to get “ombudsman” into an anagram one of these days.

From Cymbeline:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Shift around the letters, and it becomes:

There’s no need to shun death, that has neither hot days nor dark stormy nights.

Life is so much worse that you may as well go now and get compensated for earned tumult.

Age sneers. Gallows rule!

Tomorrow is 7/7/07. Could this be your lucky day?

Perhaps you’ll get a new iPhone tomorrow. Or maybe someone will pay you to buy them one! I saw this article about people paying other people to stand in line for them, and it reminded me of our Shakespeare in the Park discussion from April.

I wonder – does it change the ethics of the situation if the product is not free? Is standing in line still “part of the experience” of getting an iPhone?

I am purple for vets, and I bleed in a dove;
I’ve a diamond below, and a club just above;
I’m what Senators gotta have miles (and miles) of;
And I’m Crazy On You, and ask What About Love?

Who am I?

UPDATE: Riddle solved by Ro. See comments for answer.

Real life or parody? Sometimes, I can’t tell the difference anymore. That’s when it’s time for the Headline Game.

Below are two headlines from CNN.com and two headlines from The Onion. Can you spot which are the real headlines and which are the fakes?

1. Keg thefts cost brewers $50 million
2. Relieve stress by smashing up a hotel room
3. Report: Many U.S. parents outsourcing child care overseas
4. Revised Patriot Act will make it illegal to read Patriot Act

Note: CNN headlines taken from front page of CNN.com; headline of actual story may differ. Capitalization on the Onion headlines changed to match the style of CNN.

Answers: Story 1, Story 2, Story 3, Story 4

How did you do?

My last Thursday Morning Riddle rhymed four words that each ended with a different letter. It reminded me of an earlier Conundrum that asked you to come up with rhymes for “zoo” without duplicating ending letters.

So, according to this guy, you can find 26 plurals, each of which ends in a different letter of the alphabet. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but let’s see what we can come up with.

He says you don’t need to use words which are both the singular and plural, fish and sheep for example, but I won’t make that restriction. We should probably stick to English, or words commonly used in English. I’ll also put no restrictions on how many responses each reader may post.

So from that post we already have H (fish), P (sheep), N (oxen), and I don’t think we need to worry about S. So that leaves 22 letters.

I’ll kick it off by starting at the beginning with A: data, media, criteria, etc.

21 to go. Any thoughts?

UPDATE: Responses provided by Kenneth W. Davis (3), Pseudo-Pedantius (5), and DeLisa (3), and me (5). 5 letters remain.

Discuss.