Back in the days of NeXT, there was a bundled application called Digital Librarian. And as AppleInsider describes in this article, “Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Dictionary 2.0”,

Included with the system were the complete works of Shakespeare, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Thesaurus.

With the new Dictionary.app, you have the ability to view other dictionaries, as well as all of Wikipedia — I’ve already been using this capability a ton. Combined with using the keyboard shortcuts under the “Search” menu, searching multiple places is very easy and quick.

An item that might go overlooked is in the “Go” menu — “Front/Back Matter.” Choosing that while the Dictionary is selected reveals various meta items like the people associated with making the included New Oxford American Dictionary, prefaces, introductions, etc. But there’s actually a massive amount of additional resources here. Check it out:

• American Voices by William A.Kretzschmar, Jr.
• How to Read an Etymology by Anatoly Liberman
• Key to the Pronunciations
• Key to the Abbreviations

Ready Reference

• Language Guide
  • Rules of English: Understanding Grammar
  • Guide to Spelling
  • Guide to Capitalization and Punctuation
  • Words: Making the Right Choices
  • Clichés
  • Proofreader’s Marks
• The History of English
  • Timeline
• States of the United States of America
• Presidents of the United States of America
• Declaration of Independence
• Constitution of the United States of America
• Countries of the World
• Chemical Elements
• Standard Weights and Measures with Metric Equivalents and Conversions
• Metric Weights and Measures with Standard Equivalents and Conversions
• Alphabets

Of course, in our always-online culture nowadays, all of this stuff is available via your favorite web browser. But if you happen to be offline (horror of horrors), these could be very useful.

April 23rd is shared as a birthday by several people of importance to me, one of whom is of the greatest importance of all. :)

First up, in 1564, a certain William Shakespeare who wrote, amongst other famous works, a sonnet which was read at Denyse’s and my wedding:

CXVI
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
  If this be error and upon me prov'd,
  I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

Next up, in 1899, Vladimir Nabokov — my favorite writer. He wrote this:

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

And finally — Denyse, my amazing wife. Our 10th wedding anniversary is coming up in June, and it feels simultaneously like it went by in a flash and like we’ve been together forever. Happy birthday and much love to you, D!

Presented without an admission charge in the stunning outdoor venue of the Redlands Bowl amphitheatre, all Festival performances are conducted for a free-will offering collected at intermission. Thanks to sponsors, individual donors and an appreciative audience, the Redlands Shakespeare Festival is able to provide full-scale productions of the works of the Bard to families of all economic backgrounds.

This is what I like to see — futuristic technology married to historical information. From the Google Earth Blog:

Google Does Shakespeare - Google Earth Files Available

Recently Google Books created a dedicated web site to the works of Shakespeare which includes the complete plays available for viewing online. It also includes links to Google searches in the Google Images, Scholar, Groups, and News. They even mention that if you download Google Earth you can find the famous location in England where Shakespeare’s original plays took place - the Globe Theater, as well as a model of the theater….

There is also an excellent collection of placemarks showing the places quoted in Shakespeare’s plays…

Why Shakespeare Is For All Time by Theodore Dalrymple, from City Journal, Winter 2003:

…Yet the prescription of (Prozac) (and others like it) to millions of people has not noticeably reduced the sum total of human misery or the perplexity of life. A golden age of felicity has not arrived: and the promise of a pill for every ill remains, as it always will, unfulfilled….Anyone who had read his Shakespeare would not have been surprised by this disappointment. When Macbeth asks a physician:

Canst thou not minister to a
mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a
rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles
of the brain,
And with some sweet
oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom
of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

The physician replies laconically: Therein the patient / Must minister to himself.