People are obsessed with William Shakespeare.  Did he really write his plays?  Why did he make up all those words?  What would he tell you about himself if he filled out that 25 Things meme that’s all the rage on Facebook and MySpace?  What was he really like?  Well, scholars have recently uncovered a lost painting of Shakespeare that may reveal the real face of the bard of Stratford-on-Avon.

It’s pretty fascinating to see that Shakespeare wasn’t the mustachioed, balding, skulleted dude everyone always pictures him as being.  In fact, he had Don Johnson in Miami Vice 5 o’clock shadow and a pompadour!  Did he secretly ride a steam-powered motorcycle and wear a leather jacket with a big frilly collar?  Was he actually gay?  Who knows?

Part of the fun with historical figures is that whatever you want to believe about them can be perceived as true.  Given enough time, any conjecture can be supported by some piece of evidence or another, which is fun for amateurs but maddening for professionals who actively try to debunk conspiracy theories.

Tags: William Shakespeare, lost portrait of Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s real face, Cobbe painting, historical figures, conspiracy theories

Margaret O’Callaghan had a need for a new type of kitchen utensil.  The round-bottomed ladle and the spatula are just not good enough when you’re dealing with things like crock pots and serving dishes.  That’s why she invented the scrudle, a combination ladle and spatula designed to scrape the deliciousness from any sort of cooking […]

Every day, Tom Baker deals with the issue of traffic.  Given Southern California’s massive concentration of cars, it’s no wonder that Baker would get frustrated dealing with the daily traffic routine.  That inspiration resulted in these great images of Los Angeles without the cars.   Here’s the full image gallery, and it’s awesome.
I love the […]

Have you ever wondered where salt comes from?  I mean, salt is in everything from fertilizers (potassium chloride) to the dinner table (sodium chloride), but where does it actually come from?  Why, salt mines, of course!  They’re not just for horrible industrial accidents or mad scientist lairs anymore.  English Russia has a great look inside […]

For some reason, the kids these days love the Twilight saga.  Believe me, it pains me to call it the Twilight saga, because to me a saga is a great, sweeping work of masterful literature, not a teenage vampire romance novel.  Either way, the latest movie based on the Twilight books, New Moon (officially The […]

People worry about all kinds of crises as the world ends, but as the movie Zombieland taught us, sometimes it’s our snack foods that are most important to our happiness.  For Tallahassee, it was his beloved Hostess Twinkies.  If your favorite food is the humble Eggo waffle from General Mills, then you’d best head to […]

I love goofy little websites like this.  From the Wal-Martians to quality engineering, I love a nice, odd corner of the Internet to investigate.  If it’s something that can result in some comedy thanks to random word generation, even better.   That’s why when Mysterio offered to predict my holiday gifts, I jumped at the […]

Linguist d’Armond Speers is an odd bird.  How else could you explain someone that taught his son Klingon as his first language? For the first three years of his son’s life, Speers spoke to his son only in the fictional alien language Klingon from the Star Trek universe.  His reasoning?  It was an experiment to […]