Sir Patrick Stewart and David Tennant will portray Claudius and Hamlet in a BBC production of Shakespeare’s play to be shown on PBS’ Great Performances tomorrow night and online afterward. Watch a trailer for it on the Great Performances site.

Miley Cyrus is coming to grips with life in the 21st century. She has stopped tweeting and uses the web less often than she used to. “I’m a lot less on my phone, I’m a little bit more social,” she says. “I have a lot more real friends as opposed to friends who are on the Internet who I’m talking to — which is like not cool, not safe, not fun and most likely not real. I think everything is just better when you’re not so wrapped up in [the Internet].”

Of course, she doesn’t read BwB, so that part of her life (that very small part) is malnourished.

Hey, Lars! We’ve been nominated for an award in the 4th Annual Cannonball Catholic Blog Awards. We’re in the category: “Best Blog by a Heretic.” I’m not joking, and I hope we stomp our competition.

In celebration of this nomination, I offer this video of one of my favorite songs–favorite being a loosely defined word that could mean anything.

I have been busy this week and will be next week as well, so my blogging (and pre-blogging, prep-blogging, post-blogging, and linking) will continue to be light and even lite. But at the moment, I am putting folding clothes, so here’s a link to a post on amusement over out of context Bible verses on t-shirts.

One of the best out of context verses I’ve heard was a missions conference banner reading, “All this I will give you – Matt. 4:9.” The person telling the story said he couldn’t recall a missions context in Matthew 4, and if you don’t remember that reference either, I’ll tell you it’s a quote from the devil when he said he would give Jesus the world if he would worship him. I can only assume a biblical illiterate used a program to search for a few words and ran with the best ones.

Freedom isn’t free.

The problem is that most high quality content found on the internet (music, video games, stories, illustrations, etc.) costs significantly more money to create than it is making on-line. There is a huge gap between the cost of production and the price of consumption. Some organizations, such as the New York Times or the makers of the game Spore, complain about this gap and seek to correct it. When they do, they are endlessly mocked on blogs and many consumers refuse to pay up. This results in such organizations either backing down or finding themselves with far fewer customers. In either case, the degradation of content continues, professional people are laid off, and the public gets more and more Beyoncé mashups to feast on.

Fr. Thomas McKenzie offers suggestions for Christians using digital content.