Rumsfeld and Godwin's Law

Maybe instead of Godwin's Law, it should be called Rumsfeld's Law instead. I had no idea Rumsfeld was so fond of the Nazi references. And yeah, yeah, yeah, this is another non-Renaissance post, so here are some random Renaissance observations. I bought a bunch of C. V. Wedgwood books this weekend (and by a bunch, I mean three). I'm trying to figure out which Shakespeare films to teach next year. I'd like to do Welles's Othello, but that would mean having to include the Fishburne-Branagh Othello or the high school melodrama O, neither of which I particularly like. So I'm thinking of pairing up the Hamlets of Olivier and Almereyda and the Macbeths of Welles and Kurosawa instead. Doing that, however, means omitting Peter Brook's King Lear and Kurosawa's Ran, and I like Ran better than Throne of Blood. Gah. And if I do go down the Macbeth route, Welles beats Polanski, I think; despite the nudity and violence in Polanski's film, it's ultimately quite boring (how many voiceovers can Macbeth speak/think?).