Along with technology, video games, superheroes and gratuitous explosions in movies, I also have a great love for the works of Shakespeare.
I know, I know - "One of these things does not belong here."
But to be honest, it was actually Marlon Brando who got me into The Bard.
It was in high school, when every student has to learn Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar. And like every student in my class, I couldn't make heads nor tails of what was being taught.
It was all Greek to me, to quote the man himself.
But then our teacher herded us in to see the 1953 movie version of Julius Caesar starring Brando as Marc Antony - and something clicked!
Maybe it was his delivery, or perhaps just having actors speak the lines instead of trying to hear them in my head, but suddenly I understood it all.
I eventually asked to read more plays in lieu of class assignments, and went on to study his works in more depth at university.
I learned a lot of great things from Shakespeare, such as the fact that clowns or comedians are usually the agents of self knowledge in literature, and you should always make double sure your girlfriend has actually committed suicide from drinking poison before plunging a dagger into yourself from grief.
You'd be surprised how many times that comes up.
I can also argue quite convincingly that Shakespeare did indeed write his own works, not Bacon (or any other breakfast meat), or a million monkeys sitting at a million typewriters.
That said, a computer programmer from Nevada did recently report he had reproduced 99.9 per cent of The Bard's works using "virtual monkeys."
According to tech blogs and news sites, Jesse Anderson's monkeys (actually computer programs) randomly generated nine-letter chunks of text, which were then compared to Shakespeare's plays. When all of the nine-letter chunks in a play had been randomly generated, then the play was successfully reproduced.
I'm not sure what purpose this served for science or literature, but I'm guessing Anderson will now move on to researching how much wood a woodchuck could chuck, or possibly how many licks it takes to get to the centre of a Tootsie Pop.
However, there are some folks out there who are indeed trying to bring Shakespeare's work to the modern age - and hopefully new converts.
This year, the Royal Shakespeare Company answered the question "To Tweet or Not to Tweet" - with a resounding yes - by tying in its production of Romeo and Juliet with "Such Tweet Sorrow," a five-week Twitter instalment credited to Juliet by the lead actress.
A similar treatment was given to another of Shakespeare's works in "Twitter of the Shrew," a 12-day production of the play that spanned 19 Twitter accounts.
There's even a course at the University of Calgary that is teaching Shakespeare by using Twitter to study his works.
Sure, purists may balk at the idea of reducing good old Will's iambic-pentameter dialogue into mere 140-character blurbs - but Shakespeare himself said "Brevity is the soul of wit," and "when words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain."
So, if something can open up Shakespeare to someone the way Marlon Brando did for me in high school, who cares how it's accomplished?
Sure, Shakespeare never wrote about video games or superheroes and there is a decided dearth of gratuitous explosions in his works. But there is plenty of murder, wars, political intrigue, sex and even some fantasy. So, it's definitely still worth the time and effort - or tweets and email whichever you prefer.
