Just for Halloween

From Slashdot:

How Zombies Work, from the always excellent How Stuff Works site

From New This Week at Librarian's Internet Index:

Pumpkin Carving 101
The Pumpkin Nook (good for Thanksgiving too!)
A vegan Halloween party
The Dark Side of the Net (links to all things scary)

Funny Times

Every so often I get an ad for the monthly humor publication called Funny Times. It's a compilation of cartoons, columns, and essays selected from a wide variety of sources and sure to make you think as well as laugh. Lo and behold, we've got a book of this wonderful stuff. Funny Times Presents the Best of the Best American Humor (817.08 F965) has been quietly residing on our shelves for about three years. Definitely worth a look.

Library sightings

All the usual stuff going on here, but what caught my eye was the shared media experience being enjoyed by Alan, Nate and Noel. Spiderman 2 on a PlayStation 2. In the meantime, Rob slaves away like the good student he is.

Getting connected

I've signed up for a rash of services lately, mostly to see what they are all about. I now have newly minted accounts on Facebook, MySpace, Gmail, and Google Talk. Trouble is, who am I connecting to? My IM buddies are all on AIM still. I'd feel like a jerk putting up my picture on Facebook or MySpace. I will admit, though, that the idea of a still-empty e-mail account is sort of delicious.

Next step: Flickr and Furl. Well, maybe next week.

Outlaw lit

The cover of The Outlaw Bible of American Literature (810.8 Ou86) isn't very exciting, so I didn't scan it. But the content sizzles. Just think, all crammed into one fat volume are excerpts from the likes of:

How to Talk Dirty and Influence People by Lenny Bruce
The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda
Live From Death Row by Mumia Abu-Jamal
Sister of the Road by Boxcar Bertha
American Splendor Anthology by Harvey Pekar
The Doggfather by Snoop Dogg
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas
Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver
The Woman Rebel by Margaret Sanger

More presents, sigh

I guess the library is different things to different people. I did get a sweet smile from the perp, though.

Presents in the book drop

Sometimes we get little "extras" in the book drop. Today's items were a Hyperlite baseball cap and a box containing a pair of the protective goggles that students have to use for chemistry. Looks like the manufacturer (Jones and Company, if you can believe it) hasn't updated its look in awhile.



Jake claims that students use the book drop for temporary storage, dropping items off for safekeeping on the way to class and then picking them up afterwards. Jake also claims he's putting us on.

Not your father's graffiti

And here I thought graffiti was all about spray painting slogans on walls and trains in the dead of night. Nicholas Ganz's book Graffiti World: Street Art From Five Continents (751.73 G159g) informs us that graffiti has become high art, not only here, but all over the world. Check out the work of this unknown artist in Paris:

Revitalizing the Book Chat

At last week's RifRaf (book club) meeting, I tried to get a sense of why the Book Chat seems to go through long periods of profound sleepiness (i.e., inactivity). Here's what folks said:

1. Too many old posts. Unless you specify dates through the history function, you have to scroll and scroll to find the new stuff.
2. Too many threads. It's hard to figure out where a topic will be discussed.
3. Too many old posts.
4. And, once again, too many old posts.

Some thought it would even be a good idea to wipe the slate clean and start over. I don't know if I'm quite ready to do that, but I could certainly delete or archive anything that dates before, hmmm, 2005? If you have any strong opinions, let me know.

Orson Scott Card and the movies

Again, courtesy Slashdot, (you can tell I'm catching up on my reading) I've learned something interesting. Orson Scott Card reviews the movie Serenity and proclaims it Good. So good, in fact, that he says:

This is the kind of movie that I have always intended Ender's Game to be (though the plots are not at all similar).

And this is as good a movie as I always hoped Ender's Game would be.

And I'll tell you this right now: If Ender's Game can't be this kind of movie, and this good a movie, then I want it never to be made.

So, guess I'd better go see Serenity. And after that, I just might read Ender's Game again. I agree with Orson - I'd rather see no movie than a bad movie.

Think everything you want is online?

Not so. Courtesy Slashdot, I've learned that even Google acknowledges it would take 300 years to index all the world's information. CEO Eric Schmidt notes that of the approximately 5 million terabytes of information out in the world, only about 170 terabytes have been indexed. Does that still mean that Google will be destroying all the information it can't index?

While I was away

I spent a good part of last week hanging with 4,000 school librarians. While I was gone, little fairies came in and decorated the library for Halloween. Today is Columbus Day, a school holiday, so I'm here all alone (yes, keeping the store open for someone...), feeling very much cheered by the paper bats hanging everywhere.

When librarians come back from these professional events, they tend to bring lots of tchotchkes with them - pens with vendor names, giant paper clips with vendor names, canvas bags with vendor names, key chains with vendor names -- everything short of flesh-and-blood vendors. This time, though, I struck pay dirt. I cannot WAIT to give this item to a certain president of a certain book club who is an over-the-top, true-blue, fairly wacked-out Jane Austen fan. Hint: think bobble-head.

Off to school librarian land

This blog will be a bit quiet for awhile. Tomorrow is Rosh Hashonah. Then I'm leaving for the bi-annual roundup of school librarians, the American Association of School Librarians National Conference in Pittsburgh. It's no fluke that I'm doing a session called "What's a Blog Doing In My Library?" The AASL conference is preceded by the 12th Treasure Mountain Research Retreat, in which a smaller number of us will meet to share and discuss the research in our fair field.

One of the things I'm liking about today is that when I check a book out to someone I can say "Your book is due on Halloween." Only happens once a year.