Both of these YouTube videos landed in my inbox in the last few days, and both made me giggle. So I’m passing them along: An intrepid documentarian watches the strange biannual ritual of the March of the Librarians in Seattle. (It helps if you’ve seen March of the Penguins.) Introducing the Book! If you’ve ever […]
On a handmade sign taped to a washing machine at my laundromat yesterday: OUT OF ORDER(NO RING CYCLE) I think whoever it was meant "rinse cycle," but it made me giggle nonetheless. "No Ring des Nibelungen today, the washer’s broken…" [Update: Someone just surfed over here while Googling for "Wagner’s Rinse Cycle." I might’ve known […]
In one of the stairways leading up to the William Rainey Harper Library at the University of Chicago, there is a niche that holds an immense bronze bust of Walt Whitman, some three or four feet high. When I was an undergraduate there, I used to go past the bust almost daily. I found it […]
Via Crooked Timber: Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog! Go. Read. Now. And be prepared to laugh until you cry. (The Brokeback Mountain parody post slayed me: "At morwe-tyde, he sayde me, ‘Thou knowst I am not of the scole of Edwarde II.’" And the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight references! Hilarious, by Seinte Loy!)
As soon as I saw the Dynamic Einstein Picture Generator (c/o Rana), I knew I had to make this. Click to enlarge: (For the non-librarians reading this: He’s showing a class how to use science article databases. And yes, I also considered having him demonstrate Boolean operators: "search for (wave OR particle) AND quantum.") And […]
I’ve never been much of a one for playing April Fool’s Day pranks myself, but I’m glad to see that the good people at Library Journal have been observing the day in an appropriately leg-pulling spirit. Since the special LJ April Fool’s Edition will probably disappear tomorrow, here are a couple of screen captures for […]
Herewith, the results of the pseudo-aria contest. Though, really, since I couldn’t pick any one entry, it’s more like the caucus-race in Alice in Wonderland, in which everybody has won, and all must have prizes. Anyway, the winners are: “Come vergine”: simile aria from a baroque opera by Handel, in which the hero (countertenor) compares […]