April 200329 April 2003
Peeps
visit the library. We were out of town for Easter and for a week
after, so we're just getting around to linking to this. Ditto for ALA
conference protective gear. Chicks dig a guy who
listens to audiobooks on an MP3
player made out of a Kalashnikov ammo magazine. 18 April 2003
A rap song about libraries! Our first BibDitties
offering is "Pictures at the Library," by obnoxious white guy
Emiless. Of all the websites with MP3s, this is certainly one of them now. 17 April 2003
Donald Rumsfeld has provided us with a useful quote to pull out
as a response the next time someone calls
for Internet filters as a way to keep perverts from doing illegal things
in the library: "It's untidy. And freedom's untidy. And
free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things." Reasons
Why Our Book Club Disbanded -- A list from McSweeney's. New
Children's Book Helps Kids Deal With Pain and Isolation of Plastic
Surgery -- A story to touch the heart, from The Onion. Here's a
fun bit about the ala.org re-do. 15 April 2003
Fun
article from The Washington Monthly about the professed favorite
books of presidential candidates. The piece does not
include any cracks about The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The Dutch library saga of Smelly Feet Man continues. For a slightly strange experience, just scroll through this
BBC News page and take in the three photos without reading any of the
article's text. What makes America great: People selling
on eBay PDFs and printouts of the images of the Iraqi leaders
playing cards, which anyone with access to eBay can get
for free from the DoD website. Speaking of those cards, there are 55
people in the "most wanted Iraqis" list, but only 52 are
included in the deck. We're too lazy to figure out who didn't make the
cut, though we did notice that a whole suit could've been made out of
the photo-not-available folks. 9 April 2003
ALA has unveiled its redesigned
site, in case you hadn't heard. ALA information minister Melvil Saeed
al-Sahaf announced, "The
pages load very quickly. The URLs are all short and easy to memorize,
and there are no bad links within the site." The Kent SLIS student organization is
selling t-shirts, including one with librarian pick-up lines featured recently on
LISNews, including a line that we wrote. We don't recall being asked permission. Added to Lib.Sigs.: "We've taken care of
everything / The words you read, the songs you sing, / The pictures that
give pleasure to your eye." Rush ("2112") 4 April 2003
We had an odd dream last night: Octopi had been
engineered so that their skin was being used for computer/video/ebook/etc.
displays. It was called cephalopaper. And some people were using
live octopi for their computers. Anyway, after waking we did some
Teoming and found that display
material that works like octopus skin is being developed. Maybe we
had heard about it before and forgot. Unshelved
is the new name of the great comic strip
(link for Google bomb participation) that used to be called Overdue.
Must reading for all librarians. We're disappointed that none of the
dozen or so names we submitted won the renaming contest, but we at least
get a little satisfaction that two of our submissions (Book Drop
and Shelf Life; we wouldn't be surprised if we weren't the only
ones to suggest them) made the short
list. A name we thought of sending in, but didn't, is TCSFKAO. Added to Lib.Sigs.:
"It doesn't cost any more to print something true than it
does to print crap." Melvin Burgess (Losing It.
Andersen Press, 2003, p. 254 -- as quoted in review
by a horrified Anne Fine). 3 April 2003 Parody
of LJ news article. Nice April Fool's joke, complete with parody
URL. This, as well as InfoWorld's Un-Public
Domain piece, added to Laugh'n'Links. We must've hibernated through "this winter's" foxy
librarian look. Hey! al-Jazeera has animated
cartoons on its website! Even if you don't read Arabic, you should
be able to get the gist of at least some of them. 1 April 2003
Under new powers granted by the USA PATRIOT Act, the
government is replacing National Library Week with National Security
Week. And you're not allowed to tell anyone about it.
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Copyright 2003 Brian Smith. Non-commercial distribution of material from The Laughing Librarian is permitted only if the original URL and this copyright notice is included. All commercial distribution is prohibited without written consent of and large cash payments to the author. Some images are from a commercial clipart package and may not be redistributed.