September 200322 September 2003
Here's another fun way to celebrate Banned Books Week. Tell library
patrons: For more information about Banned Books Week, just run a Google
search for "BBW". Or let's observe Band Books Week, instead, to promote great
books about musical groups. Our
Band Could Be Your Life would top our list. 20 September 2003
Did you hear that fundie nutjobs have asked school libraries to remove Harry
Potter? Yes, you've heard it hundreds of times. Yawwwwwwwn. Banned Books
Week would be a lot more interesting if we focused on books that would be
banned -- that even should be banned -- if they existed. You prob'ly
don't want to read our list of the Top
25 Would-Be-Banned Children's Books while at work, nor in the presence of
"younger or more sensitive viewers" (as our local PBS station used to
say in its weekly warning before Monty Python's Flying Circus). On a related note, we thoroughly enjoy the Dick-and-Jane style illustrations
on Ken & Carol's Rejected
Children's Books page ("Look, look," said Sally. "Look where
I'm pierced."). And someone has compiled titles from other joke lists
into the Top
101 Rejected Children's Books. Minnesota
GovDocs librarians pose with the documents they love. Some of the
snapshots are fairly amusing. 19 September 2003
Today is Talk
Like a Pirate Day! How's this sound: "We have thousands of
major-label CDs that library patrons can borrow and copy without paying
an additional penny to the record companies." That reminds us: A couple months ago, Robert
X. Cringely wrote about a diabolical scheme he concocted (with a follow-up).
He proposed a company that would buy one copy of every CD, and then each
shareholder would be able to download songs because the shareholders --
as the mutual owners of those CDs -- would legally be permitted to make
copies for personal use. Well, you know, the taxpayers own the
CDs in a library's collection ... you see where we're going here. 18 September 2003 Really putting
the "E" into ebooks, TextArc
is an experimental tool which creates a visual representation of a text
and relationships between all the words in it. Stuff like this could
have KM applications in the future, but for now it seems to be something
to look at while listening to Tangerine Dream or early Pink Floyd (as
long as you have a fast machine and fast connection). Check the
TextArc-ing of Alice in
Wonderland. On second thought, Jefferson Airplane might be better
musical accompaniment for that one. Speaking of music, the
upcoming Tori Amos best-of CD will be called Tales
of a Librarian. Let's stick with today's music theme:
Quite a few of these iPod
ad parodies made us laugh out loud. 16 September 2003
In today's comics pages, Out
of the Gene Pool proposes a library drama for TV. Jessamyn
recently pointed to this funny Librarian
Dating page. The same site also delivers a Librarian
Jokes, Humour and Funnies page which is unintentionally quite
amusing if you give it a little thought. 13 September 2003
Somewhere in Heaven -- or maybe in Hell -- two guys are
swapping rehab stories; having a few laughs; and singing about guns,
drugs, death, desperation, and hope. RIP, WZ and JC. 10 September 2003
This breaks our heart: How can a library host an
event called Booktoberfest,
and not have a beer tent? That's just plain un-American. Now, we'd like to see the folks behind these
toys design a Librarian Action Figure. In keeping
with the Japanese creature theme, we've added this to Lib.Sigs.:
"What the hell's going on? It's like a monster convention
here!" (Godzilla, Mothra, and King Ghidorah: Giant
Monsters All-Out Attack) This is pretty much how we've been
feeling now that the kids are back in the library doing homework. 08 September 2003
Ref Grunt is
a librarian's (b)log of interactions during his desk shifts. The
"use your imagination to fill in the rest of the conversation"
aspect of many of the one-liners is pretty fun. What Do
You Read? A comic about the Patriot Act and libraries. "You
are the dumbest, maddest man I've met. That's what I get for putting you
on to books." (Orca) Added to Lib.Sigs.
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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.