April 200422 April 2004 School librarian charged with throwing beer party for students. According to the story, "at one point, bullets were flying." We wonder whether any porn filters are protecting our kids from fingerbutt photos. "You can use it in so many different contexts ... You can use it when you're happy, you can use it when you're sad, you can use it when you're deeply pissed off ... ." RealPlayer vid of Neil Gaiman explaining why fuck is "unquestionably" his favorite word. Which sorta echoes what Carlin said all those years ago: fuck offers "a little something for everyone." Farkers are making up covers for unlikely Star Trek books. You are a librarian! Affirmations courtesy of Tangognat. The condensed and snarky version of Shakespeare's Pericles. Lib.Sigs. now includes a couple lines from Josephine Carr's classic literary masterpiece, The Dewey Decimal System of Love:
19 April 2004 Not only is it National Library Week (Really?? Like, duh-uh!), but it's also TV Turnoff Week. The two events dovetail nicely in this old bookmark from our Print Shop. At the intersection of National Library Week and National Poetry Month is the 17-car pileup known as library haiku. New Mexico State even did a booklet of its library haiku contest winners! (PDF) "If there are two things that go hand in hand in this world, it is the public library and the desire to urinate." A meditation on urination from Male Librarian Centerfold. Maybe if real libraries offered $20 lap dances, we might not have this problem with underfunding. But remember, no matter what a librarian tells you, there is no sex in the rare books room! When you start at 9:00 and read counterclockwise around the FCC's seal, you got yourself the F*U*Commission. So, if a television network shows the seal on screen, should we report them to the FCC? Portrait of John Ashcroft, done up in pornomosaic. 8 April 2004 LISFeeds is down, therefore our RSS feed is. Though we guess it's back up if you're seeing this in your aggregator. John Ashcroft is hard at work to increase the number of American men with prostate cancer. Museum of Hoaxes -- If you're teaching one of those "don't believe everything you see on the Internet" classes, this is the place to find examples. In yesterday's funny pages, Agnes judges a book by its title. 6 April 2004 Unusual Libraries -- Bookboats, bookbikes, bookburros, etc. At work, we've suggested (several times) that the library put its bookmobile on a raft in the front drainage ditch and fill the vehicle with slot machines. Booktastic! sure sounds like one of those get-to-know-each-other games that aren't much fun at all, except when you make sport of other players' answers. (At least, the "casual reader" aspect comes across that way.) Maybe Rory Gilmore would like it. Would you believe ... Maxwell Smart testifies before Congress on intelligence lapses. Apparently, one eBay member knows it's National Poetry Month! "There's nothing so refreshing/As a house that smells like clams ..." From a few years ago, poet Charles Bernstein's essay against National Poetry Month, which concludes with a proposal for an International Anti-Poetry Month instead. 5 April 2004 We suspect that today's Hagar the Horrible strip is being clipped and posted in circ departments across the country. Too bad King Features has a 2-week lag in putting strips online. (Update: Websites of Hagar syndicatees have the current strips.)
Also at librarism.com, a handful of librarians have been added to the parade. Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame opens in June. Folks at I Love Books have been combining book titles in amusing ways. Folks at Fark have been making up book covers for unlikely sequels. 2 April 2004 Reuters news article about a travel book spoof. Think your library has printer problems? Now that Scholastic has pulled Shonen Jump comics from school book fairs (due to smoking, profanity, etc.), maybe they can stop trying to turn American youth on to satanic witchcraft.
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Know
anyone who steadfastly defends intellectual freedom and
habitually creates charred disasters on the grill? That's the kind of
person our new "Book" Burner BBQ apron was designed
for. T-shirt also available, at the 
Copyright 2004 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.