From the Onion A.V. Club: 13 sidekicks who are cooler than their heroes.
I made some very pretty CSS stripes today. When I have the file online I will show it to you, internet.
I am freaking going to bed now. As my facebook status bar says... I am freakin' exhausted. EXHAUSTED LIKE A FOX!
I am so tired, internet. I feel like I have been running around for days. My feet hurt, internet. Do you want to come over tonight and rub my feet while I watch Veronica Mars? And maybe do my dishes?
I am on facebook now. It's pretty bizarre. I mean, the point of this site seems to be that we all go to school together, except we don't make friends with each other, because school is too big and scary. Right? I mean, the U of A has over 30,000 students, how am I supposed to make friends with any of them? I see these people once, and then they disappear forever. (Except this one woman who works in the library and who scowls at me everyday... but that is another matter, for another entry.) But the internet is a much friendlier place, with only several MILLION people on it. So we can all "poke" each other, and then poke back, and then be friends. And write little messages to each other. And continue to not talk to each other at school.
Me and my compatriots at Future Librarians for Intellectual Freedom (FLiF) are keeping tabs on freedom to read week over at our blog. I sat in HUB today at our table, giving away postcards and pamphlets, answering questions, and reminiscing with strangers about our favourite challenged books.
"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all." -Oscar Wilde
"Free societies... are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence." -Salman Rushdie
"The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion." -Henry Steele Commager
"Censorship reflects society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime." -Potter Stewart
"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only weapon against bad ideas is better ideas." -Alfred Whitney Griswold
"The paper burns, but the words fly away." -Akiba ben Joseph
"Every burned book enlightens the world." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
"If your library is not 'unsafe', it probably isn't doing its job." -John Berry, Library Journal, October 1999
Reading week reading update: so not only did I finish Library: An Unquiet History, I also finished-- in a coup that surprised everyone, including me-- A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books. This is a book that I have been reading for over a year. Goal met.
I am off for the weekend, to experience the thrill and bright lights of Bowden. When I come back it shall be the Deletia Freedom to Read Week Extravaganza... Week... A-palooza. Event. Exciting, no?
While I am gone, you may engage in Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading, or talk quietly amongst yourselves. Remember, I can hear you by turning on the intercom in the office.
I declare February 23 to be forthwith and hereafter known as... Dress Like Your South Park Character Day.
Quick review...
This is what I would look like as a South Park character:
AKA. Jocelyn wishes she could put more than one photo in a single entry. Oh well.
I only recently learned that this building exists. Doesn't it look like a building from a Batman movie, or from the Cold-War-era USSR, or something? I love it.
i went on an LRT expedition today. I am well aware that this may make me sound crazy, but I am prepared for that eventuality: I like riding the LRT around in a circuit. It's extremely relaxing. Also, I like watching things go by with no action required from me--I enjoy riding in cars (passengering?) for the same reason.
A photo-essay on Soviet roadside bus-stops. Some of them are quite striking--a vision of the future, straight from the 1970s. From polar inertia, "the journal of nomadic and popular culture."
Gullible.info is a website of interesting facts. Whether these facts are true seems impossible to determine, but really, does it matter, in this post-modern world? I am listening to John Hodgman's Areas of my Expertise as an audiobook right now (I downloaded it for free from iTunes for some reason, maybe you can too!) and it's great, a compendium of (fabricated) human knowledge. "Now I sense that you have further questions… you are reasonable to ponder, who is this John Hodgman, and how did he come to know so many invented facts?"
I am reading a book a day for reading week, that's the theory. (Young adult books are acceptable for this project, otherwise it seems insurmountable.) On Monday I finished The Garneau Block. Tuesday I finished The Xanadu Adventure, thus concluding my re-reading of all the Vesper Holly books. Yesterday I read The Watsons Go To Birmingham--1963, which was excellent. Today I am hoping to finish Matthew Battles' Library: An Unquiet History. Will she make it? Only time will tell!
From Thingology, the Librarything blog: When Tags Work, and When They Don't. Why does LibraryThing have such success with a user-supplied tagging system, while Amazon doesn't?
"Tagging works well when people tag "their" stuff, but it fails when they're asked to do it to "someone else's" stuff. You can't get your customers to organize your products, unless you give them a very good incentive. We all make our beds, but nobody volunteers to fluff pillows at the local Sheraton."
An interesting article, in which the author recounts his borderline obsessive hunt for the location and photographer of the Windows desktop wallpaper photo "Autumn." Autumn and the Plot against Me. [From VanityFair.com]
It is almost hard to believe that this photo is of a real place. Like all the Windows desktop wallpapers, it has a pervasive sense of fakeness. The leafy lane, the island with the palm tree, the green hill and too-blue sky: simulacra.
1. Spambox lets you create a temporary email that will forward to the email you tell it for the amount of time you set. Use it to register for websites that seem likely to sell your personal info to the highest bidder.
2. Cl1p is an "internet clipboard." Store information there if you need to access it later from a different computer. You can also use it for collaborative projects since anyone with the URL can access your information.
For all those unschooled girls over the centuries, who sat atop library ladders devouring their fathers' and brothers' books without permission, the library was Samarkand. Excitement, adventure, happiness bloomed in the sunlight filtered through tight-drawn linen blinds, as they gathered up treasure that no one could steal. The most adventurous, like Lady Mary Wortley, taught themselves Latin, so they could plunder Martial and Juvenal and Ovid, and learn as much about sex, drugs and rock'n'roll as their brothers knew. Libraries are places where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
-Germaine Greer writes about her favourite word, "library." Guardian Unlimited.
Other consumption in brief:
No One Cares What You Had For Lunch: 100 Ideas for your Blog. I got this book out of the library and it was dumb. It failed to inspire me with any great blog ideas (other than the one about reviewing recent books you've read/movies you've seen, except I was already doing that on a near-constant basis. So.) I don't have much else to say about it, but if you doubt me, get it out of the library yourself.
The Garneau Block is Edmonton writer Todd Babiak's debut novel. I am enjoying it, although the level of local detail is jarring--the book keeps mentioning the Sugarbowl, a coffeeshop/bar where I go on an almost weekly basis, the last time being Thursday. There is a weird uncomfortableness that accompanies that. I mean, the characters could go in there for coffee, and I could be there. What would happen then? It would be too meta for words. I like to stay out of the novels I read. [Edited Feb. 19th to add: The Garneau Block is not Todd Babiak's debut novel. His Debut Novel was Choke Hold, which was published in 2000. My only excuse is that I am my own research staff.]
Pan's Labyrinth was such an amazing film that I keep trying to articulate why I loved it. So visceral and scary and stressful--I had a stomachache for about an hour afterwards. The acting was incredible. It was in Spanish. What more could you ask for? (I was mistaken about it having Emperor Franco though, in case you were depending on that.) Also, it caused James and I to embark on a little historical information-seeking expedition, because we realized we knew nothing about Spain after world war II. So it had an educational effect, to boot.
I went to IKEA yesterday, and I am going again today. (It's the only place where I am ever really perfectly content-- because I am not worried about going to IKEA. I am half-kidding.) And I will be playing my first Warcraft of the weekend today. I think that warrants a "w00t."
I rent seasons of CSI (the original, William Petersen-having one) and watch them, compulsively, several episodes at a time. Many people don't like this show, and I wholeheartedly agree with them. It's terrible-- so formulaic, so contrived, so predictable. Like most TV crime shows, its dramatic success depends on the characters "TAKING! IT! PERSONALLY!" Grissom's quips and puns, most of them relating to a victim's cause of death, which are meant to be endearing, are in fact formulaic, contrived, and predictable-- are we noticing a pattern here? Also, has anyone else ever doubted that such a large number of intricate, elaborate, and complicated crimes happen in Las Vegas? In Edmonton, there are plenty of murders, but they tend to be stabbings in bars, and then when the police come, a guy holding a bloody knife says something along the lines of, "yeah, i murdered him/them. I was drunk and/or we had a fight and/or it was gang-related."
Given my acceptance of the fact that CSI is not good, why do I keep watching it? I have been asking myself this question recently as I work my way through season 6. I believe there are two answers. First, all TV shows require a certain amount of concentration, and that amount varies according to the show. Battlestar Galactica requires enough attention that I don't like to do other things while I watch it. CSI requires the perfect amount of attention for me to watch: ie., not very much. I don't really care what happens, whatever happens is probably basically the same as what happened last time, and the show makes everything obvious enough that you don't have to focus. The characters' relationships, such as they are, are sketched in the barest possible terms to be still recognizable as relationships. There are science montages that take up quite a bit of time which you can just ignore. You can watch CSI while doing almost anything else and the show will not punish you.
The second thing I like about CSI is that I have almost come to admire the way this show is made. It is lowest-common-denominator film (TV)- making, Bruckheimer at the top of his game. The viewer doesn't have to do any cognitive work because everything has already been thought out for them. The music and the editing tell you what you are supposed to feel, when you are supposed to feel it. I think this whole theory of making TV can be summed up in that shot in the opening credits, when we see the whole CSI team walking under some yellow police tape. The wind is blowing in their hair, and they are in slow motion, and the theme song plays, and if you stop to think about it, what you think is this: "How did this show manage to trick me into believing that forensics investigation is a glamorous, sexy job, that these people grapple with the weight of justice and progress and modernity on a daily basis-- and yet, that they are so well-balanced that this epic struggle seldom tired and never defeats them?" The answer is in that shot. I have stopped resenting being manipulated. Instead, when I start to cry over an officer-involved shooting or ponder the dynamics of the Sarah/Grissom relationship (Will they? won't they?), I just let myself be carried away. I will be CSI's ideal audience, never questioning the fantasy the show has constructed around heroism and the value of science.
But as I watch, I will probably be doing something else at the same time.
LibrarianAvengers' new film rating system. It would be helpful if you knew more about a movie before going in, such as, "Rated C for Creepy Child Singing" or "Rated K for Keyboard hacks Pentagon in two clicks." (Especially the second one. Does anyone else get annoyed by supposedly top-security computer systems which film heroes can hack by typing the word "HACK"?
Tonight I am hopefully going to see Pan's Labyrinth, which will be rated 'A' for AWESOME and 'S' for both "Spanish" and "Subtitles." Oh, and 'E' for "Emperor Franco."
I listened to a really great episode of This American Life yesterday. Have I mentioned how much I adore that show? Even the old episodes, you can listen to online (just not download). Episode 175: Babysitting.
Side-note: Ever since I started taking a web design for usability class, I have suddenly elected myself the Usability Police. [Even though this is a job more than adequately being performed by Jakob Nielsen.] When I see websites with frames, I get out my bad-design beatstick and my consider-the-user handcuffs. This American Life, I'll let you off with a warning this time, but next time I see you violating the It's Not 1997 Anymore, Web-Design Wise bylaws, I'm bringing you in.
the library's halls
gently suffused with the smell
of fresh, hot french fries.
warcraft will take up
as much time as you can give
so effortlessly.
it's an albatross
discouraging and endless
but homework persists.
Normally I hate these blog widgets that tell random visitors, "I'm a Capricorn" or "My superpower is HTML copy-and-pasting" or whatever, but this is too funny to pass up:
Also, I made some changes to this blog. A new archive for quotations (since in blogger they disappear when I replace them--and also because, obviously, i enjoy making collections of things). An actual, functional search box-- technorati wasn't doing it for me, so I went over to the google side. And in the right-hand column is a link to my del.icio.us account, although why anyone would want to access that is beyond me.
iConcertCal is an iTunes plugin that runs in iTunes. It checks for upcoming concerts in your area by bands in your iTunes library. I'm serious, dude. INSTALL IT!
And everybody knows that it's now or never
Everybody knows that it's me or you
And everybody knows that you live forever
Ah when youve done a line or two...
-everybody knows, leonard cohen
I am having one of those days, the days that are traditionally referred to in my family (copyright violation aside) as terrible, horrible, no-good very bad days. They delivered the wrong pizza, and the wrong armed services editions! I am writing an unwriteable paper. I posed for graduation pictures this morning in my Veronica Mars "Go Pirates!" shirt, and politely declined the offer of fake roses. (I went for the cheezy bookshelf backdrop though. When in Rome.) Tomorrow is Valentine's day, a holiday that always gets me into a maudlin weltzschmerz funk. (Did I just write that sentence? Oh yes. I think I did! Now that, people, is gloom. Take note.)
I am tired of all 1121 songs on iTunes.
The only thing that would startle me out of my funk is a warehouse of Lego. But let's calculate those odds, shall we?
How Not To Talk To Your Kids. This article describes the research of psychologist Carol Dweck, who suggests that emphasizing children's intelligence over other qualities may actually hinder their learning.
It didn't cross my mind until half-way through the article, but as a former Smart Kid, I was paralyzed by the experience of trying something new and failing at it. There are all kinds of things that normal people learn to do--skate, drive, play video games--that I have never learned because I tried them, didn't take to them immediately, and gave up on them. I wonder now if being constantly told what a bright kid I was had something to do with it--you forget that a big part of getting better at things is just trying, failing, and still working at it.
The question, I guess, is whether education and parenting can survive what could be perceived as an attack on the cult of self-esteem.
Note to self: when I have kids of my own, emphasize in this order (a) physical beauty ("Try to lose some weight so boys will like you more") (b) proficiency at sports ("remember, you're not going to have friends unless you know how to play hockey") (c) obedience ("good boy, you did exactly as I said in a timely fashion") (d) intelligence ("Well, I guess being book-smart could have advantages... maybe.")
Can you tell I installed stumbleupon in firefox?
Skyscrapers! A handy comparison guide. I found out that Edmonton's tallest skyscraper is only 45 stories, which is really nothing special. (I tried to find the building where I live, but, I'm embarrassed to say, I forget what it is called.)
Man I love the internet.
I played with Meghan's wii today, and my shoulder actually hurts now. Not that I am trying to contribute to an already over-hyped situation, but video games that encourage nerds to exercise should be embarked on with great caution.
Pandora internet radio will take a song or artist you like and then suggest other things you might like. This, in and of itself, does not sound that exciting. In fact, I could design a system that would do this. My system would work like this:
Type in the name of an artist or song you like: _______________
Based on the fact that you like ____________, the Jocelyn Music Recommeding Engine suggests you try The Cure. They make awesome 80s-style pop that is layered, atmospheric, and fun. If the song "Just Like Heaven" does not make you want to dance around, then you are dead inside.
Did Aphra Behn coin this phrase? I could like to go over to the reference library, but I am too lazy. I'll keep you updated.
I thought of someting to say on the way to the LRT this morning, but then I promptly forgot what it was. It might have been about (a) the charmingly multicultural nature of Tim Hortons (b) the prescient writings of Vannevar Bush (now reprinted in The Atlantic Online!) (c) the fact that it is freezing cold in my apartment, and, for that matter, at school and outside.
A book that would make a cute Valentine's day present: The Secret Language of Sleep: A Couple's Guide to the 39 Positions. You can take this test and find out your sleep position. I like the irrelevance of the questions.
I already know what kind of sleeper I am: a finicky one.
I have been working on my digital librarianship paper, due tomorrow, so I issue this update from deep within the throes of research. I hereby declare a moratorium on books/articles dealing with digital libraries using the title "books, bytes, and x," where x is any other word that starts with 'B': behaviour, bucks, buildings, bridges, beyond, etc. Seriously. Your alliteration is impressing no one.
Went to see Volver. Have crush on Penelope Cruz. Am drinking weird Co-op iced tea. I am all set up at school ("step into my office, or more accurately, everyone's office,") but I want to go home, where forefox is customized in a much more satisfactory way. I am listening to my ipod and I keep thinking I can fast forward through songs with the computer- d'oh!
But you know what they say: you can never go home. Because if you do, Jocelyn, you will try to watch CSI while writing your paper, and we all know that will never work.
On the plus side: I subscribed to the This American Life podcast, and now I can listen to the episodes on my iPod on the LRT. The one I was listening to this morning contained the phrase, "it's not a crack house, it's a crack home," which made me laugh out loud enough that people looked at me strangely.
Current paper length: 329 words. Longer Letter Later, as I used to write to my pen pals when I was in fourth grade. [Ideally, this should be written with one large 'L', and then the remains of the three words arranged beside it vertically, to form a sort of acrostic.]
I can't think of appropriate titles for entries anymore. I'm in a titling rut. The first person to email me or leave a comment with a title, as long as it does not contain any really rude words, will get to name this entry. Ooh, laziness contest!
Monday morning links:
I just ordered my first Armed Services Editions from abebooks. The ones I ordered are The Gaunt Woman and We Followed Our Hearts to Hollywood, neither of which I have even heard of as books. This is fine because I am more interested in the artifacts. Plus they were only a dollar each. I had them shipped to my parents, because getting me cheaper shipping for my internet purchases relieves 12% of their guilt over moving to the States. And, obviously, because it is cheaper.
I would like some kind of personal project to celebrate Freedom to Read Week. I'm not sure what though. Last year I re-read all the Anastasia Krupnik books, which was excellent. I mean, I could say that I am starting to collect Armed Services Editions for Freedom to Read Week. The only problem with that is that those two things really have almost nothing to do with each other.
I get so excited about Veronica Mars' shout-outs to other shows and movies. All through season 2, everyone was Big Lebowski-esque, talking about their "special lady friends." In season 3, Veronica keeps saying "frak," the "curse-word of the future," as I think I may have mentioned. However, the plot thickens: apparently this word has also reared is lexical head on The OC. This leads this blogger to suggest: has "frak" jumped the shark? Say it ain't so!
[I have never read that blog, by the way, and my link does not constitute an endorsement. It has a bunch of graphs on it, which I can't really condone. I was searching for "curse word of the future." Hits not as helpful as you might think. Frakkin' google.]
I need to order this poster: Keep Calm and Carry On. (You will have to scroll down a tiny bit.) It's a reproduction of a poster from London in the (bombings of the) 1940s. Obviously, we all need this hanging above our desks. I feel calmer just thinking about it.
Speaking of posters, and by extension things you hang on your wall, I received and framed and hung up some of my etsy art. It's exciting. Here's a picture!
