CGHS Library

If You Are Searching For Humor, TOO BAD

The following is an actual conversation that occurred in the library.  I would avoid it at all costs if I were you.

Person 1:  Everywhere I go, I order chicken strips.

Person 2:  Even Iceland?

Person 1:  They don't have chicken strips in Iceland.  People gnaw on rocks.

Person 2:  With moss or no moss?

Person 1:  I always order the rock that rolls so it gathers no moss.

Pandemic 2

Thankfully, Pandemic 2 is a game. Your objective is to create a disease that is the most deadly and least visible, able to kill everyone from Canada all the way to Australia.  [As the description on the web site says, "Customize your disease and wipe out the population!"] What the game doesn’t say in the intro and instructions is that this game is near impossible to beat. If your virus, bacteria, or parasite does not spread fast enough, then the countries will build immunity to it. If you spread it too fast, they make a vaccine. The most frustrating part of the game is that Madagascar is populated by lemurs, causing your disease that you have cared for and nurtured to stagnate and fail to spread, because not too many lemurs go on airplane trips around the world. All this results in you bashing your head to your desk involuntarily because of the realization that five hours of your life was just wasted. 

-Tim A.

If you are interested in some real-life reading on the subject of plague, CGHS Library has a rather frightening assortment of books on the topic.

When Plague Strikes: the Black Death, Smallpox, AIDS

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance 

Virus X:  Tracking the New Killer Plagues Out of the Present and Into the Future

The Great Influenza: the Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

In the Wake of the Plague: the Black Death and the World it Made

The Devil's Flu: the World's Deadliest Influenza Epidemic and the Scientific Hunt for the Virus That Caused It

The Black Death

Cowboys

"In portraying pioneer characters on the stage and in moving pictures, actors have worn buckskin clothing--a correct thing for them to do.  But I never could take pleasure in looking over certain specimens of mankind whom I have often seen loafing about in public places or holding down chairs in dime museums, togged out in buckskin suits, moccasins, and sombreros, wearing on their faces the nearest thing they could contrive to a do-or-die expression.  I never saw a frontiersman who had, among men who knew him, a high rating as a man of ability and brains, who ever cared to make a display of himself in towns and cities by wearing anything which he knew would make him conspicuous." (--from FIFTY YEARS ON THE OLD FRONTIER by James H. Cook)

from Cowboy:  The Illustrated History

Science Lingo

A few days ago, my good friend Sabrina B. and I were paying very close attention to the lecture in chemistry class (yes, I'm serious), and saw that the chemical symbol Zn(OH) was really fun to say.  So, we came up with the awesome idea of coming up with our own language composed completely of chemical symbols. We haven't gotten very far from Zn(OH)₂ and MnO₂, and we don't really have translations, but that's ok, at least we know what's going on....

-sarahhhhhhh

Dickens

Masterpiece Theatre is doing the whole Dickens thing now through May 3 with televised versions of Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, and The Old Curiosity Shop. If you can't read the books, these are probably the next best thing.

The Graveyard Book

The LA Times did a nice story on Neil Gaiman winning the Newbery. We just received the book at CGHS Library, and I read it over the weekend. The book is beautifully constructed, interesting, and funny: rich with the pagan sensibility that serves both horror and children's literature well, the kind of book I wanted to read again immediately upon completion, though the ending disappointed me slightly.

When Gaiman heard that he won the award, he immediately twittered his enthusiastic and profane response.  School Library Journal reported it and said that librarians on the floor of the American Library Association Conference at the time were "dismayed" by his reaction, though Nina Lindsay begs to differ. "It really makes me wonder exactly who in that room of many hundreds the reporter spoke to, since the dozens I talked with were thrilled and laughing at Gaiman's response.  It's just a good feeling that such a celebrity would feel as excited about getting the Newbery as we are that he got it."

Gaiman knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote his tweet.  He is forty-eight, exactly the same age I am, and though I know he leaves the house more often than I do, I have been around the block a few times (My La-Z-Boy has wheels.), and I am sure he has lapped me repeatedly. I think we can eliminate naivete as a prime motivator for his tweet.  In an interview, again with School Library Journal, he half-heartedly sidesteps the issue, "You did curse in your tweet. I tweeted once I was sort of up and trying to figure out what was going on, that somebody is trying to phone me, somebody is trying to get hold of me. And I thought, I’ll twitter it."

Personally, I think Gaiman was deliberately trying to tweak the nose of the Establishment, whatever that is, and that the Establishment did not care all that much.  He is quoted in the LA Times piece, "I never really thought of myself as a Newbery winner. It's such a very establishment kind of award, in the right kind of way, with the world of librarians pointing at the book saying, 'This is worthy of the ages.' And I'm so very used to working in, and enjoying working in, essentially the gutter."

Still, despite his self-perception, Neil Gaiman is both too old and too successful to be anything but Establishment himself. The Newbery insures that he will sell lots and lots of books. He would have sold lots anyway, and Stardust and Coraline have both been made into movies. He has an extremely lively web presence. Everybody is charmed. Everybody wants what Gaiman produces, and they are prepared to pay to acquire it.

He certainly did not shock the kids, most of whom have been reared on a steady diet of cable television and rap music. And the librarians? Mr. Gaiman might think of librarians as Establishment, but they think of themselves as subversive, free-spirited, Children-of-the-Sixties, even though there is currently some debate about where to SHELVE The Graveyard Book in libraries.  I mean, do you put it in the children's section or in the young adult section?  Ah, Fellow Professionals, I love you. Just try to put it out there where your people can get at it, ok?

The LA Times reports, "On Gaiman's blog, he writes that "The Graveyard Book" is not a children's book. It's 'a book for pretty much for all ages, although I'm not sure how far down that actually starts. I think I would have loved it when I was eight, but I don't think that all eight-year olds were like me.' " 

I don't know about that, but I do know that if you truly want to be Anti-Establishment these days, Kids, clean it up.  Everybody will be shocked.  -mh

Online Cons

Trusting anything on the internet is risky.  I thought PC WORLD put together an excellent recap of current internet scams with Top 9 Dirty Tricks Scammers Use.  Ignorance might be bliss, but it can also get you in lots of trouble.

"What the average guy might call a con is known in the security world as social engineering. Social engineering is the criminal art of scamming a person into doing something or divulging sensitive information. These days, there are thousands of ways for con artists to pull off their tricks (See: Social Engineering: Eight Common Tactics). Here we look at some of the most common lines these people are using to fool their victims."

Jellicoe Road

"We heard her almost straightaway. In the other car, wedged into ours so deep that you couldn't tell where one began and the other ended. She told us her name was Tate and then she squeezed through the glass and the steel and climbed over her own dead--just to be with Webb and me; to give us her heand so we could clutch it with all our might. And then a kid called Fitz came riding by on a stolen bike and saved our lives.

Someone asked us later, 'Didn't you wonder why no one came across you sooner?'

Did I wonder?

When you see your parents zipped up in black body bags on the Jellicoe Road like they're some kind of garbage, don't you know?

Wonder dies."

(. . . . from the prologue of Jellicoe Road, 2009 Printz Award Winner)

Holy Cow

Sarah Macdonald backpacked around India when she was young and remembered "only heat, pollution, and poverty, so when an airport beggar read her palm and told her she would return to India for love, she screamed, 'Never!' " However, eleven years later, she finds herself back in India when the love of her life is posted there as a journalist.

Sarah is no Tim Cahill, but she can turn a phrase.

For example.

"If I can't have convenience I may as well have luxury.

And power.  India's boundaries of behavior are still dictated by caste, upbringing, and wealth. . . . I'm considered filthy rich and that means I can treat people dreadfully and get away with it. In fact, it's expected. Mrs. Dutt tells me to stop being so sucky crawly all the time.

'Why are you saying please and thank you all the time to your servants? It's not necessary, you sound too desperate to be nice. Have some backbone, you're very annoying.'

We all hear Mrs. Dutt screaming at her cook every night and it's rumored she belts her cleaner, but mostly she shows her power by pretending people don't exist and complaining about how stupid they are when they're standing right behind her. It's appalling, but it rubs off. I'm beginning to get a little impatient and short sometimes when people are slow or stare too much."

Facebook Privacy

Nick O'Neill outlines "10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know."  If I used Facebook, I would want to know this stuff.

"Everyday I receive an email from somebody about how their account was hacked, how a friend tagged them in the photo and they want a way to avoid it, as well as a number of other complications related to their privacy on Facebook. . . . I figured that many people would benefit from a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook. [Here] is a step by step process for protecting your privacy." (Nick O'Neill on allfacebook.com)