CGHS Library

You Know It's Serious When Magic Is Spelled With a "K"

In my s-l-o-w progression through BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, I have finally reached season five. I love the Magic Box, the shop where Giles sells magic paraphernalia. He keeps all the deepest, darkest, most dangerous books and potions in a loft easily accessible by shimmying up a ladder. The books practically have a sign that says, "Hey, the interesting stuff is up here!"  

So the other night, Willow is incensed enough to Climb the Ladder and find the book hidden BEHIND the other books, entitled, aptly enough, DARKEST MAGICK. She violently knocks off the clasp that keeps the book closed and it falls open, a mysterious wind rippling the pages. SPOOKY!

Ripped

 

Actual Cover of Actual Book Scott is Actually Reading

Have you ever wanted to see the mountains of South America first hand?  Have you ever wanted to trek through the jungle dodging poisonous fauna of all kinds?  How would you like to camp in the rain, catch rare diseases, swim in shark-infested waters, and mingle with possibly hostile natives? 

Nah, didn’t think so. 

However, if you would like to enjoy all that suffering from the comfort of home, I recommend Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, Tim Cahill’s first book in his series of adventure/exploration essay collections.  Cahill goes all the places you won’t, sees all the things you would have missed, and then writes them down in a way that is both awe- inspiring and hilarious.  Even if exploration isn’t your thing, Cahill probably is.

-Scott

Wuthering?

Now that Valentine's Day is well and truly over, it's time to read a book (or watch a movie) where everything turns out horribly in the end because the characters are just too nasty for anything better to happen.  I recommend Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.  (I had to look up, "wuthering," which turns out to be a pretty obscure word derived from a Yorkshire dialect and referring to the sound of the wind in the trees.)   

I did find one review of the latest PBS television version of the book that I thought was fairly entertaining.

 

"Tom Hardy, who plays Heathcliff, is a compelling man to look at but not classically handsome. With his full lips he can look soft and tender (and even handsome) playing a young Heathcliff, but as the character ages, Mr. Hardy transforms himself into a physically menacing man, creating a memorable character oozing with passion, venom, and hatred. Hardy's loose limbed and prowling walk; large shoulders and thick thighs; scraggly hair; slightly crooked teeth; disheveled clothes; and uncouth air bespeak Heathcliff's inner torment. Even when Heathcliff transforms himself into a suave and presentable suitor in order to court Isabella Linton, he exudes danger. Cathy Earnshaw, tied to him heart and soul, understands his actions instantly, but Heathcliff's victims, projecting their own vision onto the man, are like lambs to a slaughter." (Taken from PBS's Remotely Connected.)

Control Freaks Unite

This post from the Online College Blog lists "100 Powerful Tools to Organize Your Thoughts and Ideas" and includes online tools that can help you take notes, bookmark websites, highlight important text during online research, create mind maps, track time, keep up with appointments, collaborate with others, manage projects, and much more.

Is anybody else overwhelmed by this?  I think I'll just paper my computer in real-life sticky notes and call it good.  

And another thing!  While earning college degrees online may be how people learn in the future, I do not think there is any substitute for intelligent discussion with real life people occupying the same physical space. I've taken my share of both online classes and the old-fashioned kind. The online classroom wins hands down for convenience, while a real classroom wins in the Quality Education category.  I love technology. However, even I am beginning to wonder how much human beings are willing to sacrifice in quality for the sake of convenience. 

Perhaps I need to build a cabin in the woods. -mh

Comic Books on the iPhone

Geoffrey W. commented on something he read on the internet, and I told him not to believe everything he reads. He said, "I never believe anything I read.  But then, I mostly read comic books."  

Boy do I ever have a deal for him!

io9.com discusses UClick and iVerse, companies that sell comic books on iTunes for the iPhone. 

By going to UClick, I just discovered The New Adventures of Queen Victoria which is just so weird I can't even believe it.  I can't decide how I feel about it, but I can't seem to look away. -mh

Meaninglessly Meaningful

"Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."

Like so much on the internet, Wordle can be strangely beautiful in an odd sort of I-Have-Lots-of-Time-on-My-Hands sort of way.  Here are two I particularly liked even though I did not make them.  -mh

 

Happy Valentine's Day

Holocaust Testimony

The moving and often disturbing testimonies of Jewish migrants and refugees to Britain, many of whom survived Nazi concentration and labour camps, are being made available online in their entirety for the first time at the British Library site along with excellent supplementary material. Over 440 hours of life story recordings explore 66 personal experiences of persecution across war-torn Europe and the impact of the Holocaust, covering:

Anti-Semitism before the Second World War

Pre-war refugees and the "Kindertransport" 

Ghettos and concentration and labour camps

 
Survival in hiding

 
Resistance and liberation

 
Searching for family in the aftermath

 
Building a new life in Britain

 
The legacy of the Holocaust 

Lincoln is 200

The basic facts about Abraham Lincoln are familiar.

• He was born in Kentucky in a log cabin so small it is hard to imagine how his entire family slept in it.
• The family moved to Indiana where he was raised.
• Off to Illinois, the lanky Lincoln became a frontier lawyer, served as a state legislator and won election to the Presidency at a time when the nation’s very survival was at risk.
• Inaugurated in 1861, he served throughout the Civil War, working to break the grip of slavery and to put the country back together until an assassin brought him down.

A common man forged in uncommon times, Lincoln is the model American leader.

Read a short biography, view an extensive timeline, meet his family, take a virtual tour of the places important in Lincoln’s life, re-discover his words and speeches, including his famous Gettysburg Address translated into 29 different languages, and ask yourself “Did You Know?”

-taken from Lincoln Bicentennial website

TV = Evil

"Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard Medical School looked at the media habits of 4,142 healthy adolescents and calculated that each additional hour of TV watched per day boosted the odds of becoming depressed by 8%.

Other forms of media, such as playing computer games and watching videos, didn't affect the risk of depression, according to the study published today in the Archives of General Psychology.

The results don't prove that TV viewing itself causes depression, said Dr. Brian Primack of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Research on Health Care, who led the study. "It could be argued that people with the predilection for later development of depression also happen to have a predilection for watching lots of TV," he said.

But the circumstantial evidence pointing to TV as the culprit is strong, the study found." (Read more at the LA TIMES Science blog.)