poesy galore

When the world is your instrument: Mogees

2012-01-06T08:56:00.000-06:00

Mogees is, according to the website, "an interactive gestural-based surface for realtime audio mosaicing". The video demonstration is thrilling:

Mogees - Gesture recognition with contact-microphones from bruno zamborlin on Vimeo.

More text from the website:

In the video we show how it is possible to perform gesture recognition just with contact microphones. Through gesture recognition techniques we detect different kind of fingers-touch and associate them with different sounds. In the video we used two different audio synthesis techniques:

- physic modelling, which consists in generating the sound by simulating physical laws;
- concatenative synthesis (audio mosaicing), in which the sound of the contact microphone is associated with its closest frame present in a sound database.

The system can recognise both fingers-touches and objects that emits a sound, such as the coin shown in the video.

I don't understand this, or what's happening in the video: is the microphone simply massively amplifying the almost inaudible sounds your fingers make while tapping and riffing on objects? But I think it's amazing, would go nuts to get my hands on the technology, and wish one of the "objects" in the video had been a living thing.

[via Kottke]

Street Art Utopia's Best of 2011

2011-12-20T09:58:00.000-06:00

Street Art Utopia posts 106 of the most beloved street art photos--2011. Some of my favorites (click through to the gallery for, occasionally, more information on where and who):

Bruce Sterling Closes the 2011 Art + Environment Conference

2011-12-09T10:10:00.001-06:00

Author and futurist Bruce Sterling gives a smart and entertaining talk about where we are now and where we might be going, both climate change-wise and art-wise. Watch below or just press play and listen while you do other stuff (I know 28 minutes seems like a long time to sit and watch--at least it does to me--and the talk doesn't depend on visuals. Sterling's an animated, worthwhile speaker even when you're just listening).

"Call Me Hope"--from Mama Hope's "Stop the Pity. Unlock the Potential" campaign

2011-12-08T13:41:00.000-06:00

This is great:

From the YouTube description:

"This is the second video in Mama Hope's (http://www.mamahope.org) Stop the Pity. Unlock the Potential Campaign. At Mama Hope, we believe that the essential first step in changing the world is telling the story of connection instead of contrast and potential instead of poverty. People everywhere have talent and capacity, and people everywhere share a desire to be able to use those gifts to improve their lives and the lives of the people they care about. To learn more about the projects we undertake to unlock this potential and get involved, visit us at ‪http://www.mamahope.org

Directed by Joe Sabia (http://www.joesabia.co) and Bryce Yukio Adolphson (http://www.bryceyukioadolphson.com)
Shot and Edited by Bryce Yukio Adolphson
Post-Production Sound by Matt McCorkle (http://www.equalsonics.com)
Produced by Nyla Rodgers (http://www.mamahope.org)"

Hot Drinks: Wendy's training videos from the 80s

2011-10-24T09:58:00.001-05:00

Well do I remember being shut in a windowless room at 16, first day on the job at General Cinema, to fumble a training cassette into a sad VCR and awkwardly learn what my work would entail (all the while feeling like I was being watched). In retrospect, I wish I had sought work at Wendy's, if only to be locked in a room with these. Many more on YouTube.

"Then hand that drink to the Coordinator, and tell the guest you'll see him later."

"Vittles" by Aaron Belz

2011-10-23T12:21:00.001-05:00

[My favorite poem from Belz's Lovely, Raspberry.
More Belz, including this poem, at ucity review]

Vittles
--Aaron Belz

Considering how little new there is to say about varmints
perhaps one can write something new about vittles,
or if the mood of the room in which one is writing
is cast perfectly for such an occasion one might even
venture to write something new about vittles that also
discusses or touches upon the interests of varmints,
for varmints are known to prefer certain vittles over others
and to reject some vittles entirely, such as anything leafy.

Leafy edibles might not even be properly defined as vittles,
in which case one inevitably turns one’s attention to parsnips.
Rumor has it that there is a certain kind of varmint that,
while unilaterally rejecting leafy edibles, will in fact partake
of a parsnip if the mood in the room is cast perfectly
for such an occasion, or indeed if the white china is so white
as to remind that varmint of the moon and set him to baying;
he might even partake of bay leaves if that is the case.

Bay leaves, however, and in fact parsnips themselves,
have traditionally been associated with critters,
what with the diet of critters being almost entirely leafy
and not at all thought of as vittles. It is almost comical
to imagine a critter munching on vittles. Let’s say,
however, that you’re stumped for ideas for your writing;
in this case, you might try picturing in your mind
a critter eating vittles—or a varmint eating leafy edibles.

Such fancy performs the function of a mental crowbar,
that is to say, it can if you allow it to perform that function:
you will suddenly remember three or four really sucky
moments of your childhood that you had suppressed,
and they will arrive in your mind with their own lexicons
and their own contextualizing power that is so overpowering
as to recontextualize even your recent thinking about vittles
and all the new things you had hoped to write about them.

Nina Simone, Harlem Cultural Festival, 1969: "Ain't Got No/I Got Life"

2011-10-22T11:49:00.001-05:00

I love the joyful ways she sings boobies--a departure from the original lyric.

Hennessy Youngman's "ART THOUGHTZ"

2011-10-22T10:21:00.003-05:00

This Metafilter post on Hennessy Youngman's "ART THOUGHTZ" has been sitting, starred to watch later, in my Google Reader account since May. Glad I clicked through. "ART THOUGHTZ" has cracked me the hell up all morning.

On Post-Structuralism:

ART THOUGHTZ: Post-Structuralism from Hennessy Youngman on Vimeo.

On Bruce Nauman:

ART THOUGHTZ: Bruce Nauman from Hennessy Youngman on Vimeo.

On the Female Gaze, with guest host Tamara Suber (slightly offensive, wholly pretty great, and very NSFW):

ART THOUGHTZ: The Female Gaze, with Special Guest Tamara Suber (NSFW) from Hennessy Youngman on Vimeo.

More:
Hennessy Youngman on Vimeo
Hennessy Youngman on YouTube
Hennessy Youngman on Tumblr

Complaints Choirs

2011-10-15T21:09:00.000-05:00

Via Brain Pickings, an article about Complaints Choirs around the world. I'd never heard of these before, but the earliest iteration seems to have been in 2005. From the Complaints Choirs Worldwide site:

It all got started during a winter day walk of Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen in Helsinki. Perhaps it was due to the coldness of the day that they ended up discussing the possibility of transforming the huge energy people put into complaining into something else. Perhaps not directly into heat – but into something powerful anyway.

In the Finnish vocabulary there is an expression "Valituskuoro". It means "Complaints Choir" and it is used to describe situations where a lot of people are complaining simultaneously. Kalleinen and Kochta-Kalleinen thought: "Wouldn´t it be fantastic to take this expression literally and organise a real Complaints Choir!"

The Helsinki Complaints Choir:

From the Complaints Choirs of the World FAQ:

HOW DID IT ALL STARTED?

We just realized that people complain a lot, no matter what their life circumstances are. Whether they live under socialism or capitalism, whether they are rich or poor, young or old. We wanted to tap into this unending source of energy, we wanted to transform this complaints energy into something else, something surprising. The idea itself stems from the Finish word "Valituskuoro" - which means Complaints Choir. We wanted to see what happens if one takes this term literally. We tested the project in Birmingham (UK) in 2005. The song "I want my Money back" created during a complaints workshop at Springhill Institute became an instant hit on the net.

DID YOU WANT TO COMBINE SINGING WITH POLITICAL PROTEST?

Complaints Choirs are not intended as protest choirs or an agit-prop revival. The political complaint is only representing a small margin of the wonderful world of complaints. Why should such important issues as broken underpants, boring dreams or spying neighbors be excluded? On the other hand the private, the personal, can be very political at the same time. If somebody complaints "I have too much time!" it can be seen just as a personal tragedy, but it also points to a major defect of the capitalistic society, which sidelines people because they are of no use in the production cycle.

HOW DOES A COMPLAINTS CHOIR COME INTO EXISTENCE?

All citizens of a particular city are invited to complain about anything they want and to join the choir. At the first meeting the freshly formed choir decides democratically on the content of the song. A local musician composes a tune for the text which is then rehearsed in 4 or 5 meetings. In the end the choir performs their collective grumbles at different locations in the city.

The Complaints Choir of Copenhagen:

You can see lots more complaints choirs' performances here. It doesn't appear that Minneapolis has one (yet).

"So, you think you can kern?" --Kottke

2011-10-12T12:14:00.001-05:00

Playing Kern Me, the beautiful kerning game, is like scratching a wonderful itch. Test your kerning skills against a typographer's.

"Jen Ratio"--notes from Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken

2011-08-22T09:22:00.005-05:00

Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World is waking my brain up more than any other book has for a while. I'm reading a library copy, so I'll be copying out passages here that I know I'll want to revisit later, adding some notes on occasion.

from page 190:

"Dacher Keltner has devised a simple way to...measur[e] the social well-being of any shared environment. It's called the 'jen ratio', from the ancient Chinese word for human kindness. It compares the total positive interactions between strangers to the total negative interactions, in a given period of time and in a given place. The higher the ratio, the better the social well-being of the space and the happier you're likely to feel after spending time in it. The lower the ratio, the poorer the social well-being, and the unhappier you'll be if you spend too much time there.

To measure the jen ratio of a space, you simply watch it very closely for a fixed period of time--say, one hour. You count up all the positive and negative microinteractions between strangers, keeping track of two different totals: how many times people smile or act kindly toward each other, and how many times people act unfriendly, rude, or openly uninterested. All the positive microinteractions--such as big smiles, a hearty thank-you, a door being held open, a concerned question--get tallied on the left side of the ratio. All the negative microinteractions--a sarcastic comment, an eye roll, an unexcused bump, someone cursing under their breath--get tallied on the right side.

The jen ratio is a simple but powerful way to predict whether being in a particular place will make us happier or unhappier. When Keltner surveyed several years' worth of recent research on social well-being and social spaces, he concluded: 'Signs of a loss of jen in the United States are incontrovertible...with a jen ratio trending toward zero.'"

-----------

Thoughts: what is the jen ratio of your library? I subbed at the Nokomis Library last Friday and, much as I love the library I currently work in, noticed that it just felt especially good in there. Part of this I'd attribute to architecture: lots of windows and natural light, great sightlines from the info desk through the rest of the building, lots of neat nooks & crannies for folks to snuggle into while still remaining in sight of the desk and part of the whole. But also: the layout and staff personalities were such that everyone who came in the door was greeted, often by name--it's a community library, much smaller than the one I spend most of my time in, but I still think this could be somewhat feasible in a larger space--and you got the feeling that everyone there wanted to be there, was actively participating in "libraryness," as opposed to rushing in to cross off some chore. It's a different neighborhood, in the city as opposed to the gogogo upper-middle class suburb I work in, but I also thought it had a more positive vibe than similar-sized libraries I've visited in the city. Does Nokomis have a higher jen ratio than many other libraries? Does the responsibility for that lie in the staff?

What is the jen ratio of your workplace (while the wider library might be a little less high than Nokomis, the workroom in my library has a pretty good jen ratio, I'm sure)? Of your block? Of your city (I think Minneapolis has the highest jen ratio of anywhere I've lived)? Of your relationships?

Art Swap at the MIA

2011-08-06T14:42:00.001-05:00

Just got back from my first Art Swap, and I'll definitely go to the next one. I love the idea: bring a piece of art, trade it in for a golden ticket, then browse the tables of art and choose a piece to take home.

I didn't get there until 1:30, and the swap ended at 2, but it looked like many folks had made a full morning/afternoon of it--you can return the art you chose for another golden ticket, then choose a different piece, and repeat the process as often as you like as new art arrives. There was a string band playing, some beverages for sale, and a generally festive atmosphere.

I didn't have my camera, and neglected to take a picture of the art I swapped in--a framed art photo we bought several years back at a silent auction fundraiser and never found a great spot for--but below is the piece I brought home for our green-walled living room. I like it, and am considering whether I want to keep it as is or alter it in some way (especially after seeing lots of great mixed media ideas at the Powderhorn Art Fair this morning):

"Foods" by Dahlia Elsayed

2011-05-30T08:24:00.004-05:00

I first saw this video a few weeks ago, and have thought about it on and off since. It reminds me of Eileen Tabios's The Chatelaine Shops and Spends (and her other similar projects), which I remember thinking was a brilliant use of Blogger way back in 2005--and, to a lesser extent, of Denise Duhamel's Mille Et Un Sentiments (scroll down at link for excerpt).

I think I could probably benefit from watching this every morning. I've been wondering a lot about "wants" and feelings recently. Which are fleeting? Which are significant? Are any significant? Are all fleeting? T will often say to me, "It's just a feeling, not a fact. It will pass." This sounds like wisdom...but is it? What does a practice like that mean for a maker of art (or maybe that's the one place you stuff the feelings)? What does a practice like that mean for one's life (stability? enlightenment? regret)?

When it comes to food cravings, at least, it's easy for me to grasp:

New Uses for Old Poetry

2011-05-14T07:50:00.001-05:00

Louise Gluck poems, placed around the perimeter
of the garden, will deter squirrels and rabbits.

Extend the life
of cut flowers--add a Lucille
Clifton poem to the vase water!

Make a paste of Bernadette Mayer
poems and vinegar
to soothe bug bites and stings.

To freshen a stale carpet, scatter
James Tate poems on it,
wait a few hours,
then vacuum.

2,052-voice YouTube choir performs Eric Whitacre's "Sleep"

2011-04-14T11:20:00.001-05:00

"The 2011 Virtual Choir video features 2052 performances of 'Sleep' from 1752 singers in 58 countries, individually recorded and uploaded to YouTube between September 2010 and January 2011. http://virtualchoir.org"

Don't miss this, even if you just watch a little of it. I haven't been this moved by a YouTube video--or global art project that 2.0 video curation and publishing made possible--since Where the Hell is Matt?

"You took my joy. I want it back."

2011-04-14T08:45:00.002-05:00

Damn, am I glad to have found this song today. It was released in 1998, and there are many times over the past 13 years when it would've been great to have known of it, but I'm still glad to find it now. I'm lucky enough to have never had a person in my life to sing it to, but it's nice to belt out to gloomy weather and clinical depression, and I can imagine folks addressing it to a toxic job or situation or gender norm. It also lends itself easily to all kinds of adaptation--protest call & response (you took our rights; we want them back). I want to teach it to the girls when I get home, so they'll have it as they go through puberty, relationships, life.

Lucinda Williams, "Joy":

"History for Music Lovers" videos by the "historyteachers"

2011-03-27T20:55:00.002-05:00

Simply the most ~~insane shit~~ fabulously bizarre stuff I've seen online in ages. Educational videos about history, set to pop songs, but that doesn't begin to cover it. The use of songs like "Hollaback Girl" and "Bad Romance" (for the French Revolution) one might expect, but a music video about the Crusades set to "Eyes Without a Face"?

"Black Death" (set to "Hollaback Girl" by Gwen Stefani)

"Macedonia" ("My Sharona")

"Ancient Minoan Civilization" (to Radiohead's "Creep")

"The Crusades" ("Eyes Without a Face," Billy Idol)

*More at thehistoryteachers' YouTube channel (including "Trojan War" set to "Tainted Love")

Riveting

2011-02-12T19:23:00.000-06:00

[all from the 1930s-40s in Color Flickr set by the Library of Congress]

"Things I Don't Have to Think About Today"

2011-02-03T10:39:00.002-06:00

Ten years ago, in DC, my white female then-partner and I realized halfway through moving day that one small trailer wasn't going to cut it for all our stuff. We asked our black male friend and his black male cousin, who were helping us move what we couldn't lift, to go rent a moving van (I forget the company) while we kept on packing. They came back and told us that, unfortunately, none were available on such short notice. My partner called the company and was assured that there were plenty of available vans she could rent immediately. She told the guys there must have been some mistake, and asked if they could head back and pick one up. It hit me like a sledgehammer that they had been turned down because they were two black males wanting to move a bunch of stuff across state lines in a hurry. I miserably suggested one of us ride along with them (in retrospect, we shouldn't have given the company our business. I regret it).

This December 23, after waiting an hour and a half in a jammed airport check-in line, I realized I'd somehow lost my driver's license between home and the airport--it wasn't with me. I told my family to go ahead, that I'd go home and catch a later flight, since I was sure the airline wouldn't let me on without a photo ID. My partner suggested we at least ask if there was some way I could fly ID-less. We asked, and were told this sort of thing happened fairly frequently, and I could still fly, but I'd need to go through both the X-ray-like body scan and the enhanced patdown, and have my hands tested for explosive (I guess) residue. No problem. I didn't wonder until days later if I would have been given the same treatment if I'd been in hijab, or been a Somali male, etc. I doubt it.

I came across the above cartoon, by Barry Deutsch, today via swirlspice. It reminded me of something I like even better, John Scalzi's October 2010 blog post "Things I Don't Have to Think About Today". Below are the first two stanzas, but I really recommend reading the whole thing.

Things I Don’t Have to Think About Today

Today I don’t have to think about those who hear “terrorist” when I speak my faith.
Today I don’t have to think about men who don’t believe no means no.
Today I don’t have to think about how the world is made for people who move differently than I do.
Today I don’t have to think about whether I’m married, depending on what state I’m in.
Today I don’t have to think about how I’m going to hail a cab past midnight.

Today I don’t have to think about whether store security is tailing me.
Today I don’t have to think about the look on the face of the person about to sit next to me on a plane.
Today I don’t have to think about eyes going to my chest first.
Today I don’t have to think about what people might think if they knew the medicines I took.
Today I don’t have to think about getting kicked out of a mall when I kiss my beloved hello...

[read rest of Scalzi's post]

From The Katrina Paintings by David Bates

2011-01-06T08:59:00.001-06:00

from The Katrina Paintings by David Bates

"The revery alone will do..."

2010-12-21T14:06:00.001-06:00

Emily Dickinson poem carved into a planter outside the library where I work:

"To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few."

Matthew Cusick's Map Works

2010-12-16T19:39:00.000-06:00

In the "Why the hell didn't I think of that?" category, a breathtaking series of collages made from maps by artist Matthew Cusick, via BoingBoing.

[previously, and somehow relatedly in my head, Richard Saja's embellished toile]

Don't miss seeing this! "Ain't No Grave": Beautiful Crowdsourced Video--The Johnny Cash Project

2010-11-14T08:45:00.001-06:00

This is flat-out freaking gorgeous. (click, or view below):

"The Johnny Cash Project is a global collective art project, and we would love for you to participate. Through this website, we invite you to share your vision of Johnny Cash, as he lives on in your mind's eye. Working with a single image as a template, and using a custom drawing tool, you'll create a unique and personal portrait of Johnny. Your work will then be combined with art from participants around the world, and integrated into a collective whole: a music video for 'Ain't No Grave', rising from a sea of one-of-a-kind portraits. Strung together and played in sequence over the song, the portraits will create a moving, ever evolving homage to this beloved musical icon. What's more, as new people discover and contribute to the project, this living portrait will continue to transform and grow, so it's virtually never the same video twice. Go to www.thejohnnycashproject.com to participate!"

The above version was posted to YouTube 3 months ago. See the current version at The Johnny Cash Project. If you click "Contribute," you'll be given three frames to choose from. Select one, and you can draw it right on the site over (if you choose) the original frame for reference. If you click "Explore," you can watch different versions of the video--ones with only pointillist drawings, with only "sketchy" drawings, with the top-rated frames, with the most recently-drawn versions of the frames, etc. Fantastic.

"Wild Plants of Japan": Time-Lapse Videos

2010-11-14T07:18:00.001-06:00

Via this post at BoingBoing, some mesmerizing time-lapse videos of plants by Omni/ScienceNet. I don't think any "space alien" imagery we've ever come up with compares (though I wish the first video had the same score as the second):

A Very Potter Musical

2010-11-09T20:48:00.000-06:00

Oh, wow. It took Darren Criss showing up on Glee for me to discover A Very Potter Musical. Criss (who plays Blaine, the nice gay guy from the all boys' school on Glee) stars as Harry Potter in the fan musical, available on YouTube. I've only seen two scenes (videos) so far, and after the second (if you haven't seen it yet and only watch one of these, watch the second), I'm in for them all. Here are scenes one and two:

Cho Chang. Draco. Ah!

The Getty Museum's Augmented Reality Art

2010-10-31T14:19:00.000-05:00

From The Getty Museum: augmented reality lets you remotely view one of their art objects in 3D, turning it around to see all of its sides. If you have a webcam, you can try it yourself.

The brief video demonstration makes me want to create 3D objects meant to be viewed this way, and not in person:

(via post at Free Technology for Teachers)

Paris Review: All Writer Interviews Now Online, Free

2010-10-26T11:38:00.003-05:00

The Paris Review has put all of its interviews online, free to read and arranged by decade. Of the few I've read so far, (50s: Ralph Ellison, 60s: Edward Albee, 90s: Jose Saramago), standouts are

Marianne Moore's:

Working as a librarian was a big help, a tremendous help...

Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure...

Do the poet and scientist not work analogously? Both are willing to waste effort. To be hard on himself is one of the main strengths of each. Each is attentive to clues, each must narrow the choice, must strive for precision...

and the interview with Jorge Luis Borges:

Ah, New York. I was there, and I liked it very much—I said to myself: “Well, I have made this; this is my work" and comments on Old English poetry, Eliot and Sandburg, humor in his work, and more--reading this one felt like being a student in a fantastic seminar.

"Changing Education Paradigms" video by Sir Ken Robinson

2010-10-25T07:05:00.000-05:00

I really enjoyed this short presentation on our current dominant educational model and its--in many ways--lack of relevance (and sense) at this time. Didn't hurt that the speaker moved quickly and seamlessly from topic to topic in a way that reminded me of Eddie Izzard:

via Stephen's Lighthouse

More and more across the web, I've been seeing the idea that real growth or solutions or invention comes from groups, not individuals, and it made me think about how I dreaded group assignments in school because of the way they usually turned out: not with the group working together, but with individuals taking a portion of the work and doing (or not doing) it, then the group rushing to slap it all together in a way that barely cohered before presenting the finished piece. The times I can remember groups working really creatively, the excitement of working together, was when we were given a problem to solve--as opposed to "Do a group report on art in Japan." The problem-solving type of group project was usually assigned in a science class, the "do a group report" in humanities classes. As a parent and someone interested in the future of education, I'd like to see more problem-solving-type group activities assigned in humanities classes. The first (not great) example that comes to mind: "You're a group of representational painters, making your living painting portraits and landscapes. Photography has just been invented. How do you respond? What should painting do now?" rather than "Do a group report on Cubism or Impressionism."

"This painting is not available in your country."

2010-10-22T11:50:00.002-05:00

By artist Paul Mutant:

Iambik Audiobooks: Small Press Books in Audio!

2010-10-20T16:30:00.005-05:00

I don't use exclamation points in blog post titles often. I do often refer library patrons looking for recordings of public domain works (there are inevitably way too many last-minute holds on Huck Finn on CD at the end the summer when it's been assigned to every highschooler in town) to LibriVox, which features free audiobooks recorded by volunteers.

Today, LibriVox founder Hugh Maguire has launched a company that sells (very inexpensive) audio recordings of a selection of small press books.

Iambik, the new company, currently offers 11 DRM-free audiobooks as mp3s or m4bs, including Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Davis (Soft Skull) and Like Son by Felicia Luna Lemus (Akashic Books).

Iambik seeks input on which small press books you'd like to listen to, and is also open to hearing from publishers, authors, narrators, and prooflisteners who might be interested in working with them. Great news, I think.

Enjoying today's #sadchildrensbooks tweets on Twitter

2010-10-20T13:16:00.004-05:00

Some favorites:

@norakl If You Give a Mouse a Cookie You Can Track His Web Usage and Invade His Privacy

@delilahsdawson How Do Dinosaurs Eat Your Legs?

@robertbtaylor Schrodinger's Cat in the Hat

@michaelbain Little House on the West Bank

@Sascha_Zuger Just So So Stories

@meandmybigmouth The Secret Garden Centre

@HouseofJules One Fish, Two Fish, Dead Fish, New Fish

@MattHoltzclaw Slap The Bunny

@mollage Tales of a College-Educated Nothing

@petersagal Bread and Water for Frances

@thatsmynewband Where's Waldo? I Have to Tell Him His Parents Died

and (I can't find the attribution) Everybody Poops...Except You

Great Visualization of the Depth of the Chilean Mine

2010-10-15T06:39:00.003-05:00

Rob Cockerham created a long web page to help him (and others) get a sense of the depth of the mine shaft trapped miners had to ascend in Chile. 1 pixel = 1 inch. Just scrolling the depth made my stomach sink.

Via BoingBoing.

Fort Worth City Councilman Joel Burns: It Gets Better

2010-10-14T17:16:00.004-05:00

At a 10/12 city council meeting, gay councilman Joel Burns gave an amazing speech about the recent GLBTQ teen suicides and his own experience. I'm blown away by how good a job he did, words and delivery. Watch all 13 minutes:

Best American Essays 2010

2010-10-14T12:15:00.003-05:00

Best American Essays 2010 is edited by Christopher Hitchens, and Metafilter helpfully points out (with links) that most of the essays can be read online.

Skype-canning your employees a la Up in the Air too compassionate for ya?

2010-10-13T21:17:00.004-05:00

...then you might appreciate the method mobile phone company Everything Everywhere recently used with its workers. From a 10/11/10 Telegraph article:

"All 16,000 employees of Everything Everywhere, the mobile phone company created by the merger of Orange and T-Mobile, were told last month whether or not their jobs were safe at mass meetings across the country.

Up to 1,200 middle managers and back office staff who could lose their jobs by the end of the Christmas holidays were shown a red light and told they were "at risk". Other staff saw the light go yellow, which meant they must re-apply for their existing job...A blue light indicated their job had been 'mapped' into the new business plan and [they] were being kept on. A green light showed the creation of a limited number of new roles.

The presentations were made in public in front of between 30-60 colleagues. Some employees are thought to have had no idea that their jobs were at risk before the humiliating public meeting. One employee said: 'Some of the people got up and walked straight out of the room, others sat there crying, others were absolutely dumbstruck.'"

More: Everything Everywhere Staff See Red Over Traffic Light Redundancy System (Telegraph)

"Everybody Likes the Snappy Worker"

2010-10-13T10:34:00.014-05:00

Via Metafilter. Charles Mather's "Work Incentive" posters, printed in the 1920s, were "the first motivational posters for the private workplace market." You can view 62 of them here.

62 Work Incentive Posters by Charles Mather

Youth Pride Chorus: It Gets Better

2010-10-07T08:46:00.002-05:00

Just beautiful. Stick through the whole performance.

Studology 101

2010-10-06T18:38:00.006-05:00

I discovered Studology 101 tonight via the It Gets Better Project. Pookz and DZ have both been out since age 13. Their videos are educational, blunt, and utterly charming (though not always politically correct). So far they've uploaded 81 videos on aspects of stud life. Here's the inaugural video from Nov. 2008:

Here's a Studology 101 episode called "Homophobic People":

More at Studology 101's YouTube Channel

Online Archive of Gov't-Commissioned Comics

2010-10-06T10:26:00.006-05:00

Well, this is cool--an online archive of comics commissioned by the US government starting in the 1940s. Click on a cover, get the pdf: for example, here are 1951's Bert the Turtle Says Duck and Cover and Foxhole On Your Front Lawn. Famous comics characters even show up from time to time: in Security is an Eye Patch (1968), Charlie Brown and Sally help the government educate readers about lazy eye syndrome.

*Government Comics Collection (UNL Libraries Digital Collections), via the ever-valuable Research Buzz

Excellent Free Use Photo Set at Fontplay.com

2010-10-05T22:21:00.014-05:00

Trawling around for free use images to use in my "It Gets Better" piece last weekend, I found an amazing mother lode of fantastic photos, Free Photo Index, and I wanted to recommend it here in case you're looking for a free use photo source. The page says simply "10,000 Free Photos by Dennis Hill and Friends," and folks are free to use the images in any way they want (library poster? visual poetry? holiday cards? band or event flyer?), no attribution necessary. The quality is fantastic, I think: just looking at a lot of the images made me want to make something out of them.

There's a six-page gallery just for mannequin images, for ex, where I grabbed this:

I flipped it around, ran it through a few effects filters and added text at Picnik, and used this image [horizontally] in the video:

A "Light" gallery has everything from neon signs to fires to lamps. There's a "Music" gallery, 17 pages' worth of "Textures," 6 pages each of "Dolls" and "Humanish," a "Words" gallery, and more. It's nice to find a site where every image is equally free, no-strings-attached, so you don't have to squint to make out individual images' licenses. Some more samples:

[my video for the It Gets Better Project]

2010-10-03T19:18:00.003-05:00

(some images modified after borrowing from the generous

Flickr Free Use and CreAtive ComMonS (All Free Stuff) pools)

24 Cents Annually for the Arts: Taxpayer's Receipt

2010-10-02T13:46:00.005-05:00

At The Washington Post, Ezra Klein suggests that taxpayers should get receipts with breakdowns of what they're paying for what. Klein offers a sample receipt for a taxpayer earning $34,140, coincidentally almost exactly what I make:

I'm paying 24 cents for funding for the arts (don't spend it all in one place, artists) and roughly 2606 times that for Medicare. I hope all the anti-tax Tea Party recipients of Medicare appreciate my contribution. Via swirlspice.

Being Visibly Queer-Friendly: Please Consider It

2010-10-02T08:47:00.016-05:00

Six GLBTQ teen suicides were reported in the month of September. Six that we know of. Six that made the news.

I urge you, if you work with kids in a library or school or afterschool program or religious organization, to please consider wearing something (or posting something in your office, if kids visit you there) all the time that identifies you as GLBTQ-friendly. At 36, out since 18, I still feel a little lift (and gratitude) when I see a rainbow sticker on a car or posted in a shop window (or, for that matter, a queer magazine with all the other magazines in a library). It still makes a difference to me.

When I was 17, in 1992, a professor of mine wore a pro-GLBTQ button on his bag, and seeing it made my heart beat faster. I bought one and wore it (this was a button that simply said that the wearer supported GLBTQ rights--not that the wearer was GLBTQ) from my dorm room all the way to the bathroom. Then another girl opened the bathroom door, and I turned red and ripped it off before she’d even seen it, and buried it in a drawer back in my room, and even then worried that my roommate would find it when I was out of the room. Just conjuring up that moment for some weird reason makes me feel scared enough, now, to need to pee. I couldn’t wear the button yet (when I came out a year later, things went a bit too far the other way: I hardly had one piece of clothing that didn’t have some kind of queer slogan on it)—but it made a difference, however small, that someone I knew and respected—the professor—could wear it without blinking or even mentioning it, like it was perfectly normal.

I remember that dark swirling feeling I had in high school and the first year of college before I came out, the feeling that if people knew who I was that their stares would crumble my body to dust. I remember blushing a lot, and feeling my stomach sink a lot, and feeling hunted and baited by the few people (I think it was only a few) who suspected. I remember feeling ice cold when I walked by their lockers. I remember feeling like my sexuality was the source of their deepest amusement, their most hilarious joke among themselves. That they daily looked forward to that moment when I would pass by and they could make me pay for who I was, if only with their eyes and cruel, knowing grins.

I was never openly, loudly bullied, and I never had more than three or four people who made me feel bad. I’m trying to imagine what it feels like to have a huge portion of your school—including adults at your school—enjoy making you feel bad, ashamed, sick (that’s right--not just making you feel bad, but enjoying it, thriving on it, feeling a little thrill when you walk by or when they think of some new clever way to attack or hurt you). And then going home and having their intolerance follow you onto Facebook or Myspace or in texts to your phone. Bullying without borders.

As GLBTQ rights are slowly won, each generation of GLBTQ people tends to think that it's easier for the new one coming up. I know I've been guilty of thinking "Well, if I was 11 in 2010 instead of 1985, I'd have come out at 11." In 1985, I didn't even have a vocabulary to describe who I was--I honestly didn't know what "gay" or "lesbian" even meant. In 2010, most kids know what it means. And they see successful, out, unashamed GLBTQ folk, at least on TV. And maybe their schools have GSAs, though I’m sure some kids are afraid to attend meetings (I know I would’ve been—my siblings went to the same school. I might’ve been ready for a GSA, but I wasn’t ready for my family knowing I was interested in one). But perhaps there's a mistake in thinking this stuff makes it easier.

In addition to seeing Ellen and Kurt on Glee, today’s GLBTQ teens are also seeing GLBTQ rights discussed almost every day in the media. Eat breakfast. Wait to see if the country decides folks like you are allowed to be in the military. Pop a Diet Coke. See a photo of Fred Phelps picketing funerals with a “FAG BURN IN HELL” sign. Take a bus. See a campaign ad arguing that you should never be allowed to marry. Right at that moment when change seems to be accelerating--a biracial president! Gay marriage legal in Iowa!--is when we see a huge backlash against the change. People that were passively racist/homophobic/etc become actively so. People, goaded by anger and irresponsible politicians, somehow feel it's okay to make remarks they wouldn't have made before. Hatred in the air and on the airwaves trickles down to kids. Opinions get magnified into passions and crusades.

And there are parts of being a queer adolescent that, even when role models are available and rights are won, are humbling. So entrenched is the default assumption that everyone is straight that straight kids don't have to come out to their parents. And coming out, as long as GLBTQ folks are considered "lesser" (and discussions of sex between generations are considered taboo) in the U.S., isn't easy--even to accepting parents. For one, you usually know your orientation before you're ready for your parents to think of you as a sexual being. And when an 11-yr-old girl tells her parents she has a crush on a boy, they don't respond, "How can you know you're straight when you're only 11?" Queer 11-yr-olds are regularly told they can't possibly know who they are yet. Finally, as long as GLBTQ folks are considered lesser, you might have the feeling that you're disappointing your family, letting them down by being queer, giving them one more thing to have to "deal" with. This is not a great sensation to be running around with as a young teenager.

We can help young queer kids by knowing about things like the It Gets Better project, I'm From Driftwood, and The Trevor Project--and promoting them through posters or buttons or bumper stickers, so kids can see and learn about them without having to ask for them (which they might not be ready to do). We can also help by visibly wearing a button on our lanyards or bags that identifies us as queer-friendly. Kids will notice, even if they don't yet feel comfortable approaching you to talk about it. I wear a "Be Proud at Your Library" button on my lanyard that I whipped up at Zazzle. It costs $1.45 to get a button from Zazzle. They're easy to make. Consider making one--or customizing the one I've linked to (you can change text to "school" or whatever fits your situation)--and wearing it. Bumper stickers are a little more expensive at Zazzle, with a base price of $3.99. I made the below and ordered one. You can also make shirts, stickers, posters, and more. Note: before buying anything from Zazzle, check at RetailMeNot for promotional coupon codes--Zazzle regularly offers them.

Why buttons and bumper stickers? I think it's extremely important to be visibly queer-friendly out in the world, especially in less metropolitan areas. Some kids aren't ready to attend GSA meetings, and some may even shy away from watching queer-friendly YouTube videos if it's on their home (or even a library) computer. Seeing a car pass by with a friendly sticker while your mom's driving you to your piano lesson doesn't require a kid to pursue anything: it just happens. And we need to reach (and not judge) kids who aren't ready to pursue anything, but may be comforted by seeing a queer-friendly face (or bumper).

Please consider making or buying and wearing or posting something that identifies you as a GLBTQ-friendly adult, and passing this post on or writing your own. We are needed.

YOU ARE NOT ALONE: It Gets Better Project by shelfcheck

T-Rex to Go: Build Your Own with Chicken Bones

2010-09-30T09:29:00.005-05:00

This morning in off-the-beaten-path library finds:

T-Rex to Go: Build Your Own with Chicken Bones by Chris MacGowan

Back flap: "The famous carnivore Tyrannosaurus Rex has fascinated humans for years. Now, with simple explanations, easy-to-follow diagrams, and a few household items, you can turn the remains of your chicken supper into your own miniature--and frightening--model T. rex, complete with teeth! McGowan provides a wealth of information on dinosaur evolution and paleontological procedures, as well as delicious chicken recipes and step-by-step dinosaur-skeleton-building instructions, making this a book the whole family can enjoy."

Makes me think of the Brittany Murphy character in Girl, Interrupted. Could be a kick-ass science project for the right kid, though.

"Once a little boy sent me a charming card..."

2010-09-26T21:50:00.003-05:00

"Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, 'Dear Jim: I loved your card.' Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, 'Jim loved your card so much he ate it.' That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it."

--Maurice Sendak

[This quotation has been reblogged all over Tumblr the past two days, but I can't find a documented source for it.]

Three Poems from Heaven

2010-09-26T21:26:00.003-05:00

Heaven is poet Mairead Byrne's blog. The Best of (What's Left of) Heaven, Byrne's most recent book, currently tops my wishlist.

Man, do I love these three poems:

---------

WORK

He worked really hard.
He worked really really really really really hard.
He was no good though.
I don't even think he wanted to be good.
He just wanted to work really really really really really hard.

FAMILY STORY

Your father. Your poor father. Your father.

His mother. His poor mother.

His father.

MORE POEMS THAT LOOK LIKE POEMS

This poem is the opposite of Concrete Poetry:

Concrete poems are poems that don't look like poems.

Heck they might only have one word.

My poems look like poems alright.

But there

the resemblance ends.

Andy Smith Illustration

2010-09-25T09:40:00.000-05:00

Andy Smith Illustration

"I Love My Boo" on Facebook

2010-09-24T05:27:00.000-05:00

GMHC's I Love My Boo campaign features "real young men of color loving each other passionately. Rather than sexualizing gay relationships, this campaign models caring, and highlights the importance of us taking care of each other." Via swirlspice.

Links: Music and Language

2010-09-24T00:55:00.001-05:00

Recently bookmarked:

*Dewey Music, an interface for much more easily browsing the Internet Archive's vast free collection of music (if you're a fan of live recordings, here's the mother lode). I could spend hours just looking up all of the genres on the "browse" page

*American English Dialect Recordings--a collection from the Center for Applied Linguistics that features 118 hours of North American accents

*RapGenius, a growing archive of rap songs with allusions and potentially unfamiliar slang explained (and sometimes, less usefully, just commented on)

*"Even Isolated Cultures Understand Emotions Conveyed by Western Music"--a post at Cognitive Daily, and a finding that somehow disappoints me

*"Linguistics Challenge" Puzzles--fun set of linguistics puzzles to work through

*Cover Lay Down, a music (and mp3) blog devoted to "folk covers of familiar songs, [and] reimagined versions of folk songs"

Shana Moulton: Food for Thought

2010-09-23T15:54:00.011-05:00

Or rather, herbal tea for thought: Shana Moulton's image essay, "Squiggles, Trees, Ribbons and Spirals: My Collection of Women’s Health, Beauty and Support Group Logos as the Stages of Life in Semi-Particular Order." (small excerpt, left--go see whole)

MN 8675309: Jenny?

2010-09-23T13:20:00.006-05:00

Via Mashable, Bump is a start-up that aims to allow people to contact each other via their license plate numbers. It's opt-in: you need to go to Bump's site to "claim" your license plate in order to see any messages you might have been sent (Bump will store messages sent to your plate even if you haven't claimed it; when you claim it, you'll be able to read them)--and it's still in private beta.

Once you've claimed your plate, you can receive messages sent to it via text, email, or voice message. Happy scenario: you're in a theatre and receive a text from a Bump-using Samaritan that you left your lights on, that your car's being towed, that your meter's expired, or that you left your baby in the back seat. Also likely: messages like "Nice merge, asshole," comments about your bumper stickers ("I went to New College, too!" or "Jeebus hates your kind"), and, of course, missed connections. A local car wash owner could "bump" owners of dirty cars with special offers (or an auto body shop --> cars that need work). I'm trying to think of a police/medical emergency use for Bump, but can't.

Mashable: "Eventually Bump will enter AAA’s realm and offer premium services to drivers through a member program. Upgrades will include discount offers, special privileges and roadside assistance. The company is also working with rental car companies, sports leagues and fast-food outlets on marketing initiatives to target special offers to members on the road by tapping into existing video cameras. In this capacity, Bump aims to bring Groupon-like discounts to the real world through license plates, which may be a bit too ambitious for privacy-conscious drivers."

Not at all sure I'd want to use it, but interesting concept.

I'm From Driftwood and It Gets Better

2010-09-21T20:06:00.009-05:00

Last week, I came across I'm From Driftwood, a project started by Nathan Manske in (I'm pretty sure) 2009. The site features short videos from GLBTQ people from all over the U.S. (and a few from other countries) talking about their experience, and was conceived as a way to help show GLBTQ teens that they're not alone--that GLBTQ people are everywhere (Manske is from Driftwood, TX, an unincorporated community with a population of less than 1500). It's nicely organized: you can view videos by state or country, click on "transgender" (or "bisexual," "lesbian," and so on) to see videos just from trans folk, etc. Manske raised funds for the project via Kickstarter. I'm From Driftwood's YouTube Channel lists 81 videos so far. Looking through the lists of towns and states, I can imagine how great it would feel to find one's own small town on there as a teen--even at a jaded 36, having been out half my life, I was excited to see that people from my state of origin and my current state have participated.

Today, Mashable reports that queer writer and activist Dan Savage has launched a YouTube Channel called It Gets Better with a similar premise. The channel currently features one video, an introductory post by Dan and his partner Terry.

I hope both get more press.

"We Know Best: Doctors Tussle with Miners"

2010-09-21T19:46:00.002-05:00

A strange article at the Sydney Morning Herald by Jonathan Franklin on how psychologists are treating the trapped miners in San Jose. Excerpt:

In an effort to dominate the miners, the team of psychologists led by [lead psychologist] Mr Iturra has instituted a series of prizes and punishments. When the miners behave well, they are given TV and mood music. Other treats--like images of the outside world--are being held in reserve, as either a carrot or a stick should the miners become unduly feisty.

In a show of strength, the miners have at times refused to listen to the psychologists, insisting that they are well. ''When that happens, we have to say, 'OK, you don't want to speak with psychologists? Perfect. That day you get no TV, there is no music--because we administer these things,''' said Dr Diaz. ''And if they want magazines? Well, then they have to speak to us. This is a daily arm wrestle.''

And later on:

''If there is one group that is not exactly disposed to psychologists it is miners,'' said Dr Rodrigo Figueroa, a psychiatrist with Chile's Catholic University who was hired by the Chilean government to monitor the mental health treatment.

What? There's a Gertrude Stein statue in Bryant Park?

2010-09-18T00:47:00.001-05:00

The statue has been there since 1992, but I haven't been to NYC since 1990. Wow.

Image by & via New York City Statues, who I hope won't mind my reposting it here, and who note that Stein's was the first public statue of an American woman to be installed in New York City. (Yep. In 1992.)

"Because of Libraries We Can Say These Things"

2010-09-17T12:42:00.001-05:00

by Naomi Shihab Nye

She is holding the book close to her body,
carrying it home on the cracked sidewalk,
down the tangled hill.
If a dog runs at her again, she will use the book as a shield.

She looked hard among the long lines
of books to find this one.
When they start talking about money,
when the day contains such long and hot places,
she will go inside.
An orange bed is waiting.
Story without corners.
She will have two families.
They will eat at different hours.

She is carrying a book past the fire station
and the five and dime.

What this town has not given her
the book will provide; a sheep,
a wilderness of new solutions.
The book has already lived through its troubles.
The book has a calm cover, a straight spine.

When the step returns to itself,
as the best place for sitting,
and the old men up and down the street
are latching their clippers,

she will not be alone.
She will have a book to open
and open and open.
Her life starts here.

"Citizen Advocacy 101"

2010-09-17T04:16:00.004-05:00

(via this post at Maddow Blog)

I'm trying to reeducate myself when it comes to time. Often, if I see that a video being passed around is over 3 minutes long, I won't watch it. YouTube loads slowly at my house, and it can take 15 minutes to watch 5, so I don't click through. I've been up since 3am, unable to sleep, and finally decided to click through on this one, which I've seen blogged in several places since Tuesday. I'm glad I did.

I'm not sure if the girls are playing up their innocence at the beginning--their seeming cluelessness about everything except their desire to see DADT repealed--or not. A prompt alerted me that "the good part" started around 3:45, but I let the whole thing play, and it gave 3:45 much more power. If I were teaching high school right now, I think I'd show this in class. See below or click to view.

Senator Bennet responds to the girls here.

Bonus insomnia viewing: Jon Stewart Announces "Rally to Restore Sanity" for 10/30

Clients from Hell

2010-09-16T14:07:00.001-05:00

Clients from Hell is “a collection of anonymously contributed horror stories from designers.” For example:

“The typography does not please us. Too much 'Tim Burton', not enough pirates.”

“I don’t want any sound on the commercial, the text needs to be smaller, and the logo is up for too long. I want this commercial to be like an Easter egg hunt. I want people to have to look for information and search for the logo.”

Client’s Assistant: “He wants it simple yet dramatic; I’ve attached samples. Please call me if I haven’t been clear.”
[The client attached an image of center-justified Times New Roman text surrounded by a box]

“Please color this page for us so we can see your creativity. This will help us decide whether or not to hire you.” Attached is a child’s coloring page, a picture of a cat playing electric guitar.

“We like this guy a lot. He’s perfect for the brochure. Can you make him African American?”

Instapaper, e-readers, & some articles I've enjoyed recently--

2010-09-04T10:55:00.009-05:00

More than books, I've been using my Nook to read longer articles--massive blog posts or long-form journalism that I've saved in my Bloglines account to (supposedly) read some day. Instapaper rocks my world. I've known about it for a long time, but--like the articles--never got around to trying it out. Getting the Nook was a long-overdue push to do so.

If you're not yet familiar with Instapaper, it works like this: you set up a free account at Instapaper, and can either add an Instapaper button to your browser, or manually enter links (while signed into your Instapaper account) to online articles you want to read. The articles stay saved there until you decide to download or print them. You can download them to read on a Kindle, or in ePub format to read on other e-readers (like the Nook); you can print them, or you can read them right there at Instapaper (minus all the distracting ads and clutter that surrounded them at their home on the net). I have a hard time reading long articles online--I'm one of those folks for whom e-ink really is easier on the eyes--and Instapaper in tandem with the Nook means I'm reading longer articles again. It's ridiculously easy to use, and it means I have a steady free stream of fantastic non-book content to read on the Nook.

Some pieces I've recently enjoyed and recommend:

*"The Surprising Satisfactions of a Home Funeral" by Max Alexander (Smithsonian, March 2009)

*"Google's Book Search: a Disaster for Scholars" by Geoffrey Nunberg (Chronicle, August 2009) (a smart and entertaining look at troubled metadata at Google Books)

*"Spar" by Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld Magazine, October 2009) (a deservedly award-winning science fiction short story)

*"Washington, We Have a Problem" by Todd Purdum (Vanity Fair, September 2010) (on a US president's day in the age of 24-hour news, among other impediments. This made me a little more sympathetic to the current administration, and to any future administration--it's astonishing how many barriers there are to getting anything accomplished these days in Washington. We absolutely do have a problem, unless something gives. Highly recommended)

*"Letting Go: What Should Medicine Do When It Can't Save Your Life?" by Atul Gawande (New Yorker, 8/2/10) (Of all of these, this is the one I'd most strongly urge--physically, if I had to--people to read. Important stuff)

In other e-reader news: you can now (haven't tried yet) get Lifehacker and other Gawker blogs in your e-reader via Calibre, and digitizing your own books is becoming popular in Japan, creating demand for more bookscanning-friendly scanners. I'd love to be able to put some of my favorite books that aren't yet (and many never be) available in ebook form on the Nook. If you're interested in more ebook news, TeleRead is an excellent blog for it.

"That thing you're interested in?" "I still like it."

2010-09-03T22:20:00.004-05:00

Two panels from another hilarious post by Allie at Hyperbole and a Half, "The Four Levels of Social Entrapment." Her drawing style gives me fits. (I mentioned her "On Being An Adult" here in June):

(click to read the rest of The Four Levels of Social Entrapment)

Fantastic Infographic on Student Loans

2010-09-03T13:46:00.001-05:00

Infographic by College Scholarships.org

Noise to Signal: On Blogs

2010-08-23T20:53:00.006-05:00

Rob Cottingham, creator of the webcomic Noise to Signal, has been on a roll lately on the subject of blogging:

Who Are the Marketed-To in Your Neighborhood?

2010-08-15T09:17:00.005-05:00

Via Lifehacker, a fascinating tool put out by Nielsen used by marketers to determine what "types" live in your ZIP code and how to market to them. Types are arrived at by, according to Nielsen, "ground-breaking segmentation techniques." You can look up your ZIP code here, and see your area broken into five main types, some with less-than-flattering names. Click on any one type to see more information about it.

I currently live in South Minneapolis, at 55407. Types include:

American Dreams, who are

"a living example of how ethnically diverse the nation has become: just under half the residents are Hispanic, Asian, or African-American. In these multilingual neighborhoods--one in ten speaks a language other than English--middle-aged immigrants and their children live in upper-middle-class comfort." American Dreams folks, we learn, shop at Old Navy, buy motivational tapes, read Black Enterprise, watch TeleFutura, and might drive a Lexus IS;

Big City Blues, described this way:

"With a population that's almost 40 percent Latino, Big City Blues has one of the highest concentration of Hispanic-Americans in the nation. But it's also the multi-ethnic address for low-income Asian and African-American households occupying older inner-city apartments. Concentrated in a handful of major metros, these younger singles and single-parent families face enormous challenges: low incomes, uncertain jobs, and modest educations. Roughly 25 percent haven't finished high school." Big City Blues families shop at The Gap, go to movies, read Ser Padres, watch Noticiero Telemundo, and drive Volkswagens;

Close-In Couples: "a group of predominantly older, ethnically diverse couples living in older homes in the urban neighborhoods of mid-sized metros. High school educated and empty nesting, these mostly older residents typically live in older city neighborhoods, enjoying their retirements." Close-In Couples shop at Macy's, travel by rail, read Essence, watch Rachael Ray, and drive PT Cruisers;

Money & Brains: a "wealthy, older family mix" who "seem to have it all: high incomes, advanced degrees, and sophisticated tastes to match their credentials. Many of these city dwellers are married couples with few children who live in fashionable homes on small, manicured lots." Money & Brains types shop at Nordstrom, contribute to NPR, read the Sunday newspaper, watch News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and drive something from the Lexus RX series. [I can't remember ever seeing a Lexus in my neighborhood, and now two segments drive them!]

;

and finally, Multi-Culti Mosaic: "a mixed populace of Hispanic, Asian, and African-American singles and families. With nearly a quarter of the residents foreign born, this segment is a mecca for first-generation Americans who are striving to improve their lower-middle-class status." Multi-Culti Mosaic folks shop at CVS Pharmacy, buy "Spanish/Latin music," read Seventeen, watch Premio Juventud, and might drive a Volkswagen GLI.

In my neighborhood proper, there are also a bunch of white, queer or queer-friendly, work-at-nonprofits, bicycle-riding, left-leaning, shop at farmers' markets and Savers and Target (but no more!), watch Rachel Maddow or Democracy Now, over-educated, etc. folks, but not enough to make up a fifth of 55407.

Before moving to Minneapolis, I lived in Milford, DE, 19963--a town of 15,000 about 20 miles north of Rehoboth Beach--whose types included, Nielsen says, Crossroads Villagers, Mayberry-Ville, Simple Pleasures, Traditional Times, and Young & Rustic.

The library I work at is located in 55344--one of the ZIP codes of Eden Prairie, the Twin Cities suburb recently rated the #1 place in the country to live by Money magazine--and 55344 includes Executive Suites, Gray Power, Home Sweet Home, Movers & Shakers, and Young Influentials. At least a third of our library users--maybe closer to half--are not included here, and are Somali immigrants who have come to live in Eden Prairie in the last 10 years (most more recently), who do not have internet access at home. Not surprising, I guess, but interesting: that the people who most use the library here aren't the people who are most recognized by marketers. I'd wondered about the use of this tool for libraries (who are, ever more, needing to market ourselves). But then, the people who most use the library don't need to be marketed to: they're there because they have to be. So perhaps it's still useful. The "Gray Power" category certainly is, in terms of program planning.

As for 90210--come on, you were wondering--its types include Bohemian Mix, Money & Brains, Movers & Shakers, Upper Crust, and Young Digerati.

I could spend a lot of time with this strange little tool, finding out what the Young Digerati read (Wired, I was hoping--but no, of course: The Economist) and marveling that it's the Middleburg Managers who "buy books on tape." The Segment Look-up shows all 66 (and a 67th: "Unassigned") categories in which United States residents might be officially lumped (what on earth are Country Squires? Hey, there's a category called Shotguns & Pickups!). It's a weird little glimpse into how we're glimpsed. Thanks to Lifehacker for blogging it.

Mockingjay, Instantly

2010-08-14T20:13:00.010-05:00

I asked for and received a Nook for my birthday, in large part because the library system I work for started offering ebooks for dedicated devices last month and I'm increasingly feeling the need (and desire) to have a hands-on familiarity with the formats we offer and the devices they work with so I can explain the ins and outs to patrons (Whew). I hadn't yet felt the need for a dedicated ereader for purely personal use--I have an iPod Touch and find reading ebooks on it comfortable enough.

When I mention the Nook the others, the first question I get is, "Why not a Kindle?" Two main reasons: one, the library's ebooks--most libraries' ebooks--all libraries' ebooks?--aren't compatible with the Kindle. Amazon has chosen to make a device incompatible with ePub, the most popular--and closest thing to an early "universal"--ebook format. This is tough at work, when eager new Kindle owners come up to the information desk asking how to check out library ebooks to read on their Kindles. We post a list of compatible devices, but most folks don't check that before purchasing an ereader (and many have received Kindles as gifts). Amazon has made the Kindle a pretty inconvenient and unfortunate device for most libraries (though some libraries actually purchase Kindles to loan out), at least for the time being. It doesn't endear me to the Kindle--though I have no problems with the device itself. More importantly, I still haven't been able to get over Amazon's handling of last summer's Orwell fiasco. I have no idea if Barnes & Noble would've handled it better; I just know how Amazon handled it. Terribly.

I'm not sure how long the dedicated ereader will last (as opposed to a device like the iPad). The Nook takes a while to start up (a minute or so), and a second or so to load a new page at every page turn. No huge deal if you're from my generation, but I can't imagine that younger folks who've grown up using (or coveting) lightning-fast touchscreen devices will stand for it. Sonys, Nooks, and Kindles feel to me a bit like the old "Speak n' Spell" toy I had as a child. Brand-new, out of the box, they seem dated. The Nook has a touchscreen along its bottom (fine, but not as fast to respond as my Touch's touchscreen), but the screen you read your book on is static e-ink. Easy on the eyes, yes--easier to read on for extended periods of time than the Touch? I'm not yet sure--but once you've used a touchscreen you just (or I just) can't shake the impulse to touch the screen and expect something to happen. In the course of the two days I've owned it, I've tapped the Nook's screen at least ten times, expecting a book to open because I've touched its title. You can read about two-year-olds (and cats) all over the web who jump right in on iPads, adapting to the touchscreen almost instantaneously, and who try to tap their parents' watchfaces, etc, expecting the screens to respond to touch commands. I feel pretty confident that the touchscreen is where the future of ereading is at--that, or e-ink devices will have to seriously speed up their response times.

So, what excites me about this artifact in my hand? Mockingjay. It's the third book in Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy, and it will be released on August 24. I pre-ordered a print copy a while ago, and today I pre-ordered an ebook copy for the Nook. Mockingjay is a hotly-enough anticipated title that there will be midnight bookstore parties with long lines of people waiting to get their hands on it as soon as possible (unlike the first two books, Mockingjay never came out as an ARC beforehand). When Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out, my household had pre-ordered a copy to be delivered that day, but by mid-day, when it hadn't yet arrived, Teresa went out and bought a copy in a bricks & mortar store, unable to wait. How much faster will my ebook copy arrive than my print copy? Will it arrive instantly at midnight? I think it might.

Mockingjay is currently on the Top 10 list--at number 9--of bestselling ebooks from Barnes & Noble. It is the only book on the list that has not yet been released (and won't be for 10 more days). When the 24th comes, I hope someone will be keeping track to see if the ebook version outsells the print version (including in-store and pre-order). I won't be too surprised if it does (or if a good number of those purchases come from people who don't even have handheld devices, but plan to read it on their computers, because it's the fastest way to get it). Buying an ebook for your Nook, or your Kindle, etc, combines the luxury of being utterly physically lazy with the luxury of instant gratification. No wonder at all that they're selling like hotcakes. Think of the appeal (to many, if not to you) of eBay's "Buy It Now!" feature, and add "Have It Now!" into the mix. Even careful, really-think-about-it-before-spending book buyers (like me--I'm not much of a book buyer and am also on the library's waitlist for Mockingjay--I wasn't originally planning to buy it--but now my whole family's into the trilogy and T will just buy it regardless if I don't do it before her) are likely to make one or two impulse ebook buys when it's that convenient and easy.

Interesting times. See also: Shelf Check comic strips tagged "ebooks"

Hurt Wit Chu: 3 Favorite New Mashups

2010-07-31T13:10:00.002-05:00

I've posted about mashup artist Pheugoo before (9/07). Here's a new favorite of mine: Johnny Cash covering Nine Inch Nails meets Queens of the Stone Age (the video's a still image; embedding so you can hear the song)

You can download the mp3 of "Hurt Wit Chu" free at Pheugoo's site.

BRAT Mashups are new to me (and available as free downloads at BRAT Productions Mashup Page). This one, laying the vocal from the Cure's "Just Like Heaven" over the music and backing vocals from the Commodores' "Easy," is brilliant:

Finally, here's "Time After Romance"--Lady Gaga/Cyndi Lauper/Three 6 Mafia by mochi beats (free download). It's more of a jolt than the above two at first (I like that in a mashup: when it takes a second for your brain to rearrange itself and be able to simply hear the music as it is, not just how it differs from its source tracks), but on repeated listens, I think the mix really brings out the sweetness of "Bad Romance"--it's a love song, fit for a slow dance:

Revolutionary Voices: If You Have This Book in Your Library, DON'T Weed It! Here's why:

2010-07-30T14:07:00.018-05:00

The banning of any book hurts. The banning of Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology (ed. Amy Sonnie, Alyson Books 2000)--recently pulled from the Burlington County Library System in New Jersey--will hurt many.

Ten years old, the book remains, sadly, as revolutionary as it was when I reviewed it for School Library Journal upon its publication. That year, I nominated it for SLJ's Best Adult Books for Young Adults list (it made the list, as did the other book I nominated, Naomi Klein's No Logo).

If you aren't familiar with the story of how the book got pulled, though no formal challenge had been lodged, and how it relates to Glenn Beck, please click here for the story at Amy Sonnie's blog, Banned Librarian, and here for the updated story in SLJ . I don't want to summarize it here--though I will reproduce a quick quote:

"[I]n a May 3 email, [Library Director Gail] Sweet told staffers that they needed to 'pull' Revolutionary Voices from library shelves. 'How can we grab the books so they never, ever get back into ccirculation (sic),' Sweet wrote to BCLS staffers. 'Copies need to totally disappear (as in not a good idea to send copies to the book sale).'"

Totally disappear. When library books don't go to the book sale, they get a) put in the recycling bin, if the library is responsible or b) put in the trash. Note: Sweet also referred to the book as "child pornography." Of its 54 contributors, only 11 are under 18 (most are in their early 20s), and of these 11, only 2 mention sex at all (and this in ways totally in keeping with YA novels*, etc). Very few of the pieces mention sex, period.

The banning of any book hurts, but Revolutionary Voices is out of print. Copies remain in only 400 libraries, according to WorldCat. And there's nothing else like it out there. 54 youth contributed stories, poems, artwork, and zine pages to the book. Most also contributed pictures of themselves, along with short bios. Here's a sampling of sentences from the bios:

"I am a 23-yr-old mixed-race queer poet of Vietnamese/Scottish/Swedish descent"

"I am a 20-yr-old Igbo woman from Nigeria…I am trying to find my voice as a Black queer woman living in the United States. Our society tries to speak for us young folks, and it's about time we find and use our own voices"

"I am a triracial, First Nation, Two-Spirit Fairy Trans Faggot activist"

"a 17-yr-old queer Latina living between homes in New Jersey and California"

"I am a poet and queer youth activist about to enter tenth grade"

"I am a 19-yr-old Chinese-American, born in Hong Kong and raised in San Francisco"

"i am 23 years old and active not only in the arab community but also in ethnic/feminist/queer communities"

"I am a gay biracial (Japanese and white), Nissei, male, genderqueer"

"I am a 21-yr-old queer boi of mixed heritage (human-melting-pot-style) and intersexed physicality"

Now: it is hard enough for queer youth to find books about white queer youth, and books about white queer youth that talk about more than just coming out. This book is full of the work of young queer writers of color (it does include white queers, too). It has pictures of the young queer writers of color. And it's about a lot more than being queer and coming out.

Here's a paragraph from the Introduction:

"What's so revolutionary about these voices? The young writers in this collection, like so many revolutionary thinkers of the past and present, are moving toward a radical consciousness by questioning heteronormativity and positioning themselves as young and queer in a world that tells us queerness and teen sexuality are discrepant. We think critically about regimes of gender, race, class, ability, and age. We see that we live under a system of heterosexism, white supremacy, misogyny, and capitalism--where homophobia is wielded as a weapon of sexism; where most of us are taught a Eurocentric version of history in school; where young people, especially young people of color and poor people, are being tracked into prisons. This is a system that justifies spending more money on the military than on education and health care combined; a system where foreign business interests control peoples and nations of color and the United States bombs and sanctions whoever it pleases. This system makes possible a society that packages queer identities with rainbow ribbons and sells them to the highest bidder. A society in which Pride has been commodified… Unlearning mainstream society's teachings is a difficult process requiring visible alternatives and open dialogue. This collection is our attempt at opening this dialogue. We share our work to counter our own invisibility, to become allies to one another, and to demonstrate that we believe in ourselves enough to take up a pen, paintbrush, or a camera in our own defense."

This book should be in print**; this book should be in libraries; this book should be in readers' hands. If you own it at your library--we are lucky here; our library system owns 2 copies--please don't weed it, ever. It's ten years old, yes. But it reads like now, and tomorrow, and probably many tomorrows after that.

*as commenter "Josh" wrote in the comments section of the SLJ article: "No one is removing books marketed toward preteen girls in which 150 year old men eating the placenta out of their new wife so that the baby that is devouring her from the inside can be freed. Nope, they are simply further marginalizing an already shaky and oft oppressed teen demographic.

**I've contacted the editor to see if she's interested in trying to get it back into print, or creating an ebook version

Forgive them, for they know not what they do.

2010-07-27T21:54:00.001-05:00

Jesus Inspirational Sport Statues--Just $21.95

Always with the sports. What about Jesus Inspirational Arts Statues? Theatre: Jesus tenderly holds bottle of spirit gum out to child as child puts on wig. Painting: Jesus holds the palette and beams at the canvas. Writing: Jesus pats child's shoulder encouragingly as child stares at computer screen, shot glass in hand.

Clay Shirky re: Publishing

2010-07-26T06:50:00.003-05:00

From Cognitive Surplus:

"Scarcity is easier to deal with than abundance, because when something becomes rare, we simply think it more valuable than it was before, a conceptually easy change. Abundance is different: its advent means we can start treating previously valuable things as if they were cheap enough to waste, which is to say cheap enough to experiment with. Because abundance can remove the trade-offs we're used to, it can be disorienting to the people who've grown up with scarcity. When a resource is scarce, the people who manage it often regard it as valuable in itself, without stopping to consider how much of its value is tied to its scarcity. For years after the price of long-distance phone calls collapsed in the United States, my older relatives would still announce that a call was "long distance." Such calls had previously been special, because they were expensive; it took people years to understand that cheap long-distance calls removed the rationale for regarding them as inherently valuable.

"Similarly, when publication--the act of making something public--goes from being hard to being virtually effortless, people used to the old system often regard publishing by amateurs as frivolous, as if publishing was an inherently seriously activity. It never was, though. Publishing had to be taken seriously when its cost and effort made people take it seriously--if you made too many mistakes, you were out of business. But if these factors collapse, then the risk collapses too. An activity that once seemed inherently valuable turned out to be only accidentally valuable, as a change in the economics revealed."

(Shirky elsewhere discusses how, yes, being able to publish at the push of a button means we'll see a lot of crap published--but we'll also see more experimentation and variety in what is published, as publication is no longer tied to the need to make a profit and appeal to a large swath of consumers; a book doesn't need to be a "guaranteed bestseller." Before movable type, the average book was a classic--only canonized "great books" saw paper, because they weren't a risk. Movable type paved the way for cheesy romances, throwaway lit, etc--but also for more risky writing. Same with the "publish" button on blogs or elsewhere on the web. Poetry has long been in this kind of model, I think--to some extent it seems, now, as if all the world's not a stage--but a small press.)

Eat. Pray. Spray. Delay. Then Walk Away.

2010-07-16T23:13:00.006-05:00

Nice post at the New Yorker's book blog in response to the news that Fresh is launching fragrances named "Eat," "Pray," and "Love" (after Elizabeth Gilbert's book Eat, Pray, Love) in which New Yorker bloggers offer their own literary-inspired fragrance suggestions.

"Ian" suggests

“White Noise” Musk. Have the long hours and high anxiety of teaching Hitler studies turned you into a one-man “airborne toxic event”? Try White Noise, a cologne that contains extracts of the new wonder drug Dylar! You’ll be the sweetest smelling Frankfurt School prof on campus, and that fear of death might go away, too. (Product note: Side effects include complete inability to “distinguish words from things.”)

Madeleine:

Zola’s “The Belly of Paris” Solid Perfume. Rotting fish, pungent cheese, lots of dirt, and a note of desperation in a petroleum base.

Nick:

Kitty Kelly’s “Oprah” Biography Mist. This has a lavender twist, but mostly smells like walking through a Michael’s Crafts parking lot.

and my favorite:
Eileen:

“Grendel” Musk For the Monster in You. Apples, shocked grain, a swampy mixture of sulfurous dragon smoke, and the blood of thanes. Notes of existential yearning and a hint of regret.

Read the whole post at Book Bench.

What would you do if you didn't need the approval of 15 committees??

2010-07-16T18:36:00.003-05:00

Put another way: what would you do if your library system wasn't wasting your talents?

The lightning-speed rollout of the Old Spice/New Spice videos, the fun of the Librarians Do Gaga video (and, to a lesser extent--but probably only because flash mobs have become fairly common--the Seattle Library Flash Mob), JoCo Library's Read to a Unicorn April 1st post...all have me both excited

and

frustrated about libraries run by committees and the compartmentalizing of library jobs (that is, you have your social media people, and only your social media people work on the library's social media presence; you have your communications department, and all communications with the public have to be run through it, etc.) If you work in a medium to largish library system, you are a part of a crowd of workers. And chances are, your library system isn't crowdsourcing within its staff...your library system isn't making use of everyone's talents. A big shame, because libraryfolk tend to be a pretty talented bunch.

I think of what, for ex, David Lee King does for Topeka & Shawnee. David has lots of talent; David has lots of gear...but a lot of folks who work in libraries have lots of talent and lots of gear. What ultimately matters most, it seems to me, is lots of permission. David has that, I think--at least it looks like it from here--and most of us don't. Many of us don't need to be told or taught at conferences how to engage with patrons via social media, how to market our libraries via YouTube or Facebook, etc--we need our administrators to be told or taught that they should allow us to do so. In the largish public library systems I've worked in--all good systems, and none of which I mean to complain about here, as I'm pretty sure it's the norm (which I do mean to complain about)--you can barely post an Out of Order sign on a bathroom door at your branch without getting the font approved by someone in PR or communication. You can't do spontaneous programming, as all programs need to be approved (so they can be officially promoted, when promoting at the branch level would probably yield as high a turnout) at least 6 months in advance. You can't seize the moment; you can't seize the day; you're lucky if you can seize the year. Old Spice/New Spice practically seized the nanosecond.

Part of me wants to propose a place for library workers to post their ideas, ideas of stuff they would do if their library systems let them--so that other library systems, perhaps systems more willing to take risks, can run with those ideas if they want to. Free Library Ideas. "Use our brains, 'cause our employers probably won't, and we care about libraries, and we want good library shit done, even if we can't get it done at our own libraries."

Here are a few of mine:

If your library has a Facebook page, slap together a gift app. It takes about an hour. Create fake book covers in Picnik or wherever, covers that say things like "Pulse-Pounding Thriller" or "Savvy Historical Romp." Patrons can send them to people, and each should come w/the attached message: "For 10 Great Pulse-Pounding Thriller recommendations, call _____ Library at XXX-XXXX" [or insert ask-a-librarian's email, etc]". Boom. Facebook gifts. Reader's Advisory promotion. An hour or two of work. (Facebook quizzes are also a piece of cake. Have *something* fun & light to offer aside from your library's info, at least. Local history quiz? How Well Do You Know Your Library? quiz?) Quizzes and Facebook gift apps are kind of "yesterday," I know--but today's yesterdays are most library systems' tomorrows, so hop to.

National Poetry Month promotion for kids (or adults, really): run weekly drawings for personalized poems. You've got a poet on staff, or on your teen advisory board, or in your local literary community. You make up forms, or have a web form--kids write in 5 things they want included in the poem (give them suggestions: a sport, Harry Potter, a favorite color, toad guts, etc), and check whether they want the poem to be silly or serious. Draw one name a week, or 5 names a week, or 10 names a week during National Poetry Month--whatever your poet/s can handle. Poets write poems, type up poems on nice paper, give/mail poems to kids. Kids' parents frame that shit & never forget it.

What else? Some kind of free reading-type content to download to e-readers/iPhones/etc. A free ebook, courtesy of the library. That's right; your staff puts it together. A selection of our librarians' favorite short stories in the public domain, if no one on staff wants to write original stuff. A compendium of library-related humor. An anthology of literary mash-ups (Pride and Prejudice and Librarians) by staff. Our Library's Got Talent. Anecdotes. Whatever. People LOVE free ebooks. I slapped up an e-chapbook of previously published poems--poems! who reads them (unless they're personalized [grin]--on feedbooks (cover designed in 30 min on Picnik) in May, and it's seen almost 1500 downloads. Yeah, I know that isn't tons. But I didn't promote it at all--not even on my blog. I gave it one tweet. People are downloading it because they want free ebooks. But you, you promote your library's free ebook via your library's social network presences, your library's web page, etc. Boom. You've given people something different, for free, and folks, it really wasn't much work at all.

If YouTube and blogs and LOLcats have taught us nothing else, they're taught us that sometimes the little guys, the guys who may otherwise have gone undiscovered, are damn smart, talented, and funny. You new page may be a sharper writer than your senior PR person. For goodness' sake, don't let some other library learn about that before you do.

If anyone from any library system that will approve it wants to work with me on any of the above (especially the ebook), let me know.

What are your ideas? What aren't you getting to do that you'd do in a heartbeat if you could?

If The Giving Tree Had a Sassy Gay Friend

2010-07-16T13:13:00.002-05:00

Wii Golf against Jordan Baker, anyone?

2010-07-16T10:07:00.003-05:00

Aw, yeah. You know I'll be downloading the free trial of this when I get home. It's The Great Gatsby: the Video Game, by I-Play:

Spend a summer on a jazz-fueled adventure based on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s legendary novel. Experience the Roaring Twenties first-hand as you uncover secrets behind the richly decadent facade. Explore one of the most tragic tales in literary history.

Here's hoping the eyes of Dr. TJ Eckleburg shoot lasers.

2010-07-10T10:40:00.007-05:00

What a great idea: a small theater company in Portland, OR performs "Trek in the Park"--"a live performance of a classic Star Trek episode." I'd happily perform Golden Girls episodes in a Minneapolis park if I found some willing costars.

---

I wasn't able to get into Justin Cronin's The Passage before I had to return it to the library, but the epigraph stood out for me: Shakespeare's Sonnet 64 with the final couplet lopped off. I like reading and writing sonnets, but find the turn in the final couplet (or sestet) often feels dishonest ("All sonnets say the same thing"--William Carlos Williams). Sonnet 64's final couplet doesn't feel as forced as others, but I think I agree with Cronin that the poem's stronger without it. I had a professor who theorized that Shakespeare wrote the first twelve lines of his sonnets, then farmed out the final couplets to an apprentice.

---

From Victor Dover's "Retrofitting Suburbia":

"On crude functional levels the postwar suburbs have failed. One can measure, for example, the miserable rise in vehicle-miles traveled, up 40 percent in just the past decade, with all the associated problems of energy, pollution, time and stress. Or one can watch the annual budget scramble in which unsustainable municipalities attempt to provide services to far-flung citizens or to maintain an inefficient, non-compact infrastructure...On a less crude, human-nurturing level, sprawl does not measure up either. We are only beginning to discern the social entropy that results when 'sense of place' vanishes. Participating in self-government has become a low priority for many because they've lost the sense of belonging to a local culture."

---

New research from Harvard indicates that doing a good deed can temporarily strengthen your physical endurance--and doing an evil deed may give you an even greater boost.

2010-07-05T20:33:00.003-05:00

"I'm Pamela Gorman, and I approve this message" [ratattatatatatatata!]

2010-06-30T13:42:00.003-05:00

Amazingly, this is an actual campaign ad--not a joke. Shared on Facebook, but posting here too, for my pals who aren't on it:

I can't decided what's worse--the guns or the puns.

X-Ray Pin-Up Calendar

2010-06-22T07:51:00.004-05:00

Berlin-based ad agency Butter created this calendar as a promotional giveaway for Eizo, a German company that supplies monitors for x-ray viewing. Click through to view misses January-December (most in more risque poses than these). Via PicoCool.

Hyperbole and a Half on Being an Adult

2010-06-18T21:02:00.000-05:00

Neatorama points to a great short comic about the times one occasionally decides to try to be an adult: "This is Why I'll Never Be an Adult". I love the expressions its creator, Allie, manages to completely nail in just a few seemingly simple drawings:

I admire adults who aren't like the one the comic depicts, but I'm nothing like them. Click to see the full comic, with captions.

Ellis Nadler: "The Amniotic Tuba"

2010-06-11T10:28:00.002-05:00

By artist Ellis Nadler:

(a precursor to Nadler's Cards of Wu series, via the continually wonderful A Journey Round My Skull)

One half of a secret handshake

2010-06-10T12:46:00.008-05:00

I’ve just started listening to Michael Chabon’s recent book of essays, Manhood for Amateurs, and this line from early in caught my attention:

Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake.

It articulates so well my experience of reading books as a child. Or looking at art, for that matter. I feel now that I experience most works of art (including ones I manage to make) as one half of a fist bump.

------------

Janet Maslin refers to Josh Kilmer-Purcell's new memoir--one of many, many memoirs in the last few years about urban sophisticates moving to somewhere countryish, milking goats, and raising chickens--as "Chicken Lit." I like this designation almost as much as "Bonnet Rippers" (don't know who said it first) for Amish romances.

-----

[on cutting hours at public libraries]

"Public Broadcasting is a good example for public libraries (and a competitor for donor support). Does public radio turn off their transmitter when they need money? No, they put on specially good programming and have pledge drives. My local library puts donor names on bricks; I'd like to see libraries put donor names on opening hours."
-from "Are Public Libraries in a Death Spiral?" by Eric Hellman (via Katherine Gould's PVLD Director's Blog)

Also: NYPL President Paul LeClerc Testifies at City Hall in Response to Proposed Cuts to Libraries (full text of testimony)

-----------

Boneshaker Books, opening in what had previously been Arise!Bookstore's space on Lyndale Avenue, Minneapolis, has an intriguing offer for book lovers (or book writers):

"Do you have a favorite book that you or your organization thinks every bookstore should stock? Join our Skeleton Crew with a $250 donation. You'll get to select a book that Boneshaker Books will stock, permanently. That's right: we promise to always have your selection in stock."

Kind of scary. Kind of awesome. Don't tell any Tea Party members.

"Why should I let the toad work

2010-06-08T07:27:00.002-05:00

Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

--Philip Larkin, whose own work was librarianship

The 25th anniversary of Larkin's death will be marked in his home city, Hull, with meter-high fiberglass toads.

Note to Worcester, MA: There's still time to mark the 35th anniversary of Elizabeth Bishop's death (2012!) with meter-high fiberglass man-moths.

Caught in the oil at The Big Picture

2010-06-04T21:40:00.002-05:00

The Big Picture has a new gallery up, by AP photographer Charlie Riedel. Eight photographs of seabirds mired in oil in Louisiana. Don't miss it.

O.J. Simpson, Terminator

2010-06-04T07:02:00.007-05:00

Via Neatorama: Wild Ammo took several movie posters and altered them to reflect the films' original casting (that is, who was first approached for the parts). Interesting how often male action roles ended up switching from black actors to white actors and vice versa: race was not considered an integral part of these roles, just as long as the actor was black or white (God forbid an Asian actor sneak in there). The Matrix originally featured Will Smith as Neo, not Keanu Reeves; Hancock was George Clooney, not Will Smith; The Terminator was O.J. Simpson (ha!), not Arnold Schwarzenegger. I have a hunch that this doesn't happen as often with female roles.

"I Am Sitting in a Video Room 1000"

2010-06-04T06:31:00.003-05:00

In homage to Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room,", YouTube user canzona uploaded a video to YouTube, ripped it from YouTube, uploaded it to YouTube again, and repeated the process 1000 times.

Here's the original video (or click to view):

Here's the 1000th iteration (or click to view):

You can see more (all?) videos from the process at canzona's YouTube channel.

(via BoingBoing)

Scratch N' Sniff

2010-06-01T20:25:00.003-05:00

Two fun things via Folderol:

Amy's Vintage Scratch N' Sniff Sticker Library and

Sesame Street Fighter by ~gavacho13

Librarians Do Gaga: "Don't forget the databases"

2010-06-01T07:26:00.002-05:00

From students and faculty at the U of Washington's Information School (see below or click to view):

"Kiss From a Rose" at David & Anna's Wedding

2010-05-31T21:32:00.005-05:00

Just as the reception after my brother's wedding was beginning to wind down, someone requested "Kiss From a Rose." What resulted was my & my family's favorite part of the day: Dave & Anna's friends surrounding them as they slow danced, in this kind of undulating anemone of warm wishes--a bodily serenade. The video's of very low quality (you can just barely spot the bride & groom dancing in the center--look for the dress), but I'm really grateful to 12-yr-old Bella for being the only one in the room to realize that the moment needed recording, even if all she had was a low-end digital camera (view below or click to watch):

Shyness as a form of self-attention

2010-05-26T14:19:00.002-05:00

Embarrassingly, this simple observation blew my mind:

"[L]et’s not confuse shyness with modesty or humility. Charles Darwin, who was very interested in shyness, correctly diagnosed it as a form of “self-attention” — a preoccupation with self. How do I fit in here? What do they think of me?"--from a 04/10 article, "Shyness," by James Parker on Boston.com

I consider myself shy
= I consider myself too much.

Documerica on Flickr

2010-05-26T12:49:00.005-05:00

For its Documerica Project (1971-1977), the EPA hired freelancers to photograph "images relating to environmental problems, EPA activities, and everyday life in the 1970s." The photos have been posted to Flickr as part of the US National Archives Flickr stream (link goes to their sets). Like many of the collections public institutions have made available at the Flickr Commons, they make for good browsing.

(photo: Ernst Halberstadt)

I remember sitting in cylinders like these. They were fantastic. I haven't seen any in a park in a long time.

A 1973 electric car that looks a lot like the current Smart car:

(Frank Lodge)

Load any one set and be bathed in the dimly bright coolish warmth of the 70s-photos color palette: (for example).

(Danny Lyon)

Documerica

Yeshua Ha-Nozri

2010-05-16T18:40:00.007-05:00

A search on "Jesus" at Wolfram|Alpha yields, among other things, the result "Full Name: Yeshua Ha-Nozri."

A Google search on "Yeshua Ha-Nozri" yields only 4,240 results, many related to Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.

A Bing search on "Yeshua Ha-Nozri" yields 526 results, many again related to The Master.

A Wikipedia search reroutes to the entry on Jesus, and, incidentally, lists Jesus's cause of death as "crucifixion." (Wouldn't that be "means of death"?)

A search of every EBSCO database my library subscribes to yields no results, outside of in-text results, for Yeshua Ha-Nozri.

Biography Resource Center = no results.

Wolfram|Alpha's list of sources for its "Jesus" entry isn't terribly helpful. I can't figure out which one (it's not Britannica) led to "Yeshua Ha-Nozri" as Jesus's full name. The Master and Margarita is not mentioned in its source list (though it would've been fun to discover that Wolfram|Alpha pulls all of its data from Russian literature).

Outside of Bulgakov, have you encountered "Yeshua Ha-Nozri" (the phrase, people, the phrase)? Why so few search results, I wonder? The obscurity takes most of the pleasure out of the idea of wandering into a Tea Party rally and asking people who Yeshua Ha-Nozri is.

Meara O'Reilly's Chladni Singing

2010-05-16T11:41:00.005-05:00

Via BoingBoing, and absolutely mesmerizing--

Sound designer, instrument builder, and singer O'Reilly writes, "Chladni patterns were discovered by Robert Hook and Ernst Chladni in the 18th and 19th centuries. They found that when they bowed a piece of glass covered in flour, (using an ordinary violin bow), the powder arranged itself in resonant patterns according to places of stillness and vibration. Today, Chladni plates are often electronically driven by tone generators and used in scientific demonstrations, but with carefully sung notes (and a transducer driving the plate), I'm able to explore the same resonances. I'm currently writing songs based on sequences of patterns."

Chladni Singing from meara o'reilly on Vimeo.

I can't wait to explore O'Reilly's site (list of projects includes "Sung Language Studies," "Glass and Water Tone Generator," "Maritime Listening Device" and more) further.

2010-05-15T16:35:00.005-05:00

I'm fairly certain that the worst popular song lyric ever written is

She checks out Mozart while she does Tae-Bo
Reminds me that there's room to grow

from Train's "Drops of Jupiter" (lyrics), and I remember screaming "No! Noooo!" the first time I heard the lines "I'm slowly getting closure/I guess it's really over" in Daughtry's "Over You" (a line which still gives me a stomachache), but their writers aren't even mentioned in Blender's 40 Worst Lyricists in Rock.

Letters with Character

2010-05-14T13:05:00.006-05:00

As part of the promotion for What He's Poised to Do, Ben Greenman's forthcoming book of stories inspired by letters, Harper Perennial invites folks to submit a letter written to a fictional character.

HP is posting selected letters at a Letters With Character: the blog. My favorites so far are

the letter to Lowly Worm of Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go;

the letter to Malone of Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies;

the letter to Charlie of Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower;

and the letter to Olympia of Katherine Dunn's Geek Love.

"we wanted to allow the car to become a blogger"

2010-05-13T10:59:00.002-05:00

How thoughtful.

Ford’s Tweeting Car Embarks On ‘American Journey 2.0′ @ Wired

Cory Doctorow: front matter from For the Win

2010-05-11T20:05:00.003-05:00

Cory Doctorow's second YA book, For the Win, launched today. Below is the front matter in its entirety, which I think is incredibly worthwhile reading even if you aren't interested in and don't plan to read the book itself:

----------------[all below is by Doctorow]-------------

INTRODUCTION

For the Win is my second young adult novel, and, like my 2008 book Little Brother, it is meant to do more than tell a story. For the Win is a book about economics (a subject that suddenly got a lot more relevant about halfway through the writing of this book, when the world's economy slid unceremoniously into the toilet and got stuck there), justice, politics, games and labor. For the Win connects the dots between the way we shop, the way we organize, and the way we play, and why some people are rich, some are poor, and how we seemed to get stuck there.

I hope that readers of this book will be inspired to dig deeper into the subjects of "behavioral economics" (and related subjects like "neuroeconomics") and to start asking hard questions about how we end up with the stuff we own, and what it costs our human brothers and sisters to make those goods, and why we think we need them.

But it's a poor politics that can only express itself by choosing to buy or not buy something. Sometimes (often!), you need to organize to make a difference.

This is the golden age of organizing. If there's one thing the Internet's changed forever, it's the relative difficulty and cost of getting a bunch of people in the same place, working for the same goal. That's not always good (thugs, bullies, racists and loonies never had it so good), but it is fundamentally game-changing.

It's hard to remember just how difficult this organizing stuff used to be: how hard it was to do something as trivial as getting ten friends to agree on dinner and a movie, let alone getting millions of people together to raise money for a political candidate, get the vote out, protest corruption, or save an endangered and beloved institution.

The net doesn't solve the problem of injustice, but it solves the first hard problem of righting wrongs: getting everyone together and keeping them together. You still have to do the even harder work of risking life, limb, personal fortune, reputation,

Every wonderful thing in our world has fight in its history. Our rights, our good fortune, our happiness and all that is sweet was paid for, once upon a time, by principled people who risked everything to change the world for the better. Those risks are not diminished one iota by the net. But the rewards are every bit as sweet.

AUDIOBOOK

The good folks at Random House Audio produced a fantastic audio edition of this book. You can buy it on CD, or you can buy the MP3 version from a variety of online booksellers. I also sell it myself on my site.

Unfortunately, you can't buy this book from the world's most popular audiobook vendors: Apple's iTunes and Amazon's Audible. That's because neither store would allow me to sell the audiobook on terms that I believe are fair and just.

Specifically, Apple refused to carry the book unless it had "digital rights management" on it. This is the technology that locks music to Apple's devices. It's illegal to move DRM-crippled files to devices that Apple hasn't blessed, which means that if I encourage you to buy my works through Apple, I lose the ability to choose to continue to sell to you from Apple's competition at some later date in the future. That seems like a bad deal for both of us.

To its credit, Audible (which supplies all of the audiobooks on iTunes) was willing to sell this book without DRM, but they insisted on including their extremely onerous "end user license agreement," which also prohibits moving my book to a device that Audible hasn't approved. To make it easy for them, I offered to simply record a little intro that said, "Cory Doctorow and Random House Audio grant you permission to use this book in any way that does not violate copyright law." That way, they wouldn't have to make any changes to their site or the agreements you have to click through to use it. But Audible refused.

I wouldn't sell this book through Wal-Mart if they insisted that you could only shelve it on a Wal-Mart bookcase and I won't sell it through any online retailer that imposes the same requirement on your virtual bookshelves. That's also why you won't find my books for sale for the Kindle or iPad stores -- both stores insist on the right to lock you into terms that I believe are unfair and bad for both of us.

I'm pretty bummed about this. For the record, I would gladly sell through both Apple and Audible if they'd let me sell it without DRM, and under the world's shortest EULA ("Don't violate copyright law.") In the meantime, I thank you in advance for patronizing online audiobook sellers who respect the rights of both authors and audiences. And I am especially grateful to Random House Audio for backing me in this fight to get a fair deal for all of us.

THE COPYRIGHT THING

The Creative Commons license at the top of this file probably tipped you off to the fact that I've got some pretty unorthodox views about copyright. Here's what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a long way, and more than that is too much.

I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and film studios and so on. It's nice that they can't just take my stuff without permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a piece of the action. I'm in a pretty good position when it comes to negotiating with these companies: I've got a great agent and a decade's experience with copyright law and licensing (including a stint as a delegate at WIPO, the UN agency that makes the world's copyright treaties). What's more, there's just not that many of these negotiations -- even if I sell fifty or a hundred different editions of For the Win (which would put it in top millionth of a percentile for fiction), that's still only a hundred negotiations, which I could just about manage.

I hate the fact that fans who want to do what readers have always done are expected to play in the same system as all these hotshot agents and lawyers. It's just stupid to say that an elementary school classroom should have to talk to a lawyer at a giant global publisher before they put on a play based on one of my books. It's ridiculous to say that people who want to "loan" their electronic copy of my book to a friend need to get a license to do so. Loaning books has been around longer than any publisher on Earth, and it's a fine thing.

Copyright laws are increasingly passed wihtout democratic debate or scrutiny. In Great Britain, where I live, Parliament has just passed the Digital Economy Act, a complex copyright law that allows corporate giants to disconnect whole families from the Internet if anyone in the house is accused (without proof) of copyright infringement; it also creates a "Great Firewall of Britain" that is used to censor any site that record companies and movie studios don't like. This law was passed without any serious public debate in Parliament, rushed through using a dirty process through which our elected representatives betrayed the public to give a huge, gift-wrapped present to their corporate pals.

It gets worse: around the world, rich countries like the US, the EU and Canada have been negotiating a secret copyright treaty called "The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" (ACTA) that has all the problems that the Digital Economy Act had and then some. The plan is to agree to this in secret, without public debate, and then force the world's poorest countries to sign up for it by refusing to allow them to sell goods to rich countries unless the do. In America, the plan is to pass it without Congressional debate, using the executive power of the President. Though this began under Bush, the Obama administration has pursued it with great enthusiasm.

So if you're not violating copyright la right now, you will be soon. And the penalties are about to get a lot worse. As someone who relies on copyright to earn my living, this makes me sick. If the big entertainment companies set out to destroy copyright's mission, they couldn't do any better than they're doing now.

So, basically, screw that. Or, as the singer, Wobbly and union organizer Woody Guthrie so eloquently put it:

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

DONATIONS AND A WORD TO TEACHERS AND LIBRARIANS

Every time I put a book online for free, I get emails from readers who want to send me donations for the book. I appreciate their generous spirit, but I'm not interested in cash donations, because my publishers are really important to me. They contribute immeasurably to the book, improving it, introducing it to audiences I could never reach, helping me do more with my work. I have no desire to cut them out of the loop.

But there has to be some good way to turn that generosity to good use, and I think I've found it.

Here's the deal: there are lots of teachers and librarians who'd love to get hard-copies of this book into their kids' hands, but don't have the budget for it (teachers in the US spend around $1,200 out of pocket each on classroom supplies that their budgets won't stretch to cover, which is why I sponsor a classroom at Ivanhoe Elementary in my old neighborhood in Los Angeles; you can adopt a class yourself here).

There are generous people who want to send some cash my way to thank me for the free ebooks.

I'm proposing that we put them together.

If you're a teacher or librarian and you want a free copy of For the Win, email freeftwbook@gmail.com with your name and the name and address of your school. It'll be posted to http://craphound.com/ftw/donate/ by my fantastic helper, Olga Nunes, so that potential donors can see it.

If you enjoyed the electronic edition of For the Win and you want to donate something to say thanks, go to http://craphound.com/ftw/donate/ and find a teacher or librarian you want to support. Then go to Amazon, BN.com, or your favorite electronic bookseller and order a copy to the classroom, then email a copy of the receipt (feel free to delete your address and other personal info first!) to freeftwbook@gmail.com so that Olga can mark that copy as sent. If you don't want to be publicly acknowledged for your generosity, let us know and we'll keep you anonymous, otherwise we'll thank you on the donate page.

I've done this with three of my titles now, and gotten more than a thousand books into the hands of readers through your generosity. I am more grateful than words can express for this -- one of my readers called it "paying your debts forward with instant gratification." That's a heck of a thing, isn't it?

-------------------------[end Doctorow]

FTW, indeed.

Tea Party Jesus

2010-05-08T14:47:00.003-05:00

is a Tumblr blog of paintings of Jesus "speaking" the words of prominent Tea Partiers. A "Great idea!" shout out to whoever put this together.

Tea Party Jesus

Etsy find: Tinder & Bloom

2010-05-07T16:29:00.006-05:00

I recently bought a slim leather iPod case from Tinder & Bloom that I love:

It feels good and solid in my hand--more protective than a lot of the other handmade cases I've seen, and definitely easy to spot in a pile of mass-produced cases. It smells nice & leathery. I like a lot of artist Suzanne Allen's other cases, too (I already want another, and I'm not a buy-it-even-if-I-don't-need-it [which I won't, I don't think: my case feels sturdy]-kind of girl).

Passing it on in case you're case-hunting (or looking for a great small gift for an iPod/iPhone/othergadget user). I spent $25.

Information Overload, 18th century-style

2010-05-07T16:20:00.002-05:00

The multitude of books is making us ignorant. --Voltaire

Already mentioned this on Facebook, and

2010-04-27T21:42:00.006-05:00

I know it's been around for a while, but

I still love Bea Arthur Mountains Pizza.

You can request your own celebrity landscape food combos here.

2010-04-27T19:46:00.000-05:00

via

BOOBQUAKE: April 26, 2010

2010-04-24T17:32:00.002-05:00

Blag Hag writes, "In the name of science, I offer my boobs."

It's past time to test the theory that immodestly dressed women cause earthquakes.

BH: "On Monday, April 26th, I will wear the most cleavage-showing shirt I own...So, who's with me? I may be a D cup, but that will probably only produce a slight tremor on its own. If you'll be joining me on twitter, use the tag #boobquake."

Boobquake on Facebook

Boobquake shirts for sale ("Modestly dressed women seldom make earthquakes.")

2010-04-13T09:36:00.007-05:00

I always enjoy looking at WWII-era posters (A: awesome graphics B: Imagine asking today's consumers to eat less sugar and shut the fluck up because we're at war), and was pointed to The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County's poster collection (with nice full-size downloadable pdfs) yesterday, which includes some I hadn't seen before:

At first, I thought this was supposed to be Satan. Then I noticed the "Rising Sun" eyes, and now I wonder if the font was the designer's idea of something "Oriental".

That's a cough? It looks like it's from The Exorcist.

They even made posters for cows!

I used another in today's Shelf Check.