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Silliness

Friday silliness (bad cake decoration edition)

I've become completely addicted to Cake Wrecks, a blog dedicated to documenting examples of cake decoration gone horribly, horribly wrong. Some of the cakes are just ugly; others reveal startling levels of literal-mindedness on the decorator's part; others are wrong on so many levels that one is left murmuring "Oh dear God in heaven" as […]

I <3 xkcd

The web comic xkcd always makes me laugh, but today’s I just had to share: (Image licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.) [Update: Crud. Typepad template vs. <img> width conflict. Click the link above the comic to see the punch line.]

Proof that the LOLcats model is universally adaptable

How on earth have I gone all this while without knowing about the existence of the LOL Manuscripts blog? Its motto: "Everything could use a little LOL. Especially the Renaissance." Technically they're LOL woodcuts, but, as the author of the blog, a graduate student who makes frequent use of EEBO, puts it, "LOL Early Modern […]

Note to self

Googling the piece of music that’s stuck in your head will not unstick it. If anything, giving in to the impulse to Google for it will make the earworm twenty times worse. Damn you, Léo Delibes, you and your ubiquitous duet.* Also, please get out of my head now. OK? [clutches skull and whimpers] * […]

And, on a much less serious note…

…but also of interest to those who like visualizations: Songs represented as charts, a photoset on Flickr. (Via little. yellow. different.) As a long-time Pet Shop Boys fan, I was much amused by this one.

The dangerous world of special collections

In the ongoing series of Things I Learned in Library School, here are the latest, all courtesy of the course on Curatorship of Special Collections I’m taking this term*: Conservators use the term "inherent vice" for those physical characteristics of books that cause them to self-destruct. The standard example is the acid in wood-pulp paper […]

Career guidance from science-fiction TV shows

Not long ago I came up with a career-inclinations quiz question, a way of identifying what one wants to do. Imagine that you and a bunch of other people, from various walks of life, are stranded on an island* — or, if you prefer, sent off to start a colony on an uninhabited planet.** Assume […]

The perennial appeal of geeky t-shirts

Today I saw a student wearing a "Schroedinger’s cat is dead" shirt. (Hint: look at the back view as well as the front view.) I want one for myself now. Actually, ThinkGeek shirts are quite popular among my iSchool classmates; I’ve also been thinking about getting this one. I’m still waiting for someone to put […]

Flying Spaghetti Monster takes over Baltimore

I’m back from a weekend at the family homestead in Baltimore, and as my mother and I were out for a walk along Falls Road and around about, we found ourselves face to face with the Flying Spaghetti Monster, in all his noodly glory. I don’t know what impresses me more: the seamless integration of […]

Supermarket 2.0

One more post, since I’m on a roll today. If you’ve been hearing a lot about Web 2.0 (or Library 2.0, for that matter), then you must see "Supermarket 2.0." I’m not quite geeky enough to get every single one of the jokes, but oh, the bottled water tagged "transparent" and "WYSIWYG," and the cashier […]