Self-portrait as a South Park character, courtesy of the South Park Studio (linked to by so many people at this point that I forget where I saw it first).
Oh, lord. Remember this story about the egregious book-banning bill? It’s back (link via LISNews). Is anyone else thinking that homophobia makes people certifably insane? I mean, this is nuts. It’s loony. The fact that this bill is still around suggests to me that someone has been putting hallucinogens into Alabama state legislature’s drinking water. […]
Trailers for the Firefly movie! Fellow Joss Whedon fans, rejoice! (Via Making Light and TangognaT.) You know, I didn’t really get into "Firefly" when it was on TV. Fox’s addlebrained decision to show the episodes out of sequence made the storylines hard to follow, and the cinematography was too dark to look good on my […]
Brief summary of what’s in my head right now: Major decisions to be made, and soon. Mild panic over timing. General sense of life shifting on its axis. (I don’t want to go into more detail until the decisions are made, so that’s all I’m going to say at present, except that it’s good rather […]
Like vilaine fille and languagehat, I also wasn’t sure if this wasn’t a really elaborate hoax. But since it’s evidently not, holy cow. Lost works by Sophocles and Euripides and Hesiod and maybe Aeschylus! Lost epics! This makes me want to revive my Greek. Oh, how I envy the classicists…
Dear everyone out there considering a career as a pharmacist: If you have religious objections to birth control or emergency contraception, if you believe it’s the same thing as abortion (which it isn’t), or if you think you should be allowed to refuse to dispense emergency contraception on account of your conscience, or if you […]
One of the sights I saw while in Minneapolis was a pedestrian bridge with a John Ashbery poem running all along its length in both directions. According to this article, the poem was commissioned expressly for the bridge. I didn’t know it was there until I spotted it while crossing the bridge itself, and even […]
So of the sessions I attended at ACRL, the two standouts were the pair of papers on "Curiosity and Motivation-to- Learn" and "Socratic Pedagogy at the Reference Desk" by Kate Borowske and Jessica George, respectively, and the session on Google Print and Google Scholar, with Adam Smith from Google and John Price Wilkin from the […]
I knew it. I knew it! Psychologists at Dundee and St Andrews universities claim the work of poets such as Lord Byron exercise the mind more than a novel by Jane Austen. By monitoring the way different forms of text are read, they found poetry generated far more eye movement which is associated with deeper […]
I’m back from ACRL, which was great all around, though next time I’ll stay for three nights instead of two. (And the next one will be in my native Baltimore, so I’ll be able to stay with family.) My compatriots from the fellowship program and I kept drawing up comparisons with the MLA conference: more […]