Today is a semi pay-it-forward day…It’s 3lOg Day The general plan is to introduce someone else to 5 new or off-the-beaten-path blogs. You tell someone, and so on, and so on… Here’s my kooky, mostly non-LIS related list:
- Birding Babylon – first heard about this New England soldier on the radio. Chronicles his hobby as a birder and observer of natural history while on tour of duty in Iraq. Read it.
- Megnut – Meg Hourihan is certainly not unkown (a co-creator of Blogger), but I found her blog while doing some research for a program. Megnut covers her side hobby as a foody and avid reader of epicurean lit. It’s nice to see someone else who appreciates this genre.
- Chocolate & Zucchini I am a long time lover of all things French, this is another foody blog authored by Clothilde, a software engineer living in Montmartre, one of my favorite parts of of Paris. C&Z also includes enticing photos of culinary delectables and high-end cookery (!)
- etc. You all know Amanda Etches-Johnson from her blogwithoutalibrary blog. I am still trying to teach myself to knit. In the meantime, I’m inspired by all of her crafty powers.
- Tales of whey, get it? Bovine Bugle blog. Stories of cows and a family running an organic dairy farm in Vermont. Doesn’t get more wholesome than this.
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming…
You start thinking too hard about what you’re going to wear when you talk to the student athletes returning to campus! Can I wear the sparkly tee AND the Fluevogs? This is the last week of business casual before school starts (we can’t wear jeans, although I’ve tested the waters on a Sunday or two) and I try really hard not look either business casual or too much like the librarian stereotype. I even retired my Danskos after my last semester in grad school. The reference librarians here have been meeting with the academic arm of the athletic program this summer, brainstorming how we can better serve the student athletes. I really hope students will be less reluctant to stop at the reference desk after we drop in at the team meet & greets. I also hope they’ll be more likely to drop me an IM (or email even) after we get a chance to talk to them about some of the new things happening at the library.
I’ve been avoiding this since the beginning (going back into my WP html files to do some much needed inside work on my blog’s innards), but my search function is a little wack and I think it’s a “since the last update” issue. The plus side is that the WP support forums are excellent. I’ve just been a little lazy and hoping that the problems would just GO AWAY.
[edit 7.28.05: It's a formatting thing, sort of. I've temporarily disabled excerpting until I can get my explicit excerpting (limits number of words shown in an excerpt) to work. Loving PHP. ]
The spammers have finally gotten around to my blog and to them I say: $@#%!! Today is the first day of my “Discovering Rhode Island” vacation. I will be looking for the hidden treasures of my new home state through July 4th. Self-imposed unplugging should also give my “L” key finger the time it needs to heal. I’ve identified some cool sounding walking and rambling books as well as the requisite AMC guide, so my first stop will actually be the main branch of the Providence Public Library. See you back here after Independence Day.
Just combing the CNI (Coalition for Networked Information) announcement archives and I noticed that last month they announced their feed! So I subscribed to the feed vs the listserv and because I use Thunderbird as my email client (PC IT should cover their eyes at this time), I just refresh my inbox to read the new feeds…Suweeet [Steve Cohen-ism]
The signs of seedling life in my peat pots and the brief lull between the end of the semester and the beginning of summer library projects has me fixating on unplugging. I’ve all but abandoned my Live Journal blog (the place where I’d normally park most of my personal goings on) but reading (as well as reading about writing) is also a way for me to unplug (hmm, maybe I should come up with my own numbered list). On my way back from my consortium’s VR meeting this morning, I caught the tail end of a Boston based NPR show called the Connection. There is a new, young director of the Iowa Writers Workshop (my dream sabbatical). Lan Samantha Chang. I haven’t read any of her work, but I really dug some of the things on her current reading list: Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Love (one of my favorite books), Colette and MFK Fisher. That’s a real blend…
I think I’ve finally caught up after the NEASIST program, search committee responsibilities and the regular work stuff. It was a relief to finally get through the stack of journals that have been waiting for me. Nothing like routing list guilt to motivate you. A pile of Choice and BookList journals can give me that nervous stomach feeling in the same way that a backlog of weekly New Yorkers once did. I…can’t…catch…up. (more…)
This is just interesting chatter..I was just in the caf to grab a sandwich and the place was at a bit of a standstill. The sandwich ladies were chatting about the election of Cardinal Ratzinger as the new pope, and people (staff, students and Friars alike) were standing around looking up at the TV screens. Some folks certainly seem to have had a favorite contender and two people I don’t know walked up to me and said: “I was hoping it was going to be the cardinal from Africa…” I’m sure I wouldn’t have paid too much attention to the process if I didn’t work at a Catholic college, but it has been interesting to learn a little more about how a pope becomes a pope. I’ve heard some Catholic jokes I never would have heard before (I was raised a Baptist). We get a steady stream of religious questions at the reference desk. I still haven’t forgotten my first on Day 3 of the job: “Do you have a Bible?” We have a lot, of course, the study bible at the reference desk had gone missing so I had to hustle to find the most appropriate search string in the catalog. Hint: it’s not “bible”. 
Megan Fox uploaded this to the NEASIST Flickr page. Greenwood Press was giving away a Jane Austen Bobble head doll at ACRL last week. Move over Librarian Action Figure…
Not just a phrase for our kind. This is more of a memory jogger for me, but I needed a break this morning from the typical NPR radio fare, so I flipped to Imus just as the editor of the Wonkette blog was saying “it’s a little meta” in response to the gossip about the gossip over whoever will be crowned the new gossip columnist for one of the DC dailies. This topic doesn’t hold much interest for me, but it reminded me of a funny article I read recently comparing the women of hip hop to female bloggers. I can’t recall where I read the article but I’m hoping someone else read it and can remind me. The author essentially drew similarities between the “milk shake” factor in hip hop videos (I believe the author used Lil’ Kim as an example) to female bloggers allegedly needing to be more provocative or outlandish (think of the initial hype over Wonkette) than their male counterparts in order to get any attention (because obviously the content alone wouldn’t be enough, feh.) It was an amusing article but I tossed it into the “boys with their toys” category because of the overall tone. Thinking a little more on what I read regularly online, I don’t believe I’m drawn to a particular voice over another (male v. female). I just let my interest guide me.
Just received my link to the online ballot for the ALA 2005 Elections. Will you be voting? Online voting is open through April 22. I attended my first midwinter in January in Boston. That was a dizzying experience, mostly due having to factor in travel time between meetings scattered across the city, and I used to live there. I really can’t see myself going to a full-on ALA conference and getting as much out of it as I have at smaller conferences. I’m getting used to conferences like CIL and ASIST where keynotes and plenaries do not conflict with regular sessions and you can actually get to most of what you’re interested in. I think I also already feel “plugged” in because I’m professionally active locally.
