Spelling Bee Protests

Four people dressed in bee costumes protested the Scripps Spelling Bee in Washington, DC.

According to literature distributed by the group, it makes more sense for 'fruit' to be spelled as 'froot'...

While I agree literacy is important, I don't think dumbing language down will help anyone. In fact, I think it might be UNGOOD. Perhaps DOUBLEPLUSUNGOOD.

Library of Congress and Twitter

Every Tweet Will Be Preserved for History. Seriously?

I wonder what category tweets go under in the Library of Congress Classification system.

Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200

More in the battle against late fees! A teenager in Colorado has been sent to jail for an overdue DVD.

Apparently the kid borrowed House of Flying Daggers and accidentally packed it up while moving. The DVD's about $30; it cost $200 to get the kid out of jail, another $200 to get his car out of the impound lot, and $60 in court fees.

Littleton Mayor Doug Clark said the city plans to change its policy on overdue DVDs and books as a result of the case.

"We're not going to arrest people who don't return $30 DVDs," he said.

Gee, y'think?

Onion Google Article

While only the AV Club section of The Onion is an actual news site, some people get a little confused. So: this is not a real news article about Google responding to privacy concerns in an unsettlingly specific apology.

"Americans have every right to be angry at us," Google spokesperson Janet Kemper told reporters. "Though perhaps Dale Gilbert should just take a few deep breaths and go sit in his car and relax, like they tell him to do at the anger management classes he attends over at St. Francis Church every Tuesday night."

"Breathe in, breathe out," Kemper added. "We wouldn't want you to have another incident, Dale. Not when you've been doing so well."

Why the Internet Will Fail

Back in 1995, a guy named Clifford Stoll wrote an essay about why the internet would fail.

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Goodness, we can't function without salespeople!

That's perhaps unfair. I've met plenty of helpful salespeople who have answered my questions. Still, a necessity? Not always. Sometimes the internet is better informed than a salesperson. On the other hand, I can never tell if a shirt in a shop online will look okay on me, and I definitely can't just give it to someone who will seek out the proper size for me.

Mr. Stoll has a point. Yes, teachers are important. So are librarians! But saying the entire enterprise will fail because of a few shortcomings - some of which aren't even shortcomings anymore - was just silly. I wonder what he has to say now? At least he makes really cool bottles.

Forging Author Signatures is Bad

Forrest R. Smith III, a guy with a stately name but perhaps not the best conscience, carefully forged the signatures of famous authors in first edition books and sold them on eBay.

Another bookseller noticed that someone was buying first-edition books and a short time later those same books were being put up for sale, but as signed copies of a book whose author was dead, he said. - Boing Boing article

I can forge my brother's signature pretty well. I don't think he's going to become a famous author, though. Maybe he should work on that.

Happy Grover Appreciation Day

In a cheap move, today's post is to wish everyone a happy Grover Appreciation Day.

It is very vaguely topical because it leads to the discussion of the popular children's book, The Monster at the End of This Book. Sadly, the twist ending does not translate well to online format. Eat that, ebooks!

Book Reading as Racial Harassment

In 2007 a student working his way through college was found guilty of racial harassment for reading a book in public. Some of his co-workers had been offended by the book’s cover, which included pictures of men in white robes and peaked hoods along with the tome’s title, Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The student desperately explained that it was an ordinary history book, not a racist tract, and that it in fact celebrated the defeat of the Klan in a 1924 street fight. Nonetheless, the school, without even bothering to hold a hearing, found the student guilty of “openly reading [a] book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject.”

An article about political correstness on campuses and how it's changed. It quickly becomes centered on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), but fair enough.

Ban the Dictionary!

Some southern California schools have removed Merriam Webster's 10th Edition dictionary from their classrooms due to a 'sexually graphic' definition for oral sex: "oral stimulation of the genitals".

A district spokeswoman, Betti Cadmus, said: "It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature."

The best part of this is that a priest chimed in against the ban:

"It is not such a bad thing for a kid to have the wherewithal to go and look up a word he may have even heard on the playground," father Jason Rogers told local press. "You have to draw the line somewhere. What are they going to do next, pull encyclopaedias because they list parts of the human anatomy like the penis and vagina?"

There are also diagrams in encyclopaedias. That is some dirty, dirty stuff.


UPDATE: It's back! But you can choose whether your child uses it or another version.

2010 Olympics Impose Logo Rules on Public Libraries?

Here's some odd news: a memo circulated around the public library system in Vancouver that all non-sponsor logos were to be covered up during the Olympics.

The reasoning:

"As we all know, the sponsors have paid a lot of money to sponsor these Games. The library is a department of the City of Vancouver and I didn't want any of our staff to be in potentially embarrassing situations," Ms. Kavanagh said.

But really:

VANOC spokesman Greg Alexis said the only time that VANOC would be concerned would be a case in which non-sponsor brands were used at an official Vancouver 2010 Winter Games event where the city's Olympic logo was used.

Bizarre.

Beware of Science Fiction

Way of Life Literature has posted an article warning Fundamentalists against science fiction. Not only does the article point out agnostic and atheist authors, it even mentions that Arthur C. Clarke was 'probably a homosexual'. Okay.

Save the Queen's English!

Wired has posted an article about Lake Superior State University's 2010 Banished Words List, which can be found here.

The big offenders: tweet, sexting, chillaxin', app, and friend as a verb.

I have to say I'm kind of a fan of non-words. It's slang, and people fifty years from now will look upon it as quaint, I think. In the meantime, if someone knows the word 'app' is short for 'application', I'd rather use 'app'. And if I'm explaining something to, say, my mother, I will tell her 'app' is short for 'application, which is a program'. Not to mention 'app' has been used as a word long before Apple made iPhones by computer geek types; it's shorter than saying 'application'. That's what words do: they name something, a thing or concept or idea, and they are recognizable. In the case of slang like 'chillaxin'', I'd think the meaning of the word could be readily deduced. Made-up words have little place in academic papers and the like, but the rest of the time language may as well be fun. There's no need to be formal all the time.

Abe Books Weird Book Room

And now for something completely different: the weird book room at Abe Brooks.

Included on the page age books about:

• Jewish chess masters on stamps
• 50 sad chairs
• Farting proudly
• Whether or not Karl Marx was a Satanist
• Bowling better through self-hypnosis
• How to survive a robot uprising
  

Another Lady Saves Us All From Filthy Library Books

Can a man please pull something like this sometime soon? A judge in Lewiston, Maine, has ordered a woman to return two library books or go to jail. This woman at least sent cheques to cover the costs of the books she is not returning, which I guess is somehow better.

Why is it up to the ladies to protect us from pornographic sex-ed books and The Black Dossier? I'm starting to be concerned about the lack of men in the library. Where are the self-righteous grandpas?

Library Flash Mobs

Courtesy of another student in my class, some libraries at academic institutions have been the surprise hosts of dance parties. Students show up and dance. One place had a 'silent dance', where people listened to the music through headphones started at a certain time. That just sounds cool. I can't help but feel bad for the people trying to use the library for library things during the impromptu parties, but I still think it's interesting. Beyond that:

Edwins found the students' antics amusing, though also recognized that stress-relief strategies can play in important role during finals time. She said library staffers felt strongly that it was important to offer additional services to students during the period leading up to exams. The library has developed stress-relief programs, serving cocoa, bagels, and even sponsoring study-break massage sessions.

Massage sessions? Really? Wow.

F#@K Yeah!

A librarian decided to get some swearing in as part of a lesson in the First Amendment curriculum. He (she?) apparently taught the kids about more than a dozen curse words. (I liked the note by the LISNews editor on the article - 'I bet the kids could have taught her a few more.') I'm with the LISNews editor on this one. Those kids already knew those words, and they got treated to a lesson they'll remember for the rest of their lives.

Danish DVD Ripper

From Boing Boing: 'In Denmark, it's legal to make copies of commercial videos for backup or other private purposes. It's also illegal to break the DRM that restricts copying of DVDs. Deciding to find out which law mattered, Henrik Anderson reported himself for 100 violations of the DRM-breaking law (he ripped his DVD collection to his computer) and demanded that the Danish anti-piracy Antipiratgruppen do something about.'

No Guns Allowed

In Knoxville, Tennessee, some guy brought a gun into the library. Apparently there weren't enough signs saying DO NOT BRING YOUR GUN. Why would anyone bring a gun into a library? To fight library bad guys? To be very very serious about people being quiet? Scary.

Hitler Loves Cushing and E-Books

More about Cushing! I previously mentioned it in my first real post in September.

Sounds like things went pretty much how I thought they would, except the thing where people compare the headmaster James Tracy to Hitler. I really should have seen that coming, though. Has fifteen years on the internet taught me nothing? People love bringing Hitler into any argument. Any argument. Back in 1990, a guy named Mike Godwin said, "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." Voila, Godwin's Law.

Here is an example from the article, taken from a blog at parentdish.com*:

"Save the books, fire the instigator of the book-burning. Let Hitler stay dead."

Contrary to the impression given back in September ("When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books"), James Tracy now says:

"If I look out the window and I see a student reading Chaucer, to me it's utterly immaterial whether it's a paperback or a Kindle. I'm just glad that they're reading Chaucer."

Scrolls are okay! Just not for research, which he says was what he was talking about. As for reducing his library staff, apparently that's not true:

Actually, he says, he has hired more librarians to help students navigate the electronic stacks and tell "what is valuable information or reliable from what is junk."

Not all the students love it. There's a comment by one student about giving people coffee in a library, and another about how annoying using an e-book version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol was to take notes on.

While Kindles themselves are expensive, the books are less so:

Corbett [Tom Corbett, Cushing's director of Media and Academic Technology] says he can purchase many e-titles much more cheaply than traditional books. Often he pays just $5 apiece, so for the price of a $30 hardback, he now orders six e-books.

That's a pretty good deal.

More Hitler comparisons, from Paul Biba at TeleRead, who got it from someone named Danny Bloom: Amazing Luddite protest against ebooks. I saw this a while ago but was too astounded to comment or quote. If it's okay for Paul Biba, it's okay for me. Here is the Hitler reference in an essay, Protecting the Printed Word, by author by Alan Kaufman:

Which teen or twenty something in their right mind is going to opt for paper over electronic texts? No one of course. That's just the way of evolution, goes the narrative. Publishers and readers, writers and agents, are well-advised to get with this truth or perish. As to the bookstore, it is like the synagogue under Hitler: the house of a doomed religion. And the paper book is its Torah and gravestone: a thing to burn, or use to pave the road to internet heaven.

Surely book concentration camps are just around the corner. Sure, guy.



* No link for you. Look it up on your own!

The War on Science Fiction

Speaking of science fiction! I came across an article from The Spearhead called The War on Science Fiction and Marvin Minksy. It was so awesome I had to take several days to process it, or at least that's the excuse I'm using for now.

It starts out promising:

Science fiction is a very male form of fiction. Considerably more men than women are interested in reading and watching science fiction. This is no surprise. Science fiction traditionally is about men doing things, inventing new technologies, exploring new worlds, making new scientific discoveries, terraforming planets, etc. Many men working in the fields of science, engineering, and technology have cited science fiction (such as the original Star Trek) for inspiring them when they were boys to establish careers in these fields.

Okay. Sure. Science fiction is great and inspiring. Unfortunately, now boys won't get that inspiration because of the feminization of the genre. There are girls in space now and that just isn't cool, okay? Girls in space mean relationships and talking and fewer lasers.

Pro-Male/Anti-feminist Tech (that's the name on the byline of this article) quotes Marvin Minsky, a leading AI researcher at MIT. Minsky says,

General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.

I find that statement false; science fiction deals with the problems people make. Science fiction has held a mirror to modern problems with a setting of the fantastic. Racism, communism, ecology, cautionary tales... science fiction is the perfect forum for all these things.

All is not lost, however:

There is still a great deal of written science fiction that is real science fiction, so all is not lost. However, many boys who would have gone on to make scientific discoveries and invent new technologies will not do so since they will never be inspired by science fiction as boys.

Thank goodness for books! Science is saved! Just don't read any Honor Harrington books.