October 30, 2003

fun with gov docs

One thing that always seems to get people's attention when showing them the wonders of Congressional Universe is the Financial Disclosures section. I showed a bunch of undergrads how to look up the financial statements of elected officials and they seemed mighty impressed!

Totally unrelated to gov docs, but still fun, via Mefi, you can get some H.P. Lovecraft themed carols, free MP3s of "The Carol of the Old Ones" and "Great Old Ones are Coming to Town" are available.

I don't usually collect X-Mas songs, but this looks pretty good!

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psychic librarian

This is the time of year when it is time to unpack your blankets, the leaves begin to turn, the stores start putting up their christmas decorations, and when a very large number of freshmen start to work on their research projects!

I taught 3 classes yesterday, which is basically my limit. After one class I learned that I need to be a little more assertive with students when they are doing individual research. I try to make the rounds of the classroom and check in with everyone several times. And sometimes when I ask them if they need help and they say "I'm doing ok, I've found some articles", I usually don't tend to press the issue because I've got a whole classroom to get to. But I found out after my last class yesterday from the professor that there were a couple of students that needed some extra help, but I didn't know it at the time. This is why very limited psychic abilities might be useful for a reference/instruction librarian because then I would be able to sense when "I'm OK!" really means "I'm not ok, but I don't want to ask you for help right now!" and then maybe I could do something about that.

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October 27, 2003

graphic novel reading list

I got quite a haul of graphic novels recently. For some reason at the Coop, they had marked down the first couple volumes of Akiko by Mark Crilley, and I know its gotten great reviews, so I decided I had to liberate these books from the bargain bin.

I did some online shopping and picked up books 2-5 of Transmetropolitan. I don't know why I've avoided getting into this series in the past, probably because I knew I would like it so much I'd end up getting all the books, and I couldn't budget for it before.

Not to neglect the manga side of things, I picked up the 4th volume of Kare Kano and the 6th volume of Fushigi Yugi. That should be enough to keep me occupied for awhile, I think!

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October 24, 2003

Slowsilver

Quicksilver is mocking me. I haven't made much headway. It sits there and smirks, with its many lenghtly pages and historical references.

Insead, I'm reading kids' books! I picked up Coraline, and loved it. It is the darkest and spookiest book I've read in a long time. There were many details that seemed very true to childhood -- Coraline's insistance that she is an Explorer, her dislike of spicy food, and the way she relates to her eccentric neighbors who never call her by her correct name. The resourceful child having to rescue her parents is a staple of children's literature, but the "other mother," that Coraline meets when she passes through a mysterious door was so original and creepy, I was rushing to the end of the book to see how Coraline would be able to defeat her.

I also finished reading The Slippery Slope. I'd read a bunch of the earlier Lemony Snicket books, but this is the first one that I've read in about a year or two. I was happy to see that Mr. Snicket was up to his old tricks, referencing Frost, Swinburne, and Stockholm syndrome as the Baudelaire orphans attempt to escape their latest unfortunate events.

Sometimes I think it is too bad I don't have a legitimate excuse for my reading habits, like being a children's librarian : )

Oh, well, if a horde of bookish children randomly show up at my apartment, I have enough comics and books to keep them entertained for a couple hours.

Posted by tangognat at 09:36 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 23, 2003

no classes today

This felt very luxurious. I was working reference instead. I had one not so great and one really good virtual reference transaction today.

The not so great one was for a student who had the dreaded "formats assignment", where he was required to use x number of books, x number of web sites, and x number of articles. The student's question upon logging in to the reference service was something like "I need a web site about happiness." After determining that the student was needing a web site for the sake of checking it off on a list, I tried to ask some open ended questions as to which aspect of this sort of abstract concept of human behavior the student might be interested in exploring, and didn't get much of a response that I could use to direct my search. I ended up sending the student a link to the lii.org section on psychology, figuring that there had to be some general web based sources there that the student could use for background information. I sent the student a couple examples of some stories on news web sites (health effects of happiness, etc) and described some of the search strategies the student could use to find more information. The student wasn't happy with the links/search strategies I was suggesting, but wasn't being any more specific than "The web site has to have a date on it so I can cite it". I eventually gave the student information about contacting his local reference service to follow up on his question.

This was in sharp contrast to another student I was helping at the same time, who was just getting started with research on a legal topic, he was very happy with the "law about" section of http://www.law.cornell.edu/ and I was able to take him through some searches in lexis nexis, and he asking questions about search strategies, article sorting, finding other legal information, and I felt like he was at least off to a good start.

I'm using sports and pop culture examples more and more to explain boolean to students, especially the classes working on a paper related to a controversial current event. So one I used a couple days ago that got some instant glimmers of recognition from the class was:

Kobe NOT (nutella OR nike OR sprite)

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October 20, 2003

Quicksilver

I'm finally starting Quicksilver. I'm glad there's a wiki up to annotate it. Currently, I am very very amused that the opening paragraph starts the novel off with a hanging at the Boston Common. Good lord, it is 916 pages long. Pray for me!

Also pray that Don Nelson will not let Antoine Walker take as many random 3 point shot attempts now that he is a Mav. I hope that Shawn Bradley has been eating his Wheaties over the summer. Dirk too, since he will be forced to play center much more now. Maybe Najera also. I didn't think it was possible for the Mavs to have even less at the center position than they already did, but I guess they really wanted to unload Rafe's very expensive contract.

This will make it even more interesting to watch the Mavs play against the Celtics though! I'm psyched!

Posted by tangognat at 08:31 PM | TrackBack

Heat Guy J

Via Animenewsnetwork, Heat Guy J is going to be on MTV sometime next year. I've been curious to check this out because some of the same people who worked on Escaflowne, the director of the movie (which had some wonderful animation despite the not so great adaptation of the tv series plotline), and the character designer of the tv series got together for this show, about a crime fighting android and his sidekick. The world needs more crime fighting androids!

Little preview clips of Heat Guy J dubbed are available here.

I swear, anime and manga are growing more and more mainstream, if a dubbed show is going to be airing on MTV.

Posted by tangognat at 12:12 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 17, 2003

comics in libraries = guerrilla marketing

Comic book resources column "The Comic Pimp" on getting comics into libraries, the suggestions are excellent because a librarian helped with the column!

Posted by tangognat at 07:35 PM | TrackBack

October 16, 2003

beware falling helmets

Sometimes when I am filled with anger, I like to visualize a giant plumed helmet falling out of the sky to smite my enemies.

This is a product of reading The Castle of Otranto, one of the first gothic novels. You have to love a book that features a paragraph like this in its opening chapter:

The first thing that struck Manfred's eyes was a group of his servants endeavouring to raise something that appeared to him a mountain of sable plumes. He gazed without believing his sight.

"What are ye doing?" cried Manfred, wrathfully; "where is my son?"

A volley of voices replied, "Oh! my Lord! the Prince! the Prince! the helmet! the helmet!"

Shocked with these lamentable sounds, and dreading he knew not what, he advanced hastily, - but what a sight for a father's eyes! - he beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers.

And it just gets worse for Manfred after that! The horror!

Posted by tangognat at 08:11 PM | TrackBack

October 15, 2003

crazy reference desk

It was a busy day at the reference desk. I love the fact that people wait 2 days before their paper is due to get started on their library research.
I used to do this all the time when I was in college, but usually I'd have all the research out of the way and then just stay up until 6am typing the paper. Believe me, you haven't lived until you are staring at your computer at midnight, confronted with the idea of churning out a 10 page paper on epistolary novel, drawing upon readings of Lady Susan and The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

Everyone in this large undergraduate class get to learn about the concept of article databases being restricted to a certain number of simultaneous users. I think that 1/4th of my questions centered around this issue, and I informed people of their other options for research that did not have a login limit. I also got to helpfully suggest "Violence is not the answer!" when one disgruntled student was contemplating walking around the library and physically removing other researchers from their computers if they were using the database in question.

I had a very very irate woman march up to the desk, extremely angry that the library "Did! Not! Have! This! Essential! Journal!" Dealing with people who come to the desk with major attitudes is never fun. I don't mind when someone becomes hostile or cranky when I'm telling them that there is nothing I can do to personally log them in to a swamped database, because I can see why they'd be dissapointed. After a little back and forth with the woman, I discovered that one of her journals was in fact at the bindery, and about to come back in a few days (she didn't want to hear this, as soon as I mentioned the word bindery it became unimportant to her) and the reason why she couldn't find her other journal was because she was wandering around looking for journals in the book stacks, and not the area where the bound journals are.

I allowed myself a silent inner smirk. I don't think it is easy to find things in a library, especially if you aren't used to it. I'll walk people to the shelves and show them how to find what they need if they are having trouble, but it doesn't make sense to get angry at the library or at the librarian when you're looking in the wrong place for what you need, especially if people are there to help you out!

Posted by tangognat at 12:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 11, 2003

Hellsing

I'm on a bit of a vampire kick now, so I finally started watching Hellsing, a lovely show about a vampire vampire hunter named Alucard (cute name, huh?) who works for the Hellsing Organization, a secret society in London dedicated to the eradication of all vampires. His boss is a very driven British woman named Sir Integral Wingates Hellsing, who inherited her family's vampire hunting business from her late father.

I knew I'd like this series when I saw the opening credits, which featured a nice jazzy theme song, ghouls crumbling into dust, a black dog with 8 red eyes, and many, many corpses.

Alucard, our vampire vampire hunter anti hero, starts off the first episode with a bang. He doesn't seem to have any problems blowing holes in his own kind with special blessed exploding silver bullets. In fact, Alucard takes the time to criticize the doomed vampire's fashion sense before dispatching him. This is a little unfair, I think, because I don't believe that most vampires could pull off Alucard's big pimpin' ensemble of yellow sunglasses, billowing red coat and matching hat.

Alucard turns a female police officer named Seras Victoria into a vampire (after asking her permission nicely), and she spends the rest of the series struggling with being undead. The Hellsing organization is kept busy because someone mysterious is creating artificial vampires by implanting vampirism inducing microchips in humans. Also, the Vatican starts poaching on Hellsing's turf by sending a crazed knife wielding vampire hunting priest to England.

Hellsing is 13 episodes long, and although it does start off well, it slows down a bit towards the end. There is definitely more room for plot/character development, some of the relationships between the characters aren't as detailed as they could be. Still, if you are looking for vampire themed anime to watch in this spooky month of October, you can't go wrong with Hellsing.

Posted by tangognat at 05:45 PM | TrackBack

October 08, 2003

sunshine

I just finished reading the new Robin McKinley book Sunshine, and I have mixed feelings about it, as I do sometimes when reading Robin McKinley books. My copies of The Blue Sword and the Hero and the Crown are around 17 years old, and I tend to reread both of them around once a year, to the point that now when I pick them up, I'm half rereading and half remembering the passages I've involuntarily memorized. So I love reading new books by her but I realize that I'm not going to be getting that same sense of connection to her work that I felt when I was a pre-teen.

At first when I picked up Sunshine, I was all "McKinley writing about vampires?!! Sign me up!" But a couple things kept pulling me out of the book. One was the way exposition and back story seemed jammed into the first few chapters. I love the world building aspects of fantasy/sci-fi, and I especially love it when you can read a book that gradually shows you the laws of physics that have been bent or you learn about a new magic system (I'm thinking of some of Nina Kiriki Hoffman's books) through the interactions between the characters and their environment.

There were far too many times in the first few pages of Sunshine when I felt like I was being visited by the plot exposition fairy, who was perched on my shoulder intoning into my ear "Vampires walk among us, there are werewolves and demons living in modern day society, humans have recovered from a war with supernatural creatues blah blah blah," and I was waiting for it to be over so the book could actually begin. This is probably because I've read far too many books of the "vampires walk among us" genre, I'm sure I have some baggage and do not tend to get excited about this particular theme unless the vampires were something unexpected like cyborg vampires, vampires that get their strength only from green jello shots, or roving interior decorator vampires.

The other thing that drives me batty sometimes when reading a book is when things that exist in this world get renamed or cosmetically changed and no one really explains what they are or how they work. This is a place where I wouldn't mind like one or two sentences of exposition :)

In a world where our plucky heroine makes her living baking muffins, rides a bike, and drives a car, why can't the Internet be called the Internet instead of a "globnet"? Why on earth is a computer called a "combox"? If our heroine somehow is getting access to a channel of information only about the supernatural from her world's "globenet", who is aggregating this data for her? Ok, I'm being an overlynitpicky librarian here, but these were the things that kept pulling me out of the book.

Once I got the first couple chapters out of the way, the book starts to settle into a groove, and I wasn't turning the pages wondering when the story would start. Sunshine meets her Vampire and starts on her path to self discovery, learning more about her past and her friends (one of them is a librarian) and family. I couldn't put the book down, I've been carrying it around with me and reading it on the bus. I did enjoy reading Sunshine, but I'm not going to be rereading it every couple of years.

Posted by tangognat at 10:56 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 07, 2003

beyond the valley of the refgrunt

Ever since refgrunt went on vacation I've noticed an alarming spike in my referral logs. Clearly people crave more refgrunting. Here you go!

Printing
French Dictionaries are over there, miss.
We can't hold your backpacks for you while you go eat.
Printing
Scissors
If you are researching public health policies, try these sources...
That speaker is in that building across campus
Printing
You search the library catalog to find out if we have a journal
Printing
We don't have the videotapes that are on reserve for your class at another university. If we did, you couldn't check them out today, since you aren't a student here. Sorry sir.
Wireless
You can check out an ethernet cable over there, miss
Group study places are over there
Here are some resources to try for your poli sci paper
Citation management software
We don't have MSWord on these computers, sir
Grammar handbooks are there, miss
You can get into E-Journals from your dorm room, sir
Printing

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October 06, 2003

committees from hell

I totally forgot that today was Yom Kippur. I am such a bad ex-jew.
Actually, I am probably a very good ex-jew for totally forgetting about a major holiday. I don't feel all that repentant either : )

However, sometimes I feel like doing committee work is atonement enough to last me throughout the rest of the year. I don't think that the group projects that students endure in library school prepare anyone for the sheer mind numbing drudgery of committee work. Like, when you are the only person on the committee with a certain needed skill set, so you end up doing most of the work. (Although this happens in libraray school too). Or the slippery slope that you start sliding down, once you've done some committee work, your reward is more committee work.

At a former job of mine, I always had an interesting Thursday morning, because 3 of the 8 committees I was on were all meeting at the same time. So sometimes I would play committee musical chairs, where I would show up at one committee for 20 minutes, then go to a different part of the building for the next one, etc. Eventually I got to the point where I just went to the committee that had the most sane committee members. Sometimes they brought cookies!

I have a committee meeting soon. I think I'm getting sick, perhaps it is the Black Death, and I will not have to attend the committee, because I will no longer be suffering on this mortal plane.

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October 05, 2003

Lost in Translation

I saw Lost in Translation today, I was quite proud of myself for being able to catch bits and pieces of the untranslated Japanese. See, watching all that anime recently has paid off! Although it isn't too hard to translate basic stuff, like "How many years have you been in Japan" when the little old man was yelling at Bill Murray in the hospital.

Really, I felt all nostalgic, and I wished I could walk into a Pachinko parlor. And then I remembered that Pachinko parlors are noisy, lame, and annoying.

When I was walking home today, I noticed that the Korean/Japanese restaurant in my neighborhood has carefully saran wrapped the plastic food displays in its window. Which is good, I suppose, you don't want your plastic food to get all dusty.

Posted by tangognat at 11:00 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

October 04, 2003

blast from the past

I've been avoiding watching Saint Seiya, er Knights of the Zodiac on the Cartoon Network.

When I was 13 and the only way I had of watching anime was hanging out with the local university anime club, and getting new episodes meant waiting for the guy who knew another guy who knew some people who were part of a fansub group to mail us a videotape, I thought Saint Seiya was the coolest show ever. Where else could you get references to astronomy, greek mythology, and death matches?

I swear, kids today with their cartoon network, anime network, dvds, and their P2P methods of fileswapping digital fansubs have no idea how hard it was to get your hands on anime in the '80s! I also had to walk 5 miles uphill barefoot in the snow to get to my anime club every week.

Seiya hasn't aged all that well, but it isn't too bad for a show that was originally animated in the mid 80s . I guess it was necessary to replace the original japanese 80's metal theme song with a bad Bowling for Soup cover of Flock of Seagulls "I Ran" to make it more palatable for today's audience?

I think that the version on the Cartoon Network has been highly edited, with much less violence than the original show. I've heard that they've retouched all blood to make it blue instead of red, but I didn't get a chance to check that out, there was no blood at all in the show I watched last night.

Posted by tangognat at 07:29 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 01, 2003

giant robots and their eggs

I finished watching Revolutionary Girl Utena. The later episodes get progressively darker, you have storylines dealing with incest, immolation of junior high students, and standing shirtlessly on the hoods of moving sports cars. It had one of the more satisfying endings to an anime series that I've seen, I was worried about getting a more traditional fairy-tale ending due to Utena's Prince obsession but that thankfully didn't happen.

Now I've moved on to RahXephon, which tells the story of an artistic boy named Ayato who discovers that strange people are out to get him, stumbles across a giant egg from which hatches a giant mecha that only he can pilot, sees that his mom has spooky blue blood, and bursts out of a shell surrounding Tokyo only to realize that contrary to what he has been taught, the rest of the world still exists, he has to set his watch 12 years ahead into the future, and he has to get to work fighting giant singing alien invaders!

There is much debate (among those who care to debate such things) about RahXephon and its similarities to Evangelion.

I don't really care about the comparisons, other than so far with RahXephon, I have not yet wondered if I need to be doing mind altering drugs in order to understand it, and that thought did keep crossing my mind towards the end of watching Evangelion. Ayato is also MUCH less whiny than Shinji about being forced to fight invading aliens.

Production on RahXephon is by Studio Bones, the same people who helped bring you Cowboy Bebop. I enjoy the way music is interwoven throughout the series, songs are used as weapons as well as a path to self-discovery.
RahXephon also has excellent character development, continuing storylines are mixed with episodes that sometimes focus on tertiary characters yet provide more information about such burning questions such as:

What's up with Ayato's blue-blooded mom, is she EVIL?
Who's running the earth, and are they facists?
What's with the giant Jupiter-like shell surrounding Tokyo?

Posted by tangognat at 09:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack