TangognaT

hellboy reviews

(spoilers in reviews)

At Comic Book Resources

At Comicon

Nick from Chud reviews it at CNN
Also, Chud has an interview with Ron Pearlman and another with Selma Blair.

If you like your interviews to feature pop-ups of girls in bikinis, there is also another interview with Ron Pearlman at FHM where he dresses up as Hellboy to shoot pool with the interviewer.

I'm going to see it on Friday :)

Here's an intro to Hellboy, with many scanned pages of comic art.
I hope that my reaction to it is closer to Nick's "this restored my faith in movies" response as opposed to the more critical "movie is pretty but has no plot" take on the film from some of the comic book sites.

one book, one college/university

I'm not sure if this has been done in academia before, but it looks like the library at the Rochester Institute of Technology is sponsoring a "one book" reading program, similar to the ones that many communities have participated in.

On the informational page it describes how the library released 100 copies of Leif Enger's novel Peace Like a River into the community, and says "students, faculty, and staff are encouraged to read the book, write comments in the margins, and sign and date the inside back cover," before passing on the book to someone else or bringing it back to the library for redistribution. I think that's a nifty idea. Often reading someone else's notes in the margins of a book drives me crazy, but if I was reading a book as part of a community building exercise like this, I'm sure I would enjoy seeing who else read my copy of the book and what they thought about it.

dave sim and the onion

Dave Sim's Onion Interview (via Fanboy Rampage), the interviewer had previously written about the logistics in getting the interview set-up, with a follow-up here

stick a fork in me, I'm done

At some point in the semester, I just run out of energy with the whole teaching thing. This is when, more than ever, I'm thankful for coffee. Sometimes I wish I could have a pot of coffee this big. I think that I only have around 4 classes left, and I teach 2 tomorrow. I'm just not looking forward to a class where:

1) I have to spend a little bit of time on internet searching/evaluation.
2) How to look up contact information for members of congress (quick and easy, but every minute counts).
3) How to find articles, and the students' topics range across several totally different subject areas.
4) Hands-on time so they can actually have some time to locate some sources.

It is a little too much fit in to a 50 minute class that might show up a few minutes late :)

Usually I spend less time on certain things and try to put faith in my Super Happy Library Instruction Handout of Fabulosity! Well, most of the time I think that students probably don't look at them very much. Or use them to take notes. Which is fine, but in a case like this I can use the handout as a class outline (good when I'm teaching in the morning so I remember what I planned to go over) and list of resources that I won't have time to mention.

signs of the end times

Now I know we are living in the end times. I can tell that the days of the rapture are nigh due to the following signs that could only point to the end of days.

Umm, an anime series about a guy with a girl for a hand. Via Worlds Within Worlds.

Golgo 13 manga expresses Japanese fears about currency trading. Then Golgo 13 kills Bill "Family Circus" Keane.

Tokyopop Star Trek: The Next Generation Manga

Worst of all, and a true indication of the apocalypse Wolverine Marries Witchblade, via Fanboy Rampage

Holy Tintinnabulation!
(via Neilalien)

first lines from novels

I just started reading The Towers of Trebizond, which is often cited as having one of the best first sentences from a novel:

'Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

I thought about some other favorite first lines (some longer than 1 sentence) from novels:

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog's blanket and the tea-cosy." - Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again" -Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

"He came there in the off-season. So much was off. All bets were off. The last deal was off. His timing was off, or he wouldn't have come here at this moment, and also every second arc lamp along the peninsular highway was switched off." - Denis Johnson, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

"My father had a face that could stop a clock. I don't mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase the ChronoGuard used to describe someone who had the power to reduce time to an ultraslow trickle." - Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair

"She could not remember a time when she had not known the story; she had grown up knowing it." - Robin McKinley, The Hero and the Crown

"Taran wanted to make a sword; but Coll, charged with the practical side of his education, decided on horseshoes." - Lloyd Alexander, The Book of Three

"The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are-you-in-trouble?--Do-you-need-advice?--Write-to Miss-Lonleyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard." Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyhearts

"No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard — and he had never been handsome." - Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

"It was about eleven 'o clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills." - Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

Over at the Constant Reader, a couple of first sentence tests

Do you have any favorites?

fun with microfiche

Something to do with your discarded microfiche...

nagoya

Old photo of Nagoya Castle

This is a cool digitial archive of photos that was posted on metafilter several days ago.
Nagoya Castle was destroyed in World War 2 and rebuilt in 1959.

I voted today

I voted online for ALA today. It was my first time voting for anything for ALA, because in the past I broke out in an allergic rash when looking at the paper ballot. The voting process was very easy, although by the time I finished voting for all the sections that I'm a member of I got a little sick of seeing the same satisfaction survey after I cast each ballot. It was tough trying to vote for ALA council because the names just become a blur. I knew one person who was running, so I voted for her. For everyone else, I tended to look at the background info for the candidates I thought had cool names and tried to vote for a varied mix of people. I don't know if that's a bad voting method or not but at least I voted!

anime water taxi

Via Gizmodo, Leigi Matsumoto of Space Battleship Yamato, Captain Harlock, Galaxy Express 999, etc has designed a real life water taxi. Very cool.

I've been slowly going through my site and closing up old comment threads to prevent more spam (I'm sure there is a plugin that would do automatically do this for me), but I think I will leave the comments for this entry on Peach Girl open because of the impassioned debate about who Momo should end up with, Toji or Kiley. So far the vote is split.

I haven't read any Peach Girl beyond the first volume, I try not to get sucked in to the high school romance genre unless I find it really compelling. Especially for the super-long series that run over 10 volumes, it is more of a time committment/availability at the local library issue for me than anything else. For whatever reason, I liked Mars and Kare Kano much more than Peach Girl, and I've read most of the volumes of those series that have come out so far.

Happy Birthday to me!

Today my blog is one year old. Thanks to everyone who has stopped by and commented. Except you comment spammers. You are not thanked, you minions of evil.

I was going to come out with an open ended pledge to myself to keep blogging for a certain period of time, say, until the Mavs win the NBA playoffs. But since that would only give me a few more months to blog, I'm not going to make any promises I can't keep :)

Join me again in another year, same bat-time, same bat-channel, when I will ponder eternal questions like:

Why are OPACs so fugly?
Does Pez last forever?
Chocolate yoghurt, weird or good?
Does Gundam ever end, or does it also go on forever, much like Pez?

changing faces and alternate universes

Books in the mail! I love getting books in the mail! Now I can start on The Towers of Trebizond and Baudolino. I also picked up Junko Mizuno's Princess Mermaid. The art is in color (first manga I've read with color art) and looks totally trippy.

I finished reading a couple graphic novels over the weekend. I read the first Human Target collection. The main character of the comic is a man named Christopher Chance who impersonates people who are going to be assassinated.
There are so many characters disguised as other characters it gets a little confusing at time. It was not the best comic for me to be reading over the shoulder of a friend while I was riding the subway because it was easy to lose track of what was going on. However, when I sat down and read Human Target with more concentration, I was able to appreciate the twisting storyline. It is a great suspense comic.

I also picked up the Planetary collection
Crossing Worlds, which collects the Planetary crossovers with The Authority, JLA, and Batman. I missed a couple of the crossovers when they first came out, so I was happy to find the collected edition. Jakita Wagner's encounter with Batman was lovely :)

pope alexander

It is hard for me to focus on any current movies, because I am looking forward to Hellboy so much! Hellboy! Who needs to go see a movie about a semi-aryan looking famous Jewish carpenter when you could be seeing a movie that features a sarcastic red demon with the right hand of doom, and an appreciation for pancakes?
Which Hellboy character are you? (I'm Liz Sherman, fear my fire! FIRE!)
Do you want to create Hellboy playmobile figures for your kids? You could!

I did not have Hellboy on the brain when I went to see Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the Charlie Kaufman/Michael Gondry movie that turns out to be a heartwarming tale about lovers having their memories erased. There's even a web site up for the fictional memory erasing company Lacuna Inc.

Jim Carrey has always got on my nerves with his constant mugging, but he really underplays his role as Joel Barish. There are some interesting tricks done with scene transitions and lighting when Joel visits his past memories while they are slowly being stripped away. Somehow based on viewing Adaptation and Being John Malkovich, I was expecting a more cynical and disjointed movie. But it ends up being a much more coherent story than I thought, and I didn't feel like it was about to collapse from the weight of its own cleverness, which was my reaction after seeing Adaptation. The title comes from an Alexander Pope poem, Eloisa to Abelard.

british spies of middle age

I got caught up on some reading over the weekend. I finished a book of Michael Gilbert's short stories, Game Without Rules, the first story collection I've read that was positively blurbed by both Rex Stout and Eudora Welty. It details the adventures of two 50ish British spies, Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens who are neighbors in the country. Gilbert has a very dry sense of humor. When Mr. Calder is informed of the death of a disreputable man who attempted to tail him, he says "My acquaintance with him was limited to poking him with my umbrella. I cannot regard him as a deep loss."

driving underground

For the past year, every couple of months when I drive somebody to the airport, I spend a greater portion of the driving time underground. I had my longest stretch driving through the big dig today on my way home from the airport. I tend to get creeped out if I'm driving and I can't see the sky for several minutes. It feels odd driving down an artificially lighted tunnel during the day. And while I was driving home not seeing the sky I started wondering if this is what our future transportation system would look like if the earth was destroyed by global warming and nuclear fallout, leaving hordes of inarticulate zombie mutant gangs to roam the earth's surface while the few remaining survivors of the human race have to burrow underground in order to create habitable living conditions.

I've probably seen too many sci-fi disaster movies.

aim question answering

This is an interesting example of virtual reference in action, even though it isn't a librarian answering the questions :)
http://sylloge.typepad.com/questions/
I must say, I've only gotten questions like this a couple times in virtual reference. Most of the questions I've gotten have centered around people not really knowing where on their library's web page to click in order to find the information that they needed, sometimes the questions will be more in depth like helping someone get started on a research paper.

snow!

It is a little odd for me to wake up to no snow on the ground, and on my way home from work spot people cross country skiing on campus.

Someone came to the reference desk dressed in a tuxedo, with a tie and cummerbund and everything looking for chemistry textbooks. Who knew future chemists were such natty dressers? I would not have guessed based on the chemists I've known.

Mark Cuban has a blog, so far he seems to be ranting about sports media and his new tv show The Benefactor. (via Boing Boing)

link-fu

I wonder if future music archaeologists will be able to reconstruct our pop music by taking apart all the Jay-Z remixes. Like Jay-Zeezer = Black Album + Weezer's Blue Album (via Waxy).

Cerebus #300 came out and I forgot to go to the comic book store, but Ninth Art wraps it up. Evidently part of the issue contains the information that the work will enter into the public domain after Sim and Gerhard are dead.

The Scooter Girl trade is coming out in May, it is the best romance comic featuring mods with vespas that I've ever read. It is also the only romance comic featuring mods with vespas that I've ever read, but don't let that stop you from picking it up. After months of wondering if Ashton and Margaret would ever get it together, now I know! And it is nice to read a comic with character growth! Now there is new Blue Monday to look forward to in April.

Harvery Pekar Jazz reviews (via the hurting).

Via AnimeNewsNetwork, an article from the Daily Yomiuri about the importance of anime as a cultural export.

books about other books

I do love reading books that feature characters who love reading. I just started reading Inkheart by Cornelia Funke and I know I'm going to love it because it features quotes from other books in the opening of every chapter. This seems fitting as the main character Meggie is beginning to discover her that her bookbinder father's dark past centers around a mysterious book and a horrible enemy who will do anything to possess it.

libraries need more monkeys

Wow, Fanboy Rampage, source of endless comic book goodness posted this image today:

Clearly that Man-Ape with the gun is an impassioned library patron. We need that type of enthusiasm for reading more than ever. I'd love to give books to someone who thinks that reading the classics will help them conquer the world. I might not want to be held up at gunpoint though. Maybe the Man-Ape didn't have a library card?

Updated to add: even more comic book simians can be found here (via Neilalien).

lovely comics reference sources

Well, fun online fan-based reference sources:

DC Comics Timeline

Marvel Chronology Project

both via Fanboy Rampage.

not being able to turn it off

After work today instead of powerwalking to my mass transit stop I got sidetracked overhearing a conversation behind me:

"I couldn't find anything scholarly on my topic!"
"Seriously?"
Yeah, but my prof told me not to worry about it!"

So my innerlibrarian was just screaming "NO, NO, NO, NO!" upon hearing this so I turned around and conducted an impromptu reference interview and suggested a couple sources for this girl's research paper. And I mentioned that she could always check at the Reference Desk if she was having a hard time finding scholarly material.

So, I figure I've done my bit for library outreach for the evening :)
But it made me slightly disturbed that I can't turn off my librarian instincts after work. I'm sure that people who talk to me who make the unfortunate decision to randomy wonder about a topic are sick of my suggestion "We could look that up!"

If I ever leave librarianship and return to civilian life, I'm probably going to need hypnosis to replace the phrase "Let's look that up!" with more common innocuous comments like, "What was up with Todd Bertuzzi?" or "Chris Weber is a lying crybaby felon."

resisting the siren call of the public library

I think I'm going to skip going to the library for a month or two. All of the library reading I've done recently has left me with an even bigger backlog of books to be read than usual. Next I want to read the new Don Quixote translation, Rose Macauley's Towers of Trebizond, and I've been told to read Umberto Eco's Baudolino. Oh! And Motherless Brooklyn and Inkheart. We'll see if I can get through all that in the next 3 weeks. Somehow I doubt it. I only read a couple books last month, I am deeply shamed.

the good, the bad, and the giggly

The Good:

A student comes up to the reference desk after only using google for her project, saying that her prof. told her to "ask a librarian." I show her a couple article databases she can use for sources for her topic and give her a crash course in searching the library catalog and explain to her about the citation management software she's heard rumors about. She says "Wow!" and I know I've really helped her out! Yay for being a librarian!

The Bad:

Having to play cellphone police when someone leaves their bag and cell phone out on a desk near the counter. The cell phone goes off 4 times, inflicting a high-pitched Blink 182 ringtone on everyone else studying quietly. I walk over and silence the phone, and when the cellphone user comes back 10 minutes later, she stares at me blankly and says nothing when I tell her of the library's no cell phone policy. Then she starts returning her calls. I should have taken her stuff over to lost and found! Grrrrrr...

The Giggly:

When showing the wonders of WorldCat to somone needing to track down serial holdings in local libraries, he asks what the "cat" part stands for, and I say catalog. He starts giggling because whenever I said "worldcat" to him, he thought I was referring to some sort of universal feline :)

kinky for governer

Author and 'personality' Kinky Friedman is running for governer of Texas. That's great. I'm almost wishing I could live in Texas just so I could vote for the man who wrote the immortal song "They Ain't Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore."

I remember driving across the country with an audiobook of "Blast from the Past", which was most entertaining because Kinky narrated the book.

He even has his campaign store up, you can buy a flag to support him!

the answer to your question is NO!

I always feel a little bad when I have to tell someone "No" at the reference desk, even when "No" is a perfectly correct answer to their question. Like the student who was having problems accessing the wireless network in the library. After I asked him if his computer had ever been configured to access the campus wireless network (it wasn't). I gave him the information he needed to get his computer set up to access everything. Basically he needed to visit campus computing, and they would set him up. But he would not take this as an answer:
"What is the IP address for the server?"
"I don't know" (thinking even if I did know I wouldn't tell him, since it wouldn't do him any good anyway if his computer wasn't set-up).
"Would they know over there?" pointing at the circulation desk.
"No, they wouldn't. You really need to go over campus computing, they'll be open tomorrow."
He walks off to the circulation desk to ask them the same question and get told "No" again.
Now, I might have appeared unhelpful, but I gave him the information he needed, it wasn't my fault that you can't walk into the building with your laptop and access the wireless network without getting your computer registered.

Likewise with the student from Harvard who wanted to check out a book. I couldn't do much to help him. Why he would want to check out books from my library when Harvard would have everything he would need was beyond me. I think he was just visiting the library with a friend and wanted to grab a book, but it isn't like a library at a smaller academic institution than Harvard gives out library cards the same way a public library does. And I'm sure Harvard has an excellent interlibrary loan department.

Oy!

Don't dismiss manga or women!

The new issue of Sequential Tart is out, and as usual it is full of good stuff. One article I found interesting was "How Do I Dismiss Thee?
Ways That Dismissal of Manga Dismisses Female Readers from Comic Book Discours" by Barb Lien-Cooper. The article was written in response to Stephen "graphic novels in libraries" Weiner's The Rise of the Graphic Novel. Lien-Cooper isn't happy with Weiner's treatment of manga in his book, finding fault with the characterization of manga as "genre fiction." She also takes issue with the implication that girls haven't been reading comics before the "recent" manga invasion. These are good points, although I can't say for sure, not having read the Weiner book. I think that describing manga as "genre fiction" is a little misguided, because it would be more accurately described as having multiple genres (which the American comics industry is sometimes lacking). I don't know of many American publishers putting out high school romance, tennis, cooking, street racing, twentysomething romance, cross-dressing in revolutionary war era France, star-crossed penguin love, dance, or high school teaching comic books. Which might explain why manga has such broad appeal.

anime librarians

I still think the best anime out there for librarians is Read or Die, as any tv show that starts with a scene of a villian with super electric powers on his way to destroy the library of congress has to be a pinnacle of excellence that few series will ever be able to reach. I mean, the insert on the Read or Die dvd divides up all the scenes in the show into chapters with books assigned to them with their LC call numbers. Chapter 4 on my dvd is "Crimes of love and hate, by H. Ashton-Wolfe HV7914 .A82 1928a". And the lead character of the series, Yomiko Readman, will go to any length to get her favorite book back.

There's another series that I started watching recently, Haibane Renmei, that also has a librarian character. Nemu falls asleep on her books frequently, but in the 5th episode she shows Rakka (a new arrival in Old Home) how to process books at the library. Nemu also leads a storytime and finds the children exhausting :)

I'm liking this series much more than Serial Experiments Lain, the earlier show by the creator Yoshitoshi Abe. However just because it is based on a work by Abe, I'm sort of expecting it to get extremely surreal and insane at the end. After watching 7 episodes, it seems to be very pastoral and philosophical, with a slowly unfolding storyline. This seems appropriate for a series with a narcoleptic librarian as a supporting character.

better off dead

Over at the sneeze, interviews with Better Off Dead's Savage Steve Holland and Dan Schneider.

Two dollars! I want my two dollars!