February and March 200430 March 2004 At last! The concluding book of the Left Behind series is out today, the one in which Jesus returns. Which brings to mind a great line from the late standup Bill Hicks: "Lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. You think when Jesus comes back, he's really going to want to see a fucking cross, man? 'Owww!' Maybe that's why he hasn't shown up yet." We're pretty sure that's not going to be a Daily Left Behind Quote anytime soon. We finally got around to reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. The main character is allergic to designer-fashion labels. No, she's not a librarian. Speaking of pattern recognition, what we heard last year about George Bush's information-gathering activities regarding death-penalty cases when he was governor (i.e., reading summaries written by Alberto Gonzales) sure sounds a lot like what we're hearing from Richard Clarke about Bush's information-gathering activities regarding Iraq after 9/11:
As the wife of another terrorism expert who quit his job with the Bush administration (and went to work for the Kerry campaign) said last year about the White House, "There's no curiosity about opposing points of view. It's very scary." Speaking of the Kerry campaign, the Democrats were complete dickheads last week when they made a big deal about Bush's WMD jokes at the Radio and Television News Correspondents Association dinner. As a White House spokesperson said, "It's traditional at events like this dinner for the President to poke fun at himself." On the lighter side, The Daily Farce has has some pretty good headlines lately. We also got a chuckle from this book-themed Herman comic strip. The Fifth International Edible Books Festival rapidly approaches. 16 March 2004 Wow. Mid-way into March already. We spent most of February being very busy at work, slightly but constantly sick, and generally tired and withdrawn. We did get to PLA in Seattle the end of the month, though. On the plane ride back, while listening to George Carlin talk about how his immune system kicks ass due to the rivers of sewage he swam in as a child, we picked up some respiratory crud. We still need some sun and more rest. Or some sewage to swim in. A belated roundup of PLA ... The video captions for Anna Quindlen's keynote speech had some amusing typos: e.g., "I read like a man yak." She mentioned that she gave her son Portnoy's Complaint to read when he was 13, so he'd know he wasn't the only teenage boy with raging hormones. (We bet they didn't have liver for dinner in that house for a while, though.) We met Bill and Gene and bought a WWDD book and t-shirt from them. And during our swag-hunting rounds, we picked up a nice feather-and-leather roach clip from one exhibitor.
A quote from Quindlen's speech has been added to Lib.Sigs.: "The greatest threat to the book is not the computer. It is the censor." We haven't been making our usual rounds of the Web, but the Calvin and Hobbes Extensive Strip Search did reach our foggy attention a couple weeks ago. A search for "library" brings up a nice selection of strips. (Update: Calvin's lawyers have transmogrified the site out of existence.) Also, we saw that Wrybrarian got written up in the April issue of Chicago magazine. We have dutifully added her to the list of Chicago-area librarian sites over on librarism.com. Plus, she's in a band that just released a CD. 2 February 2004 Library Lover is the latest song by the anAACRonisms to be added to BibDitties. And the shortest. Because February is the shortest month of the year. And February is, of course, National Bird Feeding Month. Happy birthday to us! This month also marks the 5th Anniversary of The Laughing Librarian. We don't remember the exact date we put this site online, but it was sometime in February 1999. The original version of our home page had a much larger, animated logo. The Lord of the Rings: What if it had been written by someone else? Fun for the literature-literate. An indie film composed entirely of product-placement scenes from big-studio movies would have been a lot more clever if it hadn't been done two years after Josie and the Pussycats. |
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