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We're offended and outraged by your recent "Librarian Hell" cartoon. You're apparently unaware of the existence of Dewey Decimal classification (under which, of course, books are not shelved in alphabetical order), and that reflects more poorly on you than on librarians. Your crude portrayal of a librarian as a chicken is especially insulting, because librarians are courageous defenders of intellectual freedom. We demand that you remove this offensive cartoon from your website and issue an apology to librarians everywhere. Thank you.

p.s. The librarians who complained to the Boston Globe about a sports column last week are dipshits.

Gotta be fair. The program blurb for his talk mentioned "2.o" five times, but much applause to Michael Stephens for his excellent and - as far as we can tell - 100% bullshit-free keynote at the Illinois Library Association conference yesterday morning. Several times during the afternoon, we heard librarians say something along the lines of: "Like he said in the opening session ..."

The latest blog post (www.creedthoughts.gov.www\creedthoughts) from our favorite character on The Office:

"When I get hungry – and I mean hungry – there are only five words that can satisfy me: All-You-Can-Eat Buffet. They’re like libraries of food, but instead of late fees, they’ve got soft-serve." ...

1. Not a banned book, but some of the changes made between the 1963 and 1991 editions of Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever are pretty entertaining.

From librarian.net: "Banning books is bad. Challenging books is an exercise in free speech and a totally appropriate way of giving community feedback on library selection policies. Lumping challenged and banned books together confuses two different issues, to my mind."

Not to mention that a book is far more likely to be absent from a library's collection due to budget restraints or to biases in selection procedures or in librarians' minds than to removal following a challenge.

And "buried treasure"? We hadn't realized that Captain Underpants books were so difficult to find.

At the last public library where we worked, we made Banned Books Week into more of a First Amendment observance. Instead of ALA's overpriced crappy posters, we put up these posters from the Illinois First Amendment Center.

Classic piece from The Onion: Nation's Teens Disappointed by Banned Books.

BTW, BBW is also the stock symbol for Build-A-Bear Workshop.