We look at A Tiny Revolution on occasion, but we hadn't until recently read the Orwell essay whence the blogger got his title.

"A thing is funny when — in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening — it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution. If you had to define humour in a single phrase, you might define it as dignity sitting on a tin-tack. Whatever destroys dignity, and brings down the mighty from their seats, preferably with a bump, is funny. And the bigger they fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate.
...

All this is not to say that humour is, of its nature, immoral or antisocial. A joke is a temporary rebellion against virtue, and its aim is not to degrade the human being but to remind him that is already degraded. A willingness to make extremely obscene jokes can co-exist with very strict moral standards, as in Shakespeare.
...

It would seem that you cannot be funny without being vulgar — that is vulgar by the standards of the people at whom English humorous writing in our own day seems mostly to be aimed. For it is not only sex that is 'vulgar'. So are death, childbirth and poverty, the other three subjects upon which the best music-hall humour turns. And respect for the intellect and strong political feeling, if not actually vulgar, are looked upon as being in doubtful taste. You cannot be really funny if your main aim is to flatter the comfortable classes: it means leaving out too much. To be funny, indeed, you have got to be serious."

Is that all just another way of saying, "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke"?

Next time someone calls the ref desk, looking to donate their set of encyclopedias from 1967, we're going to suggest they collect some more old books no one wants and build a bar out of them.

It would also be cool to see Joan Steffend showing off a project like this on the "It's Still Crap" segment of HGTV's "Decorating Cents".

The law really ought to be called the "Online Reference Librarians Protection Act." Declan McCullagh reports that President Bush signed legislation which makes it illegal for anyone to annonymously try to be annoying via email, IM, or other Internet communications. This means, for example, that instead of just hitting the Block button when some twerp IMs the ref desk with a request for oral sex, you can call the Feds! Respect mah authoritah!

McCullagh also wrote up a FAQ on the new law.

(p.s. We despise and avoid the phrase "virtual reference," since there's nothing "virtual" about it. Real patron. Real question. Real librarian. Real answer.)

What if food came with terms and conditions like those stuck inside the packaging of Coldplay's latest CD? We might get something like ColdPizza, a nice parody over at Groklaw. (Groklaw's commentary about the Coldplay DRM/EULA itself is well worth a read, too.)

This all reminded us that we needed to do a black "librarian = pirate" shirt to replace a design that wasn't selling in the librarism.com store. (We weren't happy with the original shirt's graphics, anyway.) So, because the bigass corporate copyright holders equate sharing with piracy, and cuz we're in the sharing business, thar be black librarian/pirate shirts here. Shirts available with purple skull or green. There's a black Zen Librarian t-shirt now, too.

Oh, and here's a freebie librarian/pirate desktop wallpaper image. Yarrrrr!

Looks like the hip-hop, sampling approach to research is an issue in churches, too. Rabbi Marc Gellman discusses 2005's trends in religion, one of which is "biblical illiteracy":

"I ... see this in the Sunday-TV preachers I regularly monitor for good
jokes. Many of them use biblical verses as mere decorations for their
psycho-babble sermons, not the driving reason for their sermons. They rarely
engage in sustained text study before launching into the elevation of
bourgeois atavisms under the guise of a religious truth. "

One draws the obvious conclusion from this that The Bourgeois Atavisms would make a good name for a rock band.

Speaking of TV preachers and hip-hop, we think Creflo Dollar and 50 Cent should get together on a project, and call it $1.50.

(We see that Wittenburg Door has already riffed on Creflo and Fiddy, in a slightly different way. Also, Mr. Cent drops Dr. Dollar's name in a G-Unit song, followed by "I pop you punk niggaz like I pop my collar.")

We faxed a membership application over to ALA yesterday, for one reason only: We're going to PLA in March, and us joining ALA and PLA in addition to registering for the conference nets our employer $30 in savings over nonmember registration. That's enough to add at least another nice hardcover to the collection.

So, there is a benefit to being in ALA! This year, for us, at least. We might have to make a ribbon to stick on our conference badge holder (right under the "ALA Member" ribbon) that says: $30 Whore.

Still on the subject of perverts ...

This item on the Cinematical blog, "MovieFone thinks I'm a perv", is pretty funny. The conversation with the MovieFone AIM robot began like this:

2:49:14 PM karinalongworth: alfred hitchcock
2:49:14 PM moviefone: That's rude. I'm here to help. Type, help if you ned it.

Jenny's been mentioning IM bots recently, but, as Cinematical's experience demonstrates, IM bots ain't all that. We actually found this out some months back, since we -- even though we don't live in Ann Arbor -- came up with the idea about a year ago to do a library chatbot for work, but it ended up that we couldn't pull it off.

We wanted to give the kiddies who wanted to "just chat" on our virtual reference service a place to go for idle banter, with answers to a few basic library questions, too. We set up a Pandorabots account, including an animated Web avatar and AIM connection, but neither we nor our minion had the time or scripting skill to get the artificial intelligence to work to our satisfaction. For example, we wanted the bot to stop giving out drink recipes and be able to make a few reading suggestions in different genres. Plus, AIM stopped playing nice with Pandorabots.

Snakes on a plane. Maybe we'll give it another go next year.

We've found that users of our library's IM reference service frequently ask whether we're a real person or a robot. They've probably seen us trying to dance.

We've also found that the AIM Yellow Pages robot doesn't recognize our ZIP Code, which has been around for only a couple years, so we can't use it to look up places in our burb. See? Bots ain't all that.

Still, we let our consortium's ILS vendor know a while back that we really, really want an IM interface for our catalog. And about 83 other features. We enjoy playing Veruca Salt every once in a while.

p.s. Wired magazine lists the 50 Best Robots Ever. Understandably no IM bots, but no Robot from Lost In Space? Danger! Also over at Wired.com is a list of 10 Sexiest Geeks of 2005. No one we've ever met is on the list, though we're big fans of Bookslut's Jessa Crispin and of Judge John Jones' opinion in the intelligent design case.