I think we all know that librarians come in all kinds. There are some mousy ladies in orthepedic Oxfords, some imposing Matriarchs of the Materials with beehives, and some wild cats with ink everywhere. The Texas Library Association is putting out a calendar of librarians’ tattoos in order to raise money for libraries affected by hurricanes Rita and Katrina. Good Cause… but really, I’m not sure anything could cause me to stick a needle in my skin to fill it with ink. Now a calendar of librarians’ motorcycles… That would be useful. You can read more about the story at YahooNews
Requiem for a Blog
I think that my first understanding of blogs was as a sort of online journal or diary about the author’s everyday life, and so, while I really wanted 
to create one, and I did create several, using Blogger before Google devoured it, I was having trouble trying to continuously write about my fairly unremarkable day-to-day business. However, as blogs continued to grow, people started to use them in different ways. There are still tons of diary-like blogs, but there are also photo blogs, art blogs, writing blogs, themed blogs, and a host of formats, templates, and skins to make them look as cool as they read. I tried again and created Get Your Book Red Here, which I have successfully run for over a year now.
For the most part, I keep up and comment on English, literature, language, and humanities related stories, with a series of Please Excuse the Randomness posts when I want to share something really cool that has nothing to do with anything else. I choose WordPress for this endeavor just to try it out. While Blogger was and continues to be more customizable at the free level (It’s easy to change skins or even create your own with the XML file Blogger now uses to house that coding), WordPress has a clean, sleek user interface that I really appreciate and for really beginner bloggers, I think it might be my first recommendation.
Library Stuff
http://www.librarystuff.net/
Library stuff is by blogger and librarian Steven M Cohen, but you’d never know it based on the layout of the blog. It’s hosted by Information Today, Inc. and so the top navigation bar includes links to Information Today’s many other blogs, sites, and advertising, which can sort of make the blog feel more like a page of sponsored links and less like a independent librarian’s blog.
The content is quite interesting. He essentially tags and posts briefs of news stories that might be of interest to librarians along with some stuff that’s just for fun. I always find that type of thing useful and I do it myself on this blog, though I do try to comment on each article. I think that his blog would be even more useful if he presented his reflections about the stories
I have to work on the 4th of July! That is definitely a change from the past. But more importantly, I won’t have any BBQ. I really don’t know how I’ll survive the holiday.
I’ve also bookmarked a ton of interesting reading and language stories but this school and work thing has been a challenge. For the first time in two months I’ve actually cleaned my apartment (don’t vomit, please. It really wasn’t that bad.) I thought I’d celebrate this feat by honoring a celebration of bad writing. San Jose State University’s annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is a contest of bad writing at it’s best. The winner this year honed up on cliches, runons, and other things to make grammarians and English teachers cringe. Enjoy the opening words of a tale I like call, “Ellie, May I have a Ghost Story?”
“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”
You can read more about the contest and the winner, David McKenzie, at Yahoo! News.
I’ve been rare busy this summer. A full school schedule and an internship have left little time for posting. Still, I’d like to announce that I’m working on publishing a scholarly article, which is awesome and I’m generally beefing up my resume. In the meantime, I am still looking for interesting “get-your-book-red” type news. Here’s a neat video with Neil Gaiman discussing his Coraline and possible further Hollywood ventures. One of the most interesting things about Neil is that he really has managed to be an excellent writer, with acclaimed movies and books, while still managing to be very low key. I’d like to manage something like that. Though here’s an article from the London Times about this Most Famous Writer You’ve Never Heard of:
Neil Gaiman: The most famous writer you’ve never heard of
Amanda Craig discusses his new novel The Graveyard Book and finds that his wild imagination knows no boundaries
UNTIL LAST YEAR, Neil Gaiman may have been the most famous writer you’ve never heard of, but with the filming of Stardust and Beowulf, and the dramatisation of The Wolves in the Walls by the National Theatre of Scotland, all that has changed. The equivalent to a rock god ever since his cult Sandman books were published 20 years ago, Gaiman is now one of the biggest things to hit children’s publishing since J.K. Rowling – also, as it happens, published by Bloomsbury.
I’m in Covent Garden to interview him about The Graveyard Book, an interlinked collection of tales about Nobody, a baby boy who escapes from the serial killer who murders his entire family, and is brought up in a graveyard by ghosts, vampires and werewolves. Like his bestselling children’s novel Coraline (also being filmed for release next year), it takes you into some scary places but, as he points out, what adults read as the most uncomfortable thing they can imagine, children take as a huge and thrilling adventure.
“Adults know I can take them by the hand into a dark place and run away, whereas children trust me, and I want to repay that trust,” he says. Not for nothing is one of his best fantasies, Anansi Boys, about a young man who discovers that he’s the son of the African god of mischief; one of the joys of reading Gaiman is how he subverts our expectations of magic, horror, fantasy and the mundane.
An immensely likeable man with messy dark hair and, at 48, an endearing love of leather jackets, he was born near Portsmouth in Hampshire, the son of the last independent vitamin manufacturer in Britain. A geeky child who embarrassed his younger sister by always having his nose in a book, he went straight into writing after school.
For two years he lived in Edgware and “did the starving writer thing, producing a bunch of short stories and a children’s novel that everyone rejected before I realised that I hadn’t written enough, lived enough”.
He then had a wonderful three years in the early 1980s, working as a freelance journalist for publications such as Time Out, “living off chicken wings at film screenings”, and interviewing everybody he wanted to meet, including Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett (both of whom later collaborated with him on books.) But in his mid-twenties his love of comics became too powerful to resist.
Graphic novels are now pretty mainstream and respectable – when I tell Gaiman that my teenage daughter wants to become a graphic novelist he exclaims at once, “Good – then she’ll become very rich!”
However, it was unexplored terri-tory to all but adolescent males when he began the Sandman series; he still gets the owners of shops such as Forbidden Planet saying: “I got to thank you, man, for bringing women into my stores.” Part of the attraction was that “unlike the novel where you’d be on the same shelf as Apuleius and Austen, comics have been around for only 100 years and there are all these cool places nobody has taken it as an art form. It’s harder than writing film scripts – it’s like writing, directing and editing a film.”
Now published as ten books, Sandman’s market still keeps growing, and 20 years on, what seemed like the most disposable medium has become enshrined in leather bindings and a huge international fan base. Almost all Gaiman’s books are, in a way, about someone trying desperately to fit into a dull, safe place and finding himself, like the shop-boy in Stardust, happy only in a crazy, dangerous one.
His oeuvre spans the “extreme sex and weirdness” of American Gods (about a former convict travelling across the US with a former god) to the primal fear of the picture-book The Wolves in the Walls. He loathes the concept of the crossover book, but his richly imaginative, dark fantasies have the classic element of appealing to the adult in children and the child in adults. It is no coincidence that two of the classic children’s authors he most admires are Rudyard Kipling and P.L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins, both of whom had a profound influence on The Graveyard Book.
Gaiman had the idea for it 20 years ago, when newly married and living in a tall thin house without a garden. He’d take his toddler son across the road to ride his tricycle in the local graveyard, and the idea of a boy brought up by dead people was “one of those wonderful, clear, perfect moments”. He wrote a page and a half before realising that he needed to learn his craft if he wasn’t to waste it; grappling with it every five years until finally realising in 2002 that he “wasn’t going to get any better”. Though inspired by the atmosphere of an English graveyard, it also fits perfectly into the Gothic, post-Poe American sensibility, and is a memorable, captivating read.
Pleasingly, Gaiman himself now lives in “a huge, Addams family-style house in America, with acres of spooky woods,” after realising in 1991 that he could buy his dream house there for the price of a one-bedroom flat in London. He moved his wife and three children to Minneapolis and has never looked back, writing the much-garlanded American Gods and becoming one of Hollywood’s favourite writers. His own family, baffled by his choice of career (though always supportive) realised that he had “finally got cool” only after attending the premieres of Stardust and Beowulf within weeks of each other last year.
The “mad artistic one” has, just like his heroes, come good.
As a future librarian, I’ve heard the Wikipedia warnings a million times, coupled with a desire to embrace Wikipedia for what it is: a very useful way to get introduced to lots of topics. But nothing quite brings misinformation into the spotlight than a big journalism mess. Apparently, a sociology student put up a quote he wrote in the style of a famous dead guy and journalists were quoting it to high heaven… without verifying it. And that’s not Wikipedia’s fault but it does show that it’s not the most reliable source. Caveat students!
Irish student hoaxes world’s media with fake quote
DUBLIN – When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.
The sociology major’s made-up quote — which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer’s death March 28 — flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India.
They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia quickly caught the quote’s lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first.
A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets in an e-mail and the corrections began.
“I was really shocked at the results from the experiment,” Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.
“I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn’t come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up,” he said. “It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact.”
So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version — or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald’s florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin.
“One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack,” Fitzgerald’s fake Jarre quote read. “Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear.”
Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources — none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia.
When he saw British 24-hour news channels reporting the death of the triple Oscar-winning composer, Fitzgerald sensed what he called “a golden opportunity” for an experiment on media use of Wikipedia.
He said it took him less than 15 minutes to fabricate and place a quote calculated to appeal to obituary writers without distorting Jarre’s actual life experiences.
If anything, Fitzgerald said, he expected newspapers to avoid his quote because it had no link to a source — and even might trigger alarms as “too good to be true.” But many blogs and several newspapers used the quotes at the start or finish of their obituaries.
Wikipedia spokesman Jay Walsh said he appreciated the Dublin student’s point, and said he agreed it was “distressing so see how quickly journalists would descend on that information without double-checking it.”
“We always tell people: If you see that quote on Wikipedia, find it somewhere else too. He’s identified a flaw,” Walsh said in a telephone interview from Wikipedia’s San Francisco base.
But Walsh said there were more responsible ways to measure journalists’ use of Wikipedia than through well-timed sabotage of one of the site’s 12 million listings. “Our network of volunteer editors do thankless work trying to provide the highest-quality information. They will be rightly perturbed and irritated about this,” he said.
Fitzgerald stressed that Wikipedia’s system requiring about 1,500 volunteer “administrators” and the wider public to spot bogus additions did its job, removing the quote three times within minutes or hours. It was journalists eager for a quick, pithy quote that was the problem.
He said the Guardian was the only publication to respond to him in detail and with remorse at its own editorial failing. Others, he said, treated him as a vandal.
“The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn’t use information they find there if it can’t be traced back to a reliable primary source,” said the readers’ editor at the Guardian, Siobhain Butterworth, in the May 4 column that revealed Fitzgerald as the quote author.
Walsh said this was the first time to his knowledge that an academic researcher had placed false information on a Wikipedia listing specifically to test how the media would handle it.
I’ve been reading a book on Frank Lloyd Wright for an internship I’m doin. ‘m not terribly knowledgeable about architecture, but I love the interior spaces he managed to create by “braking the box” as they say, as well as his use of natural light. However, besides the fact that I enjoy his spaces, I’m liking him less and less with each page, it’s raised some interesting questions. First is one on bias. I’ve always heard that women are harder on other women but the writer of this biography seems excessive. Granted, there does seem to be evidence that FLW’s mother wasn’t the nicest woman in the world, but where does one get off using words like “indescretion” and “breech of conduct” for the son’s innumberable affairs and humiliation of his various wives and “mad,” “cold and cruel,” and “unforgivable,” etc. for the mother? It seems just plain biased. But why?
The author also prefaces the book writing that it is easy to forget that the man is in the art when looking at FLW’s life,meaning that it is easy to want to dismiss him after learning about his various scandals and personal defects. I believe the reverse. It seems to me that people are always making absurd excuses for the behavior of geniuses which they wouldn’t dare make for anyone else. However, I had to wonder how much we can separate the artist from the art? Many of my English professors were trained in the Formalist school, which states that there is a text which one analyze, which lives on its own,in spite of and beyond its writer. But even so I suppose that we do look at all information within the environment in which it was created and within our own current environment. And the author of this biography seems to be suggesting that we look at FLW only through the lens of his architecture. But is that honest?
I should have taken more philosophy classes….
I’m gradually trying to learn design for my interest in web development. I figure that I can learn the coding (I’m already familiar with HTML/CSS; I really want to learn flash) but I find design to be an important but, alas, elusive aspect. Where should I place graphics? When should I place graphics? How should links and content be arranged? What typeface should I use? That last one’s a doozy. While I have never done anything as heinous as use Comic Sans for…. anything, I had no idea that there was a whole movement against it. For designers, typeface is a special issue and, importantly, one that gets people up in arms. Read this Wall Street Journal article (Pictures are also from WSJ).
Typeface Inspired by Comic Books Has Become a Font of Ill Will
By EMILY STEEL
Vincent Connare designed the ubiquitous, bubbly Comic Sans typeface, but he sympathizes with the world-wide movement to ban it.
![[Vincent Connare]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/HC-GN597_Connar_BV_20090416161747.gif)
Vincent Connare
Mr. Connare has looked on, alternately amused and mortified, as Comic Sans has spread from a software project at Microsoft Corp. 15 years ago to grade-school fliers and holiday newsletters, Disney ads and Beanie Baby tags, business emails, street signs, Bibles, porn sites, gravestones and hospital posters about bowel cancer.
The font, a casual script designed to look like comic-book lettering, is the bane of graphic designers, other aesthetes and Internet geeks. It is a punch line: “Comic Sans walks into a bar, bartender says, ‘We don’t serve your type.’” On social-messaging site Twitter, complaints about the font pop up every minute or two. An online comic strip shows a gang kicking and swearing at Mr. Connare.
The jolly typeface has spawned the Ban Comic Sans movement, nearly a decade old but stronger now than ever, thanks to the Web. The mission: “to eradicate this font” and the “evil of typographical ignorance.”
“If you love it, you don’t know much about typography,” Mr. Connare says. But, he adds, “if you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby.”
Love It or Hate It
Vincent Connare
Below, a sampling of groups and products that cheer, jeer or just document the proliferation of the font.
Typefaces convey meaning, typographers say. Helvetica is an industry standard, plain and reliable. Times New Roman is classic. Depending on your point of view, Comic Sans is fun, breezy, silly or vulgar and lazy. It can be “analogous to showing up for a black-tie event in a clown costume,” warns the Ban Comic Sans movement’s manifesto. The font’s original name was Comic Book, but Mr. Connare thought that didn’t sound like a font name. He used Sans (short for sans-serif) because most of the lettering, except for the uppercase I, doesn’t have serifs, the small features at the end of strokes.
Mr. Connare, 48 years old, now works at Dalton Maag, a typography studio in London, and finds his favorite creation — a sophisticated typeface called Magpie — eclipsed by Comic Sans. He cringes at the most improbable manifestations of his Frankenstein’s monster font and rarely uses it himself, but he says he tries to be polite when he meets people excited to be in the presence of the creator. Googling himself, he once found a Black Sabbath band fan site that used Comic Sans. The site’s creators even credited him. “You can’t regulate bad taste,” he says.
Still, he is tickled by — and trades on — his reputation. A picture signed by Mickey Mouse that was sent to Mr. Connare to thank him after Disney used the font in ads hangs in his house. His wife, Sue Rider, introduces him at parties as the father of Comic Sans. A friend of his claims to know someone who broke up with her boyfriend in a letter written in Comic Sans to soften the blow. But there certainly hasn’t been much money in it for Mr. Connare since Microsoft owns the font.
Vincent Connare
A beach towel using the typeface in Australia.
Of course, there would be no movement to ban Comic Sans if it weren’t so popular. “We’ve been using that font for years,” says Peter Phyo, a manager at O’Neals’ restaurant across the street from Lincoln Center in Manhattan. “That is just the procedure. I wouldn’t know the exact reasoning. It also looks nice on the menu.” Mr. Phyo says he hasn’t had any complaints.
The proliferation of Comic Sans is something of a fluke. In 1994, Mr. Connare was working on a team at Microsoft creating software that consumers eventually would use on home PCs. His designer’s sensibilities were shocked, he says, when, one afternoon, he opened a test version of a program called Microsoft Bob for children and new computer users. The welcome screen showed a cartoon dog named Rover speaking in a text bubble. The message appeared in the ever-so-sedate Times New Roman font.
Mr. Connare says he pulled out the two comic books he had in his office, “The Dark Knight Returns” and “Watchmen,” and got to work, inspired by the lettering and using his mouse to draw on a computer screen. Within a week, he had designed his legacy.
A product manager recognized the font’s appeal and included it as a standard typeface in the operating system for Microsoft Windows. As home computers became widespread, Comic Sans took on a goofy life of its own.
Out to crush that goofy life is Ban Comic Sans, whose weapons include disapproving stickers, to be slapped on inappropriate uses of the font wherever they are found.
bancomicsans.com
The ‘Ban Comic Sans’ group slaps its stickers on uses of the ubiquitous font, such as a retirement-benefits document.
Ban Comic Sans was conceived in the fall of 1999, when Holly Sliger was a senior at the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, studying typography and graphic design. Designing a museum gallery guide for a children’s hands-on artifact exhibit, Ms. Sliger says she was horrified when her bosses told her to use Comic Sans. She told them it was a cliché, and printed out a list of other typefaces she thought better suited the project. They insisted on Comic Sans.
“It was like hell for me,” she says. “It was everywhere, like an epidemic.”
In the midst of the project, she met her future husband, Dave Combs, at synagogue one Saturday. He was a recent college graduate working as a graphic designer, and she knew he would sympathize. “This is horrible,” he remembers saying. She says, “That’s when I knew he’s the guy I would marry.” The couple did wed a year later and continued to gripe about the font.
Vincent Connare
A banner in Comic Sans typeface at Teatro Valencia in Spain.
Mr. Connare says he first realized that the tide had turned against Comic Sans in January 2003, while studying for his master’s degree in type design at the University of Reading in Berkshire, England. He got an email from Mr. Combs asking for permission to use his photo for stickers, T-shirts and coffee mugs to promote “typography awareness” for the movement to ban Comic Sans that he and his wife had founded. Busy and distracted, Mr. Connare said OK.
“It sounded a bit silly,” he says. He didn’t think it would amount to much.
But the Combses had global ambitions. A map hangs in their daughter’s bedroom, marked with little red flags to show the dozens of locations around the world from which people have requested their stickers. “They’re like parking tickets,” Mr. Combs says. As the movement grew, Mr. Connare’s image became the logo for Comic Sans bashing.
Mr. Connare eventually, in February 2004, asked the Combses to stop using his picture, and they did.
Today, Mr. Connare sometimes speaks at Internet conferences, using 41-page PowerPoint presentations written in you-know-what. He talks with the Combses about creating an “I Love/I Hate Comic Sans” picture book together.
The font has become so popular that it’s approaching retro chic. Design shop Veer is selling a T-shirt with a picture of human heart on it made entirely of tiny Comic Sans characters. Veer’s text: “Love it, love to hate it, or hate that you love it.”
I’m always fiddling around on the internet when I should be working, but you all reap the benefit. I’ve found some great online toys for library geeks and book lovers. Check these out if you haven’t already:
created using Amaztype
Catalog card generator: Do you miss your card catalog? No? Well most people don’t. But, you can generate your own nifty catalog cards with your own text with this nifty toy from blyberg.net.
I just did a user instruction session and I created my own book trailer for The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner. I’ve always loved this book and thought it should have been made into a movie. Book trailers would make a great book report project.
