I simultaneously revere and pity precious few intellectual pillars quite as I do librarians.
When popular culture isn’t snapping to the stuffy, fuddy-duddy characterization of Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s librarian Rupert Giles, they’re marginalized into repressed (but inwardly slutty) sexpots always one down-low tingle away from letting down that tightly-bun’d hair, flinging aside those bookish Lisa Loeb horn-rimmed glasses, and busting a perfectly good blouse’s buttons.
(Wow, you’d think I’d pondered that last image a few times. Consider especially that I initially typed “bustons,” then wonder where my mind really drifted …)
But I digress; I know at least one librarian very personally myself. What she endures, I wish upon nobody. She shoos wily preteen boys from scoping out porn using library computers, and on at least a few occasions, has sent homeless folk scuttling from bathrooms. All the while, she probably wonders fairly regularly: “Are any of you people actually here for the damn books?!”
She once showed me a comic strip that might appeal at least as much to cynical bookworms as to the librarians who service their collective book-learning jones: Unshelved. The comic strip by librarian Gene Ambaum and cartoonist Bill Barnes first ran on February 16, 2002, and chronicles the misadventures of Mallville Library’s staff, their misfit ape-mascot Buddy and various assorted and odd patrons. The humor can be as dry as a Nevada summer heat, but if you’ve ever felt like the one-eyed king in the land of the intellectually blind, it will strike a chord.
Thousands of strips like these are collected in eight volumes available for prices ranging from $11.95 to $36.95 each. For a small extra charge, the creators will even sign your copy. In fact, splurge for the autograph and give it randomly to a librarian. Say “thank you” in a way he or she will appreciate. And pay your damn fines, while you’re at it!
(By the way, the website also posts fresh strips Monday through Friday, making it well worth “bookmarking.” And yes, that is amongst the last library puns I will ever attempt. I apologize. Truly.)
It’s March 14th, pi-nally! (I’ll wait a few minutes for you to stop chuckling at my punning GENIUS.) What is Pi Day, you ask? Naught but a cheeky holiday – nay, celebration! – observed by quality nerds and math enthusiasts the world over to celebrate the Greek letter of Pi ( π ), which is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi = 3.1415926535… so it’s only fitting that March 14th (3.14) = Pi Day. And now that you’re all edjumacated, let’s look at some awesome holiday-themed gifts that you’ll absolutely pi’ne over. (Somebody, stop me!)
There’s an awesome collection of “math appreciation” and Pi Day Gifts out there, but my favorites are the Albert Einstein action figure (“go go, Gadget Relativity Theory!”); the fantastic – and refreshing! – Pi shaped ice cube tray; and the t-shirt with its iconic symbol constructed from the first 4993 digits of Pi. Freakin’ genius!
Look … I get that this whole DIY project is meant to be in jest, but WTF crafters?! I know I occasionally rag on you for your scrapbookin’, crochetin’, quilt makin’ tendencies – but this Laptop Compubody Sock is just a hazard. Not only because it’s virtually guaranteed to overheat your laptop (and your head), but because you’ll almost certainly be dragged off to the mental ward for wearing this in public. But take heart! You can always knit yourself a straitjacket iPhone cozy.
As a web designer and WordPress developer – hell, as a plain ol’ Internet user – Internet Explorer 6 has been the bane of my existence for years. Thanks to quirky rendering of stylesheets and a host of other nagging bugs, creating a website that looks the same in IE6 as other browsers can be an absolute nightmare. While the modern versions of IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari all play relatively well together, designing for IE6 usually entails CSS hacks and conditional styling, and the smallest of style changes always have the potential to cause yet another rendering issue.
While web and graphic designers have been imploring stubborn IE6′ers to upgrade for ages, our pleas were mostly falling on deaf ears. But finally there’s light at the end of the tunnel! Google has announced that it will phase out support for IE6 in Google Docs and Google Sites on March 1st – but the big news is that some current and future YouTube features will no longer work for IE6 users as of March 13th. Huzzah! I’m expecting that more major sites will follow suit in the near future, and there’s really no reason not to. After all, the vast majority of folks who still use IE6 are likely only doing so because they either don’t know how to upgrade their browser, or don’t have any idea that it’s out of date – and with some not-so subtle nudges in the right direction, I’m hopeful that the number of hold-outs will dwindle significantly.
But if you’re one of the defiant 6′ers who abjectly refuses to upgrade for your own incomprehensible reasons, maybe this will sway you: a wildly unofficial (but hilarious!) IE6 funeral, to be held in Denver, Colorado on March 4th. Show up in your best funeral attire and get ready to pay your last respects, bishes!
Note: When I was researching this post, Google Suggest offered the phrase “IE6 is a bag of smashed buttholes” as a search option. Freakin’ made my day! =)
When all of the “I’m With Coco” hullabaloo kicked up in January (of which I’m a firm supporter!) I found myself wondering, does Conan O’Brien have a Twitter account? I was surprised that he hadn’t yet hopped on the social networking bandwagon, but now that the ruckus has softened to a simmer and he’s a settled into his unintended sabbatical, Conan has finally acquiesced to his legions of fans and opened up a Twitter! The world, as we know it, will never be the same.
That screenshot was taken just moments ago, and with only one tweet to Conan O’Brien’s Twitter account, he’s already scored more than 250,000 followers. The best part? This absolutely slaughters Jay Leno’s (relatively) paltry 30,000-some tweeps, and his account has been open since April 2009. Take that, Leno! You may have once been “the king of late night”, but when it comes to crowning future Twitter royalty? All hail The Coco One!
