nichole's auxiliary storage

Set adrift on memory bliss

When I pointed out this clever aural amalgam by Luke DuBois of every #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart to JM, he listened for 30 seconds and pointed out that the composer put both "Little Star" and "Bird Dog" in the piece, when "Bird Dog" was never #1 on the Hot 100, just the Best Sellers in Stores chart.

At the moment he's yelling at the TV, where the MST3K bots are making factual errors about pop music (confusing "Arizona" and "Indiana Wants Me") as a happy couple strolls on a beach, a la a Sessions or K-Tel commercial.

Living with a pop music savant is better than I ever imagined. Except when he can't resist playing every hit from 1989-1991 for me because he finds it amusing that I know all the words to tripe like "Romeo" by Dino.  Uh-huh, right, like him knowing every word to both "Say You'll Be There" by the Spice Girls and "My Happiness" by Connie Francis is something to be proud of.

Happy New Year, whatever you're listening to tonight.

The Numbers Must Be Single

Andy at The Land of Bob explains a little sudoku history between lovely photos of Tokyo and vicinity.

Chairmen of the boards

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reviews some board games. They like Power Grid (who wouldn't?) but also, inexplicably, Liebrary. (BGG is not impressed, describing it as Balderdash with books.)

My 20-minute layover at the Capitol just got significantly less boring

The Wisconsin State Journal reports that the city's wifi network is up - sort of - and free - for now.

 

In other news, the city's IT manager, Metro manager, and Mayor's office have all ignored my "hey, isn't Google Transit Trip Planner cool! Whyn'cha sign us up?" email. I s'pose that's a typical response to a typically frothy message, about a non-problem they've already solved.

Tell your best library anecdote

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Don't

Memory Bank by Wallace West

I was drawn to this morsel of pulpy science fiction at the Source, a Minneapolis-area game and comics store (where JM got a great deal on an out-of-print classic over the Thanksgiving weekend - but I digress). What attracted my attention was the blurb on the back:

The custodian of the Bank and ruler of the Centauran council was the most beautiful woman of the Centauran world, thousand-year-old Marian.

Yes, folks, she's a librarian.

The Memory Bank operates on the premise that if it holds humans' memories for them, their emptier brains can live forever - it's experience and knowledge that causes aging. Marian looks after the collection, described vaguely as a huge computer running a "film-and-dot" memory system.

Only there's no index. It's impossible to find valuable thoughts, like the military strategies that would save the human race from certain destrution by telepathic aliens, amid the torrent of stream-of-consciousness blather. (I wonder if West read Bush's "As we may think," written about six years earlier.)

Need I say the writing is awful enough to be fun? Enough to have been blogged by John & Belle: Ask not for whom the admiral cooed. Marian's written as a total ice queen; she's obsessed with indexing the Bank, she won't deign to have a drink with the boys, and yet she's jealous of Our Hero's psychic barbarian girlfriend. She fades into the background after being rescued from some alien-possessed kidnappers, and the book closes with the hero and his girl making out.

Hope I didn't spoil it for anyone.