nichole's auxiliary storage

Compassion at work

So a coworker went to see the Dalai Lama speak in Madison, and recounted how an audience member asked him how to get meaning from her life when her 9-5 job is so meaningless. His answer was that no matter how you spend your time, if you are compassionate, you are making a difference.

One of my favorite columnists, Lucy Kellaway at the Financial Times, drew a similar conclusion. It turns out that what people say they value the most at work are nice coworkers. So even if you are the smallest cog in the most useless bureaucracy, as long as you're making someone's day-to-day life more pleasant, you're doing good work.

(I'd add that you ought to try to find something meaningful to do outside work, as well - but the sentiment Ms. Kellaway and His Holiness describe is a good touchstone.)

Cap Times improves HTML page titles

Case in point: Lifestyle & Entertainment: Delectable Fresco provides a perfect evening.

Good job, Cap Times! Keep it up. Including the article title is a good step. Now how about getting rid of errant colons and including the name of the (online-only) "paper"?

WAPL08: Notable genre book discussion (and bonus Have You Heard...)

Four well-read librarians with delightfully diverse tastes brought a pile of really good books to this session - some highlights I've added to my own list:

• See you in a hundred years: four seasons in forgotten America by Logan Ward - "Better Off" redux?
• Life as we knew it by Susan Beth Pfeffer - apocalyptic YA novel
• Unwind by Neal Shusterman - Parts: The Clonus Horror for teens
• Before Green Gables by Budge Wilson - sounds sweet
• Driven by Eve Kenin - possible romance/road  B-movie fun

With the exception of Green Gables, I seem to have latched onto the eschatologically-flavored titles. Hm.

Another good source of yummy reads that I learned about in the "Have You Heard About" session was twitterlit.com, which feeds you 2 first lines of books every day.

Well, that's all I've managed to blog. Post-conference resources, slides etc. will be on the WAPL site soon. Happy trails, all!

Books read in 2007

Interesting to compare this to 2006. Did I really read 81 books this year? That's about 175% up from last year. Must be all due to the Bluford series.

Joshua Glenn: Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance {Find in a library}

Nikki Turner: Christmas in the Hood (Street Chronicles) A jail favorite.  {Find in a library}

James Patterson: Violets Are Blue A jail favorite.  {Find in a library}

Herman Melville: Typee {Find in a library}

Marisa Acocella Marchetto: Cancer Vixen: A True Story {Find in a library}

Studs Terkel: Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do {Find in a library}

Jay McInerney: Bright Lights, Big City {Find in a library}

Johan Huizinga: Homo ludens; a study of the play-element in culture. {Find in a library}

Jimmy Fallon: I Hate This Place: The Pessimist's Guide to Life {Find in a library}

David Weinberger: Everything Is Miscellaneous {Find in a library}

Jerome K. Jerome: Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog {Find in a library}

Ivan Goncharov: Oblomov {Find in a library}

H.G. Wells: The History of Mr Polly {Find in a library}

Andrei Codrescu: The Dog with the Chip in His Neck {Find in a library}

Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections: A Novel {Find in a library}

Dan Kieran: Crap Jobs: 100 Tales of Workplace Hell {Find in a library}

Alan and Carl R. Pagter Dundes: Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire {Find in a library}

Molly O'Neill: Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball {Find in a library}

Herman Melville: Bartleby and Benito Cereno {Find in a library}

Ian Stewart: Why Beauty Is Truth: A History of Symmetry {Find in a library}

Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time {Find in a library}

Anna Funder: Stasiland {Find in a library}

Tom McCarthy : Remainder {Find in a library}

McSweeney's: Mountain Man Dance Moves {Find in a library}

Jon Stewart: America (The Book) {Find in a library}

Peggy Orenstein: Waiting for Daisy {Find in a library}

Joshua Ferris: Then We Came to the End {Find in a library}

Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh: Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor {Find in a library}

Leif Enger: Peace Like a River {Find in a library}

David Rees: My New Filing Technique is Unstoppable {Find in a library}

Madeleine L'Engle: Ring of Endless Light {Find in a library}

Suzanne Stefanac: Dispatches from Blogistan {Find in a library}

Rob Bell: Velvet Elvis {Find in a library}

Richard Alexander Hough: Victoria and Albert {Find in a library}

Dave Eggers: What Is the What {Find in a library}

Dave Eggers: How We Are Hungry {Find in a library}

Carl Hiaasen: Sick Puppy {Find in a library}

Michael Pollan: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals {Find in a library}

Michael De-La-Noy: Queen Victoria at Home {Find in a library}

Jaime Hernandez: The Death of Speedy {Find in a library}

Ellen Klages: Portable Childhoods {Find in a library}

Barry Schwartz: The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less {Find in a library}

Kathe Koja: Going Under {Find in a library}

John Langan: Search for Safety (#13 Bluford Series) {Find in a library}

Paul Langan: Shattered (#12 Bluford Series) {Find in a library}

Paul Langan: The Fallen (#11 Bluford Series) {Find in a library}

Paul Langan: Summer of Secrets (#10 Bluford Series) {Find in a library}

Ben Alirez: Brothers in Arms (#9 Bluford Series) {Find in a library}

D. M. Blackwell: Blood Is Thicker (#8 Bluford Series) {Find in a library}

Anne E. Schraff: Until We Meet Again (#7 Bluford Series) {Find in a library}

Paul Langan: The Gun (#6 Bluford Series) {Find in a library}

Paul Langan: The Bully (#5 Bluford Series) {Find in a library}

Anne E. Schraff: Someone to Love Me (#4 Bluford Series) {Find in a library}

Anne E. Schraff: Secrets in the Shadows (#3 Bluford Series) {Find in a library}

Anne E. Schraff: A Matter of Trust (#2 Bluford Series) {Find in a library}

Anne E. Schraff: Lost And Found (#1 Bluford Series) {Find in a library}

Max Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism {Find in a library}

Tom Lutz: Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America {Find in a library}

Dave Barry: Dave Barry's Money Secrets: Like: Why Is There a Giant Eyeball on the Dollar? {Find in a library}

Margaret Mason: No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog {Find in a library}

Sherman Alexie: Flight: A Novel {Find in a library}

Naomi Novik: Black Powder War {Find in a library}

Naomi Novik: His Majesty's Dragon {Find in a library}

Naomi Novik: Throne of Jade {Find in a library}

Steven Johnson: Everything Bad is Good for You {Find in a library}

Stephen Jay Gould: Rocks of Ages (Library of Contemporary Thought) {Find in a library}

Strangers At Home: Essays on the Effects of Living Overseas and Coming "Home" to a Strange Land {Find in a library}

Thomas L. Friedman: The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century {Find in a library}

Christopher McDougall: Girl Trouble {Find in a library}

Craig Damrauer: New Math: Equations for Living {Find in a library}

Minna Proctor: Do You Hear What I Hear? Religious Calling, the Priesthood, and My Father {Find in a library} First chapter's inane, the rest is interesting.

Mary Edwards Wertsch: Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress {Find in a library}

Jeffrey Brown: Any Easy Intimacy {Find in a library}

Thomas Lynch: Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality {Find in a library}

Charles C. Mann: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus {Find in a library}

John Kovalic: Livin' La Vida Dorka (Dork Tower, Vol. 4) {Find in a library}

John Kovalic: Heart of Dorkness (Dork Tower, Vol. 3) {Find in a library}

John Kovalic: Dork Covenant (Dork Tower, Vol. 1) {Find in a library}

Brian K. Vaughan: Pride of Baghdad {Find in a library}

Jonathan Gold: Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles {Find in a library}

Sister Souljah: The Coldest Winter Ever {Find in a library}

State of the food blog ecosystem

Kate at Accidental Hedonist recently wrote about missing the food blogging scene of 2005. Her touchstone was that the corporate site Epicurious won 2nd place in the 2007 Weblog Awards, which to her was a blow to individuality. Other things on her mind were the ballooning number of food blogs, the rise of PR flackism, and the loss of a sense of community.

I can see where she's coming from; the same has happened to many specialized blogging communities over the last few years. It's a recurrent pattern in any online community. In some ways it's unstoppable.

I like to find the good in it. What I've seen is an explosion of hyperlocal blogs, smaller but more engaged communities, and budding niche writers like Eating in Place, the folks at Underground Food Collective, and Wisconsin Fish Fry Reviews (just as a quick sample - there are more great ones out there). Admittedly I'm biased towards the locals because of my project, but I see nothing but room for growth in the food blog scene.

On the other hand, Kate may be right that the wider food blog world is oversaturated. It's tough to form a large community around food blogging, especially writing about cooking. At best it can inspire others to try their hand at recipes and share a meal in spirit. At worst it can be just as narcissistic as any average online diary.

This ultimately means that the winners of national blog polls will lack character, like Starbucks winning Chicago Magazine's "Best Coffee" vote, and Pedro's placing in the Mexican food category in Madison magazine (both recent true stories). The votes for "best food blog" will necessarily be split because the field is so specialized. But that's OK. Quality isn't measured in chicklets.

"Music that soothes the soul"

There's a sincere, if slightly heavy-handed and a little tardy, piece on the benefits of UWEC's Music Therapy program in this week's Spectator:

Angela Boinski, 27, an inmate at the Sauk County Jail, participates in the anger management class UW-Eau Claire music therapy students facilitate every week.

"These women are lifesavers," Boinski said, with tears in her eyes, during Friday's session.

I haven't gotten a reply from Vice Chancellor Tallant, either. Makes me grumpily wish I'd made bigger alumni donations so I could threaten to withhold them.

Music therapy at UWEC uncertain

Via the Spectator, the campus paper at my alma mater, UW-Eau Claire:

Provost and Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs Steve Tallant announced Friday morning his recommendation to cut the music therapy program in the face of a strained budget with other departments and programs taking priority.

This is incredibly bad news if it happens. UWEC has the only accredited music therapy program at a state university (the other is at Alverno, a private women's college in Milwaukee - a fine program, but not necessarily accessible to everyone).

When the news first came out that the program was threatened, I wrote the chancellor, hoping an alum's voice might help - but maybe not without wodges of cash. Here's my (redacted) letter, which did not receive a response. So I'm going to try writing Vice Chancellor Tallant.

Dear Chancellor Levin-Stankevich,
I am a proud UWEC alumna. I recently read in the Spectator Online about the dilemma facing the University regarding the Music Therapy program. I wanted to write to share my support for the program and the university, and to ask if there is anything I can do to help.

The Music Therapy program was the single most attractive aspect of UWEC when I was choosing a school. Even though I eventually took a different path and became a librarian, the program meant a great deal to me when I was at Eau Claire. Professor Rasar's dedication and expertise is still an inspiration.

I understand that this is a very complicated subject, but I would just like to reiterate my desire to help in any way I can. Thank you for your time.

Still so, so sick of this ad in PC World

Before:

After:

Also interesting to note who has a cubie and who's in an office with a door.

Chowhound & Burger King: separated at birth?

Same font, same color scheme...weird. Unless Chowhound/CNET and BK are bedfellows, but I'm too lazy to look it up.

WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL: Madison.com now user-friendly

Sorry to yell. Just illustrating a point about html page titles in the new, more user-friendly WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL. Read the article fast, before the link breaks.

Two suggestions for Madison.com re: actual user-friendliness, especially for bloggers:

• please provide meaningful html titles, ideally including the name of the paper and the headline of the article.
• please provide permalinks.

Sorry to sound snarky, but this is pretty basic usability stuff. Thanks for listening.

Cineplexity (and John, John, Sean and JM) on the local tee-vee news

Monday's Channel3000 5 o'clock news had a profile of John Kovalic that happened to feature an awful lot of Cineplexity.

Wanted: pheneticist(s)

Palmer's made a great point about Madison's local online news ecology:

[...] the blog aggregators at dane101.net, POST, and The Daily Page's Miscellany are now virtually unusable. Content needs to be segregated to make it more easily accessible. [...] There's a lot of repetition and posts on disparate subjects are all lumped together into a gigantic agglomeration that must be parsed with the aid of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

My first reaction was that a librarian needs to jump in there and help these aggregators get organized. (Typical - suggest this kind of thing to a librarian and her nervous tic comes back, but she does roll up her sleeves.)

My next reaction was that some sort of Digg-local would help do the trick (not a new idea, of course). It gets around the gatekeeper problem, and is more scalable (and seems cheaper) than curating by hand.

User-generated and -rated content has been called a "holy grail." Like the grail it's a myth. The trouble is the critical mass required for a community effort to turn out anything useful. In a smallish place like Madison, no matter how wired, it would be hard to reach that point for a local news and blogosphere aggregator.

Plus, "regular people may not be interested in interactive news in the way geeks are." Surprise. Then again, nothing about Madison is regular.

Still, the news that Digg's planning to expand into product and restaurant (restaurant?) reviews is interesting.

I suspect the path of least resistance will be somewhere in the middle.

How's that for noncommital?

Update: thedailypage.com does tag their posts, but the path to a tag cloud is labyrinthine (example). And I completely forgot about outside.in (d'oh).

LOLcar

Geek.Kon Madison

Whoa, the first Geek.Kon sounds prefect-ly geeky. I will so be there.

Isthmus reports a local Elvish expert is going organizers are thinking of inviting a local Elvish expert (apologies for messing up the facts). Hm, wonder just who that could be...

Madison Interactive

The Cap Times had a nice writeup of the music panel event for Madison Interactive that happened April 30. They described MadInteractive as a "group of web professionals," which is close, but the group is really for anyone who runs a public website in the Madison area, be it a blog, a forum, a commercial site, or even (gasp) a library.

JM and I are moderating this month's panel on - what else? - food. We'll have chefs, local food bloggers, dining guide editors, and more. Come on down. More details at the Madison Interactive blog.

Don't miss the State Street Pict-o-Trivia Contest

...at Dane101. That is all.

Memo to Ray Allen, Madison mayoral challenger

Now that you're past the primary, I have a campaign slogan for you: Mayor Dave for Dave. Eh?

(This has nothing to do with my vote.)

Cineplexity gets its first non-industry press

... from JM's (semi-)hometown paper, the Hudson Star-Observer.

Read in 2006 (and 2005)

Maybe in 2007, I'll shoot for a book a week. I've been toying with the idea of reading stuff off the jail wish list. That would do nothing to balance my (unhealthy?) tendency to overdo the, shall we say, earthy autobiographical comic books.

Books read in 2006
as entered in my "sustained reading of complex texts" list

Title	Author	Date entered
The Complete Peanuts 1959-1960	Charles M. Schulz	12/27/2006
The Neddiad	Daniel Manus Pinkwater	12/27/2006
A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey	Kevin Murphy	12/27/2006
Wild life, the Cardinal collection	John Kovalic	12/27/2006
A Child's Life and Other Stories	Phoebe Louise Adams Gloeckner	12/27/2006
Codex	Lev Grossman	11/29/2006
The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade	Thomas Lynch	11/28/2006
Essays in Idleness	Yoshida Kenko	11/28/2006
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More	Chris Anderson	10/22/2006
Hustling Is Not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl	John M. Chernoff	10/22/2006
Exchange Is Not Robbery: More Stories of an African Bar Girl	John M. Chernoff	10/6/2006
Behind Bars: Surviving Prison	Jeffrey Ian Ross	9/18/2006
Ridiculous Packaging (or, My Long, Strange Journey from Atheist to Episcopalian, in Two Acts)	Karen Favreau	9/15/2006
The Complete Peanuts 1957-1958	Charles M. Schulz	9/14/2006
Digital Dish	Owen Linderholm	8/30/2006
Hungry Planet	Peter Menzel	8/30/2006
The Confusion	Neal Stephenson	8/14/2006
King of the Vagabonds	Neal Stephenson	8/7/2006
Theory of Fun for Game Design	Raph Koster	7/31/2006
Quicksilver	Neal Stephenson	7/31/2006
Raising Less Corn, More Hell: The Case For The Independent Farm And Against Industrial Food	George Pyle	7/22/2006
How to Be Idle	Tom Hodgkinson	7/22/2006
Bonjour Laziness: Jumping Off the Corporate Ladder	Corinne Maier	7/22/2006
Keep the Aspidistra Flying	George Orwell	7/18/2006
Thirty-three Swoons	Martha Cooley	6/26/2006
Other Electricities	Ander Monson	6/23/2006
The Nextgen Librarian's Survival Guide	Rachel Singer Gordon	6/23/2006
Life's a Bitch	Roberta Gregory	6/21/2006
True Believer	Virginia Euwer Wolff	6/15/2006
I, Coriander	Sally Gardner	6/12/2006
The First Part Last	Angela Johnson	6/6/2006
Promises I Can Keep : Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage	Kathryn Edin	6/1/2006
Translation Nation	Hector Tobar	5/18/2006
Ego & Hubris : The Michael Malice Story	Harvey Pekar	5/9/2006
Wicked	Gregory Maguire	4/18/2006
The Cluetrain Manifesto	Christopher Locke	4/14/2006
Bed and board	Robert Farrar Capon	4/13/2006
Five Percenter Rap	Felicia M. Miyakawa	4/7/2006
The Promise : How One Woman Made Good on Her Extraordinary Pact to Send a Classroom of 1st Graders to College	Oral Lee Brown	4/4/2006
Cosmopolitan: A Bartender's Life	Toby Cecchini	4/4/2006
Monster	Frank Peretti	3/31/2006
Here be Snapdragons	John Kovalic and Liz Rathke	3/19/2006
Ordinary Genius (Flyover Fiction Series)	Thomas Fox Averill	3/9/2006
Not Much Just Chillin': The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers	Linda Perlstein	3/9/2006
Past Mortem	Ben Elton	2/24/2006
Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society	Raymond Williams	2/6/2006
American Mania: When More Is Not Enough	Peter C. Whybrow	2/6/2006

Better late than never.

Books read in 2005
as entered in my "sustained reading of complex texts" list

Title	Author	Date entered
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell	Susanna Clarke	12/16/2005
Ambient Findability	Peter Morville	12/14/2005
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation	Lynne Truss	12/14/2005
Memory Bank	Wallace West	11/28/2005
The Quitter	Harvey Pekar	11/28/2005
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture	John Battelle	11/22/2005
Entities	Eric Frank Russell	11/10/2005
The House of the Dead	Fyodor Dostoyevsky	11/10/2005
RFID	Steven Shepard	11/10/2005
Maakies	Tony Millionaire	9/22/2005
The Complete Peanuts 1955-1956	Charles M. Schulz	9/22/2005
Toothpaste For Dinner	Drew	9/17/2005
Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology	Eric Brende	9/15/2005
The Pirates Laffite : The Treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf	William C. Davis	9/2/2005
Stranger in a Strange Land	Robert A. Heinlein	8/23/2005
Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico	Anne Rubenstein	8/22/2005
All God's Children	Fox Butterfield	8/4/2005
The Complete Upmanship: Including, Gamesmanship, Lifemanship, One-Upmanship, Supermanship.	Stephen Potter	7/29/2005
Cube Farm	Bill Blunden	7/29/2005
Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet	Mineke Schipper	7/25/2005
Wild With a Glue Gun: Getting Together With Crafty Friends	Kitty Harmon	7/25/2005
The Wu-Tang Manual: Enter the 36 Chambers, Volume One	The RZA	7/25/2005
Healing by Heart: Clinical and Ethical Case Stories of Hmong Familes and Western Providers		7/18/2005
Happy Kitty Bunny Pony : A Saccharine Mouthful of Super Cute	Popink	7/18/2005
Why People Buy Things They Don't Need	Pamela Danziger	7/13/2005
The Deeper Meaning of Liff : A Dictionary of Things There Aren't Any Words for Yet--But There Ought to Be	Douglas Adams	7/6/2005
Status Anxiety	Alain de Botton	6/26/2005
The Life and Times of Henry Pratt	David Nobbs	6/26/2005
The Quit	Evan Harris	6/16/2005
The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System	Siva Vaidhyanathan	6/10/2005
Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas	Elijah Wald	5/19/2005
The Grasshopper King	Jordan Ellenberg	5/9/2005
Doing Time on the Outside : Incarceration and Family Life in Urban America	Donald Braman	5/2/2005
Those Episkopols	Dennis R Maynard	4/11/2005
I didn't get where I am today	David Nobbs	4/11/2005
Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (Inside Technology)	Geoffrey C. Bowker	4/5/2005
The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization (Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing)	Elaine Svenonius	3/21/2005
Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences	John Allen Paulos	3/16/2005
Sherwood Anderson	Kim Townsend	3/15/2005
The! Greatest! of! Marlys!	Lynda Barry	3/12/2005
The Smallest People Alive	Keith Banner	3/7/2005
Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop and Some People	Danny Hoch	3/7/2005
My New York Diary	Julie Doucet	3/7/2005
The Platypus and the Mermaid: And Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination	Harriet Ritvo	2/3/2005
Uncovering Labour in Information Revolutions, 1750-2000		1/19/2005
Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping	Paco Underhill	1/3/2005

Children's Book Week: The Value of Believing in Yourself: The Story of Louis Pasteur

One book stands out as the one I asked my mom to read to me until the binding fell apart, even after I had it memorized, even after I was well old enough to read it myself.

It was The Value of Believing in Yourself: The Story of Louis Pasteur. It's one of the books in the ValueTales series, that staple of late 70's children's bookshelves.

There's a podcast about The Value of Believing in Yourself by the awesome folks at Just One More Book!!, which is where I learned that author Spencer Johnson is the Who Moved My Cheese and One Minute Manager guy. I'm embarrassed to say I never made that connection before.

I am still not sure why I fixated on this book. It's about how Pasteur developed the rabies vaccine and saved a little boy's life.

Perhaps it was as simple as the book's compelling story arc, inviting illustrations, and happy ending. Or the comfort of the familiar.

Maybe it was the pathos of the poor sick dog, teased and provoked by a thoughtless little kid (who then, of course, learns his lesson). I was one of those girls that cried more over stories of animals - especially dogs and horses - than over human suffering. Thank goodness we had a healthy, loving pet dog, or the rabid pup in the story may have given me a complex.

Possibly it was the idea of the "invisible enemy," the rabies germs, portrayed as dark blobs with sharp, gnashing teeth, comical little stick-legs, and dinner-roll feet. They were scary, but were ultimately defeated.

The ironic thing is, I wouldn't say I absorbed the lesson so very well. Most of the time I'm my own worst enemy. However, even now, when I daydream about roads not taken, my idle thoughts (unburdened by facts) are most often tinged with regret over not going into the sciences. My lack of confidence in math is what I think ultimately landed me in libraries. Maybe I should have kept reading ValueTales up through high school calculus...

MyOutdoors.net

Isthmus reports in "Log on to the great outdoors" about some Madisonians developing a sort of social networking site where people can share their outdoor adventures:

MyOutdoors.net was conceived by LeClair, 26, an English and communication arts graduate of UW-Madison who now works at the Madison Public Library while pursuing his English teacher’s certificate. “The social networking Web sites like Friendster and MySpace were inspirations,” he explains. “But the idea clicked when someone showed me pictures of a hunting trip.”

Worth keeping an eye on...and thanks, Isthmus, for finally getting your content online!

Pluto, you're still my favorite

It's only drizzling

I was on the bus and saw this truck toting a big mirror with an odd sign. "No spitting."

Stencil

Seen on a recent A to Z adventure:

More stencil graffiti is at the (sadly defunct?) Madison Art Crime Collective, and a (really old) article from Dane101.

My favorite new feed

is the Consumer Product Safety Commission's "Recalls and product safety news from CPSC."

A recent gem: Endurance Treadmills Recalled for Unexpected Speed Changes Posing Fall Hazard.

They're got podcasts and mp3s too, if you're into that kind of thing.

Poptimism

At the tail end of a Slate article, The difficulties of accounting for musical taste, Adam Christian cites an expert "poptimist":

Does your iPod need some updating? Be sure to consult jmsr525's top 100 "best songs from 1955 to 2001" before putting together that poptimist playlist.

Who are these people with their lists? Oh, wait...

The Stories of Lemony Snicket (to the tune of Edmund Fitzgerald)

John over at The Big Miscellaneous has written a 15-stanza (and counting!) parody of the Series of Unfortunate Events books to the tune of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."

Here follows the tales of those sad Baudelaires
And Count Olaf, who wishes to kill them
Inexpensive to buy, give these orphans a try
If you want to raise sad, morbid children

Wow, John!

Old joke, but good

Miss Information witnesses a fun encounter, which is even better than the "original."

Calling Academic Decathlon alums

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports that Wisconsin Academic Decathlon needs some help.

I loved my year in Ac Dec. It was a fun competition & a chance to be proudly geeky. As an added bonus, it recognizes that the smart kids aren't all on the honor roll.

What are the odds?

Not always that odd.

In one ten-day span, the same six numbers won the Wisconsin Lottery's SuperCash game twice. It made the paper (and made JM late for dinner yesterday).

On the scales of unlikeliness, it would be more likely that you would flip a coin 18 times and they would all be heads.

JM did some similar debunking back when the NY Lottery drew 9-1-1 on Sept. 11, 2002.

You and I both randomly choosing the same letter of the alphabet is less likely than 9-1-1 coming up somewhere in the US on September 11.

(Maybe it's just that the amount of time you spend with mathematicians has a direct inverse realtionship to how amazing you think oddball lotto drawings are. Happy Valentine's Day, mister!)

Update: Apparently the story was Farked (and then put behind a pay wall) with the headline: Same six numbers win Wisconsin's lottery twice in 10 days. "That's unlikely," says lottery mathematician John Obvious. (Somebody has to answer the dumb questions...)

7-Year-Old Strikes Archaeological Gold

The Wisconsin Historical Society reports:

A 7-year-old boy and his "Kids Companion" mentor made the archaeological find of the year in Wisconsin on a November day in 2005 while exploring the Wisconsin River bed in Sauk City.

I don't know about you, but when I was 7, finding a rare archaeological treasure would have made my decade.

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.