The Rogue Scholar

Dorothy Parker & Lillian Hellman

It's probably not wise for a bibliophile to admit, but I've never been much of a fan of Dorothy Parker or Lillian Hellman. That said, this article by Marion Meade in the latest Book Forum was fascinating all the same. Enjoy!

Pastafarianism.

Worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Worship It! Now!

All right, fine, don't worship it . . . but don't dismiss it out of hand, either. Faith is one of those wacky  things of which only humans are capable, and it's a delicate balance between making sense of the universe in which we live, and coming off as stark raving mad. That goes for all of us professing belief in God, Jesus Christ who was his son and died for our sins, except for Jews who don't, and Muslims who do but believe in His Prophet Mohammed, more,  Evolution (note the capital E there), Quantum physics, General and Specific relativity, Buddha, Zen, various Hindu deities, Orishas, Lwas, Science, Satan, or what have you. I didn't care for Hebrew school much (washed out after two and a half years) but I did come away with this notion: Faith is good, idolatry is bad. Questioning authority is good, blind obedience is bad.

Either we're all crazy or we're all sane.  If my observation is worth anything, then God's Children,  we surely all are, but some of us are consistently more childish than others.

My point here is that religion is inherently funny.  Laughter is inherently spiritual. Spirituality is inherently mind-expanding.

Just my two cents. </sermon>

Emily Dunning Barringer, M.D.

From Bowery to Hollywood: Emily Dunning Barringer, MD, Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine - an exhibit at the New York Academy of Medicine Library

 

In 1903, Emily Dunning Barringer, MD became the first woman to serve as an ambulance surgeon in New York City. She was also an advocate for women's health, with a particular interest in venereal diseases and the plight of female inmates in New York prisons. With the coming of the second World War, she worked tirelessly to allow women physicians to serve as commissioned officers in the armed services.
In 1950, she wrote an autobiography, "From Bowery to Bellevue", about her experiences as an ambulance surgeon in 1903. Two years after the book's publication, a movie version, "The Girl in White", was released.
This exhibit explores Dr. Barringer's real and reel lives; journal and newspaper articles, photographs, and books explore her professional life, while  posters, ads, and memorobilia provide insight into the marketing of the film.
The exhibit is on display in the Library, 3rd Floor of the New York Academy of Medicine, 1216 Fifth Avenue, New York NY. The display is available for viewing Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, from 9am to 5pm and Wednesday from 9am to 7pm.

Nicked From Andrew Tobias

WORST ADVICE EVER

“I before E except after C.” 

 

Oh, yeah?

 

The feisty foreigner seized the beige reins in one vein-bulging hand and – weirdly adorned in leis (a veil of distraction so no one would remember his face?) feigned disinterest no more. The heist of his neighbor’s heir’s freight had begun. 

 

What they should have taught us: “I after C must follow E . . . but not literally.” (Not literally, because I’s frequently follow C’s without an intervening E – city, cicada, scintillate – and sometimes even when an E follows – efficient.)

 

No wonder Johnnie can’t spell.

 

MORE FREE AUDIOBOOKS

Lynn Gongaware: “LibriVox – recorded by volunteers from the public domain.”

New Projects

For the record, I agree with the sentiment that children and pornography don't mix.  Heck, adults and pornography don't mix half the time.  Having said that, I'm convinced there has to be a better method of keeping the two away from each other (kids and porn) than this.  (Dare I suggest more involved parenting?)

While we're on the subject of Google (again), take a look at this relationship chart of the biggest search engines. It's an interesting way to think of the gestalt of who pushes data to whom and for what reason. Not a bad way of getting an instant reality check on why some results appear more or less frequently than others depending on who's pushing and/or paying for what. I put this one in the Reference Resources TypeList for safe keeping, so if you can't be bothered to bookmark it, it's here if you need it.

New projects are making their needs felt: I'm working on an article about the Academy's Grey Literature Report and I've got a deadline that isn't approaching too quickly, but it's sooner than I'd thought (thank God for desktop calendars) so that's being dealt with.  I'm also expanding the list of E-journals (a whole bunch of BMC titles and plenty more) into our Serials Solutions account, but that's not as pressing.  And, I just did the quarterly batch activation of XML targets for Link Finder Plus, which means I'm going to have to spot test a few of them early tomorrow. (I like to wait a day or so just to make sure everything has passed through the pipeline, which is probably a tiny bit paranoid on my part.)  This all while keeping up with 4-6 MARC records a day to keep from either getting rusty or falling too far behind in the Grey Lit.

I'm back to work.

The Google Side of Your Brain

I'm not usually a USA Today reader, which is why I managed to miss this article by Elizabeth Weise from December 18, 2005.  I think the title says it all: "This is the Google Side of Your Brain."  On the tiny chance that I'm not the only person on the planet who hasn't read this yet, her main question is whether we're outsourcing some portion of our collective memory to entities such as Google, which has a reuptation of being able to hand you the knowledge tidbit were searching for.  It's a great read.

Exporting Censorship

Xeni Jardin writes on the nature of what, in her experience at BoingBoing, gets filtered out of which websites, and why and how.  Meanwhile, Lily Pregill (NYAM's Special Projects Librarian who works across the hall from me) points to an article in the current issue of Harvard Magazine, entitled "The People's Epidemiologists" by Madeline Drexler.  Good stuff on both counts.

Two-Tiered Internet

I like the Center for American Progress.  I really do, for the sheer level of research they utilize when writing any given bulletin they send out. I am in awe. Having said that, I'm not sure how I feel about their latest posts on what they call the Two-Tiered Internet. The NY Times has a better written account of what it means and why.

Cool Times Tool & the Patriot Act

I know I'm a day late and dollar short with this, as I am with everything I write here, but it's Wednesday and this caught my eye.

Linking to the NY Times is always problematic because of their new NY Times Select subscription package, but this makes linking to non-subbed articles a lot simpler.  In fact this tool is so darned useful that i stuck the link in the Reference Resources TypeList, so take a look at it.

And so, instead of pulling a whole story down from the Times (violating copyright in spirit if not in letter) or hoping that the link I post today is still good two weeks from now as the story gets archived behind a firewall, I can just post this link to this story about how a slightly revised Patriot Act just got passed in the Senate by a 95-4 vote. The good news is that there are new curbs on who can be spooked and under what conditions--not to mention limits on spooking library patrons--but the bad news is that the new limits aren't all that great.

Oh, and "spooking" is "to spy on," for the three readers who didn't already know. Enjoy!