A new album, thanks to Wikipedia

I can’t remember now where I came across this, but I’ve had it saved for awhile with the idea of posting it here, so here goes.

1. Go to the Wikipedia home page and click random article. That is your band’s name.
2. Click random article again; that is your album name.
3. Click random article 15 more times; those are the tracks on your album.

Band Name: Puhinui Train Station
Album: Bun Kabab
Tracks: 1) Irricana, 2) Saint-Martin-de-Caralp, 3) Managers and ownership of the Philadelphia Phillies, 4) Valentin Belkevich, 5) Alan Crofoot, 6) 2007 Chennai Open – Singles, 7) Chatrices, Denis Carey, 9) Logtang, 10) Henry Lefroy, 11) Misanthropy Pure, 12) Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey, 13) Minnesota State Highway 241, 14) Bodysuit, 15) Foehn wind

Houseplants

I came across this book in the library last week. It made me laugh, because I am EXACTLY the kind of person this book was written for. I checked the book out and brought it home. We don’t have a single plant in the entire apartment. But I don’t think I’ll use the book or buy any plants. We get ZERO natural light in this place. And there is nowhere to put any plants anyway.

Exhaustion

I am tired. Bone. Weary. Tired. These past few weeks, there has not been a single moment when I haven’t felt like I could lay down and sleep for a hundred years. I cannot remember the last time I felt truly energetic. I can muster up a good show at it, but I’m not really feeling it. I go to bed tired. I wake up tired. No amount of sleep helps. Eating healthy food isn’t helping. Taking my vitamins isn’t helping. Getting fresh air and exercise every weekend isn’t helping. I am tired physically and mentally. I feel like my brain is in a perpetual fog. I haven’t had a clear sharp thought in a long time. I suspect all this is a combination of the weather and my new full time work schedule. But I don’t know for sure. I just wish I could feel alert again.

Vinyl Cafe

Can I tell you how overjoyed I am that the Vinyl Cafe is releasing podcasts now? I loved listening to that show when I lived in Vancouver. Stuart McLean’s stories about Dave and Morley were hilarious. I love NPR, but I miss CBC radio too.

Going to China?

I went to REI yesterday to see if I could get a rain jacket on clearance. A nice waterproof rain jacket costs more than $100, so I was thrilled to find a more affordable one on clearance. While I was there, I picked up a map for Olympic National Park, where Deborah and I are backpacking this summer. Then I proceeded to have this very strange conversation with the cashier who rang me up.

Cashier: Preparing yourself for the rain?
Me: Yeah. My sister and I are going to the Olympics this summer and I hear it rains a lot there. Thought I should get a better rain jacket.
Cashier: Cool, are you going as a spectator?
[Pause a few beats while I think about what he said, then realize he thinks I'm going to the summer Olympics in China.]
Me: Um, no. We’re backpacking in the Olympic Mountains for a few nights.
Cashier: Oh, oh! Cool.

Seriously? That guy was either new or having an off day, because it’s totally strange that when I said “Olympics” his mind leapt to the sporting event, not the mountains, even though a) he works in an outdoor store, b) we are just three hours from the Olympic Peninsula but about 14 hours from Beijing, c) I am buying an expensive rain jacket intended for outdoor sports (not a windbreaker for a Chinese summer), and d) I am also buying a map of Olympic National Park. Very strange.

Being taken seriously

I had a disconcerting experience today, the details of which I shouldn’t, and won’t, go into. But it made me think about how I have become increasingly aware of some people’s attitude towards photography in this new age of digital cameras. Many people think that because there are good affordable point-and-shoot digital cameras out there, that taking good photos can be done by anybody. They look at beautiful photographs and say “Heck, I could do that.” Maybe you could, but do you even know how that photo was taken? Do you know that the reason the photo looks so good is that the photographer knew to wait for the light to be just right at the end of the day, and that they used a tripod to make sure the image was as sharp as possible, and that they used a split neutral-density filter so that both the sky and the land would turn out?

I also find it frustrating when the purists and the “real artists” look down on digital photography. Yes, taking pictures with a digital camera is different than taking pictures with a film camera. But that doesn’t mean that taking awesome photos requires any less skill with a digital camera than with a film camera. As for the whole Photoshop thing, well as long as you’re staying true to what you saw when you shot the picture, how is Photoshop any different than the darkroom?

I’m not trying to sound like a photography snob here. I like photography and I enjoy being outdoors taking pretty pictures. I like to think I’ve learned a lot in the last year or so, but goodness knows I have plenty more to learn. But I hope that with the passing of time, certain people will stop looking down on “easy” landscape photos or digital photography. It’s insulting.

School work

I have the day off today and I’m doing some major – and long overdue – cleaning. I came across some library school stuff that I had never gotten around to recycling. Among the stuff was a paper I wrote for my Collections Management class, a paper about the theft and mutilation of library materials. It was interesting to re-read, since at the time I wrote it I had never had a real library job (just student work in university libraries). Now with real-world public library experience under my belt, all the stuff I wrote about in the paper means way more to me than it did then.

Anyway, I wanted to tell you about my two favorite parts of the paper. In the old days, books would have curses in them in the hope of deterring theft. I opened up my paper with this wonderful little curse:

Whoever steals this Book of Prayer
May he be ripped apart by swine,
His heart be splintered, this I swear,
And his body dragged along the Rhine.
Book Curse — Simon Vostre of Paris, 1502

The other favorite part of my paper is reporting the results of a nationwide library survey asking what the most frequently stolen materials were (not a survey conducted by me, I’d like to point out!). The top three frequently stolen items were 1) Joy of Sex and sequels, 2) all G.E.D. (general equivalency diploma) examination books, and 3) Prophecies of Nostradamus. The article commented that looking at that information, one might be led to think that the typical library thief is “a high school dropout sitting on a mountainside casting spells and waiting for the end of the world, but having really good sex.” Ha ha ha ha! I’ll always think of that now, every time I discovery another G.E.D. book missing.

(For any of you fellow library nerds out there, this is the article: “The ’self-weeding’ collecgion: The ongoing problem of library theft, and how to fight back.” Library Journal, October 15, 1996, pp. 38-40.)