etc.

Two regular readers have recently complained about access to my site being denied as a result of slithy filters. To me, this speaks volumes about what’s wrong with Internet filtering software and it’s also a sad day in etc. land when we have to say goodbye to 2 out of 4 regular readers. However, it did inspire me to undertake a wholesale clean-up of the old and delinquent files that have been living on my server and even though having your personal domain filtered out must give you some sort of street cred, I can categorically claim that there is no p0rn, s3x, or spank1ing going on around here anymore. Let’s see what they think of me now.

I’ve set up a notifylist for those who have emailed me about their access problems. The plan is to email the entire entry (links included) to listmembers. If you’d like to sign up too, do it here.

CanLit at it’s most precious. I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or an insult, maybe a bit of both. Clara Callan is a 20- (and then 30-) something single schoolteacher living in smalltown Ontario in the 1930s. Clara narrates her story through journal entries and letters to her sister Nora, who is pursuing her dreams of fame and fortune as a radio performer in New York City. Clara is a fairly archetypal 30′s woman, all grace, manners and self-censorship, which makes reading between the lines of her epistles one of the most interesting things about the book. It’s a fine piece of literature if you can get past Clara’s mild austerity and nagging priggishness. I don’t think I managed to.

Chuck0 wants librarians to just say no to wikipedia. I’ve been just saying no for about a year and couldn’t agree with him more.

Like your own penmanship? Like to make it a TTF? Well, now you can, and you don’t have to mess with heavy metals to do it.

· The curse of regularity will get you everytime. I’ve had 17 emails in the past two days, seven from people I know (real life know, that is) and ten from Web friends, inquiring about my silence over the past week. It seems that a few back-to-back posts sets a level of expectation that I clearly cannot maintain. I’ve been around, of course, preparing presentations, writing more articles, consuming media and posting about it elsewhere.

· Last weekend I spent a few hours in my parents’ basement going through boxes of stuff they’ve been storing for me for ages. I whittled the number from seven to four (mostly books I still have no room for) and purged a whole recycling bin’s worth of class notes from two of three degree programs I’ve completed. I’d always imagined that I’d hold on to those notes since I have such good memories of those classes, not because of the comfort and distance of lapsed time but because I actually enjoyed them. Still, the purging was easy and liberating, I have such little nostalgia for physical things.

· I’ve been a tea-drinker for six years, always strong, black, long-drawn, and deeply-caffeinated tea. For the most part I would become indignant at the sight of milk in tea, a position that only weakened when someone dunked a cookie in a cup in my presence. For six years I’ve been unwavering in my commitment to black tea but have always been mildly seduced by the dunking of cookies and last November I succumbed to the coaxing of my mum and sister, milky tea-drinkers both, and added a dash of the dairy to my cup, followed closely by a generous slosh-around of a Bourbon Cream. Woe that I drank the brew for six years before trying this! A good buddy sent me some Assam leaf-tea for Christmas and thus inspired a holiday season that will forever be known as the Cookie-Dunking Christmas.

· The mister, who travels to the Far East every Fall for work, has talked me into going with him this year. China, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan. Not that all that much talking was required mind you, the trip itself is a no-brainer, but leaving work for 18 days during one of our busiest months has held me back somewhat. Lucky for me (big luck, HUGE luck), I work with a group of wonderful and supportive people who have been wonderful and supportive about my tentative absence so the trip is [tentatively] a go. Only tentative because a lot can happen in all these many months between then and now, but has this stopped me from spending hours in the Travel section of my local bookstore? What a ridiculous question.

· I have been playing four records in constant rotation lately: Pilate’s Caught by the Window, Sebadoh’s Harmacy, Andy Stochansky’s Five Star Motel, and Yo La Tengo’s I can Hear the Heart Beating as One. What have you been listening to?

A big, yummy novel about Victorian London and the thieving villains that populate its seamy streets. Fingersmith is narrated by Sue and Maud, two orphaned girls whose histories and fortunes are tied to Mrs. Sucksby, a lying, cheating, scoundrel who seizes her chance at riches through an elaborate ruse that ends up ruining her own life, but not before putting Sue and Maud through all manner of peril and pain. Waters’ narrative is replete with salty sub-plots, charming characters, and piquant commentary on the social mores of urban life during the nineteenth century — a sort of Dickens meets bawdy romance/mystery novel circa 1950 with a generous helping of homoerotica thrown in. You can’t help but enjoy all that.

After watching The Real Cancun we needed some sort of wholesome antidote and this film was just the thing. It’s warm and funny and Ellen Degeneres and Albert Brooks both do a wonderful job and, in the spirit of most Disney animated films, there’s enough here to entertain a child and keep an adult’s interest piqued. Watch it.

This is one of those books that I felt I should have enjoyed more and was disappointed that I didn’t. More disappointed with myself than with the author in fact. It’s about a map drawn by William Smith in 1815 that illustrated the geology of the British Isles, the first of its kind that, as indicated by the title, marked the beginnings of the science of geology. The book is laden with Eureka!-type discoveries of the sorts of things we take for granted (like the existence of fossilized organic matter in rocks that were previously considered pure mineral) since we live in a time when much of the geology of our planet has long been demystified. If you’re more into this sort of thing than I am, you will probably like this book more than I did. While it is entertaining in a lot of parts (I’m sort of glad I chose to listen to it rather than read it) & accessible in many, I think I was probably looking for more of William Smith and less of The Birth of Modern Geology.
Addendum 14.01.03: Faced with a week of long, snowy drives to and from work and all my other audiobook choices still on hold and not yet forthcoming from the public library, I decided to listen to this book again. I enjoyed it much more the second time around and felt a moral obligation to make that known here, lest someone was discouraged from reading it based on my initial review. Winchester is a careful and impeccable historian with a delightfully abundant vocabulary that’s never superfluous, as a large vocabulary can sometimes be (you know, never use a $10 word when a 50¢ word will do) and he is more than generous in his treatment of William Smith, a man who seemed pompous and self-important a lot of the time. Liking this book the second time around sort of proved the veracity of that adage about reading a book you like at least 3 times and one you dislike at least twice.

You will probably be surprised by this: I didn’t think this film was all that bad. I’ve said before that expectations are everything and it’s just this rationale that gets me through bad films that have the potential to be bad film-watching experiences. If you sit down to watch this expecting some sort of thinking-person’s explication on the social and anthropological implications of the binge-drinking, drug-smoking, coitus-seeking college students of Anytown, USA, you will probably be disappointed. I was expecting wet T-shirt contests, body shots, plastic characters, and no plot. And I’m happy to report that I was somewhat pleasantly surprised because, guess what, there’s a mild attempt at plot after all!

I’ve been working on a presentation I’m giving to the librarians at my institution at the end of the month as part of a brown-bag lunch series. I gave one last year on using various Web tricks and tools to help you do your job faster, easier, with less ado. Like most librarians I know, I do ridiculous amounts of Web noodling and collecting so when the brown-bag organisers asked me to give the same session again this term, I snuck in a few brand new tools I’ve found and grown dependant upon since I gave the session last year.

Last year I introduced the group to bookmarklets and they loved them. That you could search google, lookup a definition, and change the appearance of a Webpage with the simple click of a button, no typing at all, well that understandably floored most of them. This time, the jaw-dropper will most definitely be John Udell’s Library Lookup. This genius bit of code searches your local library’s holdings with, you guessed it, the simple click of a button, no typing at all. So if you’re looking up The King is Dead by Jim Lewis at amazon.com and you’re at the item page (where the ISBN appears in the URL), all you’d have to do is click on your lookup link and a pop-up window opens to your library’s catalogue, searches the ISBN, and gives you the holdings info. This is some sort of golden nugget of code and John Udell is some sort of golden god of javascript.

John has included lists of bookmarklets browsable by catalogue vendor and if your local library is not on any of the lists, you can build your own bookmarklet quite easily. For local readers, here’s the bookmarklet for the Toronto Public Library catalogue and here’s one for McMaster University. Drag the links to your links toolbar (clicking on them will do nothing) and you’re set to begin hassle-free book browsing.

Some days I don’t mind sounding like a cheap marketing campaign if the product is something I actually believe in.