happy new year

It's the end of the year, for everyone in europe already the 31st, which means no work for me. So, i thought i might try this, putting this in the running for my worst post.

The best thing i did this year was start library school, putting me on a good
path for a real career. maybe in a few years my ultimate goal of owning a
house will be realized. i realize that means i'll have to get a new goal, or
maybe i'll just die happy the next day.

the second best thing i did this year was start this stupid pink blog which
caused a chain reaction up and down the state, keeping me in regular contact
with people who i want to be in regular contact with, but would be in much
less regular contact with without the blog. as far as i can see, the blogs are the next best thing to hanging out, and they make me really happy. so keep it
up.

my deep fryer was a great present, although i haven't used it to its full
potential, yet. and i may be getting over it a little, i haven't used it much
lately, it's not nearly as much fun by myself. i'm glad my donuts turned out so delicious, but rarely do i need an entire batch. and now that i don't go to
long beach anymore, i'm glad i can fry my own salmon, but that is also not
really worth it for a single portion. if 2004 is the year of the deep fryer,
2005 will be the year of the ice cream maker. if frying doesn't give me a
heart attack, the heavy cream certainly will. it killed mr. baskin, or mr.
robbins, or maybe both.

2005 ought to be better than 2004 for me. i'm dreaming about the day i quit my
job. i may quit after the fiscal year profit sharing May 31 or i may wait
until the major conference we're holding in July, depending on how i feel and
if they let me play a major role. i think conference planning would be really
good experience. and maybe i'll actually learn something from the job besides
how to lie to customers to get them off your case.

after the spring semester i'll be done with my core classes, they say things
get a lot more interesting after that. all electives. i might be able to start
a practicum by fall, if i really get my act together. my work this semester
has been satisfactory at best (although it doesn't seem to be hurting my
grades). my goal for next year is to write something stellar that i can submit
for scholarships, awards and/or publication, or at least write something that
will be a good base for something in the future. the library world is small, my program is not particularly competitive, all the really bright, hotshot
people are at UCLA. i could probably really shine if i wasn't at
work 40 hrs a week.

Goal for the year: stop consuming non-dairy creamer. finish the box in my
desk. by the end of the year, only put things i can identify in my coffee. it
shouldn't be hard, non-dairy creamer is always disappointing, yet i keep consuming. i don't understand.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Jesus saves

Recent tsunami events are tragic and horribly shocking.

but i'm not so interested in hearing stories of how horrible people's lives are now. it doesn't take a genius to figure out things are bad. i'm interested in the red cross (and others) efforts to help. and i'm not getting much info. so i clicked this story Asian Disaster Toll Could Top 100,000 -- Red Cross stupidly assuming i'd get a bit of info that i could easily process, before i started on harder news sources. instead i got this gem. it just seems like good form to not print crap like this and embarass the people you supposedly care about:

"When the waves came and it kept climbing higher and higher I knew God had meant us to die," said islander Augustine. "But my child was there with me and I had to run. Jesus saved us."

apparently they're having family problems in heaven. you see what happens when you upset your dad kids. he goes and kills a bunch of people.

in other news, last night they issued a tornado warning for most of the south bay. i was sure i'd end up in oz, or at least not have to show up to work today, because the roof had blown off... no such luck.

Schools Replace Milk Cartons With Bottles

Apparently, kids drink more milk when it comes in bottles

I just don't understand. Kids are just way too susceptible to marketing, I guess. And bottles are sexy?

wonderment

first, i may be shrinking. i'm going to start drinking more milk. i don't understand. all the hats i tried on monday were too big. then i bought a size 7.5 shoe when i usually wear 8.5. and yesterday at the mall, all the clothes i tried on were too big. and even a size smaller than i usually wear was roomy. i realize that i was sick and didn't really eat for 2.5 days, but i got my appetitie back and you'd think after christmas and christmas eve where i was constantly eating i would have gained back any weight i might have lost. my pants today are very loose. so i think i'm shrinking. i should know in a few days if i have to push my car seat forward, or roll my cuffs up higher than normal. i hope i don't shrink to nothing and disappear. i want to be a librarian before i die or disappear.

also,
my second-cousin, or however that lineage thing works, got an eye-toy for christmas. i saw a commercial for it a few days ago, i was pretty sure it was witchcraft. some kids on tv were playing some kind of DDR game without a mat. usually i can understand all the commercials on tv, and i was perplexed.

but i've seen one now, and i know what it does. please forgive me if you already know this, but i'm still trying to figure it out. you hook the web cam looking thing up to the Playstation, and it films you, and somehow turns that into game controling. my bratty 8 yr old cousin got 2 games, a skateboarding or something (skateboarding without wheels?, snowboarding without snow?) type game that you control by moving your head side to side and stop by thrusting your arms out to the sides. it looked fun, but you can't pry a bratty kid away from his toys on christmas to try yourself. being a bratty kid of the new milennium with the attention span of about 2 seconds he didn't quite get the hang of this game and gave up after we all suggested that maybe the nickelodeon game would be a bit easier to start with. so i watched him play sponge bob bowling, jimmy neutron something and managed to play a krabby patty making game myself. there is quite a learning curve to this device, and the kid was just not getting it.

now i want one. this thing fascinates me, whatever it is, however it works. technology is fantastic! i'm pretty much not in danger of buying a playstation and the camera thing, but if you have one, i'll come over and play...what other sorts of useful things can we do employing this technology? do they do stuff now that i'm not aware of? (because that's likely) and how much cooler are videogames going to get? all you have to do is move around a bit and hit the things onscreen. none of those tricky buttons to learn. pretty soon they'll perfect that thought technology and things will really be magic.

meanwhile, i noticed an awful lot of videogames that involve actual movement of the player. can't get you kid to go outside and play baseball, then get him the videogame of it where he can do the exact same thing, just more hi-tec etc. i don't know how popular these things will be, but it's nice that the industry can say they're doing their part to get these kids to excercise.even though-- and this could be an entirely new post, but i'll keep it short-- it's no one's responsibility but the parents to keep their kids healthy and safe. no one else. not the fcc, not the library, and especially not private industry.

New Year's Eve Party

please rsvp here.

$100 is burning a hole in my pocket

last night was my office christmas party at the cheesecake factory. i was chagrined when i learned we were only allowed one drink ticket. then i saw the size of the drink which was able to keep me amused until the buffet was set up, which was able to keep me amused until the prizes were awarded.

the minimum prize was $40 from best buy. the top two prizes were a laptop and a plasma tv. i won a very satisfactory prize of a $100 macys gift card. it wasn't the $150 macys i was hoping for, but it also wasn't the $40 or the stupid ass $300 movado watch. i guess i could have sold that thing on ebay, but currently i'm in an instant gratification kind of mode.

so now i have $100 for my own amusement to spend at macys. it's a darn good thing i'll be in sf this weekend to do just that. the thing about $100 though, is that it's not enough to buy something expensive, yet too much to be satisfied with buying something moderately to low priced. i shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, but $100 is not an ideal amount for much of anything. i'll probably do something stupid and buy another coat and have my free money cost me another hundred or so... please, stop me, i'm becoming too obsessed with buying coats. they are too expensive. i was much better off when i was buying paper goods.

Care Bears: Journey to Joke-a-lot

Bleh. I'd heard of the movie. I saw the toys in the ads, and much to my delight it was on the disney channel this weekend. I was on my way to a play, so i stuck a tape in and made the effort to record it. and i'll never have those 2 hrs of my life back.

first, the computer animation made my eyes hurt. there were way too few frames per whatever amount of time they measure frames in, or however that works. it was chopy. and then the little star friend had some kind of horrible trail, like when you turn the trail of your mouse on, only psychedelic. bleh. i'm no expert on animation, and i generally don't like that computer done crap. but this was horrid, and my dad agreed.

the story is that grumpy bear is a bad mechanic, and he always makes rides for the care bear fair that fall apart... cute and adorable so far.. but funshine bear laughs a little to hard when his carousel spins off its axis and grumpy gets even grumpier. funshine says he was just trying to cheer grumpy up, but grumpy says, if you can't tell the difference between when to laugh and when to console or something then maybe he shouldn't be in care-a-lot. so funshine runs away and magically finds joke-a-lot where "serious" is a forbidden word.

now, i am rather familiar with care bears. and i know that is not the way care bears act. they are wise, they are comforting, they help kids with their feelings. they are NOT the kids themselves. they don't do crap like run away from home, they stop kids from running away in the first place! they help those kids at camp who aren't good at anything. and that boy with the magic evil book. and the star friends are friends. they're not dogs, and they don't lick your face. yuck! so, 10 mins into the movie i've decided i reject the premise, and it doesn't get any better from there.
there was one gem that stopped me from burning my vcr. and it's not even funny now that i think about it. but funshine is giving a speech to the joke-a-lot crowd, because they've (wrongly) crowned him king. and he starts with the "boy are my arms tired" joke.. and then promises as king they'll be a something in every something and "a chicken joke in every pot" ahhhh, funshine bear...

so everyone learns a lesson in the end and it all turns out alright.

i may need to buy the real care bear movies on dvd just to get the bad taste out of my mouth, or maybe i'll just watch them on video to cleanse my vcr.

polite company

things not to talk about in polite company (read: work): religion, sex, politics, prison...

things i've unsuccessfully tried not to hear about at work: religion, crazy religious people, crazy religious people in prison who have visions, crazy people in prison, on drugs who have visions, high school kids having sex, why bush is good and kerry is a bad, bad, immoral man.

oh my freaking gosh. am i the only one who knows how to exist in polite company. miss manners would be appalled, she might faint of shock, but then she'd have to resist the urge, because they might start talking about God again. what you do on your own time is one thing. certainly, i'm not a prude, i just act that way so people will think i'm professional. i will not torture you by recreating the conversations. But i'm sure you can guess how they went. me, i was just sitting there trying to not be included. trying not to smack some sense into the guy who insists that the holy ghost came to his dad in a vision and make him quit drugs and drinking. he was on drugs and drinking for gosh sakes! i had to listen to like a billion intervention stories. when the virgin mary shows up on my grilled cheese sandwich, that's when i'll start believing in posession.

i really need to get a job in a library.

Peep!

we've all seen this from years ago.

but this one really takes the cake. yea for libraries!

and paris hilton was spotted in a bunny necklace on the cover of ym. this is strange, because they are years old, i saw them on unwrapped over a year ago, and they weren't new then. i tried to get to the bottom of it, (well, not very hard). unfortunately, if you try searching paris hilton peeps... well, you can imagine

and if you haven't had enough: http://www.geekbabe.com/peeps/

happy easter!

Going north

Next weekend i'll be in and around the bay area. I'm thinking people should come to Blakes for happy hour on tues dec 21 if they'd like to see me. then i'll be on my way back home. or i'm open to suggestions

As if my car doesn't have enough scratches

I was just innocently on my way to work today, just like every day. Stopped
at the light, because i'm not a bad person who crosses over the part you're
not supposed to cross over to get to the left turn lane. And just as traffic
starts moving again, i take my foot off the break and some freak in a big red
suv comes barreling down the part you're not supposed to drive on and
scratches the passenger side of his car with my drivers side mirror. So he
know's he's hit me, and stops abrubtly and signals like he's going to turn
into the jack in the box, but then just keeps on driving. it's a hit and run.
but more like a horrible lackluster low speed chase a la oj simpson. i follow
him for a couple miles down van ness, but he doesn't seem to be stopping. i
try to pull up beside him, and i see that he has a nice scratch on the side
of his car, but he doesn't seem to want to acknowledge me. and the last thing
i want to do is take on a crazy in an suv. so i copy down his license plate
number and keep heading to work.

i finally arrive and work and i see that only the part that holds my mirror
is scratched. i most definitely have less than $700 damage, honestly, a $4
bottle of gold nailpolish might fix my situation. my mirror holder on-er was
slightly scratch from before anyway thanks to a minor drive-thru incident (or
maybe it was a parking lot ticket machine incident, or maybe both, i can't
remember).

So my mom, who likes our insurance agent, calls him and inquires. he says just to document everything. i have a year to press charges with the police. and if for some off reason the other guy decided to make a claim, it won't reflect poorly on me that i wasn't the one who reported it. normally i'd love to see an asshole driver get arrested. but my friends have been having horrible luck with their incidents lately. one friend was in her car, in a parking lot and a truck backed into her. she wasn't moving. but she was in her car, parked in the spot, and the insurance found it to be 50/50 fault. also another friend was found 100% at fault when it most definitely was only partial. I don't need that crap on my record, so the asshole is going to get away. bleh.

maybe my dad will fix the scratches for me, for christmas. even though i've been not so subtly hinting that i want an ice cream maker.

so now my claim is documented, and all the identifying information is safely filed away. (c) 2004

Much Cuteness

I wouldn't mind one of these guys for christmas

Also, a bit more on the librarian. I sifted through some of the comments. and these super good library nerd ones struck my fancy:

I think having a call number label on the Spear of Destiny label at the end
would have been a nice touch. Or perhaps a copy of LCSH (library of congress subject headings) sitting somewhere.

and

his lack of social skills didn't bother me but the idea that he has all this
information in his head made me grumble. I'd like to see him be really good
at looking something up efficiently and accurately which is really the skill
that librarians should be proud of.

Get your own geek!

For a way too detailed summary of The Librarian, please see Kenny's.

My semester is over now, and i have time for such trivialities as watching tv movies again. I taped it, and watched it last night....

Do they know what a librarian is? Granted, librarians have a tough job keeping the world safe for democracy. But they don't do it by guarding magical artifacts. they do it by bringing information to the public, not squirreling it away in a secret cave. Stephanie is right. I was mulling over
alternate titles too, and couldn't come up with anything good. but given the plot and asked to come up with a title, librarian wouldn't have crossed my mind at all. I guess "the archaeologist" would just make george lucas sue.

all through the interview they keep saying "the librarian." as if there's only one, and no one finds it strange, not the hundreds of applicants and not wylie. but i supposed since they all answered magic letters, they're not the questioning type.

As for the artifacts, I never had time to devote to fully explaining why national treasure is the worst movie premise i've ever heard. but, suspending unresonable amounts of disbelief, pandora's box? I'm no classicist, but i was pretty much under the assumption that the story of pandora's box explains why there's so much crap in the world today: disease, murder, evil, poverty... and then, magically, there's hope too. never have i heard that the resolution to the story was that all the crap magically got stuffed back in the box. Hope is the resolution. there's crap, but then hope makes it seem less bad. yes? so, that would mean, if pandora's box exists it would currently be empty? yes? my cursory google search confirms this. is there another story i
don't know about?

so, nerd boy, who's never been on a plane in his life just ups and heads for the amazon. newhart (who's fantastic, and really the reason i was able to stick around to the end of this movie) and curtain just send him. they give him no preparation. the fate of the world is in his hands, adn they don't even try to help. granted, he has all the book smarts in the world, yet he can't open a bag of peanuts.

on the plane we meet nicole noone (also known as tough english chick). guess what bob newhart tells him--"trust noone"... ahhh, priceless...

so the movie progresses exactly the way i would imagine. people do dangerous things and find treasures after solving complicated puzzles. this seems rather like "the game" that those nerd boys in palo alto play where they go on "treasure" hunts following ridiculously cyrptic clues. honestly, the premise of this movie must be their biggest fantasy.

So, of course, good triumphs over evil. the spear, is safely back in "the Library" where it can be friends with the sword in the stone (which nerd boy pulled out, so now he's the true king) and the sword of destiny (are they the same, i don't know) and ultimate power is now in the hands of the library (or whatever it is that the spear is supposed to grant) this premise, which is not explored at all, rather amuses me. I'm sure everyone wants to believe that their chosen profession is the best. But now mine is, just try to stop it. if hitler caused all that trouble with a bit of the thing, just think what the library will do to you if you stand in it's way. bow to the power of the library!

also worth noting: nerd boy gets hot chick. this is something that's really lacking in most things i watch. i don't claim to be an expert, it could be more widespread than i believe. but i like seeing it. it's something that so rarely happened in all those 80's movies where the social classes all try to get along. they all learned a lesson in the end--but the nerd boy never got the girl. wussy, weak nerd boy who needs a girl to protect him gets her in the end. granted she's a bitch, but she's hot so she doesn't need to be nice. anyway, she fights off streaky haired asian chick saying, "get your own geek," to cement the beautiful relationship.

conclusions:
Wylie is geeky, even for a librarian. and mostly he seems to act like a little kid, not a 30 something. also, who freaking gets 22 degrees? if you like college that much why can't you just get a phd or two and start teaching. honestly!

Bob Newhart is fantastic. I didn't know. I'm going to have to start watching his stuff on tvland. it's still on tvland right?

Not that I care about writers, but a very simple click on imdb tells us that the last thing this guy did was around the world in 80 days. certainly, you can't expect a good movie from that.

Isn't Giles from Buffy the vampire slayer a librarian who fights evil too? On that note, do you think they'll have a wylie action figure, because i'd like to add it to my collection.

the movie isn't as bad as a lot of crap i watch (like anything on the disney channel), but i didn't really enjoy it as much as that crap. mostly i'm not so into action movies. i was rather into the young indiana jones tv show when i was in middle school. but mostly because my dad watched it, and i had a crush on young indy . even though, i just looked him up,it turns out that he's freaking old!

I don't really see this a changing the image of librarians. curtain does a good job of reinforcing the dowdy spinster librarian with cats image. and while wylie has lots of fun adventures, he doesn't do one single thing that a librarian does, except maybe eat and breathe and get dressed and
such...although, newhart is fantastic and i hope to one day have someone like him as my supervisor and mentor. i wonder if the torrance librarian with the strange moustache has newhartish traits

The librarians are saying things like: hmm, nerd boy with 22 degrees, yet not one of them is an MLIS? and he gets to be librarian. it's a good thing we have rules against that crap in california.

Issued by the ALA :
press release

reviews - i haven't had the patience to read through much of them, but i may get bored enough today. (or i may just keep blogging)

other links
http://www.hollywoodlibrarian.com/ an interesting project, lets hope it gets off the ground
http://www.filmlibrarian.info/ i'm gonna get netflix for a month. maybe i'll watch some of these movies. if i make it through all the jem, carebears, and rainbow brite and strawberry shortcake episodes. unfortunately the browse by rating feature doesn't quite work. because, it would be quite an interesting survey of librarian porn. (it does mention that lovely alice in wonderland movie we watched in class) although i go to a real school now, not the type that would really encourage me to write about librarian porn.