This week’s Best of Me is up, hosted this week by Rita Rudner. (I don’t know what’s real anymore.) Also, look up the Storyblogging Carnival for some interesting fiction.
And this is not really a carnival, but here at The Skwib we love any attention. Forward Biased gave us a nice plug. Why is it called The Skwib? An excellent question.
What are the rules for Google literature? Not as developed as the rules for Googlewacking, that’s for sure. Let’s just say you have to have something literature-related in the search term (which can be in quotes) and it must return only one result.
Today’s adventure with Google and literature comes from the phrase: “Mr. Shakespeare goes to town”. Surely someone has thought to combine the Bard and the Jimmy Stewart classic? (Not the crappy Adam Sandler remake, though I do admit to laughing at the bit where he got the butler to assault his frostbitten feet.)
You will find this title amongst the voluminous list of manuscripts found in the Newman Levy Papers at the New York University library. Apparently Mr. Levy was a lawyer who liked to write light verse.
Some of his published works include:
Gay But Wistful: Verses by Newman Levy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925)
Newman Levy, My Double Life: Adventures in Law & Letters (New York: Doubleday, 1958)
Hmm. I do not want to set up The Skwib for a libel charge, but does one get the feeling that Mr. Levy is trying to tell us something with these titles? To further strengthen the case, I offer these unpublished manuscript titles:
Don’t fear the reaper. Christopher Walken for President.
Here’s his statement:
“Hey, you’re talking to my guy all wrong here. It’s the wrong tone. You better watch it, or I’ll stab you in the face with a soldering iron. Hey, does your mother sew? BOOM. Get her to sew that.”
He’d kick Arny’s ass. Official site.
Who had any idea there were so many librarian superheroes? Apart from Barbara Gordon, aka, Batgirl, I didn’t realize there was such a large number of informavore vigilantes careering through our halls of higher learning.
This is just a smattering, of course. For more, you could try Google, or as Jessamyn West suggests in this presentation, Tips for Aspiring Librarian Superheroes, you could actually go to a library and ask them directly. (They are legion.)
Real life:
Seeressa, who champions the graphic novel in libraries. Also, have a look at the Librarian Avengers. Worth visiting for the cartoon alone.
Cartoony heroes: Rex Libris and Linux Lass
Film: Rachel Weisz in the Mummy movies was a librarian. And then there’s The Librarian: Quest for the Spear: I don’t know, looks kinda dorky. Not good PR.
For an old, old man, it had been a busy week, but there was still more to do before the bureaucrats took the weekend off.
He’d managed to deflect the moderates, who felt Japan should apologize for the bombings of San Francisco and Los Angeles; it was 60 years ago, and he wished people would just forget the past. They should think about the future. As though they should apologize! No matter how horrible, those bombs saved millions of lives – many of them Japanese. To think he’d almost told that fruitcake Hitler that they didn’t want the a-bomb technology. What a mistake that would have been!
And he’d successfully screwed the Chinese over again. Heh. Must drive them nuts, he thought. For the third time, China got the Asian Free Trade Board to rule in their favor on the rice duties Japan had been imposing, but he told his people to ignore it. But what could China do? They had lots of land and peasants, but no army. No technology. (It all came back to their nuclear arsenal again, didn’t it?)
But the nuclear arsenal was not going to fix the problem in Arabia, where the fundamentalists were waging a successful insurgency against the Imperial occupation. You couldn’t nuke everything. It would just take more troops. Perhaps more levies from Korea and Manchuria. Continue Reading →
NEW YORK — Jeremey Oogulak, the head buyer for Boomingdales, has finally lost all his marbles.
After several years of picking unsuccessful lines for Boomingdales, the flamboyant fashionista has stocked the men’s department with nothing but loincloths, armbands, necklaces and round pill-box hats. (Oogulak is seen in the photo, modeling the look himself.)
“I’m calling it the New Savage line,” Oogulak told The Skwib, “and so far sales have been very good.”
This was a lie. According to the cashier at the men’s department, only one patron — a member of the pop group, Village People Redux — has bought a complete ensemble.
A group of Papua-New Guinean-Americans has gathered near the front doors of the department store, protesting the stereotyping of their native dress, with placards that read: “New Savage Is Old Prejudice”.
Boomingdales officials refused to comment.