Great: Found a CD at the library called Now That’s What I Call Arabia 10 (with cover and font in the style of those Now That’s What I Call Music CDs). Even Better: The computer recognized it as The Best Arabian Album 8!
First I was all “That’s a thing?”, then I was all “That’s great!”
The laugh-out-loud cats sell out, A. Koford
Not only enjoyable funny comics, but so beautiful! Four stars.
Asylum : inside the closed world of state mental hospitals, photographs by Christopher Payne
Payne is especially interested in the self-sufficient state asylums, and includes really neat pictures of farm building and shops in addition to lobbies and patient areas. I liked the giant sauerkraut vats in Pennsylvania! The short essays included discussed how the (already financially strapped) institutions were unable to continue after they were legally barred from relying on free patient labor. Quite interesting! Four stars.
I shall destroy all the civilized planets! : the comics of Fletcher Hanks
Reprint of the (now public domain) comics of Fletcher Hanks. I can see why he was influential despite the stories being not at all good and the characters being near-omnipotent to the point of draining the dramatic potential of the story. It’s amazing stuff, but I’m not sure it was done on purpose. It’s a bit like looking at outsider art: it’s good stuff, but it is still nine kinds of crazy, too. Three stars.
Little Wolf’s book of badness by Ian Whybrow, illustrated by Tony Ross
This book has great character voice, even more character in the illustrations, a fun story, and is overall really neat and adorable. It brought me back to my favorite books as a kid (and the illustrations measure up to my childhood favorite, Quentin Blake). Please pick it up to at least see the pictures of Little Wolf and of the lunch his mother packed for his journey. Five stars.
1. Stop by the Indian grocery looking for cinnamon sticks (no dice)
2. Notice fresh ginger on sale (99 cents a pound!)
3. Buy a whole bunch
4. Chop it up into a rough paste in the food processor
5. Squish that paste through a clean damp cloth to make ginger juice
6. Put most of that juice into a ice cube tray to save for later
7. Mix the leftovers with sugar syrup and soda water (plus the displaced ice) for a drink spicy enough to make your ears burn
8. Later notice that your hand hurts from ginger juice chemical burns
Success!
In reading through book reviews for work, I’m looking for books that will appeal to the kids who aren’t avid readers, especially for booktalking season. I just read a review for one that sounds pretty good for that. The drawback? Has the same title as one I booktalked last spring. Boo.
Little Brother, Doctorow (Y)
It was good, but not great. At the end he recommended the books that inspired him and I think they were all better overall than this book. Not that it isn’t worth reading, but it’s not an all time great. Three stars.
Little Vampire, Sfar
Collecting Little Vampire Goes to School, Little Vampire Does Kung-Fu, and Little Vampire and the Canine Defenders Club. I had previously read (and apparently forgotten great swathes of) the first two books. Adorable stories and excellent art. And did you know that there are four more books yet to be translated? And a cartoon? Four stars.
From “Manual of library economy, 3d and memorial ed.” by James Duff Brown, an anecdote about (I believe) Brown himself:
Quiet as he was in many ways, he was of a social disposition,
a trait which found an outlet to some extent at the Library
Association, of which he was a councillor from 1890 to 1911;
but for closer purposes of camaraderie he founded, with Mr Jast,
the well-known Pseudonyms, a dining-club of librarians and
their friends, which had its origin in the ‘nineties, and flourished
for many years. The meetings were held in various Bohemian
restaurants in Soho, professional and literary topics were debated,
and Brown reported them in The Library World. The reports
had little relation to the actual proceedings, and few people
were more entertained, and, incidentally, astonished at their
own wittiness (as reported) than the Pseudonyms themselves.
I just flipped through a book (first of many, the peril of weeding the 900s), Cause: Reconstruction America, 1863-1877. Many of the illustrations are taken from Harper’s Weekly, a leading illustrated newspaper of the time: so interesting! But I especially liked this caption, so packed with information:
The New Orleans Tribune, founded in 1864, was America’s first black-interest daily newspaper. Because Louisiana had a large French-speaking population, there was usually a French and an English edition. Sometimes a single issue carried some news in French and some in English. From late 1864 to early 1868, the newspaper’s managing editor was the very radical Belgian astronomer and naturalist Jean-Charles Houzeau. Having a somewhat swarthy complexion, he did nothing to dispel the widespread belief that he was black.
From The New York Times, August 1, 1897, page 1.
HARPOONED A POLICEMAN
Remarkable Result of Mr. Peter Drapp’s Rat Chase in a Fifth Avenue Store.
USED SHEARS AS A MISSILE
Perforated the Calf of Gilligan’s Leg and Caused Him to be Sent to the New York Hospital for Repairs.
There was a surprising disturbance of the public peace and public peace officer in Fifth Avenue yesterday afternoon. The primary cause of it was a rat, the propelling cause was an inoffensive citizen named Peter Drapp, the victim was a policeman, and a pair of shears figured incidentally, but prominently.
No. 409 Fifth Avenue is near the corner of Thirty-seventh Street, and is the florists’ establishment of Seibrecht & Son. It was one of the quietest places in New York. The avenue is not very busy at this season, and, while flowers grow best in Summer, they go best at other seasons. No vehicles were passing. The Fifth Avenue stage which was due to make a noise at that time was busy a block or two away, where the horses had stopped to look at the men giving imitations of laborers at work in the water main excavations, the driver was absorbed in mental mathematical operations intended to locate a missing nickel, and the passenger was waiting with the beautiful patience the stages are intended to develop.
Moved by the silence to a suspicion that he had overslept himself and was late for business, a large gray rat which lodges in the Siebrecht cellar suddenly ran through the hole he had made for himself in the store. Peter Drapp, who is a clerk, saw the creature, and gave chase. When they had gone a few laps the rat saw that Mr. Drapp was gaining, and fled out upon the avenue.
Police Officer John Gilligan of the West Thirtieth Street Station is an impressive policeman and was doing the force and himself credit as he strolled on his beat watching a young woman who was just ahead of him. He saw the rat, and so did the woman. She seized her skirts and cantered around the corner. He paused while a mental struggle occurred between instinct which men, terriers, and cats have in common to pursue a rat, and the dignity becoming a Fifth Avenue policeman, which forbids him from sharing any merely human interests or being subject to merely human impulses. Then he did a very human thing and said “Ouch!” A sudden shock and surprise had caused nature to triumph over dignity and the traditions of the force.
Mr. Drapp, fired by the chase and reckless with the eager ardor of pursuit, had seized a large pair of shears, ordinarily used for the amputation of flower stems, and essayed to use them as a dart or harpoon. Like Apollo of old, whose bad aim with a discus gave Mr. Drapp the hyacinths he sells, Mr. Drapp threw wild. His purposes were laudable, but his calculation was bad. The shears went astray, and the points of them perforated the calf of the right leg of Police Officer Gilligan, a calf at that moment belonging to the Mayor and Common Council of the City of New York. That was when Policeman Gilligan said “Ouch!”
Also he fell. The experience of having a stray pair of shears fly through the atmosphere of Fifth Avenue and stab a policeman twice in the calf of his leg was a new one, beyond the contemplation of the regulations. Gilligan did not know whether he was assassinated or merely killed, but he knew something remarkable had happened to him. Therefore he fell and waited. Meanwhile Mr. Drapp was paralyzed by the result of his harpoon practice and simply stood and stared. The overthrow of a policeman by a missile intended for a rat hurled by a florist’s clerk was beyond his conception and baffled his imagination.
It was some time before anybody did anything. The rat was first to recover presence of mind and withdraw.
Mr. Drapp finally ran out and saved his shears, pulling them out of Gilligan’s calf, where they obviously did not belong. They were uninjured.
The sight of a policeman prostrated with a pair of shears in his leg soon drew a great crowd, however, and many rumors circulated. Mr. Drapp found himself being pointed out variously as a maddened victim of municipal oppression, the leader of an Anarchist group, and a dangerous maniac, and withdrew from the scene. An ambulance from the New York Hospital removed the wounded man to that institution. The rat seemed to be all right when last seen.
Front page, ladies and gentlemen, front page.