eclipsed by the lunar body of cluelessness

[cimorene]

via cleolinda via guinevere33,

It's ... sublime. It's like looking into the solar corona of hackery, eclipsed only by the lunar body of cluelessness. Even when you go into the comments on his own right-wing site, you read things like: "I too believe Hollywood is filled with perverts and socialists. But an Oscar for Episode III? Are you high?"¹

and here's something else you can file in your brain under "things everybody else already knew": åbo akademis huvudbibliotek has no stacks.  i've heard about libraries like this, in toronto or new york or something, that my mom has been to with me when i was too young to remember, but the thought was so weird and alien that i never bothered to stick it in there under "things cim knows about libraries".  this explains why i had such a hard time finding things at the main library last fall!  and why it seems to contain so few books, because the ones on public display are only the läsesals examplar, the ones that can't be removed from the library at all.  there is a wonderful way of obtaining books from them that can be done almost entirely over the internet!  you just search the catalog and click "beställ"! references to fizzbin have no logical validity in this context.

1. okay, that paragraph contains the best single sentence, but my favourite bit was actually the part about lawrence of arabia.

Comments

[buddleia.livejournal.com]

Oh help, that blog entry made me giggle so much my face has got stuck and now everyone who speaks to me is chary of the rictus grin on my face.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

i know. i didn't think i could laugh that much that early in the morning (it isn't now, but it was when i read it).

[telesilla.livejournal.com]

How in the name of Pauline Kael's Haunted Panties do you critically analyze cinema?

This amused me as well. The whole post was brilliant and hilarious.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Are you trying to play that McCarthy was just a well-meaning Senator who's just now being maligned by revisionist liberals, and that his vicious drunken smear tactics, abuse of his office and treason-mongering are only being made subject of the film because he's Republican? Seriously, you want to live in that camp? ... oooookay. Just checking.

it's practically one solid mass of great quotes.

[retrofit88.livejournal.com]

this closed-stacks thing is common pretty much everywhere except America. It was actually the Newark Public library, under the leadership of John Cotton Dana, that pioneered the idea of open stacks. I don't know why it never really caught on outside the U.S.; the library community here in the States is big in favor of "serendipitous* browsing" - finding cool stuff you never would have looked for because it's next to stuff you were looking for. It's one of the things people worry we're losing by having more and more content online. I agree that there are probably a lot of people who aren't serendipitously finding articles from the same issue of a journal anymore, because people just get isolated individual articles as search results. On the other hand, they can actually _find_ things by searching, which I think is a worthwhile tradeoff.

It's awesome that you can pull stuff from the closed stacks online - that makes them almost as good as open stacks. :) Yes, I have my prejudices. I couldn't stand the thought of a multi-million-volume collection that I couldn't wander through. I'd feel very deprived.

*"serendipity" is one of my favorite words ever - purely for etymological reasons

sorry to ramble on so in your comments! Hope it's of at least peripheral interest.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

no, that's fine, i've had some family friends in library sciences. i grew up in alabama where the public library was a giant joke, but i have some very happy memories of the university of alabama's library (which for a large research institution's was terrible but compared to the public library was, you know, hundreds of times superior). and i indeed got LOTS of mileage from serendipitious browsing--whether you are trying to find out more about a subject from interest or doing a research project, being able to flip through, say, every book on the subject and then move on to closely related ones all right there is a valuable... feature.

[apoplexia.livejournal.com]

Do they have departmental libraries? In Germany, the main library is commonly closed holdings, and the departmental libraries are open (although often you can't borrow from the dept. libraries).

[cimness.livejournal.com]

yes, but you can't borrow from them. :)