Librarian Avengers

ibrarian?

Data junkie? Obsessive compulsive? Come to the Freebase hack day on July 11, 2009 here in SF. There’s food, drinks, an excellent network, plenty of powercords, and a nice room full of geeks to chat with.

It’s a fun way to dive a bit deeper into making cool data mashups, relationally documenting your brain contents, and getting your questions answered by actually standing in front of Metaweb developers and staring at them until they make go.

Drop me a note if you are going. :)

-Erica

This is my dad, the best joker in the world.

Who else would dance to “Re: Your Brains” (Jonathan Coulton’s Zombie song) at his daughter’s wedding?

My dad, the legally blind man who taught me to drive a stick shift.

This is the guy who plopped me in front of a VIC-20 when I was 5 years old and taught me LOGO.

He kept Adobe font catalogs and WIRED magazine around the house, inspiring a lifelong love of design and geekery.

I owe him most of my bad jokes, and all of my pedanticism.

It’s a good life. Thanks Dad!

oday I Skimmed Schmaltz, and was Rawked at by a Raven.

Raven with Sausages by quinet

The schmaltz came from a mess of chicken soup I made. A thick layer of chicken fat rose to the top overnight and was skimmed off and used to season the cat’s breakfast.

Chicken soup for the soul by tsheko

The raven is a Common Raven, who was hanging out in one of the San Francisco parks that I walk through on my way to work. Common Ravens are more common out here than they are back east.

They are about the size of a small dog, and live shoulder to shoulder with their smaller corvid friends the Crow and the Western Scrub Jay. All three species enjoy Rawking, poking at things with their substantial bills, and Making Trouble.

What alliterative things happened to YOU today?

listing of grievances:

• Two stupid girls have a hair-tearing fight on the bus
• Liquid and curly fries fly everywhere
• The guy in front of me puts up his arm, so I do too
• The fighting high school girls roll out the door as it stops
• I continue listening to my podcast, because, meh, stupid girls
• People start coughing and opening windows
• PEPPER SPRAY! Hooray!

Interlude

• The guy in front of me has pepper spray in his eye
• I have some on my face
• The fighting girls are long long gone
• We all have to get off the bus
• We are coughing
• We are annoyed
• The 24 bus comes roughly every three years
• Why can’t they fight on a busier route?

Interlude

• My cheek hurts and I want to go home
• I get a cab
• I tell the driver what happened
• He immediately asks “What race were they?”
• I ask him what that has to do with anything
• He tells me he is interested in “Sociology”
• I say anyone who knows a damn thing about sociology knows better than to draw from a single data point
• I tell him that we aren’t going to talk any more
• He tells me he isn’t racist because he campaigned for Obama

Interlude

• I stiff him on the tip and go inside to take a shower
• Stupid girls
• Stupid pepper spray
• Stupid racist cab driver

The Official White House Photostream on Flickr is essentially Cute Overload for US Politics. There is a type of unabashed sincerity in the Obama administration that I’ve never seen before.

I really love this photo of the President interacting with a young visitor.

And then, of course, there is Bo, shown here visiting the Oval office for the first time. Awww. Hi Bo! Hi!

h hello Library of Congress. I didn’t see you there. Nice running into you like this!

You know, I’ve always admired your electronic resources and open-minded collections policies. My undergraduate university and career have both profited from your generous grantmaking, and your reading room sure is fun to visit when I’m in town!

Being a big organization sucks, doesn’t it? You do your best but, well, you can’t keep track of everything. Sometimes you just end up with people in charge of the Congressional Research Service, who for whatever reason, act like complete dumbfucks.

You must be very embarrassed. I mean, rescinding a job offer because you thought the candidate’s upcoming gender reassignment was…what? Icky?

You had better be fucking embarrassed. The federal court recently fined you $500,000 for your treatment of former Army Special Forces Commander Diane Schroer, who, I suspect, has better things to do than get jerked around by library staff.

I mean, career damage and humiliation aside, it seems like an anti-terrorism analyst’s time might be better spent out of court FIGHTING TERRORISM. A subject you DC dwellers seem to get pretty excited about under normal circumstances.

What’s going on here Library of Congress? Couldn’t think of anything better to do with 500 grand?

What’s going on here Library of Congress? Couldn’t think of anything better to do with 500 grand? I wonder how many smaller libraries out there could say the same.

Are there really adults in this world who have never met a transwoman and are ALL AFLUTTER by the idea?

So tell me, is it really easier to house decisionmakers capable of grossly immoral and illegal actions than it is to cull employees who show these traits? Are Library jobs really so stable that a hiring manager feels comfortable acting on overt prejudice?

And who is this legacy codger you’ve been harboring anyway? A political appointee from the 1880s?  Are there really adults in this world who have never met a transwoman and are ALL AFLUTTER by the idea?

If so, perhaps it might help to read a book or two on the subject. You might enjoy this one from your own extensive archives:

An examination of discrimination against transgender Americans in the workplace: hearing before the Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions, Committee on Education and Labor, U.S. House of Representatives.

Anyway Library of Congress, It’s a brand new administration and I’m sure you’ve learned your lesson. I expect your excellent reference staff will happily direct anyone who has experienced this kind of hiring discrimination to the ACLU.

ear Librarian Avengers:

Gus Andrews, nerd savant and mastermind behind The Media Show’s MySpace-whoring puppet twins, writes the following:

Hey, if your readers are looking for unusual work at a really neat and forward-thinking library, they should watch the Teachers College Library jobs listings over the next few months.

Most of what’s listed right now is in video production, graphics design, museum curation, and technology development. I’m pretty sure we will also be looking for event managers over the next few months. We just had some big university functions folded into our operations (distance learning and conferences), and I’m guessing there will be more hiring in those areas soon.

As I’ve probably mentioned, this is a fabulous place to work — the higher-ups have somehow managed to make a really supportive space for creative work and being a self-starter.

The museum/graphics department in particular has recently been doing a lot of fascinating work with our archives — for a recent show we unearthed a bunch of lantern slides and are still trying to figure out what to do with them :)

We’re also starting an heirloom seeds garden.
cheers!
Gus

his is causing great joy among our phone support people at work. New technology can be so troublesome!

ot something important to do? Great! You can put it off indefinitely by following these handy links.

Please Insert Your Time Here…

• Lucy Knisley comics – Don’t just read this one. Read them all. Her art is wonderful to look at, and the comics’ content swings from humor, to storytelling, to painful self-awareness.
  
• Jon Stewart skewers Jim Cramer (the yelling stock idiot from CNBC)
• The Big Picture – a photo blog that turns news stories into more than just words
• The J-Walk Blog – “The Web has thousands of halfway-decent blogs. This is one of them”
• Bunny Bookends – aww

Who needs the bathroom mirror when you’ve got a built in camera on your laptop?

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