Pugilistic Periodicalistas
I haven’t worked at a reference desk for almost ten years, but I still get reference questions.
I’m convinced that Librarians and Library Workers have some sort of radiant askability that compels people to ask us stuff.
Like this confused gentleman here:
I’m looking for photos of ‘The Avengers’…
Alas, my friend, it’s Librarian Avengers, not Avengers Librarian. I could sell you some photos of our cats, if it’ll help. They, too, wear catsuits.
I got this email from Erin this morning. I’m all ego-y now. Once in a while I get a letter like this, an occurrence which pretty much defies reality and constructs a nice illusion of me as some sort of e-persona, which I suppose I could be if I worked on the website once in awhile instead of staying up until 4am reading “Sewer, Gas & Electric” by Matt Ruff. Dangit. Curse you Matt Ruff and your seductive prose!
Erin writes:
at the YMCA tonight I saw…
an awesome girl in a “librarian avengers” t-shirt.
I was like, “Aw na, hell na– that’s awesome! Erica Olsen is like my best friend in the world.”
she was studying to become a librarian and generally thinks of you as an extraordinary genius.
I am beaming with pride!
EEE! I’m quite excited about being linked on Metafilter, but was it just me, or did some snarky person imply that the name Librarian Avengers is a possessive plural? I’m so confused. There aren’t even any adjective-noun agreement issues, and hello, avengers serves as a collective noun anyway. It’s like saying “dental hygienists” or “sports team.” This is really bugging me people. I’m wasting valuable rant time here reading linguistics texts and trying to figure this out. Besides, I stole the name from the Lesbian Avengers so am I really to blame?
Oh wait, I just realized that the snarky person was being snarky about the entry below mine. Never mind.
Hmm. Or maybe they weren’t. Hell.
A few weekends ago the charming Alexandra came out to visit. Although she, Pedro, and I all have degrees from the University of Michigan’s School of Information and took a few library and archives classes, none of us really consider ourselves librarians in any sort of traditional work-in-a-library way. This might be of interest to any of you potential library school students: Information School can lead you to choose strange and unusual jobs. Beware!
Anyway, while she was here we went out to a local sheep farm and met the nicest people, dogs, sheep, and pigs. We don’t really have access to stuff like this back in metro Detroit, so we got all excited and Alexandra took lots of pictures. And since Alexandra is a champion craftsperson, in a few weeks one of those sheep will be turned into a sweater or something. I’ve always thought that if some sort of Y2K event occurs, we are going to load up the bees in the Jeep and drive to wherever Alexandra is. She’ll take care of us. She would just knit up a nice four-bedroom house, and then cook a six-course meal out of acorns and dandelions.
If some horrible Y2K type event DOES occur, Ithaca is actually a rather nice place to be, considering the amount of locally grown food and the homebrew philosophy that sort of permeates the place. Mmm, homebrew. Gotta go.
