How to Frighten Young Books
December 13th, 2011 Brian HerzogThis comic made me laugh:
Thanks Chris.
or, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fear and Loathing at a Public Library Reference Desk
Caption This Photo
November 22nd, 2011 Brian HerzogMy cousin Karin forwarded me an email of the photo below, with the subject, "Now out in Paperback!!!"
I have no idea what it actually is, but I thought it was a funny picture - except, the message's subject didn't have quite the jokey punch it could have. So of course, I tried to think up funny captions for it. The only one I came up with that I liked was, "Wikipedia: now out in paperback."
Does anyone else have better captions for this photo? I'm going to be away for week for Thanksgiving, so in the meantime, if you have a caption idea, please leave it in the comments below. Thanks, and Happy Thanksgiving (Americans; everyone else, Happy End of November).
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Book-Related Interestingness
April 21st, 2011 Brian HerzogApropos of nothing, here are some interesting things to look at:
Optical Illusion Bookshelf
As if Dewey isn't mystifying enough. Spotted at There I Fixed It, and more photos at Neatorama:
"Become Someone Else" Bookstore Ad Campaign
This series of posters were developed to promote a used bookstore in Lithuania:
Bibliochaise Book Shelf Chair
I think this bookshelf chair looks great, but I'm not sure how comfortable it would be:
Thanks Chris - keep them coming.
Tags: ad, ads, book, Books, bookshelf, bookshelves, chair, funny, Library, optical illusion, poster, posters, shelf, shelves
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Bookshelf FAIL
January 20th, 2011 Brian HerzogThis just makes me laugh...
Tags: book, Books, bookshelf, bookshelves, fail, funny, humor, libraries, Library, public, shelf, shelves
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Libraries in Videos
July 22nd, 2010 Brian Herzog
Last week, Huffington Post featured a library-related video round-up entitled Librarians Go Gaga: 9 Of The Funniest Library Videos Ever.
Some of them I'd never seen before, but all of them were enjoyable to watch. However, the Library Girl song wasn't there, and they also left out David Lee King and Michael Porter's Library 101 project. I guess that one isn't meant to be funny ha-ha, but I was making a funny face in it.
However, my favorite video of this type, which is more Web 2.0 than library, is Are You Blogging This?, which David made in 2006:
I still occasionally find that song going through my head, even when I haven't watched it in awhile. Since libraries have been declared the Next Big Thing (via), we'll probably see ourselves in much more media - after all, we are pretty hip.
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Reference Question of the Week – 6/6/10
June 12th, 2010 Brian Herzog
A middle-aged male patron approached me while I was at the desk alone and asked,
Do you know any good jokes?
In fact I do, so I told him my current favorite:
A duck walks into a bar wearing one shoe. The bartender says, "Hey duck, you lost a shoe." And the duck says, "Nope, I found one."
Awesome. Anyway, he said he liked it, but he wanted a lot of jokes. I showed him where our humor section* was, and he said he'd look around.
A little while later, he came back up to the desk and said he wanted jokes delivered by text message to his phone. We started searching the internet for "jokes by text" and "joke of the day" and found a ton of jokes people could retype and send out as text messages. There were also lots of jokes by email, and other joke sites, but most looked kind of sketchy.
Then we found Comedy Central's jokes.com. It offers signups for a joke of the day by both email and text, and they seem reputable enough to trust. The text messages were not free, and when he saw that he kind of gave up on the idea.
Before he left, he asked if I knew any other good jokes, so I told him my all-time favorite:
A hotdog walks into a bar and orders a beer. The bartender says, "Sorry, we don't serve food."
Ah, the many required skills of a librarian.
*Of all the classes of the Dewey Decimal System, the 800's irritate me the most. Patrons just want to browse for poetry, but no, the books are arranged geographically by the author's country, and sometimes chronologically by publication date, which means similar books are in multiple sections. Our humor books are in 818.5 (or .6), which is something like Literature > Miscellaneous Writings > American Authors of the 20th (or 21st) Century, but could also be in the 808's, 817's, 827's, blah blah blah.
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Feeds & Follows
Specs
