were we all aware that the restaurant Novel inside the Boston Public Library serves "Luncheon" and "afternoon tea"?!

making it dirty, keeping it clean.

"phone fingers" are little silicone(?) finger sleeves made to keep the smudges off your iphone screen. personally, i think this product has a market with a certain kind of, oh, freshly-uncloseted lesbian? possibly even the more established ones.

thanks to geekologie for making my night.

a southern sun.

okay, i know - what does paul oakenfold have to do with library amusements? the answer: nothing! but i want to put a link here anyway. go to oakenfold's myspace page and listen to Southern Sun.

it's like a soundtrack that i want to have playing all the time, in my head. too good, even though the lyrics get a little nonsensical. you get the transcendental jist of it.

the city of boston seeks its first poet laureate! see it here in a pdf released by the Boston Public Library. one must be a resident of boston, at least 21 years old, and an active poet. (dur!) otherwise the possibilities are limitless.

kimpossible? bookfutti?

an apparently famous dutch bookblog has featured LibraryThing among other nifty book cataloging and social networking sites. see kimbooktu's comparison of book applications and reviews of all of them here: Kimbooktu: Gadgets for Book Lovers.http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

it's pretty neat. i love LibraryThing.

LibraryThing book meme!

it's out there. if you have loooots of free time and feel like exercising your basic html skillz, you can embolden, italicize, strike-through, asterisk, and underline to your heart's content.

and the best thing? only other crazy bibliophiles will know what you mean. also, you can compare your giant book meme to the memes of others. and nelson-laugh when you're the one who's read the most books.

a butt of goats?

remember when i wrote about a parliament of owls? well.

now you can have a whole government document on the subject of animal plurals. and how about some examples:

a murder of crows, of course.
an unkindness of ravens, yes.
a shrewdness of apes...
finally, i give you a business of ferrets.

also see donald burger's animal plurals site for more specific wonders, like a murmuration of starlings. and a gam of weasels.

cortazar mi corazon.

so here i am, belatedly obsessed with argentinian author julio cortazar. click yourself into a pdf version of a two-page story called The Continuity of Parks. and after you enjoy that, well, go check out the book i'm reading now: Blow Up, and Other Stories.

the first story in Blow Up is about axolatls (!!!). i swoon.

overheard in columbus, missouri

Drunk girl: "You don't read?!"
Guy: "No. I think you should live life, not read about it in a book."
Drunk girl, slowly: "I find that worse than being fucked up the ass."

- courtesy of overheard.com, oct 6th 2007.

you tell it to him, girlfren'.

exonumia = everything but coins

so i have this medallion. picked it up when i lived in bangladesh - can't remember the details of how or where. but it was probably at a touristy coin shop. which brings up exonumia: the study of everything but coins. (coins go to the numismatists, doncha know.) so, like, medallions, medals, coins modified for adornment, etc.

it's been about ten years since i picked up the medallion in question: matte silver, featuring a unicorn head and an anchor topped by a crown. the inscription reads "maritimes messageries". because i'm stupid, i've been assuming that the inscription was written in indo-era portuguese. (did the french ever invade india? i don't know these things. i think not, or at least, not for long.)

turns out the inscription is, in fact, french. how did i figure this out? by googling the damn thing. OMFG. why didn't i do that before?! <- (insert several interrobangs.) let's not go there.

les messageries maritimes: a fin-de-siecle french shipping and passenger service out of marseilles, serving french colonies around the world. paquebot = steam ship! here is an enchante quick summary of the messageries maritimes, plus a great graphic; note the unicorn and anchor in the bottom left corner of the poster. that's on my medallion!

this'll be a great story to tell my future postal co-workers during the morning mail sort.

a gaggle of geese.
a murder of crows.
a parliament of owls!

just thought you'd want to know.

asian persuasion.

"Users from East Asia popularized a style of emoticons that can be understood without turning one's head to the left.

These emoticons are usually found in a format similar to (*_*), where the asterisks indicate the eyes, the central character, usually an underscore, the mouth, and the parentheses, the outline of the face. A large number of different characters can be used to replace the eyes, which usually is where the emoticon derives its emotive aspect (contrasting the Western emoticons' emoting through the mouth). The emphasis on the eyes is reflected in the common usage of emoticons that use only the eyes, e.g. ^^. Characters like hyphens or periods can replace the underscore; the period is often used for a smaller, "cuter" mouth or to represent a nose, e.g. (^.^). Alternatively, the mouth/nose can be left out entirely, e.g. (^^). The parentheses also can often be replaced with braces, e.g. {^_^}."

- from Wikipedia's article on emoticons, accessed Oct 1 2007.

it's funny because LibraryThing users who have ostensibly seen my picture on the blog often greet me with a particular emoticon.

and somewhere in the back of my mind, i thought, "that's a japanese eye-smile, isn't it?"

and omfg, i was totally right! = {^_^}

today's book of the day is The Run, by john hay. partially because i enjoy the blue-tinted woodcut-style cover featuring alewives making their saltwater-to-freshwater migration. and partially because i ride a train line featuring a stop called alewife.

yes, named after the fish. who was in its turn named after the proverbial buxom barmaid. see, the thing with alewives is that they feed salmon and basically everything else. they might even be a keystone species. who knew that a small, silvery, anadramous fish in the shad family could mean so, so much.

{furrowed brow and emphatic fist of Deep Feeling}

treats and feats.

first of all, why did i not know about LibraryThing on SecondLife? let's just combine as many virtual venues as possible. i mean, can i just attend LibraryThing's SecondLife meeting (every Sunday, SecondLife Time) on my frickin' iphone? while i'm telecommuting? maybe i can use some sort of mirror server and an avatar for my avatar.

second, my favorite chocolate shop (never "shoppe"! try that boolean exclusion) in the world is vosges haut chocolat. why do i mention this? well, i thought it would be relevent to those who have thought about a chocolate-bacon bar; may you always dream your impossible dreams.