I was 7 years old when Elvis Presley, the King of Rock 'n' Roll, died. I still remember hearing it on the news. Elvis' music hadn't had much of a direct impact on me, but I knew who he was. Everyone knew who Elvis was. And his death was an utter shock, a moment of frozen time and disbelief. As time has gone by, I haven't really ever been an Elvis fan, but I still have to acknowledge the cultural impact of his life and death.

Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, died yesterday. He was older than Elvis when Elvis died, but not by much. I was never a huge Michael Jackson fan. I never owned Thriller or any of his other albums. Like most people, I made jokes about Jackson's strange life and behavior. But as someone who grew up in the '80s, I'd be lying if I said Michael Jackson had no impact on me, and I really did like a number of his songs. Like Elvis, Michael Jackson impacted everyone. And his death is an utter shock. I can barely believe he's gone.

These two kings, Elvis and Michael, lived strange lives that just got stranger. They were twisted, tortured, abused and abusive, living in baroque bubbles of unreality. Is this what it takes to be a king in pop culture? Maybe. Despite the accusations of terrible, abusive, possibly criminal behavior, I feel sorry for these two men. They led sad, carnival-mirror lives that took them from this world at an early age. At the same time, they touched--and continue to touch--millions of people all over the world in brilliant ways.

Pop culture is a funny thing.

You all know that I'm colossal geek, right?

Young Frankenstein is one of my all-time favorite movies. On Saturday night, we decided it was time for Morgan to see it. (She's already seen Blazing Saddles and loved it, even if she didn't get all of the jokes.) So, we got some tasty burgers from Five Guys and settled in to watch Young Frankenstein.

Morgan liked it, of course. But while we watched the movie, thoughts started drifting through my head...Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, the brilliant, eccentric scientist...Inga, his young, pretty, blonde assistant and lover...Igor, the sarcastic trickster...the Creature, big, strong and impulsive...

And because I'm a colossal geek, I spent about an hour putting this picture together (using Heromachine and The Gimp):



It kind of makes sense, don't you think? Or is that just geeky ol' me?

As I said in my previous post, I went to a school in Kansas City called Loretto for 5th-8th grades. Loretto was a private school that promoted self-paced education, cooperative learning, broad educational study and free thinking. It wasn't quite "anything goes," but it was much looser and more open than almost any other school I've gone to, not too dissimilar from the Montessori method. I really enjoyed my time at Loretto, and I was very upset when it closed during the summer of 1984, but it didn't really hit me until this past weekend, reuniting with old friends and teachers from the school, just how much Loretto helped shape who I am and what I do today.

The Library Society of the World, begun on a whim and a dare, is completely a Loretto thing. It's nonhierarchical, loosely-structured, open, free, collaborative, sarcastic and often lazy about getting things done...just like my classmates and I were at Loretto. Library Camp Kansas and my fondness for unconferences in general, that's also Loretto-inspired. My dislike of formal presentations, standing at a podium and lecturing to an audience, and my preference for free-flowing conversations and the equal exhange of ideas also comes from my time at Loretto.

If I can continue to bring the Loretto philosophy and style into my professional and personal life, I'll consider myself very successful indeed. The world needs fewer squares and more circles.

Happy 35th Birthday, Sonya Walger and Danny Strong! Oh, and my beautiful wife, Julie. Happy Birthday, sweetheart!

We've been celebrating Julie's birthday off and on this past week, because tonight she's accompanying me to the Loretto reunion. Loretto was a private school here in Kansas City with a very liberal, openminded, flexible K-12 school that I went to for 5th-8th grades. While I had as much pre-teen/teen angst as anyone, going to Loretto was overall a fantastic experience. It closed in the summer of 1984, while I was off on summer vacation. I never got to really say good bye to the school or my friends. Reuniting with them recently and renewing our friendships has made me positively giddy.

Julie's birthday + Loretto reunion = SUPER MEGA AWESOME WEEKEND!

As much as I inherently cast a suspicious eye towards large companies, I have to say, Google regularly knocks my socks off. I've just learned more about their huge new project, Google Wave, and not only are my socks knocked off, my jaw is on the floor and my eyes are popping out of my skull. Google Wave is "email, if it were created today"--but it's much more than that. It's a groovy orgy of email, IM, wikis, collaborative documents (like Google Docs) and more. My gut instinct is to agree with Jason Griffey when he says "its the biggest revolution in communication online since the invention of email." I think the implications and possibilities of this technology are astounding. But what makes it even more amazing in potential is that Google is making Wave open source and encouraging developers to create extensions and robots, but also to make of the platform and the protocol what they will. Seriously, this could he huge.

To get a better sense of how Google Wave will work and what the potential is, watch the video of the developer preview from Google I/O 2009. (Warning: the video is over an hour long and not always incredibly exciting. I watched it in chunks over 3 days.)



For a different perspective on Google Wave, check out "Five Reasons to Be Terrified of Google Wave." Personally, I think the worrying sounds a bit shrill, but it's good to look at all sides of the matter.

I love fan-made media. My friends and I all did fan-made stories and comics when we were kids, and I absolutely grok the urge to create your own stories using characters and settings that you love passionately.

I particularly love well-done fan-made media. This fan-made mock trailer for an imagined Green Lantern movie, starring Nathan Fillion, is so well-done, I jizzed in my pants. I love Green Lantern, and Nathan Fillion would be perfect as Hal Jordan. Yo, Hollywood! Please make this movie and do it well!

I'm probably going to lose some geek cred by admitting this, but here goes: I've missed every chance I've ever had to see They Might Be Giants live. So when I found out they were going to be playing in Kansas City in May, I immediately bought tickets. I knew Julie wouldn't be able to go, due to her current night schedule for work, but since Morgan was graduating from elementary school and the sixth grade, I really wanted to take her to her first real rock concert. Morgan and I were even more excited when we heard the plan for the concert was to all of the songs from their album Flood in the order they appear on the album.

I'm happy to say the band exceeded my expectations. I'd always heard they were a great band to see live, but I was still floored at what great performers they are. John Flansburgh in particular is just amazing, bouncing around the stage and playing to the audience with incredible energy. They opened with a batch of different songs, then launched into Flood, and finished the night with two short but vibrant encores. John Flansburgh closed the show with one of the best last lines ever: "We'd like to keep playing for you all, but my guitar is fucked up. Good night!"

Morgan declared the show "awesome" and said this was "an awesome graduation present." High praise indeed from an almost-seventh-grader! Me? As awesome as the show was, what made it really special for me was taking my daughter along. The performance alone made this one of the best shows I've ever gone to. Having Morgan with me for her first concert kicked it up to number one.

Date:	2009-05-11 20:10
Subject:	Dr. Horrible merch!
Security:	Public
Mood:	diabolical

http://drhorrible.shop.bravadousa.com/Default.aspx

Gee, who on my flist would want a "We do the weird stuff" T-shirt?

I saw the new Star Trek movie today. What can I say? I loved it! I think it's fantastic! It's exciting, dramatic and funny, full of adventure and wonder. It makes just the right number of homages to the original series and movies, while allowing this cast to make the roles their own. (Karl Urban and Zachary Quinto are particularly good.) If this cast and crew make more Star Trek movies, I will happily and enthusiastically see them (even the odd-numbered ones).

One of my best friends in the whole world, the amazingly talented Margaret Meyer, has started a new blog and hung her shingle up on Etsy. If you like dreamy, beautiful art, check her sites out.

After watching the Doctor Who Easter special, "Planet of the Dead," something buzzing around in the back of my head leaped out and said, "Aha!" I've consciously realized one of the things I love about the new Doctor Who show. It's not just science fantasy that's rooted in the mundane, it's science fantasy that celebrates and glorifies the mundane.

The new Doctor Who celebrates and glorifies shopworkers, office temps, waitresses, people who live in council housing, broken families, squabbling families, chops and gravy, chips and Christmas dinners. The Doctor's companions are invariably hardworking middle or lower class people who make valuable companions and universe-saving heroes because they're hardworking middle or lower class. (Lady Christina de Souza in "Planet of the Dead" is a notable exception. Captain Jack Harkness is another one.) While the Doctor leads a life of neverending wandering and adventure, he joyfully celebrates the mundane lives of ordinary people (like his bit about people who are "nothing special" in "Father's Day"). In Doctor Who, people are special because they're ordinary, not despite it.

While the TARDIS has an ordinary, mundane exterior and a wondrous, fantastic interior, Doctor Who has a wondrous, fantastic exterior wrapped around a common, mundane core. And I love the show for it.

I'm sure I have been guilty on occasion of complaining, "I didn't go to library school to do this!" I know I've heard coworkers say something similar. This being something that at the time seemed trivial and simple, nothing like what we studied in grad school: clearing printer jams, unclogging toilets, sorting donated books, cleaning up vomit, chasing horny teenagers out of secluded bookstacks, and so on and so on. I went to library school and studied reference materials, collection management, cataloging, theories of information. I got a Master's degree, for crying out loud! Surely such tasks as these are beneath me, right?

Well, here's the thing. I went to library school to make libraries my career. And sometimes library work is clearing printer jams, unclogging toilets, sorting books, cleaning up vomit and harrassing horny teenagers. That work isn't beneath me, it's all part of the job, regardless of how much student loan debt I've racked up, regardless of what letters I have after my name. The abstract ideals and ethics of librarianship are all well and good, but if printers are jammed, toilets are overflowing and there's puke on the floor, nobody gives a good goddamn about successful reference transactions.

And this is beyond libraries. Whatever job you have, whatever amount of schooling you have, work sometimes involves crawling around in dust and grime, cleaning up other people's messes, doing repetitive and boring work, doing work that, in all honesty, a trained chimp could do. It's all important. None of it is trivial. And if you think some work is really beneath you...well, I'd say you need your diaper changed and a new bottle of warm milk, because you're clearing not mature enough to handle adult labor. You're insulting the good people who regularly do such work. To riff off of Oscar Wilde, some of us are looking at the stars, but we are all in the gutter. And we all need to do our part to keep the gutter clean.

Date:	2009-04-07 15:18
Subject:	What Circus Performer Would I Be?
Security:	Public
Mood:	mysterious

( My childhood dream realized! )

Yesterday, I drove to Wichita to present at the Kansas Library Association/Mountain Plains Library Association conference on "Impractical, Unfeasible, Unfundable Ideas for Libraries." This was a presentation based on one of the best sessions of Library Camp of the West that I participated in. I expanded the premise a bit to be: in these times of economic uncertainty and hardship, now is not the time to give in to despair or to play it safe. Libraries should be daring, bold, willing to dream big, take risks and make mistakes. Rather than stand up and babble for the entire session, with Powerpoint slides to illustrate my blather, I threw out some wild ideas I would like to see in libraries and then solicited ideas from the attendees. Which was easy, because librarians are full of wild ideas they'd like to see.

Here are the major ideas we came up with:

Libraries stop rolling over for vendors

* For ILS vendors, aren't libraries their only customer base? They should roll over for us!
* What about database vendors? Why don't they give us more of what we want? (And what DO we want?)?

Libraries go completely open source

* Open source software isnt always an easy solution or an easy change
* But the ideals of OSS match librarian ideals
* Going open source could push more librarians to be computer problem-solvers

Bill Gates gives computers, software & money to libraries...

* Why not other companies, like FedEx & UPS?
* Why not other entrepreneurs who may share library values? Like Mark Shuttleworth, the sponsor of Ubuntu Linux.

Librarian travel by pneumatic tube to wherever they're needed!

Databases controlling the space.

Hybrid engines for library vehicles! Or biodeisel engines from Willy Nelson.

Partner with Meals on Wheels.

Choose something in the catalog & the item starts blinking. Spot where item goes blinks when it needs to be reshelved.

Staff-driven climate control.

Like Loews--patrons push a button & "Help wanted!" would sound out, alerting librarians.

Abolish the reference desk! Reference staff should walk around the library, not sit at a desk.

Everything with a number & up to date.

Magic button that reorganizes furniture and puts it back where it belongs after patrons move it.

Streamlined ILL!

Librarians out of the library! Have librarians on cruise ships! in coffee shops!

Technology that decodes "I want the book with the blue cover" question patrons often have.

Flashing neon signs to direct people to restrooms.

Creating added entries in MARC records for "red book" & "blue book"--tagging items in catalog--browsing by cover.

On www.etsy.com, you can browse by color. Why not in library catalogs?

Abolish the Dewey Decimal System!

Culture shift to play with things that might not work.

Combine libraries with laundromats & the DMV.

Bars in libraries!

Check out an audiobook at one Kansas library & return it to any other Kansas library.

Nationwide library cards. (Or just get rid of library cards.)

Anything marked as library materials goes through the mail for free.

The future of library technology is here! SMS services? Facebook apps? iGoogle widgets? Bah! You may as well ask for a steam-powered velocipede! My place of work, the Johnson County Library, is premiering its new technology initiative for patrons: the brain chip!

Welcome to Tomorrow. It's an exciting place.

My fellow Library Society of the Word carping nerdboy Steve Lawson has done a wonderful thing. He took an offhand joke I made about an award given out by the LSW and turned it into a real thing: the Library Society of the World Shovers and Makers Award. How do you win an award? You nominate yourself! And so I have. I've also added an LSW S&M badge to this blog, which you can see in the sidebar.

Are you a shover and maker in the library world? Than give yourself an award!

Yesterday was the second Library Camp Kansas. We had a slightly smaller turnout than we did last year, but everyone was just as enthusiastic and engaged, and we tweaked the format a little--for the better. And while we had attendees from out of state, just as we did last year, we also had an international attendee: my Australian friend Kathryn Greenhill, who is ferociously smart and adorably energetic.

Last year, we had three breakout session, one of them being lunch. This year, we left lunch as just lunch, and had one breakout session before lunch and two sessions after. Before the first breakout session, we had a session of "lightning talks," where attendees could come up and talk, in 5 minutes or less, about a particular computer app or website that they really liked. The lightning talks proved to be a great icebreaker, a great way to get people talking and sharing. People liked them so much, they said they want two sessions of lightning talks next year.

The breakout sessions I attended were really good. The conversations could have gone on and on. A lot of different perspectives were shared, and I learned a lot. There was one session I was supposed to moderate, but nobody showed up for it. My feelings weren't hurt at all, though. I spent the time chatting with my pal Bobbi Newman.

Once again, I came away feeling that I get more out of unconferences than I do from formal conferences. (Although I didn't get an ugly totebag. Is that better or worse? You make the call.) I'm really looking forward to next year's Library Camp Kansas.

I love new technologies, new tools and toys, new gadgets and widgets. I spend more time at a computer than pretty much anywhere. And yet, what technology do I keep promoting and marvelling over? Books.

Books are amazing tools. You don't have to worry about incompatible operating systems. I've never had a book crash on me while using it. You can drop them in the bath and not worry about electricuting yourself or destroying the book. (Ask my wife. She drops books in the tub regularly. No, not on purpose.)

Which is why I was particularly amused by today's Penny Arcade.

I saw Watchmen this afternoon. I think it's an outstanding adaptation of the comic and I think it's a terrific movie. I think it's perfectly cast, especially Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach. Yes, they changed the ending of the comic, although the effect is still the same. And honestly, I think the film ending works at least as well as the comic. Actually, I think the film ending is better than the comic. I never thought anyone could successfully adapt Watchmen to the big screen. I was wrong.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Date:	2009-03-05 11:59
Subject:	When's the next zeppelin flight?
Security:	Public
Mood:	cheerful

Your result for The Steampunk Style Test...

The Scientist

50% Elegant, 55% Technological, 33% Historical, 36% Adventurous and 31% Playful!

Take The Steampunk Style Test at HelloQuizzy