The Biblio File

If:book has in interesting post on how Facebook functions (and doesn’t) as a substitute for old fashioned yearbooks.

In sad news, David Foster Wallace committed suicide Friday night. Michiko Kakutani has a good article about his work at the NY Times:

A prose magician, Mr. Wallace was capable of writing — in his fiction and nonfiction — about subjects from tennis to politics to lobsters, from the horrors of drug withdrawal to the small terrors of life aboard a luxury cruise ship, with humor and fervor and verve. At his best he could write funny, write sad, write sardonic and write serious. He could map the infinite and infinitesimal, the mythic and mundane. He could conjure up an absurd future — an America in which herds of feral hamsters roam the land — while conveying the inroads the absurd has already made in a country where old television shows are a national touchstone and asinine advertisements wallpaper our lives.

I’ve been told that this video, and it’s “star,” Bas Rutten are old hat around the internet. If this is true, then my friends are jerks for not sending this to me, because I just discovered it last week. And the more I watch it, the funnier it is.

Jessamyn at Librarian.net points to this article from Time Magazine about Sarah Palin. Turns out, she tried to use her power as mayor to have books banned from the library:

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving “full support” to the mayor.

I found this over at Infodoodads–The Periodic Table of Videos. Produced by the University of Notthingham, these videos give an overview of all the elements in the periodic table, including their properties and, occasionally, how they blow up. A good resource for beginning chemistry students.

Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, was arrested Monday while covering the Republican National Convention. You can get the story, and listen to Tuesday’s show, here.

My library has launched a beta version of Encore, a new faceted search tool for our catalog. You can find information about Encore here, and take ours for a test drive here.