Kivrin

INTERNET I AM NOT DEAD though I am somewhat numb from dental work this afternoon. (Protip: if you're going to have to spend a lot of time with your head back during your allergy season, take a frickin' decongestant and avoid freaking out mid-cavity-filling about possibly suffocating on your postnasal drip.)

I come bearing links:

Stephen Fry with a beard.

The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theater (and so am I! and so is he!) does Sherlock. Funniest if you're up-to-date on Doctor Who. Actually funniest if you're up-to-date on Doctor Who and have a well-rounded knowledge of British popular culture, which means that when BreadandRoses and I watched it the other night with our friend N-the-actual-British-guy, in aggregate we were the perfect audience.

It's fortunate that N finds our Anglophila charming and not appropriative or anything.

I have been knitting a lot in response to an ONGOING EXPLOSION OF BABIES. For local friends, whose baby's pre-birth alias was Stormaggedon (Stormy for short) I adapted the ever-popular TARDIS dish cloth into a blanket. For less local friends, of which there are several, I have been practicing a baby pullover pattern, which I recommend highly because it does not require any seaming.

This morning I was all set to make a power point presentation that included a picture of Giles to kick off a "who watches the watchers?" discussion about internal security in special collections libraries... but there was a problem with the laptop, so I just talked. Giles would be huffily satisfied by the technological failure. I was spared the frustration of having it confirmed that none of my colleagues watched Buffy. I did, however, get a good response to a TARDIS reference in a meeting two weeks ago, which somewhat makes up for the disappointment of two REALLY GOOD Python references I've made in the reading room, both of which were wasted on ignorant audiences. (First one was in response to a regular researcher half-jokingly complaining about the noise level in the reading room. "I need to register a complaint!" he said. "You wish to register a complaint?" I said. "About the manuscript you received not half an hour ago in this very boutique?" He laughed, but an "I see you have made an intentionally humorous sally" laugh, not a "well placed reference, madam" laugh. Second was in conversation with a researcher about pronunciation of an obscure possibly-Germanic-but-no-one-was-sure name. I offered my instinctive reading, with a caveat that it was instinctual and not reasoned, and the researcher said "no problem, if someone questions me..." and I jumped in "And says it's pronounced Throatwobbler Mangrove" "...in Philadelphia they say [name]," she finished. And I, again, said internally, "alas.")

In conclusion, Jon Stewart, are you on vacation AGAIN? Hmph.

HAH!

I just had a minor clerical triumph. Fully explaining it would take an amount of time utterly disproportionate to its importance, but the general theme of my glee is that I thought I was going to need to spend several hours altering labels on folders and it turns out to be unnecessary thanks to a good decision I made six weeks ago.

My mental soundtrack seems to be on super-eclectic shuffle today, having gone from "And Her Mother Comes Too" by Ivor Novello, performed by Jeremy Northam to "Wise" by Catie Curtis to "Stars" from Les Miserables performed by whomever sings Javert on the Les Mis Highlights cassette I got in my Christmas stocking in about 1990. (I was always far more interested in being Javert than being that silly Cosette, or besotted Eponine.)

The Lilah/Wesley sex!icon (by _elektra) has nothing to do with this post.

All and sundry:

BE MERCIFUL AND USE STAINLESS STEEL STAPLES!!

I don't know if one can buy any other sort today. After four hours of
separating small, crumbling tubes of rust from paper and washing my hands
some four thousand times, I can state definitively that in the late
sixties, another sort was available, and that in terms of longevity and
sturdiness, it sucked and continues to suck a big hairy weasel.

Thank you.

It's beautiful today, the kind of beautiful that makes going to class seem like a crime. Work seems a trifle better, because here I can look out the window, or I can when I'm not on the reference desk.

Re: Sunday night at the Birchmere. I love Richard Shindell, even when some acoustic oddity means the guitar is competing way too much with the vocal. But no one comes off well when the have to follow Dave Carter. Also, I find that converting people to DaveAndTracy works a lot better live than with a recording.

Re: Season One of Angel. What is this "AnGELus" pronunciation? I suppose that, as it's a proper name, it's not the same as the... I'll say 'church thing' for lack of the mental acuity to find a better term. And maybe that's not "ANgelus" like I think it is. But "AnGELus" pains me.

Re: Season Seven of Buffy. Who decides what will rerun when? One lonely new episode is cruel punishment, but when the two reruns that follow it would have been good lead-ups to it (using good in the highly relative sense appropriate to the current season) that's... really low.

Re: Patrons. Why does poor JF get all the nasty ones? And can I install a pit full of piranhas into which to throw the ones with entitlement complexes? Like the little miss who apparently came to the campus thinking the campus bookstore would buy her two bags of miscellaneous books, and then was all huffy that we (not being the Gifts in Kind office, but the SPECIAL COLLECTIONS READING ROOM) wouldn't take them as a donation, and then was very huffy that we wouldn't send a staff member along with her to the proper place.