Pinterst

I wonder if the people who conclude their Pinterest notes with perky little statements like, "my husband will love this!" and "I'll be glad I pinned this later!" are real people.

It's the Funny Pictures, Stupid

I've been thinking about social websites and attributing sources this spring.

I joined Pinterst, and one of the first things that irked me was how difficult it can be to trace back to an original site. I don't necessarily want to rely on (or re-post) a household tip, a recipe, a bit of advice if I can't tell that it came from a reputable source. And then there are the quotations and funny bits! I feel mindless passing on apparent bits of wisdom from Dorothy Parker, or unattributed gags. Then again -- what of those quote books we loved to keep in the 1980s? If I jotted down Letterman's hilarity, or a school book's wisdom, I know the source; but I also liked to copy out bits from a friend's book. Mindless re-posting?

I'm not sure if my copying from a friend's quote book is exactly the same as mindless re-posting, but it does refresh my insight into the young adult mind. At the beginning of this year, I'd read an item or two (which I need to find an example of to stick here) about how as more parents became active on Facebook, more kids ditched it and started connecting in other creative ways. Young people forbidden from Facebook also took these tactics. I read that they flocked to Google+, tumblr, or Instatgram to socialize unseen by their folks. I broached the subject with the teen advisory board, many of whom are not allowed on Facebook (even as they were completing their first year of high school). I was most puzzled by tumblr, which I took to be a blogging site: what on earth are you writing about? "Oh, I use it mostly to share funny pictures." Aha!Of course that's what teens most want to share. My Facebook and Pinterest feeds suggest adults are little different.

I often want to post witty/useful things on the library's teen sites (the "quotation" from Lincoln about not trusting online sources, e.g.), but we teen librarians are dedicated to modelling source attribution to the kids. For example, if they make a PowerPoint of book recommendation, we try to steer them to images in the public domain and to credit it if that the terms of a Creative Commons permission. Given this need to Do it Right, I find Pinterest and Facebook infuriating "sources" of humor: where's the beginning?

This morning I got around to my paper copy of the Sunday Washington Post's Technology page, and found that I am not the only one trying to trace back.* Farhad Manjoo (writing for Slate at the same time, I guess I should say) explores a particular BuzzFeed post that garnered tons of attention, particularly as it circulated on Facebook. "Like a modern-day, unstuffy Reader's Digest, BuzzFeed has a knack for distilling the good and the bad of life on the Internet into short, fun, highly clickable vignettes," he wrote. He investigated the sources of the post "21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity" and also asked officials at BuzzFeed about citing sources. They talked about bringing together diverse images, clarifying the importance or meaning, and repackaging - that it's fair use that way. Manjoo doesn't seem convinced ("I'll leave it to you to decide if BuzzFeed is taking more than it's adding") and I'm certainly not convinced enough to begin to post all the funny pictures I know our kids are into without finding some kind of attribution. Although, gee it would be a great way to drive up traffic to our sites.




*Here I am trying to make a point about citations, so I need to say that this version of the story (accessed on July 3, 2012) is slightly different that what I read in my paper, out of town edition. 

Reading to Learn

I imagine early childhood educators know this truism well, but I didn't know it and it made me sit up and take notice:

The next pitfall [for children struggling in school] is third grade. 'Because third grade is a magic year,' [Harold] Fitrer says, 'It's the year you switch from learning to read to reading to learn.' The transition is so crucial, he says, that many cities use third-grade reading scores to predict how many jail beds they'll need in the future.

From an article in Style (June 6, 2012) about the city's last-resort programs.

S/F

For the first time in about a month, I had a whole weekend with nothing planned. Cool weather called us outside: Saturday Phil and I biked to the park, and Sunday I read an dozed in the hammock. With two reading days, I finished The New Yorker's science fiction issue (June 4 & 11, 2012). I enjoyed the reflections of contemporary authors on s/f; my favorite story was Jennifer Egan's "Black Box." Having encountered the "problem" of fictional aliens being described as human-like in the introduction to some collection of short stories I gobbled down one teenaged summer (in my memory, Ursula K. LeGuin made the observation - or maybe it was a collection of her stories?; either way, I associate having my eyes opened to that point by her), I enjoyed revisiting the topic in "The Cosmic Menagerie," by Laura Miller.

Many of the personal reflections touched on the ghettoizing of s/f. William Gibson, shows how important it was for him; an implicit cry not to discount any reading. He recalls science fiction authors he read seeming to flow naturally to Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs: "... my own Golden Age of Science Fiction came, in some sense, to an end, the otherness of my adolescence joining up with the wider tributary of all literature, the mother of all otherness. Had science fiction not found me when it did ... I suspect I might not have found that river. Or else, finding it, I might not have recognized it, and turned away."

Bryson's "At Home"

(I started on Shelfari, but got long winded.) Why can't I have 2.5 stars? Why isn't there a "meh" choice? More importantly: Why did I finish it, when I know I don't like Bryson?? I missed the book club meeting -- and I think it was sort of an optional title? Speaking of titles, "a short history of private life"?! It's full of notables and industrial revolution - not private life. First, I wondered why this book exists, given terrific actual histories like Clark's The American Family Home; I soon found it was because Bryson wasn't trying to do architectural or social history, he just wanted to snarkily ramble about things of interest to him. And it is a nice compendium of that sort of thing: charming tidbits strung together.

Some tidbits I enjoyed enough to flag:

Gas lights, a boon in so many ways, mildly poisoned the air, stained and corroded things, and under its light, "most plants turned yellow unless isolated in a terrarium." Aha! That's why the Victorians loved them so. Bryson followed that up with, "Only the aspidistra [a plant I had to look up] seemed immune to its ill effects, which accounts for its presence in nearly every Victorian parlor photograph." (p. 123) Neat!

"Almost certainly the most memorable finding of recent years with respect to microbes was when an enterprising middle school student in Florida compared the quality of water in the toilets at her local fast-food restaurants with the quality of the ices in the soft drinks, and found that in 70 percent of the outlets she surveyed the toilet water was cleaner than the ice." (p. 248)

A comment towards the end stuck me as Bryson's personal mission statement: "Although it is unlikely that Mr. Marsham was acquainted with either Moby-Dick or Fossil Lepadidae, both reflected a fundamental change that had lately overtaken the thinking world: an almost obsessive urge to pin down every stray morsel of discernible fact and give it permanent recognition in print." (p. 433; emphasis mine)

Ready as I'll Ever Be . . .

. . . for summer reading. I've made extra copies of the lists from the public schools and I've bought extra copies of required books. I'm lucky to have sufficient funds for book-buying; what I don't have is space. I do have storage space, but a book marked "storage" in the catalog is an invisible book, so I try to put there only extra copies of things that only check out when they are required.

The other facet of summer reading is the "club" we run. In short: read stuff, keep a list online, win prizes. I think I have memorized the prizes, so, yeah, I guess I am ready for summer!

On Thursday, I finished Tanita Davis's Happy Families, about a family with a father coming out as transgender; then on Sunday I read an article about a family at the other end, with a small child who is transgender. That story, in the Washington Post, is here; and here's the short blurb I wrote for my Shelfari to help me remember the book so as to suggest it appropriately* to readers:

Ysabel and Justin, twins, have a great family. Each twin pursues a passion -- making glass jewelry and debate team; mom has a catering business and dad's a businessman; they're close to their grandparents, and are active in their church. Then dad comes out as transgender and moves out. Much of the action of the novel happens during the spring break Ys and Justin spend with Dad, going to a therapist and participating in activities with a support group for families with  transgendered person in them. The twins are mad and confused, each in his/her own way -- will the Nicholas family find its way back to happy?

Terrific realistic fiction with conflicts small and meta, teased out at a pace that is slower and thoughtful where it needs to be, and fast in enough places to keep us wondering what's next. Would be fine for a middle schooler who needs/wants to know about a transgender person as there's (almost?) no swearing, no sexual content. Useful appendix explains terms, instructs which terms are offensive. 

*which is the point of my Shelfari, all the time

Plan R

Lots of changes of plans this weekend (don't ask); spent a pleasant day yesterday at Jamestown and in Smithfield. History, ferry ride, ham. Only the most casual of birding; imagine if we had tried:

turkey
blue bird
vulture
robins
mockingbird
pewee
chickadee
carolina wren
red-winged blackbird
grackle
pine warbler, probably 
some egret, flying
g. c. cormorant
laughing gulls
other gulls
bald eagle
osprey (one siting was baby looking out of nest - on channel marker - while parent eyed the ferry-full of humans)
crows - because their voices were certainly "different" I am calling them fish crows

Evidence that I am turning into my parents: I wanted to take pictures of gulls on ferry ride. Evidence that I live in a different time: it took one snap with the automatic 35 mm to get a satisfactory in flight shot, and I could tell right away that it was OK.

Returned home to find some clown stole one stretch of copper gutter off the garage. I'd call Do-Over if I could figure out how far back to go to change the karma.

American Modern

I've been enjoying participating in a Facebook Russel Wright group. I posted this picture recently as part of a conversation about colors we like together. I like it, so I posted it here so I can have it in more than once place. My colors are granite, chartreuse, cedar, and black chutney. (This is a good color chart.)

I am the 7%

The library teens got me hooked on a quiz site called JetPunk. I just took a "famous animals" one. Apparently 93% of people (as of today I suppose) knew Mufasa, the only one I couldn't place. Guess it's from The Lion King, huh?