Jackass Revelation

Someone should tell Knoxville that guys can get breast cancer too.

This post is about the movie Jackass I. Normally, I avoid the Jackass show and movies like the plague. The only reason I know to avoid it is that I’ll catch a glimpse or two of it while passing through a television-watching area. To me (at least previously), Jackass has been all about overage adolescence and unadmitted sexual fetishes (I mean, really, applying electrical shocks to one’s erogenous zones can’t be all about getting a laugh). Jackass stunts are what you do when you can’t reproduce the species, the same as starting wars and taking over corporations.

Then I watched it. Why? I was too tired to get up from the couch when it came on. Then I was too fascinated to stop. Then, it got very very funny.

At first, I winced. A mostly-nude man skipping around with a red carbuncle right around the area of his gluteus medius, tormenting polite Japanese people, was exactly what I expected in the adolescence department. Then the car crashes began and I took my hands away from my eyes.

Johnny Knoxville was inside of a small white car, staring up at a spinning tire halfway through his windshield. He was in a destruction derby, and several cars had driven up on top of his. There was something funny to me about that tire, inches away from Knoxville’s face, turning and turning. Things got even funnier when I was told that the car was a rental.

Then this car, smashed down to about a 3^rd of its original size, was returned to the rental company. The counter and lot person were nearly speechless. What happened to it? they were asking. Knoxville tells them that at least he’s returned it with a full tank of gas.

At that point, I was in tears of hysteria. At that point I was thinking that Jackass was very cool.

Why? It’s irreverent. It reminds me of my life before the last five years. I played in punk bands. I never did what I was supposed to, and only what I wanted. I laughed every day, because everything was totally absurd, and that’s because no one followed the rules, and that’s because no one was smart enough to know what the rules were. I knew people who would make you laugh to look at them, and that’s because they wore weird clothes and weird hair, (probably because they didn’t brush the hair and had found the clothes in a dumpster), and the joy of that laughter came from the fact that they didn’t care. I know the rush that Knoxville feels when he jumps his golfcart over a hill and crashes. I’ve jumped off stages and not been caught. It hurts, but it’s fun.

I don’t think Johnny Knoxville cares either. And there’s a weird joy in that

Perchlorate Heaven

Mead Party Boat & Hoover Dam

I have this picture of me and my sister standing in front of Lake Mead, and when I get my scanner working, I’ll upload it.  We look really happy.  It kind of reminds me of a photo my friend had of her dad.  A Navy guy, he was sitting in the ocean at the edge of the water at Bikini.  This was not long after a ‘nuke test, but he’s totally oblivious.  Needless to say, he died of some awful cancer.

In my own picture, there’s oblivious me, swimming in about 1000 pounds a day of perchlorates that Kerr McGee Chemical was dumping into the lake.  By the way, perchlorates are used to make rocket fuel.  Needless to say, my thyroid ballooned up when I was in my late 20’s.  I’m still on meds.  It’s way better than cancer, even though my heart palpitates from time to time and my hair will fall out on occasion (thankfully, I have a lot of it). I used to like to think that the chemicals came from Area 51, that maybe the rocket fuel was from reverse engineering on a UFO project, and at least my thyroid problem would be from something cool.  But the government isn’t ‘fessing up on that yet.

Last year, (missing that perchlorate dose, I guess), I went back to Mead.  We liked Mead when I was a kid. For a couple of hours, my parents wouldn’t fight. Sometimes, we got to drive the speed boat, a cheap wooden model that my dad put a really big motor on; if you didn’t accelerate, it would start to sink. My sister would be nice to me. Mead was the happy place.

So my spouse and I rented one of those blue party boats with a canopy to putter around in.  Yes, despite the rocket fuel issue, I love Mead.  It’s huge, beautiful, and scary (in ways I never suspected when I was younger).  The waves can get ocean-sized. There’s a town that was covered by the water when Hoover was finished. You can get up pretty close to the water side of Hoover Dam.  The water level is much much lower than when I was younger.  The day we went, it was late July and the temperature was about 105 degrees, though we couldn’t feel it much out on the water.  By the way, know what 105 feels like?  Sort of like someone is squashing a hot waffle iron down on your head.

Overall, our trip was great, and toward the end, before we brought in the boat to gas it up, we stopped for one last swim close to the bay where we were headed.  There was this weird brown lumpy stuff floating all over the place, and we thought it was algae.  A few days later, I looked at a map of Lake Mead and found out that we had been swimming near a place where Las Vegas dumps its sewage.

There’s a moral to that story, somewhere.

Assignment 11 – Website Evaluation

I have chosen to evaluate my city library’s website at http://www.oxnard.org, although I am very reluctant to say anything negative about it, as my own webpages are still amateurish.  On the other hand, I have viewed over 1000 library webpages in the course performing my duties for my job, so maybe I do have a valid opinion. 

First, the page layout is not that great.  It has a typical banner and left and right sections.  But the horizontal navigation panels underneath the banner are all skewed and messed up-looking.  Also, the page is probably too wide, because in Firefox, some of the panels ladder over each other.  On the good side, the information on the page is presented through links; I have seen many pages where most of the information is put on the home page, and few people would have the will or the gusto to scroll down through all of it.  Also, the skewed navigation panels have drop-down menus for additional information, which I really like because it saves space. 

The home page overall is not attractive, and this is not only due to layout but also to graphics and color.  The city’s logo is blurry, and there are additional link buttons in the banner that are all of different sizes and shapes.  The colors are a wingee blue, brown and green.  Other photos and links throughout the left and right panels also appear to be placed there at random, as if the home page were a bulletin board, and anyone is able to tack up anything they want.

The links in the left panel are inconsistent.  Some are accessed through the text, some through the graphic, and some through both.  Some graphics that are links are not labeled.  Other links, like those that bring up a page for a branch (there are 3 total), lead to what appears to be an original version of the home page (with different information), but also without the unorganized-looking links, so it looks a lot better. 

I think the big problem with this page is that it is old.  To my knowledge, I think it has been the same for almost ten years, and as we all know, the technology for building pages has advanced greatly.  There are no blogs, no scrolling news feeds, nothing to make the page look interesting.  The graphics are flat.  This page is a useful portal through which to get library hours, see what’s going on, and to access the catalog.  But it’s about as fun to use and look at as a junky old vehicle.  It needs an overhaul!  I would scrap this page and start from scratch.  I’d make the links in the left panel look more like buttons, and probably not put anything much under the banner.  I would have a center panel and a right hand panel with a blog and with library news.  I would also have a form for a library newsletter.  Last, but not least, I’d use better colors, so that the page is more fun to look at.  I’d dump that blurry city logo as it looks awful.  I would eliminate the unreadable white text over some of the larger orange text that makes it look tattered.  There is a lot of work to do on the Oxnard Library site. 

 

 

 

 

 

Five Tag Searches

My 5 tag searches on Flickr were “Lee Childs,” “UFO,” “Area 51,” “Rachel, NV,” and “Groom Lake.”  Tag searches with user generated tags can be weird; Lee Childs is an author, but the name gives results for poker players and members of family groups…okay, and a picture of one of his books in black and white.

 

However, folksonomies could cure one problem that I encountered in my database group in Library 202 – how does one figure out the user’s vernacular so that she can find items in the catalog?  What if someone calls a jerusalem cricket a “potato bug?” etc. etc.  User submitted tags allow everyone to tag items in their own language.  The downside to that – if you don’t speak a particular dialect – you may not be able to retrieve an item.  Library catalogs could benefit from user tags if these tags were added to the institutionalized tags – that way, more people could access these catalogs.

 

There are amazing social networking aspects of tags that I was never aware of until I participated in the Emerging Technologies Forum.  A major one is the ability to hook up with members of groups (such as librarians, cat lovers, etc.).

My Library and Web 2.0 Technologies = Squat

The amount of web 2.0 Technologies that my library has = the number squat.  They do have ASKNOW, a 24 hour chat reference service, on their webpage, but I don’t think that this counts, as ASKNOW is used by many/most libraries around here.

I probably should mention that when I did my reference interview at this library for 210, the librarian told me that I’d be “…better off googling” (than asking her a question, I guess). 

No meebo, no hookups to google chat, nada. 

No blogs.

No social networking sites. 

I do like my library, however.  As long as I stick with fiction, I can get what I want.  As far as anything else, it’s probably going to be pretty old. 

I didn’t post the name of the library as I might end up working there.  People get fired for this kind of thing, don’t they?

Nothing to Lose – Lee Child

I just read this book.  Why?  Partly because everyone else at my library wanted to read it.  I was something like #60 in the wait list.

You may find some relief in the knowledge that I’m not going to review this book.  However, I would like to talk about Jack Reacher, Child’s hero.

Jack Reacher is what everyone probably, at one time or another, wishes they could be.  He is a total jerk (I have a better word, but this is for class).  He doesn’t listen to anyone.  When people ask him to leave, he says, “make me.”  When his latest squeeze wants to know about their relationship status, he says, “I can’t do long-term.”

Reacher is like Pippi Longstocking in that he is the strongest man in the world (she is the strongest woman in the world), though, personally, I think that Pippi could kick his ass.  When he’s surrounded by 6 goons who want to kill him with big wrenches and knives and stuff, Reacher claims it’s not fair (for the goons).  Then he puts them in the hospital.  Even Clint Eastwood gets his butt kicked once in a while, but Jack Reacher never does.

Never, in Reacher’s world, will evil prosper.  Which is very cathartic in a weird way.  I am going to read every one of these books.

Hanging Out for Extra Credit at the Post-Emerging Technology Forum

Following are writeups for the three sessions that I viewed:

Erik Sandall’s session about iGoogle was very relevant, at least from my perspective, as I think everyone should try it. I chose Sandall’s recording because I’ve been working (struggling) with iGoogle for the last month or so, and I wanted to learn more about it. My experience with iGoogle has been somewhat happy; it puts everything in one spot, and what could be bad about that? I have my worm composting and expat blogs, Google maps, a few jokes, all this on one page to read at a glance.

Sandall explained some really basic stuff, so his presentation is appropriate for the absolute beginner, particularly someone who doesn’t know iGoogle exists. iGoogle’s pretty intuitive; you can almost fall over most of the stuff you need to know to get it working. However, Sandall’s explanation of making one’s own widget, and his demonstration of how to share one, was really useful to me. I couldn’t help thinking that, as a librarian, I could make reading list widgets and share them with others. How cool!

My next session was Susie Quinn’s Audacity demonstration. I’ve always been interested in podcasting; I certainly love listening to them. Quinn’s presentation was more advanced for me as I’ve never used any podcasting software before. I definitely plan on trying it; after all, it’s free. Quinn walked the listeners through cutting and pasting sound files, which for me, is somewhat foreign. She also dealt with important issues like copyright. When I use Audacity, I’ll be going into it with a better overall knowledge about what I can do with it. I saved Quinn’s recording so I can go back to it for reference.

Podcasting has got to be hugely useful for librarians. I certainly liked it when my instructor used podcasts for her intros. to lessons for 210. There’s nice something about hearing the actual voice as opposed to reading the print version of the spoken word; I guess the brain must digest it somewhat differently. You can hear those all-important voice inflections – anyway, I could think of a plethora of things for a librarian to do with podcasts, including announcements and even book readings on a library website or blog.

My last session was Megan Berru’s Flickr demonstration. Because I haven’t used it, I feel like a Luddite. I have a friend who posts her world travel photos there, and I love looking at them. I’ve also seen many incidences of library events posted as photos on Flickr on library webpages, so I thought it was time to learn more.

Berru’s information was very useful. Although the sign-up process and use of the website is pretty intuitive, she demonstrated a few things that I might not have figured out for myself. She explained Creative Commons photos and how to access them; one can use these photos freely as long as credit is given. I also found out that I have an account already because I have a Yahoo account. One thing that really surprised me is that Flickr is optimized for Firefox. Is anything else optimized for Firefox? Actually, I really like Firefox but have run into a few problems with it. Megan also showed us the Library of Congress photos on Flickr, which are amazing.

Every librarian should know how to use Flickr. Berru thinks that it might be a better way to help find images for patrons than using Google. She also explained that a librarian can use Flickr for networking by finding other groups interesting in similar library activities, and for promotions. I guess it was about time that I learned more about this useful tool.

Is Alice Cooper still cool or what?

Recently, I picked up a copy of Alice Cooper’s Dragontown.  It’s from ’02 and has a slight flavor of grunginess, but I still recommend it.  Heavy, heavy, heavy.  I first fell in love with the Coop when I heard Billion Dollar Babies and School’s Out.  The songwriting’s still there, though, in DT.  He really likes the Beatles, and you can hear it.  Best picks are “Sister Sarah,” “Sex, Death, and Money,” and “Somewhere in the Jungle.”

How to cook zucchini, Mexican style.

cc wally hartshorn

I gave my friend Lupe who lives behind me a zucchini plant in a pot, so she told me how to cook it, Mexican style.  It’s easy!

Slice it and saute it with some onion, tomatoes, garlic salt, and some seasoning salt.  She sautes it in manteca (lard), but it would probably be just has good with olive oil.  When I try it, I’ll let you-all know how it is.

A semi-successful yard sale.

Last Saturday, I had a yard sale.  Now, this experience is probably not as unique to most of you as it is to me; I haven’t done one in years.  I was sort of apprehensive about it, meeting new people, tallying purchases properly (I’m no slouch at math, but if I’m nervous, who knows?), and being able to communicate with my customers (my neighborhood is heavily Spanish-speaking). 

I had a lot of reasons for doing this sale, however, enough to make me overcome this apprehension.  First, I have WAY too much junk.  Junk can stress you out.  Just dusting, arranging, or putting away junk seems to be an huge waste of time in my finite life.  So I wanted to downsize.

Not only do I have a plethora of my own junk (I want to use another word here, but it might bring down my grade), but I have also inherited a lifetime of junk from my father-in-law.  Hence, the decision to get out and flog some items.

It didn’t go badly.  Useful stuff like tools was pretty big, probably because I live in a working-class neighborhood.  Much of the decorative “vintage” stuff was swept up first thing in the morning by the nutty collectors.  They were diving into my boxes before I had a chance to unpack them.  Speaking of whom, I put my sale in the paper, and people were banging on the door the day before asking to look at my items.  NOT.  Does collecting = heroin addiction?

In the end, I made 120 bucks working from 7 a.m. to 12 p.m..  That’s over 20 bucks an hour keeping stuff out of a landfill.  Not a librarian’s wage, but not bad for sitting in a chair, collecting money, and having people help me improve my Spanish.  The best part was the joy I saw on people’s faces when they thought they found a treasure.  Didn’t George Carlin say something about one man’s junk (actually, he used a four letter word starting with “s”) being another man’s stuff?  The guy who excitedly grabbed my bent-up old sport blocks and handed me five bucks, the Mom who locked up her brakes in the middle of the road and made her kid run up and buy 4 red vases, or even the funny Grandma who bought her very cute grandaughter an apron with the words, “We like to start ’em out working early.”  Overall, it wasn’t as fun as watching Frasier on T.V. or reading, or playing a video game.  But it paid more.