The worst question, by far, is, “What do you do for fun?” You can rack your brain looking for answers that make you sound cool (Fire-eating? Sword swallowing? Homemade stick and poke tattoos?), or you can own it. The internet is rightly celebrating Jeopardy! contestant Margaret Miles for doing the latter.
"Do mice throw up?" and "Any statistics on the lifespan of the abandoned woman?" are some of the less strange questions that librarians at the New York Public Library have been writing down for decades. If you're wondering if people asked about sex, the answer is "yes, absolutely."
Katie already reported on the phenomenon of library sex — please sing that in your heads to the tune of Birthday Sex and later let's rewrite the words, OK? — but just to recap, Nadine Cho, the sex columnist for UC Berkeley's student paper The Daily Californian, encouraged students to get down and dirty in the stacks.…
Right? That is the arm I want to read me Matilda as I fall asleep cuddled in it. This magical appendage belongs to Heather Warren, a kids' librarian at the Philadelphia Free Library.
A woman in California has been slapped with $7,600 in fines and ordered to stay away from public libraries after it was discovered that she had stolen thousands of library books and was attempting to sell them online. For shame, California book stealer.
The response to our Worst Pickup Lines contest has been overwhelming — the dudes (and ladies) of the world have some seriously bizarro game. After the jump, the winners of our fabulous prizes, and eight teeth-licking, ass-smelling, incest-porn-discussing honorable mentions.
Lady Gaga + Librarians= "Catalog," the best library-related jam since Arthur dropped some rhymes on the dopeness of library cards. The editing is slightly off, but it just adds to the sweet, goofy, homemade charm of the video. [BoingBoing]
Tina Harden saw references to weed and sex and decided the books were "filled with everything I don't want my [then 13-year-old] daughter to do or be." So… Do all 5th graders become pickpockets after reading Oliver Twist? [Orlando Sentinel]
In 1992, Will Manley commissioned a sex survey of 5,000 librarians. The results were allegedly deemed so scandalous that not only was Manley fired, but the Wilson Library Bulletin destroyed any remaining copies. Now, Manley has released them:
Meet Beth Hollis, a 53-year-old reference librarian from Ohio who leads a double life as the kick-ass roller derby player MegaBeth, "which is kind of a play on MegaDeath... I like the Mega too, it insinuates power." [CNN]
So what do libraries do when a book like Tintin in the Congo is deemed too offensive for normal perusal? According to a piece in today's Times, a sort of semi-banned purgatory.
"Where do we assemble? Who has the lube?" Just one of the charming tweets on the American Library Association's annual conference's "secret" Twitter account, created to monitor scandalous goings-on. [Washington City Paper]
As mentioned briefly last night, Judith Krug, the founder of Banned Book Week and champion of the First Amendment, died Saturday in Evanston, Illinois. She was 69.
Once again, librarians save the day! As reported last week, a reproductive health database run by John Hopkins University called POPLINE had removed the term "abortion" as a recognized search query in February. The change had gone unnoticed until a group of librarians at the Medical Center at UCSF had trouble gaining…
Remember the big brouhaha over the Newbery Medal-winning, "scrotum"-plugging children's book The Higher Power of Lucky? Well there's a new controversy among suddenly publicity-hungry American librarians, but this one's over boobalicious Beyonce Knowles.
