I wish I'd thought of this

Not my quote, but it's funny and I like it and says everything about two things I really don't care about.

"Twilight's like soccer. They run around for 2 hours, nobody scores, and its billion fans insist you just don't understand."

What? No More Cookery?

Did you hear the big news? (You probably have. I'm always the last to find out anything.) LC has chucked the Cookery subject heading into the dustbin of history, there to molder with such subject headings from yesteryear as "The Yellow Peril" and "The Jewish Question." Cookery was not as offensive as those, of course, but still it was useless. My favorite adjectival heading in Cookery was the one for Indian food. You want an Indian cookbook? No problem, just search under "Cookery, Indic" and it'll pop right up. (You're welcome.) It combined the sublime uselessness of "cookery" with the willful obscurantism of "Indic" to ensure that nobody could find anything. So, goodbye cookery!

And now on to another one I hate. It's not as big a deal as cookery, but it is ridiculous. You know what a longshoreman is, don't you? Of course you do. LC doesn't. Or at least pretends it doesn't, preferring to use the antique "stevedores." Stevedore? Really? The only time I think I ever saw the word in print outside of the big ugly red LC books was in the Kafka story of the same name. So all you important people at OCLC who read this blog, change it, will ya?

I Thought it Was Called a ShamWow

“Needa ShamWoo!” bellowed the morbidly obese woman in the motorized chair.
I had my eye on her already. She had used salty language on the guy who tried to open the door for her. She wanted to smack the automatic door button instead. She had demanded that he let the door go so that she could do so.
“Pardon?”
“SHAMWOO! I NEED A SHAMWOO! SHAM! WOO!”
It took five total bellowings before I realized that she needed a chair moved.

The return of the 'slave. I hope.

Hi Folks,

About 2 months ago, or soon before my last post or two, I was in a car wreck. It was pretty dramatic--I was stopped at the end of a line of cars, minding my own business, thinking the lofty thoughts you have come to expect from me, when a young woman decided that the time was perfect to both drive fast and not pay attention. It's a bad combo, if you think about it. She plowed into me doing about 40. The impact launched my poor, trusty, elderly Subaru into the car in front of me. That car, in turn, passed along the love to the car in front of it. Four cars were destroyed, and the driver in front of me and I got play a game called Who is Going to Get to the Hospital First in Their Ambulance? She got sirens and I didn't, so I silvered in that event. I did, however, get to see the inside of an ambulance (kind of a let down, if you must know) and I had the opportunity to ask the chatty EMT a few questions about the nature of his work. All things considered, though, I was pretty lucky. The Venerable Subaru was completely destroyed, whereas I walked away* with only broken glasses, a few cuts and burns from the airbag, and a concussion.**

Recovery has been disappointingly slow. The head trauma has affected my vision, which has made reading difficult. Even in this post-literate world, that has been a bit of a problem. I also had actual memory loss (very freaky), so even the Dewey Decimal System, that anchor and lamp, deserted me for a time. I actually had to use the catalog to find where the sewing books were, squinting pathetically at the screen the whole time. As you might imagine, this has made very little seem particularly funny or slaveworthy of late. I must be getting better though: just today, after a particularly galling interaction, I found myself thinking that I might be able to convert the misery a patron inflicted on me into something amusing for the blog. We'll see. So thanks for continuing to check in and hopefully there will be more here soon.

* OK, I didn't exactly walk away, but that sounds a whole lot better than "I stumbled dumbly into oncoming traffic."

** Note to you extreme sports enthusiasts: Even if you are rough and tough like Your Humble Deskslave, under no circumstances should you pick a fight with an airbag. They are mean. And speedy. They come at you so fast, even the lightning-fast, Ninja reflexes of a reference librarian are not quick enough to avoid or deflect their powerful attack. Final score: Airbag 1, Deskslave a big old goose egg.