The population of librarians on Facebook has organized as People For a Library-Themed Ben & Jerry’s Flavor and is petitioning Ben & Jerry’s, the Vermont-based ice creamery famous for its multi-flavor mash-ups, for a taste sensation they can call their very own.
Here are some of the current suggestions for a Ben & Jerry’s library-themed flavor:
• Gooey Decimal System: Dark fudge alphabet letters with caramel swirls in hazelnut ice cream.
• Sh-sh-sh-Sherbet!: Key Lime or a Chocolate/Vanilla combination.
• Cookie Bookie: A combination of cookie bits!
• Dusty Stacks: Layered ice cream with speckles of cocoa in every layer.
• Li-Berry Pie: Lime sherbet mixed with raspberry sauce and pie crust crumbles (cinnamon sugar, butter, piecrust).
• Liberry I Scream: Strawberry/blueberry sherbet and vanilla ice cream.
• Overdue Fine as Fudge Chunk: Hunks of rich fudge brownies in creamy milk chocolate drizzled throughout with golden caramel and sprinkled with mini white chocolate coins.
• Rocky Read: Vanilla with choc covered nuts choc chunks and raisins.
• In the Stacks: Butter pecan with fudge swirl.
• Reference Ripple: Anything with PB.
• Marian the Librarian Rasberryan: Rasberry and Chocolate with chunks of fudge.
• Ranganathan's Raspberry Rules!: Raspberry and chocolate chips.
• Free and Open to All: A rainbow of flavors with all kinds of chips-butterscotch, peanut butter, chocolate.
Here's a message from the leader of the charge, Andy W, on the group's Facebook page:
"4,000. It took awhile but we got there. Completely awesome. This past month and a half has been pretty different for me. Stories about the group have appeared in Library Journal (both print and online), a local newspaper, tons of tweet and retweets on Twitter, and shared on Facebook. And for all those efforts, I cannot thank you enough.
So, here's the deal now. Time to step it up and take some action in a couple easy steps.
(1) Submit a flavor to Ben & Jerry's directly.
Appeal to the 5 Flavor Gurus directly! (Arnold, John, Eric, Peter, & Nettie) Here is the link for their Suggest a Flavor page.
(2) Get involved at your state level. Library advocacy has been a hot button issue for the library community this year in light of how state budgets are shaping up. We need to demonstrate why libraries are not a luxury but an essential service in an age of digital literacy.
Here is a list of state library associations as provided by ilovelibraries.org. If you're involved already, thank you for your time and effort. If you're not, here's a chance to check it out, find your local legislators and let them know how important the library is.”
This's a pain-free opportunity to support your local library and staff and pack on some extra pounds to carry you through the long winter of our fiscal and budgetary discontent.
Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Twitter. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Monday, June 29, 2009
"Twitterature" Has Book World Atwitter
Two nineteen year old freshmen at the University of Chicago have scored a publishing deal for their book, Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less, to be released later this year by Penguin.
The students, Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman, “had an epiphany,” they declare on their website. "What, we asked, are the grandest ventures of our or any generation? And what, to give this a bit more focus, best expresses the souls of 21st century Americans?"
Their answer: that the two most important platforms of expression for their generation were literature and Twitter, and so they sought a way to marry the two.
"More than any other social networking tool, Twitter has refined to its purest form the instant-publishing, short-attention-span, all-digital-all-the-time, self-important age of info-deluge that is the essence of our contemporary world. So what could be better than to combine the two? After all, as great as the classics are, who has time to read those big, long books anymore?"
And so their "humorous retelling of works of great literature in Twitter format aimed at people aged between 18 and 35.”
The intent is to metaphorically throw the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce and JK Rowling into a log-chipper and have twenty 140-character Tweets for each come out the other end. The humor, presumably, will be added somewhere along the process, like carnauba wax in a car wash, then polished to hilarious sheen. Humor’s a tricky thing; without meta-context the laughs get lost and there's no room for any sort of context in a Twitter tweet.
This is not exactly a fresh idea. In early May of 2009, the U.K. Telegraph reported that writer Tim Collins has a new book, The Little Book of Twitter, comprised of plot summaries of the great books and aimed at the Twitteratti, i.e.:
Ulysses:
jamesjoyce: Man walks around Dublin. We follow every minute detail of his day. He’s probably overtweeting.
Great Expectations:
charlesdickens: Orphan given £££ by secret follower. He thinks it’s @misshavisham but it turns out to be @magwitch
The Catcher in the Rye:
jdsalinger: Rich kid thinks everyone is fake except for his little sister. Has breakdown. @markchapman is now following @johnlennon
Pride and Prejudice:
janeaustin: Woman meets man called Darcy who seems horrible. He turns out to be nice really. They get together.
Bridget Jones’s Diary:
helenfielding: RT @janeaustin Woman meets man called Darcy who seems horrible. He turns out to be nice really. They get together.
Okay, this is fun up to a point; I got paid to do this in an earlier incarnation: Ultimately, Collins’ book is an exercise in writing what in TVLand-speak is called the “high-concept,” a high-fallutin' way to describe the log line for the program/movie’s TV Guide entry, nothing more. Writing “high-concepts” sounds a lot more significant than writing TV Guide teasers, along the lines of “sanitation engineer” for garbageman which, come to think of it, was exactly what I was doing.
Twitterature apprs 2B aimng at smthng mre &, hopefully, litteratwerps hu thk plot is bk wll B dsapntd.
If Rensin and Aciman can capture the soul of a book within its theme, plot, character, and milieu in twenty Tweets of 160 characters each or less, and include a wry slant, that would really be an accomplishment; high art, I think, and poetry of the highest rank.
I’m not counting on it.
There is, however, a way to salvage the project so that the preciousness and intrinsic humor of each Twitter-fied book is suitably captured but it'll have to wait for the audio book version: Twitterature. As Read by Internationally Renowned Star of Looney Tunes Cartoons, Tweety-Bird.
"Cawl me Itchmale! I taut I thaw a mighty whitey-whale dwown a cwazy captain and hith cwew!"
Image ™Warner Brothers.
The students, Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman, “had an epiphany,” they declare on their website. "What, we asked, are the grandest ventures of our or any generation? And what, to give this a bit more focus, best expresses the souls of 21st century Americans?"
Their answer: that the two most important platforms of expression for their generation were literature and Twitter, and so they sought a way to marry the two.
"More than any other social networking tool, Twitter has refined to its purest form the instant-publishing, short-attention-span, all-digital-all-the-time, self-important age of info-deluge that is the essence of our contemporary world. So what could be better than to combine the two? After all, as great as the classics are, who has time to read those big, long books anymore?"
And so their "humorous retelling of works of great literature in Twitter format aimed at people aged between 18 and 35.”
The intent is to metaphorically throw the works of Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce and JK Rowling into a log-chipper and have twenty 140-character Tweets for each come out the other end. The humor, presumably, will be added somewhere along the process, like carnauba wax in a car wash, then polished to hilarious sheen. Humor’s a tricky thing; without meta-context the laughs get lost and there's no room for any sort of context in a Twitter tweet.
This is not exactly a fresh idea. In early May of 2009, the U.K. Telegraph reported that writer Tim Collins has a new book, The Little Book of Twitter, comprised of plot summaries of the great books and aimed at the Twitteratti, i.e.:
Ulysses:
jamesjoyce: Man walks around Dublin. We follow every minute detail of his day. He’s probably overtweeting.
Great Expectations:
charlesdickens: Orphan given £££ by secret follower. He thinks it’s @misshavisham but it turns out to be @magwitch
The Catcher in the Rye:
jdsalinger: Rich kid thinks everyone is fake except for his little sister. Has breakdown. @markchapman is now following @johnlennon
Pride and Prejudice:
janeaustin: Woman meets man called Darcy who seems horrible. He turns out to be nice really. They get together.
Bridget Jones’s Diary:
helenfielding: RT @janeaustin Woman meets man called Darcy who seems horrible. He turns out to be nice really. They get together.
Okay, this is fun up to a point; I got paid to do this in an earlier incarnation: Ultimately, Collins’ book is an exercise in writing what in TVLand-speak is called the “high-concept,” a high-fallutin' way to describe the log line for the program/movie’s TV Guide entry, nothing more. Writing “high-concepts” sounds a lot more significant than writing TV Guide teasers, along the lines of “sanitation engineer” for garbageman which, come to think of it, was exactly what I was doing.
Twitterature apprs 2B aimng at smthng mre &, hopefully, litteratwerps hu thk plot is bk wll B dsapntd.
If Rensin and Aciman can capture the soul of a book within its theme, plot, character, and milieu in twenty Tweets of 160 characters each or less, and include a wry slant, that would really be an accomplishment; high art, I think, and poetry of the highest rank.
I’m not counting on it.
There is, however, a way to salvage the project so that the preciousness and intrinsic humor of each Twitter-fied book is suitably captured but it'll have to wait for the audio book version: Twitterature. As Read by Internationally Renowned Star of Looney Tunes Cartoons, Tweety-Bird.
"Cawl me Itchmale! I taut I thaw a mighty whitey-whale dwown a cwazy captain and hith cwew!"
Image ™Warner Brothers.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Kafka On Twitter
4:26AM : Troubled dreams. No sleep. Toss, turn. Aches, pains. What is happening 2 me?
5:03AM : I feel like I'm sleeping in a carapace. I'd kill for a Tempurpedic mattress.
6:01AM : I awake from troubled dreams into troubled life. Oy, again?
7:12AM : Is it me or is my entire family slathered in insect-repellant? And when did Black Flag get into the scented candle business?
7:34AM : I hear my parents talking about me as if I'm not here. What's a "roach motel?"
7:46AM : WOTFS!*
8:07AM : "U can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar," Pop says, intent unclear. Whatever, I'm starving and a nice, fat Diptera Psyhcodidae sounds pretty good 2 me; I've always dug 2-winged head-cases and now I'm simply ravenous for them. But 4 breakfast?
8:26AM : I'm so lonely I could scream. But I can't. I used 2 be able 2 say, "I slit a sheet, a sheet I slit and on that slitted sheet I sit" 3 times fast w/o mistakes but now I can't even express a phoneme much less a syllable.
9:03 : Fight w/Mom. The network of pheromone trails I laid down on walls, floor, ceiling and her side of the bed has upset her. Was it necessary 2 scour all with bleach? How does she expect anyone to find me?
9:05AM : I've left home. It was that or becoming slime on the bottom of Mom's shoe. Y does she hate me so much?
11:14AM : I crawl these means streets in search of social intercourse. I've given up on the other. How would you feel if your partner tried 2 kill you with a sharp axial appendage during afterplay?
11:15AM : Where do I find these nut jobs?
11:19AM : Under rocks.
11: 20AM : Note to self: avoid rocks, sleep under stars. Scarlet Johansson would be nice.
12:04PM : Oh joy! Oh rapture! I have found a colony of like-bodied folks just like me. But I sense something sinister afoot or, more accurately, a-sticky pad
12:59PM : I'm being followed. I can't see anybody but I know, I can feel them.
1:23PM : They're out there, I know it.
1:47PM : They're hanging on my every thought. Constantly. Sucking the goo from my brain and swallowing it, one tiny bolus after another after another. Why, oh why am I being tormented so?
2:13PM : Whoops, my mistake: I'm sending out signals through the rabbit ears on my head. Mea culpa! I loathe myself but only halfway. Sure, it's not enough but half a loathe is better than none.
2:28PM : I'm trying, I'm trying!
2:43PM : Success! I now completely abhor the very thought of me.
Why? President Obama has 100,000,000 hits on Google; me, none. I am such an underachiever I don't even rate the underachiever Top Ten.
3:41PM : Must stop thinking. Thinking leads 2 thoughts and we know what thoughts lead 2: signal broadcasts!
4:19PM : Still being followed. My followers have grown into an army but who the hell are these strangers and why are they bugging me?
4:21PM : Alright, already, I'm sorry: Why am I bugging them?
4:52PM : Multi-lensed eyes: I can read so fast, now! I run across the lines of text and just absorb them. I read War n' Peace in 4 minutes flat. Fell asleep between the lines and almost missed the short, French guy's retreat. (Comprehension has suffered).
4:57PM : ...Attention span, 2. Often, I begin 2 read and the next thing I know I'm wandering all over the page, aimlessly. My textual orientation is all mixed up.
5:11PM : Yikes! First edition of Der Verwandlung (1915) selling for $14,000; Der Prozess (1925) for $1800. I earned bupkis. Where were these damned book collectors when I needed them?
5:12PM : Identity crisis! I have become a bookworm.
6:03PM : I engage in marginal worming, not affecting text. But the word "paranoia" looks tasty; I smell dessert.
8:17PM : "Funny, you don't look chewish" - just what are you trying to say, what do you mean, who told you to say that?
9:32PM : Having completely digested five of ten volumes of the complete works of Poe (Tamerlane Edition, limited to 300 numbered sets printed on delicious Ruisdael hand-made paper), I have now distended to 1000 times my original, post-human size.
9: 55PM : Having completely digested the final 5 volumes of Poe, I am now back 2 my original, human size. I look remarkably fit and am feeling my old self again.
10PM : Suicidal ideation!
10:16PM : Someone is trying 2 kill me: Me. I'm out to get me. Or am I being irrationally afraid, perceiving threats where none exist? Is that a gun in my pocket or am I just sad 2 see me?
10:18 : My followers - Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. I need my audience to affirm my existence. I'm a 'skeeter on a scum pond.
10:59PM : Rumblings in the boiler room; time 2 lose the Poe.
11:03PM : Hey, get outta here, all 10,000 of ya, wherever you are. Can't you see I'm trying 2 take, uh...Just leave. Now.
11:04PM : Another 5,000 followers. What am I, Mr. Popularity?
11:06PM : Was it as good for you as it was for me? I love Poe.
11:22PM : "Get one yourself" is not an appropriate response to "get a life."
11:59PM : The world is closing in on me. I can't take it anymore. I wriggle up the steps, all six feet, one inch of me, stand up tall, wipe the loam off all of my svelte segments, and ring the doorbell.
12Midnight : "Hi, Mom, it's me, Franz. I'm home! Set a few extra places at the table. I've brought all 15,000 of my followers home for dinner. Aren't you glad to see me? Mom? MOM!?"
______
*Writhing On The Floor Squealing
___________________
Originally appeared in Fine Books & Collections on this date.
5:03AM : I feel like I'm sleeping in a carapace. I'd kill for a Tempurpedic mattress.
6:01AM : I awake from troubled dreams into troubled life. Oy, again?
7:12AM : Is it me or is my entire family slathered in insect-repellant? And when did Black Flag get into the scented candle business?
7:34AM : I hear my parents talking about me as if I'm not here. What's a "roach motel?"
7:46AM : WOTFS!*
8:07AM : "U can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar," Pop says, intent unclear. Whatever, I'm starving and a nice, fat Diptera Psyhcodidae sounds pretty good 2 me; I've always dug 2-winged head-cases and now I'm simply ravenous for them. But 4 breakfast?
8:26AM : I'm so lonely I could scream. But I can't. I used 2 be able 2 say, "I slit a sheet, a sheet I slit and on that slitted sheet I sit" 3 times fast w/o mistakes but now I can't even express a phoneme much less a syllable.
9:03 : Fight w/Mom. The network of pheromone trails I laid down on walls, floor, ceiling and her side of the bed has upset her. Was it necessary 2 scour all with bleach? How does she expect anyone to find me?
9:05AM : I've left home. It was that or becoming slime on the bottom of Mom's shoe. Y does she hate me so much?
11:14AM : I crawl these means streets in search of social intercourse. I've given up on the other. How would you feel if your partner tried 2 kill you with a sharp axial appendage during afterplay?
11:15AM : Where do I find these nut jobs?
11:19AM : Under rocks.
11: 20AM : Note to self: avoid rocks, sleep under stars. Scarlet Johansson would be nice.
12:04PM : Oh joy! Oh rapture! I have found a colony of like-bodied folks just like me. But I sense something sinister afoot or, more accurately, a-sticky pad
12:59PM : I'm being followed. I can't see anybody but I know, I can feel them.
1:23PM : They're out there, I know it.
1:47PM : They're hanging on my every thought. Constantly. Sucking the goo from my brain and swallowing it, one tiny bolus after another after another. Why, oh why am I being tormented so?
2:13PM : Whoops, my mistake: I'm sending out signals through the rabbit ears on my head. Mea culpa! I loathe myself but only halfway. Sure, it's not enough but half a loathe is better than none.
2:28PM : I'm trying, I'm trying!
2:43PM : Success! I now completely abhor the very thought of me.
Why? President Obama has 100,000,000 hits on Google; me, none. I am such an underachiever I don't even rate the underachiever Top Ten.
3:41PM : Must stop thinking. Thinking leads 2 thoughts and we know what thoughts lead 2: signal broadcasts!
4:19PM : Still being followed. My followers have grown into an army but who the hell are these strangers and why are they bugging me?
4:21PM : Alright, already, I'm sorry: Why am I bugging them?
4:52PM : Multi-lensed eyes: I can read so fast, now! I run across the lines of text and just absorb them. I read War n' Peace in 4 minutes flat. Fell asleep between the lines and almost missed the short, French guy's retreat. (Comprehension has suffered).
4:57PM : ...Attention span, 2. Often, I begin 2 read and the next thing I know I'm wandering all over the page, aimlessly. My textual orientation is all mixed up.
5:11PM : Yikes! First edition of Der Verwandlung (1915) selling for $14,000; Der Prozess (1925) for $1800. I earned bupkis. Where were these damned book collectors when I needed them?
5:12PM : Identity crisis! I have become a bookworm.
6:03PM : I engage in marginal worming, not affecting text. But the word "paranoia" looks tasty; I smell dessert.
8:17PM : "Funny, you don't look chewish" - just what are you trying to say, what do you mean, who told you to say that?
9:32PM : Having completely digested five of ten volumes of the complete works of Poe (Tamerlane Edition, limited to 300 numbered sets printed on delicious Ruisdael hand-made paper), I have now distended to 1000 times my original, post-human size.
9: 55PM : Having completely digested the final 5 volumes of Poe, I am now back 2 my original, human size. I look remarkably fit and am feeling my old self again.
10PM : Suicidal ideation!
10:16PM : Someone is trying 2 kill me: Me. I'm out to get me. Or am I being irrationally afraid, perceiving threats where none exist? Is that a gun in my pocket or am I just sad 2 see me?
10:18 : My followers - Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. I need my audience to affirm my existence. I'm a 'skeeter on a scum pond.
10:59PM : Rumblings in the boiler room; time 2 lose the Poe.
11:03PM : Hey, get outta here, all 10,000 of ya, wherever you are. Can't you see I'm trying 2 take, uh...Just leave. Now.
11:04PM : Another 5,000 followers. What am I, Mr. Popularity?
11:06PM : Was it as good for you as it was for me? I love Poe.
11:22PM : "Get one yourself" is not an appropriate response to "get a life."
11:59PM : The world is closing in on me. I can't take it anymore. I wriggle up the steps, all six feet, one inch of me, stand up tall, wipe the loam off all of my svelte segments, and ring the doorbell.
12Midnight : "Hi, Mom, it's me, Franz. I'm home! Set a few extra places at the table. I've brought all 15,000 of my followers home for dinner. Aren't you glad to see me? Mom? MOM!?"
______
*Writhing On The Floor Squealing
___________________
Originally appeared in Fine Books & Collections on this date.
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