Burning Love -- or is that the BBQ?

Leah Garchik's column in the December 17, 2008, San Francisco Chronicle (www.sfgate.com) had this item:

"For $3.99 a bottle, Burger King is out with a new men's body spray, Flame, that "features the scent of seduction with the hint of flame-broiled meat." Unfortunately, they don't have perfume counters at Burger Kings. You have to go online, to www.firemeetsdesire.com, to purchase this product."

I think Burger King is missing a bet here. Why not have a perfume counter, at least during this December. Where better to shop at the last minute? Nothing like buying a nifty gift and getting a nosh at the same time. Then if you're hard-pressed for wrapping, you can put it in the Burger King box or paper your nosh came in -- add a little ketchup to the paper for a seasonal red tone.

Thank you Oracle for Free4All

On Saturday, November 10th, Oracle sponsored Free4All, free admission to twelve museums located in what Leah Garchik of the San Francisco Chronicle calls (and the rest of us should call) Culture Gulch, the area around 3rd and Mission, more or less. Hats off to Oracle, even if they may have done this just to make up for the inconvenience of closing a block or two of Howard Street for a week for its annual (or is it semi-annual: surely they just had one) conference.

One of the musuems I visited that day was the Musuem of the African Diaspora (MoAD.) The two floors of exhibit space were devoted entirely (as far as I could tell: I am eminently able to miss small rooms off to one side) to "Hungry Planet: What the World Eats." This has little to do with the African diaspora, but is fascinating. The exhibit consists of large color photos of families from around the world, seated/standing with a full week's purchases of food, both groceries and takeout. Text tells a bit about the family, and lists everything purchased, with prices in US dollars. A small exhibit included shots of fast food places around the world -- mostly US firms, but some local ones.

The galleries were crowded, probably due to the free day (well, that's why I was there,) and there were lots of families. Some parents used different photos to point out to their child/children that not everyone has as much to eat as we do in this country. Among the adults, there was lots of conversation too. It was all fascinating, even to a non-foodie like me. I recommend this exhibit, but there's also a companion book, which won the 2006 James Beard Foundation Book Award, in case you can't get to the museum. The exhibit continues through January 20, 2008.

Flogging Blogs

Of the two technologies covered by challenges 1-5 (blogs and photos,) the blog would seem most appropriate for my section of our library. The social aspect of photography seems unlikely to appeal to our patrons, who are mostly not local residents, and who are all adults. Far be it from me to say that adults are not narcissistic, but I think that there is less of a need to create a social nexus via photos on the part of adult researchers.


Photos of some of the rarer items in the collection could, however, be helpful --- or at least decorative.

After looking at the four libraries on the link from challenge 6, I have these comments:

• I wonder about the wisdom of a library allowing minors to post their photos on the library's website: or are those teens all 18 and older?
  


• I was entertained by the comment of one teen on the PLCMC site, that putting the library on Second Life would do away with the need to go to the library in person. For some reason it reminded me of the patron at my local library who once needed to renew for the third time the Cliff Notes item he had checked out. Maybe the similarity is not needing to read something.
  


• I wonder why Ann Arbor's list of new books in Spanish only describes them in English.
  


• Denver's homepage is useless for linking to the podcasts they have.
  


• I wonder who is being left behind in the rush to produce podcasts for kids. Just what is the socio-economic distribution of ipods, etc.? Probably a lot broader than I think.

I read about RSS Feeds, signed up for Bloglines, subscribed to a few, and was disappointed in the results. Bloglines doesn't display the entire blog. For instance, for the SF Public Library's Magazine and Newspaper section's blog, the feed doesn't display Herb Caen's typewriter, the ultimate in icons for SF Chronicle readers of the past. I miss Herb, although I also really like Leah Garchik's column, which is the closese replacement. Her "Overheards" (which, the last time I looked at it online, didn't appear in that version) can be priceless. My favorite, a mother overheard speaking to a young child: Eat your donut and then you can have a treat.

The bloglines feed for David Silver's Silver in San Francisco omits the links (using Feevy -- which I am now interested in) on the right of the blog to the most recent posts from a variety of other blogs. I've found Silver's links very interesting, particularly because a number of them are from Spanish-language blogs.

I was also disappointed that Bloglines seems to want to force a user to read only in one language: at least that's what I sense from the language specification, and the statement that blogs in other languages would be translated as much as possible. It might be fun, however, to set the link for one language, then sign up for blogs only in another. For a great column on an English-language website apparently translated from some other language, see Jon Carroll's column in the August 13th San Francisco Chronicle (http://www.sfgate.com/; click on columnists, then on Carroll, then on archive. Leah Garchik is also under columnists.) His quotes are from the accessories section of http://www.apparelop.com/. I was laughing out loud on the streetcar when I read it - fortunately, in SF no one notices or moves away. (Or asks what's so funny.)

Getting back to Bloglines, I unsubscribed to my links -- it's just as easy to have the blogs I like bookmarked, so I can see them in their entirety.

Thanks in part to the links from David Silver's blog, and from Lipstick Librarian (written by someone I knew in library school,) I have already found some interesting library-related blogs, including the SFPL Mags/Newspapers one noted above, and Jessamyn West at http://www.librarian.net/.

23 Things #6-8