WNYC recently reported on
The New York Times morgue, which has gained much notoriety via the popularization of the
Times' new Tumblr called
The Lively Morgue. I presume a lot of people have already run across this gem. If not, you should add it to your RSS reader and/or bookmark it. The content is almost always fascinating.
The
article, and particularly the video that accompanied the article, stood out to me, in part, because they feature the morgue's caretaker, Jeffrey Roth.
I really liked the commentary provided by the
Times photography and reporting staff, especially this:
"I don't know that I would say the morgue is a diamond in the rough, I might say it is a rough in the rough. It is as unpolished as the world we inhabit now, that's what makes it invaluable. It is a reminder that we are not leading a life for the first time. We've been here before."
-
David W. Dunlap,
New York Times reporter.
Labels: libraries, New York Times, photo, videos
Katie recently reminded me of how ridiculous the waiting lists were for new-release books while we were in Minneapolis. Some never became available in our three months there.
But today we got our Nashville library cards and then scooped up tons of great stuff. Among our take: TV on the Radio, Black Mountain, bookmaking books, Nicholson Baker's "The Anthologist," non-fiction like "TYPE: The Secret History of Letters," and reference like "Armed and Dangerous, a writer's guide to weapons" and "Modern Guns Identification and Values, fifteenth edition." On DVD we'll be watching, "The Puffy Chair," a road trip comedy; and "Circus Palestina," a strange foreign flick about a runaway circus tiger.
But the greatest grab of all was the B-52s "Anthology," which proves how absolutely rocking they were.
We love the inter-library loan system. We'll most likely get items from the main downtown branch, which sports amazingly huge and beautiful murals that depict the cityscape over the centuries, then return them at the small branch just 7 blocks from home.
So: Share some library thoughts in the comments.
Labels: books, libraries, music
I recently learned that
Bernard Vonnegut, brother of
Kurt Vonnegut, spent a good portion of his life researching wind and chickens.
When tornadoes slid across the Midwestern United States, into farmhouses and communities, sometimes chickens would get sucked into the vortex, flung far from their original homes, and would walk around for the next few days naked. No feathers.
So the wind ripped the feathers out.
It caused a stir, and a few people were interested in the phenomena. One man even loaded a chicken into a cannon to test how fast it had to move through the air before it lost all its feathers. But it blew up. The chicken, not the cannon.
So Bernard wrote a paper. The paper raked in an Ig Nobel Prize, which is funny. It's funny because Ig Nobel Prizes go to people for their outstanding improbable work. You can look at their Web site
here.
His paper was titled, "Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed."
While that was undoubtedly a major piece of research, Bernard was best known for discovering that silver iodide could be used for cloud seeding, the process of artificially stimulating rain. He never got an
astroid named after him for his research, but people still talk about him sometimes.
He passed away, another victim of cancer, in 1997. But you can read about that at
Wikipedia.
SOME LINKSI'm interested in the new movie
Doubt:
---+ Interview on
Fresh Air---+ Official
trailer+
Beard bird+
Library architecture+ Daniel Silliman, and
some words on journalism.
+
Radical knittingLabels: academia, architecture, birds, journalism, libraries, movies, NPR, Silliman, Vonnegut
