The legendary Irony-Free Zone

Last night at work, I came upon Token Boy and Dances With Chickens hunched over a glowing monitor.

"Find a female dwarf. With an axe," commanded Dances With Chickens. "A two-handed axe," she clarified. "No, that one doesn't look drunk enough."

*****

Making fun of avatars is dirty pool. It's like pushing a baby out of a swing - inexcusably heartless, because it's just too easy. Any time a person creates an avatar, he or she is solemnly trusting the forbearance of the rest of the human race. For example, my Second Life avatar is eight feet tall and wears a skin-tight tuxedo. Make of her what you will.

However. Once Token Boy started scrolling through the miniatures representing human wizard characters, I just couldn't resist.



"There's got to be something in here about getting this fucking thing off my hand."



This guy... throws birds at people? That doesn't seem to be a real special power.



"I remember... I remember... clapping."



"Get that Balrog offa my lawn! I'm not cleaning up after that thing again!"



Being a wizard is still no excuse for the pornstache. Plus, this guy's name is Garish MacRae.



Oompa Loompa? or balding Mae West?



"Wait for the light."



"My tumor, let me show you it."



"My pipe wrench, I will smite you with it."



"Where's that can of tuna? I found the opener."



Token Boy's character is a young mage, so he was in the market for a wizard without a beard (and, presumably, without a bird, a can opener, fire instead of hands, or a terrible mustache). This young fellow was the closest thing. Unfortunately, his name is "Marcus Starsong," which I'm pretty sure is D&D code for, "Our community embraces people of all orientations," and, while it's true that role-playing games such as D&D offer people an opportunity to explore personae that they will never inhabit in real life, I don't believe Token Boy is working that particular side of the cobblestoned alley.



Dances With Chickens said, "Not this guy, he's kind of geeky." Right.

Or possibly "I select," "I recite," or "I steal"

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the patent on LEGO. Some facts:

• "LEGO" is an elision of the Danish words for "good play," "LEg GOdt". In Latin, "lego" means "I bring together". Just a coincidence.
• The world's children spend 5 billion hours a year playing with LEGO bricks.
• My children account for about 3 billion of those hours.
• There are some awesome stop-motion LEGO fiends out there.

Some are Polish:



Some are Harrison Ford fans:



Some of them seem to believe that Han Solo and Chewbacca REALLY know their ship:



And then there's actual genius:

All you fascists are bound to lose

heartthrob, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

This one, the one who's eating his soup with a fork, talked me into buying him a black camouflage hoodie over the weekend. And matching cargo pants. He looks like he's just been released from Central Booking, and he's in first grade.

Oh but who am I kidding? With that long hair and the missing front teeth, he looks totally cool in that outfit. Ordinarily, they look a little homeless - almost all their clothes are hand-me-downs, which explains this green sweatshirt from a preschool with which we have no affiliation, and I let them pick out their own clothes, which explains combos like this one.

A bunch of us moms are kind of against camouflage. Speaking for myself, I just don't like little kids dressing up like soldiers. And it seems violent. I can't actually put my finger on what I find distasteful about it, and I think that's why I caved on that hoodie. That, plus it was six bucks at Old Navy.

You put the jitterbug into my brain

Of course there's going to be a George W. Bush Presidential Library. I mean, lots and lots of people voted for him - twice - so he's president, and presidents get presidential libraries, no matter how ridiculous it might sound. It would help, I think, if they called them archives, since after all they are mostly repositories for unique documents, and thus centers for scholarship (as distinct from education).

Anyway, The Chronicle of Higher Education is holding a Back-of-the-Envelope Bush Library Design Contest for the GWB POTUS Library. I believe they may be expecting a great deal of sarcasm in the entries they receive.

Attention all planets of the Solar Federation

Isn't it lucky that Rush never made some kind of horrendous narrative video of side one of their album 2112? Think of it.

Oh my god it could have been great, though - Geddy Lee playing all the parts, just with his hair done differently: naive longhair Geddy discovering a guitar in a cave; uptight ponytailed reduplicated Geddy as the priests smacking down the youngster; Neil Peart smirking in the background. Misty shots of Alex Lifeson with his satin-pants camel toe whaling on that guitar could be little Geddy's dream of a more culturally democratic world.

This is where fanfic comes from, doesn't it? I guess minus the choking with laughter part.

No, really, we're lucky. These guys are musical geniuses, but their visual sense is atrocious. Look at the album covers. And the concerts - I never saw more smoke and purple lights until the Jesus and Mary Chain toured the U.S. And even Jesus and Mary Chain didn't wear satin pants.

My brother and I and a few of his friends were giant Rush fans in high school (and beyond). I saved my ice cream scooping money to buy the albums and concert tickets. My brother would put A Farewell to Kings (speaking of wince-worthy visuals, and smoke, and you know, damn it, I'd like to wear a satin kimono to work sometimes too) on the tape deck in his room, hit the repeat button, and fall asleep that way, pissing my father off gigantically. He did that with ELP too though... "Hoedown" is really nothing that young unconscious minds should be exposed to.

Yes, we loved our pretentious '70's arena rock. We were never quite as inspired as this guy though.

It ain't easy to be bold in an unknown city

sky, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Yeah, yeah, we all know the Classic Signs of Depression. (Or maybe we don't - I just had to look them up. Interesting. Plus, god damn it, I thought I had lost weight because I am so fine and virtuous and here the Mayo Clinic explains that my pants are fitting better for the same reason that I can't get up in the morning. Well, shit.)

But I have a set of easily recognizable Un-Classic Signs of Depression.

• You realize that the cheap shampoo you switched to is killing your hair, and you keep using it anyway, just to finish the bottle.


• You listen exclusively to The The for a few days straight (Liblif, you were totally right - a little Matt Johnson goes a long way).


• Blog posts slow to a trickle.


• Island or peninsula? Or nook? You obsess over the design for the kitchen renovation, convinced that if you don't make the right decision, you will regret it, maybe not today, but tomorrow, and for the rest of your life.


• You read Vanity Fair magazine - cover to motherfucking cover (except for the big political article, of course). And despite what you're thinking, this is not an activity entirely without value: did you know that the new Indiana Jones movie includes Shia LeBaeiouf, brings back Karen Allen and may be about space aliens? Well I do, because I read Vanity Fair cover to cover Tuesday night.
  


• You sign up for a children's literature reading group that has on its reading list Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron. Blurb:

"Not since The Catcher in the Rye has a novel captured the deep and almost physical ache of adolescent existential sadness as trenchantly as the perfectly titled Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You."

Oh, god.

And one sure sign that depression may be abating:

• Joking about it.

We could be heroes

SpeedMan, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Who is that?
That's me!
And what superhero are you being?
SpeedMan!
And what is your power?
To run really fast in the woods and then turn into a lantern and then hang from a tree and my arms and legs are in the lantern and when I hear the bad guy I stick my legs out and touch my belly to the bad guy and sting him and the bad guy who didn't get stinged runs away and the bad guy who did get stinged just lays there and goes
"Aaaugh! aaugh! aaugh!"

And who's this bad guy, what's his name? A-Hole?
No, he's Black Hole! A-Hole must be his brother. And we don't have an A-Hole around here so we'll have to make one out of LEGO.

Oh, the irony.

By way of Maughta at Judge a Book by its Cover... one day this September, Steph at Natural/Artificial got into a fit of giggles with a co-worker about Just. How. Terrible. the new James Patterson book, You've Been Warned is. One Amazon review reads:

"All the paragraphs.
Are written.
Like THIS!
BOO!"

and she compiled all the last lines from each chapter. It is some damn funny reading.

All this was prompted by the discovery that, at the time, this stinker was at the top of the NY Times Best Seller list. As Mr. Patterson himself might comment:

"Utter. Freakin’. Amazement."

Today's new picture books - mid-January

The only boy in ballet class, written by Denise Gruska with illustrations by Amy Wummer.
Hey! Billy Elliot, his own story! No. Good lord. It's a wonderful and heartwarming story about a boy who loves ballet and who gets picked on and teased until one day when he... wins The Big Game. The other kids see that the jetés and chassés that they derided as poncy and fey are effective strategies for avoiding defensive linemen. Kind of stretching it a little here.

Llama llama mad at Mama by Anna Dewdney.
I may be the only mom, and certainly the only librarian I know, who ever didn't fall in love with Llama llama red pajama. As for this one: aw, no. Llama llama pitches a fit at the supermarket and throws all the crap out of the cart and instead of indicating her displeasure at his behavior, Mama suggests that they work together as a team to get the shopping done. Go on, pull the other one. Still, the rhymes and pictures are excellent, and I could see reading this to a three year old and saying, "Oh my gosh! Isn't that a terrible way to behave?"

The Nutcracker Doll, written and illustrated by Mary Newell DePalma.
Just in time for Chri- .... oh, I've made that joke before, haven't I? Wouldn't it be nice if our holiday books were processed in time for the holiday in question? This is a nice little one, for all the ballet-mad girls. Kepley gets to be onstage in a production of The Nutcracker. Pretty straightforward, and as it turns out, that's because it's a true story about the author's daughter. If it were me, I'd have included that tidbit on a page at the beginning or end. Maybe it was there but I missed it.




Br'er Rabbit Captured! A Dr. David Harleyson Adventure, by Jean Cassels.
Cute, cute, and more cute! It's fractured Br'er Rabbit! The narrator's uncle is trying to catch up to Br'er Rabbit to paint his portrait, and he is aided by the other characters in the folktales. Told in epistolary multiple first person narrative, a favorite for fractured stories (think Hoodwinked), we get to hear many of the tales retold in the course of trying to find the rabbit. Really fine art.

Magic Night, by Isobelle Carmody, illustrated by Declan Lee.
Don't let your adult fantasy readers get their hands on this - it'll never get back to the children's section. A pixie-like thing gets into the house and things start transforming weirdly, with only the cat to see. BEAUTIFUL illustrations, the kind that make you look at a coffee mug full of pens and wonder what it would look like if it came to life. My Big Man is going to love it, and any other Spiderwick fan is too.




Ivan the Terrier by Peter Catalanotto.
Just like Mélanie Watt's cat Chester, Peter Catalanotto's dog Ivan takes over this book, interrupting every story the narrator tries to read. The cover, a straight-on portrait of Ivan, is the best thing about this book, and I'm not being bitchy.

The Mine-o-saur by Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen, illustrated by David Clark.
Sharing. Dinosaurs. But! David Clark, we love that guy! He illustrated Gakky Two-Feet, which was super-weird, but worth it for the pop-eyed hominids (it's the only picture book I know about natural selection) and the smart colors.




When dinosaurs came with everything, written by Elise Broach, illustrated by David Small.
Now, why aren't all picture books written like this? The mom is very mom-like, and the kid sounds just like my 6-year-old, who, when asked the other day if he bugs the kid who sits next to him with too much talking, said, "No. Sometimes I ask him, 'Dude, how's it going?' but that's all." The kid in this book, upon learning that he gets a dinosaur instead of a sticker after his checkup, crumples slightly, knees together, throws back his head with his arms up, and cries, "YESSS!" And I LOVE the scratchy pen and ink and watercolor illustrations - David Small also illustrated The Gardener, one of my all-time happy weepie picture books. I even love the typeface, the same one used in 17 Things I'm Not Allowed to Do Anymore. In other words, unless In Jesse's Shoes turns out to be an unexpected superstar, I think we have our Book of the Day!

Keep love in your heart, little one, by Giles Andreae, illustrated by Clara Vulliamy.
No, no. Shut up. How am I going to know that I can't stand books like this unless I read one every now and then? Well, I have to say, if you're going to take home this kind of book, Keep love in your heart is a good option. The illustrations are quite beautiful, with lovely little details. And it's not pure schmaltz... it's more like... lemon curd. Probably because it's British.

In Jesse's Shoes: Appreciating Kids with Special Needs, by Beverly Lewis, illustrated by Laura Nikiel.
Yes, that Beverly Lewis, the one who writes the "dirty Amish books", as one of my Monday-night patrons calls them. That explains the heavy God content of this otherwise perfectly ordinary, maudlin book about Allie and her developmentally disabled older brother Jesse, who she feels guilty about being embarrassed by. Sort of like Al Capone Does My Shirts for a younger crowd. And with divinely-inspired guilt in addition to ordinary empathy-deficit guilt.

Ziba came on a boat, written by Liz Lofthouse, illustrated by Robert Ingpen.
Afghan(?) refugee child. What it was like in her village before everything went to crap and what it was like when it went to crap, plus Ziba's dreams of freedom. So many questions, starting with: what's she doing on a boat? What part of which cold, mountainous, headscarf-wearing, goat-eating country - it certainly appears to be Afghanistan, an impression that is backed up by the author's short biography - do you flee in a boat? Too distracted by that one question even to enjoy the lovely illustrations by the always-classy Robert Ingpen.

Punk Farm on Tour by Jarrett J. Krosoczka.
You know I just want to love everything JJK does: Bubble Bath Pirates was such a fave at our house a couple years ago, partly because the mom is a pirate too, and besides, the man is just so damn funny. But when I took Punk Farm (this book's predecessor) home, it got a totally ho-hum response. Aaaand... I'm not sure this one's gonna rock the house either. The band covers "Wheels on the bus"... that's kind of never a good sign.




Chester by Ayano Imai.
What do you call this kind of book? Underappreciated family member runs away from home but does not find comfort anywhere else and then comes back home and now they love him. Do you call that Wizard of Oz? Goldilocks? Whatever you call it, it is Oh My God So Very Done. I'll forgive Ayano Imai because she has spent most of her life in Japan and maybe it's not such a tired trope there, and besides, her pictures are just excellent.

Romeo and Lou Blast Off by Derek Anderson.
Well, it's cute. Romeo and Lou are a penguin and a polar bear (do you get as cheesed-off as my six-year-old does when people put penguins and polar bears in the same environment? Even when it's a silly book, it's still just Not Right.), anyway, an Arctic mammal and an Antarctic bird build a snow rocket that magically takes off and crash-lands them in a city. As they try to figure out how to get home, they interpret the city sights using their native vernacular: they think two guys with mustaches are walruses, kids in bright-colored swimsuits are fish, etc. Kind of a dud.

This is the day! Adapted by Phillis Gershator, illustrated by Marjorie Priceman.
I don't always go for Marjorie Priceman's sort of Chagall-y work: I know it's meant to be gestural, but it often falls over the edge into slapdash for me. But boy do her willowy women and 1950's wirework furniture work in this book, an adaptation of an old song that goes "Monday's the day we give babies away with half a pound of tea. Here comes a lady who wants a baby. 'I'll take this one,' says she..." It's an irresistible song, light-hearted and with an adoption theme, and the illustrations are sunny and swingy and the whole book just really works. Besides the fact that a different song with the same title is one of my favorite songs of all time. ALL TIME. THE THE ROCKS, PEOPLE. (And oh my, wasn't Matt Johnson cute back when he had hair!)

But the nanny will run you six bucks

Hurry on over to Target - they got slave kids on sale for $1.75!