Here’s what happens when someone offhandedly makes a comment about a music video on Friendfeed: dozens of librarians, thousands of miles apart, put together a small, almost-musical tribute to JoCo.
I discovered three things in watching this:
So this weekend is my annual pilgrimage to Indianapolis to GenCon. This may be my last until Eliza gets big enough to want to go with me…but it’ll be great if that happens!
I know that Josh Neff has done the GenCon thing…with all the rage around gaming librarians, any other librarians hitting the largest gaming convention in the world?
I am absolutely addicted to the new NBC show Heroes. It has everything I want in a serial TV show…good characters, interesting unknowns, and superpowers!
But, in looking to the future, I thought I’d capture for posterity 9 ways that we’ll know that Heroes has jumped the shark.
1. Claire decides that it would be better if everyone has matching uniforms that say “Team Heroes!” on them.
2. It is discovered that the “evolutionary leap” isn’t limited to just humans, and they are joined by Sparky the Dog (power: runs at supersonic speeds and leave a trail of sparks in his wake) and Mongo the Super Intelligent Spider Monkey.
3. Ando wakes up in The Matrix.
4. Horn-Rimmed-Glasses wakes up one morning, rolls over to discover Suzanne Pleshette, and declares that he just had the oddest dream…
5. We discover that all of the Heroes are actually aliens, sent by a galactic invasion team.
6. Pete and Mysterious Black Man end up in the same room, and the whole universe explodes from the interaction of their powers.
7. Claire and Pete continue their verbal flirtation, making it completely aware to everyone around them that they want each other. Then they give in to temptation.
8. Hiro spends an entire episode running towards Radioactive Guy, all the while screaming “KENADAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!” He never gets any closer.
9. It is revealed that the “evolutionary leap” will happen to everyone on Earth soon, and as we know, when everyone is special, it just means no one is.
cue the theme music
From NPR, a fascinating story about a bonobo that seems to have linguistic skills far beyond any other non-human in history. From the story:
Savage-Rumbaugh made a decision; She would stop trying to teach words and sentences to apes. She would give Kanzi a reason to talk, and something to talk about.
“What I had to do is come up with an environment,” she says, “a world that would foster the acquisition of these lexical symbols in Kanzi and a greater understanding of spoken human language.”
…
Before long, Kanzi was doing many of the things humans do with language. He was talking about places and objects that weren’t in sight. He was referring to the past and the future. And he was understanding new sentences made up of familiar words.
Another night of the Master’s Paper. Bibliography = check. Abstract = check. Subject headings = check. All formatting = check. All that’s missing is that seal of approval from Paul, which hopefully comes this weekend.
