March 19 is Act Happy Day. The week of March 17-22 is Act Happy Week. If you are an exceptionally good actor you can act like spring will really be here on Thursday.
In case you need to boost your acting skills, the Mudd has books on acting for just about anybody.
It was a dark and stormy night. The lightning was flashing, the thunder rolling. The roof of the library continued to be flat. Snow embraced each square corner and enveloped each drain. The reference librarian on duty made the rounds searching in all the usual spots for leaks. But a certain location, once renowned for drips but dry for eons, escaped this librarian’s scrutiny. Then the alert came: a student reported some water. Water. Not a leak, not a drip, but a cascade. Water pouring from the ceiling. Ceiling tiles in smithereens on the floor. The books were removed, the plastic draped, receptacles gathered.
See how our enterprising maintenance and security people saved the Mudd.
The Big Mac® is a handy punching bag, nutrition-wise. It’s made of meat, it’s fatty and it’s often the default bad guy in calorie comparisons. But did you know that a typical MacDonald’s meal (Big Mac®, fries and coffee) “contains at least 19 plant species from 12 families” which “originate in all of the eight global centers of cultivated plant diversity?” The current issue of the journal BioScience has an article detailing these attributes, Serban P, Wilson JRU, Vamosi JC, Richardson DM (2008) Plant Diversity in the Human Diet: Weak Phylogenetic Signal Indicates Breadth. BioScience: Vol. 58, No. 2 pp. 151-159, which you can read if you’re an LU person. The authors call the Big Mac® a “symbol of globalization.” So, please, a little more R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
You’re lucky. Your space solutions most likely involve a few wicker baskets and a double-rod hanging system. But when NASA gets involved it’s a whole-nother kettle of fish.
The International Space University symposium, Space Solutions to Earth’s Global Challenges, begins today in Strasbourg, France. Here we’re talking SPACE space, as in outer. Some topics are a little out-there (“Why We Need an Elevator to Space!”) and some are downright bone-chilling (“The Intersection of Air Law and Space Law.”) And who knew there was an International Space University?
Listen to some Strauss while you ponder your future on the final frontier.
It has been said that copious amounts of snow cause a person to, well, not think clearly. See pibloktoq.
Now municipalities in Wisconsin are mixing beet juice in with salt water to de-ice streets. The only catch is, people who wish to have their streets de-iced must run outside and shout, “Beet juice! Beet juice! Beet juice!”
Read about thawing in the Mudd.
Appleton is justly famous for being the childhood home of Houdini and the place where Rocky Bleier honed his gridiron skills. But it is a little known fact that Appleton is a hotbed of confectionaries. In today’s New York Times read about Appleton’s meccas to cream and butter and follow the Candyland trail throughout northeastern Wisconsin.
Wisconsin: It’s Not Just Beer and Bratwurst.
We’re announcing this a day early so you can still catch a last minute super-saver over there. East Anglia Potato Day is tomorrow. Here you can buy your Yorkshire rhubarb crowns (we have no idea,) taste some chips, swap some seeds and hear a talk on “The Commonwealth Potato Collection.” Might this include common-taters? See November 8, 2007.
FYI: The Library of Congress Subject Heading for potatoes is “potatoes.”
We’re all in favor of world-domination by robots, particularly benevolent, Japanese robots. Get a glimpse of the future at Robotopia Rising beginning today at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D. C. Eleven days of robots and robot-related souvenirs await you. There will also be “robot lectures,” which may be lectures by robots or about robots. We aren’t sure. But this is our favorite: a robot “with artificial lips that move with the same finesse as human ones, enabling it to play the trumpet.”
If we’ve been asked this question once, we been asked it a thousand times: where can I find sheet music for tunes commonly played in British pubs? We usually answer this query with the reference librarian’s shrug. But now a new source has appeared: A Traditional Music Library. This web site out of the U.K. is a “large traditional and folk music library of songbooks, tune-books, sheet-music, lyrics, midis, tablature, plus music theory, chord diagrams, scales and other music educational & academic reference materials.” It has handy full-text searching capability, too. Impress/bore/frighten your friends at your next gathering with rugby songs, sea chanties and banjo ballads.
Sometimes the planets align in such a way that in the space of a couple of short weeks National Pie Day and the release of an online pirate role-playing game come together in perfect fusion:
Used with the kind permission of the artist, Dan Piraro
