What's in Your Google Wallet?

So yesterday Google announced their new service, Google Wallet.  The no-touchy hands-off payment system works like a credit card but instead of getting frustrated because your card will not swipe you can get frustrated waving your phone at check out line.  I image a scene where a dozen people are in front of the Wal-Mart check out waving their hands like they are trying to Jedi mind trick a damn machine.  "Seriously, these are the Doritos I was looking for"  The service will also send you coupons, finally turning spam emails into those annoying newspaper-like things in my mail that I use for wrapping paper.

Also, Paypal sued Google over this service.  Yep.  Apparently when you leave one company to go work at another that oddly starts making nearly the same product, that's grounds for a lawsuit.  But do you think Paypal will win?  I doubt it.  The idea is pretty common and Google's been looking to break in to this market for years with services like Google Checkout and attempting to buy Groupon.  As long as I can get my BOGO coupons for my Zima, who cares?

Sorry, Virginia, Your Magic Woodchuck is Drunken Man Dinner

Let me take you back to a simpler time.  A time when men could be men, women could be women, and groundhogs could be groundhogs.  I share with you the most awesome "Groundhog Day" article in existance from the month of March in the year of our spaghetti monster 1939.  

Full text and commentary after the jump

Gobbler's Knob Ground's Forecast "Hooey"  

by Associated Press

GOBBLER'S KNOB, PUNXSUTAWNEY, Pa., Feb 2 - Br'e Groundhog - the Punxsutawney one - saw his shadow today and, legend has it, presages six more weeks of winter.
Chiefs of the Punxsutawney Groundhog lodge announced the woodchuck emerged from winter hibernation proptly at 8:19 a.m. (Central Standard time).  Several inches of snow covered the stoney ridge above the woodchuck's hole.
The "Sage of Gobbler's Knob," as woodchuck is known hereabouts, hustled back into his snug burrow, leaping over his shadow as he went, members of the lodge averred.
Government Weather Observer W. S. Orotzman said in Pittsburgh it was "all hooey."
"How is a groundhog," said he with disdain, "going to see his shadow when there isn't any sun?  The sun wasn't shining today anywhere in this area."
The legend of Gobbler's Knob started 41 years ago when several men got together, bought a keg of beer and climbed to the Knob to hunt groundhogs.  The routed one, fried it in butter, and ate it.
The liked the jaunt so much they founded a club that eventually grew into an organization of 500, including many notables.
Over in the eastern part of the state, there are rival groundhog "prophets" at Quarryville and another in the Lehigh valley at Allentown.
The Quarryville lodgemen, as custom dictates, pilgrimaged at dawn to their woodchuck's hole but they will not announce the forecast until tonight.
Lodge members at Quarryville voted Vice President John Nance Garner an honorary member this year.

This is the most fascinating piece of writing since "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus" but in reverse.  This is a secret expose from our intrepid reporter Mr. A. Press writing "Sorry, Virginia, Your Magic Woodchuck is Drunken Man Dinner."  Let's expose the seedy underbelly of this messed up story.

The first three paragraphs are your normal GH-Day good times punched up with city words like "presages" and "averred."  If I had skipped the headline, I would be asking my grandma to stop spamming my email with this crap from her childhood.

Then, boom.  There goes the dynamite.  We get rocked by the news that some government weasel has proved that groundhogs cannot predict the weather.  Government Weather Observer W. S. Orotzman woke up, read his morning news, went to work observing government weather and began calling bullshit about what was happening in Gobbler's Knob because he reckoned nobody was seeing any of this "shadow" nonsense on such a cloudy day.

Imagine this scene if you will.  It is a snowy Christmas Eve.  The family is huddled around the television, the kids drinking hot chocolate, dad has a soda, and mommy has her special mommy grape juice.

The local newspersons are bantering back and forth when the anchor, Chet Rodberry, puts his left hand to his ear and says "This just in: Hey, we got radar lock on Santa over Chicago"

"Wait," a voice says off camera.  The weather man, John Stormington, calmly walks out and says, "No, you don't, Chet. You don't have radar lock on Santa Claus over Chicago.  Wanna know why?  There is a blizzard in Chicago right now. If there is anyone flying in that area, may God have mercy on their souls because whatever magic demon reindeer juice they have is not going to save a fat man and an elf or two during this weather. How stupid is it that reindeer fly, anyway?"

Yeah, that year sucked.

Anyway, back to the article and away from traumatic childhood.  I would not be so critical if the article did not say he says so with "disdain."  This man clearly wants you, the reader, to know that the folks at Gobbler's Knob are full of crap about a groundhog predicting the weather.  Re-read that last sentence aloud.

Of course, this article could not stop there.  Now we are on a mission to disprove the climatology-inclined rodent.  Let's go after the history.  Apparently, Bill Murray in Groundhog Day was right: they used to pull the thing out and eat it.  With a keg.  They had so much fun drunkenly talking to and eating a woodland animal, they started making shit up.  "Hey, wouldn't it be *hic* cool if this woodchuck could tell us if it'll stay cold?"  Everyone drunkenly agreed and we have a holiday.  That seems to be the basis for most holidays, if you think about it.  "Dude, I totally think it would be cool if we had a rabbit that crapped chocolate eggs instead of crap."

This is where the article takes a dark turn.  What could have been a cute article now begins to take conspiratorial overtones when the questions come out. Whose "prophet" groundhog is the correct one, Gobbler's Knob, Quarryville or Allentown?  How do we choose a successor when we eat this one?  How far up the ladder does this thing really go?  If the Vice President of the United States is made an honorary member, what obligations does that entail from either party?  Can he call the Quarryville groundhog lodge to war when the U.S. starts fighting Hitler?

We may never know because the article seems to end rather abruptly. It was as if someone did not want

Now It's Time for More Facebook Bull$h1t

First up, Microsoft's Bing has begun to more deeply use Facebook "likes" in their search queries.  Basically, if you are logged into Facebook with Bing, Bing will use your and your friend's "likes" within the search results.  Here's the problem as I see it:  this is going to turn the Internet back into the porn, troll and 80s sitcom mess it used to be when every search includes at least one result from a group entitled "Bring Back the Facts of Life But in Porn Cause We All Know Jo Was a Lesbian." computerworld

Cameron and Tyler Winklevondl... Winkandfondle.. Twinvillian from that social movie, have been denied the appeal in their lawsuit against other really rich people and will have to get by on $100 million.  Com'on judge, that's totally not enough money to swim in comfortably!  Okay, maybe swim, but no diving!  rcrwireless

California introducing bill that will allow parents to have private information stripped from their children's social network accounts.  As long as they don't introduce a bill that let's celebrities get away with murder.  Am I right?   FoxNews, aka Broken Clock

Yeah, go slow news day.

True Blood Author Sells Over 1 Million eBooks

Did you know that sex sells?

Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse (True Blood) novels, has become the fourth author to pass the 1 million mark in ebooks sold on Amazon's Kindle Store.  Harris said in Amazon's news release: 

"When Amazon first unveiled the Kindle three and a half years ago, I would never have expected to be one of the first handful of authors in the Kindle Million Club. It's been an amazing few years for myself and the Kindle both, but even more so to have my books available to my readers in ways that just a few years ago would have seemed as fantastic as vampires coming out of the coffin."  

I am not sure what is scarier here:  that these books are selling so much or that Ms. Harris believes computers are just as unbelievable as the dead coming back to life.  Or am I reading that wrong?  Is she saying that because you would expect a vampire to come from a coffin that she always expected readers would find her books on computers?

J K Rowling!  Mean author blood lady make my head hurt!  Kill her ebook sales with your Pottery Potter-ness.  Pretty please?  Make me think, will ya.  Rowling gonna make a Kindle Million-billion-bazillion Club.  You'll see, Ms. Fang, you'll see.

Hey, how come there were never any vampires in Harry Potter?

Boy Banned From Prom After Asking for Date, Learns Irony

James Tate asked Sonali Rodrigues to prom by hanging foot tall letters to the side of the school during the night.  The school board said no.  Tate and the other boys who helped him were banned from the prom and suspended from school for trespassing on school grounds after hours and being unsafe.

Ah, youth.  I remember one time in the mid-nineties a similar situation happened.  My girl and I had been in a fight, something stupid about her giving me a pen.  I stood outside her house in my long tan overcoat holding a boombox over my head, blasting the song we fell in love to.  Then, just as the chorus reached its peak, she looked out the window and smiled.  Then her father hit me with the water hose.  Because the boombox was plugged in to the outside socket, I was electrocuted and my Def Leppard CD was ruined.  My family sued her family, we got millions and I lost the love of my life.  I will never hear Pour Some Sugar on Me without remembering her.

Let James Tate Go to the Prom Facebook Community
SFGate

Ms. Rodrigues did say yes, in case you were wondering.

Losing 2,500 Books Not That Uncommon

Woodrow Wilson High School library in Washington, D.C. was moving in the summer of 2010 to a temporary facility when around 2,500 items were misplaced, roughly the entire nonfiction collection, according to the Washington Post.

Hell, that ain't too bad.  I remember one time we lost a whole librarian.  She got a staple stuck in her finger and we figure it got infected cause she got kinda ornery and would snap when anybody got near her.  Then one day she just kinda waundered off into the stacks alone.  We found her a month later, passed away dead behind the true crime section.  We figure she just wanted to die with some dignity.  In her will she expressed she be buried like she lived, so we all got drunk as hell, put her on a boat and took turns shooting flaming arrows until she sank to the depths in a blaze of glory.  Here's to you, Brenda from Reference, the finest Viking Librarian I ever knew!

Dramatic representation of Brenda's average reference day courtesy of Long Beach City College.

"Go the F(moon)k to Sleep" Optioned as a Movie

Variety reports that the adult child rearing book Go the F**k to Sleep by Adam Mansbach has been optioned as a movie by Fox.

Self help books and twitter feeds, those make great film, ain't that right "Sh@t My Dad Says" and He's Just Not That Into You?  (Actually, I kinda liked that movie.)

Variety

Library of Congress to Rock Around the Clock

The Library of Congress and partner Sony Music Entertainment are set to release the website "National Jukebox" to the public today.  The website is a streaming service of licence free American music classics.  Users will be able to do just about everything they can do with every other music service, download, playlists, blah, yadda, and sha-mon.  

For all the ladies out there, Harry Connick, Jr will be on hand to rock the LoC with a classic song featured on the site.  Aaand swoon.  Yeah, I'm a guy and even I can say when that dude plays his version of "If I only had a brain" from Wizard of Oz I get teared up.  For cereal.

No site available right now but keep up @librarycongress.

UPDATE:  It's alive!

Washington Post

Comic Conservator Blackbeard Dies: Totally Not a Pirate Thing

 

Too soon, Mark Trail, too soon

Bill Blackbeard, known as the scholar of newspaper comics, died at 84 years of age on March 10th. 

Banned Library tends to look to the lighter side, sometimes in a mocking and neener-neener kinda way, but what this guy did was pretty cool.

When the awesomely-named Mr. Blackbeard saw there was no archive of newspaper comics, he started one.  His appreciation for the art form lead to the preservation, knowledge and recognition of comics in general.   Mr. Blackbeard wrote scholarly papers on the subject, even a collection of comics published by the Smithsonian.  Even if you do not enjoy comics, we should celebrate anyone who attempts to hold on to any part of our culture and traditions, especially those that are fading away as we head towards newer technologies.

One of my favorite things as a kid was grabbing the big Sunday paper and pulling out the "funnies."  While that may never again occur in this society, I am thankful Bill Blackbeard was thoughtful enough to hold onto all those items. 

LA Times

The Tea Party and ACLU Join Together to Form Leaftron

Superior Court Judge Monica Marlow ordered a halt on the Shasta County Redding Library's policy that states groups handing out leaflets must stay in a special 66 square foot area outside the library after the library was sued separately by the American Civil Liberties Union of California and the North State Tea Party Alliance.

Damn, that was a long sentence.

Seems the library wanted the annoying people handing out political materials to stop annoying their patrons, wrote up a policy, and got sued for the policy by the annoying people and a normally clear-headed organization that is not the Tea Party.  The argument is all about free speech, which is great, but also about solicitation, which is arguably not great.  I am fine with people handing out leaflets and flyers and whatever else they want, but get the hell out of my face when I am looking for a book or want some peace and quiet with my laptop in the library.

Yes, free speech should reign at the library.  No, I should not have to have someone pushing the information in my face unless I ask a rather tenacious librarian for it.

Redding.com

Get Ready to Flex: Paper-thin Phones In the Works

Fat ass

Ever looked at your phone and thought, "You could lose some weight with that chunky butt?"  Well, so did the researchers at Arizona State University and Queen's University in Canada.  They started working on a smartphone that uses the same e-ink technology found in eReaders.  The phone has all the functionality as a modern smart phone, except, you know, color. 

Check out this link to eBook Magazine for more on the story and a video.

Amazon All Romanitco

Amazon has announced they are starting an imprint for romance books called Montlake Romance.  The imprint will start with Connie Brockway's "The Other Guy's Bride."

I would like to announce my own imprint, coming soon:  Bestiality and Necrophilia Books.  I'm trying to get all Twilight fanfic together.  You know, for kids.

In honor of Amazon's imprint, I give you Shaggy's Boombastic:

New Nook on the Horizon?

CNET announced today that a new version of Barnes and Noble's Nook eReader is likely on the way, this time with e-ink.  Quoting from the Wall Street Journal, the article said a filing to the SEC was released that in part read that a Barnes and Noble would be announcing the release of a new eReader device on May 24th.

Oh, goody.  The summer war for how to confuse even the most tech savvy person is beginning.  Every year the same.  Imagine the questions you will get as a librarian, both in your professional and private life:

"Which eReader is the best?"
"What eReader should I get if I don't wanna spend any money?"
"What eReader should I get if I wanna read library eBooks?"
"My mind says Kindle, but my cat says Nook.  Who's right?"

And on and on and on all summer long until every cool little gadget has been released.  Then we get to show them how to use them.

CNET
WSJ

Food in the Library

There is a monster in the library.  The monster can range from two inches to seven feet tall, spreads like mad, and has a curious sound reported to be "munching or paper rustling, I dunno kinda like a garbage truck with a hemorroid."  I am talking about food in the library.

The following are some of my favorite excuses for food being in the library:

"This is my birthday cake" (it was a two foot by three foot strawberry long cake)
"My blood sugar's low" (a bucket of fried chicken)
"If my son doesn't eat, he gets hyper" (bag of potato chips ground into the carpet)
"But it's diet" (can of soda)
"It's okay, they are communion wafers" (they were, whole bag of them)
"I am checking out movies!" (bag of cheddar cheese popcorn)
"They have bunches of vitamins!" (whole raw carrots)
"But they sell it next door" (venti mocha latte with low fat foam and a dash of cinnamon)
"Because it was here and I am a termite" (wood)
"I am a mouse" (random crumbs)
"I am a snake" (mouse)