Well I was going to begin this week with a truly lovely trailer for Cornelia Funke's movie Inkheart. After all, both Educating Alice and Bookmoot linked to it on their blogs this week. Yet when I tried to locate the YouTube video I was informed that New Line Cinema had removed it. What gives? Well a quick glance at Cornelia Funke's own site made me feel a little better. She had to take it down too. Apparently there were issues with the preview's music rights. Trailer forthcoming then.
What happens in the year after a person serves on the Newbery committee? Some veg out for months at a time. Others get all crazy and keep reading like there's no tomorrow. And a few, a scant chosen few, put on big afro wigs and perform in library drill cart teams. Here, in this video, we can see my buddy Tim and the good people of the Dayton Metro library system giving it there all as they perform for a magnificently enthusiastic crowd.
Ain't my profession adorable? But you know what videos like this really make me nostalgic for? Parking lots. I miss library parking lots. Lots that could offer enough room to practice something like this. I wanted to do a drill cart team of my own for ALA (possibly with the lovely ladies of the Queens library system) but where do you practice? New York's too cramped a town.
Speaking of New York, fellow New York Public librarian and blogger Walter Minkle at The Monkey Speaks just linked the other day to this video of Stanford professor Ted Lessig and his recent talk at the TED Conference regarding copyright issues. Why play it here? Well, as Walter points out, "Librarians have long worked to make our colleagues sensitive to these laws - for example, reminding classroom teachers that they can’t legally play a DVD of Disney’s Little Mermaid on the nutzy last day of school before winter break without public performance clearance. Yet we’re also increasingly aware how these companies are working to prevent fair use of these materials. Lessig here focuses on how these corporations make it difficult for people - especially young people - to use these materials in remixes and mashups."
It's a good talk. Dunno about the mashups he features, though. I've seen a lot stronger out there.
And finally, you've seen me feature a lot of links to profiles of Robert's Snowflakes on this blog. How many of those artists actually made a video of their efforts, eh? Eh, whot, whot, eh? One that I know of.
God, but that woman's frighteningly talented. Thank you Seven Impossible Things for the link!
