The headline of the story on FOX News is a doozy: "Gay Reversal Advocates Say School Libraries Banning Their 'Ex-Gay' Books."A Chicago-based group, Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays & Gays (PFOX), is suing the Montgomery County, MD school district for their purported "exclusion of "ex-gay" information in its sexual orientation health curriculum."PFOX (I am assuming no relation to FOX) says "there's an entire community of people across the world who say that their sexual orientation changed from gay to straight. But they're not getting their message out, the group says, because libraries across the country refuse to carry literature that...
Tower of Babel at the Reference Desk
(Okay, we shoot the next lunatic, and take it on the lam. You with me?)The Merry Librarian is one of our favorite spots for prospecting; there's gold in them thar hills. Yesterday, Merry - we presume familiarity and beg her forgiveness - related the terrifying tale of a reference librarian at a loss for words simply because she was absent from high school the day the class learned to read hieroglyphics in Mayan and Egyptian, missed the pop quiz in Farsi, and failed Hebrew. And yet they still let her graduate! Here's the saga as related by Merry's correspondent:Here’s a...
Is the E-Reader Price War Next?
The way the current online price war between Wal-Mart, Amazon, Sears and Target is shaping up there is a chance one of them might be paying me to read one of their featured books by Christmas.It started as a shot off the bow by Wal-Mart to wake up the populace to their online life. Pre-order the top upcoming releases for $10 and free shipping but before you could click the buy button Amazon joined the party and matched the deal. Soon after Target joined the fray. Now less than a week later the price sits at $8.98 at Walmart, $8.99...
One Hell of a Book Store – Or the Wrong One?
From Book Patrol's International Book Shops We'd Like To Visit Department. This one in Hong Kong.Thanks to LISNews for the lead.
Gen. McChrystal’s "Bad Habit": He Loves Old Book Shops
(I wish I was home, relaxing in my library, reading a good book)During the 1960s, the phrase “military intelligence” was considered an oxymoron. In the midst of the Vietnam war it was a darkly glib joke, defensible only because of the series of strategic blunders that were made; it certainly seemed to be true that military officers were not the brightest candles in the chandelier and disdained expressions of intellect.It wasn’t true then, it isn’t true now. Buried within Dexter Filken’s New York Times magazine feature last Sunday profiling Gen. Stanley McChrystal, head of allied military operations in Afghanistan, is...