-
May 13, 2022 by libroshombre
Our family’s Kentucky Derby brunch turned out to be fertile ground for intellectual speculation, ranging from sandwiches to parasocial …
Continue reading
Category: animals, food, polution, psychology, relationships, social science, sports
| Tags: emotional flooding, freaking out, Kentucky Derby, nanoparticles, sandwiches, ultrafines
-
May 9, 2022 by libroshombre
LIBRARY COLUMN Contact Greg Hill, 479-4344 May 5, 2022 The Chilean-American writer Isabel Allende and I must smell …
Continue reading
Category: authoritarianism, demagoguery, democracy, racism, taste
| Tags: paw-paw, cumin, Ku Klux Klan
-
April 23, 2022 by libroshombre
American writer H.L. Mencken’s word-smithing, the courage of his convictions, and his pioneering work on our version of English, …
Continue reading
Category: eugenics, intelligence, Intelligence Quotiant, librarians, library school, pedantry, punctuation, reading, reference books, reference librarians
| Tags: David Starr Jordan, Henry Herbert Goddard, interrobang, IQ test, morons, Stanford University
-
April 23, 2022 by libroshombre
In “A History of Reading,” Alberto Manguel wrote, “At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of …
Continue reading
Category: Bible, book banning, censorship, e-reader, etymology, language, reading, word origins, words, writers, writing
| Tags: Archie Goodwin, Babar, Billy Budd, Billy Budd KGB, Dav Pilkey, Dr. Seuss, J. Edgar Hoover, Nero Wolfe, Rex Stout, ted geisel
-
April 23, 2022 by libroshombre
You won’t find me arguing with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s claim that “One must be an inventor to read well. …
Continue reading
Category: interlibrary loan, inventors, language, languages, librarians, libraries, libraries and librarians, library history, linguistics, scientists
| Tags: Fred Kilgour, OCLC, pants, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Turfan Man, William Gilbert
-
March 19, 2022 by libroshombre
The Lone Tones is the name of the acapella doowop group in Austin that I’ve sung with for forty-plus …
Continue reading
Category: autobiography, libraries, libraries and librarians, musicians, numbers, public libraries
| Tags: carl barks, elephants, Jimmy Reed, Keith Richards, Scrooge McDuck
-
March 12, 2022 by libroshombre
Eric Hoffer, the American longshoreman philosopher, noticed that “Whenever you trace the origin of a skill or practices which …
Continue reading
Category: art, books, classics, fruit, illustrations, illustrators, librarians, libraries, plants, public libraries, reference librarians, trash
| Tags: bananas, Eric Hoffer, Herman Melville, Moby Dick, nix, phloems, Rockwell Kent, Vladimir Putin, White Wings
-
March 12, 2022 by libroshombre
Carl Sagan is certainly missed; apart from his glowing cosmological credentials and general brilliance, he was insightful while maintaining his …
Continue reading
Category: book banning, books, comics, education, libraries, public libraries, reading, reading brain, school librarians, school libraries
| Tags: Alaska Library Association, Carl Sagan, Fred Laswell, lianhuanhua, Lu Xun, New English Canaan, Puritans, Snuffy Smith, Thomas Morton, Ukraine
-
March 12, 2022 by libroshombre
The shutdown of major league baseball made a recent New Yorker cartoon by Roz Chast poignant. Chast is a …
Continue reading
Category: comics, humor, jokes, sports
| Tags: Bang Finish, Ernie Bushmiller, gags, George Swanson, hendiatris, Nancy, Roz Chast, Rule of Three, tricolon, Yogi Berra
-
February 4, 2022 by libroshombre
Re-watching Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I have a dream” speech has left me considering the distinction between mythology and misinformation. …
Continue reading
Category: languages, libraries, misinformation, mythology, propaganda
| Tags: 1984, Aztecs, doublethink, Eric Arthur Blair, George Orwell, Mexicas, Moctezuma, MOrpheus, Nahua, POUM