Three adorable little baby skunks, a.k.a. Mephitis mephitis (DDC 599.74), were wandering around the lawns next to the library this evening, and one waddled along the sidewalk and right up to the front door and looked in. He had forgotten his library card, so couldn't check out any books, alas.
You may have seen articles about the library’s budget hearing before the City Council in the newspapers or on FATV on Wednesday night, but you may not realize how important your support for the library is for you.
A loss of certification due to budget cuts means:
·You will not be able to go into any library in Massachusetts to borrow materials,
·You will not be able to borrow materials through Interlibrary Loan and
·Grant supported programs, such as FLASH, a family literacy program, will be cut.
The library budget discussion was tabled until Wednesday, June 20 at 2:30 pm. Please show support for your public library by attending this important hearing at City Hall. You do not have to say or do anything. Your presence would send a positive message to the city council. If you cannot attend, please call your councilor and express your concern.
Thank you.
Fitchburg Public Library Staff
From the web: Ten ways for superpatrons to build better libraries. Good advice all around!
Do you know where your daffodils are?
You can find them at the above link, or in the Fitchburg Public Library stacks at 821.71 Word. Or you can see a slightly different version here:
For all language lovers, there was a wonderful episode today of the NPR program "On Point" called "Inventing English: From Beowulf to Eminem." It's available for listening online.
Thanks to City Hall and Comcast the library is now offering wireless Internet access for all of you who have laptops with wireless capability. You do need a username and password available from the information and reference librarians.
A good line can last forever. (Well, for 2500 years, at least.) And it can appear in different media, in different languages, and in both classic literature and popular culture.
Here's a scene from pop culture that's hitting it big at the box office this month, with a famous 2500-year-old line at the end:
Here's another version of the very same scene from about 100 years ago, and even then it was “news that men have heard before”:
The King with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning;
His fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air,
And he that stands will die for nought, and home there's no returning.
A prize can go to anyone who finds on the Library's shelves the next and final line of this verse, or identifies its author. (Or perhaps identifies "The King with half the East at heel.")
A colloquial term for speed bumps placed across a road to slow down traffic is "sleeping policemen." This is apparently a variant of the term "silent cop" used to designate upright posts often set in the middle of intersections to channel traffic and prevent car jams. When was the term "silent cop" first used for these structures? According to one linguistic researcher, the term "silent cop" first appeared in 1914 in the Fitchburg Sentinel.
Have any other English words or expressions originated in Fitchburg? There's a good research question for someone.
I've added a visitors map to the blog sidebar so we can see where people are coming from who visit the FPL blog. Click on it to get a bigger view. (Once a page appears on the web, people from all over the world find it.) These little additions are called "blog widgets" and there are lots of them out there, from visitors maps to weather stickers to clocks and much more.
[Here's an example of the kind of thing that could appear in the FPL blog as a regular feature. It would require keeping a bag of candy in the reference desk so appropriate rewards could be given out. Feel free to edit or delete as you see fit.]
Here's a timely poem for us in the month of March. The first ten people who come to the information desk with with the name of the author (maybe shown in a book) will get a piece of chocolate (to be eaten outside), so start searching! You can't leave the answer as a comment; you have to come to the desk in person to receive your reward.
TOSSING his mane of snows in wildest eddies and tangles,
Lion-like March cometh in, hoarse, with tempestuous breath,
Through all the moaning chimneys, and 'thwart all the hollows and angles
Round the shuddering house, threating of winter and death.
But in my heart I feel the life of the wood and the meadow
Thrilling the pulses that own kindred with fibres that lift
Bud and blade to the sunward, within the inscrutable shadow,
Deep in the oak's chill core, under the gathering drift.
Nay, to earth's life in mine some prescience, or dream, or desire
(How shall I name it aright?) comes for a moment and goes—
Rapture of life ineffable, perfect—as if in the brier,
Leafless there by my door, trembled a sense of the rose.
The New York Times has a story today about LibraryThing.com, the online cataloging system for personal libraries that some people from FPL participate in.
Are you interested in words, phrases, slang expressions and colloquialisms? Check out Michael Quinion's website to learn the definition and origins for words such as cockamamie, eleemosynary, and floccinaucinihilipilification or from where the phrase "push the envelope" comes.
In the swirl of snow in the courtyard today, our own Library Mockingbird still guards his hedges (but the musical shuttle in his throat is still until spring).
One of the most elegant book blogs on the web is BibliOdyssey (which has links to many other interesting book blogs on its blogroll). We'll start making a list of interesting book and library blogs for people to browse -- watch for them to appear on the sidebar.
Beclown: v., to make into a clown, as in "He has beclowned himself."
(This is an example of the sort of thing that could be a regular feature of the Fitchburg Public Library blog: a word of the week, an author of the day, a map of the month, a seasonal poem, a book of the month; many such possibilities are open to us.)
(How about a call number of the week?)
In February, 1857, 150 years ago this month, Henry David Thoreau came up from Concord to give a lecture for the members of the Fitchburg Athenaeum. Thoreau is the subject of the wonderful recent children's book Henry Hikes to Fitchburg, which you can check out from FPL or even read online.
Welcome to the new blog for the Wallace Library in Fitchburg, Massachusetts!
