I'm looking for slow cooker recipes that take almost zero effort to prepare...

...and one such recipe makes reference to tomatillos! I was like, "What the hell is a tomatillo? A tiny tomato?" and my esteemed colleague said "Tiny armadillos that look like tomatoes?" So now, here is the real question:

Where the hell do I find tiny little armadillos that look like tomatoes to put in my slow cooker?

Edward Joseph Doherty...or "Eddie" to his mates

Image from Amazon.com

I came across this author in the library catalogue today, and thought nothing much of him till Library of Congress Authority Headings informed me his name should be written as "Doherty, Eddie, 1890-1975" instead of "Doherty, Edward Joseph, 1890-1975." Funny how a little bit of informality can change one's perception of a guy. But I still didn't get really intrigued until I checked out his books on our catalogue and found:

1. Splendor of sorrow : for sinners only (1943)
2. Psalms of a sinner (1976)
3. Lambs in wolfskins : the conquering march of don John Bosco (1953)
   
   and my personal favourite:


4. A hermit without a permit (1977)

Seems as if half his books were published posthumously. Seems also like the guy led an interesting life. But really, I just wanna know more about the hermit who has no permit! Especially after I just looked at the Amazon.com product description:

"Meditations fun and frolicsome, by an elderly Irish hermit!"

There's more, too, like what may be chapter titles: "God is a Pushover", "The Most Unmortified Christian Mystic" and "Beware the Divine Pickpocket!"

Sounds to me like this Eddie guy lived a life of great vivacity!

Are you a floor crumber or a bin crumber?

A matter has arisen in the library today - actually, in the library lunch room, to be specific - about people who are floor crumbers (they'll just sweep their crumbs straight onto the floor with blatant disregard for the folks who have to clean it up at 4am or whatever time the cleaners come here each morning ;)) vs. people who are just a little more thoughtful than that. In this particular office we have one Floor Crumber, one Bin Crumber and one person whose crumbing inclinations are currently unknown (we haven't asked her yet).

What kind of crumber are you?

Library tangles and library cats

Last night, in between bouts of lying awake in the pitch black, wondering what would happen to an item that's been flagged for Reserve, put on and then off Reserve before the end of day system process has run, checked out to a borrower, and checked back in, but that also happens to have a request on it - in short, ARGH! - I dreamed at one point that my kitty cat Smog was...wait for it...a library cat!

There are no sleeping bags
in the library.

He was actually a fill-in library cat for the Law Library, because they had apparently had another library cat who had gone missing. My Smoggy had been doing temp library cat duty for a few months. In my dream, the day had finally arrived when somebody came by to announce that the lost library cat had returned, and so Smog's services were no longer needed. A guy who worked at the library (who doesn't work at that library in reality) got so emotional he started crying, 'cause he was going to miss Smoggy. Personally I can understand the pulling power of this kitty, but I also think that realistically, that library guy would also feel a little relief that he would finally stop being pestered at lunch time...and morning tea time...and afternoon tea time...by this naughty, naughty cat.

Anyway, in the dream I gave the crying guy a hug and said, "Don't worry, you can visit Smog at my place!" and he said back, "It's just been a really bad day..."

It's tough being a cat sometimes (and yes,
that is a paw in the bottom right hand corner).

I've only ever read a book about one library cat - Dewey - and of course as a result of that read, I've heard of other library cats. But knowing what I do about my Smoggy boy-o, it'd probably take him a while to warm up to people in the library. Not as long as it'd take my other cat, but she's not a dream library cat so she doesn't count.

"Did you mean...holy mofos batman?"

Google tells us that "holy mofo's" should not have an apostrophe. But what if we're talking about a holy mofo's right to free speech? In that case, a holy mofo certainly has the right to an apostrophe in his or her sentence.

Source

After I commented with "holy mofos" on a colleague's Facebook status (as one does while in the office, when discussing coming wild weather that will send us all home from work early), said colleague commented in response: "...Batman!" After which she set out on a mission to discover whether or not anyone else in the world had ever said "Holy mofos, Batman" before.

She found 5 results with an early search, but then the question came up: do you include that comma or not? Do you include an apostrophe, in which case you're actually talking about a holy mofo's Batman - maybe a Batman figurine in a holy mofo's possession? Oh, the possibilities are endless...but now I must check if she's still Googling holy mofos and Batman.

No, she's not. She's Googling what "kts" means, and it means...not what is in the Wikipedia article, which turned out to be WROOOONNGGGGGG.


See, kids? It's like the librarian told you. Don't trust Wikipedia.

P.S. Does Spiderman have a car?

Are you webist?

webist: racism against websites. any websites. anywhere. any time.

Yep, we were discussing what it means to be webist today. Because she was writing an email about websites, or rather "the website", and she accidentally (Freudian slip?) wrote 'webist'. Is she a webist? Not bloody likely. Am I a webist? Well, if I was I'd probably be shunning this blog with some serious gusto.

What about you? Are you a webist? Have you come here just to hate?

Webist! (I don't think those guys are webist)

In other very hateworthy news, a friend challenged me to watch this video:





I got to 35 seconds and had to have a break. Then I watched a bit more, and had to give up entirely. My brain is still not fully cleansed. I'm not sure it ever will be.

"Animals worth knowing" - a nice read for a Friday arvo

Favourite book title of a Friday afternoon:

Animals worth knowing, selected from "Life histories of northern animals" (1934), by Ernest Thompson Seton

I'm thinking that a lot of animals are worth knowing, 'cause ya know, they're all cute and stuff! Some animals may be less cute than others. For instance, if you compare a koala with a cockroach, well, okay, I guess it depends on your definition of cuteness. For some, feelers and fluttery cockroach wings may be super cute. For others, like me, fluffy koalaness is more cute.

But this isn't even about what's cute, it's about what is worth knowing. I'm curious about this book. We supposedly have it on our library, so I'm going to have to check it out and see if I agree with Seton's opinion on which animals are worth knowing.

A slight spanner is thrown into the works, however, when we see that on Amazon.com, this book is listed as Animals (worth knowing), rather than Animals worth knowing. This suggests to me that the book could be basically about animals, and the information we're given in the book is worth knowing.

I'll let you know what I think when I find the book.

"I feel a blog post coming on"

"How do you spell that? Preposterousness."
"Preposteration?"
"Preposterivity?"
"It's positively preposteracious!"

This is the stuff we talk about when we've got sore brains and it's too early even for three-thirtyitis to kick in with any reasonable excuse!

This is the office of brain hurtiness at present. At the very least the majority of people in this office have sore brains from the work we're looking at in our inboxes (or, at times, not in our inboxes but elsewhere). Particularly as my colleague isn't even doing her "real work" but work that shouldn't really be hers that she's doing 'cause nobody else in this place knows how to do it. Or at least nobody who's been able to be roped into doing it.

Ssshh don't tell her I said that.

I think my work here (making your brain hurt too) is done.

Sugar Plum Fairies, dancing all around

If you feel the urge to swear but don't want to offend sensitive colleagues' ears, why not yell out, "Sugar Plum Fairies!" at the top of your lungs?

Sugar Plum Fairies is an inhabitant of our newly-cleaned-in-2012 whiteboard. Other things on the whiteboard include a map of all the different times of the day in which one can pause to eat:

• 8am-9am - Breakfast
• 9am-10am - Brorning Tea
• 10am-11am - Morning Tea
• 11am-12pm - Munch
• 12pm-2pm - Lunch
• 2pm-5pm - Postmunchitis

Some of these you may recognise from previous blog posts around here.

Also on the board at present is a note pointing to the "Naughty Fan Corner", where our fan sits sulking 'cause we made it face the wall (prevents unseemly blowing of air into library employees' eyeballs and/or carefully coiffed hair). The fan did have an outing one day, when it was loaned out to another colleague just down the corridor a little way. But the fan had been naughty once again so it's back in its corner. Sulking.

I'd go on, but I want to mention a very special author featured in our library catalogue: one William McConnel Wanklyn, who authored the works:

• The administrative control of smallpox : how to prevent or stop an outbreak (86 p., 1913)
• London public health administration : a summary showing the principal authorities, with their origin, services and powers (59 p., 1913).

It seems Mr. Wanklyn was a pretty busy guy in 1913!

To relieve crapback, butter your stuff with rock hard ButterSoft

image source

That's all I'm sayin'.

Except... Don't knock it till you've tried it!

And by "it", understand that I don't know what I'm talking about here. It's potentially all euphemism, or none of it's euphemism. It's really up to the individual!

Post munchitis brought on by kettle lack leads to crapback

If you slouch too much, it gives you crapback. If you've lacked a kettle for most of the day, you're liable to slouch (even after an emergency temporary kettle has been delivered, STAT!) (except it wasn't really stat, in fact it took a few hours...the guys who brought it claimed to have been "testing it" before delivering it to us. I think they were testing it on mulled wine). And, as mentioned previously, slouching can lead to crapback. Therefore it follows that lacking a kettle leads to crapback. Via kettleless-induced post munchitis.

There was nary a hair on the brawny tea

It was time for a cup of tea (being brorning tea time, you see...ahead of MUNCH, but after the usual breakfast time), so I went down to the ocean and scooped up a mugful of briny water, which I planned to boil in the perfectly ordinary kettle in the staff tea room. While I was on the shore, a frightfully robust dude slathered in coconut oil, with a shiny orange tan, budgie smugglers and peroxide blonde hair, approached me. He moved with an impressive swagger, and as he drew up before me asked, "Heez it gahn?" and favoured me with a sly wink.

I stammered an incoherent response and turned to run, freaked the heck out by this spectacle of nature.

Just kidding, none of that happened. But it is brorning tea time.

Boron in da house

And I quote...

Name: Boron
Type: Metalloid
Density @ 293 K: 2.34 g/cm³

Discovery of Boron

Boron compounds such as borax (sodium tetraborate, Na₂B₄O₇·10H₂O) have been known and used by ancient cultures for thousands of years. Borax's name comes from the Arabic buraq, meaning "white."

Boron was first partially isolated in 1808 by French chemists Joseph L. Gay-Lussac and L. J. Thénard and independently by Sir Humphry Davy in London. Gay-Lussac & Thénard reacted boric acid with magnesium or sodium to yield boron, a gray solid. ⁽¹⁾ They believed it shared characteristics with sulfur and phosphorus and named it bore. ⁽²⁾ [Chemicool.com - Boron]

What I want to know is, what does all that mean for Leo F. Boron, Sophie Boron and Walter F. Boron, all of whom are authors represented in our library catalogue over here?

Back in 1960, Leo was an added author on the book Transcendental and algebraic numbers, (so not my area of expertise...). More recently, Sophie's been writing about France's constitution, and during the 2000s Walter's been all about a cellular and molecular approach to Medical physiology (come to think of it, I'm an expert on none of these things!).

Happy Boron!

"Microbes and men" by Robert Reid

I love these dorky scientists and their very dorky book titles. Microbes and men - bring any famous books by Steinbeck to mind, folks? It should have been called Of microbes and men, though, really. Right?

Anyway, this is all I have to say today, but I want to explain that this post is part of the Library Treasures blog post series we will be featuring here. Great authors, great book titles, and great other things (authority records perhaps?) that we stumble across in our lovely dusty grimy library and its...errrr, "quaint" catalogue.

One down, many thousands to go!

P.S. HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!