Miscellaneous Reviews and Thoughts

[caitri]

Finished Spellbinder: Very meh. Everything wrapped up excessively neatly and nearly inexplicably. I am also unclear as to the logic of witchcraft=paganism, only you're born a witch rather than raised one, and thus there's a Roman Catholic Pagan Witch? So there's a nature vs. nurture bit to think on, I suppose.

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The Sarah Connor Chronicles: Well I'm glad Summer Glau has work again, but she keeps flipping her hair too much. It's seriously distracting. Also when the series opens in 1999 and then we have a shooting in school (when a terminator goes after teenage John Connor) all I could think is, "Huh. So they went there??" (To those who may not remember high school back in '99, like me...yeah that was when Columbine happened. And then TV channels pulled a few eps of Buffy and maybe an episode or two of other shows because they were scared to show violence in high schools, or thinking about violence in high schools, or really anything involving high school that wasn't sweetness, light, and pretty people.

Then there's a time machine that takes them to 2007. I am curious if they will show the folks from far away '99 the ubiquity of newfangled things like, y'know, cell phones, and wireless internet, and, uh, Homeland Security. That'll be fun exposition!

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Okay, who else is watching Masterpiece Theater doing "The Jane Austen Collection"? I know you all are out there.

First off, they have a rather inane intro by Scully, I mean Gillian Anderson, addressing the mysteries of Jane Austen. Like, how a woman with little "formal education" could write six novels, and the mystery of how those novels touch our hearts (or something), and...well, it went on for a while but it really gave me a headache honestly so I blocked it out.

Tonight's presentation was Persuasion. You may recognize the plot as it was cannibalized for Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (well at least the book) (no, I'm not making that up): boy meets girl, boy and girl break up, boy and girl get back together despite crazy families. The highlights were that the Borg Queen (Alice Krige) played Anne Eliot's aunt and Giles (Tony Head) played her dad. Well it made my nerdy lil inner geek happy.

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Had friends over last night and was telling them about all the cool stuff in the archives at work. Was astonished that people with degrees higher than mine and whose careers necessitated research were flumoxed that if you wanted to go see, oh, say, a book that actually belonged to Tolkien, or anything else similarly cool, all you basically had to do was ask us. How does this happen??

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Note to local peeps:

Don't forget: Cafe Scientifique! This Tuesday, at Revolution. This month's topic is on chemical engineering and extracting fuel from biomass! Because, really, what says "fun" more than "biomass"?!

Comments

[szkoda.livejournal.com]

I might be able to answer to book question...
Small town library collections typically don't have much in the way of rare books, so I didn't learn about this as a kid.
Although they display them, museums generally do not let the public play with their specimens/collections. (Exceptions to this are when the museum has specific interactive exhibits, but these are ones that the museum prepares for the public ahead of time.)
I think of university libraries as good places to get field-specific information. The math books and journals needed for my research are not rare copies.
I wouldn't be surprised that a history/literature sort of major could get access to Tolkien (or similar). A book written in by Tolkien is different from a book by Tolkien; one is unique while the other is easily replaceable. For a fragile book, I'd expect some amount of archival training to be required for the user. I'm under the impression that it isn't uncommon for people in the humanities to know some of this. I also know of libraries where you cannot photocopy old documents for yourself for fear of harming them. (You need to get the librarians to do so.) It seems quite logical to restrict fragile documents, so I assumed it would be the case for rare ones as well. (Also, my definition of rare may be different from the official one? It sounds like a technical term.) I guess it comes down to a question of giving free access to information versus preserving materials; I assumed that the conclusion would involve circulating copies of the material rather than originals.

(Also: unless the policy changed, the library system at this university does not allow videos/dvds to leave the library for non-class related uses. At my previous school, they did circulate, and I used this to see lots of hard to find things. It was awesome! It seems odd that I'd have an easier time accessing Tolkien's notes and such than I would Citizen Cane. I'm guessing that the reason is related to supply and demand? Were Tolkien's notes are in-library only? It still seems odd that Tolkien's notes and a copy of Citizen Cane would have equal value to a collection...)

[100wordspermin.livejournal.com]

Oh, I remember Columbine and the complete and TOTAL lockdown that followed it. V. interesting that the movie decided to go there...especially since it wasn't even ten years ago, yet.

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Maybe people get confused by the no-checkout policy? I've known folks to think that "you can't leave the room/building with it" means "you can't see it at all, because it is locked up in a supersecret vault."