Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:23 AM

Okay, because Ian requested it:

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:30 AM

Okay, after watching this cartoon by Mark Fiore on Salon, Ian quipped "I wonder whether this would make a good Successories-type poster?"

And, less than an hour later, I came up with this:

What do you think? Ian says I'm being "way, way too subtle." Just after I uploaded the photo, he came up with a better quote, which I may do as a separate graphic:
 Integrity: There are some things that money can't buy. For everything else, there's MasterCard.

Anyway, things will be rather quiet here over the weekend. Ian and I will be out of town for a wedding, so don't expect any updates until Tuesday at the earliest.

Good night!

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:35 AM

Yay! I just finished the book Working Knowledge!

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:45 AM

Once more with feeling

I knew that I'd think of something right after posting the spoiler page.

Once again, Joss Whedon has done it. Every season, about midway through, fans start complaining that the show has lost it; "Worst Season Ever", and so on. And then, just before the end of the season -- in this case, in the very last episode -- he turns everything around and like a rabbit from a magician's tophat, astonishes the viewers with something so sublime that it leaves them... well, the volume of alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer argues against speechlessness, but something like that...

Unfortunately, the website explaining the Buffy Formula appears to be down (I believe he mentioned updating it with this season's resolution), although you can still read about it in Google's cache.

Added May 28th:

The Buffy Formula website has moved. It can now be found here. I'll warn you that this has major spoilers for most seasons of Buffy.

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:18 PM

The Buffy finale

Don't worry, I'm not going to post any spoilers here. But... WOW! Yeah, large parts of Willow's arc and its resolution were predictable -- kudos to Joss Whedon for having somebody actually mention "Dark Phoenix." But the final scene!? OMG!!! I can't wait for next season now.

  Added later:

  Click here to read my comments about tonight's Buffy episode with spoilers.

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:15 AM

Good morning! Well, today's Salon has a fun article with the behind the scenes scoop of Hardware Wars. I was saying to myself the other night that I'd love to see a "True Hollywood Story" about the making of that short, because it's just so amazingly spot-on. And then Salon beats me to it.

In other humor for a Tuesday morning, check out the trailers for Disney's Lilo & Stitch. The "Inter-stitch-als" spoof the whole pretentious "Disney classic" schtick, and are quite funny. On a different note, an early trailer for Disney's next animated feature -- Treasure Planet -- is available here.

Finally, former Brandesians reading this should remember Boris's Kitchen -- the campus comedy troupe. During a show in 1988 or 1989, they did a running gag mocking Bob Dylan's inarticulateness.
"And now, for your listening pleasure...

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:45 PM

Now, that was a productive couple of hours. I stopped at Wal*Mart and got a refund for an accidental double-charge from the photo developing. Went to Simmons, picked up my textbooks, and checked out the classroom for my summer courses (they're all in the same room) to find seating close to the outlets (so I can take notes on my laptop). Looked at a laptop accessory I was considering at MicroCenter (didn't end up buying it), and got a TripTik at AAA for the wedding this weekend. I'm on a roll, and going strong.

Cool beans: Be sure to stop by Google's homepage every day this week -- they're doing special logos designed by Scott Adams!

Random thought: When did strollers supplant carriages as the primary way of moving infants around? While driving today, I noticed several adults pushing kids around in strollers, and realized that I can't recall when I last saw a baby carriage in use. Although the functionality is similar, they seem to reveal very different priorities in parenting. Carriages keep the child in a passive position, with a limited view of just the sky and whomever is pushing them. Strollers allow the child much more engagement and interaction with the rest of the world. In fact, the most obscured point of view is that of the person pushing them -- directly opposite from what carriages allow.

I just checked the OED. Stroller was first used to mean "a child's push-chair" in 1920 in the Sears, Roebuck & Co. Catalog in the phrase "Stroller Style Carriage. Pram was first used in 1884, as a shortened form of perambulator, which was first used in 1856 to mean " a hand-carriage, with three or four wheels, for one or two young children, pushed from behind." Of course, this doesn't necessarily prove anything, because earlier terms may be obsolete. Still, it's interesting that nobody seems to use carriages anymore; at least around here.

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:35 AM

An interesting notion

Last night, I picked up several remainder books at the Harvard Book Store, for pleasure reading, including Neil Postman's Building a bridge to the eighteenth century: how the past can improve our future. Appendix III is nine pages titled "On the Origin of Childhood and Why It Is Disappearing."

He says that before the fifteenth century, childhood was over by about age seven, and claims that childhood is an outgrowth of literacy.

Now, this isn't a field that I've studied, so I'm not sure whether other historians have bought into this notion, but it rings true to me. He mentions Catholicism above, but for me, the clincher is comparing that doctrine with Judaism, which was a highly literate culture. There, adulthood isn't achieved until age thirteen, when the boy is not only literate, but capable of leading a religious service. And that was true even in the historical periods described above.

Oh, regarding the second part of the title, why childhood is disappearing? Television, which "requires no instruction to grasp its form, and it does not segregate its audience."

This seems to fit well with other observations. Just this morning, I read an article in Arts & Letters Daily about age-differences being blurred in sexuality. It also speaks to me about increased graduation requirements, the growing "popularity" of standardized testing, and attempts to extend certain aspects of childhood to college students, although I can't quite put those thoughts into coherent sentences for this journal. Finally, I wonder how the growing importance of the Internet will tie into this...

Food for thought, isn't it?

Anyway, I'm off to run some errands.

Posted by Lis Riba at 4:10 PM

Convergence

So, I've been reading Davenport & Prusak's book Working Knowledge for my first LSci class. Then, this afternoon, I read an article in Friday's Boston Metro about why opening day has become so much more important to moviegoers. These two paragraphs stuck out:

     "The phenomenon of crowds at blockbusters is a logical extention of both the information and competition culture," said Carol Donelan, a profesor of media studies at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn.
     "We like our movies and we want our regular fix. But this new push to get there first has to do with the perceived power that accrues to us when we have knowledge that others don't."

That's one thing I like about Library Science -- it's more a meta-subject, enriching almost any other topic of interest I might wish to pursue.