Today is April Fools' Day, a holiday celebrating practical jokes of all kinds. Some people say that April Fools' Day began in France in 1582 when the Gregorian replaced the Julian calendar, making New Year's Day fall on January 1st instead of April 1st. At the time, news of such things traveled slowly, and it took many years for everyone to get up to speed. People who continued to celebrate New Year's on April 1st came to be known as April Fools.
The Writer’s Almanac

Should Internet addiction be included in the next version of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)?
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/mg19726495.400-internet-addiction-is-a-psychiatric-disorder.html
March 29, 2008 issue of New Scientist may be in a nearby library for the whole article.

“When Australian Boyd Rayward travelled to Brussels in 1968 there was only one sight he wanted to see: a disused university anatomy theatre. Rayward was a graduate student in library science, and the cobwebby old theatre with leaking skylights housed something he had to see before it vanished forever. Inside the gloomy theatre, Rayward found piles of papers and archives that had remained untouched since 1944. These were the last remnants of the Mundaneum, a vast and visionary attempt at an immense proto-internet made from the most unlikely of materials: 3-by-5-inch index cards."
See March 22, 2008 issue of New Scientist

WIPO: Cybersquatting Dispute Cases Continue to Rise
World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) news release: "Against the background of an unprecedented number of cybersquatting cases in 2007, the evolving nature of the domain name registration system (DNS) is causing growing concern for trademark owners around the world. Last year, a record 2,156 complaints alleging cybersquatting - or the abusive registration of trademarks on the Internet - were filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) Arbitration and Mediation Center (Center), representing an 18% increase over 2006 and a 48% increase over 2005 in the number of generic and country code Top Level Domain (gTLDs and ccTLDs) disputes (see Table 1)."

Wikipedia Hits Milestone of Ten Million Articles Across 250 Languages
News release: "...the Wikimedia Foundation reached a significant new milestone: on Thursday, March 27, at 00:07 UTC the official article count for all Wikipedias combined reached 10 million. The ten millionth article, a short biography of 16th century English goldsmith and painter Nicholas Hilliard, was created in the Hungarian Wikipedia by user Pataki Márta. Wikipedia now boasts articles in more than 250 languages, with the English Wikipedia having the largest number, followed in descending order by the German, French, Polish, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish Wikipedias. The project is also experiencing rapid growth in many young Wikipedias, including Marathi, Tagalog, and Cantonese."

Last week, I read about Poetry Olympics in Sherman’s Lagoon comic strip and thought it was a clever joke. However, there has been a Poetry Olympics since 1998. http://poetry.about.com/library/weekly/aa112498.htm

Food of the week: leeks http://www.whfoods.org/
Recipe of the week is 15-minute salmon with leeks at The World’s Healthiest Foods Web site. View at 3-minute home cooking class. You may sign up for a weekly bulletin sent on Monday and daily tips sent Tuesday through Sunday.

Coming to Shumaker charity sale in Toledo
One Shot by Lee Child hardbound 376 pages
Mystery featuring action hero and “nowhere man” Jack Reacher
Much appreciated quotes:
Librarians are nice people. They tell you things, if you ask them.
The law was a game, and like any game it had a psychological component.
www.leechild.com

Up Close and Dangerous by Linda Howard hardbound 327 pages
Romantic suspense www.lindahoward.com

No Safe Place by JoAnn Ross softbound 383 pages
Romantic suspense set in the “City That Care Forgot”
www.joannross.com

Force of Nature by Suzanne Brockmann hardbound 372 pages
Romantic suspense
www.suzannebrockmann.com

Dead Ringer by Lisa Scottoline, University of Pennsylvania Law School graduate and teacher of Justice and Fiction softbound 397 pages
Philadelphia lawyers meet mayhem.
Quotes:
The law should be pure, like art. It evolves like a painting, created step by step, until the whole can be seen.
This is the first day of the rest of your litigation . . .
www.lisascottoline.com

Another moral to the Japanese stonecutter’s tale of wishing for wealth and power
Thou shall not covet.

It’s interesting to see what morals you pick out of stories. If you read an Aesop’s Fable, you may think of other morals to add to the stated one. Another fun thing is to say what you see in a painting. I vividly remember a thirty-minute session at The Toledo Museum of Art where we were invited to look at a painting of acrobats and describe it.

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com