New SLIM Comic Takes Librarians into Metaspace
"SLIM is proud to unveil a marketing resource aimed at generating newfound excitement for librarianship and increasing the awareness of the many opportunities that an MLS degree can provide.  From the same team that created Library of the Living Dead and Monster Clash, Supreme Librarians in Metaspace is a promotional comic that highlights the many facets of librarianship in a quirky, tongue-in-cheek manner.  We hope that this resource will encourage prospective and current SLIM students, alumni, and librarians around the world to take a look at the profession in a new light.  And maybe have a laugh or two while doing it."  You can view the comic from Emporia State University School of Library and Information Management at:  http://slim.emporia.edu/docs/slim_comic.pdf 

The story of Swan Lake, the classic tale of Odette, a princess turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer’s curse, has been interpreted in countless ways since Pyotr Tchaikovsky first composed the ballet score in 1875.  Who could forget Natalie Portman’s haunting performance in the 2010 psychological thriller, Black Swan.  And now there is a new twist on the ballet.   But, forget dancers pretending to be swans.  A French dance company, is putting on a show in Paris involving live swans, sharing the stage with human performers.  It is called simply, “Swan“.  “The idea behind ‘Swan’ is to recreate a new world where communication could (be) possible between living creatures,” said Luc Petton, the choreographer.  “And specially, birds and dancers are like cousins for me because both of them are dealing with movement, with migration and with international language and they are both very fragile.  It is the dancers becoming wild – maybe as wild as the swan.”  The production has been in the works for two years.  A zoo offered the dance company some swan eggs and when the swans hatched, the dancers and swans began to bond.  “They adapt to us of course but we also try to adapt to them,” said a dancer.  “We have done a lot of imitation process – like spending hours imitating them and just being there and listening and looking at them – and they look at us.  We just spend time with them, feeding, sleeping, playing, swimming, some of us – also slept with them.” 

http://www.theworld.org/2012/06/french-dance-company-swan/

Elphaba Thropp is a fictional character in Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire, as well as in the Broadway and West End adaptations, Wicked.  In the original L. Frank Baum book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West is unnamed and little is explained about her life.  Elphaba is modeled after the Witch portrayed by Margaret Hamilton in the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz:  Green-skinned, clad entirely in black, and wearing a tall peaked hat.  Maguire formulated the name "Elphaba" out of L. Frank Baum's name, taking the phonetic pronunciation of his initials:  hence, L.F.B became El-pha-ba.  In both adaptations, Elphaba is also called by several nicknames including Elphie, Fabala, Sister (Saint) Aelphaba, Auntie Witch, and Fae.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elphaba

In Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Oz explains that his real name is Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkel Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs.  To shorten this name, he used only his initials (O.Z.P.I.N.H.E.A.D.), but since they spell out the word pinhead, he shortened his name further and called himself "Oz".  The film Zardoz draws its title from the character and the book.  See other cultural references at:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Oz_(character)

Enter the glorious Rose Reading Room on the third floor of the New York Public Library on a weekday afternoon, and you'll find almost every chair filled.  Scholars and researchers still submit their book requests on slips of paper and wait for their numbers to appear on two large boards.  The stacks, filled with some 3 million volumes, are closed to the public, so books are retrieved from seven floors of shelving below.  Still other volumes are stored off-site.  "It's very hot and still in these stacks," says Victoria Steele, the library's head of collections.  "It's not good for the books.  And actually, if you take a little whiff, that's the smell of books dying."  If the library has its way, this Beaux Arts-style building on Manhattan's 42nd Street — the one with the giant lions out front — will soon see some changes.  A hotly debated renovation plan would demolish the seven stuffy floors of stacks.  Some of the books would be stored under nearby Bryant Park, and up to 2 million books would be moved to climate-controlled storage in Princeton, N.J.  The proposed project, called the Central Library Plan, would also consolidate the functions of two other facilities under one roof.  The library would sell the nearby Mid-Manhattan Library, considered one of the largest circulating library branches in the world, and the building housing the Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL) about 10 blocks away.  http://www.npr.org/2012/06/12/154786855/loud-debate-rages-over-n-y-librarys-quiet-stacks 

The World’s Shortest War

The Anglo-Zanzibar war, also known as the world’s shortest war, was over in under 45 minutes.  The exact length of time is actually debatable--some had put it as short as 38 minutes.  The whole thing started when the Sultan of Zanzibar, who had willingly cooperated with the British, died on August 25, 1896, and his nephew Khalid bin Bargash seized power in a coup.  Thinking that another candidate would be easier to deal with, the British delivered an ultimatum to force the Bargash to abdicate.  Bargash refused the ultimatum and assembled a navy in form of the ex-Sultan’s yacht, the HHS Glasgow and fortified the palace.  The British, on the other hand, assembled 5 modern warships in the harbor in front of the palace and landed two battalions of army.  Bargash tried a last-ditch negotiation effort through the US Embassy, but time soon ran out.  At 9:02 AM on August 27, 1896, when the ultimatum ran out, the British navy sank the Sultan’s fleet (yes, that one yacht), shelled and destroyed the palace completely.  About 500 people, mostly Bargash’s soliders, died.  Bargash ran and hid at the German Embassy, where he was later granted asylum. 

The World’s Longest War

The world’s longest war, on the other hand, spanned 335 years without a single shot fired.  That war, between the United Provinces of Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly, got started in 1651 and the story goes as follows:  During the English Civil War (1642-1651), the Parliamentarians beat the Royalists further and further away from London, until it was forced to retreat to the Isles of Scilly off the Cornish coast.  The Netherlands, which sided with the Parliamentarians, sent the Dutch Navy to fight the Royalist fleet.  The Dutch Navy was so badly beaten that the Netherlands decided to declare war.  However, they couldn’t blame England, since it was the Royalists in Scilly that caused them so much problem--so they declared war on the Isles in 1651 instead.  http://www.neatorama.com/2007/02/21/the-worlds-shortest-and-longest-wars/