“Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”

Why is it the most beautiful day of the year so far outside, and yet I’m stuck inside working? (Yeah I know it’s not summer and I have used Henry James in vain, but judge not lest ye be judged, readers!)

*Sigh* Silence your siren call, Beach. It won’t do you any good!  Life is not fair…

On the bright side, it’s decidedly unbusy, and I’m gathering links like it’s the harvest festival in a week (which I guess being Halloween next week technically it is). Come share!

1) If it does get really dull around here, I can work my way through 100 Awesome Social Sites for Bookworms... whoops there goes the rest of MY social life! (Ironically the more social sites for books one gets into, the fewer books one actually reads…)

2) If you’re wondering could anything possibly have been more hilariously awesome than the Beatles’ “Help” movie, cast your mind across this list of Beatles Movies Which Never Happened… mmm, Hobbit Paul anyone?

3) Another Muppet movie for this week’s YouTube – with a slightly more modern twist…

“There’s so many things that we could do…”

I’m racing to finish Assassin’s Creed I this week before I can go get Assassin’s Creed II – dizzy from jumping off things!

Oh, and I’m re-watching Arrested Development, which never fails to make me feel great about myself and gives me something new and previously undiscovered to laugh at ever time… *huge smile*

I’m also reading Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel” to try and wake my brain up a bit – it’s a hard slog, but I guess it is thirteen thousand years worth of history at once, so that’s acceptable, right??

In between times, here’s what I have found for you – enjoy!

1) Have pretties using Tag Galaxy – waste time with photo balls. And realise that user-defined tagging is really lame… but at least there are pretties…

2) When science is so wrong that it’s very very right… it’s the IgNobel prize 2009!

3) Finally, I took my mother to see “Julie and Julia” on the weekend (and EVERYONE I know who’s gone has either gone with their mother or their daughter – it’s that type of movie!) and thus I have celebrity chefs on the brain. And you don’t get much more celebrity than this…

“You cannot be lonely if you like the person (or cat) you’re alone with.”

I am all by myself this week (Mr LD is interstate for work) and the one thing I have learned is that If I hadn’t gotten married, I would definitely have been a Crazy Old Cat Lady. It’s sort of comforting, chilling and a little disappointing all at the same time… and Cat is now thoroughly sick of the sound of my voice.

Hopefully you don’t share his sentiments! Here, have some links…. good kitty, goooood…

1) I’m sure if you’re a fan (or training as a travel agent) you’ve certainly seen this one before – but I know where I’m taking my next holiday to…

2) If you’re a Bulwer-Lytton fan, the Redlines & Deadlines blog runs a similar contest, in case (like me) you can’t get enough.

3) Finally YouTube – and though I’m not one to forward plan too much, I now know exactly what I’ll be doing the day I quit working in libraries!

“There is nothing like a challenge to bring out the best in man.”

Hello!  (Was going to say HAIFRAND after having been set the ridiculous challenge of saying HAIFRAND to at least three people a day for the whole week, but quickly worked out that it’s a stupid word and a stupid challenge anyway… grumble…)

Non stupid links time!

1) We can all go buy “The Lost Symbol” by Dan Brown now, lucky us eh? Just in case you’re wondering what could be in it – or what he might be putting in the next one – try your hand at the Interactive Dan Brown Plot Generator – guaranteed bestseller blurb! (Hey, if you look it up on Delicious.com maybe user “danbrown” has it tagged as “next_book”…)

2) News about J.R.R Tolkein that’s just come to light – in case you didn’t think he was awesome enough already!

3) Youtube – this week, see what cats REALLY do with catnip… (which, by the way, I am SO going out and buying and planting in my yard…)

“I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”

Hi gang! Feeling much better now weather (and broken air conditioning) back to some semblance of normality. Went off to Melbourne for the weekend with mother, cousin and aunt – very nice, but for some reason we walked a square of about 5 blocks and could not find a single night club. What’s going on there? How can the country’s most cosmopolitan city not have a single CBD night club? (Or a single Cosmopolitan, for that matter?) Dear Minister for Commerce, I object!

One thing (or three things) I do not object to at all are this week’s links…

1) We all know how insanely fan-screamingly popular vampire books are now, thanks to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight et al . Could Amish be the new Vampire?

2) Epitome of time wasting = cute furry animals. Especially kittens. Especially if they’re all doing the exact same thing but you HAVE to see them all anyway. My friends, prepare yourselves for the epitome of epitomes (? can’t remember my greek grammar, not sure if that’s the right plural or not) … Dreaming of Kittens!

3) Finally, YouTube for the week (and a poked-out tongue to kalafudra who beat me to it but I’m posting it anyway) let’s all get super excited about Dorian Gray!

“Exercise: done against one’s wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse.”

Hi friends! Well the weather is back to normal, the students are back to crazy, and now it’s only 4 months to Christmas so I am happy! I also did a 10km charity walk on the weekend(gasp! Liberrydwarf! Doing something healthy!) first time ever, and now my muscles have gone back to non-agony state (only 2 days later, haha) I’m happy to be blogging! Here’s the fun I found for you this week…

1) Another for the “Odd but Great Webcomics” file – Goats. The link here takes you to the start of the story arc so you don’t miss anything. Nothing like drunk demonic chickens to make you giggle into your herbal tea…

2) Something intelligent and intellectual yet still weird (and we know that’s why you’re here!) – Peter Leeson’s just written a book about the economics of piracy, but for free you can listen to him on EconTalk discussing why pirates are the best case study of economic rationalism ever. Don’t you feel smarter already?

3) On the subject of pirates, I dug out the sheet music to this to have the guys in choir sing it – best musical song ever. And the Kevin Kline version is the best version ever – nuthin’ but the best here at the Liberry for you!

“If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?”

All I have to say is this. It is WINTER here right? August? Not even the last week of August?

It’s Thirty Seven Frickin’ Degrees out there. Celsius. Yep.

To use a phrase my 13 year old cousins are fond of – WTF?????

Quick, duck into the air-conditioning at get cool again with links!

1) Regular readers will know I’ve a penchant for blogging cute baby animals. (Exhibit A here. Exhibit B here. Other exhibits too numerous to mention.) Let’s venomously redress the balance…

2) I’m sure you must all have loved Pokemon as much as I did (and I’m playing it again right now, yeah baby!) but surely you must, like me and like VG Cats have sometimes thought – “… are you serious??”

3) Youtube – more from the creative geniuses (genii?) who brought you Dr Horrible. Oh for an all-region DVD player!

(Side note: Felicia Day is already super-hot! How could her avatar possibly be even hotter than reality?)

“These are a few of my favourite things…”

Three things I like a lot this week:

• Blackadder. Just bought a box set, about half-way through Blackadder II. I cannot remember laughing quite so much ever, nobody on the planet does comedy like the Brits did it back in the day.
• My cat, who finally was useful for the first time in his life and woke me up in perfect timing today so I wasn’t late for work.
• That I impressed everyone I saw “Public Enemies” with with my awesome knowledge of J.Edgar Hoover’s cross-dressing predilections.

Three things I hate a lot this week:

• We have these cute vanity plates here in Australia which are designed to mimic cool European plates. I hate when people get them put on their Japanese cars. You have missed the point, my friends…
• That my new keyboard is a bit unsure about what you want to do with quotation marks, and won’t put them in until you’ve typed the next character, so you put in “quotes”and you miss out all the space keys afterwards so you look stupid. See above.
• New frickin’ WordPress. What was wrong with the last dashboard screen, why is it now five times as many clicks to post?

There you go. All I need to do now is find a melody, and Julie Andrews eat your heart out…

Here are this week’s links. Needless to say I love them!

1) Another “100 books you should read before you kick it” list. I have personally read 16 off here (it’s mostly an American lit list – knew it was worth taking American lit class!) and I think that’s better than I did on the TLS list, but I’d be interested to know if anyone out there has read lots more than that…

2) I often complain that we run dumb programs at my institution. (Being in charge of teaching research for hospitality and recreational tourism research, and buying books about the economics of running a day spa, you might see why…) These courses blur the line between “that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard” and “that’s the coolest thing I ever heard”. And you know you pretty much wish you could take all of them…

3) Youtube = could this be the greatest (most unlikely perhaps but greatest) mashup ever? Both my mother and I like it for different reasons – it WOULD make long car trips with her easier…

“So foul and fair a day I have not seen…” (bad pun, sorry!)

Morning! This week we’ve got Wednesday off, ostensibly to go to the Royal Exhibition (kind of like a big county fair, I guess) spend too much money on crap in brightly coloured bags, vomit on the swing chair and completely ignore the animals which are the entire reason for there being an exhibition… I will be spending it at home sleeping in, I think! (Even though we’ve only just had a weekend – mid-week public holidays RULE!!)

Here are this week’s links – tastier than overpriced and slightly-melty strawberry icecream, more variety than an overcrowded petting zoo and more fun than district wood-chopping finals! Enjoy!

1) Like Shakespeare? Like DOS-based text adventures? (If you just said yes to both – hello kindred spirit!) Perhaps you’ll like Hamlet: The Text Adventure… that is the question! (*apologies, that was a cheap one…*)

2) Reasons why Winston Churchill is awesome and every guy on the planet should aspire to be like him…

3) YouTube this week – and who could possibly go past David Tennant in bad drag…?

“Health food may be good for the conscience but Oreos taste a hell of a lot better.”

Full of yummy naughty food – pizza, sausage roll, ginger biscuits. I got raisin toast (for poor impoverished people in strange countries like England where they don’t appear to have this delicacy, it’s bread with raisins and cinnamon mixed through the dough) for breakfast at a cafe yesterday, and when it came out, no joke, each slice was about as thick as 3, maybe 4 slices of normal bread. So I consumed the equivalent of a third of a loaf of bread before 9am.

And I wonder why I get chubby in winter… *shakes head*

Here’s hoping this week’s links are equally as satisfying!

1) Food is awesome, we know. (See above!)  Chocolate especially! Now we hear that Blue M&M’s save lives! Only in the loosest sense of the word, but hey, we’ll take what we can get, won’t we!

2)This week, in the “I can’t believe there’s a whole site dedicated to this” category (to which the answer is always “it’s the internet, of COURSE there is…”) FeralChildren.com. Because the world needs an archive and tracking system for small children raised by wild animals… you KNOW there was something missing in your life before, a hole has been filled!

3) Until they finally come out with Ghostbusters 3, I’ll just have to content myself not only with the originals, but the wealth of YouTube Ghostbusters takeoffs and tributes. A particular favourite – what might Ghostbusters have looked like if it had been filmed 30 years earlier?