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The first Honorary Scrooge of the Month Award goes to Sony/ATV Music for blocking a parody of Michael Jackson's 1983 hit "Beat It" from appearing on YouTube. Local high school students who frequent Lansdowne Public Library (in Pennsylvania) and serve on its Teen Advisory Board wrote and produced “Read It,” a delightful take-off aimed at inspiring other teens and tweens to just pick up a book or e-reader and take the reading plunge. However, on November 19, just three days after the video made its debut during the dedication of the library’s Ronnie Hawkins Resource Room, they discovered that the performance had been blocked on YouTube by Sony, which administers the copyrights for Jackson's music. As you can imagine, the teens were crushed that all their hard work was going to go unseen.  Heroic librarian Abbe Klebanoff After a week of intense lobbying of Sony executives and the executor of Michael Jackson's estate by the video’s editor, Abbe Klebanoff, head of public services for the library, the corporation finally relented and acknowledged the video's parody/educational purposes under the Fair Use Act. The video has been restored to YouTube. Who knows, perhaps the fat cat corporate types were visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past and woke up remembering what it was like to young and excited about creating something... or maybe the ghost of the king of pop himself paid them a call. Below you can see what all the fuss was about.
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Now that the school year has begun, I may not have any time to waste, but the boys of summer gave it a last hurrah by goofing off on MorphThing. The result:  Ryan Willis or Bruce Gosling? Intern George refused to sully his own pulchritude by morphing his facial features with another's.  Gorgeous George Michael Thanks, boys! See you next summer! With a video, of course! A clever parody of Sir Mix-a-lot's "Baby Got Back" by a middle school out of Texas.... A couple of posts ago, I summed about the hilarity of #CheeseLit, which attempted to come up with the cheesiest book titles ever. Well, today's inspired hashtag is ZombieWesterns. What a fabulous way to waste the precious time we have on this Earth! However did we have fun without Twitter? Some favorites and a few of my own devising...  10. All the Pretty Corpses 9. High Brains Drifter 8. Extremely Pale Rider 7. Butchered Cassidy and the Undead Kid  6. Munch Upon a Guy in the West 5. The Good, the Bad and the Undead. 4. The Man Who Ate Liberty Valence 3. The Ox-Bone Incident 2. The Quick and the Living Dead  And one of my favorite Westerns....
1. True Gristle Again, thanks to Keir Graff of Booklist Online for his creative jump-start. There are plenty of books and films out there with cheesy titles, whether intentional or not. But what could you come up with if asked to write the -literally- cheesiest title ever? Well, the good and creative folks over at Booklist, one of my favorite go-to sources for book reviews, spent a Friday putting Twitter to good use doing just that. I am compelled to pass along some of my top ten favorites...  10. To Havarti and to Havarti Not 9. East of Edam 8. The Scarlet Cheddar 7. Colby-Dick 6. Ricottahouse 5  5. The Island of the Blue Cheese Dolphins 4. Ethan Fromage 3. The Gouda Earth 2. The Old Man and the Brie  From the Seattle Edible Book Show And my number one favorite: The Velveeta Rabbit!
You can read the entire Best of #CheeseLit blog post at Likely Stories, a Booklist Online blog by Keir Graff. Well, this is nowhere near as clever as the Librarians do Lady Gaga parody (which you can view here in the Lady Gaga category), but it is timely. I am not sure why they selected Curious George (a male monkey) over, say, Bemelmans' Madeline (who was a bit of a girl gone wild in a much more sedate and chaste era), but maybe that was the only Big Book they had on hand at the ALA Conference. Summer means book shilling-and-signing, which is a terribly exciting prospect, but an exhausting one for an introvert. Just like teaching! Introverts who toil in a profession that favors extroverts need downtime to recover. While writing is a very introverted activity, selling is not. So I have taken on a passel of extrovert interns for the summer to "pinch blog" for me when I am in recovery mode. Dedicated or intermittent readers (or late arrivals who have surfed the categories) will recognize these faces...  Action Man Intern Bruce: Though he is in Budapest, Hungary filming his latest Die Hard flick, "A Good Day to Die Hard," (the title is enough to make one swoon in the stacks) he eagerly agreed to contribute posts... something about lots of downtime waiting for the cinematographer and gaffers and best boys to get their, er, stuff together. Don't laugh! He's surprisingly erudite for an action hero. And he has already contributed a post, History of Hair: Part I, on The Mullet, a 'do which he swears he's never worn... and I confess I have been unable to find any photographic evidence to the contrary.  The Classic Intern George: Although he is in the middle of a European tour re-imagining his hits with the assistance of a full orchestra, writing new songs, and soon to enter rehearsals as one of the acts in the Closing Ceremonies for the August 2012 Olympics in London, he graciously offered to pen a few posts. The man is simply indefatigable!  50 Shades of Gosling Intern Ryan: the Librarian's favorite pin-up volunteered to whip up some new memes, although I told him that cat-centric submissions would be perfectly acceptable. Ryan has been dashing around his native Canada lately, visiting Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, last week to see his mother, Donna, graduate with a bachelor's in education. He also visited Niagara Falls (on the Canadian side) with gal pal Eva Mendes. He promises to send a post with pix on his "Ya-hey-der" adventures.  Renaissance Jim I tried to coax James Franco into contributing a few poems, but unfortunately he feels that he is just too over-committed to do right by the task, as he is finishing up some short stories, directing dance pieces and exhibiting multimedia art, including an exhibition this month at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles called "Rebel," based on the James Dean movie Rebel Without a Cause, all while working on degrees from Columbia and Yale. I'm exhausted just contemplating that schedule!  I'm with the band... in Tel Aviv. Madonna volunteered to scribble a few posts (most likely driven by self-interest in promoting her MDNA tour), but I turned her down... alas, one diva is more than enough for this blog.
If you're a reader, a serious reader, you have probably felt this way at one time or another...or many times, for that matter, depending on how often you get interrupted! |
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February 2024
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