Saturday, December 14, 2013

Books On Film | Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

http://ibistro2.stockton.lib.ca.us/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/0/0/57/5/3?searchdata1=308186{CKEY}&searchfield1=GENERAL^SUBJECT^GENERAL^^&user_id=WEBSERVER

Rudolph, The Red-Nosed Reindeer is a Christmas icon. Few may know that the character originated in a 1939 tale written at the request of Montgomery Ward to sale in the famous Montgomery Ward catalog. 

The story follows a young Rudolph whose unique red nose gets him shunned by the other reindeer until Santa calls on him, and his nose, to save Christmas. The tale was followed by two sequels, movies, and a famous song written by the author's brother-in-law.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (song)


You can also find the song on Kidz Bop Christmas.


As a kid, my favorite of the Rudolph movies was the 1964 stop-motion animated film which departs from the original story a lot. Rudolph gets in to all sorts of crazy adventures and meets all sorts of characters who never make an appearance in the book, like the Abominable Snowman. If you've never watched it you're missing out!

http://csul.iii.com/record=b25407288~S0

Test your reindeer knowledge: Name of of Santa's Reindeer! 
The answer will be posed in the comments section.

Covers courtesy of LibraryThing.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

The Wanderlust Librarian | Pinball Wizard the First

When I was in school, I was a lonely gal. I had some friends but I spent most of my free time with books, musicals, video games and pinball. The town where I grew up was a small one. There was no public transit system, so you either had to have someone drive you, drive yourself, ride your bike or walk. Since my parents both worked and I was sans license, I did a ton of bike riding. 

The video gaming was easy. I played Nintendo with my brother at home. Through my many bike rides around town, I found the new pool hall. It was time to try a new gaming hobby. My billiard skills were awful (trust me, I tried to learn how to play). Apparently, having a long cue in my hands wasn't safe for me or the public. I learned the term "scratch" quickly. 

I tried darts. That didn't last long because I'm clumsy....and darts are pointy. Oh, and did I mention that I can't throw? Alas, thwarted again by arm movements.

I discovered that the pool hall had a small arcade in the dark backroom. None of the video games were ones I enjoyed spending money on. But, there were two pinball machines: 

     The Twilight Zone                           and                 Tales from the Crypt

I discovered that I was pretty good at pinball! I was mesmerized by the ramps, skill shots, multiball, the variety of missions to complete..... these machines had them all! I learned that the art of playing pinball wasn't all smashing the paddles constantly. There was an artful finesse about rolling the ball off the flipper at an exact time to get it up a ramp. It took patience to practice juggling the ball on the flippers to avoid losing it down the drain (space between the flippers). It was exhilarating to get the multiball bonus or win a free game. The games lasted a long time as I got better. It was a better bang for my buck! 

I was addicted. I played pinball at every arcade I went to. 

As I grew older, I moved into other nerdy gaming pursuits. Mostly of the electronic kind, but it was rare that I saw a pinball machine. 

That is, until, I was planning my trip to Las Vegas. I found the Pinball Hall of Fame . Holy. Cow. I had to go. I was vibrating with excitement. I wasn't much of a gambler and I knew my quarters would be much better spent on a game than giving it to a casino. The  was a huge werehouse chock-a-block full of pinball machines. My ideal pinball situation is a dark, windowless room. The Pinball Hall of Fame delivered. I was in heaven. I played my $10 like a champ. When I won games, I left them there for a lucky passerby and moved on to other machines. I've visited a number of times on my visits to Vegas and continue to squee with glee at the thought. It's free to go, but it costs some quarters to play the games! The pinball is in excellent condition and there are some vintage video games to warm your 1980s heart. 

Your favorite bloggess was interested in watching a documentary called "Special When Lit" but it never made it to the local area. There is, though, a book of the same title which covers the history of pinball. If you're interested, request it through our Link + system! 

After the overnight on the USS Hornet (read about it here), my friend Lizzie said we were visiting one more awesome spot.

A sequel to this post is out there (well... SOON it will be out there!)!

Until then, have a great holiday and keep warm! (play more pinball).



Book Bucket List | Book Riot Book List!

OK, this week I'm going to do something a little different.  I recently came across Book Riot's "100 Books to Well-Read" listBook Riot is a website featuring book reviews, lists, a podcast, and all good things book related from a number of contributors.  They're very cool.  On their site, I this list and thought it had a TON of good Bucket List books on it, but then I realized I haven't read as many as I would actually like.  The list has a wide variety of genres from children's books to horror.  The idea is that being "well-read" comes from having read a number of books from many genres.  They picked 100 books like this:  If it takes 2 weeks to read a book, then it would take about 4 years - how long it takes to get an undergraduate degree. (If that's all it took, I would have finished mine a lot faster than it actually took...)

So here's the list.  I've bolded the title's I've read.  
http://csul.iii.com/record=b25495879~S0

    http://ibistro2.stockton.lib.ca.us/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/0/0/57/5/3?searchdata1=460582{CKEY}&searchfield1=GENERAL^SUBJECT^GENERAL^^&user_id=WEBSERVERhttp://ibistro2.stockton.lib.ca.us/uhtbin/cgisirsi/x/0/0/57/5/3?searchdata1=153761{CKEY}&searchfield1=GENERAL^SUBJECT^GENERAL^^&user_id=WEBSERVER
  1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  2. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
  3. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
  4. All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria Remarque
  5. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay  by Michael Chabon
  6. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
  7. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  8. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
  9. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
  10. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
  11. Beloved by Toni Morrison
  12. Beowulf
  13. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
  14. Brave New World by Alduos Huxley
  15. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
  16. Call of the Wild  by Jack London
  17. Candide by Voltaire
  18. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
  19. Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
  20. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  21. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  22. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
  23. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
  24. The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
  25. The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
  26. The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor 
  27. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
  28. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  29. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
  30. Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
  31. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
  32. Dream of Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
  33. Dune by Frank Herbert
  34. Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
  35. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  36. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
  37. Faust by Goethe
  38. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  39. A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin
  40. The Golden Bowl by Henry James
  41. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
  42. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
  43. The Gospels
  44. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  45. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  46. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  47. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
  48. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  49. Harry Potter & The Sorceror’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
  50. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  51. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
  52. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  53. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
  54. House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
  55. Howl by Allen Ginsberg
  56. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
  57. if on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
  58. The Iliad by Homer
  59. Inferno by Dante
  60. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
  61. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
  62. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
  63. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
  64. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
  65. The Little Prince by Antoine  de Saint-Exepury
  66. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  67. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  68. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
  69. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
  70. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
  71. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
  72. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
  73. The Odyssey by Homer
  74. Oedipus the King by Sophocles
  75. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
  76. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
  77. The Pentateuch
  78. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
  79. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
  80. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  81. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
  82. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  83. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
  84. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
  85. The Stand by Stephen King
  86. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
  87. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
  88. Their Eyes Were Watching by Zora Neale Hurston
  89. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
  90. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
  91. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  92. Ulysses by James Joyce
  93. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
  94. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
  95. Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
  96. Watchmen by Alan Moore
  97. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
  98. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
  99. 1984 by George Orwell
  100. Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James
  101.  
    So that's 75/100! Not so bad!  A lot of those titles I haven't thought about in a long time.  So I guess that's a year of reading left to finish the list! I wonder if that will ever happen!
    How many have you read?

Monday, December 9, 2013

Just Life | Keep Calm And .....

Carry on.

I love this phrase.

Apparently, this message was commissioned by the British government to turn in to posters during World War II to boost moral in case of " crisis or invasion."

Thank Heaven that Hitler wasn't able to invade England and the crisis was averted. These posters were unearthed years later and became a catch phrase.



Today, there are many versions of this motto out there.
 

My favorites are the following :


  • Keep calm and eat a cupcake
  • Keep calm and love me 
  • Keep calm and go shopping
  • Keep calm and join the dark side
  • Keep calm and eat chocolate 
  • Keep calm and pray hard
  • Keep calm and just graduate (Already)
  • Keep calm and never give up
  • Keep calm and smile
  • Keep calm and call Batman
  • Keep Calm and be yourself

So how do you finish this phrase:

Keep calm and ..............

Signing off until next Monday- Panteha