A dignity of dragons, a lunacy of werewolves, a craving of golems, a tizzy of fairies, a vexation of zombies…

Thanks to this i09 post, I discovered David Malki’s fantastic index of “Supernatural Collective Nouns”:

(Click on the image to make it larger.)

This comic (#566) is available for purchase on Malki’s Wondermark website as a print or a poster.

The Research Maven’s first blogiversary

On August 14, 2008, I wrote my first blog post, “Don’t believe everything you read.”

On August 17th, I wrote my second post, “The writer’s bookshelf (part 1).”

On August 18th, Cory Doctorow wrote about my brand-new blog on BoingBoing, and suddenly a few thousand people came by to check it out. According to the WordPress statistics, the following day (August 19th) was the busiest with over 6100 views.

I’ve written 83 posts, and my blog has been viewed over 63,000 times.

By far my most popular post was “Porn for book lovers” in March, with over 13,000 views to date and more every day. (Yes, I do realize that many of those people were searching for porn books and got my blog instead. Which is actually kind of funny.)

Other very popular posts:  the announcement of my first Research for Writers class (because Cory BoingBoinged me again), “A question for my readers about software,” “Advice for writers about research,” “Spell-check is evil, but funny,” and my first post about the Seattle snow leopard kittens (resistance is futile in the face of such extreme cuteness).

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Marcia Glover, Cory Doctorow, Nicola Griffith, Kelley Eskridge, and Matt Ruff, because I would not have started my blog without their encouragement and advice.

I’d especially like to thank everyone who’s read my blog, left me a comment, sent me an email, or recommended my blog to others through their posts, blogrolls, and tweets.

Book stalking

Thanks to Alma Alexander for pointing out this great blog post by Rands In Repose on book stalking:

Where’s your bookshelf? It’s this awkward moment whenever I first walk into your home. Where is it? Everyone has one. It might not be huge. It might be hidden in a closet, but in decades of meeting new people, I’ve never failed in finding one and when I do I consume it…

The Book Stalking Process

This is my process and this is not a process of judgment, but one of assessment, and it proceeds in three phases:

Phase 1: Where are they?

• Where does you bookshelf live in your home? Is it in an obvious place or are you hiding it? Why are you hiding your books?
• Is the bookshelf built around the room or vice versa?
• Do you have a room specifically for books? Hot.
• Can I see your bookshelf after you’ve sat me down with a glass of wine? Even better.
• Did you spend money on your bookshelf or is it an IKEA atrocity? Wait, you built that? Awesome.

Phase 2: How are they arranged?

• Have you committed to a pure bookshelf? What’s the breakdown between books and non-books? This isn’t where I store books; it’s where I demonstrate that I love books.
• Is the arrangement chaotic or calm? Is this is a shrine or a utility?
• Vertical or horizontal stacking? What’s the rule? Is there a rule?
• Is it full? I read. A lot.
• Does your book arrangement tell a story? Can I find that story quickly or do I need you to tell it? Do you offer it?
• Do you use bookends? Are they functional or ornate? What’s their story?

Phase 3: And what do you read?

• Are these the books I expect based on what I know about you?
• Do these books represent your entire life or just right now?
• Can I tell, at a glance, the three most important books?
• Which books are you… hiding?
• How do you react when you see me stalking your bookshelf? What’s the first story you’re going to tell?
• Is there a glaringly obvious book that does not belong? When do I get to ask you about it?

What I’m learning during this stalking is my deal. The intricacies of my assessment aren’t the point. You are decidedly and blissfully not me, which is why I’m standing, wine glass in hand, totally and completely lost in your bookshelf….

I must confess that I am a book stalker. You can tell a lot about people from the books on their shelves.

As I wrote in a previous blog post:

I live my life surrounded by books. My husband and I have thousands of them, old and new, in bookcases covering the walls of nearly every room of our house.

Our books are more than just texts. They are artifacts that express who we are and what’s important to us. They are time capsules that can take us back to a particular memory or moment in time. They are symbols of our relationships– with each other, with friends, and with the authors who inscribed their books to us. They are unique, collaborative works of art, a marriage of ideas, language, typography, illustration, and design.

Writers and their rooms

Through LISNews, I discovered photographer Kyle Cassidy’s new project, Where I Write: Fantasy & Science Fiction Authors in Their Creative Spaces. The website contains 20 photographs of writers in their rooms and a description of the project:

I spend a lot of time thinking about people’s environments — the places they build around themselves, the things they choose to live with. Is there a connection, I started to wonder if there was a connection between the places that writers work and their work itself.

Why not find out?

Where I Write will be featured as eight pages in the 2009 Worldcon program guide. A much larger collection is being compiled into a book featuring Neil Gaiman, Lois McMaster Bujold, and many others along with interviews about their spaces.

Here’s Cassidy’s photograph of Michael Swanwick:

This reminded me of Eamonn McCabe’s photographs for The Guardian’s Writers’ Rooms series, though his are of the rooms without their writers.  There are over a hundred of McCabe’s photographs on the website, with commentary by the writers. Here’s Colm Tóibín’s room:

And JG Ballard’s room:

There’s also an interesting slideshow of many of McCabe’s photos, narrated by him, on the BBC website.

Update 8/13/09: This morning Cory Doctorow blogged about Kyle Cassidy’s photo project on BoingBoing and posted a photograph of himself in his London office taken by NK Guy:

No, I won’t be posting any photographs of my husband (Matt Ruff) in his room– he writes at his desk in the dark (lights out, shade down), lit only by the glow of his computer screen.

Seattle’s snow leopard kittens will make their debut on August 15th

The two snow leopard kittens born on Memorial Day at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo will make their public debut August 15th on International Snow Leopard Day. For those who can’t be there, here’s the cover of the zoo’s magazine, which came in the mail a couple of days ago:

The zoo occasionally posts photos of them on its blog and videos on its YouTube channel. The most recent video was of their medical exam at six weeks:

It looks like there’s been a snow leopard baby boom this summer– the ZooBorns site has photos of the twins born at the Toronto Zoo and the single cubs born at Utah’s Hogle Zoo and Tierpark Berlin.

UPDATE: On August 20th the zoo blog posted a new video of the snow leopards exploring their exhibit:

Editors and fact-checkers fix Sarah Palin’s resignation speech

Vanity Fair has given us a fantastic illustration of how editors, copy editors, and fact-checkers can improve any piece of writing– even Sarah Palin’s “word salad” of a resignation speech:

If you watched Sarah Palin’s resignation speech, you know one thing: her high-priced speechwriters moved back to the Beltway long ago. Just how poorly constructed was the governor’s holiday-weekend address? We asked V.F.’s red-pencil-wielding executive literary editor, Wayne Lawson, together with representatives from the research and copy departments, to whip it into publishable shape. Here is the colorful result.

Vanity Fair has posted edited versions of all eleven pages of the speech. Here are pages 1 and 5 of the speech to give you a taste of what they’ve done:

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish blog for the tip.

Wikipedia kid: “a student who has poor research skills and lacks the ability to think critically”

Thanks to John McIntyre’s language and editing blog, You Don’t Say, I discovered the new term “Wikipedia kid.”

According to the website Word Spy: The Word Lover’s Guide to New Words, a Wikipedia kid is “a student who has poor research skills and lacks the ability to think critically.”

Word Spy lists the earliest citation as an April 6, 2009 report from the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations:

Students less prepared for university education than in 2005, according to Ontario university faculty

Wikipedia kids less mature and lacking required skills

..First-year students are less prepared for university education than students from just three years earlier, according to over 55 percent of Ontario university faculty and librarians who responded to a recent questionnaire. Respondents reported declines in writing and numeric skills combined with lower maturity among students who believe that good grades are an entitlement…

Respondents most often reported the following challenges among first-year students:

Lower level of maturity

Poor research skills as evidenced by an overreliance on Internet tools like Wikipedia as external research sources

Expectation of success without the requisite effort

Inability to learn independently…

I think someone needs a vacation…

Thanks to The Stranger Slog for pointing out this hilarious Q&A from The Chicago Manual of Style Online:

Q. Is there a period after an abbreviation of a country if it is terminating a sentence? “I went to U.K..”

A. Seriously, have you ever seen two periods in a row like that in print? If we told you to put two periods, would you do it? Would you set your hair on fire if CMOS said you should?

The editor of the Chicago Manual of Style’s monthly Q&A is Carol Fisher Saller. I enjoyed (and recommend) her book, The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (Or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships With Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself).

See my earlier blog post, The writer’s bookshelf (part 3), for more about The Chicago Manual of Style book and website.

As a bonus, I’ll leave you with another of Saller’s classic Q&As:

Q. Oh, English-language gurus, is it ever proper to put a question mark and an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence in formal writing? This author is giving me a fit with some of her overkill emphases, and now there is this sentence that has both marks at the end. My everlasting gratitude for letting me know what I should tell this person.

A. In formal writing, we allow both marks only in the event that the author was being physically assaulted while writing. Otherwise, no.

Snow leopard kittens born in Seattle

Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo has posted photos on their blog of the two snow leopards that were born on Memorial Day:

The snow leopard kittens aren’t yet on public display, but you can visit the zoo’s other beautiful cats, including the ocelot kittens that were born in October:

Ocelot kittens at 5 weeks

Ocelot kittens at almost 5 months

For more photos of cute baby zoo animals from around the world, check out the ZooBorns website.

Update 1: The zoo blog has posted the first video of the snow leopard kittens.

Update 2: See my follow-up blog post on the snow leopards for news and more videos (at about six weeks and ten weeks old).

Curious Expeditions and Atlas Obscura

World traveler and filmmaker Dylan Thuras (one of the creators of the amazing Curious Expeditions website) and science journalist Joshua Foer are guest blogging at BoingBoing, where they announced the launch of their new website, Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World’s Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica:

The Atlas is a collaborative project whose purpose is to catalog all of the “wondrous, curious, and esoteric places” that get left out of traditional travel guidebooks and are ignored by the average tourist. Anyone can enter new places into the Atlas Obscura, or edit content that someone else has already contributed.

What kind of places are we talking about? Here are a few that were recently added to the Atlas:

- A hidden spot in the Smoky Mountains where you can find fireflies that blink in unison

-A 70-year-old house made entirely out of paper

- A giant hole in the middle of the Turkmenistan desert that’s been burning for four decades

- A Czech church built of bones

- The world’s largest Tesla coil

- A museum filled with the genitals of every known mammal in Iceland

- Enormous concrete sound mirrors once used to detect aircraft off the English coast

- The self-built cathedral of an eccentric Spanish ex-monk

- A museum of Victorian hair art in Independence, Missiouri

- An underwater sculpture garden off the coast of Grenada

- Galileo’s amputated middle finger

The site certainly sounds interesting (I haven’t been able to really explore it yet, as their server keeps crashing from all of the BoingBoing traffic), but it raises an obvious question, which was already asked by a commenter to their post:

…if this is all obscure information, how is any of it verified? Specifically, what’s preventing trolls at 4chan or the jokers at Uncyclopedia from deciding that there is wonderful, fertile soil available for them at Atlas Obscura, and start posting articles about a gingerbread house in the Black Forest, a place off of Cyprus where all the dolphins wink in unison, or the Bermuda Triangle-like effect near Dick Cheney’s house?

I certainly hope they have more safeguards in place than Wikipedia does.

While waiting for Atlas Obscura to come back online, treat yourself to more porn for book lovers at Curious Expeditions’ “Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries” page. Here’s a hint of what awaits you there:

Real Gabinete Portugues De Leitura Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

George Peabody Library, Baltimore, Maryland

My Wikipedia lolcat is not amused (but I am)

Yesterday Craig Silverman at Regret the Error spotted this correction from The Guardian newspaper:

An obituary of Maurice Jarre (31 March, page 36) opened with a quotation which we are now advised had been invented as a hoax, and was never said by the composer: “My life has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life.” The article closed with: “Music is how I will be remembered,” said Jarre. “When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head and that only I can hear.” These quotes appear to have originated as a deliberate insertion in the composer’s Wikipedia entry in the wake of his death on 28 March, and from there were duplicated on various internet sites.

Just the day before my husband blogged about this interesting “fact” he found in the Wikipedia entry for “Ancient Pueblo Peoples”:

The Ancient Pueblo were one of four major prehistoric archaeological traditions of the American Southwest who hunted, killed, and ate Sasquach [sic]. The others are the Mogollon, Hohokam and Patayan. In relation to neighboring cultures, the Ancient Pueblo occupied the northeast quadrant of the area and consumed almost all of the Sasquatch…

We couldn’t help but wonder how many term papers that will end up in this week.

For those of you who are new to my blog, here are links to some of my earlier Wikipedia-related blog posts:  my very first blog post on evaluating sources; my commentary on a study of college students’ research methods; and my Wikipedia lolcat.

“Let the wild rumpus start!”

Here’s a cute video of President Obama reading Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are to a group of children at the White House on Easter:

Wouldn’t it be great if Obama could do this every week? A Presidential book club for kids!

Thanks to MobyLives for the tip.

My peeps

Based on the ridiculous number of people who viewed my “Porn for Book Lovers” post, there are clearly lots of other book geeks like me in the blogosphere. If you are new to my blog, welcome.

I’m not a fan of April Fool’s Day pranks, so I made you a lolcat instead:

research cat says Wikipedia not acceptable source

Porn for book lovers

Thanks to MobyLives, I’ve discovered that the Mirage Bookmark website has a collection of stunning photos of the “Most Interesting Bookstores of the World” and the “Most Interesting Libraries of the World.”

Are you sure you can handle it? Here’s a taste…

The Lello Bookstore in Porto, Portugal:

Bookstore El Atenio in Buenos Aires:

The Library of the Royal Site of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Spain:

The Central Public Library in Vancouver, Canada:

Had enough? No? How about a photo from Wired magazine of Jay Walker’s personal library:

I feel faint…

Update: You can find many more sexy photos of libraries on the Curious Expeditions blog in a post from September 2007 titled “Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries.” Be sure to check out the rest of this amazing site.

Periodic Table of Typefaces

The Periodic Table of Typefaces, created by the designers at Squidspot and posted on Gizmodo, but I found it through author Jay Lake’s blog. (Click on the image to make it larger.)

Playing with Wordle

Thanks to Kelley Eskridge and Nicola Griffith, I spent the morning playing with Wordle,  which creates word clouds from text, blogs, or websites and allows you to change the font, colors, layout, and other elements. This is the Wordle I created from my blog: