Mattapan Trolley Returns

Good news from the MBTA.  The Mattapan High-Speed Trolley reopens tomorrow after 18 months of renovation.  I’m a big fan of trolleys and streetcars but I’ve never ridden on this branch of the Red Line.  Based on the MBTA’s history with the Arborway Line suspension of service, I was worried the Mattapan line would never [...]

2007 Year in Review: First Sentences

Some blog memes are hard to resist. I’ve seen a lot of librarians doing this on their blogs and apparently it started in Western Australian at Ruminations. This is a list of the first sentences of the first post of each month of the year from Panorama of the Mountains:
January: “The blood of martyrs [...]

Books to Read in 2008

I’m such a compulsive reader that I need to keep lists of all the books I want to read. This is something I’ve been doing for at least 15 years. At first, I wrote down the book titles on scraps of paper which I inevitably lost. Then a friend told me she [...]

Book Review: Language Visible by David Sacks

Language visible : unraveling the mystery of the alphabet from A to Z (2003) by David Sacks is a lively history of each letter in our modern alphabet (called the “Roman alphabet” which is explained in the book). For each letter Sacks traces the history of its shape from the ancient Semitic carvings in [...]

Movie Review: The Saddest Music in the World

Sometimes I really don’t know enough about a movie before I start to watch it (but that’s not always a bad thing). Before watching The Saddest Music in the World (2004), I knew that it was about a legless brewery proprietress in Winnipeg* during the Great Depression who decides to host a contest to [...]

Links of the Day for 17 December 2007

Before we get to the links, I just want to mention a couple of things:

I’ve added a del.icio.us widget to the sidebar on the right which will show you the last 5 links of the day I’ve posted. I’m not sure what this does yet other than create redundancy but it’s a start. [...]

Library Links of the Day for 17 December 2007

Striving to be “container neutral” as a Librarian by Laurie (Laurie the Librarian, 11/22/2007) via Librarian in Black - “Container Neutral is defined as choosing the best format for the information source based upon needs not upon a goal to collect resources in a particular format.”
A Treatise on the Black Market of Holds by Sarah [...]

Movie Review: Children of Men

If I’ve seen a bleaker, more depressing film than Children of Men (2006) I can’t remember it. The basic concept of this film is that 20 years in the future, women are infertile and the world has gone to hell-in-a-handbasket (whether the infertility and the worldwide anarchy are cause and effect remains unclear). [...]

Movie Review: The Nightmare Before Christmas

I’ve been meaning to see Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) for about 15 years and finally saw it this weekend thanks to Netflix. Generally, I either love or hate Tim Burton films and this one is on the love side. It has a lot going for it. Visually it is [...]

Movie Review: Barry Lyndon

Barry Lyndon (1975) is an historical epic directed by Stanley Kubrick famed for painstakingly recreating historical details and using innovative lenses to film in natural light. Barry Lyndon - née Redmond Barry - is also the film’s protagonist and he’s kind of dick. Ryan O’Neal (whatever happened to him?) portrays Barry well as [...]