NYPL vs. Snopes: Round One

I was looking for an interesting nugget to share yesterday afternoon and ran across a tasty tidbit in The New York Public Library Desk Reference, Third Edition. According to them, "The interstate highway system requires that 1 mile in every 5 must be straight. These sections can be used as airstrips in time of war or other emergencies" (752). I envisioned something like a scene out of Red Dawn, with lots of paratroopers and explosions, and I-20 as a runway. Armageddon type stuff, you know? I decided I needed to know exactly when this peculiar plan would be put into practice, so I started trying to scrounge up a few more bites.

One of the very first things that appeared in my Google search was this entry from Snopes. Turns out, Snopes didn't agree with the Desk Reference. Awkward! Which to believe?! I'm a firm believer in checking out my sources, and a few clicks later, I ran into this article. It was written by Richard F. Weingroff, an employee of the Federal Highway Administration's Office of Infrastructure. Mr. Weingroff, it seems, is tired of trying to explain to the general public that the United States has never planned to convert its highways into landing strips. Poor guy! Not only has this story circulated on the Internet, it's also being published!

How do these urban legends get started?! I'm a little disappointed that I'll never get to camp out with Lea Thompson or Patrick Swayze while fighting the Russians, but completely satisfied with the way my search ended. By the way, the Mississippi Library Commission has several books on urban legends and their origins. Why not check them out?

Making Friends

A person once asked me if librarianship is lonely work. I had to say that it is not because we spend a great deal of time surrounded by books. I see all books as potential friends because each has its own ideas, voice, and character. Of course the best thing about having books as friends is that you choose when to start and end the conversation. This idea is interesting to me because I’ve recently realized how differently some people see the nature of friendship. Yesterday a companion (let’s call her Jill) and I were discussing a mutual friend of ours (Jack, of course). Jill was speaking of Jack rather critically and said she often found Jack “sarcastic, pretentious, and disingenuous.” I could not help but think, “but that’s what we like about him, right?”
The problem here is that Jill and I have two opposing views of friendship. Jill sees friendship as a tool for comfort. She needs her friends to confide in; to offer her advice and support. I see friendship in a somewhat different way. I see my friends as competitors who should push me to ensure I do not get lazy. If a friend of mine mentions an author or philosopher I’ve never heard of, I will feel deeply ashamed and embarrassed and immediately learn more about this unknown source. What’s great is that if you make friends with books they can provide both comfort and competition. The Mississippi Library Commission even has books that explore the nature of friendship.
One of my favorite books on friendship is Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. This book is an excellent example of how society’s idea of friendship has changed. Carnegie first wrote this book in 1936 and we can see that era’s principles reflected in the chapter titles. Chapters on “Fundamental Techniques in Handling People” or “Six Ways to Make People Like You” accurately show how he saw friendship as a means to gain financial success. These titles may seem strange now (“handling people”?) but his book only reflects the time in which it was written.
Another interesting book on friendship is The Norton Book of Friendship edited by Eudora Welty and Ronald A. Sharp. This book contains poems, stories, and essays that explore the meaning and value of friendship. One of my favorite passages comes from Francis Bacon in his essay Of Friendship. Bacon sees friendship as primarily a tool for comfort: “For there is no man that imparteth his joys to his friend, but he joyeth the more, and no man that imparteth his griefs to his friend, but he grieveth the less” (88). Obviously, this statement goes against my definition of friendship but it is beautifully written. Welty and Sharp’s book is mostly positive and contains several examples of how friendship makes the human experience more pleasant.
Regardless of how you use friends, the nice thing is you can always find a new one at your local library.
Carnegie, Dale. How to Win Friends and Influence People. Simon and Schuster, 1981.
Sharp, Ronald and Eudora Welty (eds.) The Norton Book of Friendship. W.W. Norton & Company, 1991

NaNoWriMo!

This month offers the perfect opportunity for my MLC reference blog debut since November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and writing is a life lifelong passion of mine. If writing is one of your passions, too, or if you’ve always wanted to write, NaNoWriMo is the perfect time to dive in. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight November 30. This is supposed to be more of a personal challenge than anything else, but there are the rules from the official NaNoWriMo website:

- Write a 50,000 word novel between November 1 and November 30. And no – writing the same word repeated 50,000 times doesn’t count. Be original!

- You have to start from scratch. You can’t use any prose you wrote before November 1. You can, however, use material such as outlines, character sketches, plot notes, and research that you’ve previously compiled.

- Your finished work must be a novel – it has to be a lengthy work of fiction.

- Your novel must be the product of your own work – no writing teams allowed.

- Upload your novel to the NaNoWriMo website between November 25 and November 30 for word count validation.

And that’s all there is to it! If you submit your novel in time, and it meets the word count requirement, you’ll be considered a “winner,” and you’ll get an official web badge, a PDF winner’s certificate, and bragging rights. Oh yeah, and the best prize of all is that completed manuscript you’ve spent the last 30 days toiling over.

If all this sounds like fun to you, and you’re already bursting with ideas and motivation, hop to it! Channel your inner Faulkner, and let the words flow. If, on the other hand, you have no idea how to get this process started, keep reading. There are plenty of resources out there to help you crank out your novel. Help is on the way!

We have some great resources for all kinds of fiction writers here in our collection. For those writers who seek general advice and tips, have a look at The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing by Evan Marshall. Marshall outlines a 16-step program for turning your idea into a finished manuscript. You might also want to look at Novel Voices by Jennifer Levasseur, who gathers advice from several award-winning novelists on writing, editing, and getting published. There’s also Write Right!: Creative Writing Using Storytelling Techniques by Kendall F. Haven. I’ve heard it said that if you can speak or tell a story, you can write; Haven tells you how. If you’re feeling really ambitious, you could try to sell your novel. R. Karl Largent offers some advice about this in his book How to Write and Sell Your Novel.

In addition to the titles I’ve just mentioned, we have several books tailored toward assisting writers with specific interests, including religious fiction, romances, mysteries, and science fiction.

Another great writer’s resource too valuable not to mention is the official NaNoWriMo website. This site has all kinds of goodies for writers. Be sure to check out the discussion forums for tips and strategies, helpful writing resources, and good old support and motivation from other NaNoWriMo writers.

So, there you go – NaNoWriMo in a nutshell. If you finish your novel by November 30, kudos! If you don’t, that’s cool, too. Maybe you’ll finish if you try again next year. Until then, don’t beat yourself up over it. December is NaNoFiMo – National Novel Finishing Month. And after you’re finished writing, you could take the next step and participate in NaNoEdMo – National Novel Editing Month, which takes place in March. You can polish your manuscript, and then who knows? You never know what could happen next.

It all starts with word number 1 out of 50,000.

Link It Up!

Here are a few links I've come across in the past few days and thought you might find interesting:

• Read a detailed analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s finances!

• The first words to be transmitted across the prehistoric version of the internet were...LO? (It was supposed to be “LOGIN” but the system crashed.)

• I’ve been fascinated lately with Shorpy.com, a collection of old photographs on varying subjects. Warning: if you have any real work to do, do not click this link! Shorpy will suck you in!

Meebo's Un-Drought

We're supposed to get a lot of rain today, with one estimate forecasting up to four inches in some places. It feels like it has been an exceptionally soggy fall here in Mississippi. One of our Meebo patrons must have been thinking along the same line because they asked this question last night: What is the opposite of a drought? (The patron specified that they did not want to use the word flood.)

I turned to our print thesauri first, but wasn't able to find anything. Then, I found an online thesaurus that listed some antonyms for words similar to drought (absence, famine, thirst, etc...) These were some of my favorite suggestions: abundance, surplus, plenty, monsoon, feast. I liked all of these as general antonyms for drought, but I was searching for something a bit more "meteorological" in nature. (I assumed our Meebo friend was, too.)

I checked out a few of our print weather encyclopedias, but again, without an actual word to look up, I was stuck. Turning back to the internet, I "did the Google," as my dad likes to say, and stumbled on this website. After bandying about the words monsoon, deluge, and flood, pluvial seemed to stick out as the most apt opposite for drought. Here's what the OED had to say:

A. adj. 1. a. Of or relating to rain; characterized by much rain, rainy.

B. n. 2 Geol. A pluvial period.

This quotation that was used to illustrate the word was the cincher:

1970 W. BRAY & D. TRUMP Dict. Archaeol. 184/1 Prolonged periods of high rainfall are called pluvials, and are marked by changes in lake levels and in flora and fauna.

Oh, dear. It's started raining again.

"pluvial." OED Online. Dec. 2008. Oxford University Press. 30 October 2009 http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50182124.

A Nugget Goldmine!

The tagline under the title of our blog is, “We post the interesting and kooky things we find while looking for the answers to reference questions.” Last week, I got a couple of questions that were pretty straightforward, but on the way to finding their answers, I learned a lot of other excellent (and definitely kooky) nuggets of information.

The original request was “When did Johnny Horton die?” The answer was November 5, 1960. However, get this: Johnny Horton was a country singer whose wife, Billie Jean, was the widow of Hank Williams. So Hank and Billie Jean got married October 18, 1952, and on January 1, 1953, Williams died. According to the super-reliable Wikipedia, Billie Jean posthumously divorced Williams, which is weird but very interesting. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of anyone getting posthumously divorced, although there was some question about the validity of their marriage, which was only settled in 1975! Williams’ first ex-wife, Audrey Sheppard, wanted to be known as The Official Widow of Hank Williams [and thus have the right to half his estate] and allegedly paid Billie Jean $30,000 to retain this title. So anyway, back to Johnny Horton: he apparently had premonitions that he would be killed by a drunk driver, and on November 5, 1960, this came true. In semi-related news, I also learned that Hank Williams had spina bifida, that he nicknamed Hank Williams, Jr. “Bocephus” after a ventriloquist dummy (!), and that Billie Jean Jones Eshlimar Williams Horton never remarried.

Someone wanted to know “How popular was the name Sawyer last year?” According to the Social Security Administration, Sawyer was ranked #225 in popularity in 2008. Their website lets you see the top 10, 20, 50, 100, 500, or 1000 names--this is fascinating! I might’ve gotten a little carried away, as I felt compelled to create this chart, which shows the first and 1000th most popular names for boys and girls, every ten years from 1880-2000, plus 2008.



Some other names you also need to know about: in 1880, Katherine ranked as the 994th most popular name...for a boy. In 1900, Gertrude ranked as the 997th most popular name...for a boy (Dorothy was #985). Elizabeth ranked #999 and #998 in 1960 and 1970, respectively...for a boy. Were these parents just trying to honor female family members by naming their sons these traditionally girly names, or were they just mean?

And finally, there was no request involved, but the awesome book Death Warmed Over: Funeral Food, Rituals, and Customs from Around the World did teach me about this primitive Balinese funeral tradition:

“After death, a kind of Chinese water torture is performed on the body; it is laid on a table, and stream of water slowly drips onto the body. Just below this setup, the family places a cradle filled with unhusked rice so that as the water runs off the body it drips directly onto the rice, along with any liquid leaching out of the body”(6). Oh, then the rice is cooked as usual, formed into the shape of a human, and eaten. Yum!

Rogak, Lisa. Death Warmed Over: Funeral Food, Rituals, and Customs from Around the World. Ten Speed Press, 2004.

Fashion Question

Earlier today a meebo visitor asked "what type of tie should I wear with a red, white, and blue striped shirt." To answer this question I consulted Francois Chaille's masterwork The Book of Ties. Mr. Chaille explains that patterned shirts are difficult to coordinate but, "with such shirts it is often preferable to let a tie play the role of echoing colors and opposing patterns." So, obviously, the pattern should NOT be striped but rather a checked pattern, or in my opinion, a solid color (or something with subtle lines). While on the topic of colors; Mr. Chaille advises to follow "the tried and true method of emphasizing one of the colors in your jacket or shirt by repeating it in your tie." Good luck with the outfit and keep those fashion questions coming.


Chaille, Francois. The Book of Ties. New York: Flammarion, 1994. p. 147