Albania! Albania! You Border On The Adriatic...

Yesterday, my sister mentioned that it was a holiday in Albania. You might be wondering what that has to do with the price of beans, or anything else slightly relevant, but I really enjoy thinking about holidays, even those in which I don't get to participate!

{Side note} Yes, the sister has become quite the world traveler and has spent the last several months soaking up Albanian life and culture. She's been having a fabulous time over in the Balkans. Aside from occasional oddities, which I admit sound strange to my purely Western ears, Albania also has some remarkable offerings. Between the startling discoveries of sworn virgins and ongoing blood feuds, the country also boasts the town of Butrint. This ancient city is on UNESCO's World Heritage List and, for you literati, yes--Virgil mentioned it in the Aeneid (albaniantourism.com.) Mother Theresa was an Albanian and Ismail Kadare was the winner of the inaugural Man Booker International Prize. One last plug? Lonely Planet named Albania as their number one country to visit in 2011. I mean, you wouldn't want to miss this, would you?

 

Or this?

{End Side Note}

It turns out that Albanians, whose country is 70% Muslim, were celebrating Eid ul Adha (Festival of Sacrifice.) This is one of the most important holy days of the year for Muslims. "It is a serious occasion, symbolizing the submission of each individual Muslim, and the renewal of total commitment to Allah" (credoreference.) For those of you who remember your Bible, this holy festival commemorates when Ibrahim (Abraham) was willing to sacrifice his son. I was always completely flabbergasted that Abraham was willing to do that, and this celebration underscores the pure devotion he showed to following God's will. Thankfully, a ram appeared and with God's instructions, Abraham killed it instead. Now, Muslims sacrifice a sheep (or other appropriate animal) which is called a qurban in remembrance of this act (setimes.com.) Interestingly, the meat is then apportioned into thirds, with part going to the family, part going to friends, and part going to the poor (about.com.) It would sure help the homeless shelters out if we all gave them 1/3 of our turkeys next week!
I hope you had an Eid Saeed (Happy Eid!) and be sure not to get mixed up in any blood feuds.
http://www.albaniantourism.com/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/holydays/eiduladha.shtml
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/al.html
http://www.credoreference.com/entry/collinsislam/what_muslims_do
http://islam.about.com/od/hajj/a/adha.htm
http://www.setimes.com/cocoon/setimes/xhtml/en_GB/features/setimes/features/2010/11/17/feature-02

Chinese Water Torture... In My Kitchen

Sunday night I was trying to watch Adventures in Babysitting for the first time since 1988, but the drip from my kitchen faucet kept distracting me. I started wondering exactly how much water I was losing, so I set the timer on my phone for one minute and started counting. (This made perfect sense to me, but apparently not everyone is as interested in their drips!) After only 30 seconds, I had already reached 65 drips! I figured that was a substantial enough number to constitute a good sample and so I multiplied by two. (I explain my tangential methodology in order to remark on how similarly counting drips compares to calculating a pulse rate. I find it oddly apt: The health of my kitchen sink is at risk!)

130 drips in just one minute! That equals 187,200 drips in one day--a number thatseems awfully high to me. I found this nifty drip calculator over at the US Geological Survey's website and got down to some number-crunching. They use an estimated value of 1 drip =1/4 mL. So,

130 drips=1 minute...

7,800 drips=60 minutes...

187,200 drips=24 hours

Divide by 4 to get milliliters...

46,800 milliliters lost in 24 hours!

I saved myself a little time and used a metric to non-metric converter to discover that I am losing 12.36 gallons of water in just one day. Now THAT's a lot of water!

Just in case you're worried, my faucet was fixed Monday morning!

An Unbrewing of...What?

I've written before that I am enamoured with the blog Word Journal; it's posts like these that make my love grow stronger:

Ten Unexpected Collective Nouns


rout • a rout of wolves
clowder • a clowder of cats
descension • a descension of woodpeckers
disworship • a disworship of Scots
mute • a mute of hounds
raft • a raft of ducks
unbrewing • an unbrewing of carvers
neverthriving • a neverthriving of jugglers
drunkenship • a drunkenship of cobblers
shrewdness • a shrewdness of apes

Poor jugglers! And I never knew that cobblers had such a reputation. I think I might have to do a little more research on some of these (unbrewing?) and get back to you.

Have Your Smelling Salts at the Ready.

You may find this shocking, but sometimes -- only on very rare occasions -- I like to look at things on the Internet...things that are not exactly library-related. When you get over the shock, visit some of the following websites, why don't you?

Letters of Note posts letters from famous people -- scans of the letters, plus transcripts in case of messy famous people handwriting. Letters are so personal that you can't help but learn something new when you read them. This one from David Bowie is one of my favorites.

Word Journal gives you handy definitions of words you probably haven't heard before. You'll have to go there to find out what "griffonage" is.

Missed Connections is a new favorite. Sophie Blackall reads the "missed connections" columns, where people post messages to people they felt a fleeting kinship with (usually on public transportation), then illustrates them.

Don't be afraid of the name: Sexy People posts funny Olan Mills-esque portraits of people from the past. Like this gal:


Fancy Fast Food makes me gag a little, but it's still pretty fascinating. These people buy regular old fast food, then transform it into new food using no new ingredients. Click here to see how a meal from Steak 'n Shake ended up as beef stroganoff.

If there's anything you've recently found that you want to share, leave a comment for us!

Really, Really Ugly.

In the New York Times Book Review this week, Joe Queenan's back page essay, "When Bad Covers Happen to Good Books," is about ugly book covers -- not necessarily that you can judge a book by its cover, but that an ugly cover can dissuade a reader from ever wanting to read a great book.

As Queenan examines his shelves -- which he organizes by read and unread -- he notices a trend: the books that are read are pretty; the unread books are hideous. He writes, "It all added up. Until now, I’d thought that I had set these books aside for so many years because they were too daunting or, in the case of Thomas Mann, too dull. Now I realized that what these books had in common was that they were ugly. Really, really ugly."

I wholeheartedly agree. I blame the fact that I have never gotten through Nabokov's Lolita on the fact that the copy I keep trying to read is a crusty one from the 70s. I actually own a cute paperback version, but the crusty one is annotated, and I feel I'm too dumb to make it through Lolita on my own. (I did manage to watch the movie, though.)

After I read the essay this morning, I went downstairs to the Mississippi collection to see what I could scare up. My friend Ann always raves about Walker Percy's Love In the Ruins, but after examining this copy, I feel certain Percy and I would part ways just a few pages in:



Is it just me, or does that lettering remind you of this?



Remember: three is a magic number.

I also found this particularly frightening copy of The Portable Faulkner. Listen, I'm not taking this thing anywhere:



First, let us discuss the scary faux-paint effect of the "FAULKNER," which, in a certain light, resembles blood, not paint (I'm thinking of the old cover of Helter Skelter, I think). Then there is the equally scary charcoal rendering of Faulkner's haunted, craggy face, looming out and judging you for not being able to understand The Sound and the Fury without Cliffs Notes. (Aside: there are four main sections to The Sound and the Fury; if you're really stuck, try reading the sections in reverse order. I promise you'll follow the story better.)

However, this volume has been well-loved and much checked out over the years, so maybe it's my 2009 eye judging this 1964 paperback. Perhaps in 1964 the lettering was edgy, the charcoal drawing artsy. Who knows? All I know is, the words within deserve better.

Queenan, Joe. "When Bad Covers Happen to Good Books." New York Times Book Review, 3 December 2009.

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!

Happy Easter, Again.

One day, all of our archives will be back up (we keep telling ourselves that, anyway) and it won't be so hard to find older posts. Here's part of one from around Easter last year featuring interesting names from the U.S. Census, 1900-1930. You know what? I still find them entertaining!

Daffodil Wright
Egg Flattum
Bunny Warren
April Showers
May Flowers
Spring Hatcher
Spring Parks
Spring Poole
Easter Lily
Easter Bunny
Easter Cross
Tulip Pitts
Tulip Summers
Zinnia Cooner [note: male]
Zinnia Funk
Calvary King
Ernest Salvation
Victory Cross
Jesus Man [female!]
Jelly Bean Cook [male!]
Pansy Wood
Pansy Ham
Magnolia Posey
Lent Johnson [female]
Bloom Green [male]
Peter Tisket
Royal Tasket

And in other Easter news, check out this article from Time.com: "Top Ten Things You Didn't Know about Easter."



Have a great weekend, whether you wear a hat like these or not.