Fusenews: Including St. Patrick’s Fire (St. Elmo Need Not Apply)

Right about now I’m beginning to panic about next week.  Three Powerpoints and I need to find a doohickey that’ll connect my laptop to a projector.  I’ve 6 manuscripts to finish going through and writing up notes on, an inker on my white couch and a Spanish penciler on my futon, and the speeches… oh, the speeches.  And where is my Drink Night going to be anyway?  Eek!

So I’m taking my dinner break at work yesterday.  I leave my library, turn onto 5th Avenue, and see this:

With the Pope in town (maybe he’ll stop by my library and get depressed when he hears that we’ve moved Winnie-the-Pooh) it wasn’t too crazy to assume that there was some connection.  Fire + St. Patrick’s Cathedral = Pope weirdness.  Turned out it was just your run-of-the-mill flaming cab.  Ah well.

• Wow, Ellen .  That was a mighty silly thing to do.  How many librarians watch your show, you ask?  A few less now, I suspect.  Not that we don’t have a sense of humor about our profession, but how hard is it to come up with material a little more original than "If they do watch the show, they probably keep the sound turned down and put their fingers up to their mouths and say, ‘Shhhhhhhh’ every time the audience laughs."  Oh, man.  The "shhh" noise?  I never get that one.  Thanks to bookshelves of doom for the link.

• Clearly Ellen should take her cues from Entertainment Weekly instead.  Laura Lutz had the scoop on the recent article 18 Sexy Trips to the Library Stacks .  They’re all good, but I would have included the scene in Be Kind, Rewind where they’re attempting to make the children’s room of the local New Jersey library branch look like the hotel in Ghostbusters .  Extra points for including Desk Set , though.

• Mr. Mo Willems had a super exclusive sneak peek of the newest Elephant and Piggie book up the other day.  I’d steal it but then he’d probably hunt me down at Comic Con (come see me speak!) and kill me.  By the way, I finally figured out what Elephant and Piggie remind me of.  The tone is completely different, but the deadpan humor and minimal words of the books remind me of nothing so much as James Marshall’s George and Martha stories.  I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before. Recently I had to integrate all the Marshall books in with the rest of the picture books and as I did so I found that there’s nothing like a good George and Martha story to cure what ails you.