Video Sunday: Sloth and MLIS Degrees

Okay dokey!  So!  First off, for half a second there I thought I couldn’t embed videos.  Fortunately this morning I found myself a little workaround.  I can now embed almost every video, with some exceptions. Huzzah!  Now.  Librarians doing Lady Gaga.  My first thought off the top of my head is that they’re doing a play on Poker Face and not Telephone?  I’d think that with NPR doing it one place and the army doing it another, Telephone would have been the number one choice.  Or, at the very least, Bad Romance.  And why is it that when librarians hold drinks on the cover of SLJ it’s a problem but when this darling woman holds the world’s greatest martini glass she is a-okay?  That is a mystery for the universe.  Many thanks to the multiple people who sent me this link!

Changing gears entirely (and on purpose) is this wonderful video covering the most recent Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.  Now the article about this award describes it as Presentation of World’s Largest Children’s Literature Award.  I read something like that and I imagine a physically large award.  Maybe a bronze tree or something along those lines.  In fact, by “large” they mean “most expensive” because the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award is a monetary award, largest in the world.  It’s 5 million SEK (or 490, 000 EURO).  Howsoever you slice it, it’s big.  David Almond was up this year, but the ultimate winner was Belgian Kitty Crowther.  This lovely little video says more:

Would you like to see her work for yourself?  That could prove difficult.  As far as I can tell, the only time Ms. Crowther has been translated in America was back in 2000 when Hyperion brought over her Jack and Jim.  It is currently out-of-print, alas.

My August Children’s Literary Cafe will be all about ebooks and their creators.  With that in mind, my buddy Don Citarella sent me this crazy international ad of sorts for a “phone book”.  More like a phone book video game than a book book, but there might be a lot of potential applications for other uses.

Two people have mentioned the It’s a Book trailer to me recently, and both have their problems with it.  You are familiar with this title, yes?  It’s the new Lane Smith.  The trailer, like the book itself, is a mite bit problematic, though.  The whole premise of the story is the awesomeness of books and how one distinguishes them from computery stuff.  So, as Person #1 pointed out, can we mention the irony of giving this book not only a book trailer but a Facebook page as well?  Where precisely are you supposed to watch such things?  Not in a book.  Person #2 pointed out that the trailer is utterly misleading because it leaves off the ending of the actual story.  An ending that shifts the tone of the text and, alas, makes it impossible to tell in a preschool storytime.  I agree.  If you’re going to be gutsy in your wordplay in a book, you should be equally gutsy in your promotional material or you end up sinning by omission.  Here’s the trailer, in case you’re curious:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpfZQrWD2T0&feature=player_embedded

Did you miss the final results of the 100 Scope Notes Nontraditional Non-Fiction Monday?  Why, that challenge was the whole reason I found myself devouring a full pack of Bubbalicious Bubble Gum the other day.  The full results can be found here, and the ultimate winner ended up being Bookends.  I came in a respectable third, which was flattering.  Of course, full credit goes to Travis Jonker and Julie from Hi, Miss Julie who created a song review.  The first of its kind?  Perhaps (though the impressive Gilbert and Sullivan review by Book Aunt was much along the same lines).

And now it’s another round of my favorite game, “Oh!  They’re Still Alive?”  This week: Pat Hutchins!  You might know her best from her fantastic book Rosie’s Walk, though we’ve a full collection of her titles in my library as well.  She stopped by the Greenwillow offices just the other day, it seems.  In fact, the blog Under the Green Willow reported that her Titch books were turned into a television series in Spanish.  Visually, this takes me back to my youth when I used to watch foreign children’s shorts on the television show Pinwheel.  Good times.

And for the final bit of off-topicness, you just can’t do better than baby sloths.  I mean it.  You can’t.  Just try.

Brings to mind such books as Slowly, Slowly, Slowly Said the Sloth by Eric Carle and Score One for the Sloths by Helen Lester.  Good stuff.  Thanks to BB-Blog for the link.

Filed under: Videos