Teen Photoshop Workshop @ Springwood Library

Last school holidays, award-winning Sydney artist Liam Benson taught a Photoshop workshop at Springwood Library for teens. The results are great (and LOL-worthy) – see below!

Creepy face-swap

Portal/Mario mash-up

Grumpy Cat says ‘No’.

LOLpuppy in space!

Where Do You Love2Read?

The Blue Mountains Library staff recently made this fun video about the places we Love2Read (with photos taken by John Merriman). What about you – where do you Love2Read? We’d love to know – please tell us in the comments section below!    

  

Diagram Prize shortlist

The Diagram Prize is awarded by The Bookseller magazine each year to the book with the oddest title. The prize began in 1978 as a way of alleviating boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair with Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice its inaugural winner.

The 2012 shortlisted titles are :

• A Century of Sand Dredging in the Bristol Channel: Volume Two by Peter Gosson ~ documents the sand trade from its inception in 1912 to the present day, focusing on the Welsh coast.
• Cooking with Poo by Saiyuud Diwong ~ a Thai cookbook. “Poo” is Thai for “crab” and is Diwong’s nickname.
• Estonian Sock Patterns All Around the World by Aino Praakli ~ styles of socks and stockings found in Estonian knitting.
• The Great Singapore Penis Panic: And the Future of American Mass Hysteria by Scott D Mendelson ~ analysis of the “Koro” psychiatric epidemic that hit Singapore in 1967.
• Mr Andoh’s Pennine Diary: Memoirs of a Japanese Chicken Sexer in 1935 Hebden Bridge by Stephen Curry and Takayoshi Andoh ~ the story of Koichi Andoh, who travelled from Japan to Yorkshire in the 1930s to train workers at a hatchery business the art of determining the sex of one-day-old chicks.
• A Taxonomy of Office Chairs by Jonathan Olivares ~ exhaustive overview of the evolution of the modern office chair.
• The Mushroom in Christian Art by John A Rush ~ the author postulates that Jesus is a personification of the Holy Mushroom, Amanita Muscaria.

 

The prize winners for this prize are voted for by the public. Cast your vote by clicking here.

The winner will be announced on 30th March 2012.

 

So many books!

Captain James T. Kirk : Sometimes, Mr Spock, I think I should have been a Librarian.

Mr Spock : The job of Librarian would be no less challenging, Captain.

The Joy of Books

This is a beautifully done little film . . . and it confirms what I’ve been telling you; - arranging books by colour is the only way to go!

Gender Switching

A new trend in reading/re-writing the classics (apart from zombifying them), is ‘gender switching’. Kate Harrod recently wrote this in an article about gender switching for the UK Guardian:

“It’s so much fun, fiddling with other people’s creations. Fanfics, mashups, sequels, slash: it’s a game anyone and everyone can play. The TV and film industries do it too, upending the genre, plot and time period of their originals with the insouciant ease of Holmes texting Watson on his Blackberry. Next year, the movie adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies will add the shuffling undead to the mix.

But, as with song covers, one of the easiest ways to change something is simply to turn he into she and vice versa. I’ve been genderswitching out-of-copyright stories all year, and marvelling at the results. Here, for example, is Shirley Holmes:

“I had seen little of Miss Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us away from each other. My own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise up around the woman who first finds herself mistress of her own establishment, were sufficient to absorb all my attention, while Miss Holmes, who loathed every form of society with her whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among her old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition… “

Thus writes Dr Jane Watson, about to embark on an exciting new adventure with irascible genius Shirley Holmes in a fictional universe just a fingersnap away from Conan Doyle’s original.

For one thing, in this universe, Conan Doyle’s London is startlingly female. Seriously, it’s as if the late Victorian era didn’t actually contain any men, except for the occasional stolid servant or nervous abandoned husband. “Why are there so many women in this story?” I kept thinking – and then realised how depressing it was that even women assume fiction should be male-dominated. I’m now desperate to see a TV adaptation with Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley as Holmes and Watson. Julia Sawalha can be Lestrade. Tell me you can’t picture it.”

Read more from this article here.