Just a few days before his next birthday and he chose to swap out Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with everyone’s friends from Sesame Street. To get to this street, you’ll need to find Bizzell Memorial Library and head to the third floor across from the PS call numbers. He chose this topic earlier in the year before it was announced that Sesame Street was losing funding, so it now has an added importance.
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Too Many X-Overs
If you read comic books in the 90s you’ll know exactly where this is going, even if it didn’t read the X-men titles. I’d argue they were the worst offenders, but it seems like everyone was suffering this same malady back then. Onslaught, Offslaught; Distraught, Dattraught. Po-tay-to; po-tah-to.
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Bang, Bang Lucky Luke
One of the benefits of a job like mine is constantly mining for material that might make a good exhibit. An added bonus, and one that cannot be overstated, is working in a library where you have access to an amazing amount of potential–including some surprises.
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In the Trenches
Other top contenders for the title of this post were “Consider the Trench Coat,” “Understanding the Trench Trope,” and “The Wearing of the Trope Coat.”
Gathering the content for my earlier Fantastic Four post brought to mind something else I have been wanting to put together. This one has to do with costumes, or more appropriately disguises over costumes, at least in these early cases.
Let’s Get Creative
Back in January this year (2025) a colleague asked if I would be on a roundtable panel to talk about creativity at the OK-ACRL conference. I agreed and it was a great little panel with a lot of useful takeaways. I ended up ruminating for months on some things I had roughly put together for that discussion.
Thankfully, that turned out to be useful as I gave a talk this past Friday at our University Libraries annual all-hands-on-deck meetup. I wasn’t sure exactly how things were going to be going into it, but I learned a lot form the aggregation of my thoughts and notes and had several people appreciate the event afterwards.
Since we had breakout sessions and not everyone was in the same room, several people expressed either sincere of feigned sorrow for missing my presentation. Since I already have most of it written down, and it would benefit greatly from having links to quotes, events, other talks that you might want to follow I am going to roll it all out here in more or less the same cohesiveness that the live studio audience received.
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Well That’s…Fantastic
One of the things we consciously try to do with (or for) our children is to not dump our nostalgia or fandoms onto them so they can develop their own affinities. Most of the time, it turns out they end up liking what we like. Other times it goes off in a different direction than you experienced and can open up a whole new world, or worlds.
This is one of those times.
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Nobody Was Faster or A Letter From the Dead
A few weeks ago I had the first dream of my grandfather since he died in 2022. Most of the time when I see a relative who has passed on my lucid dreaming kicks in and we end up talking about them not being alive, but bar none, they’ve always been great visits that I have been glad to have. What makes this one a little different, and worth writing about on the internet is the very context in which it appeared.
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Berenstain Bears
This is another of those larger exhibits my son helps out on. I want to do a much longer post about the Berenstain Bears and their evolution across the decades, but this one was a bit of a test for something I want to do every year as a kind of a summer reading program.
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Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Continuing on with the car theme, even if our Count Car is out of commission following some fuel pump failures and fouled plugs.
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Goodbye to Our Creepo
Today we said goodbye to our Madam Curie. Affectionately known as Creep, or Creepo, because in the mornings when she would wake up she would root to the foot of the bed to come out of the covers, stretch out and creep to the head of the bed to wake us up or say good morning.
