Highlights

"Cooking Rule... If at first you don't succeed, order pizza."*

I always think about food at Thanksgiving. This year I’m thinking more about the chemistry behind baking and cooking:

This past weekend I made an apple pie—a test run of a new-to-me recipe to share at Thanksgiving. As I tossed apple slices with cinnamon and some flour, I wondered whether the flour was necessary to make the fruit “set-up” as it bakes. Otherwise, mixing flour in with that delicious fruit seems so wrong!

Do you know for sure what the flour does? And since we’re on the subject, why is there both baking soda and baking powder? I once thought they were the same thing—many baked goods were sacrificed so I could learn that’s just not so.**

To find out what all those ingredients are up to in our ovens, I searched SUNCAT for the keywords “science cookery.” These books caught my eye:

“Kitchen Mysteries” by Herve This

“What Einstein Told His Cook” ed. by Robert L. Wolke

“On Food and Cooking” by Harold McGee

Happy cooking, baking, and eating this Thanksgiving!

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*A quote attributed to Anonymous.

**This year I’m thankful I won’t be preparing the main course for Thanksgiving dinner. My relatives are thankful, too.

Thanksgiving Films Redux

I started searching for a list of Thanksgiving films but found almost the very same ones that I blogged about last year. So, here’s last year’s post again with changes in bolded type:

If you have vacation time during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, why not relax with a movie from the library?

I’m going to have to watch a marathon of all “The Godfather” airplane-related**** movies—whether I like it or not—but if you have control over your viewing, try one of the Thanksgiving-related movies below. (Suggestions were gathered from these websites. Some seem more obviously Thanksgiving-y than others.)

Click the title to search the library catalog.

• Hannah and Her Sisters
• Home for the Holidays
• The Ice Storm*
• Miracle on 34th Street
• Planes, Trains and Automobiles
• A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving
• Alice’s Restaurant
• Avalon***
• Making Thanksgiving Special
• Scent of a Woman
• The Waltons: The Thanksgiving Story (removed in 2009: no longer listed in SUNCAT)
• The Doors**
• By the Light of the Silvery Moon
• Raising Arizona***
• Rocky***
• The New World
• Annie Hall
• What’s Cooking (added in 2009 from this list)
• Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (added in 2009 from this list)

What’s your favorite Thanksgiving film?

*Warning: Roger Ebert calls this the “most depressing” Thanksgiving movie.

**Flickgrrl remembers the Jim Morrison character throwing a turkey at his wife.

***All have key Thanksgiving scenes according to Flickgrrl. Besides, who doesn’t like “Rocky” and “Raising Arizona”?

****Want to join me in an “airplane picture” marathon? Search SUNCAT for the keyword “Airplanes” limited to Video and DVD formats.

Winners

It’s a bonus post on a non-work day. NaBloPoEvWoDaMo has brought on blogging fever—I can’t get enough!

The National Book Award winners were finally* announced on Wednesday night:

• Fiction: “Let the Great World Spin” by Colum McCann
• Nonfiction: “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt” by T.J. Stiles
• Poetry: “Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy” by Keith Waldrop
• Young People’s Literature: “Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice” by Phillip Hoose

See all the nominees on the National Book Awards webpage.

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*I’ve never anticipated a book award announcement as much as this one. The email newsletter I signed up for kept reminding me of it. I’m just glad it’s over and will try not to mention it again until next year.

I felt the same way about Project Runway—at some point, I stopped caring who won, but I’d put in so much time each week I felt I needed to see it through to the end.

Links I Love Friday

NOVA: Becoming Human Parts 1, 2 and 3: “Where did we come from? What makes us human? An explosion of recent discoveries sheds light on these questions, and NOVA’s comprehensive, three-part special, ‘Becoming Human,’ examines what the latest scientific research reveals about our hominid relatives.”

I watched this series the last three Tuesdays, but if you missed it, you can watch online. It’s fascinating!

If you like NOVA and want to watch other shows, search SUNCAT for “Nova (Television program)” as the title.

During almost every show I watch that involves real scientists doing what they do, there comes a point when I think, “That’s someone’s job? Why didn’t I major in  science so I could do that!?”

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“Fashion Lessons for Graduate Students” from The Chronicle of Higher Education: Ever felt—or been made to feel—silly for watching a reality show on television?* I think you’ll like this article because we know they aren’t silly at all.

“On Project Runway, fashion becomes a metaphor for every creative endeavor: the necessity of training and hard work, requiring the ability to manage time and budgets, the importance of being current in your field and having a historical perspective, and the realization that bad luck and happy chance sometimes play a part.”

*I started writing this post on Thursday night, right before the Project Runway season finale.

Did you watch the season finale, too? Interested in learning to sew? Search SUNCAT for “Sewing” as a subject.

Or maybe you’re interested in graduate school? Search SUNCAT for “Graduate Students” and “Universities and Colleges—Graduate work” as subjects.

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Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today?, obsessiveconsumption.typepad.com/what_did_you_buy_today/: A blog documenting one artist/designer/craftivist’s personal consumption.

I read about this site in a magazine. The artist makes a drawing of almost everything she purchases. She even draws pictures of receipts. (See her daily drawings on Flickr.)

The idea of recording everything of something you do every day and sharing it on the Internet fascinates me…and bothers me at the same time. Would I ever want to share everything with everyone? Probably not, but that’s why I find people who do interesting. What do you think?

"Books are a uniquely portable magic."*

Were you one of the 1,800 who saw Stephen King at the Van Wezel on Monday night? Me, neither. But, I enjoyed reading Susan Rife’s blog post about the experience of interviewing him.

I’m not a Stephen King fan, or rather, I’m not a hardcore Stephen King fan as so many of his fans are: My mother and brother devoured both the original and uncut versions of “The Stand” and could pick out which sentences had been even slightly altered. Scary or impressive? You decide.

When I first started to work for this library system, I commuted from Tampa. Although not a huge fan of audiobooks—I’m a visual learner—I decided I needed something to listen to during my daily drives. I chose Stephen King’s “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft” on CD.

Not a King fan, not an audiobook fan—what was I thinking?!
But I loved that book, and I developed an appreciation for Stephen King’s writing.

Long story short: come join me in the hold queue for “Under the Dome” by Stephen King. The wait won’t be that long. 

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*A quote attributed to Stephen King found here.

NewsBank!

The library system has subscribed to another database: NewsBank.

Are you excited? I am!

The subscription includes:

• America’s Newspapers: Electronic editions of record for local, regional, and national U.S. newspapers.
• America’s Obituaries and Death Notices: The largest and most comprehensive collection of newspaper obituaries and death notices.
• Electronic Image Editions: Exact digital reproduction of the printed edition of the Sarasota Herald Tribune, with keyword search and the ability to browse the full publication.

NewsBank is accessed through the library website’s Electronic Information Resources page, http://sclibs.net/resources.aspx. From home, you’ll need your Sarasota County Library card number to log in.

Enjoy!

"It's only words, and words are all I have..."*

Oxford University Press announced their choice for Word of the Year yesterday: unfriend.

“Unfriend” means “to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.”

Since I find it painful to “unfriend” someone on Facebook or Twitter, I compensate by not searching for and not accepting many “friends” in the first place. Sometimes even the small group of “friends” I have post updates often enough so that I find social networking overwhelming.

Can next year’s word of the year be “information overload”? Or has that already been honored?

Social networking I’m still a little iffy about, but I’m excited about words and language. If you feel likewise, you’ll find some great books in SUNCAT about the English language by searching for the subjects “English language—History” and “English language—New words.”

For books about online social networking, try searching for these subjects: Facebook, Twitter and Online Social Networks.

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*”Words” sung by the Bee Gees.

Naked Lunch @ 50

Yesterday my boss and I oohed and aahed over the brand new edition of “Naked Lunch” by William S. Burroughs, “Naked Lunch: The Restored Text.” Neither of us were interested in reading it—just not our kind of book—but it certainly is an interesting and beautiful object.

I went searching for a picture of this edition to share with you and discovered “Naked Lunch” is fifty this year. If “Naked Lunch” is your kind of book, you might want to take a look at the website Naked Lunch @ 50, http://nakedlunch.org.

Read more about “Naked Lunch” in the library’s database Literature Resource Center—search for “The Naked Lunch (Novel)” as a subject.

And listen or read the recent NPR story on the novel’s 50th anniversary.