Kelly, I think you may have some competition....

Though I think your celeb version is much better.

Finally my knowledge of Japanese demons comes in handy

I had what was probably my most unusual reference question ever today.

A rather large and somewhat scary young man came in with a friend and asked what we had in the way of Japanese literature. This seemed straightforward enough, but as further conversation revealed he was specifically interested in the oni (demons or ogres) and more specifically was looking for artwork depicting such...because he needed some reference images for a tattoo.

I'm not totally sure if he wanted to GET or GIVE an oni tattoo -- he did have several large tattoos on his arms and legs already, but I later heard him talking to a student worker and it sounded like he actually works at a tattoo parlor.

This guy was lucky he came in on my watch, because I don't think anyone else on staff would have known enough about this particular subject to give him much help. He had a specific type of image in mind (ogre-like oni with large teeth), and said he'd already looked on the Web with no success. We probably spent 45 minutes looking at different books of Japanese artwork. I also found a few good images on ARTstor. None of the pictures were exactly what he wanted, but in the end he went away with 8-10 photocopies or printouts of scrolls and statues depicting oni. Oh yeah, and a Tsukioka Yoshitoshi woodblock print of a Japanese warrior on top of a giant skull with bulging eyes, which I have to admit would make a pretty badass tattoo.

What's funny is that this guy was from out of town, and apparently was not very familiar with the college at all. For all I know he was wandering from library to library looking for anyone who knew anything about depictions of demons in Japanese art, but I guess he finally came to the right place.

Uh oh, they're on to us

I suppose it was inevitable that someone would eventually realize the truth.

Librarians are vampires.

It's nice to have outside confirmation of my theory that IT people are a related subspecies, though.

Identifont

Here's a great site for all us book/print/typography geeks:

http://www.identifont.com/

Identifont has a lot of info about different fonts, and allows you to run a search on a font name to see a sample or similar fonts. But the most interesting part of the site to my mind is the "Identify a font" option, where you answer a series of questions about a font you've seen. It will try to tell you what the name of the font is. I've had mixed results using this to identify fonts I already know the names of, but it's still a neat tool.

Identifont also has information on downloading free fonts from other sites.

Jobbity Job in Madison

Is anyone still in the Madison area and looking for a job? One of the guys who works here at the UW preparing stuff for digitization is leaving at the end of July, and the boss said to point people her way if I knew anyone. Let me know if you're interested! (It's Leia, btw; I think my nom du guerre threw some people off. And I doubt that I spelled "nom du guerre" correctly....)

beard jokes never get old

Is anyone else super annoyed by all of the shitty trailers that keep advertising movies as being produced "by the guys who brought you the 40-year-old Virgin"? I'm pissed because Judd Apatow was only tangentially involved in most of these projects (as in, he's making money but didn't make them funny) and we can already tell that the films are going to completely suck or will be sophomoric to the point of painfulness.

Anyway, I found this neat little collection of sound clips from Knocked Up that compiles all of the hi-LAR-ious beard jokes from that movie here: http://www.soundboard.com/sb/Knocked_up_Beard_Joke.aspx.

Just listen to those clips a couple of times instead of going to see Forgetting Sarah Henderson or Drillbit Wilson or whatever else is getting promoted as the next Superbad.

Dr. Seuss in The Onion

Many of you probably got to see this IN PRINT, but for anyone who missed it:

Stop Making Movies About My Books