PunkVoter Aaggggghhh. Fuckin oxymoron!! Mind, they don't seem very punk, either...

In amongst some horrible shit at Paper Toys (like a thanksgiving turkey, fr instance) is the Sydney Opera House and Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright house.

Recommended by Vasyl Pawlowsky as one of his favourite tipples in FreePint Newsletter 156, WorldLII - World Legal Information Institute is a freely-available resource for international law

britfilms.com has comprehensive listings of films currently in production- loads of resources for film makers as well as for people who just like films. Definition of 'British film' is given onsite.

Interzone is an sf zine so well established ithat when it started you could only get it in print form on actual paper. Site has samples of the hard copy, subs details, and loads of links.

Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts is an extensive listing of folklore and mythological stories. One of the reasons I like folklore and mythology is that you can get some insight into how other people think, or thought, about the world.

The stories people tell each other about how the world is, or how people are, help you see that the way you think just now isn't the only way to look at things. Some stories can offend us, like those on the Anti-Semitic Legends or Witchcraft Legends pages. But then, so should current folk tales like asylum seekers getting vast amounts of benefit. Or ones from the quite recent past, like the belief in widespread satanic ritual abuse (SRA).

These examples are fairly obvious ones- we all feel that we wouldn't make the same mistakes as Fay Weldon did in some of her misjudged and ill-informed comments about Islam during the Satanic Verses furore, or Bea Campbell (down the page a bit) during the SRA scares. But these are woolly liberals, who are supposed to be on the side of the downtrodden and unfortunates. Maybe using the examples of quite rich people who make a living out of talking opinionated shite isn't the most ideal, but they were the first examples that popped into my head. Possibly the Bus Station Loonies had it right with that wondrous song Kill that Nazi (in my head). We all have short hand assumptions that stay in our heads because we haven't got rid of them, and it takes effort to look at the way you think. We just need to make sure that the assumptions we give head space to have a sound basis, and aren't repetitions of shite spewed by someone with a dodgy agenda -like monetary gain in the case of Fay and Bea, or the well dodgy agenda of the example given above talking rubbish about asylum seekers.

Questioning everything is exhausting. You can't do it every day all the time. Thats why we have short hand 'lumps' of thinking so we don't need to work everything out all the time. (Here's a collection of Evolutionary Theory and Memetics links- but be warned- it can be quite a reductionist and triumphalist subject. If you don't like what you find look for something else).

So going back to the whole mythology and folklore thing- it can be useful to get an idea of how other people think, to help look at the way you see the world yourself. Surrealism also helped undermine the idea that everything always had to be the way it was. One of the reasons I always had a problem with the Trots was that they were absolutely sure they already had everything worked out.

That never made sense to me. How can you have any idea what will work when we get rid of capitalism etc/make the world better, when our thinking is so tightly bound up with living in it day to day? At best we can only have an idea of what we'll do next (apart from getting rid of it, obviously). Strategic planning is useful and necessary, for things like making sure food gets grown, people don't go hungry or untreated if they're ill. But in terms of how a society would be run, we really don't know how it might work out long term. All we can really do is say that we would keep working on it and make sure its better than it is now. Once we don't have to deal with the daily bollocks we do now, we might get all kinds of amazing possibilities opening up that we can't conceive of just now. But we'd need to make sure that we don't ossify- and again there's me coming back to the maintenance of the head and thinking.

Bugger. That was quite a long witter with not many links. Now I've gone on justifying my interest in mythology and weird shit (think Forteana to science as being analogous to mythology to assumptive thought and repeat the rant above- I'll come back to Forteana, and empiricism over explaining-away-the-not-currently-understood-with-unscientific-bullshit later), another link that might be of interest is Internet Sacred Text Archive .

The Word Spy is quite useful for definitions of pointless new words and phrases. Like 'latte factor', 'wrap rage' , and other concepts that only have meaning for the vitally challenged.

The Bentley Collection is a searchable and browsable collection of photomicrographs of snowflakes- hundreds of 'em.

Above from LII - New This Week page of Librarians' Index to the Internet.

Other good stuff from LII this week-
BirdLife International - together for birds and people

A collection of Cesar Chavez resources at Cesar Chavez Day of Service and Learning, compiled by the State of California, so be warned.

ATSDR - ToxFAQs�: Mustard Gas spends a lot of time explaining why US citizens could not possibly be at risk from their government's stockpiles of the gas, since it's stored properly and the remaining stocks are going to be disposed of this year (honest) and only bad people would use it, like some of those swarthy foreigners, but you need to know about it, because if there was a cloud of the gas came settling over your school, (and it definitely wouldn't be one of our clouds of gas, but part of some evil alien plot to destabilise the US (which is the epitome of all human achievement)), you might want to know what minimal action you could take to try to reduce the bad things that would happen as a result.

Err, was that incoherent enough to be realistic?

Also it says what to do if you're exposed to mustard gas. Like if you were Kurdish and being gassed by a US-supported dictator, fr instance.

The Japanese Volcano Research Centre has a load of stuff on volcano research, and World Wide Wolves is pretty much what you'd expect, too. World Wide Wolves is aimed at a young audience.

Rodent's Yawning Animals page also, weirdly enough, describes the site content. This one heads upped from Librarian In Black which has a lot of gadget reviews and the like.

Keeping Found Things Found- A Research Project of the Information School
at the University of Washington. I had the URL for this somewhere else, but lost it. Honestly I did- I'm not making this up just so that it looks like a good subject for research....

Mic-UK [site A]: Image gallery Tiny things!!

While the metal section smells a bit of tokenism, and the existence of a techno section might make you suspicious, EC Brown: MP3 links archive has some good links to bits and pieces of interesting music. And some bad music.

This photo essay from Mother Jones is included because my friends' son is wanting to join the army. Photos and biogs of US soldiers who went home the worse for wear. Brings the effects of war home to anyone who thinks only foreign people get hurt in these things. Found at disinformation- ignore the rancid diesel advertising.

Artifact has a big pile of urls for arty stuff including galleries and good film resources. Lots of critical stuff included. No link to The Ultimate Bad Taste Fan Site , which i just feel lets it down a bit.

Site for identifying sources of UK government funding, covers the following government departments;

Department for Education and Skills
Department of Health
Home Office
Office of the Deputy Prime Minister
Government Offices for the Regions

If you think you can stand the hassle of dealing with these people

(I'm speaking from a housing co-op point of view, rather than a library point of view, where you don't have a choice about this sort of thing),

give them a look. Its your money, after all- no reason not to blag some of it back again, before it gets spent on carpet and cake.

One of the sites I check regularly, Internet Resources Newsletter: Issue 114, March 2004 is a pretty good UK resource with masses of resources on a wide range of subjects. This month has lots of building and architecture resources.

Slightly less than reliable, Facts about... is a collection of 6 pages on various subjects that could come in handy as examples of not-too reliable information- if you were taking people through analysing reliability in sources of information, for example.



Posted on 1st March at LISNews.com: Librarian and Information Science News