What’s All This About Band Book Week?

I’m here to speak out against Band Book Week. How dare those librarians force us to read books about band all week! Don’t they know there are also books about birth control and fat kids and witches and gay penguins and full frontal snogging and Huckleberry Finn AND shelves of books by Judy Blume?! Kids won’t have time to just read books about band —

Miss Litella?

Yes?

Excuse me, but it’s Banned Book Week. Not Band Book Week. Banned books.

Oh. I’m sorry. Never mind.

Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books in 2000-2007

Out of 3,869 challenges reported to or recorded by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, as compiled by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association. The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom does not claim comprehensiveness in recording challenges. Research suggests that for each challenge reported there are as many as four or five which go unreported.

1 Harry Potter ~ J.K. Rowling
2 Alice series ~ Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
3 The Chocolate War ~ Robert Cormier
4 Of Mice and Men ~ John Steinbeck
5 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings ~ Maya Angelou
6 Scary Stories ~ Alvin Schwartz
7 Fallen Angels ~ Walter Dean Myers
8 It’s Perfectly Normal ~ Robie Harris
9 And Tango Makes Three ~ Justin Richardson/Peter Parnell
10 Captain Underpants ~ Dav Pilkey
11 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ~ Mark Twain
12 The Bluest Eye ~ Toni Morrison
13 Forever ~ Judy Blume
14 The Color Purple ~ Alice Walker
15 The Perks of Being A Wallflower ~ Stephen Chbosky
16 Killing Mr. Griffin ~ Lois Duncan
17 Go Ask Alice ~ Anonymous
18 King and King ~ Linda de Haan
19 Catcher in the Rye ~ J.D. Salinger
20 Bridge to Terabithia ~ Katherine Paterson
21 The Giver ~ Lois Lowry
22 We All Fall Down ~ Robert Cormier
23 To Kill A Mockingbird ~ Harper Lee`
24 Beloved ~ Toni Morrison
25 The Face on the Milk Carton ~ Caroline Cooney
26 Snow Falling on Cedars ~ David Guterson
27 My Brother Sam Is Dead ~ James Lincoln Collier
28 In the Night Kitchen ~ Maurice Sendak
29 His Dark Materials series ~ Philip Pullman
30 Gossip Girl series ~ Cecily von Ziegesar
31 What My Mother Doesn’t Know ~ Sonya Sones
32 Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging ~ Louise Rennison
33 It’s So Amazing ~ Robie Harris
34 Arming America ~ Michael Bellasiles
35 Kaffir Boy ~ Mark Mathabane
36 Blubber ~ Judy Blume
37 Brave New World ~ Aldous Huxley
38 Athletic Shorts ~ Chris Crutcher
39 Bless Me, Ultima ~ Rudolfo Anaya
40 Life is Funny ~ E.R. Frank
41 Daughters of Eve ~ Lois Duncan
42 Crazy Lady ~ Jane Leslie Conly
43 The Great Gilly Hopkins ~ Katherine Paterson
44 You Hear Me ~ Betsy Franco
45 Slaughterhouse Five ~ Kurt Vonnegut
46 Whale Talk ~ Chris Crutcher
47 The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby ~ Dav Pilkey
48 The Facts Speak for Themselves ~ Brock Cole
49 The Terrorist ~ Caroline Cooney
50 Mick Harte Was Here ~ Barbara Park
51 Summer of My German Soldier ~ Bette Green
52 The Upstairs Room ~ Johanna Reiss
53 When Dad Killed Mom ~ Julius Lester
54 Blood and Chocolate ~ Annette Curtis Klause
55 The Fighting Ground ~ Avi
56 The Things They Carried ~ Tim O’Brien
57 Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry ~ Mildred Taylor
58 Fat Kid Rules the World ~ K.L. Going
59 The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things ~ Carolyn Mackler
60 A Time To Kill ~ John Grisham
61 Rainbow Boys ~ Alex Sanchez
62 Olive’s Ocean ~ Kevin Henkes
63 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ~ Ken Kesey
64 A Day No Pigs Would Die ~ Robert Newton Peck
65 Speak ~ Laurie Halse Anderson
66 Always Running ~ Luis Rodriguez
67 Black Boy ~ Richard Wright
68 Julie of the Wolves ~ Jean Craighead George
69 Deal With It! ~ Esther Drill
70 Detour for Emmy ~ Marilyn Reynolds
71 Draw Me A Star ~ Eric Carle
72 Fahrenheit 451 ~ Ray Bradbury
73 Harris and Me ~ Gary Paulsen
74 Junie B. Jones series ~ Barbara Park
75 So Far From the Bamboo Grove ~ Yoko Watkins
76 Song of Solomon ~ Toni Morrison
77 Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes ~ Chris Crutcher
78 What’s Happening to My Body Book ~ Lynda Madaras
79 The Boy Who Lost His Face ~ Louis Sachar
80 The Lovely Bones ~ Alice Sebold
81 Anastasia Again! ~ Lois Lowry
82 Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret ~ Judy Blume
83 Bumps In the Night ~ Harry Allard
84 Goosebumps series ~ R.L. Stine
85 Shade’s Children ~ Garth Nix
86 Cut ~ Patricia McCormick
87 Grendel ~ John Gardner
88 The House of Spirits ~ Isabel Allende
89 I Saw Esau ~ Iona Opte
90 Ironman ~ Chris Crutcher
91 The Stupids series ~ Harry Allard
92 Taming the Star Runner ~ S.E. Hinton
93 Then Again, Maybe I Won’t ~ Judy Blume
94 Tiger Eyes ~ Judy Blume
95 Like Water for Chocolate ~ Laura Esquivel
96 Nathan’s Run ~ John Gilstrap
97 Pinkerton, Behave! ~ Steven Kellog
98 Freaky Friday ~ Mary Rodgers
99 Halloween ABC ~ Eve Merriam
100 Heather Has Two Mommies ~ Leslea Newman

Celebrate Banned Book Week by reading all the challenged books you can find. Discuss with your parents, your children, your teachers, your friends, your minister and the lady who cuts your hair what the themes are that someone might have objected to and why. Talk about whether you agree or not. But TALK! There’s nothing so dangerous it can’t be talked about.

And if you hear anyone suggest a book should be challenged or banned, your first question should be, “Have you read it?” If not, they don’t get to have an opinion about it.

How many of these have you read? Do you agree with the challenges?

You Might Be A Band Geek

You Might Be A Band Geek If …
1. You just found out that people pay to get into football games.
2. A story that begins, “This one time at band camp” really is a story about this one time at band camp.
3. You match step with whoever you’re walking down the hall with.
4. The football game is just the break on either side of the halftime show.
5. The only pick-up line you know is “Need any help with your fingering?”
6. You know that getting to rehearsal early means you’re on time, getting there on time means you’re late, and getting there late means you run laps.
7. You have a favorite time signature.
8. You conduct to the radio.
9. When someone asks who your favorite band is you answer, “High school or college?”
10. You know how many people fit in a tuba locker.
11. You argue with the administration to make marching band count as PE credit.
12. When people call you a band geek you smile and accept the compliment.

Got any more? Are you a band geek?

Tell me your band stories!

Six Word Memoirs

I love these. Said to be originated by Ernest Hemingway when he wrote, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Now it’s become a worldwide phenomenon, party game, and today’s blog entry. The New Yorker has a great article about it.

Here are some to get you thinking, then I want to see yours, folks!

Couldn’t cope so I wrote songs. ~ Aimee Mann

Joined Army. Came out. Got booted. ~ Johan Baumeister

Seventy years, few tears, hairy ears. ~ Bill Querengesser

Nobody cared, then they did. Why? ~ Chuck Klosterman

Extremely responsible, secretly longed for spontaneity. ~ Sabra Jennings

Some cross-eyed kid, forgotten then found. ~ Diana Welch

After Harvard, had baby with crackhead. ~ Robin Templeton

Revenge is living well, without you. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Me see world! Me write stories! ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

Today mine is “Wanted to sleep late, but didn’t.”

What’s yours??

What’s For Dinner?

Here are four things you should know about me. Especially if I invite you for dinner.

1. I’m lazy.
2. I’m cheap.
3. I’m always in a hurry.
4. Sometimes I forget to thaw stuff.

When these things collide, there be feedbag fallout. My son found this out recently when he asked what we were having for dinner.

I said, “Boca burgers and whipped cauliflower.”

He rolled his eyes and said, “Oh boy. Prime fib and fauxtatoes.”

What’s your least favorite dinner?

Odd Book Titles, part deux

If you missed the list of winners, you can find it here.

Narrowly missing the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title over the years:

• I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen
• How to Write a How to Write Book
• Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues
• Cheese Problems Solved
• People who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Dr Feelgood
• Drawing and Painting the Undead
• Tiles of the Unexpected: A Study of Six Miles of Geometric Tile Patterns on the London Underground
• Squid Recruitment Dynamics
• Glory Remembered: Wooden Headgear of Alaska Sea Hunters
• How Green Were the Nazis?
• D. Di Mascio’s Delicious Ice Cream: D. Di Mascio of Coventry: An Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans
• Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan
• Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium
• Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence
• The Essential Underwater Guide to North Wales Vol 1
• Let’s Discover F Words
• Celebrating Boxes
• Applications of High Tech Squids
• The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox
• Detecting Foreign Bodies in Food
• Equids in Time and Space
• Sexual Health at Your Fingertips
• 227 Secrets Your Snake Wants You To Know
• Celtic Sex Magic: For Couples, Groups and Solitary Practitioners
• Design for Impact: 50 Years of Airline Safety Cards
• Hot Topics in Urology
• The Voodoo Revenge Book: An Anger Management Program You Can Really Stick With

All deserving nominees. And two — count ‘em, two — squid titles. (Three if “Equids” is a typo.) Who knew?

Which is your favorite?

Odd Book Titles

The Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title was begun by Bruce Robertson as a way to avoid boredom at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Actual titles of actual books are submitted by publishers, booksellers and librarians from around the world. Voting is held online at Bookseller.com.

I hope you enjoy these as much as I did.

The Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year: Winners 1978-2007

1978: Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice
1979: The Madam as Entrepreneur: Career Management in House Prostitution
1980: The Joy of Chickens
1981: Last Chance at Love: Terminal Romances
1982: Population and Other Problems
1983: The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling
1984: The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History and Its Role in the World Today
1985: Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power: How to Increase the Other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts
1986: Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality
1987: No Award
1988: Versailles: The View From Sweden
1989: How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art
1990: Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual
1991: No Award
1992: How to Avoid Huge Ships
1993: American Bottom Archaeology
1994: Highlights in the History of Concrete
1995: Reusing Old Graves
1996: Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers
1997: The Joy of Sex: Pocket Edition
1998: Development in Dairy Cow Breeding and Management: and New Opportunities to Widen the Uses of Straw
1999: Weeds in a Changing World
2000: High Performance Stiffened Structures
2001: Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service
2002: Living With Crazy Buttocks
2003: The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories
2004: Bombproof Your Horse
2005: People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It
2006: The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification
2007: If You Want Closure In Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs

Which is your favorite?

Amicable Numbers

What I was reading:

Amicable numbers are any pair of numbers for which each is the sum of all of the divisors of the other — they are said to have been discovered by Pythagoras. The smallest pair of such numbers is 220 & 284: the divisors of 220 are 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 22, 44, 55 and 110 (the sum of which is 284); and the divisors of 284 are 1, 2, 4, 71 and 142 (the sum of which is 220). In 1636, Pierre de Fermat showed that 17296 & 18416 were also amicable. Two years later, Rene Descartes proved 9363584 & 9437056. Other amicable pairs (as they are also known) include: 1184 & 1210, 2620 & 2924, 5020 & 5564, 6232 & 6368, 10744 & 10856, 12285 & 14595, 63020 & 76084.

What I was thinking:

Amicable numbers? Could they own a dog together? Do they like LIKE each other or just like each other? Would I want to go out for coffee with them? Nah. Not if they like math so much. Plus, I’d probably call them “Einstein” or “Brainiac” or “Poindexter” and then they’d be all like, “Your mother’s a Poindexter!” And then I’d be all like, “I’m rubber and you’re glue!” And then they’d be all like, “Yeah, you’re rubber …. rubber cement so it sticks to YOU!” And then I’d be all like, “Whatev.” And get stuck with the bill. That doesn’t seem very amicable to me, Poindexter.

Why DO people like math?!

Tapeworm

I’m always hungry. Fairly certain I have a tapeworm.

I mean, really, what else could it be?

More distressing than having a tapeworm is that none of the so-called “professionals” in my life (gynecologist, dental hygienist, hairdresser, check-out guy at the grocery store) believe me.

Nor do they seem to care.

But a tapeworm! C’mon!!

Armed with only my logic and my mad google skillz, I started doing some research. The Mayo Clinic seemed like a good, scholarly first stop, even though I don’t eat a lot of mayonnaise. It was looking pretty good until they said if one had a tapeworm, one might also notice “segments of the adult tapeworm (proglottids) in one’s stool.”

Not on MY watch, buddy. My leather ottoman is as proglottid-free as the day I bought it. But I did notice a blob of orange marmalade that I wiped off.

So I added the Mayo Clinic to the list of professionals who mock me.

MyElectronicMD seemed a promising site until they said, “The Dwarf tapeworm is spread directly from an infected person to another person.” Appalling! Don’t they know the politically correct phrase is “Little Person tapeworm”? But really, Little People are not that little, so the reliability of this site is highly questionable.

Clearly, I’ll have to travel out of the country to seek relief, much like elderly Minnesotans who are forced to sneak into Canada for their heart medicine. Luckily, they can barter for it using their abundant and cheap Viagra.

My mad google skillz proved once again invaluable when I located a translation site. I typed in “I think I have a tapeworm” and was immediately rewarded by several nations who not only didn’t mock me, but also told me how to approach Doctors Without Internet Borders.

Croatian: Mislim da imam trakavice
Dutch: Ik denk dat ik een lintworm
French: Je crois que j’ai un ténia
Italian: Credo di avere una tenia
Norwegian: Jeg tror jeg har en Bendelormer
Portuguese: Penso ter uma ténia

First stop … German Google to try my mad google skillz, I mean, my nahrung google fertigkeiten.

Herr Doctor ….. Ich glaube, ich habe eine Bandwurm.

Do YOU think I have a tapeworm? And don’t you think it ROCKS that it’s called a “Bandwurm” in German??

Coolest. Thing. Ever.

This is a graphic representation of the first chapter of my young adult mystery work-in-progress BLACK AND BLUE.

Can you tell by looking at this what it’s about? Who the characters are in this scene? The setting?

This is from The Coolest Website Ever … wordle. You simply paste in a chunk of text and the website creates a graphic. I became aware of it after the two political conventions. Someone had uploaded the text from Obama’s acceptance speech and from McCain’s and made a graphic in the newspaper.

The words that appear the largest are the ones used the most. Writers could use this as a way to check their overuse of certain words. Obviously it’s not all the words in the chapter, just the key words.

But isn’t it beautiful?

Here are some more designs ….

Cool, eh?! How could YOU use Wordle?

Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator

I named my first child almost 21 years ago and have never been made to feel ashamed. Until now. Then along comes Sarah Palin and her passel of kids with the most imaginative names. Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper and Trig.

I feel so stupid. I never once thought to name my child after a sporting event OR a math class. And if I did, I’d probably have chosen the most inappropriate, elitist-sounding names.

Lacrosse, maybe.

Or Plane Geometry. Oh, but that’s a slippery slope. It would inevitably get shortened to PG and bullies would further abbreviate it to Pig. And we know that’s bad. Especially if s/he ever wore lipstick.

But now, thanks to Really Smart Programmers, all of us can name our children in the unique manner of Sarah Palin by using the “Sarah Palin Baby Name Generator.”

If my parents had killed moose and lived in darkness half the year, I might have been called not “Becky,” but Creation Schwarzkopf Palin.

If my Mom was mad at me, maybe for wasting all my oil money on candy, she would have yelled across the tundra, “Block Lionel Palin!! You quit acting like a porkaholic!”

But the DMV and Oprah would always know me as Buster Taint Palin.

Of course, we’d know Oprah as Bang Walmart Palin. We’d call her Bang, of course.

What’s your Palin name? What’s the oddest name you ever came across?