What?

The Dreaded Cookie Monster
Photograph: Richard Termine/AP - with thanks to Hadley Freeman, www.guardian.co.uk

Okay, so where was I when they (you know, they) decided that Sesame Street was harmful to children? Sesame Street! The same show that I was stuck to back in the seventies when I was a three and four year old is now too much for children to handle. That's pish posh and a lot of b.s. I was a pretty sheltered child, or so I thought. My parents protected me, and didn't let me do any old thing I wanted, and I am very happy with the way they raised me and with my childhood, especially those early years when Sesame Street was supposedly rotting my brain and imparting horrible life lessons. Did children all of a sudden become superfragile? You can't show Cookie Monster eating cookies because it promotes obesity? How about you, as a parent, taking the cookie out of your own child's hand? Ernie and Bert bathing together might give the wrong impression? I bathed with my little sister when I was a little kid, and I did more pretend swimming and she ate more soap than anything else. I'm surprised my mom ever deemed us clean enough to get out. And we turned out okay -- maybe we missed scrubbing behind the ears, but we're alright.

I don't know. I'm feeling like I should buy the DVDs of the classic Sesame Street and show my kids those instead of letting them watch an hour long commercial for Elmo.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18wwln-medium-t.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/tv/2007/11/sesame_street_not_suitable_for.html

Guess this means I need to skip to figuring out RSS feeds so I can get this kind of information right away rather than a month and a half after it happens!

Flickr Frustration

Not really Flickr frustration. The second thing on my list of things to do is to explore Flickr and learn about mashups and third party sites. So I do this, and fall in love with a couple of different tools. But I can't seem to add them to my blog. I took an HTML class years ago, but I can't remember where I'm supposed to put things so they actually show up on screen - which is a problem. I'm writing this so I can stop my obsession for today and come back to this later.

I did want to mention which of the tools I fell in love with though. I wanted to use "Spell with Flickr" to replace the header on my blog. (One way or another I will replace the foggy flowers with something I actually want to see.) The programmer who created the site, Eric Kastner, was nice enough to put the code out there for anyone who wanted to copy and paste it into your blog's HTML, but right now I can't get it. The other tools are Trip Planner, which I might just use to document my trip to Ghana before I forget everything, and Flickr color pickr - very cool, but umm, what do you do with it?

Lets Get It Started

I have wanted to do a blog for some time now, but couldn't decide on what I should blog about, or on the name for the blog, or basically any aspect of actually putting fingers to keyboard and starting the d@&^ thing. But everyone's been talking about this program that the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County put together a while ago -- a tutorial to get us fuddy duddy librarians into the world of Web 2.o.

I don't particularly like the thought of me as an old fuddy duddy, so I guess I'd better get going on this and quick. Not all of the posts that we have to do have anything to do with what I'd like to actually talk about, and since I'm not required to do this (I don't work at PLCMC, by the way), you might see posts about a variety of things that still use Web 2.0 functions while I figure out what I want to talk about and "find myself" in the world of blogging.

Here we go!