BibliophileBullpen

Fri Apr 28, 2006 8:56am ET Reuters

TORONTO (Reuters) – A distraught Canadian family is offering a reward for the return of their mother’s head, hacked from her body in a funeral home a year ago by thieves who left cash, and her earrings behind.

Canadian newspapers reported Thursday someone broke into a funeral parlor in Longueuil, Quebec in July last year, where the body of Cecile Lemay was awaiting burial.

The thief or thieves made off with the 68-year-old’s head, but left her earrings and a cash charity donation behind.

“Each morning, when we get up, we ask ourselves: ‘Where is the head? Will it show up on our lawn one morning?’,” the Globe and Mail newspaper quoted Lemay’s sister Carmelle as saying.

The family is offering a reward of C$10,000 ($8,900) for information leading to the return of the stolen head or to the arrest of those responsible.

“We think about it each day. We can’t find closure and we want to know who did it and why,” another of Lemay’s sisters, Ghyslaine, said.

birthday boy • 1883 Jaroslav Hašek, Czech novelist (d. 1923)

birthday girl • 1877 Alice B. Toklas, American chain smoker (d. 1967)

old books new building • the Boston Globe gives us a feature on London’s new idea for an ‘Idea Store’ Library. via Sam Coulbourn

porn encore • Wildly successful Alan Moore author of Watchmen and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has been working on, Lost Girls a bluntly pornographic graphic novel.

duke by any other name • Tom Wolfe is trying to deflect comparisons between his novel “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” and any real southern university that his daughter attends which may or may not have a lacrosse team with behavior issues.

obit worth reading • John Kenneth Galbraith @ 97, NYT Obit Washington Post obit

talking head • NPR interview with crime writer Michael Connelly about his new collection of nonfiction crime stories Crime Beat.

banktoaster • apparently the marvelous legendary Mont Blanc ink refills also fit the plain & humble Bic G2 well almost. Instructables has the hack, so that your cheap G2 does the job of a $200 Mont Blanc. btw it makes a very fun read.

*George Washington inaugurated as first US president in 1789.

Stolen Body Parts Blamed for Illnesses

By ADAM GOLDMAN
Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — At least a dozen people who had routine operations claim they caught deadly viruses and other germs from body parts stolen from corpses in a ghoulish scandal that has sent hundreds of people for tests.

The patients tested positive for germs that cause AIDS, hepatitis or syphilis after receiving tissue transplants, according to their lawyers and court records.

Lawsuits have been filed for two Midwestern men, one in Nebraska and one in Ohio. Both claim they caught a hepatitis virus from the tissue implanted in back and spine operations – a contention that lawyers acknowledge will be difficult to prove. read more….

U.S.: FBI Sought Info Without Court OK

Friday April 28, 2006 11:31 PM

By MARK SHERMAN

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) – The FBI secretly sought information last year on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents from their banks and credit card, telephone and Internet companies without a court’s approval, the Justice Department said Friday.

It was the first time the Bush administration has publicly disclosed how often it uses the administrative subpoena known as a national security letter, which allows the executive branch of government to obtain records about people in terrorism and espionage investigations without court approval.

Friday’s disclosure was mandated as part of the renewal of the Patriot Act, the administration’s sweeping anti-terror law.

The FBI delivered a total of 9,254 NSLs relating to 3,501 people in 2005, according to a report submitted late Friday to Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate. In some cases, the bureau demanded information about one person from several companies.

The department also reported it received a secret court’s approval for 155 warrants to examine business records last year, under a Patriot Act provision that includes library records. However, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has said the department has never used the provision to ask for library records.

The number was a significant jump over past use of the warrant for business records. A year ago, Gonzales told Congress there had been 35 warrants approved between November 2003 and April 2005.

I dunno if you can see this…..but Google has picked up a wire story about a fellow throwing a baby out of a car window into a canal and killing it and is indexing it as ENTERTAINMENT.

I mus be old fashioned I thought Dead Baby Jokes were just that jokes.

essay worth reading • Scotch columnist Robert MacNeil says “Yes, I have a lot of books. No, you can’t borrow one.”

floating pain • moving must be going around – here’s another columnist Allen Jones who is bemoaning moving his library “The Pleasure and Pain of Owning Books

gifted • Bowdoin College acquires the Jane Webster Pearce Collection. Ms Pearce was an avid bookbinder and book arts collector bequeathed a stunning collection of fine decorative hand bindings, publications from fine presses, and artists’ books, brings with it the added distinction of increasing the size of the Library’s collection beyond one million volumes. Wells College has a sweet write up on Ms. Pearce.

new toys • ABE has taken the Google Mapping thing seriously, if you want to know where your ABE ordered books are shipping from they have started an ABE vendor map over at Frapper.

headsup • in from Win Schaeffer - InkSaver which allows you to control the amount of ink that comes out on the page.

deadhorses • the Globe’s David Mehegan asks the question: “How could a publisher risk all that money on a 17-year-old who had only a bare concept and had never written a book?” and gives us the run down on Alloy Entertainment & Wm Morris’s division of Ms. Viswanathan’s spoils.

and from the LA Times – still ANOTHER piece about the book packagers effect on the young adult common market. “It’s hard to blame readers of any age for voting with their feet when they see what’s seeping toward them and realize they’re about to be ankle deep in bilge.”

talking head • an interview with Australian Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks author of March.

blog worth seeing • while trying to reconstruct all my lovely bookmarks which got lost in the great laptop reload, I found Futureofthebook.com which is a dedicated to the history and future of the codex. of particular interest is the listing of upcoming printing workshops.

review • the Guardian’s John Banville talks about Philp Roth’s new Everyman.

The postal service have two types of employees–well three if you count the mouthpieces who wear ties and say ‘gee. we’re sorry we lost-ate-drove over your package. here’s an insurance claim form. have a nice day.’ There are counter clerks who may or may not have their head up their ass depending on the luck of the draw and then there are the postal trolls. Postal trolls are basically like any other trolls, slow moving and heavy handed, and nothing in the world gives them greater pleasure than turning nice symmetrical rectangular packages into objet d’art. Putting whatever is INSIDE the package is at the mercy of whatever blunt object is within their long armed reach.

The optimum secure book packaging will protect the book against most things sharp, blunt or wet. Despite what you may have heard read or surmised, no one type of packaging will do all those things. Like getting dressed for the Arctic – layering is the key.

INNER LAYERS -
Tissue • If the skin of the book is sensitive, say a dust jacket without a Brodart®, or a full leather binding, then a layer of tissue paper is a good start.

Cardboard • two pieces of cardboard of a size that extends BEYOND the corners of the book covers.

Bubble wrap • the kind with the small bubbles. I find the more valuable the book is the more layers it gets.

Plastic • at some point a polybag or even a grocery bag slipped over the bundle can save the book on a wet porch.

OUTER LAYERS -
Envelope - If the book bundle is still small enough, you can slip it into a Jiffybag® with or without padding. That padding is not a guaranteed replacement for prewrapping the book, but it can suffice if the book is small and sandwiched between cardboard.

Box or boxfold • Where would we be without corrugated cardboard? I shudder to think. Using brand new shipping boxes for each and every sale is not always cost effective. But if you are shipping a $$$ book to a $$$ customer, taking the time and effort to make a professional impression will encourage repeat business. If you are reusing a box that is still in good shape, make sure that all previous shipping labels have been PEELED off and all barcodes and text have been blackened out. DO NOT USE printed small appliance boxes these give a very bad impression and are usually frowned upon by the Post Office.

These steps will not always save your package from the Postal Trolls, and skipping a layer or two will not condemn it. Pack with your head as well as your hands. If it’s a $5 book if doesn’t need a $50 packing job, however the $5 dollar customer is just as delighted to get an undamaged book as the $50 customer. Besides if you KNOW you packed it properly, you won’t need to hear, “but it was damaged when I got it.”

The “Hammerhead” — can eject a CD disc at high speed, literally causing it to break on impact. This Lego device consists of “two main parts, the head that throws discs, and the tail which feeds the head with compact discs.” Two video clips and more pics after the jump.

moveable feast • Poor Andrei Codrescu and his books are moving again.

“Books don’t like to move much after their first big move, equivalent to human birth, which is out of a bookstore into a house. They don’t mind being dragged from a shelf to a couch, but that’s their maximum allowance for distance. Books are bourgeois, like cats; they mostly like sleeping and being leafed through. (For cats, that’s scratching).”

talking head • Instapundit has an podcast interview with Vernor Vinge

banktoaster • orbitfiles.com offers 1000MB of free space. this is swell…it would be a great place for me to keep my leftist swill! so easy for the feds to keep tabs on me. doncha love technology?

banktoaster • Ikea has a free downloadable Office Planner. And Google’s newest toy is a 3D modeling software download called Sketch-up. I remember when this kinda of CAD was exotic and unheard of, now it’s free – go figure.

in the news • pleasantly long piece about a ‘Books with a Past ‘ in Concord, MA