I had a bit of a challenge today, when a teenage schoolboy came to the Information desk to find 'anything' on New Zealand alpine plants. Specifically, he was after two plants known colloquially as mountain carrot and pink heather, respectively. Even more specifically, he wanted to know about biological control of those two plants. The two books I could find on NZ alpine flora weren't useful to him, so I gave him the phone numbers of the Department of Conservation. I had the biggest difficulty not calling it the Department of Conversation! As is usual in cases like this (where I couldn't find anything straight away), I spent the rest of the afternoon looking on the Internet for likely information sources (including the DoC site). It felt pretty good to eventually find some, too.
I found a website which collects curses, to be put on those fiends who steal books. The library's been the victim of a vicious DVD thief - we lost our extended version of The Two Towers a mere months after it was made available for lending - so these curses may prove well worth a try at my library...
This one which follows is supposedly from the Monastery of San Pedro, Barcelona
"For him that Stealeth a Book from this Library,
Let it change into a Serpent in his hand & rend him.
Let him be struck with Palsy, & all his Members blasted.
Let him languish in Pain crying aloud for Mercy,
Let there be no Surcease to his Agony till he sink to Dissolution.
Let Bookworms gnaw his Entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not,
When at last he goeth to his final Punishment,
Let the flames of hell consume him for ever & aye."
I just realised yesterday that SkyOne has stopped screening re-runs of Buffy and Angel, so I'm now going to have a minute of silence to pay my respects to the last (for now) of the Buffyverse re-runs.
Oh well, at least I still have seasons 1-4 of Buffy on DVD to watch, and anyway they were clashing with the latest series of What Not To Wear.
No comments:
Post a Comment