This song is one of my favourites and this version by an Australian shadow puppeteer guesting on the David Letterman show is unbelievable. The baby's hand brought tears to my eyes.
“Would this committee put money into Juno? It might not want to encourage teen pregnancy. Would the government put money into a film with a dirty title, like Young People Fucking? Would they invest in something like Brokeback Mountain? They might not want to encourage gay cowboys to have sex together in Alberta.”
(via Cenobyte – whose FTRW credentials are strong. Last year, she let me say “scrotum” AND “nut sack” on her radio show during a discussion about Freedom to Read Week.)
One of the semi-frequent questions/complaints I get from our branch librarians is how to deal with patrons who are looking at pornography. But during my training, one branch librarian mentioned that she'd had an incident with a patron looking at something much much worse: rotten.com
(I don't usually do warnings on my blog but I'm doing one here. Although there's nothing disturbing on the Rotten.com front page that I linked to above, remember that you can't “unsee” anything you see once you start clicking on the links on that page! )
Rotten.com bills itself this way:
The soft white underbelly of the net, eviscerated
for all to see: Rotten dot com collects images and information
from many sources to present the viewer with a truly
unpleasant experience.
[Rotten.com] is devoted to morbid curiosities, primarily pictures of gruesome fatalities, deformities, autopsy or forensic photographs, depictions of perverse sex acts, and historical curios that are disturbing or misanthropic in nature.
I've got mixed feelings about the site myself. Does seeing a picture of a decapitated person (to take but one example of what you might see if you click through the links on the site) harm you in some way? Is it illegal? Is it immoral? (And is that simply a cultural construct or a personal bias? Or is this an absolute value?)
On the other hand, is the site just a way to satisfy natural human curiosity? Is it better to be able to see this type of material rather than having it hidden? (The US policy of not allowing photos of caskets returning from Iraq is on the very opposite end of the spectrum.) Is it any different than the six o'clock news where you can regularly see video of people being killed, dying, being tortured, being assassinated, and god knows what else. It's explicit but on some level, is it any different than a site like MyFreeImplants.com (again, as just one example among hundreds that could be cited.)
But Rotten.com
isn't just a database of the disgusting; it's also a venue for making a
point about censorship, at least according to “Soylent,” the
pseudonymous proprietor of Rotten.com, whose highly graphic content has
earned him enemies around the world. The site is currently being
investigated by Scotland Yard and the FBI for cannibalism. The German
Family Ministry has threatened Soylent with legal action if he doesn't
find a way to shield minors from his site. And then there's the endless
cease-and-desist letters that flood in from a long list of major
corporations that object to the site.
“Rotten dot-com
serves as a beacon to demonstrate that censorship of the Internet is
impractical, unethical and wrong,” Soylent writes in his manifesto,
adding that nothing he posts there can't be found elsewhere. “To censor
this site, it is necessary to censor medical texts, history texts,
evidence rooms, courtrooms, art museums, libraries, and other sources
of information vital to functioning of free society.”
A bit of sad news today, right in the middle of Freedom to Read Week…
Dear colleagues in the Book and Periodical Council,
We sadly note that Nancy Fleming has died. Nancy was the executive director of the BPC from 1979 to 1999. She helped organize the Freedom of Expression Committee and Freedom to Read Week. Her obit in The Globe and Mail is below.
Franklin Carter
_____________________
Tuesday February 26, 2008 FLEMING, Nancy Barbara (née Chisholm) Chief Executive of the Book and Periodical Council for over twenty years and laureate of the Canadian Library Association Award for the Advancement of Intellectual Freedom in Canada, died peacefully on 24 February 2008 at Toronto Western Hospital following declining health in recent years. She was 76. Nancy leaves bereaved her three children by the late Allan Fleming, Martha, Peter and Susannah, as well as their partners; grandson McCullough and many friends and colleagues. Cremation will be followed later by a memorial event in Spring (contact peterfleming@sympatico.ca). Donations to Freedom to Read (www.freedomtoread.ca) would be appreciated.
I was a bit disappointed to click through and realise this bookwasn't actually a version of Richard Dawkins' book for young people (which would be awesome!).
But the sentiment of this controversial German kid's book certainly fits with Dawkins anti-religion polemic.
The German Family Ministry is pushing for the children's book “How Do I
Get to God, Asked the Small Piglet,” written by Michael
Schmidt-Salomon and illustrated by Helge Nyncke, to be included on a
list of literature considered dangerous for young people.
The authors and publishers have released the book online in English so that interested parties can read it themselves.
Didn't get a chance to post yesterday so missed kicking off FTRW on its official start date. But never one to be a day late and a dollar short, here's a link to the main web site for Freedom to Read to kick off the week. Explore, read, look for events in a community near you!
Message from Terry Epperson, chair of PLG’s Braverman Prize committee
Hello –
We’re
pleased to announce the fifth annual Miriam Braverman prize, sponsored
by the Progressive Librarians Guild, for the best student paper on
progressive library issues. Below are the guidelines for the prize. The
announcement flyer can be found at: http://libr.org/plg/Braverman-08-flyer.pdf. Feel free to pass this announcement on to other listservs or groups that may be interested.
Braverman Prize Guidelines for PLG
1. Entrants must be Library/Information Science students attending a graduate level program in the United States or Canada.
2. Entries must be the original, unpublished work of the entrant, in English, and must not exceed 3,000 words.
3.
The topic of the paper should concern an aspect of the social
responsibilities of librarians, libraries, or librarianship. Papers
related to archivists, archives, or archival work are also acceptable.
Topics could include, but are not limited to, such concerns as
professional ethics in the age of the USA PATRIOT Act; the
commodification of information; the political value choices of
cataloging and indexing; the role of libraries in bridging the
information gap; democratic management systems within libraries, etc.
4.
Each entry should include a cover sheet containing the entrant’s name,
full contact information (address, phone number, e-mail address), name
of the institution where the entrant is enrolled, and the title of the
paper. No identifying information, other than the title, should appear
on the paper itself.
5. Entries must be submitted electronically, in MS Word or RTF format, to bravermansubmissions@gmail.com
6. Entries must be received no later than 6pm on, April 15, 2008.
7.
The winning entry will be published in Progressive Librarian and must
conform to MLA in-text citation style. The winning entrant will also
receive a $300 stipend toward attendance at the 2008 American Library
Association annual conference in Anaheim, CA and an award at the annual
PLG dinner. Award money is available only for ALA conference
attendance; if the winner is unable to attend, the money will remain in
the Braverman Award fund account or be donated at the discretion of the
committee..
8. The judges’ decision is final. The act of
submission implies the unqualified acceptance of the conditions of
entry by the entrant.
Terrence W. Epperson, Ph.D.
Social Sciences Librarian
TCNJ Library
The College of New Jersey
P.O. Box 7718
Ewing, NJ 08628-0718
Phone: (609) 771-3352
Fax: (609) 637-5177
E-mail epperson@tcnj.edu http://www.tcnj.edu/~library/epperson/index.html
