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This week we're talking about Fire and Ice in regards to boys. I'm going to write about boys who have written songs with HOT and COLD themes. Okay, I know I'm going to show my age here, but these are my favorite songs from growing up.

I'm so glad I found these videos on YouTube! Click on the links and listen/watch to these HOT and COLD themed songs by these boys:
First, for the HOT songs I loved:

The first song is by Buster Poindexter called HOT, HOT, HOT! It's played probably at every party I've ever been to. It's a great "get up and dance" song, even for the grandparents. Watch it here: (I tried to imbed the video into the blog, but I'm not computer savvy enough)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrhf_zgtmAg








One of my favorite songs is Hot Blooded performed live by Foreigner in this YouTube video. Foreigner had some amazing songs out, but this one is the HOTtest!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBNbxW0c-as







Now for the COLD songs that were my favorite:



When this song came out, me and my friends couldn't stop singing it. And I'm sorry, but I like bad boys and Vanilla Ice was definitely a bad boy back then (and probably still is). I know, I know, it's SO 80's. It's none other than ICE, ICE BABY!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp-is6S_b_g






And this is the last COLD video by a boy. It's FUNKY COLD MEDINA by Tone Loc. I loved the story this song told. It's not only a great tune, but it's funny. Tone Loc has a great sense of humor, and the story about Funky Cold Medina is hilarious. I've never had a Funky Cold Medina, by the way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zligio51yP4





Happy watching!

Simone Elkeles
http://www.simoneelkeles.com/

author of:
Leaving Paradise Book Sense Summer 2007 pick!
How to Ruin a Summer Vacation #3 on Top Ten Teen Books
How to Ruin my Teenage Life 2008 AJL Notable Book for Teens
Perfect Chemistry (tentative title), coming 2009!

Now the story comes full-circle. Wired publishes a story by my friend Mat who I paid $10 to blog about how awesome libraries are. You may recall I mentioned this before. I even made the article!

My web friend Mat Honan does a lot of neat stuff. He does triathalons, he writes for Wired, he goes traveling to interesting places. I follow him virtually via Vox and Flickr and other random places, not in a stalker-y way but just in a “hey this person is interesting” way. I think we have friends in common, but I don’t know him in person. So, when he started doing pay-per-post posts to his blog, I wasn’t sure if he was making a big joke or earnestly trying to make some money. His posts were definitely interesting and amusing, not taking themselves too seriously it seemed. However, I was and still am a little skeptical about this whole pay-for-placement thing. I keep an eagle eye out for it in libraryland, and I think many of us do. While I don’t think we’re perfect at this game by any stretch I like to think that you go to the library, and your librarian, to get objective information not filtered through shopping incentives, advertising and viral marketing.

I thought this was a worthwhile point to make, so I decided to pay Mat Honan to make it for me. Ten dollars well spent, I think. Don’t you?

This brief but popular story about an Australian teenager doing an end-run around a government sponsored pornography filter doesn’t have much to do with libraries. However, it has some applicability to our CIPA situation here in the states in a few ways.

1. Filtering is expensive but no one knows how expensive. Should a porn filter for your library cost $100 or $1000 or $10000? Should you pay less for one that works less well? Is it even acceptable to have one that doesn’t work? Do any porn filters actually work completely well, any at all?
2. The filter in the story was created, at a cost of $84 million, and would be made available free to every family in Australia. This is in addition to the government wanting to require all ISPs to make a filtering option available with their services. A quick read of this second article indicates that the filters aren’t just for porn, or rather there are varieties of the filter one of which also filters chat rooms. Now chat rooms can be used for porn but they can also be used in many other legitimate ways. I’d argue legitimate uses account for almost all chatroom use among children and young adults. So, beware of mission creep. If you’re trying to stop kids from looking at explicit sex pictures, that’s one thing. If you’re trying to stop them from communicating with others or being communicated with in ways you don’t approve of, be above board about it.
3. Any librarian who has to work with filtering software knows the ways that kids or others get around it. There’s the Google cache hack, the Google images hack, anonymous proxies, proxies from home and many many more. If you can get to the internet at all, you can figure out, usually, how to get to the rest of the Internet.

Want to try it yourself? Here’s some instructions.

I have seen a few things that are only tangentially related to what I normally do here, but I thought you might like them.

• The New York Times does a photo essay on people and their avatars.
• Sethf does the research (yes with GOOGLE) to track down some of the facts behind michael Gorman’s possible misquote of Jimmy Wales and who was behind it.
• Oh check me out, I’m in the BIGWIG social software showcase. I’m sorry to also be in the program, theoretically on a panel on Saturday. I said okay sometime in 2006, and had to say no sometime in March. That was apparently not enough time to not be in the program. So 1.0!
• LifeHacker does “book hacks” for the library using crowd.