Okay dokey! So! First off, for half a second there I thought I couldn’t embed videos. Fortunately this morning I found myself a little workaround. I can now embed almost every video, with some exceptions. Huzzah! Now. Librarians doing Lady Gaga. My first thought off the top of my head is that they’re doing a play on Poker Face and not Telephone? I’d think that with NPR doing it one place and the army doing it another, Telephone would have been the number one choice. Or, at the very least, Bad Romance. And why is it that when librarians hold drinks on the cover of SLJ it’s a problem but when this darling woman holds the world’s greatest martini glass she is a-okay? That is a mystery for the universe. Many thanks to the multiple people who sent me this link!
Changing gears entirely (and on purpose) is this wonderful video covering the most recent Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. Now the article about this award describes it as Presentation of World’s Largest Children’s Literature Award. I read something like that and I imagine a physically large award. Maybe a bronze tree or something along those lines. In fact, by “large” they mean “most expensive” because the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award is a monetary award, largest in the world. It’s 5 million SEK (or 490, 000 EURO). Howsoever you slice it, it’s big. David Almond was up this year, but the ultimate winner was Belgian Kitty Crowther. This lovely little video says more:
Would you like to see her work for yourself? That could prove difficult. As far as I can tell, the only time Ms. Crowther has been translated in America was back in 2000 when Hyperion brought over her Jack and Jim. It is currently out-of-print, alas.
My August Children’s Literary Cafe will be all about ebooks and their creators. With that in mind, my buddy Don Citarella sent me this crazy international ad of sorts for a “phone book”. More like a phone book video game than a book book, but there might be a lot of potential applications for other uses.
Two people have mentioned the It’s a Book trailer to me recently, and both have their problems with it. You are familiar with this title, yes? It’s the new Lane Smith. The trailer, like the book itself, is a mite bit problematic, though. The whole premise of the story is the awesomeness of books and how one distinguishes them from computery stuff. So, as Person #1 pointed out, can we mention the irony of giving this book not only a book trailer but a Facebook page as well? Where precisely ar
Hi Amy!
Okay, this is nuts but here’s how it works. If you want to put in a video find the YouTube code that looks like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ-oQihxBws&feature=player_embedded. It has to have that “&feature=player_embedded” part at the end or it won’t show up. You don’t paste it into the HTML version of your post but the “Visual” one. Now it won’t work if you put it at the beginning of a post. That’s why I cheated with the Librarian Gaga video. If you put it at the beginning of a post it’ll just look like code. But if people click on the “Read More” then they’ll see the videos embedded later on in your post.
This only works for YouTube videos, by the way. I haven’t found the code for putting in Vimeo and stuff like that. Crazy, huh?
Katie, I can’t promise you that. Particularly if you live to be 100. I mean, wouldn’t you WANT that game to be played with you? I sure do. I wanna be 104 and living in Portland, Oregon with library students blogging things like, “Betsy Bird is STILL ALIVE???”
That’s my dream.
The sloths made me think of the binturong, which is also called a bearcat. It’s a member of the civet family, but is very sloth like. It also smells strongly of buttered popcorn. I smelled it for myself at the Kansas City zoo. There has to be a picture book in there somewhere. “Who has the popcorn?” ala “Who’s on first?” sort of humor.
I realize my comment is only tangentially related to this post, but I just had to tell someone about the buttered popcorn bear cat. I hope I may be forgiven.
To my mind, any reference made to buttered popcorn is worth making. Particularly if you can tie it into sloths in some fashion.
Pat Hutchins is one of the nicest people in the world! We met her a decade or so ago, through New Yorker friends, in London – visited Pat and her creative husband Laurence in Hampstead (they’ve since moved to “the Studio” in NW3). I once asked her what made her happiest, thinking she’d say, oh, “painting” or writing….she said (paraphrasing), “Being up to my elbows in dirt, working in our garden at our cottage in Sussex” (I think that’s where it is). Really a lovely person.
Ack! Thanks so much, Elizabeth, but I can’t seem to find ANY videos with “&feature=player_embedded” at the end. Ugh! Migration is NO GOOD for moi! ;(
I’ll keep trying!
Amy
Oh! I should explain. No videos do. You need to paste the “&feature=player_embedded” part after the number portion of any video’s YouTube web address. It’ll take some trial and error, but it can be done!
Elizabeth, YOU RULE!!! I crown you – QUEEN of Wordpress!
Thanks so much!
I can’t figure out why you can’t paste the embed code from vimeo/youtube/etc. into the html window. I’ve worked on several different Wordpress installations and this seems to be a basic option in most templates, even for authors or contributors who don’t have permission to do much fancy stuff.
Also, if you’d reallllly like the ability to control font size, there’s a plugin called TinyMCE Advanced that will add font size to your default visual editing options. You can tweak the options to add hand dandy functions such as anchor tags and spell check! Maybe the tech people can install that?
Or maybe the tech people have extremely young eyes and like the look of this teeny tiny font. In which case, please add my name to the petition of people in search of readable blog fonts!
Yep, it’s a mystery to me as well. By all rights I should embed just as easily here as I did on my old site. Yet this is not the case. Good to know about that plugin, though. I’d love to edit my font. But right now the tech folks are so busy with other problems, I’ll hold off for now on informing them. Soon, though. Soon.