iHeart my new iPod!

Reason #5,675 why my partner is the coolest: he came home Friday night and surprised me with a brand new shiny black video playing iPod!!!!! (wonderfully generous and a master of some very stealthy money-saving maneuvers!)

I've wanted one of these puppies ever since they first came out, so I'm thrilled to finally get a seat at the cool kid's table (even though I'll fill it up with books on tape instead of cool music .. shh, don't tell the cool kids!)

My brother filled me in on the iTunes basics, but I'm still trying to figure out how the video stuff works.

Do any of y'all know what to do when a video loads onto the iPod without sound?

I've been trawling the Web for ideas, checking all my usual how-to tech haunts (see below), but I'm mostly finding solutions that require more software. Any ideas that would let me just use QuickTime, but have it work?? (I'm running Windows XP).

And since I can't resist teaching you things, even when I'm asking questions, here are my fave places to find gadgety guides on the Web:

• Ars Technica -- a goldmine of techlore aimed at "power users and the tools they want" (my favorite is the Dissection section where they take apart components to show you the innards -- behold the guts of the iPod)
  

• W3C Schools -- a rare case where the biggest ("the largest web developer's site on the net") is also the best and, even better, entirely FREE!

• CNET -- one-stop-shopping for all your geek know-how (this link goes to the How To's)

This last one's a little off topic, but I've been doing a ton of web stuff lately and I love this thing:

• Color Schemer - Online Color Scheme Generator -- plug in a hex color to get a full palette of complementary colors, which you can then lighten and darken (it's sooo cool!)
  

Thanks in advance for the iPod video tips ... woo hoo for my new iPod!!!!

UPDATE:

Matt figured it out!! (the video with no sound thing) ... generous, stealthy AND a genius! I'm so lucky.

Fun Fact Friday: "Mary Sue"

This week's random reference question falls under the "never heard of it, once you hear of it now you hear it everywhere" category.

The question:
What's a Mary Sue?

My follow-up question:
Is Mary Sue a thing, or a person?

The follow-up answer:
I don't know ... somebody called one of my characters a Mary Sue ... but her name's Dionne.

The answer (after several more rounds of follow-up questions):
"Mary Sue" is a pejorative term used to describe a fictional character who is too good to be true, and typically suggests wish fulfillment on the part of the author (by being stunningly beautiful, magical, etc.) If the character is male, he's a "Gary Stu."

The term originated in Star Trek fanfiction, and now pops up in most dicussions of fanfiction (go Google Harry Potter and Mary Sue to see what I mean -- if you write HP fanfic you can even take the Harry Potter and the Mary Sue litmus test to see if you're committing "Mary Sueism").

Learn more at Wikipedia, a nice long article with an etymology and examples of Mary Sues.

The randomness:
I'd never heard of a Mary Sue before this question (not being a fanfic reader or writer myself) but a few days later it cropped up on my favorite reader's advisory dicussion list, where I was relieved to see I wasn't the only librarian in the dark re: Mary Sues.

So now I'm having fun witch hunting for Mary Sues in books and movies ... every female character ever to appear in a James Bond movie? Mary Sue! Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt character in Mission Impossible? Gary Stu!

Fun Fact Friday: Las Meninas

This time I'll tell you about the most coincidental reference question of the week.

The reference question:
I'm trying to find out the name of this painting I saw in the Picasso museum in Spain ... it's his version of that famous painting of the little princesses by another Spanish guy ...

The answer, which I could give right off the top of my head, having read a book about this painting FOUR DAYS AGO:
Oh, yes, "Las Meninas" by Velazquez.

I just love it when I can answer questions without looking stuff up ... but then you have to, you know, prove it. So here are the facts:

Spanish artist Diego Velazquez painted Las Meninas in the 17th century (top painting at left). Considered by many art historians to incorporate every major theory in painting, it hangs in the Prado museum in Madrid.

Picasso greatly admired the work of his countryman Velazquez, and analyzed Las Meninas very closely. He painted a study of it, which hangs in the Picasso museum in Barcelona (bottom painting at left).

And you can read all about Velazquez painting this masterpiece in the book I, Juan de Pareja, which I just finished reading, because it won the Newbery in 1966 and I'm still reading all the Newbery Medal winners (and am about to launch an online index to them ... stay tuned!)

The TIME 100: Do these people shape your world?

Thanks to my dad for today's topic!

TIME magazine has published its list of the "100 people who shape our world." Dad sent the list in an email, with the challenge: how many of these people have you heard of? And do you know what they do?

Before I link to the TIME list, which groups people by their occupations, let me give you the list like Dad sent it to me, without context:

How many of these people have you heard of? And do you know what they do?

• J.J. Abrams
• George Clooney
• Dixie Chicks
• Ellen DeGeneres
• Nicolas Ghesquiere
• Wayne Gould
• Philip Seymour Hoffman
• Arianna Huffington
• Ang Lee
• Renzo Piano
• Rain
• Rachael Ray
• Jeff Skoll
• Kiki Smith
• Will Smith
• Zadie Smith
• Howard Stern
• Meryl Streep
• Reese Witherspoon
• Rob Pardo
• Daddy Yankee
• Tyra Banks
• Dane Cook
• Matt Drudge
• Stephen Colbert
• Mike Brown
• Kelly Brownell
• Nancy Cox
• Richard Davidson
• Kerry Emanuel
• Jim Hansen
• Zahi Hawass
• Bill James
• John Jones
• Ma Jun
• Jim Yong Kim
• Steven Levitt
• Jacques Rossouw
• Andrew von Eschenbach
• Jimmy Wales
• Geoffrey West
• Muqtada al-Sadr
• Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf
• Hugo Chavez
• George W. Bush
• John McCain
• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
• Ayman al-Zawahiri
• Hillary Rodham Clinton
• Pope Benedict
• Condoleezza Rice
• Wen Jiabao
• Ehud Olmert
• Pervez Musharraf
• John Roberts
• Ismail Haniya
• Angela Merkel
• Jigme Singye Wangchuk
• Archbishop Peter Akinola
• Junichiro Koizumi
• Oprah Winfrey
• Bill & Melinda Gates
• Bono
• Michelle Wie
• Wynton Marsalis
• Angelina Jolie
• Bill Clinton & George H.W. Bush
• Steve Nash
• Orhan Pamuk
• Elie Wiesel
• Jan Egeland
• Joey Cheek
• Chen Guangcheng
• Ian Fishback
• Wafa Sultan
• Pernessa Seele
• Ralph Lauren
• Mukhtaran Bibi
• Paul Simon
• Al Gore
• Katie Couric
• Vikram Akula
• Tom Anderson & Chris DeWolfe
• Franz Beckenbauer
• The Flickr Founders
• Sean Combs
• Jamie Dimon
• Brian France
• Tom Freston
• Huang Guangyu
• Omid Kordestani
• Eddie Lampert
• Patricia Russo
• Sheikh Mohammed
• Anne Mulcahy
• Nandan Nilekani
• Jim Sinegal
• Steve Wynn
• The Skype Guys
• Dieter Zetsche

I've "heard of" most of them, but can honestly tell you "what they do" for only 42 of the 100. I'm pretty discouraged by that, since it's kind of my job to have heard of pretty much everything.

But go look at TIME's site, because seeing the names in context helps jog your memory (and tells me I really need to brush up on my reading about scientists!)

So how'd you do? And are these really the people that shape your world?

Fun Fact Friday (a little bit late)

Oh the shame! One week into a new Friday feature, and I didn't get my act together ... thank you, Doc Smartypants for reminding me that people do in fact read this thing!

Okay, here it is, the random reference question of the week:

How many corgis does Queen Elizabeth have? Every time you see a picture of her she's surrounded by little dogs!

Yes, the Queen loves the corgi. Ever since her father, King George VI, gave her a corgi named Dookie, the Queen has always had at least one of the little Welsh dogs (and is credited with greatly increasing the breed's popularity). The dogs travel between palaces with the Queen, and she even feeds them herself (learn more).

The Queen currently owns five corgis: Emma, Linnet, Monty, Willow, and Holly; and four "dorgis" (a corgi/ daschund mix): Cider, Berry, Vulcan, and Candy (learn more).

Librarianna: Armchair Linguist

Before I decided to be a librarian, I wanted to be a linguist (and I'd be both if I had the time/ money/ inclination to go back to school).

I minored in Linguistics in college, and have kept reading about it since, because I love the way the study of language takes up both halves of my brain ... it's definitely science, all regimented and rule-bound, but it's very much also art, beautiful and beyond easy explanations.

I suppose most scientists must feel that way about their subjects, but I doubt they have as much fun ... because learning about other languages is really entertaining!

Here's some of the fun you can have with languages other than the one(s) you speak:

• Norwegian dogs say Voff! Listen to many more Sounds of the World's Animals in languages from Afrikaans to Vietnamese.

• Impress your friends in "unique New York" with the 1st International Collection of Tongue Twisters, where you'll learn tricks to trip your tongue in over one hundred languages!

• The BCC lets you listen to the News in 33 languages (most popular? Persian).

• The Speech Accent Archive records sound clips of representative speakers of the world's regional accents, with maps showing the speaker's place of birth.

And don't worry if, like me, you fear it's beyond your abilities to ever master another language ... we can still be armchair linguists and learn about all the languages of the world!