I've mentioned that when the reference office moved into its location, I decided to put up a couple of posters. Last week one day I had the back office door (which opens into a corridor) open and a couple of professors wandered in to admire my Johnny Cash poster and compare notes on favourite albums ( Read more... )

Question--has anyone out there ever tried warm milk as a sleep aid? I think I read somewhere that it actually contains soporific agents released by the warming. (I know--I am a librarian. If this information is really important to me I can find it ( Read more... )

I was playing around with an unfamiliar journal database yesterday (one of those resources that acts as an electronic index for multiple periodicals.) This one wasn't a health-related database so instead of searching for "therapeutic riding" as my test case, I searched for "monty python." (Why not?) Anyway, I found a few old articles that referred ( Read more... )

I once read an account of how this sketch came about. According to Michael Palin, he was minding his own business, writing a sketch with a central joke about someone with an impenetrable Northern accent, when the character happened to say, "I didn't expect a sort of Spanish Inquisition!"

Hmm, thought Palin. Obviously, the thing I need to do here ( Read more... )

Here's one I kind of love--Michael Palin on the Parkinson chat show about ten years ago. If you skip ahead to 1:40, he talks about the "Batley Townswomans Guild presents the Battle of Pearl Harbour" sketch, or rather the aftermath in which Cleese had a small fit about being covered in mud with nowhere to clean up.

Click to view

I find it very funny that, ( Read more... )

I'm not a huge fan of Saturday Night Live and am certainly not a historian of the show, so until a couple of weeks ago I had never heard the story of the first time Michael Palin hosted ( Read more... )

I got home rather early last night but in something of a state of collapse. Fortunately I'd made a date with a barn kid so I had supper, which I ate while watching an episode of Around the World In 80 Days, then went to the barn for a short and unstrenuous ride on Mitzi. My legs were sore this morning, but I think that was the classroom floor and ( Read more... )

re: the second set of Michael Palin's diaries, the ones covering 1980-1988. I had forgotten just how tense that decade was. I was a teenager in the 80s and I'm remembering now just how much scary stuff there was in the news all the time. I concede the world is still a tense place, but I had forgotten just how much time we spent in the 80s-- ( Read more... )

After the Asperger's post yesterday I got thinking about this interview, which actually features extended footage of Michael Palin avoiding eye contact with someone he's ostensibly talking to. There are extenuating factors, mind you: this is the interview that was supposed to be a "debate" about Life Of Brian, with Palin and Cleese representing the ( Read more... )

I confess, I occasionally use Monty Python references in my teaching. Come on! To import a formatted text file from PubMed into RefWorks, you have to use three drop-down boxes to tell RefWorks what the file is and how to deal with it. Can you blame me for pointing out its resemblance to the Bridge Of Death with its questions three ( Read more... )