Brian

Ampersand argues that the Texas comic-book obscenity conviction was upheld, not because the courts accepted the ridiculous proposition that comic books are just for children, but because the jury thought the book met the law’s test for obscenity and because the defense lawyers failed to make appropriate objections during the trial.

Among the personal property that convicted Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski is seeking in court to have returned are a whole bunch of books. In addition to volumes about which plants are safe/unsafe to eat, the list includes history, ancient classics, Shakespeare, Dickens, Steinbeck … Oh, and Psychology of Women.

A government librarian in India was arrested after he attempted to stop his tranfer with a forged document. Vijay Vamanrao Dongre confessed to buying a forged letterhead of the Minister for Energy and Technical Education for 500 rupees.

Ya learn something new every day: According to this article from WorldNetDaily (a news source I know all LISNews readers love!), not only is Harry Potter an anti-Christian, realistic Wiccan, but it looks like he’s also a Nazi. At least, I think that’s what the article says.

I came across that one while checking to see how big a deal the anti-Potter nuts are making about the book release coinciding with Summer Solstice. Not as much noise about that as I had expected to see. The long day will allow bookstores in Alaska to start selling the book without having to turn on the lights, though.

This story from a couple weeks ago seems to have fallen through the LISNews cracks: Bishops warn Catholics about "Left Behind" books.

"The books are actually anti-Catholic," says an associate director of the Catholic Conference of Illinois.

"Instead of being critical of what we\’re doing, [the bishops] should face the fact that, for once, there\’s a best-selling series of books that doesn\’t shock their sense of moral values, doesn\’t use profanity and doesn\’t denigrate Jesus Christ," says Left Behind co-author Tim LaHaye.

"Don\’t make me come down there!" says God. (Okay, that one\’s not in the article. A little Day-After-Father\’s-Day humor.)

The current Punk Planet (which unfortunately — though maybe appropriately for this issue — doesn’t have the zine’s content on its website) is devoted to the joys of hard copy, and it includes interviews with and excerpts from Dave Eggers & Co., Underworld cartoonist Kaz, and others. There’s also a nice profile of
zine libraries.

The author of Hacking the Xbox is self-publishing his book. He says it was originally to be published by Wiley & Sons, who backed out over DMCA concerns. Anchorage Municipal Library and the British Library are the only libraries currently listed in WorldCat who (will) own the book.

"Hacking the Xbox presents material on cryptography, reverse engineering and security in a didactic fashion, with the Xbox used as an widely available, consistent teaching example that has a broad appeal. The concepts taught in this book are generally applicable, as the Xbox’s architecture is very similar to the common desktop PC."

In an effort to recreate the works of the Bard, experimenters at a UK university gave six monkeys a computer. "But after a month, the Sulawesi crested macaques had only succeeded in partially destroying the machine, using it as a lavatory, and mostly typing the letter ‘s’."

The results of the experiment have been published as Notes Towards The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

‘Nuff said.

As Ottawa Citizen reports:

"By a seven-to-four margin, the board voted to maintain the library’s current policy of using filters on most of the child-dedicated machines, but to leave the great majority of the library’s 280 Internet-access machines filter-free."