Monday, May 2, 2016

The dangers of being a librarian

Librarians, even some of us retired ones, cannot leave well enough alone. Some poor kid asks for an article on soybeans for a middle school essay she is writing, and we pull up thousands of things online, pile stacks of plant books and encyclopedias on the counter and try to explain that if she is going to write about soybeans, she really should read up on Far East cuisine in general and that will make no sense unless she knows something about the history of the Chen Dynasty. We can't just say, "Here, this should help" and hand her a five page article from National Geographic.

I do this to myself. After posting about kale and greens and making snide remarks about people creating anything as ridiculous as collard green chips, I had to go look it up. And that led to this little item: "Like Kale Chips? Try Collard Chips!" Click on the title to learn more and to get a recipe. Spoiler alert: There is something in there about baseball, I think, but I skipped that part.

If you do a search, you will find recipes for spicy Parmesan collard chips and Cajun collard chips and ... Well, I will let you have the fun of doing the research and finding out how far you can go by yourself.

But I do have some interesting books here on the Chen Dynasty that may prove helpful.

3 comments:

Moving with Mitchell said...

Jerry was a library administrator. Still, he can get engrossed for days in researching something mentioned in passing.

Michael Dodd said...

We're just wonderful that way! I remember when I was in the monastery -- and I was almost always the monastery librarian -- one evening at recreation one of the postulants (newest guys) got into a heated discussion with one of the older friars about, of all things, what he considered the meaningless phrase, "Hosanna in the highest." This went on for some time, growing more intense as minutes passed. I finally got up, went across the hall to the library, looked it up and came back to pass along what it meant. They looked at me, then at one another.

"I never would have thought of doing that!" they said,almost in unison, and laughed. Yet the library was no more than ten steps from where they were arguing.

Anonymous said...

Now they would pull out their smart phones. Librarians strike me as people who are good st staying on task and not getting too distracted by all the books around them.
Kato