This whole bit is made all the funnier by knowing that all of the guards were just random extras who weren’t told what was going to happen only that they weren’t allowed laugh at any cost as they wouldn’t be payed if they did.

At uni I took a screenwriting course from THIS VERY GUARD EXTRA (who went on to contribute to some of the Python stuff), who confirms this and also that Michael Palin would use different ridiculous names in every take, so they couldn’t even prepare themselves for hearing it.

no fuckin way

Favorite Mornings

Supernatural S2E08

These are actually so fun to make

More stuff I’ve had to deal with as a city librarian

Kind of a part two to this post

- An old man in a wheelchair came in wanting to print something from his laptop. We don’t have wireless printing at my library, so I apologized and told him we couldn’t do that. He asked why we didn’t have a printer, I explained to him that we did, it just didn’t have wireless printing capabilities. He kept getting mad, asking why our printer wasn’t “hooked up”. I guess he didn’t understand what wireless printing was, and I don’t think he really cared enough to listen to my explanation. He ended up rolling out, screaming, “THAT’S WHY I HATE COMING TO THIS GODDAMN TOWN. IT’S FULL OF FUCKING IDIOTS.” 

- A teenage boy came up to the desk with an armload of books, wanting to check them out, but since he lived out of state, he wanted to know if he could mail them back to him when he finished them. He got mad when I told him no. 

- Six different books about eating disorders were returned through the book drop, all checked out to the same person. Hope everything is okay with her.

- We did a banned books week event where we take people’s pictures with a banned or challenged book in front of a green screen, then photoshop it to look like they’re getting a mugshot to post to Facebook. We had a lady who was absolutely baffled by the concept. She kept asking “why’s it green? Where’s the backdrop? You’re not just gonna post a picture of me standing in front of a green cloth, are you?” We had to explain it to her four times and she still didn’t seem to get it. 

- There’s a family that comes in that’s just the weirdest little assortment of people. The teenage daughter is homeschooled, and is the epitome of those “not like other girls” cringelords. She checks out grade school chapter books, and brags about how fast she can read them. She once told me she was getting into this really obscure singer called David Bowie, and asked if I’d ever heard of him. We have teen movie nights, and her dad mentioned maybe she could go, and she sneered and was like “but there’s gonna be other people there!” I don’t find it all that strange, considering what the mother is like. She told me during banned books one year that some books should be banned because they’re “filthy”. She calls our library director a hairy troll, and not in a fun kidding way. We still don’t know what he did to piss her off so much.  The most hilarious part is that the dad seems like a cool dude who just wants to reads Westerns and do genealogical research, all while being 110% done with everything relating to his wife and child.

- The sheer number of people who are terrified of the idea of giving us their information to make a library card. We don’t really ask for anymore info than is necessary to get ahold of people if we need to, but you’d think we were asking for people’s social and credit card numbers the way some react. We had one lady claim we were trying to steal her identity because we asked for her email address.

- A man came in asking if we had On the Road by Jack Kerouac, because he’d seen it on one of those “books to read before you die” lists. I looked it up by title and nothing came up. I told him as much, and before I could suggest looking it up by author, he started saying it was disgraceful that we didn’t have such an important book in our library. He left before I could say anything else. Later, I checked up Jack Kerouac and found that we did have On of the Road, in a collection. As someone who had to read that book in college, I think I helped that guy dodge a bullet.

- All our computers shut down fifteen minutes before the library closes. It keeps people from staying after closing. We can’t stop the process once it starts. There’s always at least one patron who gets super mad about that, and will ask if we can’t just…turn off the automatic process. One lady swore in my face when she learned that she couldn’t keep playing her online slots.

- I’ve helped more people print out texts and Facebook messages for stalking cases than I care to think about 

- I overheard a woman tell her fussy six-month old baby girl that “pretty girls don’t do that”. About threw up.

- We got to dress nice the week before Christmas, and one day I wore a dress that showed off my cleavage a little because I have big boobs and that fucking happens sometimes. Some woman told me that I should cover up more because she “has a teenage son” and he “doesn’t need to see that”. The teenage son wasn’t even with her. I wanted to tell her he’s probably seen his fair share of titties if he’s a teenager, but I want to keep my job or something. I had to go to the back to yell for a while. 

- A young woman and her boyfriend came in asking if we could scan something into a computer for her to edit. I said no, since we don’t have any kind of photo editing software on the computers. She then asked “Okay, but i need to scan my driver’s license. Can I?” That set off some alarm bells, but I told her it honestly didn’t matter what she needed to scan and edit, we didn’t have the software. After she left, I discovered my director had heard everything, and he told me people used to try that when he first started working there to get out of paying tickets for expired licenses. 

- A patron stole craft supplies from an event. We know exactly who it was and what they took, because they did it right in front of the librarian running the event. Two pairs of scissors and some twine. We have no clue why they did it, but they’ve been banned and we’ve started making craft kits to give out so we can account for everything.

- A woman sincerely suggested we burn a few books because they featured scantily clan women on the covers. You have to fill out a form when you want a book to be reconsidered for the collection, and that was her suggestion for what we do with the material, adding that we should “preserve the morality of this country”. I read over the form the day after it happened and I nearly collapsed in a laughing fit. It almost - ALMOST - made me less angry about it. 

Stuff I’ve had to deal with as a city librarian, pt. ???

One of these days, this series of posts will finally culminate in me meeting God in our parking lot and her telling me the secret of a fulfilling life, with mushrooms playing a big part in things than I realized. Today is not that day. Instead, we have more insanity from the general public.

- The assistant director, Rachel, was putting program snacks away in the employee kitchen, happened to look in the doorway, and there was a little girl standing there, staring at her with huge, horror-movie eyes. After suppressing the heart attack this nearly gave her, she walked over to the kid and asked if she was lost and needed help finding her parents. The little girl didn’t say anything, just lead Rachel out the way she’d come in and back to her mom and dad. When Rachel explained to the parents what happened, all the did was mutter “not again”, take the kid’s hand, and walk away. 

- Julie walked into the bathroom and found an unsettling amount of blood. Like, a trail of it leading from the doorway to the stall. We’re hoping what happened is someone got a nosebleed and ran to the stall for paper to stop it. Whatever happened, the asshat still didn’t bother to come and tell us they’d made a huge mess.

- This “family” (I use the quotation marks because the only person who’s consistently in the group is an older white woman, so I have no idea if they’re actually related or not) that tries to come to literally every craft we have, usually with a group of about seven to eight people. This wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t always the most obnoxious, destructive weidos ever. There’s occasionally a little girl in the group, about four, who they don’t watch at all. If the craft isn’t something she can do, she’ll run around screaming and occasionally breaking things. She dropped a glass jar at the last one, and nearly cut herself. The adults in the group did nothing. Another time, a little boy was with them, probably about seven, and he kept running around without shoes. We repeatedly told him to go put his shoes back on, but every time we saw him, he was still barefoot. By the time they left three hours later, the little twerp still didn’t have any shoes, and the adults in the group never even acknowledged it. One of the older women in the group wanted to take a picture of the kids with their crafts, and when they wouldn’t stand still, she threw a screaming, cursing tantrum in the vestibule. Luckily, that time, the other adults ushered her out the door. We still heard her for about ten minutes after that. 

- One night, someone reported that there was a van in our parking lot with all its doors open. Now, being a place that employees 90% women, none of us are dumb enough to go out and check it, so instead we ask around the building to see who it belongs to. No one claims it. By the time we closed, it was gone. We never found out who it belonged to.

- A patron came in, wanting to rent DVDs, but didn’t have his library card or ID. We can’t check things out to people if they don’t have either of those things, and when we told the guy that, he calmly walked from the desk to the glass front door and started banging his head against the glass. Hard. We had to call the police to get him to stop. 

- Someone forgot to lock one of our conference rooms, so this old man wandered in and settled down to read the paper and eat a sandwich. He seemed genuinely surprised when we told him that he couldn’t be in there.

- We had to tell the Red Cross they couldn’t hold blood drives at the library anymore because they spilled an entire bag of blood on the carpet. 

- I checked in a book and noticed that the corner had been chewed. Not a big deal, sometimes people have teething puppies. So I called the family and informed them it looked like the dog had gotten to it, and the dad sighed heavily and said no, it was their two-year-old. She’s apparently been acting out a lot recently in the wake of a new baby. The poor guy just sounded so tired. 

- A former coworker was coming back from her car and saw an old man by our dumpster. She thought maybe he was just catching a smoke there or something, until she got closer and realized he was taking a piss. The same patron actually came into the building and used the computer after he was finished. We scrubbed that computer down hardcore after he was done.

- I was working on Saturday, when we close at four. A mom and her two kids came in at 3:58, and the mom asked when we closed. When I told her in two minutes, she cheerfully told her kids, “See, you’ve got two minutes! It’s fine!” The kids looked absolutely mortified, and told their mom they needed to leave, it was rude to do this. They even started heading out and tried to urge their mother to come with them. The mom actually got angry at them for, ya know, respecting us and our business hours, and proceeded to stay five minutes after we closed, mostly to flex on her preteens. 

- A woman accused me of sabotaging her when she didn’t manage to print her stuff before the computers shut down for the night. I had printed something before her, and she thought that my print job had “cancelled” hers. Which isn’t how our printer works at all, because if you send the job before the computer shuts down, it’ll still be in the queue. I remember her distinctly telling me “If I don’t get to go to this Cardinals game because I couldn’t print the tickets, I’m suing you!”

Fantastic

㋡🥀

Pretty wild that the french language is a descendant of latin. Like not only is it a domesticated version of vulgar latin, but, like, the pug version of it. Specifically selectively bred for the purpose of being cute and useless. Arbitrary spelling and frilly pronunciation to the point where nobody notices if you only pronounce two thirds of the letters and not a single consonant. Language so imprecise that you have to be a native speaker or an university linguistic professor to have any confidence in your assumption that you know what the fuck someone is saying.

How the fuck is french like "oh no, I can only fit like 21 unique words into my cute little vocabulary, so all of them need to have like 35 separate meanings, and you have to listen to my distressed snortling really carefully to deduct from context whether the word 'bouton' in this sentence means a doorknob, flower bud, button, pimple, or a secret fifth thing that I just made up! ó^ò"

Meanwhile latin, long dead and still haunting us, pulls its bloody head out of a mammoth carcass mouth full of gore like "I have a specific verb for aggressively penetrating a man's left nostril."

heartbreaking

adding an org that provides aid to children in gaza to donate to, if you are able to.

This is Mahmoud. He is the son of Aljazeera reporter in gaza Wael Al-Dahdouh. While Wael was doing his job, risking his life, he moved his family to the south of gaza because they were told it's safe. Today, Wael got a call. His family has been killed by Israeli bombs. His wife, daughter, son and granddaughter have all been killed, at once. This clip made by Mahmoud, the son who was killed today, was an appeal to the world to stop the genocide. Well, Mahmoud has been killed alongside his family. His father lives to mourn them. Losing Wael's family was like losing your own, I got used to watching him on my tv, reporting everything from gaza. Pray for Wael and for his family.

May god give him strength.

This is has been the way since forever. They see us as animals, they're given the green light. And as we're watching the atrocities they commit in gaza, Israeli forces are becoming more brutal towards every other Palestinian. Shooting us if they feel like it. People in Jenen are not leaving their houses because they most likely will get shot, no reason. You still want me to condemn Hamas? There is no hamas outside of gaza.

This child in gaza is screaming:

"I wish it was a dream. Oh, mom and dad. I wish it was a dream and my mom and dad are still alive" after being rescued from underneath the rubble to find his parents killed by Israel.

Share this, we are not numbers. Let our voices be heard in hopes that this stops.

This baby remained under the rubble for six hours. Read it again. By some miracle, he survived and he was rescued. But his mother who was holding him didn't. He looks like he's in shock, you can see tears coming out of his eyes but no expression or any sound to indicate his pain.

We are not numbers. Make an effort to end this.

for @wincestwednesdays week 1. prompt: americana

This is the paramedic who found his family among the dead victims. I thought it was only his mother who got killed, but I was mistaken. But his sister seems to have survived only.

They're telling him to calm down but he fell to the ground saying: My family. My family.

The man consoles him saying: We're all one family here. Each one of us has lost their family. Look, my sisters are in there. We have to get back up. You're strong.

Share this. Call israel on their crimes.