More on libraries and digitizing books... some who have rejected deals with Google and Microsoft

Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web
by Katie Hafner
NY Times, 22 October 2007

This week's Awesome Foursome

Here are the men I've been seeing lately...

Link Larkin. The real star of the effervescent movie-musical Hairspray is Tracy Turnblad, but the show has also succeeded in turning High School Musical's Zac Efron from a teen idol into... well, a teen idol!

Peter Petrelli. Our favourite hero from crazy television series Heroes is of course the earnest, time-travelling Japanese dude Hiro Nakamura, but we love ultrapowerful, bleeding heart Peter too - he's improving, he really is. Hooray for Peter!

Charlie Crews. Detective Crews is four months out of prison, with a 15 million dollar settlement, a surprising compassion for those he encounters, and an uncanny intuition when it comes to solving cases. Will he track down the people who set him up 12 years ago? He's the odd one out in this pack, since he is actually the lead actor in his tv series, Life. You gotta love his carrot-top and his weird quotations. We're rooting for you, Charlie!

Dr. Robert Chase. Of course the real star and the reason we watch House is its title character Dr. Gregory House. Chase has the smallest part of the three underlings (the others being Drs. Cameron and Foreman), but he is a lot better looking than his ex-boss, he's Australian, and he provided the best moment in the recent episode I saw, so he gets his pic up here too.

It's spring... more or less. I had a lovely day at the Royal Botanic Gardens in the city a few weekends ago, and couldn't resist taking some flower pictures. Here they are:

While I'm at it, I might as well put up the rest of my Spring pics as well... oak leaves from the Melbourne, new vine leaves from KG, and magnificent oaks at Domaine Chandon. I love the brilliant green you get at this time.

And here's the wash-up from the Internet today...

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Finding a light by James Lang. Review of a self-published book from a college professor about teaching college classes. The book is available for free online at the professor's Web site as well.

And Confessions of a Journal Editor by Jeffrey J. Williams, a piece about the joys and woes of the editing role and of academic writing.

Finally, it so happens that I'm reading this guy Robert Alter's book The Art of Biblical Narrative right now, for my translation paper on Wendland's "literary functional equivalence (LiFe) approach, and here he (Alter) is in Slate.com!

Psalm Springs: How I translated the Bible's most poetic book - Robert Alter writes about his new translation of the Psalms: