Amusement – Page 6 – Dumpling in a Hanky

And for the Bad…

So, we’ve seen the Good – often quite pretty or kinda-cool ladies (nobody had tagged solo male images as “librarian”, they only seem to turn up within groups or as part of a couple), doing things to do with books, reading, relaxing…that’s fine, I can go with that.

Now, we move on to the Bad (or Sexy Girls). There are two main librarian representation stereotype categories – there’s the nice girl, and then there’s these: the librarians who are obviously repressed, and are secretly just itching to rip their clothes off/show you their cleavage/stand over a handy airvent to flash their pants/ wear short, high-split skirts and stilettos, stockings and garter belts to work.

You know, the standard stuff that us librarians think about doing while trapped behind those big, nasty issue desks…

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What librarians look like…according to Etsy artists

Etsy is quite a treasure trove of. handcrafted items, in all sorts of materials. Some are great, some are good, and some are….erm….different. You can find all sorts of things when you search on there. I wondered what this random selection of creative types considered to be a librarian, or to look like one.

As a form of mild amusement, I will present here the results of a recent search I did on Etsy using the word “librarian”, which brought up results including this word in their description or tag.. Therefore, the choice of whether this is what a librarian looks like is the makers, not mine. Believe me, I would really prefer that some of this stuff wasn’t tagged as being a librarian – I got a reputation to uphold here!

They can be perhaps regarded as being in three categories: The Good (or Cute), The Bad (or Sexy), and The….WTF.
Today, I shall begin with…The Good.

The Good

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Digging about in the library

Libraries are great places to dig about to find unusual items…and even more fun is doing it using the European Digital Library (Europeana). There’s information on all sorts of interesting things held in libraries, museums and archives all over Europe to be found on there.

I decided to go on an online animal-themed hunt: after all, animals (apart from the obligatory Library Cat, or occasional dog) are not generally encourage in libraries.

So, you can find this mongoose in Sweden, this Canadian octopus in the UK, this frog in Italy, a confused sloth in the UK, a deevloping axolotl in Italy, an aye-aye in the UK, a marmoset in Romania, and a miraculous quail in Shrewsbury.

And of course, some African wild ass, which is actually found in the Netherlands.

What’s the oddest thing you can find on there, animal or otherwise?

Soggy cakes, hard biscuits, invisible refunds

Yes, so we all know by now that Jaffa Cakes are definitely cakes. (Cakes go hard when exposed to the air, unlike a biscuit, which goes soft. It’s because a cake is more moist than the air, so loses it’s moisture to the air and hardens, while a biscuit does the reverse. That’s the wonderful world of science, kids!)

And that Marks and Spencers won a VAT refund from HMRC, which had misclassified teacakes as a chocolate covered biscuit rather than a cake, and therefore added VAT to them from 1973 until 1994.

But….M&S won that judgement in 2009…so where’s the refund? Did they get it?

And what about Tunnocks, also purveyors of fine teacakes: have they applied for their refund? They’ve been making them since the 1890s…that could be some tax refund!

Biscuit-obsessed minds want to know…

Teacake image from here