Why be a Librarian?

I was asked again today why I'm studying to be a librarian.  It seems that people don't think you're cut out to be a librarian unless you look like this:

From lolbrarian, seriously check it out.

This got me wondering how librarians have such a bad rap for most people, because when I think of librarians in popular culture I think of:

Barbara Gordon, librarian.  Source

Rupert Giles, librarian.  Source

Ezekiel of the Dark Angels, librarian.  Source

An Orangutan, librarian.  Source

Something all these characters have in common is that they are particularly competent characters, who not only have vast intellects but can easily find out new information as the situation requires.  The orangutan can even cross dimensional barriers using nothing more than his mad librarian skillz!

I know that there are some other librarians with less than stellar reputations and appearances, think Sophie's Choice for one, but on the whole it seems fictional librarians are helpful, caring and generally useful people who do their best to be, if not the heroes the at least the good guys.

I can't really understand this stereotype spawning from real life either, because the librarians I have been in contact with (and as a library student I have some considerable contact with librarians) have almost without fail been cheerful, connected, competent and friendly.  Rarely have I found someone in this profession who is not interested in helping others and I don't think I've ever actually seen a librarian with a tight bun or tweed suit.

Essentially what I'm saying is that I want to be a librarian because LIBRARIANS ARE AWESOME!!!

Hello World!

Okay, so while I'm not actually a computer program, this seemed like a suitable title for my very first post evar. This is by way of explaining that various references are likely to occur more frequently here than in Sunnydale so those of you who have something against obscure homages (but, you know, pronounced alliteratively) should, um, probably stick around anyway because, er, coz i says so, yeah!

Now that that is out of the way I should probably spend the rest of this post telling my reader(s) - I'm optimistic - all about me and why I'm blogging. Instead of this and possibly in an attempt to maintain the supposed weirdness suggested by the title I shall rant about how all the good URLs for blogs seem to be gone.


So here's how it all went down. I decided I should give in to peer pressure and maybe start a blog, now fast forward something like two and a half years, so I started a blog - tadaa. I signed up and everything was going really well until I got to the part where I was trying to work out what a good name for this would be. I figured putting loquacious, verbose or sesquipedalian in there somewhere was probably a sensible warning, but predictably these were all taken - as were many different variations on this theme. My next thoughts were along the lines of verbalism, which means to say very little in very many words. This still caused me trouble because the only URL along these lines that wasn't already taken was ihavenothinginterestingorusefultosay which was far too long for me to remember, let alone try and get other people interested in .


Given that I was having so much trouble I decided to have a think and come back to it. This brought with it the realisation that although I want to be as brilliant a wordsmith as Shakespeare, or at least Dr Seuss, that this is unlikely and I shouldn't worry so much about what it is called. This lasted about as long as it took me to return to trying to come up with a title. I should probably point out that the title itself was a problem in and of itself, but in order to remember the URL I wanted it to actually have some sort of connection with it so I played around with a wide range of themes including ramblings, confusions and randomness, none of which gave me any love. It was about this time that I started thinking about what I'm actually going to put in here and realised I have no idea, probably something about films I watch and books I read, almost certainly stuff about a trip to America I'm going on in January. Generally I figured it was just somewhere that all the stuff that gets me called weird if I say it to actual real people (as opposed to my, in all probability, imaginary readership) could call home.

Thus the Home of Weird was born. If you're wondering how I can possibly say that all the good URLs are gone when I have managed to snag this nifty one, I will point out that I'm pretty sure I got the last one. Some sort of smug victory gif would seem appropriate here but as I don't have any smug victory gifs I shall instead just write "Ha Ha!" and leave you to provide the Nelson Muntz image associated with it using your imagination.


And that is the story of my blog so far, post one and already I'm getting all meta by blogging the story of my blogging, this either bodes very well or very poorly for the blog as a whole. If anyone knows which then be sure to let me know.