Cowboy Who?

The Secret Power of the Pyramid
Akins
1980

Submitter: Yes, the hit author of ESP: Your Psychic Powers and How to Test Them is back to tell you the truth about pyramids, who built them, and their mysterious powers.

I have no idea how this has lasted in a school library for 40 years, through at least five librarians, several LMS changes, and presumably an initial digitization of the catalogue. The only reason I caught it was because classes haven’t been allowed up to the library due to COVID-19, so I had extra time to weed and inventory our whole collection.

Any 40-year-old book that hasn’t been checked out since well before any of my students were even born deserves to be weeded, but this “non-fiction” book is a prime example of pseudoscience. It tells the reader about the “true” history of pyramids and how they were really built by either the gods, aliens, or Atlanteans. Certainly not a bunch of “primitive people” from Africa, don’t be ridiculous!

The book then goes on to extoll the powers of pyramids, which include preserving milk, sharpening razors, and growing plants. Really, pyramids seem capable of anything you want them to do! Akins even tells you how to conduct your own experiments to test these powers.

I’m going to keep this book to use as an example of pseudoscience for information literacy lessons. Generally, if someone promises that their magic doodad can do anything, it really does nothing at all, no matter how much it’s dressed up as science!

Holly: Public libraries are a better place for this kind of thing than school libraries. Mary loves this kind of thing (for entertainment, just to be clear, although she told an audience in a webinar today that she read a book about brainwashing so she could try to brainwash me. Maybe she did – I’ll never know!)

The post More Pyramid Power appeared first on Awful Library Books.

Panda pair Mei Xiang and Tian Tian rolled around in the snow in their temporary home.

Don’t compromise with someone who wants to kill you.

This week in DistroWatch Weekly: Review: Kwort Linux 4.3.5, SulinOSNews: Serious sudo vulnerability patched, new Tails media published, Ubuntu tries Wayland as the default display manager, FreeBSD demotes i386Questions and answers: Qt licensing concernsReleased last week: Tails 4.15, Zentyal Server 7.0, Clonezilla Live 2.7.1-22Torrent corner: 4Mlinux, Alpine, Bluestar,....

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Offbeat Careers: The Directory of Unusual Work
Sacharow
1988

Submitter: Well, Al and I have very different opinions about what constitutes “offbeat.” Mainly things that aren’t actually careers, maybe not even jobs. Miss America? Game Show Contestant? Dated and just… odd. Mary may be interested in at least one of the careers listed! LOL!

All career books need careful curation, but this one was an easy weed!

Holly: Awww, man! I tried to sign Mary up for clown college – or at least their newsletter – but the college has been defunct since 1997. If that librarian thing doesn’t pan out, she can always become a shepherd, though. Or a parade float maker. (Side note: my other favorite career book is this one.)

The post Offbeat Careers appeared first on Awful Library Books.

The Dinosaurs TV show is now on Disney Plus, so it's a solid time to check out the full series. In this review, James checks out one of his favorite show's from the 90s. Dinosaurs is an American family sitcom television series that aired on ABC from 1991 through 1994, and reruns were shown on the Disney channel and eventually on their streaming service "Disney+." The show, about a family of anthropomorphic dinosaurs (portrayed by puppets), was produced by Michael Jacobs Productions and Jim Henson.

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Some Republicans are arguing that former President Donald Trump should not face a Senate impeachment trial because he's a private citizen. That was argued before — and rejected narrowly — in 1876.

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"Fire everybody at the top," one Democratic congressman says. Other advocates just want Biden to appoint new members to the Postal Service's Board of Governors.

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From the dawn of the video game age, physical media has been a defining element of each new console. That's changing now with the proliferation of download services, so I wanted to put together a little ode and top ten list to my favorite physical formats that have graced the game industry since the 1970's - along with their labeling, branding and packaging. In short, the stuff you actually hold in your hands. Oh, and there are a few dishonorable mentions here too!

See if your favorite made my list, and let me know in the comments if it didn't! Please know that this is not meant to be exhaustive or in any way objective, and I'm kind of intentionally not mentioning *every* variant of the formats I do list; I'm concentrating on the main ones. (Some systems literally have as few as one or two official releases with their own packaging or labels! So that's a never-ending rabbit hole.) There are a couple of exceptions, but I mostly relegated them to the post-top ten Honorable Mentions. This is just meant to be a fun look at my favorite physical video game media over the years.

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The European Union's joint consumer program has urged an investigation into the Nintendo Switch Joy-Con drift issue after it received almost 25,000 complaints from across the continent. Drift occurs when the Joy-Cons don't communicate properly with the console or when they start to register inputs by themselves, such as a character moving without a player touching a thumbstick.

The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) said that 88 percent of respondents from across the EU claimed their Joy-Cons broke within the first two years of use. The body has submitted complaints to the European Commission (the EU's executive branch) and national consumer protection agencies, claiming that “Nintendo continues to sell products that fail prematurely, which is harming consumers and the environment.”

The BEUC urged Nintendo to tell users that the controllers, as things stand, have a "limited lifespan" and to repair them for free. The company has fixed Joy-Cons in the past at no cost to consumers.

The Joy-Con drift problem has been widely reported since the Switch arrived almost four years ago. Nintendo has faced numerous class-action lawsuits over the matter and Engadget's readers have flagged problems with the controllers. Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa apologized last June for "any inconvenience caused to our customers regarding Joy-Con" without explicitly mentioning drift.

The standoff at a doctor's office lasted five hours after police responded to a "disturbance type call" late Tuesday afternoon.

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Here is a list of what The Ringer thinks are the 50 best cult films of all time. It's a great list, but as in all such things, your mileage may vary. These are all quite mainstream.

31. Brazil

Terry Gilliam's Brazil—which does not take place in Brazil, and is instead named for the song "Aquarela do Brasil"—is like 1984 on acid.

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