Scrotastic!
This is by no means a complete encapsulation of thoughts by people on the Lucky Scrotum Debate (as it should hitherto be known), but rather just those posts that caught my eye.
You know a news item is big when the Daily Kos starts running info on it. Likewise, Ron Hogan posted info on Scrotumgate (I'm trying to settle on a catchy moniker here, but the word doesn't really lend itself to a media-grabbing title) recently on Galleycat that sums up some great salient points. What Adrienne Thinks About That has tallied a lot of the sites out there discussing it far better than I. The site librarian.net ("putting the rarin' back in librarian since 1999") had plenty to say in the last few days. And according to A Year of Reading, the smartest rant on the Lucky Scrotum comes via a site called Pragmatic Chaos. I liked the piece, but it sure made me feel old. The writer was 11 during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal? Oh, momma. I think I'll go get my walker and drink a phosphate on the porch as I reminisce about the early days of Caleco.
Labels: People Have Been Finding This Site By Googling "Lucky Scrotum" Which Amuses Me, Scrotums, The Higher Power of Lucky
posted by fusenumber8 @ 12:02 AM
11 Comments
11 Comments:
Book Moot has a great post about Concerned Parents vs. Book Banning Know-Nutters, which follows her own take on the topic as a school librarian. Oh, and Scott Westerfield has a funny, yet insightful, post on the Scrotum Incident of 2007.
I never knew the word "scrotum" could be so exciting until one day Mother and Daddy were playing a charades game with my sister and me. The game was to act out a single word instead of a title or phrase, and I gave Mother the word "scrotum" to act out for Daddy to guess. She made us leave the room before she'd do it. I know she didn't cheat because he never guessed it. Eventually she called us back into the room and gave us the point. I remember to this day how exasperated she was that the kids knew the clinical names for his body parts and he didn't.
There's a rallying cry and letter writing campaign on CCBC-Net listserve over the New York Times
bias of not quoting anyone who actually had read Lucky or liked Lucky. Talk about a biased report.
public@nytimes.com is the NY Times public editor's address.
Okay, there's the one librarian quoted in the NYT article who claims to have heard from "dozens" of supporters. In a country this big, "dozens" seems like a pretty weency minority of librarians. There's "sherry" who commented earlier on your blog. how many others are there? I can't access LM.Net or any of the childlit serves. is there anybody really on the other side in this debate? how many people? six? who maybe all blogged over and over? because i have read the blogs that I could find and I am not finding anything but people foaming at the mouth about those evil prude librarians. not much sign of EPL themselves. Fuse, can you tell those of us who aren't insiders how many of these people there really are? are they real, in your opinion? because this looks like a tempest in a teapot, and tilting at windmills and boxing at non-existent shadows.
I am a suppoter: http://maclibrary.edublogs.org/2007/02/19/the-higher-power-of-lucky-why-select-this-book/.
Well, Anonymous, I'm probably not the best person to ask. Consider that I live and work in New York City where book challenges are rare beasties, usually found only on Staten Island. I have no concept of how many librarians are actually refusing to stock this book based on The Word alone. We do know that book challenges and the like go unreported every year, so the same can probably be said for librarian exclusions. I mean, who's going to count the small library system where a single librarian simply doesn't purchase the title without making a big fuss? Probably happens once in a while. I don't think this is a massive nationwide ban including thousands of scrotumphobic MLIS degree-holders. At the same time, it probably occurs more than we know.
I see your scrotumania, Sherry, and I find that it works far better than the scrotumphilia I was thinking about. You win.
Turn on the View! The scotum is on!
Thanks Jenny for the View tip.
On the west coast they bleeped
out Joy and others using any euphanism for scrotum which I found quite laughable, and made a point, at that, and having Barbara
Walters read the passage out loud was quite something to behold.
I have been sorely tempted to start referring to "The Higher Power of Lucky's Scrotum," but I feel in my heart that someone's already done it. Not that I can find it again....
I think the think that really frustrates is how few words rhyme with scrotum. Like husband or orange, it really kicks up dust in the face of a decent rhyme. Best I could come up with was "don't ya just dote on 'em, love them books with scrotum." I know, dreadful.
Next?
I think what has people so upset is that the word scrotum may actually lead to conversations - with children! - about such words as testicles or possibly even penis. Those are such difficult words, especially when "dingleballs" or "peepee" serve so well. Why go muddy up the works with the correct terminology for anatomy - even if it is a dog's anatomy?
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