A Blog of Bosh

Biggest Online Children’s Library
to Debut November 20
The federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, in partnership with non-profit, industry, academic, and other government organizations today announced a five-year, $4.4 million plan to build a digital library freely available for children worldwide. The library will consist of 10,000 children’s books drawn from 100 cultures. The International Children’s Digital Library, developed by the Internet Archive and the University of Maryland, is part of a larger research project to develop new technology to serve young readers. No other library of this size, that is appropriate and accessible for 3-13 year olds, exists.
IMLS, 18 November 2002
Go to the International Children’s Digital Library where a demo is available; you will need a powerful pc system and a fast connection, as well as the Java Virtual Machine 1.4.

The Brain’s Funny Bone: Seinfeld, The Simpsons spark same nerve circuits
Different brain regions spark with activity when a person gets a joke versus when he or she reacts to it. Also see the next post.
Science News Online vol. 162, no. 20

Did you hear the one about the prefrontal cortex?
Brain scans reveal the inner workings of humour.
Nature Science Update 21 February 2001
See also: Full text in pdf, and An Interview with Vinod Goel, in which he “discusses two new cutting edge discoveries related to humor and brain activity.”. You can also download a presentation about humour and the brain, but you’ll have to change the extension to .ppt and view it in Powerpoint.

Resistance is useless, honey
Pooh, it’s true, manages, through byzantine byways that I will track below, to body forth the key principles of Deconstruction with uncanny fidelity. And that fact, given the apparent temporal priority of Milne over Derrida, would seem to prove the timeless pertinence of the latter’s approach to textuality. Yet what is the le�on of Derrida, that consummate rhetor of the iterable and the dehiscent, if not that clear sight, the grasping of significance, and even historical precedence (to say nothing of timeless truth) are all illusions, effects of that very diff�rance that constitutes the only legitimate object of critical scrutiny?
[Not relevant to Lear, perhaps, but funny and nonsensical all the same.]
Guardian Unlimited Books | Review

The Tomfoolery Show
The Tomfoolery Show was a short-lived collection of animated shorts based on the nonsensical poetry of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, with occasional nods to other literary classics by Ogden Nash and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Yesterdayland Saturday Morning TV
ONE OF those bizarre half-remembered cartoons produced by Rankin/Bass in conjunction with British cartoon studio Halas And Batchelo, the humour on the show centered around riddles, puns, and nonsensical jokes, with the titular Tom Foolery, a long-legged ball thing, a Yongy Bongy Bo, a chicken being hit by a jigsaw piece, all based around the poems of Edward Lear with characters such as Fastidious Fish and The Ubiquitous Umbrella Maker. “We’re putting on the nonsense, The funny stuff and nonsense, With riddles, jokes and silly things, It’s all Tomfoolery….”
TV Cream [search for ‘tomfoolery’, you can also download a couple of themes from the program in mp3.]