My friend Noah saw this Japanese film offered as an option for viewing on an international flight. The plot summary: “In a dystopian near future, a special police force protects libraries … A mission to safeguard a special book is actually a devious trap.” According to Noah, who saw bits of it over the shoulder of a fellow passenger, the film “looked to be one non-stop gun battle.” It’s based on a book series by Hiro Arikawa, Toshokan Sensō (図書館戦争), which has also been adapted for manga, television, and radio. Thanks, Noah Sobe!

Several excellent fake library events from Obvious Plant. The one about rough-housing with a dog is pretty close to reality, though. Thanks, Julie Grisham, Steve Lawson, and Eliza Lake!

Here at Tutt Library, Colorado College, we’re giving students back some of their leftover energy from the first part of the school year, when they arrived full of enthusiasm and excitement for their studies. Thanks, Jonathan Caws-Elwitt, for the idea!

Other libraries provide similar moral support during finals:

Kellie Meehlhause uploaded this photo to the ALA Think Tank Facebook page, and others followed up.

Do you suck at real science? Try library science! From Lisa Genius of the Acme Upstairs Library School. Thanks, Shanon, Lawson!

We Asked 22 Librarians About the Most Italian Guy They Ever Had To Find A Book For

This made me laugh so hard. Thanks, Steve Lawson!

Birds living in a cathedral in Zvenigorod, Russia accidentally preserved documents from the 1830s! ” ‘Swifts and jackdaws, which collected the documents to build nests, run their archives differently than people do,’ wrote Sedov [Dmitriy Sedov, research director of the Zvenigorod Historical and Architectural Museum] in a statement on the museum’s website. Instead of gathering up the most historically important documents and shelving them according to subject and chronology, the birds took whatever they could find. The result is an ‘incredibly diverse collection of fragments of human thoughts, feelings, experiences, concerns, passions and desires,’ he wrote, forming ‘a single giant discordant chorus’ of Zvenigorod life from 1830 through the early 1900s.”

It’s not often I get to use the category “perpetrated by animals,” so, thanks, Steve Lawson!

Hanukkah began this past Sunday, and here at Colorado College we are celebrating with a menorah made out of bound volumes. (I’ve previously posted about Christmas trees made in similar ways.)

The library of Hoseo University in South Korea has installed a two-floor metal tube slide! Thanks, Diane Westerfield. See this post for more library slides.

Sometimes a library shenanigan is not exactly a shenanigan, but something subversive and wonderful. Not exactly against the rules, but against some people’s rules, and risky in some way.

On December 2 of this year, the Mount Horeb Public Library in Wisconsin hosted a reading of I Am Jazz, a picture book about a transgender child. The reading, originally scheduled to take place at a nearby elementary school where a student had recently transitioned from a boy to a girl, had been canceled after “Liberty Counsel,” a conservative Florida-based group, threatened legal action.

See the full story here.

Thanks, Lynne M. Thomas!

Isn’t this wonderful? More information here. I love the comment at Gizmodo saying “They should also make a magazine version that randomly fires jets of water in all directions, like those subscription cards that constantly fall out.” Thanks, Esau Katz!