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1. FIL in the news
Welcome home, those of you who attended the best-attended
Guadalajara book fair ever. We hope you brought back armloads of
great books (and maybe some stories for your fellow SOListas--like,
what about the reported rampant book thefts that prompted some stands
to close?). If you want to relieve the experience of the Feria Internacional
de Libros 2000, visit http://www.informador.com.mx/informa/fil2000/
, the FIL section of Guadalajara newspaper El Informador.
2. Spanish-language sites: Science and fun
for kids & families
NASA this month introduced an ambitious Spanish
version of its flashy and authoritative site devoted to space and
Earth science: http://ciencia.msfc.nasa.gov/
Other good educational sites in Spanish are assembled
at ALA's Great Sites for Children page, of course: http://www.ala.org/parentspage/greatsites/arts2.html#g
And you'll find something for the whole family at
http://www.familia.cl/
3. Vientos Tropicales
Does your library's Spanish-speaking community include
a growing group with roots in Central America? You'll probably want
to bookmark the site of a vendor called Vientos Tropicales http://www.vientos.com/ with its vast, well-organized
catalogue of hard-to-find popular Central American materials in
many media. A lot of this stuff would be impossible to get without
a long bus ride to San Salvador or Guatemala City...
4. What's next--a cyber-Sancho? A robotic
Rocinante?
The first novel in the Western world is now available,
for free, in several e-book formats thanks to the popular Lamira.com
portal http://lamira.com/ . Go
to http://lamira.com/ebook/index.shtml
to download a reader and the text of Don Quijote.
5. Spotlight on belles-letres
A yucateca teenager in Quintana Roo, Meztli
Vianey Suárez Mc-liberty (her given name is Nahuatl for 'moon'),
publishes a lovely online literary magazine called Arrecife
http://nalejandria.com/00/rol/arrecife/
6. Outreach feature on Diversity.com
Substitute the word "libraries" for "banks"
and see if this article gives you any ideas: Why Mexicans
Don’t Trust Banks, What One Bank Is Doing About It
http://www.diversityinc.com/insidearticlepg.cfm?SubMenuID=170&ArticleID=2142&fromemail=yes
7. Some concepts simply can't be translated...
Flaco, wondering how terms such as 'chad,' (hanging,
pregnant, or otherwise) are rendered in Spanish, toured some of
the world's newspapers and came up with little more than a handful
of confetti. From El Colombiano, of Bogota: "los famosos
'chad', esos pequeños pedazos de papel rectangular". Almost
as prosaic is the Buenos Aires daily La Nación, which avoids
the ch-word in referring to the contested Florida ballots as "boletas
mal perforadas." Only by going straight to the eye of the hurricane
and El Nuevo Herald de Miami could we find anything resembling
poetry in such phrases as "pestañas abultadas," and the
rather charming "casillas burbujas" for dimpled chads.
Oh, and another of today's birthdays we forgot to
mention above: Chad Stuart, of that 60s singing
duo Chad & Jeremy...
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Normally the cumpleañeros we spotlight are
from the Spanish-speaking world, but when Melville Louis
Kossuth Dewey bounced into the world on this date in 1851
his proud parents would've been prouder still had they known he'd
dream up a clever classification system that would one day be translated
into Spanish and posted on the Web 