Choose Your Own Graphic Adventure!

That didn't sound right...

Anyway! I grew up on Choose Your Own Adventure books. They were awesome. They probably still are, I don't know. They don't write adult versions. Why don't they write adult versions? Mystery of the ages, probably.

BUT! There is a graphic novel version and it is really cool. Jason Shiga's Meanwhile starts off with a simple decision - what flavor ice cream do you want: chocolate or vanilla? From there, your path branches and branches and branches and most paths lead to death and/or destruction. There are apparently more than 3,000 possible paths (it says so right on the cover), so I don't know that I can honestly say I've finished the book, but I've gone through it several times, and thoroughly enjoyed every step of the way.

It's a great read for anyone who can read - simple enough conceptually for the kiddos, but fun enough for the adults, too. Recommended for, well, everyone. Especially if you get all nostalgic about Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Pretty picture time!

Navigating the Sea of Information or Some Such

Links!

• Library Land
• American Library Association announces 2017 youth media award winners "The American Library Association (ALA) today announced the top books, video and audio books for children and young adults – including the Caldecott, Coretta Scott King, Newbery and Printz awards – at its Midwinter Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia." So here's a good TBR pile for your kiddos! 
• How Reading Aloud to Therapy Dogs Can Help Struggling Kids "Bridges says that therapy pets allow children to focus on the animal instead of feeling self-conscious themselves. She says that this is a therapeutic distraction technique that relieves children of their worries, which helps their performance when reading."
• Information Pulls a Disappearing Act  Digital information is more ephemeral (and sometimes harder to access) than you think. 
• How the dusty Merriam-Webster dictionary reinvented itself. Bigly.  Personally, I've always had a crush on the Merriam-Webster dictionary. <3
• The William Henry Fox Talbot Catalogue Raisonné "The complete corpus of the works of the Victorian inventor of photography on paper" Awesome!
• Health, Science, & Technology
• Cancer Rates Are Dropping — But Not In Rural Appalachia  Lifestyle (particularly smoking and obesity) and environmental factors (coal mining and its fall out, primarily) play roles, of course, but lack of access to health care is the biggest problem. 
• Diehard Coders Just Rescued NASA's Earth Science Data This group is working - where else?  - in the library. "Groups like DataRefuge and the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, which organized the Berkeley hackathon to collect data from NASA’s earth sciences programs and the Department of Energy, are doing more than archiving. Diehard coders are building robust systems to monitor ongoing changes to government websites. And they’re keeping track of what’s already been removed—because yes, the pruning has already begun."
• Not Okay: Professor Smeared After Advocating for Election Integrity "The threat of being the target of a smear campaign could chill the speech of others who want to speak out on the need for ensuring the integrity of our election system—an increasingly critical topic. Such efforts to chill speech threaten the very nature of the Internet as we know it—a place for open, robust, and diverse discourse."
• Randomnesses
•  Do you have trouble getting to sleep at night? This podcast is so boring it puts people to sleep. And that’s why insomniacs love it. "There’s 'peaceful noise' playlists, white noise machines, and ASMR YouTube channels. And there’s children’s bedtime storytelling podcasts, such as 'We Love Bedtime Stories' by Leslie Collins — but nothing specially designed for adult insomniacs. Nothing, that is, until 'Sleep With Me.'"
• International
• 'Sudden death' of Kim Jong Un's half-brother investigated Seems fishy...
• U.S. News
• This is US, guys - this is what we've become: Crossing the border: US migrants seek refugee status in Canada We're a nation people flee, literally risking their limbs and lives for a chance of safety and a future.  
• Alabama immigration: crops rot as workers vanish to avoid crackdown "'It's going to be a little while, but eventually people will see what has been done here. The cost of food in the supermarkets is going to go up, and in the end we will all pay the price.'"
• Senate Confirms First Nonveteran To Lead VA " The Senate voted 100-0 on Monday to confirm President Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs,Dr. David Shulkin. The unanimous vote makes Shulkin the first-ever nonveteran to lead the VA, but that didn't stop him from winning endorsements from most of the major veterans service organizations. He also won bipartisan, unanimous support from the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs — a political double rainbow in Washington's current polarized atmosphere." 
• House panel votes against requesting Trump's tax returns So I guess we just have to take the President's word for it when he says he doesn't have any conflicts of interest. I suppose it's a good thing we don't have any reason to be concerned that he might lie, or that he might have unethical ties to businesses or, heh, questionable connections to foreign governments.... 
• Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn abruptly resigns  "Former acting attorney general Sally Yates warned the White House that Flynn was misleading about the interactions with the ambassador, an official told USA TODAY....Yates' communication to the White House was prompted by assertions from top Trump officials, including Vice President Pence, that Flynn had not discussed sanctions imposed by the Obama administration for Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election." (Although he may have been fired - it's unclear, at this point.)
• That should take care of that, right? Well...you have to wonder how closely Trump was tied to Russia, given Russia's meddling in the election. And, of course, this is the third of Trump's people to step down due to shady Russian connections - Paul Manafort and Carter Page left, too, because of suspected ties with Russia.(That's all without mentioning Russian award-winner Rex Tillerson.) So how many close associates do there have to be before we consider Trump's involvement? Russia: The scandal Trump can't shake  <shifty eyes> Nothing to see here, folks, I'm sure. </shifty eyes> A more detailed timeline reads like the outline for a great spy novel, but I don't want to live in that genre, do you?
• Related: Petraeus, Kellogg, Harward: Meet potential Flynn replacements I'd think Kellogg's involvement with the Iraq war would, I think, make him unpopular with Dems, and Trump thought that conflict a mistake (at least lately, though not always), so we'll see - maybe now it'll have been a great success, and he'll have always said that...Petraeus wasn't very careful with classified information, but neither is Trump, so that might not be a problem for him - in fact, maybe he's looking to delegate his leak activities...Harward is tied to Lockheed Martin, but seems a more stable choice than the other two, from what little I know.