Spot the thespian

I watched the library's latest acquisition - The King's Speech - last night and loved it (from talking to friends and family, I realize everyone else on the planet has seen it already). In addition to being a funny, entrancing movie, The King's Speech also gave me the opportunity to play my favorite British film game: spot the thespian. Many of the fine actors in this movie can be found in other films on the library shelves.

Colin Firth (King George VI) - wearing a lamé jumpsuit and dancing & singing to ABBA songs in Mamma Mia!
Helena Bohman Carter (Queen Elizabeth) - the darling of Merchant & Ivory, catch her in the adaptation of Henry James' The Wings of the Dove.
Geoffrey Rush (Lionel Logue) - he may be an Oscar-winning actor, but he is truly fun in Pirates of the Caribbean: curse of the Black Pearl.
Jennifer Ehle (Mrs. Logue) - played Elizabeth Bennett to Colin Firth's Mr. Darcy in the best version ever of Pride and Prejudice
Michael Gambon (King George V) - was an completely unpleasant character in the wonderful mystery with the upstairs/downstairs twist, Gosford Park
Claire Bloom (Queen Mary) - was in the 1965 John le Carré film The Spy Who Came in From the Cold with Richard Burton
Guy Pearce (King Edward VIII) - was so good in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, that I thought he was a professional drag queen
Derek Jacobi (Archbishop of Canterbury) - played the original stuttering ruler in the Masterpiece Theater series I, Claudius
Anthony Andrews (Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin) - was dreamy and dissipated in the classic PBS series Brideshead Revisited
Timothy Spall (Winston Churchill) - played the cringing toady Wormtail in the Harry Potter series.  (Bonus points if you can spot the other 2 Harry Potter alums in The King's Speech)
 
Happy actor-spotting!!

Poetry Omnibus

Eighty-one entries were received in Ketchikan’s first ever Poetry Omnibus Contest. A panel of three judges selected 20 entries for posting on the Ketchikan Gateway Borough buses this summer.

Outreach Librarian George Pasley, contest organizer, said entries were received from 10 adults and 44 children and youth. All of the submitted poems are printed and bound in a notebook which may be viewed at the Ketchikan Public Library.

Poems that were selected in the adult division were written by John Pearson, Agnes Royer, Kelly Chick, Julie Grimmer, Peggy Kennedy, Cara Murray, and Terry Heida Gucker.

Poems that were selected in the Children and Youth Division were written by Jordan Sader, Nico De Guzman, Cecelie Ekse, Malin Guthrie, Melissa Imboden, Geralyn Lovell, Gretchen Wilhelm, Jackson Kaye, and Jordan Geary.

There were three classes in the contest: Tweet poems (140 characters or less), Haiku (Americanized version), and Wish poems (10 lines or less containing the word ‘wish’).

Ketchikan Poetry Omnibus was sponsored by the Ketchikan Public Library and the Ketchikan Gateway Borough Transit Department. Congratulations to all the winners, and THANK YOU to everyone who entered!

ListenAlaska app for your iPhone or iPad

I'm going to totally steal a wonderful thing from the Juneau Public Library:  a video tutorial that shows you how to download eBooks and mp3 audiobooks directly onto your iPhone or iPad  (a couple of days ago, I posted step-by-step instructions, but live action is SO much better).

iPad & iPhone tutorial

Thanks again to the Juneau Public Library!

New to Ketchikan?

The cruise ship season starts in about 3 weeks, and we are starting to see our summer residents trickling into town. If you are planning on coming to Ketchikan to work for the season, or if you are just planning on a short visit, here's a brief tour of the library and all of the resources we have for our patrons. We offer library accounts for temporary residents...just ask at the front desk. We are open Mon-Wed, 10 am to 8 pm and Thurs-Sat, 10 am to 6 pm.

Using ListenAlaska eBooks

 

Gross National Happiness

If you were listening to "A World of Possibilities" on KRBD this last Sunday, you may remember that there was a segment on that show about the economic benefits of happiness.  Filmmaker John De Graaf spoke about a collaboration between Seattle and Victoria, B.C. to survey the happiness levels of Seatillites.  This was inspired by the tiny kingdom of Bhutan, which bills itself as 'the Happiest Kingdom on Earth'.
We just happen to have a brand new book about this idyllic country:  Radio Shangri-La: what I learned in Bhutan, the happiest kingdom on Earth, by Lisa Napoli.  Burned out with her frantic career as a radio journalist, Napoli jumps at the chance to downpace her life by moving to Bhutan, where personal happiness and contentment are highly valued.  Napoli helps launch the first youth-oriented radio station in a country without a single traffic light, where television has only just been allowed to be broadcast. 
As she gets involved with the people and the lifestyle in Bhutan, she begins to question whether her efforts at fostering modern media and communications might not just threaten the very special nature of that community.A very interesting book.