I love the Anarchist Librarian t-shirts for sale by our new friend Chris Baldwin at Little Dee.

My family spent most of last week camping with several dozen fellow homeschooling families. As you might expect these are all special people, smart and funny and every one of them outrageously talented, often in multiple intimidating ways. One common thread was music. Several times I sat listening to campfire singalongs with a dozen or so musicians playing a variety of stringed instruments (and a flute or two). I came away deeply inspired and determined to, finally, learn up a musical instrument.

Since I have gone down this path many times over my lifetime with piano and guitar, failing each time, I decided to look hard at what instrument choice would help me succeed:

• I'm lazy and undisciplined, so it needs to be easy to learn.
• I travel a lot, so it needs to be highly portable.
• It needs to feel fun, so that I'm inspired to practice and play.
• I love to sing, so it needs to be a good accompaniment instrument.
• I'm a cartoonist, so it needs to be inexpensive.

After some research the humble ukulele became the obvious choice. Like me you probably owned and strummed a cheap plastic uke at some point in your childhood, but it's quite a respectable instrument played by honest-to-god musicians. It's small, fun, great for singing-along, and reputedly very easy to learn. So I've ordered a hibiscus red concert Flea and some music books to start off with.

Meanwhile I'm enjoying all the uke love on YouTube. I already have a crush on Molly Banter, who plays the Fluke, the Flea's slightly bigger brother:

And if you don't believe ukes can make real music, check out Jake Shimabukuro:

A belated thank-you to friend-of-Unshelved Dawn Rutherford for providing the pitch for Sunday's Unshelved Book Club of Audrey, Wait!. We don't let just anyone recommend books for our strip, but Dawn is, emphatically, not just anyone.

Unshelved trivia: in addition to her many wonderful attributes as a librarian, Dawn is the one who outed our strip (then called "Overdue") to the world via librarian.net in early 2003, just weeks after we started the strip, long before we had planned to "go public" with our work. This probably worked out for the best, as all the attention forced some much-needed accountability on us. So thanks, Dawn!

You probably already know our friend Nora Rawlinson. She broke new ground as a selection librarian for Baltimore Public Library, she was editor at Library Journal, editor-in-chief at Publishers Weekly, and head of library marketing for Time Warner Books/Hachette. Now she's out to help libraries find out about books before they're out. Thus the title of her blog Early Word. Visit it today, then add her RSS feed to your daily reads!

Wait until Gene finds out that a pen name won't protect him from all the damage he's done the last six and a half years. (via hijinksensue)