Lovely Lady Lawmps

My sister is math-y. How math-y is she? My sister is sooooo math-y, she's a regular Mathy McConaughey. I'm not a math-illiterate or anything. I could take a seat among your garden-variety mathletes, but I'm talking about crazy-math. What choo talking about Willis type math. She did her graduate work in stuff that I can't even begin to explain to you, and that's probably ok because chances are you wouldn't understand it anyway. She can think about all that Fermat doughnut stuff and it actually makes sense to her. I watched that documentary about it, and all I could think were Homer-thoughts: Mmmm. Doughnuts. Anyhoo. When my sister talks to her colleagues, and they're getting into it about who solved what which way, they sometimes use the word "elegant." You probably have heard that on tv or in A Beautiful Mind or something. Or maybe you run with a mathy crowd and when you split the bill at Big Boy you talk about elegant bill-splitting. Anyway, if you haven't heard of this, it doesn't just mean that you solved something. It means that you've done something creative, perhaps something unexpected. You've solved it in a way that adds a new dimension to the way this problem is thought about.

Yesterday a patron came in to chat. She comes in a couple of times a week, and she stops to tell me about whatever movie she's watched lately. This lady watches so many movies I am in awe of her. I don't know what she does for a living or if she does anything other than watch movies, but if she does I don't know how. Today, for a change, she was telling me about something she had read about in passing: the Desert Camel Experiment. If you're sitting there reading this thinking: "how the hay-ell does a random stranger come up to you and start chit-chatting about the Desert Camel Experiment," then you aren't a librarian, my friend. This is the random landscape upon which we thrive. As she mentioned it, I quickly drummed up a couple of sources for her in case she wanted to read more about it. She thanked me, but said she wasn't really interested in getting facts about it. She just thought it was entertaining. Hmmm. Not interested in facts? Just want to be entertained? Oh yes, I can do that. "Have you ever heard of the movie 'Hawmps'?" I asked. She perked up. I continued: "I seem to recall Slim Pickens was in that. It's a comedy set during the time of the Desert Camel Experiment. Not really historically accurate or anything, but...." "I'll take it!" she beams at me and looks like she wants to hug me to her bosom.

That, people, is an elegant solution.

Kiss the rings, I'm out.
Librarian Girl