Downtime

Win a copy of The Library and Information Professional's Guide to the Internet, as reviewed in Ariadne.

This photo was taken in a dimly lit corner of the bar at the International Networked Information Conference at the Ramada hotel in February of this year. The photo features Caroline Bardrick (JISC), Lorcan Dempsey (UKOLN) and the left arm of someone who is wearing a burgundy blazer but who wishes to stay anonymous.

Email your caption; you can enter as many times as you want. Judging will be done by independent jurors; no correspondence, offers of drinks or other bribes, threats of removal of future funding etc will be entered into. The closing date for submissions is 1st July 1996; the winner and the caption will appear in Issue 4 of Ariadne on the Web. Entrants should note the comments about how we whittled down the captions for the previous competition (below). Due to popular request (mostly, strangely, from Newcastle for the previous caption competition), entrants can have their name/email address kept secret - the winner will be announced as a.n.onymous, and will still receive their prize.

So, here's the picture...

Last month's winning caption...

We asked you to think of a caption for:

Our anonymous judge has deliberated at great length, consulted the stars, independent advice and the bottom of several whisky bottles, and without persuasion or influence has declared the winning entry to be:
So, you just click on "practice your rugby catches", wait a couple of seconds while it loads and then..."
submitted by com3thomacm@ntu.ac.uk.
Honourable mentions go to: Sadly, the vaporware chose that moment to evaporate from tel@learned.co.uk and: "Now the most important thing is to be aware of what's happening on your screen at all times...... OK, did anyone see who moved it?" from m.lawes@sheffield.ac.uk.

The winner wins a copy of Networking and the Future of Libraries 2 - Managing the intellectual record. The book, edited by Lorcan Dempsey, Derek Law and Ian Mowat, is a highly topical range of edited papers from UKOLN's major international conference held at the University of Bath in April 1995 which examine the future central role of networking for the library and publishing community. Contributors to the book include Nicky Ferguson, Stevan Harnad, Joan Day, Paul Evan Peters, Margaret Hedstrom, Sheila Corrall and Brian Perry.

Many of the entries were filtered/barred through being obscene, crude, offensive or just too weird to make sense. Entries that mentioned Baywatch, Pamela Anderson or breasts formed over 40% of the submissions, which made the job of rapidly whittling them down quite easy.

Cartoon

Some more merriment for you...

Poem

NATURE TRAIL
Alec Rapkin

sunlight, in wavering glints,
blows upon spider's threads, thrown
over litter, from gorse to grass-bent

a squirrel jumps off, on springs,
weightlessly, sinuously staccato
no dump of raw stew on the road

and in the weed-clogged canal,
a little grebe, at its toilet,
squirms its head down to scoop water

rears upright, wingings milling spray,
and with peeping squeaks, beaks
into sensitive spots, preens

and sashays, shimmying its shoulders
for pleasure, wing over wing
then speeds, streamlined by cleanliness

head and beak flat to the water,
to gobble some low-flying insect,
having got in under its radar

This poem appears in the Web magazine Living Poets , Volume 1, Number VII, April 1996. It is reprinted by permission of the editor.