Owen's excited by the letter "F." Counting down with his fingers extended, he shouts out, "Five begins with F! Four begins with F! F'ree begins with F!" That was a hard one to correct.

As for me? Tina Fey in a pirate costume. She leads her pirate crew to get library cards and take out books.

Swoon.

EDIT: Tina and the Bookaneers now on YouTube.

The NY Times reports that the BushAdmin, seeking to nip potential violence in prisons in the bud, has ordered prison chaplains to purge prison library collections of any religious materials not sanctioned by an official list of 150 titles.

Who are the most aggrieved parties? Not evangelicals, fo sho. Muslim and Jewish prisoners have something to come together on: filing lawsuits against the Bureau of Prisons for violating their First Amendment rights of religious freedom. Moreover this puts the Guvmint in the biznezz of deciding what religious materials are acceptable and what are verboten. Critics of the list, including Catholic and Protestant scholars, note that so far Guvmint has not done a very competent job, making as many "glaring omissions" as standard selections.

Bad enough, this should light a fire in the belly of any librarian. The article also reports that library collections that have taken years to develop through patient acquisition through prisoner efforts and charitable donations are now irrevocably decimated. No money has been made available to replace the lost materials or purchase sanctioned selections (unfunded mandate! woo hoo!). And what does this do for the literacy needs of prisoners, many of whom had had no opportunity to discover the power of reading before incarceration?

A chaplain who has worked more than 15 years in the prison system, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is a bureau employee, said: “At some of the penitentiaries, guys have been studying and reading for 20 years, and now they are told that this material doesn’t meet some kind of criteria. It doesn’t make sense to them. They’re asking, ‘Why are our tapes being taken, why our books being taken?’ ”

Last year I had the profound experience of accompanying outreach specialists of Multnomah County Library's Jails Program to a county jail. The Jails Program provides reading material for prisoners and teaches incarcerated parents the value of reading aloud to their children, many of whom are in foster care. One incentive of the program comes at the end when the tutors videotape incarcerated parents reading aloud from a children's book that is provided to their kids to watch at home. I bring this up because several of the prisoners at the session I attended attested to having never had the opportunity to read before prison or the program. In other words, this was not only an opportunity to develop their kids' literacy, but also their own.

In sum: purging reading material bad, even in prison. Especially in prison.