Monster Mash by Bobby "Boris" Picket and the Cryptkickers -- shows three spooky "singing" faces. The Alien Ghoul on the left is made with 225 LEDs. The simple Pumpkin Face in the center is the lead "singer"/vocalist and has only 194 LEDs. The Jack-O-Lantern on the right is lit with 200 LEDs, and with the Alien Ghoul, forms the supporting, background "chorus." The surrounding purple-orange-green garland is built with 210 LEDs. As you will eventually witness on our videos, these three "scary critters" are the smallest and simplest of our ten "performers." The three set pieces only took about seven hours to construct, but it required over 10 hours to program their LED lights to the song. As you can readily imagine, the most difficult task was trying to synchronize the mouths of the 3 faces with the words/lyrics of "Monster Mash." It took a lot of trial-and-error repetitions and "tweaking" to approximate/simulate the vocalizations. We are still beginners in this time-consuming hobby of speech mimicry -- but we're getting better and faster. We probably will NOT have any singing reindeer, elves, Santa or Elvis in this year's Holiday Musical Light Show! -- Maybe for Christmas 2011. No! We are not Scrooges this year!! Wait and watch our videos in early December! To get on our YouTube Channel again, please Google: kimball ne halloween

Beware of The Blob by the Five Blobs -- LED lights of 33 Jack-O-Lanterns "dance" to the beat of the music. This four-shelf set piece is Carol's invention and custom creation -- her pride and joy. Twenty-five of the Jack-O-Lanterns (JOLs) were hand carved by her from craft pumpkins obtained at Hobby Lobby, Michaels and Menards. It required several weeks of "recreation time" to construct this JOL set piece and to program its LEDs to "flashdance" with the rhythm of ten different spooky tunes. By the way, as you will eventually witness, there are many more JOLs in Carol's entire collection!! The LED bulbs used in the pumpkins are 1 to 1.5 Watts with standard bases and were purchased at Sams and Wal-Mart. Other retail sources for LEDs—especially in strings --have been LEDgen Lighting, Action Lighting, Menards, Target, Home Depot, Lowe's, K-Mart, Family Dollar, Big Lots, Walgreens and Pamida. Some of the larger JOLs contain more than one LED bulb! In future Halloween videos, you will see/hear much larger JOL-faces "sing" the vocals of the music! You can get on our YouTube site again by simply Googling: kimball ne halloween

OVERDRIVE Audiable Books

 Beginning in early October, the library will be offering a new service for our community and patrons.  You will need to be Kimball Public Library Card Holder to take advantage of this service. 

Patrons will be able to log into Overdrive and download audio books to read on the screen or to save to a portable device.  If interested, please stop in at the library for more information.  More information will also be posted on this site and in the Observer.  To view the site go to www.overdrive.com

Painting Class for beginners

 Coming Saturday, October 16, 2010

Rachelle Eversole of Broadwater is a Bob Ross Painting Certified Instructor and will be teaching a class at the Kimball Public Library Cultural Room from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. 

Students will not need to buy anything for the class except a roll of paper towels.  Canvas, paints, brushes and 6 hours of instruction are included in the fee of $60.00.  If you wish to sign up for this class, please bring contact information and the money to hold you place to the staff at the library.

Rachell has graciously donated a painting to help raise funds for a new microfilm reader/printer.

Photos to Identify

 Several people had a great time looking at the city photo from 1919 and finding their house and trying to identify the individuals in the 1948 County Fair picture.  We will keep these photos available for more opportunities to view and identify.  Please don’t hesitate to come in and look at these pictures.  More photos will be exhibited throughout the coming months.

Library Card Month — October

 October is Library Card Month!!  This is a campaign to get new patrons into the library.  But, it is also an opportunity to update our patron database.  New plastic library cards will replace the paper cards currently used as soon as they arrive.  As soon as the new cards arrive in the next couple of weeks, we will begin to hand them out.  Thanks for supporting your public library and the changes that are happening to improve service to you.

Banned Books Display & BUS-eum

 Banned Book Week is September 25- October 2, 2010.  Stop in and see the fun display the staff put together & and why they were challenged.  Books are really not “banned”, but are challenged as to content such as foul language, graphic descriptions, and violence.  Many of them are surprises and some ridiculous, but all intriguing.  Sustaining our right read and to gain information is the reason the American Library Association does this campaign annually.  More on our Weblog:  http://www.libraries.ne.gov/kimball

The Bus-eum with the POW exhibit was very interesting.  There were two men who brought the bus.  One is on his second internship from Germany.  The other man is in charge of the Bus exhibits.  Those who visited the Bus learned some new information and enjoyed the exhibit.  The library purchased several books that contained personal stories from Traces and will have them available soon.

Twilight Zone and Halloween movie themes -- Animotion Disk between two Light Towers. The Animotion Disk (AD) contains 1,650 LEDs and is a 12-spoke, 360-degree elaboration of our 16-spoke, 180-degree Patriot Fan. The AD set piece required about 24 hours of "play" to fabricate and 6 hours to program the "dance" of its LED radial spokes to the basic rhythm of the two movie themes. The two Light Towers (LTs), with over 1,000 LEDs, required about 12 hours to construct and a few hours to synchronize their animations to the spooky music. All of our many set pieces, light panels, arches/arbors, Jack-O-Lanterns, Tombstones, Ghouls, etc will have their "flashdances" synced not only to these two themes, but also to such popular tunes as: Tubular Bells; Werewolves of London; Monster Mash; Thriller; Ghostbusters; The Addams Family; This is Halloween; and the Blob. Our first three LED-art videos will be close-up "samples" of our entire Spooktacular Halloween Musical Light Display which, when finalized, will use 96 Light-O-Rama channels ( six LOR controllers) and over 12,000 orange, purple and green lights -- all (100%) energy-saving LEDs!! We are self-proclaimed "LED techno geeks!" You can reach our YouTube site/channel (kimbnebritelites) again (most easily) by Googling: Kimball ne halloween