O Happy Day!

Your Humble Scribe has been gifted! A Vacuum Wine Saver, from Pablo!

Fortunately, Pablo is familiar with my unpleasant personality and, after briefly snatching it back and trying to stuff it into a paper bag, has apparently forgiven my immediate response that "Huh. Wine savers are for wimps who can't finish the whole bottle." Because he's a generous and forgiving person, he'll still let me watch Firefly. Right?... Right?....

A correction:

Pablo wishes to inform the world that he inadvertently misquoted Niezsche. It's "must" be overcome, not "should."

Gone to the kitchen for another beer. Note to self: remember to make CD burn of Pablo's CD of songs by Marvin the Paranoid Android. It's legal, since the CD jacket says "these files are intended for academic use only".

LIVE! From the House of Pablo!

Your Truly returned from Missouri late last night, and will be spending New Year's Eve with the illustrious Pablo. With any luck, Pablo will remember where he stashed the videotaped episodes of Firefly.

Pablo Speaks:

"Man, however, is something that should be overcome." No wait, that was Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Perhaps this is why Pablo remains The Blogless. He has nothing original to say, apparently. I think I need another beer. Fortunately, the return credit from Great-Aunt H.'s gift just about covers it.

Where does Santa live?

Here. No, here! No, here!

Here's what the 1930 U.S. Census has to say.

Thanks to the Stumpers-L list for this entertaining digression.

Virtual snowglobe

Here's one for the latent sadists among us. Works best with sound enabled.

The X(mas) Files

... in which our two favorite government investigators discover a disturbing pattern of ritualistic serial home invasions.

(Again, thanks to Louise.)

Norad tracks Santa

An interesting concept. (Thanks to Louise for the link.)

Roadblogging

I'm blogging this afternoon from a relative's (slow, balky, cranky, arrgghh!) computer in north Dallas, overlooking an (unfrozen!) swimming pool where (green! leafy!) trees blow gently back and forth in a 61-degree F breeze.

Since Enetation has decided not to accept comments from said slow/balky/cranky computer, I'm going to take care of a few comment responses here, lest people think that I'm ignoring them.

Trebor, I didn't receive your comment until I was already here in Texas with a bought-&-paid-for return ticket to Michigan. However, if you want to get together for a beer or two, let me know by cell phone. (Number will be forwarded in private e'mail.)

Carlos and Pablo, give me a call whenever convenient. I'll be in Dallas until the 25th, then back in Dallas again from about the 28th to the 3rd. Carlos mentioned wanting to see "Barbarian Invasions", which according to the Dallas Observer's webpage is playing at the Inwood Theater.

Fiend, as you probably know, the minor contretemps over the writing honor that King received recently is just the latest skirmish in the running battle between the academic exclusivists (who, I think, enjoy feeling a snarky sense of superiority over writing and allegedly reading books beyond the comprehension of the mere hoipolloi) and those who write books that actual people really do read. I've always felt that King sort of exists on a borderline between those two clans, perhaps slightly skewed toward the populist side but not wholly engulfed in it. His books, for all their popular appeal, do on occasion have a cultural, psychological, and emotional edge to them that pure shlock writers like Tom Clancy, Danielle Steel, et al, lack. (Even if his relatively infrequent sex scenes don't quite meet your exacting standards. )

As for Ken-&-Barbie Aragorn-&-Arwen, well, what do you expect in terms of related interests? I noticed that although Mattel made at least a token effort to make the Aragorn figure vaguely resemble Viggo M. from a distance, Barbie remains her usual cartoonish, smirking, decidedly un-elvish self, impossible to mistake for the ethereal Liv T.

I may post a few more Christmas-related links here over the next hour, before taking a telephone-interview call from a public library in far southwestern Michigan. Wish me luck.

Travel plans

It looks like Yours-Truly will spend most of the next month bouncing between Michigan and Texas like some kind of demented ping-pong ball. I'm off to Texas for the happy occasion of The Wedding Of The Great Yam next week. Then I'm back in Michigan for the final week of the semester. Then back to Texas for the family Christmas festivities, which will probably include a highway trip up to Missouri and back to visit various elderly relatives (who after all, will want to meet the Bride of Yam). Then back to Michigan. With any luck, I may be able to meet up with Pablo and Carlos and other friends of yore sometime in this frenzy.

Since I'm interested in railroads, and since for the first time in two years I live within reasonable local driving distance of an Amtrak depot, I thought I'd try Amtrak for this year's Christmas travel. Sadly, it was not to be. When I told the ticket agent that I was interested in travelling from Michigan to Texas, his first suggestion was that I go by air instead. After being assured that, yes, I really was interested in finding out about train travel between those two points, he checked for availability of coach seats. The result: a fare price higher than an airline ticket, with the only available fare under $400 being on a train that arrives back at my departure point at 11:38 p.m. the evening before I have to be back at work.

Oh, by the way, he mentioned, we probably won't have any place for you to park a vehicle at the depot, thanks to an ongoing construction project. Apparently I would have to hail a taxi or have a friend come and pick me up at midnight, or whenever the train managed to arrive.

The schedule presented also depended on making a key connection at Chicago between the Texas Eagle and the Michigan train, with a three-hour layover. The Eagle, Amtrak train #21/22, has been reported to frequently run several hours late, thanks largely to hostile or indifferent treatment by Union Pacific dispatchers and crews:

"AMTRAK TRAIN DELAYS ON THE UNION PACIFIC RIGHT OF WAY - September 16, 2002. Friends of Amtrak has learned of some rather alarming statistics regarding delays of Amtrak trains on Union Pacific tracks.

In August 2002, UP-attributable delay to Trains 21 and 22 totalled 20,381 minutes, or an approximate average of 339.7 minutes per train; that's an astounding 5.5 hours of UP-attributable delay for each and every Train 21 and 22."

From Friends of Amtrak, Archived News 2002

I figured that my chances of making that connection at Chicago were about as good as my chances of getting a taxi or a ride from the depot to my apartment at midnight. It would still be fun to try Amtrak one of these days, but only when I can afford a more relaxed schedule. Or they adopt a less relaxed one, and find some way to make Union Pacific honor it.

Is my brain shrinking?

CNN reports that a group of medical researchers in Dallas, Texas, have found a link between "light" alcohol consumption and brain shrinkage.

Thats bul. Ime as smart as i ever wuz. im not geting eny dumer. So ther.

[Edit, 3/28/07, salvaging comments:]

Carlos Zamora @ 9:24PM | 2003-12-07| permalink

But heavy alcohol usage makes you smarter?

email | website

Carlos Zamora @ 9:18PM | 2003-12-07| permalink

Oops, shoulda read the article before posting a smart alec comment.

email | website

The horror! The horror!

The Bad Sex (writing) Awards are out. You have been warned.

More on "action figures"

Has the Tolkien Estate exercised tasteful restraint in licensing Lord-of-the-Rings merchandise? You be the judge.

Poe, E. Near a Raven

I came across this clever puzzle-poem while looking up background information about the author's recording of Deems Taylor's long-lost musical interpretation of Jurgen. Kudos to anyone who can solve it before reading the solution.

Take this cup...?

Since two or three of my presumed teeming hordes of devoted readers have expressed interest in The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson's cinematic depiction of the Crucifixion and related events, this story may be of some interest to them. Apparently Gibson recently withdrew the film from a planned showing to Vatican officials, saying that he had second thoughts about some scenes and wanted to re-edit it.

I hope he doesn't lose confidence or distributors. The movie industry produces too few films that display any personal conviction or intellectual courage on the part of the filmmaker, and good or bad, this film sounds like an exception to that rule. I wouldn't mind if he relaxed his self-imposed rules far enough to include a translation of the Aramaic and Latin dialogue, though.

P.S. I don't know what popup ads may be displayed on others' screens, but I found it moderately amusing that when I went to the official English-language home page for The Passion of the Christ and selected the link marked "story", the sponsor's popup that appeared was from "Clean Films", a purveyor of edited, "family-friendly" videorecordings, and featured an image of a DVD of Braveheart, one of Gibson's best-known films, apparently dropping through the air toward a trash can. I guess that's irony for ya.

More Tales From The Reference Desk

A couple of days ago, a student asked for help in finding sources for a position paper she was writing. "I'm in favor of censorship," she announced. "But when I search the databases, everything I find is against it."

The librarian on duty proceeded to describe and demonstrate several online sources (Opposing Viewpoints, Issues and Controversies, CQ Researcher) that make a point of including both pro- and con- essays on various topics of public concern, which predictably include censorship. The student seemed appreciative, and left murmuring "God bless you."

Only afterward did the librarian in question realize that he was still wearing the Banned Books Week button, emblazoned with the Statue of Liberty and sporting the anti-censorship slogan "Free People Read Freely", which he'd worn earlier to a regional library meeting. Does this constitute displaying bias at the reference desk?

To laugh, or to cry?

Heard at the reference desk from a student, evidently looking to fulfill a late-semester reading requirement for an undergraduate philosophy survey course:

"Aristotle is too complex." (Glances at class handout.) "Do you have anything by Kant?"

Fortunately the librarian on duty managed to explain the workings of author searching on the library's catalog, while making the seemingly casual comment that, if her professor hadn't specifically suggested certain books, a reference source like the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (located over there, miss, in the reference shelves at call number XYZ.... ) might help identify which of the various philosophers' works were best-known and most widely read and discussed. He felt moderately proud of having handled the situation tactfully. It's not as if he recommended Cliff's Notes to a lit major... is it?

Bless me, for I have sinned...

... against the Blogger's Code. I have failed to update my blog in a timely manner, for which I risk eternal punishment in the Circle of the Unread, abandoned for all eternity by the beneficent, unseen Reader without whom all blogging is vain and useless. Forgive me.

OCLC and Library Hotel settle suit

In case you're one of the few in Library(Blog)Land who hasn't heard, OCLC and the Library Hotel in New York have settled OCLC's lawsuit over the Hotel's use of the Dewey Decimal System name. Since Louise at the Librarian's Rant covered this story several days ago, I'll simply second her insightful comments.

What's in a name?

While browsing through the online finding aids for recently acquired materials at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, I came across the following description:

Citizens for Traditional Values.
Citizens for Traditional Values records, 1984-2000 (bulk 1986-1992)
6 linear ft.
Organization originally established in 1986 as the Michigan Committee for Freedom to encourage and support the candidacies of conservative Christians for public office. MCFF worked closely with the Freedom Council in support of the presidential candidacy of Pat Robertson in 1988. MCFF changed its name to Citizens for Traditional Values in 1991.

I can't help but wonder about the impetus for the name change. Did they overtly decide that "traditional values" were more important than "freedom"?

Lift that bit! Tote that byte!

This story from CNN amused me. I admit that I gave a second glance to the words "master" and "slave" the first time I saw them applied to computer equipment a number of years ago, but that's all. As usual, Californians aren't content with that:

Los Angeles officials have asked that manufacturers, suppliers and contractors stop using the terms "master" and "slave" on computer equipment, saying such terms are unacceptable and offensive.... "Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label," Joe Sandoval, division manager of purchasing and contract services, said in a memo sent to County vendors.

Perhaps they'll decide to call them "dominant" and "submissive". No way that could be misinterpreted, right?

More DMCA lies

A used-booksellers' listserv to which I subscribe carried a link to this discussion on Ed Foster's Gripelog yesterday. It seems that Warner Brothers is sending out the usual DMCA shakedown... er, "takedown" letters demanding that Ebay suppress auctions of secondhand Madonna/Missy Elliot promotional CD's which were originally distributed with Gap jeans. Ebay helpfully explains that "PROMO ONLY means just that: for PROMOTIONAL USE ONLY, NOT TO BE SOLD. We have to respect the requests of the artists, if they want us to remove those items."

Hmm. That's not what the U.S. copyright law says:

Title 17, Chapter 1, § 109. Limitations on exclusive rights: Effect of transfer of particular copy or phonorecord. (a) Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106(3), the owner of a particular copy or phonorecord lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy or phonorecord. (Emphasis added.)

It looks like Warner Brothers is using the DMCA's "takedown clause" (and the cowardice of Ebay management) to unilaterally abolish the established doctrine of "First Sale" as described and explicitly protected in US law. If their cease-and-desist letter to Ebay, like most such letters, states, "under penalty of perjury" that resale of these CDs violates copyright law, then they are deliberately and knowingly lying under penalty of perjury.

So. Which Attorney General or Federal Prosecutor is going to be the first to haul WB's executives and lawyers into court and charge them with perjury?

I'm waiting....

Any time, guys....

The Truth About The Internet

Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie has some of the funniest short videos I've seen lately. Particularly enjoyable : "Every OS Sucks", "The Privacy Song", and "Keep Your Parents Off the Internet". (From the link, click on "video" on the left side of the page. Broadband connection recommended due to file size. )

I think the part about "Scanning Bank Account" is a joke.

... and your dissertation advisor dresses you funny!

This writer thinks academics dress funny. Is he right?

"Historically, academics have been the subject of both high and low humor. From the sixth century onward, how we look has prompted nearly automatic laughter from onlookers, even if the onlookers were dressed in twigs and had painted their faces blue....

"Look at us. Glance around a room at a professional meeting: we look like refugees. And not refugees from an interesting culture...."

Of course this article does not apply to anyone I know. The fact that I can't find a store that carries shirts in my preferred style is a reflection on the benighted, Philistine clothing industry, not on me. It has nothing to do with the fact that they were in style circa 1995.

Harumph.

Parental notification bill passes Wisconsin House

According to this story in American Libraries, Wisconsin may institute a law permitting parents to find out what titles their children have checked out from public libraries. Many library-confidentiality laws and policies currently prohibit this.

Personally, I'm of two minds on the issue. On the one hand I recognize that parents have the right to oversee their children, especially if they are going to be held financially responsible for damaged or unreturned materials. On the other hand, I've seen many examples of overbearing parents who want to enforce ridiculously strict control of their children's mental development ("We don't let Johnny read anything that isn't endorsed by The Church." "We don't let Sally watch movies that glorify violence/sex/whatever.") I recognize that for such children, the comparative freedom of reading the books and other materials in the public library can be a Godsent release from a repressive environment.

Fortunately, libraries don't keep records of what books or magazines people browse through in the stacks, so this law will have little effect on those kids who are wily enough to avoid officially checking out the books their parents don't want them to read. Can the same be said for E-books?

Banned Books Weak

Here's a link to an essay I meant to mention during "Banned Books Week" in September, but forgot about in the rush and confusion of job interviews. Enjoy.

Even a stopped clock....

In the past, I have dismissed Gore Vidal as a pedantic blowhard. But this interview with LA Weekly contains ample food for thought. Notable quote:

We are talking about despotism. I have read not only the first PATRIOT Act but also the second one, which has not yet been totally made public nor approved by Congress and to which there is already great resistance. An American citizen can be fingered as a terrorist, and with what proof? No proof. All you need is the word of the attorney general or maybe the president himself. You can then be locked up without access to a lawyer, and then tried by military tribunal and even executed. Or, in a brand-new wrinkle, you can be exiled, stripped of your citizenship and packed off to another place not even organized as a country — like Tierra del Fuego or some rock in the Pacific. All of this is in the USA PATRIOT Act. [See note below -- Felix] The Founding Fathers would have found this to be despotism in spades. And they would have hanged anybody who tried to get this through the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Hanged.

Note: Vidal is apparently here referring partly to the so-called "PATRIOT II" Act, which was drafted by the Justice Department but not presented to Congress after being leaked to the media this spring. Nat Hentoff, in the Village Voice, referred to the anonymous staffer who leaked that draft for public comment before it could be railroaded through Congress as a true patriot whose action may have saved this country from being saddled with a government with even more intrusive powers.

"There are two ways to tell the truth : anonymously and posthumously."
-- Thomas Sowell, as quoted by "Trebor" in the prestigious academic journal SuPress (vol. 2, no. 1, p. 5).

At least the concept hasn't died

It appears that Utne magazine has borrowed an idea from the late lamented Oxford American, and will include a music CD with its upcoming issue on "Indie Culture".

The OA's annual music issue and its accompanying CD of music from and about the South was one of the things I most enjoyed about that magazine. It introduced me to a number of musicians I never would have noticed otherwise, and who would never, ever be heard on a Clear Channel radio station (or even on NPR). Where else can you hear gravel-voiced Billy Bob Thornton and legendary bluegrass banjo-picker Earl Scruggs collaborating on a surreally hip-hop-flavored version of Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire, sentimental Civil War ballads sung by Billy Bragg and Wilco (and then omitted from their Woody Guthrie album Mermaid Avenue after they found out that Guthrie didn't write the song after all), and R&B crooners like "King Pleasure" imitating the sounds of lonesome train whistles on songs like Swan Blues, mixed together with bits of rare aural gold from nearly-forgotten doo-wop groups like the Delta Rythym Boys, bluesmen like Fred McDowell, and regional Southern bands like the Yo-Yo's?

Utne has a high standard to meet, if it plans to replace the OA's musical collections in my esteem. I wish them well.

The God of the Gaps shrinks (again)

Ever since the Victorian era, when scientific discoveries such as Darwin's theory of evolution first started to seriously threaten established religious beliefs, a certain subset of people who are not comfortable with either outright atheism or dogmatic Creationism have adopted the fallback position of asserting that belief in God is necessary because, after all, human science can't explain everything. This is sometimes called the "God-of-the-gaps" position. The problem is, of course, that such a God is destined to shrink ever smaller as the gaps in human knowledge which He serves to fill in like so much metaphysical Bondo continue to shrink.

Consider, for example, this story from USA Today, which describes how a research group has managed to create a virus that reproduces itself, thus infringing on territory -- creating life -- which has heretofore been cited as an exclusive province of the God-of-the-Gaps. Creating a virus that reproduces itself is admittedly less spectacular than producing men from clay or women from spare ribs, but it does appear that the Gap just shrunk by a noticable amount.

Happy Pills for everyone! (Or, It's Something In The Water)

It appears that before long we'll all be on Prozac, whether we want to or not.

According to the article, a researcher at Thee U. made these disturbing discoveries in a reservoir near Denton, Texas. I've lived in both places. No wonder I'm weird.

Linkstorm!

The fact that I haven't been blogging much does not indicate that I've failed to notice any interesting news stories. It just means I haven't taken the time to post anything about them. So the next five or six postings here are going to be various news stories that have caught my eye over the past week. Feel free to comment. Or not.

Returning from orbit

It hasn't been my intention to let the Hill devolve into desuetude, or to once-a-week posting. Unfortunately, working until 9 or 9:30 p.m. two or three times a week, and then having to get up and moving by 8:00 a.m., has severely diminished my supply of that most basic raw material of blogging, idle time. Perhaps matters will change as I get re-accustomed to life as a wageslave.

It certainly appears that social life will not interfere with blogging. Other than work acquaintances, with whom any personal interaction must be limited due to the ephemeral nature of the job and the common-sense admonition "don't sh*t where you eat", I know only one person in the entire southeastern portion of the state, and she lives about an hour's drive away. There's a group of people from the library who meet weekly for dinner at various local restaurants, which is a pleasant way to sample the many nearby culinary offerings, and there is a modular model railroad club which I will probably join. Other than that, so far, zilch. (Although there are plenty of young and attractive undergraduates of the opposite sex around, such are verboten fruit to faculty members, especially lowly untenured ones!)

In some ways, the town I've moved to resembles what Walker Percy called a "non-place". That is to say, like Covington, Louisiana, where Percy made his home, it has little dramatic local history, no flamboyant eccentricities, no unusually beautiful or hideous natural surroundings or any other characteristics that demand attention. Perhaps this will have the salubrious effect of encouraging me to concentrate my efforts on career advancement and/or personal development. Perhaps.

Depravity alert!

Another Christian college joins Thee U. in the sinkhole of modern depravity.

www.sacred-texts.com

A site which may be of some interest to Carlos, Pablo, and others. Perhaps Pablo won't have to drive back to Archer City for that multi-volume set of the Babylonian Talmud after all.

(Link ripped from current issue of Library Juice.)

Matchmaker, Matchmaker....

Thanks to Louise for this "plain-dealing" response to Dennis Kucinich's well-publicized quest for a prospective First Lady to go with his presidential aspirations.

"First of all: Never, ever, ever entrust your romantic life to Fox [television] ...."

PhD's in libraries redux

The estimable John Berry III sounds off in Library Journal about the tendency for university libraries to favor PhD's over MLS's. An interesting counterpart to the Chronicle of Higher Education article that I mentioned on October 17. Yale University figures prominently in both articles.

Well, I'm back

After a period of what Carlos would call "desuetude", the "Hill" is once more active. It doesn't seem like a week since I last updated the blog, but I suppose that lack of time for weblogging and personal communications comes with being employed. I suppose I'll have to get used to it.

The job at "Huron State" is quite different from my previous gig. To begin with, there's no nice, enclosed office for me, only a Dilbertesque cubicle located between the departmental coffee machine and the copier. Fortunately, this means that I get to eavesdrop on incautious gossippers. Unfortunately, it means that blogging or checking personal e'mail from work is even more inadvisable than normal.

The office coffee machine, by the way, is an olive-green monstrosity, held together with rubber bands, which splutters and smokes like an ailing steam locomotive and has the interesting habit of dribbling coffee everywhere but into the pot. Worse, it's usually empty. Note to self: Buy el-cheapo coffee machine that works, install it in cubicle, set timer to make coffee automatically at 8:50 a.m., watch popularity soar! (Beware of time-wasting conversations, though...)

Reference duty here is quite different from at my previous employer. "Huron State" depends even more on electronic resources than they did, and makes it more difficult to access older printed materials. The fact that students do not have mandatory laptop computers is to some extent balanced out by the fact that the library does not (yet) charge money for printouts of electronic documents.

The "Information Desk" here is located in a three-story-tall central atrium, close to the circulation desk and an extensive bank of computers for student use. The printed reference collection and a few specialized non-circulating collections (law, business, maps, and university theses) are the only printed materials on the first floor, and they are all located far enough from the reference desk to make it awkward to use them during a typical reference query. The publicly-shelved periodicals, government documents, and books are all on different floors, which makes it difficult to refer users to them if the user is not already familiar with the layout of the building. At my previous job, where most of the printed periodicals, government documents, maps and reference books were within sight of the reference desk, I could simply walk with the patron over to the shelves that held the desired journal article or reference book, and in the process make sure that it really was what they needed. Not so here. As a result, I never feel quite sure that that patron I sent up to the third floor with the list of call numbers actually found what he/she wanted, or just got lost, wandered around for a while, and gave up. (I suspect that any day now, we'll find one of those poor students wandering around the second floor gov-docs shelves with glazed eyes and symptoms of severe dehydration, twitching and moaning and mumbling disjointed pieces of SuDocs call numbers.)

I mentioned before that this institution had made the controversial decision to place 50% of its printed collection in storage rather than on publicly browsable shelves. This does not turn out to be quite as horrible as it sounds, since such materials are findable through the online catalog and (at least nominally) retrievable in 15 minutes or less. This is accomplished through the use of a huge, two-story-deep vault in the basement of the building, where the books and old journals are stored in tubs according to size and automatically retrieved by robotic devices whenever requested through the online catalog. The electronic "request" procedure, which requires the use of a university ID number or a guest "courtesy" number, is somewhat confusing and probably deters a significant number of users. And as I mentioned before, it makes it extremely difficult to browse the library's holdings in an organized fashion.

This was demonstrated a couple of days ago by a fellow who came to the desk wanting biographies and other materials on Cervantes. After showing him a couple of entries in literature reference sources and checking the online catalog, which assured me that the library owned several biographies of Cervantes, I sent him upstairs to the appropriate Library of Congress call number. (LC, unlike the Dewey system, shelves biographies and criticism of authors with their works, rather than hiding them in a rarely-visited separate section of the library.) Unfortunately, it seems that the biographies of Cervantes were among the items exiled to the Robotic Dungeon, so the student was shortly back at the ref. desk informing me that he had found only copies of Don Quixote and some collections of criticism, but not a single biography of the author. A quick course in storage-retrieval requests followed, as well as a mental note to myself that I couldn't make the same kinds of assumptions about browsing the shelves here that I could in other libraries.

On the positive side, it's better than discarding them, and a 15 minute retrieval time is far, far preferable to the week-long waits that I've experienced elsewhere. But if you don't know what to ask for, or if the catalog record is skimpy or screwed up, you'll never know what you missed, since it's not on a publicly-viewable shelf where you could see it.

Another positive note: In looking up a number of books mentioned in the current newsletter of the state historical society, I found that Huron State has purchased most of them already, and has another one on order. Ironically, they're doing a better job of acquiring recently published materials on upper-peninsula and Great Lakes history than my previous employer, despite the latter's location. This may be a result of having a healthier acquisitions budget, or it may be a result of the fact that Huron State actually has permanent staff librarians who are interested in history, as opposed to my previous employer, where none of the permanent reference staff seemed to have any particular interest in that discipline, and acquisitions in that field lagged to such an extent that the history faculty eventually started discussing ways to establish their own departmental library so they could get the information they needed for their research and publishing.

Thoughts of a Rent-a-Librarian:

I'm blogging tonight from a cheap apartment near a place I'll call "Huron State University", where I've just begun a six-month temporary contract. I can't regard this as an end to the job search, but perhaps it will stop the financial bleeding for a while.

Now if I can only find a REAL job.

On the positive side, the surrounding city has several thousand college students and faculty and a correspondingly large number of theaters, bookstores, and other ways to spend money productively. Unfortunately, this university feels no particular need to pay a decent salary to term employees. That honor, in academia, is apparently reserved for stellar performers like the former president of my former employer. After running it into the ground financially and announcing that, as a result, the university would lay off hundreds of staff and abolish several departments and programs (including the only public radio and television stations within 150 miles), she made a tearful, public pledge to forgo all future salary increases from said employer. True to her word, within two months she jumped ship to a larger university, where she's currently receiving a cool quarter-million a year and free use of a university-supplied house and Lincoln Towncar. (See last paragraph in this story.)

Isn't it nice to see Virtue Rewarded?

That's all for now. I'm off to see whether the local repertory-theater company can do a creditable job with George Bernard Shaw's Candida. Of course, I won't get any staff or faculty discount, since the university's bureaucracy is still claiming that I don't exist because I'm not in the computer network, and therefore can't have a university ID.

A belated note

Since I mentioned the new look of The Librarian's Rant recently, I should also mention that Carlos's Biblioblog also has a new and spiffy look (now with added Weatherpixie!)

A trip down memory lane : M.U.L.E.

Yesterday, while pondering on things geekish, I found myself absentmindedly humming the theme from a computer game I haven't played for ten or fifteen years: M.U.L.E.

Ah, the memories: the blocky Commodore-64 graphics.... the skanky carpet and sofa of a friend's family's game room.... the salty snacks and gallons of whatever sugary, caffienated carbonated liquid happened to be on sale from Skaggs Alpha-Beta or Brookshires... the bleary-eyed buzz of stumbling outside and navigating home in the eerie quiet of 3 a.m. in suburbia, or the pale light of impending dawn....

Taking this as the sign from the gods that it clearly was, I did a bit of websearching and found that I am not the only one to fondly remember this long-unavailable game. Earlier this year, Salon published an article about the game's creator, Dan/Dani Burten, which is as much an indictment of the electronic gaming industry as it is the story of one person's tragedy. A planned re-release of the game in the 1990's was apparently dropped when Burten refused to accede to the boardroom boys' demands for "guns and bombs", an incredibly clueless demand in dealing with a game whose unique and defining characteristic was its simple but very nearly pure theoretical model of classical economic competition. It's not as if there's any shortage of guns and bombs in the putrid swamp of indistinguishable, interchangable first-person-shooter games that have flooded the market. (Considering that Burten was at that time undergoing a sex-change operation, the demand for "guns and bombs" was also a particularly unfortunate double-entendre.)

As a result, although the game is fondly, even reverently, remembered by gaming geeks, it is effectively lost in the multiple morasses of corporate indifference, superceded computer systems, and vague confusion about who owns the intellectual property rights. There is a website, World of M.U.L.E., with information about the game and various copycats and clones, and a Dani Bunten Berry memorial webpage with information about Burten and his/her best-known creation, but apparently no readily available version of the game which is compatible with contemporary computers. The closest copycat seems to be something called "Space Ho.R.S.E.", which supposedly is downloadable in a free demo version, but the download didn't go so well over my dialup connection.

Oh well, at least I can still enjoy the cheesy but still oddly catchy theme music.

Scary thought for Halloween

Earlier today I referred to Google not being as Evil(TM) as Some Other Companies. Maybe I spoke too soon.

Say it ain't so, Sergey!

What's geekier than watching Star Trek?

Calculating the current Stardate....

Snazzy new look for Librarian's Rant

Louise's weblog has a new URL and a snappy new look. Enjoy.

More sound and fury about scholarly periodicals

According to the most recent issue of Library Juice, a group of researchers in the University of California system are calling for a boycott of Cell Press, a subsidiary of academic uber-publisher Elsevier which produces an array of astonishingly overpriced scientific journals. ( $90,000 ?!? )

Will boycotts like this, aided by constructive acts of rebellion like Public Library of Science, which recently inaugurated a free, peer-reviewed online biology journal, alleviate the crisis? Stay tuned.

(Thanks to Carlos for letting me know about PLOS: Biology.)

Here today, gone next budget year

From time to time people accuse me of being a Luddite because I express skepticism about the permanance of "electronically-archived" documents. Those people should note that, according to ALAWON, the newsletter of the American Library Association's Washington office, a bill currently before the Congress, HR 2989 as approved by the Senate, would remove funding for the National Archives' Electronic Records Archive, which was intended to "capture, make available, and preserve crucial electronic government information", especially the digital-only documents which make up an increasing percentage of government records and which cannot be collected or preserved in the traditional fashion by the government-depository library program.

Of course, that's not the politicians' and bureaucrats' problem. They'd just as soon the records of their activities disappeared before the next election anyway, and any number of industry lobbyists would be very happy indeed if information embarrassing to their employers disappeared from the public record.

The House version of the bill has apparently retained this funding, meaning that the conflict will have to be worked out in a conference committee.

Google, Amazon, what's the difference?

Publisher's Weekly reports that Google apparently is pursuing plans to supply fulltext searching of books. Amazon is not alone, although Google is not (yet) a major competitor in the book/media retail business.

It's fortunate that the folks at Google seem to be less Evil (TM) than certain other computer-'n'-internet-related companies. Otherwise I'd be scared that they were about to Take Over The World (TM).

Another solar flare

Another alert from the gse-aa mailing list, for those who might be interested:

A major solar event occurred at 1102 GMT on Oct 28th, facing the
Earth. It was three hours long and left the sun at 1200 to 2000 km
per second. The shock should arrive at Earth as early as the
afternoon of the 29th in Europe (4 PM GMT)and as late as 2 AM GMT on
the 30th.

Europeans will be able to see the aurora probably as far south as
Southern France, since it should be over Paris by midnight.

It will be night in Australia and New Zealand if it arrives at 1100
GMT. This flare is probably large enough to approach mainland
Australia and be visible from the North Island in New Zealand, so it
may be worth staying up to see.

Russia, north of 50 deg latitude will be well placed on the night of
the 29/30 to see the aurora from this flare.

Observers in the USA should not be discouraged that it will arrive
during the day of the 29th. This flare is of a magnitude that should
lead to aurora visible over the entire continental US on the evening
of the 29th. It may be on the northern horizon for those in Florida,
Texas, and Southern California, but it should be visible.

The best viewing is from a dark area, even your back yard, with a
view to the northern horizon. Look out at the sky every half hour.
Typically, an intensification occurs every two hours, lasting about
1/2 hour. The maximum activity is usually around 11pm to midnight.

Prediction by [Chuck Deehr]

On the "librarian shortage"

From the September 2003 issue of College & Research Libraries, p. 391-392:

In 1993, Library Journal reported that 20 percent of all recent library school graduates could not find full-time employment. By the mid-1990's, recent graduates were turning to nontraditional positions in the technology industy, such as Web design or online systems administration. Propelling this migration from librarianship was the average starting salary for nontraditional positions, which was 4.5 to 7.6 percent higher than traditional library positions. As recent graduates migrated toward careers in information technology, libraries gradually increased starting salaries, and in 1997, entry-level salaries surpassd $30,000 for the first time. In 1996, the average librarian had realized a salary increase of less than one percent over the previous year, but between 1997 and 1998, the average starting salary for all new hires was up 6.8 percent and then up another 4.4 percent in 1999 to $32,837....

Never fear, though. There's a government program for everything, including ensuring that library administrators will always have a vast pool of qualified but unemployed jobseekers whom they can hire for starvation wages, thus counteracting this unpleasant recent trend toward rising salaries. A press release from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services yesterday announced a $10 million subsidy to recruit yet more newbies into the grinder... er, I mean, the library profession.

Qui bono?

Geek hobbies

It seems that this list of the top 10 geek hobbies is making its way around the Internet, so I might as well join the swarm of links.

I'm proud to say that only five of them apply to me. How glad I am that they didn't include model railroading. I'm not sure how one would assess its "damage to sex life" rating. "I'll be your steam engine, baby" might have a certain kind of sex appeal, but I doubt that very many women derive erotic thrills from talk of lost-wax castings, weathering with chalk and acrylic paint, or wireless DCC. Almost by definition, anything discussed on Slashdot can't be good.

Authors' Guild objects to Amazon fulltext searching

Others have commented on Amazon's recent addition of full-text searching to its website. The Authors' Guild doesn't seem to be impressed, and objects that the publishers do not have the right to supply full text access without the authors' permission. More discussion here, and here, and at the Volokh Conspiracy. One of their concerns is that students and others will use Amazon's fulltext snippets as a way to look up essays, chapters, or statements from books and print or otherwise use them without buying the book.

Yes, these are the same folks who pettishly whined a while back about Amazon offering used books for sale. Perhaps this time they will have a legal leg to stand on, at least until book publishers incorporate mandatory surrender of all electronic full text rights into their "boilerplate" contract, as many periodicals publishers did after the Tasini v. New York Times decision.

My own thoughts about the usefulness of this feature are mixed. I can imagine plenty of situations in which this kind of search might be useful, but in many other kinds of searches it's just plain annoying. "Googling" full text via Amazon may help find forgotten titles featuring a certain character, or referring to some specific person, place or thing, but as any librarian knows, there are times when it's more useful to search only within data fields of limited scope but particular importance, like "subject" or "author". Just imagine trying to look through every book that casually refers to, say, Abraham Lincoln. Wouldn't it be more useful, if you want information about Honest Abe, to limit your searching only to books that list him as a major subject heading? Or contained enough lengthy passages from his speeches and papers that he was listed as an author?

For example: when I searched Amazon for "Frisco Railroad", I got "Where the Red Fern Grows" as the number-one result. Now, it's very nice that that fictional boy and his fictional dogs went walking between the Frisco Railroad and the Illinois River, but it hardly gives me the maps of Newburg Yard or the diagrams of the 1306-class freight locomotives that I'm looking for. The phrase occurs only once in the book, according to Amazon, so it appears that they're ranking the search results at least in part according to popularity and/or sales. This is not necessarily good.

Spurious Patent Follies of 2003

Oh, look. "Southern Michigan University" is among the universities targeted by Acacia Research Corporation, which, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Volume 50, Issue 8, Page A38,

...holds 5 U.S. patents and 17 international patents in digital-media-transmission technology. The patents cover not technological details but concepts like transmitting video on demand from servers to users' machines.

Acacia has sent patent-infringement letters to an unknown number of colleges across the country, offering to overlook past infringement in exchange for the institution's signing on to "a special royalty rate of 2 percent of gross revenue from each online course that includes digital audio and/or video content."

Must remember: Books Are Bad. Books Are Bad. Everything's On The Internet....

After All, Everything's On The Internet Anyway

It turns out that the library at "Southern Michigan University" has at least one feature noteworthy enough to have been mentioned in the Chronicle of Higher Education. (Names have been changed to protect the innocent.)

First developed for the warehouse industry, the retrieval system is a vault, with books sitting in bins and arranged according to size, not subject, to save space....

.....A handful of college libraries have installed such automated systems, some more enthusiastically than others. "Southern Michigan University"'s was the second academic library in the country to set up a retrieval system, in 1998. (California State University at Northridge's was the first.) The library stores about 500,000 items -- more than half of its material -- in what staff members call the Automated Retrieval Collection.

"B", who chose the system as dean of learning resources and technology, says the university saved more than $8-million in construction costs, which would have gone toward bookshelves, but instead helped to pay for group-study areas, computer banks, and a television studio.

Asked how the system affected book circulation, he says: "I have no idea, and I don't care." The effectiveness of the library can't be judged on the basis of circulation, he argues, "because that's not what happens here anymore." Faculty members go to the nearby ... (name of institution omitted)... for serious research, and undergraduates do all of their research online now, he says.

Sigh. Wish me luck. At least I'm forewarned not to volunteer any information or ideas that contradict the Official Doctrine that Books Are Bad because Everything's On The Internet.

A glimpse into the Library of Dream

The American Library Association's catalog of posters and other library-publicity materials arrived today, and it includes a nifty poster and bookmark featuring Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams in Neil Gaiman's popular Sandman series of graphic novels. The poster looks good, but where's Lucien? He's the librarian of The Dreaming, after all!

The perils of freebies

The Washington Times today carries an article about the Council for American-Islamic Relations and its recent campaign of donating books to libraries. CAIR says the books are intended to promote harmonious understanding of Islam; critics charge that the books are pro-Islamic propaganda that deliberately obfuscate harsh passages from the Qu'ran and other elements of Islamic doctrine and practice.

I haven't seem the particular books in question, but I do recall seeing some materials that were donated to my former employer's library by an organization based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and which raised similar issues. The books were quite clearly biased, and included strained reasoning which I would consider quite unconvincing coming from the mouth of a high school debater, much less a purportedly scholarly source. For example, one of the books, Woman in the Shade of Islam, justifies sex-based restrictions on women with the metaphorical argument that, if a ship had two groups of passengers who were assigned to different decks of the ship, it would be foolish for the group assigned to the lower deck to insist on drilling holes for water. The book also asserts that Islam is superior to other religions because it protects women from "being exposed to places of iniquity" such as nightclubs, theaters, etc. I've known more than one woman who would gladly eschew such "protection".

Despite this, I was disappointed that the library refused to make them available to the public. Flawed as they are, they offer a useful glimpse inside a mindset that has substantial significance in the modern world, just as the tracts and other materials put out by fundamentalist Christian churches and publishing houses in the U.S. are important sources for understanding the worldview of those who write them and read them. The danger would be in allowing only materials of this type to represent Islam, or Christianity. Or of excluding them entirely, and thus distorting the collection by omission.

The article also refers to Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientologists, Mormons, et al, who are also frequently eager to "help" the library by donating copies of their latest tracts, or in the case of Mormons, offering to "update" the library's collection by replacing old copies of the Book of Mormon or other documents with "newer", "more attractive" editions. This is one area where caution is justified, and older materials should not be blithely discarded. See Jerald and Sandra Tanner's analysis of changes in the Book of Mormon for an understanding of how such offers are not entirely motivated by charity. Religions which retroactively alter their scriptures while simultaneously claiming that those scriptures are infallible have a vested interest in removing public access to older editions.

Joe Bob would be proud

Interesting doings at the Kansas City, Kansas, public library: the 14th Annual Bad Film Festival.

Attention skywatchers

The gse-aa listserv predicts heightened auroral activity in coming days:

The Earth has been in a sector of the solar wind that is conducive to
the production of active aurora. Aurora should be visible near
midnight from the northern US, Iceland, Scotland, Southern
Scandinavia, Northern Russia, Tasmania, and Southern New Zealand.

This will continue through the weekend. The first solar flare in 52
days occurred yesterday the 19th. The main effects of this flare are
directed away from Earth, but the side effects should be enough to
increase activity by the night of the 22nd.

With any luck, I'll have something pretty to look at as I drive back north from Southern Michigan University on Thursday night.

Yet another crisis

Seems the media conglomerates' lobbyist-termites that infest our political system are active on yet another front in their ongoing war against fair use, public domain, and other traditional characteristics of enlightened intellectual property law.

As reported by IP Justice, the proposed "Free Trade Agreement of the Americas" would substantially modify intellectual-property laws in most Western-hemisphere countries. Among the mandatory changes to those nations' domestic laws which are incorporated in the draft intellectual property chapter of the treaty are the following:

* Mandatory adoption of the U.S.'s terms of copyright protection (life-plus-70 years, or 95 years for corporate media -- Part II, Section 3, Article 10)
* Mandatory adoption of prison-term penalties for "copyright piracy" (Part III, Article 4.1)
* Mandatory adoption of DMCA-type prohibitions against analysis or discussion of electronic security features (Part II, Section 3, Article 21)

There's also a reference to inserting the language of something called "Articles x to xx of Treaty for the Protection of Non-Copyrightable Elements of Databases - placeholder;]", which sounds like it was probably written by the same lobbyists who are pushing for HR 3261 to be rushed through the US Congress so that your local telephone company can copyright your telephone number and encyclopedia compilers can sue your local library for letting you look things up without paying them for a personal subscription .

I haven't read the whole thing yet, and probably won't, but I've spot-checked enough items from the IP Justice analysis to be confident that they're right to regard it as a threat to effective intellectual freedom. At best, it's a bullying attempt to impose Hollywood's demand for perpetual monopoly protection on an entire hemisphere without ever consulting the people upon whom it's being foisted. In the case of the "database protection" element, this may be the people of the United States itself, a fallback ploy in case people find out about HR 3261 and persuade their sometime representatives to consign it to a well-deserved place in legislative Gehenna.

Preemptive gratitude

Yours Truly recently received a valuable keepsake in the mail: a "signed" photograph of George and Laura Bush, along with an effusive note practically begging me to "become one of the first to join the Bush-Cheney '04 Team as a Charter Member in Michigan". After all, "Only with [my] help can the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign create a viable grassroots organization". Also included was a "Presidential Photo Receipt Confirmation Form", complete with checkboxes for my suggested donation of $100, $50, $25, or "other $".

A "grass roots" organization, "created" by an incumbent president's campaign staff? Sounds like Astroturf to me....

As flattered as I am that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney find my attention and my money so indispensible, I think I'll pass on the offer. The photograph ("suitable for framing!") may be useful as a prop should I be invited to interview at Thee University, though.

Don't call him a librarian!

The University of Texas at Austin is advertising on the Texas Library Association's jobline for a "Knowledge Gateway Metadata Analyst". It requires a master's degree in library science and two years of library experience, but heavens no, we can't call him a "librarian"!

You'll take what I give you and like it.

The following e'mail from Michigan's State Librarian, as sent to the MichLib-L listserv, serves as a good indicator of how libraries can expect to be treated by database publishers. Bear it in mind when considering the likely effects of HR 3261, discussed below, or the wisdom of making library services entirely dependent on such services. Ancestry.com obviously feels no obligation whatsoever to honor its contract in this case.

This message is from State Librarian Christie Brandau.

ANNOUNCEMENT REGARDING REMOTE ACCESS TO ANCESTRYPLUS

Ancestry.com, owner of the genealogical database AncestryPlus, has
terminated access to the database remotely (from your home or anywhere
outside a library building) through the Michigan eLibrary (MeL)
beginning Sunday evening, October 19. This announcement from
Ancestry.com came abruptly and without warning to the Library of
Michigan. When contacted, the company cited an increase in usage and
customer abuse as reasons for discontinuing the contracted provision.

The announcement from Ancestry.com is surprising and extremely
disappointing. However, AncestryPlus will still be available for
patrons to use free via MeL in local libraries.

Feel free to contact the company at Ancestry.com, 801-705-7000.
Ancestry.com is a part of Myfamily.com, Inc., 360 W. 4800 N, Provo, Utah
84604. They may also be reached at
http://ancestry.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/ancestry.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php.

Down the well-greased ways of paid political influence

HR 3261, a bill to allow database publishers to exercise monopoly control over the information cited in their databases, is obviously on a specially-prepared legislative fast track, and has already been rushed to approval in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property. Votes were party-line, with Republicans in favor of paying off the the well-monied publishing industry by approving the bill and Democrats opposing.

In an embarrassingly cowardly "I've-got-mine-Jack" moment, the Association of American Universities, the American Council on Education, and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges withdrew their opposition to the bill after legislators consented to throw them a bone by exempting universities and research labs from the prohibitions on disseminating information from databases.

The intent of the bill may be judged by the fact that an amendment offered by Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, which would have exempted other libraries from such prohibitions, was explicitly voted down.

Allow me to repeat that for the benefit of those who were not listening. AN AMENDMENT PERMITTING LIBRARIES TO DISSEMINATE INFORMATION FROM DATABASES WITHOUT BEING SUED WAS EXPLICITLY VOTED DOWN.

Not exactly subtle, are they?

This information was primarily drawn from an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which does not (yet) have the power to sue me for discussing events and information that I read about there.

A heartwarming tale

The Chronicle of Higher Education today contains a wonderful account of a fellow who got his Masters' in Library Science and walked from there straight into a job as collection development specialist for Yale's literature collections. Isn't life wonderful?

Of course, he first got a PhD in English literature and spent five to ten years working the slave-labor disposable-adjunct track before giving up on what he had really wanted to do. No offense to anyone is intended here, but I'm beginning to get the impression that college libraries hire permanant staff only from the pool of PhD's who couldn't get a steady job in their first choice of profession. People who were interested in libraries from the start aren't welcome.

I.P.-o-mania

Plenty of intellectual-property issues in the past few days to comment on, from trivial inanity to potentially serious bills proposed in the Congress. Here we go:

Ghettopoly

Some of you may have heard of the controversy over Ghettopoly, a repulsive ripoff of Monopoly in which "playas" compete to "pimp ho's", sell crack, and put up crackhouses and "projects" instead of houses and hotels.

Obviously this is going to be offensive to many people on grounds of race, and there have been protests against the game in Philadelphia and other places. Personally, I find it just as offensive that the game frivolously glorifies stupid and destructive behavior like robbing banks, beating up "ho's", etc. As a clinically certified First Amendment fanatic, though, I can't justify supporting attempts to ban it because of its content. However, offensiveness is not the only problem here. It's also a pretty unimaginative ripoff of the venerable Parker Brothers' game, which blatantly imitates its structure and gameplay and clearly trades on its widely-recognized appearance and name for commercial gain. This led me to wonder whether Parker Brothers or the current holder of their trademarks would have standing to sue on intellectual-property grounds. Sure enough, it looks like Hasbro is doing so. It'll be interesting to see what develops. I have to admit that I find myself wondering whether I'd feel so supportive of Hasbro in this matter if their target weren't so unattractive.

Thanks to Loreen for mentioning it and inspiring me to go digging for more information.

Copyrighting facts

Traditionally, US courts have held that information itself, that is to say, isolated facts, as opposed to a unified work of creativity, cannot be copyrighted (Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc., 499 U.S. 340 (1991) ). That will change if industry lobbyists have their way and get HR 3261 , the so-called "Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act", through Congress. The bill may make it possible for database publishers to prohibit libraries from publicly disseminating information from their databases -- a deathblow to libraries which have made themselves dependent on such databases, and a significant restriction on citizens' access to information through local libraries or state-level library consortia.

From the bill:

SEC. 3. PROHIBITION AGAINST MISAPPROPRIATION OF DATABASES.

(a) LIABILITY- Any person who makes available in commerce to others a quantitatively substantial part of the information in a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person, knowing that such making available in commerce is without the authorization of that person (including a successor in interest) or that person's licensee, when acting within the scope of its license, shall be liable for the remedies set forth in section 7 if--

(1) the database was generated, gathered, or maintained through a substantial expenditure of financial resources or time;

(2) the unauthorized making available in commerce occurs in a time sensitive manner and inflicts injury on the database or a product or service offering access to multiple databases; and

(3) the ability of other parties to free ride on the efforts of the plaintiff would so reduce the incentive to produce the product or service that its existence or quality would be substantially threatened.

(b) INJURY- For purposes of subsection (a), the term `inflicts an injury' means serving as a functional equivalent in the same market as the database in a manner that causes the displacement, or the disruption of the sources, of sales, licenses, advertising, or other revenue.

(c) TIME SENSITIVE- In determining whether an unauthorized making available in commerce occurs in a time sensitive manner, the court shall consider the temporal value of the information in the database, within the context of the industry sector involved.

More commentary here, and here, and here, and here. The Association of Research Libraries has a timeline of legislative and political activity on this issue here.

Thanks to the clever folks at ALAWON for mentioning this in their newsletter.

Black Box Voting

Diebold, the company that manufactures and heavily lobbies for the use of computerized voting machines, is using the DMCA to squelch discussion of flaws in its machines, according to the current issue of Library Juice. EFF to the rescue!

This has been an ongoing issue. Many commentators have noted flaws in the machines' security, which raise the ugly specter of elections being decided by which political party's black-ops teams hire the better team of hackers. With phantom electronic votes, of course, there would be no embarrassing paper trail to be re-counted. Whoever hacked into or otherwise controlled the machines could simply declare a winner. Diebold has, according to documents published here and elsewhere, left gaping holes in the security features of their voting machines' auditing routines, the very feature that guards against such tampering, and appears determined not to fix them.

I don't know about you, but when I have something that absolutely, positively must be preserved in an undisputably accurate form, I print it out. Hanging chads or no hanging chads, a hard-copy paper trail is at least auditable and re-countable.

Whining works, Part Two

This whining stuff is amazing. I got another call for an interview yesterday, this one at a place I'll call Southern Michigan University, which is located in one of those "great festering urban masses" that I referred to yesterday. The Fates must be snickering.

Your Tax Dollars At ... oh well. Never mind.

The Great and Sovereign State of Michigan has decided, in its wisdom, that it will no longer produce the simplified EZ tax form. Furthermore, it will no longer distribute tax forms through college libraries. No doubt the student population will appreciate this wisdom. I wonder whether they'll rate Governor Granholm "hot" as a result? From the Michigan Electronic Library's Government Documents Specialist, via the MichLib-L listserv:

The MI Dept. of Treasury sent out a second letter to academic institutions
totally dropping them from the program. In other words, colleges and
universities in Michigan will not receive ANY paper forms, reproducibles,
etc. What they will get is a poster.

As we pointed out to Treasury, students, faculty and staff who still want
paper forms will now be sent to the public library for tax materials. So,
while supplies of forms for public libraries are being cut by 25% or more,
the demand for forms will only grow. And academic libraries are left high
and dry.

That better be one impressive poster.

I'm not sure why this surprises me. After all, this is the same state that recently decided there was no need for unemployment-office locations in the entire upper peninsula. After all, we all know how stable the jobs are in the industries which dominate the upper peninsula. Tourism. Logging. Mining. (Not to mention, um, education.)

But from a political standpoint, the great festering urban masses of the lower peninsula are where the votes are. So I guess that's the most profitable place to pander.

From the Department of Unsurprising Discoveries:

The Chronicle of Higher Education discovers, to its dismay, that college students evaluate their professors for superficial reasons:

* GOOD-LOOKING PROFESSORS consistently outscore less attractive
ones on student evaluations of teaching, a new study finds.
--> SEE http://chronicle.com/jobs/2003/10/2003101501c.htm

Ratemyprofessors figured this out some time ago, and included "pepper" ratings on its website so that lovestruck, vengeful, or disgusted students could express their views on whether professors were "hot or not". Mercifully, they do not add up and display negative "hotness totals".

Whining works, apparently.

After whining piteously about my boring life yesterday, I received another request for a telephone interview, this one from a place I'll call Big State University. It's a state university with 17000 undergraduate students, located in a flat, rectangular midwestern state best known for agriculture and limestone, one well known to Carlos.

The telephone interview with Down East State U. was fairly informal. I think I avoided blurting anything terribly embarrassing. Interestingly, one of the four people on the search committee was a student. This is something I saw at a previous interview at a small junior college in Wisconsin, but I haven't seen it yet at the university level.

No news

Pablo recently mentioned that it seems I'm spending a lot of pixels discussing politics and events rather than myself lately. There happens to be a rational reason for this. My life is pretty d*mn boring right now. Last weekend, in between marathon sessions of Alpha Centauri, I got correction letters mailed out to all the places I applied to in the month of August, along with a couple of new applications for positions advertised in the last week. I note, however, that I have already received thanks-but-no-thanks letters in response to many of the August applications, so I wonder whether it's worth the trouble of delving further back into the July applications.

One glimmer of interest: I have an upcoming telephone interview with a place I'll call Down East State University. This was one I had given up on a while back, since their original position description referred to a start date of September 1. Perhaps their first choice backed out on them?

Downeast appears to be in one of the few places in the eastern contiguous United States that can compete with northern Michigan for remoteness and frigidity. It's about as far north and east as you can go without treading salt water or becoming Canadian. I searched the Chronicle of Higher Education and found about five articles that mention them, the most entertaining being a description of their athletic program's remarkably rigorous winter fitness exercises, which apparently involve running for two hours at a time in snowshoes.

On the other hand, they do seem to have some strong environmental and ecological study programs, and it looks like it could be an interesting small-town area with remarkable scenery and surroundings. And it pays better than my current gig.

One of the local theaters is showing American Splendor, and it sounds like it might be interesting enough to see. If anyone has seen it and has comments, thoughts, or rotten tomatoes to throw, let me know.

NEWS FLASH: Muskogee, Oklahoma schools run by morons

From CNN: An 11-year-old Oklahoma girl has been suspended from a public school because officials said her Muslim head scarf violates dress code policies...

The stated reason is "to stem gang-related activity." I guess Muskogee must be having a lot of trouble with menacing gangs of 11-year-old Muslim schoolgirls. I wonder what kinds of problems they've been causing. Koran smuggling? Drive-by gossipping? Conspiracy to acquire an education?

Of course, this is the same benighted state where school officials in Broken Arrow recently filed suit against a student for allegedly "casting magic spells" at a teacher. And Duncanville, Texas, persists in thinking that "ejjikashun" consists of suspending straight-A students because their shirts aren't tucked in tightly enough to please some pinhead administrator who couldn't spell cat if you spotted him the "C" and the "A".

Anyone who judged Oklahoma and Texas by the quality of these public school administrators would conclude that H. L. Mencken was right to dismiss everything south and west of his beloved Baltimore as a "Sahara of the Bozart" populated solely by drooling, illiterate yokels. But it's worse than that. These so-called "schools" are using their inescapable, taxpayer-funded monopoly power over children, not to teach them how to be functioning, responsible, educated citizens, but to indoctrinate them into habitual, abject submissiveness to pompous administrative drones. Let's be honest. These aren't schools. They're madrassahs of mindless bureaucratic conformity.

(For further reading, in case anyone's interested: John Taylor Gatto's The Six Lesson Schoolteacher and Dumbing Us Down.)

Who, me?

The pseudonymous "Ms. Mentor", in her October 6 column in the Chronicle of Higher Education, advises students and academic bloggers to be "canny and pseudonymous" lest their blogs "hamper [their] chances of getting a job."

Gee, I wish I'd thought of that.... [grin]

Too good to be true?

While doing some (ahem) research on the webpage of the one, the only Joe Bob Briggs, I discovered that he'll be hosting movie night at the Alamo Drafthouse bar'n'theater during the 2003 Texas Book Festival in Austin. From their schedule for November 7 :

• TBF at the Movies
Midnight
Alamo Drafthouse Downtown, 409 Colorado St.
Books and film merge seamlessly at this soirée at the Alamo Drafthouse. Enjoy a Q&A with Festival author Joe Bob Briggs, followed by the screening of a film featured in his new movie Profoundly Disturbing:The Shocking Movies That Changed History.

One of you Texas-type folk better give me a report. Book fu, tacky movie fu, beer-and-nacho fu. Does it get any better than this?

Well, actually, it does. The famous Rock Bottom Remainders (or at least some of them) will be playing the Festival, too.

O, those wacky televangelists....

... what will they think of next?

This is the same fellow who, you might remember, has claimed that God steers hurricanes according to his directions, and that the September 11 attacks were acts of God because he was mad at homosexuals, abortionists, and the ACLU. (Pretty poor aim for an omniscient God, if you ask me. How many ACLU members work at the Pentagon?)

Then again, Hurricane Isabel just hit this guy's home town dead center. Maybe God's aim isn't so bad after all.

The world turned upside down

I've discovered further proof of the total chaos into which the world of American politics has fallen since 2001. In this column, published in the December 6, 2002 issue of the Texas Observer, Molly Ivins, the reigning doyenne of Texas liberalism (and yes, Virginia, there is such a thing), she of the perky smile and the razor-edged pen, actually said Nice Things about hardcore right-wingers such as Barry Goldwater, William Safire, and longtime Texas nemeses Dick Armey and Ron Paul. (Well, to be fair, she has been known to grudgingly acknowledge that Armey is at least more consistent than some other politicians. But only to call him consistently "mean".)

The uniting factor? Opposition to what Ms. Ivins rightfully calls "Total Information Creepiness", the same issue that has brought together habitual opponents like the National Rifle Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, et al.

More of Miss Molly's words of wit-n-wisdom can be found here. She's one of the few people who really understands the weird & wacky world of Texas politics. Too bad she's such a habitual lefty.

Miss Molly on Texas redistricting circa 1971:

In the process of screwing all the Speaker's enemies, the redistricters inadvertently screwed a few of his friends as well, one of whom was Rep. Bill Finck, a cigar manufacturer from San Antonio. Brother Finck rose to protest the butchering of his district. "Lookahere, Dell-win," he began plaintively. "Look at what y'all have done to my dis-strict. You have drawn a great big, ol' ball at the one end, then it runs in a little-bitty ol' strip for 300 miles, and then there's a great big ol' ball at the other end. The damn thing looks like a pair of dumbbells." Finck's voice rose in pain. "Now the courts say the districts have to be com-pact and con-tiguous. Is this your idea a com-pact and con-tiguous?".

Dell-win pondered deeply at the front mike. At last he replied, "Whale, in a artistic sense, it is...."

Bipartisan disgust

Judicial Watch first came to most people's attention by filing numerous lawsuits against the Clinton administration, alleging misuse of FBI files and other abuses. They're generally regarded as conservative in orientation. But that hasn't kept them from pursuing information about the Bush administration's secrecy and suspicious corporate ties. (Stories here, here, and here....)

As I said before, it's not just the usual liberal suspects who are getting tired of the Bush Administration's coverups and connections. Are those trees marching up the hill?

D'oh.

I've been absent from the blogiverse for the past couple of days. On Tuesday morning I realized to my horror and disgust that the standard letter I had used as the basis for virtually every cover letter I sent out in the past two months included a stupid, stupid error which needed to be corrected as soon as possible. (Bad form, old chap.) Two days, a ream of paper, and about $15.00 in postage later, I've managed to send out corrections for all the applications from October and September. Next, I get to go back and check the August letters to see if the same error lurked in them.

The Doctor regenerates again

Apparently the BBC has gotten over its recent aversion to science fiction. A September 26 announcement states that they will revive Doctor Who, but is somewhat vague about the timeline. I'm not quite sure what I think about Thursday's report, attributed to none other than Tom Baker, that "cross-dressing comedian Eddie Izzard will be the new Dr Who". Is fandom ready for a cross-dressing Doctor? Better than no Doctor at all, I guess.

If that proves too hard to enjoy, I can always look forward to the Blake's 7 miniseries announced back in July, and hope they don't stuff Paul Darrow into one of Jacqueline Pearce's old outfits.

Political ponderings

Am I the only one who finds it morbidly funny that the Bush Administration appears to think national security is so important it's necessary to destroy it in order to save it? Or, to be more accurate, in order to wreak petty personal vengeance on someone who criticizes the Bush Administration?

Unfortunately, this is a distinction which the Bushies seem incapable of perceiving. The whole Plame fiasco is further proof, in case anyone needs it, that this administration adheres to no principles whatsoever, conservative, nationalistic, or otherwise, save the Machiavellian lust for power at all costs.

I doubt that very many conservatives outside of the Bushies' own insular neo-conservative faction of Enron and Halliburton alumni will feel much inclination to defend them in the long run. Bush speechwriter David Frum's hysterical, chest-beating March 19 National Review article, "Unpatriotic Conservatives", in which, with rabid saliva practically flying in all directions, he furiously denounced libertarians, Patrick Buchanan, Robert Novak, Llewellyn Rockwell, Samuel Francis, Thomas Fleming, Scott McConnell, Justin Raimondo, Joe Sobran, Charley Reese, Jude Wanniski, Eric Margolis, Taki Theodoracopulos, and any other conservative who deviated from the War Party's dictates as "traitors" who "hate their country", pretty well ensured that.

From Frum's article: "War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen — and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them."

He's right about one thing. These traditional conservatives and libertarians chose to follow their consciences at a time when it was politically dangerous to do so. (Novak, of course, has had several miraculous retroactive changes of heart after being threatened with the loss of White House favors and tipoffs.) But what they turned their backs on was the War Party's corrupt maneuvering and dishonest dealing, not "their country". As the Bush Administration begins floundering in the morass of its own corruption, it should expect no help from this quarter, any more than MacBeth could expect help from MacDuff or any of the other people he climbed over en route to his short-lived reign.

Of course, the favorite refuge of scoundrels is always an option. As the 2004 election approaches, perhaps the Administration will find it useful to once again manufacture a war.

(Note: For a less biased idea of what the much-vilified libertarians and paleoconservatives actually say and think, check out websites such as www.lewrockwell.com, www.antiwar.com, the Libertarian Party, or Buchanan's "The American Cause".)

The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light....

It's good to read that the U.S. of A. still has one strong export: jobs.

Job Search Follies of 2003

It turns out that not only am I unable to compete with other job applicants, I'm unable to compete with an empty chair. "Westover" politely informs me that, rather than hire me, they've decided to leave the position vacant.

The grapes were probably sour, anyway.

No honkies need apply.

A pseudonymous writer in the Chronicle of Higher Education sadly bemoans the lack of suitable candidates for tenure-track positions at his unnamed college. What measures of suitability are they looking for?

From the article: "We won't discriminate, but let's be honest here, we were not looking for a white male Protestant...."

Let's try this on for size. How about "We won't discriminate, but let's be honest here, we were not looking for a woman." "We were not looking for a Mexican." "Not looking for a homosexual." Fill in the blank with whatever convenient label might happen to be attached to you, Dear Reader. See how it sounds.

And academics wonder why rational people accuse them of being quota-obsessed bigots. Perhaps this unnamed college would have better luck finding good hires if it actually looked at job-related qualifications.

Michigan wine laws declared unconstitutional

Bytes in Brief reports that the 6th Circuit Court has declared unconstitutional those portions of Michigan's wine-regulating regime which discriminate between in-state and out-of-state wineries. More details at FindLaw.

Earlier this year, there was a similar case in New York.

Perhaps there is hope yet for Carlos and others who pine for exotic vintages.

More on the "PATRIOT" Act

Ashcroft sez it's never been used to seek information from libraries. Hmm. That's odd, considering that in May the Justice Department acknowledged having contacted about 50 libraries as part of investigations.

I wonder where those 50 inquiries disappeared to between May and September. Down the memory hole? The rabbit hole? An oubliette in Guantanamo Bay?

Ig Nobel Prizes announced.

Yay. Research that "can not or should not be reproduced."

The "PATRIOT" Act:

It's not just for terrorists anymore!

But I thought the war was over.

After all, our esteemed President said so.

So what on earth is Riverbend writing about? Or Salam Pax? Or Moja?

You know, I have to remind myself from time to time that the situation could be worse. Instead of being out of work in a nation run by a cynical War Party that can't be bothered to pay attention to anyone outside its own little ideological clique, I could be living in the nation that it is paying attention to.

Thanks to Louise for the link to Riverbend's blog. Without it I never would have discovered this amusing search result.