Y-town makes the news, sort of.

Joseph Sobran comments on a week spent back in his hometown: Et tu, Y.?

Meanwhile, the local police attract unwanted media attention by getting themselves caught on video conducting warrantless searches of citizen's homes. The fruits of their search: a stash of porn, some kinky sex-toys, and a secondhand strippers' pole apparently salvaged from the dumpster outside a local strip club. Aren't you glad that we got rid of that annoying Constitution thingie so that we could be protected against secondhand strippers' poles in people's basements?

Aren't you, citizen?

Messages from beyond

How long do you suppose it will be until we see this used as a device in a detective novel?

"Most people leave notes behind in drawers or boxes knowing or hoping they will be found after they die.

"This is the same, but via Internet," said Alberto Iriarte, 33, director of Global Spectrum, the Pamplona-based company which runs the service....

..."People find computers more intimate and private than letters and they feel freer to say things this way."

The Good Old Days of pulp SF

David Langford's column in the current issue of F&SF amusingly skewers some horrible pulp SF of the 1960's, including the following passage from March of the Robots by "Leo Brett" (aka Lionel Fanthorpe):

Terrifying things, steel things; metal things; things with cylindrical bodies and multitudinous jointed limbs. Things without flesh and blood. Things that were made of metal and plastic and transistors and valves and relays, and wires. Metal things. Metal things that could think. Thinking metal things. Terrifying in their strangeness, in their peculiar metal efficiency. Things the like of which had never been seen on the earth before. Things that were sliding back panels…Robots! Robots were marching…

It almost works as a kind of psychotic poetry. But not quite.

I guess it's easy to retroactively romanticize the days of the pulp magazines and publishers. Having heard of E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman books for years, I once bought a stack of paperback copies of them from a used bookstore and sat down to be entertained. That's not an experience I plan to repeat. Smith's prose style would have to loosen up quite a bit before it could be called wooden. However, in deference to his historic significance in the field, I will gladly add a recently donated omnibus editon of his "Skylark" stories to the SPL collection. This is not entirely charitable on my part. Sometimes, the best way to combat an undeservedly good reputation is to actually expose the "legendary" work to public view, just as one of the best ways to combat undeserved obscurity is to make the obscure work visible to those who might enjoy it and talk or write about it.

And who knows? There may even be someone out there who will enjoy the Skylark of Space. Just as someone might enjoy the chanting repetition of the passage above. (Not to mention its repetitive chanting.)

Phone Phollies, Episode Two

The telephone in my little corner of "Huron State U." seems to have worked for part of one day. Now it's dead again. Nobody seems to know why.

Only in Texas?

While browsing through a copy of Texas A&M Press's book catalog that somehow was misdirected to Suburban Public Library, I noticed this book. Is it a sign of a healthy commercial instinct for a major academic press to publish a book about the university football mascot? Or just one of those "only in Texas" kinda things?

Not only in Texas

Also of note: This book seems tailor-made for anyone who enjoyed Cold Mountain and want to read up further about the domestic turmoil of the South during the Civil War. Vigilante "justice" was not limited to Appalachia during that time. But I wonder how many public libraries will stock it? Public libraries can awfully snobbish about books that are "too academic".

Lost in a good dictionary

According to a recent PR squib, the Oxford English Dictionary has set up a new feature for subscribers. They've added to the subscriber page a "Lost for Words" button, which allows for random browsing through the online version of the dictionary. Jasper Fforde, eat your heart out.

For those unfortunate souls who do not have institutional or personal subscriptions ($295 a year!), there's always the Word Of The Day via e'mail. I wonder how long it would take to accumulate the text of the complete dictionary by this means?

Say it ain't so

A poster on the LibRef-L listserv mentions that Kirkus Reviews has begun offering "commissioned reviews" for $350. The information is attributed to trade publication Publisher's Lunch, to which I don't have access. Anyone out there know more?

In the cool of the evening

After a frantic last-minute burst of activities among the denizens of Suburban Public Library, I have now a few moments of peace to collect my thoughts before walking out to the parking lot and hoping that Ol' Whitey will cooperate in taking me back to my distant home. The two people who couldn't get MS Word to lay out their documents properly have departed; the fellow with the extremely loud voice who talks at great and repetitive length about his disabilities has gone home; the telephone messages about placing books on hold or getting a library card for somebody's husband have been answered and deleted from the memory of the answering machine. The library is dark, except for a few strategically-placed emergency lights, and deserted, except for me. And, to quote the bard, "I am left, alive and well, looking up and wondering why and wherefore."

(No, not that Bard. This one.)

Peace has been a rather rare commodity lately. I've been rushing back and forth between the two jobs so frantically that I literally have to plan a week in advance when I'm going to do laundry, and although finding money to buy a replacement for Ol' Whitey is a challenge, it's even more of a challenge to find time to go look at and test-drive new cars. Trying to plan the out-of-town trips that I want and need to take over the next month or two is an exercise in frustration, since virtually every weekend is filled with work shifts at one or the other job or other non-negotiable commitments.

Unfortunately, this is a rather a short-lived peace, since an appointment tomorrow morning means that I can't afford to stay up excessively late tonight. I'd take a late-night stroll around the mill pond and gentrified downtown "entertainment district" of Suburbia, but unfortunately the town pretty well closes up at nine o'clock on weekdays. You know you're in suburbia when the coffee shops close at six.

To shamelessly steal a line from another southeastern-Michigan blogger: Goodnight, my invisible friends. And forgive me my infrequent posting as I forgive you your infrequent comments.

Observations on job application procedures

Someone on a library listserv posted a query earlier today about strange documentation requests in library job postings. I composed the following unhinged screed in response, but instead of sending it to the listserv where it belongs, I'm posting it here.

The most amusing and irritating job postings are the ones, typically from municipal and community-college libraries, that demand official transcripts, plus X number of personal letters of reference, PLUS an essay or two or three on some abstruse topic particularly addressing the institution's needs, PLUS completion of an online application. "Resumes are not acceptable."

The online appliation, of course, seems to work only on alternate Tuesdays between the hours of midnight and 5:45 a.m., takes 45 minutes to partially complete, and demands abstruse information that no actual human beings have available. (Do you know the exact date that you began and quit *all* past jobs, including that part-time pizza delivery job during the summer of your sophomore year? How about *all* former supervisors' name and rank and current contact information? Invariably, there is no option for "information not available".)

Note the reference to *partial* completion of the online application. This is all you will accomplish, because after 45 minutes of laboriously retyping the information which one has already organized into a simple, attractive, easy-to-read resume, the "online application" website crashes and loses all the data and refuses to reconnect. No telephone contact information is supplied.

"Ha Ha! Better luck next time, sucker!"

When I compare this to the usual "resume, cover letter, and references" requirements for most job postings at major reputable colleges and university, I am tempted to draw a universal conclusion from my anecdotal experiences : The desirability of a job is in inverse proportion to the difficulty of applying for it.

Making connections

Ytown-blogger Mark Maynard recently initiated a meetup of local bloggers at a downtown bar. The party was winding down by the time my work schedule permitted me to drop by, but there was enough life left to keep me engrossed in conversation with kindred souls like Steve and Hillary and Brett S. Unfortunately, the unpredictable flow of the social tides kept me from meeting MM himself or YpsiDixit, whose writing I've admired from time to time (and who, judging from occasional recent postings, seems to have at least a passing interest in the local ferroequines.) I look forward to any future meetups with local and regional bloggers. Perhaps I will learn at last why a nearby burg is overrated.

P.S. For the benefit of any reader who knows not my face: no, I'm not in any of the meetup pictures. You'll have to keep guessing.

From the office of....

Huron State recently -- after nine months of relegating Yours Truly to a wobbly cubicle between the staff coffee machine and the mailbox/copier/stapler counter -- graciously allocated an entire office for my use. It's ten feet by ten feet of utter white-wallboard-and-nondescript-industrial-carpeting bliss, by comparison to The Cubicle. I spent several hours late last week hanging library propaganda on the walls, shoving institutional gray metal furniture around, and, of course, theorizing about compact office model railroads.

The next day, the telephone disappeared. The office's previous occupant apparently put in a work order confiscating the telephone to save him the trouble of re-recording his answering machine message. No word yet on when telephone service to my little closet-o-bliss will be restored. A telephone tech showed up today just before quitting time. He plugged in a telephone. It didn't work. He scratched his head and left.

The Employer Giveth, and the Employer Taketh Away. In the meanwhile, I have a ready-made excuse for avoiding administrative summonses.

In search of... a writing style

I finally got my hands on a copy of The Da Vinci Code a few days ago, courtesy of Suburban Public Library, and figured I might as well find out what all the fuss was about.

It's a fairly quick read, and the bite-sized chapters are eminently suitable for someone with a short attention span, or who, like me, has to fit their reading into scattered fifteen-minute chunks. The book is 454 pages long, with 106 chapters plus a prologue and an afterword; thus, the average chapter is just over four pages long. Considering that virtually every chapter ends with a cliffhanger of some kind, it's a breathless ride. Brown has mastered the time-honored storyteller's trick of giving out just enough information to tantalize the readers, but withholding the critical last piece at the last minute to keep them coming back for more. Sample chapter endings, chosen at random:

After a long wait, another man came one, his tone gruff and concerned. "Bishop, I am glad I finally reached you. You and I have much to discuss." (Chap. 59)

When Collet read the label above the empty peg, he knew he was in trouble. (Chap. 67)

Is there time?
He knew it didn't matter.
Withoug hesitation, Langdon broke into a sprint back toward the stairs. (Chap. 21)

Unfortunately, Brown's mastery of characterization is not quite up to his mastery of storytellers' shtick, and most of the characters never become more than two-dimensional cutouts who seem to exist mainly in order to pursue, be pursued, or inject Shocking Revelations and other useful info-dumps into the story.

The "shocking" historical/conspiratorial element of the story seems to be largely based on the 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail with a smattering of references to more academically respected sources like the fragmentary Gospel of Mary, topped off with a rather implausible series of purported secret meanings said to be embedded in the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. The way that the latter are brought into the story is even more implausible than the purported secret meanings themselves. The reader is asked to believe that a mortally wounded man, dying from a bullet to the gut, could, in the course of fifteen minutes, concieve, plan, and set up an elaborate intellectual treasure-hunt throughout the galleries of the Louvre, incorporating complicated cryptographic clues, obscure artistic references, private references only to be understood by certain members of his own family, and a generous helping of red herrings. And then, after removing his clothes and using his own blood to write a cryptic message and paint several arcane symbols on and around his body, arrange himself in a specific pose alluding to a well-known work of art before expiring. That's one very active dying man.

If one can swallow the implausibility of that opening gambit, though, the story is a fast-paced adventure tale, with large doses of entertaining intellectual and cultural gamesmanship, and it can be enjoyed on that basis. Its conspiratorial hypotheses are about as plausible, in detail, as Oliver Stone's movies, and yet it may serve a useful intellectual and historical purpose if it makes readers aware of the fact that religious dogmas, and even scriptures, have been shaped through the ages by political forces, and inspires more serious attention to the diversity of interpretations that existed in the early Christian church before the Emperor Constantine and the politically-established church at Rome imposed a single scriptural canon.

Addendum, 9/17: Lebanon has banned the book.

Of elections, voting machines and credibility

A while back, Black Box Voting publicized what it described as yet another flaw in Diebold voting machines. Details here; typical Slashdot discussion here.

I mentioned this to S., who has a certain degree of knowledge about accounting practices, and she expressed some skepticism about both sides of the squabble.

This comment, by an "Anonymous Coward" on Slashdot, raises quite another issue. Even if the election is NOT tampered with or plagued by obvious electronic FUBARs, the results will lack ironclad credibility if there is no recountable paper trail. The transparency of vote-counting, and the existence of a verifiable hard-copy record of the vote totals, and the consequent willingness of the loser to concede the election, are just as vital to a working democracy as the counting of the votes. But what if there is no transparency, no recountable paper trail, no credibility other than Diebold saying that they really, really promise, cross their hearts, that you lost fair and square, and that you should trust them? I really can't put it any better than the A.C., and so I shamelessly cut and paste:

As a country that has such a long history of voting for our representatives, we have taken for granted the single most important aspect of democratic governance: Transparency. No democracy since the invention of clay voting markers has survived without this fundamental facet of the process. It does not matter if it is a pure democracy or a representative government. It does not matter if we use electoral colleges or parliamentary votes. It does not matter if we use clay tablets, punched cards or write-once CDs. What every election-monitoring group is designed to enforce is transparency.

Why? Because the loser has to concede to the fact that he has lost. We do not force the loser to lose, the loser allows the winner to win. "I lost in a fair fight. Better luck next time." The concession speech is just as important to democracy as the acceptance speech.

If a loser of an election disputes the results and the winner cannot defend the vote count, then the loser has every right to appeal to other means--in most countries, violence.

In the last American election, the loser disputed the vote count. The winner could not defend the results, so the loser appealed to other means--the Supreme Court.

The fact that there was no outbreak of violence (at least of any significance) was not due to the voters' acceptance of the count. It was due to the voter's acceptance of the Supreme Court as the final word in American government. The loser accepted the Supreme Court decision and allowed the winner to win. The voters (some begrudgingly) accepted the decision.

But please note: the last disputed election had something that the next one will not: chads--a paper trail--transparency. Win or lose, everyone had the hope that eventually, the truth would be known. It may take days, weeks or months to determine, but the truth would be known. The system would work.

Ignore conspiracy theories. Ignore corporate donors. Ignore programming loopholes. The threat of the next disputed election is the notion that even if the election is honest, even if every vote is counted, even if the outcome truly matches the intent of the voters, the loser will be able to dispute the outcome and the winner will not be able to defend it.

Imagine the turmoil if after the last election, over a million of the punch ballots had gone missing. That is what these systems offer. It does not matter who wins this fall. The loser will dispute the result and the winner will not be able to defend it....

Here, there, and everywhere

While helping a teenager find a copy of Catcher in the Rye, I noticed a copy of what looked like a fantasy book -- R.A. Salvatore's Immortalis -- shelved in the general fiction. Investigating further, I found that it's part of one of his multifarious multi-volume series. Suburban Public Library, naturally, has one volume shelved in general fiction, one volume in Young-Adult Fiction, and one volume in the SF/Fantasy shelves. I'll not quite sure whether this is an error, resulting from chaotic collection-development and staff turnover, or a deliberate attempt to make Salvatore's sagas more visible to browsers. I suspect the former.

Ai! A Malrog is come!

Courtesy of J. from Wixom comes this link to the Grand Flaming Marshmallow Balrog Contest. Clearly, my hobbies are too boring, since they do not burst into flames on command.

Of books and memories

Michael Bronski's obsessions are not my own; however, I find much common ground with his Boston Phoenix column about the emotional and intellectual ties one develops to a collection of books. I can't recall the exact date and place and circumstances under which I acquired every book I own, but quite a few of them are associated, in my mind, with a particular time or place or person. My copy of Julia Seton's Pulse of the Pueblo is indelibly associated with the pleasant shock of finding it signed by the author, with the inlaid signature of her better-known husband, abandoned in a library book sale. My stained and shelfcocked 2-volume Norton Anthology of English Literature is likewise indelibly associated with the pleasure I derived as an undergraduate from the authors I discovered by browsing idly through its pages (not, fortunately, with the stifling boredom of the literature class for which I purchased it.) This means that a decision to sell or discard them is, emotionally, much like a decision to sell or discard that part of my life. As a result, the bookshelves groan and sag a bit more each year.

Wireless in the wheatfields

Philadelphia recently made the news because the city government was pondering the establishment of a city-wide wireless internet access area. It seems that Walla Walla County, out in Washington State, has beaten them to the punch, though.

I wish some such option were available to me, rather than paying unGodly amounts of money to ComCast for a hardwired connection. Such networks might also help bring good-quality internet access to places like the family's Ancestral Home, where the telephone infrastructure is wobbly at best and cable television and other high-speed telecommunications connections are nonexistent.

Whether it should be done through governmental efforts, like the old Rural Electricity Administration, or through corporate efforts, though, might well prompt another debate over the proper place of government and free-market economics. Left to their own devices, will ISPs clamor for the chance to serve sparsely-populated areas?

Islamism discovers women

Unfortunately, in the current state of affairs, it seems this is the result.

More politics

Some of my (apparently nonexistent) readers may not appreciate the number of political postings. Too bad; it's an election year!

This fellow quite eloquently and concisely makes a case against Bush. The only question, for me, is whether I can stomach Kerry, who's been considerably less than energetic in defending civil liberties, enough to vote for him instead of the dark-horse Libertarian candidate. I think, though, that I'll stop short of this Ypsi-blogger's tongue-in-cheek suggestion of holding "food poisoning parties" for likely Bush-voting relatives the day before the election. (Mine live too far away, in any case.)

More on the NEA reading report...

... from Walt Crawford (.pdf file). Some of the doubts he expresses sound very familiar.

Drug companies and the medical press

As a librarian at a university with a sizable number of nursing students and a correspondingly high level of use of medical journals, I found this book review from Mother Jones to be rather disturbing. According to the reviewer's synopses of the two books reviewed -- The Truth About Drug Companies, by Marcia Angell, and On The Take, by Jerome Kassirer -- "the drug and biotech industries have gained unprecedented leverage over what doctors and patients know -- and don't know -- about the $200 billion worth of prescription pharmaceuticals consumed by Americans each year. Industry has gained that leverage by funding and, increasingly, controlling medical research...." Both authors are former editors-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. Any thoughts, Pablo? Or anyone else?

Libraries and librarians try diligently to make sure that unbiased information is available for library users, especially in areas such as medical research, where biased or inaccurate information can be literally deadly. We caution users against relying on unverified, unvetted, potentially biased material from the general web. But what if the peer-reviewed sources or the researchers whose work they report are also on the take? What if all the wells are poisoned?

I think I'll just plan to stay healthy.

Edit, 9/12: This new policy from several leading medical journals may help alleviate the problem.

America, Bush style

Mass arrests. Jailed journalists. Corporate censorship of the radio airwaves.

At least he believes in the "right to remain silent."

John Armstrong

Model Railroader Magazine and the Washington Post report the death of John Armstrong, author of many articles and books on model railroad track planning. I never met him, but as an armchair model railroader and dilettante of the graph-paper-and-pencil fraternity of model railroad trackplanners, I spent many an hour poring over his work, sometimes noting things that I would do differently, but more often being pleasantly surprised by his characteristic efficient use of space, clever illusions, and excruciatingly bad puns. And, most importantly, by his encyclopedic knowledge of actual railroad operations and the way that he incorporated that knowledge into his modeling. In doing so, he helped change the nature of the hobby. May he rest in peace. Although his genius was in an area that remains obscure to most people, his ideas will continue to bring pleasure to thousands of people for decades to come.

Journalistic objectivity, or corporate thought-control?

Mentioned recently on a library listserv: The Miami Herald has banned its staff from attending concerts by Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, the Dixie Chicks, Pearl Jam, Bonnie Raitt, John Mellencamp, and other musicians deemed "anti-Bush" by the newspaper's management. Original story in Spanish here. Translated excerpts as reported on the listserv:

The Miami Herald forbid its journalists to purchase tickets to anti-Bush
concerts supporting the Democratic party, because it would be a
political contribution not permitted by journalism ethics.

In a memorandum distributed to the daily's journalists, editor Tom
Fiedler explained that the profits from ticket sales would be handed
over to political action groups.

Fiedler also forbade them to accept free passes.

No word on whether the Miami Herald also forbids its staff from listening to Brooks & Dunn, Toby Keith, or other musicians who use their concerts to promote the Republican party. Nor is there any indication whether the Herald prohibits their staff from attending, say, Southern Baptist churches that promote Bush's theology of empire and adore him as if he were the Evangelical Pope. (Except, of course, when he accidentally fails to abhor other religions sufficiently.)

Of soldiers, death, and respect

I noted in an electronic newsletter this morning that a local peace group plans to spend part of an upcoming Sunday remembering the approximately 1000 US soldiers who have died in George W. Bush's misguided middle-eastern war. From the newsletter: "Arlington Midwest (1,000 crosses or other grave markers) will be on display throughout the day. At 7:30 pm there will be a sundown ceremony with reading of the names and playing of Taps."

Meanwhile, one of the local Republican bigwigs in nearby Oakland County spent the first part of August defiantly refusing to lower county flags in honor of Michigan soldiers killed in Iraq. According to him, publicly acknowledging and honoring fallen soldiers "politicizes the war":

Instead of lowering flags, government should be building support for the troops who are fighting the war, said Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson (search), a Republican.

"His feeling is that lowering the flags to half-staff really politicizes the war and promotes opposition to the war," Patterson spokesman Robert Dustman said.

Ah, I see. A presidential candidate dressing up in a flight suit that he couldn't be bothered to wear in actual combat, and being flown out to an aircraft carrier for a photo op strutting around in front of a red-white-and-blue banner trumpeting "mission accomplished", is *not* politicizing the war, but admitting that there have been US casualties *is.* ("War is peace....") Just like the government's censorship of photos of military coffins being shipped back to the US. Just like Republican corporate supporters censored NightLine earlier this year when when they listed the US war dead.

Who's really honoring and respecting the troops here? Those who acknowledge their sacrifice, or the posturing Republican chickenhawks who use them as campaign props, then send them off to combat like so much conveniently animated meat and refuse to even publicly acknowledge them when they're killed or injured?

Down to the wire

As of 7:00 last night, the Huron State faculty union voted to authorize a strike. As of 1:00 a.m., the strike was called. As of 7:30 or 8:00 this morning (depending on which source one consults) the strike was called off as the negotiators reached a tentative agreement. So at least I didn't have to walk past a picket line.