"I'm delusional. That's why I'm calling you."
This essay, linked to by the current issue of Library Juice, got me to thinking about a series of "reference" telephone calls received by me and other librarians at Suburban Public Library. The caller usually begins by asking what sounds like an actual reference question (e.g., "I need to know the telephone number for my representative"). But before the librarian taking the call has time to check a webpage or directory of goverment officials, he's off on some other tangent, usually having to do with some military subject. And then another tangent. And so on.
A representative sample, reconstructed by memory:
"I saw this picture in a magazine, but I don't know which magazine. There were these three soldiers. Can you tell me who they were? One of them looked Portuguese. I mean, mercenaries are usually white, aren't they? I need to know how many blacks have won the medal of honor. Oh sh*t, I just dropped my cigarette, gonna burn the f*ckin' place down. Do you know anything about parachutes? I'm delusional, that's why I'm calling you...."
Fortunately, if the call is picked up by the answering machine, he usually rambles on and on until the message ends in mid-sentence, and never leaves a callback number, thus absolving the librarian on duty from having to call him back.
Obviously, the fellow's suffering from some pretty serious mental and/or substance-abuse problems. And it wouldn't be the first time that someone very lonely and isolated had latched onto the idea of calling the local library reference desk just to be able to talk with some other human being. But it's difficult to know quite how to respond, especially when he starts asking for personal names. Do I want to become this fellow's favorite librarian?
Monday, January 31, 2005
Friday, January 28, 2005
A Blog is Born!
I've started a new group blog here. It's intended as a discussion forum for politics, news, art, culture, and whatever else various acquaintances might want to discuss. Hence its name. Since it's a group blog, in which any member can post stories but no one person is solely responsible for updating it on a regular basis, perhaps it will be a useful outlet for those who have occasional outbursts of opinion but don't have the time or the inclination to blog regularly. So far, Carlos (of the currently-quiescent Biblioblog) and Fiend have expressed interest. We'll see where it goes from there. In the meanwhile, the Hill is likely to become more of a venue for personal musings, and may be updated less frequently, but will not be abandoned. The cold, stony reaches of the March still bear watching.
Busy, busy, busy
Back from the ozone again, with a few stories to tell and many complaints about the sad, sad unfairness of life, tow trucks, and automotive maintenance.
Ottawa is a lovely city in the wintertime, when the ground is covered in white and the Rideau Canal turns into the world's longest skating rink. While visiting with Fiend a couple of weeks ago, I surprised myself by making it onto the ice without instantly toppling over. Together, we made our way up the frozen canal for a kilometer or two and back, she slowly but gracefully gliding with only a hint of unsteadiness, me flailing wildly in all directions at once with arms windmilling and legs scrambling. (Or should that be "scrambled legs"?) As I mentioned to her at the time, and later in a comment on her blog, it seemed like a very apt illustration of the differences between the stereotypical female (cautious, graceful, makes steady progress with minimal disturbance or risk) and the stereotypical male (impetuous, reckless, makes faster progress but falls down frequently.)
Quote of the evening: "How do I skate backward? Like this? WHOOAAAHHH...." *thud*
We also saw the National Art Centre's production of Love's Labours Lost, one of Shakespeare's stranger plays, and one that is relatively rarely performed. I can see why. Much of the play consists of rapid-fire, nearly impenetrable seventeenth-century wordplay, like some bizarre blend of John Donne and David Mamet, which seems to prattle on endlessly and, to tell the truth, somewhat tiresomely. The plot involves a comically self-absorbed and misogynistic ruler and his courtiers, who vow to avoid (among other things) the company of women in order to focus on exclusively intellectual pursuits. A female representative of a neighboring kingdom and her ladies-in-waiting promptly arrive on an important diplomatic mission, and romantic complications ensue. I found most of the characters, and the "humorous" pranks they play on each other, to be unappealing. The play ends strangely for a comedy, not with the usual comedic resolution of conflicts and round of happy marriages, but with a sudden, tragic twist that radically alters the atmosphere of its bucolic Arcadia and seems to summarily dismiss the youthful intellectual and romantic hijinks of its pun-slinging, metaphor-twisting, hyperverbal characters as meaningless frivolities, or, at best, as nothing but a shallow prelude to the much grimmer and weightier world that awaits them outside of Arcadia. It's almost as if it's a comedy that deliberately and subversively undermines the idea of comedy itself. Perhaps Shakespeare, in his middle age, became disillusioned and cynical about happy endings?
On the whole, it was a lovely trip, even if I did have to brush some snow and pulverized ice off my pants.
Unfortunately, my return to Y-town was not quite so idyllic. An early morning flight got me to work at Huron State by 9:00 am, slightly groggy thanks to Northwest's failure to provide one of the key necessities of life but with a pleasant memory of watching the sun rise from 30,000 feet. On arriving home after work, though, Your Correspondent could not help but note that something was missing. The city had had its licenced car thieves tow Ol' Whitey while I was gone, for the "offense" of being parked for 48 hours in a legal parking space on a city street in front of the residence of its duly registered and tax-paying owner. While I was mulling this over and trying to get to Suburban Public Library for the evening reference shift, the Land Yacht, after motoring happily from the airport to Y-town and from the University to my home, inexplicably decided that it didn't feel like starting again. Despite feeling somewhat the same way myself, I found this annoying.
I won't bother to describe the rest of the week in detail, except to mention that the Land Yacht seems to have taken a dislike to cold Mondays. I can't say I disagree, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist on more reliable cooperation from it in the future. Nor will I dwell upon the towing company's momentary lapse of memory in which they claimed total ignorance of the existence of both me and my truck after I coughed up the ransom they demanded. Nor the Land Yacht's blown fuses and broken door handle. Nor the money I'm going to have to shell out for repairs for Whitey, nor the lowlife who's taken it upon him/herself to vandalize my outgoing mail, tearing it in half very neatly and very deliberately. (That's a $250,000 rip if the postal inspectors ever catch up with you, bubs.)
More pleasantly, I did get to go to one day of 31 Flavors of ConFusion, a science fiction convention put on by a local fan group, before the weekend blizzard dumped 12 inches of snow on everything in sight and made travel from Y-town to the convention hotel a practical impossibility. A quick summary of information gleaned and recommendations to be made: David G. Hartwell and his wife Kathryn Cramer are astute editors and observers of both science fiction and its fans. Watch for both their recent anthology of hard SF and an upcoming anthology of space opera. The Flash Girls and Steven Brust are wonderful and witty live musical performers. (Check out the lyrics to All Purpose Folk Song (Child Ballad #1) and A Meaningful Dialogue). Bang!, a card game recently released by Mayfair Games, is an entertainingly silly take on the Old West as filtered through the squinty gaze of the classic spaghetti westerns of Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone.
And that's about all the news that's fit, or unfit, to print. Except for one announcement....
Back from the ozone again, with a few stories to tell and many complaints about the sad, sad unfairness of life, tow trucks, and automotive maintenance.
Ottawa is a lovely city in the wintertime, when the ground is covered in white and the Rideau Canal turns into the world's longest skating rink. While visiting with Fiend a couple of weeks ago, I surprised myself by making it onto the ice without instantly toppling over. Together, we made our way up the frozen canal for a kilometer or two and back, she slowly but gracefully gliding with only a hint of unsteadiness, me flailing wildly in all directions at once with arms windmilling and legs scrambling. (Or should that be "scrambled legs"?) As I mentioned to her at the time, and later in a comment on her blog, it seemed like a very apt illustration of the differences between the stereotypical female (cautious, graceful, makes steady progress with minimal disturbance or risk) and the stereotypical male (impetuous, reckless, makes faster progress but falls down frequently.)
Quote of the evening: "How do I skate backward? Like this? WHOOAAAHHH...." *thud*
We also saw the National Art Centre's production of Love's Labours Lost, one of Shakespeare's stranger plays, and one that is relatively rarely performed. I can see why. Much of the play consists of rapid-fire, nearly impenetrable seventeenth-century wordplay, like some bizarre blend of John Donne and David Mamet, which seems to prattle on endlessly and, to tell the truth, somewhat tiresomely. The plot involves a comically self-absorbed and misogynistic ruler and his courtiers, who vow to avoid (among other things) the company of women in order to focus on exclusively intellectual pursuits. A female representative of a neighboring kingdom and her ladies-in-waiting promptly arrive on an important diplomatic mission, and romantic complications ensue. I found most of the characters, and the "humorous" pranks they play on each other, to be unappealing. The play ends strangely for a comedy, not with the usual comedic resolution of conflicts and round of happy marriages, but with a sudden, tragic twist that radically alters the atmosphere of its bucolic Arcadia and seems to summarily dismiss the youthful intellectual and romantic hijinks of its pun-slinging, metaphor-twisting, hyperverbal characters as meaningless frivolities, or, at best, as nothing but a shallow prelude to the much grimmer and weightier world that awaits them outside of Arcadia. It's almost as if it's a comedy that deliberately and subversively undermines the idea of comedy itself. Perhaps Shakespeare, in his middle age, became disillusioned and cynical about happy endings?
On the whole, it was a lovely trip, even if I did have to brush some snow and pulverized ice off my pants.
Unfortunately, my return to Y-town was not quite so idyllic. An early morning flight got me to work at Huron State by 9:00 am, slightly groggy thanks to Northwest's failure to provide one of the key necessities of life but with a pleasant memory of watching the sun rise from 30,000 feet. On arriving home after work, though, Your Correspondent could not help but note that something was missing. The city had had its licenced car thieves tow Ol' Whitey while I was gone, for the "offense" of being parked for 48 hours in a legal parking space on a city street in front of the residence of its duly registered and tax-paying owner. While I was mulling this over and trying to get to Suburban Public Library for the evening reference shift, the Land Yacht, after motoring happily from the airport to Y-town and from the University to my home, inexplicably decided that it didn't feel like starting again. Despite feeling somewhat the same way myself, I found this annoying.
I won't bother to describe the rest of the week in detail, except to mention that the Land Yacht seems to have taken a dislike to cold Mondays. I can't say I disagree, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist on more reliable cooperation from it in the future. Nor will I dwell upon the towing company's momentary lapse of memory in which they claimed total ignorance of the existence of both me and my truck after I coughed up the ransom they demanded. Nor the Land Yacht's blown fuses and broken door handle. Nor the money I'm going to have to shell out for repairs for Whitey, nor the lowlife who's taken it upon him/herself to vandalize my outgoing mail, tearing it in half very neatly and very deliberately. (That's a $250,000 rip if the postal inspectors ever catch up with you, bubs.)
More pleasantly, I did get to go to one day of 31 Flavors of ConFusion, a science fiction convention put on by a local fan group, before the weekend blizzard dumped 12 inches of snow on everything in sight and made travel from Y-town to the convention hotel a practical impossibility. A quick summary of information gleaned and recommendations to be made: David G. Hartwell and his wife Kathryn Cramer are astute editors and observers of both science fiction and its fans. Watch for both their recent anthology of hard SF and an upcoming anthology of space opera. The Flash Girls and Steven Brust are wonderful and witty live musical performers. (Check out the lyrics to All Purpose Folk Song (Child Ballad #1) and A Meaningful Dialogue). Bang!, a card game recently released by Mayfair Games, is an entertainingly silly take on the Old West as filtered through the squinty gaze of the classic spaghetti westerns of Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone.
And that's about all the news that's fit, or unfit, to print. Except for one announcement....
Thursday, January 13, 2005
I am shocked, shocked, I tell you!
U.S. gives up search for (alleged) Weapons of Mass Destruction
As if anybody really thought that BushCo was telling the truth in the first place.
U.S. gives up search for (alleged) Weapons of Mass Destruction
As if anybody really thought that BushCo was telling the truth in the first place.
What alignment are you?
You scored as Neutral Good. A Neutral Good person tries to do the 'goodest' thing possible. These people are willing to work with the law to accomplish their goal, but if the law is corrupt they are just as willing to tear it down. To these people, doing what's right is the most important thing, regardless of rules, customs, or laws.
What is your Alignment?
created with QuizFarm.com
Thanks to Louise for pointing the way.
You scored as Neutral Good. A Neutral Good person tries to do the 'goodest' thing possible. These people are willing to work with the law to accomplish their goal, but if the law is corrupt they are just as willing to tear it down. To these people, doing what's right is the most important thing, regardless of rules, customs, or laws.
What is your Alignment?
created with QuizFarm.com
Thanks to Louise for pointing the way.
Oh, and one more thing....
Hi mom.
By a circuitous and unintentional means, it seems my mother has become aware of the Hill. If anyone feels like saying "Hi mom", they can use the comments field below. Despite having disreputable offspring like myself, she's a pretty cool lady. So be nice.
Post edited 2/13/05.
Hi mom.
By a circuitous and unintentional means, it seems my mother has become aware of the Hill. If anyone feels like saying "Hi mom", they can use the comments field below. Despite having disreputable offspring like myself, she's a pretty cool lady. So be nice.
Post edited 2/13/05.
Friday, January 07, 2005
A Christmas to remember, or to forget
Have you ever had one of those trips in which it seemed that every move you made was cursed? I have.
My initial plan for Christmas and New Years was to spend some time with Fiend the weekend before Christmas, then drive down to the Ozarks for the family Christmas get-together on the 23rd and onward to Texas for a week, and back to Michigan following New Years.
Fortunately, most of the weekend with Fiend was not affected by the curse that afflicted my later travels. As she noted in her blog, we had all sorts of fun adventures. Some of them were delightful, like seeing the musical comedy that indirectly inspired the movie You've Got Mail and browsing the rambling used bookstores that make A-town such a pleasurable and dangerous place for bibliophiles. Others, like having the front grille of my car bashed in by a nitwit driver who blithely sailed past a stop sign into multiple lanes of oncoming traffic on a through street, were not so delightful. Fortunately, no one was hurt, although the other two cars involved were totalled. The Pontiac's front grille and headlights were damaged. (Note: If one plans to be involved in a low-to-moderate-speed collision, plan on driving a twenty-year-old full-size family sedan with heavy steel bumpers and a full-length steel frame.)
Still, on the whole, I couldn't ask for better company for such adventures, delightful or no.
It was after Fiend left that the curse manifested itself in all its gruesome strength. I contemplated driving to Missouri in the damaged car, but reports on the 22nd and 23rd of record-breaking blizzards in Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio; of interstate highways closed due to snow and roadside motels packed with stranded travellers sleeping in the hallways, dissuaded me from doing so. Thinking quickly for once, I informed family in Missouri that I wouldn't get to visit them for Christmas this year, took the Pontiac to a local body shop, bought an air ticket to Texas for the New Year weekend, and made plans to meet up with family and friends in Texas during the reduced time available to me. Problem solved!
Or so one would think. One would think wrong.
Unfortunately, my air itinerary had me making connections through the Little Rock airport. This, as I found out, is not a good idea. The airport staff there are evidently unaccustomed to people making connections through their fair city. This means that they are unaccustomed to such niceties as transferring baggage from incoming to outgoing flights. Which, in turn, means that I arrived in Dallas-Fort Worth, but my luggage, with all but a few of the family's Christmas presents, did not. It was not until the middle of the next day that the airline finally got around to delivering them. Fly the Friendly Skies, indeed. The flight attendant who expressed amazement at the very idea of connecting to another flight in Little Rock had the right idea.
In the meanwhile, Pablo and Carlos picked me up from the airport and, following long-established tradition, we went out for exotic food, a raid on a secondhand bookstore, and a snooty foreign movie. Unfortunately, the Inwood, the chosen site of past revels, was closed for renovation, so we had to settle for the Angelika Theater.
Oh, I'm sorry. I said Theater, but it's not a theater at all. It's the Angelika Film Center, which is much more prestigious than a mere theater. Sorry for the confusion.
Either way, A Very Long Engagement was worth seeing. It's a bit too romantic to be a war movie, and far too graphically bloody to be a traditional romance. This means that one can not fall back on the comfortable expectations of cliched movie genres. The central question of the plot -- whether the heroine's fiancee did or did not survive the War -- remains unresolved and could go either way right up until the end of the film. Although there are a few moments when it seems that leading lady Audrey Tautou's performance is reminiscent of the gamine Amelie, the sheer brutality of the trench warfare depicted in the film, and the amoral inhumanity of those who exercise power over human life and death with no thought for the consequences of their actions, counterbalances her perkiness and perseverance with a very real and very cold sense of bureaucratic evil at work. If I were to venture a highfalutin' metaphor, I'd say that the continual push-and-pull between her persistent love for her fiancee and the military's callous disregard for humanity is an instance of the perpetual battle between those who love life and those who love death.
The "neighborhood" around the Angelika looks like a planned experiment in upscale New Urbanism, with narrow brick-paved streets winding between two-and-three-story buildings housing restaurants or trendy shops (shoppes?) on the first floor and (presumably pricy) apartments above. Curious, but a bit too new and synthetic and self-consciously trendy to appeal to crusty old cynics like myself. Give it a few decades to accumulate grime and non-standard, non-committee-approved building alterations, and I might reconsider. Having lived in a small downtown area that actually supplied most of what a person would need, including affordable housing, within a space of a few blocks, without central or artificial planning, I am not easily impressed by consciously planned imitations.
New Year's Eve became a substitute Christmas with parents, brother, and sister-in-law in Austin, Texas. Spent the rest of the vacation visiting Pablo's new/old house, getting my butt kicked at Settlers of Catan, and rummaging through the long-stored remnants of my pre-Michigan life in a storage compartment, trying to find a few useful pieces of it that I could mail back to myself in Y-town.
The trip back didn't go any more smoothly than the trip down. (Remember that curse?) American Eagle changed their departure gate twice at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, took off almost an hour late, and arrived in Little Rock fifteen minutes before the scheduled departure time of my connecting flight. I elbowed my way down the aisle of the airplane and sprinted the length of the Little Rock terminal only to find a "cancelled" sign hanging on the Northwest departure gate and no Northwest personnel in sight. After wandering around for an hour or so trying to find someone from Northwest, I was eventually able to rebook passage on a later flight. They didn't lose the luggage this time, and it only took them two hours to unload it from the aircraft in Detroit. And so home again. And it only took 15 hours!
Notable Christmas swag:
Return of the King extended edition DVD. (Thank you!)
Nifty socket-wrench set specially designed for work in close quarters like car engines (in case I ever have time to do my own mechanic work)
Fancy coffee
Various books, including a couple of books about the Louvre's art and architecture, Literary Feuds, and Dungeon, Fire and Sword : the Knights Templar in the Crusades.
Scented candle
Various cat toys, including a battery-powered mouse that scares human beings and amuses felines.
Heavy insulated gloves
Pilgrim in the Ruins : a life of Walker Percy
Have you ever had one of those trips in which it seemed that every move you made was cursed? I have.
My initial plan for Christmas and New Years was to spend some time with Fiend the weekend before Christmas, then drive down to the Ozarks for the family Christmas get-together on the 23rd and onward to Texas for a week, and back to Michigan following New Years.
Fortunately, most of the weekend with Fiend was not affected by the curse that afflicted my later travels. As she noted in her blog, we had all sorts of fun adventures. Some of them were delightful, like seeing the musical comedy that indirectly inspired the movie You've Got Mail and browsing the rambling used bookstores that make A-town such a pleasurable and dangerous place for bibliophiles. Others, like having the front grille of my car bashed in by a nitwit driver who blithely sailed past a stop sign into multiple lanes of oncoming traffic on a through street, were not so delightful. Fortunately, no one was hurt, although the other two cars involved were totalled. The Pontiac's front grille and headlights were damaged. (Note: If one plans to be involved in a low-to-moderate-speed collision, plan on driving a twenty-year-old full-size family sedan with heavy steel bumpers and a full-length steel frame.)
Still, on the whole, I couldn't ask for better company for such adventures, delightful or no.
It was after Fiend left that the curse manifested itself in all its gruesome strength. I contemplated driving to Missouri in the damaged car, but reports on the 22nd and 23rd of record-breaking blizzards in Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio; of interstate highways closed due to snow and roadside motels packed with stranded travellers sleeping in the hallways, dissuaded me from doing so. Thinking quickly for once, I informed family in Missouri that I wouldn't get to visit them for Christmas this year, took the Pontiac to a local body shop, bought an air ticket to Texas for the New Year weekend, and made plans to meet up with family and friends in Texas during the reduced time available to me. Problem solved!
Or so one would think. One would think wrong.
Unfortunately, my air itinerary had me making connections through the Little Rock airport. This, as I found out, is not a good idea. The airport staff there are evidently unaccustomed to people making connections through their fair city. This means that they are unaccustomed to such niceties as transferring baggage from incoming to outgoing flights. Which, in turn, means that I arrived in Dallas-Fort Worth, but my luggage, with all but a few of the family's Christmas presents, did not. It was not until the middle of the next day that the airline finally got around to delivering them. Fly the Friendly Skies, indeed. The flight attendant who expressed amazement at the very idea of connecting to another flight in Little Rock had the right idea.
In the meanwhile, Pablo and Carlos picked me up from the airport and, following long-established tradition, we went out for exotic food, a raid on a secondhand bookstore, and a snooty foreign movie. Unfortunately, the Inwood, the chosen site of past revels, was closed for renovation, so we had to settle for the Angelika Theater.
Oh, I'm sorry. I said Theater, but it's not a theater at all. It's the Angelika Film Center, which is much more prestigious than a mere theater. Sorry for the confusion.
Either way, A Very Long Engagement was worth seeing. It's a bit too romantic to be a war movie, and far too graphically bloody to be a traditional romance. This means that one can not fall back on the comfortable expectations of cliched movie genres. The central question of the plot -- whether the heroine's fiancee did or did not survive the War -- remains unresolved and could go either way right up until the end of the film. Although there are a few moments when it seems that leading lady Audrey Tautou's performance is reminiscent of the gamine Amelie, the sheer brutality of the trench warfare depicted in the film, and the amoral inhumanity of those who exercise power over human life and death with no thought for the consequences of their actions, counterbalances her perkiness and perseverance with a very real and very cold sense of bureaucratic evil at work. If I were to venture a highfalutin' metaphor, I'd say that the continual push-and-pull between her persistent love for her fiancee and the military's callous disregard for humanity is an instance of the perpetual battle between those who love life and those who love death.
The "neighborhood" around the Angelika looks like a planned experiment in upscale New Urbanism, with narrow brick-paved streets winding between two-and-three-story buildings housing restaurants or trendy shops (shoppes?) on the first floor and (presumably pricy) apartments above. Curious, but a bit too new and synthetic and self-consciously trendy to appeal to crusty old cynics like myself. Give it a few decades to accumulate grime and non-standard, non-committee-approved building alterations, and I might reconsider. Having lived in a small downtown area that actually supplied most of what a person would need, including affordable housing, within a space of a few blocks, without central or artificial planning, I am not easily impressed by consciously planned imitations.
New Year's Eve became a substitute Christmas with parents, brother, and sister-in-law in Austin, Texas. Spent the rest of the vacation visiting Pablo's new/old house, getting my butt kicked at Settlers of Catan, and rummaging through the long-stored remnants of my pre-Michigan life in a storage compartment, trying to find a few useful pieces of it that I could mail back to myself in Y-town.
The trip back didn't go any more smoothly than the trip down. (Remember that curse?) American Eagle changed their departure gate twice at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, took off almost an hour late, and arrived in Little Rock fifteen minutes before the scheduled departure time of my connecting flight. I elbowed my way down the aisle of the airplane and sprinted the length of the Little Rock terminal only to find a "cancelled" sign hanging on the Northwest departure gate and no Northwest personnel in sight. After wandering around for an hour or so trying to find someone from Northwest, I was eventually able to rebook passage on a later flight. They didn't lose the luggage this time, and it only took them two hours to unload it from the aircraft in Detroit. And so home again. And it only took 15 hours!
Notable Christmas swag:
Return of the King extended edition DVD. (Thank you!)
Nifty socket-wrench set specially designed for work in close quarters like car engines (in case I ever have time to do my own mechanic work)
Fancy coffee
Various books, including a couple of books about the Louvre's art and architecture, Literary Feuds, and Dungeon, Fire and Sword : the Knights Templar in the Crusades.
Scented candle
Various cat toys, including a battery-powered mouse that scares human beings and amuses felines.
Heavy insulated gloves
Pilgrim in the Ruins : a life of Walker Percy
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