Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Attention Sherlockians and Adventure Tales... ians(?)
Wildside Press's electronic newsletter reports that they have two issues of fiction magazines available for free promotional download. Enjoy, if that's your thing.
Wildside Press's electronic newsletter reports that they have two issues of fiction magazines available for free promotional download. Enjoy, if that's your thing.
Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #4 and Adventure Tales
#6 may be downloaded via Rapidshare:
http://rapidshare.com/files/422176735/shmm4.pdf
http://rapidshare.com/files/422176143/AT6.pdf
Adventure Tales #6 includes several tasty oddities, including an H. Bedford-Jones ("King of the Pulps"!) profile and story; poetry by Clark Ashton Smith; and a Fritz Leiber sonnet (!!!) about the Grey Mouser.
Amber by Night
Carlos, should he revisit this dusty forgotten corner of the blogosphere, may enjoy this review by the esteemable and invaluable TangognaT. It appears to fall directly into the "hot female librarian" genre of manga.
Sadly, neither Ameila nor Amber are reported to wield magical pieces of paper, slay horrific monsters, or perform death-defying feats of acrobatics.
Carlos, should he revisit this dusty forgotten corner of the blogosphere, may enjoy this review by the esteemable and invaluable TangognaT. It appears to fall directly into the "hot female librarian" genre of manga.
Amelia is a typical bookworm librarian. But she has a secret. At night, she works as a provocatively dressed waitress named Amber....
Sadly, neither Ameila nor Amber are reported to wield magical pieces of paper, slay horrific monsters, or perform death-defying feats of acrobatics.
Digging up the past
Long long ago in a galaxy far far away, your humble correspondent attended a creative-writing class. One of the students in the class submitted a poem which included a couple of lines that have stuck with me ever since, regardless of whatever merit the poem as a whole might have had.
Paging Geraldo....
Open, Sez Me
Diving into the Wreck : Day 1
Dumpster Diving : Day 2
My Back Pages : Day 3
Scraping the bottom of the barrel : Day 4
My boxes and trunks of debris (and blowing sand) contain similar notebooks and stuff. So why aren't I a successful author? The fault, dear Cassius, is surely in my stars.
Long long ago in a galaxy far far away, your humble correspondent attended a creative-writing class. One of the students in the class submitted a poem which included a couple of lines that have stuck with me ever since, regardless of whatever merit the poem as a whole might have had.
The sands of time bury the past. Without them, life would cease.Since I've been doing a little personal archaeology myself lately, I felt a certain degree of kinship when I read author and Inferior 4 + 1 blogger Paul Witcover's description of his excavation of a trunk of personal possessions that had remained locked since his college days.
But sand can blow away sometimes, revealing hidden graves.
Paging Geraldo....
Open, Sez Me
Diving into the Wreck : Day 1
Dumpster Diving : Day 2
My Back Pages : Day 3
Scraping the bottom of the barrel : Day 4
My boxes and trunks of debris (and blowing sand) contain similar notebooks and stuff. So why aren't I a successful author? The fault, dear Cassius, is surely in my stars.
News of the weird
Some startling news from the Telegraph:
Aliens have deactivated British and US nuclear missiles, say US military pilots
The story below seems more like something I would expect in Texas, but sure enough it's from way up north in "librul" Yankeeland.
Assistant attorney general blogs against gay student body president
Hm. A couple of people I know have boasted of their accurate "gaydar". Feel free to comment about the video in that link.
And finally... one of the most misguided seduction attempts of all time. Why is it that over and over again, hyperconservative ideologues end up making public fools of themselves with bizarrely inappropriate sexual behavior? Bill O'Reilly with his strange obsession with loofahs, falafels, and sexual harassment of female employees; Ted Haggard's prediliction for drugs and male prostitutes; Larry Craig's "wide stance" shenanigans in airport bathrooms; Mark Foley's sleazy electronic pursuit of teenage Congressional pages. Now comes ... (or doesn't, if you take my meaning) .... James O'Keefe, the right-wing "fake pimp" best known for smearing the voters-rights group ACORN with selectively-edited video footage portraying himself as a ludicrously stereotypical "pimp" seeking advice about dealing with imaginary prostitutes, then getting caught trying to wiretap the telephone of a US Senator. Evidently Mr. O'Keefe thinks he's pretty hot stuff. So hot that, if he could only lure CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau onto a floating "pleasure palace" stocked with enticing condom jars, sex toys, posters of naked women, and a bed set up with a video camera, she would inevitably fall for his manly charms and provide him with invaluable video "seduction" footage that, with just a little of his trademarked "selective editing", he could use to embarrass CNN.
No, really. Read the story here and here. And here, with entertaining commentary.
I don't think our boy James is quite as irresistable to "the lay-dies" as he thinks he is.
Some startling news from the Telegraph:
Aliens have deactivated British and US nuclear missiles, say US military pilots
The story below seems more like something I would expect in Texas, but sure enough it's from way up north in "librul" Yankeeland.
Assistant attorney general blogs against gay student body president
Hm. A couple of people I know have boasted of their accurate "gaydar". Feel free to comment about the video in that link.
And finally... one of the most misguided seduction attempts of all time. Why is it that over and over again, hyperconservative ideologues end up making public fools of themselves with bizarrely inappropriate sexual behavior? Bill O'Reilly with his strange obsession with loofahs, falafels, and sexual harassment of female employees; Ted Haggard's prediliction for drugs and male prostitutes; Larry Craig's "wide stance" shenanigans in airport bathrooms; Mark Foley's sleazy electronic pursuit of teenage Congressional pages. Now comes ... (or doesn't, if you take my meaning) .... James O'Keefe, the right-wing "fake pimp" best known for smearing the voters-rights group ACORN with selectively-edited video footage portraying himself as a ludicrously stereotypical "pimp" seeking advice about dealing with imaginary prostitutes, then getting caught trying to wiretap the telephone of a US Senator. Evidently Mr. O'Keefe thinks he's pretty hot stuff. So hot that, if he could only lure CNN reporter Abbie Boudreau onto a floating "pleasure palace" stocked with enticing condom jars, sex toys, posters of naked women, and a bed set up with a video camera, she would inevitably fall for his manly charms and provide him with invaluable video "seduction" footage that, with just a little of his trademarked "selective editing", he could use to embarrass CNN.
No, really. Read the story here and here. And here, with entertaining commentary.
I don't think our boy James is quite as irresistable to "the lay-dies" as he thinks he is.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Lazy librarians
I'm late to this party, but it seems I should write a little something for those rare folks who may still from time to time stop by to take in the view from this barren, windy little Hill in the blogosphere.
The New York Times reports that Santa Clarita, California, has outsourced its public libraries to a foreign-owned private equity firm, LSSI. The story reports that the CEO of this secretive, for-profit business is quite certain he knows how to improve libraries.
Hey, if he can make unsupported, insulting assertions about the work habits of a profession he doesn't know squat about, so can I. I bet I'm closer to the truth than he is.
The 2004 article from Library Journal linked above also states that LSSI's contracts typically include a clause which forbids the contracting entity from making any critical or negative public statements about LSSI. Corporate image management at its finest! One side of an argument is enough, isn't it? Surely that will make for more efficient collection development.
LJ and other commenters also note that LSSI takes advantage of volunteers to replace paid staff wherever possible. A commenter on the NYT story states that under California law, it is illegal for a for-profit business to skirt the minimum-wage laws by having "volunteers" work for free. This of course begs the question of why on earth any sensible person would volunteer to work for free to boost the profit margin of some distant, rapacious corporation, or bump up Mr. Pezzanite's no-doubt generous annual bonus. Certainly, as George Will noted, the ideal price of labor, from a business perspective, is zero, but I strongly suspect that even if it were legal, the perceived desirability of volunteering at the library would drop once the library was (correctly) perceived as a for-profit enterprise, headquartered elsewhere, with no connection to the local community other than using it as a source of money to be vacuumed away to New York or London. No one volunteers to sort books for free for Barnes & Noble or Borders, just like no one volunteers to work on a GM assembly line, or staff a Macy's retail sales counter, or clean Mr. Pezzanite's dirty underwear for free.
I wonder if Mr. Pezzanite, from his lofty CEO perch, looks forward to living in a society in which the last vestiges of a stable, professional middle class have been eradicated, and the vast majority of the population outside the executive aristocracy lives hand-to-mouth in precarious part time jobs with no healthcare access and a selection of retirement plans consisting of (1) work till you drop or (2) find a sturdy refrigerator box and stock up on catfood. Look out Mexico, we're gonna pass you... going down.
The readers' comments to the NYT article are on the whole more enlightened and thoughtful than the article itself. But of course, the general public doesn't have much to say about decisions like this. Those decisions are for our betters, says the new social contract.
As for me, I'm too tired to write much more at this point. I was supposed to be home two hours ago after my reference shift ended, but since then I've been intercepted by several students burning the midnight oil on term papers and needing to find peer-reviewed criticism of Hispanic literature of the 1970s, arguments for and against civil rights for gay people, and nonpartisan information about tax rates in the United States over the last ten years. And I'll be back at 8 am to prepare to teach an English class how to find useful and reliable information about political science. I guess Mr. CEO Pezzanite thinks I'm still here because I'm lazy, don't do anything, and should be replaced by a 19-year-old working for minimum wage.
I'm late to this party, but it seems I should write a little something for those rare folks who may still from time to time stop by to take in the view from this barren, windy little Hill in the blogosphere.
The New York Times reports that Santa Clarita, California, has outsourced its public libraries to a foreign-owned private equity firm, LSSI. The story reports that the CEO of this secretive, for-profit business is quite certain he knows how to improve libraries.
“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can to to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”The LSSI strategy for improving libraries, as described by the NYT and other sources, depends primarily on "cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees". And, of course, eliminating pensions and other benefits. After all, if minimum wage part-time workers who are thinking about maybe some day getting their GED are good enough for Wal-Mart, they ought to be good enough to do whatever it is Mr. Pezzanite thinks librarians do while he golfs, manages his investment portfolio, handles a busy schedule of three-martini lunches at five-star restaurants, harangues his chauffeur for not keeping him far enough away from the Little People who infest the public roadways, bullies his illegal third-world immigrant housekeepers, and keeps a squadron of personal assistants busy arranging photo-ops and adulatory interviews with uncritical "media personalities".
Hey, if he can make unsupported, insulting assertions about the work habits of a profession he doesn't know squat about, so can I. I bet I'm closer to the truth than he is.
The 2004 article from Library Journal linked above also states that LSSI's contracts typically include a clause which forbids the contracting entity from making any critical or negative public statements about LSSI. Corporate image management at its finest! One side of an argument is enough, isn't it? Surely that will make for more efficient collection development.
LJ and other commenters also note that LSSI takes advantage of volunteers to replace paid staff wherever possible. A commenter on the NYT story states that under California law, it is illegal for a for-profit business to skirt the minimum-wage laws by having "volunteers" work for free. This of course begs the question of why on earth any sensible person would volunteer to work for free to boost the profit margin of some distant, rapacious corporation, or bump up Mr. Pezzanite's no-doubt generous annual bonus. Certainly, as George Will noted, the ideal price of labor, from a business perspective, is zero, but I strongly suspect that even if it were legal, the perceived desirability of volunteering at the library would drop once the library was (correctly) perceived as a for-profit enterprise, headquartered elsewhere, with no connection to the local community other than using it as a source of money to be vacuumed away to New York or London. No one volunteers to sort books for free for Barnes & Noble or Borders, just like no one volunteers to work on a GM assembly line, or staff a Macy's retail sales counter, or clean Mr. Pezzanite's dirty underwear for free.
I wonder if Mr. Pezzanite, from his lofty CEO perch, looks forward to living in a society in which the last vestiges of a stable, professional middle class have been eradicated, and the vast majority of the population outside the executive aristocracy lives hand-to-mouth in precarious part time jobs with no healthcare access and a selection of retirement plans consisting of (1) work till you drop or (2) find a sturdy refrigerator box and stock up on catfood. Look out Mexico, we're gonna pass you... going down.
The readers' comments to the NYT article are on the whole more enlightened and thoughtful than the article itself. But of course, the general public doesn't have much to say about decisions like this. Those decisions are for our betters, says the new social contract.
As for me, I'm too tired to write much more at this point. I was supposed to be home two hours ago after my reference shift ended, but since then I've been intercepted by several students burning the midnight oil on term papers and needing to find peer-reviewed criticism of Hispanic literature of the 1970s, arguments for and against civil rights for gay people, and nonpartisan information about tax rates in the United States over the last ten years. And I'll be back at 8 am to prepare to teach an English class how to find useful and reliable information about political science. I guess Mr. CEO Pezzanite thinks I'm still here because I'm lazy, don't do anything, and should be replaced by a 19-year-old working for minimum wage.
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