Let the race begin

I can't believe Fiend hasn't called dibs on this story: Kerry names Edwards his running mate

My reaction: Edwards adds a much-needed dose of youth, photogenic looks, affability, and Southern regional background to an otherwise gray, stodgy, stereotypically "Massachusetts-liberal" Kerry ticket seeming made-to-order for Republican campaigners to ridicule. I don't know much about his policies other than what's listed on his website. He seems to have a good reputation as a speaker and campaigner.

Cranky thought #1: Is his success so far largely due to having a handsome face and a telegenic demeanor? Perhaps I should watch this movie again. On the other hand, it worked pretty well for John F. Kennedy.

Cranky thought #2: Are the Democrats doing the same thing that the Republicans did in 1996, putting the tired old party warhorse at the head of the ticket while submerging a more energetic candidate in the number-two slot?

In any case, at least he's not Dick Cheney.

CD46:6, CD46:7... 6. CD46:9, CD46:10... 6. CD 47:1... OC....

I have just spent the last hour or two performing one of the most menial tasks known to the literate world: updating Suburban Public Library's copy of the local municipal code, then checking every single page against a checklist to make sure the good citizens of Suburbia will have access to the correct and current version of the law in the unheard-of event that one of them comes to the library to look it up. Yes, I know it has to be done. No, I don't like doing it. If I wanted to spend hours poring over the minutiae of local ordinances against railroad trains travelling faster than 35 mph, people trespassing in city cemetaries after 10:00 pm, or the display, in certain zoning areas, of "Human male genitals in a discernibly turgid state, even if completely and opaquely covered", I'd have gone to law school.

Meanwhile, a library user whom I'll call ChattyMan has interrupted me three times to discuss his various get-rich schemes, most of which involve either using the internet to track down misplaced bank accounts or studying obsessively for various civil-service exams. I wish him the best, I really do, but I'm getting a little tired of his knowing winks about whatever latest "secret" he's discovered.

As someone else said recently, I have had more exciting days.

Happy Birthday to the Great Experiment

For those who haven't already seen the happy sparklings of fireworks (as prescribed by John Adams), here's a virtual substitute. For those who feel inclined to do some patriotic reading, try here. May the Great Experiment continue to flourish, and a curse upon all who would wish her ill.

A Bush is not a Bush is not necessarily a Bush

When I was in lieberry skool a few years back, one of the required readings I most enjoyed was Vannevar Bush's 1945 essay "As We May Think", in which he predicted, among other things, a device, the "memex", that sounds much like an analog version of a personal computer. (See especially sections 6-8). He was wrong about the mechanical details of just how the storage and retrieval of information would be handled, since the transistor and many other required components of digital technology were not yet invented, but it's interesting that, by thinking about what people would *want* to do with technology, he was able to predict with a reasonable degree of prescience what they *would* do with it.

Of course, he wasn't always right, but that's the danger of being a prognosticator.

For the Potterphiles among us:

J.K. Rowling has announced the title of the next book in the Harry Potter series. (And, no, it's not Pillar of Storge.) No release date, though.

Thanks to Louise for mentioning it.

To chat or not to chat

Stephen Coffman, V.P. of Library Systems and Services Inc. and author of Going Live! Starting and Running a Virtual Reference Service, and Linda Arret, project coordinator for the early and pilot stages of QuestionPoint, examine the whys and wherefores of virtual reference service. And, more importantly, whether the results have been worth the effort and expense. Many of their observations match my own skeptical mutterings.

Thanks to the ColLib-L list for the link.

A disappointed library user

Requested this evening at Suburban Public Library: pictures of the effects of various sexually-transmitted diseases "like the ones I saw when I was training with the Navy". The grosser, the bigger, the more colorful, the better. He wants to show them to his teenage son, who for some reason seems embarrassed by this request. Querent seems disappointed by the library's selection of medical encyclopedias and the young-adult books on STD's, and asks why the library doesn't have such materials. I pass his suggestion on, without comment, to our young-adult librarian.

Recent reads : Under the Banner of Heaven

Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven will no doubt be raptly appreciated by those who are already inclined to think the worst of religious organizations and people, and ignored by those who do not wish to entertain skeptical thoughts about them. In other words, it won't reach the people who need to read it the most, and will reinforce the prejudices of those who already fail to understand any variety of religious thinking.

Most obviously, the book is about the Lafferty brothers, a clan of polygamist fundamentalist Mormons who claimed to receive direct revelation from God, and -- most importantly for purposes of the narrative -- took it upon themselves to murder a recalcitrant wife and her infant child when she refused to go along with their ultra-patriarchial group madness. This was, of course, duly justified by a "revelation" scrawled in pencil on a piece of yellow note paper.

Krakauer goes beyond this grisly tale, though, by showing that the phenomenon of extremist religious beliefs based on authoritarian patriarchial ideas is not solely the province of lone kooks, but instead is deeply ingrained, particularly in Mormon history, but also in present-day groups like the ill-fated Branch Davidians and in communities of people living by such beliefs in the present day, most notably the polygamist Mormon communities of Short Creek, Arizona, Bountiful, B.C., and various villages in Mexico. One could also draw parallels to radical Islamist groups, the racist nuts of the so-called "Christian Identity" groups, et cetera, ad infinitum.

To no reasonable person's surprise, disputes in and between such groups, whether they be over power, women, or between spatting family members, quickly turn into feuds between competing "prophets", all brandishing purportedly-infallible "prophecies" supporting their own desires. And, all too frequently, sending their followers out to wreak "divinely sanctioned" mayhem or murder.

Krakauer does a good job of showing how the thought of being a "prophet" or divinely-sanctioned dictator works like an addictive drug on someone, like Ron Lafferty, who's already prone to be self-centered and eager to exert power over others. Whether he really believes that the "revelations" come from God or not is almost irrelevant, because the ability to use them to bludgeon others into doing one's will eventually becomes not only a temptation, but a habit and a psychological crutch. In the end, even a deceiver can end up deceiving himself. The elder Lafferty brother's bizarre courtroom antics, and his lawyer's desperate attempts to save his life by trying to convince a jury that he's insane, provide the only note of comedy in an otherwise grim tale. At one point, Krakauer points out that under certain psychological theories, anyone who believes in the existence of God, or gods, or angels or any other supernatural beings, is automatically considered insane. (These theories were apparently quickly abandoned as legal guides when the decidedly theistic population of Utah heard them discussed in court.)

It's difficult to know what to say in conclusion. On the one hand, any religion which teaches that present-day private "revelation" can supercede or contradict earlier teachings or scriptures leaves the intellectual path wide open for egomaniacs like Lafferty to concoct whatever "revelations" they please. On the other hand, renouncing the validity of all present-day "revelation" sounds uncomfortably like an announcement that God is dead, or at any rate that the religion in question has lost touch with him/her/it/them. Such implied statements don't make for enthusiastic converts.

Teaching that present-day revelations can be valid insofar as they are consistent with prior scriptures seems like the obvious answer. And yet this can simply fossilize prior human errors in the recording or understanding of those same scriptures. It also presupposes a consistent God, which not all religions necessarily assume. I once had an interesting discussion with a Mormon who allowed that she considered it possible that God continued to learn and mature over time, an idea which is anathema to most orthodox Christian churches, and can appear utterly terrifying if one extends it to the logical extreme of a capricious God arbitrarily changing the "rules" of the universe, or of morality, in mid-stream.

An example of what could be

I've commented before about the harmful effect of the US's current copyright law, and the intellectually impoverishing practice of giving away yet more years of legally-protected monopoly every time the intellectual-property-owning industries ask for it.

The Michigan County History project is one example of what dedicated scholarly and historical groups can accomplish when not hobbled by perpetual copyright bans. It supplies searchable online full text of nearly two hundred county histories published before 1926. Most of these books are long out of print and hard to find, and supplying their text online today is hardly a financial hardship to the original author or publisher, even if the original publishing company still exists. There are a great many books and other materials published after 1926 which are similarly out of print, but which cannot be legally made available in the same fashion because the dead hand of perpetually-extensible copyright laws, repeatedly extended for the enrichment of the owners of a relatively small number of perennially-popular works, forbids it.

JSTOR and other academic databases frequently use what they call a "moving wall", a contractual prohibition on coverage of the most recent three to five years worth of certain journals. This parallels the original intent of US copyright law: to protect a creators' and publishers' right to profit from new work, but make past works available on a regular and continuing basis as time goes by. The IP barons who profit from perpetual monopoly on a few perpetually popular works wish to fix that wall forever at 1926, with no new material ever again entering the public domain. But it's long past time for the wall to start moving again.

Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, free at last!

Last week was my last week working for "Huron State" until fall, which means that for the next two months I'm only working half-time at Suburban Public Library. I've spent the last few days revelling in my newfound freedom to do things like wash clothes, read books, buy groceries, read e'mail, make telephone calls, swim in the pool my rent money pays for, and cook real breakfasts rather than gnawing on cold, chewy bagels while driving through deranged bumper-to-bumper commuter traffic. Living, in other words, without timing everything to the minute to fit into the miniscule crevices of time left over between Job Number One and Job Number Two. It's been wonderful.

In the process I've neglected to write much. Clearly this is a situation to be rectified....

Is this what John McCain and Russ Feingold had in mind?

Via the Carpetbagger Report: The Hill (um, different Hill) is reporting that the Republican party intends to use the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law to prohibit advertisement of Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 911, which opens in theaters tomorrow.

This, of course, is exactly what critics of the law, ranging from the far right to the far left, said it would be used for: to silence political criticism for the benefit of incumbents.

A theater in A-squared plans to have a midnight showing of Fahrenheit 911 tonight. I haven't quite made up my mind to go tonight, but I'll be seeing it someday soon. Just to piss off the Bushites.

Girls = Evil proved (or maybe not)

From The Slasinski Log: A mathematical proof that Girls = Evil. And a rejoinder showing that girls can be either evil or -evil. Which, I suppose, just proves that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was right.

W Ketchup?

Recently advertised in the pages of the magazine my brother refers to as the Weekly Republican: W Ketchup. Hey, with a handful of French -- er, freedom fries -- that makes two servings of fresh vegetables! (See here and here.)

Now... what about those unpatriotic traitors who are still eating the enemy's mustard?

But perhaps the bottle's label says more than its hucksters think it does. Look closely at the bottle. Don't the "colonial soldiers" look just a tad, er, menacing? And George Washington doesn't just look traditionally grumpy -- he actually appears to be blushing in shame at this latest indignity.

You never know what you'll find in a book

Courtesy of Lady Crumpet's Armoire: the Wall Street Journal discusses the "unintended mysteries" of personal items left inside used books.

For the readers' delectation, here's a highly selective list of the most interesting debris of previous owners' lives that I've found inside secondhand (or library) books over the years:

* A pressed red rose resting upon the title page of that most chivalric of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Knight's Tale.
* A long, phantasmagoric poem full of occult references, dedicated to the poet's One True Love and inscribed on the flyleaf of an ominous-looking, black-bound copy of Frazier's The Golden Bough.
* A $20 bill, used as a bookmark in a book of model-railroad plans.
* A cancelled check with Ernest Thompson Seton's signature, laid into an inscribed copy of one of his wife's books about southwestern Indians.
* In a long-ago library book sale: an inscription to a friend... from myself!
* Just yesterday, at Suburban Public Library: what appears to be a wallet-sized high-school yearbook photograph of "Kenny", with a note on the back indicating that "it's great to still be friends with you", and also noting that he thinks D. "is really GREAT" and he plans to marry her.

Here's how bad the Bush Administration is:

It's making people nostalgic -- nostalgic! -- for the Clinton Administration, prompting adoring fans to stand in line for Clinton's recently-published autobiography despite horrible reviews. ("badly conceived, flatly written, poorly edited...." -- CNN). And good 'ol Bill is happy to cash in, of course....

The man was a lecher and a liar and a con artist. But at least he didn't go around starting unnecessary wars while his henchmen dismantled the Constitution.

Orrin Hatch wants to outlaw your VCR

Senator Orrin Hatch (Republican, representing the RIAA/MPAA) reportedly plans to introduce a bill cunningly titled the "INDUCE" Act of 2004 sometime in the near future. That's short for "Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation Act". Hatch is lying through his teeth by pretending that the bill has anything to do with "protecting the children". Nothing even remotely relevant to children appears anywhere in the text of the bill. (Also available here for anyone who doesn't like .pdf's.)

What the bill's all about is suppressing technological development and suppressing our Constitutional rights to free speech and legal representation, all for the benefit of the poor lil' ol' media industry, which just happens to have donated large amounts of money to Senator Hatch's slush fund. It seeks to do so by extending liability for any conceivable potential copyright infringement to anyone who "aids, abets, induces, counsels, or procures" such infringement. The past legal actions of the Hollywood IP barons (the Sony Betamax case, for example) have made it abundantly clear that producing hardware or software capable of copying anything they don't want copied will be considered to fall in this category, whether or not the product has legitimate non-infringing uses, whether or not any significant number of people actually use it for illegal activities. So will academic and technical discussions of encryption or copy-prevention technology -- remember the RIAA's legal threats against computer researcher Edward Felten? So will political and editorial statements "inducing" or "counseling" anything that Jack Valenti objects to. (You remember him -- the "What's Fair Use" fellow?) And one legal scholar even suggests that Hatch and Co. are stealing an idea from the Bush "Justice" Department's recent prosecutions of attorneys who represent government-targeted defendants, and, by including the word "counsel", seek to effectively outlaw legal representation of anyone accused of copyright infringement.

Don't take my word for it. See what Declan McCullagh, the Electronic Frontier Foundation , and the folks over at Copyfight have to say. (More assorted ranting and raving available via Slashdot.)

Orphaned newspapers find a home

Nicholson Baker, in his 2001 book Double Fold, mercilessly excorciated librarians and archivists who, according to Baker, have abandoned their role as preservers of the published record, especially long print runs of old newspapers and magazines, in favor of flashy but flawed modern technologies such as microfilm and electronic "archives", or in many cases in favor of simply dumping everything that wasn't new and "sexy" into landfills with no attention whatsoever to the preservation of the historical record. Microfilmed copies are bedeviled by missing pages, poorly photographed images, loss of color information, and awkward means of access; electronic images may have all of the above problems, plus extortionately high subscription rates. Both have other problems as well.

Unlike many activists, though, Baker had both the will and the means to do something substantive about his bete noire, and when he heard of an extensive collection of 19th-century American newspapers that was being discarded by the British Library, he took action to acquire them and preserve them.

In thanks, the snobs of the library world sneered at him. He was roundly derided as a meddling outsider and a crank. Comfortably ensconced in their offices and committees and roundtables, the library administrators who have the time and job security to comment publicly upon such things snickered knowingly that he'd never find a home for them, that he was a mere dilettante who would soon lose interest, that he'd get tired of paying storage bills, that the newspapers would never be publicly accessible.

Wrong. (See also here, here, here.)

Nice work if you can get it

The library aboard Cunard's newest liner, the Queen Mary II, just below the bridge.

But -- gasp! -- according to the June 15 issue of Library Journal, they do not have an MLS-holding librarian!

Should I inquire, I wonder?

Libertarian campaign blog

Thanks to Carlos for sending me the link to the weblog for Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian presidential candidate. (More-or-less static campaign website here.) One of the blog posts is titled, forthrightly, "Libertarians hope to cost Bush the election", presumably by attracting the votes of fiscally responsible, small-government conservatives who can't stomach the abuses of the current Republican regime. More power to 'em.

Who else but a libertarian would be willing to appear on both the O'Reilly Factor *and* a Gay Pride parade? In the same week, no less?

From the Austin Chronicle:

If they can't win outright, the Libertarians are hoping that they can pressure President Bush from the right much in the way Ralph Nader is running to John Kerry's left, especially in battleground states like Wisconsin, Oregon, and Nevada. They hope to appeal to Republicans disaffected by the Bush administration's war in Iraq as well as its economic policies – many conservatives, like U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Surfside (himself a former Libertarian presidential candidate), oppose both the war and the administration's willingness to engage in deficit spending on a massive scale.

Badnarik is on record strongly opposing the war in Iraq as imperial military adventurism, and the USA-PATRIOT Act as a dangerous restriction on constitutionally guaranteed liberties. He also opposes all gun laws – saying he moved from California to Texas largely because of his opposition to California restrictions on gun ownership....

Robert Heinlein would be proud

The world's first privately-funded manned spacecraft takes off in pursuit of the $10 million Ansari X Prize.

Mysterious Texana

An unidentified collector of materials about the early history of Texas died recently, and Sotheby's is putting his collection up for auction.

But where did they come from?

Of chat reference

In each of the academic libraries at which I've worked, the administration and staff have gone to significant effort to provide virtual or "chat" reference service. At each of those two libraries, the response from library users has been decidedly underwhelming. Now it is possible that the limited times during which the libraries have offered this service, or a lack of publicity, or technical glitches, could be partially responsible for this. But it leads me to wonder whether there's really any patron demand for such a service, or if it's just a service in search of an audience, something that libraries feel compelled to do just because they can, and because all the cool libraries are doing it.

An article from the Spring 2004 issue of Reference and User Services Quarterly appears to support my sour thoughts on the subject. (Johnson, Corey. "Online Chat Reference : Survey Results from Affiliates of Two Universities". Reference and User Services Quarterly 43 (2004): 237-247.) Those interested in reading all the gory details can look it up in print, but here are the statistics that caught my attention:

Percentage of students and faculty who have used chat reference: 3.3%
Percentage of students and faculty who cite chat as their first choice for reference service: 4.4%

One of the reasons frequently cited for chat reference service is that library users with only one dial-up telephone line cannot call the reference desk for in-person telephone assistance while connected to the internet (and, presumably, using library catalogs or databases.) Is this likely to be a factor in the future? More and more people are using broadband internet which does not interfere with their use of a landline telephone; more and more will likely start using voice-over-internet services which permit voice telephone service to co-exist with internet connectivity; and wireless or cellular voice communication seems to be increasingly ubiquitous. How many people actually prefer conducting reference inquiries via awkward, abbreviated chat messages instead of speaking in person, if both options are available?

The survey in the article also suggested that 35.6% of faculty and students thought chat reference service would be the most widely used library service in ten years, but given my experience with rarely-used chat services and the vanishingly small percentage of users who say they have in fact used such services, I'm skeptical.

Smoke on the water, a fire in the sky

Immediately after sending a message about this disaster off to a library listserv that was discussing cruise ship disasters, I received an Aurora Alert from the GSE-AA list:

Subject : [gse-aa] Auroral Alert
Date : Thu, 17 Jun 2004 09:43:52 -0800
There was a solar flare on the 16th of June. The shock from this flare
should reach about midnight on the 17th GMT. This means that the
distortion in the solar wind that leads to auroral activity should occur
during the night over the USA. This prediction may be as much as 10
hours off, but it would be worth it to check the northern sky tonight if
you live in the northern half of the US.

Greenwich Mean Time-to-local-time conversion here (click on the appropriate flag).

*Sigh*. My life is turning into a Deep Purple song. That's scary.

Happy Bloomsday, everybody!

Although I have never made it through a single book by James Joyce, far be it from me to wish ill to his faithful followers.

Toxic waste? What toxic waste?

Senator Inhofe, the Oklahoma blowhard best known for his spirited defense of torture, sadomasochistic pornography, and war crimes, has sneaked a little present into a highways appropriations bill, which could radically affect citizens', local governments', and other researchers' access to routine information about the transportation facilities in their midst. Details at ALAWON.

Just one more case of the current crop of Republicans' obsession with hiding information.

Supremes dodge the Big Question on Newdow case
(and Justice Thomas goes Over the Rainbow)

It's old news by now, but since I mentioned the case when it was first argued, I should mention the Court's decision in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow, the case in which an atheist parent sued to prevent his child's school district from requiring her to recite the Pledge of Allegiance on the grounds that the phrase "under God" constituted a governmental establishment of religion. Disappointingly for those who love legal Armageddons, the Court ruled against Newdow on the narrow, technical grounds that under the child custody agreement between him and his ex-wife, she had final legal custody of the daughter on whose behalf he filed the lawsuit, and that he therefore did not have standing to sue.

The interesting part of the opinion, after one wades through pages of minutiae about parental custody, is the concurring opinions. Rehnquist and O'Connor argue predictably that the "under God" phrase does not violate the First Amendment prohibition of establishment of religion because of its traditional and ceremonial nature. To tell the truth, their arguments sound a bit weaselly, but that's usual when judges try to navigate the dangerous waters between the words of the Constitution and the desires of themselves and a significant portion of the population. But then Justice Thomas, as this blogger puts it, goes "over the rainbow" and asserts a novel-to-me claim that the Fourteenth Amendment, although it does extend to the states the First Amendment right to individual religious free expression, somehow fails to correspondingly extend the federal ban on establishment of religion. Thus Thomas bluntly asserts that, under existing establishment-clause jurisprudence, requiring the Pledge of Allegiance with the words "under God" does violate the First Amendment -- but then argues that the existing jurisprudence should be abandoned in favor of his own novel theory that it doesn't matter because the "establishment" clause of the First Amendment, unlike every other part of it, doesn't apply to state governments.

Theoretically, his argument would permit every state to set up its own official, established church, and, presumably, use governmental power to promote that state church, so long as it didn't overtly infringe on individual free exercise of religion enough to attract federal attention. How'd you like to be an atheist living in Utah, or for that matter, a Mormon living in South Carolina, under this theory of law?

More Baptist battles

The Southern Baptist Convention, largest Baptist denomination in the U.S., has huffily taken its marbles and gone home rather than play nice with the Baptist World Alliance which it helped to found in 1905, according to this story from USATODAY. Also here, here, here, and here. (The SBC website, as of 8:00 p.m. this evening, apparently sees no reason to publicize this to its readers, preferring instead to push a legal proposal to seize centralized control of local Baptist institutions while evading financial responsibility for them.)

The vote to leave the worldwide Baptist organization reportedly is in response to a report which

"...complained that some in the alliance had questioned "the truthfulness of Holy Scripture," refused to affirm the necessity of conscious faith in Jesus Christ for salvation, promoted women preachers, criticized the SBC and its foreign mission board and adopted an "anti-American" tone.

The last straw came in 2003, when the alliance accepted as a member the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a rival group to the SBC formed by moderates who oppose denominational leaders' conservative policies.

Prior to Tuesday's vote, Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, said the SBC should not give money or endorsement to an organization that includes liberals. (AP via USATODAY)

So much for "God so loved the world." Paige Patterson's God, and the God of the SBC, apparently only loves conservative Americans. Is it any wonder that the rate of baptism in the SBC continues to shrink, when its leaders are this determined to lash it to the mast of a sinking political ship? And when they display more interest in worldly powermongering and politically "punishing" anyone who criticizes them than they do in preaching the Good News of forgiveness, or doing the good works that Jesus advocated? So determined, in other words, to rigidly ossify themselves into ultimate irrelevance?

I guess I forgot to read the part of the Bible where Jesus said that the purpose of his church was to be pro-American. Or pro-capitalist. Or that Caesar -- er, President Bush -- was the leader of the church. Is that somewhere in the Book of Republicans, maybe?

I may disagree with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship about some things, but at least I'm reasonably sure that the moderate churches that make up their membership would at least be willing to talk with me if I showed up on their doorstep, shaggy hair, doubts and all. And that, not the increasingly Pharisaical Southern Baptist Convention, looks a whole lot more like the true ministry of the Son of Man. You remember, that shaggy-haired guy who ministered to thieves, lepers, criminals, and prostitutes? And chased the crooked moneychangers out of the Temple with a whip in his hand?

Chop chop.

"Huron State" president resigns, takes job in Washington DC.

DANGER -- PHILOSOPHY

I thought Carlos might enjoy this cover from a recent issue of Philosophy Now.

Hearts of Darkness

One of the only truly insightful essays to appear in National Review lately was Theodore Dalrymple's "Hearts of Darkness", from the May 31 issue:

"We all want to think that our boys are different, that they would never stoop to the vile practices of foreign despots, such as the abuse of captives of the torture of prisoners. But this is to forget the meaning of Original Sin: that there is within each and every one of us a capacity for wrongdoing and evil, awaiting only an opportunity to assert itself. And chief among these opportunities is the possession of unbridled power over others....."

So, if this is true, why is NR so gung-ho about giving unbridled power, without any legal or moral restraints, to the Executive branch? (Sadly, the article is not available on line.)

The world's most expensive parking ticket?

From the July issue of Trains magazine:

A Union Pacific coal train blocked a grade crossing near Caledonia, Wis., for more than six hours April 18, and racked up more than $13,000 in fines, according to the Racine Journal Times.

The train was delivering coal to a nearby power plant. The crew parked the train, uncoupled the diesels, and left. The rear car of the train blocked the crossing from at least 4:33 to 10:33 p.m.

Caledonia police issued 20 tickets. Nineteen of them, written every 20 minutes, carry a fine of $660 for blocking the highway. The other, for $1280, was for being a public nuisance. It was the sixth time since October 2003 UP had been cited for similar violations.

Union Pacific said the crew had broken thetrain apart to open one crossing, but didn't realize it was blocking another.

I'd feel more sympathetic toward the Yellow Borg if they didn't have such a track record (so to speak) of arrogance toward railfans, modelers, employees, and everybody else. Clearly the Caledonia cops were fed up with the repeat offenses.

The Stepford Wives

The version of the story that's now playing in theaters is more of a comedy than a paranoid thriller in the style of the book it's loosely based on. The cloying sweetness of Stepford -- the ultimate "gated community" -- is played to a point almost beyond satire, and scenes such as the extended closeup on the face of Nicole Kidman's character after she receives bad news early in the film, or a subsequent scene in which a Stepford Wife goes haywire in the middle of a dance floor, or the very strange gag about a oddly-located ATM machine, are so broadly comedic that it's difficult to feel any real sense of danger as the secrets of Stepford work their way closer to the surface. However, some of the comedic bits work on their own merits, and the film does have an entertaining surprise ending that has something to say about either sex regarding the other as a trophy or prize possession. The opening sequence, with its short, sharp parody of so-called "reality" shows, also says something about a culture in which people feel entitled or obliged to "conquer" the other. If all relationships must have a "winner" and a "loser" who is, at best, treated as a submissive possession, can anything but Stepford or some other dysfunctional social order be the result?

A lazy day

I had ambitious plans for Saturday. I was going to drive up to Owosso and go to the opening day of this group's railroad museum. What happened instead is that I slept late, and once I finally dragged my lazy self out of bed, I decided to spend the day reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn instead. So I'll just have to check out the railroad museum at some later time. These upcoming "opportunities" look a little too expensive. Not to mention that paying good money to be fireman, i.e., shovel several tons of coal by hand, sounds just a bit too much like a certain famous literary prank. Fortunately, they seem to have a steam-powered excursion scheduled for later in the summer, when I'll have more time.

I started reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn after it was recommended to me by a student worker at "Huron State". I'd heard of the book for years, of course, but never got around to reading it. It was a pleasant surprise.

The book really doesn't have much of a plot. There's no obvious didactic point to it, nor does it follow the standard rising-to-a-climax and falling-to-denoument pattern that most of us learned about in school. It meanders slowly from one chapter to the next, with a substantial part of the middle of the book being told out of chronological order. It begins with Francie, the central character, at the age of eleven, but then digresses into a lengthy account of her parent's lives and her earlier life. One major character's death "before the age of thirty" is asserted by the author long before she ever gets around to recounting that portion of the character's life. Exciting action and plot development are not good reasons to read this book; however, it has an incredible wealth of character development and detailed observation of life in the Brooklyn tenements in the early twentieth century. Stephen Crane turned a much more withering gaze on those same tenements in his short, bitter Maggie : a Girl of the Streets. Smith's book is a bit gentler in tone, but the same hazards are present.

The whole book reads as if the author had turned a microscope onto the lives of her characters in order to examine their lives and characters in a leisurely fashion, and it's somewhat to the reader's surprise that such ordinary people turn out to be so interesting. A good book to read on a slow, lazy Saturday. But may all the gods there be protect me and all others who toil in the stacks from becoming like the librarian in the book:

Each week Francie made the same request and each week the librarian asked the same question. A name on a card meant nothing to her and since she never looked up into a child's face, she never did get to know the little girl who took a book out every day and two on Saturday. A smile would have meant a lot to Francie and a friendly comment would have made her so happy. She loved the library and was anxious to worship the lady in charge. But the librarian had other things on her mind. She hated children anyhow. (p. 24)

Later in the day, some co-workers drafted me to go see the current iteration of The Stepford Wives. More on that tomorrow.

Libertarians vs. Libraries

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a free-market libertarian thinktank best known for advocating homeschooling in Michigan and being sued on extremely dubious grounds by a Michigan teacher's union, now wants the state of Michigan to stop funding public libraries. "Libraries need not be public entities...."

This question has come up before, and I'm no closer to resolving the philosophical conflict between politically libertarian ideals and my love of libraries that don't try to hardsell their customers on the latest hype, carry only the highest-volume-selling items, summarily dump "unsold" backstock, or do any of the other less savory things that commercial entities do. ("Buy three Harry Potters, get a Nicholas Sparks free!") Or restrict their users to members of certain social/economic classes or organizations, as a private organization would be able to do.

It's unclear to me whether Mackinac's proposal would also eliminate services like the Michigan Electronic Library, a state consortium-purchasing plan that makes an impressive number of electronic databases available to individual state residents as well as libraries. Most rural libraries would be unable to pay for any significant number of these, and as small individual purchasers, what kind of bargaining power would they have in a database market that is rapidly being consolidated and dominated by a few very large corporate players, a market in which new entrants to the business are highly constrained by copyright laws?

It's also unclear to me whether Mackinac's homeschooling followers around the state would be pleased to have their public libraries, a potential major source of educational materials, have to cut back their operations.

I doubt that this proposal will be taken seriously outside of the MCPP's core team of ideological True Believers, but still....

Parallels

A few days ago, I serendipitously noticed a book in "Huron State"'s return cart, and picked it up: The Stoning of Soraya M.. It's a horrifying and gruesomely detailed documentary account of an incident in which a 35-year-old woman in a rural village in Iran was stoned to death in 1986. What's particularly horrible about it, beyond the sheer brutality of such a punishment for "adultery", is the fact that she was very clearly innocent. Her husband (a petty crook) and the village's fraudulent "imam" (an educated embezzler on the run from the law) consciously and deliberately concocted a false accusation and manipulated village opinion so that her husband could free himself from the obligation of supporting her and afford to acquire a newer and younger wife in the city.

This is, as the author points out, only one of over a thousand such cases.

While I was reading it, certain aspects of the story began to sound extremely familiar. The references to the young girl accidentally losing a kite, the husband's preference for flashy cars and prostitutes over his wife and children, the reference to a stone representing the "pillar of Shayton" [i.e., Satan}, all sounded strangely familiar. Eventually, I realized why. One of Susan's poems bears a very close resemblance to this story. Close enough that she must have read it, or heard or read another source about the same case, even though she assigned a different name to the main character. It was an odd feeling to realize this -- that I was reading something she had read years ago, something that had impressed itself upon her mind strongly enough to become part of her own writing. It would have been fascinating to ask her about this and see what she had to say. But that's impossible.

O happy day!

While toiling away diligently at job #2, Suburban Public Library's reference desk, I inquired whether the person ordering the library's science fiction and fantasy materials would be interested in seeing the review sections from my subscriptions to Locus and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Instead, she said "Why don't you just take over ordering them?", and assigned an unexpectedly generous amount of money to last through November.

Happiness is... an acquisitions budget.

It came from Lubbock, Texas....

Carlos may be interested in finding out about yet another pop-culture scion of the high plains, as reviewed here by Charles de Lint.

Holidays are wonderful things!

(Editorial note, 6/5: I wrote this post on Wednesday and haven't had time to post it since. Such is the life of a boomer librarian....)

Thanks to the Memorial Day holiday and some relaxing time with the Pablo the illustrious (but still Blogless) and M., I've been feeling rested and ready (if not yet tanned) since the past weekend. We'll see how long that lasts.

Summary of the weekend:

Saturday:

Lunch at the Sidetrack Bar & Grill. I never would have thought of french-frying sweet potatoes, but they're surprisingly good that way, especially with a little horseradish sauce. Sadly, despite its trackside location, not a single steel wheel was anywhere to be seen.

The Automotive Heritage Museum across the street was an interesting place to visit, with some real rarities on display. Multiple Corvairs were in evidence, in recognition of the fact that they were built just east of town at the Willow Run plant. (I doubt that Ralph Nader will ever garner many votes around here!) I found the working, cutaway model of the Corvair's unusual flat-six engine to be quite entertaining, and I wish the straight-six in my truck had the oomph of the ones that Hudson put in its stock-car racers in the early 1950s.

Off with Pablo and M. to the Real Seafood Company. Managed to get a table this time. Pricy, pricy, pricy! But good.

Off then with Pablo and M. to the next-to-last showing of the Threepenny Opera. I've commented about seeing this before. I enjoyed seeing it again. Some of the actors' mannerisms seemed a bit stagier than they did before, but this could have been just because they were more familiar. As usual, I found myself humming one of Weill's catchy little paeans to human depravity most of the way home.

Sunday, off with Pablo to Frankenmuth, Michigan, a town once settled by German immigrants which nowadays styles itself "Michigan's Little Bavaria". A bit touristy but entertaining. On the way back stopped off at the Junction Valley Railroad, the work of a man with a fascinating obsession to build his own quarter-size railroad... from scratch. I can't even imagine spending hundreds of thousands of hours in a machine shop building welded-steel cars and locomotives, each of which weighs several tons. Not to mention laying a spaghetti-bowl of miles of intertwining track for them to run on. It's safe to say that this guy is no longer a "model railroader". When your layout-construction tools are shovels and backhoes rather than hammers and nails, it ain't modeling!

Sunday evening: Finally got around to sampling the Dalat restaurant in downtown Y-ville. Excellently spicy. Spent evening discussing life, the universe and everything. Adjourned pending further discussion.

Things of Caesar and Things of God

A couple of news stories about clashes between religious belief and governmental power caught my eye lately.

In this story from CNN, park officials have decreed that a Baptist church group may not use the waters of a public park to do open-air baptisms a la John the Baptist. Fortunately, it seems that several religious and civil-liberties groups have weighed in on the side of the besieged Baptists. "Wade in the water, children, the courts gonna trouble the waters...."

In this case, the Michigan Department of Health has insisted that six Amish families in Gladwin county install large septic systems which the Amish say are not only unnecessary, due to their simple way of life, but against their religious principles. (Other articles here, and elsewhere.) Although the story dates from 2002/2003, I haven't yet found a record of a final decision.

Texas versus the Unitarians

Pablo, Louise, and others have brought to my attention the recent controversy over Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn's decision to revoke the tax-exempt status of a Unitarian Universalist church in Denison, Texas. (News stories here, here, here, and elsewhere.) The comptroller seems to have used two litmus tests, depending on which story you read. One requires that a "church" must have a single, unified system of belief; the other requires belief in a "God, Gods, or a supreme being". As Pablo points out, many Baptist churches arguably would not meet the first requirement because of the longstanding aversion of many Baptists to any formally written "creed". (Jokes about this are a dime-a-dozen. For example: Q: "If you put two Baptists in a room, how many intepretations of the Bible do you get?" A: "At least three!" Or, Q: "Do you belong to any organized religion?" A: "No sir, I'm a Baptist!") And others have pointed out that certain varieties of Buddhism, for example, do not mandate belief in a Supreme Being.

The cold, hard facts? Strayhorn's decisions seem to be motivated, more than anything else, by the amount of favorable media attention a church is able to muster up. Political pressure, not any kind of principle, seems to be the most important factor in the decisions made by her and prior Texas Comptrollers. Consider:

From the Houston Chronicle article linked above: "Shortly after Sharp's staff granted the Ethical Society of Austin its religious status, the Austin American-Statesman ran a story about it with the headline "Godless Group Gets Religious Exemption. That same morning, Sharp reversed his staff and ordered no organization be granted religious status unless it believes in "God, Gods or a higher power." In the Texas courts, this became known as the "Supreme Being test."

From the Baptist Standard: "Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn abruptly reversed course after her office's denial of tax-exempt status to a North Texas church because of its beliefs--or lack of them--attracted media attention."

No such favorable media attention has come to the rescue of North Texas Church of Freethought, wiccans in Copperas Cove, pagans in Bastrop. And so they remain officially "not religious".

I myself have mixed feelings about religious exemption from taxation. And I'm certainly aware that claims of religiosity can be frivolous. But there's got to be a better standard than mere political popularity.

"It's kind of like a sexy take on a librarian."

Ordinarily I have little interest in linking to stories about feminine fashion. But the statement above makes this story marginally blogworthy.

But what happened to the other half?

According to the Kansas City Star, the city of Blue Springs, Missouri, recently returned "almost half" -- $132,000 -- of a $273,000 federal grant which it received in 2002 "to fight a perceived growing Goth culture." Was the city was in imminent danger of being inundated with mopey, pasty-faced teens in black eyeliner?

Apparently not. Sadly, it seems that the city lacked any Goth culture to fight. And it only cost $141,000 to find this out.

Thanks to Neil Gaiman's blog/online journal for the link.

Harry, meet Lyra

The Boston Herald reports that a cinematic version of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials books is in the making. I expect a certain degree of controversy to ensue, unless the plot and characters of the books are significantly altered. Pullman's books have a much darker take on religion and the supernatural than J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" or C.S. Lewis's "Narnia" books.

Thanks to Miss Katherine for the link.

A correction

It appears that the young woman who created the Chernobyl motorcycle-trip photostory that I linked to a while back may have indulged in some creative writing. (See this entry from Neil Gaiman's online journal and the Museum of Hoaxes' comment.)

The photos are still haunting, even if the accompanying prose was fictionalized.

(Also found through the Museum of Hoaxes: the Little-Known Attractions of a town that I can now openly identify as Lynchburg, Virginia. The grain silo of "Hugh Johnson" should look familiar to some readers.)

Some more satirical posters...

This blogger has created some entertaining posters about a certain voting manufacturer who Shall Not Be Named.

Considering said company's track record of using "aggressive interpretations" of the DMCA and other intellectual property laws to silence criticism, one wonders how long the page will be up.

BlöödHag

This band has been mentioned several times on the LU list. Anyone out there heard them, or know anything about them?

Am I Blue?

Nope.


What Color is Your Brain?
brought to you by Quizilla

At work or in school: I work best by myself. I like to focus on my ideas until my desire for understanding is satisfied. I am easily bored if the subject holds no interest to me. Sometimes, it is hard for me to set priorities because so many things are of interest.
With friends: I may seem reserved. Although my thoughts and feelings run deep, I am uneasy with frequent displays of emotion. I enjoy people who are interesting and of high integrity.
With family: I am probably seen as a loner because I like a lot of private time to think. Sometimes, I find family activities boring and have difficulty following family rules that don't make sense to me. I show love by spending time with my family and sharing ideas and interests.

Link shamelessly stolen from Lady Crumpet.

Perhaps the third time will be the charm

The Oxford American, the self-styled "Southern magazine of good writing", which has already used up two of its designated number of lives, announces that it is once again back in publication, this time in association with the University of Central Arkansas. The New York Times seems to be growing sarcastic about their on-again, off-again existence, though:

The Oxford American, the Southern literary magazine born again more times than a backsliding Southern Baptist, has found salvation, and resurrection is expected in November.... The OA, as it is known, will switch from bimonthly to quarterly and will operate as a nonprofit entity, something at which it is experienced. The OA had the odd distinction of being the only magazine this year to win a National Magazine Award after it had closed.

I really do wish them the best. They're like that talented and ambitious hard-luck cousin whose brilliant plans always seem to fall just short of solvency. Do you suppose they'll honor the remaining issues on my old subscription and the gift subscriptions I gave away before their most recent demise?

Here's the dealbreaker: will there be any more Music Issues?

Editorial note, 6/2/04: The OA's new FAQ page provides some answers.

Is this our culture?

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting (and free) essay about the disturbing similarities between the notorious Abu Ghraib photographs and what Rush Limbaugh calls "good old American porn".

Ypsi-blogger Mark Maynard has made similar comments, as here.

I believe wholeheartedly in the freedom of expression and of the press. Even so, it's disheartening that so many people, given those freedoms, choose to dive straight into the gutter and stay there. Unfortunately, the perceived legitimization of violent and pseudo-violent porn has a tendency to desensitize people to real sex crimes, just as constant exposure to airbrushed, impossibly idealized "soft porn" tends to desensitize people to the actual sexuality of real live human beings. The antidemocratic Alexander Hamilton once famously said "Your people, sir, is a great Beast." Was he right?

Spam steganography

A week or two ago, I stuck this URL in my briefcase with a cryptic label, "Blogworthy". I guess it is at least mildly interesting, and if I commit it to the blog that's one more loose piece of paper I can throw away. Yay!

Spam Mimic

No good deed goes unpunished

More fun'n'games at "Huron State".

Controversy in New Mexico

Hard lessons from poetry class: Speech is free unless it's critical

This blogger has been following the story closely, and apparently got a response from the school district.

"Persons of skill will recognize numerous other embodiments of the invention as presented herein...."

It appears that Clear Channel has claimed a patent on the concept of producing digital recordings of a concert for sale immediately after the concert. Discussed here and here and probably elsewhere.

Seems to me that fans of the Grateful Dead, among others, have been doing this kind of thing for decades. I'm not sure exactly what C.C. is claiming as a novelty here. Considering how much verbiage in the patent is devoted to piously declaiming against evil "bootleggers", and that C.C. is already filing lawsuits to stop bands from recording and selling live CD's of their own concerts as described here, it doesn't look like a good development.

A peek around the corner...

... at what may lie ahead if Bush wins the election this fall:

U.S. preparing for military draft in spring of 2005

From UtneReader (and other sources):

After the champagne popping from Washington to Crawford, Texas subsides, a re-elected President George W. Bush would reinstate the military draft sometime next spring. Legislation is already on the table in both the House and the Senate, in the form of twin bills S 89 and HR 163, "in order to staff up for a protracted war on terrorism...."

The bills in question -- S 89 and HR 163 -- can be looked up here.

Muskogee school district reverses rules on religious headcoverings

An update on a news story that I discussed several months ago. It's easy to mock and rail against silly rules; it's equally important to acknowledge when those responsible for them have the common sense to repeal them. (Even if it is under threat of a lawsuit....)

*Chuckle.*

The Billionaires for Bush are happy to explain it all for you. With a soundtrack, even!

"John Kerry is a douchebag but I'm voting for him anyway."

Couldn't agree more.

It's baaaack....

Looks like the Republicans are once again trying to sneak parts of the discredited "PATRIOT 2" bill through Congress, this time by attaching them to the fiscal 2005 intelligence authorization bill. As described by the American Library Association's Washington Office Newsletter and in this news story, the bill (HR 3179) would automatically issue gag orders for all "national security letters", expand the penalties and enforcement of such gag orders, and permit the government to "conduct secret surveillance on suspected terrorists or spies without proving that they have any affiliation with a foreign government or terrorist organization."

Is it a coincidence that this follows just a few months after this incident, in which the Bush Administration's enforcers in the FBI were forced by unfavorable and unwanted publicity to back off on their demand for the membership rolls and other internal information about a left-wing activist group? If your administration's activities displease the public, why, then, just outlaw public knowledge of them! Simple, right?

How, exactly, enquireth your Humble Correspondent, is this compatible with democracy?

For an administration that brags so much about its devotion to Christian morality, the Bushies seem much more interested in hiding their activities under bushels than in the intellectual implications of Bible verses such as John 8:32: You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

Of palms d'or and Michael Moore

Michael Moore's anti-Bush documentary 9-11 wins the top prize at one of the world's most prestigious film festivals.

But will Americans be allowed to see it?

Moore may be a bloviating blowhard, but dammit, I want to hear what he has to say and make up my own mind.

Attention readers: your IP address has been demanded by the FBI....

... if you clicked on the link to Bev Harris's Black Box Voting website (www.blackboxvoting.com) in a posting on this blog earlier this year. For further details see this story at Seattle Weekly; for wildly erratic discussion, see Slashdot. Harris is the activist whose criticism of the flaws of electronic voting machines has been instrumental in leading states like California to ban machines which do not produce a voter-verifiable audit trail.

Diebold, Inc., headed by Bush fund-raiser Walden O'Dell, yesterday announced to that it intends to keep churning out the machines.

Have a nice day.

Editorial note, 5/26: corrected minor factual error.

Time keeps on tickin', tickin', tickin'....

As some of you may already know, Your Humble Correspondent is now working two different jobs in a desperate effort to stay above the ever-rising sea of credit card debt and ward off the menacing specter of two upcoming months of unemployment thanks to a certain university's policy of not keeping low-ranking library staff on the payroll all year. As a result, I haven't really had the time to devote as much attention as I should to writing about the things that I think about the most.

What, you thought off-the-cuff comments about television miniseries-in-production were the only thing on my mind while the Iraqi prison scandal and Diebold voting machines were making headlines 'round the world?

Don't know me very well, do you?

Unfortunately, those topics demand more focused thought than I've been able to muster while charging back and forth between two jobs. Although the following noirish quote from Raymond Chandler's Farewell My Lovely deals with a different aspect of the truth-seeking business, it pretty well portrays my attitude toward life these days:

I needed a drink. I needed a lot of life insurance. I needed a vacation. I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.

Since I have tomorrow off, I'll try to use that time to get some of this stuff off my mind and into the ether instead.

Farewell to RefGrunt

After a year of chronicling the day-to-day grind of library service, Ref Grunt has retired his blog, saying that updating it had become a chore rather than a pleasure. I can understand the feeling, but I'll still miss his laconic chronicles.

Desideratum

Another review in the Feb. Locus caught my eye:

In Stephen Dedman's "Desiree" the protagonist is a lonely high school boy named Sebastian. A friend gives him a piece of shareware called "Venus", which purports to create your ideal mate online. Sebastian plays along, and finds himself very attracted to the girl simulated by the program -- in many more ways than physically. But of course she's not "real" -- and what's more she's shareware, and if he can't pay for her she'll be deleted....

Unfortunately, the story appears only in an e'mail magazine called Oceans of the Mind, which appeareth not in the mighty tomes of WorldCat. The teaser from their website is tempting, but not enough to lay out $19.95 for a year's subscription. So I guess I will just have to hope that the story is one day published in "meatspace", rather than exclusively in virtual form.

Ironic, huh?

(Insert regularly-scheduled observation about the difficulty of archiving electronic publications here. Y'all know it well enough I don't have to type it again.)

A voyage to Earthsea?

While dredging through the debris covering my desk, I came across the still-unread February issue or Locus. Good thing I noticed it, too, because right there on page eight was a photo of Ursula LeGuin, with a caption stating that "the miniseries based on the first two novels of her 'Earthsea' saga for the Sci-Fi Channel has been given the green light to begin production in New Zealand this Spring." A little more digging (on the web, this time) led to more information and an invigorating interview in the Guardian in which the GrandMistress herself discusses the miniseries, Dr. Who, dreams, and other stuff:

Q: Perhaps you feel a bit out of step with your contemporaries?

UKL: Why should a woman of 74 want to be "in step with" anybody? Am I in an army, or something?

By casting Danny Glover, Kristin Kreuk, and Isabella Rossellini in leading roles, the producers seem to be paying at least some attention to LeGuin's description of the people of Earthsea as primarily dark-haired and dark-skinned. Of course, the main character may look a little pale by comparison....

What will matter more than cosmetics, in any sense of that word, is whether the series manages to capture the psychological subtlety of LeGuin's work. Yes, Ged is a wizard-in-training, but his reasons for his journeys and tests are a bit less obvious than a game of Quidditch, and the far-flung, culturally fragmented archepelagoes of Earthsea are more varied than Hogwarts Academy.

Reason's June issue, again.

Courtesy of the LU list: the L.A.Times' May 18 story about the June issue of Reason magazine. My copy hasn't arrived yet, natch....

Library stuff

This webpage supplies access to Booklist book reviews from 1995 through 2003. Its author seems quite discontented with the ALA's Booklist webpage, which supplies selected current reviews but summarily announces that "As of April 2003, Booklist reviews are no longer being archived on the Web site. Turn to the print Booklist for complete review coverage."

It remains to be seen how long the non-ALA-sanctioned "backdoor" to the archived 1995-2003 reviews will remain active and unblocked. Yup, everything's available for free on the Internet, and always will be... who needs those musty old printed copies....

This link ripped from www.librarian.net, which also has some interesting links to articles about the new Seattle Public Library building. (NYT evil-registration-required article here, New Yorker here, some photos here.)

I'm not all that impressed by the appearance of the building, but I am intrigued by the New Yorker's description of the architects' arrangement of the bookstacks:

The architects saw that in most older libraries, where books are stored on rows of shelves on separate floors, collections are arbitrarily broken apart, depending on the amount of space available on each floor. But since the Dewey Decimal System is a continuous series of numbers, they reasoned, why couldn’t books be stored on a continuous series of shelves? And what if the shelves wound up and up, in a spiral? They saw that it was possible to design stacks in the manner of a parking garage, with slanted floors joined in a series of zigzagging ramps. The stacks, which the architects named the Spiral, take up the equivalent of four floors in the middle of the eleven-story building. They are open, which means that you can browse.

Melvil Dewey meets Frank Lloyd Wright!

More wisdom from Grand Rapids

Another tidbit gleaned, long after the fact, from my belated browsing of long-stockpiled issues of Locus: WOOD-TV, an all-"news" television station in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the Calvinists roam the streets like roaring lions, has deemed Asimov's Science Fiction to be (horrors!) an ADULT publication, and they are SHOCKED that it would be included on a list of magazine subscriptions available through a school fundraising program, right alongside such sterling family-oriented publications as Esquire, Vogue, GQ, and Elle.

Asimov's response here. Discussion at Analog here.

Hold it... wait a minute... something's happening here! I feel an insidious force seeping out of the computer screen. It's coming from the WOOD-TV webpage. It's making me think like their reporter! Suddenly, I see sex and nothing but sex, everywhere I look! Aigghhh....

(Long silence.)

Heh. Heh. Huh. WOOD-TV. (giggle.) They said "wood". Heh-heh! Heh-heh!

(Whap!) Shut up, assmunch!

Heh, heh....

Shut up, they explained.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports (Subscriber link):

The inspector general of the National Endowment for the Humanities is investigating a former NEH employee for allegedly leaking confidential information to The Chronicle for an article it published on the agency in January.

The inspector general, Sheldon Bernstein, sent a letter to Julia C. Bondanella, a former assistant chairman for programs at the endowment, in March, accusing her of disclosing information about grant applicants and employee matters. Ms. Bondanella, now a professor of French and Italian at Indiana University at Bloomington, was quoted in a January 16 article about flagging -- the practice of marking controversial applications, often for projects dealing with sexuality, race, or gender, for further review.

The letter threatened Ms. Bondanella with civil and criminal penalties, said her lawyer, David Colman....

The purportedly confidential information? Well, here are the paragraphs containing information attributed to Ms. Bondanella that were published in the Jan. 16 Chronicle:

Still, at least one NEH insider insists it is politics, not merit, that is now driving many decisions in the review process. Julia C. Bondanella, an old friend of Mr. Cole's at the Indiana University at Bloomington, who joined her former colleague as the endowment's assistant chairman for programs in 2001, left after just one year, in part because she felt that ideology influenced the grant-making process.

"Obviously, any chairman is going to have a political agenda to some degree," says Ms. Bondanella, who has since returned to academic life in Bloomington. "I wasn't comfortable with the way in which applications were being reviewed."

So. According to the Bush appointees at the head of the NEH, not being comfortable with an agency's procedures, and acknowledging that administrators have political agendas, constitutes "confidential information", the revelation of which warrants "civil and criminal penalties"?

Sounds like standard operating procedure for the most secretive, bullying, and corrupt presidential administration in recent history.

Bad Baby Names

I know several people who have pursued the urge to procreate. Fortunately, few of them have come up with any candidates for these lists. Or, noticably, this one.

Thanks to Louise for the link.

Missed my chance

In belatedly browsing through the April issue of Locus, I read an interview with Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which contains the following comment:

"After Kris Rusch left F&SF in 1996, Ed Ferman contacted me about the job. We had worked together on the 'Best of F&SF' anthologies, and that's how he knew me. Kris told me Ed believed the ideal age to become editor was about 30...."

Between that and a former co-worker's recent discussion of the fact that she edited the re-issue of a major series of young-adult novels in her twenties, it's pretty clear that I've missed whatever chance I might have once had for literary or editorial immortality. As luck would have it, this comes just as I start seriously reconsidering whether I should be in the library profession at all. (Five years of beating my head on various brick walls with no discernable results would tend to suggest that my talents lie elsewhere, if such talents can be said to exist at all.) I guess I'll go through the formality of applying for an associate-editorial position at this magazine, but not actually expect to receive any response other than the standard canned form letter. After all, I am Past My Prime and have No Relevant Experience.

Moving on from the depressing topic of (not) earning money to the vastly more entertaining topic of spending it, I looked through Locus's calendar of upcoming science fiction and fantasy conventions, and noticed that the Mythopoeic Society, students of J.R.R.Tolkien, C.S.Lewis, and Charles Williams, and publishers of Mythlore magazine, are holding their 35th annual MythCon just down the road this year. And guess who's coming to dinner?

At least he's older than me, and I can pretend my relative lack of achievement is due to being Too Young.

Copyfights and "hoarding"

Copyfight is another interesting blog about intellectual-property law at the dawn of the "digital millennium". This passage from Lawrence Lessig's recent appearance on behalf of the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act is quite interesting. Consider the following:

Larry: We're in the middle of a transition in the way people get access to content. The natural way now is to hoard. If the FCC doesn't screw it up, we could imagine that people in the future are persisently, ubiquitously connected. People would no longer need to be database managers. In that world the incentive to hoard goes away. Structure of access changes dramatically.

For "hoard", read: "assemble and maintain personal and institutional libraries." It's strange to think about it this way, considering the mutual hostility that exists between IP barons and librarians, but the existence of copyright law is one of the factors that necessitate the existence of widely-distributed libraries of books and other material in hard copies. Much published material from before the 1920's is readily available in full text on the Internet via Project Gutenberg and a myriad of other sources. The relative scarcity of legally available commercially-published material from more recent years is largely due to the requirements of copyright law and the threat of legal sanction should it be violated.

If, in some utopian Lessigian future, most seekers of information are indeed "persistently, ubiquitously connected", and the vast bulk of published information is readily available via that connection, many budget-minded academic and political administrators will predictably want to abolish the "cost center" of maintaining a library. After all, one might argue, it's just an expensive money-pit that duplicates what's already available for free.

Will readers' aesthetic preference for solid, printed books for personal reading be enough to keep libraries and bookstores open in such a world?

What about the need for stable and widely-distributed copies of documents of political or cultural importance? Jasper Fforde writes humorously about fictional villians removing characters from classic novels and otherwise wreaking havoc with the worlds inside books. His books are fantastic and funny because, after all, everyone knows that no one can suddenly and unilaterally alter the contents of every printed book, every copy of a newspaper or magazine, or every physically discrete CD or DVD or VHS tape in the world. But what about a world in which such hard copies were scarce, not readily available through libraries, or not published at all, or if the archived text existed only in a few centralized electronic fileservers? Several recent episodes have demonstrated that both private corporations and political rulers are all too eager to retroactively edit the published record when given the opportunity to do so by having that published record centralized in one easily-altered electronic archive. And of course, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four provided a warning, sixty years ago, of the uses to which a centralized "Ministry of Truth" might put its control over information.

Unfortunately, I'm skeptical of the impact that aesthetic pleasure or the vital-but-unremunerative need for redundant and independent recordkeeping will have on squinting budget-keepers or smoothly cynical political administrators. In my experience, library and university administrators are all too willing to pass the buck to other institutions, frequently without any concern for whether those unspecified other institutions are able or willing to take it. Public libraries blithely assume that academic libraries will pick up the slack; small and medium-sized academic libraries blithely assume that the Big U.'s and the state libraries will pick up the slack. Big U.'s predictably resent the resulting "parasitical" use of their collections, and state governors blithely (or cynically) abolish the state libraries when it suits their political purposes to do so.

This being the case, should librarians suppress their natural gag reflex and, in order to protect their profession, line up in support of the likes of Jack Valenti in their attempts to lock up intellectual property behind virtual electric fences and concertina wire? Or nobly follow the principle of free and open access to information toward a destination that may spell political doom for their institutions and their jobs? And, incidentally, abolish the very idea of a stable, reliable published record that isn't subject to political or mischievious tampering?

"Pagan fun in Y...."

Carlos forwarded me this link recently, with the tagline "Pagan fun in Y." The official website of the program discussed is available here.

I dunno. With programs like "Sex & Spells: Gender and Political Activism in the Witchen Community" (by "Macha Nightmare"), it's indubitably pagan, but I'm not so sure about the "fun" part. Since the conference registration fee is $125, I doubt that I'll find out any more than that.

Pablo "the Blogless" will no doubt be interested to know that the American Friends Service Committee LGBT Issues Program is a supporting sponsor.

The Book Bound in Pale Leather?

A rather grisly little artifact from the collection of the Boston Athenaeum.

More on H.R. 107, The Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act of 2003

Some testimony from Wednesday's hearing is available from the website of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. The comments of Gary Shapiro, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Consumer Electronics Association, are particularly enlightening:

"... One of the central failings of the DMCA is that it preserved fair use as a defense to copyright infringement, but more perniciously created the new crime of circumvention without a fair use defense. As a result, even if no infringement occurs when a consumer simply unlocks something he or she owns, he or she could be held liable under the DMCA. The Boucher-Doolittle bill would bring the two statutes into harmony by imposing liability under the DMCA only when it also exists under the Copyright Act...."

Huzzah!

Four Minnesota colleges (Macalester, Carleton, Gustavus Adolphus, and St. Olaf) tell the Dutch Pirates to walk the plank.

Now is the time for all good academics to publish via Public Library of Science, SPARC, or other open-access venues. We'll sink the scurvy dogs yet. Or at least force them to offer more flexible access plans and scale back their monopolistic profit margins to a level consistent with economic reality.

I have found the perfect woman for Carlos.

She's smart, exotically attractive, and has a sarcastic sense of humor. She's a Christian and a conservative thinker with an intellectually active professional job. She's single, and she lives within a reasonable driving distance, just across the Red River in Oklahoma. (Hey, that IS a reasonable driving distance by Texas standards!)

Unfortunately, like most such women, she's fictional.

Yes, I know it's a cheap shot...

... but I still wonder whether the CornCam really represents what Iowans do for fun.

Link found on Letters to Myself, the weblog of Jon Hansen, author of numerous sf/fantasy stories (including Tales of the Plush Cthulhu, linked below), harborer of feline armies, and (like so many good bloggers) a librarian. If any of you freelance writers out there are getting depressed by rejection letters, his blog and these stats will either depress you tremendously or give you solid proof of the tough odds that all freelancers face.

Little Bag o' Horrors

The Plush Plagues: almost as much fun as Plush Cthulhu!.

(Thanks to Louise for the link.)