Back by popular demand

Carlos, you asked for it. It's been a busy month, but I should find it easier to update the blog on a regular basis over the summer.

Goodbye to All That

As of the beginning of May, I'm no longer an Academic Librarian. I question whether I'll ever want to try that career path again. My experience in academic library-land has been that unless you're an unsuccessful would-be academic with multiple unused graduate degrees, there are no steady jobs to be had, and no opportunity to work one's way into a long-term career. Covering a university library's reference desk for twenty to thirty hours a week counts for precisely zero in the academic measure of an employee's worth. Likewise with any desire to provide good quality service to students or faculty who don't happen to be the heads of their department or the personal friends of library administrators.

In the calculus of academic careers, students and low-ranking faculty are undesirable pests to be avoided, since time spent with them detracts from the amount of time one can spend kissing administrator's asses, schmoozing with tenured colleagues, padding one's vita with "scholarly" publications that no one will ever read, and collecting and carefully arranging paper documentation for future promotions. Students (and library users generally) have no influence on hiring committees, tenure committees, or budget allocations. Therefore a wise aspiring academic will do everything possible to avoid them and avoid wasting time on them.

When I interviewed with "Huron State", I was told that the position would involve reference and bibliographic instruction as well as other duties. During the two years I was there, I was assigned to precisely one hour-long bibliographic instruction session. I was assigned twenty-two to thirty hours a week of reference desk coverage, including the majority of the library's evening hours from 6 to 10 pm. The "other projects" ranged from the fun (event-related bibliographies and displays) to the mildly interesting (investigating or confirming the availability of lists of titles) to the dull (modifying MARC records for periodicals to include links to electronic indexes and databases) to the stupendously pointless and time-consuming (transcribing information from thousands of electronic catalog records onto paper). When I questioned the methodology and purpose of the latter, I was informed in so many words that, as a lowly lecturer, I wasn't supposed to ask such questions.

Meanwhile, tenured faculty with three-day work weeks made sarcastic comments about my selfishness and disloyalty for having a second, part-time job with which to supplement my munificent $25,000-per-year salary and pay rent during my otherwise unemployed summers. Another tenured faculty member consistently refused to speak with students who had complex or specialized reference questions in her assigned subject area, and complained bitterly to the administration about mere lecturers who complicated her life by referring such students to her. And another considered it to be her perogative, as a tenure-track faculty member, to throw shrieking temper tantrums at Mere Lecturers.

Meanwhile, in addition to covering 22-30 hours of reference desk service per week, I was expected to cheerfully volunteer to cover whatever reference hours the tenure-track librarians didn't feel like covering. And, oh, by the way: lecturers get no vacation time at "Huron State", and must apply well in advance for permission to earn or use comp time.

The university is currently conducting a search for tenure-track librarians. Since I did not have the foresight to accumulate a stack of unused graduate degrees before becoming a librarian, I was not qualified to apply for said positions.

Suburban Public Library, amazingly, considers me to be capable of ordering books, organizing library programs, and doing other things that professional librarians do, despite the fact that I'm only working there part time. I've applied for a full-time position there, and I hope to get it. I may get frustrated at the paucity of resources available for in-depth historical research, non-bestseller fiction, and poetry. I may get bored dealing with a clientele made up largely of people whose interests revolve ceaselessly around the latest fad diet book, the latest quick-get-rich infomercial, the latest paint-by-numbers bestseller or right-wing political hatchet job.

But at least it would pay enough to live on.

When Roombas Attack!

I've thought of getting one of these handy little devices. Anyone who's visited my place can vouch for the need for more-frequent vacuuming.

Sadly, though, it seems they do not get along with household pets.

Thanks to the Stilyagi Air Corps for the link.

A clash of loyalties

Either way this contest went, I was going to end up both congratulating and offering condolences.

Congratulations to the Lady Bears, and condolences to the Spartan women, who will be coming home on their shields rather than carrying them (metaphorically speaking.)

Drink your way to genius!

In Bellwether, Connie Willis wrote about drinks that enhance one's mental powers. Apparently this is one more instance of science-fiction's prophetic powers. Behold Google Gulp!

Oh no!

I wonder if I'll have time to make it to Archer City this weekend.

This makes me mad

Had an unpleasant episode at work yesterday evening. A male person, wearing jeans and a beige jacket and lurking amongst the shelves of the children's area of the library, exposed his genitals to a young girl browsing the stacks. (I refuse to call such creatures "men", by the way. Biologically male he may be. A man he is not.)

Fortunately, the girl was a relative of a library worker, and felt comfortable and self-assured enough to immediately tell the library staff what was going on. When the cowardly sleazebag saw her going up to the library staff desk, he bolted out the door and was gone before anyone knew to stop him.

I'm glad nothing worse happened. My only wish? That some library staffer had known what was going on in time to stop him or at least identify him. Who knows how many other kids might not have felt self-assured enough to say anything?

One of the children's librarians spent a few minutes with the girl after the library had closed, both of them "practicing" screaming at the top of their lungs. Rehearsing what the girl should do if something similar happened again. (Her response, when asked what she would have done if he had touched her? "Bite him!")

Against my will, I now feel obliged to scrutinize all unaccompanied men entering the library. When I saw a middle aged man chatting briefly with a gregarious and intelligent young girl who frequently comes to the library with her homeschooling mom, I felt obliged to stay in the area and keep both of them under observation until he left. It's a dirty world we live in.

London is a happening place

From Joss Whedon's blog: Advance screenings of Serenity, the cinematic continuation of the dearly departed Firefly, are taking place in London.

Also found through the same source: Doctor Who has apparently regenerated again. From the FAQ: The official World Premiere of new series starts in the UK on BBC1 on Saturday March 26th at 7pm. The North American premiere will be Tuesday April 5th 8pm on CBC in Canada. No airdate has been given for the series in Australia or New Zealand yet, and a US broadcaster has not yet been announced.

Grrrr.

The month in review

Aside from last week's quick post about the snowfall, I've been too busy to blog for almost a month. A quick recap of the past month:

Spent the weekend of the 13th-14th up in Ottawa, visiting Fiend and exploring Winterlude. My skating skills seem to have regressed since January. I fell down on the frozen Rideau Canal more often this time around than I did on my first visit. Could it be that I'm getting overconfident? The snow and ice sculptures, the "bed races" across a frozen lake, and the other appurtenances of the Winterlude festival are all pleasant memories, even if the ice sculptures were a bit drippy due to some unseasonable warmth the previous week.

With the end of my current contract at Huron State rapidly approaching and no word about renewal, I've returned to my jobhunting ways. That is to say, I am once more inundating the postal service with resumes and cover letters going hither and thither and yonder across the country with little visible result. I did have one telephone interview with a place I'll call Gulf Coast State University during the month. It seemed to go reasonably well. Although I don't have much experience performing the exact functions they're looking for, I did manage to blurt out some questions and observations which prompted actual conversation with some members of the search committee, rather than just the usual packaged rote questions and answers. Certain family and friends who reside in the Lone Star State would probably like to have me closer at hand, or at least have a free place to drop their luggage while they head for the beach. Unfortunately, it's about 1500 miles in exactly the wrong direction from some other places I'd like to be.

The Ann Arbor Model Railroad Club sponsored its usual annual train show this month. I was disappointed by the lack of modular layouts on display. Last year there were three or four operating layouts; this year, that number was reduced to one, with the rest of the show dedicated to dealers hawking their wares. I did end up patronizing the latter, though. I spent more than I should and less than I wanted to. At least I'll have some nifty toys to show off, if I ever manage to make it to a local model railroad club. And the Lionel layout at grand-dad's house will look a little spiffier next Christmas (or whenever I next get time to fiddle with it).

Unfortunately, I was back in Missouri on more sombre business this past weekend, attending the funeral of Great-Uncle S. He was not a relative with whom I'd ever spent a great deal of time over the years, but I always havd a great deal of respect for him. He was the epitome of a gentleman and a capable, responsible, sensible man in every way, and his influence on the family and the community in which he lived will be greatly missed. It is possible that in the absence of his calm and moderating influence, both may fragment and dissolve. I hope not.

My return from Missouri was delayed by the inevitable encounters with shirt-tail relatives and community acquaintances with whom one must, for the sake of politeness, share a cup of coffee, or a lunch at a local restaurant, before departing. Many problems of the world were solved, and the moral and intellectual character of many individuals not present was analyzed in deep and searching detail. Consequently, instead of making it all the way back to Michigan on Sunday evening, I found it necessary to check into a cheap motel near Fort Wayne, Indiana, at about 3 a.m. I noted that, for a cheap motel, it had a surprisingly large bed and mirror. I didn't realize until morning that it was right across the street from an ... ahem ... "gentlemen's" club. (I don't particularly want to think about why the wooden ceiling beams near the bed had bolt-holes through them.)

Accomodations notwithstanding, this proved to be a fortunate delay, since I was able to visit the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg Museum in Auburn, Indiana the following morning. It's one of the best antique-car collections I've ever seen, and although the cars and displays are not arranged in any particular chronological order, it does a good job of showing that at one time Indiana was home to a number of thriving and historically significant auto makers. I knew that Cord had introduced things like retractible headlights and front wheel drive to North America several decades before anyone else, and that the Duesenberg roadsters of the late 20's and early 30's were among the most glamorous creations of their era. But who knew that the same family of companies had also introduced the hydraulic brake, superchargers, and unit-body construction? Even for those not particularly entranced by automotive engineering, it's worth seeing if one ever passes through northern Indiana with a couple of hours to spare. The cars are gorgeous, and the building, the former headquarters of the Auburn Automobile Company, is a fittingly grand place in which to see them.

Unfortunately, the rather curt woman on duty at the next-door National Automotive and Truck Museum of the United States was unable to provide any information about the "Samson" or "Sampson" truck which my great-grandfather is said to have driven. Also unfortunately, the Garrett Historical Society Museum, housed in a former B&O railroad depot, was closed. Fortunately, it is located next to an active CSX switching yard, and while I was parked there, a fellow ferroequinologist dropped by. According to him, the partially-dismantled Florida East Coast steam locomotive which is en route from Traverse City, Michigan, to a proposed tourist railroad in Colorado, and which has been the subject of much discussion on Michigan railroad messageboards, was in a train waiting in the yard. Unfortunately, the train in question was hidden on the inaccessible side of the yard, behind another train, limiting his (and my) ability to photograph it. Apparently he did eventually get a chance to photograph it, though, since I later received copies of the photos from him via e'mail.

Unfortunately, I had no time to wait for trains, since I was due to work the reference desk at Suburban Public Library that evening. And so homeward through the snow flurries and the slush. Waiting at home: two hungry cats, an overflowing litterbox, at least two piles of cat-puke on the carpet, and two phone messages about potential job interviews.

So it goes....

Perfect snow

Y-town and Suburbia are receiving today what I would consider to be Perfect Snow. It's fluffy, it drifts through the air picturesquely, and it sticks to the ground only on unpaved surfaces.

Unfortunately, I've yet to figure out how to post pictures, and I don't have a camera with me in any event. So you'll just have to take my word for it.

Copied without comment...

...from Huron State's winter 2005 schedule of music and dance events:

Barry Manilow Competition

Many of [the school's] finest undergraduate music majors compete for scholarship honors as they perform in thie annual prestigious competition recital.

Well now, there's a surprise

I'm a....

Loner. Loner 75% Goth 56% Geek 50% Drama nerd 50% Punk/Rebel 44% Stoner 25% Ghetto gangsta 19% Prep/Jock/Cheerleader 13% What's Your High School Stereotype? created with QuizFarm.com

Recent reads

Bellwether -- Connie Willis

Explains it all: stupid management theories, faddish hairstyles, incompetent mail clerks, hula hoops and tongue piercing. Not to mention chaos theory and, above all, the importance of being a little greedier, a little pushier, and slightly less stupid than the average sheep. Funny and thought-provoking and highly recommended. I'm still internally debating whether to use this book's revelations as a practical guide to office politics.

"I'm delusional. That's why I'm calling you."

This essay, linked to by the current issue of Library Juice, got me to thinking about a series of "reference" telephone calls received by me and other librarians at Suburban Public Library. The caller usually begins by asking what sounds like an actual reference question (e.g., "I need to know the telephone number for my representative"). But before the librarian taking the call has time to check a webpage or directory of goverment officials, he's off on some other tangent, usually having to do with some military subject. And then another tangent. And so on.

A representative sample, reconstructed by memory:

"I saw this picture in a magazine, but I don't know which magazine. There were these three soldiers. Can you tell me who they were? One of them looked Portuguese. I mean, mercenaries are usually white, aren't they? I need to know how many blacks have won the medal of honor. Oh sh*t, I just dropped my cigarette, gonna burn the f*ckin' place down. Do you know anything about parachutes? I'm delusional, that's why I'm calling you...."

Fortunately, if the call is picked up by the answering machine, he usually rambles on and on until the message ends in mid-sentence, and never leaves a callback number, thus absolving the librarian on duty from having to call him back.

Obviously, the fellow's suffering from some pretty serious mental and/or substance-abuse problems. And it wouldn't be the first time that someone very lonely and isolated had latched onto the idea of calling the local library reference desk just to be able to talk with some other human being. But it's difficult to know quite how to respond, especially when he starts asking for personal names. Do I want to become this fellow's favorite librarian?

Once more into the breach

The Biblioblog is back!

A Blog is Born!

I've started a new group blog here. It's intended as a discussion forum for politics, news, art, culture, and whatever else various acquaintances might want to discuss. Hence its name. Since it's a group blog, in which any member can post stories but no one person is solely responsible for updating it on a regular basis, perhaps it will be a useful outlet for those who have occasional outbursts of opinion but don't have the time or the inclination to blog regularly. So far, Carlos (of the currently-quiescent Biblioblog) and Fiend have expressed interest. We'll see where it goes from there. In the meanwhile, the Hill is likely to become more of a venue for personal musings, and may be updated less frequently, but will not be abandoned. The cold, stony reaches of the March still bear watching.

Busy, busy, busy

Back from the ozone again, with a few stories to tell and many complaints about the sad, sad unfairness of life, tow trucks, and automotive maintenance.

Ottawa is a lovely city in the wintertime, when the ground is covered in white and the Rideau Canal turns into the world's longest skating rink. While visiting with Fiend a couple of weeks ago, I surprised myself by making it onto the ice without instantly toppling over. Together, we made our way up the frozen canal for a kilometer or two and back, she slowly but gracefully gliding with only a hint of unsteadiness, me flailing wildly in all directions at once with arms windmilling and legs scrambling. (Or should that be "scrambled legs"?) As I mentioned to her at the time, and later in a comment on her blog, it seemed like a very apt illustration of the differences between the stereotypical female (cautious, graceful, makes steady progress with minimal disturbance or risk) and the stereotypical male (impetuous, reckless, makes faster progress but falls down frequently.)

Quote of the evening: "How do I skate backward? Like this? WHOOAAAHHH...." *thud*

We also saw the National Art Centre's production of Love's Labours Lost, one of Shakespeare's stranger plays, and one that is relatively rarely performed. I can see why. Much of the play consists of rapid-fire, nearly impenetrable seventeenth-century wordplay, like some bizarre blend of John Donne and David Mamet, which seems to prattle on endlessly and, to tell the truth, somewhat tiresomely. The plot involves a comically self-absorbed and misogynistic ruler and his courtiers, who vow to avoid (among other things) the company of women in order to focus on exclusively intellectual pursuits. A female representative of a neighboring kingdom and her ladies-in-waiting promptly arrive on an important diplomatic mission, and romantic complications ensue. I found most of the characters, and the "humorous" pranks they play on each other, to be unappealing. The play ends strangely for a comedy, not with the usual comedic resolution of conflicts and round of happy marriages, but with a sudden, tragic twist that radically alters the atmosphere of its bucolic Arcadia and seems to summarily dismiss the youthful intellectual and romantic hijinks of its pun-slinging, metaphor-twisting, hyperverbal characters as meaningless frivolities, or, at best, as nothing but a shallow prelude to the much grimmer and weightier world that awaits them outside of Arcadia. It's almost as if it's a comedy that deliberately and subversively undermines the idea of comedy itself. Perhaps Shakespeare, in his middle age, became disillusioned and cynical about happy endings?

On the whole, it was a lovely trip, even if I did have to brush some snow and pulverized ice off my pants.

Unfortunately, my return to Y-town was not quite so idyllic. An early morning flight got me to work at Huron State by 9:00 am, slightly groggy thanks to Northwest's failure to provide one of the key necessities of life but with a pleasant memory of watching the sun rise from 30,000 feet. On arriving home after work, though, Your Correspondent could not help but note that something was missing. The city had had its licenced car thieves tow Ol' Whitey while I was gone, for the "offense" of being parked for 48 hours in a legal parking space on a city street in front of the residence of its duly registered and tax-paying owner. While I was mulling this over and trying to get to Suburban Public Library for the evening reference shift, the Land Yacht, after motoring happily from the airport to Y-town and from the University to my home, inexplicably decided that it didn't feel like starting again. Despite feeling somewhat the same way myself, I found this annoying.

I won't bother to describe the rest of the week in detail, except to mention that the Land Yacht seems to have taken a dislike to cold Mondays. I can't say I disagree, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to insist on more reliable cooperation from it in the future. Nor will I dwell upon the towing company's momentary lapse of memory in which they claimed total ignorance of the existence of both me and my truck after I coughed up the ransom they demanded. Nor the Land Yacht's blown fuses and broken door handle. Nor the money I'm going to have to shell out for repairs for Whitey, nor the lowlife who's taken it upon him/herself to vandalize my outgoing mail, tearing it in half very neatly and very deliberately. (That's a $250,000 rip if the postal inspectors ever catch up with you, bubs.)

More pleasantly, I did get to go to one day of 31 Flavors of ConFusion, a science fiction convention put on by a local fan group, before the weekend blizzard dumped 12 inches of snow on everything in sight and made travel from Y-town to the convention hotel a practical impossibility. A quick summary of information gleaned and recommendations to be made: David G. Hartwell and his wife Kathryn Cramer are astute editors and observers of both science fiction and its fans. Watch for both their recent anthology of hard SF and an upcoming anthology of space opera. The Flash Girls and Steven Brust are wonderful and witty live musical performers. (Check out the lyrics to All Purpose Folk Song (Child Ballad #1) and A Meaningful Dialogue). Bang!, a card game recently released by Mayfair Games, is an entertainingly silly take on the Old West as filtered through the squinty gaze of the classic spaghetti westerns of Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone.

And that's about all the news that's fit, or unfit, to print. Except for one announcement....

Ninth circuit endorses sexual discrimination

Alternet has the story.

I am shocked, shocked, I tell you!

U.S. gives up search for (alleged) Weapons of Mass Destruction

As if anybody really thought that BushCo was telling the truth in the first place.

What alignment are you?

You scored as Neutral Good. A Neutral Good person tries to do the 'goodest' thing possible. These people are willing to work with the law to accomplish their goal, but if the law is corrupt they are just as willing to tear it down. To these people, doing what's right is the most important thing, regardless of rules, customs, or laws.

What is your Alignment?
created with QuizFarm.com

Thanks to Louise for pointing the way.

Oh, and one more thing....

Hi mom.

By a circuitous and unintentional means, it seems my mother has become aware of the Hill. If anyone feels like saying "Hi mom", they can use the comments field below. Despite having disreputable offspring like myself, she's a pretty cool lady. So be nice.

Post edited 2/13/05.

A Christmas to remember, or to forget

Have you ever had one of those trips in which it seemed that every move you made was cursed? I have.

My initial plan for Christmas and New Years was to spend some time with Fiend the weekend before Christmas, then drive down to the Ozarks for the family Christmas get-together on the 23rd and onward to Texas for a week, and back to Michigan following New Years.

Fortunately, most of the weekend with Fiend was not affected by the curse that afflicted my later travels. As she noted in her blog, we had all sorts of fun adventures. Some of them were delightful, like seeing the musical comedy that indirectly inspired the movie You've Got Mail and browsing the rambling used bookstores that make A-town such a pleasurable and dangerous place for bibliophiles. Others, like having the front grille of my car bashed in by a nitwit driver who blithely sailed past a stop sign into multiple lanes of oncoming traffic on a through street, were not so delightful. Fortunately, no one was hurt, although the other two cars involved were totalled. The Pontiac's front grille and headlights were damaged. (Note: If one plans to be involved in a low-to-moderate-speed collision, plan on driving a twenty-year-old full-size family sedan with heavy steel bumpers and a full-length steel frame.)

Still, on the whole, I couldn't ask for better company for such adventures, delightful or no.

It was after Fiend left that the curse manifested itself in all its gruesome strength. I contemplated driving to Missouri in the damaged car, but reports on the 22nd and 23rd of record-breaking blizzards in Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio; of interstate highways closed due to snow and roadside motels packed with stranded travellers sleeping in the hallways, dissuaded me from doing so. Thinking quickly for once, I informed family in Missouri that I wouldn't get to visit them for Christmas this year, took the Pontiac to a local body shop, bought an air ticket to Texas for the New Year weekend, and made plans to meet up with family and friends in Texas during the reduced time available to me. Problem solved!

Or so one would think. One would think wrong.

Unfortunately, my air itinerary had me making connections through the Little Rock airport. This, as I found out, is not a good idea. The airport staff there are evidently unaccustomed to people making connections through their fair city. This means that they are unaccustomed to such niceties as transferring baggage from incoming to outgoing flights. Which, in turn, means that I arrived in Dallas-Fort Worth, but my luggage, with all but a few of the family's Christmas presents, did not. It was not until the middle of the next day that the airline finally got around to delivering them. Fly the Friendly Skies, indeed. The flight attendant who expressed amazement at the very idea of connecting to another flight in Little Rock had the right idea.

In the meanwhile, Pablo and Carlos picked me up from the airport and, following long-established tradition, we went out for exotic food, a raid on a secondhand bookstore, and a snooty foreign movie. Unfortunately, the Inwood, the chosen site of past revels, was closed for renovation, so we had to settle for the Angelika Theater.

Oh, I'm sorry. I said Theater, but it's not a theater at all. It's the Angelika Film Center, which is much more prestigious than a mere theater. Sorry for the confusion.

Either way, A Very Long Engagement was worth seeing. It's a bit too romantic to be a war movie, and far too graphically bloody to be a traditional romance. This means that one can not fall back on the comfortable expectations of cliched movie genres. The central question of the plot -- whether the heroine's fiancee did or did not survive the War -- remains unresolved and could go either way right up until the end of the film. Although there are a few moments when it seems that leading lady Audrey Tautou's performance is reminiscent of the gamine Amelie, the sheer brutality of the trench warfare depicted in the film, and the amoral inhumanity of those who exercise power over human life and death with no thought for the consequences of their actions, counterbalances her perkiness and perseverance with a very real and very cold sense of bureaucratic evil at work. If I were to venture a highfalutin' metaphor, I'd say that the continual push-and-pull between her persistent love for her fiancee and the military's callous disregard for humanity is an instance of the perpetual battle between those who love life and those who love death.

The "neighborhood" around the Angelika looks like a planned experiment in upscale New Urbanism, with narrow brick-paved streets winding between two-and-three-story buildings housing restaurants or trendy shops (shoppes?) on the first floor and (presumably pricy) apartments above. Curious, but a bit too new and synthetic and self-consciously trendy to appeal to crusty old cynics like myself. Give it a few decades to accumulate grime and non-standard, non-committee-approved building alterations, and I might reconsider. Having lived in a small downtown area that actually supplied most of what a person would need, including affordable housing, within a space of a few blocks, without central or artificial planning, I am not easily impressed by consciously planned imitations.

New Year's Eve became a substitute Christmas with parents, brother, and sister-in-law in Austin, Texas. Spent the rest of the vacation visiting Pablo's new/old house, getting my butt kicked at Settlers of Catan, and rummaging through the long-stored remnants of my pre-Michigan life in a storage compartment, trying to find a few useful pieces of it that I could mail back to myself in Y-town.

The trip back didn't go any more smoothly than the trip down. (Remember that curse?) American Eagle changed their departure gate twice at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, took off almost an hour late, and arrived in Little Rock fifteen minutes before the scheduled departure time of my connecting flight. I elbowed my way down the aisle of the airplane and sprinted the length of the Little Rock terminal only to find a "cancelled" sign hanging on the Northwest departure gate and no Northwest personnel in sight. After wandering around for an hour or so trying to find someone from Northwest, I was eventually able to rebook passage on a later flight. They didn't lose the luggage this time, and it only took them two hours to unload it from the aircraft in Detroit. And so home again. And it only took 15 hours!

Notable Christmas swag:

Return of the King extended edition DVD. (Thank you!)
Nifty socket-wrench set specially designed for work in close quarters like car engines (in case I ever have time to do my own mechanic work)
Fancy coffee
Various books, including a couple of books about the Louvre's art and architecture, Literary Feuds, and Dungeon, Fire and Sword : the Knights Templar in the Crusades.
Scented candle
Various cat toys, including a battery-powered mouse that scares human beings and amuses felines.
Heavy insulated gloves
Pilgrim in the Ruins : a life of Walker Percy

More intellectual-property follies

From the December 14 Chronicle of Higher Ed:

The American Chemical Society has sued Google, the popular Internet search company, arguing that the new Google Scholar service violates a trademark the society holds for its search product, Scifinder Scholar.

In the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on December 9, the society argues that it holds a "common law" trademark for the term "scholar," because people often refer to the Scifinder Scholar tool as simply "scholar." ...
(Full story by subscription here.)

In other news, I hereby assert a trademark on the word "hill". I demand that cartographers everywhere immediately cease and desist from infringing on this "common-law trademark". A license to use my trademark may be available at very reasonable rates. Or not.

Some tuneful theologizing

... courtesy of a link forwarded by Pablo (The Still-Blogless).

A Hymn for the Reformed Child

Carry on Pablo, you'll someday be free of that dour predestinationism.

Spotted on the way to work...

... at Suburban Public Library this afternoon:

A fire-engine red Monte Carlo with the vanity license plate "QABALAH" and a large Star-of-David window sticker. Sadly, I could not tell whether the driver was wearing a skullcap or sporting payos.

A tiny Japanese compact car with the words "Rice Goes Here" stenciled over the fuel hatch.

These things amuse me, I know not why. Perhaps I'm suffering fever-induced brain damage or something. But then again, Cherry 2000 amused me, too, so perhaps the damage is something I've been living with for a while.

The Librarian

Last night, I and a couple of local friends settled in with cheesy-popcorn, potato chips, and other assorted snacks to watch The Librarian : Quest for the Spear, a 2-hour made-for-TV movie that appears to be intended as the pilot for a projected series. I had, I confess, some hopes that it would be an ironic-but-intriguing boost to the rather pathetic public image of the profession.

Sadly, none of the snacks could compete with the cheesiness and flakiness of what was presented on the screen. I'm not a big fan of taking one's frustrations out on television screens -- unlike Edward Abbey, I've never taken a gun and blasted a hole in the silly thing -- but on this occasion, the screen did get pelted with popcorn on a number of occasions.

The plot of the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the show can be summarized more or less as follows:

Our Hero, an uber-nerdish perpetual live-at-home grad student with 22 degrees (and counting), gets thrown out of university for being too good of a student. This guy's so pathetic outside the classroom that the blind dates his mother sets up for him last about thirty seconds before the woman goes sailing out the door, advising him to get a job. His own mother, in between bludgeoning him with thunderously trite advice about head and heart, feels compelled to advise him not to listen to the books if they "tell him to do bad things".

Fortunately for our socially-inept hero, a magically-engraved invitation to apply for a "prestigious position at the Metropolitan Public Library" inexplicably falls from the sky into his hands.

While interviewing for said position in an improbably opulent public library building, he suddenly starts pulling Sherlock Holmesian stunts like telling the interviewer all the embarrasing details of her personal life based on his hyperacute observation and excruciating knowledge of trivia. This, apparently, is enough to get him the job as "The Librarian", since the interviewer is so wowed by his perception that she has mononucleosis that she immediately cancels all the other interviews and Bob Newhart magically materializes in a shimmer of sparkly stuff to guide him into a deep dark secret vault underneath the library where, it turns out, all the greatest magical treasures of myth are conveniently stored in one place. Our Hero is informed that he's really, really special because there's only one Librarian (with a capital L) and they choose The Librarian very carefully. In response, he promptly tries to open Pandora's box and nearly gets decapitated by Excalibur.

Believe it or not, the plot gets less plausible from there. Mayan temples in the Amazon rain forest, filled with impossibly complicated booby-traps lifted straight from the Indiana Jones films. People blithely tromping through the peaks of the Himalayas with jackets unbuttoned. People jumping out of airplanes and surviving because someone else jumps out of the same airplane with a parachute and chases them down and catches them before they hit the ground. Butch-and-Sundance-style paired jumps into impossibly shallow water, and a subsequent swim down the river in which an important book, while carried in a visibly soggy backpack, somehow conveniently fails to get wet. Ridiculous purported mental feats like instantly learning a dead language with only one surviving manuscript and nothing to compare it to. Ridiculous physical feats of the kind made possible only by CGI and the total denial of reality. A couple of sultry female kickboxers who, after the requisite tough-girl posturing, inexplicably-but-predictably come to lust for the nerdish hero. (I will grant, however, that their inevitable one-on-one faceoff yields one of the few really funny one-liners in the movie.) Plot holes you could drive the Polar Express through, including the totally unexplained disappearance and reappearance of a major character.

It's as if the producers deliberately looked for every silly action-movie cliche they could find, and then asked themselves: yes, but how can we make it WORSE?

I could go on, but why bother? If you must watch it, watch it for unintentional laughs. Or for the novelty of seeing Bob Newhart try to portray a martial artist. He really does try, but even staged choreography and professional editing just aren't up to the task of making the avuncular Bob Newhart appear to move quickly.

Best and most unintentionally unironic line: "The fate of the world rests in my hands? That's sad."

Miscellaneous political links

Okay, that was nice. I'll have to do the nice, nonpolitical personal anecdote thing more often. But I have a great big heaping stack of political links collected over the past month, too! Most of 'em are old news but rather than simply consigning them to oblivion, I'll give them their brief moment to shine in the rather feeble public glory of this blog.

Conservatives had snarky things to say when Hillary Clinton used rubber-stamped signatures to help sell copies of her book. What do they have to say, I wonder, about Donald Rumsfeld using fake auto-signatures on the condolence messages sent to the grieving families of US personnel killed in Iraq? (Discussion at DailyKos.) I guess it's probably okay. After all, Dubya and Rummy have important press conferences and golf games to get to. "Yer kid's dead. Now watch this drive!"

If George W. Bush were running against Jesus of Nazareth, his campaign advertisements would look like this.

General JC Christian, Patriot, explains it all for you. Presumably Republican Jesus would kick Liberal Jesus's ass. In a 100% manly, thoroughly heterosexual kind of way, of course.

Not exactly breaking news, but worth noting as one more example of BushCo's authoritarian, secretive, anticonservative agenda: the attempt, over the summer, to suppress legal information about asset-forfeiture procedures by which governmental bureaucrats unconstitutionally seize private property.

And, last but not least, the post-US election cover of Britain's Daily Mirror.

A charming, nonpolitical personal anecdote

A couple of nights ago, Yours Truly was working the reference desk at Huron State U. when a student walked up and asked for a sound recording of a certain play. Y.T. dutifully checked the catalog and found that the library owned an 33 rpm LP recording of the play.

YT: "Well, miss, we have a recording of the play, but it's an LP."

Student (confused): "What do you mean, LP?"

YT: "Long-playing record. You know, a record on vinyl."

Student: "Uh.... vinyl?"

YT: (After a pause). "It's an older recording format. You've probably seen them. Black records, about this big across?"

Student: "Will it play in my CD player?"

YT felt very old at that moment.

I'm back!

After a monthlong gap in posting due to a combination of long hours at work, disgust with BushCo and the lemminglike dittoheads who voted for them, and the national snark shortage, I'm back.

This message brought to you by....

Fiend, whose moral and intellectual support (and repeated queries of "when are you going to start blogging again? Huh? Huh?") have prompted me to get back up off my *ss. (Take that, Limes!)

Now among her words of advice were to write about small, everyday, personal things, rather than trying to Solve the Problems of the World. Since the upcoming Quincy World Summit Meetings, to be held concurrently with the annual family holiday reunion dinner, will no doubt supply plenty of opportunities to discuss the parlous state of the world and be informed about how most of its problems are due to the pernicious influence of "liberals", I will for the most part follow that advice. I will studiously ignore the ongoing neocon ideological purge in the US cabinet. I will not comment on the replacement of crusading evangelical Attorney General Ashcroft with Bush's personal lawyer from his salad days in Texas, who advises him that the Geneva Convention's prohibitions against torture, assassination, and other war crimes are "quaint" and "obsolete". Nor will I discuss the replacement of Colin Powell, the only member of the cabinet with actual, recent military administrative experience and any degree of international respect, with Condoleeza Rice, an unquestionably bright woman who nonetheless seems to have a unsettling tendency to refer to her boss as her "husband". Nor will I

Actually, I don't think I'll be able to follow Fiend's advice for very long, despite the risk of being "smited" for criticizing "God's President". I mean, BushCo just cries out to be mocked, doesn't it? Don't those "unser Führer" billboards down in Florida richly deserve to be held up to the derision and horror of those capable of consulting an English-German dictionary or using a simple web translator?

You don't believe we're on the eve....

I go to bed tonight hoping that the Bush Administration will not spring some last-minute plan to disrupt the election tomorrow. I go to bed hoping and praying that the election will go smoothly, but dreading that it will be tainted by fraud and by blatant Bush administration attempts to suppress democracy to preserve its profitable, cozy grip on power. I find myself wondering whether, if exit polls begin to go against the ruling administration, there will be "terrorist" attacks intended to panick the remainder of the electorate into voting for a warmonger.

Am I paranoid? Or are these thoughts rational when the ruling administration has shown itself to have no moral or ethical principals whatsoever in its singleminded, Machiavellian pursuit of power, profit, and personal aggrandizement? Can it be that the only reason democracy has survived thus far in the U.S. is because no political administration thus far has been amoral and vicious enough to subvert or defy it?

Is it rational for me to wonder whether the Bush Administration, which believes itself to be anointed by God and (more importantly) to have the unquestioning support of the military, will accept the results of any election that goes against it? Or to wonder whether the votes cast will even be counted?

For you who are on the fence, or contemplating voting for Bush: Consider the various proposals that the Bush Administration has floated as "trial balloons" in the past couple of years, and then backed down on because they feared the loss of popular support. Cancelling elections. PATRIOT II. Enabling corporations to import vast numbers of indentured servants from the Third World to replace American workers. Consider its chutzpah in starting a bloody war on blatantly fraudulent premises, and using that war to funnel billions of dollars to its business cronies in no-bid contracts so openly rigged that the FBI is investigating them even in the face of likely retaliation from an administration whose notorious penchant for petty vengeance has led it to betray CIA agents in order to "get back" at their spouses for criticizing it. Consider the President's assertions that he and his operatives have the legal power to seize anyone, at any time, and plunge them into a black hole of perpetual incarceration without trial, without legal representation, without family contact or judicial review or public acknowledgement of any kind. To "disappear" people in the style of the old-fashioned South American goon squads. To torture and degrade prisoners in total disregard of international treaties and basic human decency.

Now consider what that same administration would be like in a second term, with no Constitutional incentive to care about popular opinion.

If you consider Bush and Kerry to be equally offensive, consider this: Kerry will at least have an incentive to acknowledge public opinion if he wants to be re-electable in 2008.

If you are morally offended by Kerry's unwillingness to outlaw abortion, consider this: is Bush's insistence on smugly sending thousands of adult men and women out to die or to wreak havoc on tens of thousands of other human beings in an unwarranted war any morally superior?

I grant that the bulk of the American populace may, in fact, be blinkered and ignorant enough to blindly follow Bush down the path toward further destruction of America's historical tradition of political and economic liberty. As P.T. Barnum famously said, no one ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the public. I hope that this is not the case. I don't think it is.

And I go to bed hoping that when the tumult and the shouting dies tomorrow, the tumult and the shouting will be all that dies.

Of Canada and satellite dishes

This legal news from up north might be of interest to one or two readers. Slashdot discussion here, along with discussion of the British Columbia privacy minister's reaction to the US goverment's insistence on indiscriminate data-mining via the so-called "PATRIOT" Act and other means.

A convergence

We want to bankrupt the U.S., says Bin Laden. Okey-doke, says Bush....

A convergence

We want to bankrupt the U.S., says Bin Laden. Okey-doke, says Bush....

Bush spreads lies again

Remember the Bush campaign's telephone smear campaign against John McCain in the 2000 Republican primary? The one in which Bush used anonymous automated telephone diallers to smear McCain with false charges at the last minute?

Guess what.

That's right, they're doing it again. The Detroit Free Press and the Daily Kos weblog are reporting a surge of automated, anonymous telephone calls in Michigan, all either seeking to link Kerry with the phrase "gay marriage" or to fraudulently direct voters in Democratic districts to incorrect polling locations.

If anyone out there's contemplating voting for Bush, at this point you're doing so consciously knowing that you are voting for lies, bigotry, and deliberate subversion of democracy.

An interesting challenge for law students:

Find a way to make sharia law compatible with human rights.

More Bush campaign dirty tricks

Old news, I'm afraid, since I haven't had much time for blogging lately. But for the benefit of anyone who hasn't read it elsewhere:

"Former employees of a Republican-controlled company, Voters Outreach of America, AKA America Votes, which conducted voter registration drives in Nevada, have blown the whistle on its practice of selectively destroying the registration forms of people who attempted to register as Democrats.

"Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats.

"'We caught her taking Democrats out of my pile, handed them to her assistant and he ripped them up right in front of us. I grabbed some of them out of the garbage and she tells her assisatnt to get those from me,'" said Eric Russell, former Voters Outreach employee.

"Eric Russell managed to retrieve a pile of shredded paperwork including signed voter registration forms, all from Democrats. We took them to the Clark County Election Department and confirmed that they had not, in fact, been filed with the county as required by law.

"So the people on those forms who think they will be able to vote on Election Day are sadly mistaken...."

"The company has been largely, if not entirely funded, by the Republican National Committee."

The Republican-funded company reportedly skipped out on its Nevada landlord without paying the rent and flew (by night, presumably) to Oregon, where it busily committed further election fraud on behalf of its paymasters. Just another example of the "moral values" loudly touted by the current crop of Republicans.

More here, here, here.

Libraries are thieves!

Old news, but still entertaining: the Writers Against Piracy. "Put down the library book, and back away slowly...."

Of G.W. Bush and solipsism

Apparently, not only does the Bush Administration not care what the rest of the world thinks, they don't want the rest of the world to know what they think.

Durn furriners. Y'all just shet up an' do what yer told!

Conference report, days two, three, and four (belated)

Blogging the succeeding days of the conference turned out to be more difficult than anticipated, due to limited availability of internet terminals and time.

The exhibitors' hall was somewhat smaller and attracted fewer vendors than the ones at prior Texas L.A. and American L.A. conferences I've attended, but I came across a few interesting regional publishers and distributors I wouldn't have found otherwise. At the library association sales table, amongst the high-priced and (ironically) poorly-indexed directories of state associations, lacquered jewelry, library-themed tchotchkes, and recent books by conference-attending authors, someone was selling bars of all-natural "librarian-made" soap in various flavors (pumpkin, rose petals, etc.) I asked her if she'd read Fight Club. She laughed knowingly. I didn't buy any soap. Others did, however; she was sold out by the second day.

The keynote speaker on the first day discussed at some length the various impacts that he thinks technology will have on libraries. Although a great deal of what he said regarding the social impact of constant electronically-enabled social connectedness made sense, I suspect that some of those few who read this blog will take exception to his statement that "bloggers don't care about privacy." It was the first, but not the last, time that the concept of privacy was dismissed as old-fashioned and no longer relevant to the modern, wired, interconnected world.

Gleanings from various sessions and workshops throughout the conference:

The state electronic library plans to change their interface this coming January. I can't see anything wrong with the current interface, but I guess Change is Good (TM).

A speaker on internet privacy recommended ZoneAlarm as a good free-or-cheap downloadable firewall to protect personal computers from viruses, trojans, etc. (Any thoughts/reviews from those more technically savvy than myself?) He also suggested, without overtly saying so, that a dismaying number of government computers were distressingly vulnerable to such malware. The fact that many such computers have access to citizens' private information was duly noted.

All Music Group has good swag at their presentations. I picked up a couple of nice classic-jazz compilation CDs at their presentation table before rudely skedaddling to another talk. (So sue me.) It occurs to me to wonder about the ethics of having commercial vendors do scheduled presentations about their for-profit products on the same featured basis as non-commercial speakers, meetings of professional interest groups, etc.

I sat in on a session about "use and creation of portfolios for professional development" in academic libraries. Who knows? Such information may someday be useful to me. While waiting for the presentation to begin, I noticed that one of the tech people from Suburban Public Library was also sitting in the room. Was she contemplating a job switch into the academic world, I wondered? And what did she think about seeing me in the room? It turned out she was receiving an award from the group sponsoring the talk. Thinking quickly, I grabbed my digital camera out of my briefcase and snapped a picture. Then I sat through the rest of the talk, about how to organize a portfolio for tenure review and/or promotion in academic libraries, as if it were a boring but necessary adjunct to getting her photo.

Meeting people from both "Huron State" and Suburban Public Library throughout the conference was slightly awkward. It was as if I were trying to negotiate a social event while juggling two dates. (Which, for the record, I have never done, and never intend to do.) Fortunately, the Huron State folks made it rather easy for me by not inviting me to go to lunch with them or otherwise interact with them for much longer than the space of a brief hallway conversation or two. The SPL folks were more friendly, which isn't particularly surprising considering that SPL was willing to pay my way to the conference and Huron State wasn't. I was a bit annoyed when I found that the other SPL folks were staying at the ritzy conference hotel while I roughed it at a cheaper chain hotel five miles down the road. But I shouldn't complain about it. I could have insisted on staying at the conference hotel, even when the head of reference darkly hinted that, for a part-timer, low conference expenditures would be a good idea. (Really, I don't mind that they had in-room jacuzzis while I had a dank chain-hotel swimming pool with cloudy water. Or that they had dinner and drinks in a top-floor-of-the-skyscraper bar and restaurant overlooking the bay while I gnawed on bread and cheese and apples from a cardboard box, or that they had spectacular tenth-floor views of the autumn colors of the northern Michigan forests while I had a first-floor view of a parking lot. Really, I don't mind. Believe me. Not at all. Nope.)

Thursday afternoon, a presentation billed as Business for Beginners turned out to be an overview of small-business-startup resources available from a particular state agency and other sources, rather than the more general discussion of current, general business-reference resources that I'd hoped for. But I did get some useful lists of resources for the occasional library user who's contemplating starting a business.

The "best of the best" presentation about exemplary small-library programs and projects in the state featured the director of the library of my former residence in the U.P. and, among other things, the display of wedding gowns and other feminine stuff that she and the local historical society had put on at the library. After the talk, I inquired about the status of their unique and extensive archival collection on a very interesting Yooper railroad. Fortunately, it seems they are in the process of digitizing portions of it, and took my e'mail address to send me further information. Unfortunately, I haven't heard anything from them since.

Thursday night, having opted out of the $38-a-plate dinner with accompanying celebrity speech, I decided to walk from the El Cheapo Motel to the local downtown for dinner. Bad idea. Three miles later, I turned around and started walking back. In the rain. Cold rain. At least I slept well once I got back.

The Friday morning presentation on library weblogs didn't tell me much I didn't already know, but it did inspire me to think that SPL might benefit from public and/or staff weblogs, and that if I were to suggest and implement such a thing it might actually look like a technological "achievement". (Gotta think about that portfolio.)

The motivational speaker at the end of the conference didn't particularly appeal to me, but others seemed to like her. Spent the rest of the afternoon driving up the very narrow peninsula north of Traverse City, past beachfront property that I'll never be able to afford and many, many acres of cherry trees and vineyards, to the Old Mission Point Lighthouse, where I snapped a photo of granddad's Land Yacht posed in front of the lighthouse, under a sign announcing the 45th parallel, the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole. I figured he might enjoy seeing how far north it's ventured. (The lighthouse, by the way, seems to be a private residence. It must be strange to live there, with tourists constantly walking by, gawking and taking pictures of your house from ten or twenty feet away.)

The Land Yacht performed flawlessly on the road, surging along the road like a battleship ponderously but effortlessly shouldering its way through the waves.

And so home, and so to bed.

Conference report, day one

I'm blogging tonight from a terminal in the coffeeshop of the very swanky Grand Traverse Resort. Not a whole lot to report, other than an uneventful trip and the first half of a preconference program called Poetry in the Branches. The most entertaining, if not necessarily the most useful, parts of the program were the occasional brief writing exercises. The first was to write a short poem addressing an audience and telling them to do something. Here's my rather uninspired free-verse offering:

An address to the audience

You with vacant eyes
waiting sadly in your chair
for beauty or vitality
to enter, by the ears or by the eyes,
that closely guarded chamber of your skull:
Hey! You! Get off your ass!
Write! Speak! Do!

The second was to respond to Kim Addonizio's "What Do Women Want?" and the third was to write something beginning with the phrase "I want...." I cheated and combined the two:

What Do Men Want?

I want a red convertible.
V-8, dual pipes, standard shift.
Four on the floor. Oh, yeah!
Roaring down the road
without a care, without a worry,
without a payment or insurance bill,
without paying for the gas.
Driving in the sun along the California coast.
And when it rains...

Hm.

No. I want a red truck!
4x4. Ground clearance. Yeah!
Now we're talkin'! In my red truck,
I'll go anywhere! And everywhere!
Up hill, down hill, through the woods, through the mud.
More powerful than any other driver on the road,
except...

Hm.

I want a red tractor-trailer.
Now we're talkin' power! Air horns!
I'll roam the country as I please.
No one gives me orders! I'm an independent man!
No one gives me orders!

(Except for that woman in the red dress.)

Not exactly masterpieces, but they kept me entertained.

Now I'm off to see if I can find the considerably cheaper hotel where I'll actually sleep tonight, perhaps a nice restaurant, perhaps a beach or bluff looking west over the lake so can feel all romantic and Byronesque and stuff as the sun sets and the full moon floats overhead.

And I'm off again...

... to beautiful Traverse City, on the shoreline of Lake Michigan, for the state library conference. No doubt its proceedings will be enlightening as all get-out, but I'm actually looking forward to a few days of comparative relaxation. For once, I'll have my evenings free to wander on the beach, watch TV, read a few books, or do whatever else takes my fancy. I have a sneaking suspicion that I will be sick-unto-death of the area's cherry fetish by the time I get back. (Cherry fudge, cherry salsa, cherry hamburgers...)

Depending on availability of internet connectivity, I may or may not be able to check e'mail and do blog updates from T.C.

In case you ever wondered...

... about Lynne Cheney's lost and long-out-of-print literary masterpiece, Sisters, www.whitehouse.org is auctioning off a signed copy and has posted copious excerpts online.

Also available online: an extended summary of John Kerry's lost and long-out-of-print book The New Soldier.

Both books are scarce and drawing high prices on the secondhand market, in case anyone's lucky enough to own one. But Your Humble Correspondent predicts a rapid fall in demand for one or the other in one week.

Dammit.

The Libertarian candidate for president came to Huron State, and I missed it. Dammit.

A startling moment

While driving back from Missouri, I stopped at a gas station near Indianapolis. While filling the tank, I popped the hood and checked the oil. Consternation! There was no oil to be seen! I could see the entire length of the dipstick, right down to the very end! Was I running without any oil at all? What new disaster was this?

Running a finger down the length of the dipstick, I realized that it was indeed coated with oil. Clean, translucent oil. Oil that I could see through. After driving that truck for eight years, I had forgotten that engine oil could look like anything other than opaque black sludge.

Blogger back briefly again

Back from the Ozarks again, this time with grand-dads car safely in hand. No doubt about it, it's a land yacht (like this one); however, it seems to be a smooth-riding and mechanically solid land yacht, and it's a definite improvement over relying over Ol' Whitey, who seems to be experiencing grave medical difficulties and is currently parked with the transmission firmly stuck in second gear.

A couple of vignettes from the bus trip:

* * * * *

Waiting at the decrepit, crumbling A-squared bus depot for an hour and a half after the bus was scheduled to arrive, with temperatures dropping and dampness descending out of the darkening sky. Being asked, repeatedly, by a woman with a foreign accent, whether I knew when the bus was going to arrive. Chatting with a cabbie who parked his vehicle under the depot's unused loading bay and cheerfully informed everybody in earshot that the buses had been known to run two hours late, that at the rate things were going, nobody would make their Chicago connections, and that he had "often" taken people to Chicago to make their connections after they missed trains or buses. According to him, the bus company would reimburse any such fare. Uh huh.

* * * * *

"Pardon me, is this seat taken?"

"Uh huh. My friend's sitting there."

(After the bus pulls away from the depot with the seat still unoccupied)

"I'm sorry to see that your friend apparently missed the bus."

"Wha? You talkin' ta me? There weren't no friend! I just did'n wan' you sittin' there! HAW, HAW!!!"

* * * * *

The Chicago terminal is reasonably modern and clean and bustling, but the St. Louis terminal is surrounded by what looks like a bombed-out postapocalyptic disaster area. It's a pity, since the interior of the terminal still has some residual shreds of grandeur. With its two-story tall lobby, towering pillars, and decorated ceiling, it's reminiscent of the old-style grandiose urban railroad depots.

Outside, amongst the boarded-up storefronts and burned-out apartments/housing projects, I couldn't help but notice some apparently abandoned railroad tracks, with what appeared to be rusting catenary-wire supports, that emerged from an alley and promptly dived into an underground tunnel nearby. I doubt that I'll ever find out more than that about them, though.

Thursday's headlines....

... in the Detroit News say a lot about the American electorate:

STATE LOSES MORE JOBS: Factory rolls are down 6,000 while tourism sector takes hit, edging jobless rate to 6.8%

KMART'S EX-CEO TO GET $94M: Payout to departing exec comes as chain cuts workers, payroll

AS GAS PRICES SOAR, DRIVERS CHANGE LIVES: Motorists consider hybrid vehicles, cancel vacation plans to accommodate skyrocketing costs

NEWS POLL: BUSH LEADS IN MICHIGAN.

Let's see. The economy is in the tank, corporate executives are looting companies while running them into the ground, prices for vital commodities are soaring out of reach. Why, clearly what this country needs is... more of the same! "Thank you sir, may I please have another?"

It's eerily reminiscent of the situation described in this book, in which Baffler veteran Thomas Frank seeks to explain why midwestern voters routinely express unquestioning, lemming-like support of a party that just as routinely victimizes them economically.

Blogger back, briefly

Returned from the hills 'n' hollers of the Ozarks last Monday. Grand-dad's birthday party was quite impressive as such things go, with perhaps 40 or 50 cousins and nephews and nieces and relatives of various types in attendance. Unfortunately, I could not for the life of me identify more than a handful of them by name, although I was generally able to distinguish those on my grandmother's side of the family from those on my grandfather's side. It helps when one branch is generally short and slight, with sharp facial features, and the other is generally big & burly.

Heard a few interesting stories about grand-dad. Apparently at one time, a fellow who had boxed professionally in a nearby city came back to D. County and challenged him to a sparring match. According to Uncle B.'s recollections, the onetime pro had the advantage in the first round, and went somewhat beyond the level of "friendly" sparring. By the second round, grand-dad came back at him and drove him out of the impromptu ring. "At first I was only defending myself, but it turned out the only way to defend myself was to hit him first...." (That's not an exact quote, but it's close.)

Looking at the pictures from the 1930's, when he worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps' construction projects around the Ozarks, I find the story believable. In the pictures, he's a tall, burly, dark-haired guy with a rather bellicose, glowering look on his face, invariably wearing a fedora cocked at a rakish angle as if he's daring someone to knock if off his head. Today he spends most of his time in a wheelchair, but he still looks pretty good, I'd say, for someone who's ninety years old. I won't have any cause to complain if I last that long.

The toughness wasn't just physical, either. Several people alluded to the fact that he basically had to assume the duties of a farmer and head-of-household at the age of 12, when his father died of pneumonia and, literally with his last breath, told him to take care of his mother and numerous younger siblings. Something to remember when I'm tempted to bemoan my sad fate because of some comparatively trivial difficulty encountered much later in life.

Mother, as usual, had exerted great effort in organizing and decorating for the party. The cake was a work of art, complete with a photographic representation of a Model T in green-and-black icing, and the booklets that she and Uncle B. put together were well worth reading. (Yam and S., you should get one if you can.)

I'm headed back to Missouri tomorrow evening by bus to pick up a car and drive it back to the northlands. Carlos, as a seasoned aficionado of Trailways and Greyhound, do you have any helpful hints as to proper etiquette and comfort on such trips?

Blogger on the road

Gone to Missouri for the next few days for a relative's birthday. Back early next week.

"We overturn Poletown."

Not exactly breaking news, but worth noting: the 1981 Poletown decision, in which the Michigan Supreme Court allowed a municipal government to use the power of eminent domain to seize an entire neighborhood of private dwellings and businesses and hand it over to a politically-connected business, and in doing so paved the way for a flood of similar schemes across the nation, is no more. (See also here and here. Text of decision here.)

Historical background, with some information about the pernicious effects of the Poletown precedent, here. As I understand it, the Hathcock ruling requires that eminent domain be used only when the intended use of the land is for public USE, not for the private benefit of some politically-connected real estate developer or corporation that speciously asserts that their personal profit is somehow connected to the "public interest" by way of vague promises of "economic development" or "increased tax revenue."

Good riddance to bad legal rubbish.

A vote for Bush is a vote for....

"I am often asked if I still think we should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity. The answer is: Now more than ever."

-- Ann Coulter, professional hatemonger and Republican mouthpiece. From her recent book How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must), p. 3.

News for game theory geeks

A team from Southhampton University, in England, has developed a program for Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma which can -- in certain circumstances -- beat the reigning champion Tit-for-Tat. Discussed on Slashdot, of course.

Speaking of game-geeks, I did my good deed for today by introducing J.-from-Wixom to a couple of my fellow untenured wageslaves at Huron State. Actually, it was her idea to show up at the library this evening inquiring about the flight speeds of African swallows (laden and unladen), but by serendipitous chance she showed up just after I and my two colleagues had started talking about the game Settlers of Catan. The "reference interview" quickly turned into a cheerful babble of gaming geek-speak, and discussions of plans to meet up for a beer after work. (Where they await me even now, probably planning all sorts of dastardly tricks and ambushes.)

Unfortunately, it means that I probably should not tell J.-from-Wixom about the blog. Pity.

More alarums and clamours

If you still think we live in a democracy, and wish to preserve that illusion, you might try taking the advice of the American Library Association's Washington Office Newsline and raise a stink about the legislative committee which is reportedly working on resolving the differences between different versions of two bills passed by the House and Senate.

The Senate bill, the National Intelligence Reform Act of 2004 (S.2845) is reported to closely follow the actual recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, according to the ALA. The only provision that arouses their discontent is the creation of a de facto national ID card, which Senator McCain has surreptitiously sneaked into an amendment without public debate. (Where, one wonders, are the Republican Evangelicals who always froth at the mouth over such "marks of the Beast"?)

By contrast, according to ALAWON's current issue,

The House bill, H.R. 10, the 9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act, goes far beyond the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission and includes a variety of anti-liberties and immigration provisions, including some parts of the PATRIOT II legislation. Among other things, the bill:

* Broadens intelligence surveillance inside the United States to non-citizens with no connection to a foreign entity;
* Permits the deportation of individuals to a foreign country without a functioning government, even if there is a risk of torture;
* Limits the ability of individuals to seek political asylum;
* Expands preventive detention;
* Creates a national I.D. system that goes beyond the Senate bill, requiring all motor vehicle databases to be linked together. It also ties driver's licenses to visa status.

On the other hand, if you'd rather not have your name on the Bush Administration's list of "disloyal" citizens to be put under surveillance and rounded up after the election, perhaps it would be best to keep a low profile.

An assertive paradigm for library service

I got a chuckle out of this posting to the LibRef-L listserv a few days ago. Best quote:

If we want students to locate library reference tools when they enter the library (either in person or online), then force them to encounter these resources whether they're looking for them or not. We should be as ubiquitous as porn sites, and as hard to get rid of as spyware.

Stratford and other wonderful things

Stratford, Ontario, is a fairly small city well out into the farmlands of central Ontario. Nonetheless, it's home to one of the premier theatrical festivals in Canada, and a fun place to visit, especially on a cool crisp autumn weekend, and especially with the right company. And "Fiend" is most certainly the right company!

Despite the Attack of the Overly Friendly Feline (who apparently thought that any human interlopers in his/her territory were fair game for frantic, neurotic leg-rubbing and lap-crawling), we managed to make it to two plays.

The authorship of Henry VIII seems to be disputed. Current scholars seem to think it's the result of a collaboration between Shakespeare and a certain John Fletcher. It's a somewhat melodramatic history play, which portrays a few tumultuous years of the reign of its namesake king. Notably, it portrays only the first two of his famous eight wives, and ends with the birth of Elizabeth, daughter of Henry VII and Anne Boleyn. (Jane Seymour, wife number 3, makes a brief, nonspeaking appearance at the very end, but this doesn't seem to be part of the original script.) It's quite clearly intended to glorify the father and the mother of Queen Elizabeth I, and promote the virtue of Elizabeth, the ruling monarch in Shakespeare's time, and her Protestant rule. The very existence of Mary, Henry's fanatically Catholic daughter by his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, is ignored totally; the Catholic archbishop Wolsey is presented as a scheming, corrupt manipulator who tricks the king into divorcing Katherine in order to promote a marriage to a French princess, thus conveniently absolving the King of responsibility for his divorce. Incredibly, for anyone familiar with the history of the time, Henry's historic split with the Catholic church is completely ignored except for a few oblique references, by very unsympathetic characters, to "spleeny Lutherans" and "heretical" beliefs on the part of the King's eccleciastical supporter, Thomas Cranmer. The closing speech, praising the newborn infant Elizabeth in terms more suited to the birth of a demi-goddess, is such blatant flattery that I could hardly suppress myself from laughing out loud during it.

In short, the plot is politically-motivated melodrama that makes hash of history. But it's tasty hash, full of delicious intrigue and the spice of danger. The actress playing Queen Katherine almost steals the show with her spirited reaction to the shabby treatment meted out to her by the King and Cardinal, and the actor portraying the Machiavellian Cardinal Wolsey is a worthy villian indeed, full of smooth words and sharp dealing.

My favorite moment that didn't happen: a cell phone went off, somewhere in the audience, while the King was summoning a couple of intimidating-looking Guards to the stage, and I found myself wishing that, with a snap of the royal fingers and a commanding sweep of the royal hand, he had ordered them to summarily drag the offending churl out of the theater to be cast into Outer Darkness.

The other play was a fresh interpretation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, with the human characters in modern dress and the denizens of the faerie world attired in form-fitting, jungle-inspired costumes, climbing and dancing with wild abandon and occasionally cavorting in mid-air. (The fairies' trapeze and bungee-cord maneuvers were reportedly developed in consultation with Cirque de Soleil.) Even so, I got the biggest laughs from the clever comedic acting of the actors portraying the confused human lovers, the bumbling amateur actors, and the much-put-upon rational ruler Theseus and his court. There are a few elements that aren't strictly Shakespearean, but I have to imagine that if acrobats flying through the air on bungee cords had been available in his time, he'd have happily used them. Perhaps he would even have found a use for those irritating cell phones.

Of the two plays, I preferred Henry VIII by a small margin. (Sorry, Fiend!) But that may be only because it was entirely new to me. Both were good. I enjoyed the unfolding, unfamiliar plot of Henry VIII, and I enjoyed the spectacle and witty dialogue and broad physical comedy of Dream.

For the bibliophiles among us, Stratford holds a number of decent bookstores to browse. Nothing near the level of Larry McMurtry's monument to bibliophilic obsession out in Archer City, but acceptably interesting. I picked up a book of medieval castle plans and several SF novels by Iain M. Banks which, so far as I know, are not officially "in print" on this side of the border. Fiend managed to score a copy of the Dictionary of Imaginary Places, which should serve her well in trying to figure out just what I mean when I refer to the latest place my imagination has wandered off to.

And, of course, Stratford has a railroad yard and depot. Fiend will no doubt be utterly fascinated to find out that that mysterious green-and-yellow locomotive on the grain train we saw appears to belong to the Virginia Southern Railroad. (Right? Right? *grin*)

Yuck.

Not a "wonderful thing" at all, but noteworthy anyway. I had my first experience dealing with an internet masturbator earlier this evening. A kid, apparently from one of the local high schools. Another library user reported seeing him "wackin' off", so after locating him and verifying his odd behavior, we had the campus public-safety officers come talk to him and escort him out of the building.

Now, who gets to disinfect the keyboard?

A quick note in preparation for tonight's debate

Do you have your Bush Bingo cards ready?

Sadly, I'll be at the reference desk while the Great Debate unfolds, but I'll be dropping by this event afterwards to catch the post-debate chitchat.

More, about Stratford, Ontario, and other wonderful things, later. Must get back to reference desk now.

The right-wing censorship machine rolls on

Florida Gulf Coast University cancels a scheduled speech by author Terry Tempest Williams "after President William Merwin and the board of trustees decided Wednesday that the forum would be too politically unbalanced and negative toward President Bush."

As Williams points out, "the school’s 13 trustees, six of whom are directly appointed by the governor, have ties to the Bush family." And university administrators know who controls their purse strings.

Phone Phollies, episode 3

"Huron State" prides itself on being a technologically advanced institution. However, they can't seem to install a telephone correctly. It's still dead.

A bookstore to avoid

Elder's Bookstore, in Nashville, Tennessee. The Nashville Scene explains why.

As different as can be

I looked over three job postings yesterday. The institutions involved are as different from each other as different can be.

One is a large state library with a strong archival and historical focus. I think they may be looking for someone with more knowledge of genealogical research, but perhaps my involvement with the state historical society and railroad-history groups will appeal to them.

The second is a bare-bones "business college" which focuses on providing vocational training for entry-level clerical and health-related jobs. It's a part-time position which would allow me to keep working at Suburban Public Library and in doing so reduce my work week from 60 hours down to 50 or so.

The third is at a tiny private college deep in the forested hills of Vermont, which originated in 1863 as a Unitarian seminary and has since made itself a testbed for experimental educational ideas. (I didn't even know Unitarians had seminaries.) Its turbulent history has included financial troubles, high administrative turnover, and most recently, suspension of their residential undergraduate program in favor of graduate programs, adult education, and nonresident programs. Its library catalog is largely non-automated, but somehow it seems that working there would be an interesting challenge. How many Institutes Of Higher Education, after all, have the sense of humor to include statements like this in their official histories?

During those years, several applications were made to the regional accrediting association --- and were rejected, in part because the financial resources of the college were fragile, in part because its program and procedures were so radically different from those of most colleges. In early December of 1959, however --- and to the genuine surprise of most people at (G.) --- the most recent application for accreditation was accepted....

They seem to still have a certain innovative spirit, judging from their current calendar of events, which includes a "Celebration of Homeschooling":

(G.) invites homeschooling families with teens to attend a weekend retreat on our beautiful Vermont campus at the height of autumn foliage season. We are designing a new undergraduate (B.A.) program specifically for young people who are ready to begin college studies (full- or part-time) and want to continue learning in the independent, community-based style they’ve enjoyed as homeschoolers. We want to work in partnership with homeschooling families to plan the details of the program, and during this retreat we will hold several open-ended planning discussions.

Homeschoolers are definitely a niche market that is underserved by traditional colleges. But how, exactly, does one provide good library service to a user population this scattered? Especially with limited electronic resources? A library position at such an institution might end up more like being a research consultant or long-distance information broker than like a traditional librarian. What an interesting thought experiment.

Meanwhile, Huron State has issued forth a decree from those on high that all library periodical holdings -- all 5000+ of them -- must be assigned to particular academic departments within two weeks. Why this must be done, no one knows. Why it must be done in two weeks, no one knows. All anyone knows is that the tenure-track librarians can't be bothered to do it, so the lecturers have to.

Of 'Cubas and Camaros

A heartwarming story from the Detroit Free Press: 16-year-old gearhead girl rebuilds her mother's first car from a rusted-out wreck into the drop-dead gorgeous, fire-breathing muscle machine it was meant to be. Most envy-inspiring line:

Christie doesn't dare drive the 'Cuda to school. It might get scratched or dented. Instead, she has a 1969 Chevrolet Camaro, also a classic, for everyday driving.

And speaking of Camaros: David Koresh's Camaro, complete with "David's 427 Go God" stamped on the engine block, was recently auctioned in Fredericksburg, Texas. (You missed your chance, Carlos!)

I am 80% "Mr. Right"

"h4yleyg" from Bookcrossing offers her opinion on what ten books a man should have on his shelf if he wants to impress women... er, I mean, be a well-rounded individual.

But really, War and Peace? Please, no!

Note: 80% calculated on basis of books read, not necessarily books currently owned. Void where prohibited by law. Your results may vary.

America, Bush style

The mother of a soldier killed in Bush's unnecessary war in Iraq is dragged away from a campaign event in handcuffs while the crowd chants "Four more years! Four more years!"

Because, you see, they support the troops. Get it?