LISNews: Librarian News

Unknown to me anyways. A fascinating article at NRO on a very old, mediocre, but incredibly influential play called Cato: A Tragedy.

Interesting that so much inspiration comes from entertainment.

A fascinating comparison of 2 recent news stories:

Masters of the Game -
The Left on Churchill and Summers by Jonah Goldberg

I'm tired of hand written messages being taped to the Reference monitor so I thought I'd try out Post-it Lite. Its a cute little program though it might be worth it to go with the $15 standard version to allow cascading and color change. Anyone else tried it or something like it?

Purple vs Orange

Neat! Occasionally I need to look at the calendar from a whole 12 month/1 page perspective. In the past I've gone through the trouble of creating them from scratch but Microsoft has some neat templates already available here.

A guy by the name of Mark over at Captain Comics just recently described his solution for rehabilitating an old comic and I thought it was worth passing along:

"I picked up an issue of Miss America, Teen Life from 1946 at a comic show a few months back. This issue smelled pretty bad, I could barely read it without having the allergies go. So I took an old wooden wine box (I don't drink wine but I used to work next to a liquore store, this is an old Bola gift selection wine box, 3 inches high by 16 square (roughly). I got some cedar boards from Home Depot, cut them so they would fit into the box, placed them on the bottom, then I took some of the acid free archive comic book backing boards and put them over the cedar, then I put the comic on the acid free boards and simply left it.

Now the mustiness is almost gone, and while it has been replaced by a cedar smell for the most part the cedar doesn't smell as much or as bad, and I have a feeling if in another few months I take the comic and put it into a box without cedar that smell will fade as well and I'll be able to put the comic into a standard mylar board and bag.

I figure this has worked well because the Bola box is large enough and the wood is pourous enough for the air inside to be refreshed even when it is closed and thus the cedar smell is absorbed into the paper.

All in all it cost me less than 25 dollars (the cedar from HD was the only real cost) to make this, (the box was free, they were throwing it away), so I thought I'd pass this method along."

I've come up with a few questions for the two new candidates...

In order to pay for the lighting that goes up around the town for the Holiday Season (Christmas!!) as well as some First Night events, Billerica created a Holiday Festival Committee to raise the money. One of the events is a tree raffle where different groups put up and decorate trees involving a variety of themes. Boxes are placed by each tree and people can buy sheets of raffle tickets and put tickets in the boxes to win the different trees. Not just trees either, wreaths and gift baskets galore. We are up close to 90 different items this year.

The library has been in a new building for over 4 years now and has hosted it every year since the building opened. Everything went up last week and will stay up for the next 2-3 weeks. Its quite a sight to see. You can get a small preview here.

Chew on that.

Way back in July I talked about convincing our YA librarian and Asst. Director into setting up blogs. Well, the YA backed out but today I finally sat down with the AD and launched
this.

The word popped up here today but also in another online discussion forum I use to put off work. Its an overused term but it seems someone is taking a crack at it with a book called Varieties of Conservatism in America, a brief synopsis today in The Corner.

For the Liberals here there is a companion volume called Varieties of Progressivism in America

Its topics like these that make me hate being smart enough to know what I should know, as opposed to smart enough to already know or too dumb to care.

Dear Birdie,

Bush won big with the popular vote but even a big win is still only 51% to 48%. That's a pretty balanced country.

I live in Masschusetts. In an effort to make the state a little more balanced Governor Romney did a great job of recruiting candidates to run for offices all across the state.

Last I heard, not only did most or all of the candidates lose but there was a net loss of Republican seats in the State House.

There are no Republican Reps going to Congress.

Kerry won 63%.

Truly a Strange Country and no doubt one in which the majority of my profession would like to live in.

Me? I love a challenge.

- Greg

Well, I've done all I can do. I got up at 6am and showered and shaved and watched the news until 7:40. Then I walked a few blocks over to the firestation where I vote this year (previously I voted at a school but they're not using the schools anymore).

I was second in line at quarter of. The guy in front of me was wearing sweatpants and looked a little worse for wear. We were chatting and he told me he hasn't voted since Dukakis in '88. He could never make the vote before because his meds always made him tired and he slept through it. Today he was going to vote then go home and shower and go back to bed. He's voting Democrat to make sure he still gets his check. Seriously, that's what he said.

A few other people arrived before the polls opened, all women. One woman in her forties possibly fifties hadn't voted ever. Just before it opened a young woman showed up and put on a button that said "Election Protection' plus a tag that said she was an impartial observer. When we got in she went and sat down beside the tables where we sign in and got some type of form to take notes on.

We use paper ballots where we just fill in the oval and feed it into some kind of scanner. Personally I think this system is way better than any out there. There were 6-7 offices up for election but only about half had two or more people running. I voted R on the ones I could and left the other blank. Writing someone or something in seemed frivolous.

I'd also like add a note here and say 'Thank God for little old ladies!' In all my experiences voting its been elderly volunteers who were checking names and handing out ballots. They can be a little slow sometimes but when you think about how many there are out there at all the different polling places they are a great resource.

While I'm turning my ballot in the first guy in line was asking the woman at the desk, "if I'm registered Independent can I still vote Democrat?" I don't know if I should feel bad this guy canceled my vote or glad that mine canceled his.

On my way out another guy was setting up a sign outside. I didn't get all the details of the sign but it was something along the lines of 'Election Protection' and if you had any problems voting go see him. He asked me if I had a problem voting and I said "Nope" and walked home.

As far as I'm concerned its over. Once I know there is nothing more I can do then I'm at peace with whatever happens from there.

This arguement reminds me of the forest fires debate. "A small controlled fire today is better then a large uncontrollable fire tomorrow."

The whole freakin world has gone completely batty. This link came by way of the Corner, its from the Guardian and here's the last paragraph:

"On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?"

I'll be so glad when this over.

I submitted the Teresa article for listing a little while ago and now see it was rejected. Yes, I know, there could be any number of reasons why it wasn't listed. I just found it funny that we could have two listings for articles dealing with Laura's genitalia but none for Teresa's trashing Librarians.

Over at The Corner they were commenting on a Slate article that polled 31 authors on who they were supporting for President. Only 4 went for Bush and one of them was Robert Ferrigno who said:

"Most novelists live in their imagination, which is a fine place to be until the bad guys come knock knock knocking….I'll be voting for Bush because his approach to stopping the people who want to kill my children is the right one, i.e., kill them first."

Since then the Corner has point out that several negative reviews have been added to Ferrigno's latest book, The Wake-Up over at Amazon.

Why do women, usually middle-aged, think long-johns, particularly white ones, and a t-shirt is appropriate outdoor attire?

Just to be fair, why do men wear t-shirts where their chest hair is coming out over their neckline?

I can now add wetvac to my list of "Experienced With".

Some backuped pipes today down in the lowest level where Children's is located, fair amount of flooding. Custodian is on vacation this week so I dug out the wetvac and tried to minimize the damage somewhat. The pros are down there now.

Took me three trips to figure out there was a cap on the side to drain and I didn't have to take the whole cover off to empty the vac. Yeesh.

Those who ask for renewable energy might make more headway if they didn't constantly get in their own way.

A wind farm is trying to be built in my hometown but the Audubon Society is busy worrying about bird migration.