Month: May 2004

A brave statement for a librarian to be making these days: A children’s book depicting a masked burglar pointing a gun at a woman will remain in Evanston Public Library despite complaints that the image is too violent for young readers. “A good library collection should have something to offend everyone,” said Jan Bojda, head…

This is an awesome idea, especially in light of the recent vicious assaults on an art gallery owner in San Francisco’s North Beach. [CCA Santa Fe link courtesy LISNews.]

Americans are increasingly a clueless and brutal lot. Latest case in point: a San Francisco woman is forced to shut down her art gallery, after Brown Shirt thugs beat her up over the display of a painting depicting the Abu Ghraib prison abuse story: ‘After displaying a painting of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners, a…

I took the first mid-term for my Brigham Young University independent study geography course Saturday—an undertaking necessary, says the state of Michigan, before I enter grad school June 29th. (Michigan says I need 12 undergrad credits in geography, political science and economics to meet their standards for an elementary social studies minor. Ain’t bureaucracy grand?)…

The latest issue of Airways magazine, the 100th, reports the following tidbit about a Harris Poll ranking 60 major American companies by reputation and perception: ‘United was 52nd, putting it in the bottom ten. That was lower than both American Airlines and Halliburton, the alleged Iraq War profiteer. But United was not dead last. It…

Weather today was really nice, not too muggy, sunny and warm later in the afternoon and evening. I walked home from campus after a brief stop at Panchero’s on South University for take-home burritos. It was a nice walk; East University had a couple of low-key parties going on in backyards, and you could smell…

I saw a bunch of different kinds of sparrows outside on my way to work this afternoon, and, of course, the usual contingent of foraging robins and starlings. Birdsong filled the air, and I had no idea what any of it belonged to, but it was nice to listen to. But another bird, much larger…

I recognized none of the birdsong I heard walking home tonight. The daunting Birds of Michigan (Auburn, WA: Lone Pine Publishing, 2003) makes you feel like such a nitwit when you open it up and see meticulous descriptions of the calls and songs of hundreds of Michigan birds. The Eastern kingbird (Tyrannus tyrannus—what a great…

Weird how eerily quiet it was tonight ….. except for the occasional sound of what had to be firecrackers in the distance. Is today some holiday that I’m not aware of?

My first time in the Fine Arts Library in Tappan Hall today. It’s a smaller library than the behemoths next door, but it’s got its charms. There’s a nice, extensive reference room, and across a landing, there’s two floors of stacks (deserted when I visited today). I didn’t find the James Gillray books I was…

Crazy Wisdom Books on 114 South Main is worth a visit at least once. They’re well-stocked. They have two floors, one with a fairly decent selection of metaphysical and “alternative religion” (pagan, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.) books, though the inventory within each category is not as deep as the amount of categories is wide, and the…

Apparently everyone’s not universally thrilled with the new Seattle Public Library. A blog called Caminothoughts opines: Will it take half the electricity production of the Skagit River dams just to keep the greenhouse-like building at a tolerable temperature during a warm and sunny summer? This afternoon with a little sun and a large number of…

It just started pouring rain. Forget what I said.

We went to Tios the other night. Very good Mexican restaurant (odd location, though, across the street from the Ann Arbor News building and nothing else around it). The atmosphere was pretty laid-back, the rows and rows of chili bottles lining the walls was a nice touch, and the food, though a little too rich…

The New York Times has an amusing article today about blogging. It’s essentially the same idea as most articles or mainstream media treatments these days. Blogging is an addiction (therefore morally suspect), people sit on the toilet and blog into their laptops for hours (even on their anniversaries!!!) and ruin their relationships, people who blog…

The sun seems to be making a reappearance the past two days. It’s in and out, but it’s definitely there. I would say I guess the worst of the rainy weather is over, but I know better anymore than to hazard any guesses about Michigan weather.

One of the State Theater’s recent offerings was “Latter Days.” It was not a great movie, but after seeing it, it’s difficult for me to suppress a chuckle watching those duos and trios of schlumpy, black-suited, backpacked Mormon missionaries who traipse around campus handing out their proselytizing flyers. I saw a group of them hand…

From an introduction to an otherwise typically dry BBC story tonight about an international NGO conference: Host: Hello, Francis. Reporter: Hello, Max, how are you? Host: I’m well, thank you. Do carry on.

I know that they’re the coming evil mark of the beast destroyer of privacy hand in glove with the USAPATRIOT Act, but after spending the morning doing inventory for my favorite AA middle school library, I’m beginning to wonder if San Francisco’s position about the joys of RFID technology in library books isn’t so bad…

Flooding in St. Clair County ….. a tornado watch in 15 southeastern Michigan counties till 11.00 ….. over a dozen tornadoes swept through southern and southeastern Nebraska and nearly wiped out the town of Hallam overnight. So far it’s been quiet here except for a few showers and a brief rush of torrential rain earlier…

Weather has been much calmer in the past 24 hours. There were a few scattered raindrops when I took the dog out a few minutes ago, but nothing beyond that other than the sight (which I love) of a sky full of gray rainclouds tumbling overhead in a dark night framed by the lonesome-looking telephone…

… And then there’s a whole discussion thread (same site) about libraries in which someone says she never goes to libraries because the thought of touching books that someone else has handled freaks her out, which is about the strangest reason not to go to a library I’ve ever heard. She writes, seeming to think…

Someone wrote in to I Love Books asking what it was like to work in a bookstore. Here’s one answer: You don’t sit around and read and discuss literature all the time when you work in a bookshop. You do tell customers where the latest Mitch Albom book is a million times a day. You…

From Tuesday’s Ann Arbor News: A 34-year-old man admitted he punched a pedestrian in the face in Liberty Plaza Park in downtown Ann Arbor Monday because he didn’t like the look on his face, city police said. The 53-year-old victim said he was walking through the plaza at 7:40 a.m. when he was suddenly punched…

There’s an article in today’s Ann Arbor News about cafes that you may have seen. I’m happy to say Ambrosia wasn’t mentioned in it once, not because I don’t wish Ambrosia long luck and much prosperity, but because it’s nice to know there’s a cool cafe that somehow manages to slip under the radar of…

A quote from his new book, On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) In the Future Tense (quote courtesy New York Times): In America, it is acceptable to cut off any driver in a vehicle that costs a third more than yours. That’s called democracy. If that’s democracy, then Michigan has democracy…

Where to begin? The Pixies are back together for a reunion tour, are not apparently tearing each other limb from limb, and are like a breath of fresh air. Morrissey has relased a new album (with a sadly ironic cover photograph of himself holding a Tommy gun), You Are the Quarry, of which the Guardian…

Ref Grunt has closed its doors. Long live Refgrunt.com, although its posts appear to be dismayingly intermittent.

There are many cool things about Michigan weather, I’ve discovered. One is that it’s so unpredictable (within reason). Another is the months of snow, which I have to say I’ve missed. And another is that when severe weather happens, it reminds you that Mother Nature really is still in charge, not us puny humans. That…

Ambrosia, which is staffed by a bunch of avid, amiable fishing enthusiasts who would probably be much, much happier in Berkeley if it weren’t for the lack of walleye and lake trout, was all abuzz this afternoon about the near-tornado. “You could feel the hair raise on your arms and you could smell the copper…

I walked through the connector between the undergraduate and graduate libraries yesterday and today on my way to work. Late yesterday afternoon, an impressive storm was brewing that turned out to be the near-tornado of last night. This afternoon, a similar storm was brewing as I walked through. I stopped to look out the window…

Acording to Atlas of Michigan (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1977), which places this paragraph above a path map of an apparently really nasty tornado that hit southeastern Michigan on 12 April 1965: Tornadoes are usually spawned by an advance of a strong cold front into a mass of warm, moist air from the…

Before Ann Arbor became Storm Central in the past 48 hours, birds were everywhere. One reader (and someone who knows her avians), Dorothea of the fantastic Caveat Lector, wrote to tell me that the bird I was mystfied about the other day was a yellow-shafted flicker, otherwise known as a Northern flicker, or by its…

Okay, Yankees, when the sky turns as dark and ugly GREEN as it did at 2:30 this afternoon, that means you’ve got yourself a tornado somewhere VERY. CLOSE. BY. This means get in the cellar, fool, ‘fore you get sucked up like Helen Hunt’s daddy in that Twister movie. But the sirens didn’t even sound…

The title of a paper given by MIT meterology professor and chaos theorist Edward Lorenz at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington DC on 29 December 1979: Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? From Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” (1900): The…

We had a ‘possible-tornado-producing’ storm last night with blowing sirens and one-inch hail and minor flooding in Ypsi and a house burned after a lightning strike. It was all higgledy-piggledy for awhile around midnight. The native Californian was in denial about it all for at least a few minutes, lying in bed as the sirens…

How fun to get something like this in your e-mail box at midnight: ‘On Monday, May 17, the University of Michigan Administrative Information Services determined that a small selection of personal student data elements may have been exposed to some individuals within the University community through the Wolverine Access Web site. The data elements that…

More stuff on the Seattle Public Library from LISNews: The New Yorker calls the new central library “the most important new library to be built in a generation, and the most exhilarating.” The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has been trumpeting the new library, with an overview and groovy QuickTime panoramas of various of the library’s floors. The…

Today’s LISNews links to a New York Times article about Fundrace.org, an intriguing site that allows you to track campaign contributions by neighborhood. This is information you can go down to any registrar’s office and legally view; nothing unusual except in the presentation and the speed of access to the information. One Ohio woman was…

According to the radio, not only are cicadas on the way (though so far the hype has exceeded the reality), but gypsy moths, European chafers, Asian longhorn beetles, Japanese beetles, mosquitoes, and of course the pervasive emerald ash bore are also about to make their presence known. (According to the Michigan State University Extension entomologist…

Still no cicadas to speak of. Steve says it’s not been consistently warm enough for them to want to come out. I have, however, seen lots of birds, including a number I can’t identify (I’m waiting for a field guide on hold at the University library to help with that). One of them I’ve seen…

Tony Randall passed on Monday, followed yesterday by Elvin Jones, probably the greatest drummer (never mind greatest “jazz drummer”) who ever lived. Jones was born in Pontiac and got his start in the Detroit jazz scene in 1949. He played on some of the greatest jazz albums ever recorded, including Charles Mingus’s Pithecanthropus Erectus, Sonny…

No titillating “overheards” from Ambrosia today; just a bunch of employees meeting over cheesecake and listening to their benefits person yack about how awesome Blue Shield of Michigan’s health coverage is. Why this company’s HR meeting was being held in a sidewalk cafe I don’t think I want to know.

In a mere 25 minutes or so, the first homo marriages in the United By-God States of Amurrica will take place in Massachusetts. [sarcasm] We’ll be hiding in the basement so that the Angel of Death and Divine Retribution ‘Gainst the Homos and Homo-Loving will pass us by as this cataclysmic event foisted upon us…

Before the dandelion adventure, we paid a brief visit to the University of Michigan Museum of Art. (We were thinking of doing part of the 16-site Wander Washtenaw event sponsored by the Washtenaw County Historical Consortium this weekend, but I didn’t get my act together enough to realize that it went on all day yesterday…

Haven’t seen this many dandelions in a town ever. Like with the squirrels, AA believes in plenty of something. Opus Bayley took a much-needed dandelion break in the park next to the Jewish Community Center. It’s been a fabulous day …

Looks like « someone wrote a really good letter to the editor of the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal », right there in full red-meated Dubya country. Congratulations and keep your head down; those Texas fascists will be gunning for ya now: ‘Bush Priorities Questioned ‘Where did I go wrong? I’m a registered Republican because I believe in…

I had this conversation with a friend not too long ago: If you have a ton of books to choose from to read, what’s your strategy? I am myself addicted to having way more books around than I’ll possibly have time to read. This entails choices. Some books you’ll never get to. Some you can…

We went to the downtown area today and did some window shopping. West Side Book Shop was one of our stops. I’d never been there, and it’s a cozy, well-stocked store, if a little crowded and tilted more to the antique side than to the standard used-book trade. (There were some fantastic rare books on…