Day: May 6, 2004

Humidity was fairly high today (now yesterday). I brought a sweater, but the library complex was strangely warmer. It felt like the first really humid, warm day of the year (though I’m sure there have to have been a couple of others). A couple of middle-school girls spent the whole time on the bus home...

There’s an attention-grabbing Library Journal article about “NextGen” users (born between 1982 and 2002) and their attributes. (Courtesy Creative Librarian.) They’re “format agnostic,” they’re “nomadic,” they multitask, they prefer web sites with content richness rather than table-of-contents-centered navigation, and they “find no need to beg for good service.”

Why does it take the publicized photos of humiliated and abused and tortured Iraqi prisoners (which has arguably further ruined our tattered image and made the nation even more vulnerable to terrorist attack) to get the Boy Emperor to, as the BBC put it, ‘make an unprecedented public apology’? After all, he won’t apologize for...

There is a website devoted to the infamous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, at which you can view a slide show and order a video of the episode. The originator of the experiment, Philip Zimbardo (whose Psych 101 course I took as a freshman), told the New York Times (also reprinted on the front page of...

You know, I’m sorry, but I’m on an our-culture-is-crappy kick tonight. While at that notorious southeast AA middle school, I served a couple of hours in the ‘media center.’ It was fine, I always enjoy that. But am I a complete old crotchety s.o.b. because I think it should still be called the library, damnit!?...

While subbing today at the city’s notorious southeast-side middle school, I noticed one thing during a geography class viewing of a movie about South Africa and apartheid during the 1980s: The kids were talking and laughing and not paying the slightest attention during the parts where the characters were laughing and having fun. But when...

I just woke up from two very weird dreams. In the first, Frank died and I started dating Julia Roberts. Yes, really. And after a month, she proposed. And her mother was talking to me about stuff and saying that I was the one Julia had been waiting on for so long. (The trigger: I...

“Friends” and “Frasier” are broadcasting their final episodes this week and next, respectively. “Friends” I watched occasionally but never really got the point of. Tina Brown has written a scintillating column in the Washington Post about its cultural significance, so I suppose I’ll re-read that and try to absorb the Zeitgeist. (There’s also an interesting...

It’s supposed to be over 80 outdoors today. No problem, right? Well, in the past two weeks or so, the huge turn-on-the-air-conditioning project has taken place all over campus (I presume); Scott tells me that they have to schedule months in advance and bring in these vast teams of union workers to manipulate the age-old...