Month: May 2004

Meanwhile, 140 miles away, in Kendallville, IN, a petition is being circulated to stop a proposed $7.9 million library building. Once the opposing signatures are submitted, the library will have 30 days to gather competing signatures. Whoever gets the most signatures wins. The new building is being opposed for the usual reasons. [Story courtesy LISNews.]

On Tuesday night, Frisinger Park was jam-packed with cars and trucks and a girls’ softball team and their parents and boosters. Passing through the park, which I normally do on my way home as a shortcut, was inadvisable. Wednesday night was less of a zoo, although there were a handful of boys and their dads…

It was virtually impossible for me to sleep last night. The heat is upon us, and it definitely rises to the top in our house. It was only 65 degrees outside last night but it felt like a Dutch oven indoors, even with two high-powered fans at full blast in the bedroom, except in the…

In between thoroughly (and devastatingly, I might add) trashing the new Wolfgang Petersen “Troy” movie and bemoaning the scariness of having just graduated, two women in Ambrosia were discussing this afternoon why it was that a mutual friend always suffered from the affliction of people developing crushes on him. “It’s because he’s hot but non-threatening,”…

It just doesn’t get any more Fascist FunDumbMentalist than this: ‘The Roman Catholic bishop of Colorado Springs has issued a pastoral letter saying that Catholic Americans should not receive Communion if they vote for politicians who defy church teaching by supporting abortion rights, same-sex marriage, euthanasia or stem-cell research. Several bishops in the United States…

Three girls coming into the ‘Media Center’ for Career Day presentations on cosmetology today: ‘See, this say media center, but a media center where you go to use computers and stuff. And this ain’t no media center. This a LIBRARY. It full of books.’ Yeah. What she said.

I guess I was grossly mistaken when we moved here; I thought we would be paying much less for gas per gallon than we did in San Francisco. A week ago, I was waiting for the interminable light at Packard and Stadium to change and the price at one station on the corner was raised…

Ann Arbor isn’t the liberal bastion I thought it was; while ‘guest teaching’ today at a central AA middle school during a Career Day assembly, I passed a science classroom which was empty except for the teacher. She had the radio blaring out with full throated and ‘kill all the liberals in the colleges and…

Yesterday I was riding one of the Hatcher elevators with an undergrad who was helping a co-worker cart some ficuses somewhere (aren’t ficuses always either standing in a corner of an office or being carted somewhere?). The co-worker asked him what he was planning on doing after graduation. “Oh, I don’t know, go to law…

Three weeks ago, NPR’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty recently did a report on Catholics and John Kerry that has raised some temperatures in the blogopshere. I won’t go into all that, but one blog quotes the reporter as telling American Libraries in February 2000, “Reporters should be thinking about big ideas and can get bogged down…

It’s an absolutely lovely night outside. Humid, but a perfect temp, with the Big Dipper directly overhead, night sounds all around—it would be a great night to camp out, if my tent wasn’t in Oklahoma. And yes, I heard more cicada sounds while I was out there with the beagle. The vanguard of Brood X…

Frank pointed out the cover of Section E ‘Connection’ of tonight’s Ann Arbor News (Motto: ‘Still the World’s Worst Website). Headlined Highs and Lows of Clothes (ain’t that alliterative?), it’s a discussion of how, for today’s teen girl, ‘less is more.’ I think he regrets bringing it home. It provoked a longish rant, which you’re…

A bicyclist and I came to the same narrow passageway in the sidewalk on Maynard in front of Ambrosia and Madras Masala at exactly the same moment today. (There were people at the outddors tables in front of Ambrosia, making the sidewalk even more crowded.) Should I have yielded, or should he have? Neither of…

Speaking of the local election story, the front page article on the subject mentions that Ann Arbor mayor John Hieftje has a Republican challenger in this year’s election—former City Council member Jane Lumm. It would be nice to know what Hieftje and Lumm’s positions are on local issues. The article doesn’t go into that. Neither…

In today’s Ann Arbor News, there was a huge (why so huge, I don’t know, but it obliterated a far more important story about upcoming local elections) front-page article about high school kids and their midriff-baring and short-skirt fashions and the “tensions” that said fashions are creating. Apropos of not much, in the midst of…

On tonight’s broadcast of The Connection (an NPR-affiliated radio show): Blogs offer a constant rush of political opinion: the gloating, the jeering, and those knockout punches. But not everyone thinks bringing punditry to the people is a good thing. New Yorker writer George Packer argues that by blurring the line between journalism and pure rant,…

From this morning’s Free Press: Historically, Brood X has sidestepped Wayne, Macomb and most of Oakland counties. They were, however, spotted in Bloomfield Hills the last time they came out in 1987. Go a little west, though, to Washtenaw, Lenawee and southern Livingston counties and you’ll run into them. Millions of them. Hundreds of millions….

Nancy Pearl was on NPR this morning, recommending older political novels to serve as an antidote to all of those scary partisan election-year non-fiction diatribe-tomes on sale at your favorite bookstore. (Some of her recommendations: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Ward Just’s A Dangerous Friend, and Henry Adams’ Democracy). She’s got a really…

We’re having regular thunderstorms and thunderstorm forecasts this time of year. Having never experienced thunderstorm season in the Midwest, I find it fascinating. Last night, for example, a fairly rambunctious storm rumbled through at about 11. Tonight, on the other hand, while I was at work, there was a brief burst of rain and thunder,…

It amuses me, I’m not sure why, that there are more articles on the upcoming cicada infestation in the Washington Post (a search of the Post website shows 17 separate articles on cicadas in the last week alone) than I’ve seen in the local papers, although I suppose the Post’s cicada watch amounts almost to…

My god I didn’t think it was possible, but it’s true; the Boy Emperor is incable of learning from his mistakes and « is beginning the march of war on Syria »: ’[The Boy Emperor] will order economic sanctions against Syria this week for supporting terrorism and not doing enough to prevent militant fighters from…

« Delta Air Lines says pay cuts or bankruptcy »; in other words, pilots should screw themselves out of a third of their paychecks or we’ll take our marbles and go home: ‘Delta Air Lines said Monday that it may have to file for bankruptcy if its pilots union doesn’t agree to significant wage cuts,…

Seems a little lazier, a little more mellow here than last week (well, except for the freeways, but that’s another story). There were a few people sitting on porches along State Street Row, but less in a party posture than a relaxation posture. Campus was alive and breathing, but not all that hectic: a few…

Just woke up from another spectacularly weird dream … this one was a first, since it was just like watching a TV show and I wasn’t in it. In fact, it was a TV show … Dallas, of all things. I don’t recall ever watching a single episode of Dallas ever. Not even the ‘Who…

« Lawrence Ferlinghetti is still beating ‘em »: ’… The first plane to hit the first Twin Tower The last plane to hit the last Twin Tower The only plane to ever hit the Pentagon The birth of a vast national paranoia The beginning of the Third World War (the War Against the Third World)…

Thomas Jefferson wasn’t perfect, but he was on to a good thing when he wrote that separation of church and state was a good and desirable thing. Case in point is Colorado, an increasingly Fascist FunDumbMentalist state where « a judge and lawmakers are being threatened and harassed by nuts from the Springs »: ‘Colorado…

The Torture Roundup for tonight: « A pregnant Lynddie England gets hung out to dry ». She’s been turned into the face of American torture by the media and the military, her family is angry at the military, angry at Bush and in denial and she herself is back home and pregnant. The New York…

Publicly, the NeoCons want us to think everything is a-okay and hunky-dory. Privately, « as the Washington Post reports », military officials are unhappy with the Dr. Strangerummy/Wolf-of-Dimwitz lunacy: ‘Deep divisions are emerging at the top of the U.S. military over the course of the occupation of Iraq, with some senior officers beginning to say…

Downtown was (if possible) more packed today than usual. Must have been the nice weather and lots of out-of-towners. We saw a couple of movies at the State (“Latter Days” and “Good Bye Lenin!”—the latter for the second time), poked around at Kaleidoscope (a great, albeit cramped, store just down State from the theater, packed…

I don’t think it’s a particularly uncommon thing to want to eat out at a restaurant and (if you’re a non-smoker, or if tobacco smoke makes you physically nauseated or you’re allergic to smoke) ask to be seated in an appropriate section. The restaurant we ate at last night made a pretense of seating us…

Here’s a familiar one. A newspaper (in this case, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune) interviews a handful of undergrads (in this case, at the University of Minnesota) about their research practices. One student says that she goes to the library and uses it as a kind of away-from-home study hall, but uses it for nothing else. She…

Repetitive stress injury workers’-comp costs as a justification for implementing RFID ….. hmmmmm. That’s a new one on me. I can’t say (as a public library patron) that I wouldn’t check out books that are fitted with RFID, but it sure would make me think twice. On the other hand, since RFIDs are clearly the…

As usual, Librarian.net puts it way better (and way more succinctly) than I ever could: Of course, any librarian knows that the best thing to do is to call your librarian [who is at the library already] and then have her [or him] find the answer which might involve using Google but might not.

Nicholson Baker has announced that Duke University Libraries has agreed to house his American Newspaper Repository collection. To make a long story short, Baker saved a lot of old newspapers in their original runs by organizing a corporation and purchasing the newspapers from various libraries (most of the collection was from the British Library) that…

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…

According to this account, seven students from Kalamazoo College were banned from entering Bush’s campaign rally at Wings Stadium on Monday. So much for inclusiveness. If you’re not a verifiable Bush supporter (and reading this, I don’t know what you would have to do to prove that you were a supporter in order to gain…

I’m a little late on this, but here goes. Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 23. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. “But this is to anticipate the end, rather than to find a serviceable beginning.” [The Third Reich: A New…

Without going into details, my grades this past term were either as good as or better than I expected. So I came off all right (not perfect, not even close, but better than I expected) in 503, the Search and Retrieval class that had me up until 5 in the morning a couple of weeks…

It’s too disgusting to even link to, but Major League DumbBall is putting ads on the freakin’ bases, for cryin’ out loud. And they’re for a stupid, ignorant and inevitably crappy sequel to a crappy Hollywood movie version of a crappy comic book about an freaky arachnid weirdo superhero. Gosh, just when you thought they…

Much more bustling downtown today. Still not like a typical school day, but Steve says the traffic getting around town, especially around State, was actually worse than during the school year. A mixed bag, I think. I found a table in Ambrosia easily. Campus (the outdoors parts) seemed fairly busy. The libraries were fairly dead….