There’s a big fat front page story in the Ann Arbor News today headlined “Library considers big changes for main branch downtown.” Apparently the fight is between the District and the Downtown Development Authority, and the issue is the parking lot next to the library building on South Fifth.

The library doesn’t own the parking lot; the DDA does. And the DDA doesn’t want to give up 16 of its 223 spots to help the AADL transfer the entrance of the library from the spot where it is now, facing Fifth, to what would basically be the north side of the where the front of the building is now (I guess, looking at the map, where the young adult section currently is), with a passenger dropoff section presumably replacing the 16 parking spaces that the DDA is concerned about.

The crux of the story is that the library board of directors evidently feels that without the transformation of the lot, the main library branch, which has been at the corner of Fifth and William since 1957, is doomed and will need to relocate, possibly to a building somehwere half its current size, though nobody seems clear on where downtown they’re going to find a building that fits that description.

Now I can see the library’s point; the current situation is not that functional. There is absolutely no way you can get out of your car (or other vehicular conveyance) in front of the main branch now without getting creamed or causing a major accident. Fifth Street is basically a one-line north-south highway, and woe betide you if you’re a pedestrian trying to get across the lanes of traffic. Thus, you either use the DDA parking lot or you park elsewhere and walk.

However, the idea that a new building for the main branch is going to materialize downtown when there’s no space for anything downtown seems odd (not to mention the idea that a building half the size of the current building will be able to hold the current collection).

On the other hand, why the DDA is balking at accommodating what is undoubtedly the most significant use of the parking lot next to the library is a mystery that remains unanswered by the article.

And Sunday’s “move-out today,” or so goes the scuttlebutt (heard as I walked by a couple of people sitting out in front of Ambrosia this morning, one of whom was talking about how much she was looking forward to the atmosphere of the town once all the students are gone).

Helicopters circling over central campus, lots of clueless out-of-towners wandering around, lots of ties and shirts and trousers as opposed to jeans and shorts, people scrambling around to assemble poses for video cameras, the worst traffic on State and South U that I’ve seen in weeks if not months ….. yep, today must be graduation day.

I’m done. The end of the year has come for me, and I seem to have survived. (The true test will come when grades get posted, but I’ll assume for now that I did okay.)

Damn. One year under the belt, one to go. I don’t think it’s sunk in yet.

Today’s Duke Ellington’s birthday. A tip of the hat to the incomparable Sir Duke.

One of the north-south streets through East Pasadena is Michillinda—it starts up in Sierra Madre, near where my sister lives, and descends into San Marino.

Something I never knew (I always assumed it was just a corruption of an Indian or Spanish name) was that Michillinda was named by the original families that settled in the area in 1873-1874—some of whom were from Indiana, but others of whom were from Illinois and Michigan. (Mich ….. Ill ….. Ind[ian]a.)

Probably inspired by Charles Nordhoff’s accounts of the curative powers of Southern California’s dry climate (not the same Charles Nordhoff who co-wrote Mutiny on the Bounty, but an earlier one), all of the “Indiana Colony” families had fled from those three states to Southern California and the San Gabriel Valley to escape the harsh Midwestern winters.

Meanwhile, record-breaking temperatures back on the left coast. Pasadena, my hometown, hit 99 degrees (breaking a record set in 1992 by 7 degrees). The weather station at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, near where my friends Kit and Erin now live, recorded a temperature of 103. Normally temperate Santa Barbara hit an intemperate high of 98.

Up north, San Francisco hit a high of 82, Oakland hit 84, and the nasty, unfriendly, xenophobic town of Livermore, probably the single most scary place in the nine-county region (and that includes the East Oakland flatlands, Cloverdale, North Fair Oaks, and the outskirts of Novato), became even nastier at a temperature of 92.

srah said it was snowing this morning ….. and sure enough, when I took the dog out, there were unmistakable flakes in the air. I never thought I’d see the stuff this late. Amazing.

In the interest of full self-disclosure (to a point), people in glass houses, etc., I hereby present a brief (and by no means exhaustive) list of songs that I love that would probably be highly likely to appear on a 50 worst list somewhere, and probably, in fact, do appear on such a list (double points if you can ascertain which one actually does appear on the worst recommendations over at Stereogum):

• Jellybean Benitez/Madonna “Sidewalk Talk”
• Howard Jones “Pearl in the Shell” (and almost any other HJ song from about 1983-1984)
• Ambrosia “Biggest Part of Me”
• Garth Brooks “Friends in Low Places”
• Pat Benatar “Ooh Ooh Song”
• Fifth Dimension “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In”
• Sheena Easton “Morning Train (Nine to Five)”
• America “Ventura Highway”
• Captain & Tennille “Love Will Keep Us Together”
• Spandau Ballet “Gold”

Oh, yeah, and one of these lists I’ve linked to places Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” on the list of worst. Sacrilege!!!

More candidates that I hadn’t thought of for 50 worst songs (from Stereogum):

• Chris De Burgh “Lady in Red” (truly horrific)
• Patrick Swayze “She’s Like the Wind” (ditto)
• Don Johnson “Heartbeat” (tritto)

However, Swing Out Sister should not be on the list. “Breakout” is cheesy in retrospect but no other song screams 1987 quite so well as that one.

An amazing quote from a new biography of King James I by Alan Stewart that I’m saving to read until after the end of schoolwork (the quote is from a memoir by the seventeenth-century writer John Oglander):

“If he had but the power, spirit and resolution to have acted that which he spoke, or done as well as he knew how to do, Solomon had been short of him.”

I went to work around 9.00 this morning and the campus seemed blessedly deserted. I saw maybe five people cross my path as I walked from the corner of State and South University to the Undergrad Library.

By the time I got off work at 12.15, though, the campus was exploding with people. The fourth floor of the undergrad was packed with studying students. Almost every table and carrel was occupied. The center of campus was a boom town. Ambrosia was more packed than I’ve seen it in a long time. Everyone’s getting in their last push before the end.

I was disappointed, having expected this to be the start of the clearing-out and mass exodus, especially after Friday night, when everything around the Diag as I left work seemed so sunbathed, idyllic, and laid-back it could have been a scene from the video for Sheryl Crow’s “Soak up the Sun” or an advertisement for “The O.C.” But I guess the real exodus won’t really occur till this coming weekend, based on the conjecture at work and the above observational evidence. I admit that I’m looking forward to the quiet, in more ways than one.

There’s a seven-minute (or so) segment in the bonus features on the DVD of Jeffrey Blitz’s 2002 documentary “Spellbound” that features a semifinalist from Ann Arbor. There are a few seconds of footage of the town at the beginning of the segment, with interesting choices for shots—the Greyhound bus depot on Huron and the bridge (Ann Arbor Railroad?) that Jackson goes underneath as it turns into Huron—but no obvious Chamber of Commerce shots (the central campus, Michigan Union, the Huron River, etc.).

Today, a first: a trio of homeless people kicking back with their cadged shopping carts in Frisinger Park. They must have been there because the police rousted them from the center of town for the Book Fair. I was surprised to see them—the homeless in Ann Arbor are virtually invisible, unlike in San Francisco, where they are virtually a city unto themselves. I almost experienced a double take.

I don’t know what tactics Ann Arbor uses to “control” (i.e., get rid of) the homeless population here, or what other factors (other than the weather, which is not exactly friendly most of the year to the “residentially challenged”) militate against their presence here, but they are effectively absent, unless you count the handful who use the Downtown branch of Ann Arbor District Library as a rest stop, or the few who stop and rest at the North University entrance to central campus, or the man (or different men taking shifts) who doggedly sits and panhandles every day between White Market and the GNC outlet on William.

It’s Ella Fitzgerald’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Lady Ella, wherever you are.

Strange how you can have two very different experiences at two not-all-that-dissimilar chain restaurants. We had dinner at Macaroni Grill on Thursday night, and that was fine. The food was great, and although the restaurant was somewhat crowded, all we had to contend with was a loud cell-phone chatterer at a table behind us (and an annoying conversation at the table next to us about Biblical “textual deconstructionism,” whatever that means). Tonight we had dinner at nearby Bennigan’s, where an ill-behaved toddler at the table across from us whined loudly through the second half of the meal and where an indescribably boorish jerk stopped to jawbone a busboy and stood with his Neanderthal rear end not five inches from my face. Should I have made a scene? I felt like it, but where would it have gotten me? Oh, well, at least our server was the height of solicitousness.

Pickerel Lake is hardly a unique appellation. Turns out there’s at least 22 other lakes in Michigan with exactly the same name.

We drove past campus today and saw undergrads dutifully trundling their belongings out to sidewalks and cars, along with a few half-hearted, exhausted lawn parties sputtering along and a ton of “For Rent” signs all the way from the center of campus out to past Zeeb Road as we drove out to Dexter-Huron Metro Park for another beagle excursion (this one much shorter than the epic Pickerel Lake trek last weekend, because we were all kind of groggy and tired, including our friend David, who’s been visiting this week from San Francisco).

Wow. It’s kind of astonishing, actually, having been in the Academic Time-Space Continuum for (seemingly) so long and all of a sudden being dumped back unceremoniously into everyday existence. It’s hard to believe, but the end of the year is here (if you can call eight months a year). Now if I can just get this last paper written …..

Maybe we didn’t give it enough of a chance, but I was kind of underwhelmed by the Ann Arbor Book Festival today. (It fills a portion of North University for a couple of days every year around this time.) There were a sizable number of people there, but nowhere near as many as I expected, and nobody seemed thrilled to be there; there was a lot of milling, very little excitement.

Of course, if you’ve seen one book fair, you’ve seen them all, I suppose. They’re mostly booths full of T-shirts and merchandising opportunities (as opposed to books). But is there some magic that this fair has that we were not plugged into? Or is this another case of the notorious Ann Arbor über-hype at work? I don’t know.

Update: Bentley points out that this is actually the first time the Book Festival (as an outdoor, pavilion-type event) has been held. The Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair (which is held in Michigan Union on Sunday) is actually the event that’s been around for 26 years. This would explain much. Thanks for the clarification.

I’m really, really going to have to take (and see through) 502 next winter. Damn.

Having said that, I know (especially now that the term’s essentially over) that there’s no way on God’s green earth I could have taken it this year (along with my other courses and my job and my DFE) and survived. That is the simple truth.

Can’t recall the last time I slept for 10 hours straight, but that’s what I did last night. It felt great.

I was on the bus this afternoon and passed through Party House Row on South State. One of the roofs had about fifteen subscriber newspapers, still in their wrappers, scattered all over it. I wonder what that was all about.

Done, done, done ….. up till hours I’m ashamed to divulge finishing it, but it’s done ….. don’t know how coherent the product is, but it’s done. Hallelujah.

Now, the CS 810 paper awaits. But that will actually be fun to write (I tell myself).

The beagle is once again in his customary final exam support role, next to me down here in the basement as the wind from the approaching thunderstorm howls outside.

Superstitious though it may seem, I know I’ll make it through as long as he’s around.

Blender and VH1 have teamed up to list the 50 worst songs of all time. I would agree that Starship’s “We Built This City” is a plenty bad song, but the worst? The worst? Have these people never heard Bryan Adams’ ”(Everything I Do) I Do It for You?” Michael Bolton’s “How Am I Supposed to Live without You”? Kenny G’s “Songbird”? Anyway, I may be old and irrelevant, but any magazine that splatters photos of Mariah Carey and Christina Aguilera all over its website will have a lot to answer for in 10 or 15 years.

Also, it says everything that none of their top 10 picks is older than 1982, which means none of the Blender crowd is older than, say, 28. That means not old enough to have ever suffered through the sheer torture of Mary MacGregor’s “Torn between Two Lovers,” David Soul’s “Don’t Give up on Us,” and Terry Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun.” What punishment is it to have gotten through Wang Chung and Bobby McFerrin intact and relatively sane? You can only say you’ve lived if you’ve survived Dan Hill and Barry Manilow. And Morris Albert. Now those are battle scars.

How long will it be before all the ash trees in southeastern Michigan die out? I heard a figure on the radio just now of 6 million ash decimated by the emerald ash borer and almost did a double take. Unbelievable.

A howling wind tore through the boulevards of the southeastern Michigan town, stirring up dust motes, leaves, beetles, and memories of regret, pathos, and anomie.

This year’s Lyttle Lytton Prizes (a spinoff from the better-known Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, sponsored every year by San Jose State University) have been announced. The winner:

This is the story of your mom’s life.

Runners-up:

I am pleased to announce that, although attitudes have improved immensely, the beatings will continue.

And:

While a hellish yowl tore my throat, the panicked kitten—in fact me—leapt crying for the throat of Julia, there seeking comfort—and revenge.

And:

Juicy, their love was like forbidden fruit: tasty.

My favorite, though, is this one:

I know who the murderer is, Kevin blogged.

[Link courtesy Metafilter.]

Tornado weather, says Hillary ….. great!

The one that passed through the day we arrived last August was enough for me, but I suppose that’s wishful thinking.

(On another subject, Hillary has a great post about John Negroponte, Bush’s new “ambassador” to Iraq.)

Let’s see. Prediction from the National Weather Service: possibility of thunderstorms 20%; temperature will rise to 76 by noon then fall to 67; and the winds will be between 25-30 mph, with gusts as high as 49 mph.

Great. I don’t know whether to dress for wind and rain or for a luau.

This weather is almost astonishing in its California-ness. Blue skies, sunlight for most of the daylight hours, temperatures in the high 70s, and lots of dry wind. I suppose, on second thought, it’s more like a typical spring day in Merced, but that’s neither here nor there.

Wildflowers are popping out all over the complex. The robins and the starlings, with their shiny-coal feathers and their striking long yellow beaks, were out in force all weekend, poking around the grass for food. The squirrels were not quite as mobilized, but they made their presence known. A black cat from across the fence terrorized the beagle briefly.

The twentysomethings across the “yard” from us played some ball for a while this afternoon, but it was otherwise very quiet this weekend, which is curious considering that they were out almost every night during the week tossing Frisbees or tossing their pigskin. Maybe they work weekends, who knows.

This weather, though undeniably pleasant in a generic sort of way, makes me feel incredibly lethargic and useless. I find it amusing that it has finally been proven beyond a doubt that this so-called native Californian does not really have any deep primordial longing for stereotypical Californian weather conditions. Not that anyplace in California other than San Diego necessarily has those stereotypical conditions (if you think LA does, check out the eternal smog-yellow sky and then get back to me).

Those fanstasies that people are supposed to have about escaping to Tahiti or Maui or some other tropical island with palm trees and piña coladas? I don’t have those.

The one silver lining that I haven’t quite been able to figure out is that my allergies seem to have suddenly dissipated. No clogging or asthma for the past three or four days, at least, and no pharmaceutical adjustments needed. Not sure why, but I’ll take the normalcy wherever I can get it.

The dog was back to his old tricks today, though he seemed to be somewhat more drowsy than usual (which is to say, he spent somewhat more than his usual 22.5 hours a day asleep). He ran without much apparent impairment down the stairs to be let out this morning, darted speedily over to the patio door to make some noise at a visiting squirrel, and whined for treats. All is normal in beagle world.

The nightmare that is the last few weeks of school is almost over ….. yet it seems right now as though it will never be over. April 29 seems very far away.

We no longer have cable, so we’re already unwittingly doing it, but if you have cable and are of a mind to do this, it’s something to consider. [Link courtesy LibraryJuice.]

Today really felt like the first day of spring. Classes were sitting out holding their sessions in circles on the grass, there was some massive groovy “Goodness Day” event going on in the Diag, and every available spot on the grass was covered with sunbathers or Frisbee throwers. A lot of out-of-town visitors now too, as one of our readers predicted. It’s supposed to get up into the 70s in the next couple of days. It almost makes you wish there were a beach nearby.

Walking down Liberty tonight after a movie at the Michigan, we saw the planet Venus rising low in the sky to the west. It would be difficult to think of a more beautiful sight.

A guy from Lansing talking about the two halves of Michigan on a radio call-in show this morning: “We don’t worry about the UP, and they don’t worry about us trolls in the south.”

A random question (inspired by a recent srah post): Does anybody know of any good places to buy tea (as in loose-leaf or bags in stores, store sections, etc, versus cafes that sell tea by the cup) in the Ann Arbor area? I am getting a tea jones and would like to try something other than my usual diet of English and Irish Breakfast.

It was sunny late this morning when I got up (had my first long sleep in almost a week). But the cloud cover rapidly rolled in and the National Weather Service is predicting a 20% chance of showers. April in Michigan.

I’ve talked to a few of the second-year students in the past couple of days. The adjectives I’d use to describe them and the looks on their faces: relieved, relaxed, and, in some cases, resigned. One of them got a library job offer that you could see made his face light up. The look on his face gave me some hope.

To a one, they can’t wait till April 30, when every last vestige of group projects, finals, and graduation will be done and over with.

It would seem that I’m going to have to start using a peak flow meter on a regular basis, at least until the pollen season is over. It’s a very simple device, actually; the best analogy I can come up with is to those “Hi Striker” carnival attractions in which you strike a platform with a mallet and try to hit the bell at the top of a pole. In this case, I blow as hard and as fast as I can (a book I looked at says it’s like trying to blow out as many candles as you can on a crowded birthday cake) into a mouthpiece on a plastic cylinder with a small round indicator that flies up to whatever level you achieve on a scale from 0 to 700. The optimal “flow” for someone of my age and height is 596. I make over 500 most of the time, but when I get an asthma attack, it drops off to the 400s or worse.

Apparently we’ve made it to another milestone: a listing in Google Directory. (We’re under Reference -> Libraries -> Library and Information Science -> Personal Weblogs, if you’re interested.)

I wouldn’t agree with the brief description of our blog that appears there. Because this blog is all about the beagle. It’s that simple. And very zen.

… there was a huge Good Friday concert in the Diag today complete with a big wooden cross on the steps of Hatcher and an electric Christian rock band that sounded like a washed-out version of Live circa Throwing Copper, performing a retooled rendition of “O come all ye faithful,” so you really never know where this crazy schizophrenic campus is at.

There’s a long column in yesterday’s Chronicle on Higher Education advising Ph.Ds on how to make the transition to librarianship, “because the library profession consistently offers a deeply satisfying career with multiple rewards that are too often missing from the faculty positions within reach for most Ph.D.’s.” The column includes tips like:

• “Librarians and human-resources recruiters most appreciate applications that are short and sweet — until you have the MLIS degree in hand (at which point you can revert to the beloved vita with relative impunity).

• “The years you spent earning your Ph.D., and getting published, could be described as ‘10 years’ experience in academic research and critical writing.’”

• “That’s why the opening statement of your cover letter should convey that you are genuinely interested in library work — not as an alternative to teaching, driven by desperation, but as your ruling passion.”

Great. Wonder how many Ph.Ds I’ll be competing with when I go out looking for a job. I don’t have anything against Ph.Ds. In fact, I admire you guys. But, you know, I’d like to get a job too. And I don’t have a vita to use “with relative impunity.”

It’s always amusing to watch hypocrisy in action — as when certain conservative library blogs that normally get into conniption fits about any e-mail or posts on any other library-related site (including their own) that “don’t have anything to do with libraries” write reams on their own blogs about such library-related topics as gay marriage (and why gays are biologically disordered, and why if gay-positive books are allowed in libraries there will eventually be a backlash and a rise in books on how not to be so gay, etc., etc.).

I lay in a hot tub for a half hour tonight and felt as though it were the first time I had had a chance to breathe and relax in days. I had to think for a couple of minutes to recall what day it actually was. I have been buried in the basement and chained to my computer since at least Saturday working at one thing or another, and I have neglected my significant other (for which I am deeply sorry), my sleep patterns, my spirituality, my posture, and my diet. Somehow it doesn’t feel that last term was quite this much of a grind; I don’t know why this is so. It’s all been a blur of BBC News, iced tea, journal articles, bibliography citations, one book after another, and the occasional break to attend to the whining of the beagle. The best part is that it will be over in three weeks.

Morrissey may not be making great music anymore, but he’s still good with a one-liner (this one’s from tomorrow’s Guardian):

Q: What do you feel when you look in the mirror?

A: Extreme reluctance.

Census stories fascinate me. This one, from today’s Associated Press wire, shows that San Francisco County lost more residents in 2002-2003 than any other California county (Steve and I left the month after the July 2003 cutoff point).

Meanwhile, Los Angeles County gained the most residents (which is ironic, considering that people used to flee LA to move to SF), and the fastest-growing county was Riverside.

The long-predicted flow of people from the coastal counties, which are fast becoming unaffordable except for the wealthiest, to the inland and mountain counties is taking place. When I was a kid, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties were weeds, wildflowers, and wide-open spaces, with sleepy towns and military bases interspersed along stretches of Highway 10. Now they are booming exurb factories, with no end in sight to the sprawl. When Steve and I visited last year, that sprawl was in evidence everywhere, from the wide, spacious, pedestrian-free boulevards of Ontario to the gleaming sparkly bustle of Palm Springs International Airport to the spooky, walled-off “gated community” enclaves of Rancho Mirage.

I find myself wondering where in California anymore would be a tolerable (and affordable) place to live.

My presentation was serviceable; it was supposed to clock in at 5 minutes and the professor signaled when I was going over the clock (which I don’t think she did with others who seemed to go over 5 minutes). I suppose that there were some advantages in going first (there were 19 presentations of 5 minutes each today, with a similar number scheduled for next week, and I had volunteered to go first), the biggest of which is that the nerves and the butterflies were quickly dispensed with. The disadvantage (or one of them) was that I got to see what others did with their presentations after I had already done mine, which meant that I couldn’t adjust my style in response.

Most everyone else’s were very good, excellent in some cases, but the difference was that mine, I think in retrospect, was kind of all over the map (given the topic I chose, that was probably inevitable). It was synthesized, but maybe it was a little too synthesized, maybe not reliant enough on scholarly journal articles and research. Oh, well. It’s done.

Now there is the final homework in 503, studying for and taking the 503 final, and finishing and presenting the looming Comm Studies paper.

I went to Ambrosia this morning to sit and do some last-minute prepping for my final 643 presentation. A grad seminar (apparently in Mideast politics, because every other word was “Islam” or “Baathist”) was holding court at a bunch of tables in a circle in the back. I sat at an empty table next to them and did my presentation outline on a legal pad while they pontificated. Meanwhile, a GSI sat at the table in front of me and held office hours with several of his undergrad students.

The Lecturers’ Employee Organization held a one-day walkout today to protest what it terms the University’s intransigence in addressing bargaining issues that the union has been pursuing with the university since last August, including salary, benefits, and “job stability” (i.e., tenure). Naturally, neither the local news coverage nor the position papers put forward by the union and the university has shed any light on the realities of the situation, and I don’t know enough about the history of the dispute to express an opinion about the walkout, so I won’t.

The picketers did not block any of the entrances to the library complex or West Hall. I don’t know what I would have done if they had; I suppose my instinct would have been, of course, to honor the picket line. I probably dishonored the strikers by not taking the recommended day off. If I had not had my final presentation hanging in the balance (the professor did not reschedule her class, nor, according to a firm letter sent out by the provost yesterday, was she or any other faculty member supposed to, which is of course one form of leverage that the university has in its arsenal), I would have taken the day off. I suppose my acts were selfish; I wouldn’t argue with anyone who said they were.