nichole's auxiliary storage

Just a shirt, ya crybaby

So around 1993, I got to go to UIUC for a summer camp for high school geeks. They let us play on the computers and gave us t-shirts. One of these t-shirts was for a new program called Mosaic. I took it home and it sat in my closet.

I moved out, went to college and then grad school, where I realized that being in your early 20s and having a Mosaic t-shirt might carry some serious geek cache. My mom and I tried in vain to find the t-shirt back at home. I told her to keep an eye out for it.

Well, she found it...

Correction post-photo album search: I am an idiot - apparently it was a different flavor of geek tshirt all along. Memory is a cruel mistress.

Librarian voting bloc

There's an excellent essay on who librarians are supporting for president, and what a victory for either side would mean for libraries, over at Michael McGrorty's (always superb) Library Dust. He admits that his own poll may be unscientific, but David Brooks, personal experience, and common sense back up his conclusion that the vast majority of librarians are not fond of Bush.

I'm still thinking about the good, bad, and irrelevant effects of a profession that's not politically representative of its constituents. By its very nature, a "profession" that professes to serve all is hard pressed to resemble its constituents.

Before I sign off - because every political post should end with a laugh - Bush makes lipsynching mistake.

Nifty library outreach idea

Via WisBlawg, news that Paula Seeger, solo librarian at the Dane County Legal Resource Center, provides an Internet Tips newsletter. DCLRC provides legal information to the inmates at the county jails, something they can't get elsewhere. As this small but visible service attests, Paula's on top of outreach for this important library.

She's also nice to JLG volunteers who come to her office unannounced - and, just like JLG volunteers, keeps a stack of grubby playing cards-cum-jail bookmarks recovered from circulating books.

"Librarians are hot"

Overheard at lunch. The speaker of this delightful truth followed it with the universal "hot" hand gesture, the quick lick of the index finger and tap of an invisible hot surface in midair, accompanied by the "pssshhh!" sound of steam being generated.

Which inspires a whole new take on the single-finger librarian "ssshhh!" All hail the new shush.

Jandek on Corwood

PSA: The Jandek DVD is now available for preorder.

Unofficial correction

Just a weensy, totally unofficial clarification of the Wisconsin State Journal report of the stabbing incident at the library: the volunteers involved were working on a mailing for the Green Party, not the library. That's all I know.

People act weird on the Internets.

Every now and then a bit of weirdness goes on over at the UDCP, the puzzle forum/blog JM and I set up.

The first incident was when a newbie started getting a little too brash asking for the answers to active contests in Games magazine, something we obviously frown upon. Someone called the newbie a nasty-ish name, and he responded, sounding hurt. JM and I fretted a bit about what to do as the site mods - until we checked the IP logs and found out Newbie had called himself the nasty name.

JM's also written an original contest for the site, and now that the winners have been notified I think I can blab about it. Shari Elf's music provided a trivia answer, and we emailed back a forth a bit about it. She said a guy emailed her, claiming he'd just bought her record on CDbaby (he hadn't), but could she please send the lyrics to him right away. There were audio files online that provided the answer, too. Jeez.

Library songs

Before I graduated from library school, I made this mix CD of library-ish songs for some folks.

I couldn't get my hands on "What's Your Fantasy?" by Ludacris ("We can do it in the library on top of the books, but you have to be quiet") in time. Via 3hive I just heard a kickin cover by Travis Morrison.

Update: The mother of all library song compilations. With lyrics.

Voting from jail

Of course, I don't know exactly whether felons are voting from the Dane County jails (and the officials don't seem to, either).

I do know that the last time I went in to the Public Safety Building jail, the fifth housing unit I visited had a posted notice telling inmates how they could vote. After I saw it, I kept an eye out for more, but never saw another. That makes only one of at least seven units, possibly all twelve, that provided this basic and important information to inmates.

Since a significant number of jail inmates are not felons (remember, jail is mostly for people waiting to go to trial, people serving short sentences, and people en route to prison after they're sentenced), it's unconscionable to fail to provide voting information to them. Whether they'd give a shit about the election is another matter, but still.

Harry Potter at Guantanamo Bay

Via librarian.net, a USA Today story about Ahmad Al Halabi, a Syrian-born, naturalized US citizen working as an Air Force translator at Guantanamo Bay, who was jailed for alleged spying.

He was keeping mementos of his service, including "secret" orders and snapshots. His apparently undue sympathy towards Muslim detainees, which he summed up as, "All I wanted was for them to treat those prisoners like human beings," supposedly also brought him into suspicion.

Al Halabi says he did not witness any treatment of prisoners that has now been called into question as abusive. But he says he saw things at Guantanamo that disturbed him. He says guards would purposely mishandle the Koran "just to see the detainees' reaction."

Nice. The library bit:

[Al Halabi] also was in charge of handing out library books. Investigators seized a cellblock roster that included a series of numbers next to the name of an Australian prisoner named David Hicks. Investigators speculated that the digits could be a secret coded message.

Al Halabi said the numbers were references to library books. Hicks was on the waiting list to receive a Harry Potter book.

"The Brits were always arguing about which volume of Harry Potter they could have," he says.

Shari Elf tribute premier; Shellboy = so good.

Yay! The Shari Elf tribute album is on the way! From her site:

Be among the first to hear some songs from the album by tuning in on line this Friday (October 22) to KVMR, Nevada City, California.

Listen live 2-4 pm California time, 4-6 pm midwest time, here is the link:

http://www.kvmr.org/webcast.html

Also, I will be calling Alice at about 2:15 her time, 4:15 Kansas City Time and talking live on the air! Oh boy, this will be fun!

I got a sneak preview (by dint of submitting a watery violin version of "I'm taking your stuff") and by far the catchiest was the original song "Shari Elf, Shari Elf," by Shellboy, aka Tracy Augustine. His music brings to mind the Residents in the best possible way.

He also has a 5-minute, 5-song EP reviewed at shmat and Reviews by Milo. Glorious. I wish there was more.

I love that Shari's brought these songs together. Pretty much the whole album (present author excepted) rocks. Some people just won't get it, but what can you do.

Halloween costume

For Halloween I'm thinking of dressing up as a Woman of the Future (Kayla sez a gas mask would convey this nicely) and wear a sandwich board that says, "People of 2004, please don't vote for Bush." You don't think this sinks to their level, do you?

Would someone who's actually going out for Halloween please use this idea? Thanks.

Small audience

Going through his high school German textbooks last night, JM came across a Wortschatz of food words, including Fruchtsalat.

"More like Furchtsalat," he said.

Charming

There's this panhandler outside the Walgreens at the end of State Street that I pass almost every day.

"Spare change for Viagra?"
"Spare change for the microscopically endowed?"

I think Chris Rock's observation can be applied to patter, too.

But is any of it actually funny?

Things not to forget

Why is it that I ignore my own favorite music for months, nay years, at a time? You'd think half a music therapy education would remind me to check in, just to restore my humours.

Maybe it's that my own music collection is a mess, due equally to my own thrift/insolvency and having access to libraries and friends with reasonably good taste throughout those formative years.

So thanks to Cornjob Memorial Library, I was reminded how much I love the Shaggs. Damn Spin, why would you ever run an article about a musical that just closed?

In the same issue (9/04) and a different vein was a long article on the Pixies, which was interesting despite the medium. (What a racket music media is.) Last time I "remembered" I liked them, I checked out everything my little burg's library had and stayed up all night listening.

The time before that was when my dorm roommate's boyfriend came over wearing a Doolittle t-shirt. And a mullet. Northern Wisconsin can do strange things to people.

Now with pictures

These are the blinds and the tree next to the tree. Thanks to a very nice anniversary present (we love you, Mom and Dad), I can now illustrate my ever-salient points with serviceable amateur snaps. Hip hip hooray!

Yarn crisis

Hilary's run out of yarn inches from the end of a gorgeous project. Can anyone help her out?

big big dreams

I've been keeping an eye on ISBlogN since it got props from librarian.net and Catalogablog.

Reading it feels like I'm stepping into an alternate reality. There are a few familiar landmarks (a tip of the hat to authority control, a mention of LC) but much of the terrain is foreign.

I can't quite silence the little voice that persists in saying Glenn may be reinventing the wheel. Unfortunately the little voice is rather inarticulate when it comes to how, exactly, the solutions and tools of librarianship - beyond what he's already identified - can help in his quest for clean, reliable book data. The little voice is also relatively clueless about the book industry, which is his focus and forte. So I muffle the smug little voice and read on, fascinated.

The wiki thing: OMG. OCLC database as wiki? Are we hearing a voice from the private sector say book metadata should be free? Revolution!

I wish I knew what Glenn's other readers think. There are no comments or trackbacks yet, and true to form only 14 of 41 Bloglines subscribers are public.

Wisconsin Book Festival (or not)

I completely missed the FOUND show on Sunday night (too lazy), along with the rest of the Wisconsin Book Festival. Talking about it later to library-types, I found I wasn't the only one not especially drawn to the event.

Some of the reasons:

• bad timing: football season (whether that specific weekend is a home game or not, downtown is always crowded in fall); last fling with temperate weather not conducive to sitting indoors; midterms.


• lackluster events: I admit, nothing but FOUND and Zine Fest really grabbed me. Others said the lineup has been less appealing each year.


• sick of books: My favorite reason. We get all the literary exposure we want, and a book festival is about as appealing to library-types as a flower show is to a florist. Doubly so for those hardy souls who volunteered at the festival.

Again, it seems library work can dampen the ardor of bibliophilia and cure milder cases of bibliomania.

Four more years

(Um, not what you may think. Not by a loooong shot.)

Happy anniversary, mister.

PS I don't miss the beard.

Productivity tip

GTD is nice and all, but this plan is far more elegant. Via Violet.

Bookkeeper trick

Thank you, thank you, thank you Matthew!

Jersey Fresh

So my sister has forsaken the green hills of Wisonsin for the Garden State (motto: "We got first choice"). In a recent missive she told me about her search for a farmer's market, and how she came across the "Jersey Fresh" web site.

It brings together a market directory, recpies, and buying tips, which include awesome seasonal availability calendars and nutritional info. New Jersey's a couple growing zones warmer than us, but they share some of Wisconsin's most common products.

It's like SavorWisconsin, with more useful content.

Careers for book lovers

From the librarian cliche files:
Some people think librarians read a lot of books at work. These people are clueless.

In two years of jail library volunteering, I've discovered that the deputies read way more than I could ever get away with at work. Bus drivers too - at stoplights or parked at the side of the road for no reason.

I had a friend in the LIS minor at UW-Eau Claire who realized halfway to certification that she preferred shit retail jobs over libraries because she could keep up with her reading list.

Mel & Floyd audio now online!!

Thanks to Sarah and John (in NYC, of all places), episodes of WORT's own Mel and Floyd are now available as mp3s on Indymedia.org!

(For those of you outside Madison, Mel and Mr. Smarty Pants (and sometimes Floyd) have a one-hour slot on local radio during which they regurgitate the news through what could be described as an aural Fark-minus-Republicans-and-boobies-plus-extra-monkeys filter.)

Here are three shows to get this party started:

September 24: Indymedia article | mp3 audio

October 1: Indymedia article | mp3 audio

October 8: Indymedia article | mp3 audio

Watch for more at Indymedia and in my sidebar links under "Mel & Floyd audio!"

<1940NewYorkWorld'sFairAnnouncerVoice>This is a watershed development in the great tradition of community-sponsored radio in Madison, Wisconsin. Forward! </1940NewYorkWorld'sFairAnnouncerVoice>

Literary doomsday

"Isn't that when your library fines exceed the price of the book?" -- Josh Weinstein as Tom Servo, MST episode 104, "Women of the prehistoric planet."

Horoscope

The other librarians will alternately praise your audacity and criticize your recklessness after you redesign the Dewey Decimal System on a drunken dare.

FOUND events galore

From the FOUND mailing list:

Guess what you guys? Found's gonna be back on The Late Show with David Letterman tonight, Wednesday October 6th. We'll be sharing with Dave and you guys some of the fantastic new finds we've been collecting on tour.

Plus, FOUND is having a live show at the Orpheum as part of the Wisconsin Book Festival. Saturday 10/9, 10pm, totally free. Can't wait.

Not very nice

On the title page of "Breeding behavior for bushel weight and agronomic characters in early generations of oat crosses," someone has appended, in blue ink, the phrase "is a jerk" to the author's name. Dr. Pawlisch seems like a nice enough guy - jeez. But who knows.

Oct. 5 lunch menu

Today at the Catacombs: corn risotto (with the tiniest, roundest tomatoes I've ever seen), beet and apple salad, and kohlrabi (I think). Raspberry apple crisp for dessert since dinner last night was a small serving of some yam/leek co-op thing and a vegan peanut butter cookie. I must certainly be all de-oxidized and organic by now.

Timber

And now, from the "lengthy story which only succeeds in impressing upon the reader the writer's need to get a freakin' camera already" department, the story of the felling of a tree.

There used to be a sick-to-dead maple tree in our neighbor's front yard, close to our driveway. A little while ago, I came home at lunchtime and saw, to my glee, that the city forester's crew had come to cut it down.

This was after it had dropped most of its leaves, extending our raking season by a good three weeks. I'm glad it's gone. Large, moss-speckled limbs had begun to appear in our driveway when we weren't looking.

So when I saw the big bucket-lift truck in front of the house, I took my lunch and moved to the front window to watch. The two-man crew worked fast: the guy in the bucket lift used a tiny chainsaw to cut the branches off and threw them to the ground, where the other guy piled them at the curb.

When all that was left was a trunk, the branch-piler got a bigger chainsaw. While the guy in the lift steadied the trunk, his partner took a wedge out of it on the side facing the house.

Then he made a cut in the other side of the trunk, set down the chainsaw, and got a hammer and some orange plastic shims. These he pounded into the cut as his partner pushed the tree in the direction of the house. With a crunch and a thump that I felt through the living room floor, the trunk fell over. The guys cheered.

As the guy on the ground sawed the stump down, I looked up and saw the guy in the lift had extened the machine's arm as high as it would go in order to retract it back onto the truck. He was a good fifty feet up, higher than I could see past the edge of the roof. I tried to imagine how far he could see from up there.

A couple days later, another crew came by to pick up the branches and the felled trunk. Now all that's left is some sawdust in the gutter and the bottom layers of an ever-growing wall of leaves at our curb.

Info needs of strippers

One of the groups in my Info Use and Users course last year at SLIS studied the information needs of exotic dancers. (My group covered pastors - it's who you know, I guess.) They ended up with a really well-done study.

If I remember right, the dancers were wary of the group at first because their trust had been somewhat violated by another group of researchers. Once the library students were granted interviews, though, they found that dancers' primary source of information about their work were other dancers. The club DJ was an important resource as well, since he was at the club every night and always knew what was going on, even more so than the manager.

Anyway, this all piqued my interest in a little blurb out of Canada: Assault, disease, among hazards reported by strippers.

The study's findings were used to develop English and French-language brochures for sex workers that cover legal, security, financial and health issues.

The flyers contain advice for strippers, such as using a scarf or towel while sitting. Exotic dancers are also advised to scream if assaulted in private rooms.

That led me to the STAR project web site, which includes pdfs of the brochures themselves, as well as the full reports and publications of the project. Interesting stuff.

Acknowledgements in theses 2

In The Zionist pioneer youth movement in America as a social movement by Joseph Greenblum: "To Erika, for everything words do not express."

Meet the dispassionate Drs. Moody, twins born in 1918 who went through school together, right up through PhDs in physical chemistry.
LeRoy to Leonard, in The molecular kinetic behavior of certain seed globulins:

Mr. L.E. Moody, a fellow graduate student, worked jointly with the author on the preparation of the seed globulins, and has given assistance and advice during the course of this project.

Leonard to LeRoy, in A contribution to the physical chemistry of the seed globulins in solution:

Mr. LeRoy Moody assited in the preparation of the proteins. Without his assistance much of this work never would have been completed.

In Sequential tests for the detection of linkage by Newton Ennis Morton: "My wife, Nancy T. Morton, helped to compile the tables and showed remarkable forbearance at other times."

It seems to my admittedly unscientific eyes that the PhD theses mention spouses' forbearance, assistance, patience, etc. much more frequently than the Masters theses do.