Whoo-hoo. - 02 October 2007

Story time was much smoother today, and felt better all-around. Of course, I also had nine more children than I did the last week, but that’s okay, just meant more people having fun. I did have to walk through the rain to the post office and back. And then when I got home, I find that the voter registration card I was looking for had arrived... just after I had mailed out a new application, thinking things had gone weird. My sense of timing is perfectly preserved. At this point, it just happens to be working against me. D’oh.

My professional self nods invitingly at the opinion expressed by Musings and Migraines that librarians will be at the vanguard of the revolution. When one received a National Security Letter and the accompanying gag order, they went to court to reveal themselves as the recipients. They were denied at the time, but later on, the location that was given the letter was revealed. Apparently it wasn’t as vital anymore to hide from the people that libraries are targets of snoops. Librarians are doing a lot more, too, to make sure that your right to read anything without government agents questioning your patriotism. And we’re not too fond of your nosy neighbors that think they know what’s best for you to read, either. So go read a challenged and/or banned book and spite them. And be glad that, so far, nobody’s been convicted of obscenity just by writing words - that may be changing soon, if one federal prosecutor has her way regarding a web site that had fictions of children being molested, tortured, and sometimes killed.

Things of potential interest to me and all those who are looking into the business of raising young children (ugh, what an awful segue) - using baby videos/DVDs as a surrogate parent is not necessarily the best idea, according to a study published by University of Washington researchers. That said, in the press release for the study, the Baby Einstein series of videos was mentioned by name as a possible thing to avoid - Baby Einstein is now owned by the Walt Disney Corporation, and they came out swinging, questioning the science and demanding a retraction. The President of the University of Washington, to whom the letter was addressed, responded with a refusal to retract. This looks to be a staring contest until some other report that both sides can accept breaks the deadlock.

Making a strong showing for “Most Useless Phallicly-shaped object”, aside from [insert appropriate male person]‘s genitalia, a "Tower of Invincibility" is planned for construction in Washington, D.C.. Certainly not a large phallic-shaped object designed to invoke size comparisons or to attempt to show that America has a giant wang (that would be Florida, and with the age of many people flocking there for retirement, the position is probably apt as well). And not a middle finger sticking up as a giant “Screw you” to the rest of the world, either. This can only end in ridicule. Thus, mockery is on the agenda tonight. After having a hearty laugh at the big dick, point, laugh, and mock people who swear by bottled water as a superior product, considering that much of it is what would be tap water run through a couple of processes, bottled, and then sold back to you at an exorbitant markup. I’m not sure whether to mock or pity the people behind NRG potato chips, which are, indeed, caffeinated. Because caffeinated chips and soda is exactly what you need for those late-night programming runs.

After reading all of that, be sure that you brush up on hand gestures and their meanings (especially the places where an innocuous gesture in one country is a grave insult in another), and get ready to use them as we delve into darker realms.

New d00d in charge of the Joint Chiefs. He’s still got a long way to go. Deaths in Iraq are down by half this month. Fantastic. That’s still nearly 1,000+ dead Iraqi civilians and American soldiers. What’s worse, is that probably is progress, comparatively speaking. To try and help justify the continuing need for violence, a Navy Cross recipient describes why he supports the war - five things, four of which had to do with the way that Saddam Hussein treated his people, and one which might count as at least a half-point, but which also will reinforce the idea that Muslims are terrorists. Almost no justification at all for the continued action of fighting the Iraqi people and dragging them toward a conclusion that they seem to resist mightily. Covering ground about private security firms, in OpinionJournal, Ben Ryan paints security contractors as honorable, well-trained men that are inexpensive to field and accuses the mainstream media of painting them as monsters without knowing them. Perhaps it has been just a few rotten apples all this time, but that doesn’t inspire confidence in the professionalism of the contractors. Or the military and executive apparatus that employs them. Add in that the contractors may have been trying to cover their misdeeds, and confidence evaporates.

Speaking of money, the presidential campaign continues to be able to raise vast sums to be spent convincing the people that someone is the best candidate. Why spend $200 million for a $2400,000 / year job? The perks must be awesome. And the obligatory war spending shot - nearly a supermajority of Americans say that there should be less spending on Iraq with regard to the additional $190 billion dollars that Mr. Bush is asking for.

Ready some of those gestures before wading in to a Limbaugh column - David, not Rush, and laugh heartily and/or throw your favorite insult as he spews talking point after talking point about the war in Iraq. All stuff that’s been said before, with plenty of “grow up, children” and “Democrats are socialists and don’t understand the great ordeal being undertaken here”. Standard retort is Ben Franklin, with or without the double deuce. In addition, Ann Coulter has released a new book, nonpartisanly titled If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans, so you can get a bonus helping of spew if you decide to leaf through it.

One more matter of free speech versus being a disturbance to wrangle over - from Prison Planet, the account appears to be that members of the group Code Pink were expressing their disagreements with a pro-war rally and were arrested, one for the heinous act of simply reading the Constitution. Reading some of the source material from Code Pink DC, it sounds like that peaceable disagreement was somewhat loud and attention-grabbing. In both accounts, however, members of Code Pink are arrested for exercising their right to free speech. What I want to know, though, is whether there is any law on the books, federal or otherwise, that allows demonstrators to be removed and arrested if they’re being “too loud” or a disruption to the event going on. Sort of the idea of one’s free right to swing fists ends at the point where someone else’s nose in contacted. The comment section on the Code Pink blog has a strong contingent of Anonymous that run several character attacks on the demonstrators and accuse them of being traitors and of not according proper respect to military veterans and their families.

Last out of this segment is the doom-and-gloom prediction of Operation Save America that Hillary will win, because God hates the way Republicans are fielding pro-choice candidates and Christians are okay with that. Not because of any virtue of Hillary, mind you, but all because God is pissed at Christians and Republicans for not keeping the Republican party worthy. In fact mass defection to a third-party candidate might end up happening if Rudy, who is not good enough for the evangelicals, receives the Republican nomination. Fred Thompson seems to think the same, but that he's the candidate that Dobson and OSA want. Perhaps, if things go really wrong, they’ll come to blows, like some Italian nuns did on Sunday, prompting the closure of their convent.

Doing that neat segue thing, still sort of related to Operation Save America, considering they were trying to get it closed before it opened, the Planned Parenthood clinic of Aurora, Illinois, opened today after being issued an occupancy permit. On the national front, however, abstinence-only programs still enjoy the favor of Fearless Leader, despite their repeatedly-proven inability to produce reduced rates of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases among the target demographic. Furthermore, as the price of birth control rises and is unaddressed, there may be even more difficulties across all age groups. Funny how trying to enforce abstinence has this weird backlash where the opposite of what abstinence is supposed to bring about starts showing up even more.

Accidents in laboratories involving deadly diseases are on the rise. Luckily, no-one has died from these accidents, and the labs involved say the public was not at risk during any of the accidents. Still, there’s a reluctance in labs to report accidents that are required by the law. And that’s where people start getting antsy - if someone could come out of a lab like that infected with something contagious and deadly, the pandemic could be in third gear by the time anyone noticed. Accidents do happen, of course, but we’d like to make sure everyone knows when they do, just in case there’s reason to believe that things were not contained.

I think even the students at MIT would be proud of this particular hack - Eight artists built a secret studo apartment in the middle of the Providence Place mall and lived there, on and off, for about four months before being caught. The place was missing a few important things, like running water and toilets, so it wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good.

People get attached to their robots, according to a Georgia Tech study. Well, yeah - people name things, and then as those things prove to be useful, people get attached to them. Even so much that they start working with the idiosyncracies and wonder where they go with firmware updates and the like. Perhaps we’ll be seeing our NS-5 units sooner, rather than later. Although if they look or sound like Elmosapien, I will run in the opposite direction. If they perform a function like Clocky, an alarm clock that beeps and then runs away from you, then maybe I will chase them, only to smash them with something. That could get expensive.

Instead, I think I will show off that there’s always more options for Hello Kitty Hell, like solid gold Hello Kitty playing cards. And from there, I will flee for sleep.

Well, almost. It being October, and with certain harvest festivals approaching, I can’t help myself. While it’s not, say a Chick Tract on the matter (which I could probably go dig up, if I really wanted to), why not have a look at Hairy Polarity, attempting to not only convince everyone that a certain children’s book series about a young wizard is a gateway into witchcraft of the evil and demon-conjuring kind (bonus points for having it through the girl that the boy loves, too. Anti-witchery and misogynistic all rolled into one!), but also displays a characteristic lack of invention when it comes to names and situations. Have a look at the first seven pages, and then realize that there’s still twenty-five more for poor Airy, getting manhandled like that so that someone can swing their sledgehammer at a bowl of water, expecting the water to be crushed. The narrative structure, characterization, and dialogue available in the sample are of such low quality that I could probably round up a crack team of fifth grade students and have them produce a work that was superior in every capacity but art. And depending on the fifth graders and the lead time I had, I might even beat them there, too. *sigh* I realize that there are plenty of exhortations in the Christian Foundational Writings to go out and convert the world, but I have a distinct feeling that he meant that you should go out and try to be as much like him as you could, day in and day out, and that through the virtue of your deeds and example, you’d bring more people into the fold. Selling the religion by not selling the religion.

Okay, bed time now. After all, I still have stories to tell.

Got to get up early tomorrow - 03 October 2007

Going to get some more baptism by fire experience tomorrow - I’m learning about all the stuff that they don’t tell you about when they hire you, after spending a session brainstorming how to carve out a teen-friendly space in my tiny library and attract people to it. Tomorrow I get to see and do some of the presentations that happen to inform the populace of the stuff that the library system is doing for them. And then drop off information in other places. And go weed. The good part is that my day ends a little earlier tomorrow, because it begins a little earlier.

Be wary of suspicious media files, including video material or malicious MySpace code - since there’s a growing shell against spam phishing and blind attachment-opening of obvious executable files, those who want to do harm or hijack computers are embedding their code in other places, perhaps in spots that could be tripped just be going to a rogue MySpace page.

The music industry does not like you. In fact, they want to squeeze as much money out of you as possible. The latest tactic is that the chief Sony BMG anti-piracy lawyer said in court that ripping CDs you legally own is stealing music. That’s right - transforming data that you own into another format so that it can be used on a different player is stealing a copy of that song. Under that logic, every time you changed a component of your stereo, or bought a new CD player, you would need to rebuy your entire CD collection, since playing your current CD in the new equipment would be stealing a copy of the music. (Right? Or is that just a good exaggeration?) While there’s obviously some portion of ripped or downloaded tracks that then become freely available on file-sharing networks, I still thought that CDs and the data contained therein were subject to First Sale Doctrine. Apparently, according to that lawyer, they are not.

Better, admittedly, that what might have happened to the people in the wrong place at the wrong time if a Bosnian who entered the United States embassy with explosives and nails had not been thwarted by the metal detector. The article also makes it a point to mention that he was carrying Islamic literature. What significance the literature, or its presence, has to the facts and/or narrative of the story, I do not know. The aborted attack is better than the killing of African Union peacekeepers by rebel forces in the Darfur region. That particular massacre could stop at any time, along with the one going on in Burma. Anyone? And with the CIA and the United States Army being designated a terrorist organization by Iran, does that mean the U.S. can finally admit that we’ve been training people who then commit terror attacks against their country and other countries?

Without shots being fired or any threats to invade, North Korea has agreed to shut down its nuclear reactor in exchange for several millions of tons of fuel oil, basically making up for the energy that would have been generated by the nuclear plant. So people can rest easier about nuclear North Korea, at the cost of some fuel oil.

The cost of equipping a soldier has increased a hundredfold, going by adjusted dollars, since World War II. The weapons used have become better, the armor to protect the soldiers have become stronger. All of this is more expensive. Perhaps in spite of this, or because all this gear is supposed to help soldiers return home safely, the Army says that it has met its 2007 goal of 80,000 new recruits. They will probably need all of them, considering that the United Kingdom plans on reducing its Iraq force by 1,000, even as the United States continues the “surge” idea. Some of those soldiers may not be fully focused on their tasks in Iraq, as spouses of military personnel that do not have legal resident status may be deported while their spouse is away on duty. Which is just fine with Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies, saying that granting stays for the spouses would be “amnesty for illegal immigrants...letting lawbreakers get away with their actions just because they have a relative in the armed forces”. Wow. Nothing stops true love like a hostile government.

Mr. Bush reaffirmed that he has little care for the people in his own country in addition to having little care for people in another country by vetoing the expansion of the S-CHIP program, that would have insured several million more children under a government insurance plan, following through with his promise. This is the fourth veto exercised over six years of government, and there’s a strong push to over-ride the veto and pass the legislation anyway. Mr. Bush is unwilling to spend a fraction of his Iraq War appropriations on something that is arguably more helpful than fighting in the Middle East.

Despite all the signals that things are going to go their way, the Democrats still look like a party afraid to step up and hit the ball, assuming that the voters will throw one at their head. There are a few ways that this election beanball could happen, and we’re still thirteen months away from the general election. Still, could you do a little less cowering now so that later, you might remember what having a spine is like? And thus actually pass a bill requiring some sort of troop withdrawal, rahter than just demanding that Mr. Bush tell you how he would do it, if he had to. And just possibly decide not to continue funding the war by proposing additional taxation? That sounds like a matter of “Well, we think we can’t stop him, so we’ll at least try to limit his damage.”

The current and traditional method of financing things such as schools and libraries is to assess a certain taxation on the value of each parcel of land, and then collect the tax from the owner of the land. A farm and land owner protested his tax bill of nearly eighteen thousand USD by paying the tax in $1 bills, and perhaps next year, will decide to pay the taxation in coinage that values at less than $1 USD. People protesting the existence of the Untied States and its governing system in a bigger way are meeting in Tennessee to discuss the possibility of secession from the Union. Representatives from Southern states and Vermont are both discussing the same thing - whether it would be possible to separate themselves from the federal government. Good luck on that.

Something that looks cool, but it probably very much a “no touch” experiment - water in two beakers charged with a high electric current forms a bridge between the beakers. Something even cooler, and that may be touchable, albeit with the assistance of space vehicles, is that an asteroid has been named by the International Astronomical Union after George Takei.

Something cool that could potentially suck - hybrid cars are too quiet for the blind to hear, which could lead to dangers in street crossing.

Something that sucks and will continue to do so, most likely, Wally World is suffering from bad customer service and bad employee service - which is nothing new for most of us, but hey, those low, low prices! Better customer service has come from a store that refused to sell a man alcohol because he would not show his identification. The man was 72 years old. Some part of me says, “Well, he probably didn’t look under 30, unless he’s got really good skin for his age, so they probably could have sold him the booze” and some other part of me says, “Well, if the policy says everyone gets carded, regardless of age, then they were doing their job to the nines, and should be respected. That gentleman can just shop elsewhere.” What do you think?

The BBC gives us a choice over-reaction in the United Kingdom, where the smell and smoke from burning chillies was sufficient to shut down an entire neighborhood because someone feared it was the scent or smoke from a chemical attack. Well, I suppose it was a good test for hazmat response teams, if nothing else. And they’re probably glad that it was a false alarm in the end.

Cranking Widgets offers up a list of ten ways people change when they become parents. On the other end of the spectrum, the Globe and Mail describes a French mother who wrote a wildly popular book about forty reasons not to have children. I might say about the first that working with children in general starts imparting to you those ten things, and possibly cementing in your mind some of the forty reasons from the second list.

I sigh, disappointed at the following - the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal to the state of Alabama's ban on sex toys. Is this another side effect of a conservative stacking of the Court? But by banning sex toys, they’re encouraging the women to go out and have sex with men (or women), aren’t they? Wouldn’t the best abstinence campaign be the one that promises a Battery Operated (or not) Boyfriend to every woman who wanted it, in the size, shape, and colours that she wants it? Would certainly be less expensive that those ineffective abstinence campaigns that suggest that all women should just sublimate those feelings and do nothing about them.

But by far and away the winning item for tonight is the Ohio legislator who had a topless woman appear when he put his flash drive into a computer to give a lecture on how a bill becomes law. The punchline I was waiting for, and that never materialized, is that the topless woman was the statue of Justice. In this case, however, there appears to have been a folder of similar pictures on the drive, which the legislator received as a gift. I still think the story would have been better if the topless woman was the statue of Justice that got shrouded.

And that’s all I have tonight. Hopefully I’m not too square in front of the middle school crowd tomorrow, telling them about the wonderful services that we have here at the library. One of those things that comes with being the one of the two librarians who’s probably better suited to being able to read and react to the teen pulse and talk with them. In some sense, I may have become the teen librarian that also happens to tell stories to the kids and work with them. Eh. If this strange mishmash of duties works out and I like it, then tally ho, d00d.