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I found my story groove last week and confirmed it this week. Ah, what fun. Just not that many kids came to see me today. Probably because it was rainy. I’ve noticed on rainy days my turnout is less than stellar. And then there was work today. More things added to the “things I’ve learned” column, and sufficient things have happened to generate a “things I would like my users to know” column, which may be making an appearance sometime soon. I was pretty sure that work would creep into this journal, and while I’ve done my best to anonymize and be general, if you recognize yourself in that second column, please, for the librarians’ sake, change that habit!
Also, Washington State's Young Adult Review Group nominated the manga Death Note for an Evergreen Award. Librarians understand a lot of this stuff (but we’re always looking to understand more!), and we like being out on the forefront of new stuff.
Sonic the Hedgehog is confirmed as a Super Smash Brothers Brawl character. Now, perhaps, we can finally determine who really does kick more butt in a head-to-hand Smash Bash.
Doctor Robert W. Bussard, inventor of the Bussard ramjet and collaborator on many other fusion projects, has passed away. For those whom the name sounds familiar, recall that in Star Trek there are “Bussard collectors” that take in hydrogen for use in the engines of starships. His project at the time of death appears to be on magnetically contained and controlled fusion reactions.
We’ve got political insanity for sea to shining sea. Let’s set the mood with a presidential candidate joking about how other candidates should consider suicide because their support doesn't match their fundraising. [Worms]Stu-pid.[/Worms] And it gets, well worse from there. The Republican debate in Dearborn seemed to consist of the debaters taking potshots at Senator Clinton's campaign, tempered by the fact that everyone seems to believe that the Senator will win the White House, to the point of setting up and introducing bills that would help frame an agenda were she to actually become president. Cart before the horse, I’d say, considering we haven’t seen the first of the dark-maned surprises. Additionally, money continues to be wasted on ineffective cargo screening technique.
Internationally, A former intelligence chief in Pakistan said Osama bin Laden [if he's alive] is probably hiding in a city, not a cave. Which would give him greater freedom of movement and anonymity. Which very well might mean that all the guns are pointed in the wrong direction. Of course, if the United States military/coalition authority decides that they wish to again engage in urban warfare, hopefully they’ve learned plenty from Iraq. Speaking thereof, Turkey may be invading Iraq to deal with Kurdish rebels in the north part of the country. This does not bode well for infrastructure in Iraq.
Then things get ugly - observe the comments to a photo spread chroncling American "vagabundos", which could be vagabonds or homeless or something else. Those who speak the appropriate language, translation help? But anyway, many of the English-language comments are of the type that say “These people choose this. They’re just lazy and should get a job.” or “Drug addicts. This was their choice.” - always someone’s choice. While there may be the occasional person who does choose this kind of lifestyle, it’s certainly not the case for many people who are homeless or wandering not because they want to, but because they have to. What happens, though, is that the idea of some people wanting it spills over into “all of these people want this, and chose it, and why should I help them?” And then there’s the continuing argument over whether pole-dancing exercise is legitimate or sexualizing.
Diving yet deeper, and getting into quiche territory, Greta Christina laments about the short memories that vaccine resisters and AIDS denialists have (potential quiche for those who are resisters or denialists, not for Greta Christina) who see a world largely without the things that killed their fathers' and forefathers' generations unceasingly and without mercy, where drug companies and insurance companies are all out to make money off the poor people who don’t know any better. If the vaccinations lapse, and the immunity doesn’t develop, we may remember in a hurry why those vaccinations are needed. Or even better, go look at countries that don’t have vaccinations, drug therapies, and the like. See how their quality of life is, and ask yourself whether you want our country to go through the sufferings that others are. (We’re still not in favor of jacked-up insurance that puts profit before people, though.)
Solidly in quiche contention, and pissing off my professional sensibilities (although answering a question in the same way that I do at the first line) is Safe Libraries, an organization that finds the American Library Association and its principles repugnant, and the Office of Intellectual Freedom a hypocritical organization interested in making sure that pornography is widely available and distributed to all, whether they want to view it or not, in violation of law and legal decisions. That’s nice. Both this organization and I (and probably the ALA) all answer the question “Are children safe in libraries” with the answer “No. They’re not.” I think what we all have are different definitions of what constitutes “safe”. If you mean “safe from ideologies and points of view that are different than your own, or the accidental viewing of age-restricted material”, then a library is a sentient porcupine with venom-tipped quills. We can filter children’s access (and have to, actually, according to the laws of the land), but that means squat if the person sitting next to them is of age, using unfiltered access, and is looking at age-restricted materials. If you mean “physically safe from predators and those who seek harm”, then it’s still not safe, but the risk can be reduced by applying excellent parenting and protection strategies to about the same risk you would have going to any other public place. In any case, no, the library’s not safe. If you want to raise your child in a bubble, don’t bring them to my desk. If you don’t want your kid reading anything other than what you will approve beforehand, then you’re going to have to monitor everything they read. And there’s still always that chance that something will happen that will shatter all your carefully constructed protections and expose the child to the real world. Might not even happen at my library. And then there’s the cake-topping stuff, where in order to protect one’s children from the dangers of the Internet, parents should:
Obviously no trust or faith that children are savvy, wise, and understand what’s going on, and that they will make good decisions, or at least come talk to you about things that might be off-kilter. If you go through all of those actions, I can guarantee that they’re coming straight to my desk and using their alloted Internet time to do all those things you just prevented them from doing. (Where they can, of course. We still have filters, some ports are blocked off, et cetera.) And they’ll be even less likely to talk to you about potentially dangerous situations. Funny how in trying to make things “safe”, you’ve ended up making them potentially even more un-safe.
If, by any merciful chance, this site is a highfalutin’ satire or parody, then I missed the joke somewhere in the folds.
After all of that, though, there is one other thing that takes the quiche. (I can deal with people having an opposing opinion and expressing it, even if they want to make the ALA out to be a demon with nine heads and seven tails, sweeping stars down from the sky.) And that’s with anti-abortion protesters and lawmakers that utilize tactics reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan. Making such a din and noise, doing everything but that which is illegal (blocking someone from getting in or out of the clinic is still illegal, as far as I know) in an attempt to shame someone having an abortion into reconsidering, regardless of whether having the child would ruin the family or mother more than aborting. Or that would shoot doctors that perform abortions, bomb the clinics, and force workers there to check for suspicious people and packages or wear bulletproof vests while going about their job. Or the ones that follow and harass workers and women away from the clinic, or put up “Wanted” posters with the names and addresses and telephone numbers of those who work at an abortion clinic.
And then the lawmakers that get into the act, passing statutes that require abortions to happen early, or require that married couples obtain the husband’s consent before performing an abortion, or “cooldown” periods that require someone to wait before being able to have an abortion. The ones that fund abstinence campaigns and seek to outlaw birth control and sexual education. The ones that make it seem like abortion is illegal in their state now (even though it isn’t) and that pass “trigger” laws that will outlaw abortion if the court decision that currently permits them to happen is overturned. For the legal scholars, I thought that a law that is found unconstitutional is scrubbed from the books and would have to be re-passed were the situation or court decision to be overturned. Or maybe that’s my idealism showing again. Trigger laws like that feel like one of the forbidden Go moves, where one cannot deliberately place a man in a position that would cause them to be immediately sacrificed. In the South, the Bible Belt, the fight is fiercest, mostly because it seems like a Sisyphean task (or even worse, a Promethean one - achieve it, only to have birds picking at your liver every fucking day because you pissed off a god), and the people in power have no particular willingness to permit abortion clinics and doctors to exist. As such, they tacitly endorse the idea of having even more single unwed mothers on welfare, looking for foster parents, and lots of children entering an already over-stressed child support system. All as a punishment for deciding that sex is something that a woman can decide to do or not to do, on her own merits and thoughts. Because being ant-abortion is very often not about the children’s lives. If that were so, the pro-life movement would be laying down the foundation and building a massive support network for all those children who would otherwise be aborted. They’d be working tirelessly to promote the alternative and show with examples just how good a life it will be if the mother carries to term, even if she gives the child up for adoption afterward. But that’s not there. The current administration demonstrates that it would rather have more poor and uninsured children, because it believes that they’re poor and uninsured by choice, not by circumstance. Quite the 180 from Yeshua bin Miriam’s teachings, which many anti-abortion people profess to follow.
No, they want to control sex. The point of attack is not the child, but the act that can potentially conceive children. And it’s not a very supportive stance. It wants to punish women for choosing to exercise their sexuality by forcing them to carry a child to term, by forbidding the use of prophylactics or birth control units or the ability to abort if those methods should fail. It’s either children or abstinence, with no gradations in between. Far from being “pro-life”, the stance is now much more “anti-choice”. Still persecuting heretics, but not for doctrinal differences, this time. For that, the quiche is yours. Enjoy it well, you stupid, stupid, rat creatures.
And then we get into futurology with a bleak picture of the United Kingdom and the world 10 years from now, totally in a surveillance society and thinking that it's normal. While things may not progress to that point that quickly, there’s nothing in that article that isn’t out of reach and can’t be justified with some excuse, be it terror or better marketing. The Democrats are pushing for expanded wiretapping powers, and Mr. Bush refuses them because they don’t grant retroactive immunity to telecoms that engaged in warrantless wiretapping, and the Republicans want mroe broad authority to spy on people. Nowhere does anyone seem to be thinking “You know, maybe we should stop this, turn around, and go back to being a country that affords its citizens privacy and civil rights.”
There is at least one piece of “good news” - doctors in Israel are treating heart-diseased Iraqi children. If there’s such a thing as a Hippocratic Oath or the promises that medics and Doctors Without Borders make for Israeli doctors, or even if there isn’t, kudos to them for stepping beyond national politics to practice healing.
And something that deserves unvarnished praise, even though it will draw scorn and complaints from many - the writer for 'Dear Abby' is in favor of gay marriage, and is not afraid to say so several times in her nationally syndicated advice column. Rather than provoking a storm of angry letters, the syndicate that distributes her column hasn’t heard complaints. Perhaps some editors don’t run those columns, but there’s nothing coming back up to the office. Dear Abby’s writer is also in favor of honesty about transgenderism and acceptance of the transgendered as well.
After that, I think a massage is in order. Robot-driven face massage sounds like something worth trying - maybe it’ll get rid of the incessant jaw pop that I have.
Cool stuff starts off with what I think this is an Addams-style car (go-kart, maybe?). Or something that Lovecraft might have driven to work. Either way, it’s really cool. The Phantom Roadster puts it all together for the person who wants style in their scare. Moving on from there, a shirt that details the strength of Wi-Fi signals near it. Perfect for those times when you want to know whether you can get on the ‘net where you are. Or if you’re cruising the skies in your personal dirigible VTOL-capable air yacht. (Or office dirigible, if you like.)
Miyazaki group raises 73 million yen to purchase an area that inspired the movie "My Neighbor Totoro". A little more than a third of that money was raised from the general public through donations. Which is really cool, and green, too.
If you ever wondered where the culture for dirty jokes comes from, you’re going to go back a long way - at the very least to the sixteenth century, where sexual and scatological humor were all available at the local comedy troupe. And other’s are wondering why the fuck we're cursing in the first place, and why people think that fuck, the other Seven Words, and other words and phrases not uttered in polite company are so much of a fucking problem. (Those singing a South Park movie tune right about now are rewarded with the knowledge that they’re following my train of thought as I write this.)
Going from cussing to things that might make people cuss (or laugh, knowing the joke involved),![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thewayne can’t pin down the source of it, but he offers what building a house would be like if architects had to do things the way software developers are supposed to write systems. Much fun to be had.
Tonight’s last thing is something that xkcd did once in a comic somewhere (apparently #195, and now has an official guide to refer to - a complete census of the Internet has been taken, showing who owns what blocks of IP addresses, assuming that that particular IP responded to the census ping.
After all those characters and bytes, if you’ve made it to the end, fantastic. You get a cookie. And possibly a ride in the TARDIS to make up for all the time you likely wasted reading all that. G’night everybody.
Also, Washington State's Young Adult Review Group nominated the manga Death Note for an Evergreen Award. Librarians understand a lot of this stuff (but we’re always looking to understand more!), and we like being out on the forefront of new stuff.
Sonic the Hedgehog is confirmed as a Super Smash Brothers Brawl character. Now, perhaps, we can finally determine who really does kick more butt in a head-to-hand Smash Bash.
Doctor Robert W. Bussard, inventor of the Bussard ramjet and collaborator on many other fusion projects, has passed away. For those whom the name sounds familiar, recall that in Star Trek there are “Bussard collectors” that take in hydrogen for use in the engines of starships. His project at the time of death appears to be on magnetically contained and controlled fusion reactions.
We’ve got political insanity for sea to shining sea. Let’s set the mood with a presidential candidate joking about how other candidates should consider suicide because their support doesn't match their fundraising. [Worms]Stu-pid.[/Worms] And it gets, well worse from there. The Republican debate in Dearborn seemed to consist of the debaters taking potshots at Senator Clinton's campaign, tempered by the fact that everyone seems to believe that the Senator will win the White House, to the point of setting up and introducing bills that would help frame an agenda were she to actually become president. Cart before the horse, I’d say, considering we haven’t seen the first of the dark-maned surprises. Additionally, money continues to be wasted on ineffective cargo screening technique.
Internationally, A former intelligence chief in Pakistan said Osama bin Laden [if he's alive] is probably hiding in a city, not a cave. Which would give him greater freedom of movement and anonymity. Which very well might mean that all the guns are pointed in the wrong direction. Of course, if the United States military/coalition authority decides that they wish to again engage in urban warfare, hopefully they’ve learned plenty from Iraq. Speaking thereof, Turkey may be invading Iraq to deal with Kurdish rebels in the north part of the country. This does not bode well for infrastructure in Iraq.
Then things get ugly - observe the comments to a photo spread chroncling American "vagabundos", which could be vagabonds or homeless or something else. Those who speak the appropriate language, translation help? But anyway, many of the English-language comments are of the type that say “These people choose this. They’re just lazy and should get a job.” or “Drug addicts. This was their choice.” - always someone’s choice. While there may be the occasional person who does choose this kind of lifestyle, it’s certainly not the case for many people who are homeless or wandering not because they want to, but because they have to. What happens, though, is that the idea of some people wanting it spills over into “all of these people want this, and chose it, and why should I help them?” And then there’s the continuing argument over whether pole-dancing exercise is legitimate or sexualizing.
Diving yet deeper, and getting into quiche territory, Greta Christina laments about the short memories that vaccine resisters and AIDS denialists have (potential quiche for those who are resisters or denialists, not for Greta Christina) who see a world largely without the things that killed their fathers' and forefathers' generations unceasingly and without mercy, where drug companies and insurance companies are all out to make money off the poor people who don’t know any better. If the vaccinations lapse, and the immunity doesn’t develop, we may remember in a hurry why those vaccinations are needed. Or even better, go look at countries that don’t have vaccinations, drug therapies, and the like. See how their quality of life is, and ask yourself whether you want our country to go through the sufferings that others are. (We’re still not in favor of jacked-up insurance that puts profit before people, though.)
Solidly in quiche contention, and pissing off my professional sensibilities (although answering a question in the same way that I do at the first line) is Safe Libraries, an organization that finds the American Library Association and its principles repugnant, and the Office of Intellectual Freedom a hypocritical organization interested in making sure that pornography is widely available and distributed to all, whether they want to view it or not, in violation of law and legal decisions. That’s nice. Both this organization and I (and probably the ALA) all answer the question “Are children safe in libraries” with the answer “No. They’re not.” I think what we all have are different definitions of what constitutes “safe”. If you mean “safe from ideologies and points of view that are different than your own, or the accidental viewing of age-restricted material”, then a library is a sentient porcupine with venom-tipped quills. We can filter children’s access (and have to, actually, according to the laws of the land), but that means squat if the person sitting next to them is of age, using unfiltered access, and is looking at age-restricted materials. If you mean “physically safe from predators and those who seek harm”, then it’s still not safe, but the risk can be reduced by applying excellent parenting and protection strategies to about the same risk you would have going to any other public place. In any case, no, the library’s not safe. If you want to raise your child in a bubble, don’t bring them to my desk. If you don’t want your kid reading anything other than what you will approve beforehand, then you’re going to have to monitor everything they read. And there’s still always that chance that something will happen that will shatter all your carefully constructed protections and expose the child to the real world. Might not even happen at my library. And then there’s the cake-topping stuff, where in order to protect one’s children from the dangers of the Internet, parents should:
1. Get your child off MySpace,
2. severely restrict cell phone usage and preclude text messaging,
3. Prevent IM usage,
4. Get blocking software for your computer,
5. Get software to spy on your kid’s computer usage,
6. And for Pete’s sake get the computer out of the child’s room.
7. At a minimum, if your kid is doing any of these things, you have to do it to so you learn what’s what.
8. Also, use Google Alerts to find your child’s name, then have Google send you daily news and web alerts on that name.
9. Lastly, get your public library to change its porn pushing policies.
Obviously no trust or faith that children are savvy, wise, and understand what’s going on, and that they will make good decisions, or at least come talk to you about things that might be off-kilter. If you go through all of those actions, I can guarantee that they’re coming straight to my desk and using their alloted Internet time to do all those things you just prevented them from doing. (Where they can, of course. We still have filters, some ports are blocked off, et cetera.) And they’ll be even less likely to talk to you about potentially dangerous situations. Funny how in trying to make things “safe”, you’ve ended up making them potentially even more un-safe.
If, by any merciful chance, this site is a highfalutin’ satire or parody, then I missed the joke somewhere in the folds.
After all of that, though, there is one other thing that takes the quiche. (I can deal with people having an opposing opinion and expressing it, even if they want to make the ALA out to be a demon with nine heads and seven tails, sweeping stars down from the sky.) And that’s with anti-abortion protesters and lawmakers that utilize tactics reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan. Making such a din and noise, doing everything but that which is illegal (blocking someone from getting in or out of the clinic is still illegal, as far as I know) in an attempt to shame someone having an abortion into reconsidering, regardless of whether having the child would ruin the family or mother more than aborting. Or that would shoot doctors that perform abortions, bomb the clinics, and force workers there to check for suspicious people and packages or wear bulletproof vests while going about their job. Or the ones that follow and harass workers and women away from the clinic, or put up “Wanted” posters with the names and addresses and telephone numbers of those who work at an abortion clinic.
And then the lawmakers that get into the act, passing statutes that require abortions to happen early, or require that married couples obtain the husband’s consent before performing an abortion, or “cooldown” periods that require someone to wait before being able to have an abortion. The ones that fund abstinence campaigns and seek to outlaw birth control and sexual education. The ones that make it seem like abortion is illegal in their state now (even though it isn’t) and that pass “trigger” laws that will outlaw abortion if the court decision that currently permits them to happen is overturned. For the legal scholars, I thought that a law that is found unconstitutional is scrubbed from the books and would have to be re-passed were the situation or court decision to be overturned. Or maybe that’s my idealism showing again. Trigger laws like that feel like one of the forbidden Go moves, where one cannot deliberately place a man in a position that would cause them to be immediately sacrificed. In the South, the Bible Belt, the fight is fiercest, mostly because it seems like a Sisyphean task (or even worse, a Promethean one - achieve it, only to have birds picking at your liver every fucking day because you pissed off a god), and the people in power have no particular willingness to permit abortion clinics and doctors to exist. As such, they tacitly endorse the idea of having even more single unwed mothers on welfare, looking for foster parents, and lots of children entering an already over-stressed child support system. All as a punishment for deciding that sex is something that a woman can decide to do or not to do, on her own merits and thoughts. Because being ant-abortion is very often not about the children’s lives. If that were so, the pro-life movement would be laying down the foundation and building a massive support network for all those children who would otherwise be aborted. They’d be working tirelessly to promote the alternative and show with examples just how good a life it will be if the mother carries to term, even if she gives the child up for adoption afterward. But that’s not there. The current administration demonstrates that it would rather have more poor and uninsured children, because it believes that they’re poor and uninsured by choice, not by circumstance. Quite the 180 from Yeshua bin Miriam’s teachings, which many anti-abortion people profess to follow.
No, they want to control sex. The point of attack is not the child, but the act that can potentially conceive children. And it’s not a very supportive stance. It wants to punish women for choosing to exercise their sexuality by forcing them to carry a child to term, by forbidding the use of prophylactics or birth control units or the ability to abort if those methods should fail. It’s either children or abstinence, with no gradations in between. Far from being “pro-life”, the stance is now much more “anti-choice”. Still persecuting heretics, but not for doctrinal differences, this time. For that, the quiche is yours. Enjoy it well, you stupid, stupid, rat creatures.
And then we get into futurology with a bleak picture of the United Kingdom and the world 10 years from now, totally in a surveillance society and thinking that it's normal. While things may not progress to that point that quickly, there’s nothing in that article that isn’t out of reach and can’t be justified with some excuse, be it terror or better marketing. The Democrats are pushing for expanded wiretapping powers, and Mr. Bush refuses them because they don’t grant retroactive immunity to telecoms that engaged in warrantless wiretapping, and the Republicans want mroe broad authority to spy on people. Nowhere does anyone seem to be thinking “You know, maybe we should stop this, turn around, and go back to being a country that affords its citizens privacy and civil rights.”
There is at least one piece of “good news” - doctors in Israel are treating heart-diseased Iraqi children. If there’s such a thing as a Hippocratic Oath or the promises that medics and Doctors Without Borders make for Israeli doctors, or even if there isn’t, kudos to them for stepping beyond national politics to practice healing.
And something that deserves unvarnished praise, even though it will draw scorn and complaints from many - the writer for 'Dear Abby' is in favor of gay marriage, and is not afraid to say so several times in her nationally syndicated advice column. Rather than provoking a storm of angry letters, the syndicate that distributes her column hasn’t heard complaints. Perhaps some editors don’t run those columns, but there’s nothing coming back up to the office. Dear Abby’s writer is also in favor of honesty about transgenderism and acceptance of the transgendered as well.
After that, I think a massage is in order. Robot-driven face massage sounds like something worth trying - maybe it’ll get rid of the incessant jaw pop that I have.
Cool stuff starts off with what I think this is an Addams-style car (go-kart, maybe?). Or something that Lovecraft might have driven to work. Either way, it’s really cool. The Phantom Roadster puts it all together for the person who wants style in their scare. Moving on from there, a shirt that details the strength of Wi-Fi signals near it. Perfect for those times when you want to know whether you can get on the ‘net where you are. Or if you’re cruising the skies in your personal dirigible VTOL-capable air yacht. (Or office dirigible, if you like.)
Miyazaki group raises 73 million yen to purchase an area that inspired the movie "My Neighbor Totoro". A little more than a third of that money was raised from the general public through donations. Which is really cool, and green, too.
If you ever wondered where the culture for dirty jokes comes from, you’re going to go back a long way - at the very least to the sixteenth century, where sexual and scatological humor were all available at the local comedy troupe. And other’s are wondering why the fuck we're cursing in the first place, and why people think that fuck, the other Seven Words, and other words and phrases not uttered in polite company are so much of a fucking problem. (Those singing a South Park movie tune right about now are rewarded with the knowledge that they’re following my train of thought as I write this.)
Going from cussing to things that might make people cuss (or laugh, knowing the joke involved),
thewayne can’t pin down the source of it, but he offers what building a house would be like if architects had to do things the way software developers are supposed to write systems. Much fun to be had.Tonight’s last thing is something that xkcd did once in a comic somewhere (apparently #195, and now has an official guide to refer to - a complete census of the Internet has been taken, showing who owns what blocks of IP addresses, assuming that that particular IP responded to the census ping.
After all those characters and bytes, if you’ve made it to the end, fantastic. You get a cookie. And possibly a ride in the TARDIS to make up for all the time you likely wasted reading all that. G’night everybody.
