a website for the conservative librarian
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Friday May 14, 2004
Just a quick post before the weekend.
Consider me a member
of the HALTHOMO community.
Via Collecting My Thoughts comes this
site. A step
back to happier fashions but from a single male's perspective its more a reminder of
Gil
Elvgren.
One of the fun things about having this site through
Register.com is I can look at some very useful webstats. I don't just get traffic
but which sites people are jumping from to my site and also traffic broken down
by country (though not by state which I wish was possible). I get hits from Spain,
Australia, Japan, South Africa, Belgium... Very cool and if there are actual people
in those countries looking in and its not some of kind of electronic bounce I just
wanted to say "Hi!"
In my last stats I had one hit from of all
places: Cuba!
No information or files were transferred so I don't know how that works but interesting
none the less.
At the MLA conference a few weeks ago I was able to
place an order with a vendor who deals in graphic novels. Our library already has
the first 9 volumes of Lone Wolf and
Cub. I was able to order the rest, which arrived
today. Well not the rest actually, idiot me thought we had #10 and we don't so I'll
have to see about plugging that little hole but otherwise I look forward to reading
the entire series. In general I don't like Japanese animation or comics but there
are a few diamonds in the rough.
Enjoy the day!
Thursday May 13, 2004
Time to go, some errands to run. Night.
Something was bugging me about that post yesterday and
I couldn't figure out what it was until after I got home. I said it was basically
PR and $20,000 certainly sounds like a lot of money. Then I remembered Keith Michael
Fields talking at MLA and one of the things he mentioned was
SPECTRUM.
Since 1998 ALA
has provided over 250 scholarships for $5000 in what can only be called a racist
effort to increase the number of non-white librarians. Not just increase the number,
but the fact that these people applied and received these scholarships means they
believe their skin color has relevance to the profession that they have chosen.
ALA has spent $1,250,000 perpetuating a very crude and ignorant concept.
$20G to supply an entire country with children's
books versus over a million dollars for racist propaganda. Nice.
Here's the link to donate to LISNews. It sounds like
he is getting a good response but please don't let that stop you. $5 or $10 goes a
long way. Check out the great response that Spirit of America got.
What do you know? They did bring it back from the
brink. Enterprise was excellent last night. The relationship between the Xindi and
the Guardians makes a lot more sense and the action was great.
I'd like to say tonight is TV free now that both
Friends and Apprentice are done but as a comic collector I have developed this
bizarre habit of wanting to catch the beginning and ending of things so I'll
probably watch the final episode of Frasier. I've watched repeats here and there
but never been either for or against it. Grammer's biography is a great read
however.
A good way to judge a sitcom is by how much you enjoy
watching the repeats. That 70's Show is always a staple and I notice that tomorrow
night WB is running Reba from 8-10 and I will watch every episode. If you can get
past the absurdity of the premise its a really great show.
Wednesday May 12, 2004
Time to see if Enterprise can pull themselves back
from the brink.
Night
Ann Sparanese, that wonderful person who helped save
Michael Moore's book, comes to Fidel Castro's defense in the letter pages of American
Libraries, May '04. She's responding to Karen Schneider's essay in a previous issue
which I mentioned here. Her complaint is that those awful Librarians were funded with
US funds. Here's a quote:
Honestly I don't know if you could or couldn't, in
this country it wouldn't shock me. The point though is you don't have to. Anybody
can come into our library and use the word processing computers to type up whatever
propaganda they want, they can surf the web and look at whatever they want, and
they can even request whatever books they want including biographies of Castro,
Che Guevara, Stalin, Hitler, they can get Mein Kempf or the Communist Manifesto,
they can even take out some how-to-sculpture books, go home and make a big giant
statute of Fidel Castro and stick it out on their lawn. Something Ann has probably done.
ALA received $20,000 from the Tides Foundation to
provide children's book to public libraries in Iraq. The Tides Foundation has
been described as an 'ATM for the
Left' and receives big money from the likes of George Soros and Theresa Heinz
Kerry. Its very odd to have two organizations who are unquestionably anti-Bush and
anti-war do something to actually help the effort. They had no interest in what
was available for the children to read during Saddam's reign but now that they can
do a little PR suddenly its a good thing. Well, its good for Iraq anyway but ALA
is as shallow as I am cynical.
LISNews is having some financial problems. When Blake
comes up with a way to donate I'll post here. The web community is certainly large,
but only a select few are offering a service worth contributing too and this is
certainly one of them.
The comments about a rightwing coven are a little
disturbing. Having been called a fascist and compared to Stalin on I believe at least
a couple of occasions I'm not about to say LISNews is apolitical.
LISNews is having some financial problems. When Blake
comes up with a way to donate I'll post here. The web community is certainly large,
but only a select few are offering a service worth contributing too and this is
certainly one of them.
The comments about a rightwing coven are a little
disturbing. Having been called a fascist and compared to Stalin on I believe at least
a couple of occasions I'm not about to say LISNews is apolitical.
Some nice comments in the Feedback Forum for a change.
Although I'd better confess up front that the its vs. it's was someone's complaint
about my writing not me complaining about others. My rule on that particular little
concept is: screw it, I'll look it up for official docs but nothing less. So I guess
that makes us ideological twins just not identical ones.
Tuesday May 11, 2004
Stayed a little late, time to run. G------ G----
is on, I'm completely lost from missing the week before last. Damn you MLA.
Night
LJ 05/01 has an article titled "Born With The Chip" by
Stephen Abram & Judy Luther. It talks about the fact that our young patrons are
going to be techie by nature and lists 9 ways how this is going to affect us.
Interesting and certainly legitimate subject. Just a couple minor points:
This generation has a well-defined value system, and NextGens express themselves by
voting with their actions across the political spectrum. High levels of veganism,
vegetarianism, political action, environmentalism, voluntarism, and more indicate deep
thinking about how they live their lives and the principles upon which they plan to
base their impact on society.
Veganism and vegetarianism indicate deep thinking?
People who don't eat meat for health reasons are no more deep thinkers then people
who are on the Atkins diet, you do what works for you. People who don't eat meat
because they feel really sad about big doe-eyed animals dying for their dinner plate
have an incredibly limited concept of life. I am going to feel no better or worse
for the death of the cow or pig that feeds me then the spiders I kill in my apartment.
I simply thank God for supplying me with a wide variety of food to eat and ask him
to please keep the creepy crawlies out of my bathroom.
This generation demands respect and finds no need to beg
for good service. In general, they are direct communicators, neither rude nor obsequious,
just direct. On the positive side, they will ask for help. On the negative side, they will
express dissatisfaction with services that do not meet their expectations.
I'm not buying this. If a teenager walks up to you
and is 'direct' then he's being rude, period. Direct is just another way of saying,
"lacks basic manners." As for dissatisfaction with services, that directness comes
from a generation that thinks googling is research. If they are dissatisfied with
services its probably because they don't understand what the service is.
I used to read this guy several years ago. He has his
own enormous library to work from and writes some excellent articles. His old site
went down way back due to work overload I believe. On a whim I googled him and came
across his new and improved site. Very cool.
I had my radio interview this morning that I
mentioned last week. Their blog is here. It went really well. No yelling, no screaming.
Its amazing how many people are comfortable with filters on children's computers and
yet ALA couldn't think clearly enough to try and make a compromise. For the most part
we didn't cover a lot of new ground, or at least it wasn't stuff I hadn't argued before.
Obviously the new format was unique. Its tough to think on your feet and I can understand
why politicians use talking points though I loathe the concept.
They had an interesting question comparing FCC
rules to the strictness of internet filters, saying we are more lenient on the TV and
radio then we are on the internet. I didn't have a response right then, I was honest and
said that wasn't a comparison I had come across. I did come back and say that with
television we now have the v-chip and what I could have added was that with satellite you
can have a selection of channels for your children and lock them out of the rest. As for
radio I didn't say and honestly I don't know. I think we've lowered the standard so much
that its very difficult to reset things where they should be. Its possible that if XM
becomes more common that more controls will be put in place on public airwaves.
On their blog they have the play list of songs they, I believe,
played before and after my appearance. He had asked me last week if I wanted to suggest
a performer and the only one that came to mind that I thought they might have is Jonny
Lang. He knew him but didn't think he had any of his works. He asked if blues was my music
of choice, I don't know as I have a music of choice but I think that explains part
of the list's theme. I've put holds on a couple of CDs of the music listed, I look
forward to getting them.
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