Here’s one for rare book collectors around the world:
Vatican Publishes Knights Templar Papers.
Enjoy!
Blog
Magna Carta For Sale–U.S. Constitution Next?
The UK Independent says that the Only Copy of Magna Carta in Private Hands to be Sold in New York. I’m temped to say something truly obnoxious such as wonder whether the U.S. Constitution can be far behind, seeing as how the current regime in Washington D.C. has little apparent use for it, but I won’t. I don’t need to. (That’s what headlines are for.)
Chaos, Catalog Migrations, and Beer
Everything is is chaos. If you own a house with a mortgage you may lose it if you’re not careful. The FDIC may not do much to preserve your bank account if push comes to shove. The financial elites are wrecking what’s left of the economy, the ex-spooks are suggesting that the rabble can analyze intelligence every bit as well (or better than) the CIA, and there are firm plans for the U.S Air Force and Navy to bomb the living crap out of thousands of targets in Iran. And, oh yes, all that jazz about eating locally is a pipe dream, although Suzi Steffen has put together a decent if small reading list on the subject to wade through.
Faced with all this mishegoss and woe, I did what any red-blooded patriotic American would do. I made beer. More on that in a bit.
But first I made sure that SirsiDynix actually migrated the catalog properly. (It did.) Then I did a check on whether the proxy server was tested on time (it was not). Worst of all, in the time I originally wrote the previous paragraph and the time I now resume writing, the proxy server situation has deteriorated to the point where beer news seems far more important to me as opposed to IP addresses, EZProxy configuration and authentication permissions and a lack of access to a number of electronic resources.
(I know, I know . . . nothing is more important to the library or its patrons then access to the necessary resources. All true. But the IT department is aware of the problem, I am aware of how to contribute to its solution and we’re doing what we can as quickly as we can to get things back to normal. In the meantime, I made beer.)
Obligatory 9/11 Post
I’ve written on this subject before (here and elsewhere) and I don’t think I have anything genuinely new to say on it, so I’ll stick to the things that are old but still true. The "Still True Today" category is a new one that I blatantly stole from Matthew Miller’s book "The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America’s Problems in Ways That Liberals and Conservatives Can Love." Miller’s idea about raising the awareness of the typical American about things that are problematic for 21st century U.S.A. is to imagine what it might be like if every newspaper had a weekly or daily column titled "Still True Today" in which would be presented a salient fact such as "47 million Americans still do not have health insurance," or something similar. And since I don’t see anything like it in any newspaper I read, I figured I’d go ahead with the idea here.
So, it’s been six years since we lost the World Trade Center and as events would have it, the 11th once again falls on a Tuesday as it did in 2001. Some related bits and pieces that are Still True Today include:
3,000 American victims of the events of that day are still dead and are still missed terribly by their families and friends. And certain politicians (*cough* Giuliani *cough*) are still reminding us of the fact on national television for the sake of getting you to vote them into power and privilege. And for the most part, it’s still working.
This is not to avoid the fact that at least 70 thousand Iraqis remain dead since "major combat operations" ended in 2003 and they are terribly missed by their families and friends. And that is not to detract from the fact that nearly four thousand American servicemen and women are still dead from action in Iraq since 2003. They are missed as well.
However, let’s not lose sight of the fact (unpublicized but still a fact) that the attack was committed primarily by Saudis, not Iraqis. We’re still buying Saudi oil as fast as they can pump it out of the ground, and we are still selling them expensive weapon systems. Unfortunately we’re also still beating the living crap out of the folks in Iraq and we’re still fighting in Afghanistan as well. And despite the noise coming from congress, we’re still not planning on leaving either country any time soon. (And Osama bin Laden is, we are told, still alive and supposedly making new video tapes.)
On the subject of Afghanistan, opium is still the most profitable crop grown there, and the Taliban is still in control of a big chunk of the country. This despite an American military presence there since 2001.
To backtrack a bit, there are still an uncomfortable set of questions about the events of that day which have never been adequately addressed in the public arena. And one still need not resort to conspiracy theories to describe what can still be explained by pure human fuckery, greed and ambition.
Worst of all considering our current leadership, the Doomsday Clock is still set at 5 minutes to midnight. It could be worse–three minutes or one minute, or the stroke of midnight itself–but it’s not likely to be set back in the near future, mostly owing to a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons that are still set on hair-trigger alert all over the world.
But there’s good news, too. A lot of people are still refusing to give in to the anger and fear that seem to be the standard (read, "conditioned") response to today. You’re still far, far more likely to die at the hands of Planet Earth herself (or an auto accident) than from a terrorist plot. And you’re just as likely to get home safely today as you were yesterday, and the day before that (and the day before that.)
Additionally, Ann Coulter still has not convinced anyone to blow up the NY Times. And notwithstanding six years of threats, warnings and concerns from the government there still has not been a terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
So, my advice to people remains what it was six years ago: kiss your significant other, play with your kids, tell your family and friends that you love them and enjoy what you have. Heck, remember what life was like in NYC on that day six years ago and be nice to total strangers for a day. All of them.
P.S.: Purely for the heck of it, I’ll point out that the National Review has still not replied to my open letter. Oh, well . . .
Architect Selected for Bush Library
The story is here. I won’t make any jokes about how much room they’ll need to house both books, but I am wondering of the book about the pet goat will be part of the collection. I’m pretty sure that Richard Clarke’s book about what went on prior to 9/11 won’t be, but that’s the cynic in me talking. Again.
Ah, well. A new library is a new library I suppose.
New Political Reality Check Website Arrives
If you enjoy the kind of non-partisan research on politics that Factcheck.org provides, you might want to take a good look at a new competitor, Politifact.com. They have a top notch research staff and a very accessible style of presentation. We’ll see how they evolve over time. In the mean time I’ll post the link in the sidebar as well.
News Flash: 3 in 4 Americans Read a Book in 2006!
I don’t think there’s anything to say about this story from Yahoo! News other than to suggest that it’s not good news for the future of the country:
"One in four adults say that they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and seniors were most avid, and religious works, and popular fiction were the top choices."
Not that there is anything wrong with "religious works", usually meaning the Bible in one form or another, or popular fiction per se (I admit to a guilty pleasure for Jeffrey Archer novels.) And I suppose something like the Left Behind books would qualify as both categories in one if you consider them religious works. (Surely they’re pop fiction.)
What worries me about news stories like this is not the normal "How could so many people read those kinds of books?" that you hear from the crowd that reads, say the NY Times religiously. Referring to the above mentioned materials with the word "those"–which is always spoken with a tone of extreme derision and disgust in such circles–denotes an episode of literary snobbery. The sort of person who would speak such a line without really thinking and with a straight face would rather die than voluntarily read a western, or a detective novel or one of those Left Behind books, or even admit they looked at the covers as they walked past the rows in the local Barnes & Nobel. Which is a shame because there are well written westerns and detective books out there. And, say what you like about fire and brimstone revenge fantasies like the Left Behind books but at the end of the day, boy they were fun to read (I got what I could from the library and bought the rest from used book dealers.)
What I’m referring to is the assertion that in a country of 300 million souls–out of roughly 200 million adults– 50 million did not read a single book for an entire year. 50 million otherwise decent Americans decided to do literally anything but read for an entire year. I’m stumped as to how that could be. Actually, I’m not stumped because I can imagine the life of someone who’s not a complete and utter reading freak–reading is time consuming, it’s not always easy especially if you’re not used to reading for fun, and a book can easily demand as much devotion as a mistress without providing the obvious benefits of one. Reading is tough! Worse, if you read you can’t be social. Reading is by definition a solitary activity. You have to enjoy being alone with a book a lot of the time.
The good news is (of course) that if one adult in four did not read even a single bo0ok last year, then three out of four did. And that, friends and neighbors, is reason to celebrate.
Bill Moyers Talks About Karl Rove
Today, I can limit my post to three words: "Moyers on Rove."
After you’ve absorbed that–and only after that–watch what Stephen Colbert has to say about Daily Kos, hate groups, and librarians here.
(All right, that was 39 words, shoot me.)
It’s The Little Things We’ll Miss Most
We’re officially beginning the migration of our catalog from a 13-year old in-house server whose performance can only be called "less than satisfactory"–I’d use stronger language considering what I’ve heard about the device’s past history both at the technical and political level, but I’ve only been here a couple of months (not even) and speaking ill of those no longer employed at MCNY seems rude–to a spanking new CMS account at SirsiDynix’s off-site servers. A proxy server will be brought online soon after and all operations should (I hope) be finished by the last week in August which would give us about a week to field test the new systems before classes begin after Labor Day.
At any rate, as I think about these things, it strikes me yet again just how much of our modern libraries’ livelihoods depends on resources we take for granted. Electricity is one. We don’t think about it much but so very much of our work depends on it being readily handy at the touch of a button or the flick of a switch. As an example of this we were emplored by the college president some weeks ago to please turn our desktop PCs off when we left the office at night. Doing so, she said, would save us roughly thirty thousand dollars a year in wasted energy. Thirty thousand dollars is a lot of electric power.
We don’t, granted, need electricity to run our libraries. But it makes everything infinitely easier. I mean, we don’t need XML or MARC or JPEG2000 or a million of the other modern tools we (all right, I ) use on a nearly daily basis. A case in point that’s been making the rounds has been the BBC’s recent story of the Bibliomulas, the book-carrying mules who are led through the mountains of Venezuela to promote reading to the country’s rural population. By the reporter’s account, people there seem to approve. People like to read, and they’re just happy that they haven’t been forgotten about.
Of course, in rural Venezuela, electricity is an option, and an expensive one at that. And I confess that I worry when I realize that I’m paying ConEd twice as much this year for power as I did last year without using twice as much of the stuff. And when I note that I note a major difference between the library here and the one I left at the Academy . . . MCNY doesn’t have a card catalog. A lot of libraries built after the 1980s don’t have them, either. Which means that electricity isn’t really an option anymore, it really is a necessity and we really do need it. I can’t pack our reserve and reference collection on the backs of mules to take them to students who might live in Brooklyn, Queens or upper Manhattan. The simple truth is that once power gets to be a certain price we’re screwed.
I’m not suggesting this is imminent but I do wonder sometimes if we librarians are as smart as we like to think we are (meaning smarter than me.)
At any rate, we’re migrating the catalog. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
The Open Library
Sure you have heard of it by now, haven’t you? You haven’t? All right then, read all about it here. And let me know what you think. (I’m still deciding how I fell about it.)
(Thanks to Ian Fairclough for this tidbit.)
What Price Unipolarity?
In the interest of making genuine news available to anyone who wants it, I came across this article a short time ago and have decided to link it here. It’s not so much that I believe every word that Putin says, so much as I despise censorship and I haven’t seen this stuff anywhere locally.
The upshot: the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and Russia is accelerating and the prospects for reducing it are grim. The transcript of Valdamir Putin’s interview is there, and it hasn’t appeared anywhere in the main stream media that I can determine (though a couple of nifty articles about how Russia is "planning to aim nuclear missiles at Europe" have been widely distributed.) I’m not here to analyze the contents, but you should read it and decide for yourself how close we are to actually seeing WWIII (in the now-oldskool MAD sense) in the next few years (maybe months, who the heck knows anymore?) Matt Savinar did post a fair analysis of his own here, and while he may sound alarmist to some, I don’t think alarm is unwarranted.
When I was a kid, maybe 9 years old, I sat and watched a movie with my parents one summer night. The name of the movie was "On the Beach," which was more or less based on the book of the same name written by Nevil Shute. The premise is grim: a full frontal nuclear exchange between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. wipes out the northern hemisphere and the fallout from all the weapons used wipes out all life on the planet. The book takes place in Australia and while everyone there is going about their daily lives, they’re really just waiting to die as the fallout clouds travel south.
Shute’s weapons were juiced up for the book, laced with cobalt to produce higher-than usual fallout content, which doesn’t work in real life. The point was that WWIII = the Death of Planet Earth. Even if the science was wrong, the image worked to communicate the message behind the words. And it was an image that most people involved in the arms race between us the the Russian subscribed to or at least had in the back of their minds when their words "nuclear war" came to mind. God knows that’s how we civvies thought of it.
Clearly that image is gone from the minds of those who hold the power these days. At any rate they are gone from the minds of those Americans currently running the show. And to my mind, that can’t be good for anyone, because if twentieth century history tell us anything it tells us that you can’t bully Russia. Stalin purged 30 million of his own people to satisfy his paranoid fantasies of assassination and later, his visions of an imminent invasion by Japan. Putin, an ex-KGB guy, has eradicated entire towns in Chechnya in the name of counter-terrorism. In the past we could trade with them, bribe them, and refuse to help at all if we thought we had nothing to gain, but we never actually bullied them. (I realize that putting our defenses on high alert after they’d done the same is something else.) The Russians are the ones who absorbed the bulk of battlefield deaths in WWII and kept on going despite shortages of literally everything, including hope. They are obstinate, observant, and fatalistic. Point a knife at one and he’ll laugh at you because he knows that even if you kill him, a half dozen of his friends will find you and kill you in return. Point 3,000 nuclear missiles at them and they’ll do whatever they think they have to just to make sure you don’t get to go the funeral. (I admit being married into a Russian family by way of my sister-in-law might be coloring my views.)
Anyway, read the transcript, maybe spare a few minutes to wonder what comes next, and perhaps take a few precautions and make a few plans. (I did.)
But if the world does not blow up in the near future, I’ll be starting as the new Tech Services Librarian at Metropolitan College of NY on Monday. Wish me luck!
Rushdie Still Driving Iran Nuts!
Whether it made political sense for the Queen to elevate Salman Rushdie to knighthood at this particular time or not, I do not know. In one sense, this is like throwing gasoline on a fire. I do know that he’s been making the Imams in Iran crazy for over 20 years, which from a writer’s viewpoint, cannot be a bad thing. (You know you’ve hit the Big Time when someone wants you dead. Doesn’t matter who.) In college we English majors all dreamed to getting onto as many hit lists as possible because of what we’d written, drawn, sculpted or put on film. Rushdie was elevated to near-god status when his life was first threatened for writing the Satanic Verses. If nothing else, it spurred dozens of us to immediately run out and buy the book. Which is what I think you should do if you haven’t done it already. (Click here.)