Interning Woes

I'm nearly done with my library technician degree. I have two classes left. One is the internship. I've been volunteering 6 hours a week for nearly two years now, and asked for an internship where I work. The newly hired librarian, who does not know or care about all the hours I've worked there turned me down "I just don't have time, and neither does anyone else, because I say so." I predict she won't have this job long. If she's this abrasive with me, she'll be worse with the staff (some of whom already quit) and drive off volunteers and cause more friction with FOL, run by the library's founder.

The local academic library also turned me down, as did the branch at the more distant academic college library in Rocklin.

The local high school said no, too. Anyone running a social justice club in a conservative community like this one should probably not be allowed around children, or at least consider therapy for the implied self-destructive trait. Perhaps that is harsh, but I also learned she does not interact with the academic library supporting her students AP program half a mile away, nor does she exchange books with the county library despite the books coming 100 yards from her branch so it would be super easy to do. She sends her students to the other branches, each several miles away so "no car" means "no books". This is unfair to the students in my opinion. That this librarian says she's "ready to leave the county for any library job anywhere" (paraphrased from what she said to me directly) is probably a good thing. In my experience "social justice" is a step towards cultists and sacrificial lambs.

I really hope that my difficulties finding an internship is merely a local problem associated with the Housing Boom crash that's impacted library budgets in schools and public libraries around this part of the state. That would mean I could go to Reno and get paid, or drive down to Sacramento, where there's jobs at the state library, and get paid (once I have my AS degree).

I may have an internship at the library an hour away. I hope so. There's potential work there that nobody else can do, especially extracting reports from their database. I'm experienced at that in some types of databases. If I can find out about their database and track down the report software and fix the breaks, through their IT, and upgrade/smooth their interface so they find it easier to work with, that would help them. And justify my being there without threatening anybody's job. That is important.

UPDATE: I was accepted for an internship at the Yuba College academic library, staring in January. While this is an hours drive each way, and will require me to go there twice a week, costing me a tank of gas every week, it is better than the other college who announced they won't consider library interns with less than half their MLIS completed despite their prior library technology program only two years ago. That is unprofessionally hostile and raised my eyebrow. That is a place to avoid until that employee either retires or gets fired. Placer County has some politics issues I think I'd be happier avoiding.

Students

I talked to a high school student today. He's reading the Dresden Files books and likes them. I told him about Butcher posting to my group back in the day, then leaving soon after saying he was going to focus on a modern-fairie magic setting. Turned out to be a good idea whose time had come. Cyberpunk is strangely common, so ubiquitous as to not matter. Soccer moms with bluetooth headsets recording their kids on tablet computers or smartphones with a faster CPU than my last computer in the 90's.

Still, the kids are so enthusiastic and that's a nice feeling talking to them. My feeling about interacting with teenagers is don't talk down to them. Treat them like they're responsible adults and they generally will be. And when they're enthusiastic about positive things express interest and encourage them. They mostly have good kids around here. Even the ones growing up on dope farms are still working for their own future one day. I'd like to see those kids with a future outside dope, but any kid reading is already making a better future for themselves. Love the books. Love the books! It really IS enough to love the books.

Book Review: Supervisors Survival Kit, 11th ed.

So I'm reading this book for one of my librarian classes and I have to say that translating it into English from Jargon (it was written in Jargon), makes it very cynical. Its an updated version of The Prince. I can't say I'm disappointed because it is everything I have both feared and personally witnessed to be true about modern managers, which is that they are generally horrible and a fantastic argument for both Unions and returning certain medieval organizations back to life. I won't say which ones, but they sometimes had Guilds and tended to wear black.

Never let your employees feel safe and they won't ask for a raise. 

This book is depressingly accurate. It gives all sorts of bad but functional advice which is certain to drive any supervisor nuts and turn them evil if they weren't already. There's no warnings about the dangers of ambition, or how to shield employees who get the work done from bosses who have no clue how that happens while you're dealing with their egos and abuse. Not nice. I want to say that this book is realistic, but I already compared it to Machiavelli.

I am writing up the cliff's notes version of the translation and using the filter of real world experience to correct the Positivity!! that real humans find so insulting. See the smile? That's what you see on Middle Managers told to do the impossible and expecting to lose their best employees by giving the order.

Consider Azula, from the same series. She's a raging psychopath, who only cares about getting what she wants, nothing else. Her ambition and madness define her, and while she can motivate her friends as allies she eventually drives them off, and fails when alone. This is the truth of management. If you go into management with ambition, you are screwed, and will destroy yourself and everybody around you. This is why new "experienced" managers coming into your workplace from somewhere else should be FEARED, because they just ran from the mess they made somewhere else, and haven't learned from their mistakes. They're going to make the same ones again somewhere new.

Good managers need to avoid ambition, and defend at all cost their productive employees, and go home at night despite complaints and threats from your own boss about how you should get things done or they'll get even. They won't. It is too much work. Sometimes the best manager is a slacker.

The Trouble With Innovation

I'm a library student, learning the skills in college (and eventually grad school). There's a fair bit of promotion of "innovative programs" from time to time. I'm trying to be fair as I read these things, but I find the use of Jargon by library writers like Dysart to be really off-putting. Jargon gets used a lot by con men and people after other people's money (OPM). This being a retirement community, con men after practically a constant threat. They call twice a day with Nigerian Prince Trusting and Your Close Relative is in jail in mexico and need your credit card to bail them out. And they get enough hits to justify the calls. They often use jargon, and I've suffered through all sorts of "programs" and cults over the decade so my filter is primed and ready for the next one. And maybe Dysart is just really excited about the subjects. But I'm not.

I work in libraries because they have books. People come to the libraries to read books. They have internet at home. They don't need that at the library. They find a book and borrow it and bring it back when they're done. Know what self-checkout kiosks do? They get ignored and people still wait in line to see the librarian. And when people use the kiosks half the time they don't work, but print a receipt as if they did, so people take the book home and bring it back, so half the books out aren't checked out. That that come back doesn't fix the issue, because the number of checkouts impacts the budget and which books get weeded (thrown out). So the automatic kiosks which SHOULD solve problems created ones we didn't anticipate. This is a law of engineering, btw. Its called the Law of Unintended Consequences. This is important and relevant to all library programs. The people supporting their promotion gain something from them being funded, but are not responsible when they fail. Until such time and failure is punished, stupid programs will continue to be a problem in tax-based govt services, like libraries and schools. So I always think about whether a program is going to have unintended consequences, and ponder just what those consequences will cost.

Think about that when you're excited about some jargon filled program that only costs OPM. Sigh. Wasting public money is not the way to get better funding. For a library, it isn't innovation which will save you. People want boring libraries. They want new books in them, too, and you can't buy the books if you're wasting funds on BS. Stick to the basics and only invest in things you know will work. Not what's hot in some city far away. That's what I think.

Divisive Topic: Generational Differences

IN my library supervisor class, LIBT 208, taken for my AS degree at Cuesta, a topic was raised requiring the students to generalize about the different ways that different generations both communicate with each other and think of themselves. It was revealling. It was also divisive. The Baby Boomers were offended that younger generations do not respect them. They believed we didn't mind being insulted as slackers when we work harder than they do, and find their disrespect in the workplace offensive. We hadn't said anything, instead quitting those jobs rather than deal with an abusive boss, which Baby Boomers tend to be. Many inherited their jobs from the Greatest Generation, who grew up in the great depression and fought WW2 and Korea before pumping out 2.4 babies. Those babies, the Boomers, are the most spoiled in history of our species, and lived through the greatest wealth and peace, ever. What did they do with it? They got high. They partied. They spread diseases. They joined cults. My generation watched all this in disgust, and many in my generation saw their parents divorce, which largely broke the entire idea of marriage for us forever. The Baby Boomers also voted to extend the party, insisting that selling off the future in enormous debt, and then printing money without anything to back it, mirroring the collapse of Zimbabwe and Germany (creating Hitler), and think we should be Grateful to them for their stewardship... I am appalled at their gall. My whole generation agree with me, too, as many articles confirm on the internet. While it is possible to work together, Boomers tend to be really arrogant and ineffective leaders. Only the job itself can keep the younger generations coming back, and only until its obvious that the current leadership failings are destroying the business or institution being run by Boomers. That's what we discovered in our discussion. The Boomers focused on how disrespectful younger generations are towards their authority, accidentally confirming my point. They just don't see themselves realistically, and this inability to recognize their sadistic need for dominance, likely caused by the Veterans running things so long, means they overcompensate and aren't listening to those around them. Boomers don't have to be this way, but they often are, and their knee jerk responses in the classroom discussion are exactly what I predicted.

That's the thing about work experience. I have worked for two decades in businesses or organizations run by Baby Boomers. Sometimes I've had a good boss. Often I've had sexist, racist and sometimes raping bosses, drunks or drug addicts, all of whom got away with it. Some were stealing from the till, but most were stealing from the employees. They were horrible people. They were laughing sadists, straight out of a horror film, and nobody in charge of them wanted to admit they'd hired a sadist, so they protected them to the detriment of the employees, who quit in droves, just as soon as the abuse became too much. Some of those employees quit pregnant with the boss's baby, after he raped them after hours. It was NOT okay. I quit a job where a coworker was fired for nearly dying from a miscarriage, but at least it wasn't the boss's baby that nearly killed her.

Gen X, which I belong to, has too many decades of watching the Baby Boomers thrash around harming themselves and their loved ones and neighbors and employees to respect the monsters they've always been. They are a threat, not an ally. We are polite because they have the majority votes, and consistently vote to harm the future. It is mostly a matter of waiting for them to die so they can stop hurting the future. Only then can we make things better again. And we've had decades to learn what not to do, which is why we get along better with the Gen Y/Millenials. We learned to ignore/disregard the Boomers. They aren't wise. They are harmful. They don't like being caught out, and deny deny deny. This is why they mostly vote Democrat, and defend racism and creating poverty and communism. They don't care that they're wrong because they were taught two things: 1) It doesn't matter what you do. It only matters how you FEEL. and 2) If you throw money at a problem it will eventually go away. And steal the future's money. They don't have a vote!

Small wonder we don't like them. I feel a great sense of relief when dealing with Veterans, who respect the future and youth more than the Boomers who tend to be smug about how rich they are, or blame everybody else if they're poor. Its never their own decisions that lead to their poverty today. This is really common, for both outcomes. Rich boomers tend to be quite offensive to the generations they robbed, but we can't do anything about it but stare, and possibly add another entry to our eventually history books on their generation, published after they die and no longer control what is said about them. History is written by the winners, and dying rich isn't really winning. I predict that Gen X will be pretty harsh about the Boomers in our history books on them, listing every greedy vote, every act of cultural depravity, every bit of hypocrisy and mania they perpetrated against themselves and us. They will be a warning to the future. Don't spoil your kids or they'll turn into Boomers. The Boomers who nearly destroyed democracy and civilization.

It isn't a nice thought, but it is the result of the abuse. Boomers are pretty consistent with their arrogance.

The Upsides of Librarianship: Books On Hobbies

One of the big upsides of being a library shelver is I get to see the books that people borrow. I see what hobbies people are investigating, and you find out by the books they return, which I put on the shelf. Beer making is a good one this time of year. There's also lots of books on knitting stuff. And there's an entire row of cookbooks and food-based hobbies. An entire row is around 10,000 books. Think about what that means. One of the big challenges of modern librarianship is finding a way to connect patrons, searching through the stacks, to remember there are internet URLs to support that subject. In one of my classes, it was suggested we generate 2D barcodes and stick them up with a label in the stacks. And that might work.

In prior years I used the internet to investigate many different sports, such as bicycling, and found information on Bicycle Tourism (not just day rides but overnight with luggage on the bike), and motorcycles and scooters, and over the summer I learned about RVs. A lot about RVs.

For this Fall I have been learning about small sailboats: board sailers and day sailers.

The Laser is a wonderful olympic class boat. They're very simple to sail, which is why they are extra difficult. You really need to know what you are doing, and the more you learn, the faster you become. And there's books on that, too.

Stevenson Project Weekender, a day sailer with a cabin to sleep inside. 

Locally, we are about to have Octoberfest. Which is a fine thing, since All Hallowes is technically 3 weeks long, and starts with the beer and runs until Hallow Evening, aka Hallowe'en. Its a harvest festival. Feasting of the stuff you can't cure and preserve for the winter, spring, and summer until something ripens enough to eat.

My buddy collects pocket knives, even classic ones. I appreciate their essential value, being a Boy Scout, something that stays with you. Boy scouting taught me backpacking, astronomy, sailing, and even marksmanship. I liked putting holes in paper, and knocking over black metal animal-shaped steel plates from 200 yards away, also a sport, collectively known as target shooting. Being country people, and a Boy Scout, this is part and parcel with my skillset. There needs to be librarians with male interests too, after all. Like beer making, BBQ grilling, fishing, hunting, shooting, boating, motorcycles, 4WD jeeps and offroad navigation. Fire making and whittling and pocket knives. We do stuff not many women are interested in. And women who are interested in these things end up very popular with men, which irritates all the women who would rather eat chocolates alone than climb a mountain with a man and gain the associated benefits. We all make choices.

Exotic Eucalyptus Burl handle

Classic Opinel, with beechwood handle

So I was recently reminded of the Opinel pocket knife, which is a fantastically simple design. Its a curved bit of beechwood with a narrow slot, a slender blade, and a twisting collar to lock it open. Collecting and carrying such things are classic male interests. Like reading about horsepower to weight ratios in supercars, or the latest grilling techniques, or a review of beers or single malt whiskeys. Or carbon fiber paddles for the latest lake kayaks. Or the qualities of good digital SLR cameras. Men like this stuff.

Civil War Recreationists on Constitution Day, Nevada City, California. 

The whole point of public libraries is to get people in the door, and get them to borrow books, and thus serve the people. If you don't offer stuff like this, men won't care, won't visit, won't fund libraries. And if all your librarians are female, they might be unaware of men's particular interests in things like tools, and not purchase representative materials. You really have to watch out for that. Your entire nonfiction section may end up gender biased to the point of uselessness to half the population. Remember that. Males are 49% of the population. I'm encouraged that so many of my classmates are married women, many with sons, and won't put up with any gender bashing nonsense. Its discouraging to see it at work, even if only a few of the staff commit it for their own reasons I am not privy to. I am glad they're still stocking men's magazines since the last male head librarian was there, over 5 years ago and still bashed by the lesbians because he has Aspbergers so wasn't easy to get along with, a condition common in librarians, much like OCD and ADHD. We can't afford cruelty to people who work in our industry, nor can we afford to overlook institutionalized abuse. I am not in a position to remind these haters to knock it off, and they've been like this their whole lives. And probably will continue for the rest of them too. Meh. I do what I can for my patrons.

Grad Student

I got my official notice today that I've been admitted to grad school so I am officially a grad student. I start school next Spring. I won't finish my current program until the end of Spring next year, so there's some overlap, finishing this while starting that, but I'm only looking at two classes and paperwork for 4-5 certificates and an AS degree. Only valuable for a job application, but public services like that. Hell, I might even work at the local high school library. I will be qualified, and they pay better than the county does, anyway. There's also the local college, about one mile away, which has a college library. Their pay is lower, and has a high turnover rate (people quit every semester) because the place is mismanaged. I was wondering about possibly doing my internship there. I have learned, through experience, that many of the organizations here are run by egos, not laws, and exploitation is the thing they have in common. I have to be very careful about that. I don't want my resume damaged by some jerk manager.

KissManga.com

So I found a pre-license fansub site for japanese Manga, which are a kind of comic book without retardation. You read them right to left. Lots of manga go on to become popular enough to be turned into anime. Sometimes those stories are changed or simplified for audience reasons. Sometimes for censorship. Japan only allows one kiss in a broadcast. That's it. More than one and its pornography. But they have love hotels specifically for screwing when unmarried or cheating, and nude mixed public bathing at hot springs. Those are okay. Just no kissing. Holding hands is risque. This ultraweird victorianism is America's fault, actually. During the Occupation, after the war, we banned a lot of their porn because we were worried that poverty to create brothels again. Japan had a lot of those before the war. Debt slavery driven by a lack of modern banking options meant that loan sharks were the only place to get money to start a business, and you'd better hire an assassin to kill the loan shark if he wouldn't accept agreed payoff and tried to scam you for more. Japanese Yakuza also unofficially police Ginza and Shinjuku night city in Tokyo, even today. They keep things safe and clean and remove any violent drunks because happy drunks spend money and everybody is happy for it. Funny how that business works. The Yakuza run the pachinko parlors and they get a cut of all the profits, tax for their services keeping things calm and cheerful. The end result is Japan has relatively safe night life, but standards for what constitutes pornography are really skewed compared to America. Ironically, this opens the door for Manga, which allow for stories pretty similar to 90210, with young people hopping beds and getting emo about who to sleep with this month. They don't turn those stories into anime very often. It is a little too grown up, and I wondered if such stories existed.

A couple years ago I watched a pretty good anime called Golden Time, which is about a new college student who had recently recovered from severe brain damage that resulted in complete memory loss from before the accident. He still knows how to speak and read and write, but he has no memories of life before the accident. He has had to reinvent himself as a new person. He's healthy enough, now, to pass his exams and get into a law school in Tokyo. He meets some interesting people, including a woman who was rejected by a classmate after years of being engaged through high school. She's pretty neurotic and adjusting to this big rejection is hard for her. Another woman belongs to the folk dance club, and tries to recruit the hero to join and make friends. She is nice to him. Its a rather tragic story, as you might expect, because a woman is the root of his troubles, even if he's forgotten her. She feels guilty about it too. People remember him, the old him, but he has no idea who they are. The pitying looks are something he wants to escape in the anonymity of Tokyo. You expect a certain amount of adult romance. They are college students, but there's a lot less than you want. Its awfully clean. The hopping beds doesn't seem to happen. Holding hands, no kissing. That's about it. I found it kind of frustrating.

Honey And Clover was another college level story about love and ambition and the harm people do each other. I've written on that before. That's more tragic, but also plausible characters. People do get that obsessive and broken in college, where they have no governor on their behavior. They can go to extremes and ruin their reputations and hurt a lot of people. Whether they recover from that or not is another question. I knew a lot of people like that. Some of them are probably still alive.

The thing about manga is that you can dig and eventually find something more plausible and not such a gimmick. I found Hetakoi, which is about a guy who has just come of age, 20 in Japan, and went to a hot spring alone for his birthday. There he sees a stunning woman naked, passed out drunk. He yelps, she gets rescued by the staff and he's rather shocked by the whole thing. Then he starts college. Where he meets the girl. Every time he sees her, he remembers her naked. IN Japan this is practically a marriage proposal, which begs the question: why do they have mixed nude bathing then? Hypocrisy much? In my experience, the sort of women you see in mixed nude bathing are the sort of women that you never want to see nude. The sort of visual scarring which might put you off of marriage because they sag in terrible places, and the stretch marks are awful too.

This story is about a couple that are probably a good match except their timing is off. They don't get into the right place in their lives at the same time. They have lingering issues that ruin things between them, and its kind of tragic, which from what I've seen is the preferred kind of love story in Asia. The kind where everybody dies at the end. Or worse, one dies and the other lingers in regret. Not a happy ending. The opposite from America, where Happy Endings cause all sorts of irritation in people who are sick of cliches. This is why I mostly ignore American movies and most American TV shows. Hollywood's love affair with cocaine and cliches and rampant sexism and racism really put me off. I don't want them to get any of my money. I don't buy the claims that Michael Bay is mocking racism in America by making racist movies (like Transformers). Hollywood is evil. We already know this. People who say nice things about Hollywood are evil. People who listen to vapid drug addled movie stars for their political position on important topics are evil. I hope they die soon. The only thing good about Hollywood is the drugs kill movie stars. I just wish it killed them faster. They are bad people. The quicker they die, the faster people will have to find a new starlet to obsess over. Flavor of the month, according to the Tabloid fans. They don't mind. They like the drama. Sigh. Horrible people. If libraries start stocking actual tabloids I am changing careers. Or I'll privately refer to them as fishing for idiots.

I haven't finished reading Hetakoi. I suspect it may get a happy ending after all this drama and missed timing. The couple is rather tragic. That's their primary problem.

Finals, Spring 2015

It is Finals week. I'm nearly done. There's just the one for web programming, and I'll do that pretty soon, this morning. I need to sign up for Summer semester courses. Those will be fun, I think. Advanced and Intermediate searching are required courses for graduation, which makes sense. That they're only 1.0 unit each suggests there should be one course that's more in depth and might come in sooner. Librarians have core responsibilities.

1. Check out books
2. Check in books
3. Put books back on shelves
4. Find books for patrons
5. Buy new books
6. Prep new books for the shelf
7. Charge overdue fines as needed

Notice there is nothing listed there about the following: 

1. Babysit children
2. Babysit homeless
3. Provide internet porn
4. Be a movie rental store
5. Teach classes
6. Run a plastic extrusion shop with 3D printers

This became a test question, actually. The point being that too many head librarians are trying to turn their libraries, in some kind of manic desperation, into those other things. A library is NOT a homeless shelter, nor it is a mental health clinic, nor is it a place to abandon your children. If I see stuff like that where I work, I am calling the cops for an arrest to be made. It is also not my job to enforce any laws beyond overdue book fines. That's where my responsibility ends, and I really wish that other librarians would remember they are NOT trained mental health technicians, and they are neither qualified nor are they certified pediatricians or child welfare officers. That's not our job. If it were up to me, I would hand off management of these other facilities to other relevant departments. The county IT department and fund and maintain and PAY FOR STAFFING the internet kiosks that a prior librarian got installed and then ran away from the costs to another job. Not cool. 

I swear you learn so much just attending to volunteering and internships. I am learning a ton from others mistakes and while it looks like DVDs are now a common part of a library, it literally killed off the area's movie stores. There's no reason not to just stick to redbox kiosks, since the local movies only really serve the extra poor, who always have money for beer but complain they can't afford a computer or streaming netflix and broadband? Please. No. That was another final's test question. The entire concept of the digital divide is a scam for handouts. Its the modern Obamaphone of libraries. I recommended free wifi, but no loaner computers and no internet kiosks. Bring your own computer or use the hardcopy books. Libraries are not in place to provide internet porn. And you'd think that would be obvious but other librarian students in my classes have actual rules about what porn is allowed, in public. Are you kidding me? Too much tolerance for abuse is the same as lawlessness. I swear that there needs to be tasers and cattle prods in libraries, but that crosses a line. You have to remove the internet kiosks instead. Make the place a proper information archive, not a hangout for druggies and mental health patients. Its not in the job description and the staff aren't trained for this. 

Shifting Books

I have been working daily at the library since a week ago Friday, shifting around 30,000 books. Most are moving around 100 feet, and we have carts to carry them, but I still have to pick them up and put them down twice each. Often there is bending and stretching. The result is sore muscles. Every day I come home exhausted and have a beer or glass of wine, and a tall glass of water. You sweat like a pig while doing this work. I take a shower afterwards. Who knew that being a librarian means sweating like a pig and needing a shower afterwards?

I've discovered quite a few really interesting books as I shift around the non-fiction and oversized. There's some great ones on home building. If I were in county government with a too-small middle class, I would be lowering the fees for new building permits and setup a method to scale those fees to the house size so it is actually possible to move here for less than $500K. Lots of poor and middle class retirees should be able to live in a small house, if such houses had a financial reason to exist. Too many of those built here are 3-5 bedroom mansions for very large sums of money. Most of them have 3 car garages. Up here that's actually a good idea, but the local tiny houses only really need a 1-2 car garage.

The books in the oversize area contain building plans completely appropriate to the area, including some really nice Victorians. We really need more of those here. The Modernist ones mostly suck, and in time they look stupidly crass, which drags down their value, whereas Craftsman Bungalows hold their looks and value and as we become a post-car culture they will become much more obvious living in the long-term. Particularly since it seems that a thermite battery isn't going to happen. A pity. Lithium polymer is better than nothing, but only just. For the cost, a Scooter is better, and requires less maintenance.

We really need that sort of thing. I have found that adapting to poverty is mostly a matter of resignation, that reality rejects white males until something needs doing, and then we matter until that thing is done, at which point we're told to die again. Small wonder the dream of white males is to go to places with no other people, build our own stuff and deny entrance to the hateful sexist and racist buggers that want to steal it from us. I'd rather burn it down than give it to them. And the haters insist they deserve it because "You didn't build that".

Someday, with sufficient knowledge and the right voice for each character, I will be able to do a good job writing a novel for the California we deserve, one with buildings like in Italy, with hurricanes and rainstorms and heavy tile roofs, and narrow streets because we will become pedestrians again, walking to the train station or bus stop, no longer pretending to be relevant in a car culture that has died. My own car is dying and will stop running soon enough. This is sad, and expensive, since all this work I'm doing won't pay for repairs. Soon I'll be bicycling to this volunteer job, and won't that be a hassle in the afternoon heat? Sigh.

Community College vs Public Libraries

Public Libraries are very popular with the public, but they are commonly underfunded and the jobs are aggressively fought over, mostly by women, some of whom are the sort who do not like men at all and are allowed to be militant with their beliefs without fear of termination. This sort of problem is not one I can solve. This is unfortunate, but its how things are. Childrens libraries are usually run by mothers with young children, which is fine. Teenagers would be better served by people like me, but the people who hire librarians would never believe the revolutionary idea of talking to teenagers like adults rather than condescending at them like children. So people like me are never hired to run YA libraries and teenagers avoid them. The good news there is teenagers still like scifi, at least the male ones do, and female teenagers get recruited into militant lesbianism after plentiful exposure to self destructive victimization porn, aka Vampire Bodice Rippers (Meyer and Carriger) which are the majority of female teen books today. I wish that weren't the case, but the exception are mutant rebel murder porn like Divergent and Mockingjay. As expected, teen boys hate that crap. As a proto-librarian in training I've TRIED to read the girl stuff just to understand it, and I don't get how this qualifies as okay for teen viewing. Its murder porn. Its the worst of humanity, and its brainwashing teenagers into victimhood. They would probably read it anyway, however. Teenage girls are all about self-harm, after all. This is why they grow up to be neurotic cat ladies surrounded by pee and rotting newspapers.

I'm really good at helping the elderly, but libraries do not hire for that, even though they should. Should is one of those words that's a long way from reality. So unless I discover a county library that is run by sane people instead of the usual militant feminists and communists and mothers of young children (thankfully the majority of the staff), I am looking at some real challenges in getting hired due to being male rather than the other gender and its pretenders and outliers that go into the wrong restroom. Librarianship is interesting in that it is a bastion of sexism and discrimination against white males. This is odd because many books aren't inherently gendered, though Romance novels certainly are.

I already know that one should NEVER volunteer at a college, because once you do, you can't be hired there. Volunteering at my county's public library has guaranteed I won't be hired there either. I do more work than the paid librarians do, and their snide remarks about my work being too efficient seems to be feeding politics I want nothing to do with. A pity, but at least I know this is not the place to seek a job anymore. Same with Placer County, which is even worse. Places that purport to believe in literacy are the last to pay for it.

So I'm looking at other places with libraries. Most will require me to move elsewhere, being too far away. I know that Chico State is a proper college, but they offer a library science MLIS program and have a huge university library. It is a tempting backup to the San Jose State program, and probably worth more in the job market than SJSU's sheepskin. There's proper job experience. I suspect I'd gain something working the local college library, only the local college library is run by a college that's at least halfway crooked. So I'd gain additional reasons to dislike their communists, always sheltered in colleges, and that's exactly how evil persists. It has a place to go that's safe. The Sacramento Valley largely comments on the communism in Chico, and the money flowing into the community there is significant compared to the general poverty of everywhere else. If I went to that school I'd get a lot of work experience in a university setting at their library, which would be useful. Might even pay for housing. More expensive than here. But a lot more options.

If I get some volunteer time at the local college library, that could lead to paid work at a different college library down the road. I notice that rural towns sometimes have a community college, for all the high school graduates that want to leave town and have a better life than wage slavery or child rearing and drug addiction. Rural community colleges are very focussed on achievement towards escape from poverty. Someone as goal oriented as me might be a welcome employee at the college in Redding, for example, though that town is accused of having real violent crime problems.

Finding all the opinion pieces masquerading as "scholarly" with traces of statistical citations are rather common. Finding truth among all the chaff is the hard part. Perhaps students will want that? Or is pointing out all the conflicting statements contrary to the communists? Will they fire me, or do they get knifed by the local lumberjacks who hate communists more than I do? Considering that Jefferson State is proudly anti-communist, if they actually break away from California I'm exactly the sort they want. My interest in non-fiction maintenance manuals and cookbooks is probably a big plus, since those are all about making your money worth more by lasting longer. Jefferson is likely to remove all the self destructive stupidity of the vicious communists in Sacramento and allow all sorts of public experiments with private funds, rather than private experiments with public funds. So experimental cars instead of collegiate hooker training. And CNC and machining would make good sense there compared to art galleries and advanced communism. Diesel mechanics, not golf carts.

Finding a library that will hire a white male conservative atheist is my goal. People like me have to be valuable somewhere. The entire country can't all be communists and cultists, can it?

Gender Biased Workplace

Libraries are supposed to serve all patrons who walk in the doors. The ones who roll in the doors too, on wheelchairs. We are supposed to provide them books to read. Help everybody find education or entertainment. I volunteer at a library that has spent most of a decade with budget cuts, despite serving a relatively rich area with $500K houses being average for retirement. Rich retired people expect good government services.

The library, to the patron, works. They don't mind all the books unshelved. They don't mind the long delays from reporting a scratched movie to its getting back on the shelf. These are rich people, for the most part. They will order it on Netflix, no big deal. Netflix will send it to them. Overdrive does the same with books. For the cost of overpriced librarians with menopause and paranoia issues, striking out at their coworkers with neurotic random accusations, you can fund an enormous amount of ebook and audiobook download content. For the cost of dealing with a person, you can afford to replace them with 24/7 services that don't wear out, don't require a person to handle or check in materials or inspect or leave weird useless codes they came up with, psychotically without telling anyone.

Yesterday I spent two hours polishing DVDs because the audiobooks I'd like to clear back onto the shelves had 12-19 discs and the same librarian just wrote "polish" on them, not which disc needed it. And its usually one of those dozen plus that needs polishing. So there's audiobooks on that shelf now for nearly two months because the DVDs have a higher payback. The DVDs get borrowed. The audiobooks are less frequent. And once an audiobook gets scratched, they will skip forever. Polishing sometimes works, or reduces the skip duration, but it isn't removed entirely. This is a reason I think all new audiobooks should be recorded, but this isn't my library to run, and archival standards I think are rational aren't happening here.

Last week I learned that the library where I work was using funds to put brand new books into a robot in North San Juan. The robot will take their library cards and drop a book in their hands, and return the book too. Sounds neat right? In North San Juan, everybody is growing dope, and few of them shower more than once a year. Those brand new books are going to get smudged and saturated with dope smoke and worse and will be ruined. Thousands of dollars of books are going into this machine, in a place where paying a local to run room-sized library makes more sense, even with limited hours. They don't have a school. San Juan has a bar, and their market is called Mother Truckers, and its on the dirt road out of town, on the Ridge where the growers are. NSJ is all about comfort zones, and crazy. They have shootings there, and home invasions by jilted Trimmers seeking revenge after an unpaid summer of work, and the results are often deadly and don't get back to the sheriff. Somebody gets shot. Somebody gets buried. That's the kind of place The Ridge is. And they're not going to take well to a robot kiosk.

I know that the county library is a girls club. I know that half the women working there are menopausal, and many of them need retirement. I know that the few men working there are volunteers, like me, and the ONE man paid by the county as a librarian has had his life threatened at the nasty library in Grass Valley, and there are no apologies coming from the head librarian or the police depart that didn't show up for two hours, despite being two literal blocks away. I'd like to say this indicates the library is broken, these mistakes and spending problems... but for patrons it works fine. For patrons this is a good library. As a patron it has excellent books and a good selection to read. It doesn't matter about its management choices or destructive willingness to participate in only partly funded expenditures that divide their time and reduce their job satisfaction, making them lash out against coworkers. The library is fit to be tied, under the surface, but the patrons only see that it has nice books.

So it works and nobody knows it is broken. And they might even get money for hiring employees someday, but I expect that patrons will turn that down. After all, it works. As far as patrons care, it works. For my own sanity I'm there once a week and not getting much appreciation. Unhappy people complain, and you can't have a conversation because they're extremist Liberals despite most donations coming from Conservatives, which is NOT what you'd expect. I think there's a future for a conservative MALE librarian, which is why I continue my education, but I don't think there's a future in this county's library. A single token MALE employee and over 50 paid females? Duh. Of course that's gender bias. It is painfully obvious bias. Radical lesbians and man haters think they can do whatever they want, and with the married librarians unwilling to say anything, you have a hostile work environment. I will never work there because I can see its a hostile work environment and its mismanaged, with unfinished projects everywhere. With contrary and illogical policies meant to attack volunteers and ridiculous bias enforcing attacks on those who do the work by those who don't? Sorry, that just isn't a future I want any part of. This is a shame. I don't think the Friends of the Library want things this way, but that's how it is. This is another example of a no-baby-dirty-bathwater situation. Throw it out? Well, the patrons wouldn't understand there's a problem, and you'd have to build back a working model after tossing out the trash. Sigh. Too much effort. Start over elsewhere.

Courses

My coursework in Library Technology continue. I read papers, textbooks, articles, use online tools for research or cataloging (which is much preferable to trying to do it manually), and I write papers and do projects and turn things in for grading. There's even quizzes and midterms. And this is for credit, at a properly accredited school. This is important because my investment needs to be paid off in a job at some point. Even people I dislike politically and socially still deserve the right to read. And maybe by reading, they'll learn something important, maybe even change their mind. That isn't silly, since the sharpest capitalists are the converted hippy pot growers. They invest their time and money, and they sell for a profit. So much for hippy love. Sweating on a hillside all summer really strips away your BS, and A/C isn't free. These are the people I serve at the library, and its pretty amazing. I have shelved, several times, books on building underground eco-bunkers, which are bunkers loaded with carcinogenic chemicals and mold spores that will ruin your lungs and kill you, often in soil that's saturated with mercury and arsenic, both of which are poisonous and drive you insane. Which explains a great deal. Old pot smokers sometimes trigger their schizophrenia. I saw one of those at the market today. Communism fails when you have your own comfort and survival in one hand, and death along with the person you pretend to save in the other. Not very nice, and its a lesson you learn or die from it. That's just how things are. Up here you learn that lesson sooner than later. There are SO MANY object lessons to observe, after all.

Once I get through with this program, I'm applying for the Masters program and get started there. Hopefully I can start that next January. I will want to apply this summer, once I have the grades, and I'll be talking to the counselor at the University to verify this with an agreement for passing the courses for Summer and Fall semesters, which gets my GPA where it needs to be to qualify for the school. Lots of A's after all. I need them. With that degree, and my work experience as a volunteer, I should be able to work for a proper wage at a paying library that has a real budget. Or even a remote and very cheap living library in a place like Sierraville or Portola or Alta. Maybe even Ashland, at the university. Imagine getting paid real money to run a library in Oregon? That would be okay, I think. It would be a real change from what I'm used to, and maybe that would be good for me, as well. The internet Trolls are irritating, and they love to pick fights with conservatives and constitutionalists. They are easy targets, after all. However, what they are doing is the sort of childish crap you'd expect. Meh. I really wish I believed in the future of this country, but at this point I believe in regional strengths, and think we should all worry about those the most. Our region. Our nation is full of cancer, and its dying. Our region will live on when the nation is history.

Not Libraries

I keep reading stuff from people who aren't librarians that want libraries to be community education and makers workshops. I'm fond of Make and Makezine and Makeblog. After all, it was founded by the younger brothers of my high school classmates. That's literal, actually. The thing is, a library really IS a book warehouse. While its become a sort of education center for baffled owners of Kindles and iPads because their grandkids got them and they turned off the help menus first thing, even then that should be as far as it goes. Libraries are about books, and about information searching. I did an assignment yesterday elaborating my views after watching several videos by extremely young, extremely idealistic, extremely rich children who have no clue about budgets or having to accept NOT having something in order to have something else. They don't make hard choices because they're too rich to know those exist for everyone else.

I like community education, but that should happen at the Community College, which is in town and has fairly reasonable rates for classes. So does the Veterans center, and the local catholic church. There are tons of clubs with lots of facilities to hold them in which does not require use of the library rooms, nor does it suck money and time away from folks who are overworked as it is. Librarians are busy enough with cataloging (which I now know is a difficult task), book prep, and shelving, much less minding a desk and the fact that there's no reference librarian anymore. That's the one you ask "What books do you have on this subject?" and they pull up a list of things for your book report. A very useful person when you have a problem that takes a lot of information to solve. That is something that should exist, but isn't funded anymore.

I object to well meaning mandates that try to turn a library into a catch all building. It is a book warehouse. Stop trying to turn it into a baby sitting service, a college, and now a workshop. It isn't those things. Those things deserve their own buildings, and their own staffs, and their own time off. The current library staff works almost six days a week, and they're pretty exhausted by all the conflicting demands so they aren't giving their best to any one thing. They can't. The cataloging is behind. The book prep is behind. The shelving stacks up. People who know HOW to polish DVDs don't because it is a thankless job, and there's always more to do. I do it because I don't care about being thanked, and I've got Discworld to distract me. Very important, laughter. Life is seriously ironic.

All this said, I've love to see cheaper community classes on things like RV maintenance and motorcycle servicing. Might have saved the leg of the lawyer whose engine seized yesterday. Shattered his leg in a couple places when the back wheel locked and it threw him off and landed on him. Had to crawl off the road. The Houston Motorcycle collective, which mostly restores Honda 350 bikes, would be a useful resource if there was one of those here in town. They're safer than scooters, since they can go through potholes, and have better brakes. And even climb Highway 20 or 49, if need be. I sometimes think my blog is getting read by the local trimmers because the stuff I discuss turns up not long after. I don't have local friends, mostly because the locals are either retired rich people or skanks with no prospects and several children and diseases and drug problems, or married and poor and desperate enough to be a scam threat. Desperate people do desperate things. It is safer to keep your distance socially. You don't get entangled that way. I'm glad there's a couple cooking schools locally. Good. I'm glad there's a place with a classroom on cheesemaking. I'm glad there's a local that makes yarn from alpaca wool. Good. I'm glad there's all sorts of crafts growing into very small businesses. Even if they don't hire anyone, at least they're doing something useful with themselves rather than make trouble for everyone else. Even that nutjob with the perfumes. He will kill a few people with those poisons, but few of them will be here at least.

I'd love for the local semi-retired machinists to start a machinist apprentice craft-house. Masters taking apprentices, teaching them. It would be useful, locally. I'd love for the local motorcyclists who ride around here to teach maintenance and repair and restoration at the high school. Motorcycles cost less than cars, and get better mileage than a Prius for a fraction of the cost. If you ride slow, you are at far lower risk, though the guy above was only going 20 mph when the engine seized. So its not a guarantee. Oil in a bike engine gets pumped a little too fast, apparently, so it breaks down faster. It doesn't have to be this way, but it generally is. Its one of those things. Still a think you can read about at the library. There are books and web pages and videos on repair, but that doesn't mean a classroom is a garage for working on your bike. And it doesn't make a librarian qualified to do the work or teach it. And there are people in govt who think "just make the library do it" and then don't fund their dumb experiment. And that's really frustrating for the ladies there.

I do wish I had a Honda 350 to restore though. And a teacher who could help me do every step of the project, engine and wiring and fuel mix in the carburetor. All of that requires knowledge I don't have. Imagine if the students commuted to school that way. Then took classes on restoring or building something like a BugEye Sprite convertible, one that's so simple it doesn't even have a trunk lid, or shock absorbers. Its on springs. And drum brakes. And still gets 60 mpg because it is so light and has a tiny engine. Is this interesting to the community? Hell yes. Is it something that should be worked on in the library? No, of course not. I do hope that someday when I can see the politics are little more clearly, I'll understand why they even bother with stuff beyond the scope of their agency. Right now it is just loony.

"Is That Your Leetle Car?"

In the movie "A Good Year", the "hero" of the story gets stuck with a Smart Four2 or 4Two, whatever, that he drives through Provence (southern France) like a maniac and nearly kills his future girlfriend who is riding her bicycle along the vineyard road. I grew up around vineyards, drunk drivers, and I got to watch the tow trucks winch them out of the ditch after the ambulance cleaned up the biological mess from the wreck. It was mostly big American muscle cars that killed people. The little cars could make the turn. I learned a lot from the experience. Suspension and brakes are better than power. So I have a certain enjoyment of little cars. 

If you've got a little car, and its got good suspension and brakes, you can do something about the power, however. Here's one with a Hayabusa race motorcycle engine. 

Clown cars are fun to stick in movies. The tiny Fiat 500 with its 13 horsepower engine was one of the stars of Roman Holiday, along with the Vespa Audrey Hepburn rides (badly) through Rome. It is worth noting that Audrey Hepburn played a royal hiding out for a vacation, when in fact Audrey Hepburn actually IS a royal duchess of Belgium, slumming as an Actress. So the role was more ironic than you probably realized while watching it.

Anyway, there's lots of clowncars in the world, and most of them are fitted with engines just strong enough to get the car to the shops and back, and maybe make the school run. They're very much about economy. But they don't have to be. And some of them have interesting roots.

Before the Honda CVCC, there was the straight inline 4 engine they used. And that was based on a simpler machining than the inline 3 cylinder created by Triumph. An engine that continues to live today in various forms. Most 3-cylinder cars, like the Geo Metro, Chevy Spark, and quite a few others, are about the economy run, but are still based on the Triumph Motorcycle engine, which is currently water cooled and produces around 100 hp and makes very fast street bikes. I saw one on my walk today.

Like this one. Lots of disc brakes, but they're only as good as the rider and going too fast into a corner will still kill you. The engine, however, makes for interesting cars.

Take a crappy little Triumph or equivalent 1960 open top roadster/convertible. Instead of the 30 horsepower or less antique engine, put this motorcycle engine in there. How fast does it go now? Fast enough to need to convert from drum brakes to disc, I bet. And to think hard about frame stiffening so the power doesn't just warp the body every time you press the accelerator pedal. The tiny Opel Corsa that Hammond drives through Botswana is an original triumph inline 3, if you didn't know. How would that perform with the modern water cooled Triumph engine? And keep in mind that the Geo Metro has the detuned version and are rather famously durable.

What if you build a car like the Opel Corsa, only with carbon fiber and aluminum body and frame, but then painted it exactly like the 1956 cream yellow color and made it look exactly the same to casual inspection. Only its half the weight and 5 times the power. Can you imagine what fun that would be to drive on a mountain road? A lot nicer looking than the Smart, which ALSO uses this engine. As does the Nissan Micra. And the Ford Focus EcoBoost engine is this too.

My car is old. I don't know how many more times I'm going to be fooled into fixing it, only to find another expensive repair is needed. I'm getting pretty tired of spending big money on the car that I keep expecting to fail when I need it. I really don't know what it needs to keep working. And I'd love to have a little car that can lurch forward when I stomp on the gas. I miss that. A little Opel Corsa with a sleeper, all carbon fiber and motorcycle engine underneath would be a real hoot. Its not like I'm in the time of life to attract women. I'm more in the "repel women" stage of life. I don't need a car that appeals to them. I need one that runs and I enjoy driving for its own sake. And I'd like to have something worth chuckling at, something like me.

Rural Libraries and The Travelling Technician

It is my dream that once I finish my MLIS degree I can get a job at a rural library. Hopefully it will pay more than minimum wage. Enough to have a little house and a car payment.

Perhaps in Weed, which had its library burn down in wildfires last summer. A bit tragic, but nobody died. They have to rebuild the library building, and then buy new collections to restore the library to its former state. As Weed is ranching country, with a bit of logging and the local lumber mill, the book selection should be appropriate to their interests. Some librarians are very rude to males for their own personal reasons. I could speculate but I will simply say I have lots of time to observe so I can't pretend this is otherwise. I suspect this is common in the industry. It shouldn't be the case, but it is.

However, my goal is to get into rural libraries and gain experience and skills, well beyond the usual book prep or disc polishing or basic shelving, though I find shelving meditative and relaxing. I would enjoy doing library projects in rural branches for a few years, then move to another branch and do a different series of projects. This would let me live in more than just Weed, but also communities like Red Bluff, Susanville, Bishop, Minden/Gardnerville, and if this county ever regains some civility, Truckee. Maybe even Tahoe City, which was a nice little town on the north shore of Lake Tahoe.

I would be happy in a little house with a good heater, and a little car that's acceptable in the snow. They do expect you to come to work whether it is snowing or not. Library patrons read more when the weather is crappy. The coming pineapple express will fill the library by the time I get there Saturday, and there will be TONS to shelve and go right back out again. I do enjoy that this county are educated and voracious readers.

I might even enjoy travelling by RV towing my little car behind, though I will probably just reduce my things down to what fits in my car and a trailer for the bulkier items like my bed and eventually a modular desk which is light enough to pick up myself. When you can personally lift every item you own, and put it all in your car and a teardrop trailer behind it? You have mobility. Having lived in apartments before, I say: never again. Apartments are horrible. I want my own walls. Even the additional cost in heat is worth more than the noise pollution of hateful bastard neighbors. RVs cost more than rent, but an RV might make sense if the work contracts are shorter than a lease. My efficiency with projects at libraries makes the other staff, who spend too much time complaining, consider me a threat to their continued employment. This willingness to do the work rather than complain about it is a huge difference in approach. I see a lot of job protectionism behind this dragging of feet. It bothers me.

A couple years ago there was a job advertised for a part time library position at the branch in Truckee. Truckee is on I-80, just east of Donner Pass on the main interstate, and just north of Lake Tahoe a dozen miles. Its at the western edge of the plain before the mountains get really tall, up 30 miles from Reno through a canyon with a river that originates in Lake Tahoe. Its an important crossroad and major ski resort area. There are several trailer parks, heavily treed and popular in the summers but under feet of snow most winters and empty. There's also the mansions, many of which are second homes owned by millionaires, and the ski chalet homes as well, for when ski season is going strong. If this storm got colder and dropped snow, that might be the case. But overall, the Eastern side of the sierra has big openings between the trees, without poison oak or shrubs. Rather the opposite from the western slope where I live. Around here is heavy brush, poison oak, and wild game. It is completely different. The eastern side of the sierra has a band of rivers full of trout flowing down, and then those rivers head into the desert and die on lakebeds full of salt washed down from the mountains as the minerals decay into ions. They are stunning. And people have to live near the water to survive. Much of the land is unusable. Little of it has wells. Hauling water to a home or ranch is stupidly expensive and never worth doing for long. It makes you poor. Thus most of Nevada's population is clustered near these flowing rivers in Reno, Carson City, Minden, and the better fed springs that managed to catch passing rainstorms often enough to provide water. This is tricky due to rain shadow. Many people who should understand these core limitations to habitat march into a town and tell the locals they should be happy communists. Living is hard. That does not fly. I would never, and this makes me far better for their needs than nearly all California librarians. I get it. I know how to make land better, and I know that doing so isn't free. And I realize that even teaching that may require a delicate hand and reasonable expectations. In northern Nevada, the Humboldt River winds through many communities before hitting the Carson Sink and going to salt. Its a crucial water supply drifting out of mountains near Idaho's border. Can it be used better? Can the water be used to rebuild perched aquifers to yield better hay for the ranchland that follows the river? Its narrow, but the grass is thick.

What I'm finding from YA fiction is that I like nonfiction better. YA needs to exist for the kids, but Nonfiction might solve some important problems for tax paying adults. It would give the rural ranching poor some better answers to problems. Around here we've got poverty being solved with agriculture. True, its mostly pot growing, but its not completely illegal.

We also see solutions to housing through RV renovation or even construction rather than deal with crooked foreclosure scams, with unstated debts you buy worth more than the house. Not okay. While an RV is a house on wheels, it can be wrecked. And moving it around is expensive in gasoline. However, it avoids the expense of a tow vehicle that sits idle most of the time. And avoids the expense of unfair taxes because attempting them makes people drive away. When a community attacks its membership, there are consequences. In my case, its taught me that nice is temporary and it is more valuable to get paid than bother with claims of "someday we'll return the favor" because that never happens.

Assignments

Note to self. Always remove the instructions from an assignment before submitting it. Some teachers miss the work if you leave the instructions in.

In future assignments, I get to do a book report on an author, for which I chose Terry Pratchett. The more of his work I read, the more I like it. He really is a quality writer.

I also will be doing an assignment cataloging books from my personal library. You might think I'd do the scifi, or perhaps the anime, but I have decided to do my cookbook collection. I wish I'd held into the Bull Chef. Maybe I'll order myself another copy. He's often full of bull, but he also shows old ways to cook things, older seasoning or alternative cooking methods. It is because of him I learned how to use the broiler further away from the food. That turned out to be really useful. I also learned the joy of steak and gravy. That is a traditional dish rarely served in modern times, but it tastes fantastic. Especially if you sautee mushrooms and onion. The library where I work has a really good cookbook collection. About a four hundred of them, maybe more. Think about that. Yes, a fair bit will be overlapping, but a lot won't. They aren't borrowed nearly enough. If it were up to me, I'd make displays from the different cuisines so people borrowed them more often. Food is life, and good food is good life. Do not underestimate its power. Someday I will have that ability. This being Valentines day month, most obsess about "love" or "chocolate" or cakes. Bah. I'm looking forward to Saints Patricks Day, because I get to boil corned beef, cabbage, red potatoes, caraway seeds, bake soda bread (irish biscuits fyi), and serve Guiness Stout and probably Jameson whiskey. Tradition is worth observing when it leads to a hearty meal. Many feasts have important traditional reasons, but the underlying one is feasts boost your immune system and fat reserves so you don't DIE FROM EXPOSURE, which was a real threat for most of human existence. Ireland has crappy soil, but not as bad as Scotland. Both have frost lift of boulders out the ground, which makes plowing the soil very problematic, and is the real reason for the pretty stone walls. That's as far as they wanted to carry the damned stones every spring. Piling them up in a wall just makes sense. Ergo, you get paddocks. It looks pretty, but its just laziness.

You want to see industrious people, look at Switzerland. After the ice melts in the spring, they take wheelbarrows and dig up the muck at the bottom of their fields, in the ditch, and push it to the top of the hill where they dump it again. Every year. This way they rescue their soil from further erosion. It is hard work.

Despite the lack of books for teenage boys in the young adult section, it otherwise conforms to every recommendation for young adult needs. Its a well designed space and comfortable. It just needs more for boys. Many of them like Scifi rather than vampire love triangles. Scifi is almost made for teenage boys, really. Mercedes Lackey and all those suits of powered armor and space battles? Why not.

I suspect that gamer resources might be welcome. I will check to see what they have.

Too Many Acronyms

It is apparent to me that my biggest challenge in working, once I get hired somewhere without gender prejudice, won't be dealing with bums or illegals or screaming abandoned children or drug addicts. No, my biggest challenge is the use of acronyms in library context. There are way too many of those. There's also the use of antique terms, like monograph. WTF is is a monograph? I had to look it up. Wouldn't Non-Fiction be fine? I have encountered many people with OCD, and radical lesbians (the kind who actively and visibly and verbally hate men rather than those who don't pay any attention to us), and also the incredibly meek and retreating who can't deal with the needed polite confrontations of public life. Being a man, I have the advantage there. People come into the library for a reason. Asking what that is can often end a confrontation positively.

Still, the acronyms are something I will have to get used to. They were fashionable for a while. They go out of fashion too. When they give ideas proper names I will welcome that.

Library Materials Damage In The Electronic Data Age

Two of the more popular aspects of the library are not books. They're CDs and DVDs. These are optical media and are susceptible to scratches which make them skip or stop playing altogether. The library where I work has a machine, which I am an expert using, which will polish most scratches off of a disk. Not all, but most. Some types of damage is unfixable. At that point, the optical media either goes out damaged or is discarded, possibly for replacement order of that specific disk or not and the book is incomplete. There's been a vandal who deliberately damages Stephen King audiobooks, ruining the final disc of each one he's borrowed so nobody else can hear the end. I do not know if the librarians have done anything about this or not. I do know that I keep getting DVDs and CDs with scratches on them, and its eating up about 90 minutes a week to repair them. I am a volunteer. No paid librarian has to time to do this. They are bogged down with cataloging tasks, with operations, with selection and purchasing, and with minding the desk. Volunteers do the book prep. Volunteers do the shelving. Volunteers do the weeding and hold list. And returned books stack up on heavy wheeled carts by the desk, showing just how behind they are. When volunteers aren't there, books aren't shelved. When I'm polishing discs, books aren't shelved.

I can't ask patrons not to scratch discs because many patrons are clumsy or ignorant of what Optical Data means. And it only takes one clumsy patron to wreck a disc for the next dozen users, and the book won't be submitted to me for repairs until one of those tells the librarian.

I can't ask patrons to repair or maintain their CD player because for many of them it is a magical device they don't understand. There's a slot or shelf, the put it there, push the button, magic happens. They don't know or care about dusting the shelf or blowing dust out of their electronics to prevent the sensors getting bogged down. Its always the disc to blame, not their poorly maintained hardware. Particularly here where half my patrons are drug growers living in lean to's or tents on BLM land or National Forest growing fields of pot very much illegally. They are in a dusty environment, watching DVDs on dusty laptops. I know this because sometimes the books come back stinking of pot. Or contain fragments of marijuana inside the containers. No, I am not joking. It is ironic that they are primary patrons just like the rich people in their forest mansions. I have to maintain media for both kinds of patrons. At this point, because I am not systematically going through the entire collection of movies and music and audiobooks systematically, I have to wait for a complaint. I have found that any disc I borrow requires polishing before it will work properly, so I only borrow on days I have access to the polisher, and polish it before taking it home. This saves irritation for me, but the problem could be prevented by digital archiving and use of USB thumb drives for the data. I really think those or cellphones are the future with this. However, and this is important, there's security risks with a sneaker net like that, and protecting both parties from viruses or malware, or claims thereof that tie up county lawyers defending against this, and possible injunctions to stop using them impacts everybody. There's a lot of ways this can go wrong. The vandal wrecking the Stephen King books would happily inject a virus into the county library computer system and trash the database if he knew how. Vandals are like that. We all know examples of attention seeking sadists out there.

The alternative to carrying the data out on DRM self-erasing file formats and security keys is streaming the data to users logged into the library system under their library account. This appears to be legal in Tennessee, but I don't know if its legal in California. If music and audiobooks stream to patrons, they won't be scratching the CDs because they won't be touching them. And 90 minutes a week will be regained for other tasks. I'm not the only one doing this task. Another person puts in the same amount of time. So its more like 3 hours a week in volunteer labor for a server which once setup and new materials are uploaded as part of the book preparation process and the CDs archived physically as backups, requires no further handling or repairs. DVDs are likewise a problem, though generally patrons are more careful with them. They tend to abuse audio CDs and are more careful with DVDs even though both are optical media. I think the track-feeder loaders on most car CD players cause most of the damage. They grind in any dust that's on their rubber wheels, and then can contact the surface while spinning. They're pretty bad.

Digital server archives of optical data need to be the way forward on this issue.

Librarians are like Veterinarians

In good times, people are happy to have adorable pets and spend money on their care when they get sick. In bad times, when money needs to go to essentials, Rover gets put down when his infected foot costs as much as a car payment. Libraries have similar problems. In good times, libraries have the budget and staffing to expand their collections, offer lots of services to the public, and be really useful to patrons coming in to find information or entertainment, or socialize with other readers and hobbyists.

In bad times, libraries are more essential because the people coming in are more often there out of financial hardship, seeking information to solve a problem or start a new career path that can hopefully drag them out of the trap they've found themselves in. In bad times staff is needed to help these people, but this is precisely when budget cuts means there's fewer staff to do the work, and while they have the skills, they don't have the time. This is more tragic than ironic.

The trouble is, good times don't last and we're in a series of economic bubbles. Knowing we're in bubbles that eventually burst, what can head librarians do to plan for this, and how should they budget for the eventual cuts? And how should individual librarians deal with an industry that ruthlessly cuts their hours, benefits and jobs every time they are needed most?

In nearby Placer County, just down the mountain from me, to my South, the library there spent like there was no crash in the economy and now they're cutting hours to branches and closing at least one branch completely. They'd been operating by keeping only retired part time librarians on short hours to avoid paying them benefits, thus cutting their costs by half but would be starving these workers if they weren't retired already. It is currently common for California librarians to work 2-3 part time library jobs and pay for their own benefits out of pocket rather than be properly sustained by the communities they serve. This cost cutting insult shows that the Community does NOT value them or their contributions, which is exactly the time to pack up and leave for places which DO value librarians. More reason to support mobility.

When I worked in GIS, which is a type of digital map archive mostly used by govt but eventually gets sold to car GPS companies so you can find an address and get directions there, I was told my job was going to end if I didn't learn how to program in Visual Basic. It takes around 2-3 years to learn this skill and normally pays $80K per year. I was getting $19K/year as a GIS technician, and would be looking a 50% raise if I learned this skill, which is roughly 1/3 if I completely avoided map data and just programmed computers instead. $30K for an $80K skill. Govt considered that just fine. I didn't. Neither did my coworkers. Within a year of my leaving, all of them were gone too. A completely new staff does that job and hides their data from prying eyes but I STILL see my data, from 15 years ago, in use in maps today. What has the new staff been doing? CYA, apparently. The flaws we suffered from still exist too. I could have manually programmed those parcels years ago. Idiots. Archival jobs may be steady and stable, but when it becomes CYA, run away. If you stay you've ruined your reputation and you become obsessed with hiding your own incompetence.

General public libraries and the librarians who work in them, for the public good, should not get bothered by many things libraries have become. The local pot growers generally wash before coming in these days, which is good. They didn't used to. The ones sleeping outside don't light the place on fire. Inexpensive rental of the community room for club events means its a useful community center, though the insistence by lawyers that clubs can't sell their own materials in the room to other club members is something that should be changed. If an astronomer wants to sell his telescope to another astronomer, what's the harm? Its not like they're flea markets.

Childrens librarians do end up baby sitters of little kids while the mom's hunt for educational materials for her own career or books on child psychology or a romance novel. Romance novels are the single biggest loan material. Small wonder. Marriage is often the end of romance. That's just life. Managing a YA collection seems to end up a teen support group, and trying to include materials relevant to teens is tricky in a down economy. Rural teens have to deal with drug addiction and pregnancy, and military service vs barely legal pot growing are choices teens make if they don't have the patience for college. Impatient people, by definition, don't have the patience to learn patience. The lucky and smart ones start businesses in more legal venues, but around here those drift into illegal as well. Its just something that happens with desperate times.

For those with a yen for learning, librarians can help them most, finding useful resources and keeping them aware of what is going and what is coming, so they can prepare for each. As a shelver I can observe all of that, and its really interesting with my slight disinterested smile crafted to be as inoffensive as possible as I manuever politely around browsers to return books to the shelf. This is what patrons need. Get the books back where they can be found. Help them find what they're looking for. Type in the search if they feel embarrassed that they hunt and peck. Write it down for them. Don't let them see you judge them. At least the came in the doors to stop being ignorant. They've already made the first and most important step.

This willingness to stop being ignorant is why I like public libraries.

BOOK: The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman

This is the audiobook.

I found the story too hard to follow without the prior novels to explain what is going on. The voice acting was top-notch, the description and use of language was excellent, it was best possible quality of writing.

I have borrowed the first book to the series, The Golden Compass, from the library and will be listening to that in coming days. I will write a review once complete. I know a movie exists. I saw it years ago, but found it really confusing. While talking polar bears in ornate armor charging into battle is quite the image, from what I've seen of the real plot, its way more convoluted, more like Dune than Star Wars. Hopefully I will be able to understand what's going on with the setting if I start from the beginning.

ANIME: A Certain Magical Index

This is another Shonen Jump title so it is a typical "furious hidden inner power" story with temper tantrums and a lack of responsible adults. The villains are typical "beyond crazy-evil" or "will shortly be converted to allies", which is one of the conceits of Japanese culture, VERY similar to the Post WW2 conceit in American cinema that we used to talk villains into doing what we want, or fool enemies because they're all just dumb. Pretty much all Cary Grant movies were this.

The gimmick of Index, as its referred to by fans, is that Academy City is a million students with psychic powers created by the city scientists to study their experiments. Unfortunately, the less obvious aspect of the city is some of the experiments on students are officially sanctioned violence and murders. The whole place is a bunch of schools, teachers, maintenance robots, libraries, and rapid reaction police with fully automatic rifles which are often not enough to stop the power users. One especially vicious experiment is a high level psychic who serial-kills 10,000 identical clones of another high level psychic, one after another, in inventively vicious ways for some plot reason. Yes, the hero works to save the clones, but the violence in the course of the story is like a tournament of death, battle after battle, and a secret war between the Vatican and Aleister Crowley who is running this city of psychics.

Japan has a really WRONG understanding of Christianity. The Catholic church sent priests from exploration ships in the 1700's from Portugal. They made a BAD impression and all were eventually tortured to death by the rulers of the time. Ever since then, Christianity is treated like a violent cult in Japan and while most Japanese marry using the Christian ceremony, they don't practice the faith, or understand it at all. Japan is officially Shinto in order to end the power of Buddhist monasteries two centuries ago. At the time, Buddhist monks had joined a rebellion against the shogun of the time, the shogun being the supreme ruler of Japan. He won, and the monks were required by law to marry, which violated their oaths to Buddha. While most Japanese are buddhist from their marriages to their deaths, their kids are raised to Shinto faith, mainly through visits to shrines and festivals. This cultural transition has no room for Christianity, and that faith becomes the key undercurrent of the series' second season. The war going on between black mages from the Vatican and their relationship with Index, a 14 year old girl who ends up living with the unlucky hero, cursed with God's Right Arm (literal), as factions of one side, which is incompatible with the psychic powers of the rest of Academy City. It is for this reason that the second season of the anime is not broadcast in America. Most people find it quite offensive. Most think the author of the light novels on which it was based needs application of a cattle prod or taser somewhere sensitive for the level of offense he commits against the two billion Catholics on Earth.

I just can't recommend this anime to youths of either gender. While there is a lighter side story called Railgun, the author just can't seem to resist mass murderers and ultraviolent murder-death experiments. This is unfortunate, but its the violence that ruins it. The cute and comedy moments just can't save it from the viciousness.

It is true that Japan is essentially eating its children by crushing the economy, preventing new businesses from being created by denying business loans, and even denying marriages by insuring nobody can get a job in Japan thanks to the 26 year long Clinton-Recession, which in real English means Depression. 26 years of Depression with earthquakes, massive tsunami, nuclear power plant leaks, and jobs outsourcing to Korea and China has been a continuous assault on their youth. With official racism keeping kids from leaving Japan for fear of being labelled outcastes who can't come back if things get better someday, this is more and more often turning up in YA popular media. So officially endorsed murder of teenagers seems like something going on, which is why I think it keeps turning up in popular manga and anime in Japan.

ANIME: Bleach

Bleach is a Japanese manga and anime, a kind of comic book. Its Shonen Jump, which specializes in "furious hidden inner power" stories, which are essentially about unfairness leading to temper tantrums, and usually require absurd villains I would describe as American servicemen's kids, which remains a huge social issue in Japan since America is still occupying Japan to defend it from Korea, Russia, and China, because they are constitutionally unable to extend military power beyond the islands' defense. Japan is also rigidly racist, which explains why half-bloods are considered subhuman monsters and creates a various underclass of outcastes (the appropriate literal term). The punk-rock outfits of Bleach, and the absolute absence of any real adults in the entire series, makes their choices more important but its really off-putting.

The first two arcs of the story are worth watching or reading, but after the events in the afterlife the story seems to largely run out of ideas and the author is famous for offending most of his audience with a two page print of the Japanese kanji (word-symbol) for Heart on a big white page at a crucial moment of the plot. Like the author was high and just didn't know what to do next. You can offend your audience. And they will remember it, and NOT forgive you for it.

Bleach is famously mocked for penis envy in its second episode with the reveal of the hero's hidden inner power which creates a huge sword taller than he was, which says more about the series than most any review, including this one.

Note that hair colors other than dark brown, sometimes depicted as purple, are strong indicators of half-blood "change" as in spare change which is meant to be a deadly insult in Japanese exclusionary racist culture. Having a different hair color is reactionary, and essentially dares people to mention it and start a fight. Unlike how Japan depicts itself, in Anime, bullying and fistfights are common. As I know some Japanese English teachers in Japan, actual Japanese schools are vicious, violent, and suffer badly from ADHD and ADD. Japan is not kind or peaceful or polite. They just say they are. They are to tourists. But not to each other. Japan has real problems with inbreeding in their history and has only slight objections to siblings marrying. They only recently outlawed families adopting and raising minor orphan girls to be wives to family members. In most Japanese states (prefectures) age of consent is technically 13, abortion is free, and rape isn't treated as a proper crime by the authorities since the maximum punishment for a pure japanese rapist is 2 years and $2500 fine. For a halfblood or foreigner the crime is life in prison or death penalty. Keep that in context when you consider the really different values and treatment of people in japanese teenagers. The consequences are so very different depending on who your parents are. So when a person meets you, the immediately say "pure japanese" if they are, which is pretty much a free pass on any crimes they commit. What this means in America is that Bleach characters commit criminal acts that they justify by their temper tantrums. These are not good role models, and responsible parents would object to their kids reading about these people. I just can't recommend this series for that reason. It is too violent and teenage boys reading it may mimic the actions in the series.