"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.