“How quickly the world owes him something that he didn’t know existed ten seconds ago”

I got a nasty call from a disgruntled patron who lives on the other side of the state (this system issues library cards to every state resident, don’t get me started) outraged over the lag time he experienced when he used the library’s database subscription to Rosetta Stone. The problem lay in the fact that he was trying to access it using a satellite modem. Rosetta Stone is an incredibly data intensive, interactive program, one, by the way, that would cost him almost $500 to subscribe to personally FOR ONE LANGUAGE, while our subscription offers him access to 10. He ended his stern lecture with, "I'm VERY disappointed," like I was his kid who gotten drunk and wrecked the family car on prom night.

The drawbacks of satellite modems are quite well known. Here they are spelled out in Wikipedia.

Satellite Internet also has a high latency problem caused by the signal having to travel 35,000 km (22,000 miles) out into space to the satellite and back to Earth again. The signal delay can be as much as 500 milliseconds to 900 milliseconds, which makes this service unsuitable for applications requiring real-time user input such as certain multiplayer Internet games and first-person shooters played over the connection. Despite this, it is still possible for many games to be played, but the scope is limited to real-time strategy or turn-based games. The functionality of live interactive access to a distant computer can also be subject to the problems caused by high latency. These problems are more than tolerable for just basic email access and web browsing and in most cases are barely noticeable.

There is no simple way to get around this problem. The delay is primarily due to the speed of light being 300,000 km/second (186,000 miles per second). Even if all other signaling delays could be eliminated it still takes the electromagnetic wave 233 milliseconds to travel from ground to the satellite and back to the ground, a total of 70,000 km (44,000 miles) to travel from the user to the satellite company.

My favorite part of this section?
The delay is primarily due to the speed of light being 300,000 km/second (186,000 miles per second).

So, save it for Rosetta Stone, your internet provider, God or whoever else you think created the laws of the universe, you bellyaching crybaby, you ungracious, unreasonable, self-important, malcontented jackass. While you’re doing that, the library will try its best to bend the laws of physics so you can look like a total tool trying to learn conversational Mandarin at the beach on your laptop.

Death of a Patron

Today I found out one of my patrons died. He was a regular so I had been wondering why I hadn’t seen him in a while. A couple of months ago he was stabbed to death in one of those seedy residential hotel rooms and then his body dumped like so much trash into a dumpster behind the building. The murder remains unsolved, and the police have been unable even to locate next of kin. One of my colleagues got the news when the police finally released his name to the papers in the hopes someone in his family will come forward to claim the body.
He was a little guy, but more Bantam rooster than runt, with a swagger that I couldn’t help but find charming. He took great care with his appearance and always dressed in a dark suit. He might have passed for a slick lawyer were it not for the sorry condition of his teeth, including a missing front incisor. (It turns out he wore a dark suit because he was a livery driver.) He was unfailingly courteous and had interesting, rather high brow taste in movies, which he enjoyed discussing with whoever was on the reference desk. Our last conversation was about Kristin Lavransdatter.

When I brought up some pictures of the movie on the screen he leaned in to look closer. “So many beautiful women in the world,” he said wistfully. Of course this comment took on rather sinister meaning when the circulation staff, who always knows the dirt on everyone, let me in on the fact that this patron was on the Megan’s Law website for forced oral copulation with a 14 year old, a crime for which he served jail time. The circ staff told me that when he would visit the library after being released from prison he dressed not in dark suit but in short cut off jeans and a white tank top like a Polk Street hustler. This most likely was just a hangover from a survival strategy in prison – a man of his stature would have been a helpless target for rape.

What a sad and tawdry ending to a sad life.

School trip

Two patrons decided to resolve some matter by fisticuffs in the atrium, right in front of a visiting class of elementary school children. If I had witnessed a fist fight at such an age I would have most likely burst into tears, but the children were delighted and immediately began pounding their tiny fists into the palms of their hands and chanting, “Fight, fight, fight!” Security broke the fight up. As the class trailed out I heard one of the boys who was clutching his new library card say to his friend, “This has been the best day!”

A lump of coal and a switch

A boy, 8 years old according to his record, called the library to renew his books. He was telling me his library card when I heard his mother call to him in the background. I don't like it when people try to talk to me when I'm trying to use the phone, but telling one's mother, who was only trying to help, to shut the hell up on Christmas Eve is really asking for a big lump of coal and a switch in the next morning.

Bum's Rush

Bum's Rush
There’s a vegetarian restaurant in town that is owned and operated by a Hare Krishna like religious sect that let’s just say has made its way on the list of several cult watch groups. The restaurant’s walls are decorated with photographs of the group’s charismatic leader performing humanly impossible feats of strength, or posing with Mother Theresa and Princess Di, or holding forth before crowds of thousands. The female followers who work in the restaurant are mostly white bread hippy types, but wear saris, bindis and long, braided hair. They all float around the restaurant with blissful, blank smiles that can only come from serious protein deficiency and/or the consequences of taking 2000 or so acid trips back in their heyday. It’s rumored that back at the compound they all live in stark, sexually segregated barracks. Celibacy is required of the followers, but some apostates reported that the Leader would invite some of the younger, attractive women back to his private chamber for grueling all night performances of girl on girl action. I also notice that at the restaurant the women seemed to be doing most of the hard labor around the restaurant. Needless to say, this restaurant is completely cash driven.
I occasionally go there because options are limited around here and they make a decent salad. The last time I was there seated I was suddenly overcome with the smell of open sewage and Ripple. I looked up and a wino was shuffling slowly past me toward the bathroom, his pants completely and utterly soaked with diarrhea. All of the diners were choking. I was afraid that the restaurant would be all welcoming and compassionate but instead one of the workers ordered him out immediately. "Go to the library, brother! We are not equipped to deal with that." He thrust some napkins into the wino’s hands and shoved him out the door. He then lit some incense which of course they had on hand and the smell slowly dissipated. Although I was grateful to finish my meal, I wasn’t too happy about the staff directing the man to the library, because we certainly aren’t equipped to deal with that mess either. We certainly don’t need that kind of ‘business', especially when there are plenty of shelters within walking distance which are. This is the kind of bio mess that makes our custodial staff have to go out on stress leave.

Plausible

You indicate that I still have the book Havana Nocturne checked out. It was originally due Nov. 2nd, but I put it in the return bin outside of the library on October 24 at about 8:10 a.m. I remember it clearly because a homeless man was throwing up right next to it (yuck!)

Like those in the dentistry, law enforcement and proctology professions, we hear a lot of bad and outrageous lies at the library, but this email had the ring of truth to it and sure enough, the book had not been scanned correctly and was sitting on the shelf.

Any Given Sunday

A man, one of those filthy, wild eyed street prophets so common in this city, marched into one of the sleepier branches in the system dragging a young woman behind him. She was considerably younger than he was, and seemed dreamy and out of it. This is a branch patronized principally by acid burnouts on disability, throwaway kids and various other drop outs and casualties of the Summer of Love. He asked for the key to the bathroom and pulled his companion into the bathroom with him. After a minute or so the sounds of their ‘lovemaking’ began to fill the library. Even the catatonic homeless began to stir and look quizzically about, just like the patients in Awakenings after they received L-Dopa. A staff person raced over and began kicking the door and threatening to call the police. A minute or two later they emerged, and the man began running around the library yelling, “I just had sex with my child bride! I just had sex with my child bride!” He did a couple of laps and then ran out the door, abandoning his child bride, who then sat down to wait in line for the internet.

This happened on a Sunday, which reminds me of a story my cousin told me. He was in college and a bunch of his friends were sitting around and one of them began to describe how his family had returned from church one day to find their yardman doing something unspeakable (i.e., sexual) on the lawn. One of the girls in the group, an inoccent from lower Alabama, opened her eyes in horror. "On a SUNDAY?," she gasped. Like that was the offensive part of the story, like any other day of the week would have been more acceptable for such perversions.

Why I Will Miss Riding the Bus

Don't even try denying it, because I know exactly what's going through your head right now: What would this hair look like spilled across my bedroom pillow in the moonlight?

Now that I'm no longer pregnant I've resumed commuting by bike to work. I will be so sad to miss out on unexpected pleasures like this.

I found some mullet inspired haiku on the internet. I have entitled this one Mullet Picnic in the Park.

This super cool hair
And a bucket of chicken:
What more could I want

At Long Last!

I apologize for the long hiatus but something about pregnancy and the post partum period made me too mentally thick to blog. I felt like the guy in Flowers for Algernon after the experimental procedure wears off and his IQ plummets from genius levels to his original IQ score of 68. Since I was hardly at genius levels to begin with, I basically went from functional to persistent vegetative state. I didn’t get any reading done either. I pretty much kissed books good-bye one after I realized I had spent 5 minutes puzzling over a People magazine article like it was Advanced Genomics.

But the little darling is so worth it!

I have been bleeding my colleagues for tales of all the happenings while I was gone. My first time at the desk a tweaker lady approached the desk in a palsied gate and asked where the lost and found was. I told her security handles lost and found and directed her to the office. She drew back and looked at me with narrowed, suspicious eyes, like I was sending her into a trap.

“What are they going to do in there, tie me up, handcuff me and fuck me?”

It’s good to be back.

Maternity Leave

I will return soon.

Abation, LOL!!!

The New York Times recently reported that IM chat slang is creeping into school reports, driving teachers crazy. It also seems to be making its way just as inappropriately into pregnancy scare letters. Look at this gem that E found in a newly returned book, a note in which some young lady contemplates the future direction of her relationship after a potential pregnancy crisis.

dear Simon,

Since our scare, ive been thinking. We are seriously not ready for stuff like this. We too young and financially, emotionally not ready. I mean what if I was, what then? You get? I don’t know. Would you want me to have had the abation? This scare has really got me thinking about the Future. Just makes me really think. I just feel scared and insecure about the future.

I just don’t know. The last scare really really scared me. I’m still really really scared. I was actually really considering it, thinking about it. What if I was. idk. I feel kinda confused. So sorry. I think I confused you too. Boo! THE END I think! LOL!!!!

Simon's 'boo' is kissing cousins to Amber Richardson, my favorite Onion columnist.

Crocuta crocuta

I have a soft spot for the misunderstood creatures of the world, the spotted hyena in particular.

They are an evolutionary oddity, a chimera, with snaky long necks and strangely shortened rear legs that give them their comical, awkward gait. Although they resemble a bear/dog/lion mixture, their closest relative, and not a close one, is the mongoose.

But here’s where spotted hyenas get really weird – the males and females are nearly impossible to tell apart, so much so that it widely believed until not that long ago that spotted hyenas were hermaphrodites. Females are awash in androgen and have scrotum like sacks and a pseudo-penis, just like what you hear happens to certain juiced up competitive female body builders. Actually, in the hyena’s case this pseudo penis (which they can make erect at will) is a fusion of the clitoris, labia of the vagina. Hyenas give birth through this narrow tunnel, which makes childbirth a risky proposition and frequently results in the death of the first time mother or the first cub, who will suffocate before it can make its way out. The females are highly aggressive, and the dominant female will try to kill all other females in her litter, sometimes within seconds of birth.

They live in female dominated, matriarchal packs. Male relatives are usually driven off, presumably to prevent inbreeding. As one hyena researcher states, “Female dominance imposes unusual diffidence and patience on males. Their obvious fear of female aggression makes courtship an often amusing spectacle.

Although labeled as scavengers, hyenas are skilled hunters. A pack can reduce a cape buffalo down to its hooves in minutes. Actually, hyenas will eat the hooves (and horn, teeth and pelt), extract what calcium there is to be had and then regurgitate it like an owl pellet.

This is a picture of a friend of mine taken while he was in Ethiopia. Hyenas descend upon this one town at night, presumably because they’re fed as a tourist attraction. Looks like he can feel that hyenas hot breath on his face.

Kicking it at the BK Lounge

Last Sunday E was at the sketchiest Burger King in the city, which, naturally, is located right across the street from the library. A seedy looking man leaned in the door and called to his lady, who was standing next to the food pickup station, clutching a grimy receipt.

“Oh, honey,” he said in the stilted, carefully enunciated words of a bad liar, "We're going to be late for…church, so you better just get a refund for our meal. We cannot wait any longer.”

She shuffled over to the cash register and asked for a refund.

The manager gave her the once over. “Ma'am, this food was purchased for you two, not by you two. I will only give a cash refund to the person who bought the food for you.”

Obviously some misguided Samaritan had bought them a meal in lieu of a cash handout, which of course they had absolutely no interest in, since you can’t trade street drugs for a flame broiled Whopper. After a lot of righteous indignation, she gave up and skulked out. She and her life partner then walked off down the street, bickering, I'm sure, over which one had failed in his oer her part of their sad little grift. Sebastian and Michelle ride again!

This city spends a staggering 80K on services per homeless person. They are not going hungry, believe me, despite the gauntlet of increasingly aggressive cant one has to face coming to and fro the library. Sorry that I sound so jaded, but cash handouts do nothing but fuel addiction and support an underground economy of drugs that is ruinous to the quality of life for all involved. One of my fedup colleagues will scream at people, primarily tourists, that she sees handing out money to panhandlers around the library, “Enablers! Quit ruining my city!”

Happy Easter

We're going to have our own Easter egg hunt in the stacks of the the library today and by "Easter eggs" I mean human feces.

David Sedaris did a hilarious segment on This American Life about this phenomenon, although he focuses mostly on the goings on at large retail chains. His theory is that it is an acting out, a fecal uprising, against faceles corporatation, like throwing a rock through a Starbucks window at a G-8 demonstration. He became intrigued after his boyfriend mentioned offhandedly one day that when he worked at The Gap customers would often use the dressing rooms as bathrooms, even though there were bathrooms located conveniently throughout the mall where this Gap was. Sedaris, furious that Hugh withheld such fascinating material from him, embarks on his own informal research project about these incidences by polling everyone he meets who worked at a store if this had ever happened. My favorite reponse was from an elderly woman he just met who had worked at Target. She grasped his hands and gave him a deep, haunted look.

"Why, however did you know?"

She reported employees would find poo all over Target, but the most popular place was in the interior of the circular clothing racks. I suppose humans are no better than caged monkeys, flinging our poo as an act of defiance and rage. As thoroughly revolting as that is, I was relieved to know that the public library is not an isolated target of this sort of bio-vandalism.

Billy hatches on egg

Or puts the unborn in its place. Although this cannot be comfortable for Billy, and it certainly is not for me, my ever expanding abdomen has become his new favorite perch. I suspect he senses that there's a rival in there who must be told his place in the pack. Or perhaps he is trying to help me incubate it in his own special way.

According to the Dog Wheeesperer, some of the ways dogs exert dominance are to sit upon, lean against or place a body part upon whomever/whatever they're trying dominate. Because Billy is the most nervous and insecure alpha ever, he cannot be direct about it and has to stealth dominate. Whenever we have guests over Billy will sidle up next to the "intruder," curl up, feign sleep, stretch and then subtly but deliberately place a paw on them. In his little dog mind, hiearchy has been established. and he is now the boss of them.

This does not bode well.

Beautiful

During my last hour on the desk some workmen were jackhammering stonework that had become a tripping hazard not 20 feet away. The noise was deafening and made meaningful reference work or even conversation impossible. As frustrating and nerve rattling as the conditions were, I was reminded of my all time favorite Snopes entry.

Fun fact: More than a quarter of pregnant West Virginians smoke! You stay classy, West Virginia.

Supposedly babies in utero will begin to squirm and kick when mothers even THINK about lighting up.

A word from Spoon

I am completely disgusted. Your pregnancy is ridiculously long and the results unimpressively small. I myself gestated a brood of six puppies in just 63 days. By the time you reached your fourth month I had my puppies whelped, weaned and sold off to good homes for a tidy profit. I also had my figure back.

This fills me with dread

Here is a photograph that really showcases the infamous Key head. Doesn't it make you wince? I imagine my poor, dear great-grandmother is gazing down upon her baby (either my grandmother or great-aunt) in disbelief that she survived childbirth. Such an immense, disproportionate head doesn’t even seem evolutionarily possible.

Has it really been over a month since I posted last? This pregnancy has made me completely good for nothing. At least the constant, gnawing queasiness has ceased. It's hard to believe that not too long ago a woman's entire adult life was a continuous cycle of birthing, nursing and child rearing. You see how many might find death a welcome relief.

Hell Labs: Ironic Punishments Division

I do apologize for dropping off the face of the earth, but I've just feeling too sick to write. For the past few months I have been whipsawing between nausea and voracity. The cruelest part of the whole situation is that it's like being carsick, in that reading makes it so much worse, which is a special kind of hell for a librarian. This stage should have ended weeks ago, and I do feel a slight lifting.

I try to eat my way out of nausea, and when I do it affords me a small window of relief before the queasiness settles back in. And when I eat it's not pretty, it's in a gulping, gasping, urgent manner that reminds me of the mess hall scene in Alien. John Hurt seemingly recovered, ravenous and strangely jovial for someone who had recently had a pulsing leathery horseshoe crab like alien affixed to his face, joins the crew for a meal in the mess hall. He repeatedly declares how hungry he is and attacks the food. Before he can greedily down more than a few bites, he begins to cough and convulse until the alien bursts from his chest in a spectacular plume of gore.

I read that the director, Ridley Scott, decided to do a little method experiment and not let the rest of the cast in on what was going to take place in the scene, so their ghastly reactions of shock and horror were completely genuine. Come to think of it, this whole scene is more of an apt metaphor for pregnancy than I would care to dwell on right now.

Back to hosting my own little adorable parasite...

The Daily Coyote

I so hope that this is not going to end in "The Yearling" style heartbreak, but I'm adoring the photos for now:

http://dailycoyote.blogspot.com/

A cousin was telling me how when he lived in Jackson Hole he saw a coyote slink up in broad daylight and snatch and carry off a 15 pound pug that had been sunning itself on his neighbor's porch. And not to be its bride, I'm afraid - no trace of the pug was every found. His neighbors had just moved from New York City and found out the hard way that a pug, defenseless in every way, is not the best choice of pet in Wyoming.