Oh Shit

House OKs flag desecration amendment

"By a 286-130 vote — eight more than needed — House members approved the amendment after a debate over whether such a ban would uphold or run afoul of the Constitution’s free-speech protections."

Everyone grab their inner tubes. We're heading down the slippery slope.

Thanks Leila

I specifically did not read this on Friday because I was having a Happy Baking Day and didn't want to switch into Angry Rant Mode. Decided to read it this morning. And then all the posts about it.

Leila, why do you hate me so much to do this to me?

I'm so angry I'm shaking enough to spill my tea. My Tea!

Can't find angry music....

I can accept that people are snobs. I can accept that they think if it's not high literature they think it's not worth reading, and therefore not worth teaching. I'm used to this flavor of stupid.

I understand that adults have no concept that if a kid is forced to read something that he/she cannot relate to he/she will associate "reading" with "sucks" and this is as much a product of how it is taught as well as content of reading.

But this I could not let slide:
-From reply 'how to keep a child childish-
When it comes to selecting texts for middle school and high school, I'll take Hemmingway, H.G. Wells and the rest any day over what some politically correct, moralizing modern author would have kids read. I want my kids to have a literary experience (for cultural literacy's sake; for the discovery of philosophical ideas; for the witnessing of well written prose; etc.) and it gauls me to think that what they'll get is a lesson in how to cope with troubling teen issues. If they want to teach this, and I'm not saying they shouldn't, they should have a weekly 'teen dilemmas' class.

Is this class going to have such units as "Suicide: Don't Do it" and "Suze is a Punkrocker: Why Suze Cuts Herself" and "Having Your Room and All Your Belongings Destroyed by Your Father: Why Johnny Should Get Good Grades" and "Running Away: Your Step-Dad's Not Mad, He's Just Adjusting"?

Are you f**king joking me? Because Sex Ed is received so well by most communities I can imagine how well a class containing 'teen dilemmas' like drugs, rape, abuse, depression, and SEX would be received. God forbid they read books about characters dealing with these dilemmas. Just have a class that says Don't Let This Happen to You! or Make Sure to Tell an Adult!, because it's never the adults in the kids lives who are the problems. Because reading about a character, even a fictional character, can't possibly make someone feel less alone or that he/she didn't cause these problems, or that maybe there is some hope. Of course these books have absolutley nothing else to add other than their "issues". They have no life philosophy, no way to help, nothing to do with social inequalities or ingrained social apathies.

I think I'll have to come back to this later. It happens when a rant gets so big it starts to lose it's coherance in my head and just becomes a jumble of screaming.

I'm just so glad I went to college and majored in Photography

Photo giant to discontinue production of film paper

And, no my college has not yet changed the course requirements for the degree in photo despite the mention of the two companies at the end of the article going bankrupt being those who we bought most of our supplies from. With Kodak now ending production of black and white photo paper it is essentially ending black and white photo process.

I'd like to go back to my school and bitch slap my teachers who ALL claimed that digital would NEVER replace film based photography and that we had nothing to worry about.

This is it

This probably best articulates why I want to do what I do:

A free public library is a revolutionary notion, and when people don't have free access to books, then communities are like radios without batteries. The entire flow of communication is bricked off. You cut people off from incredible sources of information -- mythical, practical, linguistic, or political -- and you break them. You render them helpless in the face of political oppression. We were not going to let this happen.

The longer I work in a library, even as a drone, the more I feel like librarians are the LAST defense of free information, and the more I want to smack the librarians who just think of it as a 9-5 job.

Sunshine by Robin McKinley

For some reason the irony of reading a vampire book called Sunshine did not hit me until I picked it up fromt he library. I can be dense sometimes.

I really liked how it started off. The reader doesn't really know they're in an alternate reality from their own until the vamps show up. Then it's suddenly 'this is not the book you thought you were reading". That was cool. The psychological battle during the captive scenes of Part 1 were also cool. Once part one was over though, the book became very formulaic for me.

The"all vampires are evil and we must destroy them but there's this one who's kind of nice and for some reason he's going to help our heroine destroy his peers AND there's going to be weird but unfufilled sexual tension between them" has been done. And it's not my favorite vamp device.

Then there were these two things that bugged me. One, I understand not stopping the story to explain everything about this world that the story takes place in and generally I appreciate authors not believing their readers are so stupid that they can't infer things by context, but to explain so little that the reader is begging for more details about how magic, wards, the "paranormal police" operate can be just as frustrating. It can feel like you are reading the middle of a series and you missed all the explanation in previous books. Two, the same holds true for slang. Making up your own slang as an author gives an otherworldly feeling to the story and prevents the book from feeling dated. But IT HAS TO MAKE SENSE IN CONTEXT. I must have read this passage over a dozen times and I just can't figure out what the author was trying to convey.

Jesse and Pat would be trained in hand-to-hand, and even amok, and thor as hell with the muscles you get if you bash The Blob into trays of cinnamon rolls every morning.

My last issue may or may not be valid. I may be reacting to the latest Laurell K Hamilton books where the plots (what little there is left of them) have slowed to a crawl because of this same issue. We spent so much time inside Sunshine's head that the action seemed secondary and unreal. That was my basic reason for not really digging the book after part one. It worked in part one. It did not work for me in the rest of the book. I kept being like"stop thinking about it and DO something", to both the main character and the author.

So there it is. Sorry that I cannot read vamp books cleanly anymore, but I haven't been able to do that in years. They still all fall into categories for me, and it's ususally a matter of which cliche they become.

Strangely enough I was in a bookstore immediatley after I finished Sunshine while another woman was begging the booksellers for "books like Sunshine". I couldn't belive the stupid advice they were giving her. Anyway, my advice for books like this one would be Barbara Hambly's Those Who Hunt the Night and Traveling with the Dead and Mercedes Lackey's Children of the Night (this is a series but I haven't read the others, last I knew it was out of print, but that no longer seems to be true). No, I didn't offer my advice. I did not work there and was not being paid. No, it's not very nice, but there is a certain point where you must go, I don't work here and I don't need to help customers. Just like I don't need to straighten their shelves either.

And so it begins

Or atleast this is the first incident I've heard about so far.

Men charged over plot to sell new Potter novel

This isn't supposed to happen in real life

This is only supposed to happen in horror movies.

So, we were cooking dinner tonight. Our "quick" version of beef stroganoff was going in the crock pot. Towards the end of that cooking process Jeremy put on rice to cook. We use sushi rice because, I personally like it better than long grain white rice, and I find it easier to cook. I came down stairs to fix my plate, only to be met in the kitchen doorway by Jeremy with a horrified look upon his face. I thought perhaps the rice had burnt (it would have been expected with how many other things had gone wrong in the dinner making process). But no, it wasn't that mundane.

There was, well, what appeared to be a LARGE MAGGOT in the cooked rice.

EW.

My first thought was did something get into our dry goods cabinet. But, no, Jeremy informed me that he had just opened a NEW (sealed plastic) bag of rice.

EW.

I'm totally skeeved out. I'm not going to be able to eat ANYTHING tonight.

Non-Book Stuff

First, we had a computer/hard-drive crash this past weekend. I don't have regular email right now. Not sure when that will get settled again.

Second, I saw Stars Wars III. I went into it with VERY low expectations. It was OK. I would probably not sit through it again, but atleast Lucas didn't gloss over all the things I expected him to. I have no idea what the point of the Wookies being in the movie was though.

Third, I recently found out my grandmother now has bone cancer (she had breast cancer a few years ago). Or atleast we are pretty sure she has bone cancer. Technically I am not supposed to know. She is not telling large chunks of the family, but because she is like this about her helath, we already had in place a grapevine. Unfortunately, that's what it is, a grapevine. I don't have the details. I don't know how serious it is or if her doctors are expecting it to be treatable. There is also rumor that she is being tested for several other cancers. My grandmother is also telling various folks different things, so nobody really has the full story. It's incredibly frustrating. I respect her wanting privacy, but I also don't really want to be suprised to find that she's suddenly past away and I don't know why. I am currently trying to figure out how to get her to let me spend a bunch of the summer with her without her thinking I'm hovering. The library is cutting more hours and B&N STILL has not contacted me, so this would be an ideal time for me to just take some time off and go spend it with her. I don't know if pages are allowed leaves of absences, but I think I will talk to my assitant director about it tonight.