I'm a Library Nerd

anI recently wrote another freelance article for CIO Magazine about how to research technology topics online. I enjoyed the assignment because I was able to use my library science education to talk about something I enjoy: research.

Not only was the article fun to write, but one of my sources, popular library blogger Jessamyn West, mention my article and name in a recent post on her library technology blog.

I've been reading her blog for years and now I'm a tiny piece of the content. How cool is that?

Update: My story was one of the top stories on CIO.com for the month of November. Even cooler!

Message Rock

I wrote about this rock in my town a long time ago with the intention of posting regular updates on new spray-painted messages. Turns out I don't drive that way as often as I thought.

I went by over the weekend and happened to have my camera.

As Metropolis Turns

Today after lunch when my coworker Jason and I were heading back to the office, I asked if he minded making a pit-stop at Newbury Comics.

"So you can get your stories," he said, putting an inflection on "stories" that was subtle but that nonetheless separated it from every other piece of fiction in the universe. Stories, as in what every grand-mammy in America calls her soap operas.

As I thought about it, I realized how much my grandmother's stories and my stories have in common. Besides the obvious fact that comic books and soap operas are both long-running, rather old-fashioned, serialized fiction invented to sell soap to housewives and BB guns to boys, they're also similarly outlandish. A bullet-proof man isn't any more ridiculous than the antics Reba and Victor got up to on a regular basis on Guiding Light.

"Yes," I said to Jason, "so I can get my stories."

Campaign Junkie

I love reading political blogs for up-to-the-minute news about the presidential campaigns. I read the New York Times' The Caucus, the Washington Post's The Trail, CNN's Political Ticker, MSNBC's First Read, USA Today's On Politics, Slate's Campaign Junkie...

Sometimes I feel like my eyes are going to pop out of my skull, but I can't get enough.

When I've read all the blogs, I check for campaign analysis in The New Yorker and The Atlantic. And I like to see what's on BBC News too, for a European perspective.

I like to see how different news organizations portray the same story, and how the candidates portray themselves. I like to get a feel for who's making what kind of news -- who's leading what poll, who's embroiled in what scandal, who's getting endorsed by what union.

And while I like reading about all the candidates (the scary Rudy Giuliani, the awesomely knowledgeable and unfortunately ignored Joe Biden, et al.), it's fun to have a horse in the race. When I stuck my Obama sticker on my car last February, I did so with an audacity of hope. But at this point I believe with my rational senses that he'll be the Democratic nominee. (For the record, watch to see John McCain pull out the Republican nomination after all.)

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

This year, screw Christmas -- I'm waiting for the Iowa caucuses.

Cowboys and Indians

I first encountered Larry McMurtry when the old man made his way across the stage, sporting a tux with a Bolo tie, to accept his Oscar for his work on the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. In his short speech, he thanked not his family or his friends, or God -- but his typewriter. "I couldn't have done it without you," he said. I liked him immediately.

A few weeks ago, coming off a good but claustrophobic and navel-gazey John Updike novel, I wanted something sprawling and airy, and I remembered McMurtry. I'd never read anything about the Old West before, but that seemed just the medicine. I picked the most popular of his books, the one that earned him his Pulitzer.

My first impression of Lonesome Dove was that the writing was overly simple. The vocabulary is no more than a fourth-grade level, and it tended to point out the obvious. On top of that, it was too like Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman -- a little mushy and mainstream. But the Pulitzer Prize logo on the cover made me keep pushing through the 1,000 page novel.

Now, by page 900, one thing is clear: Larry McMurtry is a genius. The Doctor Quinn tone was a tease, and I'm sure he did it on purpose. When characters start getting their balls cut off and shoved down their throats, and burned, and drowned, it's all the more shocking.

There are few stand-out passages in the book, which actually makes the book itself feel more memorable and solid. Rather than catching certain things in your memory, the consistency lets the whole thing build and accumulate in your brain. It never hits you over the head with its greatness -- but at some point (for me it was around page 600), you out-of-the-blue realize that it's been amazing. Then you worry about it being over too soon.

I'm enchanted with the world of the Old West, it turns out. My sense of fantasy has always been rooted in sci-fi and super-heroes. Gun-slinging cowboys and saloons and Indians and the Great Plains seem like a new invention to me. And Lonesome Dove is one of those books you read for the world it presents as much as for the characters, similar to Lord of the Rings. Given the level of detail, I find it hard to believe that Larry McMurtry didn't actually live in the 1870s, the same way I can't imagine Tolkein not spending time in Middle Earth -- the places and customs both books describe are so real as to be alien.

I was happy to learn there are two sequels to Lonesome Dove (and both are its equal in length). Guess I should be thanking McMurtry's typewriter too.

Nice Digits

I just made an appointment to have my travel vaccines for India. When I gave my phone number, the receptionist complimented me on it: "Nice number!"

That's a first.