watz in a name

rebirth after death

2010-04-03T22:11:00.009-04:00

Last spring after my paternal grandparents died, my co-workers took a collection amongst themselves and gave me a gift card to a local nursery. I bought four fruit trees - one for each grandparent, 3 of whom are were now dead. After some time, it was clear that the apple trees had some kind of blight. (below)

The peach trees were also suffering, (above) though not as bad.

I didn't know if any of them would survive.

Meanwhile, in fall, I set out bulbs that me and those same co-workers "procured" from the University gardner.

This spring is shaping up to be quite nice here at The Lodge. :-)

Spring

2010-03-31T21:29:00.004-04:00

I started my day walking into work with my grandmother.

Every spring morning that is sunny and crisp with patches of dew kissed daffodils here and there, is a morning I get to walk with my grandmother. It may only be as long as it takes me to walk from the car to the office but, in that time, I'm a child again and we outside in her garden or walking to town or hanging out laundry or some other chore. But always I am by her side again and we are enjoying the smell of wet new grass.

I ended the day with my grandfather, her husband. I've never filled my mower's gas tank or smelled gas anywhere else that I didn't think of him. So, as I mowed my spring crop of wild onions, he sat under the pine tree in a plastic lawn chair whittling his cedar stick and spitting tobacco juice to his left. Every once in a while I caught him smiling at me, especially as I mowed around the peach tree I planted in his honor last year.

She will be 98 in September 2010. He died in 1998 when he was 88. I couldn't have asked for a better day.

Watz in the name "Reform"?

2010-03-20T11:41:00.003-04:00

My first problem with the Health Care Reform bill is that it needs to say health *Insurance* reform, not health *care* reform. I don't think there's anything wrong with our "care". Doctors are not incompetent but, to call it health "care" implies that they are. They are not the problem. The problem as far as I can tell lies with insurance companies. But, of course, they can't call it what it really is because the lobbyists are SO powerful - and that's not party specific. That is a systemic political illness.

The other problem I have with the bill (admittedly not knowing everything that's in it), is this decades old practice of throwing in crap in a bill that has nothing to do with the over-arching issue. This state wants this, and that state wants that; they throw it all in together and get crap passed that, ordinarily, would never see the light of day. But again - this is not a party specific problem, or even bill specific - it is a politically systemic illness and, as I said, nothing new.

All this to say, I don't disagree with folks who are not for this bill. But where I see us going down the wrong road is when we start saying things like Nancy Pelosi is the anti-Christ. Granted, she ain't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but she's certainly no worse than G.W. Bush - the President who started an unjustified war that has now lasted longer than WWII and was, in no small way, the first nail in our economic coffin. We had a financial surplus up to that point.

However, specific politicians alone are not the fault; after all, no one person, not even the president, has such far-reaching power as to pull a trigger by themselves.

I've come to realize that our so-called *democratic* political system is severely broken and THAT is the real problem we ought to be fighting to fix. Unfortunately, we're all so caught up in 24-hr sound bytes (even the smartest among us) that we're virtually blind to what's really happening: That being that we have essentially become a two-party system with backroom deals that the American public only hear about if the *media* deems it so. This manner of behavior simply doesn't work and it started long before Obama or Bush or even Clinton. We've now allowed our representatives to create a division that, if we're not careful, could rival that of the Civil War. I'm totally serious about that: we are coming very close to such a precipice.

There are extremists in both camps but, at the end of the day, I believe the majority of the population is in the middle and unfairly represented. We, as a nation, are able to discuss issues in a civilized manner and come to some agreement where everyone wins for the most part. Yet, civility no longer sells magazines or boosts ratings. Ya gotta think that Patrick Kennedy was on to something last week when he railed against the media for their lack of real news coverage. If anyone is the anti-Christ in this country, it's them.

Who cares who Tiger Woods slept with? Who cares if Eric Massa groped his employees? Who cares what party is the majority this season? I care about whether my parents get the health care they need. I care if my military friends are asked to fight a war that gets us no where. I care if my representative is dishonest with what I have charged him/her to do on my behalf. I don't give a shit what they do in their bedroom and I don't care what they had for lunch. I care how we keep this country alive and thriving.

Voting matters. I say we create a law wherein, if our collective elected bodies can't do anything more than fight, say no, make deals in the backroom, or pull a filibuster or some other underhanded charade, we send the whole lot packing and elect a new batch that will govern on the up and up. In that same reform we allow the American people to VOTE on the tough issues; like health "insurance" reform. That way there's no party finger pointing - we decide where we're going.

Don't Fence Me In

2010-02-27T14:37:00.003-05:00

So sings my sweet pal Callie Cardamon on her latest release, Easy Street. The only problem...I just can't see Callie on a horse. But, then, I can't ride either so, what do I know?

Speaking in Tongues

2010-02-26T20:39:00.002-05:00

I had such an interesting interview with artist Marjorie Guyon yesterday. She and her beautiful agent, Alaina Simone, talked about her latest project Nation of Nations. In that conversation I was reminded that artists think deeply, considerately, passionately.

I've been surrounded by academics so long that their insistence to be right, without doubt, unequivocally perfect, that it crushes the possibilities of what might be, what could be - perception. It's all about perception. Even the sciences - it's all perception, isn't it? Today it's this rule, but tomorrow some other genius will find something better, truer - another perception is born.

Meanwhile....art is one person's perception. It just is what it is. You're not forced to study it or accept it as truth, you're just asked to look and think.

I'm not happy in academics. I miss the freedom of art.

RCC Continued

2010-02-21T12:06:00.003-05:00

I love Facebook (when the developers haven't screwed it completely). I created a note yesterday with all the band name suggestions we'd gotten - 149 of 'em - with the 150th quickly following the post. Some are really, really good. Some are just funny. Some are sick (yet somehow funny, but that's just me). But the one that always sticks out is Red Couch Conspiracy, as I mentioned yesterday. Dan is at peace with it - Pete hasn't chimed in because he's "winter camping" right now (I don't know if that's code for -"I'm freaking out so, I've gone to sleep in a tent in the UP in the dead of winter and hope I don't wake up"). Whatever....

In the meantime, Stacy Yelton, who came up with the name RCC, sent along this very interesting article on how all the good band names are taken. Fortunately, Googling RCC only turns up my blog! Allmusic.com doesn't turn up anything either, though there are lots of conspiracies out there.

So, there's this new thing called reverbnation (thanks to Matt Burke for turning me on to it) and I've created a Red Couch Conspiracy profile there. It's sparse yet but I may throw together some snippets of of our songs just so you can get a sense of where we're going.

In the meantime, here's the note I created on facebook with all the names my friends have come up with. Enjoy!

Pool
Take That Charlie
Slap Charlie
Up In Ya
Bend Over Charlie
Chainsaw Critters
Face Velocity
Screaming Zucchinis
Portable Squirrel
Potable Squirrel
6 Minute Abs
Once in a Bleu Moon
Once with Bleu Cheese
Terry, Tereski, and Tood
The Electric Intestine
Bleu Greene
Kopana Terry and the Fuzzy Sphincters
Kopana Terry and the Killer Titties
Kopana Terry and Kapow! Tings!
Poppy Twang and the Bluebirds
kopana terry and the pool boys
super blue moon pool
The Wilsqueezblues
squeezbluesco
Kopana Terry and the Killer Time
Kopana Terry's Killer Time
Killer Ko and the Daydreams
Pool Hall
Pool Haul the concrete Pool
the cement pool
the Pool Cues
Pool Time
Skip skool for the pool
Skip Sckool and the Pools
Pool of Drool
What Would Ko Doo the Great Danes
pool-rific
Once With Bleu Cheese Dressing
Once With Roquefort
Once With Gorgenzola
Koko and the Puffs
Koping skills & the Trauma
Spill in isle 3
Deere John and the BushHogs
Red Couch Conspiracy
watch me play these instruments
Trout Grinders
bordello botox
Crouching Squirrel, Chainsaw Charlie
Witchita Wheat
It's my favorite sofa
Letters To Lennon
kitten vortex
Pussy Magnet
Red Pussy Magnet
Dang! That's all I gotta say about that
RPM
Dewey Decimal System
East Coast Seismic Warning
Flow Charts
Power Point Presentations
Kopana's Man Band
AnaPok
Aunt Pannies Mannies
Aunt Mannies Panties
koping skills and the lorazepams
Sleepless
lack of sleep
Dreamy Ko and the Sleepers
Hot Flash and The Night Sweats
Kick-Ass Birthday
I'm Graying Here
Here Comes the Gray
Not today Gray Grays Labotomy
That Guys' Band
Space Anatomy
Shell of a Man
Michelle and Man Shells
That Guy and Ko
Ko Guy Ko
Ko Man Ko
Bang Sum Guy
Any Given Holiday
Koko Kollective
the kopa kopanas
kopana blue
The KoKo Kochos
Ass Kickin Ko's
Ass Kickin Mo's
Ko-a-Kolas
Gravel Drop Travellers
Stone's Throw Caravan
stonecipher road/trail/lane
Kopana Stone Shakers
Kopanana and the Mandrills
Blue Ko and the Crew
Blue Ko and the Hue Crew
Bluestone Road
De Cypher
Blue De Cypher
Ko-Band-Ah
Common thread
Cut and Paste
Off Base
Word Smith
Tune Smiths
Sleazy Cheesy
Rock-on !!! and always rule the day
Peace
Floating Feathers
Sky ward bubbles
stone of hope
mountain of dispair
Hot Koko and the Mellows
a stone's hope band name
name band
insert name here
band camp
Kohunas
flirting with elves
screaming tin pickle boxing the bald husky
befriending the big goodness
Kopascetics
Witchita Wheat & The Threshers
Me and The Boys
Bittersweet Downs
TV Snow
Nekkid Mole Rat
Yes, No, Maybe
Sleeping Lizard
Reptiles in Repose
Resting Reptile Reclining Reptile
Kopana and the Drunken Militia
Kopana Moonshine and the Stills
Sweet Grass and the Foggy Bottoms
Kukla Kopana and the Ollies
Kops and Robbers
Ted Kopana and the Nightly News
Hats on a Drunken Worm Band Name
Bootilicious and the Hot Pockets
Blank Book
French Terry

Red Couch Conspiracy

2010-02-20T12:08:00.005-05:00

This is the working name for the band...at least for now. Speaking of "the band", everyone keeps asking about it so, here's the skinny:

(rehearsal space, December 2009)

About 6-7 years ago I said to an old guitar player pal, Pete Poggione, that technology was catching up so we could play together again since he was then, as now, living in Michigan. That grew into the idea of "Pool" as in a pool of talent wherein people I had known or played with over the years could be in the same band from anywhere in the world.

At Christmas 2009, three of us from said Pool got together at my house and began writing/playing some stuff; myself, Pete, and Dan Kibler from Harrisburg, PA. Three days later was born "Red Couch Conspiracy" or RCC for short.

(Left: Dan Kibler, Right: Pete Poggione)

We've currently got 9 songs and we're scheduling our next rendezvous when, I suspect, we'll finish writing said songs, write a few more, and actually record (for real this time) a good portion of them. Once that happens, we'll be able to invite other guests from the "Pool" to fill in the gaps. But it was pretty clear in '09 that the core of the band was the three of us.

Words can't describe how grateful I am to Pete and Dan. I have a renewed sense of self, and a renewed sense that my life won't end with a day job and a pocket full of stress. There is hope on the horizon and it's name is Red Couch Conspiracy.

What do we sound like, you ask? It's a little hard to categorize (but we must, it is the human way, after all). It's actually easier to say what we are not: we are not country, blues, or jazz. We are not opera or classical. We are not Top 40 pop, rap, or hip-hop. I would venture we sound like a mix of Squeeze, Wilco, Crowded House, Over The Rhine, with a hit of blues and touch of The Stones and Mellencamp. So - if you can come up with a category for all that, then that's what we sound like.

(Above: Kopana and her Mannies on the Red Couch)

Valentine's Day

2010-02-14T16:22:00.002-05:00

Valentine's Day is a whole lot better this time than it was last year. Last year my beloved Jack cat had died just two days prior. It was a harbinger of the year to come but, at the time I didn't know that. But it ruined VD just the same.

I still miss that old cat. He was the best.

2010 brings more play, less work

2010-02-09T09:25:00.002-05:00

The title is exactly as I had intended 2010 to be. The first thing to go, less Tonic. Now, before you thousands of fans turn blue from gasping, fear not. The interviews continue - I've got three lined up over the next 10 days in fact - it's just that the show has been streamlined. That means, some things nobody was paying attention to anyway have been cut, like the Call to Artists and Remembrances. For as much as I'd like those to remain, they are time-eaters and I just don't have it to give anymore. So, until some $$$ starts flowing my way to help support the time it takes to keep them up-to-date, they've been 86'ed.

"The" book

2010-02-02T19:17:00.003-05:00

Yes, it's come to be know simply as "The" book. People are as sick of hearing me talk about it as I am of hearing myself talk about it. But finally, things are moving.

Well, they were.

Then I got a call from a friend who asked me to send the manuscript (now a completely designed book) to the University Press of Kentucky, ironically, the only publisher I had approached previously and the only to reject me. Granted, it was the nicest let-down I'd ever gotten but it was a "no thanks" just the same.

So, just how weird is it that they want to see the book some three years later when it's ready to be self-published? I'll keep you posted on just how weird weird really is.

Hats off to The Black Rose

2010-02-01T16:39:00.003-05:00

It's been eight months since my last post. Seems when my dog died she took some of me with her. But many, many things have changed since then - and all for the better.

One of those great things was the new friends I made through Humanity Academy. It was a week-long session filled with many ups and downs, mostly downs because we had to confront the horrible ways we treat one another, either because of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or just because somebody doesn't look and act the way we think they ought to. Stupid shit, but it's real and it hurts. But in all that dust-up I found a few people I could connect with. One of those is my friend LaKetta Rollins. She writes The Black Rose and has encouraged me to start writing again as well.

And so....here is to all things in the past, moving on, being stronger, and finding good friends along life's path. Thanks L. Shawn Rollins for being my pal.

R.I.P. my best friend - Dog is God spelled backward

2009-05-21T18:25:00.006-04:00

what I always saw when I walked

last night - we walked the yard a lot

She was sick of my camera in her face

new toys

2009-05-03T18:27:00.005-04:00

I've had a recent influx of gear upgrade-ness....

One I play and get to listen to all the time (Grestch drums and a PreSonus Firewire recording set-up). The other, I get to look at. Here, you have a look, too.

happiness in the grief

2009-04-27T08:59:00.007-04:00

April has been a hard month. Not just for me but for many others I know. But in grief comes goodness.

For instance, I have some of the best co-workers anyone could ask for. Instead of sending flowers to both funerals, they instead gave me a $100 gift certificate to a local flower shop. I knew almost immediately what I would do with it.

On Saturday I bought and planted four fruit trees; one for each grandparent, even the one still living. I could think of no more fitting a tribute to their lives and the impact they each had on me than to plant a tree in their honor.

(I have planted everything, except the mature trees, in this pic)

My Terry grandparents had apple trees all over their small farm and my grandmother Terry's home place, at the head of Railroad Fork, was littered with apple trees. They even had an orchard on the side of the mountain.

My maternal grandparents (Adams) had a peach tree behind their house and it was from this tree that a green snake fell down the back of Mamaw's dress while she was wringing a Sunday Chicken's neck. Needless to say, she slung the chicken into the creek, broken neck and all, in order to free herself of the serpent. Someone downstream enjoyed our Sunday dinner, I'm sure. We had a vegetarian meal instead. But my Mamaw Adams made the best crab apple jelly on the planet from the crab apple tree beside their garden.

Fruit trees: I can't thank my co-workers enough for helping me honor my grandparents.

R-L: Hazel Prater Terry (Jonathan Apple), Hannah Hamilton Adams (Crab Apple),

Orville "Bodine" Adams (Georgia Peach), Thornton Terry (Elberta Peach)

a really bad day

2009-04-15T20:29:00.004-04:00

the dog is fading fast. this morning she was panting and pacing as if this was the final day.

By 10:30 I'd gotten the following note from a stranger:

I'm a big fan of Stealin' Horses from way back. I love the music. I found you through Gregg's page. I'm still shocked over his passing. This is too awful. Be well, and may God comfort you in this time of loss...me, I'm still waiting.

My heart sank. He turned 44 just days ago. I still don't know what happened only that it was "unexpected and sudden".Gregg Fulkerson and his son Carter

Not more than 30 minutes later my mother called to tell me of my grandmother Terry's passing, a short 9 days after my grandfather Terry died. It's been a bad, bad day.

Hazel and Thornton Terry, 1983

an update

2009-03-28T13:00:00.002-04:00

I didn't realize how long it had been since I last posted. Shame on me for having a life. Must be the delicious spring-like weather. Last weekend the garden got tilled and 18 asparagus crowns were planted.

Yesterday, I took a vacation day and went home to West Liberty. All three living grandparents are in dire straights.

My dad's parents are both in the hospital. They were in the same room until Mamaw Terry somehow came down with e-coli (hospitals are so unsanitary). She screams every time she's touched because of the severe swelling caused from fluid retention, and that is caused from the congestive heart failure and kidney malfunction. He is struggling to breathe because of pneumonia and heart issues. He weighs a whopping 100 lbs! Alzheimer's is setting in so, he's usually very irritated (further evidence that I come by my colorful use of language naturally) and, unfortunately, he's a walker. This morning, for whatever reason, he thought he'd get up. He fell and cut himself all over. It's just not looking good for either of them. I did manage to keep his anxiety at bay for a while yesterday by applying a cold rag to his head. He was somewhere between a heart attack and an anxiety attack. The cool rag and touch helped to keep him quiet for as long as I did it. No sooner would I move that he would become agitated again.

Meanwhile, my mom's mother continues to suffer light strokes periodically. During lunch yesterday we noticed she was sitting in her chair with her head in her hands. I got up and asked what was wrong. "I'm 97, that's what's wrong. You wait till you get this old, you'll know what I mean." Can't argue with that. I went back to the dinner table.

It's so funny to learn so much about oneself in the throws of their dying (not sure that's the correct spelling for this context). Every word they speak, every move they make I see myself and I understand more about who I am and where I've come from. Some things are truly born of genetics alone. No amount of therapy or prayer is gonna change it. Might as well embrace it. Let the colorful metaphors continue, I say!

Jack

2009-02-14T23:12:00.005-05:00

This is the last picture of my boy Jack. It was taken during the ice storm less than 2 weeks ago. He was still doing good then - he'd started his new round of antibiotics and was pretty perky. He took a turn very quickly.

He was the coolest cat ever. He never messed where he shouldn't. He never asked for anything that he didn't need. He never got underfoot. He never meowed incessantly. The worst thing about him was that he was a puker - from the moment I met him, he was a puker. That aside, he was an utterly perfect cat. A true Zen kitty if ever there was one. I'd had him for 3 years; he was probably 13-14. He'd lived at least 7 lives by the time he got to me and I saw him through his last two. He was a fighter for sure, even though he was a tiny guy.

He died on Thursday the 12th. While most people fear Friday the 13th, for me it's always been Thursday the 12th. I broke my leg on Thursday the 12th. I took a racket to the head and had 12 stitches over my eye on Thursday the 12th. My mother got hit by a stupid girl who ran a red light on...you guessed it, Thursday the 12th. And, so, it came as little surprise that my beloved Jack died on Thursday the 12th. Little surprise, too, that I had been suffering one of my worst migraines ever that same day (something I share with my mother - bad things happen when migraines are involved).

Here I am, 3 days later, and I'm still looking for him at different places in the house. I caught myself calling Max Jack and Lilly Jack. I'm sure I'll call the dog Jack, too, before long. I buried him beneath the Norwegian Pine in the backyard and, without realizing it, I can see it from every window in the house. I keep apologizing to him that I couldn't do more to fix the problem. Like I can fix Lymphoma. Poor guy. He was the best cat ever.

Jack. Jacket. Jackie. Jackie Doo. Jacket Man.

on being thankful

2009-01-07T23:04:00.002-05:00

first there was John Travolta's 16 year old son who died suddenly and then I watched Barbara Walters' interview with a very ill Patrick Swayze. Famous people, sure, but human like the rest of us. They come on the heels of a holiday where I was reminded that we're all getting older. Nearly everyone I know, their health is on the edge, some are actually tipping over. So, I've been pausing to think about how lucky I am. I've got my issues, sure, but by and large I'm pretty damn healthy. I know two friends with MS, two others with diabetes, still others with this and that - all things that could turn deadly in the blink of an eye. I've had friends die at very, very early ages - lives cut entirely too short. At the end of the Walter's special I found myself thanking God that I'm ok. With elderly parents and no children or spouse, staying healthy is even more important than ever. There's nobody but me so, what the hell happens if I go down? I don't wanna know. Not yet.

just one more

2009-01-05T19:48:00.004-05:00

a very happy Lance, feeling relatively good, in a happy "Celly" on our way to Tulsa
he thinks he's an old man. I think he's "Oh Man!"

a new year

2009-01-04T20:52:00.004-05:00

well, here we are, 2009, and tomorrow sees me and many others back in the office for the first time this year. I'd like to say I'm excited to go back to work. I'd like to say I've done everything I said I was going to do before we broke for the holidays. I'd like to say I have set resolutions that I have started...and can actually finish. I'd like to say many, many things that are true but, so far, I've not said anything true except that it's a new year.

(Robin, Lance, Kate)

I was very fortunate to visit my beloved Tahlequah, Oklahoma over the holiday. It was a short visit, and action packed as always (Dirty Santa party pic above), but it was very, very good for many reasons. Not the least of which was seeing many of my best pals on the planet and realizing that they, too, are aging. It's not just me. And, with the exception of yours truly, we're aging very well for the most part - at least as far as looks are concerned. Health is another matter entirely.

It is this last point that is fueling me to improve my health and well-being this year. To stop giving all of my energy to my day job and my second, non-paying job and to start using that energy to make me a better person to my fellow man and to myself; emotionally, physically, spiritually, and intellectually. I should be coming into my prime, not feeling overwhelmed and tired all the time. If I live as long as my first grandparent that died, my 44th birthday this week marks my mid-life. It seems to me that 44 years is not enough and that 88 won't be enough either. So, in case I don't even make it that far, I better get to work on making the most of what's left and stop giving it to energies that don't deserve nor fully appreciate it.

There - I feel better now.

count bleep

2008-12-10T20:49:00.001-05:00

My friend Bryan posted this on facebook. It's funny enough to share here. Watch it!

repeal day

2008-12-05T14:34:00.003-05:00

I never understood how crazed fanaticism overtook an entire nation enough to ban alcohol. It's the same hysterical frenzy that caused marijuana to be labeled as some kind of death trap - which it's not....at all. Lo and behold, they legalized alcohol again and put a tax on it to make some needed cash - smart idea, that! But we're still too stupid to do that with pot. No, we'd rather fill the jails with people who don't belong there; make a little money in court fees - very little by comparison to taxation; get people killed over a little weed; and deny sick folks some relief. For all the good things this country has come up with, we've done some pretty stupid stuff, too. Banning marijuana is but one of those stupid things.

So, let's all toast to repealing one stupid move! Then, let's hope the idiots among us piss off so marijuana can be legalized before more people are incarcerated or die for nothing.

Oh, and NPR has a great bit on the 75th anniversary of the repeal.

rainy sundays

2008-11-30T08:24:00.005-05:00

She's had a streak of good days lately but that doesn't prevent the inevitable nor does it diminish the fact that she's simply not ok. She's whiter than she used to be; she's got what I call "Old Dog Nose" (it's really a fungus that attacks, well, old dogs on their noses); and in almost every picture from the last two years her cataracts show up better than almost everything else in the picture.

Still, when I go outside with her, she runs like she's 5. In fact, one day last week, she spotted a roaming cat and chased it into the neighbor's driveway. I'm sure she would have chased it further if she could have seen it. The next day, that same cat lay in wait behind a tree, then did some kind of bizarre faux attack before taking off across the yard as if the dog was in hot pursuit, which she wasn't. She was so surprised she just stood there as if to say, "What do you think you're doing, you stupid cat? Can't you see I have absolutely no interest in you? And yet you choose to blindside me. Chicken! Coward! Moron! Now, go away or I shall taunt you a second time." OK, the last bit is my voice, clearly. I love that old dog.

I can only think of one other thing that could possibly be more gut wrenching than putting her down and I can't even entertain the thought so, I won't. One horrible decision is bad enough.

Dog is God spelled backward

this is outstanding

2008-11-23T21:01:00.003-05:00

I can't tell you how excited I am about this. Above are the three regional winners for the MET competition in Kentucky. The woman at the rear I don't know but the other two, I do. I have the great honor to hear Chris Conley sing at First Pres Church nearly every Sunday. He's so sweet and sings just as sweetly.

The bigger deal, though, is Andrea Trusty. Andrea and I are from the same small town, West Liberty. I've known her dad for years. About two years ago I got an email from Andrea who found me online via my website. She confessed that I had been a big influence to her as a child when I came to her elementary school one day and gave a clinic on music. I thought it was so sweet of her to find me all those years later and tell me what a difference I had made in her life. Sometimes, when you're no longer doing what you love, it's hard to remember how many lives you can touch with music.

So it is with great, great pride that I saw her announced as a regional winner via Rich Copely's fantastic blog Copious Notes. Not that she will ever see this post but just let me say it out loud for both of you other readers - Way to go, Andrea. you are MY hero!

saturday musings

2008-11-08T10:19:00.002-05:00

I've got a few thoughts quickly before I dash off for the day. Of course, it has to do with the election.

1. When I heard Brian Williams announce Barck Obama president, I turned all Pentacostal; threw my hands in the air, thanked Jesus, God, and the Holy Ghost, and cried my eyes out. I can't remember a time I was so overcome with that much joy. It's a wonderful feeling to be on the right side of history.

2. John McCain, though I did not vote for him, is a stand-up guy and if he had run as a younger man, against another oponent, he might have won. Even though I'm not a Republican, I always said I liked John McCain and it would be tough for me if he ever ran. Of course, that's before I knew who Obama was - so, when the time came, the decision wasn't hard at all.

3. Shame, shame, shame on McCain top aides for raking Sarah Palin over the coals. I didn't think she was qualified but I did not dislike her as a person. How dare they be nasty to her. Campbell Brown said it best and I urge you to watch what she had to say about these nasty people. If the GOP had any sense at all, they would never hire these people again - for anything, not even gophers.

44

2008-11-05T07:53:00.004-05:00

Hats off to John McCain who gave a helluva speech. If he had been so eloquent and chosen a different running mate, this election might have been different. Thankfully, he did not. And, so, a change has come. No more excuses.

worrisome

2008-11-04T17:46:00.002-05:00

After I voted, I went to the grocery (Kroger). I was in the veg aisle where workers were restocking shelves. That's when I heard one worker say to a customer, "There's no way I'd vote for him (Obama). He's not a patriot." She went on to drag Obama through the mud and I couldn't help but think, "Are you the woman NBC polled in Kentucky after the primary who said you didn't vote for Obama because he's Muslim?"

No wonder people away from here always look at my feet to see if I have shoes.

35 minutes well spent

2008-11-04T17:32:00.001-05:00

Peace be with us all

this is a scream!

2008-11-03T10:01:00.004-05:00

I wear lipstick....and you're a dipstick......

What am I going to have to laugh at after this election?

Well....it depends who wins, doesn't it?

if shrubby can't do it....

2008-10-29T20:51:00.002-04:00

my pal, Stacy, and I watched Barack Obama's 30 minute infomercial tonight after which we discussed other election tidbits from the day....like the absolutely disgusting and humiliating Obama effigy they found hanging from a tree on UK's campus this morning. (Kudos to UK President, Dr. Lee Todd, for taking swift and apropriate action)

Anyway....Stacy mentioned she had also watched this morning a Christian fundamentalist on CNN who claims that electing Obama is certain to bring about the Apocalypse. Stacy's response?

"If George Bush couldn't bring on the Apocalypse, Obama sure can't!"

'Nuff said.

all in good fun

2008-10-19T18:02:00.001-04:00

another great find

2008-10-04T11:47:00.004-04:00

my pal Josh has a pretty funny blog. Today he turned me on to this chart from a blog by Aden Nak - I laughed out loud :

It pretty much sums up what I thought of her. I still can't get over how some people actually thought she did a good job. A good job at what? Reading the cue cards? Remembering what John's "boot camp" team told her to remember? What am I missing here?

I will say this, though; I truly do feel sorry for her. She is clearly out of her league and it must be painful to know that. Surely she's not so ignorant taht she doesn't realize it.

Oh, one last thing, being raised a Pentecostal myself, I can tell you that no self-respecting Pentecostal would ever be caught dead, in church or out, in those 3" red pumps she had on. Me thinks the McCain team needs to learn a thing or two about the Pentecostal culture. The idea is to be humble (flats or low heels in Earth tones), not slutty (3" red fuck-me pumps). Then again, there are false prophets among us......

Pirates! In my adventure

2008-09-28T22:19:00.002-04:00

Somebody asked today if I'd be a pirate. My answer was, yes, but not today, as in not this minute but yesterday; a classic pirate. Problem is, I don't think there were women pirates. Women who "serviced" pirates, sure, but pirates? Someone who knows piratical history better than me could answer that. What I know of pirates you could fit on the head of a pin.

However, I adore the pirate books by Gideon DeFoe.He's like Monty Python meets Christopher Moore. My personal fav of the series thus far is Pirates! In an Adventure with Ahab, though Pirates! In an Adventure with Communists is pretty good, too. You should really check out his website - he's a funny dude, then read the books.

stiff and laughing

2008-09-21T11:20:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I did what everyone else seemed to be doing - I worked outside on my house and in my yard. It was a perfect day - few bugs, low humidity, nice temp. I needed to have a talk with God about a number of things anyway. So, it worked out for me, the house, and the yard! Best of all, I didn't turn my computer on - not once!

Problem is, I'm so damn stiff today I can't turn my head. Slight return of the headache that plagued me all of last week, I spent the evening on the couch atop a heating pad watching college football because I was afraid this might happen. But, in this this election year I can always count on something to make me laugh at least once a day and here it is....from a friend's email....

this might be fun

2008-09-13T15:23:00.001-04:00

I found this while reading the dream life. It comes from another fun blog sunday school rebel. You are encouraged to take it to your own blog!

Song you love: Jaime's Crying by Van Halen

Word you love: complicate

Academic subject you love: folklore or Appalachian studies and creative writing

Hobby you love: tonic: arts and music magazine

Type of baked good you love: pineapple upside down cake

Type of sky you love: the Oklahoma sky at any time

Beverage you love: chai latte with skim milk and 2 packets of Splenda

Vacation you love: Yellowstone, Jackson Hole, Grand Tetons, Badlands, Black Mountains, Deadwood - something like that

Restaurant you love: Azur

Way of getting around that you love: My TC

Person you love: puuuuuulease, there's not just one and I won't choose

Room in your home (or ideal home) you love: sunroom (Ideal home)...but since I don't have an ideal home, I'd say my living room is about as close as I can get

Movie you love: The Sound of Music

Book you love: The Four Noble Truths, The Dalai Lama

City you love: St Louis

Future plan you love: Going to Oklahoma

Form of communication you love: email

Junk food you love: ice cream, any kind

observations

2008-09-11T17:14:00.004-04:00

It's been a weird week. A childhood friend's dad was buried today and during last night's visitation I saw many people I haven't seen in years. That got me thinking:

1. Life is entirely too short for everybody
2. I'm probably the most blessed person I know
3. Funeral visitations are the best place to socialize (honestly...where else will you see people you haven't seen in years and actually be in a situation to sit down and talk to them beyond 'How are you'?)
4. The nicest artists are usually the most gifted (and thankful)
5. We're screwed if Sarah Palin...uh, I mean McCain, wins the election
6. Being a liberal stands in stark contrast to my increasingly conservative family
7. I'm so thankful it wasn't my dad in that solid copper coffin
8. Dogs are much easier to deal with than children...on so many levels...and they're cheaper, too
9. Doctor turned DEA agent is weird
10. Cop turned golf pro is even weirder
11. Drummer turned librarian - weirdest of all
12. What are the situations that make us feel old?
13. SEE #11
14. The Dalai Lama is very, very wise
15. Computers are overrated
16. September 11th should be a national holiday

god bless gloria steinem

2008-09-08T10:00:00.001-04:00

Read her op-ed piece here

this is snorting funny

2008-09-04T13:16:00.004-04:00

Sarah Palin as Deloros Umbridge?

You bet!

who's yer daddy?

2008-09-01T21:55:00.003-04:00

The weekend started with a rousing volley at work over McCain's choice of Sarah Palin. Some rediculous thing about shoring up the base. The base of what...Idiots? That's an insult to good Republicans, and yes, there are good Republicans. Not to mention an insult to women. But I digress.

Yesterday I had a dinner party where the rumor was that Palin was covering up a daughter's unwanted pregnancy by claiming the baby as her own - her youngest.

Today, on what was to be the first day of the GOP convention altered because of Hurricane Gustav (conveniently eliminating Dubya's speech), we learned that the rumors aren't true because Palin's 17 year old is currently pregnant. Oops.

So, I figure tomorrow we'll see those Palin nude pix everyone is talking about. What? They're actually her daughter? Oops again. Then what? Oh, that's right, Troopergate.....and, oh shucks I thought the bridge to nowhere was a great idea but changed my mind...give me that gun, dang it, I got me a caribou in the way of my oil drill!....FIRE.....tasty.

And to borrow sentiments from my pal Josh...see the McCain/Pailn Campaign photo below

Priceless!

I want to believe - the unexpected grief

2008-08-27T20:02:00.007-04:00

There's something about this picture that really bothers me.

I've been haunted ever since the democratic primary when I cast my vote for Obama. Momentum was on his side and I got caught in the wave like everybody else. It's not that I don't like him - but, as I heard someone say recently, it wasn't his turn. Dammit - it was Hillary's turn - she'd earned it, deserved it, knew exactly what she was doing and was about to fulfill so many things she tried to fulfill before the boy's club pushed her back into the kitchen. Well, I'll be damned if they didn't do it again. Here we go taking a backseat to the boys...again.

That said, there's absolutely no denying that Barack Obama has the ability to rally the troops, as it were. It is a skill that all great presidents have had - Lincoln, Kennedy, Clinton. It is a sign of great leadership, in my opinion. And while Clinton and Obama sounded identical on many levels, he has managed to unify people inside and outside the democratic party as no one else ever has, and doubtless few ever could. He is a smart, confident, competent man and I believe him.

I miss Hillary and I don't think I'll ever get over not voting for her but I trust Barack Obama to do what's right, to be a stand up guy for everyone, to be the man who makes sure my veteran parents are never denied health care, or someone's children are never denied a decent education, or that people are allowed to love who they want without fear of persecution, that women will be paid the same as men and given the same opportunities, that our civil liberties are reinforced without closing our borders, and that we fight only the wars that really have to be fought.

Now, wouldn't it be great if his first act as president would be to strip Dubya and Cheney of all their assets to help repay the money they've flushed down the toilet with Haliburton and the rest of their snake oil debacles....or, better yet, why not use those assets to rebuild New Orleans! And just after seizing the assets, try them both for high treason against the United States and send 'em to Guantanamo....or maybe Anthrax Island. Or maybe just lock 'em in a sound proof cage in the middle of Capital Hill where they'll have to watch the country grow into what it's capable of instead of being reduced to the lowest common denominator they left us.

I'm extra proud of the Democratic party, too. I came away from this convention feeling as if we are the party of the educated, the kind, the tolerant, the compassionate, the understanding, the caretakers and caregivers, the strong. We're a good bunch and we are made up of every facet of American there is. How cool is that?

I still don't like that picture though.

here - this is very good

2008-08-25T09:44:00.002-04:00

http://www.imvotingrepublican.com/

why this guy?

2008-08-23T12:15:00.004-04:00

OK, I'm the first to admit that I'm not a brilliant political strategist. Heck, I didn't even pay attention to politics until I was in my late 20's (though I did vote regularly). I had far better things to do than worry about America's foreign standing or our economic stability. But, as with most adults, these things increasingly concern me, among so many others like health care, for instance. And, now, after 8 years of complete and utter stupidity in the white house (and that nasty man, Cheney, who we all know is really calling the shots), even young folk are getting involved. Thank God for that - we might have a chance to get back up on our feet with them pulling for Obama. The down side: I have a sinking feeling that someone will off Obama (some crazed racist is just evil enough to do it, you know they are) so, for me, who he chose for his running-mate was nearly as important as running himself.

So....somebody explain to me why Joe Biden is a good choice for VP? Yeah, I've read all the reviews - all the pontificating about his being an insider (as if that's a good thing), a foreign policy guru (could have chosen a number of people for this bit), filling in Obama's gaps (that's what a cabinet is for), yadda yadda yadda. I look at Joe Biden and I see a white man with bad hair who's the same old political bullshit we've had forever and a day.

So much for change.

I feel like change has been traded for votes - soothing all those independents who can't seem to understand how bad the Republican party has screwed us over, all of us - that somehow electing a war hero (with little else going for him as far as I'm concerned) is a good thing... forget that Grandpa doesn't even know how many friggin' houses he owns (doesn't really matter, though - his wife is the one with the money).

I'll still go for Obama but I have serious doubts about his winning now - and about his commitment to real change. You just can't scream change then turn around and hire a guy like Biden and expect me to believe change is really what you want. The only thing I see changing now are the leaves.

Disappointed.

a total bummer

2008-08-20T22:25:00.004-04:00

All the comedians are dying (Bernie Mac was the latest) and now it seems all the great musicians are following suit....first Isaac Hayes then, yesterday, LeRoi Moore of one of my all-time favs; Dave Matthews Band. They called it "complications". hmmm I wonder if it's similar to the "complications" that killed Bee Gee Maurice Gibb? I'm sure there's a ton of other "complications" that I can't think of off the top of my head.... a real pity and a real loss one and all.

R.I.P. LeRoi

Pic from Dave Matthews Band website

history

2008-08-16T23:36:00.003-04:00

...and then he stood alone with #8 - way to go Michael!

i like fun stuff

2008-07-24T19:34:00.002-04:00

like these... and more found here

Imponderable Questions

Before they invented drawing boards, what did they go back to?
Can vegetarians eat animal crackers?
Do fish get cramps after eating?
Do infants enjoy infancy as much as adults enjoy adultery?
Do Roman paramedics refer to IV's as "4's"?
Does the Little Mermaid wear an algebra?
Doesn't 'expecting the unexpected" make the unexpected expected?
How come abbreviated is such a long word?
How come Superman could stop bullets with his chest, but always ducked when someone threw a gun at him?
How do I set my laser printer on stun?
How do they get the deer to cross at that yellow road sign?
How do you tell when you run out of invisible ink?
How does Teflon stick to the pan?
How is it possible to have a civil war?
How much deeper would the ocean be if sponges didn't grow in it?
If a deaf person swears, does his mother wash his hands with soap?
Why is bra singular and panties plural?
Why is it called "after dark" when it really is "after light"?
Why is it called tourist season if we can't shoot at them?
Why is phonics not spelled the way it sounds?
Would a fly without wings be called a walk?

what's happening to me?

2008-07-20T13:22:00.002-04:00

what's happening is this - I'm getting my life back!

I finished that god awful degree and slept.....and slept and slept and slept - reluctant to go out in the yard, go anywhere, do anything, I wasn't even inspired to paint the house (which is in serious need of a paint job). I thought something was wrong with me. Turns out I was right. Something was wrong - I'd just finished something horrendous that I never wanted in the first place! Last week I had a long, much overdue conversation with my PhD pal who said she'd done the same thing after defending her dissertation - it's a common phenomenon with academics. When you ought to feel free and light, you shut down instead. It was in that moment that things turned around for me (I love my friends). And, except for a massive migraine on Wednesday, I proceeded to have an incredible week!

Monday I was lucky enough to play, for the second year in a row, for the Girl Scouts at Camp Judy Layne (my pal Stacy sometimes calls it Camp Mary Jane, other times Camp Mary Kay) with my pals Melanie Johnson and Marianne Sherman. Now, such a gig may sound trivial. It's anything but. I would play that gig long before I'd go play The Hoosier Dome again... or CBGB's, the Stone Pony, you name it, every great gig I've ever played I'd give up to play for these girls. Why? Because they love it - I don't think music has ever given me more joy than seeing the look in their eyes when they hear us three women play and realize they can do it, too. You can see the light bulbs come on in their brains - the excitement is infectious. It makes me feel like I make a difference; something sorely lacking in my current "day" job.

The Lexington Herald-Leader got wind of what Melanie has been doing with these girls and the story became the front page lead in yesterday's paper. (be sure to watch the video). Someone apologized to me that Marianne and I weren't mentioned by name (we were referred to as "two of her bandmates") - I said, "I don't care - Melanie is way overdue her 15 minutes - I've had mine!"

So, I flipped the front page and there's a large, albeit horrible, picture of Alison Krauss and Robert Plant from their show the night before at Rupp Arena (watch the video provided on their website).

And could somebody tell me what it is about newspaper editors that cause them to pick pictures that make people look retarded? Seriously - the H-L did it to me years ago and I thought it was something personal but when I saw the pic on the inside of the paper of Alison looking just as retarded as I had, I knew it really was a deplorable lack of sense on their part (they had enough sense to not post it online, at least). She's beautiful and to choose a pic that makes her look like she just got off the short bus is just stupid.....oh bother.....

Anyway....I'd seen Robert with Jimmy Page back in '95 - one of the best shows ever. I've seen Alison God knows how many times and I don't think I've ever heard her hit a flat note (I don't think I can say that about another singer). Their show together was a religious experience - like seeing The Who in the late 80's with Simon Phillips on drums. My pal Stacy looks at me by the third song and said, "As long as that man's alive, women will never need Viagra!" She's so right - it was like a 2 hour orgasm. And it wasn't just him, the music was impeccable, ethereal, otherworldly and not at all what you'd expect. I can only describe it as taking American music to a completely uncorrupted level. Buddy Miller was along and you can never, ever go wrong with him on a stage - easily the most underrated American musician touring today. T Bone Burnett is no slouch nor is Stuart Duncan who really showed his stuff. My only criticism was the drums - there were times when I wanted the fancy big drum sound to let loose with some serious rock and roll groove. Stacy loved them but I equated the sound to a big man with small balls. Sometimes you just need big balls and there were a few instances where some big balls would have come in really handy!

It was a full moon Friday night and I had a blast!

Imagine my surprise when Saturday I went to see Mamma Mia....the week-long fun was continuing! (how bout the Abba-ites at the premier below?)

It was a roasting hot day - perfect for a matinée. The singing bordered on bad most of the time but, strangely, I didn't care. It is such a feel good story, Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnon are so handsome together, the scenery so beautiful, that you just don't care that they can't sing their way out of a paper bag. It is a total chick-flick and, despite myself, I loved it. I ate buttered popcorn, raisinettes, a large diet, then went to Frisch's for a Big Boy, fries, and a chocolate shake - what more could you possibly want out of a hot day?

And did I mention that I interviewed author Gwyn Hyman Rubio last week, too, who's uniqueness and kindness was an inspiration to me? Here's a woman who had a bestseller (Icy Sparks), her next book was a let down because some suit pushed her for a deadline, then she stood up and said, "ya know what? I don't work that way and you're not worth it to me or my writing." Girlfriend is writing her next novel on her own terms. I LOVE that.

I was also sent a copy of Janis Ian's autobiography and will be talking to her soon. That won't be boring - talk about a survivor! The list of good stuff happening to Tonic lately just goes on and on...

Today is Sunday. I have to go back to my "day" job tomorrow. I can only hope that the energy and creativity that's filled my life outside the library this past week somehow find a way this week to overtake the digital doldrum that is my life during the day.

living in a fish bowl

2008-07-12T11:55:00.006-04:00

The neighbor next door to me is having a party today......for 300 friggin people! That's not an exaggeration - that's how many have been invited (well, 301 if you count me)!!!! I wake up to some thumping, a few voices, and a barking dog. I opened the blinds to find his entire back yard littered with white cloth tables and fold out metal chairs (Those won't be fun today - it's 90+)....and then the loud polka music started. Aren't you sorry you're not here for the spaghetti polka cookout for 300 Catholics? So, this is a birthday party for him and three of his fellow parishioners. Why they couldn't do this at the church is a mystery.

Said neighbor, we'll call him....Tim....has a penchant for wigging out the neighborhood on a normal day. He teaches violin (NOT fiddle) - Suzuki method [insert motorcycle rev here] - so, there's a constant parade of mini-vans ferrying children smaller than their instruments. Sometimes, when the appointments overlap, I find the mini vans in my yard - not in front of my yard, no, they're not smart enough to keep the wheels on the pavement, no, right side wheels in my grass. Lovely.

When the weather permits (and the humidity is low) he opens the windows! I must say, there's nothing more effective for running off neighborhood cats than a 10 year old learning Bach. In the spring and fall the cat shit collection in my flower bed diminishes a great deal :-) I suppose I should thank Tim for the relief...but I won't.

(looking at Tim's fence, gate to right of tree, weird vine stuff behind Rhododendron)

Adding to his oddness, what tries to pass for a privacy fence between our yards has a gate. The gate opens from his side so, apparently, Tim put it there for reasons yet to be understood. I invested in a lock. Creep. Said privacy fence is a joke - the slats are so far apart that I might as well not have a fence - I see everything, as does he. In fact, the place would be much improved without it for he doesn't keep it up, literally. He's allowed this odd vine thing to grow to such an extent that the roots, in at least five places along the fence, have become trunks, interwoven between the slats - for, remember, they're wide. They've become so heavy that they're pulling the fence toward him. From his side I'm sure he doesn't notice, from my side, it looks like white trash took a dump between the yards.

Back to today's shin-dig, just as he announced the ping pong table was open, the winds picked up and, according to the local radar, he's about to get rained on. Better take that PA in the house! But wait, it's not raining yet so there's plenty of time for all the fat women to attack the dessert table - which they are....because I can see them through the f-ing fence!

...wait......crack of thunder.......scream..........sweet, delicious rain.......

I love Saturdays!

...but, wait, there's more........

With a short lull in the storms, the hordes returned to the yard, brought their guitars and congas, and began to sing. I heard faint whispers of Kumbaya - I'm not kidding. They circled the faux apple tree, clapping in time with the conga, and sang. The rains returned. (what happened? ...the anglo equivelent of a rain dance?) Anyway, I heard Happy Birthday in there somewhere - the rain poured - unperturbed the singing continued. Arms stretched to Jesus - remember, I can see through the fence - the rain grew harder, the singing grew louder....hallelujas sounded....maybe they're not Catholic after all....I'm thinking evangelical Baptists. Oh Lord, I'm going to Frisch's.

smokin'

2008-07-08T21:07:00.001-04:00

ok - new fad - weeds on Showtime. Watched the entire 3rd season and the first 4 episodes of the 4th season in a week's time. LOVE it. Go there now - find out more, outstanding cast! Mary Louise Parker (Fried Green Tomatoes), Elizabeth Perkins (Big), Kevin Nealon (SNL), Justin Kirk and a bunch more.

riddle me this, batgirl...

2008-06-25T15:14:00.002-04:00

So, remember my pal, Melanie Johnson, I mentioned a few days back....has the video on YouTube singing an Aimee Mann song? Well, Miss M has a groovy, funny as hell, band called The Bats. Lo and behold - who should show up on YouTube yesterday but.....you guessed it, The Bats. Be sure to listen carefully to the words - you won't be disappointed.

see - I told you!

2008-06-23T09:01:00.002-04:00

May 29th blog said "Korman died just days after Dick Martin (Laugh-in) died! Is the universe cleaning house of comedians?"

George Carlin is dead now. I'm afraid my poor attempt at a joke may not have been a joke after all. Eddie, Ellen, Judy, et al - better take your vitamins, have a physical exam, drink lots of water...it's gettin' scary.

R.I.P. George

deep thoughts...NOT

2008-06-22T10:54:00.005-04:00

Yesterday I edited an interview I'd done last week with sci-fi novelist William Gibson. This is the guy who coined the term cyberspace (from his debut novel that's won every award known to man called Neuromancer) . He single handedly (for the most part) created the cyberpunk genre and the generation that follows. I knew his book but I didn't know him.

When the interview was going down I really liked him and liked what he was saying. During the editing, I understood more of why I liked him - he brought me out as much as I brought him out. It wasn't his job; his job was to talk, not listen. Now, as the throngs of you who read this rush to listen to our exchange, I'll warn that you'll be disappointed. I took out my 20 minute diatribe on the evils of the music business. So, I've cheated you (or spared, depending) but, for me, it was cathartic somehow. Here was a guy who is a sponge - that's part of how he writes these incredibly accurate (scary accurate) stories - who was genuinely interested in my career, my take on the business and just how nasty it can be.

The more I talked, the madder I got. 15-20 years out of the major leagues and it still pisses me off. I think it's fair to say that I'll go to my grave pissed off at Clive Davis and his mafioso cronies for wrecking a perfectly good opportunity. I see him now and just wanna puke, especially when he's being hailed as some kind of rock-n-roll savior - he's a smarmy businessman, but nobody wants to talk about that part. For every star he's found, there are thousands of careers he's wrecked along the way (One of the guys from Milli Vanilli - another Clive debacle - killed himself, for example). That's not an exaggeration - I was actually one of the lucky ones - my record got made and put on the market - there were 20+ bands under his purview that same year that never got out of the studio.

Despite the ruffled feathers, the good thing is this: Now I play because I love music - which is why I started playing in the first place more than 30 years ago. The business can wreck that for ya, at least, it did for me for a while. Today, I have more gratification playing for the Girl Scouts than I ever had being on MTV or playing the Hoosier Dome. (and, yes, that's a summer gig I have; playing at Girl Scout camp for little rockers - easily the most appreciative audience on the planet).

In the end, I reckon it was worth it if for no other reason than to appreciate where I am right now.

fun with balls

2008-06-21T11:13:00.008-04:00

So, if you didn't like Peter Gabriel before, maybe you'll like him after Big Blue Ball - a huge collaboration with musicians from all over the world. My kingdom to be surrounded by this much talent!

With the exception of Sinead O'Connor's track and the last track, title track unfortunately, it's bloody brilliant. I can't stop listening.

Go, now - read about it, then - crank it up or put your headphones on. You won't be sorry.

youtube-mania

2008-06-12T09:57:00.002-04:00

My pal, Melanie Johnson, has a GREAT video on YouTube as part of the Aimee Mann song contest. Check her out.

sunday readings

2008-06-08T14:07:00.004-04:00

A friend recently loaned me his autographed copy of Chris Offutt's The Same River Twice. The memoir by the Kentucky born writer had long been on my reading list but I'd never gotten around to it - though I have read most of his first release Kentucky Straight. I have no lasting impression of it which, to my way of thinking, says I needed to make space on my hard drive of a mind and it wasn't important enough to keep.

There has been much ado about The Same River Twice by Kentuckians who think it's portrayal of us natives is less than stellar, less than accurate, less than kind. I withheld judgment until I'd read it from cover to cover.

Offutt is from Rowan County - neighbor to my home; Morgan County. I've long thought that Rowan County was....different. When I was in high school, rumors were rampant that devil worshippers sacrificed cats and goats on Clack Mountain - a tall hill near the Morgan/Rowan County line just beyond Cave Run Lake. They said the head warlock was a prof at MSU and that ritual orgies were the nightly norm. Me and friend took a chance and drove around Clack Mountain looking for what we'd been told were satanic symbols leading the way to the ritual site. We found symbols on rocks, painted in red. Clack Mountain was desolate - a dirt road marking the spine of the ridge, more symbols as we went further into the woods, trees started closing in, the road become narrow and pitted with holes where the grader no longer tread; we turned back - considering ourselves brave enough to have gone as far as we did without admitting we were too chicken-shit to go any further...even though we knew full well that anybody who'd heard the rumors was the likely hieroglyph artist.

Still, I never liked Rowan County.

Concerning Offutt's book, the only bit I took exception to was where he says that, if you're a man, porking your cousin, your sister, or a barnyard animal is OK but another man is strictly forbidden. He says it near the bit where he was getting friendly with a NYC hooker, grabbed what he thought was her pistol only to find it to be her hard, throbbing gristle! Freaked him out - as it would anyone, I'm sure.

So, ok, he doesn't agree with gay sex - a lot of people don't. But do they, in Rowan County, really condone sleeping with beasts and relatives long before other men? Is this some mountain guy thing that I somehow missed out on? Does he mean to say that all the boys I dated in high school (which was a LOT) somehow never let it slip that, before our dates, they'd relieved themselves in their nanny goats? That I was in competition with their sisters? That my own father would let me lose in the world and not warn me about such things? I'm sorry - I don't buy it - I think he's full of shit and, that if there is such a pact, it belongs to his family alone rather than some cultural norm. There's nothing normal about it.

I'll grant you this: my dad has told me about a family in Perry County (where he was born) who were well known to inbreed - everyone knew it and looked at them with pity. He said, "They didn't know any better than to not sleep with their sisters." This family was so inbred that deformities were the distinguishing family features, like square jawlines or beady blue eyes in other families. Apparently, you could spot them a mile away, what with their abnormally off-centered noses, distended bodies, and crooked eye sockets. All this to say, normal mountain people, normal people period, do not sleep with their sisters and cousins! And, sorry, inbreeding, where it really does take place, isn't confined to Eastern KY - hello - this country is full of incest, the world is for that matter!

So, I gotta go with his critics on that one - just perpetuating the stereotype, he is. Otherwise, I thought his book was extremely well written and provocative. Though, in all honesty, I felt dirty after reading it. I felt like I had mosquito bites, unshowered, hungry, stinky, sticky, hungover, longing for a bed instead of a floor, a place to belong. Of course, that's the mark of a good writer - you felt everything he went through. But it's not an adventure I'd take again.

things that happen on a saturday

2008-06-07T14:59:00.005-04:00

First up: Hillary Clinton's concession speech

Despite knowing I did the right thing casting my primary vote for Barack Obama I still feel like a traitor. Today's concession speech just drove that point home. As tears dripped down my cheeks while she graciously spoke of Obama (to her credit - though he did right by her, too), in my mind I saw both my elderly grandmothers, 95 and 92, being denied the right to vote. While neither of them are/were the type of women to cause a ruckus, much less as suffragettes, they were, none the less, born before women had the right to vote - their lives, in many ways, played out as benefactors of that suppression. Being keenly aware that their opportunities denied were now mine to explore, I was overcome with shame and guilt that, in the end, I had not worked harder to see our gender uplifted to the country's highest office.

Despite that, I still know Obama stands to be our best presidential candidate and that all those women who sacrificed their lives and livelihoods so many decades ago did not do so in vane. Their ambitions were wholly fullfilled when I cast my vote even though I did not do it for one of our own. I voted for a man whom I believe will do his utmost for everyone - not just women, not just blacks, but every single person in this country. Had Hillary been as eloquent and passionate a speaker, as generous of spirit and candor as Obama, had she been as gracious throughout her campain as she was in her speech today, we may very well have seen his concession rather than hers. But, as she rightly pointed out, it's never good to say "what if" but better to move forward. I believe Obama is the person to get that done and it would be to his credit to have her as vice-president. But even if he doesn't (and if he doesn't, I will trust his judgment), there can be no doubt that what Clinton did in this race was historic. She has made it easier for the next qualified woman to run. And for that, we should all be truly grateful - even if you were always an Obama supporter.

Before I end my confession, let me finally say that, for all her faults (and she's got plenty, Lord knows), Clinton was right to campaign to the end and right to host a concession "party" days after many called for it. The media, and even myself, said more than once at points in this campaign that "she should throw in the towel". But, in fact, she won the popular vote and her supporters would have felt disenfranchised had she done so. Likewise, I don't believe for a second that she stalled in her concession for any other reason than losing is hard and she had supporters who were extremely loyal - it's the least she could do for them. And if she stalled for position? She is nothing if not smart. I believe history will show that both those decisions stand to unify the party rather than divide it - everyone's voice had a chance to be heard - everyone's vote had a chance to count. That's important.

And, now, as with the presidential election in which Al Gore really won the presidency - we should, as a country, suspend the use of delegates and let the popular vote guide our outcomes. Nothing is more disenfranchising than to work toward a common goal only to have antiquated politics overrule the will of the people. Had such a change been made sooner, we would not have had Dubya and Cheney in the White House, we would not be in a bogus war, we would not be suffering the largest unemployment rate in more than 20 years, we would not see our stocks plummeting, we would not be faced with Global warming without being proactive and signing the Kyoto protocol, etc. etc. etc. And, I dare say, we would have Universal health care by now - my grandparents could afford their drugs without choosing between that and food, and I would have the option to leave my job for another if I want to.

Next up: The Belmont stakes wherein Big Brown stands to be the first Triple Crown winner in 30 years. The great thing about this race: there's no delegates - you either win, or you don't. Worse case scenario, it's a photo-finish. It's not inconceivable that they could tie....though that would be historic, too.

judy-ism

2008-05-31T11:25:00.004-04:00

I mentioned Judy Tenuta in my last post - lo' and behold, an anonymous commenter replied that Judy is alive and well, performing in Denver this weekend. Too bad I'm nowhere close to Denver - I'd go. But if you are - here's her website

Location aside, I was glad to hear The Goddess is still making people laugh with her IUD. Call me stuck but I still quote lines from her appearance with Rodney Dangerfield (HBO special as I recall) back in the 80's (giving away my age now). One of the funniest shticks I've ever seen - still!

Seems I saw her again a few years later - the bit about mountain girls - that wasn't quite as funny. Of course, I did take some offense to that particular bit and, to be honest, that's the only part of the routine I remember. Because she pissed me off or because she wasn't that funny? Hard to say really. Anyway, I'm sure she meant no harm and I love her just the same. We're all fair game in the world of comedy, as well we should be, after all. But I seriously never heard a peep about her after that. You can't blame that on me - I have nothing to do with HBO programming. If I did, I'd have....running water and shoes... :-D

bummer

2008-05-29T22:34:00.001-04:00

I'm bummed about Harvey Korman dying. I'll be way bummed when Carol Burnett dies. I'll be bummed when Tim Conway, Vicki Lowrance, and Lyle Wagner die, too. And Korman died just days after Dick Martin (Laugh-In) died! Is the universe cleaning house of comedians this week? Who's next - Goldie Hawn? Rita Rudner? Judy Tenuta? (Whatever happened to Judy Judy, BTW?)

Thank God Ellen DeGeneres and Eddie Izzard are still kicking or we'd be left with a host of mediocre comedians until we, too, die. OK, so, Mike Myers and Steve Martin are very funny and they're still alive....and Jamie Lee Curtis plays great comedy roles (when she's not screaming at men in masks with machetes)...and the world will never be totally over as long as John Cleese, Michael Palin, and Jennifer Saunders are still around - God bless 'em one and all, those witty Brits.

I still miss Lucille Ball and the Three Stooges. Corny but true. There's nothing better than a good physical comedy stint. In my next life I want to be a comedian. Well, actually, I want to be a meteorologist/storm chaser but....in the life after that I wanna be a comedian.

the tudors

2008-05-27T21:31:00.006-04:00

so, I said to a friend today that The Tudors on Showtime is one of the hottest shows going. If you're fascinated at all with the 1500's and you really like beautiful men (contrary to the portraits of Henry VIII), The Tudors is what you're looking for. Lord help me - I feel like Mrs. Robinson but being middle aged does not mean dead - which is what you'd have to be to not notice a fine specimen like this....

And he's just the king! (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) How about a king with a best friend (Henry Cavill) that's just as beautiful as he is!

The list goes on - there's no end to beautiful men or talent in this show - from Sam Neill to Peter O'Toole (as Pope Paul III, no less), even the theme is moving, haunting, memorable. It's really a great series. Go, now...

here's the deal

2008-05-27T14:44:00.002-04:00

So far my vacation has consisted of a funeral for an errant uncle, grocery shopping, dinner at O'Charlies, digging up Rose of Sharon bushes, a massive allergy attack with a migraine that landed me in bed for 24 hours, another round of poison ivy, and total boredom. How sad is that you want to go back to work because you're too damn bored to stay home? This is what my life has been reduced to - boredom. There was a time when I couldn't be at home enough - there was so much to do, so much to create. Now I just feel completely overwhelmed, underpaid, over-taxed, undervalued, and basically....depressed. That's it - depressed. I've got to get a creative job or I'm gonna go off the deep end.

To make it worse, I voted my heart with Obama and have felt like a complete traitor to the female gender ever since. As if every woman who fought and suffered to earn me the right to vote was slapped upside the head, spat on, and called dirty names. Shit!

preakness

2008-05-17T23:13:00.002-04:00

WOW - can you say "second coming of Secretariat"?

OK, that's a bit heavy but, still, both wins have been MORE than impressive. If Big Brown's feet hold up, I don't think there's another horse that can challenge him. The only one that could is dead now :-( I guess that means I'll vote for Barack Obama :-)

mother's day

2008-05-11T08:54:00.002-04:00

It's not that I don't love my mother, Lord knows I do, but I've decided that Hallmark is responsible for all of these holidays that require cards, gifts, dinners, travel, or other devices that cost money. Money none of us really have but are shamed into spending anyway for fear of seeming ungrateful. Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentines, Halloween, Memorial Day - ok, not Memorial Day - thank God they've unsuccessfully rallied the troops behind Secretary's Day, Bosses Day, Grandparents Day, and a host of others. You know someone is bound to be left out - how about Convicts Day? Junkie Day? Gardeners Day? McDonald's Employee Day, Grandchild Day? Daughter's Day? Son's Day? Nephew's Day? Meteorologist's Day? Arborist's Day? [Insert your title here] Day.

I'd write more but I'm due 100 miles away in a few hours for, you guessed it, Mother's Day dinner!

Eight Belles

2008-05-03T23:11:00.003-04:00

R.I.P. big girl. You did great things.

Derby Day

2008-05-03T11:18:00.001-04:00

Ya know, I've been praying for rain; for the new plantings/transfers and so I'd be forced to stop working in the yard to stay inside and do a few things that need to be done here...like clean the house, update Tonic, and fix the myriad aesthetic things wrong with my new website. But I didn't mean "rain on Derby Day" for heaven sake! 6:30 a.m. Derby Day - pouring. The dog was most unhappy and, as usual, blamed me for the wetness she had to endure as she trolled the yard for a dry place to....make wet. How rude of me! Even the cat, the indoor cat, seemed somewhat put off as rain sprayed through the screen door and rudely slapped him in his little kitty face. My fault, of course (he's in cahoots with the dog). How rude of me!

Still, this is a welcome respite from dirty nails, aching back, and nosy neighbors. Don't get me wrong, I love my neighbors - I'm very blessed actually - but I don't always want to talk to them. Especially if I'm looking my very worst in ball cap, uni-boob i.e. sports bra, and fat-dimpled, white-as-snow legs. My ass stuck up in the air should be enough to keep their tongues wagging without actually talking to me. Then again, maybe that's why they talk to me - not because my fat ass is attractive but because they want to know the person who's stupid enough to hike the double bun-ed wide-load to the sky instead of bending at the knees like a normal person.

Whatever.

All this to say - I'm putting my money (if I had any, which I don't) on Eight Belles. The only filly running for the roses today. So few fillies make it to "The Show" that, when one does, us similar gendered humans must support her. The jury's still out on Hillary though....

it's been a while

2008-04-28T22:01:00.002-04:00

I haven't had time to say much lately but that doesn't mean I haven't been paying attention to things. In fact, I've been paying a LOT of attention to my neglected yard for the last two weeks.

I bought my house one year ago last Monday and I've hardly had time to touch anything outside. It showed. We've had a stretch of great weather and my dad was sweet enough to trade his truck for my sports car. I've hauled three loads of brush, four load of rock and stepping stones, transplanted god knows how many bushes and plants that were scattered willy nilly all over the yard, bought and used a pick ax on some pretty tenacious honeysuckle stumps (still working on those), tilled and planted a garden...ok, a friend with a tiller actually tilled it but I did the rest..let's see, what else? I'm the recipient of a ton of creeping phlox and a lilac bush that I'll pick up Thursday from a very generous friend, yesterday I planted a Japanese maple, tomorrow I'll plant four azalea bushes....and then it's time to invest in some herbs for the tiny herb garden I'm putting next to the kitchen door!

Oh, and today I finally cleaned my house after I stopped by my favorite Fayette Seed and bought corn and bean seed.

The other thing I've finally had time to do is go back to working on Tonic. Last Friday I interviewed James McMurtry. I was expecting a tough time - he's notorious for not saying much and it's not like I have years of experience with pulling the best out of rocks like that. As luck would have it, though, not only did he talk quite a bit to me, but he cracked a few jokes and was genuinely kind...in a detached "I've done this so many times I'm just going through the motions" kind but kind none the less. If I didn't know where he was coming from I might think otherwise.

Anyway, it was a big deal for me to talk to him because his first record (yes, I still call them records the way God intended!) was a long time favorite of mine. I think I got an advanced copy or something - my manager at the time had some gig going on in the Mellencamp...camp...so, that's how I found out about James. I hardly took it out of my CD player. Somebody finally stole it - that someone shall remain nameless - I know who it was. I never had the heart to replace it until last week and man, it's like finding an old friend. Tons of great memories came flooding back and what a breath of fresh air that was! Turns out James is only a few years older than me so, it really was like finding an old friend. And it was nice to hear how much he's matured over the past 19 years even though Wasteland is as good today as it was then. Wish I could say the same for me :-D

spring is springing fo sho

2008-04-16T22:45:00.001-04:00

it's been a helluva week and it's only Wednesday!

dad survived surgery; grandma Terry survived a heart attack; I passed comps; I'm having a vacation day tomorrow to take advantage of the incredible weather and clean up my yard while I have dad's truck since he's recovering from his surgery; I saw my good friend Kate Kelly for the first time in her professional position as the Tahlequah Chamber of Commerce Tourism Director (freaks me out a little) you can see her, too redfernfestival.com (be sure to let the video load); I had Starbucks once and Qdobe 2x; I helped a friend with a door and met her fab little dog; I have great neighbors; I have the best co-workers; I had great conversations about tonic and it's future; the list goes on and on and on

Yup - it's been a helluva week and it's only Wednesday

this is too sweet

2008-04-14T13:42:00.003-04:00

Kathryn Lybarger, as part of Blue 2.0, made the sweetest little video ever. It suits her, too. She's a woman of few words but mighty when she uses them. The creation reflects the creator.

Blue 2.0 - the final episode

2008-04-13T22:04:00.003-04:00

So....I believe the last thing that's required for Blue 2.0 is a flickr account, a podcast, and a YouTube video review.

Here's the short and the long of it......

Flickr = http://www.flickr.com/photos/tahlequah8/

Podcast = http://www.wuky.org/tonic choose any podcast that lists me in the blurb (I suggest going through the literary archives and listening to the 3 part Rita May Brown interview - it was one of my earliest and still one of the best.

YouTube =

a blast from the past. See if you recognize anyone you know. :-) That's really the only comment I'll make. Prolly the only one I need to make.

Blue 2.0 update

2008-04-06T21:52:00.001-04:00

I've been a bit pre-occupied of late but am taking the opportunity to update a bit on our Blue 2.0 requirements.

MySpace: I've had an account for well over a year - probably 2, in fact. It's been long enough that I can't remember when I did it. Here's the URL: http://www.myspace.com/kopana I use my Blogspot blog for blogging, not MySpace, and I never did much of it there either. Until recently, and I've said this before, I just didn't see the point - my life is extremely busy. So, I'm busy living it instead of writing about it. However, there are certain things a blog is great for but....not on MySpace.

Here's the deal - I don't like all the ads and I don't like that I have to login all the dang time. I don't really care for all the cutesy stuff either - the little emoticons and moods and all that. However, I do think it's a great place if you're a musician or other artist that needs a web presence and you don't have the resources to have your own domain - for whatever reason. I also think kids love it and love hanging out with each other in this virtual space. Personally, I'd rather go out for dinner - it surely tastes better than licking the screen but...to each his/her own I guess.

Anyway, I've got a few friends but I haven't gone out of my way to collect them. I know people who just horde all these friends like it's the next big thing and, I guess for them, it is. It just never took over me like that.

Then there's Facebook - I feel the same way about it as I do MySpace. I hate to sound so poo poo about it all but I just do not have the time to devote to either one to the degree that so many people do. But I'll tell you the truth - my biggest issue with both of them is the whole logging in, logging out business. See, with Blogspot it's simple because I used Firefox's Scribe add-on to publish directly to the blog and never have to login. Oh sure, I could do it with MySpace, too, but Blogspot looks better - but wait, we were talking about Facebook weren't we?

Yeah, well, I think I've said all I should say about either of them for fear my friends will leap out of the screen and choke me. But please don't Poke me - that damn superpoke stuff gets on my last nerve. I have a friend in VA who tries to Superpoke me all the dang time, throw tire irons at me, send Santa to flip me off, God knows what else - I got so tired of being poked I just stopped playing. Remember what I said about not having time for this?

I just sound like a total stick in the mud, don't I? I swear, I'm not. I'm just busy.

I did Classmates.com so many years ago I don't have a clue what my name or password are now - which should tell you what I thought of it.

As a third alternative, I signed in to Linkedin - I've come across a few people who are "linkedin" just recently and find that it could be a really, really useful tool. As long as they make it easy and quick, I'm good to go. In fact, here's the url: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kopana

I like it! I'll probably try Ning and Orkut later when I'm not so tired. But now me thinks there's something good on the History Channel (And why, or why, can't we get History International in Lexington without paying out the nose for it? It's sooooooooo good)

enough already

re-inventing the library

2008-04-05T15:57:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I had a very engaging conversation with two co-workers. One has been a librarian for 20+ years starting in reference; today she's directing the efforts of Preservation and Digital Programs. That trajectory of positions may not, on the surface, make much sense but, given the changing landscape of technology in libraries, it makes perfect sense. The other is the head of Digital Programs proper who has worked diligently over the last 8-10 years, sometimes as a one-man show, to build important, lasting content for the digital arena. So it was with great interest that I listened to these two very different people, who take very different approaches to both content creation and management, be a somewhat united front in the face of problems libraries face in how to better engage users and, perhaps more importantly, remain relevant in the face of the Googles of the information world.

This morning, I read a recent article in the Educause Review from Peter Brantley, Executive Director for the Digital Library Federation (DLF), wherein he said, verbatim, what one of my co-workers said--which just happened to be the thing that stuck in my mind from yesterday's conversation:

"No one goes to libraries to find things anymore."

Sounds fatalistic, doesn't it? But it's true -- sad, but very true. The whole of Brantley's thought says (which is not quite as verbatim as the co-worker's single sentence but pretty darn close):

"Digital library collections are useless unless they’re seen. No one
goes to libraries to find things anymore. That is the rightful business
of search engines; it is what they do well. Libraries must work to make
their collections easily discovered by people—not just by sophisticated
librarians. They must be able to open up access to their collections
through many different doors. Libraries must be available everywhere."

Brantley says a lot of other interesting things - things that will surely piss off a lot of traditionalists. But part of our conversation yesterday not only involved where libraries need to go but why we haven't done it yet. Brantley doesn't answer this question quite as pointedly as yesterday's conversation --He sort of tiptoes around it-- but our talk shot straight to the heart. The most intriguing pontification I heard is that librarianship offers a home for certain personality types; those who are forward thinking, adaptable and welcoming of change; and those who hate change even at the expense of their own demise. The latter may be why Brantley says;

"Those of us in the library field have not done a good job of letting go
of the way that we have defined ourselves in the past. We have not done
a good job of redefining ourselves in the world today...And we have not
actively innovated in important areas that will help define our
existence and our own preservation in the years ahead."

The one thing Brantley says, and what I have believed from the start of my journey in digital libraries, is that the relationship with IT, whether it be campus IT or library IT, is the relationship to foster; besides funding, it is the single most important facet of library livelihood in existence today, though, sadly, it is the relationship that has lagged the furthest behind all others (probably because libraries have such a hard time changing from who we were to who we need to be).

I can't speak to other libraries and their IT situations but it has been my experience that IT is the single most detrimental force holding back the forward motion of library digital initiatives. I'm not talking about "digital libraries" as the textbooks define it but, rather, the library as an information entity in the modern world. You can have all the forward thinking, innovative, smart ideas you want but a lackluster, stubborn, unimaginative, understaffed IT department will bring forward momentum to a screeching halt with one fell swoop. I've seen it happen. People get mad, they get their feelings hurt, all the personal crap comes out and still nobody stands up and talks about the elephant in the room. You have to have an IT department that is innovative, properly staffed, and knowledgeable about today's library environment or you're gonna get run over, plain and simple. Libraries, on their own, can not make the technological changes they need to survive. It takes IT expertise to turn ideas into reality. Most librarians aren't programmers and, those rare few who are, don't have time to both shepherd their jobs and invent/create necessary technologies!

Finally, Brantley says:

"...these are not “library problems.” These problems are shared by IT
communities. They are shared by publishers. They are shared by search
engines...solutions to these problems will come about through the ability of
libraries to collaborate among themselves and also with IT communities,
publishers, search engines, for-profit content providers, and others.
These are collaborative problems, and they will be solved with
collaborative solutions."

But, as a librarian, I think they are library problems first and foremost. All these other entities Brantley mentions are commercial at their core and, as such, they work for profit. And profit fuels a LOT of innovative thinking. Libraries are primarily non-profit beasts with little or no monetary incentive to move forward. In fact, we usually face budget restrictions that make innovation hard to damn-near impossible. So we have little choice but to get it together; learn to play with everybody and each other or in 10 years time we'll all be looking for jobs at Google.

Now I sound fatalistic. Truth is, I have faith will pull our heads out of our behinds ane do great things. After all, librarians are some of the most ballsy, innovative people going -always have been - should always be! Maybe we ought to add that to our Code of Ethics:

1. Equitable Service and Access
2. Intellectual Freedom
3. Right to Privacy
4. Respect of Intellectual Property Rights
5. Respect Colleagues and Co-workers
6. No advancement of private interests @ the libraries expense
7. Personal beliefs separate from professional duties
8. Continued professional development
9. Constant innovation and collaboration

Just one girl's opinion :-D

mensa invitational 2008

2008-04-05T12:33:00.004-04:00

this from an email forward (printed here by permission from no one). If it's old, sorry, it's new to me and made me laugh out loud. #2, of course, is my favorite (though it is NOT new - I've heard it before...apparently the mensa who came up with it isn't as smart as the hillbilly he/she would like to be)...

The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Here are this year's winners. Read them carefully. Each is an artificial word with only one letter altered to form.

1. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
2. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
3. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
4. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
5. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
6. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
7. Inoculatte : To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
8. Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.
9. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
10. Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's, like, a serious bummer.
11. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
12. Glibido: All talk and no action.
13. Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
14. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
15. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
16. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.
17. Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

stress over an interview

2008-04-03T20:30:00.002-04:00

so, I've been reading a book on management (yes, I know, it's very compelling literature). I stumbled onto something kinda weird. There are several different strategies for doing an interview - structured, unstructured (makes sense), group and board interviews (they make sense, too) and then there's... the "stress strategy".

Some company out there actually takes this approach....

The interviewer assumes a hostile or antagonistic demeanor to purposely stress the candidate. Now, call me crazy but, what the hell kind of company would do that? What kind of business would benefit from hiring some fool scared enough to sit through it? And what kind of glutton for punishment would actually work for a place like that? A co-worker and I debated briefly today about the discovery and we simultaneously said, "BOLT!" (I actually said something much worse)

I never claimed to be the best manager in the world but God help me if I ever get so cocky that I think intimidating a candidate is good management. That's just not a nice way to be. My grandmother would be very disappointed!

a thought on the digital divide in info literacy

2008-03-26T22:44:00.001-04:00

just a note on something I read this week concerning the digital divide.

A study from Tufts University suggests that the digital divide is getting larger because educated middle and upper-middle class parents and their children spend more time online and, therefore, are more informationally literate than their economically depressed counterparts. I saw a few comments like, "You left off 'Moron'" and "...might as well say the poor are stupid, after all, they're not smart enough to read your report." I can't say I disagree but, at the same time, it stands to reason that if you spend more time online you might get better at what you're looking for and be able to discern legit info from bogus.

Someone else said something like, "you have to want to learn no matter how much you practice" and that's true to a point. For instance, let's say you spend hours upon hours online but it's all at Target or iTunes or, dare I say, some two-bit porn site. I can see where one would be limiting their knowledge increase. But there are those people out there who surf for the sake of finding out new things, learning exciting stuff they didn't know about - those people are absolutely capable of putting their practice to good use.

I have a friend who devotes several hours on Saturday mornings to surfing - she looks at all kinds of stuff; from cars to bird houses to medical symptoms and their treatments and back to cars again. Over the years as I've watched her grow into this routine, I've seen her become much more savvy about sites and their information. She's not particularly well off financially (though she is not in poverty) and, though she has been in a professional position for her entire adult life, she has only a high school degree. But she loves to learn!

So, a lot of the results of being information literate must surely be based on the individual - and that goes for the digital divide as well. Maybe some backwoods library somewhere still doesn't offer internet access to their patrons but, most do, even in limited hours. Anybody of any economic background can most certainly get the access if they want it. So, it makes me wonder if part of the digital divide dilemma isn't up to us librarians to fix. Maybe we've been thinking about it all wrong; maybe it's like any other "service" you have to advertise. Would you buy a new model car from a maker you've never heard of? Or ask your doctor about some over-priced medication if you didn't see it advertised on tv? Or take your kids to the county fair if you didn't know it was in town? Would you take your kids to a gaming event at the public library if somebody told you about it and and showed other people there having fun that looked like you? Maybe....

From my own experience I can say that I never found a library, any library, particularly inviting. Every image I've ever seen (until very, very recently) has shown only well-to-do, particularly of the Caucasian persuasion, quiet, book-entranced kids. If you're smart and you like to read but hanging out with stuffy white kids ain't your thing, then why would you want to go hang out someplace like that? I wouldn't and I didn't. And I can't think of a single instance when a library system or a librarian ever tried to change my mind until I got to college. It's only been recently as a younger generation of librarian has come into the workforce that new ways of reaching people are really happening - like gaming for instance. Using that approach then reaching the public in a way they respond to i.e. advertising (billboards, TV and radio spots, print ads, etc.), maybe the next kid that likes to learn but hates being stuffy and homogeneous won't feel like an outsider like I did.

Now I'm just sounding sad and pathetic. Enough!

more information retrieval thoughts

2008-03-24T19:41:00.002-04:00

if one were asked to compare certain aspects, like full-text vs. surrogate record searches, or information retrieval through different methods such as MARC records (surrogate), the internet, or aggregated databases, what would you talk about?

There are pros and cons for each method. How accurate you want your answer might determine which avenue you choose and both have differing rates of precision (optimized retrieval of right/relevant information) and recall (optimized retrieval) of their results.

Let's take full text searching for instance. Aggregated databases and most web based texts offer "full-text" searching. That sounds great but there are some drawbacks. With databases you're usually only able to search the citation or abstract - leaving out the biggest portion of the article. You may miss the very articles that are most relevant to your needs because synonyms and other helpful associated terms weren't included in the abstract/citation. The same can be said for web searches - it's a jumble of information in a far less organized environment and, so, many relevant pieces just aren't found (Google's kick-ass page ranking algorithm can increase your chances of success but it's still not a controlled vocab). Too, this kind of "free-form" searching, as I sometimes think of it, can, and does, easily produce a good number of false hits.

This last point, however, isn't always so bad. How often have you done a Google search (or another search engine of your choice) and come across information that may or may not be directly related to what you were looking for but proved to be important and interesting none the less? Some of this success has to do with "natural language" and the way web content is indexed, both of which we'll get to in a bit

Then there is the surrogate records, I always think of them as MARC records, which I access a lot in my current position. This individual item inventory has a list of fields that will tell you, in a controlled manner, a host of relevant facts like title, publisher, preceding or successive titles, publication date, and so on. Any one of these fields can be both an access point and a source of retrieval. The problem is that you'll only get the location of the item, not the item itself (except, perhaps, there is a PURL included - a persistent url that will take you directly to a digitized object). That's become a point of serious disappointment in the Google age - people not only want to find the information they're looking for but they want it now. They don't generally want to schlep to a library to look at a book or article.

Far more than most web content, surrogate records are derived by a controlled vocabulary. Unlike natural language which let's users build the bulk of web information, a controlled vocabulary takes skill and time to generate. You can add synonyms, homonyms, and polysemes that enhance the aboutness of the item, thus increasing the precision of a hit. But this comes with significant drawbacks, in that, it's expensive to maintain and, because it is labor intensive, it may very quickly lag behind current and new information.

Natural language indexing doesn't suffer this problem. It's automatically indexed by the computer and, so, has an immediate result of the information. Granted, it may not be right or relevant - it may be so far off the mark you walk away scratching your head going "I asked for checks for my bank account, not checks in cotton material." A computer can not effectively process natural language. It doesn't know the difference between being serious and being sarcastic (though the idea of the semantic web aims to make computers intelligent enough to read and know the difference between this and all other differing language quirks).

Jesus - this subject is just huge when you think about it, trying to connect the index to the controlled vocabulary to the natural language vocab to the internet verses commercial databases verses a surrogate record and all the stuff that goes into each one. For everything you say, there's 2x as much you'll leave out. poo - I hate that kind of stuff

meta metadata data

2008-03-22T22:48:00.002-04:00

Can you have a conversation about metadata without discussing information retrieval? For that matter, can you talk about information retrieval without discussing metadata? Prolly not in a modern library context since they're so intertwined - so let's not waste our time - Let's talk about both (this may take two days)!

Metadata - data about data - sounds redundant on the outside but it is, and has always been, at the core of what libraries do. Let's consider the old card catalogue for a moment. Those little cards had information (metadata) about books; author, title, Dewey decimal number, publisher, etc. It was data about....data. And each was a point of access, a way to find the book you wanted amongst the thousands on the shelves (this is important when we talk about information retrieval in a bit).

So why should it be such a stretch to think of metadata as any thing other than what it is? information about a book; A way to find the book you're looking for. And in today's electronic world, it's a way to find a book anywhere in the world a la the web! People seem to struggle with it for two reasons, I think.

1. because it's called something fancy sounding - metadata - a name synonymous with nothing in layman terms (the word information is infinitely more universal) and

2. the electronic nature of metadata, or schemas under which metadata is generally ruled, is relatively new (in the big scope of things) and ever changing. It's damn hard to keep up with if you're not knee deep in the conversation all the time. To be perfectly honest, it's hard even if you are - it changes a lot, standards are in flux, and the language is not always intuitive.

Plus, there are so many different kinds of metadata collected and preserved for so many different reasons that knowing one schema does not guarantee across the board understanding. It's been my experience that the more traditional librarians seem to struggle with the concept more than younger people who are used to navigating in the computer world. New monikers aren't as likely to scare the bejeezus out of them, where as traditional librarians are feeling the technological crunch more and more and any new ingredient can increase anxiety. (Obviously, a topic for another discussion, anyway...)

METS, MODS, Dublin Core, DACS, TEI, EAD, the list goes on - they're all schemas, or standards, meant to preserve a set of structural, administrative, and preservation assets about an object, whether it be analog or digital in nature. These schemas are generally aimed at particular kinds of collections.

METS, for instance, is used with the Library of Congress' National Digital Newspaper Program. Written in XML (eXtensible markup language), METS acts as a wrapper (don't you love how real life translates into the virtual realm?) in that - it harbors a lot of information concerning a large group of files (in the case of NDNP, a large group of containers full of files) and arranges it in a meaningful way so that many things about the files (objects) can be read and understood, in whole or in part, without ever opening the files. Take, for example, newspaper images; things like title, publisher, microfilm date and microfilming agency, page number, issue number, date of publication, reel sequence number, etc. etc. are all collected and stored in the METS files, either with the reel, the issue, or the image. Too, the images are themselves embedded with certain metadata like file format, scanner and software version used to capture the image, and more. Plus, different file formats are capable of being embedded with more or less metadata. DACS may collect and arrange information about archival collections in a similar or different fashion based on the DACS guidelines from an object level, collection level, folder level, any number of ways one might choose to get at the collection(s). Each schema is designed for the kinds of collections they aim to describe, preserve, and access.

It should be noted that using XML to markup the metadata goes a long way in making the electronic collection information interoperable and bodes well for future transitions and improvements.

This metadata language, then, no matter the schema, allows for certain accessibilities, for instance, through a browser interface. This point is important when we think about information retrieval. In some ways, the whole point, or perhaps I should say - the joy of, metadata is that it provides for wider access in a digital environment. What we choose to collect and embed in our metadata schemas (or our image metadata) directly impacts how well our objects can be found by users. I'm talking purely from an electronic standpoint now, forget the card catalogue of yore.

It's possible that every point could be an access point if one chose to make them so. On first glance one might say, "well, of course, every point should be an access point" but that's not always the best approach depending on the circumstances. Here is where librarians can really be a huge help, not only in designing metadata standards but in the retrieval of the information gleaned from them. As information professionals, we're perhaps in the best position to know how users tend to look for their information (some may challenge this assumption what with the uprising folksonomies and other Web 2.0 ideas but let's forego that idea for right now).

There's a few ways one might find information; a library's OPAC; a database of surrogate records (MARC records most likely). Perhaps the most widely known is OCLC's WorldCat union catalog that acts sort of as the do all and be all of catalogues because it can easily connect to records within it's 10,000 member library's catalogues. Mind you, it doesn't get you anything more than the location of the object or, in some instances now, you might find a purl (persistent URL) field in a record that will take you to a digital object (sometimes a book or audio/video stream), but if it's an analog object (such as an undigitized book), you're not going to actually get the book, only where it's located. Though it's difficult to gain access directly to the object you want, these record databases are vital to a library's inventory so, it's not like they're not necessary. They just don't do everything users demand today.

Another way to find information is through commercial databases. These contain an aggregation of journals, periodicals, articles, books, etc. Personally, I find these avenues very frustrating. If you can gain access to them (for instance, if you're a student at a university, let's say, you may need access to the proxy server if you choose to do research off campus or outside the library itself and, if you're not a student, you may not have access anywhere BUT the library) they're not easy to navigate and they may or may not offer full-text access. You may only find a simple citation.

This is a personal pet peeve of mine, and I don't think I'm alone on this. Here's how these things work; some vendor decides to provide digital imaging of, let's say a scientific journal for example, and they lump a bunch of these journals together. They go off and sell these packaged journals to libraries. The good thing for libraries is; less physical storage is necessary and, in some cases, they may even get a break in the deal if they, say, take X package of journals at a discount if they also buy Y package. It can be vastly cheaper on many fronts than if they buy the paper products. Sounds good, right? The problem, and this is where the peeve comes in, is that these vendors can suddenly decide to drop any of their journals even though you, the library, bought the rights to the electronic copies for X number of years. Not only does this cause a business dilemma but it causes a great ethical dilemma concerning your users. What if you're a library in a major medical university setting? Do you think a disease is going to just stop happening because your doctors and internists can't get the information they need? Of course not. So, it becomes, to me at least, a way for the commercial vendors to hold information hostage. But libraries have little choice - nobody has the resources to digitize the stuff themselves and space is a rare commodity for everyone it seems - the content is massive in scale - so they're actually better off sticking with the vendor and hoping the information remains available. In those instances where something is discontinued, usually the vendor supplies a copy of the digital files to the library - after all, they've paid for it. Then, lo and behold, the journals show up on CDs even though a library generally isn't equipped to store or manage OR have the internal interface to allow access to their users through a browser. It's a catch 22 and I look forward to some whiz kid coming up with a way to circumvent this hold vendors have over our information.

I might mention that both of the information retrieval methods mentioned above have some amount of keyword search capabilities, more so with the commercial databases, though both employ controlled vocabularies - especially OPAC records. But the aggregated databases don't generally offer keyword searches of the full-text documents - only the abstracts or citations. As such, a lot of relevant information may be left unidentified to the user. And, of course, with MARC records, full-text keyword searching does little good since the records are succinct, distilled information bits, well informed and carefully crafted bits that come at the price of labor of skilled workers i.e. $$$, but bits none the less.

The other method of information retrieval, and this is where metadata plays a huge and developing role, is the internet. The good things are: it's free to anyone who has access, it provides wide ranging content in a number of languages, the goods sit on millions of servers so it's loss isn't so volatile, and it has become very user friendly what with tag clouds, folksonomies, and the like. Users generate the information, users may be better able to find the information. Of course the problems are everything I just mentioned. With all that comes the fact that, because it's user generated, it may not always be reliable information and there's tons of redundancy in the information. How many times have you done a Google search for something and 10+ pages of hits have been returned to you? And a lot of those hits come from commercial sites; hardly the harbingers of reliable, unbiased information. Too, a search engine won't always be able to search the "deep web" so, there's a lot of hidden information that won't be returned to you.

This is not to say you can't find good stuff on The Web - you can - but the information illiterate among us will just take the first thing that comes to them and think it's the gospel truth - like the email circular claiming Obama is a Muslim - hello - my mother sent it to me so it must be true, right? My mother would never lie. Right. But what we face as information professionals is the speed and convenience the web offers to everyone. In may ways., it levels the playing field between the haves and the have nots. Information isn't locked in a dusty archive or ivory tower university anymore - and because it's not, because that playing field is there for each and every one with the where with all to go looking for it, means that our older, trusty avenues of information, like our OPACs and commercial databases, are lagging behind the expectations of our users. And, so, there ya go.

Stick a fork in me, I'm done.....

better than I ever could

2008-03-22T14:55:00.003-04:00

I just came across the best statement on the library profession that I have ever read. It's from author Rachel Singer Gordon and it's called "If it quacks like a librarian..."

Since November myself and a fellow librarian have been mulling over the idea for an article about Library Schools and the role they play, or more specifically - what role they're not playing - as the rise of paraprofessionals come aboard in the work place. After reading "If it quacks like a librarian..." I don't think there's much we can add to the argument, really. Or, if nothing else, Gordon sums up what I personally think about the topic better than I ever will. To paraphrase a portion...

"It’s one thing to value the MLS. It’s another thing entirely to condescend to non-MLS librarians (yes, I said librarians), paraprofessionals, and other non-degreed library workers, to discount
their opinions, and to ignore their contributions to their libraries and to librarianship as a whole...

What is it they say about academia — that the politics are so fierce because the stakes are so low? All this talk about “erosion of professional standards” boils down to this: we’re terrified because the outside world doesn’t tend to value librarians, and we’re worried people will pounce on any excuse to fire us, lower our salaries, or otherwise devalue us further.

Well, guess what. The outside world doesn’t know — or care — that librarians have an MLS. They don’t care what LJ decides to print. They just care about the service they receive and whether someone can do the job she was hired to do...An MLS doesn’t automatically make someone a good librarian, just as the lack of an MLS doesn’t automatically make someone a bad — or non — librarian."

I encourage anyone interested in this very current, and very heated, topic, on either side of the argument, to read Gordon's piece in its entirety - it isn't long but, then again, it doesn't need to be. As with most LIS topics - leave out the BS and quality content could be had in two paragraphs or less. 'Nuff said...

maundy thursday

2008-03-20T21:48:00.006-04:00

Love one another

That's the message Jesus gave the disciples not long before he was crucified and one that is often lost this time of year (just about any time of year actually), either because of the bunnies and eggs or the need to only observe the resurrection and be downright bizarre about it (there's just no other word for it that I can think of). For the last two weeks I've been blessed with people who have been really kind to me for one reason or another. From the stranger at the grocery to my co-workers to my family and friends far, far away. Each one has brought something generous to my table without provocation. And in those words and deeds of kindness have been lessons that I needed and that I am profoundly grateful for. Love one another. I hope I'm able to return it to one and all.

sunday sermon

2008-03-16T15:57:00.001-04:00

I don't generally like sermons so, just ignore the subject line. but I thought of it because A. it's Sunday (I know, not very original) and B. practice essays are a lot like sermons - you're asked to talk about a particular subject and, so, in many ways the language and position are often black and white, cut and dry, there's little room for "I don't know" or "it could be this but it could also be this". Sermons don't often say "I don't know, it could be this or it could be that". Or maybe I'm just thinking of evangelical sermons....

...anyway....

Let's consider for a moment the major internet technological advances that have propelled libraries to the state we are in today. It mostly started in 1969 with ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency...net). Derived from ideas mentioned as early as 1962, the United States Department of Defense lead the way in building a system that used packet switching instead of the previously used circuit switching. Circuit switching is most closely identified with telephones. A single call ties up a circuit which then remains unavailable for any other use until that call ends. ARPANET's idea of packet switching meant that data could be communicated in packets to a variety of machines at once thus enabling multiple communications simultaneously. The system grew slowly for many years, and other "nets" were also developing tools for better mass communications, though all were used mostly spearheaded by researchers for research and remained a disjointed jumble of independent networks. These "nets", like ARPANET, had long since developed email and file transfer protocols by the time "the internet" emerged at CERN around 1989/90 (maybe as late as 1991/92 depending who you believe).

Introduced, and developed in large part, by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the use of hypertext or http ("text on a computer that will lead a user to other, related information on demand") along with the internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) was essentially meant to connect all the analogous networks that had developed since the 1960's in a way that made each available to the other simultaneously. What this meant, then, was that normal communication lines, like telephone lines, could open a world of information sharing to anyone who had access to "the internet" or "the network" by way of the internet protocol via service provider and a computer and could deliver and receive information from any other terminal, or terminals, that used this same system. It's perhaps important to note that Berners-Lee purposely opened this technology to the world, ensuring that it's use could be had by those outside global research communities.

However, many believe the true start of "the web" began in 1993 with the introduction of the first graphical browser (GUI) interface MOSAIC. MOSAIC allowed images to be embedded along side text rather than served independent of the text in a separate window. This was a significant step in that, most "non-scientists" could "surf" the web in a way that seemed most like life, as if thumbing through a book or newspaper (though not nearly so linearly).

Once MOSAIC came aboard, the technological advances seemed to speed up at a rate that was, and still is, mind boggling. In fact, Mooer's Law from 1959 suggests that as technology develops it will double every 18 months and the price of computers/drives/storage/etc. will come down. Experience says this is true though still not always economical for the common wo/man (hence the digital divide, but that's for another day).

Once MOSAIC and it's successors were introduced to more and more people, their behavior with the technology developed. This new knowledge placed demands on developers of other internet technologies like Email that evolved into instant messaging or chat clients (like AIM and jabber), listservs, message boards, and "groups" like yahoo!Groups. These things enticed users to become more involved in online activities so that still more advances and tools were developed thus giving rise to Web 2.0 and technologies like RSS feeds, wikis, virtual spaces, mash-ups, podcasts and audio streaming, and more.

All of this has added up to be a major challenge for libraries in how we deliver services to users, the role of librarians, and how the library now identifies as "place". Reading rooms have turned into computer labs. The idea many users have now is that everything can be found on the internet, which, of course, isn't true, but that hardly matters if that's what patrons believe. It puts the burden on libraries to ensure good information is as available, if not more so, than all the misinformation that's out there. It has demanded that reference services find new ways of reaching constituents. For instance, reference may be place based but it doesn't have to be place bound - offering virtual reference services through web portals, usually through their host library's website. This also requires that reference librarians be especially adept with electronic resources as many databases and journals are now electronic products only and they're not always easy nor intuitive to navigate, even for the most hearty of veteran researchers (a small drawback to all this technology: the ever changing interface!). An idea that has been used in the past for virtual reference has been consortia virtual reference, texting, or "field hospital" reference services strategically placed around campus.

This new delivery system of information has also given rise to privacy issues and intellectual concerns. For instance, what do you do if you find a patron surfing child pornography sites? Some librarians are instructed to look the other way for fear of disturbing the very delicate private and/or civil rights of the patron. The U.S. Patriot Act allows the FBI and other government officials to confiscate patron documents if they so choose, again aligning the library and librarians against the very precarious patron privacy debate. And there is the idea of intellectual freedom which suggests that we each have a right to our own thoughts and ideas as well the research that goes into them and that no one, most especially libraries, should interfere with the research that may go into their derivation.

As mentioned earlier, one of the drawbacks to all this technology is what's known as the digital divide. Because an internet service provider and a computer that's internet ready are not the most economical of tools, financially speaking, it leaves a good portion of the population at a disadvantage for finding information. This is perhaps less so these days as the proliferation of the personal computer has exploded since the turn of the century. Never the less, there are those in less fortunate economic circumstances that stand to lose a great deal without such access. Libraries, some would suggest and rightfully so, are bound by our adopted ethics to serve each and every human regardless of race, gender, political or economic status. So it is with this in mind that a proactive approach to reaching these under-served patrons, especially in the public library realm, comes to play out. Again, offering services to entire users to the libraries is probably the most efficient and creative way to do it - coffee shops, free computer courses for children and adults, fun ways of waiving late fees like DDR games and the like, and, of course, good old fashioned print advertising in a way that makes people feel welcome. This is a huge topic in and of itself and how libraries can best serve the under-served in their communities.

And with that - I bid you adieu for now and prepare for a kick-ass SEC championship game. Go Hogs (Arkansas Razorbacks' coach is a KY Alum and a darn nice guy - how can you not want them to win? Oh, okay, Georgia did do a pretty historic job getting to the game - I love underdogs...and their coach was at Western KY for a good while - how could you not want them to win? Wait - didn't I ask that already?????)

from daylight to dreams

2008-03-15T13:03:00.002-04:00

...and the weirdness continues I guess. At least now I'm dreaming about it instead of living it. The past two nights have been rife with weird, lifelike dreams. Too lifelike really.

For instance, last night, the first dream found me at work but it was a factory and the walls were painted the color of a muted, institutional brown. It was loud and dirty. Potential employees were being brought to my office, which was on the second floor overlooking the factory floor. One in particular was a friend of two current employees. Those two current workers never listened to me but they would listen to my male counterpart. They made it very obvious, too. I would give them direction and they'd say something like, "Well, we'll see what Mike has to say about it" then walk away laughing. So, when their friend showed up at my door and wanted a job, I was none too impressed. I asked him to wait in the lobby for me. Someone was there with me when I shoo-ed him back to the lobby. Whoever it was said, "Why did you do that?" To which I said something like, "Why on Earth would I hire the friend of the two people I already have that are as insubordinate as can be? Do I look to you like a glutton for punishment? And why are the nasty, hateful, sexist, racist, mean people around here somehow above reproach?" Then he demanded that I at least give the guy an interview so, I did. I asked pointed questions and, sure enough, birds of a feather, as they say. I think I told him to get lost, I'm not sure.

The dreams switched quickly, something about a woman carrying a cat as she was looking to buy a house that I was selling - I must have been the Realtor (a dream to be sure). It was a bland, emotionless room, like a suburban apartment I'd had 20 years ago, with horrible partical board bookshelves and a flower print couch (I never had a couch that bad). BLEE

Dream switches again and I'm working on a road crew in downtown San Fransisco with some guy whom I apparently knew really well for we were having that kind of conversation. We were mixing something strange in a large, grey plastic wheel barrow - like cat litter and sod or something like it. We were either patching potholes or repairing sidewalks. Scene switches and we're in a neighborhood just off of the downtown corridor. The street is lined with beautiful houses, many of which are businesses. We decided to go into one of the houses to see what they were selling - it was like a little head shop with lots of delicious incense and fun postcards, wait - we still have a job outside but look, it's quitting time. I go to the truck to leave but there's an old white VW beetle parked so close to our old beat-up truck that the only way out of the parallel space is forward. The driver is still sitting in the beetle and he looks odd somehow though I can't really see his face. We pull forward and out into the street. I look in my rear-view mirror and the beetle is following us and now I can clearly see who's driving. It's Jack Nicholson as The Joker though he's dressed in a white suit wearing a red hat and red tie. I looked at my friend in the passenger seat and said, "Okay, now it's too weird, I'm waking up."

Personally, I like the dreams when I'm smoking cigarettes best. I know I'm dreaming so I can smoke all I want without consequence! I'm always more relaxed when I wake up.

i greatly dislike meetings

2008-03-12T22:57:00.003-04:00

what a weird day this was.

My one-eye stray cat, Jack, (I guess he's not really a stray since I've taken him in) was diagnosed with diabetes Monday. The one thing I have never ever ever wanted to do is give shots - I hate needles as much as I hate snakes ....and that's A LOT! So what have I done for the last two days? Give a cat shots in the scruff of his neck. I take him back to the vet this a.m. so they can monitor his glucose something-or-other then off to work I go.

I'm trying to meet with some IT folks about fixing what can be classified as nothing less than a fire Marshall's nightmare - a mess of extension cords and six plugs (or as a co-worker too gleefully pointed out in that...that...that tone "do you mean a power strip"? The only thing she left off was "idiot" "Hillbilly" or "moron" I'm not sure which). They're all chained together providing power to a herd of computers, and I mean a herd! Waiting, waiting, waiting, need to get allergy shot while they're open, waiting, waiting, tired of waiting, running out of time - go for allergy shot.

Last week's shot gave me an immediate reaction which then touched off an anxiety attack. That was fun - nothing like blood pressure through the roof and a heart rate that would easily launch me into orbit. No jet propulsion necessary. My pressure went so high the nurse had trouble getting the BP cuff on and, by the time she took it off, bruises around my bicep - attractive! The reaction didn't last long (it was a new, stronger dose, that's why it happened - the anxiety just cuz a racing heart freaks me out) but it was in the back of my mind today. I made a vow that, no matter what, I wasn't freaking out.

Got the shot - the reaction took a while to set in, well after I'd left the office. And a little too late for me to freak out. I spent the rest of the day in a anti-histamine induced haze, short of breath, fighting sleep every time I sat down and real trouble stringing a sentence together.

Return to office - pile of mail on desk, IT folks walk in. No time to check mail, virtual or real. Trying to explain the situation on antihistamines takes twice as long with three times the effort. (just so you know, me and antihistamines aren't like antihistamines and other people - they knock me out, even the ones that aren't supposed to!)

Quickly eat something before next meeting.

Next meeting - a follow up from a workshop held recently. I had jotted down a few notes - mentioned one thing from the workshop and, either I didn't explain it well (wouldn't be weird even on a good day), or a certain committee member decided she'd just pick on somebody today and I was the closest fool. She was so damned hateful I just shut up and was thankful to be drugged. Otherwise I would have really taken offense to her pretension. As it was, she gets to take the blame if something goes wrong. Ya know, you can lead a horse to water......

Back to regular job, meetings going on all around me, quiet quiet quiet, all of a sudden, impromptu meeting in another room. Makes me late top pick up the cat from the vet. Get to vet where I learn that the insulin isn't working. Either he needs a different kind or I'm not giving the shots "deep enough". For crying out loud - ya want me to hit a bone? I had to leave the cat overnight.

I came home. I heard his little bell run to the back door when I slipped in the key. I opened the door but no Jack. It was my biggest wish. I didn't want a cat but he needed a home. Now I want him to meet me at the door every day. And I want people to stop being shitty to each other, including me. Is that so much to ask?

oh what a tangled web we weave

2008-03-08T22:08:00.003-05:00

On this very snowy morning/afternoon/evening, I continue to multi-task as I usually do. Half of me is working on all the work I can't get done during the week because of my day job - that could include anything from photography, music, web design, tonic interviews or web page updates, or in today's case, blogging/thinking/sorting/purging/writing/thinking/laundry/cleaning/thinking/writing - and the other half continues to clean up a mess I inherited from the last project manager. Talk about a great case for hiring based on experience versus a degree; you won't find a better example of why experience matters more than what I'm looking at. But I digress....sorta......

Anyway....I wanna talk about Web 2.0 - the somewhat misnomer that's mostly about social internet activity, application based, collaborative cool! (How's that for a description?) The 2.0 suggests a better version of what's come before. In the case of Web 2.0, as with Library 2.0, the advance is not so much in the technology as in the way the technology is being used. It has become more user-centered and user-controlled, less server fueled and more application/client fueled, it is interactive and dynamic, riddled with multimedia experiences.

As evidenced by some of the recent blog action here, UK Libraries has undertaken an adventuresome task to get staff and faculty up-to-date with the many ways today's Web, or Web 2.0, can enhance not only their personal experience but the service they provide to our patrons. An IMLS study released just last week found that libraries and museums are actually thriving in the new internet environment. They found that patrons trust information from libraries and museums more than perhaps any other internet source. And, instead of realizing long-standing fears that the internet will/is driving users away, evidence suggests it's actually ushering patrons to the libraries! The quick and easy access to information is basically fueling people's desire to learn more. There are several key assets Web 2.0 offers which is helping to create this kind of behavior. RSS, Wikis, Blogs-MySpace-Facebook and other avenues also known as "social networks", mash-ups, and virtual spaces like Second Life.

RSS (really simple syndication) gives one the ability to receive posts from the internet automatically. It's often called a feed. So, for instance, you could subscribe to this blog and every time I make an entry, notice of that entry arrives automatically to your reader (a reader is simply a collector of your RSS feeds such as Google Reader or Bloglines). RSS uses xml syntax and allows you to keep up with certain areas of interest without wasting time trolling to each web page for the information. In the case of a library, for example, one might subscribe to vendor feeds, publisher feeds, other library or librarian blogs that are a wealth of information. I've recently found two such blogs that are proving invaluable professionally: The Shifted Librarian and LISNews. Both fill my Google Reader with helpful information about advances in the field and what others think on any given professional topic that I can access quickly then move on with my day.

Wiki. I can't say enough about this technology. If you're about sharing your knowledge, work in an organization that's desperate to share knowledge within it's ranks or with colleagues abroad, if you're looking for others who share an interest in something with that you'd like to contribute to, wikis are the Mt. Everest of cool. Wikis are perhaps the ultimate collaborative tool. The name "Wiki" was coined by Ward Cunningham in 1995 based on his wikiwikiweb development and comes from the Hawaiian term wiki wiki which means quick. As the name implies, this tool can be easily altered (edited) by any number of people, the underlying language being HTML. Of course the most famous of these collaboratives is Wikipedia. For all the wonderful things it presents to the world is also presents a challenge to educators and researchers in that not everything is factual. By virtue of collaboration, it is prone to being wrong. But I've found, as many students have also, that sometimes it provides just enough "right" to set you looking in the proper direction and, for that, it's worth a lot. We use a wiki in my department for damn near everything we do and it's a HUGE time saver. It may take a little while to implement and, of course, it takes care and feeding, but it ultimately saves tons of time digging through stacks of papers/files, or bugging your co-workers with the same questions you've asked a billion times. It's not out of the question that some portions could be opened to external collaboratives by colleagues with similar interests. I'm of the opinion that every library or library department should institute a wiki if for no other reason than to document their policies and procedures for posterity. I think we tend to think that as long as we know, everything is okay, not taking into account that we will someday retire and our treasures may become someone else's nightmares if they don't know why we did some of things we do now. essentially, you save yourself time and you really will save your next generation a lot of heartache. (this would definitely fall under "good-management" practices!)

Social Networking - I'm not much on MySpace and Facebook though, clearly, millions are. Maybe it's because I have my own domain and can do what I want so, I don't need them as much. Too, I just don't like the whole login/logout BS - my days and nights are far too busy to be bothered. The one "social" technology I've fully embraced is blogging. I resisted for years, played a bit with it on MySpace, but I'm just too damn busy to be bothered. However, participating in Blue 2.0 has completely changed my attitude toward blogging. And not just the act of doing it myself but tapping into other's blags as well. As I mentioned before, The Shifted Librarian and LISNews are regulars in my reader and I am grateful for them. They are learning tools and, in many ways, that's exactly what blogging is supposed to be. Maybe you learn about yourself based on what you write but you can really learn a lot about the world by tapping other blogs. MySpace and Facebook are good for things like individuals and bands that don't have server space or the skills to build a comprehensive website but, never the less, have a real need for an internet presence. In that regard, libraries, too, have a need for an internet presence. MySpace and Facebook provide a way to go to where the people are if you can't get them to come to you. So many younger people are using the two social spheres that it only makes sense they should be accustomed to approaching anyone in the arena - including libraries. What a great place to put your virtual reference desk! And, hey, let's not forget Flickr (which I almost just did). And, just tonight as I continue to think and write (I'm tired of cleaning) I discovered LibraryThing! This is one of those things that I've heard classmates talk about but, because I actually work in a library and take classes, I don't have a lot of time to pla, as it were. Now that I do - WOW! This is pretty cool. OMG - when setting up your profile it asks what other networks your associated with, like MySpace or YouTube - then it gives you a drop down menu. Holy Smokes - there's got to be more than 60-70 social networks listed!!!

One of the most important aspects not to be overlooked about all these incredible social networking avenues is tagging and folksonomies. Again, going back to the idea that Web 2.0 is user controlled, you, the user, can add tags that you think are relevant. What word might you use to find a particular item? Add it as a tag - you'll remember because it is your language, your "folk"sonomy. The bigger aspect of this is the corralling of a common language by the people, taking the taxonomy out of the hands of professionals and putting it in the hands of people who want to easily access the goods. I think this will be a VERY interesting field of study in the the not-too-distant future. After all, language is a fluid beast - it's constantly changing, what one day is slang ends up in the dictionary next day and so it has been for hundreds of years. Tagging is yet another step in this evolution me thinks.

The last two things I mentioned are virtual spaces like Second Life and mashups. Maybe I'll write on them tomorrow but, for now, I have discovered LibraryThing and I'm gonna go have some fun!

so...strategic planning doesn't exist in project management, huh?

2008-03-07T20:40:00.004-05:00

Strategic planning is basically all about long term plans, from 3-20 years, developed by executive chiefs of an organization, or, to quote someone else, "it's analogous to top-level, long-range planning". They go on to say succinctly, "[it is] ... fundamental decisions that shape and guide what an organization is, what it does, and why it does it, with a focus on the future."

If you know anything about digital technology in a library setting then you know the development of a digital library or digital collections are rarely supported by hard-wired funds, that means soft money, that means projects, that means you better plan for it and it better be a long term plan. Even the slowest administrators have now realized that this stuff doesn't keep indefinitely. Which is to say, you better get a money stream flowing and keep the gate open.

Guess what? You want a digital project? You better f-ing plan for it, and I don't mean conventional planning where you just go by what's right in front of you and hope for the best, waiting around until something breaks. Shooting from the hip won't get you very far. And if you think for a second it's only "top-level" managers who make these kinds of decisions, well, they might but it's highly doubtful that - unless they've come up through the ranks on the digital train - they're going to know enough about serious digital preservation to even know where to begin. Which is to say, get a clue - it's your lower-level/mid-level managers that do the stuff day in and day out that actually know enough to make a long term plan. Sorry but there are some projects that do not allow living in an ivory tower and watching the river roll by and, in this age of technology, it's digital projects that demand every manager get on board and plan accordingly. Oh, sure, your top level people can make all the decisions but it's a bad, bad, bad idea. Okay, admittedly, I'm pissed at bad managers and even worse educators playing at being managers (I thought that's what theater was for).

I know, I know, the textbooks would have us believe that "strategic planning" is meant to drive a larger organization's planning efforts, such as a whole library system or a university. Take Lee Todd's business plan that's meant to guide the entire university toward top 20 status (best I can tell even that's just about money and little else), THAT took strategic planning. UK's libraries and how they're organizing themselves to meet such a challenge - THAT is strategic planning. I'm not arguing that such is not strategic planning, it is, what I would argue is that even smaller steps require "strategic planning" in the truest sense of the term. It is the one year, three year, five year plans that matter every bit as much if not more - a 20 year plan won't do you any good if you don't know what you're doing right now. "Organization" means involving everyone, not just the top level managers, unless you just want fail then, be my guest. Real life good management means listening and communicating with everyone in the system, deciding where you collectively are at this moment, where you want to go, what you need to get you there, how you're going to get what you need to get you there, and what it's going to take. Then it is a matter of making it happen in a pro-active manner (SWOT and PEST and all that mumbo jumbo).

So, for instance, let's say you want to build a digital library that has a ton of collections that includes all kinds and media and is respected nationwide. Right now, all you have is a flat bed scanner from Wal-Mart, yourself, and a student workforce of 2 kids at less than 20 hours a week each, and an archivist colleague screaming that everything they have is equally as important as everything else they have and it all needs to be digitized right now because you have a computer, a flat-bed, and a job and the internet is free. What do you do?

1. Don't shoot yourself (though it may feel like the best thing to do at the time)
2. Don't shoot your colleague (though they may deserve it on some meta-physical level)
3. Decide what's most important to get your colleague to shut up (like coffee and relaxed conversation for starters)
4. Make a dream list of what your perfect digital library would look like and how it would function. Now, start working backwards from that point....

5. How many people do you see it taking to make that perfect library? Why start with people? Because the technology is the easy part - finding smart, creative, affordable experts (this is especially true at UK and other bureaucracies that have "fixed" pay scales) is actually the hard part...you'll see....
6. What kind of gear do you have?
7. What kind of collections do you have? Audio? Video? Live streaming? Images? Are they search-able? Why or why not? What's your interface like? Does the same interface serve all of your collections or are you using more than one application and/or interface to search and serve your goods? Remember, part of this is in anticipation of what technological advances will be in place by the time you actually get to this point (which is damn near impossible to figure but - try)
8. Work backwards - who's the last person you hire? What's the last piece of gear you add to your arsenal?

Get the picture? Keep working backward until you reach today, right now. You've got no budget, a flat-bed, yourself, 2 students, and a pissed off colleague that has NO idea what's involved in digital collections. What do you do? Work with them to decide what's really most important that you can reasonably digitize on a flat-bed scanner in x amount of time.

Good. You scan it. First project over. That worked out. Now what are you going to do with it? Where's it going to be stored? How's it going to be accessed? Who's going to do that work? Aha - perhaps you should have answered these questions before the pissed off colleague showed up, eh? Maybe, maybe not. For all the "strategic planning" in the world I guarantee life will find a way to throw a wrench in your system and you'll be lucky if it's ever something this simple. It's actually more along the lines of the sky falling and you doing your best Chicken Little imitation. Impressive how how your pitch can go!

Anyway, you get the point, you have to visualize what you want and start with what you have right now to "strategically plan" how to get there. And it is never, ever, ever just a one-person show. Oh sure, one person may end up taking all the credit, and that's fine - somebody has to - but it's never just one person.

or·gan·i·za·tion (ôr'gə-nĭ-zā'shən) Pronunciation Key n. noun
1.	a group of people who work together

boss hog, sheriff rosco p. coltrane, and deputies enus and cletus

2008-03-04T20:45:00.003-05:00

Let's talk about staffing for a bit, shall we? Have the times changed or what? It used to be you only needed a high school education to get a decent job. Then it was a bachelor's degree - writer Luis Jorge Borges was once assistant librarian in a Buenes Aires library eventually becoming the director for the National Library in Buenes Aires with just the equivalent to a bachelor's degree though it was not library related. But that was the 1930's and 50's respectively. Today, even a master's degree can be lacking depending on the job.

In libraries, however, after several decades of some amount of professional stability, things are topsy turvy to say the least. What with the para-professional movement challenging degreed librarians coupled with increasing patron demands for technological prowess versus an aging workforce (the first official baby boomer was eligible for retirement just last year) who are mostly lacking in know-how and "want-to" technology skills, the library "profession", and thus the library staff itself, could change dramatically in coming years. To be sure, staffing a library has never been a cut and dried affair. Even before librarians organized themselves into a recognized and celebrated "profession" there were, and continue to be, other extenuating circumstances that shaped staffing priorities. That likely won't change no matter the direction.

To staff a library, there are several qualities to look for in a candidate. First, of course, one has to have some organizational sense. That could be organization skills in terms of cataloging, staff supervision, accounting, digitization, information retrieval, specialized collection knowledge, etc. etc. Regardless, a prime candidate is someone who can consistently maintain one or several of the aforementioned tasks depending on the size and kind of library they're hired into. These skills may be very difficult to quantify at an initial interview, say via phone or in person. To overcome this, in an academic library setting, faculty candidates, for example, are typically required to give a presentation on a topic determined by the hiring committee. This topic is generally geared to a current topic of interest wherein the presentation itself lends some relevant clue to the candidate's knowledge base and problem solving skills. Anybody can shelve a book but, in today's technological environment, how a candidate uses that technology, talks about that technology, shows examples of how that technology can be harnessed and used to the betterment of the patron and library - that's the kind of qualities that will get attention in today's academic library.

There is much, much more to consider beside technology, however. One must be considerate of one's quantity of patronage and thus staff accordingly. Understaffed or overstaffed libraries can lead to problems, both internally and externally, not to mention significant budgetary woes. One would not hire a staff of 300 for a small town public library but it might be necessary for a large university library. Just how specialized those positions are depend a great deal on who the patrons are or who the library may be attracting (or wanting to attract) - in the case of an academic library it could be a bigger freshman class or maybe more specialized researchers.

To that end, patrons will likely be more comfortable dealing with librarians who reflect their own image, such as race or gender. When selecting a new hire, these issues can be mighty factors depending on one's patron demographic(s). Take, for instance, a university library in the heart of the Hispanic community whose student body is comprised of 75% Hispanic students. It might be wise to consider Hispanic staff if the library wants to truly reach out tot the majority of it's student population by way of identification and comfort. Of course, this sort of affirmative action staffing is apt to change as the cultural and socio-economic environment of the patrons change. It's very important to understand that staffing is a very fluid event. people come and go regularly, especially in larger organizations like large academic libraries. So, too, do the patrons change in all manner of ways and, so, staffing to fill, the voids and address changing patron categories must always be a consideration.

As mentioned earlier, the current para-professional movement could greatly impact staffing in the future as their skill sets rise to the level of professional librarians. In these scary budgetary times, nothing looks better to an accountant, budget officer, or HR librarian than someone with all the skills at half the price. This may be especially true in academic libraries where the institution of tenure is coming into question more and more these days. Working, well trained para-professionals stand to play a deciding role in that future debate.

Then there are those issues as mandated by law such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963. the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and again in 1991 wherein rights were granted to women and minorities to sue for punitive damages if discrimination can be proven in the workplace, The Age Discrimination Act of 1967 (freaky to be at an age where that personally matters), and the very important Family Medical Leave Act of 1993. These and other laws have a great impact on staffing. The University of Kentucky, for example, is an Equal Opportunity Employer brought about in part by the Civil Rights Act and Affirmative Action to ensure that no one is denied employment or education because of their race or gender. Diversity is a very important factor in staffing recently at the University of Kentucky Libraries. The student body is becoming more diverse, the libraries must reflect that same tone if it is to successfully reach incoming students of differing backgrounds. Likewise, younger patrons are more technologically savvy and, thus, the library staff must raise it's own technological expertise if it is to administer to the student body all the advantages a University environment is to offer.

And let's not forget that, at least at UK, a great deal of the day to day work is done by a student workforce. We would come to a screeching halt without them! 'Nuff said.

That's it - I'm sick of writing now.................

fayol and aristotle? 2 men, 2 much time on their hands

2008-03-03T20:42:00.003-05:00

okay, so socrates is more at home with management functions than aristotle. Never the less, his take on logic was enough to drive me nuts as an undergrad - that one has the time to dissect an argument to such a degree that a whole new field of study can be built around it tells me somebody wasn't stopping the smell the flowers nearly enough....and lo these many centuries later, we're all paying for it and lawyers are getting rich because of it. But I digress....

Henri Fayol, like aristotle and the great navel gazing scheme he championed, spent a good deal of his life running a mining facility only to up and decide that the world would somehow be a better place if he could break down what it was that he was doing as a manager in a mining facility. (I guess therapy wasn't available at the turn of the century) Thus was born 14 redundant functions of management. Thank God clearer heads prevailed over time and beat down 14 into a mere 5 functions: staffing, controlling, planning, organizing, and fainting, I mean, leading (and if you give them to Prof. Carrigan out of order, as I just did, shame on you - if they're in the book one way, they must be regurgitated exactly the same way - there's no room for individuality or free-thought in management, dammit). Forget that even these 5 functions are redundant in some fashion....but then, newer gurus on the scene heard my cries of boredom and have thus decided only 4 functions should do. Whatever. I'll start listening when we're down to the only function that matters: common sense. But I digress again.......

Of course, it's not enough to have five functions, no, we must also have roles! Enter another man with too much time on his hands - Mintzberg. Actually, it was the 1970's - he probably needed a dissertation topic more than the navel gazing of yore. Anyway, he picks 10 roles then, being the brilliant mind he is/was, breaks those down even further into three friggin categories: interpersonal, informational, and desicional. Now, don't you feel like a better manager already? More than the 5 traditional functions, these roles really got tongues wagging - lo and behold, they're like some sick vin diagram with overlapping roles, lions, and tigers, and bears, OH MY!

Where are my damn ruby slippers, Toto? Take me back to Kansas...there is no intelligent life here. Or maybe it's just me that needs to smell a few more flowers.

WTF?

2008-03-03T09:11:00.002-05:00

Would somebody please explain to me how a library school can believe there's no strategic planning in project management? Top level managers don't have anything to do with it? Like some project is just decided on willy nilly and let the chips fall where they may, as in "conventional planning", with no thought what so ever to how it will impact future projects, the department, or even staff and staffing issues? Please - somebody - explain it to me cuz it's just inexcusable to think it doesn't exist.

That's my rant for the day.......glad I got that off my chest

gaming = information literacy for some

2008-03-02T15:19:00.002-05:00

Historically, libraries have used the more traditional means to increase information literacy among their patrons, such as hosting literacy programs for both children and adults, and supporting collection development that enabled equal access, whether that be to those patrons with English as a second language, various disabilities, or differing age groups. As technology has increased, so, too, have the avenues by which literacy learning can be administered.

Libraries and librarians have found it necessary to expand their horizons, as it were, to include new technologies like audio/video outlets, multimedia devices, and the internet in order to keep up with, and reverse the growing trend of, literacy decline. To this end, libraries across the country are harnessing the power of gaming as one way to increase information literacy among their patrons. One of the more innovative ideas is using fantasy football as a way to teach information literacy. Though fantasy football isn't necessarily "gaming", in the sense that one has an external device, it is a game just the same. And just like board games can often subliminally teach positive group dynamics like working within a team structure, problem solving, and management, fantasy gaming can gather and refocus one's "common sense" skills into a means of understanding accurate, reliable information for any number of other literacy applications.

Paul Waelchli's article in C&RL News from Jan 2008 talks about instructing students on finding quality, reliable, accurate information concerning their fantasy football players/team then applying those same skills for their homework. Having asked a series of questions before and after the instruction, Waelchli juxtaposed the answers and, it was clear that, through this simple exercise students learned that much of their information gathering skills already exist, they just needed to understand that the same skills apply to their more formal research. This particular exercise was performed at a research library but fantasy football's popularity does not discriminate based on age, gender, race, or language per se. This same tool could be applied to other literacy programs in public libraries large and small and to any number of patron groups with similar results.

Other great gaming examples are appearing, too. A public library is using "Patron Appreciation Day" as a way to allow patrons to waive fines by playing "Dance Dance Revolution" against a librarian; the equivalent of "washing the dishes to pay for your dinner". University of Notre Dame has its take on "geocaching" called "Caching in at the Libraries", and the list goes on. Gaming approaches may prove inadequate for an aging American population who aren't as interested in this kind of interactive tool or who don't want to learn this method of information gathering, however. How, then, does a library deal with these patrons who are equally important though less open to new technologies?

Unlike generations of yore, the baby boomer generation, those 50 and over that are nearing retirement, lead more active, social lives well past the time their fathers and forefathers did. They may actually be more open to new ways of learning, such as gaming, but they're also not without tradition. Services that have proven well in the past can't be ignored just because of new technologies - collection development still plays a great role in servicing literacy and information literacy to aging adult patrons. Large print books, specialty topics geared toward older interests such as personal finance, medical, and retirement books, and even simple access to the internet with large screens for better "large print" viewing can provide extraordinary learning.

Libraries, while serving their younger patron's technological prowess, can also shore up older patrons by establishing and maintaining long-term literacy programs and other courses that geared toward interests they may want to learn about, such as computer and internet skills like San Fransisco's "Seniornet"; an online network developed for older adults who who wants to learn computer skills. Even having older "senior" adults volunteer in a library, whether that be as a greeter or on a planning committee or even as a representative that goes out into the "senior" community, can raise the comfort level such that seniors feel as if they are not being left out of the technological revolution and more likely to want to learn.

that's it - I'm sick of thinking now............

the passing of time

2008-03-01T21:31:00.001-05:00

My mother called this afternoon. "I've got pneumonia," she said between coughs, followed by a deep wheeze just before another cough.

"Why aren't you in the hospital?" I asked.

"Don't need to be," she smarted. Clearly, she had made up her mind. It reminded me that a smart ass tone is sometimes inherited. 'The apple does not fall far from the tree', as they say. Listening to her is sometimes like listening to myself, and that we sound eerily alike, makes it all the weirder.

"Well," I replied, "alright then," resigned to say no more.

"Mabeleen Barker died. I reckon I can't go tonight [to visitation] but I'll probably go to the funeral tomorrow. You remember Mabeleen, don't you?"

"Oh heavens, yes, I remember her. Bless her heart, what happened?" I asked sympathetically.

"You know she always thought the world of you. Loved you to death. Always did. You remember her?" She asked again.

"Yes," I repeated, feeling that same, oh-so-familiar smart she'd just handed me well up in my throat "Of course I remember her. What happened?"

"Oh honey she'd been sick for years. You know, Keith [her oldest son] is down there in the hospital and she died in the hospital at Ashland."

"Well," I said, knowing full well there was no point in asking again. She may or may not ever tell me exactly what happened to Mabel and, frankly, I was surprised she didn't tell me all about Keith's problems. Instead, she told me something worse.

"Your daddy come home from the bank today and said Gary Skaggs is in the hospital down there real bad off."

"He is? What's the matter with him?" I asked, hoping for better results this time.

"Had a stroke yesterday. Said he's got a blood clot in his spine. They don't think he's gonna make it I reckon," she said rather matter of factly.

It was a blow I hadn't expected. I grew up with Gary's wife and all of his in-laws. I'd known Gary since he and Regina married 25 years before - back in the days when they had nothing.

They first lived in a rented trailer down the road from her parents. She was barely older than I was when she had her first of three children. She loved little Josh but I could see she was itching to live a little. When Gary got a job in the mines near his native Louisa, they moved into another rental house just down the hill from his parents in a little hamlet called Blaine. Blaine's favorite son was Gary's brother, Ricky. They looked so much alike there was no mistaking they were brothers though their journeys had taken very different paths even then.

I used to drive over to Blaine on weekends and take bags and bags and bags of food to them. Mining didn't pay much and I was bored as could be going to school at EKU. Regina was frighteningly skinny so I bought large cans of protein shake mix to fatten her up. It didn't work. Gary was all muscle, of course, from working hard labor and slept a good part of his time at home. Regina being away from family was lonely so we were the friends we needed to be for one another at the time. It was a hard time for them and an unsettled time for me. It was the kind of time when you're young when true friendships are born that, despite time and distance, never fade.

In a few short months I dropped out of college, got myself in a rock-n-roll band and started touring and recording constantly. After that, we drifted apart, only seeing one another at the county's annual Sorghum Festival or someone's funeral. With time, Gary got tired of the mines and started doing road work for Ricky. They moved three or four more times. He wasn't happy on the road and went back to the mines. They got a divorce, then got remarried [only after she married and divorced some other man], then had another son and daughter. In the meantime, I came off the road, went back to college,was a self-supporting artist among other things before finally landing a job at UK. I don't think any of us did what we thought we'd do way back when we were thick as thieves.

The last time I saw Regina was in a hospital less than a year ago; she was staying with her father who had just suffered a heart attack and I was visiting an uncle who suffered a host of problems. I can't remember the last time I saw Gary - at the festival probably 10 years ago. He was always a handsome, handsome man and loved his family more than life itself. He reminded me a lot of my dad - a guy that would sacrifice time and again to provide for his family. It just about killed him when Regina went off with that other man. I saw her only once during that time and misery was written all over her. A few years later when she and Gary had remarried, I finally saw in her an adult; a woman who finally understood what mattered.

"They said they don't know if they'll do surgery to remove the clot or not but, said no matter what, he'll be a vegetable even if he lives," mom said.

"I hate to hear that." All fairy tales end I guess.

blue 2.0 continues

2008-02-23T21:51:00.001-05:00

del.icio.us is bloody brilliant! I've heard about this for some time but had no real concept of what it was and what it can do. Now that I've explored it a bit I have to say it's...well....bloody brilliant. How many times have I blown up my machines only to reload myriad browsers and have my bookmarks lost - oh sure, you can "save" them but that doesn't always work. But del.icio.us does much, much more than simply save your bookmarks - it puts them in some kind of logical order that's a helluva lot easier to find than having them strewn about in folders. Then there's the whole tagging business which just heightens the experience. If I get nothing else out of Blue 2.0, I have learned the joy of blogging and del.icio.us - worth the price of admission for sure.

Now, there may be other del.icio.us-like products out there but I'm not familiar with them (like I said, I never gave this sort of thing much thought before now) so I can't say whether or not del.icio.us is the do all and end all of social bookmarking. I have to admit, "social" is a little scary - I mean, I like the convenience and all but I don't know just how much of me I wanna put out there - kinda like this blog - I would never say something here that I might say in a diary - God knows the world is full of freaks and you just never know what someone is gonna read and just freak out over. But I digress....suffice it to say, I remain concerned with the worldwide social aspects all this great technology offers. It reminds me of how much I loved the wild west when I was kid and wish, even more now, that a person could just ride off into the sunset and create a whole new life and have it be possible nobody would ever see or hear from you again. Fat chance of finding that kind of privacy now - big brother is ever creeping closer to our bedrooms and the wild west is long gone. Unless I can grow gills and live 3000 feet below the water's surface I think that fantasy is just that - a fantasy. Listen to me - I'm digressing again!

ok, ok, moving on - Google Docs - I've known about this for a long time now and played with it a bit back when I first heard about it. As I recall, I had some tech issues with it at the time- saving wasn't very safe i.e. it didn't save whatever I had written - but it's working now (chances are, I was the problem - I usually am). If I were in a position to share writings Google Docs would be good. For now - I'm sticking with local clients. However, this goes a LONG way to stifling Microsoft's monopoly over Office docs and there can't be anything bad about that. I'm all for freeware - if you're going to be social, dammit, go all out.

And with that, I close - del.icio.us rocks!

everybody's working 4 the weekend

2008-02-15T22:22:00.002-05:00

Ya know, years ago when I was playing covers (I'm talking the early 80's here), "Everybody's Working For The Weekend" was on the set list. Visions of rednecks drinking Bud out of a can streaming to the lake or some dive of a bar who just spent their entire week frothing at the mouth for Fridays. I just never much understood that sort of life, it seemed horribly pathetic somehow - that you do some menial job just to live a little on the weekend. Now that I work a "real" job, I understand it a little better but that doesn't mean I have to like it and it surely doesn't mean I have to get used to it.

I've learned a couple of important things this week:

1. Just because I have allergies doesn't make me useless
2. Just because I'm 10 years older than some of my co-workers doesn't make me slower (in some ways I'm actually faster than I was at their age)
3. I really need a vacation and not some 3 day weekend I pass off as a "break"
4. I'm uncomfortable with the way I look and it's pissing me off
5. I will never have another dog as long as I live - never, ever!
6. I love my house and I love spending time alone with it
7. I don't much think of myself as a photographer and neither does anyone else apparently
8. People who thought of me as a musician apparently still do (I guess that's something)
9. I really miss Oklahoma
10. I'm hyper even when I'm sitting still
11. I get bored much faster than I used to
12. I'm working for the weekend so I can work on all the things I don't have time to work on during the week
13. See #3
14. Did I mention I really miss Oklahoma?

another week

2008-02-13T20:17:00.002-05:00

Hello dear reader (you must be totally bored by now)....

I've not had time to check in for over a week. I don't really have time now but I'm actually working on other things in the background whilst I write. Suffice it to say, I am my usual busy but, for whatever reason - the stars are aligned and Venus is in my quadrant or some such astrological speak as that - things have been exceedingly good this week. It's been filled with laughter and fruitful meetings where everyone has come to the table with great ideas and positive attitudes. My pal, sk1, has returned to work from a bad week away as did my pal, Marie, who had been away ill... and there were no tornadoes. Mind you, we had snow and ice, but no damaging winds to speak of.

And so, I bid you adieu for now as I carry on and hope to get to this week's Blue 2.0 assignments by the weekend. Onward...............

windy wednesday

2008-02-06T18:10:00.000-05:00

last night reminded me two things: the great tornado outbreak of 1974 and the aftershocks of the 1987 Whittier, California earthquake.

The '74 outbreak. I was 8. It was April. I had a mini-bike and a red leather jacket. It was probably Naugahyde. I longed to ride every day after school...wearing the red leather jacket, of course. It smelled like dye. Naugahyde.

That day my mother had a doctors appointment in Lexington. I went to school like I always did, got off the bus at my Mamaw Adams' house in town (that being West Liberty), and waited for dad to pick me up to take us both home to the country (Malone it's called) where I could ride my mini-bike.

Mamaw had a thing for weather. It was the same thing she has for colds and diseases; they are things to be feared yet immortalized in some fantastically obsessive way. As if talking about them in the worst light will make them go away, not realizing it's more like that game where you whisper a sentence to someone and marvel at how inaccurate it is by the time it gets to 10 people. A simple cold is suddenly a death sentence.

And so it was with the weather that day - as Mamaw tended to her chores around the house listening to WLKS 1450 (one four five o) and their up-to-the-minute weather reports. They were streaming in slowly but surely - unusual given the lax communication in the mountains in the early 70's. But even an 8 year old could feel something amiss that day. It was saucy. The birds were still. The clouds were evil. Everyone spoke in whispers. I was assured mom was fine more than once, not by Mamaw, of course, since she tended to fear the absolute worst. Dad reassured me.

And so, once I was home with dad's reassurance, I rode my mini-bike to Mark's house. I rode it in the tobacco field across the road. I rode it down Jones Creek, hitting pot holes on purpose. I stopped on the old iron bridge, turned the motor off and looked up the holler to the west. The world was tight just over the ridge. Even the chickens at Ade's farm buckled down early. I rode more. As afternoon turned to late evening, claps of thunder rumbled in the distance, wisps of rain slapped my red leather jacket like the devil's tongue. It stung my face. I loved it.

But when I had had enough riding and yet mom wasn't home, I began to panic. Mind you, I wasn't prone to panic - that was Mamaw's job. In fact, she was to be avoided in certain situations...like illness and weather. So it was particularly odd that I broke form and took on "Mamaw" traits. I tried to maintain composure and dad helped me do that with his reassurances that everything was fine (I always, always believed him).

The evening news; Walter Cronkite announced a day of deadly storms from Texas to Canada. An event like no other in recorded history. More panic. Xenia, Ohio, home to my mother's Uncle Randy, suddenly appeared on screen...in pieces. It didn't even look like a town. It didn't look like anything except scared people in a garbage heap. Panic panic. Quickening of the breath, heart rate up, too-much-Vietnam-over-dinner images running through my head. Poor Uncle Randy. Mamaw calls, once, twice, Uncle Randy, where's Shirley?, Uncle Randy, Where's Shirley?

Just when I couldn't eat one more bite of my Swanson meatloaf TV dinner (a la aluminum tray), mom pulled in our gravel driveway. I bolted. Dad kept eating (he rarely broke form). Mom stepped from the car surprised at a swift welcome home. It's not like she was oblivious to the weather, she just didn't know how bad it was. She absolutely didn't know I knew how bad it was. And she didn't know about Xenia. She had sat through heavy rains and wind, heard news of bad storms in Ohio and Tennessee, but that was about it, she explained...as she casually pulled from the back seat bag after bag of Hills, K-Mart, and J.C. Penney goods. I still had on my red leather jacket. It smelled like dye. The air was deathly still.

Fast forward to 1987. October 1, 7:42 a.m. Whittier, California suffered a 5.9 on the Richter scale. A month later I was sleeping in the Beverly Comstock Hotel (same hotel where Freddie Prinze killed himself...same room for all I know). I awoke to see the walls breathing like a human. In, out, in, out, slow, rhythmic, fluid. The TV was dancing across the table. The windows were rattling. The bed was bouncing like a cheap hotel quarter bed. I looked at the clock. 7:31 a.m. I went back to sleep.

When I woke up at 10, I asked my roomie if they noticed anything odd that morning since, after all, when I woke up the walls were intact, the TV still on the table, the windows in one piece, and no quarter slot for the bed. That's when I found out I had just slept through a 5.1 aftershock.

Last night, as the unusual tornado outbreak bore down on my house, literally, I heard the cop sirens at 12:30 a.m. That in itself is pretty remarkable. I woke up, turned the TV on, went right back to sleep. I would have slept through the whole thing had a friend not called from her closet to wake me up an hour later. I looked out the window. It was raining so hard I couldn't see the end of the garage. I went back to sleep. 30 minutes later another friend called to say she had a twister go through her back yard. Two trees down, fences missing, garages torn apart, siding peeled like a banana skin. I went back to sleep.

Trauma = sleep.

Oh, and in case you're wondering about the uncle in Xenia - here's a picture of the store he was in when it hit. Groceryland.

As he tells it, the sky looked ominous and green. He stopped at the grocery for a gallon of milk before heading to the bowling alley for League night. As he neared the front door of the store, someone yelled to him that there was a twister headed down main street. He turned to see it barreling at him. He ran into the store screaming at everyone to get down. Being a grocery there really was no place to hide. One guy made it to the walk-in cooler while my great-uncle and the other customers lay one atop the other against a block wall in back. He was laying on a small boy, maybe 10 years old, he said. Women were screaming, glass was breaking, the wind was whirling, then nothing. Dead silence. When he looked up all he saw was sky. Every person in that store walked away without a scratch. He found his car sandwiched vertically between two others. He walked home.

phat tuesday

2008-02-05T11:05:00.000-05:00

Mardis Gras - Fat Tuesday - Super Tuesday - voting, drinking, bribing, drinking, driving, drinking, food, food, food. The phat fact is, I'm not on vacation, my state is not part of the primary, the only thing I'm drinking is root beer, and what should be winter is more like a spring storm with winds and hail and lightening.

I think next year I'll make it a point to be doing something fun on Fat Tuesday even if it's calling in well and taking myself for a nice lunch somewhere.

Today's bastardization - Mr. Kopana - woe be to the charity that sends their beg-a-thon goods addressed as such! It's one thing to get the name wrong, it's something altogether worse to mistake the gender (did these people never go through business school?).

inebrates create original names

2008-02-03T21:13:00.001-05:00

Last night I attended a winter fund raiser for the local NPR affiliate. This particular party always involves lots of drinking and food. You can imagine the number of drunks versus sobers by the end of the night. I heard a higher number of mis-interpretations of my name than usual at this party.

The best one, and this may be one of the best ever, was Praetora. In fact, I had to ask the woman to repeat herself three times just to be clear about what she was saying. She was, indeed, saying Praetora. It turns out that the Roman guards to the emperor were called Praetorian Guards, as explained to me by another woman guarding the door to the bar for no apparent reason, wearing a leopard skin dress and dark, dark, dark sunglasses, speaking to every soul that came and went within earshot.

That's all fine and well but, if you can explain to me how one gets from Kopana to Praetoria, I'd like to hear it! And I might mention that this woman, when sober, actually knows me! She's known me for several years now. And while we don't generally co-mingle anywhere but the station, she does, never the less, know what my name is. Or, at least, I thought she did. But who knows if it was the result of a long standing mistake or that bizarre blue drink she was nursing.

The other name came from three very drunk people, none of which ever, ever, ever said my name right. The closest they got was Kopaeta or Kopeta...I think I even heard a Kopepa in there somewhere. Needless to say, I couldn't leave the party fast enough.

susie-q-t

2008-02-01T15:25:00.000-05:00

as promised, here is my take on the assignments for weeks 3 & 4 of UK's Blue 2.0

First, let me say that I love the whole idea of RSS (really simple syndication). When you want to keep up with a variety of feeds, whether they're business or personal, this is the fastest, most efficient way to do that. I don't think I'm unusual in that I have little or no time during a normal day to read extraneous stuff. RSS helps me maintain some semblance of a normal life outside the confines of my job.

I think I would be ok with bloglines if it were not for the fact that I am, and have been for some time, using Google Reader. The reason I will stick with Google Reader instead of bloglines is because I have it on my Google page with several other key widgets (is that what they're called?) that I look to for various and sundry meaningless things....like my horoscope..... but I digress.

Bloglines is very easy to use, set up, and maintain. I don't find it particularly appealing aesthetically speaking, but it is minimally sleek and a lot of people like that look.

Oh, and the question I believe was: "what blogs do you like?"

I love, love, love Mustache's of the Nineteenth Century. mustachesofthenineteenthcentury.blogspot.com This is one of the most creative endeavors ever and it's very educational is a funny kind of way.

The other blog I enjoy is zemkat.blogspot.com This blog is packed with intellectual tidbits about everything: from techie stuff to slis stuff to general good humor...that's appropriate.

The blog I've been keeping an eye on the longest is stuckincustoms This guy is one of my fav photogs. He does some really incredible work and is very communicative via his blog. If you're into photography at all, he is not to be missed! And he includes a tutorial on how he achieves his incredible HDR photos!

Oh, and finally, I don't keep up with this blog but I stumbled across it recently when I was a panelist for the blogger awards. There were a lot of categories that I just would never look at ordinarily and that's where I found Cap'n Dyke, Lesbian Pirate Queen and Rogue Blogger lesbianpiratequeen.wordpress.com This woman is hysterical and, if you've ever read any of the Daniel Defoe Pirates! books, you'll love this.

PBwiki, on the other hand, is not extraordinary, intuitive, marginally fun, or or or or or or (can you tell I don't like it?)

In keeping with the day's theme, here is the link to my wiki susieqt.pbwiki.com it is sparse, sparse, sparse, and will remain so. Instead, I will build a wiki using mediawiki as referenced in another Blue 2.0 blog called zemkat's blue blog (remember I said it was a wealth of information?). It's free and open source and that's a huge plus when it comes time to understand what you're building. In fact, in talking with a fellow artist, I think we'll build a wiki for our small artist group as a collaborative project. We tried years ago to make some collaborative artwork but not eveything we did was......good......I think we'll have more success with something akin to wiki-ness. If nothing else, it will foster our communication in other ways than a simple yahoo!groups connection.

As to wikis in general, they're great tools. Wikipedia is awesome and, while it's not accurate 100% of the time, it is, none the less, a fantastic source to at least point you in a legitimate direction when you need good information. There's a lot to be said for that.

Wikis are absolutely fantastic tools for the workplace. We use a wiki here in our office. For me, and I know for some of my co-workers, it took some getting used to. I was of the paper club (that's what I call those of us who just have to have something written down, something to hold in their hand, something to mark on and doodle all over) and, I',m still in the club to some extent, but I've come to depend on the wiki as a real collaborative tool where anyone with the expertise, however big or small, can contribute to the overall brain-trust of the department. In this way, you're not isolating the knowledge base but making it accessible to everyone and anyone who may need it. It has proven invaluable and completely changed my perspective of what can be accomplished with this kind of technology.

In short, I don't like PBwiki but I love wiki-ness.

...and now, for something completely different....

wake up little susie

2008-02-01T13:51:00.000-05:00

Having a unique name is really great...except when you're a kid. As most of us are painfully aware, kids can be cruel and having such a unique moniker as mine, well, you might as well put a bullseye on your forehead and hand them an arrow!

Very early in my first grade experience I was tired of being the object of uniqueness. I got off the bus one day, walked into the house where my mother was cooking dinner, and promptly announced, very adult-like in fact, that I wanted to change my name. Smiling, she turned from the sink and asked, "What do you want to change it to?"

"Susie," I said confidently.

Nearly 40 years later my dear, sweet granny still calls me Susie.

everyone has a story

2008-01-30T20:08:00.000-05:00

In the short time this blog has been in existence I've had nearly a half dozen people come to me with their "name" stories. Mis-heard names, mis-pronounced names, wrong names, really wrong names, you "name" it, one of us has had experience with it.

I encourage anyone who reads this to consider the bastardization of their names, or the same for those whom they love, and comment on them here. If you're reading this, you've got a story. I'd love to hear it and I'm sure others would, too.

P.S. blog entry concerning Blue 2.0 assignment in the not-too-distant future (I'm actually busy working at my job lately)

over the hump

2008-01-24T09:53:00.000-05:00

With a somewhat stressful week half behind us, I march on toward the weekend when I can turn my attentions back to redesigning my website, a responsibility that has been four years stagnant....and it shows. I've learned a great deal about web design in that time. So much, in fact, that I'm truly embarrassed at the way it currently looks. I'm tempted to put up the new site even if it's not done - just cuz it's better half baked than what I've got now.

But I digress - my point is, and I do have one, that there are two very important pieces of software that I've come to loathe of late.

1. Microsoft's Front Page. It inserts a lot of crap code that dirties the water and throws errors left and right. While it might be "user friendly" for some (and was the only thing - I thought - available to me at the time I first built my site some 5+ years ago), in reality it causes more problems than it fixes.

This time 'round I'm using html kit which is free (bonus). But, for all I use it for, I might as well create the pages using any 'ol text editor. I write the code by hand, as it were, not using automatic tag inserts, GUI, or other bell and whistle effects. I don't use any of html kit's functions other than it's automatic changing of the font colors according to the code, and I do find that helpful to my eyes if nothing else. That feature alone has made using html kit worth using.

2. AOL's AIM instant messaging. I was asked to install this chat client as part of UK Libraries Blue 2.0 experiment. I have found no redeeming qualities about AIM. AOL, in my mind, has become the Microsoft of personal communication. They're proprietary and invasive, wrecking havoc on browsers and performance overall, what with the download of peripheral goop like games. Compared to other chat clients I've used AIM doesn't come close to being user friendly or rightly functional. I really don't understand, given the chat clients that are freely available, why Blue 2.0 chose such an invasive species.

And that's my rant for today -

Toothpaste

2008-01-17T19:16:00.001-05:00

People often ask who I'm named after, where I got my name or what my name means. I've asked these same questions of my mother many times. Surprisingly, I got different answers - and they seemed to differ according to the age I was at the time I asked the question.

For instance, my first memory of asking produced the answer, "I had a doll named Kopana."

Next came, "You know how little girls like to change the letters of words and make new words? I had a doll named Kopana."

Followed by, "There was a popular toothpaste when I was young called Ipana Toothpaste. You know how little girls like to change the letters of words to make new words? Ipana Kopana."

NOTE: For those too young to remember Ipana (45-ish or younger) you may have instead seen the movie Grease. There is a scene in which the girls have a sleepover at Frenchy's. On TV is an Ipana Commercial....sing along: "brusha, brusha, brusha, new Ipana toothpaste...."

And then there's my own theory; the theory mom would never fess-up to even if I was right. Before she married dad she was engaged to a Hawaiian. I don't know his name (she's only mentioned him once in my 43 years) but there is a common Hawaiian male name "Kaapana ". (In fact, there's a famous slack key and ukulele master named Led Kaapana ledkaapana.com) Am I a leftover from a romance gone asunder? I think it entirely possible....especially since she'd had 20+ years of rearranging letters to make new words by that time.

Still - nothing sounds as good as being named after a toothpaste!

more names

2008-01-16T12:46:00.000-05:00

Here's a good one for ya - remember back years ago before everyone had a cell phone? Back when you made collect calls? Back when dialing zero got a live human being? (Does it still get you a human on the first ring?) Anyway, back "then".....I was traveling a lot and needed to call home. I made a collect call to my mother.

Operator: "Operator. How may I direct your call?"
Me: "Collect from Kopana"
Operator: "One moment"

ring......ring......ring......

Mom: "Hello?"
Operator: "I have a collect call from Chrysler, will you accept?"
Mom: laughter......
Operator: "Ma'am, will you accept the charges?"
Mom: "Yes" more laughter.....
Operator: "Go ahead"
Mom: "Chrysler?" laughter........
Me: "We haven't heard that one yet!"

hello friends

2008-01-14T21:50:00.000-05:00

It's far too late at night after a harrowing Monday (aren't they all?) to build a blog but here I am.

What's in a name, you ask? You tell me! With a name like Kopana, trust me, I hear all kinds. Mis-spellings are fun, too. The latest is Kotana which sounds strangely like a feminine hygiene product laced with the scent of banana- I told you it was too late to do this.

I'll share more bastardized mis-spellings later - there's plenty.