Wednesday, January 4, 2006

My Excuses The holidays are over and it's back to work. U. Maryland has a long intersession between the fall and spring semester during which the campus shuttle bus does not run, and I push myself back and forth between work and apartment on my bike. A few days of this (and I have a month of it to look forward to) and I become too tired to write much. It will be a thin month for the web log. I've been trying to write something on the NSA Elint thing. The overload of articles to wade through has been overwhelming, and it keeps coming - new information and articles every day. I'm not getting the feeling even after three weeks that I understand what this is about. What writting I 've put together reflects this. It occurs to me that most of the links will be offline - withdrawn to subscription archives by the time I finish it. What I wanted to say here; though, is that with this week at work it has finally hit me that my friend Rob Bratton has really left. He actually left in the middle of last month to take a cataloging job over at GW law school's library The George Washington University Law School - Library Information & Services. Now when I hear some internet streaming radio station play the Wiper's "Youth of America" who do I have to share this with? Or when the afternoon show on WFMU unnaccountably plays Crippled Pilgrims' song "Out of hand" Playlist for Diane's Kamikaze Fun Machine - October 27, 2005 , who else would appreciate that it was my old friend Derrick Hsu's  and Alex S. Fountain of Youth Records that first put that album out. Who now will try to tell me why libraries (and librarians) need to exist when we have Wiki's, and Google. Some people possibly like their work and where they work. Where I work is a perfect Potemkin villiage of idiots, and I find more difficult with each passing day to care about subfield delimiters. The dangling shiny object that is tuition remission for university wage workers is only one of the cruel jokes that exists in this cold callous world. However; before he left for fairer fields Rob did have one final statement: "Pod Six was Jerks." Well. Alright then. 11:44:31 PM    comment [];trackback [];

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. 2006 Paul Bushmiller. Last update: 2/1/06; 8:57:45 PM.