513 What are your librarians buying for your library?

If you are a Democrat and think your library is doing an outstanding job with the "newest arrivals" shelf, or if you are a Republican constantly submitting suggestions for purchase and think you are getting lame excuses, Tomeboy has crunched the numbers and found out why you are both correct. In his article 223:1 (the ratio of Democrat librarians to Republican), he has taken the best seller lists of politically biased books, left and right, and compared them to OCLC WorldCat holdings records.

If you're not a librarian [what in the world is an OCLC? what is a holding?], some of this will seem a bit arcane, but you'll understand the conclusions--twice as many current, best-selling liberal books will make it to the shelves of your local library.

512 Credit for lunch

Joanne Jacobs points out an article about students at Berkeley public schools which reports they will be getting credit for lunch. They’ll be eating, and learning about nutrition and organic foods, as well table manners and the art of conversation. Big deal. When I was in junior high school, we called that class home economics and we had to eat what we cooked.

511 Mount St. Helen's volcanocam

Mount St. Helen’s volcanocam. We used something like this to track the fires at Glacier National Park last year. When we left Ohio (Amtrak) stopping in Arizona and California, we thought the fires would be gone before we got to Glacier in two weeks. We were wrong.

510 A Spat about Beer

About a month ago I wrote about updating my blogroll at Church of the Acronym and adding some Lutherans, rejecting some Christian sites because of trash talking. With some reluctance, I added Daniel, a Lutheran, http://beerisforamateurs.blogspot.com/. Daniel loves beer, but doesn’t think much of non-LCMS Lutherans. He has also taken the word “Lutheran” out of Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the synod to which my church belongs, and replaced it with an asterisk. Nice guy, huh? (Christians don’t need enemies; they’ve got each other.) But, I reasoned, maybe he is Gen-X or an Echo-Boomer and thinks it is cute. Generational differences, you know, so maybe he would mature.

I left a comment for him (e-mail) that I didn’t think much of his promotion of beer on a site intending to speak to the claims of Christ. (His only graphic is a grinning beer babe.) Now, according to one of his rants about me and my church, (“Who is Norma,” Oct. 3) Daniel the LCMS blogger has demanded to be removed from my blogroll. It is really tough to leave a comment at his website, or track back to his articles--you get e-mail or a web address, but no way for your comment to show in the context of the original.

I’ve got four blogs, a journal and three 3-mail addresses, and all my blogs are comment enabled. I’ve never received a message from Daniel. Somewhere in blogland another Norma is puzzling over a very odd message about beer.

509 Another September 11 story

“Michael Jacob was officially adopted by Karen and Pat Moan on September 11, 2003. He lives with his family in Southern California and is looking forward to celebrating his third birthday on March 31st.”

Read about an amazing charity, The Garden of Angels, that pays for burials of babies thrown in the trash and creates a safe haven and finds adoptive homes for newborns who could have ended up there. Their stories will leave tiny footprints on your heart.

Thanks to Sherry for the tip.

508 Adding photos

Through Picasa and something called Hello I can now add photos to my blog. The teeny-boppers do it all the time, but so far I keep taking pictures of the instructions and adding that. But I have successfully added one of my paintings to the Catablogging topic from last week. Scroll down. That's my cat sitting on the porch at our Lakeside house. Since I retired, I've been painting small, topical watercolors. I scan them onto notecards and sell them at a local gift shop. If you want to add my cat painting to your blog, you can (it's copyrighted, but I'm giving you the artist's permission), but please credit me and give this URL. Thanks.

And for your added enjoyment, I've added a wedding photo to my September 11 blog. We look like children playing dress-ups! That's my childhood friend and college roommate JoElla, as maid of honor, and my husband's childhood friend Tom, as best man. This is fun. I'll have to dig through some more old pictures.

507 When magazines multiply--what do you do?

Esther has the same problem we do with magazine subscriptions. We are gradually letting subscriptions to various architectural and home magazines die off--sometimes a slow painful death, as the subscription agencies continue to send pleas for renewals and special offers. Her description of how to say good-bye is hilarious. I'll have to send it to my friend, Lynne (who works in magazine fulfillment).

I’ve been so disappointed with my New Yorker--it was much better when my friend Nancy would give me her left-overs. When Esther is deciding how to winnow her supply she writes:

“Then, I kissed The New Yorker goodbye. The cartoons had failed to amuse me one too many times, and I found their articles pretentious and appallingly long; as an editor, I saw, in my mind’s eye, a kinder, simpler world, where each of the feature articles was a third shorter and no one missed the extra verbiage. Hasta la vista, you longwinded, overhyped, affected publication.”

Perfect. I knew I’d have something in common with Esther. At least she doesn’t collect first issues and get behind in that blog.

506 It's been a bad summer for the media

John Leo writes, "In truth, the news business had a disastrous summer. In July, a Senate intelligence committee and an official British investigation both concluded that President Bush had been on firm ground when he spoke the famous 16 words in his 2003 State of the Union message (that the British had learned Saddam Hussein had sought to acquire uranium in Africa). When the 16 words appeared to be untrue, the press endlessly trumpeted them, often on the front page, but when Bush drew heavy support from the two investigations, you could hardly find the news with a magnifying glass. In the New York Times, the British report was carried way inside the paper and read like a muddled translation from classical Urdu. This seems to happen a lot when the Times is forced to report news it doesn't like. On July 25, the Washington Post press critic, Howard Kurtz, reported that his newspaper had carried 96 references to the issue when Bush appeared to be wrong and only two after the revelation that he looked to be right. The totals for the three major networks and three elite newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, were 302 before and nine after. According to Kurtz, CBS never did get around to mentioning that the investigations had supported the president.

Media handling of the charges by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was even more peculiar. Most major news media stayed silent for nine or 10 days as the story of the charges spread over radio and the Internet. A few bloggers argued that this was an attempt by big-time media outlets to rule the Swifties' charges out of bounds. It seemed that way to me, too. When big media finally did rouse themselves and address the issue, they tended to focus tightly on Democratic talking points, such as who provided the funding and were the Swifties illegal surrogates for the Bush campaign. In many news outlets, the adjective "unsubstantiated" seemed welded to the noun "charges." "

U.S. News.com John Leo, “Self-Inflicted Wounds”

505 He'd Rather not have an agenda

The Washington Post has an article on Dan Rather today. That surprises me. People have such a short attention span. Sure, we'd like to continue talking about the bias of the press and why they don't see it, but there really are more important issues for conservatives. Like the Republicans who are falling away from Bush because they don't like the neo-cons (mostly former Democrats). That's what got Clinton elected the first time--unhappy Republicans defecting from Bush 41.

It is so strange that Dan Rather can't see his own bias*. I have biases and opinions. Most people do. Why does he think he is immune just because he went to journalism school and has been in front of a camera for years. That actually makes him more susceptible! How could you not get a big head if millions of people were hanging on your every word, and the press quoted you, and movie stars knew YOUR name. Gosh, Dan. Get real. My little blog gets about 50 hits on a good day--when it is up to 100, you probably won't be able to talk to me.

*"I'm an independent journalist," Rather said. "I don't have a political agenda. What I'm trying to do is be an honest broker of information. I'm going to make my mistakes . . . and not give in to those" who are themselves "biased." WaPo story here by Howard Kurtz.

504 Happy Blogiversary

Today is the one year anniversary of my first web log post. My first one looked like this

Thursday, October 02, 2003
#1

Most of my writing has been sent via e-mail to friends and family in attachments, which increasingly no one is eager to open. I don't blame them. Last week I was receiving about 50 worm infested e-mails a day, about half with attachments.

So I'm thinking, if I had a blog home, I could just ask the good folks from Montana, Florida, Virginia, Illinois, Nebraska, Georgia, California, Washington and Michigan to check out my blog for the latest details on what I'm thinking or writing. I've put out a compilation of my poetry and essays, "Let me collect my thoughts," and this will be an extension of that. Web Logs are perfect for people like me who like to write but don't want to publish.

503 The Blind Man at the Bus Stop

We saw the blind man at the bus stop as the bus was pulling away to the east. We were driving west at 35 mph, so we don't know if he was a bus rider, or just waiting to cross busy North Broadway near Kenny Road.

No one has more respect than I for the parenting abilities of the blind. My grandmother was blind and raised nine children on the farm with no electricity or indoor plumbing. Even so, not even that incredible woman would have attempted to cross a four lane street with a toddler on her back in a child carrier with only a white cane for guidance.

502 The Debate

I went to bed about 30 minutes into the debate. Kerry was clearly the better debater, to my inexperienced ear. But what made it intolerable for me was his image at congressional hearings 30 years ago. It just kept popping up. He was good lying then too. Really good. Probably caused many deaths with his deceptions. Anyway, there are many bloggers who blogged throughout. One of the best I read was at NRO after people began commenting on Kerry's body language, which apparently looked like signing:

"I'm listening on radio, so I'm missing all-important body language. But Kerry seems marginally better than Bush. The President sounds determined, but dull-witted. Kerry sounds urgent, but empty."

Yes, that's what was bothering me. Empty.

501 I've got my eye on. . .

Women bloggers. As luck would have it, I clicked through "next blog" today and found three women bloggers who look like good possibilities for my blogroll. Two are using the same brown wallpaper template (which looks better on my laptop screen than my pc, for some reason). The three are (da dah):

Jo's Blog

The Anchoress and

Cindy Swanson.

They all appear to be conservative (from their blogrolls) and Christians.

Then there is Esther, urban and Jewish, My Urban Kvetch.

To my list of librarians, I've added Michelle Kraft's KraftyLibrarian, about medical librarianship. I was surprised how quickly my medical searching skills left me when I retired, so I'll be watching her for pointers.

500 Catablogging--Traveling with a Cat, pt. 1

A Globblog is a blog that supports the global economy; a clogblog is a blog from Holland; and a catablog is blog written by cat people. We only have one cat, so I don't do much catablogging--although some bloggers--usually women--make that their total focus.

If we can drive the 120 miles to our lake house without the cat throwing up or pooping, it has been a successful trip. Last week's round trip and this week's trip here have been in that rare category. Meds didn't help much, because by grabbing her, wrapping her in a towel and stuffing a fraction of a tiny Dramamine down her throat made her very unhappy about traveling anywhere. And the towel didn't protect us against biting.

Now we have a method that works much better. Thirty minutes before the car trip, we pick her up gently and place her in the carrier and put it in a quiet room and close the door so she can't see us scurrying around the house packing suitcases, and loading the cooler. It cuts her anxiety level way down--especially by not force feeding medication. We also began taking a straighter road, less scenic for us, but easier on her nervous system and tummy.


Cat on on Cool Pink Porch

Catablogging pt. 2

After we were settled in at the cottage, my husband couldn't find the cell phone. "Check under the seats of the car," I reminded him. That's where it was lost for several months last year. "I did, but it isn't there."

We'd had a slight mishap on the way up. The cat mewed like she needed to use the facilities, but it was just a ruse. Once out of her carrier, she decided to wander around and look out the windows. She made a move for the front at the same time I braked, and she slid forward struggling and scrambling. My husband lunged for her and yelled (I was driving), and I steadied the coffee cups. This frightened the cat and her back claws caught us both, causing some blood gushing on his arm. But he caught her and put her back in the carrier.

It was this incident that caused me to tell him to check under the seats. The cell phone had been riding peacefully between the coffees, last time I saw it. So I told him I would dial the number on our land line, while he sat in the car. I did so and could hear a very faint tune in our living room. I went through my book bag, his camera bag and my purse. No phone. I motioned him to come in the house.

"When did you change the ring? I distinctly heard a classical tune when I dialed the cell phone." He seemed puzzled. I guess I've never actually heard the full glory of our cell phone alert. So I dialed again. The music was coming from the couch area. I dumped everything out of my bookbag and there it was, wedged between magazines and books, a black phone in a black bag.

The cat watched with great interest wondering what we were doing crawling around on the floor. Or perhaps she knew and was laughing at us.

499 Going without health insurance

We did that--the first year we were married. When you were young in the 60s you didn’t think much about it. Most young people are healthy (if they don‘t drink or smoke)--they also think nothing will ever happen to them. Our kids did the same when they left home at 18. Most companies today that offer health insurance have a waiting period--a month, three months--or it is an option that the employee needs to help pay for through payroll deductions. And what 18 year old thinks he should pay for anything?

So we paid up front in 1961 and sort of “lay away” for our first baby, from the time I found out I was pregnant. Later we bought a hospital insurance policy--but all our doctor visits we still paid out of pocket. Yes, doctor visits were cheaper then, probably about $10-$15, but our income was only about $4,000 a year--so you crunch the numbers and see what the difference is in today‘s dollars.

But this post isn’t about me but about the poor who lack health insurance today. The Current Population Survey of the Census Report got a lot of negative media play last month, particularly here in Ohio where Cleveland made the list of poorest cities. It being campaign time, of course, President Bush got a lot of blame as though he personally had insisted parents have babies without marriage or not earn high school degrees, the major cause of poverty in the USA.

American Heritage Foundation has issued WebMemo 556 which includes some interesting details that the MSM and many in the alternative press left out of their coverage. He refers to the U.S. Census Bureau, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2003.” Report No. P60-226, August 2004, at http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/p60-226.pdf and summaries from this and other sources. The CPS is a snapshot, but other data in the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), also provided by the Census Bureau, follow individuals.

Poverty is often short-lived. More than half of all poverty “spells” (time spent in poverty) last less than four months, and about 80 percent last less than a year. In fact, very few people—only about 2 percent of the total population—are chronically poor in America, as defined by living in poverty for four years or more.

Substantial income mobility, both upward and downward, exists in America. About 38 percent of all households in the lowest income quintile rose to a higher quintile within three years. An almost equal percentage (34 percent) of all households in the top quintile fell within three years.

Spells of uninsurance are short-lived. The typical family that loses health insurance is uninsured for only 5.6 months on average.

Very few people lack health insurance long-term. Only 3.3 percent of all Americans went without some kind of health insurance for four or more years. Additionally, only one in nine people were without health insurance for more than two years of the four-year study period.

Health insurance coverage rates have risen over time. In 1996, some 8.8 percent were without health insurance for the entire year, a figure that dropped to 8.0 percent by 1999. Conversely, 78.2 percent of all Americans had health insurance for the entire year in 1996, which rose to 80.4 percent by 1999.

Read the entire report to see the references.

498 Why an old computer game can't pick a president

Over at Tech Central, Nelson Hernandez Jr. explains why Douglas Kern's recent article ("President Elect - 2004") using the model of Commodore 64-era political game President Elect 1988 to predict the upcoming election, will not work in 2004. He gives numerous thoughtful explanations of the differences in time and culture, but I thought this paragraph particularly worth the whole article.

“. . . this election has seemed less about articulated policy issues and political ideology than any in the past. To editorialize, political campaigns are now more about entertainment and political theater because substantive, intellectual discussions of complex public policy topics result in poor television ratings and apparently have no positive effect on "swing voter" behavior. Try to imagine the show-stopping absurdity of Bush and Kerry earnestly arguing the particularities of an issue as technical and specific as the fate of the islands Quemoy and Matsu (as Kennedy and Nixon did in 1960) and you get a sense of how far we have come toward presidential politics becoming just a high-stakes reality television show, where the tactical objective is to simply to entertain, titillate and seduce the fickle "swing voter". “

If not Kerry, who? Hernandez offers Gephardt.

“My sense is that none of the Democrats who ran this year would have been likely to defeat Bush under the above circumstances. I think Dick Gephardt would have presented the most formidable opponent: he could have picked up a few close Midwestern states (e.g. Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota) while retaining all the states Kerry will win this year. In addition he would have been more likeable, less liberal and less vulnerable to attack than Kerry. Combined with moderate-to-conservative running mate from a battleground state capable of definitively swinging his home state into the Democratic column, and this election would have been very tight indeed. But even the optimal ticket (from a purely tactical standpoint) from the roster of candidates that ran this year would not have offered the Democrats a cakewalk.”

The entire article is here.

497 A Rich Childhood

"You can't describe the vastness of the Panavision prairie to East Coasters. Either the idea bores them--sorry, if there's not an all-night Thai take-out every ten blocks I am so not there. Or it's incomprehensible--what, a dirt ocean that just sits there?

Yes. That's it. The earth is flat and the sky is big, and you're a small lone thing rolling between the two. True Midwesterners have no time for oceans--all that pointless motion. It comes in, it goes out. What's the point? True Midwesterners have no time for mountains. They're so obvious. They don't do anything. We have mountains, in a way; they're called clouds. And they move. Can yours do that? "

Read the whole essay by James Lileks here.

496 Head Start is a Dead End for Children

Strengthening “Head Start” is under Bush’s budget plan if he is re-elected. The program is nearly 40 years old and has shown no appreciable long term results for education. Children have been immunized, families have been linked with various social service agencies, and a huge number of people have been employed--about 27% of them parents of the children. A program that started out planning to cost $17 million the first year (but cost $100 million), had ballooned to 1.4 billion in 1991 under Bush 41, and about 8 billion in 2004 under G.W. Bush. That’s about $7,362 for each of the 910,000 enrolled children.

The Head Start program is administered by the Head Start Bureau, the Administration on Children, Youth and Families (ACFY), Administration for Children and Families (ACF), Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

Grants are awarded by the ACF Regional Offices and the Head Start Bureau’s American Indian and Migrant Program Branches directly to local public agencies, private non-profit and for-profit organizations, Indian Tribes and school systems for the purpose of operating Head Start programs at the community level. (DHHS web site)

Using Google, it’s practically impossible to find an independent assessment of this program. If a politician votes to freeze the program at current levels, he is accused of “dismantling it.” Here’s an example from New Hampshire--I have no idea who Charlie Bass is, but this statement called “Voting to Dismantle Head Start,“ shows the problem:

"[Charlie] Bass voted for a bill that dismantles some of the high-quality standards and comprehensive services that have made Head Start a successful early childhood education program for New Hampshire’s toddlers. Current funding only allows 3 out of 5 eligible children to be served by Head Start, but Bass froze current funding levels and cut enrollment in Head Start for the first time in history. It also created block grants that provide no standards for minimum class sizes, child-teacher ratios or curriculum effectiveness. Bass’s vote was decisive - it passed by 1 vote, 217-216. [GOP Head Start Reauthorization Bill - Passage, H.R. 2210, Vote #444, 7/24/03. Adopted 217-216 (R 217-12; D 0-203)]" http://www.nh-democrats.org/Blog.asp?id=49 6/8/04

Unfortunately, Head Start has no high-quality standards, and it has no high-profile “graduates.“ Funding requests just call for more money to expand the failed program and to hire more degreed teachers--as though that were the problem all along. The NCLB of President Bush created great controversy when it attempted to test the program and was criticized for testing pre-schoolers.

After 40 years shouldn't we be seeing improvement in scores, behavior and over-all quality of inner city and minority districts? The “jewel” of the Great Society is made of paste--library paste, it seems. If you know of a study that claims that Head Start is a success, that isn’t written by someone who takes it to the bank, I’d sure like to hear about it. I think our children deserve better, but no one knows how to do it.

495 Phones in Dorm Rooms Disappearing

The Keptup Librarian points to an article that reports how phones in dorm rooms are disappearing and being replaced by cell phones.

Phones in dorm rooms? What's the fun in that? I still remember checking the bulletin board by the phone in the office at Oakwood Hall (now torn down) in November 1957 and finding out my nephew David had been born. And at McKinley Hall at the University of Illinois where we had one phone per floor (more advanced than little Manchester College), I'd watch for that note: "MC 2:15 WCL." If you are of a certain age, you'll know how that message caused the pulse to pick up.

494 House by the side of the road

Every morning this past summer on my way to the coffee shop near Lake Erie, I passed a 1950s ranch along the side of the road. It looked like the typical 3 bedroom, 1 car garage, big picture window in the living room I remember from my youth--a "modern" house. It was sitting on a truck bed waiting for a foundation. Then a second ranch, maybe from the 60s, moved in next to it, sitting on supports for weeks. The owners of the lots who had moved them there to catch the summer renters, probably lost a prime $1200-$1500 a week from fishermen or vacationers anxious to enjoy the lake.

Cement shortage, I wondered? We import cement from China (takes 44 days), but impose high import duties for cement from Mexico (takes only 4 days), probably to protect American companies. This is hurting our housing industry and will impede the rebuilding in Florida which has just been through four hurricanes, tornadoes, and flooding. I'd like the USA to give Mexico all the help it can in free trade or trade concessions, so Mexican workers can stop risking their lives by coming here illegally.

Of course, it's much more complicated that that as this Houston Chronicle article shows: "Cemex, the world's third-largest cement company, acknowledges that Mexican prices are high compared to many other markets, and only slightly cheaper than in the United States. But company officials blame expensive energy, labor, transport, distribution and regulatory costs in Mexico, and the absence of government subsidies given to many foreign producers."