When Southern Baptists Take Over the Library...

...what they do is get rid of the books. Seriously. My mother was a children's librarian at Eastanollee Elementary School in Toccoa, Georgia for twenty-seven years, and the first thing they did when she left was they started throwing books away. They started with the non-fiction: anything over ten years old had to go. This sounds like a good idea until you realize that that doesn't just encompass things that are constantly changing like recent history, geography, and science, but things that seldom do, like dictionaries, books about mythology, biographies of people long dead (the debate about whether Lincoln was gay is unlikely to matter much in a book written for a five year old), histories of Georgia, all that stuff.

Now they're hitting the fiction too. They've started throwing away all the children's books that aren't explicitly Accelerated Reading-related (a bullshit program, see this) and anything they didn't want to read (Catch-22: they were required to read X number AR books so they didn't have time to read for fun anyway): so basically, thousands and thousands of books got thrown away. They got rid of all of the Story Collection--which is EVERY SINGLE BOOK OF STORIES. Bye bye, Brothers Grimm. See ya later, Hans Christian Anderson. No Christmas stories, no Br'er Rabbit, nada.

Oh by the way, did I mention the time Mom got in trouble for writing the library's mission statement because she said people could find books for "education and pleasure"--and the PTB had a fit about the term "pleasure", because who wants THAT in reading material??

Oh I fucking hate people. I'm going to try to get Mom to write to the ALA and if she doesn't I might myself. Fuckers.

Moment of Life Minutia

Just come back from the nursing home to see my aunt. She looks like hell. It does not look good. What is worse: a funeral on vacation or not?

~

One of the cats was outside in the yard playing with a baby snake. Where there is one snake there is more.

~

My Mom surprised me with a very nice Brooks Brothers suit she got on sale for me to do interviews in and stuff. Very nice, very Grown Up. It scares the shit out of me.

Politicians are stupid...

...and baseball can't be trusted.

Um, yeah, and we have terrorism warnings but what multimillionaires are up to is the major problem?

Priority issues? Anybody?

Woo Hoo, Dragon Sex!

Isn't it funny how science channels have to show all animals, even made up ones, doing it?

I'm watching Animal Planet's Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real program which I've been waiting for for months and even though it's narrated by Patrick Stewart it's still hopelessly dorky. For one thing they're doing it like this whole "and what if they really DID find preserved dragons??" pseudo-archaeology perspective, and for the rest they are hopelessly cribbing from Anne McCaffrey dragons minus the telepathy. (Okay and the telepathy was the coolest part! Seriously! I SO wanted a telepathic best-friend dragon for most of my teenage years. And, um, okay, I still do. Cos that would be neat.)