Is It Really a Surprise?

Baseball players do drugs...that's the big story this past week. I read a few of the stories surrounding the investigation and was left wondering, who cares? They haven't been my hereos for quite sometime.

Growing up in Anaheim, I used to go quite frequently to Angel stadium when all the big teams came into town. I looked up to the players as a teen, and would eagerly wait for the stars to arrive for practice to get their autographs. They were my hereos. Until they spoke.

There were a few nice players of course; Nolan Ryan and Cal Ripken, Jr. were all class; as was Kevin Mitchell, which is odd considering his frequent trouble with the law. But for every Ryan or Ripken there were 100 bad apples.

Some of my favorite moments? Frank Thomas (playing at the time for the White Sox's) yelling at a kid for daring to ask him for an autograph (this, sadly, wasn't actually polite compared to some of the other White Sox's...one of the players actually shoved a little kid when he ran up to him with a pen and baseball card!)

Ken Griffey, Jr. (playing at the time for Seattle) I notably remember because he locked himself in the car while Kevin Mitchell (his driver that evening) signed autographs. I remember a little kid tapping on the car, and Griffey looking up at the little fan, then simply looking at the floor of the car and pretended not to notice. Mitchel ended up signing autographs for about 20 minutes, while Griffey stayed in the car just starring at the floor.

I saw Wally Joyner when he was both a Royal and an Angel; his obnoxious behavior changed little with each team. I liked him better as a Royal, however, because he was booed as he went to the bus.

Tommy Lasorda was polite depending on how well the team did that night. He'd always sign autographs and try to be professional, but some nights he was a complete jerk about it. For the most part he was just a grouchy old man. The worse I saw him was at a public signing where he was signing autographs in support of some new food he was endorsing.

Finally, there's Darryl Strawberry; I saw him run from autograph seekers just so he didn't have to deal with them. I stayed late one night after a Dodger game hanging out with a bunch of friends in the parking lot; in retrospect I'm pretty sure he was smoking pot, but I was too young to know what that was then; it was the most relaxed I had ever seen him, and the only time I got his autograph.

Seeing so many bad sports in the game, it became harder and harder to support them; so eventually I just stopped. I still catch the occasional baseball game if the tickets are free or cheap, but it's just not the same anymore. The magics gone when you see them up close.

Stick With Your Day Job

Who pays fifty plus dollars to go see a writer? Me for one (FYI, that's $50 for two tickets). That's how much I paid to see David Sedaris in Riverside this summer. And I hear that's the going rate to see him in 2008 when he makes a few stops in support of his forthcoming book Indefinite Leave to Remain (Little, Brown and Company - June 2008)

It seems like a growing trend for writers who are able to become famous in their careers...and why not? Musicians charge money to see them play a CD they want you to buy, so why should writers charge people to hear them read from a book they want you to buy? But here's the difference, and it's a big difference, if they charge big money then they should, at the very least, be good at performing.

In the case of Sedaris it was worth it; if nothing else I talked him before the reading for a good ten minutes, which was worth the price of ticket alone. But how many writers are like that?

Below is my incomplete list of writers I would pay $25 bucks to see:

1. Sarah Vowell
2. Dave Eggers
3. Thomas Pynchon
4. David Foster Wallace

Things That Pop Into My Head While Bored At the Reference Desk

Why doesn't everyone wear their socks inside out?

How did I end up here?

Does Apple really not have the capability to create a iPod Touch with bigger storage? Or perhaps it's just all part of there marketing plan? Get them to buy this, then the bigger one comes out in six months. I'm sorry, Apple, but you are not the anti-corporate enviorment you try to make us believe. You are no better the Microsoft. And at least Bill Gates gives money to charity...what have you been doing with yours, Steve?

Is Warren Buffets kids not at all upset that he didn't leave them any money?

Why don't they just call it a computer center? And if people want books they can go to the bookstore. People who read statistically have more money then people who sit on their butts all day playing computer poker, and checking out the personal ads on Craigslist.

Does anyone who wears a tennis shoe play tennis? Everyone who walked into today wearing them does not look like the tennis-type.

I think I'd rather have a jury by professional jury person (someone who gets paid to sit on a case (like a career)), and not a jury by peers.

Were any of the Golden Girls fetching in their younger days?

I think that movie The Holiday is making Americans try and be British and say, "I'm going to have holiday at my boyfriends home." It just sounds stupid when some American chap says it.

Why does it always sound dirtier when a British person talks about sex?

I don't really miss TV now that it's on strike.

How the heck is J.D. Salinger still alive? Has anyone check in on his home lately?

Who will be the next American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature? I'm guessing DeLillo, but I'm hoping it's Pynchon.

Kansas City Public Library

About once a year a new library is built, and every other librarian stares with envious eyes, because they wished they could get that kind of money. The glam library this year, in my opinion, is the Kansas City Public Library. I don't know when it opened, but I think it was recent. It seems to be a cross between a library, a museum, and a hotel. And it has a cafe, which I think is a must in new libraries. I know there are many who disagree, but it seems to be what people want.


Below are a few pictures. Visit the libraries homepage for an expanded view of the new library (http://www.kclibrary.org/)

The Future of Books

Every few months some company releases the equivalent of an eReader, and sparks a discussion about whether or not society will ever adopt the idea of a paperless world. In the end, people ultimately agree that readers will never adopt the technology because nothing beats an actual book.

The talk of the town in recent months has of course been Amazon’s little contraption, Kindle. It’s too expensive, and people still are not quite ready to grab onto this kind of technology, but I for one believe it’s the closest thing to the reality of eBooks that consumers have ever seen. I think it’s quite sad how little librarians have done to campaign for the little device.

A pretty large conscientious of librarians say that books are here to stay for some time; I’m not in this conscientious. I still believe that one day people will adopt eBooks. For some time, I’ve believed that the publishing business was on the verge of a new median in literature, and that new median will rest in interactivity.

I think one day they'll be wi-fi equipped (with built in Internet Browsers and one day full blow GUI operating systems), and we'll get Blogs and RSS feeds we subscribe to automatically once they are updated—much as they are with Kindle…but I’m going to go a step further and say that I think this same kind of technology is going to keep authors literally at readers hands, and they'll be publishing a lot more novellas (if there is any median out there that can bring the novella back to their glory days it is these kind of readers).

I believe in the future every library will have free wi-fi and people will walk in with their readers and automatically their will be the database of every book they can put on their reader. I don't believe we'll see the end of books for a long, long time (if ever), but I do believe these devices will be as common to some people as an iPod. And I believe that when they are, books will change; we'll start seeing more books for free, but embedded with advertisements that readers can click on and go to the Internet right on their eReader.

I think we are already seeing a trend in people’s reading habits, and that trend is they like to read more content in smaller doses. I think eBooks fit perfectly into this trend.

The problem with eBooks so far, in my opinion, is they have predominantly targeted the traveling businessman; this market is too limited. The future of eBooks rest in the company that can make something for the rest of us. Something that will let a college professor beam his lecture notes to every student in class who has a reader; something that will let a television viewer instantly receive a recipe they just saw on a Today Show cooking segment; something that will let a person stand next to a bus stop and automatically receive the bus schedule delivered to their reader; and finally, something that let’s you not just see a Wikipedia website, but the entire Internet. The technology is here for such a device, but not enough has been done to grab a hold of it.

Nicholson Baker Is a Big Fat Idiot

If you go to graduate school to get a degree in library science, you’re bound to come across figures in the literary circle that really pissed off a librarian, and your entire two years in graduate school will be at times misery because of this literary figure.


There was only one when I was in school. Nicholson Baker. There are few people who can stand alone in a sentence by being both the noun and verb--good ole Nick is one of these people.


The curse of Nicholson Baker apparently all started in 1996, when Baker wrote an article called “The Author vs. the Library” for the New Yorker (volume 72). The article attacked the way the San Francisco Public Library was discarding many of its older books.


I have not read the article, I do not care what the article has to say, and indirectly I don’t hold anything against Baker (although I still cringe when I hear his name and silently curse him for the horrors the name put me through in graduate school).


To this very day, many librarians have remained bitter and outraged with Nicholson Baker; in fact many faculty members at San Jose State’s library science department will probably be willing to argue about Baker and book preservation at the mere drop of his name.

Divorcing the Enviornment

I've heard people say don't divorce for the sake of the children, or good old family values...but today I heard a new one: stay married for the sake of the enviornment. Scientist are now citing the increase of single family homes (due to an increase in divorce) as a contributing factor to the environments destruction. Read the full story here (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/03/AR2007120301485.html). So I guess next time you see a celebrity pull up to an award show in an eco-friendly car with his fourth wife/husband next to him/her throw an acorn at his head, and tell him he doesn't really care about the environment.