time for something fun and a bit silly. This week's Music Thing teaches the seldom-endorsed lesson "beer makes you do stuff good":

Some weeks it just doesn't pay to browse the news feeds, especially when stories like this are included.

Let's review this, shall we? A paraprofessional, working with the consent of a second paraprofessional, has decided that she (well, the two of them), know better than the trained professional librarians what is acceptable material for the collection. Second, she decided to take an award-winning graphic novel out of circulation, for concern that it was "too explicit" for younger patrons. Third, when a patron request prevented her from re-checking out the book, she decided to cancel an 11 year old's request to prevent "objectionable material" being in the hands of a minor.

And then protests her innocence when the library system fires them both.

There are so many ways that her actions are disgraceful, I'm not sure where to begin.

First, no library person is authorized to make personal judgment on a patron's choices of material. That is for the patron themself, or his or her guardian if underage.

Second, as a paraprofessional, the women were not authorized to make collection-level decisions in the first place. There's a reason that professional librarians get a masters degree -- learning how to manage the collection is one of the many classes taught.

Third, no library person EVER is allowed to pry into the personal information of the patrons.

Fourth, librarians (and all the more so paraprofessionals) are not child guardians. This bears emphasizing. We are not your children's parents, nor babysitters, nor teachers, nor legal guardian. We are not in place to take care of your children's behavior or reading habits, that's YOUR job.

The women violated the library's code of ethics and the law by misappropriating library property, conspiracy to destroy library property, and violating information privacy ethics. It's stories like this that make me wish the ALA Library Bill of Rights (and to a lesser degree, the ACRL Intellectual Freedom Principles) were required reading for all library hires.

These women blatantly violated articles 1, 3 and 5 of the Bill of Rights, and deserve any and all punishments levied against them.

Dammit, libraries are supposed to be gateways to information, where people can satisfy their curiosities without prejudice by library staff. We're supposed to facilitate reading and information-seeking, not impose limits.

I don't care if "people prayed over me while I was reading it because I did not want those images in my head;" if it offends you that much, don't read it nor let your children. Your authority ends there. Your morals do not get to dictate my reading habits, nor your employer's policies. Might I suggest working in your church's library instead, if it's such an important matter to you.

in keeping with the Veterans' Day/Armistice Day solemnity this week, I offer you this video from the 2008 Armistice Day observance in London, the massed bands of the Household Division playing Elgar's elegant "Nimrod" from the "Enigma Variations":



Next week, a return to the fun Music Things.

My heartfelt thanks to all who have served, and continue to serve this country.

as pointed out by mzmadmike and others of my Barfly friends, some of the responses to the Fort Hood tragedy show an incredible degree of wishful thinking.

By the base commander's order (and general current military practice), Fort Hood was a gun-free zone, with weapons carried only by those who required it for duty (military police, basically. I'm sure there's a few others who'd have to carry, but not many). Let me repeat this to underline the point: the headquarters of the 3rd Armored Cavalry and the 1st Army West division was unarmed. When Major Hassan opened fire, he was illegally carrying a weapon. 13 men and women died, with another 30 injured, because they were unable to respond to the threat. Hassan was finally taken down by an armed MP. Some of the victims tried to take him down unarmed, and failed.

In response to this? calls for further bans on guns. Because people can't be trusted with such dangerous things. Not even the soldiers professionally trained in their use.

Banning guns only creates a population of unarmed victims, ripe for the picking by the criminals who will ignore the bans anyway.

there are many reasons Johann Sebastian Bach stands so prominently in the classical music canon. Sure, the man wrote close to 1200 masterworks of all lengths and genre, but there have been prolific men before and after him, whose birth and death dates were not used to demarcate a musical period (1685-1750, the Baroque period, for those curious). Towering above the scores (heh) of other musical Bachs in his family (the Bachs had been musicians and composers for going on 4 generations by Johann Sebastian's time), Bach's works show a maturation and refinement process unparalleled. His late works, most notably Ein Musikalisches Opfer and Die Kunst der Fuge (A Musical Offering and The Art of Fugue, respectively) show Bach's absolute mastery of the contrapuntal style and textures available to him as a Baroque composer.

A Musical Offering is replete with master touches. Canons written out as one single line of music, the spacing of the following voices left as an exercise to the performers. Crab- and mirror canons similarly written as one line of music, the reversal or inversion left to the performer. A "rising" canon that is written to ascend the diatonic scale by half-steps each time through (C to C# to D....) A six-voiced fugue to conclude.

Here now, in illustration, is a "crab" canon from A Musical Offering, so-called because the second voice of the canon is playing the music from end to start, similar in the minds of Baroque musicians to the sideways scuttling of a crab. Listen, watch, and enjoy:

Like Beethoven last week, Bach is typically thought of for his massive orchestral and organ music. But also like Beethoven, Herr Johann Sebastian has a large output of delicate, lyric music as well. Here, enjoy another true classic of the sort, Bach's Air from the third Orchestral Suite (BWV 1068):

(on a side note, I should point out that the piece is properly just called the "Air". Its' more commonly known sobriquet came from the 19th century virtuoso Fritz Kreisler, who would often play the primary melody using only the G string of his violin)

Names are tools of conjuring. "Wagner" evokes brassy histrionics. "Bach" majestic organ textures. And "Beethoven" to most people will conjure brassy, brash exuberance. The Fifth. The Ninth. The Missa Solemnis. The countless virtuosic outbursts throughout his piano sonatas. But Beethoven was equally a master of gentle lyric beauty, as exemplified by this week's Music Thing, the second movement of his 27th Piano Sonata:

130 years ago, Thomas Alva Edison made the first electric light bulb. Here's a scan of the original NYT coverage.

I had ideas for this week's Music Thing....and then strega42 showed me THIS:



Yes, it's long, but it's worth it.

in case you needed a bit of perspective, here's a single-frame shot from Mars orbit, showing Earth and its moon in the top, with Jupiter and its moons in the bottom:

Is BIG friggin pic

this week, we return to the fun and silly:

Life is what happens when you're making other plans.

I had a fun, slightly silly Music Thing all ready to share with you today, and then I read the news yesterday to learn of the passing of Marek Edelman.

It's okay if you don't know who he is, I didn't when I saw the headline, either.

In the late summer and early fall of 1943, Marek stood as one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, resisting the Nazis for 43 days. After the Wehrmacht and Schützstaffel forces crushed the rebellion, Edelman managed to survive the Camps till war's end. Rather than leave Poland like so many other Jews did after the War, Edelman stayed, helping to resettle the town of Lodz. He worked there as a cardiologist, because he wanted to save as many lives as he could, until the Communist government forced him out of business in the 1960s. In the 70s he joined the Polish Solidarity movement, which led to his brief time in prison as a political prisoner in the 80s.

Edelman was thought to be 87 at the time of his death in Warsaw this week.

On behalf of Edelman's never-ending fight against injustice and oppression, and countless others who too have risen far above and beyond the call of duty, I offer you this rendition of the Partisan Song from the Warsaw Ghetto:



Lyrics to the song can be found here.

It's been a bit over a year since I moved to Illinois to begin this weird journey towards a graduate degree.

Seeing that I've just turned the page to a new year of the Jewish calendar, it seemed a good time to pause, reflect and take stock. The lead-in to the New Year, with Yom Kippur's solemnity fast behind, seems to encourage these sorts of thoughts. (Last week's Yom Kippur went well, I think....and while it may be belated, I still offer forgiveness to any of my readers who have wronged me, in hopes that they forgive me in return, that neither of us need have each others' slights on our conscience as we move into the future.)

I've found a degree field I enjoy, and a specialization within it I want to pursue professionally and possibly for a Doctorate as well (if I get accepted. We'll see.) So what if cataloging is the obscure black art of LIS? I enjoy the work.

I've found a department I enjoy working in. This can't be overstressed. I spent last year languishing in benevolent neglect at best, for a boss who didn't like me, in libraries whose staffs I didn't really mesh with. In my first two weeks of working in the Cataloging office, I was better friends with the entire unit than I'd managed in 11 months at the Engineering and Physics libraries. I'm getting hands-on training not only in my job description as a copy-cataloger, but I'm starting to do original cataloging work as well, including some rather complicated work on some of the volumes in the backlog.

I've found a strong, vibrant Jewish community to engage with. Yes, U of I's Hillel and Chabad have a low-key tension between them, but to have a Jewish population on campus large enough and active enough to support no less than four different minyanim every friday night (reform, conservative and orthodox at Hillel, orthodox at Chabad) is such a contrast from the minimal Jewish presence at GSU (and apathetic at that).

I've found colleagues and staff in the library school I like. I may never be the world's greatest extrovert, but I've begun making friends with the professors and grad students here, and socializing with them on a regular basis.

And....perhaps the most astounding development of this past year, I've found a girl. Someone who complements me on more levels than she or I can count, who's become such a part of me in a short time, it's hard to imagine being without her. Someone who's just as crazy for me as I am for her. Keep your eyes on this space; if things continue apace, you'll likely hear further announcements regarding the Interesting Girl within the next year or so.

Looking over it all....I'm doing pretty damn well for myself. Considering where I've been in years past (and trying not to think how much of all that was self-exacerbated, if not purely self-inflicted), I'm doing exceptionally well. I do believe things are coming together for me and I'm well and truly moving forward -- a very welcome thing after so, so many years of running in circles or just plain drifting sideways.

I've long known that Hollywood exists in a world of its own that only happens to share the same space-time coordinates with planet Earth. Most times I can ignore that, but events this week have made the disparity between their reality and ours unavoidable.

( let's get this outrage party started! )

"An idea that isn't dangerous is not worth being called an idea at all." -- Oscar Wilde.

Show your support for dangerous ideas by reading a banned or challenged book this Banned Books Week.

About 3 years ago, the robotic space probe Cassini spent 12 hours in Saturn's shadow and managed to capture this spectacular image of the gas giant eclipsing the Sun:


(click to embiggen the image and see it in its full 162-miles-per-pixel-scaled glory.)

(in the upper left side, just outside the brilliantly lit main rings, you can see the pale blue dot we call home....)

So last year, I was working as a Grad Assistant in the Engineering and Physics libraries and switched over to just being an hourly employee this year in cataloging, since my boss made it eminently clear she wasn't going to renew my GA contract at Engineering.

So, I tendered my resignation from my GA contract in May, planning to start in cataloging in mid-July after attending the ALA conference in Chicago. Seems simple enough, no?

But.

I hadn't used up all my vacation and sick leave when I stopped working, meaning that the balance needed to be paid out to me.

This hasn't happened yet.

I repeat, four months later, the vacation hasn't been paid out to me. I went last week to Library HR, talking to the head of the department, who assured me that everything in my HR account was cleared up and I should be up and running by week's end.

This didn't happen.

I went back yesterday, talking again with the head of Library HR. Who proceeds to tell me that she no longer has control of my HR record, it's now being held by someone else in the HR system.
I went off to work for the afternoon and she harangued University HR, and it looks like I'll finally be paid for both my vacation from LAST YEAR and start getting the 70 hours I've accrued in cataloging paid out as well.

Will I finally get another UIUC Library paycheck?
Will my sanity hold out long enough to get this settled?

Find out about All this and more in the next installment of "In search of a paycheck"

this week, a return to classical repertoire. Enjoy Carl Reinecke's exquisite (and incredibly challenging, so I'm told) flute sonata Undine: