In "The Free Library of Philadelphia is an increasinly librarian-free Library service."

Dude, I'm at school. My school pays for online subscriptions to fucking every scholarly journal out there What on Earth could possibly make you think that those online journals are not part of the library? Consider that each journal has been selected, indexed, cataloged, and paid for by librarians.

In "Christianity and BDSM."

Q: Why did Jesus stay on the cross for three days? A: Because he forgot his safe word.

In "Top 1000"

Seems the key-word is titles; doesn't specify what sort of titles, book, CD, cartoon, whatever. Authority titles. It's safe to assume that the vast, vast majority of a library's holdings will be books. Catalogs do not differentiate between cartoon books and text books. If one examines a result, i.e. "Garfield," you will find a little doohickey that says "Bibliographic records." In the case of Garfield, there are 91 and in the case of Huck Finn, 1,093. Each record describes a different edition of a work or bibliographic entity. My guess would be that Garfield-the-comic-strip is interpreted as a serial and that each individual strip is a part of a larger work. This'd be analagous to serials or bound journals. That Huck Finn has 1,093 bibliographic records indicates that the OCLC member libraries have collected that number of different editions. Or something like that. One night I got blasted off Kris Kristofferson and Old Crow and forgot everything I learned in cataloging.

In "Curious George: Is College Really This Easy:"

Heh. Wait 'til you get to grad school. I'm ~halfway through my master's and it's a joke. I'm thinking of getting a PhD on the theory that it's far easier than working. (Plus I can practice music all day, go to shows every night, and play shows on the weekends.) Fuck college.

In "Curious George: Let's Secede"

So what you're telling me is that the North should rise again?

In "How about a caption for this pic..."

George W. Bush: Finger on the trigger but not smart enough to release the friggin' safety.

In "Virginity Rules!"

They are clearly not virgins on account of their site design is thoroughly and epicly fucked. I mean really, what god would allow a Flash interface and popping up the main body of the site in a dickweed little window?

In "Curious George: Why don't you vote?"

Because voting for a politician makes you an accomplice to their crimes. Adapted from an old, old Life in Hell comic by Matt Groening

In "Curious George: Favorite Online Cartoons"

Daily Dinosaur Comic. I love this one. It's nerdy but really, really cool. And the drawing stay the same every day. How rad, eh?

In "Curious George: Quarter life Crisis, job, blah blah"

In seriousness and overcoming my scholastic cynicism, it may be a field that's a good deal more complicated that it initally appears. It's also somewhat broader than reshelving books and going 'bing' at the checkout. My program covers everything from kind of groovy cognitive approaches to how people look for information to management and administration to databases to customer (patron) service to community analysis to knowledge organization. About half of the faculty are computer science PhDs, maybe a quarter are traditional librarians, and the rest are pretty evenly split between lawyers and philosphy PhDs. To return to the original question, there are positions as librarian's assistants or paraprofessionals with the same relationship to a librarian as a paralegal has to an attorney. There are community college programs for this line of work, though I haven't any experience with them myself. One could work in a public library, academic (university) library, or in the private sector in a corporate or law library. I'm uncertain what the pay is like, but the people that work in libraries tend to be cool people to be around, though I am a bit biased. About the greatest job ad I ever saw was for a librarian's assistant at Battelle. The job did not require an MLS/MLIS (Masters of Library/Library and Information Science) and started at, if I recall correctly, $2,800-3,100US/month for 25 hours a week. I don't recall if benefits were included, but you can imagine the appeal. I'm willfully ignoring my own job prospects right now, so I don't know if that's a common job description/salary range but it pretty much describes my dream job, and I'm pretty similar to the poster except I've got grad school as a day job. Also, one of the drummers I play with works intermittently as a paralegal. That might be worth considering as well.

You know, the farther I get into the program, the more I ask myself that very same question...

Librarian might be worth thinking about. The librarian college I'm at is chock full of ex and current musicians and is pretty gig friendly. However, it does require a master's degree (the job, not the college), which is neither cheap nor particularly fast. And I've heard that it is the only field requiring the aforementioned masters that pays *less* than elementary education.

In "Sperm counts fall as guys get lucky"

>I had 41 last week Are you bragging or complaining? Merle Haggard would say he's just talking to himself here, man-to-man.

In "MetaFilter's down again."

It's my understanding that Metafilter went down because Matt turned on unlimited new user signups for the briefest of moments and the resulting influx crashed the server irrevocably.

In "Big SUVs have been BANNED from many public streets, but nobody seems to have noticed "

goetter raises an excellent point and one that suggests the author is either an idiot or trolling the SUV haters. For example, my Toyota Tacoma four-by (20 mpg in the city, 25 highway, ~8,000 miles annually) has a GVWR of... *walks to driveway* 5,100 lbs. Actual weight of the vehicle last time I made a dump run was 4,200 lbs with a full tank of gas, me, my dog, a topper, and a couple hundred pounds of assorted crap in the tool box. It's probably a 3,600 lb truck fully empty. I will also mention that there is an exemption for local deliveries on GVWR restrictions on everything but bridges, IIRC. That's how come movers and delivery folk are allowed to drive their big-assed semis into residential neighborhoods.

In "Curious George: Mefi New Member Sign Up?"

/sings I've got MeFi I've got Gmail I've got karma on Plastic a first post on Slashdot I'm the number-one hit when you Google my name So never fe-e-a-a-r-r! I'm king of the blog-o-spheeerrreeee!!! Or is that a little smug?

In "Who was General Tso and why are we eating his chicken.? "

I would like to formally thank all y'all for helping me to decide what to have for dinner.

In "What OS are you?"

I am Amiga. It's okay, I guess. I really wanted to be Nextstep. (He types from a powerbook w/ a terminal open)

In "Curious George: fashion"

Just remember, mere months ago that undergrad was a high school student. It'll all make much more sense that way.

In "Clapton's Guitar Tech Speaks!"

Ooo. I envy your Dan-o. They're unspeakably sweet. I've got one of the first re-issue six-strings they built (before they started calling them the U-2) and it does that kind of Gretschy thing ever so well. It does, I confess, help that I tore out all the electronics but the pickups and had it rewired with somewhat higher quality gear. And if it's time to brag about our guitar collections... I have a '40s Gibson acoustic, I think an L-00 or something, and a '71 Les Paul Custom (both on loan from the my-older-brother-who-no-longer-plays collection), the aforementioned Dano, an '88 Stratocaster with sentimental value and a neck warped to near unplayability, an '85 Squire Tele (my favorite), two lap steel, one mother of toilet seat and one bakelite, two pedal steels (one ten-string and one twelve), a Deering Goodtime banjo, and a National Estralita. I got carried away, what can I say? I do play shows and work the occaisional session. And most of the guitars I'm willing to lend out to players I trust. Oh yeah, couple old Fender amps too. And, the jewel of my collection a Peavey Classic 20. The cheapest and most under-rated supplier of pure tube tone I've ever found. And it's tweed!

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