It was rather striking how contemporary to our current situation that whole thing sounded like.

So a key plot part in 'No Down Payment' is that Jeffrey Hunter's character (who worked at Los Alamos during WWII) is an electrical engineer that is getting pressured by his company and his wife to do more of the sales for the increased pay and more job dynamics. He's resistant mainly because he only sees himself as an engineer. But he also has moral qualms because the machine he is working on is an automation system for a factory and he acknowledges that it will put 500 people out of a job.

I usually don't mind the hoops, if they're not too onerous. There was one recently that I had to tell the person we just couldn't meet the requirements.

I acknowledge that many of these students are already stressed by the class and the whole exam thing and the foreign nature of getting a proctor, so I really try to make it as easy as possible for them.
I can afford the executive processing to handle the bureaucracy better than they can at that moment.

I think today is the first time I had a professor ask *ME* what my procedures were for proctoring an exam.

I usually have to find out what hoops an exam-giving institution wants me to jump through.

We both agreed on the simplest and best method: he will email me the exam and instructions and I will scan and email it back when the student is done. It was a very productive 2 minute phone call that was mostly me spelling my email address.

Saw a headline that McConnell is being released from his rehab center.

Also saw a headline that Murkowski is opposed to the Blanche nomination.

Coincidence? Probably not. They'll probably puppet McConnell's rotting corpse up the aisle to vote.

Watching 'No Down Payment' from 1957 and it's interesting to see Tony Randall playing a sleazy philandering used car salesman.

This movie is actually pretty great so far. It's interesting to see films at the end of the 50s begin pushing the envelope on their stories and the edges of the Hays Code.

Because of all the conditioning

You know why VOIP phone systems suck? When the Internet goes down, you can't call IT to tell them that the Internet has gone down.

I recently read 'Hamnet' by Maggie O'Farrell and while the book was okay, the best part was the little narrative sequence that explained how the bubonic plague traveled from Egypt to England.
It's amusing to see that Sapkowski did pretty much the same thing nearly 20 years earlier in 'The Lady of the Lake'

This paper also featured a story about Ted Kennedy being charged with leaving the scene of an accident that led to the death of Mary Jo Kepchne

Catching up on obituary requests, and one of them is from the paper on the day when the Apollo 11 astronauts launched from the Moon to begin their return to Earth.

I always love seeing the various news stories in the papers when I have to go find obits.

So apparently the email capability of our obituary index website went tits up sometime in April. I tried troubleshooting a bunch yesterday but I don't know if it is a MS change, a PHP change, or something changed by our IT that affected SMTP.
This stuff used to be rather easy before we had to content with spammers, scrapers, and crawlers. Why do people have to ruin stuff?

Decided to runaround the problem and embedded a new form from MS Forms, and figured out Power Automate a bit to send emails

August 4 is International Owl Awareness so I am sharing my parliament! The delightful term for a group of owls is a parliament. I love the whimsical terms of venery for groups of animals and this is part of my ongoing series of linocut terms of venery prints. For my parliament of owls I made two columns of local owls. You can decide for yourself which are the loyal oppositions and which are the government in this parliament!

🧵1/

mcdonald's restaurant sign, detail two, route 66, azusa, california, 1979

Doing some collection development and I was on the fence about a book. I thought it sounded great, but I'm not sure it will do very well in the library.
But then we've not been order a whole lot of nonfiction, and shelves are getting barer. So I'm getting it, and maybe it will find an audience.

I am also still listening to 'Pandora's Star' by Peter F. Hamilton.

I had really forgotten how long it took this book to get to the actual plot of the series. I've been listening for about 10 hours and it's still not there.

#FridayReads
@bookstodon

This week I'm reading 'The Lady of the Lake' by Andrzej Sapkowski, the fifth full novel in The Witcher series.

I'm interested in the story (although this one seems so much more horny than the previous books which never shied away from sex), but the structure of it is needlessly complicated. It's rather a frustrating read because the author refuses to stick with a plot or even a timeline with any consistency. Everything is just being talked about secondhand.

#FridayReads
@bookstodon

This is just to say

I have OCRed
the text
thet was in
tne arch:ve

and whicb
yov were prabaldy
seamhing
for "breahtast"

Fargme ms
fheg mem debo:w5
sb ?mccf
mmb 5c oc1b

Legends & Lattes is getting a graphic novel edition! Excellent!

Synopsis for an upcoming Donald Duck comic:
"Christmas isn't looking too cheerful for the citizens of Duckburg until Huey, Dewey, and Louie discover gold on Uncle Scrooge's land -- but getting it out and safely to Scrooge's money bin proves to be far more complicated than anyone thought. But along the way -- presents for everyone!"

Doesn't Scrooge have a swimmable vault of gold coins? If the gold is on his land, isn't it his? How does that help Duckburg?