An election-day tag cloud
For our US members:
LibraryThing is strictly non-partisan; I'm not trying to make any points with my selections! I tried to think of issues and topics that were in play this year, or that commonly motivate Americans' votes. I left out education because there are so many books tagged education that it made all the other tags look like ants! And what this? Nine million tags and not one gubernatorial?
I do have one semi-political comment to make. I went down to our new voting place, a freshly built school on Munjoy Hill in Portland. The school also houses the local branch of the Portland Public Library, and indeed the school's library and the branch library are intermixed.
Well THAT lasted a few weeks! Now the branch library is closed to adults during the day so that patrons and school children can't come into contact. How sad. How very sad.
LibraryThing is strictly non-partisan; I'm not trying to make any points with my selections! I tried to think of issues and topics that were in play this year, or that commonly motivate Americans' votes. I left out education because there are so many books tagged education that it made all the other tags look like ants! And what this? Nine million tags and not one gubernatorial?
I do have one semi-political comment to make. I went down to our new voting place, a freshly built school on Munjoy Hill in Portland. The school also houses the local branch of the Portland Public Library, and indeed the school's library and the branch library are intermixed.
Well THAT lasted a few weeks! Now the branch library is closed to adults during the day so that patrons and school children can't come into contact. How sad. How very sad.
posted by Tim at 4:40 PM
18 Comments:
I've also got "politics-u.s.", "politics-Illinois", "politics-Chicago", "radical politics", "political cartoons", "political art", "political philosophy", "anarchism", and, of course, "handbags" (closest tag I could find to "This country is going to hell in a handbasket!").
Oh, I found one person tagged one book as "soccer moms." The book? Little children. Excellent.
http://www.librarything.com/tag/soccer%20moms
To bad about the library but not a surprise. Just a classic example of a lack of forethought.
Not that I think you deliberately left them out, but I think civil liberties and constitutional law have been hot topics, too, though not as vocally most recently as Iraq and Foley have replaced warrantless wiretapping and signing statements in the news. And there are "third party" terms which are pretty heavily represented here, more so than national voting would indicate; libertarianism, for instance, seems to be overrepresented in readers here.
There's a "gubernatorial" tag now! Just for you.
And that sounds like 20 years ago in my school district, when they were making all the classrooms (libraries especially) "open-space" and within a week of the buildings opening the teachers had rigged together makeshift walls.
As a former Hill resident who used to live about a five-minute walk from the old school, I'm very sorry to hear that it's closing during the day. That used to be my library branch of choice when requesting books on hold or just to browse. I now live on the other end of town, but I miss my branch library.
Yo, Tim! What's all this: Warning: include(/inc_nav.php) [function.include]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/tspalding/live.librarything.com/data/blog/index.php on line 374
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That's up at the top of this page where the tabs used to be.
lilithcat - Tim's working on putting the navigation tabs back on top on the blog page right now, which is probably why you're seeing errors. Soon, all will be well...
Soon, all will be well...
And so it came to pass. ;-))
(Iigured it was something like that, but wanted to mention it just in case.)
No, thanks. We're upgrading it in various ways now, so expect bumps.
Our town is building a new library. Very exciting, it took more than two years to get it through town meeting! For the past year, and until the new library is finished, the library is housed in one end of the newly renovated elementary school. They have a separate entrance, but still it is closed during school hours. sad... Not my idea of community or inclusion.
Hey Crow, have we met?
Language: Sorry for your probem. I need to get into author issues again. As I said somewhere, the plumbing is changing so trying to fix them one at a time is tough. But I did run the "reconciliation" script, which fixed your problem as far as I can see. That doesn't mean similar problems can't happen between runs of the script. Apologies and we're working on it.
On schools and libraries:
I'm just troubled by the mania around children and pedophiles. It's a serious problem, along with many other dangers children face—car accidents, choking, peanuts in the sauce, etc.—but it's risen to a level of hysteria such that most children today are kept inside and protected more than children in Sarajevo under seige. When I was a kid, I wandered my neighborhood looking for stuff to do with friends. I wasn't shuttled from one organized activity to another, with every moment of my day scripted and bubble-safe. There were—studies have shown—just as many pedophiles snatching kids then as now. Can't parents come to terms with trade-offs? Nothing will keep their kids 100% safe; there are trade-offs and—pardon the crassness—costs of doing business.
Incidentally why not return to giving librarians wider discretion to eject and ban people? Pardon the hot-button issue...
Tim, I totally agree. Your last message could have been written by me! The scare hasn't reached my country full-scale yet, but we are getting there...- Yay for free-roaming children (and yes we did stupid things such as digging a cave in a sand hill).
A question about the blog: The comments never show a date, only a time. Bit confusing, really. Any way to tweak the settings?
Oh, you're right. That's annoying!
I just changed it. Or, well, I just flipped the switch and asked it to rebuild the whole thing. Cross your fingers...
"Now the branch library is closed to adults during the day so that patrons and school children can't come into contact."
The official reason (according to their press release): "“We feel that adding Saturday hours and shifting the weekday hours toward the afternoon and evening will better serve the public.” Damien also said that parking should be more plentiful in the late afternoons, evenings, and on Saturdays."
Whatever that means.
"most children today are kept inside and protected more than children in Sarajevo under seige"
Have you ever been to Sarajevo, that you can make that judgement?
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