Walt at Random

Note the category on this post–probably the last time that category will be used, and probably the last post I’ll make while employed by RLG. (Unless I do the next “megapack” disc mini-review before midnight tonight…and yes, one’s coming, but probably not today.)

“27 and change”? That’s how long I have been/was at RLG. My vita turns out to include a small portion of what I’ve actually worked on during those 27+ years, and offers little sense of the changes during that time. Nor will I bore you with that long list of successes, “failures” (projects that didn’t result in ongoing services, and “negative successes” (cases where I helped make the case not to proceed with a project that appeared certain to do more harm than good).

“and change” also looks to the future. I’m still not sure what I’ll be doing for OCLC–but I’m pretty sure it won’t be what I’ve been doing (except for transitional work), and that’s almost certainly a good thing. (My final job at RLG, designing and implementing internal activity reports and salvaging/refining/completing customer reports, was not one I would have chosen, but it was another change that turned out to be interesting and worthwhile in its own right.)

A few weeks ago (May 31) we had the final RLG picnic/BBQ, with a commemorative T-shirt and chance to take leftover conference tchotchkes (we did a great “www.rlg.org” refrigerator magnet/clip once, along with all the pencils, magnifying rulers, RCM puzzle, and various other stuff). A bunch of “alums” (people who’d already retired or left under other circumstances) showed up.

Wednesday, we had the final RLG pot luck. I’ve never been much for the noontime potlucks, particularly after I was cut to 75% time and took off early most afternoons. This time, I went.

Today, there’s a final something-or-other going on that began at 4 p.m. at a beer-and-burger place up in the hills. I didn’t go, for a variety of reasons. (I’m not much for that kind of farewell, and I’m even less for either driving home after even one drink or hanging around there without drinking. And this being my last “part-time Friday,” I left work at 11 a.m.; it would seem odd to go back at 4 p.m., even if “work” is at a hangout.)

Monday, some portion of the remaining/ongoing staff will be there starting the long transition–probably not all that many, given that Tuesday’s July 4 and lots of people will take their first personal day under new employment to make a 4-day weekend. I’ll return to full time at that point.

Some time this weekend, or maybe later, I’ll reorganize my personal website to make appropriate affiliation changes. That process will continue, to be sure, as we get OCLC.ORG email addresses, as things firm up and change, as life goes on.

It’s been one heck of a run. I’d hoped for 30 years at RLG, but I don’t believe anyone made that landmark. Maybe a new milestone should be “six decades in library automation”–which means working more-or-less full time until 2011. That doesn’t seem implausible. (”Six decades” does not mean 60 years in this case; it means I’ll have been doing this stuff continuously and within six different decades.)

With any luck at all, you’ll see me as excited about my future at OCLC as I’ve been at times about events at RLG. With a little more luck, you’ll see me more excited about the future.

Meanwhile, it’s the weekend.

I don’t want to get into the “OPAC wars” at the moment, but reading reports on various programs, I have to ask:

What’s a “known item”?

I ask that based on the assertion by a number of people that online catalogs are only good for finding known items.

My naive sense is that a known item is one particular entity (or, pace FRBR, a work which may have multiple instantiations), identifiable by a title and, usually, an author of some sort.

In which case, I’ll assert that any decent OPAC is also good for something other than known item searching that matters to quite a few library users:

“What do you have by this author/composer/musical group?”

Maybe that is a known-item question, since it presumes knowledge of the name of the creator. But I don’t think so: The assumption is that there are multiple items, and only the creator’s name is known.

[Incidentally, the question generally is "what do you have that's currently likely to be available to me to walk out with today," not "what exists somewhere in the bibliographic universe." At least that's my public-library-patron assertion. And I do regard "oh, and by the way, so-and-so also writes under these names, and you can click here to see what's available under those names" is a very helpful additional answer, although tossing the other pseudonyms in with the initial result may not be so helpful.]
(I’ll also suggest that many OPACs are pretty decent at “more like this” searching based on hotlinked subjects or even call # browsing, but that would get into the OPAC wars, and I don’t want to go there. Yet.)

So: Do I misunderstand “known item”? Or is the claim of uselessness possibly overstated?

I probably shouldn’t write at all until at least yesterday, since I’m now 15 hours into the “travel day” and just skimmed through 458 library blog posts and 150 others (and, surprisingly, only flagged a dozen to look at again later–but I’d say at least 100 of those posts are repetitions because of Bloglines or blogging software glitches).

Still, before I forget, in no particular order, and with zero cosmic significance:

• There is no Ten in the LITA Top Tech Trends. I’ve seen that extraneous word in at least two blogs. It’s TTT: Top Tech Trends. Not TTTT.
• The time given for each TTT panelist was decided, at Midwinter, by the TTT committee and the TTT panelists. I wasn’t there. I was just The Enforcer. (Actually, a one-minute sign and a red “time up” sign were being held up in the front row of the audience–but I quickly realized that the panelists couldn’t see the signs. Too bad. I really was hoping not to say anything after summarizing Sarah Houghton’s trends…). I think five minutes is probably about right; in this case, it was literally the only way to save half an hour for managed audience questions. I think the managed-questions portion went very well (as did the whole thing, and since I’m no longer a panelist, I can say that): Most questions were included, while avoiding diatribes. (And I must apologize to Sarah: I left out “brighter” in the range of adjectives that distinguish the LiB from the bozo offering her trends.)
• I wonder whether we’ll ever have an accurate number for how many people were at ALA–which is not necessarily the same as the registration count. Exhibits felt light; my hotel noted that a number of people had cancelled at the last minute; I wouldn’t be surprised if a thousand or more people just didn’t show up. Why? Because of the “lift” problem I noted pre-conference: There just weren’t enough airplane seats on the key travel days. I know of people paying $700 for flights booked more than a month ahead, $900 for flights booked fairly well ahead–and of one person being quoted $3,000 for a coach seat a week ahead. I can say that a $900 fare would have increased my total conference expenses by nearly 50%; for a lot of people, the extra $300 to $600 or more–or just the inability to book a flight at all without staying late or going in early–may have prevented attendance.
• That said, there were still probably at least 15,000 librarians and vendors in New Orleans, and I believe most of us found attendance worthwhile. I wouldn’t have missed it…
• Apologies in general to people who might have expected to run into me and didn’t. Thanks to a combination of factors–the strain of the last couple months, four or five days of pre-ALA weather in Mountain View where the lack of air conditioning made 92 to 96 degrees difficult to bear, getting a really bad night’s [lack of] sleep Friday night, the effect of the front half of the Convention Center being closed–I was just plumb exhausted by mid-day Saturday, and took what measures I could to protect energy. That meant spending less time at social functions and marginal (for me) programs than I might otherwise have, definitely not trying to stay up for the 10:30-midnight blogger/Louisiana librarian gathering, skipping a couple of kind invitations to fancy dinners that would keep me up too late… and generally laying a little bit low.
• I’m grateful to all the folks who asked how things were going in terms of OCLC-RLG and my future. I think the short answer “It’s probably going to be all good, personally at least,” is better than the slightly longer answers I was giving. [OK, I might not word it exactly that way, but, well...]
• And, given that cheap entertainment playing slot poker was one way to preserve a little energy and sanity, I should report that Harrah’s New Orleans has good music–I’m guessing it’s more or less the same blend of oldies used in other Harrah’s, but with every third or fourth song replaced by something local (songs about New Orleans, zydeco music, songs by other NO musicians, etc.). And, unlike some casinos last time we were in Reno, the music wasn’t playing SO LOUD IT HURT YOUR EARS.
• Sure, I went to some programs. Sure, I toured all of the exhibits. Maybe I’ll have something to say about them later–but seems like lots of other people are covering things pretty well. (Cop out? You betcha.)

Oh, and I have to mention the LITA breakfast for 23 of the former presidents, as part of the division’s 40th anniversary celebration. (LITA isn’t 40 years old, but the division is: It originally had a different name, Information Science and Automation Division or ISAD.) Great stuff, and a good chance to see a bunch of people I really don’t run into that often.

Added next day: It probably isn’t obvious from the above, although my pre-conference posts may have hinted at it, but:

• Keeping ALA in New Orleans was exactly the right thing to do. Exactly. I believed it when the decision was made. I believed it after the misreported story about killings in a drug-infested area of New Orleans. And I believed it even more while I was there, starting with the cabbie who, while grumping a little about ALA’s proficiency at sending people to the airport shuttles, expressed delight at us being there (his house is “OK,” but his furnishings were a total loss)–and all the way through.
• Despite all the wonderful voluntarism, donations to NOPL funds, “over”tipping, ALA wasn’t there as a charity operation. We were there as a conference, with conferees having the usual good time in and after events. (”The usual good time” for NO being a little different than “the usual good time” for, say, Orlando.)
• As I commented on John Blyberg’s first-rate post-ALA note: We did good. New Orleans did good.

Google just published the June 2006 edition of Google Librarian Newsletter.

The “outside” article this time around is Libraries and Google/Google Book Search: No Competition!” by yours truly–written several months ago, appearing now. There’s an interesting bit of Googler feedback relating to some questions/criticisms I raise along the way. (Note: This was written long before we had examples of the somewhat-less-than-archival quality of some of the book scans.)

If this isn’t the last time “Walt Crawford, senior analyst at RLG” appears on a new publication (or its equivalent), it will be because of publishing lags. But, of course, “Walt Crawford, OCLC” and variations on that theme will start appearing…oh, probably a couple of weeks after ALA.

I’m not departing until Friday [very early], and I don’t see much point in posting my ALA schedule (don’t carry a cell phone, won’t be IMing or emailing, unlikely to be able to set up anything except in person).

But I thought I’d note a couple of things, for anyone who did want to look for me…

Friday: I plan to be at the WebJunction reception, and have registered for it–but that assumes that I get from the airport to my hotel in good time. I might be late. I might not make it at all. In the latter case, sorry I missed all you good folks…

Saturday afternoon: I might go to the LITA SF program, or I might go to “the ultimate debate,” or I might be in exhibits, or…

Saturday late afternoon, evening, night:

• I suspect I won’t make it to the LITA Happy Hour because of OCLC/RLG stuff.
• While I’ve RSVPed for the ALA blogger’s bash, 10:30 p.m. is pretty late in the day for me (I’m an early riser, and I do adjust to new time zones almost immediately). So my attendance there is, at best, iffy, and if I’m there at all it won’t be for very long.

Sunday: I will for sure be at the LITA Top Tech Trends program, but not spouting off: I’ll be the one shoving trendspotters away from the mike (or just speaking over them if there are multiple mikes) if they keep talking after their time is up. I’ll try not to have too much fun doing that, and I will be moderating the discussion period. Heck, with luck, The Experts will recognize that five minutes means five minutes, and I won’t have much to do at all.

I do plan to attend the LITA Awards Reception following the TTT program.

Monday? Well, if you’re another former LITA president, you know where I’ll be at 8 a.m. Otherwise, I’m leaving Monday just as loose as possible.

And I return on Tuesday, ready for the final three days of the 27 years and 19 days I will have worked for RLG.

In all those empty spaces, I plan to peruse the exhibits, maybe go to some other programs or discussion groups, say Hi to a few hundred colleagues and have longer conversations with some, continue my occasional gumbo survey of decent cheap places at lunch and dinner, overtip, have a glass of wine here and there, and do some minor touristy things. If you want to stop and chat, don’t let the fact that I seem to be walking like a bat out of hell dissuade you: I always walk fast…

(OK, there’s always the possibility that the San Francisco Chronicle changed the wording on the NYTimes story it reprinted this morning–but I doubt it.)

If you know New Orleans and you’re going to ALA, you must have gone “Wha?” when you read this morning that the Central Business District, CBD, was a hotbed of drug activity and was where the quintuple slaying occurred.

After all, CBD’s pretty near the conference area.

Here’s a key paragraph of a New Orleans Convention & Visitor’s Bureau statement:

Contrary to reports in the national news, the recent reprehensible murders of five youths in the city occurred at 4:00 a.m. in the sparsely populated Central City neighborhood miles away from the Central Business District, French Quarter, Convention Center and Warehouse Arts District. Unfortunately Central City has historically been the location for criminal behavior prior to Hurricane Katrina, and remains a “hot spot” for unlawful behavior. The murders have no bearing on any crime or safety issues in the areas of the city frequented by tourists.

Read “conventiongoers” for “tourists” and you get the idea: The media just plain got it wrong.

Of course you should be careful in New Orleans, more so if you’re going outside the general convention area (CBD, Warehouse Arts, Convention Center, French Quarter). For that matter, I can’t think of many cities where you should be walking around by yourself at 4 a.m. in any downtown area…
But don’t get panicked because of erroneous reporting.

Some of you may remember a flurry of posts back in 2004, offering good advice for people attending ALA. I pulled together some of those (and some other related lists) and even added one tip of my own, in Perspective: Good Advice: Making Some Lists in the July 2004 Cites & Insights. (OK, I might have added more tips during the blogging–but I didn’t have W.a.r. back then.)

I haven’t seen similar sets of advice this year, and the stuff from 2004 still makes perfectly good sense; that portion of the HTML page (down to “Suggestions for Presenters”) fits on both sides of a single sheet.

So there’s the first thought: Those tips from 2004 are just as valid this year. I’ll particularly stress “don’t overschedule” and “you will walk miles every day”

I haven’t been back to New Orleans since Katrina, but I have been back within the last two years. From what I remember of the convention center/downtown area, what I’ve read about the situation these days, and what I know of ALA’s arrangements, I will suggest a few specifics:

• You’re going to walk half a mile to get from the exhibits to the front door anyway. Add another mile to that, mile and a half at most, and you can get to many or most hotels, lots of restaurants, the French Quarter, etc. In other words: You may need the shuttle bus if you’re heavily loaded, but I think of “the sliver by the river” as a walking town, at least in daylight or in groups. For an average walking pace (say 3 miles per hour), most places you’d want to go aren’t more than 30-40 minutes from the CC’s front door, and many of them are closer than that. (Nothing wrong with taking cabs, but they may be in slightly short supply, particularly on the big flight days.)
• Which emphasizes another point: Wear comfortable shoes. If you’re able to walk a few miles a day, plan on walking a few miles a day. You’ll get more out of the town and the conference.
• And wear comfortable clothes! Figure on it being 90/90: 90 degrees (Fahrenheit) or above, and 90% humidity much of the time. One time when ALA was in New Orleans, a general call went out to scrap the coats & ties (and equivalent stuffy clothes for women). Maybe that call should have gone out this time as well. You’ll have a lot more fun when you’re not dying from the heat and damp.
• Sure, the high-end restaurants will mostly be open, apparently including Commander’s Palace. If that’s your thing, go for it: New Orleans depends on tourist/convention money, and always has. But, you know, those less fancy restaurants mostly have good Nawlins food as well, at considerably lower prices; you could put some of the difference toward maybe slightly overtipping the people who are trying to recover. (It’s real easy to figure one dollar out of every four on the bill…) (OK, I’m prejudiced on this one: I’ve generally been happier with the “ordinary” meals I’ve had in NO than with the hotshot restaurants, although they sure do fancy service at those expensive places. To my taste, the everyday NO places do food that’s maybe 80% as good as the top places, at 50% of the price,and with a whole lot less attitude. I like the neighborhood places, the semi-dives, and for that matter some of the heavily-localized hotel restaurants. Of course, I’m doing another gumbo exploration anyway, so I may not be the best judge here.)
• If you’re volunteering on one of the two special days, good for you. If you feel the need to take one of the tours that features unrecovered areas, that’s fine too. But if you just want to enjoy the conference, enjoy getting together with all your twice-a-year face-to-face friends, enjoy good food, and enjoy New Orleans for what it used to be and the pieces that have returned: You know, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. You’re part of what will bring (most of) New Orleans back: Visiting Money, Having a Good Time. If anybody tries to lay a guilt trip on you, ignore them.
• As at any conference, show a little common sense. I don’t know if post-Katrina French Quarter is still a 24-hour-a-day frat party (as one local cabbie described it at 5 a.m., as we were passing all these drunks leaning against lightposts in that 24-hour drinking town with “sure, take the drink out on the street” laws), but you know, you really don’t have to see how many Hurricanes you can drink. Going out alone most anywhere at 3 a.m. is rarely advisable in any city. And, for what it’s worth, it really doesn’t hurt to tuck your badge into your pocket when you leave the convention center or your meeting room–although, if you’re swinging one of those freebie bags, chances are your status isn’t going to be any big secret.
• Finally, and most important: Laissez lez bon temps roulez. Let the good times roll. New Orleans needs ALA. New Orleans needs you–to come, enjoy yourself, eat, drink, and spend money. And, to be sure, visit the exhibits, take in some programs, and wave or stop for a chat if you see me. [No, I don't know any French. I've been to New Orleans often enough to know that motto, though--even if I did have to check the spelling.]

Cites & Insights 6:9, July 2006 is now available. This 26-page issue (PDF as always, but most essays are also available as HTML pages from the home page) is predominantly one 18-page essay:

• Perspective: Finding a Balance: Libraries and Librarians - A mostly-upbeat continuation of the “Library 2.0″ conversation.

The issue also includes:

• Bibs & Blather
• Perspective: Scan This Book? - You must have known I’d have something to say about the Kelly/Jarvis booktrashing!
• The Library Stuff - Nine annotated citations
• My Back Pages - Eight snarky little essays

If you write a blog: Please be sure to read Bibs & Blather

Once in a while, I glance at “Web pages that suck.”

Usually very well-chosen examples of utterly horrendous web techniques.

Today’s, though, is an oddity: The Oak Ridge Boys site.

Not that the site doesn’t suck–but Vincent Flanders, proprietor of WPTS, usually excludes musical groups and artists from consideration, because such sites are expected to push the envelope.

So why did he make an exception? Because of this “incredible grammar error”:

The Oak Ridge Boys is one of America’s best known country acts.

I sent Flanders email saying that, by my standards, that’s not a grammatical error at all. The Oak Ridge Boys is a musical group; it takes the singular, just as The United States of America or The Beatles or … (at least in American English, given that corporate entities are “people” in the U.S.).

Would you say “The United States are the world’s leading exporters of pop culture”? No, you wouldn’t,

The members of The Oak Ridge Boys are musicians. The Oak Ridge Boys is a group.

Preface: I still don’t much care for “biblioblogosphere.” For one thing, there are loads of “biblio” blogs–blogs about books–outside of library blogs. For another, “sphere” implies something I don’t necessarily agree with. So I’m using “liblogs,” also less than ideal since it could apply more directly to blogs from libraries. There really isn’t a perfect word. Life is like that.

I do plan to do another investigation of sorts, probably significantly different than last year’s. I haven’t started (and won’t until after ALA), and I haven’t made any final decisions about how and what. But there are two things that bloggers out there could do to help, or at least to clarify. (A modified version of this post will appear in the next C&I and in posts to some lists, I think.)

• Want to opt out? If you just don’t want your blog involved at all, here’s what you need to do: Send email to citesandinsights@gmail.com or waltcrawford@gmail.com with the subject heading Liblog optout, and give the name of your blog and an email address I can use to verify that it’s you and not someone else. You don’t need to provide a reason. (I think this year’s look will be even less “hierarchical” than last year’s, and I can’t imagine why you’d want to be excluded, but it’s your blog and your business.) If you opt out, your blog just won’t appear. Period. Email should reach me by July 15, 2006.
• Usage numbers? I’d like to try to correlate Bloglines subscription counts with direct/indirect readership. You can help, if you have access to stats for your weblog. I won’t name names or provide individual figures, but if I get enough numbers, I may do a paragraph or two about correlations. Here’s what you can do to help:

1. Find two figures for May 2006: The average sessions per day (or total sessions: I can divide by 31), which is almost always easy to find, and the unique visitors during the month–or “unique IP addresses” if that’s what you have. Sometimes that’s a little harder to find.
   In a standard Urchin install, go to Domains and Users, then IP Addresses. The first page will have text something like this:
   IP Addresses (1-10) / 1,930
   the number after the slash is the number I want–in this case, 1,930.
   In a standard Weblog Expert install, it should be right on the General Statistics page, as “Total Unique IPs.”
   I know it’s readily available in WebTrends, and should be available in most any statistics package.
2. Send email to citesandinsights@gmail.com or waltcrawford@gmail.com with the subject line Liblog usage, and include in the body the name of the blog and the two figures (clarifying whether sessions is average per day or total for May 2006).
3. Email should reach me by July 31, 2006.

That’s it. I hope not to get any of the first category of email, but will honor whatever I do get (and can verify). I hope to get at least 10-15 of the second category. As Gmail users can guess, I’m using the subject lines so I don’t have to gather up lots of individual emails; I should wind up with one “conversation” in each category. (But if you get the subject lines wrong, I’ll deal with it.)

Thanks. Oh, by the way, if you have a liblog–not an official library blog–that you think I’ll overlook because it’s not listed in any of the typical places, you could also send me appropriate email.

That’s right–the last* Cites & Insights** will be appearing well before ALA Annual: Based on other uncertainties, I’ll say “no earlier than Wednesday, June 14, and no later than Tuesday, June 20,” with the most likely dates being Thursday, June 15 or Sunday, June 18.

*This will be the last C&I with a masthead saying “written and produced by Walt Crawford, a senior analyst at RLG.” RLG’s members approved the merger, so my last day as an RLG employee will be June 30–because that’s the last day RLG will have employees. Don’t cry for me, whether in Argentina [46 readers so far this year] or elsewhere: I’ll start working for OCLC on July 1, going back to full-time from the 75%-time position I’ve had since last fall. Sure, I lose more than 1,000 hours of sick leave in the process–but that’s a tribute to my general good health, and would happen in any job change.

The bad news: I have to change health providers, I drop back to no accumulated vacation (but get paid for the vacation I had), I’ll have to reacclimate to full-time work, I’ll miss some of the great RLG people who aren’t signing up for the transition, and the initial period–the “transition” of RLG services and stuff to OCLC–is likely to be somewhat difficult, just as the last month has been difficult. The good news: In the long run, I think there’s a good chance I might be working with (and certainly working for) a broader range of libraries, including the public libraries I admire so much–and that I might even have a job that’s a little more in line with my professional activities. And, to be sure, there are great people at OCLC as well.

**This will be the last substantive issue for this academic year. I’m sticking with the plan I announced a couple of months ago. Balance in copyright was last issue’s primary theme. Balance in libraries and librarianship–which you could consider a contribution to the ongoing discussion of web services and other new library tools–is the primary theme of the forthcoming issue. I don’t intend to have an issue as big as the Midwinter issue, although I’d love to have that much readership; at the moment, though, I have more text in the four draft essays (not including Bibs & Blather), so I’ve got a lot of editing to do. The August issue will be one most readers can cheerfully skip, a probably-short issue devoted to typography and design issues.

***What? You actually thought I was shutting down C&I just because of job disruptions? Or maybe that OCLC frowned on the publication? Wrong on both counts–and I know I have loyal readers at OCLC, as I apparently do here (this blog shows 1,613 sessions from oclc.org since May 1).

I can’t say for sure how things will go over the next months and beyond, but I’m pretty nearly certain that “regular” C&I issues will resume in mid to late August, that is, with a September issue. And I’m only a little less certain that the September issue will feature Looking at Liblogs, a new take on last year’s single most discussed article.

Coming soon: A post regarding that probable feature and what you can do now to help (or at least clarify) it.

[Modified to break up a ridiculously long paragraph. No text changes.]

All four in color (more or less, in one case)—with two of them featuring a form of prehistoric feminism. As I’m now finding to be common, about half of the IMDB user comments appear to be from people who either didn’t actually watch the film or were stoned or drunk while doing so—which in some cases may make sense. Note: Spoiler alert for two of the flicks–but if you’re watching these for suspenseful plot, you’re really in the wrong place.

Blood Tide, 1982, color, Richard Jefferies (dir.), James Earl Jones, José Ferrer, Lila Kedrova, Mary-Louise Weller, Martin Kove, Lydia Cornell, Deborah Shelton. 1:22 [1:23]

This is an odd monster movie, if only because the monster (a vicious marine beast) appears for about four seconds total. Set on a remote Greek island (no telephones), where a young man and his new wife come by fancy yacht to seek out his sister. She’s busily uncovering older layers of a religious painting (finally uncovering the prehistoric beast). Meanwhile, you’ve got James Earl Jones as a cynical treasure hunter blowing up underground areas to find ancient coins and treasure (and maybe unleash the beast) while otherwise drinking heavily, various girlfriends and others acting strangely, virgin pseudo-sacrifice…well, lots of good actors, good scenery, and a plot that doesn’t really go much of anywhere. Generously, $1.25.

The Brain Machine, 1977, color, Joy N. Houck Jr. (dir.), James Best, Barbara Burgess, Gil Peterson, Gerald McRaney. 1:25 [1:21]

Strange psychological experiments—four volunteers in a sealed environment with a beautiful scientist/doctor, two scientists outside, lots of mainframe computer equipment, a hammock of sorts that can apparently not only read minds but can insert things into them (maybe)—and a second team that really controls the experiment on behalf of The General and The Senator, now that they’ve killed the scientist who Found Out The Truth about the experiment. The volunteers turn out to be a seedy lot, but still may not deserve their fate, either crushed by the walls of a computer-controlled chamber gone wrong or electrocuted as they try to escape. A little too realistic in the resolution: When the man supposedly in charge of both experiments asks his superior how he expects to cover this up, the superior shoots him. (Sorry if this spoils the movie.) Otherwise—well, “establishing shots” of a house and pool appear interminably often for no apparent reason, as does a seemingly-identical sequence with the Real Control Team: This has the feel of a 45-minute TV episode padded out to 85 minutes. Zero for the incoherent plot and really awful ending; $0.75 for some interesting B-movie acting along the way. $0.75.

The Wild Women of Wongo, 1958, color, James L. Wolcott (dir.), a cast of beautiful nobodies (only Joyce Nizzari has more than one other film credit, and her role doesn’t even merit a character name). 1:11

As Mother Nature informs us in a voice-over, she and Father Time did an experiment 10,000 years ago that went wrong: They set up an island village Wongo, with beautiful women and “beastly” men—and, a few days’ walk away, another village with beautiful men (none with facial hair, all pretty boys) and not-so-beautiful women. There are also supposed ape men ready to attack everyone, but we only see two of them and they’re pretty pathetic. The alligator temple is also involved, with a mysterious revolving-stone entrance. When the son of the beautiful-men king comes to Wongo to ask the ugly men to go to the other village to fight off the apemen, the beautiful women go ape, and prevent the ugly men from killing him; this leads to all sorts of hijinks, with the beautiful women rounding up the beautiful men, the homely men finally meeting up with the homely women, lots of winking in the temple of the alligator, and an apparently happy ending. There’s also a parrot who talks a lot, which is one of several clues that this movie was done as a lark. (All of the prehistoric folk speak perfect English, but other than dress styles there are no obvious anachronisms—and we have to assume that women of 10,000 years ago were skilled in making fabric and preparing sundresses. I didn’t see any zippers, buttons, or seams; give them credit for this.) Not exactly serious anthropology, but harmless fun and fairly well filmed (but with complete nobodies as actors, albeit many of them very attractive complete nobodies). Oh, and of course there’s one catfight: You expected that, right? $1.25.

Prehistoric Women, 1950, color, Gregg C. Tallas (dir.), Laurette Luez, Allan Nixon, Judy Landon, David Vaile (narrator). 1:14 [1:13]

This movie would be a lot more tolerable if most “night scenes” (actually filmed in daytime but with smoke machines running) weren’t so obscured as to be nearly unwatchable. This time around (also 10,000 years, and the whole story is told as an expansion of a cave drawing), the prehistoric folks all speak unknown languages (mostly just names), and a really annoying narrator tells us what’s going on—including gems such as that “swan diving was invented before swans” and a tendency to tell us what we just saw happen. Anyway, in this case one women and some female children escape from a tribe where the women were really treated badly; the children grow up into beautiful young women in short cloth sundresses (with belts and purses of sorts, and in some cases strappy sandals, but few really egregious anachronisms), and dance themselves to exhaustion because—well, because they need men. So they capture some (wearing animal skins—I guess cloth is just for women) to use as husbands and slaves. The handsomest one escapes; on his way back to his tribe (in caves), he manages to discover fire. (Otherwise, it’s fair to say that the men are…well, they can’t figure out how to pick up rocks and throw them back at the women who are slingshotting them, and they don’t seem to have progressed from clubs to spears. As Harry Belafonte would say, “That’s right, the women are smarter.”) He comes back to rescue the others, gets captured, various subplots with a nine-foot giant and a flying chicken—sorry, dragon—are resolved, mostly with this burning stuff (did you know that striking any two rocks together repeatedly will cause fire just when you need it?)…oh, and of course the men turn the tables on the women. Yes, there’s a catfight in this one as well. They discover cooked meat in the process, and I guess they all live happily ever after. The acting is…well, unlike Wild Women of Wongo, there’s no reason to believe they weren’t kidding. Very generously, $0.75, if only as an early D-grade color curiosity.

Sigh, I had a nice long post ready here to guide frustrated C&I readers to a small, fast PDF reader: Foxit Reader. Recommended by PC World, it’s a free under-3MB download (one .exe file, no install, may cause security questions since it’s an executable) that starts up in a second or so and looks to have most Adobe Reader functionality. Not much speed improvement over Adobe Reader 7, but a lot better than the initial “let’s load umpteen pieces” Reader 6 startup.

Only one problem (well, three: Making it the active reader in Firefox is a slight nuisance, and there’s no text-to-speech capability):

For C&I, at least, the printouts aren’t identical to the original. It appears that Foxit Reader is doing something strange with embedded fonts–perhaps emulating them or just not getting them quite right. The results are that spacing’s a little off here and there, and the Berkeley Bold I use for boldface (which is not a bold version of Berkeley Book, the regular text face) is badly off, looking like something’s wrong with the type. Small differences, but the result is a slightly “jaggedy” page. If I hadn’t spent my own money and a fair amount of time getting C&I to look as good as possible, I might not care–but I did, so I do, and the clash between the magnificent Berkeley Book typeface and the slightly helter-skelter outpout from Foxit was too much to deal with.

If none of that matters to you, you might find Foxit Reader worthwhile. As it stands, I can’t recommend it (so won’t provide a download link): After all, the whole point of PDF is presenting an accurate rendition.

Well, there’s an hour or two of my own time (at home and at lunch) wasted; now to go home this evening and restore Adobe as the PDF viewer of choice in IE and Firefox.

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Note: The Foxit spacing problem has since been solved, but I haven’t had occasion to do a new check. It may be a good alternative to Reader.

I did something this morning that I’ve rarely had to do: Deleted a comment that had made it past Spam Karma 2.

I didn’t tag it as spam, because it wasn’t clearly spam. But I did consider it offtopic and mildly offensive, an all-lower-case rant. It wasn’t a case of disagreeing with me; it was a case of being disagreeable.

I maintain open commenting, which is becoming rarer (I think). I intend to feel free to delete comments that I regard as inappropriate.

As for trackbacks, those were originally allowed but didn’t appear; now they’re explicitly disallowed, as a second line of defense for the thousands (literally) of spam trackback attempts. (Spam Karma’s number at the foot of the page is real, unfortunately.)

I seem to have a new problem (is this a “lazyweb” call for help? dunno): I’m no longer getting email when a comment appears. Since I’m not likely to check W.a.r. more than once a day or so (and a whole lot less than once a day if I’m offline, e.g. during ALA or vacations), that may mean that comments don’t get read and responded to (or deleted, as necessary) for a while. I do read every comment, when I see them. I’d love to know how to get the mail notification to work again…I’m guessing it’s some interaction between Spam Karma and WP’s discussion settings.

That’s it: No big deal. (Oh, as for the informal ALA New Orleans post: It appears that the post to LITA-L never made it, for reasons unknown. If someone else wants to copy that text, or just the airport-related portion, to LITA-L or any other list, be my guest; just say “Walt Crawford sez” or something of the sort. Jessamyn’s comment indicates that not-wildly-unreasonably-priced tickets are still available from some cities for some dates, but that may not last long.)