Walt at Random

Just a numeracy quickie:

On the way in to work, listened to a news report about a “green” car show (on California Report, CA NPR stations, produced by the local station). So far, so good.

Some official said it was so important because Californians buy one out of every ten cars sold in the U.S., which she seemed to think was a startling fact.

Antennae having risen, I confirmed what I believed to be the case: One out of every eight people in the U.S. lives in California.

So I guess the startling fact is that Californians buy cars at a slower rate than the rest of the country–that it’s not the “car-crazy” state after all?

Fifty musicals for $15-$20. What could that mean? Clearly, you’re not going to get the spectaculars like West Side Story, Oklahoma, The Music Man for that kind of money (I’m seeing some very cost-effective collections of deluxe two-disc editions of such musicals, though—like six of them for $70 or less). As I go through these, it may be interesting to see how “musical” is defined—it can be a picture about music or musicians (real or fictional) so that lots of music gets included, a picture with a regular plot that has lots of music (well-integrated into the plot or otherwise), a musical revue on film—and maybe other things. This set has four or five duplications with other 50-movie packs I’ve reviewed, but at least three of the four I’m sure of are quite good movies, so that’s OK.

As an amusement, I note that Mill Creek Entertainment follows the erratic spelling of what these movies appear on: the incorrect “Disk” on the sleeves, the correct “Disc” on the discs themselves. As with all the 50-movie packs, assume VHS-level transfers, frequently from mildly-damaged originals, with no special features and (always) four scene divisions per title (most packs now have intelligent scene breaks, not just an arbitrary quarter of the length). If there are enough missing frames to reduce the run length by more than a minute from what appears in IMDB, I give the actual DVD run time in [square brackets]. The dollar rating at the end of each mini-review is fairly forgiving and ranges from $0 to $2.50, although anything over $2 is rare. A buck or more means I think the movie is worth watching on the whole and might conceivably watch it again; $1.50 or more means I think the movie would be worth buying as a bargain DVD on its own.

Disc 1

The Fabulous Dorseys, 1947, b&w, Alfred E. Green (dir.), Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Janet Blair, Paul Whiteman, Bob Eberly, Helen O’Connell, Art Tatum, William Lundigan. 1:28.

The Dorseys aren’t much as actors, and the plot may be realistic but still comes off a bit hokey—but it doesn’t really matter. Great music by great musicians, including a first-rate jam session with Art Tatum. Pretty decent print quality, and the sound track’s more than good enough. Worth watching just for the musical numbers. $1.50.

Calendar Girl, 1947, b&w, Allan Dwan (dir.), Jane Frazee, William Marshall, Gail Patrick, Kenny Baker, Victor McLaglen, Franklin Pangborn. 1:28 [1:20]

Cute plot, good musical numbers, but the sound’s badly damaged in portions and the picture’s pretty frayed as well. I’d give this $1.25 in a decent transfer, but can’t go higher than $0.75 under the circumstances.

Sunny, 1941, b&w, Herbert Wilcox (dir.), Anna Neagle, Ray Bolger, John Carroll, Edward Everett Horton, Grace Hartman, PLaul Hartman, Martha Tilton. 1:38 [1:35].

This one also suffers from a badly damaged print, but it’s a thoroughly enjoyable flick nonetheless—this time with a plot that actually drives the movie. Sunny Sullivan’s a circus performer (singer, horseback rider) who meets up with the wealthy scion of an automaker during Mardi Gras in New Orleans. They get engaged. The circus friends (Ray Bolger and crew) show up at the wedding and she runs away with them—but of course love conquers all: It’s a musical! Even with the damage, this one’s worth $1.25.

Swing Hostess, 1944, b&w, Sam Newfield (dir.), Martha Tilton, Iris Adrian, Charles Collins, Betty Brodel, Cliff Nazarro, Harry Holman. 1:16.

Martha Tilton was a vocalist for Benny Goodman and is absolutely first rate as a singer, and more than good enough as an actress. As with Calendar Girl, this one’s partly set in a “struggling artist” apartment house—this time with lots of novelty acts (magician, acrobats). The plot hinges on a situation that could only have happened during a few years: The master disks on which records are directly cut are so expensive that a recording studio head (and masher) insists on using the rest of a disk that Tilton’s already cut a demo on—and her half gets released as though by the (awful-sounding) girl the head brings in. Hijinks ensue (this is most definitely a comedy), and of course it all works out. The most interesting part here: “Telephone jukeboxes” in restaurants, where you put in a coin, pick up a phone, and tell the operator what tune you want, at which point she plays the disc on one of several turntables at the central station. I can only assume this actually happened. Not great, but quite good. $1.25.

…made me who I am: thinking for myself, appreciating engineering and science but also literature and music, believing that ethics come from within and that we need to treat other people well because we’re all in this together, not because some giant shaking finger in the sky will smite us otherwise. (My father was also, always, a strong, active, supportive church member, even president of the Modesto Council of Churches for some time as lay leader of his church…that’s a different issue. My brother called him a “James Christian.” Some of you will know what that means better than I do.)

…was reliable. If he said he’d do something, he did it.

…was head of a functional family. We grew up knowing we were loved. Not a lot of money (he was always a city employee, back when that meant, well, not getting a lot of money), but lots of what we needed.

…was always intellectually curious, reading, learning, discussing. Was also a woodworker, electrician, civil engineer (by trade), stamp collector, genealogy buff, photographer, and more.

…was married almost 60 years to my mother; then, a year or so after she died (when he was 88 or 89), married a 91-year-old widow in the church and had another first-rate marriage for more than 7 years before she died.

…was a mensch.

…had 97 good years and most of a 98th good year, albeit with more trouble getting around and some other problems. He died in his sleep, apparently without pain.

…was born November 30, 1908; died November 18, 2006; and had his life celebrated yesterday afternoon at First United Methodist Church in Modesto, in a service that he had a large part in designing and would have liked, even if it ran a little long.

No condolences required. He was a good man and a good father. He had a great run. I was reminded yesterday how much he meant to many parts of his community–the church, the Engineer’s Club, Y’s Men and the YMCA and the camp, Camp Jack Hazard, and more. I was reminded in some ways how relatively little I’ve done by comparison.–and, to be sure, how proud he was of what I have done.
If you’re interested, the obituary notice should still be available from the Modesto Bee:

Start here, go to the search box, enter “crawford” (I can’t link directly to the result); the name’s Charles Crawford.

Seems to be a fair amount of excitement among libloggers about Blog Slurper, a new Blurb template/program to, well, slurp up the contents of a blog and turn them into a book.

Dave Hook, The Industrial Librarian, thinks it might make sense to turn all of the Carnivals of the Infosciences into a book. Steven Cohen, Library Stuff, thinks ALA Editions should jump on that idea.

And I just don’t get it–particularly for something like the Carnivals.

I’m not saying blooks–books based on blogs–never make sense; there are clearly cases where they’re good ideas.

I’m also not dissing the Carnivals; I make a point of reading them, and am delighted that they’re all listed in a nice compact wiki page. Checking a few of them from that page confirmed my gut feeling. Some Carnivals consist of heavily-annotated/commented links; some consist of links with just enough annotation to guide you to the original post. Many Carnival inclusions are reasonably ephemeral, and they cover a huge range of subjects somehow related to the overall theme.

To turn this into a book, you’d need extensive indexing–and you’d be left with a book full of URLs, a book that made relatively little sense without, ahem, typing those URLs into a browser and hoping that the blogs were still around. It would still be an astonishingly random book.

Could such a book really attract enough readers to justify the cost of indexing and production within ALA Editions’ overhead structures? What would be the sales pitch for buying a print book that’s not quite as useful as the wiki page? I may be missing something here–but I’m probably as strong a “print books ROOL!” person as most any liblogger, and this is one where I don’t see print books as the right medium.

For that matter, I wonder whether you could use Blog Slurper to produce a formatted manuscript for any publisher other than Blurb? That’s a secondary question; the easiest part of turning the Carnivals into a book would be harvesting the text and transferring it to Word or QuarkXPress or whatever. I think that’s also true for most other blogs–if I wanted to produce a book based entirely on selections from this blog (unlikely, although it’s highly likely that text from this blog will turn up in books at some point), “slurping up” the posts–presumably by category, since pure chronology makes no sense at all for a multitopic blog–would be the easy part.

Among others who’ve posted enthusiastically about Blurb and Blog Slurper, Greg McClay (citing Rachel Singer Gordon’s post,, as I should also do), is apparently thinking about producing such a blook so he can be reminded of what he’s written.

Really? As with most any WordPress blog, McClay’s blog has a search box that works very well, and he uses categories to label posts. Between the two tools, I’ve never had any problem locating an old post–although I’m sometimes bemused by the other posts that come up, along the lines of “Oh, I said that too, didn’t I?” Here again, I wonder how a print book is going to make it easier to locate old posts.

Then there’s the other problem with Book Slurp: Blurb’s pricing. Right now, Blurb is designed to produce full-color vanity books, and priced accordingly. Let’s say that you slurp up 50,000 words of posts–which really isn’t all that much text for a year’s worth of a fairly frequent blogger, and is the length of many typical nonfiction library books these days. [This post all by itself is just over 1,000 words--admittedly, pretty darn long for a weblog.] Assuming plausible formatting on Blurb’s current full-page service (they don’t yet offer 6×9 text-only paperbacks), that would probably yield about 100-120 pages. (In a well-formatted 6×9 paperback, figure not much more than 300 words per page, but I’m assuming 400-500 words per page for the larger pages.)

Blurb wants $30 bucks a copy for such a book. Plus $9 shipping. Of which Blurb keeps 100%.

Blurb’s strength is pure ease of use (you don’t have to understand book design, you don’t need to layout the book and produce a PDF file, you just have to populate a template), and the service makes sense for very short run gift books: Where you want to produce photo albums for four family units, for example, Blurb may make sense.

Otherwise…well, check Lulu or Cafe Press, to give two examples of operations set up to support true self-publishing for short-run books dominated by text. Assuming that the 50,000-word blook requires 170 6×9 pages (with generous text size and margins), Lulu’s production and distribution price would be $7.94 a copy; I believe their default shipping charges are low. The price of a Lulu book is set by the author (at or above the production costs), and the author gets 80% of the difference between price and cost; thus, that blook that’s $30 plus shipping on Blurb might be $15 plus shipping on Lulu, with the author getting $5.60 per copy sold.

I’m not touting Lulu here, and it’s absolutely true that you can’t compare black-and-white 6×9 paperbacks to full-color 8×10 or 8.5×11 paperbacks. Lulu charges 15 cents a page for color pages, as opposed to two cents a page for b&w; a 100-page full-color book would start at right around $20 a copy–still, to be sure, considerably lower than Blurb. But the author has to design the book, at least in part. (There are quite a few services that compete in different ways. I’m just using one example.)

(Print-on-demand makes sense for very short run books, or where you can’t predict the sales level at all. When/if I do some C&I-related books, I’ll use Lulu or a competitor. But if you can project several hundred sales and have ways to distribute a book, traditional methods are still considerably cheaper.)

So what am I missing? How would a print book serve the Carnivals? Why would it be easier to search than a blog with a search box and categories?

I was checking Bloglines, and encountered this post at Grumpator. I’m not going to comment on the meat of the post (although I probably should: can I just say, appalling and saddening but not at all surprising, unfortunately).

But Grumpator also commented about comments–about moderating them, that is, and I was so struck by the list of reasons for deleting comments that I followed the link to John Scalzi’s whatever.

And can only say, “Me too,” except that I don’t moderate all comments–but have no particular qualms about deleting them. Scalzi’s list of reasons for offing a comment strike me as eloquent and just about right, and maybe I would add Grumpator’s little extra:

There may be some leeway if the comment is signed and I know you (and consequently know you’re full of shit), but Anonymous posts in particular are regarded with a great deal of suspicion.

Actually, I generally don’t knowingly allow anonymous posts under any circumstances. LISNews is plagued by anonymous cowards; W.a.r. doesn’t have to be. Traceable pseudonyms (Angel, for example) are just fine.

Note: Other than the usual spamment, I haven’t been having any particular trouble in this area of late, but now I have something to point to when/if problems do arise in the future.

As I was plowing through 600+ posts on Bloglines (a couple hundred of them phantom posts, the already-read posts that seem to show up in clumps of 25 from one blog every so often), I encountered one in which, in passing, the poster asked whether New York City was the 4th safest large city or the 1st–because of a statement from New York politicians saying they were #1 (where the published rankings show them as #4 and San Jose, the largest city in Northern California, as #1).

Not a contradiction, probably; rather, the joy of definitions. The New York claim is based on reducing “large cities” to the ten largest cities in the U.S., where the published ranking is based on the 31 cities with more than half a million people.

Heck, if the tenth largest city becomes safer than NYC, the NYC politicos can always redefine the population of “large cities” again…until maybe it’s “cities with more than three million people that happen to be situated on an island,” and then they get to keep the safest large city rating forever.

Nothing new here. For years, Holland America has bragged about being the highest-rated “large cruise line,” and the definition of “large cruise line” is always one based on number of ships, so as to exclude the cruise lines rated much higher than Holland America (Crystal, Regent Seven Seas, Silverseas, and Holland America’s corporate mates Windstar and Seabourn have two to five ships each; Holland America has quite a few more).

Did you know that Cites & Insights has the most readers of any ejournal*? I suspect that’s a true statement; it’s just not a particularly meaningful or interesting one once you read the footnote. The key is to come up with an apparently meaningful broad definition, with the details in the fine print…

*In the field of librarianship produced and edited by a single person

That’s not fair, of course: There are doubtless wonderful hotels in Manhattan that carry the “boutique” label. But I thought a quick post might not be out of order after returning from a quick speaking trip.

I’m not naming the organization I was speaking to, because they’re not really to blame for the hotel problem and absolutely not to blame for the other problem (see below). They offered three possible hotels that were reasonably priced and not too far away from the conference venue and suggested reserving very early. I failed to reserve very early, and the other two hotels were unavailable.

First, the other situation: Be wary of SuperShuttle in Manhattan. I use it in other cities, almost always with very good success. This time, with a prepaid voucher (thanks to Orbitz’ recommendation), I arrived at the pickup point at 4:35 p.m. (SuperShuttle doesn’t actually have airport stations, at least not in JFK Terminal 9). I arrived at my hotel at…7:25 p.m. Yes, part of that was Manhattan’s grotesque rush hour; a lot more, though, was loading up the van with people going to six different places–and, as I didn’t realize until my return to the airport, almost perversely bad choices as to routing. (Going by the same buildings in the same direction two or three times didn’t give me a lot of confidence either.) When I asked at the hotel how early I should book a SuperShuttle return on Saturday (I had a prepaid voucher for that as well), in order to be sure of reaching the airport by 7. a.m., they said “4 a.m.–if they show up.” I booked a sedan, which took 25 minutes to get to JFK from the hotel. Sure, it was $50 instead of $17–but my time’s worth something.

Now, as to the hotel (and I use the term loosely): That one I will name–the Union Square Inn.

Here’s the description on their website:

Welcome to Union Square Inn, the finest affordable boutique hotel in Manhattan, New York City. Great rates, great location and great service make us the best New York boutique hotel choice.

Not merely a boutique hotel, but the “finest” and “best” New York boutique hotel!

I suppose “European-style” and “cozy” elsewhere on the site might be warning signs. Despite the claim of rooms as low as $99, the rate wasn’t that wonderful: $357 for two nights (including tax), for a room with one double bed. The rest of the site talks about first-class amenities, “modern, comfortable rooms” with private bathrooms, and even has a menu for their hip Cafe Samantha.

Here’s the reality. Cafe Samantha doesn’t exist–well, the teeny-tiny space does, but it’s only used for a “continental breakfast” (apparently coffee and one variety of sweet roll, maybe two). Maybe the Cafe did exist as a breakfast-lunch place at some point, but it doesn’t now. No big deal. There was a decent 24-hour restaurant two blocks away.
My room was on the fifth floor. There is no elevator. Not a broken elevator–no elevator. Funny how the website doesn’t mention anything that might suggest that. (Maybe “European-style”?) The room was large enough for the double bed, two nightstands, a dresser, and a chair–”cozy” is probably the right term. Modern? Well, the paint was in good shape and there were electric lights.

No closet. Only a short hanging rod (half of it over one of the bedside lamps). Yes, there was a bathroom–but if I’d been two inches taller, it would have been very difficult to use the toilet without banging my knees on the opposite wall.

As for first-class amenities–those did not include either a radio or an alarm clock (or room service, or anything indicating phone charges, or…). So, down those five flights of stairs again, ask at the front desk, they say they’ll be happy to program in a wakeup call. Which I asked for. And, the next morning, called to cancel since it hadn’t happened, at least by five or ten minutes after the hour. It was critical that I get the 5 a.m. wakeup call on Saturday, so I’d get my transportation to the airport, but they assured me that I’d get that wakeup call. Fortunately, my sleep was sufficiently affect by premonitions that I woke up before…there was no wakeup call. (Are alarm clocks that expensive, that at $180 a night they can’t afford to have them? The TV, such as it was, was hospital-style, locked to a wall mount up in the corner, so maybe that’s the case.)

I suppose the first-class amenities meant that there was soap and shampoo in the bathroom. That’s true. (No handtowels the first night, but that’s being picky.)

Again, I don’t blame the conference organizers. They probably checked the same first-level reviews that I did. Only one of those reviews mentioned the lack of elevator (and even then didn’t mention five stories). Since I know from reading user-submitted reviews elsewhere that some very negative reviews have to be discounted. (I remember sailing on Crystal Cruises once, a magnificent line with superb service, and hearing one couple starting to complain about this and that even before the ship had left the dock–I think that mostly boiled down to their Not Being Recognized as Very Important People and being treated as well as the rest of us…) If I’d read more assiduously, I would then have had a problem: there were no other available choices that suited the group’s apparently tight budget, or at least none they’d suggested.

My “speaking page” on my website includes among my requirements “lodging at the conference hotel (if there is one) or a business-class [or better] hotel,” After this trip, I may do a little rewriting to clarify what I mean by business-class (think Hilton, Marriott, Embassy Suites, Westin, Sheraton…). It’s fair to say that I assume a business-class hotel will have elevators if it’s more than two or three stories tall and will have radios or alarm clocks, maybe even closets. Heck, it’s fair to say I’d assume the same of a Motel 6. But, of course, there are no Motel 6s in Manhattan.

Would I go back to Manhattan? For the right arrangements, sure–but those arrangements would absolutely include a name-brand business-class (or better) hotel. And taxi, not shuttle, fare to and from the airport. (Which the inviting group’s paying: Again, this isn’t aimed at them.)

See this post for background on this series of feedback invitations–of which this is the last.

4. Interesting & Peculiar Products

This ongoing section is somewhat unfocused. Some of the products may be applicable to libraries; some probably aren’t. Sometimes it’s clear that I’m poking fun at a product; sometimes I’m not sure whether I find a product more interesting or more peculiar.

I&PP appears every few months–and “every few” has resulted in patterns of five, four, five, four per year since the name changed from “Product Watch.” (Anyone remember when almost everything in C&I was Something Watch?) This year, I&PP appeared in the January, February, June and October issues.

The choices here (and, of course, I welcome any response) are a bit different:

1. Drop this or move the items to this blog; it’s too random for C&I
2. Keep the interesting library-related products and drop the rest.
3. It’s interesting as it is: Don’t mess with chaotic success.

Comments and responses either as comments on this post or as email to waltcrawford at gmail.com.

Again, don’t expect real speedy responses; this is a postdated post, and I’m presumably returning from New York today.