Walt at Random

You know, that explains a lot…

Your Annnual Conference and You

I’m going to make a prediction, based on very limited observation.

The space provided for each Gmail account will reach seven gigabytes (or, rather, 7,000 megabytes–I have no idea whether Gmail’s megabytes are “disc megabytes” or “true megabytes”) on, let’s see now:

The Fourth of July, give or take a week.

Actually, if they’re adding space at a steady rate–which is a huge “if”–then it should be either July 4 or July 5, 2008.

If I’m wrong, I will double my monthly payment for Gmail for the course of one month. That’s as much money as I ever put behind my predictions.

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“Disc megabytes” as used in almost all advertising and specs for hard disk space (and, I believe, optical disc and flash drive space) are based on the decimal system–thus, a megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes, and a gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes. “True megabytes” (or “RAM megabytes” if you prefer) are based on the binary system. Thus, a megabyte is 1,024 kilobytes or 1,024×1024 bytes, and a gigabyte is 1,024×1,024×1,024 bytes. It does start to add up–in this case, to roughly 73.3 million characters. You still sometimes see tiny little footnotes on ads because there have been people who sued because their hard discs didn’t have as much storage as was advertised.

Things get confusing because OS tools, at least on the Windows side, usually return “true megabytes” sizes–so, for example, the primary portion of my notebook’s 250GB drive is reported as “238,113,628,160 bytes” and also as “221 GB.” (There’s a secondary partition for recovery–”11,943,071,744 bytes” but also “11.1GB”) So do I have a 250GB hard disk or a 232GB hard disk? The only plausible answer is, of course, Yes.

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Updated August 5, 2008: Well, if I’d said “give or take a month” instead of “give or take a week,” I would have been less wrong. Looks like it rolled over to seven gigabytes some time this morning.

In Old Caliente, 1939, b&w. Joseph Kane (dir.), Roy Rogers, Trigger, Lynne Roberts/Mary Hart, Gabby Hayes, Jack La Rue, Katherine DeMille, Frank Puglia. 0:57/0:54.

This time, Roy Rogers is the prime cowboy at a huge Alta California ranchero—and the foreman, Sujarto, is betraying the owner, Don Jose, to a band of outlaws stealing the gold received for shipments of cattle to California miners. Meanwhile, settlers are arriving—this group of wagons with Gabby Hayes in his full Gabbitude. Sujarto tries to blame Roy Rogers for the gringos holding up his people; Roy Rogers track Sujarto to a meet with the rest of the bandits—but Sujarto manages to place the blame on Rogers and Hayes, who are taken off to be hung in the morning.

It all works out—well, not for Don Jose, but for the rest of them. The plot is pretty solid for a one-hour B western, including a remarkably clever way to trap the outlaws. Rogers contributes several songs, some with a group backing, one with Hayes. There’s also a fine dance number at a fandango. The print is in very good shape except for a little dirt near the end; the soundtrack’s so-so. Those flaws reduce this to $1.

Rough Riders Round-Up, 1939, b&w. Joseph Kane (dir.), Lynne Roberts/Mary Hart, Raymond Hatton, Eddie Acuff, William Pawley. 0:58/0:54.

Roy and friends come from Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders to join the border guard, firmly instructed not to cross over into Mexico without permission. Roy and old codger friend wind up on probation because the third rough rider gets shot in a barroom brawl. Add in Arizona Jack and his band of thieves, hiding out in Mexico and raiding across the border—and robberies of an American-owned gold mine in Mexico.

Naturally, a couple of songs, including one under dire circumstances. Nothing terribly wrong here, but nothing terribly right either. Even as short Bs go, this is a little disappointing. Maybe we need Dale Evans. $0.75.

Hell Town, 1937, b&w (originally Born to the West). Charles Barton (dir.), John Wayne, Marsha Hunt, John Mack Brown, John Patterson, Monte Blue, Syd Saylor. 0:59 [0:55].

The first five or ten minutes get off to a truly rotten start. The print’s dark enough that you can’t quite figure out what’s going on, there’s a song that seems out of place—and then there’s some kind of riding gun battle involving a herd of cattle, but it’s hard to tell what’s going on. Enter a young John Wayne and old-coot friend (Syd Saylor)—who seem totally amoral, ready to join whichever side of the battle appears to be winning. Did I mention that the sound’s distorted? At this point, I was about to give up—but didn’t. (IMDB may help on the confusion: Apparently, when the flick was reissued as Hell Town, the production company “added random stock footage of cattle drives, chases and stampedes to bring the running time to over an hour.” Some of it certainly looks random!)

It gets better, sort of. Wayne’s a cowboy on his way to Montana, who has a wholly undeserved belief that he’s the best poker player west of the Mississippi—and is broke as a result. The sidekick tries to sell lightning rods, apparently as a straightforward low-buck con. The battle was apparently an attempt to rustle most of a herd of cattle (from a ranch owned by Wayne’s character’s cousin) on its way to market—and of course one of the higher-ups in the cattle company is involved. Also of course, there’s potential romance. Somehow, Wayne turns semi-heroic (although still a compulsive gambler and really bad at it). All ends well, I guess. Given the confused plot (not helped by four missing minutes), poor print and distorted sound, I’m being generous at $0.75.

The Kansan, 1943, b&w. George Archainbaud (dir.), Richard Dix, Jane Wyatt, Albert Dekker, Eugene Pallette, Victor Jory, Willie Best. 1:19.

John Bonniwell, on his way to Oregon, encounters the James Gang as it’s planning to rob the bank in Broken Lance. He drives them away but gets shot in the process. As he’s recuperating, he finds that he’s been elected marshall—mostly because of the Steve Barat, the banker and town boss, who’s counting on him to keep the town in line as he (Barat) milks it for all its worth. Things don’t work out that way, as Bonniwell proves to be a man of integrity and honor, not just the law. It doesn’t help that the bigshot’s brother Jeff, a gambling man, has a lot more honor than anyone expects. Oh, and the hotel keeper (Jane Wyatt) is involved in all this—starting with Jeff and ending with John.

It’s a strong movie, with a solid plot, some fine acting and some remarkable action scenes. A barroom brawl is about as extensive and wild as I’ve seen, even though I do believe the same chair crashed through the same huge mirror twice during the sequence. There are two negatives, one related to the print and one, I suspect, a sign of the times. The print’s damaged in spots with missing chunks, some dirt and occasional soundtrack problems. And much of the humor in the film has to do with “Bones,” a black valet at the hotel, who’s portrayed stereotypically. Even with those drawbacks, it’s worth $1.25.

Walt at Random has the most readers of any blog in its class.*

That seems like an appropriate way to begin this little poke at a full-page Chevy ad in today’s San Francisco Chronicle. The ad’s announcing an increase in incentive money, and features three different models. The highway EPA estimate appears for each model–and for two of the three, it’s accompanied by “Best-in-class highway fuel economy” (in one case followed by “with manual transmission.” And, oh yes, there’s a footnote for each of those claims.

The mileage figures aren’t bad, but they’re also not great. Not that I’m a skeptic, but, well, I was pretty sure that the Chevy Cobalt didn’t get as good mileage as a number of other compact cars.

So I did what most readers never bother to do: I read the footnotes.

Here’s the footnote for the Cobalt:

Based on 2008 GM Compact Car 3-Door Coupe segment.

And for the Impala:

Based on Impala with 3.5L engine and 2008 GM Large Car segment.

Isn’t that great? GM’s defining “class” based entirely on cars it manufactures. I don’t know how many “compact car 3-door coupe”s GM makes, but this definitely nicely avoids comparisons with all the compact cars from Honda, Toyota, Kia, Hyundai, Mazda…and even Ford and Chrysler.

Imagine if libraries had advertising budgets and the same approach to facts vs. truth. Every library could really be a star, without much trouble:

Mallsville Public Library answers more reference questions than any other comparable library^

Followed by more promotional material, followed by this substantially smaller footnote:

^Based on libraries that are not part of larger library systems, that serve between 2,000 and 2,500 people and that are located within 10 miles of the Mallsville River. Phone and IM reference excluded for purposes of comparisons.

Fortunately, libraries really aren’t businesses in some key respects…

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* Based on library-related blogs written by semi-retired male non-librarians between 60 and 65 years old, living in California.

I missed it by a week, but Marylaine Block has announced that she’s formally ending ExLibris. That announcement comes as #309–which includes a list of “my favorite ExLibris pieces.”

For years, I checked Marylaine.com every Thursday afternoon to see what Block had to say this week. ExLibris was a founding member of the failed COWLZ initiative–indeed, Marylaine Block probably started the whole notion. ExLibris wasn’t always weekly (there were 309 issues over nine years), but it was fairly regular until the last year or so.

Back in the day, there were the Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues, Current Cites, Library Juice (as a periodical), ExLibris, NewBreed Librarian and Cites & Insights. Now…hmm, maybe there’s something about “Cites,” since Current Cites and Cites & Insights are the sole survivors. (Or maybe there’s something about California, or a monthly schedule…)

Marylaine Block provided a real service. I was honored to be one of the 29 “gurus” she interviewed.

Thanks, Marylaine.

Time to do a few real posts, not the stuff I’ve been doing…but maybe not quite yet.

This one’s a good Friday post–but it may give some of you ideas.

To wit: Over the last month or so, I’ve seen most web pages (and nearly all blog posts) as a little more elegant than they were in the past–and found myself ready to read more before I click to the next post or the next site.

The specific choice I’ve made isn’t one I’d recommend for anyone else (and it wouldn’t be available to 99% of you, I’d guess), but the approach will work for most everybody.

I’m reading more of your posts because they’re in a typeface I find both elegant and readable, even though it’s really not very well suited to the screen. Namely, you’re writing to me in Berkeley Oldstyle. (Not Berkeley Book–that’s even more print-oriented, a little too light for the screen. Also, there’s no boldface in Berkeley Book, so it winds up “emboldened,” which is a little strange. You see Berkeley Book in Cites & Insights and in Cites & Insights Books publications, using Berkeley Bold when boldface is needed.)

What’s that you say? When you look at your own blog, it’s in Arial or Helvetica or maybe some other, slightly more interesting, sans serif face? Probably–and I’d guess 90% of all blogs and websites are in Arial, Helvetica, Verdana, Tehama, or one or two other sans faces. I just got tired of all that sans. Even on-screen, I much prefer serif. (You may note that this blog uses serif type–but not Berkeley, since you have to pay to have Berkeley on your computer and almost nobody’s likely to do that.)

So here’s what I did–and you can do it, too. Should you? That’s your choice. In my experience, FireFox 2 and IE7 both render well enough that doing this radical thing shouldn’t screw up too many pages. Usually, this choice will also affect printouts, although not always.

Here’s what you do. I’ll use Book Antiqua (probably Palatino on the Mac) as an example, since it’s commonly available, but you can use any typeface that suits your fancy:

• In Firefox: Click Tools, then Options. Select your preferred typeface as “Default font” in the Fonts & Colors section. Then–this is the vital step–click on Advanced and uncheck “Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above.” Click OK. Click OK on the Options box. Shazam! Most of the type on your webpages–not quite all–will be in the typeface you prefer. You may need to change the size option a little (I use 17), as some typefaces set smaller than others.
• In IE7: Click Tools, then Internet Options, then Fonts. Choose your preferred proportional typeface as “Webpage font:”. Click OK. Then, back on the Internet Options page, click Accessibility. Now check “Ignore font styles specified on webpages.” Click OK. Click OK on Internet Options. Shazam!
• For IE6: First, upgrade to IE7… (actually, pretty much the same options apply, but seriously, upgrade to IE7 or to Firefox, or Opera if you prefer. I don’t have Opera, but I’m sure it has a similar override capability).

You could say this is ignoring the “design choices” made for pages–but do you really believe that everyone consciously chooses the same boring typefaces? Most of the time, that design choice is a default.

You can have fun with this, although you probably want to get to something that suits your preferences (which could very well be Arial or Verdana or Lucida–or just letting the “designer” specify the typefaces).

For current MS users (that is, Vista), there seem to be quite a few nicely readable serif typefaces, e.g., Cambria, Calisto, Constantia, as well as the old standbys Book Antiqua (used for this blog), Bookman Old Style (not my fave), Goudy Old Style and Georgia.

You could even use Comic Sans. Just don’t show me.

Or you could get silly for a few minutes, using something like Rockwell, Mistral (or another handwriting typeface), Corsiva, Matisse, or if you want pages to look like stock certificates, Copperplate Gothic or Engravers. Or, ahem, University Roman. But I can’t imagine spending much time with those typefaces…

Am I serious about this? Well, I normally leave these overrides on for my own web use, unless I’m investigating sites in a way that requires respecting their typography. You might find any such change horribly distracting. Heck, you might just love the standard typefaces that everybody uses. It’s your computer.

What to say?

I don’t remember who was talking about it, but some liblogger was grumbling about meaningless permalinks–the kind this blog has always had (e.g., http://walt.lishost.org/?p=421).

So, sez I, I’ll do something about it; the settings seem much more accessible in WP2.5.

As of now, permalinks are now meaningful: the year, the month, and the post title. (I still don’t have a “permalink” text item; the title of each post is also the permalink.) That’s retroactive–but <b>internal</b> permalinks–from one post to another one within this blog–will still show up as “?p=…” and should still work just fine. I’ll start using new permalinks in future posts…

For a little while–I think just one day–there was a problem: The “named” permalinks were showing up in the blog, but they didn’t actually work because I hadn’t made the needed changes to the htaccess file. (There’s a reason for that, but you don’t need to know it.) David “medical librarian” Rothman let me know there was a problem–just a few minutes before I was planning to try to get it fixed.

Fortunately, thanks to Blake Carver, the fix was nearly immediate. So if you tried a meaningful permalink and it didn’t work–it should now.

And yes, that does apply to the link for “A really big look at liblogs.” Where you get the chance to tell me I’m an idiot (on one particular topic) with no fear of retribution.

Cites & Insights 8:5, May 2008, is now available for downloading.

This 28-page issue (PDF as usual, but each essay is also available in HTML form) includes:

• Bibs & Blather: One Book at a Time – A year’s experience with self-publishing.
• Perspective: Offtopic or Not? Mill Creek & Libraries – Do 50-movie (and 100-movie and 250-movie!) packs make sense for public libraries?
• Making it Work Perspective: Changes in Liblogs: Slouching Toward a Study – How have 227 liblogs changed between 2005/2006 and 2007? Notes toward a possible study of 500+ blogs.
• Net Media Perspective: Citizendium and the Writer’s Voice – Notes on Citizendium and how it’s developing–and why I disagree with one fundamental tenet of both Wikipedia and Citizendium.
• Offtopic Perspective: 50 Movie Hollywood Legends, Part 1 – From the sublime to the ridiculous, from Good News to The Fat Spy, two dozen movies with big-name stars.
• Retrospective: Pointing with Pride, Part 1 – Looking back at “the 1s”–the first, 11th…91st issues of C&I.

Since a couple of other bloggers have mentioned that they’ll be at TLA (I just spell it TxLA to avoid confusion), here’s my mention–but I think the others actually live there.

I’ll be at the Texas Library Association Annual Conference this coming week–arriving Tuesday early afternoon, leaving Friday morning. Staying at the Hyatt Regency.

Presenting “Balanced Libraries: Books, Bytes and Web 2.0″ on Wednesday, from 2-3:50 p.m.

No, I’m not going to talk nonstop for an hour and fifty minutes…not that I couldn’t, but nobody deserves such punishment. I’m planning to talk for a little less than an hour. The nature and flow of the talk will depend on who’s there, to some extent. The talk will certainly be based on Balanced Libraries: Thoughts on Continuity and Change. Among other things, I expect to offer some notes on work in progress–some of which will appear in Cites & Insights a few days after the conference. There will definitely be plenty of time for discussion.

It will be my third time at TxLA, and appears to be my speaking trip for this year (although that could always change). I will be a small part of a program during ALA Annual, but I’d be going there anyway.

As always, when I speak at a state/regional library conference (my favorite kind of speaking), I try to go for most or all of the conference. I certainly plan to be at the Tuesday all-conference welcome party, spend time in the exhibits, and attend some programs. I always enjoy meeting people I haven’t met and seeing people again…

I could say “posting will be light for the next week,” since I still travel without computing technology (OK, OK, so I will have an ugh cell phone and my cute little MP3 player), but posting here is so erratic that there’s no point.

Admittedly, this all assumes that American–my favorite airline–has its MD80s fully in the air by Tuesday, since that’s what I’ll be taking between San Jose and DFW, but that seems like a pretty safe bet…

A Friday Funny of sorts:

OK, so I get Publishers’ Clearing House email–hey, at one point I actually found PCH to be a reasonable way to buy subscriptions, and this way I’m not spending $0.41 on the miniscule chance of Winning Big Bucks. (Or the 10 minutes it used to take to find the right stickers…)

I haven’t taken them up on any of the offers for online merchandise (sometimes subscriptions, more often not)–but I was impressed by two of the offers in today’s contest email:

• Apocalypse – 20 Movies on 4 DVDs
• Chilling Classics – 20 movies on 6 DVDs

Each of them just $4.99–per installment, with a mere four installments. I’m told this is 20% off PCH’s regular price.

Oh, plus shipping and handling, which looks to be $6.99 per set.

What a deal! They even show the boxes–which look remarkably similar to those put out by Mill Creek Entertainment, since I’m sure that’s what they are. (There’s also a set of 15 John Wayne movies–but those are in a tin box, so how can you make value comparisons?)

Here’s the thing: As noted in a previous post, Amazon now sells Mill Creek’s 50-movie packs for less than $20–sometimes much less than $20. And, of course, if you buy two of them (or one and almost anything else), shipping is free. To the best of my knowledge, nearly all of the movies in 20-packs come from larger packs (checking one of these two, one film out of 20 might not be in 50-packs or 100-packs). For that matter, Amazon itself sells one of these two packs for about $9, as it does some of the other 20-packs.

I’m not a great fan of supersizing meals–but somehow, given that the discs will be exactly the same quality whether in 50-packs or 20-packs, I can’t see paying more to get less (or, if you really just want the 20, paying more than twice as much because it’s warm and cuddly PCH instead of mean ol’ Amazon).

Let’s Live a Little, 1948, b&w. Richard Wallace (dir.), Hedy Lamarr, Robert Cummings, Anna Sten, Robert Shayne. 1:25 [1:24].

Robert (Bob) Cummings plays an overworked ad man (Duke Crawford—what a name!) who’s ex-fiancée is also his client—and wants him back, holding up the contract renewal to get him. Meanwhile, there’s a psychiatrist with a new book entitled Let’s Live a Little and he’s assigned to work on promoting it. He meets the psychiatrist, a beautiful woman, and he’s having a bit of a nervous breakdown. Oh, the psychiatrist shares an office suite with her maybe-boyfriend, a surgeon (doesn’t every shrink work next to a cutter?). Various light romantic-comedy stuff ensues, as does semi-psychiatric stuff—people hearing bells and seeing the wrong people–with what is apparently a happy ending. There’s a wonderful sequence early on—Cummings is on his way to meet the doctor, hasn’t had time to shave, so jumps into one of a fleet of cabs equipped with electric razors: An idea he created. He gets distracted and shaves off half his mustache—thus, not unreasonably, causing the office receptionist and doctor to assume he’s a patient.

Cummings is great at this sort of role. Hedy Lamarr as the psychiatrist is first-rate (isn’t she always?). Anna Sten as the ex-fiancée/cosmetics boss chews the scenery a little, and that’s probably appropriate for her role. It’s a decent little romantic-neurosis comedy. The print’s a little choppy at times, and there’s a significant break in flow that’s either some missing minutes or pretty abrupt editing. One real oddity: In the opening credits, there’s a black shape superimposed on the lower right corner of the screen, pretty obviously added in post-production. Did the original production company bail, leaving this to “United California Productions Inc.,” which as far as I can tell never released another movie? The sound is marred by heavy white noise, unfortunately, the main reason I can’t give this more than $1.00.

Lady of Burlesque, 1943, b&w. William A. Wellman (dir.), Barbara Stanwyck, Michael O’Shea, Iris Adrian, Charles Dingle, J. Edward Bromberg, Frank Conroy, Pinky Lee. 1:31 [1:27].

This is a mystery with comedy and musical numbers, based on The G-string Murders by Gypsy Rose Lee. It’s a charmer, making burlesque (clean burlesque in this case—comedy, music and dancing) neither glamorous nor too seedy (just seedy enough). Along with various personal and professional jealousies that arise (and which dominate the picture), we get the mystery itself—and it’s not as much a murder mystery as it might seem, although there are a couple of murders, both involving G-strings. (There’s also a great song, “Take it off the E string, play it on the G string.”) It’s distinctly a who-dun-it: Who’s trying to shut down the show—or the theatre—and why?

Well written and well acted. I have to downgrade it a little for the print quality: There are gaps at times, which is always disconcerting. Still, it’s an enjoyable, well made picture. $1.25.

Love Affair, 1939, b&w. Leo McCarey (dir.), Irene Dunne, Charles Boyer, Maria Ouspenskaya. 1:27.

A classic—not exactly a romantic comedy, since there’s very little comedy, but a great romantic flick. He (Charles Boyer) is an engaged French playboy. She (Irene Dunne) is an American with a boyfriend. They meet on an ocean liner, share dinner, try to avoid making a scene. There’s a great sequence at his grandmother’s place—and Maria Ouspenskaya is magnificent in the role. At the end of the cruise, in New York, she proposes that, if it makes sense for both of them, they’ll meet in on July 1 at the top of the Empire State Building and take it from there. Complications ensue—fairly serious complications. There’s a happy ending…of sorts. This one’s the original. It was remade twice, once by the same director as An Affair to Remember (and sleepless people can think of at least one more picture inspired by it).

Great stars, great acting, (Dunne and Ouspenskaya were both up for Oscars, as was the picture), well written (another nomination), well made. This version has two flaws (in addition to the usual VHS-quality print): the soundtrack’s a little damaged at points, and there are some fade-to-black breaks that make no sense thematically but might be well timed for advertisements. Even so, I’ll give it $1.75.

Letter of Introduction, 1938, b&w. John M. Stahl (dir.), Adolphe Menjoy, Adrea Leeds, George Murphy, Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy, Mortimer Snerd (in a bit part), Ann Sheridan, Eve Arden. 1:44 [1:29].

An unusual movie in several respects. It’s a drama—but with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, as well as Eve Arden. It’s romantic—but in an odd way. Adolphe Menjou plays an oft-divorced actor who’s been away from the stage for years. Kay (Andrea Leeds) shows up with a letter of introduction—from her mother, letting Menjou know that she’s his daughter. (The sleeve gets it wrong: He didn’t “sever his relationship” with her—he never knew she existed.) As he tries to make things right—but without simply announcing that she’s his daughter—various complications ensue. What more to say?

Well played, but the print’s dirty, there must be some significant gaps and the sound’s not all that good. For this copy, no more than $1.25.

Looking for deep thoughts? Boy, have you come to the wrong place…

Disappointment: We watched The Bourne Ultimatum on Saturday night. We’d seen The Bourne Identity. Somehow, the second flick (these are flicks, not films) is way down on our Netflix list… Anyway: A little ways in, my wife noted that she didn’t remember the plot of the first flick. At the end, we agreed there was a reason: Neither of us would remember the plot of this one two weeks later, much less a few months later. Lots of action, lots of car crashes, no heart, no real plot… A flick many people would love, but it sort of felt like a waste of a couple of hours. (If you love the Bourne flicks or novels, more power to you. Just not really our thing.)

The Pearl Rule (if I have it right): When I picked up a few books at Mountain View Public Library last time around (three weeks ago–I’ll take them back later this week), one of them was George Carlin’s 2004 book. I seem to remember liking George Carlin as a comic–snarky, a little mean-spirited, but literate and funny–so expected th like the book. Five or six pages in, I realized that it wasn’t so much a book as a bunch of little observations slapped together in no apparent sequence–like a blook, but less coherent than most of those. OK by me…

Then, a few more pages in, I found that I was getting lots of dystopian views, an enormous amount of bitterness, and damn little humor. And, speaking of “damn,” a different four-letter word was being used to an extent that, frankly, comes off as a lack of a real vocabulary. That word can be effective used sparingly. When we start a movie where it’s used in every other line of dialog, we usually don’t bother–and here, it seemed to show up at least every couple of paragraphs. Sure, that reduces the shock value–but it also means the prose reads badly.

Well, OK, no problem: You’re not going to like every book you pick up, and apparently Carlin’s aged differently than I have. He’s turned into one of those who frowns upon any questionable pleasures that don’t happen to be his own while, of course, frowning even harder upon anyone who disagrees with him. And somewhere along the way, he seems to have lost his humor.

I made it to Page 38. Which is where the Nancy Pearl Rule comes in, if I remember it rightly.

That rule? Once you’ve decided to give a book a try, you should give it a fair try–which starts out as being “read the first 50 pages,” but as we age, we find that life is too short. Thus, the rule as I remember it: Read the first 100 pages minus your age–so, for me, the first 38 pages.

Over the last couple of months, I had the other half of the Nancy Pearl Rule, in both cases with Connie Willis novels. (I love Connie WIllis’ short stories, but hadn’t really been familiar with her novels.) To Say Nothing of the Dog was, for some reason, a little difficult–maybe because I was initially reading it in short spurts, which wasn’t the way to read it. But at Page 38, it was clear that I should give it a few more pages–and by Page 100, I was hooked. This month, I picked up her Doomsday Book–which is a big book (578 pages in the mass-market paperback my local library has) and “five years in the writing.” It also took a little getting into, because it is a big, serious book–but by Page 38, I knew I was going to read the whole thing. And loved it, of course.

Then there’s Donald E. Westlake and a newish Dortmunder novel, What’s So Funny? With Westlake, I don’t need 38 pages. On the other hand, his prose is of a sort where you go through 38 pages pretty quickly…and just keep turning those pages. Not big, serious books, but I do love ‘em.

Now to read that serious librarianship book I agreed to review…

I hear from semi-reliable sources a grotesque rumor that I was “on” LSW Meebo (is that like being on drugs?) during a presentation on LSW at CiL.

LSW? CiL? What are all these initialisms?

I can only say this to that: I’m as likely to be found on LSW Meebo as I am to post mini-reviews of old movies.

I would note that any LSW participant (I hear from those deranged types who actually frequent whatever-the-heck it is) can set their screen name to be anything. Michael Gorman, Edgar A. Poe, waltcrawford, you name it…

TLI? Well, LSW isn’t an acronym (at least I can’t think of any reasonable way to pronounce it as a word), so TLA doesn’t work. Besides, I’ll be at TLA (or TxLA, if you prefer) next week…in the flesh, not in some crazy person’s impersonation of me in a room talking about…well, no I’m not going to repeat that. And since LSW Meebo is passworded, you can’t get it from the buffer anyway

23. And still it didn’t crash. Not that I was there to see it, of course..

Back in November 2006, I wrote this post–or, rather, I cut it out of an Offtopic Perspective in Cites & Insights and used it as a post, with slight updating.

Since then, I’ve been staying on the treadmill, watching those old movies (and in some cases TV movies), posting each time I get through one disc, and adding a new Offtopic Perspective each time I finish half a box (six DVDs, once in a while seven DVDs). For a while, it seemed as though the company–now named Mill Creek Entertainment–was running on empty, just distributing the 20-odd sets they’d assembled from public domain, TV movies, and other sources where they didn’t need to pay royalties.

A couple of weeks ago, Seth Finkelstein of Infothought sent me an odd email, assuring me it wasn’t spam and he wasn’t getting a commission. He reads C&I sometimes, and knew I watched these old flicks. He saw that BestBuy.com was having a two-day sale (sorry, it’s over): Two of the 50-movie packs for $25. I didn’t really need any more movies–I’m on disc nine of one set and disc seven of another, with two more packs (100 more movies) waiting after that–but, hey, 100 movies for $25 is a pretty good deal. So I checked it out–and found a couple of sets I wasn’t aware of, one of them released last month. I ordered two of them (that’s right, I now have more than 200 movies waiting to be watched–I intend to keep using that treadmill for years to come), and decided it was time to take another look at Mill Creek Entertainment.

Here’s what I found: The company’s active–and they’ve come up with some even bigger packs. As I write this, there appear to be thirty different 50-movie megapacks, up from 21 in late November 2006. 50-packs I don’t remember seeing before include Box Office Gold, Combat Classics, Drive-in Movie Classics, Family Fun, Frontier Justice, and Nightmare Worlds.

There are also eight hundred-movie packs–most of them straight combinations of 50-packs with no duplications (e.g., Action Classics combines the Action and Suspense 50-packs), all of them (I believe) composed of movies that are also in 50-packs. There were already some smaller subsets of 50-packs and that continues–I see 24 20-movie packs and nine 10-movie packs. (I could see some people going for the 20-pack of John Wayne flicks, most of them early and short, and some of the thematic packs are interesting.)

For libraries where the “informal circulating collection” model suggested in the earlier post might make sense, Mill Creek now has something else to offer:

250-Movie Packs.

That’s right. Four packs–Family Collection, Horror Collection, Mystery Collection and (predictably, given the 50-packs) Western Collection. The “foil collectors boxes” still have individual cardboard sleeves for each disc. So you’d have 240 informally-circulatable items, each with four or more old movies, for a total outlay of no more than $400 and probably significantly less.

Make that definitely significantly less, if you can buy from Amazon: I see all four 250-movie packs available for $50 each. That’s a thousand old movies for $200–less than a buck per circulating DVD.

I’m not shilling for Mill Creek. There are a couple of the 50-movie packs I’d be reluctant to buy for myself or a library (a couple recent packs are heavy on R-rated schlock), and lots of these movies are from damaged prints, nearly all VHS-quality or worse. When they say “Carefully digitally remastered,” they mean the movies were converted from analog to digital form: Otherwise, they couldn’t put them on DVDs. It does not mean restored or anything of the sort: Not at these prices!

That said, Mill Creek Entertainment is doing a fine job of using the public domain for all it’s worth, and I think that’s a good thing. Sure, you can download a lot of these movies–but why bother?

I just checked Amazon a little further. They appear to have all thirty 50-movie packs at $13 to $18 each) and all eight–whoops, all nine 100-packs (there’s one that isn’t even on Mill Creek’s site yet, and it won’t actually be out until May 2008)–at $27 to $45 each.

Mill Creek has some other stuff–collections of cartoons (300 in one box), TV boxed sets and TV-movie mixes, even a few indie movies and fitness sets. But mostly, Mill Creek is boxes of public domain movies at fair prices. The prints may be (and usually are) mediocre, and lots of the pictures are B or less–but there are also some classic gems. Within the last two weeks, I’ve watched McClintock! and the original, black-and-white, Irene Dunne/Charles Boyer Love Affair. Good stuff.

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Clarification: While it’s clear that most Mill Creek releases are from the public domain, most is not all, and MCE never claims that its releases are in the public domain. Some material is from TV shows, TV movies, and movies where rights could be licensed for presumably either nothing or very small sums, given the prices of the sets.