Another post with no grand meaning–just a few miscellaneous items.
Cheapo movies in color and broken plastic
I gave the five-disc pack of 20 Spaghetti Westerns (really 19 Spaghetti Westerns and Possibly The Worst Western Ever Filmed, but not an SW) to a friend who loves this stuff…and saw Mill Creek’s bigger package, “Spaghetti Westerns”–not quite a 50-pack, but a 44-pack on 11 discs–for about $15 on Amazon. Since I know I want to watch some of them again and enjoyed most of them, I put the pack in a new Amazon wishlist.
And also remembered how much I’d enjoyed, just as pure dumb entertainment, the Hercules-and-friends “hero” movies in one of the Mill Creek megapacks. There’s a whole 50-pack of them, “Warriors,” a 13-disc set (really 12.5 discs). Also put that in the wishlist.
Checked last week. Both were at $11.99. My wife needed a supplement we get through Amazon. So, hey, why not?
They arrived today. I’m sure I’ll enjoy both sets when I get around to them some time in the next few years. But there was one difference, consistent with the smaller sets I’d received free from MCE: Instead of the old cardboard boxes, these came in plastic boxes.
Snazzier, but with one little problem (also true of a couple of the smaller sets): The plastic is brittle. In both boxes, which I opened to make sure the discs were all there, there were broken pieces of the box. Oh, I could send them back to Amazon, but why bother? The boxes are still workable, and that’s a lot of hassle for such cheap items. In a way, it’s an odd sort of progress: the new boxes are much snazzier for retail sale and appear much sturdier, but in fact the old cardboard boxes hold up much better.
Generations and personal issues
Jenica’s right, of course, on both counts.
Will library bloggers stop tossing out generational arguments that hold no water?
About as soon as library gurus stop trying to convince public librarians that print books are DOOMED (based on various oversimplistic theories, certainly not based on significant drops in either library print circulation or sales of print books) and that they should run away from the things their patrons actually use, toward some wonderful new future in which, well, you pay for each use or convince your city government that a community center needs professional librarians to run it. Good luck with that.
What? HarperCollins actually surprised you? You thought that you owned that ebook?
Hmm. I’ve combined three or four different things there, haven’t I?
“Hell, Walt, you’re old. You should retire.”
I did, whether willingly or not. But, of course, the job itself went away–and it was never a professional librarian post.
Not asking questions when you don’t want the answers
I’m moving forward with stuff for the April C&I (out sometime between 3/15 and 3/31) and, as it happens, the May issue.
I’m also still dealing with a recent incident in which I was told, in effect, that there were only a handful of people who gave a damn about one area I was active in. Which removed a bunch of already-written material I’d expected to use in C&I.
I find that I don’t want to ask about other aspects of C&I. That answer was hard on me. I concluded two things:
- I shouldn’t ask a question when I might not want the answer.
- I should work with real publishers on all but the smallest projects.
I’m doing the latter. One result is out this month from ALA Editions. I’m hoping for one more each year…
Or, what the hell, there’s an unlimited supply of books out there to be read, at least unlimited in terms of my reading capabilities…but, you know, maybe later.
