TV streaming changes. I dropped Paramount Plus and I was so glad they asked me why (Bari Weiss, 60 Minutes, Fox News Lite). We used it for access to a local station, but I can get that station with YoutubeTV which seems to be the best streaming service at this time. Now we watch our local news then switch to PBS Newshour. There is little else that is not controlled by oligarchs bending the knee. The news get crazier every day (invading Venezuela, red meat at the top of the foot pyramid). The mad king will start a world war to prevent the release of the Epstein files. The murder by an ICE agent in Minneapolis feels like a huge escalation; it feels like Kent State. Today on the state library list-serv, a librarian posted a most carefully worded email acknowledging that staying silent after yesterday's events doesn't feel right. I replied all with my own carefully worded email, hoping that starts a conversation about how we can all respond to our world being torn apart. The poster had a great quote after her signature: “To be a librarian is not to be neutral, or passive, or waiting for a question. It is to be a radical positive change agent within your community.” Oh yeah. That's my people.

This is the week without an ILS. Evergreen is shut down and Koha comes online on January 14th, the same day as book club and new student volunteers. No cataloging for a couple of weeks. Book group will discuss Ron Currie's The Savage Noble Death of Babs Dionne this week so I re-read the first chapter. "Think of generations as a chain, one link leading to and binding the next, and all of them--even the most distant--forever connected and inseparable...Think of them all as yourself. A single entity, spanning centuries. Finding its current but by no means final iteration in you." And her fascination with the Stations of the Cross: "how macabre and obvious the whole thing was. The blood, the agony, the melodrama...You sometimes wondered what an alien would think if you told them the central religious ritual of a third of Earth's inhabitants involved simulated cannibalism...you would kneel and think about how if Jesus had been executed in America, everyone you knew would probably wear a little gold electric chair around their neck." At 14 Babs kills the cop who raped her.The French priest who helps her escape is named Clement Thibault. Deeply satisfying and set in a nearby town without changing any place names.