The Times-PicayUnity November 14, 1999

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November 14, 1999

Welcome to November, the gray time, the season of the hunter, the wait for the white time. November is made bearable by flickering images; it is a time for movies and books and the creation of bright things. Halloween begins the season. Thanksgiving ends it.
One of the bright lights of this November was a voting day on which the state of Maine agreed with me on all issues. Bond issues for support of technical colleges, digitizing PBS, buying more park lands all passed. An initiative to ban partial birth abortions failed, and one to allow medical use of marijuana passed. Toto, I don't think we're in Louisiana anymore. An amendment to the constitution passed that will require that referendum votes be held at regular election times. There are a lot of those referenda here because there's a lot of healthy grass roots politics. That's a good thing. But last year a referendum to overturn Maine's gay rights law passed because the election with that one item on the ballot was held in the middle of friggin winter.

The Reading Report. Sometimes at work I'm in a certain mood and I wander through the bookstore in the Union looking for something that seems right, something that calls me over to it. This time it was this book Toolbox by Fabio Morabito. It belongs in the classification Books That Only Jean Likes and it is intensely satisfying. I'm putting a couple of excerpts from it here so my librarian friend Eileen in Augusta can check it out. If anyone deserves to have her named mentioned in reference to picayune considerations, it's Eileen who can spot a mispelled word at a thousand paces. Frinstance, on a form I designed for her, there's this blurb. Can you spot the egregious spelling error?
The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, US Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction if no to be "used for any purpose other tha private study, scholarship, or research." If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of "fair use," that user may be liable for copyright infringement. This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order if, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright laws.

WhoDat Speller:
WhatDat Word:

In the fiction department I picked up, after a day of meetings in Augusta, a book called leo@fergusrules.com because it reminded me of April Sanders, a girl I taught at Slidell High who craved ice hockey and Japanese comics and is probably the mayor of Atlanta by now...no that would be Ambrosia Grant...April would have her own computer game company. Anybody know where April is? The book has an afterword by Pagan Kennedy. Is that a power name or what. In Lacombe there was a woman who dressed always in baptismal white and would show up occasionally at the Ace hardware store looking for more nuts and bolts to obsessively sort. She called herself President Goddess. That covered a lot of bases: the political, the mythological.
I'm rearranging the file structure of the PicayUnity site; let me know if any links mysteriously stop working. And try to have yourself a fabulous little week.
Last Time

	The Reading Report. Sometimes at work I'm in a certain mood and I wander through the bookstore in the Union looking for something that seems right, something that calls me over to it. This time it was this book Toolbox by Fabio Morabito. It belongs in the classification Books That Only Jean Likes and it is intensely satisfying. I'm putting a couple of excerpts from it here so my librarian friend Eileen in Augusta can check it out. If anyone deserves to have her named mentioned in reference to picayune considerations, it's Eileen who can spot a mispelled word at a thousand paces. Frinstance, on a form I designed for her, there's this blurb. Can you spot the egregious spelling error?
The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, US Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction if no to be "used for any purpose other tha private study, scholarship, or research." If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of "fair use," that user may be liable for copyright infringement. This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order if, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright laws.
WhoDat Speller: WhatDat Word:
In the fiction department I picked up, after a day of meetings in Augusta, a book called leo@fergusrules.com because it reminded me of April Sanders, a girl I taught at Slidell High who craved ice hockey and Japanese comics and is probably the mayor of Atlanta by now...no that would be Ambrosia Grant...April would have her own computer game company. Anybody know where April is? The book has an afterword by Pagan Kennedy. Is that a power name or what. In Lacombe there was a woman who dressed always in baptismal white and would show up occasionally at the Ace hardware store looking for more nuts and bolts to obsessively sort. She called herself President Goddess. That covered a lot of bases: the political, the mythological. I'm rearranging the file structure of the PicayUnity site; let me know if any links mysteriously stop working. And try to have yourself a fabulous little week.