I just today returned that book to the Town of Colonie library for my daughter. She enjoyed it immensely, and excerpts were often the topic of discussion during nightly dinners.
One of my sons is more politically astute than I. And, dammit, I read the WaPo or NYT almost every day and occasionally, to get out of my bubble, the WSJ or (eeesh) even the Washington Times, all store-bought paper copies.
He reads almost everything on-line, including those papers. And more. We talk politics every morning, and I have begun to feel like a dinosaur; he’s read the on-line version of those newspapers the night before I drive out to get copy in the morning.
Not just that; he’s reading other sourced on-line stuff that hasn’t broken yet. I kinda pish-posh most of that web-based innuendo until I read it with ink stained fingers, and often have to admit “Eh, ok, so that really is happening”.
None the less, I will
never give up a real newspaper held in hand, folded over to picked back up, reading every word, including the Obits. I’m not sitting in the diner squinting at some device next to my plate of eggs.
Stripperguy, Colonie ain’t Schenectady. I have McCrea kith and kin in Colonie.
I do understand that choice of locator; one long ago hitchhiking trip we were headed north to the Adirondacks, and figuring that if we wrote “Rome” on our sign it would confuse the issue. We wrote “Utica” instead.
Standing on the Baltimore Beltway ramp to I-83 north, holding our “Utica” sign the first driver who stopped said “I can take you as far as Rome”.
Back to libraries. I love libraries, and have all my life, even as a pre-teen. At one (semi) professional period I was in the Nat’l Library of Medicine once a month, requesting old journal’s sent up from the dusty sub-basement stacks to be photocopied (yeah, that not-scanned-online ago). Dozens of old journal articles requested by different researchers, sometimes only obscure references that needed some digging. I could ask for only 5 to be sent up from the bowels at a time, and those took a good while for those to come up via dumbwaiter.
I got seriously, tenaciously, count-on-me good at that library research; I wasn’t driving into DC traffic and coming back with less than a 90% success rate. That tenacious success rate takes time. Sometimes a
whole day spent in the library. Oh please don’t throw me in the briar patch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7tyhpWiZyM
Ok, there was a diner nearby on Wisconsin Ave that I could walk to. And a package goods store on the anti-beltway blue highways reimburse-my-mileage route back. Good, all-day times.
There was a Law School library at the University where I worked, and I taught myself how to use it for reference. It is really
not that hard to figure out how a law library works. Just think of how many stupid managed-to-pass-the-bar Lawyers there are.
There are at least one or two folks who use my little country library who share similar tastes in non-fiction reading. Fortunately inter-library loan requests now stay at the library where they were returned; a lot of my finds on the new non-fiction shelf are other folk’s returned requests.
And, hopefully, my returned loan requests have been awaiting their discovery. Help a brother out, request some good books.