I Left Out George Steinbrenner

[tmcg]

Making this was fun--you type in names and Condemn them, Redeem some if you change your mind, then run through deciding who's more evil--but I think some of my Condemned got maybe a little too serious. I also had too many of them, so I had to Squish the theatre talkers and Domino's drivers.

Whoever keeps putting my middle initial on my convention badges
Circle I Limbo

The people who canceled Firefly in favor of "reality" programming
Circle II Whirling in a Dark & Stormy Wind

Cellphone performance artists
Circle III Mud, Rain, Cold, Hail & Snow

Anyone who contributed to making Microsoft Word suck
Circle IV Rolling Weights

People who talk in theatres during shows /// Homicidal Domino's Pizza drivers
Circle V Stuck in Mud, Mangled

River Styx

The corrupt and inept people destroying the library where my friend works
Circle VI Buried for Eternity

River Phlegyas

Racists, homophobes, and the other socially intolerant
Circle VII Burning Sands

Cheney, Rove, and Dubya
Circle IIX Immersed in Excrement

Abusers of children, the elderly, animals, domestic partners
Circle IX Frozen in Ice

Design your own hell

Comments

[thirdstreet.livejournal.com]

I love it! I love it! I love it!

[terrymcgarry.livejournal.com]

*g* Thought you might.

[cardigirl.livejournal.com]

Great stuff! However I have to wonder/worry about what city your friend works in that is getting its library pithed.

nvm

it's pretty much all of them. (Or too many, anyway. Our City Council still kinda likes us.)

[terrymcgarry.livejournal.com]

It's a library in the New York area, and it's a horrible situation. Gross mismanagement, circulation plummeting, perfectly good books being thrown out in piles. The saddest thing is how many libraries that may describe.

[cardigirl.livejournal.com]

I'll get my librarian credentials yanked for admitting this in public, but the truth is libraries are continually getting rid of what any other person would call perfectly good books. There's only so much shelf space, and public libraries are not ever meant to be "keep everything forever historical archives." It's an easy concept when covers are shredded, pages are torn out or razored, magic markered, or if it's a 1960's book on STDs or even a 1980's book on famous Olympic athletes. People twitch, though, at many other decisions librarians have to make every day. Often it's because a book is simply no longer getting used (computers make that easy to track now).

Decent looking books get turned over to the Friends of the Library for sale at ridiculously low prices. Books that look a little groody, though, won't sell and so get sent ... yes... to landfills. There's not staff or even volunteers enough to sort out what might be given away (and taken to) nursing homes or the Boys and Girls Clubs. (BTW, this makes me f*ckin' nuts. I *HATE* the idea of any remotely-readable book taking up space in a bloody landfill.)

That all being said: it sounds like that's not nearly the extent of the problem with your friend's library. Mismanagement is a shame, because a decent head of state can at least wage a battle for the institution. Here in Phoenix, our circ is up somewhat and I recently read a surprising statistic that *library use* is up nationwide. Wasn't quite as surprised when it was clarified that they were counting remote use of computer databases and the like, but still...

Libraries and other publically-funded institutions are getting financially gutted, and here I run the risk of going off into my "what happened to civic duty" rant. We *are* in flux and must make changes. (OCLC did an interesting survey of library perception worldwide; ask if you want the link). But I'm sorry for your friend, and for your friend's community.

[terrymcgarry.livejournal.com]

Oh, weeding I completely understand, and my shelves show how I've reaped the benefits of it. (I love library discard books, because their identifiers show their history and where I picked them up.) You describe its process in a healthy library really well, though, and your point about staff/volunteers is well taken; we were just musing on why these books couldn't be donated to charity, and that explains it.

In this particular case, though, they're books in great shape, they're not being offered for sale, some of them were moving well in circulation, and the criteria for discarding them are boggling. So it's extra heartbreaking to see them Dumpstered. Rescue attempts are made where possible. We've adopted a bunch. It feels like taking in strays. *g*

I would love to see that survey link, thanks! And thanks for the sympathy. I'll pass it along, and he'll appreciate it.

[cardigirl.livejournal.com]

OCLC's 2005 report is Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources. It's available at www.oclc.org//reports/ , the first link.

Taking in strays... yeah I have a few of those myself. ;)

I wish the donation-to-charity issue were less of a knot. The problem is, the discard books run the gamut from "my dog threw up on it" to "yet another copy of the Da Vinci Code of the 100s we had to buy and this one is just a bit shabby." No one wants the former; even the latter is iffy. Make that a shabby unknown thriller and no one will ever pick it up. Sorting through those piles is... impossible; it's thousands and thousands of books, if not tens of thousands. All you can do is shrug.

[melissajm.livejournal.com]

The combination of music and content is...inyeresting. ;)

[terrymcgarry.livejournal.com]

Hey, I was running back through old entries trying to organize the tags, and I saw this unreplied-to comment. The David Massengill song "It's a Beautiful World" is about a soiree where the guests are the most evil people in history. It's kind of a shaggy-dog song--moderate in tempo, almost lulling, until the punch line, which is that at the end of the night "they all threw a pie in George Steinbrenner's face." So it seemed to be a good accompaniment to the populate-your-own-hell meme. *g*

[melissajm.livejournal.com]

Ah, now I get it. ;)