I have to concur with what JJR is saying in relation to libraries. I was in Sacramento this week on a train layover and decided to take my kid down to the public library. To keep a short anecdote short, the book search network went down for about 20 minutes while we were there. Talk about instant nostalgia for the card catalog…was looking for Spengler’s Decline of the West without a clue where to go. I believe that one of the librarians would have been able to help, but they were all obsessing over talking to tech support.

Preview of things to come?

Randy

RE: the coming economic crisis…I am a librarian at a state university, and even during the last Great Depression most libraries stayed open. It helps that I’m the only professional cataloger here, so I would not be easy to replace. I also worry about how well online union catalogs will continue to function in an era of increasing fossil fuel scarcity. If our campus electricity supply begins to look like downtown Baghdad’s, it would not surprise me if our patrons begin demanding the card catalog back! Fellow library colleagues look at me like I’m crazy when I say this, but I can imagine a future when just keeping the building climate controlled for the health of the books will be a big ticket item of primary consideration, and we won’t be able to afford all the electronic whizzbang that is all the rage in libraries today. I’m not a luddite per se, and I love all those full text databases, too–it’s just that I take a longer view and am very skeptical about the viability of longterm digital storage for archival purposes. Print on paper remains king, in my book (this is also a minority view among contemporary librarians, but still the correct one, I think).

Happened just the other day

It was getting kind of long

Could have said it was in my way

But I didn’t and I wonder why

I feel like letting my freak flag fly

…and I feel like I owe it to someone.

–David Crosby

Don’t think prospective employers like the look too much, though, and y’all should just be awful grateful that it looks respectable on you.

I am 57, also, and a musician by trade (jazz, blues, country)….not a lot of money—I have to try and work with as many people as I can, and I use a lot of gas, too (so far the IRS .35 cents a mile still works for me in my 27 mpg Taurus wagon, but all bets are off after 2010 and human civilization comes off Peak Oil and into decline) traveling to gigs as they dry up because people would rather stay home and “cocoon” with their home theater systems; but I’ve done it since I was young, and it keeps my soul alive while having to stare into the demon face of Corporatism.

I wrote to Richard Heinberg a few years ago after reading his book “The Party’s Over”, because he is a amateur violinist, also. I asked him what he thought the post-peak future of music would be. He said “definitely acoustic”. By inference, for the majority of us who are not “big acts” (according to guitarist John Stowell, that is about 5% of all of us who play for a “living”) that will mean small-scale and local. It can be a good thing if work at it. After my first road trip to Nevada in 1973, I knew I didn’t want to be part of that 5%!

Thanks, Stan

When the spouse and I bolted the states in late 2002, bound for her ancestral farm and the act of renovation — as well as helping her aging parents live out their waning years in relative grace — I stopped sporting “conservative camouflage” (read: clipper cut) and stopped cutting it entirely.

Spent the next four years “doing battle” with a handicapped uncle, as I emptied his “playground” of thirty years worth of accumulated junk, in which he’d had nearly five years alone to really muck it up something fierce. You wouldn’t believe the nylon twine & baling wire constructions I survived.

When the time came to actually start putting to practice what I’d been reading about stone masonry for historic buildings (c.1751), my nearly five-year-old tail suddenly became a liability. For nearly a month, each day I struggled to wash away the stubborn grey dust was one day closer to…

…the clippers. And short it will stay, though definitely not regulation, until I’m through with the building. The wife and all my rock and roll friends miss it, as do I now and again, rather like an amputee with a ghost limb. And that’s the thing about hair: it grows back.

Happy shearing!