Best concluding line to a student paper, ever?:

From an art school student's (very good) paper on phases of lesbian sadomasochism, from the conclusion on how the debates from decades ago are still lingering on in the community:

The humor hasn't changed much either; everyone still takes potshots at butches.

. . .

Interesting praise from an art school colleague.

The other week, I was talking with an art school colleague about unionization stuff, and he was like, "And that's because a lot of people don't have the militancy that you do."

And he meant it as a compliment.

That made me laugh for a while when I thought about it, but overall I find it a lovely compliment.

I even called my mother and told her, and she liked the word "militancy", and I texted a few friends.

My one friend from Pittsburgh texted back and after quoting some line from a poem was like -

Well, militant is the main way to go anymore.

. . .

Library find: Another cool barcode.

The other week I was shelving, and I found a book whose barcode ended "...007".

Two morning sights:

The other morning, I was running an errand in my neighborhood before running off to work, and as I'm hustling down the sidewalk, I see a mailperson ahead of me, a(n early 40s) (slightly taller) (slim) (very black) man, and as I go to pass him, he pauses and turns off to deliver something, but his cart keeps going.

"Good morning!", I was like.  "You got a runaway cart here!".

"Yeah," he was like, in a surprisingly deep voice.  "Sometimes it's got a mind of its own."

Later, after my errand, as I began biking up to work, I saw a couple (hispanic) workman in bright green smocks by the intersection where it was all newly paved, with these odd wheeled handrollers that they were using to put down white preliminary lines where the crosswalks would be later sketched in.

Morning mini-hallucination.

The other morning I was super groggy from having a heavy workout at the gym the evening before, and when I went to go open my blinds in my bedroom, I thought I saw oranges strewn across the yard next door.

As it turns out, they were actually large-ish dandelions, in the funny morning light that turned their color towards orange.

You know what was a bad idea?

Microfilm!

Flipping through and scanning a hard copy of a newspaper is very quick, but to scroll, stop, and magnify page after page eats up time exponentially.

If you need one article and know exactly where to find it, microfilm's not bad, but if you're browsing around in certain date ranges and trying to find stuff that's maybe there and maybe isn't, it's like the kiss of death.

The tradeoff on time simply isn't worth what you'd save in storage space, though I guess the portability of the reels is somewhat a plus.

The other day, flipping through 4 (four!) issues of a daily newspaper that wasn't more than 30 page each per issue, took me like an hour, honestly.

Sights of a Monday walk-in-the-quarry-park:

1) Two (late 20s) (white) hipsters fishing by the pond edge.

2) Two (pre-teen) (Mexican) kids fishing by the pond edge, listening to a static-y radio that turns out to be tuned to very (Mexican) music with a tuba.

3) Up on the edge of the big field, a (late teens or very early 20s) (hispanic) couple, each with a cat on a body leash, with the leash held in pretty short.