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where I come from the library was a fast food franchise, where you could also check out crayons, two at a time. I went there late one day, (couldn't recall why stars twinkle... and planets don't) only to be told the information I needed was available on alternate Thursdays, so I had a hamburger and read about barber poles. 
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tsuwm one-ups: where I come from the library was a fast food franchise,
where you could also check out crayons, two at a time.
I went there late one day,
(couldn't recall why stars twinkle... and planets don't)
only to be told the information I needed was available
on alternate Thursdays, so I had a hamburger and
read about barber poles.And interesting reading it would have been ... I've often thought I should produce the definitive book on New Zealand barber poles. Somehow, though, the motivation is just, um, lacking. As would be a market for the book, I dare say. My total experience of Minnesota is the Minneapolis/St Paul airport transit lounge. Based on that breadth of Minnesotan local knowledge alone, I believe I can quite fairly extrapolate for the entire state and say that I wouldn't be surprised about your library!   Actually, come to think of it, isn't the whole place based on a fictitious town called Lake Woebegone? - read this month's National Geographic for an explanation of this outrageous slur on the Loon State, or go to http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0012/feature5/index.html and have someone better qualified do it ... Cheers, tsuwm!
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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Carpal Tunnel
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Well, when I was a child, our liberry was a
bookmobile. And, it wasn't real regular 'bout its runs,
neither. One time, the driver overstayed his welcome at the bar in the next town, and that bookmobile didn't move
for 30 days. 'Nother time, though, we were lucky--he had a flat tire right up the street, so we got to borrow books till the tow truck finally showed up five days later--and then he had to go back and get the right size tire.
'Course, there wasn't just a real big choice of books,
'specially if you were a kid. The kids' books were kept
away up on the top shelf. Gee, you'd'a thought we were
gonna tear 'em up or somethin'! You might have thought
he'd have gotten tired of us leavin' our muddy footprints
on the lower shelves, but no, they stayed up on that high
place. We learned to be careful not to bang our heads on the ceiling. We had to be quick, too--climb, look, and grab, all in however long our co-conspirators could keep the driver occupied. Once we had the books in our hands, we were safe. All we had to do was tell him we found them
on the floor, because we really did find books on the floor,
all the time: young Bobby Joe used to make a killing--he could time it down to the second, practically, how long the
driver could keep it up on two wheels as he came around into the courthouse square. The rest of us lost our money
every time.
We had to be careful with what we picked out, too.
"Charlotte's Web" had a page missing where Billy Sam's
6-year-old brother tried to eat the spider. We all knew to
avoid "Misty of Chincoteague"--Betty Lou's baby sister
threw up on it. A shame, too--we all loved Misty.
None of us minded all the crayon scribbles and animal
footprints across the pages. The occasional dead bug was
no problem, either, though I didn't much care for finding
the live baby snake in the nature book. Somebody'd put it
there for added learning, I reckon.
We used to ask the driver why he always began to shake, even before he shut the motor off in our town, but he just
turned away and drank something from a paper sack and never answered.
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Once, a very long time ago, I was stationed at Hakata Air Base in Japan. I wrote a parody for use by the little theatre group I was directing, based on the Allan Sherman song, which began "Dearest Mudda, Dearest Fadda, Here I am at Camp Hakata." It was set in the Navy barracks, the naval detachment being the smallest of the three detachments in residence. "All the soldiers, hate us sailors, and the airmen, are like jailers." Thanks for the memory.
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Pooh-Bah
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Apologies for comming back on to the original thread after all this time.
I agree with so much of what has been said about the current standards of English - I sometimes despair at the notices that are circulated from University House (Head Office, as it were). If an institution of the sort to which I belong ( established in the '60s - not one of your "New" universities, says he snobbiishly) can't get it right, what hope is there?
I also remember quaking in my shoes when hearing, at the age of nine, that I was going up into Miss Treweek's class -she had a reputation as a Dragon of the first order. I soon found that she was an excellent teacher who rewarded effort just as surely as she punished slackness and grew to love her dearly. (Hers is the only name that I remember from my primary school days, which says something - even if only about my memory) It was her teaching that gave me reasonably good spelling and an instinctive grasp of correct grammar.
But her efforts to instil the rudiments of language, inter alia, were built upon a foundation of work by other competent teachers and, above all, on the help and encouragement that I received at home, which is so important.
A not insignificant number of people from the working-classes in the C19 learned to read (far more than learned to write) because they had parents - particularly mothers - who taught them their basic letters, and who then used this as a means to further education.
However, just to put this whole debate into some sort of longer perspective, I have to tell you that, when researching into something quite different, I came across a letter in one of the Manchester area newspapers - the Bolton Herald, I think - by a local employer deploring the standards of spelling and grammar amongst the young people that applied for jobs at his firm. These standards had dropped alarmingly over the past twenty years, he siad. The date of the paper was 1874.
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Rhub said, inter alia: I also remember quaking in my shoes when hearing, at the age of nine, that I was going up into Miss Treweek's class -she had a reputation as a Dragon of the first order. I soon found that she was an excellent teacher who rewarded effort just as surely as she punished slackness and grew to love her dearly. (Hers is the only name that I remember from my primary school days, which says something - even if only about my memory) It was her teaching that gave me reasonably good spelling and an instinctive grasp of correct grammar.Yes, I had one of those, Mrs Taylor. But it was the times tables which were my bete noir and the cause of her (assumed) displeasure. As with you, my hat is off to her even now. A good teacher was a thing to be treasured! Incidentally, our resident SC AEnigma has "bete noir" as "beetle noise". Could this be a legitimate synonym?
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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mfa expounds: I used to get mad at my school,
The teachers that taught me weren't cool.
You're holding me down,
Turning me round,
Filling me up with your rules. *John and Paul
Well, I opened my heart to the whole universe,
And I found it was loving.
And I saw the great blunder my teachers had made--
Scientific delirium madness. *from "5D," J. McGuinn
"Kenny and his brother had a game out in the back -
Let's make the water turn black." (Frank Zappa)
Says it all, really, doesn't it?
-CK
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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-dunno, ck, if that's how you really feel, it may just
go "to prove that there's nothing you can do with a really dedicated misfit" [or two]. (credit: the writers
for "Lost In Space")How about "Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!" from "Space Family Robinson"? From memory it was the only line that anything spoke in that show that made sense. And the robot got to use it. Damn, now I'm going to have to go and dust off my old "Mother's Day" LP to listen to the rest of that song ... if my turntable still turns at anything approximating 33.33 rpm. 
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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