Negative-Base Numbers

Me: Why would you do that? As a knee in the groin of the humanities
majors?
Greg: Yes! That's the whole point of mathematics!

Duration of entire conversation: 4 seconds

Greg: Stop accusing me of denying things quickly.
Me: But you do.
Greg: No, I don't.
Me: You did just then.
Greg: No!

Thursdays with Walter, week 4

about 15 minutes before class: What say we knock off early? See ya!

There's something in the atmosphere. Zombie. Spray zombie. We should all be hibernating.

I'm not real, I'm just inflatable.

"Please select logoff time." How about every fifteen seconds? That'll be fun.

One would hope that's a pseudonym, but maybe not.

What did Nicholson Baker call them? Cost-cutting, penny-pinching...whatever.

He's Canadian, so that's good. That makes him okay by me.

Let's buy a volatile toaster. BOOM! Wow! Did you see that one go?!

See what it does to people? Look at me!

Nothing exciting happens in these books unless you're about nine years old, and probably not even then.

So, you want to clean up after the parade?

Is there some place where it's just raining acid? Wait a minute--yes! America!

Call in the boys! Round up the gang!

Now we all have cultural assets, whether you like it or not.

You don't want your milk to have a friendly green putting-green top on it. Fuzzy!

I used to go to these meetings and listen to people bicker about the size of a cassette aperture. You ever wonder why that roll of 35 mm film fits in your camera the same as the last one? You forget that all of these conveniences are...convenient.

Everybody's got their master files as tifs, and now lossless jpeg 2000 comes along and it's got extensibility and flexibility and four doors instead of two and I don't know what.

Ah, dated comedy.

Why are you supposed to be using...Blue Fairy? Blue Ray? to play your movies on your...flying saucers? This is preservation class! We use technical terms all the time!!

They're in Bethesda; they must be good, because everything's more expensive in Bethesda.

Standards are a real strange business. These are people all over the world who get together and actually decide on something without starting a war.

They'd rather climb Mount Everest with nothing but a hat and bicycle.

If you speak German for more than an hour, your lips go numb.

Book repair disco music! Anyone who wants to dance, just break loose.

Oh, it's beautiful. It's like a Maserati. Don't you want to buy it, just to look at it?

Ah! Analog data compression, see?

Next thing you know, Goethe's going to appear and start singing.

You build a case with a drawer on the bottom, and on the top you have the book in the new binding, and down below is husband number one, kicked out in the cold: "I tried to give you shelter..."

Pay no attention to the man behind the thingies here.

You don't appreciate a football field-sized machine until you see people walking around it.

You people with your knowledge. You should go get jobs in technology factories or something.

What's happened to people's curiosity? "Here's a steamer trunk." "Oh, let's use it as a footrest!" How could you not look in it?

Ha ha ha, you didn't get to see the mortuary part.

Song of Myself? Boom, the ego's right there!

If you hate the Civil War, read Grant's memoirs.

Isn't technology kind of insane?

It's like a dinosaur eating a toothpick!

Mommy, what happened to the tree?

Hyah, step aside, I'm comin' though!

Do you have any papermaking videos? No? What kind of store is this?!

Doesn't that sound like a great idea? Go to a whole nother university and get a whole new degree, and never have money for 25 years, but you would know so much!

To me, that's a Frisbee that makes things happen.

Can you trust a Frenchman saying anything? Nothing personal.

The Times lies every day. All the news that's fit to print, heh heh heh.

Just one more thing about paper. Okay, just three more things about paper.

These are scientists. Have you ever hung out with scientists? They just come up with things, they don't know why. "I made paper out of tractor fenders!" "What ya gonna do with that?" "I dunno."

That's it for paper. Don't ask me any questions about paper. Forget about it. It's over. You had your chance.

Books are always talking to each other, you just need to get in on the conversation.

The Modern Classics, bound in deer hide, to display next to your gun rack.

Don't let the little paper that says "reproduction" fool you.

They all know each other, and publish incestuously.

Mobs of book-eating children going into the stacks! Can you see that?

Some rodent will see you and squeal to the press. Archy and Mehitabel will type it up.

It's hard to fine-tune a student early in the morning.

Tonight's exciting concluding episode...

Thursdays with Walter, week 3

This isn't worth anything, I hope. I use it as a Batman cape.

Help me! I'm an old map!

"page 31-34 creased, page 35 has a bullet hole, page 39 was eaten by mice, bloodstain on page 90"

This is a quintessential red state observation.

There is wisdom in the newspaper! You just have to dig deep for it.

There's only one other Rootie Kazootie book; oddly enough, it's called Rootie Kazootie.

We've all read a Little Golden Book. There's no stigma.

You all know the drill if the copyright mafia show up at your house. We live within the rules when it's possible.

It will be interesting to see if by the end of class you have a pound and a half of paper to lug around.

For this class only, I have created the Hindu god of dumpster diving. For those of you who weren't here, we talked about dumpster diving in the context of dumpster diving.

Paper you could take out to lunch, it's so good.

It's spelled "couching," but you don't say "couching" or you reveal your ignorance.

It was sitting there like paper with a match.

You're setting it on fire? It's going to burn, I think.

You try to make something safe, it's not permanent. You try to make something really exciting, it explodes.

It's...it's a horrid mutant waffle.

on burst testing: Why does that Kleenex just make it? Why does that shopping bag get you right up to the front door before the bottom drops out? They test that: it only needs to make it out of the store.

Never get into an armwrestling contest with a bookbinder.

It's a German machine--it makes no mistakes.

Tell 'em to go jump. You won't have a job left, but you'll have said that: that's fun.

"Shall" the vendor silly. You only have to "will."

In the meantime, you have an intermediary who speaks the language of the evil one: the lawyers.

If you start reading the boilerplate, I guarantee your mind will not be with you long.

You can't really do it at home using baking soda and a pair of pliers.

It's amazing: after all these years no one knows this stuff. I guess that's why I teach this class.

If there's anything in this profession that isn't a headache, let me know.

As soon as you buy it it already has shelf age, unless you go to the paper mill and grab it as soon as it comes out and throw it in a cooler like an organ transplant.

Now you can impress your HVAC buddies.

You're breathing last semester's air. Ew!

Whoever said it's not the heat, it's the humidity, they were the philosophers of conservation.

Why do I have that? That's a very good question, and you're never allowed to ask it again. Because if my wife hears it, then there'll be two.

Any kind of HVAC work, you'll need more than is left of Lehman Bros.

I don't know where they hire these people; there must be a lot of circuses going bankrupt.

It's like the baleen of a whale!

Microns are way smaller than peas.

You have once again incurred an expense.

If you have big pockets, get bigger ones.

There may be other people, but he's the guy.

On the scale of difficulty, this is toward impossible.

The image of people reading in sunlight? Might as well put a book in the oven. Here I am, cooking this book.

If you don't know if your building has drainage, you'll find out when you're swimming through your collection.

In the old days, it didn't matter: your carbon footprint could be a hundred miles wide and nobody cared.

You can see the humidity's having a little party down here.

It's very seldom 131F in the stacks.

First of all, the engineer is going to kill you, so you don't have to fire him.

On the web, you can see really snazzy, beautiful pictures; they look like they're in mylar.

Thursdays with Walter, week 2

If you have a pen, they shoot you right at your chair.

For a mere four thousand dollars, you've got a dollar-fifty book all saved!

Money, it means nothing to me: save my book.

Think of microfilm as your friend, not a loathsome piece of curled-up plastic.

Instead of Blackberry thumbs, you had scroll-unrolling thumbs.

on hemp paper: You make nice paper, and you're in a mellow mood all day.

Parchment vs. Vellum, going ten rounds!

You can get pretty wiggy in this subject.

By looking at this, you've all agreed to give me one million dollars. It's an Aztec curse.

on elephant dung paper: If you think about it, the elephant's done the pulping for you.

Taking living hearts out of people? A little detail.

When you shook hands with the ambassador and got smallpox, that's not such a good deal.

Corrugated cardboard! Made into paper that looks strangely like corrugated cardboard!

We went through a whole blender doing this, but at least I have something to show for it. We're people who don't get out a lot.

Paper is used, as we know, for filthy lucre.

People who are stamp collectors...you thought catalogers were strange!

Is that animal glue? I'm glad I didn't use stamps in the 1800s.

They ran out of fonts and had to use circus flier fonts: Terrible! Ha! Shocking! Whee!

History has a way of sneaking around and hiding in the backs of newspapers.

on the history of the Remington company: Eventually they put their plowshares away and went to weapons, so they did the opposite of what the bible says.

It's like a washing machine, except it comes out paper instead of pants.

That's a switch: I get a rebate!

This has more information than you can possibly understand in your lifetime. That's what I like about the internet, too: you no longer feel like an idiot, because there's no way anyone could know everything.

on accelerated aging tests: If you sat in front of a sunlamp next to a nuclear reactor on a hot stove, there's a good chance you'd degrade.

Yeah, I'm That Professional

Me: Some tune with a name too long for me to bother to learn came in.
Component librarian: Do I need to worry about it?
Me: Maybe.
Component librarian: Did I ask you to order it?
Me: Probably.
Component librarian: Well, thanks, then.

Thursdays with Walter, week 1

Here begins a series of posts quoting the instructor of my Thursday night class, LBSC 786. You will understand that I had to adopt a new note-taking technique that would enable me to separate real, functional notes from the kind of garbage I post here.

Driving in the dark when you're almost 60? You don't need acid, man!

That's the one thing you will get in this class: an obscure humor refresher course.

The cruel world awaits you, and this course will help you in no way whatsoever.

Ah, the fall, when college campuses are a-twitter with "like."

The art of bookbinding died centuries ago, but they keep doing it!

If you had to read this, your mind would snap.

This is one of my favorite books, because every time I open it, some of it goes away.

I'm Polish, and in high school I studied German, so I fought World War II in my head.

What are you doing here? Go back to your states! Aren't you in a militia or something?!

To fight the pandemic flu, get your hands drunk.

That's a good article. I'll probably...er...you'll probably find someday someone has made a copy of it and perhaps left it on your desk.

English literature students...I don't know that any of them ever got lives.

Mylar! I imagine sometimes the entire world under mylar! Suffocating, but so cool looking!

I started in the library as a page. Then I became a chapter, and now I'm about five novels.

College Park is hard to understand. It's like a huge yard sale with a university in the middle.

It's like a conservator's asylum.

One of 'em's a recidivist English major.

You don't have to be a member of the international conservation cult.

Why do mice always "scurry about?" Don't they ever just run? I saw a mouse scurrying about! It's like something from Dickens.

Your printing is so quiet! I should make copies for everyone! It's like artwork!

Why does my coffee maker have a clock on it? I don't want it to make coffee by itself! That freaks me out!

She was driving a Disney golf cart, so she was empowered.

The guy who did Goofy's voice figures into this class in conjunction with Bozo the Clown, but that comes up later.

You're a baseball person? You're going to like today's quiz. Oh, there's a quiz today, by the way.

A mission statement! Write that down!

Any good glues? I used to listen to jazz on the radio and assemble model cars, and I wasn't sniffing glue, but man, the jazz sounded awesome.

Static cling! It's better than laundry! I put a thing in mylar inside a plastic sleeve, and you'd need a truck to pull 'em apart.

You've been contaminated by Americana.

Why would you want to drive 200 miles per hour across a salt flat? Doesn't it make you thirsty just thinking about it?

That means everybody's here, plus two strays and a Spaniard.

Good luck with that, that's my advice.

Somebody figured out paper and somebody figured out ink, but they didn't do it on the same day.

Indulge me: I'm old.

The Problem with Compact Fluorescents: Solved

Greg: I’m concerned about the mercury.

Me: We won’t put them near the Wii.

Greg: Okay, good.

Seriously, we talk like this

Me: Pretzels are scalable. I mean, tortillas are scalable, too, but not as
much.
Greg: Tortillas are quantum. Pretzels are continuous.

The State of Classical Music

Adrian: Nobody riots at premieres anymore like they used to. They just complain about it on their blogs.

The Beach Picnic Explained

Mom: Sunday night we're having a beach picnic with the Simpsons.
Greg: What's a beach picnic?
Mom: You go down to the beach...
Me: ...with food...
Mom: ...and you brush the sand off your hot dog...
Me: ...and you wonder if that's salt or sand...
Mom: ...and when you start chewing, you find out.
Greg: Ah.

Science!

Me: What's a good-looking guy like you doing with an eyebrow like that?
Greg: Mad sciencing.

I may not be a jazzer, but I'm jazzier than some

Orchestral librarian: Is “Jumpin’ at the Savoy” in that medley?

Me: No, no, no, you stomp at the Savoy and you jump at the Woodside. Where would we be if people just started jumping wherever they felt like it?

The Postmodern Chemistry Set

Mike: Firefox extensions are the new guy-DIY thing to do around the house. It's totally the "Oh, I can fix the toaster" of the 21st century, except without the electrocution or kitchen fires.

Technically, it can be both.

Greg: That's an interesting idea.
Me: No, that's a terrible idea. What the hell's wrong with you?
Greg: It's that, too. I just said it was interesting.

Job Satisfaction

Dan: Why is it I always seem to catch you on a bad day?

Me: Because that’s the only kind there are?

Gift List Issues

Me: You're really easy to shop for, it's just that the things you want and the things your mother wants to buy you...
Greg: Have a null intersect. Form a disconnected space. Are mutually exclusive.
Me, writing: Okay, slow down...
Greg: I'm trying to think of an algebra one, but I can't think of anything good. Sits in the center of a nontrivial exact sequence?

Win

Me: Your victory was only temporary.
Greg: No, my victory was awesome.

From the Last Day in Norwich

Me: The question is, how many tics can I give you by the time we get to the airport?
Greg: Probably four.

If only I knew which was which

Either Greg or Sarah: Since when is thinking illegal?

The other: Since I became the mind police.