Saturday, August 28, 2010

The Importance of Being Earnest


















I shush because I care.

"This coffee's bitter."

C'est vrai. If I want bitter, I'll go home and talk to my wife.
Badabing, that's the end of this life. Let me make this

perfectly Nixonian, incoming freshman class:
you are the victim of deception, of agitprop.

The library does not guarantee free textbooks for all.
Free textbooks for all the library does not guarantee.

The bookstore guarantees textbooks for thee,
gold coin or pound of flesh, gallows or the axe,

death by desperate, knotted stomach, winded pipe
or bleeding through merry halls til thou expire.

Wars & security states ain't cheap, bub
but they sure is rub-a-dub-funny.

Shush! or you won't hear the laughing.

14 comments:

SueH said...

I, too, possess such a 'shushing' librarian - but, alas, not much good in our open-plan libraire....

....and did you desecrate the hallowed halls of regimented literary works by daring to utter the mortal body-blow phrase, suggesting your incumbents should get themsleves hence to a book-purchasing emporium....?

Wax-on lyrical, my fiend!

Demeur said...

You mean to tell me that today's youth haven't figured out how to scan and upload to their P to P network? My my today's young whipper snappers aren't as smart as I thought.

Candace said...

No doubt the military's decision to start with the child soldier case was made to embarrass the Obama administration. That'll teach 'em to leave us alone so we can incarcerate people indefinitely.

Btw, one of my favorite gifts ever was a Jane Austen action figure. :)

Randal Graves said...

sue, bah, open or closed, one floor or many, there's always occasion for shushing.

And of course young scholars must frequent said establishments, or do you wish our superpower economy to fall prey to foreign interests?

demeur, that's the smart way to do things, buy the sucker, scan it, thus saving money on copying, return for a full refund. Get off my lawn.

candance, can American pretzeldential administrations even be embarrassed? That's akin to a porn star blushing for being nude.

I've got a Poe sitting on my desk, but alas, no booze-fu grip.

Life As I Know It Now said...

I don't shush anybody except those noisy tweens--they always are getting shushed and thrown out of the library due to their adolescent antics--goddess love 'em. But those pressed upon and discriminated against almost adults are fans of vandalism and loudness and snottiness so out they go.

S.W. Anderson said...

A 15-year-old who makes and plants explosives, the better to kill people, is no child, IMO. He was old enough to know what it means to kill someone, and stepped up to the adult level of taking one's best shot, and taking one's chances, in war. He is now a prisoner and deserves to be held accountable for his deeds.

I don't know if the case against him will be adequate to win conviction. That's for the commission to decide. But no one should go squishy because of his tender age. Madrassahs and hanging out with al Qeada types are mind- and status-altering experiences, and not for the better.

Tengrain said...

Graves you swine!

Ah, e-Book textbooks at $70/pop, and that you cannot sell back. That, my friend, is the future!

Rgds,

TG

Tom Harper said...

"I shush because I care." Aw, a caring librarian.

Madam Z said...

Graves, you whine! Shush!

La Belette Rouge said...

Does your Librarian action figure want to make an appt. to see my Freud action figure?;-)

Susan Tiner said...

I think LBR wins today's comment thread.

Librarians actually looked like that and did much shooshing when I was a little kid spending oodles of time in libraries.

Randal Graves said...

liberality, surprisingly (though maybe not given that we're not a "public" library) the last bout of vandalism we had was about a decade back when some local neo-Nazi stooge group slapped a bunch of their stickers in some books.

SWA, sounds well & good. Let me know when we apply the same standard to American "heroes" who murder the next Afghan wedding party.

tengrain, don't forget the limited, six-month access!

tom, be quiet!

madam z, bwah!

LBR, show me your kung-fu grip and I'll show you mine. ;-)

susan, used to? It's a requirement that we all sport buns and horn-rims.

Commander Zaius said...

“Optically, this has been a terrible case to begin...

With megatons of intellectual punch, as compared to Bush/Cheney, they just can't seem to fathom the simple concept about how situations and actions look to the public.

Freida Bee said...

Shushing is so sexy. Sometimes, I do it too.