I went to the Amish Country Cheese Festival in Arthur, IL, over the weekend. This guy won the cheese-eating contest, wherein one was obliged to eat a one-pound block of cheese in under five minutes.

This is a photo of a photo of the original California flag, raised in Sonoma in June 1846. It was created for the Bear Flag Revolt, a 26-day rebellion staged by Anglo settlers in California against the Mexican government (since CA was Mexican territory at the time). An independent “California Republic” was declared, with a president (William B. Ide) and everything. It was all a big to-do and hullaboo, but the rebels soon found out that the US had declared war on Mexico over a month earlier.

Bear Flag rebels: “Oh.”

And US forces soon occupied the territory. The president of the short-lived California Republic ended up enlisting as a private. Following a series of battles and sieges, California was ceded to the US in January of the following year. The Bear Flag Revolt’s “sole legacy” (according to a pretty smug Wikipedia) was the flag itself.

The bear on the flag has been redrawn as variously stantat (standing either on four feet or up on two like some kind of bear-person) or en passant (walking, likely toward freedom and/or crippling budget deficits). The red stripe, originally painted with a mixture of berry juice and brick dust, has remained. The early bears look pretty pathetic, more like marmots than anything fierce or intimidating. Thankfully the bear’s been redone.

More on the various flags of California here at this website curated by a retired history teacher.

I use it A LOT. Like you know when you’re filling out an application online, and you’re afraid you’ll lose everything when it times out on you? That has happened to all of us. You can copy/paste your responses into Word, and copy/paste them back out if you have to… Or you could just use Jumpcut.

Or like when you paste something into a chat window and press Enter before making sure what you pasted was what you wanted, and you forgot that the last thing you copied was actually something embarrassing…? Well, anyway. Jumpcut. There you go.

The other day, I watched Desk Set on Netflix Instant, starring a loudmouthed Katharine Hepburn and an aging Spencer Tracy. She’s the head librarian at the reference room of the Federal Broadcasting Company in New York; he’s a visiting engineer working on a secret supercomputer project that, it is rumored, will render all the librarians obsolete.

Opening sequence — so early 60s

Obviously, after reading that description, I had to watch it, seeing as my Library & Information Science classes begin next week. It was an interesting setting for a movie about libraries — this reading room’s raison d’être was basically a fact-checking office for a thinly disguised NBC. Script writers would call the librarians asking who had the highest batting average or what all the names of the reindeer were. The librarians would find the answer in a book or, more often, in their memory.

The boss' office upstairs at 30 Rockefeller Center

That was interesting to me, that the film showcased librarians as valuable not for their looking-things-up skills, but for the knowledge they had in their heads — and how they could not, therefore, be replaced by a supercomputer.

My kind of library!

Spencer Tracy’s character’s computer was a room-filling Magic 8-ball: you typed in your query in a question format, and it printed out the answer for you. All the information in the library had to be entered in first by hand. If your question was unclear, it asked you questions back. (Librarian: “How much does the earth weigh?” — Computer: “With or without people?”)

As it turned out, though, the computer was not intended as a librarian’s replacement. It was installed “to save time for more research.” As a librarian’s aid. Well, the supercomputer in real life evolved far more than the film dreamed. Now nobody would need to call the reference section about a batting average when they could just Google it. It’s funny how the breadth, depth, and ease of the Internet far surpassed what anybody dreamed. But where, I get asked often as a future library science scholar, does that leave libraries? Where does that leave librarians?

Stylin' librarians in front of the supercomputer, and also my keyboard brightness icon, oops

My canned answer has been that librarians’ main job, besides the usual shelving and checking out of books, is not necessarily to know the information, but how to find it. And not necessarily how to find it because it might be tucked away in a dusty old encyclopedia somewhere, but how to find it because there often are too many sources. What’s reliable? What do we have access to?

In other news, my next birthday party will have a 1960s Supercomputer theme.

ROAD TRIPS + STOPS ALONG THE WAY

Bottom line: San Diego to Providence, summer 2009, with Meredith & Crow

• Paulden, AZ, to visit Caiti [ + Grand Canyon]
• Albuquerque, NM ( + Los Alamos)
• Denver, CO, to pick up Crow
• Fort Scott, KS, to visit Deven
• Petersburg, IL, to visit Jordan
• Chicago, IL, to visit Taylor
• Niagara Falls, NY ( + Buffalo)
• Kingston, NY, to visit Arune ( +Woodstock)

Top line: Providence to San Diego, summer 2010, with Meredith

• Youngstown, OH
• Champaign, IL
• Chicago, IL, to visit Taylor again ( + Madison, WI)
• Rochester, MN, to visit Joanna
• Custer, SD, to camp ( + Mt. Rushmore + Wind Cave)
• Yellowstone, WY, to camp
• Spokane, WA, to visit the Johnsons
• Vancouver, BC, to visit Elyse
• Portland, OR, to visit Nicole ( + Seattle)
• Crescent City, CA, to visit… what were their names, Mere? [Bill + Becky]
• Palo Alto, CA, to visit Christina and Christine ( + San Francisco)
• Echo Park, CA, to visit Becca

Middle line: San Diego to Champaign, IL, summer 2010, with Mom

• Sacramento, CA ( + Donner Pass)
• Battle Mountain, NV
• Laramie, WY
• Des Moines, IA

Conservative approximation of number of miles driven during these road trips: 11,274

It’s part of the new fall/winter collection just released by APC. It’s all pretty great, for both men and women, and in typical simple APC style… But I have just two questions.

Why is there an APC Karaoke DVD? And why is their favicon the Internet Explorer icon?

We visited an extremely silly Dave Eggers show at Electrical Works in San Francisco. You can see pretty much all of it here. This suspicious chihuahua was probably my favorite.

There are more. Suggestions?

N.B. “Like” (as a filler word) is too easy a target to nominate for this list, particularly because the author utilizes it often.