The Culture Channel

I am now getting spam with titles like "downlooadable archives"

I'm suddenly reminded of the Piled Higher and Deeper comic where one of the character's getting spam mail with subject lines like "increase your thesis! Make you advisor happy!"

Look what I found while searching the National Agricultural Library's Special Collections for Ephemera:

Henry Cantwell Wallace Papers

I wrote that finding aid! And arranged those papers, and labeled the folders, and everything.

Debating whether I can reference superdickery.com in a paper on the uses and treatment of ephemera. I bet comics count as ephemera -- if brochures, flyers, musical programs, restaurant menues, political buttons, and chapbooks count, then so do comics.

Actually, I'm not so sure chapbooks should count. They may very very cheap books, but they're still books, and not intended for a short-time, single purpose use. Technically, neither are comics, but I bet you could make a case for old, 1930s comics. Sold from newsstands, printed on cheap paper, generally considered disposable... ephemera!

(Buttons definately = no. They are physical artifacts, as are stamped pennies, wooden signs, and anything else that's not paper-based or photographic).

There are times when I thank God I did all that history and English -- because I can pull Lyon's Sex Among the Rabble and Alice Fah's The Imagined Civil War off my book shelf to pad this paper out with examples of the usefulness of print ephemera to historians.

One of the nine exceptions to the US Freedom of Information Act is, and I quote, "geological and geophysical information and data, including maps, concerning wells."

No, I don't know why, either. But someone in 1966 thought it important enough to mandate that it be kept confidential.

Also, government agencies must make "all reasonable efforts" to search for a record? That's like copyright law's requirement that you make a reasonable effort to search for a copyright holder, or sexual harassment legislation that defines as harassment anything that would offend "a reasonable woman."

"Reasonable" is a weasel word, and can either be used to get you off the hook entirely, or come back to bite you in the ass if you claim you made a "reasonable effort" and someone else disagrees.

Yes! Last final is emailed to my professor, and I am officially done with the semester.

Good news on the paper front-apparently, it only has to be five-ten single-spaced pages, not eight to ten, so if I can write another page (getting me to a solid five) I should be able to append my three pages of hierarchical linear arrangement for comics titles and get eight pages, and hand that in for a solid B )at least I'll have fulfilled the requirement of proving I understand the course concepts and citing the text and readings five times).

So, for those who care deeply about hierarchical arrangements (probably about as many of you as cared about entity-relationships), here's another excerpt from the paper:

( Everything is more interesting with Captain America in it )

Steve doesn't agree that his presence makes hierarchical categorization more interesting. Look how sullen he looks in the GIP (Tony, on the other hand, probably would find it fascinating).

Well, the paper on Baltimore voluntary associations and the Freedman's Bank is turned in, as of 11:00 this morning. All 24 mediocre pages of it--I simply couldn't make myself care enough to seriously rewrite it or polish it, so when I get a B- or C in the class, I'll have only myself to blame. I'm hoping for a B, so I don't have to (ever) retake it.

Depending on what I got on the midterm-I-still-haven't-gotten-back-yet for American History, I may be able to pull and A- in that, and I know I can get at least a B in Information Structure class, provided I can get 8 pages on hierarchical categories written by Thursday and not suck on the exam tomorrow.

Paper is due exactly 48 hours from now. We shall see if my skills at overly-verbose BS still remain strong enough for me to get a halfway decent paper banged out during that time, or if my English major kung-fu is now weak.

Primary source research in bank records and 1867 & 1870 Baltimore city directories is done (well, mostly--I'll probably be adding more sources in the second draft).

I probably should have spent today desperately catching up on the secondary sources I haven't read, but I wanted to get through the second directory, so that I could have those extra bits of occupational data--and it turned out to be a good move, because I found 36 people who weren't listed in the 1867 edition, and who I'm therefore positing came to Baltimore after 1867 (luckily for me, their names are all from 1868-and-onward bank accounts, so I can make the hypothesis).

I've now got an outline and a set of conclusions (no thesis statement yet, but that generally materializes halfway throught the paper, anyway), and it turns out I have more information than I thought--I know I can get at least ten pages out of this, which means I can hopefully pad it out to 20-25 by being tediously verbose. My goal for tonight is to get at least five pages written before they kick me out of the library.


If you encounter me anywhere on lj between now and Monday afternoon, an all-caps comment along the lines of "get the hell off the internets and write your fucking paper, you whore" would not be inappropriate.

You know, I finished two extensive cataloging projects for information access class today, and yet I still feel like I've accomplished nothing. Because I haven't written any fixit fic yet.

This may be a sign that my priorities are ever so slightly skewed.

Also, I still have 3500 bank records to get through by Friday. But, you know, a grad-student research project on post-Civil War Baltimore isn't going to begin to contribute as much to society as post-Civil War Marvel fic. (That actually wasn't sarcasm, by the way)

I have to pay $90 for class materials for my library science class. $90! Because the professor is charging us forty dollars for the syllabus and class assignments! (as well as fifty for the books, which we have top buy from him, not the UMD bookstore).

Personally, I think that's unethical. Actually, it goes beyond unethical to just plain slimy and possibly evil. If he doesn't want to pay the photocopying costs to make multiple sets, he could just email them to everyone in a pdf file for free. You do not charge for assignments or for your syllabus--that's supposed to be covered in the already too high tuition prices we're paying to take the class.

In more pleasant news, I watched the interviews on the director's cut to Daredevil. Turns out, the directors cut was originally intended to be the theatrical release. The studio had them cut out almost a quarter-to-a-third of the film so that it would be ninety minutes long and "fast-paced." Hence the gaping plot holes and rushed feeling to the theatrical release version.

Studio guy claims that the theatrical cut is the "true" and superior version of the movie. The director/writer and producer claim that the director's cut is superior (and truer to their vision of a darker, more complex story, rather than a straightforward action/revenge plot, as well as truer to the characters, especially Foggy and Matt).

I get the strong impression that Mark Steven Johnson and Avi Arad are comic book people first and foremost (or at least comics fans), and that studio editor had never picked up a Daredevil comic in his life. The cutting process apparently went something like this:

Writer/director: But, but you can't cut that scene of Foggy in the courtroom! It's so well-acted and funny.
Studio guy: But not exciting enough. Cut it!
Writer/director: But it has Coolio in it, come on.
Studio guy: I thought I told you we were cutting the subplot that shows Matt and Foggy actually being lawyers and the Kingpin actually being a threat to Hell's Kitchen. It distracts from the action plot.

Studio guy: Why is this scene here? It's too slow.
Writer/director: Because it provides depth to the character and is also taken directly from a panel in "Man Without Fear." It's classic Daredevil backstory! Trust me, fans will love it.
Studio guy: But who are these people? Why do we care? Cut it!
Writer/director: But, but, if you cut this shot, Frank Miller will cry!
Studio guy: Who's Frank Miller?