Overdue updates

Okay, it's time for a new post.

Updates:

-Thanks to m.h. for the blog's makeover. We must put this new look to use with more posts.
-Welcome (back) to the Regenstein, happyfeet!
-Goodbye, axl! I guess the Oriental Institute is also for lovers, but not as much as the Reg. Write us from there!
-And finally, some Local 743 news from Gary, the library's 743 rep:

The votes are being counted now in the election for the Teamsters international officers. Around 300,000 out of the over a million members voted. The count will continue for several days. The few results we have so far from Teamster locals in the East are these:

Leedham 3,088 votes 31.76%


Hoffa 6636 votes 68.24%

Again keep in mind this is not an election for the officers who run your local. We are still waiting to see the outcome of a lawsuit filed by the Department of Labor against Local 743 for alleged election fraud. It's my understanding there is also an allegation of criminal activity. Criminal activity? In the Teamsters union!!

My immediate thoughts were: "I love Gary. And why is Jimmy Hoffa running for and winning an office in Teamsters?" Edit: Oh yeah. Mafia ties to the Union have existed long before my time. I knew that.

I have other ideas for posts, mostly involving pictures because those are always more fun (some of the ideas are not mine, but I always give credit where it is due). See you all soon!

A colleague departs for the Orient

We gnash our teeth and weep over a colleague's recent departure to the Orient. We wish him luck and bid our final farewells in full knowledge that this is the last we may see of our friend. For we know what lurks beyond University Avenue. History bears witness to the mystical passion burning deep in the desert of the Oriental mind, and however hardily constituted we may trust our dear philosopher's mental mettle to be, it is a dangerous test to which the Orient subjects a good Christian, however thoroughly immersed in the advantages of Civilization his formative years may have been. Still, we hold out a minor hope that axl may retain, even among the peoples of the East, a sense of what was once a robust masculinity, a firm trust in ὁ λόγος, and the most unwavering commitment to sexual orthodoxy manifest in the West since the years prior to the good Rev. Graham's loss of innocence, albeit after a long and heroic struggle with Beelzebub. In any case, godspeed, friend, and may we be blessed with your safe return to the Pub next Tuesday...

A Founding Myth

Had he been one for listening, we might have persuaded the Creator to keep things simple. Already there existed a system, a Light in the Darkness, brought forth from indeterminate Chaos and present in the sensuous Truth established by the Library of Congress. What pride was there in a hope for transparency? This, in beautifully concrete symmetry, was ὁ λόγος. In that time outside of Time, Nature had no independent form, for Joseph Regenstein's library itself was the Form of Nature. Beyond Time, inside of Time, at various points in the ether quite over Time, JRL and its abstract manifestation, LOC, carved into the Formlessness its own Perfect Form. And the Library's board saw that it was good, and it was proposed that in this image Man should be made.

Still the Creator balked: "This is not meant for Man, nor is it meant for Her Whom I Have Not Yet Named. The Man I must create has yet the Finite to traverse, and here you ask that I provide him with the Infinite while still in his infancy. Alliteration, also, is not for Man. I digress. I shall install within him a mechanism much like what you have designed here. I shall call it Libido...no, uh, I believe rather--I shall call it Memory! And Man shall have access to Knowledge, and he will encode this Knowledge and maintain it among like articles of Knowledge, and his Library of Knowledge will grow, until the University's budget can no longer support an additional automated retrieval system, at which point, well...hmmm...I'm still working out the details. But in addition, by virtue of his participation in the realm of Finite things, Man will be witness to Decay, and for your temerity tonight [by which he intended the Eternity which had passed before that first awful Monday], I shall see that the same principle of Decay applies to your books. Spines will crack, pages will disappear, and you will misplace many years of Congressional records from what I will, according to my nature, describe mysteriously as the Y-4's. Anyway, kids, Daddy's gotta bounce." And with that he cast us, along with Books III and IV of Aristotle's Physics, into the B-level, to wither in remorse for our untimely audacity...