Live from the Rock!

Brown University's Rockefeller Library, I mean. They got stuff here I ain't got access to up at Boston U., so I rode down with J. this morning when she came down for her day's graduate-funding-earning session.

I watched the Democrat debate last night. I thought Kerry and Braun came off the best, and Kucinich the worst. In general, though, they sounded as though they should just work together as some sort of decemvirate.

Stopped in for coffee at a place off Thayer Street today and heard a license inspector threaten to shut them down on Monday if they "didn't have it yet." Being Providence, I half wondered if he meant a bribe, but surely there are less colorful things to which he could have been referring.

Later today I am ignoring my own department's opening-fall-semester reception in favor of that of another department of a different academic discipline at an entirely different university. Possibly I will know more people.

Time now to go flip through new classics journals in the periodicals room and hope no one has published anything I have to read.

copiers

In Rockefeller Library, there are, to my knowledge, 6 photocopiers, on two levels, available for public use. Possibly there are others, but I have never needed to know about them.

Two of them won't take my copy card. (*)

Two of them have blinking error lights.

One of them prints dark streaks across every copy.

The other has had something of a line-up to use it.

Incidentally, in new periodicals alone (quite apart from the hit list I brought with me) I had about 200 pages' worth of articles to copy that seemed relevant, many directly so, to my dissertation. Alas.

Now I go join my beloved and her colleagues for bad burgers and, I hope, better beer.

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(*) The fourth Brown University library copy card I own, as I forget to bring them every time I come down here (which is admittedly not too often). Last night, meaning to avoid this, I marched right upstairs to my desk to find one of the old ones and then got distracted, ultimately forgetting the copy card entirely, when I saw my credit card bills sitting there on top of my strata of papers as a grim reminder of duty. But as it's five cents a page cheaper to use the card, it's worth it to spend the dollar for a new card each time. Woe, alas, eheu, oimoi talas, ktl.