Way back then

Yesterday was a day off, so I went to the huge and understuffed San Francisco Public Library. One of several new or refurbished buildings that line the Civic Center Plaza, the library is an attractive hodgepodge of styles which nonetheless probes to be a spectacularly inefficient library-- if you believe the critics. I went to the periodicals department on the 5th floor, loaded some microfilm into an ancient viewer, and typed in several news stories reporting on the October, 1990 demonstration protesting the visit to SF by evangelist Larry Lea. The Texas preacher wanted to "exorcise" the "evil spirits" he said held sway over San Francisco -- on Halloween, which is practically a national holiday here (if San Francisco were a nation). A grand time was had by all.

I had two amazingly nerdy customers this week at the l.n.c.b.. The first was an 11-year-old boy who, while his mother checked out her purchases, earnestly explained to her some arcane point having to do with "Lord of the Rings" and Sauron's powers and the Ring and all. The second was when some schlub returned a Monty Python boxed set of DVDs and bought a huge box of "Windows XP Server" software and manuals. Only a real nerd would have a boxed set of ten Monty Python DVDs, and only a truly deadly one would exchange it --unopened -- for software. And boring server software, at that. The damn box of software weighed a ton; it's the first time I've double-bagged something.