please, for the love of whatever you hold holy, get a zen garden or a kitten or a mustache

So apparently I should have taken the hobo's threats more seriously: I've spent the last several weeks "trapped" in a hobo dungeon, unable to post to this web-log or do other things like eat stuff that isn't bugs or perform routines of hygiene. I decided to slap quotes around trapped because, as it eventually became apparent to me, a sickly child could have punched their way out of the cardboard box that was my prison. I had been waiting for rain to do the job, but apparently hobos use a portion of their thousands of dollars of daily panhandling money to buy sealant for the cardboard dungeon. But then the hobos imprisoned a sickly child and that child punched their way out of the prison and I followed, slipping through the corrugated edges into freedom.

So, now I can resume my life, which mostly means again posting on this web-log. (Though obviously the life I resume is one lived in constant mortal fear of hobos.)

Now I'll smoothly transition to discussion of the new library catalog. For those of you not in the know a library catalog is a device that will reveal, through archaic means no one truly understands, whether or not the library owns a particular item. Crazy stuff, but significantly easier (trust me) than walking the shelves with a pallet of notebooks and transcribing the collection so that you can consult your records upon deciding you'd like to read a particular book. The new catalog allows you to review items, which means no one will ever read a bad book again. This is the sort of sorcery I can get behind!

The downside of course is that change frightens people, particularly the elderly or ignorant. (Clearly I'm not saying that only the elderly or ignorant have complained, or that one must be stupid or old not to have immediate success with the new catalog, but I'd venture that most of the callers that have huffed and screamed through their phone with enough gusto to send my lip tentacles quivering are probably limited by either age or mental faculties.) Improving things makes them furious, and though this is a reasonable stance, I'd just like to suggest that perhaps they'd find peace if they took up tending a zen garden or a kitten or a mustache.