Libraries!

What better way for a booklover to prepare for the coming Obamapocalypse than to obtain a library card? We'll save a bundle! So ten-year-old Sarah and I went to our small town's public library Saturday to sign up for cards and see what was available. After filling out the forms (the cards should be available there next week) we looked around. She hit the motherlode and came away with Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, L. M. Montgomery and a healthy dose of Hardy Boys and Boxcar Children. I found nothing by Dorothy Sayers or Elizabeth George among their thousands of mysteries and romance novels, and the friendly lady behind the counter couldn't find anything in the system by Fred Kaplan - either no library in central Illinois has a copy of his Lincoln book, or she didn't quite know what she was doing.

So the local library is a bust for me, but with their card I'll be able to check out books from the Champaign library when I'm in town for office hours Wednesdays and Fridays. I'll just need to be careful not to visit when the Bedlam across the street from the library releases its lunatic inmates for the day.

Memory and recitation

An essay by Lance Mannion on the power of recitation.

Government smokes

Sp President Obama signed the SCHIP bill yesterday, and the government program has a very special funding source:

The Congressional Budget Office says the bill will enable states to cover more than four million uninsured children by 2013, while continuing coverage for seven million youngsters. The bill will increase tobacco taxes to offset the increase in spending, estimated at more than $32 billion over four and a half years.

It's now your patriotic duty to smoke like a chimney. It's for the kids! And if the feds are smart, they'll start marketing their own line of Patriotic Old Glory Presidential cigarettes:

• cherry-scented Washingtons
  
• Lincolns: 100s and 120s
  
• Nixons: short and crooked
  
• Obamas: with a premium dark wrapper
  

And how about a line of Clinton cigars?