Monday, November 28, 2016

The library after closing, empty, and no one is around

Martin Luther King Library, downtown, Washington D.C.
D.C. libraries are unique in their design and character, and often best appreciated when empty. There's something haunting about an empty library at night. It's as if the voices in the books hold sway.

The District's online borrowing system is very good. It's one of a number of library systems that enables use of Amazon's Kindle format. This means that you can download it and use it on a Kindle, Android and iOS device that's no different than a book ordered directly from Amazon.

How does Amazon gain?

It may sell books to readers, such as myself, who don't finish a book in the allotted borrowing time and then buy a copy off Amazon. In any event, Amazon is catering to readers who likely buy books as well as borrow them. In the end, it can't hurt their business and likely compliments it.

One of the sites I use for reading ideas is Kirkus Reviews. It has this continuing mini-review section that gives readers the essential advice about a new work: skip it, buy it or borrow it.


Saturday, November 26, 2016

The Trump presidency and the White House seer


I have great respect for solo protesters. They usually aren't protesting something. They are there to warn. It's prudent to take them seriously because they may be seers, people with ability to sense a future. What better place to spread their message than outside the White House gates. 

People with prophetic ability exist but we don't know how to recognize them and usually ignore them. They operate in a different place..

The person with the signs above was in front of the White House in 2014. This was well before the age of Trump. I happened by and took some photos, but don't remember what he said.

But his sign includes severals quotes, carefully lettered in black ink on cardboard. The photos only show the first two.

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow and the moneyed power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." - Abraham Lincoln. 

The second was from Franklin Delano Roosevelt:The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power."






Friday, November 25, 2016

Bear rug at auction


This is a bear rug.

DC is the home of mushy people

is full of 'mushy people,' said a new arrival in a sent in 1910. Postcards were an early form of Twitter

What the new arrival to Washington D.C. wrote in 1910:

"Well I am at home here. I remember what you told me not long ago, but I've found company for there are more mushy people in this city than I ever saw before." Signed. Geo.