T. Scott

Birthday Parties

When we got home from the champagne tasting, the message light was on.  I knew it was Josie.  I pressed the button, and there she was, singing "Happy Birthday" to me.

Squeaky little girl voice, but her pitch and rhythm are exactly right.

I'd been home fifteen minutes or so and then she called.

"Happy Birthday Nonai!"

"Thank you, Bug!"

"Did you hear my message?"

"I did!  You sang wonderfully.  Would you sing it for me again?"

She giggles.  "Yeah," she says, shyly.

"Did you have a good birthday?" she asks when she's done with the song.

"Yes," I say.  "I had a fine time."

"What party did you have?"

That is, did I have a Gymboree party, or a Pump It Up party, or did I have some of my friends over for a Pirate party, or what?

"Well, I haven't had a party yet."  This perplexes her, and she's a little concerned.  She's always had at least two or three birthday parties (and attends her friends' on a regular basis), so how can it be my birthday and I haven't even had one yet?

"We'll have a party when you and your Mom come over on Sunday...  Okay?"

"Okay," she says, apparently placated.  "Love you, bye..." 

Beauty's In The Eye...

Here in the South, beauty pageant culture is a very big deal, and there are many girls younger than Josie who've already learned the runway walk.   Marian cringes at the idea -- it's a subculture she doesn't want any part of.

On the other hand, given Josie's requited love for the camera, getting a bit of modeling work has some appeal.  It's not a practical pursuit right now, given everything else M. is trying to keep up with, but she was intrigued by the Gap's Casting Call contest, whose winners will be the featured photos at babyGap and GapKids stores early next year.  Maybe a foot in the door?

So Josie's been entered, and Marian is trying to get everyone she can to vote for her as a fan favorite.  You go to the Gap Casting Call website, and enter Josie's number (794876305) and can vote once a day from now through November 17.  You do need to register with DisneyFamily.com in order to vote (ah, there's the catch!), but it's fairly painless and you can opt out of getting email ads from them.

Being the dutiful Nonai that I am, I've registered and linked and I'll be putting in my votes.  Marian'll be grateful for any help she gets.

At The Zoo

"C'mon Bug.  We can't get out that way."

"But why?"

"Look -- they've got it blocked off.  We've got to go around this way."

"But Why!?"

"I dunno.  C'mon along this way."

She plants her feet and gives me her insistent look, eyes fierce, lower lip pushed out.  "Tell me WHY!"

"I don't know why.  D'you want me to make something up?"

Her face relaxes.  "Sure!"

"It's like this....  A wild alligator escaped and is wandering around over there.  A four year old little girl walked down that way, and the alligator caught her and gobbled her all up!  So they blocked that way off until they catch the wild alligator so that no other four year old little girls can go that way."

"Oh....!" She says thoughtfully, "I see....!"

Anniversaries

When Idie asked how many years we'd been married, I teased, "How old is your restaurant?"

"Um, fourteen, we think?"

"Our marriage is just six weeks older than your restaurant."

The Hot and Hot Fish Club would be one of our favorite restaurants even if we didn't almost share an anniversary date, but the coincidence of its opening just weeks after I moved here has always made us feel particularly affectionate toward it and Chris & Idie.  It's always near the top of our list for a place to take visitors, or if we want to do something special for ourselves.

A few years after they opened, they participated in a charity action at which most of the leading chefs in town offered something special -- dinner at your house for twelve of your closest friends, for example.  What Chris & Idie put up was four seasonal tasting dinners for two.   We were able to get it, and over the course of the next year, about every three months, I'd call Chris and we'd talk about what he was fixing that was particularly suited to that season, and then he'd put together a seven course menu for us, with paired wines.  Each meal was spectacular -- and the fact that it was all prepaid, so that we never had to look at a bill, made it even more fun.

At the last of the four, we were chatting with Chris and I was bemoaning the fact that we'd come to the end of it, and joking that I'd like to take out another year's subscription.  He shrugged and said, "I'd be happy to do it anytime.  Just give me a call."  And we did.  Many times.

Given our travel schedule in the fall, we're just as likely to be in some other city on our wedding anniversary as we are to be home, so when I realized that we'd be in Birmingham this year, and that it was a Saturday night,  a tasting menu at Hot and Hot seemed like the perfect thing to do.  And just to make it a little extra special, I booked a suite for us at the Hotel Highland so we could walk to the restaurant and not have to worry about driving home afterwards.

Bill, the sous chef, was in charge and after asking us if there was anything in particular we were interested in, and hearing that we wanted to leave it entirely up to him, he came up with this menu (bear in mind that each course is half or less than half the size of the normal portion):

• Tomato Soup with Cream and Truffled Grilled Cheese
• Hot and Hot Tomato Salad with Applewood Smoked Bacon, Fresh Peas, Corn, Fried Okra and Chive Aioli
• Cauliflower and Chestnut Gratin with Herb Breadcrumbs and Truffle Oil
• Grilled Mississippi Shrimp with Local Golden Kiwi and Shaved Fennel Salad
• Garganelli Pasta and Homemade Guanciale with Wild Mushrooms, Parmesan Cheese and Truffle Oil
• Charcuterie plate with Pickled Veal Tongue and Homemade Souse Meat
• Hickory Grilled Beef Tournedos on Blue Cheese Potato Gratin, Chef's Garden Spinach and Wild Mushroom Jus
• Cheese plate of Thomasville Tomme from Sweet Grass Dairy, with Persimmon & Toasted Walnuts
• Trio of Sorbet with Homemade Cookies

John did a spectacular job of matching the wines to each course.  We sat at the chef's counter where we could watch the cooks put it all together.    It's an amazing show.

The new cookbook is just out, so we bought a copy, and Idie inscribed it for us.   When we finally waddled back to the hotel three hours after arriving at the restaurant, we sat on the couch and leafed through.   Wonderful pictures and stories, and the recipes of some of the dishes we'd eaten that very evening. 

It was a truly splendid anniversary.   May we, and the Hot and Hot Fish Club, have many, many more.

Colleagues and Mountains

Each MLA Chapter has its own, very distinctive, personality that informs the tone of its annual conference.  There are superficial similarities -- everybody has a keynote address, usually there are contributed papers, there's a business meeting at some point.  But the intangible essence of what the members go to the conference for and what they hope to get out of it can be strikingly different.  Lynn sees this more acutely than most, since she generally gets to at least three or four different chapter meetings each fall. 

Midcontinental, which covers the largest geographic area but has fewer members than most chapters, prides itself on its informality and its frontier spirit.  These people cherish the mountains and the high plains.  For some of these librarians, this is the one time of the year that they get to hang out with colleagues, and the relaxed meeting schedule reflects that, with long breaks and plenty of unscheduled time.

Which is not to imply that the program is an afterthought.  This year, in particular, the program committee's done a superb job, with a real heavy-hitter as the keynote speaker this morning (which is why I'm up and getting ready to hit the shower even though it was close to two in the morning by the time we finally got to bed after the late drive in from Denver).  T.R. Reid is one of the most knowledgeable and sensible writers on the state of healthcare in America today.  If the angry mobs at the Town Hall meetings would stop shouting themselves blue in the face and take a few minutes to pay attention to some of the facts that he is so good at presenting, we might be actually having a sensible debate about what we should be doing as a nation.  Sigh.

Anyway, it'll be a real treat to hear him speak and to spend some time in the company of a small, but passionately dedicated group of colleagues.  With mountains as a backdrop.  And snow!

Breckenridge Again

Lisa says the snow in Breckenridge is beautiful.  She sent a picture. 

I'm plenty eager to get out of the swamp that Alabama has turned into these past couple of weeks.  Endless rain, temperatures in the mid-eighties.  The sun struggles to clear a bit of sky every afternoon but the thick gray clouds are too much for it.  We get up every morning to look out the window and see if the lake is splashing over the dock yet.

Twenty-one years ago tomorrow I was at NLM presenting the results of our evaluation of MEDLINE on CD-ROM -- a radically new concept at the time.  It was there that I first spoke about the "inept, but satisfied, end-user."  I flew straight from DC to Colorado and while sitting on a panel just a couple of days later, heard the woman sitting next to me use the same phrase, which she'd heard "just last week at NLM."  It apparently escaped her that she'd heard it from me.

That's when I figured I'd better write it up.  The brief essay appeared in Medical Reference Services Quarterly the following spring and has by far the most citations in Web of Science of anything else I've ever written.  In Australia a couple of weeks ago, Diane mentioned that she still uses the essay in the classes she teaches.  I'm proud of it, and amused.  Who'd've imagined that tossed-off phrase would have such staying power?

I'd flown over the Appalachians a few times by then, but I'd never seen the Rockies.  In the van on the way from the Denver airport I was quiet, just watching the scenery.  My first morning in Breckenridge, when I first opened my eyes, I looked out the window to see the mountains touched by the dawn light.  And I lay there, for a long time, without moving, as the light crept up the hills, changing the colors from purple to orange to gold.  I hadn't known until that very moment that "purple mountains majesty" wasn't a poetic image.  Just a literal description.

It was my second MCMLA meeting and I was beginning to make some of the friendships that have lasted now for decades.  That was the year I met MEY on the dance floor.   I was wearing a shiny green sharkskin suit and red deck shoes.  It is fortunate that few pictures survive from those days.

As far as I knew at the time, I was quite happily married.  And yet it was only seven years later that Lynn and I got married at an MCMLA welcome reception (we were even listed in the program).  In twenty-two years I've only missed one meeting, choosing to go to Brazil for the ICML congress in 2005.  Last year we had to leave Cody early, when the call came about Lynn's mom, but I still count it as having been there.

It's the perfect blend of professional and personal.  A few years ago, when I got to the registration table, I found there'd been some kind of a mixup and they'd never received my payment.  The woman at the desk gave me the registration packet anyway,  saying, "Oh, nevermind.  We know you're here every year."   Of course.

Josie on Saturday

She was unaccountably shy when we stopped at the guitar store.  I needed to pick up a couple of sets of strings for the trip to Colorado next week and she stayed right close to me, took my hand even when we were in the store, and when I took her into the acoustic guitar room she giggled uncontrollably as if we'd just come face to face with one of her music heroes.  I took her into the drum room.  (I wanted to see if there was some new percussion toy I needed to get for Tambourine Grrl.  There wasn't).  I showed her that she could tap on the congas and bongos and she went around the room doing that, with a silly wondrous grin on her face.  She fell in love with a full drum kit that was decked out in a sparkly metallic green sheen.  Duke would've loved it too.  I bought her pink and purple guitar picks on our way out of the store.

This was on the way home from Bottega.   It's my favorite place to take her for lunch on a Saturday.  Very low key and kid friendly, despite being one of the finest restaurants in the southeast.  They seat us at the banquette and bring a basket of crayons so that she can color on the sheet of butcher paper that tops the table.  I always order the mac n' cheese for her and hope that it comes before she has entirely filled up on the bread and olive oil.  She'd eaten all but three pieces before I stopped her and told her to wait.  "You're going to fill yourself up and you won't have any room left for the mac n' cheese!"  So she waited and actually ate about a third of her serving.  Then she told me she was done.  I told her to eat one more.  She did.  Then she finished off the rest of the bread.  I ordered a carpaccio to go for Marian.

Back to her house then, to play until her Mom came home.  She put on a princess outfit (she has several, of course -- this time she wore her Belle dress because she remembers that's my favorite), and we fixed lunch for Pooh, Tigger, Mickey and Gymbo.  Then we napped.

No News Is Good News

I've banned myself from listening to the news.

My habit has been to put on music in the morning when I get up to write (I've got the iPod on shuffle at the moment -- the Pretenders just came up).  At 7:30 when I pour a bowl of cereal before my shower, I switch to NPR, and continue listening on my drive to work.  More NPR on the drive home, and then, while I'm fixing dinner, maybe watch a bit of MSNBC or CNN on the little TV on the kitchen counter.

It's not doing anything for me.

I could almost believe that Joe Wilson's outburst was calculated to divert the discussion from the specifics of Obama's speech to a raised voices argument about whether or not Wilson should be censured or praised.  Obama gave a good speech, with the clearest statement he's yet made about what he believes should be in the healthcare bill.  There's plenty to discuss there, and, indeed, plenty to criticize if you're a small government conservative.  But that would still require some reasoned thought, and what's the fun in that?  Wilson cleverly hijacked at least half of the news time that could have been devoted to those discussions.  And then the House had to go through the senseless move of censuring him, thus keeping the vitriol boiling for another couple of days.  Anybody want to talk healthcare?  Nah, that's too complicated, let's talk about Joe Wilson and whether he's an idiot or a hero.

Then Jimmy Carter lifts the tarp off the elephant in the room and points out that racism is fueling much of the most hostile responses to the President.  This seems to me to be quite obviously and unremarkably true and I still (almost) wish he hadn't said it.  Now you've got Limbaugh using that as a launching pad for his line that in "Obama's America" it's alright for black kids to beat up white kids on the schoolbus.  And then news commentators take Limbaugh seriously as a political analyst.  Ai-yi-yi!

The notion that Limbaugh (and rising star Beck) actually speak for the Republican Party or have any interest in improving its standing is laughable.  They're entertainers.  Limbaugh has always been very clear about that.  His objective is ratings, pure and simple.  If he bothered to vote in the last election, I would imagine that he voted for Obama.  Certainly having Obama in the White House is far more in his self-interest than McCain/Palin would've been.

Finally I faced the fact that I wasn't learning anything from listening to the news.   It was just depressing me.   I don't really think that the inability of most members of the public to think clearly is getting any worse, but social media and the 24-hour news cycle have certainly made it much easier to demonstrate one's complete lack of critical thinking than ever before.  And I don't think our politicians are more venal, obnoxious, self-serving, lying and craven than in the past.  Wilson himself barely holds a candle to some of his more illustrious predecessors in South Carolina.  But I don't really need to hear about them anymore. 

So I'm loading up the CD Changer in the car -- Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse, the RH Factor, Hendrix, Alejandro Escovedo, Bob Geldof & Bill Frisell.  I'll be a happier man when I get home.

Halfway Round the World

Alas, when people gather to share stories about the horrors of airplane travel, we'll have nothing to share about our flight home from Brisbane.   Everything was on time, all of the gate agents and flight attendants were friendly and good natured.  Economy class on V Australia turned out to be every bit as comfortable as advertised, and Lynn had some fun conversation with the guy sitting next to her, who was on his way to LA to meet, for the first time in person, his internet girlfriend of nine months.  We watched movies, had some pretty good food, slept for a bit.  I did a lot of writing.

We breezed through immigration and customs and transferred our luggage.  Stopped for a cappuccino, and then on to the Sky Club to check email and have a bloody mary.  It was early morning in LA, and just after midnight in Brisbane (our flight left Brisbane at 11:00am on Sunday and arrived in LA at 6:45am on Sunday.  I love that.)

I'd already upgraded us to first class for the flight from LAX to Atlanta, so we had lunch on the plane.  More reading and writing and another hour long nap.  A short layover in Atlanta, then home.

Halfway around the world in 24 hours. 

I was trying to explain to someone who'd not been to an ICML conference before what was different about this gathering from other meetings of librarians.  I said that, first of all, the people who came to this meeting had a shared concern for global health issues and, in particular, the challenges of getting good health information to people in developing countries. They have an expansive view of the role of librarians.  And secondly, the people who came to this meeting really wanted to be here, and most of them had gone to some personal expense and trouble to be able to make it.  Even with the global economy in the state that it is, there were some 500 delegates from 45 countries gathered.  So it's very different from the typical domestic regional or even national meeting where many of the people are there just out of habit -- they go every year and are mostly interested in seeing their friends and checking out the local restaurants.  Of course, seeing friends and checking out local restaurants was a very important part of this meeting as well.  As was finding new friends. 

The meeting was incredibly well organized.  The keynote sessions were uniformly excellent, from Jeff Drazen doing a brilliant kickoff that provided considerable insight into the challenges of putting out a top-tier journal, to Ian Frazer on the critical role that librarians have to play in addressing health challenges in developing countries, to Brian Fitzgerald, at the session that I chaired, doing a rapid-fire overview of the intellectual property issues swirling around open access, the Google book settlement, patents in the digital world, and the opportunities for collaborative drug development.   The contributed papers & posters covered an extensive array of subjects, and I have to give particular credit to the presenters for whom delivering a paper in English was a considerable challenge and who had the courage to rise to meet it.

Conference support was superb.  The Bearded Pigs even had a professional sound & light crew for our performance at the gala dinner.  With Malcolm up in the rafters monitoring everything, I'm sure we have never sounded as good (and likely never will again).  There were still a half dozen dancers on the floor when we finally wrapped it up at 11:30.

Oh, I suppose we'll tell the story about one suitcase being delayed for a day on our way in, and the tale of our poor lost cab driver who took two hours to get us to our hotel from the airport (typically a twenty minute drive) will be good for the telling.  But right now, after getting a good seven and a half hours of sleep and waking up at my normal time on a Monday morning, I've got nothing but good things to say about international travel.    Americans really ought to do more of it.

Getting things done

Rod asks perceptive questions.  We've been having a good time.  He's been here this week for his second site visit as part of our participation in the NLM/AAHSL Leadership Fellows program.  During his first week, back in April, we tried to structure the week to give him a broad overview of the library and its relationships to the rest of the university.  This week we've been digging in more depth into how the library itself runs, so we've had long and intense discussions about budget and personnel issues and strategic planning and all of the things involved in moving the organization forward.

"Don't let perfection or 'better' be the enemy of good."  My colleague, Jim Shedlock, uses this phrase as the tagline on his sig file.  It indicates a theme that Rod and I have returned to many times this week. 

I'm often grateful that I'm not a perfectionist.  Like the quest for perfect information in decision making, the impulse towards getting things exactly right can be paralyzing.  Or at the very least, time wasting.

We've been talking about how to achieve that delicate balance of engaging all of the members in a group, getting all of the opinions and issues on the table, and then deciding which to take into account and which not, in order to keep things moving.  Time and again I've seen situations where, in the quest for perfect consensus, the desire to accommodate the opinions or concerns of a single member of the group end up either derailing the process altogether or, at best, resulting in a solution which is actually not as effective as it might have been, had it not been for the desire to adjust the result for that single individual.

It's a very difficult judgment call on the part of the leader.  If you don't accommodate every objection or issue, you run the risk of having members of the group feel that their views are being insufficiently respected, and that can sabotage your group process altogether.  And sometimes, the views of that outlier might be exactly the brilliant idea that is needed.  On the other hand, trying to come to perfect consensus all too often leads to the result found when trying to "write by committee."  By the time everybody's edits have been incorporated, the document is a stilted, bloated, caricature of what might have been.

There's no magic formula that tells you (the leader) what to do in these cases.  You rely on experience, good listening, asking the right questions, and an intuition for when it's the right time to pull the plug and move on.   You hope that you'll get it right more often than not, but the fact is you're going to get it wrong sometimes too. 

Fortunately for me, I'm comfortable with that.  It's good enough.

It'd kill a perfectionist.