Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Appropriate library carrel behavior

You know the shtick: Those young folks, they love to alter signs. STOP + the war, etc.

One of the few, thin rays of joy (or maybe that's radioactive waste?) emanting from our rapidly crumbling infrastructure at Wisconsin is that we have lots of cool old stuff around because nothing ever gets repainted or refurbished. Well, Engineering and Business are pretty much so shiny new that it scares me to go by them, but they are wholly owned subsidiaries of our corporate masters and overlords at MegaCorp, Inc. No, I mean the traditional core areas that make up what we once called a "university": Letters & Science, Ag, Ed, Extension, and such. Places where people used to go to learn to think, to move up in the world, to contribute to social progress. Ahhhh, I'm getting all misty.

Anyhow, the carrels in the main library haven't been painted in decades (since the place was built, I'm guessing), long enough that there are NO SMOKING signs painted on the inside. I didn't get a picture of the best 'NO SNORING' variant, but you get the idea. I checked a few others in search of the one I've seen that's just dead-on perfect, but couldn't find it. I did find one banning an activity that would surprise me to see in a carrel, but one some 19-year-old surely took tremendous delight in putting up.

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