small beer

Just a couple of notes:
+ Ken Jennings kindly reciprocated with a link to my post about his apparatus/asparagus puzzler. Thanks, Ken!
+ My sources tell me a sporting event of some significance will take place this weekend. I don’t know if I’ll be able to catch it, though: Mediacom (the local cable company) and Sinclair Communications are in a tussle of what’s gotta be pocket change to Sinclair. The upshot is CBS has been dropped from our cable system. People all over northeast Iowa are dusting off rabbit ears (or plotting an evening at a sports bar). Not sure what I’ll do . . .
+ My job takes me all over northeast Iowa to visit high schools, and lots of them are in very small towns. I often arrive in town with a little time to kill before my visit, so rather than hang out in my car in the parking lot–which might attract the wrong kind of notice in a rural community–I set up a makeshift, traveling office at the town library. I love small town libraries. The librarian is always friendly, they have a regular crowd talking like it’s a coffee shop, and there’s often an idiosyncratic cast to the collection, as though its accessions are guided by just a few personalities. The library is often a kind of showcase building for a town losing population by the year. That’s both heartening and little sad–they’re proud of their library, but it sometimes feels like the last thing they’ll raise together.