No, I would not be able to teach. I'd actually welcome the time off, if I were able to tweak it to work with my kids' school breaks, for example. But I don't know how realistic that is in the context of adequately supporting the academic mission of the library - to take off 45 days DURING the semesters (this is a community college, so summers are very active.) 180 days is only 36 work weeks a year! I am used to working 49-50 weeks a year. (There are only 2 faculty librarians out of a staff of 10-12, and I think the non-faculty are on 12-month contracts, so actually opening the library would be able to continue, but I would be the only full-time reference librarian able to visit classes, for example.)

flea,

sounds like they want you to work 4 days a week, 15 weeks, 3 terms.

Cashmere,

lot's of 'ma coming your way.

Huh, that might work, actually.

Aww, Cash, family~ma.

Go you on the good interview, flea! Hope it works out to be something good for you, schedule-wise.

Oy, Cash! Good luck to your fam.

Good luck with the job, flea!

I am resisting going downstairs to punch someone in the head right now.

Remember back in 1913, when radium was the hot new thing? Yes, back in the day when radium suppositories could cure any disease, there was conjecture it could also be used to make... giant frogs. For people to eat.

Our Radium-Raised Giant Frog Dinners

Professor Dawson Turner, at the recent meeting of the British Association in Birmingham, England, made the astonishing announcement that by treating a frog's egg with radium he had bred a frog three times the normal size of the species.

The application of this discovery may have several very important results for humanity. Perhaps its first, or at least the most obvious, value is that it will furnish us with a means of increasing the food supply and thereby keeping down the ever-increasing cost of living.

Even at its present stage of development the experiment is capable of greatly reducing living expenses. Frog's legs are delicious, succulent food similar in taste to fine chicken, and in many ways superior to the choicest quality beef. Frogs are very easily raised, and when they are bred to a large size one leg will yield a dinner for a large family at very small cost, probably not more than ten cents a pound. Frogs are now quite cheap, and when increased in size they will become relatively cheaper.

It seems reasonably certain, however, that the process can be applied to all the food animals, including beef creatures.

A steer three times the normal size will certainly represent a very great economy in the production of beef. In fact, it has already been calculated by the scientists of the British Association that such an animal would cost one-third less than the present type, owing to the economy of feeding one animal instead of three and the great saving of time.

...

In theory it appears possible that this discovery may be applied to man. There would, of course, be little advantage to be gained from producing an enormous man, who would help gobble up the available food supply. The desirable object would be to breed a man of increased brain power.

The stimulation of the body cells of the frog would be replaced by a stimulation of the brain cells of the man.

People were crazy back then.

This is hypnotic: [link]

THE CALL GIRL WHO CLAIMS SHE’S A VIRGIN (Nov, 1959)

She was a lesbian teacher. They could not prove she was a call-girl.

The article is, of course, homophobic and the writer is annoying, but it's still an interesting depiction of lesbianism in 1959.

We’re referring to Ginny’s favorite type of hangout — those little side-street cafes in Greenwich Village that would strike the normal person as being a trifle weird, to say the least.

The kind of place where men are strictly off-limits, where girl-meets-girl, to dance together, cheek-to-cheek, snuggled tightly to each other’s bosom, hardly moving their feet to the sensuous music, completely oblivious to anything or anyone around them, on dance floors so small a fair-sized automobile would hardly find room, and so dark it would barely be seen if it did.

These are the hush-hush lesbian dives, where waiters are deep-voiced girls, with short-cropped hair, dressed in natty tuxedos. Where girls from the local bohemian set and from uptown cafe society mingle together to enjoy the intimacy of their own set.

(Ginny has often been quoted as saying she prefers “offbeat” people to “normal” ones.) Girls from the Social Register are found here, too, their foreign runabouts parked in gleaming splendor under the street lamps. Young daughters of doting dowagers whose blue blood would turn sickly green if they knew where their little Brendas and Leonoras were spending their evenings — and the gender of the creeps with whom they were passing their nights.

Many of the girls who make these bizarre bistros their home-sweet-homos actually hate men, or simply dislike them to the point of loathing. Others are afraid of anything in pants that isn’t a girl.

All the true habitues have one thing in common: Where sex is concerned, they prefer their own.

My car doesn't know words.

But it now has a new window.

And my brastrap just broke.

I give up.