[Publib] Re: Thursday (now Friday) humor

[Joe Schallan]

West Virginia has been a state since 1863, a seccession
from the rest of seccessionist Virginia, whose departure
from the Union was something with which the Westerners
did not agree.  Perhaps the rest of Virginia still refuses
to acknowledge? Or forgive?

Which reminds me that on my one and only trip to
Virginia -- Charlottesville on a very hot and moist
summer day -- I was advised to "move around more"
or I could very well find myself engulfed in kudzu.

It is my understanding that vast tracts of Georgia have
disappeared under kudzu, including some libraries.

A high school friend of mine has lived for many years
in Manhattan, and he says anything north of West
145th Street is "upstate."

Thus, Yankee Stadium is "upstate."

And then there is poor New Mexico, whose location
and status seem so questionable that New Mexico
Magazine regularly runs a feature called "One of Our
Fifty is Missing":

http://www.nmmagazine.com/FEATURES/50missing.html

My favorite is the tale about the fellow who wanted
FedEx to ship a package to a friend in Albuquerque,
only to be told by the counter person that his FedEx
branch didn't handle international shipments.

It is said that Iowa is "flat, dry (in the sense of
teetotaling), Protestant, and Republican" except my
home town of Dubuque, which is "hilly, Catholic,
very, very wet, and Democratic."  I recall murmurings
from the rest of Iowa about cutting Dubuque
County loose and letting Wisconsin or Minnesota
bid on it.

Regional antipathies (or should that be "pathologies"?)
and misinformation extend even to the library world,
of course.  Several weeks ago a patron gleefully
ripped my bark off -- taking me to task for our pitiful
lack of subscriptions to scholarly and scientific journals.
I weakly countered that public library branches typically
don't carry such journals, but I was informed that back
home in Denver, every single neighborhood branch of
the Denver Public Library has extensive print
subscriptions to academic journals.

Of course, I had violated one of the prime directives
of public library work:  Never argue with a patron.

Joe Schallan
Phoenix
a.k.a.
The Big Chimichanga (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimichanga)
The Navel of Arizona
The Straw that Stirs the Arizona Drink
The Booming Metropolis Up I-10 from the
  Insignificant Cesspit that is Tucson