Street Paint



My inner blob.



     Remember when there was a shortage of street paint? It was a few months ago I think and I found it very strange indeed.      Where did all that paint go? I can't imagine we've built so many new roads that they've run out of paint. And, judging from some of the roads I have travelled, they certainly didn't run out because they're repainting old stripes. Let's face it, we're talking two colors here: white and yellow. Not a hard thing to keep in stock as far as I'm concerned.
     I do have a solution for it though: stop painting so many wacky, meaningless, creatively-shaped, impossible-to-follow lines on the roads!
     At any intersection take a look at the lines that form the turn lanes. Here's an example. At one corner I use frequently, the right-hand stripe along the shoulder of the road goes straight then veers to the left as the street widens. This is meant to funnel traffic into the straight ahead lane. Fine. Good.
     But...
     Now they need to show drivers that there is a right-hand turn lane at this intersection. So, the street stripers create this blob shaped image with lines filling it in so drivers know they're not supposed to drive inside the blob. A little closer to the intersection and another lane dividing line appears between the straight-ahead lane and the right-hand turn lane.
     You would have to drive a rubber car to follow the line that curves in from the shoulder to create the blob shape then get your vehicle into the turn lane without crossing either the line-filled blob or the straight line marking the separation of the straight-ahead lane and the right-hand turn lane. You can't do it without crossing one of those sacred, solid-line lines! They're setting us up to break the law!
     If they just let the shoulder line run straight up to the intersection and put one solid stripe from the intersection back maybe ten or twenty feet, the job would still be successfully accomplished and they'd save hundreds of thousands of gallons of yellow street paint.

Show your disdain for yellow stripes!

     So, civil engineers, street planners, and developers, beware. Some people color outside the lines. I drive INSIDE the lines. So there.

Probably the Funniest Cat Video You'll Ever See

Hey, I didn't name it. I didn't make it. But it's right up there with the other funny, goofy, hyperactive animals videos out there. Don't miss the going over the baby gate. Check out that form! And the last shot...well, I don't want to give it away but if I could relax like that I'd be very relaxed.

My own cats, two domestic shorthairs, and my dog, a Miniature Pinscher better know as a minpin, do the most clever, cute, adorable, awe-inspiring things every day. But I'm too (lazy, busy, whatever) to live my life with a camera in my hand. So I rely on other people who think YouTube is the be-all and end-all videographic experience. I, uh, don't.

But you should have seen what the dog did yesterday...

Old vs. New or Classy vs. Functional

This image is an example of the architecture of the New York Public Library when it opened in May, 1911. At that time it was the largest marble building in the United States and had over one million books on the shelves. The Library Director, Dr. John Shaw Billings, designed a huge reading area on the top floor with seven stories of book stacks and a system in place designed to get the book to the library patron as fast as possible. The very first patron waited six minutes for his book. The building, once the whole library, is now known as the Humanities and Social Sciences Library.

I'm fairly certain the West Melbourne Library does not contain any marble. Nor will it, now or in the future, hold more than 1,000,000 items. WMPL opened 87 years after NYPL with only one floor and a nine-seat reading area. It is a comfortable, friendly place that gets the book in hand in under a minute. (If we own it. And if it's not checked. And if it's shelved correctly. But we won't go into all that.) This very functual building was built in the middle of a cow pasture and suffered bulls in the employee parking lot the first year. Ah, the good ol' days.

At the turn of the century (the last century,) high society in New York, the movers and shakers that raised and donated money to build the library, would not have been impressed by a small, block building with a teal-colored metal roof. Citizens of West Melbourne in 1911, our own movers and shakers, were too busying keeping the mosquitos from carrying their kids away to even consider a library.

The point is...uh, what was my point? Oh. Yeah.

But it's our library. It belongs in this community, serving this population, and getting books into the hands of its patrons. Same as the NYPL which is serving its own population and still moving books off the shelves after 87 years.

Let's hope the same will be true of the West Melbourne Public Library.