Slow day

Today's been very slow, probably because it's July, and too hot inside given the decrepitude of our A/C. I haven't seen anyone in over 2 hours up here.

I've spent the day doing some ILLs, which allow me to play with my new scanner, and getting up the gumption to do some cataloging.

Cataloging is probably the most universally unliked part of librarianship. I actually think it's fun, but then I've never been normal either. I was one of those who thought the library school fundraiser T-shirt with a "Top-10 reasons to become a librarian" was funny. Especially the "I love to alphabetize" entry.

It's pretty easy most of the time too. Much cataloging has already been done by the Library of Congress or (in my field) the National Library of Medicine, and you can download the stuff straight off the web. But you have to double check all of it, because sometimes what they've done is just .. weird.

One of the current batch of books is on medical statistics. "How to report medical statistics" to be precise. NLM thinks it should go under "History of Medicine", subsection "Medical writing and publishing. Historiography."

?????

I've recataloged it into "Public Health" (not the best place, but closer than history, and the only section with statistics as a subsection), "Statistics and surveys", further breakdown to "Theory or methods of medical statistics". This just seems a more natural place to put a "how-to" book on this subject, not to mention that in my small collection, I want to keep all the stuff on a given subject together. That's how my patrons search for it.

So it's time for my afternoon snack, and to download some more catalog records while checking them for sanity....

Thoughts on date rape

Finally got to reading Critical Mass yesterday and saw the post from Friday on date rape Ireland meets campus PC. Back many years ago, I read an historical novel by Dorothy Dunnett, which had portions of the old Irish Brehon law as chapter headings. One of the portions she used dealt with just this subject. If I understood it right, sex at a planned encounter was never rape, because the woman had agreed to it by making the assignation and then showing up. If the encounter is not the result of a previous arrangement then the sex is legal until the woman screams. If she doesn't scream, she can't go back later and say it was rape, just as today, it's not rape (supposedly) until one party says "No". The difference is that with the requirement of a scream, the law is saying that to say "No" one must say it is such a a way that a reasonable third party would agree that it was indeed a "No". Seems pretty simple and elegant to me.

If anyone out there knows more about Brehon law than I do (not that that would be difficult) please let me know if I've got it wrong!

More humor, (sort of legal)

Another cute piece of legalese, though not a legit opinion. Courtesy of Overlawyered:

EULA

Read carefully, and at the end click the "I do not agree" link.

Legal humor

For those who need a good chuckle on Friday morning, two legitimate legal opinions.

Hyperphase vs. Microsoft

Bradshaw vs. Unity Marine Corporation, Inc.

I especially would like to meet the judge who wrote the latter opinion. Overlawyered's description of SOP to the contrary, this fellow didn't turn in his sense of humor when he sat his LSAT.