I am writing an article on the possible impact of the latest filtering legislation. With the help of The New York Public Library’s Ask Librarians Online, I have been looking the following links:

• 2000 Public Library Internet Study
• Libraries, the Internet and Filtering Fact Sheet
• Filtering Facts and Family Friendly Libraries Announce “10 Most Unsafe Public Libraries for Children”

More on this later.

I have been sick, sick, sick. Finished Frank Herbert’s Dune and feel empty the way I often to after an engrossing book. What does it feel like when you read?

The American Library Association votes to challenge Children’s Internet Protection Act.

Just got tickets to Steve Earle.

I was in DC last week for the American Library Association conference. It was an interesting and depressing time to be there; the mall is trailer-stroon in preparation for W. His is a victory for medeocracy.

The big doings at ALA this year revolved around the new filtering laws. Libraries with e-rate funding for Internet access or IMLS funding will be required by law to employ “technological protection measures” against dirty pictures and the like. I’ll have more on this later.

I really like to be clean. I brush my teeth after lunch, take my stuff to the cleaners more than I need to, stuff like that. These cleaning tips resonate with me.

• For lint problems
• Laundry
• How to clean anything

I am reading Frank Herbert’s Dune and have been sucked in by it. This is how I know when a book has captured me: I take the local subway over the express so I can sit and read undisturbed.

Finally got the PDA itch. Decided I wanted one on Sunday. Looked at the budget Monday. Bought it Tuesday at lunch. It is a HandSpring Visor Deluxe in snow. I almost did not go with HandSpring because the writing on their site is so bad. The expandability is what tipped be back.

While I was home this Christmas, my mother used her mother’s linen for a pre-holiday party. When she pulled the linen from the closet, she realized that it had last been pressed by my grandmother who has been dead for 12 years. Grandma used the following all-but-lost technique:

1. wash linen
2. line dry
3. sprinkle linen with water (she used something like a large salt shaker for this)
4. roll linen tightly in towels
5. refrigerate overnight
6. iron the next day with a very hot iron

The linen story inspired me to search out the following links. I will put some tech stuff up soon. Just want to be a luddite for a day.

• FreeRecipe
  http://www.freerecipe.org
  Free Recipes From The Early 1900s
• Old Fashioned Advice
  http://www.freerecipe.org/Old_Fashioned_Advice/
  Also from the FreeRecipe people, this site has advice on such topics as jelly making, the use of sour milk and thrift in cooking.

Vacations always make me feel sort of Little House.

Almost missed my subway stop this morning. Reading again. This time it was a well written article in the House and Home section of the Times. Good journalism does something to my brain. It is not just the facts and the exploration that I enjoy; the reading just feels good. It is as if the journalist were massaging my brain.

My sister and I talked about these sorts of feelings while I was visiting her in LA last summer. We had each just finished the latest Harry Potter and were in a bit of a funk as a result. With a good novel, the feeling is the same as when you strike up a promising new friendship. That is why it is so sad when a good book ends.

I would be interested to know what other genres feel like to different readers. Email me: cbickner@hotmail.com.

I have been looking at these links on the recommendation of a colleague who works in communications policy.

• The Digital Divide Network
• Digital Partners
• DiversityInc.com
• PewInternet
• Filtering - Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Using Technology To Control Access To Information

This is all going somewhere.