Between 2010 and 2019, Cauli Le Chat (2006?-2020), feline roving reporter for Mooresville Public Library (Mooresville, Indiana), reported all things interesting to cats (and humans) happening at the library. Related stories from across the state (and beyond) were also included.
Thanks to Wild Thang, who will be running by the Post Office later today, "Flat" Cauli IV will be on her way to Lukšiai, Lithuania to join Shay Laws' English class at Vincas Grybas Gymnasium.
Vincas Grybas Gymnasium, Lukšiai, Lithuania
Some of the Students at Vincas Grybas Gymnasium
(courtesy of the school's website)
We are just so excited here at my Library about "Flat" Cauli IV's new adventure! This is the inaugural outing for "Flat" Cauli IV, so we're expecting big things. She will be our special "foreign correspondent," and she will report all her travel news from Lithuania and who knows where else!
Many thanks to Miss Shay and her students for arranging this once-in-a-lifetime tour of a wonderful country. I've "never been there, [but] they tell me it's nice." (Joe Walsh won't mind me borrowing that lyric from his song, "Life's Been Good" [1978]) To paraphrase the band Hoyt Axton's song, "Never Been to Spain" [1971], "Well, I've never been to [Lithuania], but I kinda like the music."
The MPL Indiana Roving Reporter Room now has a ScanPro 2000 digital microfilm scanner and reader, as I previously reported. My Minions had an opportunity to demonstrate the device to moi, and I must say that "favorably impressed" is an understatement. Just look at the high-quality resolution of this image (at 300 dpi) of an advertisement that originally appeared in The Mooresville Times during January, 1910. (I purposely selected a poor-quality microfilmed image to demonstrate my new gadget. The ScanPro 2000 created a much clearer image than one could have obtained from an old microfilm reading machine.)
Excellent Resolution & Detail on This ScanPro 2000 Digital Image
That's a considerable improvement over our old microfilm reader; what's more, I'd have to print and then digitally scan the paper image to show you the difference. Mind you, the paper image would be quite acceptable--easily legible with good contrast, despite the generally inferior quality of the photography used for this portion of this microfilm--but the printed image is nowhere near as sharp as this digital image.
I can see we're going to have quite a bit of fun doing historical and genealogical research with this baby.
Perhaps you're curious who George R. Scruggs was. I am, if nothing else, a reference catbarian, and local history is my particular bag of catnip. So go here, already.
At present, I'm recommending that only Library Staff (who have been trained to use it) should utilize the ScanPro 2000. So, if patrons would like to research microfilm, the staff will be happy to assist. For the moment, we also have the old microfilm reading machine, which patrons may use themselves (under staff supervision). No offense, but these tools are quite expensive, so we don't want anything broken. No need to raid anybody's piggy-bank.
ScanPro 2000 is Mighty Fine, I'd Venture,
Cauli Le Chat
MPL Roving Reporter
Technology News Beat
P.S. Want to see Scruggs Dry Goods Store again in one of my Library's "treasure trove" local history videos? Say yes, please and thanks. (I have claws, you know. Just saying.)
60 seconds in a minute
x 60 minutes in a hour
x 24 hours in a day
x 365.25 days in a year (more or less)
________________________________
31,557,600 seconds in a year
That may not be scientifically accurate, but it is close enough for us felines. That's how long this blog has been up-and-running. An entire year! Seems much longer, somehow.
Humans like annual celebrations, so I think my people readers would appreciate something deeply meaningful and worthwhile. So would I, but I've got to finish this blog first. Then I'll make for the canned tuna-in-oil, big-time.
We've covered considerable ground during this past solar revolution. Over 400 blog posts with roughly 50,000 viewings. I'm pleased with the results.
We still need something special as a celebration, however. Let's see what's on YouTube.
I know exactly what they're saying. So do my loyal feline readers: Sparkle the Designer Cat, Tober (the Thorntown [Indiana] Public Library Cat), Browser (the Pine River [Minnesota] Public Library Cat), and my British kitty pals Bea, Buttons, and Timmy. I suspect that Morgan the Library Bunny (at Morgan County [Indiana] Public Library) and Keisha the Spaniel also know what this feline pair is talking about.
But we're not telling.
What will the next year bring? Lots of canned tuna-in-oil, I'm hoping.
Thanks For Following My Blog,
Cauli Le Chat
MPL Roving Reporter
Annual Anniversaries News Beat
P.S. Reminiscing about the past year reminded me of "Goin' Back," written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King (1966) and performed by the Byrds as a single (released October 20, 1967) as well as on the LP, The Notorious Byrd Brothers (1968).
P.P.S. I would be remiss if I didn't include as a musical closer "Reminiscing" (1978), by the Little River Band. If memory serves, this was the group's biggest hit single.
P.P.P.S. Reflecting upon passing years made me think, as I often do, of George Harrison (1943-2001) and his first solo album, All Things Must Pass (1970), which included the title track on side three, track five of the three-disk LP set. You may not have known that the Beatles first recorded a demo of the tune, but it was not released as a Beatles song until The Beatles Anthology 3 (1996).
Novelist and naturalist Gene Stratton-Porter (1863-1924) was a Hoosier native. She was born in Wabash County, Indiana, but for 25 years she lived near Limberlost Swamp near Geneva, Indiana. Here's a coincidence: the author's birth name was Geneva Grace Stratton, and she lived in Geneva. Coincidence? This will get the conspiracy theorists furrowing their brows.
Although Stratton-Porter became famous as a fiction writer, she also wrote many non-fiction naturalist books, was a proficient photographer, and even became a movie producer. For the early 20th century, that was quite a series of accomplishments, especially considering the social obstacles women faced during that time that effectively barred many from independent business enterprises.
Many critics rank A Girl of the Limberlost, first published in 1909, as Stratton-Porter's masterpiece. It is a romance novel as well as a coming-of-age tale. Its age should not detract from its contemporary value. What makes this novel relevant to readers a century after its initial publication is its theme of struggling against poverty (due to a miserly mother in this book) to achieve personal success, improve self-esteem, and garner an improved standard of living, coupled with the romantic triangle between the main character, Elnora Comstock, the chief heart-throb, Philip Ammon, and his fiancée, Edith Carr, the primary antagonist to this blossoming love between poor girl and rich fellow. Include a wicked widowed mother for good measure, and you have all the makings of a modern Cinderella story.
The poverty aspect of the story is somewhat complex. The Comstocks live like poor folks, not because they lack property, but because they are not managing it effectively. The wilderness that the author clearly loved could be maintained with minimal encroachment, and this development (selling some timber or cultivating arable land) could easily provide Elnora's educational needs and the mother and daughter's daily comforts. Katharine Comstock (the mother) is embroiled in such bitterness and martyrdom (her widowhood, you know) that she doesn't really care how harshly she and her daughter exist. Such an attitude, Stratton-Porter makes plain, is just mean-spirited, not to mention myopic. Fortunately, the mother and daughter reconcile at the novel's midway point, when Katharine learns a shocking truth. (There's a "hook" if ever there were one.)
If one were searching for an intended audience, I'd venture that the book best fits Young Adults (ages 13-18) and 'Tweens (ages 10-14), which, obviously, are somewhat overlapping classifications. Adults should certainly enjoy the book, too. You will be captivated by the wondrous writing, "whereins" notwithstanding. Stratton-Porter was in peak writing form with this work.
I've noticed that many blogs that review Stratton-Porter's works invariably mention their wholesomeness. (Indeed, the back cover of a Grosset & Dunlap edition uses the term.) A Girl of the Limberlost is certainly no exception. The budding romance between Elnora and Philip, as well as Elnora's trials and tribulations with her mother, finances, and schoolmates, are powerfully delivered without recourse to vulgarity or lewdness. For some readers, this is highly valued, and it might help to stoke their interest in reading the novel. For others, it might make the reading seem "dated" or "quaint," but that assessment would be unfair to the author's vision and expressiveness. Just because of book is over a century old is no reason not to read it. (I'll try a quadruple-negative sentence construction if it will earn me a gold Olympic grammatical medal. It's not for nothing that I'm known for not neverthelessing. Okay, that was sort of a flub.)
Naturally, you may find A Girl of the Limberlost in our Evergreen Indiana online catalog. In fact, my Library's Indiana Roving Reporter Room has a 1909 copy published by Grosset & Dunlap. Are there copies at other Evergreen libraries? Duh. The Adams Public Library System (APLS) has a branch in Geneva, after all, so you know they must have a bajillion copies.
I'm a Back-to-Nature Feline,
Cauli Le Chat
MPL Roving Reporter
Readers' Advisory News Beat
P.S. There have been at least four movie adaptations of the novel A Girl of the Limberlost. Want to watch a four-minute sampler? Easily managed, if the video clip were still available online. Sadly, it's not.
Today (December 17) is Wright Brothers Day here in the U.S. of A. It was on this day, 108 years ago, that Orville and Wilbur Wright successfully flew their heavier-than-air, mechanically-propelled and pilot-controlled aircraft for a whole 12 seconds (covering 120 feet) at an altitude of roughly 10 feet above the sands of Kill Devil Hills at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Subsequent trials that day covered approximately 175 and 200 feet of powered, controlled flight. Pretty good for a couple of bicycle shop owners from Dayton, Ohio, following three years of glider experiments at Kitty Hawk.
First Mechanically-Powered, Pilot-Controlled Airplane Flight
(Orville Wright at the controls; Wilbur Wright running alongside the right wing)
December 17, 1903, Kitty Hawk, N.C.
(Photo courtesy of NASA)
This airplane, the Wright Flyer I, is on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. You should go there to see it.
Few inventions have changed human society (and history) to the extent of this particular achievement. Every human should marvel at being able to fly like winged dinners. It's frankly amazing that humans can become aloft at all, given their considerable bulk and general slow-wittedness (as compared to felines). But they did, and for slightly over a century they are still flitting about in the air. It's a pretty impressive feat by any measure.
So, hats off to Wilbur and Orville Wright on this day of their great triumph over gravity! Wilbur, by the way, was a native Hoosier. Yep--born in Millville, Indiana (Henry County) in 1867. You can look it up. Too bad he died in 1912, before powered air flight became common-place. Orville was born in 1871 in Dayton, Ohio, so he was a native Buckeye, like James Thurber and Scowl-Face's mom. So he was in good company.
Orville lived to see jet aircraft and rudimentary rockets (he died in 1948), which must have fired his imagination. What the Wrights accomplished certainly has fired the imaginations of generations of humans. We felines are pretty darn impressed, too.
Flying Felines Would Make a Great Name For a Rock Band--Just Saying,
Cauli Le Chat
MPL Roving Reporter
Holiday Observances News Beat
(With apologies to Dave Barry for appropriating one of his jokes for my tag line.)
P.S. As my musical closer to today's post, I could have used "Jet Airliner" by the Steve Miller Band from the group's album Book of Dreams (1977). Sadly, it has a curse word rather prominently in it, which makes it not-so-family-friendly. So let's grab one of the Byrds' stranger songs, "2-4-2 Fox Trot (the Lear Jet Song)," which was included on the band's LP, Fifth Dimension (1966).
