Seeing this picture and so many others in the last few months, and hearing his witty, easy style, I have come to realize that I WOULD like to have a beer with Obama.

Following on that is the epiphany that I didn’t really understand the notion some people had that they liked Bush because they thought he was an average Joe and could see having a beer with him, because I would never want to have a beer with a person like Bush, president or not.

In reality, even if I don’t always agree with everything Obama does and would never base my vote on this, it really is very nice to have a president that you like and can relate to. It’s my turn.

(To do this on FB, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)

1. My first car was a Chevy Cavalier hatchback. I named it Siegfried and I got all teary-eyed the day I left it on the car lot after trading it in for a Saturn. I couldn’t help but think how betrayed he must feel after years of service.

2. In high school, I was particularly fond of reading romance novels, aka smut books. Nothing like sitting in the hallway of your Catholic high school before class reading about throbbing man parts and dewy lady bits.

3. Every guy I’ve ever dated (or wanted to date), with the possible exception of my first high school boyfriend, was a soccer player at some point in his post-pubescent life (i.e. not just a group of 5-year-olds kicking each other in the shins). I really like soccer players.

4. The first albums I ever bought were cassettes of Kenny Rogers Greatest Hits and Barry Manilow Greatest Hits. I bought these because my brother refused to sell me his old cassette player unless I also took these tapes off his hands.

5. I have always fought a “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” mentality, with an urge to collect just about anything one could collect. As a child, in addition to my straw collection, I used to collect pretty rocks at the beach. I was limited by adult supervision to only the rocks I could fit in my pockets, but I would fill up my socks as well so I had lumpy cankles. I didn’t fool anyone, but I usually got an “A” for effort and got to keep the extra rocks.

6. I am really good at weaning orphaned foster care raccoons. Not only do I make a really nice looking raccoon diet, one that you might consider eating if it weren’t for the fish and mouse bits sprinkled throughout, but I can also work the tough love. If the raccoon is fat and healthy, I will aggressively reduce the number of bottles and amount of formula once they hit weaning age. I’m okay with letting them get a little hungry so they have a reason to explore the bowls of luscious fruit, yogurt, egg, and meaty bits.

7. I started volunteering at WildCare after going to the Marin Humane Society to look into volunteer options there and coming home with another cat.

8. I hate having people look at me when I cry. My dad and I have an unspoken agreement that, if we are watching a sad movie together, we will silently, without speaking or looking at each other, retreat to separate ends of the house to compose ourselves in private. Steve got this memo but ignores it and always looks over to see if I am crying. Yes, I’m crying! I always cry!

9. Music moves me emotionally. Even if a movie is not very good, I can be quickly moved to tears by an emotional or patriotic swell of music. The one exception to this is at the end of The Wrath of Kahn. The first time I ever saw it was with Steve. I got sufficiently teary-eyed when Spock died, but I burst into laughter when Scotty started playing Amazing Grace on the bagpipes. The idea that Scotty, about whom there was never an inkling he played the bagpipes, was suddenly playing them because, of course he would, he’s Scottish, was absurd to me. I continued laughing as the full orchestral version surged. Steve still hasn’t forgiven me.

10. When I was in 6th grade, my best friend and I used to play GI Joe. We would trade off who was Lady Jaye and who was Scarlett. It was a tough call because Lady Jaye was obviously so much cooler, but Scarlett got Duke who, at the time, I thought was cuter. I’ve since realized I was wrong and Flint was definitely the manlier man.

11. When I first moved out to California for an internship at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, I didn’t know anyone except my cat. I had adopted Cassady my senior year of college and we drove across the country together that summer. Appropriate since she was named after Neal Cassady who was the basis for Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s On the Road. Anyway, when I got to California and knew no one, I used to take Cassady with me as I drove around getting a sense of the area. I even put her on her leash and harness and took her with me up to the regional park on a couple of occasions.

12. I would consider going vegetarian for ethical/humane reasons, but I really don’t like many vegetables and beans and have trouble accepting tofu. I don’t know what I would eat other than cheesy pasta all the time.

13. I like tomatoes but I don’t trust tomatoes with an unknown provenance. Unless I have at least purchased the tomato and cut it up myself, or preferably grown it myself, I just don’t trust it and will usually pick it off of whatever it is on. I will make exceptions depending on the food item and who is serving it. After all, it’s hard to hide it when you’ve scraped all the tomatoes off your bruschetta.

14. I remember my First Confession because I was so nervous I totally forgot what I was supposed to say. I blanked once I got in the confessional. The priest practically yelled at me when asking who I was. I finally managed to stumble through “Bless me Father for I have sinned” and made up a few sins to confess. I think my first Confession was also my last.

15. I played the alto saxophone in grade school band. Kenny G was hitting it big when I was in 6th grade or so and I begged my parents to buy me a soprano sax. They had the good judgment to put me off a year until I lost interest in the sax altogether.

16. I have never been athletic. I ran track and played basketball in junior high, but was never very good. Our basketball team actually won some championship when I was in 7th grade, but it was certainly not due to my efforts. I believe I made 1 basket in 2 years. But I was pretty good at defense, never letting the person I was covering get a hand on the ball.

17. I skipped 8th grade; for a very long time I was always the youngest person in any group of peers. It was a real shock when that stopped being the case.

18. I used to pull my own hair when I was a baby. Apparently, the harder I pulled, the louder I screamed, and the louder I screamed, the harder I pulled. My mom loves telling this story.

19. I did a radio show for 2 and a half years with a friend in college. I recently digitized my old tapes and transferred them to CD. Steve keeps saying I should post a clip to my blog. I will if I ever come across one that doesn’t make me cringe with embarrassment.

20. When I was in 1st-2nd grade, I saw a speech therapist because I had a hard time pronouncing my “S”’s.

21. I started college as a musical theatre performance major, but gave up the performance dream after my first year. I got so nervous at auditions that I was almost incapacitated. In fact, I came very close to skipping my audition to get into the School of Theatre Arts in the first place because I felt so sick to my stomach. Since college, I have gotten better and done a few shows with the local community theatre, but I still struggle with auditions. I never have the same trouble with performances because there is validation in being cast and it just seems easier and more natural to me. I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I had had access to beta blockers back in college.

22. I am very frugal and hate to waste money. I bring leftovers to work every day for lunch and I maintain an iron control over the thermostat at home. But I can’t pass up a good sale so I sometimes buy things I don’t really need to save a few bucks.

23. I want to do a volunteer vacation at the Best Friends Animal Society in Utah someday.

24. My first job was at Taco Bell. I worked there for 8 hours every Saturday through the school year (more in the summer) from age 14-16. I started working there because I wanted to go to Europe with a chorale group and my parents made me pay for half. I appreciate that they always made me pay for the extra stuff I wanted. When I started at Taco Bell, I made $3.35 an hour. Later the minimum wage was raise to $3.45 an hour. It took a while to pay for half of that Europe trip.

25. When I got my belly button pierced a few years ago, I would fill a glass with warm salt water and sit with it cupped around my belly button for a daily soaking. I really freaked my dad out that Christmas when I used one of the glasses he usually used to drink scotch for this purpose. I can be wicked this way.

Alas, the library conferences I have attended since then have been, shockingly, barren of booth babes.

Perhaps this should be re-thought.

My “contact” at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco today sent me pictures of the Delicious Monster booth. They were promoting their new Delicious Library software for cataloging books, movies, music, software, toys, tools, electronics, & video games. Honestly, what other choice did they have than to employ the Sexy Librarian booth babes?

As their web site says, “Visit our Delicious Librarians in Booth 2602″.

I appreciate the sexy librarian as much as anyone else, possibly more. But I have to say, I think there would be an issue if I showed up to work one day dressed like this.

I’m sorry, but what does this even mean?

You can barely see the joke here, but Steve insisted on taking this picture. In real life, it is one I-DOT worker working while 2 other workers watch him. Steve has a history with Illinois road construction. . .

This place has been here for years. Why bother going to Las Vegas?

Ah, I used to love eating freshly fallen snow.

Everyone, even the cops, drives like the speed limit is 65 anyway (so somewhere between 70 and 80). Keeping the speed limit on the interstate so low just makes criminals of everyone. Which, I suppose, is appropriate in Illinois. . .

As Blago said, “If they don’t perform, f*** ‘em.” (page 33)

Ah, the proud Illinois plains state farming tradition.

As Steve said, “Flaming skulls are cool. . .”

Hey Betty Sue, can I take your 5-year-old for a motorocyle ride? I have this adult helmut she can wear. Don’t worry if it’s so big she can barely hold her head up. That’s just extra protection!

Now the entire town can drink and bathe in holy water!

With such a flare for marketing, why in the world are the stores in this MALL closing?

Does this really need a caption?

I was surprised at the lack of signs advising me that I am going to Hell this year. I usually see a good 5 or 6 of them. Alas, all I could find was this big sign on the side of the interstate. I wonder, are these the only 6 they could remember? Or just the most important ones?

But this afternoon, after I sent a friend a long message explaining why I hadn’t gotten around to it yet, I realized that I could probably get the darn thing up and running in the same amount of time it took me to tell her why I hadn’t done it yet. So, after work, I did it. Fortunately, I had already done something at least similar to the layout change on my PolicyWonk blog, so I snagged that code and finished it lickety-split.

So, I will have my most recent 10 tweets at the top of my main blog page, as you should see above. I might bring this down to 5 once I see how much real estate 10 tweets takes up.

If you are a Twitter user, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/annenb.

I don’t think I can make my tweets show up in the RSS feed for this blog. So, if you follow my blog through a reader, you’ll need to set up another subscription for my Twitter feed if you want to follow it.

I’m kind of excited about this new tool. It takes so much time for me to get a regular blog post up, which I’ll continue to do at my usual snail’s pace, that I think it’ll be a good way for me to keep things really up to date. I’ll just follow up with more details and photos after the fact. Onwards and upwards!

I would not fare well as a wife in the 1930s.

13 As a 1930s wife, I am Very Poor (Failure) Take the test!

I am, however, a superior husband, although not very superior.

60 As a 1930s husband, I am Superior Take the test!

I’m very happy that this matter was resolved so quickly, but I feel very bad for the database administrator who made the original call as I imagine that person had a very, very bad weekend. It’s just such a shame that we live in an environment in which someone felt like they had to make this change in the first place.

POPLINE, “the world’s largest database on reproductive health, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues”, is funded by USAID.

I received a couple of e-mails today from various listserv subscriptions that POPLINE has recently decided to make the term “abortion” a stop word in their database. For those unfamiliar with the term, a stop word is a word that a database will not include when used in a search. Typically, these are words like “and”, “or”, “to”, “of”, etc. If you include one of these words in your search, the database ignores it.

A medical librarian was having trouble replicating a search she performed in January on POPLINE and asked for assistance as to why her results were incomplete. This is the reply she received from POPLINE:

“Yes we did make a change in POPLINE. We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now. In addition to the terms you’re already using, you could try using “Fertility Control, Postconception”. This is the broader term to our “Abortion” terms and most records have both in the keyword fields. Also, adding “unwanted w2 pregnancy” in place of aborti*. We have a keyword Pregnancy, Unwanted and there are 2517 records with aborti* & unwanted w2 pregnancy.”

You can still pull up the results by selecting “abortion” from the controlled vocabulary list, but no results are retrieved via a simple keyword search. I wonder at what point the abortion-related records will simply be purged from the database.

At this point it is unknown if they were getting pressure from above to make this change or if they made it, as they say, preemptively.

* Please understand, I know this can be a hot button issue, but this is a message about access to information and political interference in scientific research, not about abortion.*

Whatever your personal views are on abortion, this is not a database of personal belief systems. This is supposed to be a database of scientific literature which can be used by medical professionals and laypeople to find scientific research. On either side of the spectrum, if people are searching for scientific information about the physical or mental health effects or social implications of abortion, this database is doing them a serious disservice.