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64 of the most spectacular libraries in the world

I've only been to six of these, all in the U.S. (and I virtually lived in Suzzallo for two years while in grad school), but there's another half dozen, some in Canada or Britain, that I've either seen the outsides of or visited in previous facilities.

earthquake non-report

We're some 60 miles south of Napa.  We were asleep during the quake, and stayed asleep.  I felt the Paso Robles quake, which was a slightly higher magnitude (6.5 vs. today's estimated 6.0) and about twice as far away, a decade ago, but I was awake at the time (in fact I was in the theater, waiting for Peter Jackson's Travesty III to start).  But, this far away, it came across as a gentle rolling, and if I'd been asleep it would probably not have woken me up.  The drama of earthquakes outside their immediately affected areas tends to be overassumed by those not used to them.

B.'s sister is in Napa, though, and there it is certainly notable: power and water out, things fallen over and smashed, her husband clonked by a bureau (he's OK).  Somewhat more severe than what we went through in Loma Prieta - the magnitude isn't as great, but they're a lot closer to the epicenter than we were.

Reports have some crumbling buildings in downtown Napa and Vallejo - typical of such quakes, they hit worst in pre-code buildings, regardless of location - some buckled roads, one significant fire, numerous injuries but no fatal casualties.  Everybody hang on.

third eye

In addition to posting on my own blog on Blogspot and LiveJournal, I now have a third place to appear.

Actually I was invited to join the group of Tolkienists blogging for The Tolkien Society several months ago, but it took this long for me to approach the hump of figuring out how to log on and work the thing, and even then it took several stupid questions patiently answered by the TS chairman, Shaun Gunner, who's responsible for this and I hope not by now regretting it.

My first post up is the review of John Carey's The Unexpected Professor posted here yesterday. The nice repro of the book cover along with it is not my doing, but I expect that of Daniel, their WordPress guru. I expect that from now on my Tolkien-related posts will appear there as well as here, and perhaps the more recondite ones may appear only there, though if so there will be a link from here.