Wasted

I can't believe I've done this again! A whole night squandered on teh Internets, and nothing worthwhile accomplished! Well, not absolutely nothing, I guess. I discovered that the USC digital archive has been greatly expanded, and its historic photograph collection (which has some really great stuff that can't be found anywhere else) now comes with more egregious errors than ever! Streets given the wrong names, north, south, east and west conflated, names misspelled, years gotten wrong, buildings misidentified... on and on. I now have a compulsion to fix everything there, but I've tried that before, when the collection was much smaller, and gotten no response from them. Now there's more than ever to irritate me! Sometimes I really, really, really hate academic institutions.

I also found that the University of California's California Digital Library has been getting bigger. Just what I need, another University web site to piss me off.

Damn, look at the time!

Who

The owl began hooting early this evening. The western sky was still that deep shade of daylight blue which lingers for a few minutes at the margin of night, and a few streaks of cloud glowed pink. A cricket had begun to chirp, but no stars had yet appeared, when the midnight sound of the owl emerged from a nearby wood. It continued as the sky darkened, and the now autumnally intricate silhouettes of the oaks slowly merged with night, as the last cerulean glow that revealed their diminished clumps of foliage and the lately exposed branches faded to black. Without a breeze, the air nonetheless cooled quickly, as though the land were eager to surrender the remnants of the balmy day. I found myself saddened by the brevity of dusk, the loss of that color and vanishing of the stark detail of the silhouetted trees. Everything else seemed to be in such a rush, goaded by that early owl who hooted and hooted the world into darkness.