Thursday, August 23, 2007

Get out your tinfoil hat, folks

Mrs. A alerted me to the presence of a wingnut, yesterday. I actually witnessed the first and last bits of the story.

An unfamiliar-looking gentleman entered the "liberry," approached the circ desk, spied Mrs. A there and then, in hushed tones, asked her to help him find "the book on the Clintons."

"Which one?" Mrs. A asked. "We have several biographies of both Bill and Hillary."

The man seemed a little nervous, but said, "the... the Monica Lewinsky book."

Mrs. A lead him down to our biographies shelf and showed him where the various books on the subject were, including Monica's. After a short time, she came back to the circ desk and said something that I found pretty atypical for a long-time degreed librarian: "Would you get on Google and look up a list of the kings of Babylon?"

"The kings of Babylon?" I asked.

"It's for the gentleman over there," she said, pointing in the man's direction. She explained that he needed to find a list of the kings of Babylon so he could see how it relates to Bill and Hillary and, no doubt, their upcoming attempt to reestablish the empire stateside. Normally, we would look this information up in an encyclopedia or other credible reference source, but Mrs. A's patented raisin-cake-sense had gone off while talking to the man and she was pretty sure he'd be satisfied with a print out from the "innanet" and knew I could find one quicker than she could.

"Um, I've got the one off Wikipedia," I said. "It's possibly accurate."

"Just print it and give it to him."

I printed it and Mrs. A took it over and gave it to him free of charge.

After a while longer, the man returned to the circ desk with his Monica book. I already knew the answer to my first question.

"Can I scan your library card?"

"I don't have one."

Right.

I passed him an application for one, safe in the knowledge that he would fill it out only as far as it took for him to notice the Drivers License requirement, at which point I imagined the man would scream "HOMELAND SECURITY!" and make a break for the door. (It's happened before and he would hardly be the first to complain about the requirement.) However, the man filled out the form, wrote his drivers license number on it and allowed me to set him up with a patron record with no worries. He seemed very nice, well-mannered and content, a credit to the wingnut population.

Then again, what if he's right? I'm sure there are any number of conspiracy sites out there making Babylonian/Clintonian connections. In fact, as I've noted in the past, quite a few of the larger conspiracy sites I've seen before have featured advertising for Hillary's presidential campaign.

1 comment:

Tony Kris said...

We have a guy like that at one of the downtown branches. Always researching something politcal and trying to get us to sign his petition so he can run for governor. I think he actually got on the ballot this year.

Huge fan of the blog. Keep up the good stuff


An employee of a small town "liberry" chronicles his quest to remain sane while dealing with patrons who could star in a short-lived David Lynch television series.