This unusual, and persistent, cold, ice, and snow will be with us for a while. In Washington County (home to my library), you can view a list of shelters and other information to use or to pass along as needed.
You can also phone 211 for this information, inside and outside Washington County.
Check on your friends and neighbors too and make sure they have heat and food.
If you want to volunteer your time (vs. your money) but have only a few hours or days, here and there, don’t forget about this website for the Portland Metro Area: Hands On Greater Portland.
From the Washington County (Oregon) Law Librarian:
If you are looking for AARP bylaws, either the national ones or for the Oregon Chapter, please contact AARP directly. The Washington County Law Librarian does not have them.
A couple of years ago, in response to a patron’s request, I sent out an email message to colleagues on a law librarian listserve asking if anyone had found an online source for AARP bylaws. No one had, but since then, I receive emails every couple of months from someone asking me to “please send me a copy of the AARP bylaws.”
If you’ll allow me to go off-topic for a moment, the Portland Tuba Christmas (see here also) event is Saturday, December 13th, 2008.
This is definitely a Do Not Miss event for everyone – and I mean everyone – at least everyone who likes to laugh. We might even have snow!
Writers have excellent online and professional organization resources (including libraries!) for researching the publishing business, but two topics a lot of writers don’t think about, until it’s too late:
1) Publishing scams (see, e.g. Writers Beware, from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc.)
2) What to do if your publisher goes bankrupt?
I was trying to decide if et al needed a serial comma – and I came across this:
In Bournemouth, England at least, “plain language” means you can’t use these: E.g., bona fide, and more (etc. too)
Excerpt from the story at Newstin dot com: Town halls ban staff from using Latin words, in case they confuse immigrants:
In case you haven’t already seen this: Blog Search Engines, by Ann Smarty at Search Engine Journal.
Thanks to iLibrarian for the lead.
Ye old, “trust, but verify” cliché that many, most, attribute to Ronald Reagan, and that one hears way too often nowadays, surely goes back much further than Reagan, and likely even further back than the first place I read a version of it. It is certainly a turn of phrase that could easily be lifted (as have most of all our best lines :-) and used in other contexts, not excluding election campaigns:
Winston Churchill’s, “The Hinge of Fate,” 1950, Houghton Mifflin edition, page 687:
“…. Memories of the war may be vivid and true, but should never be trusted without verification, especially where the sequence of events is concerned.”
From NASA: Back it up, Commander, Back it up!!
(Can you go backwards or up or down in space? Or on earth, for that matter?)
On Sunday, 2 a.m., November 2nd, 2008, the clocks are turned back to 1 a.m – Hurrah! (Or is it Fall Forward instead of Fall Backward 😛) See Time and Date, which asks and answers:
The Oregonians’ West Bureau ran a story by Dana Tierney in their Thursday, October 16th, 2008, print Washington County Weekly insert, “Food allergy group is nothing to sneeze at.” There was an interesting local resource featured, as well as the usual national ones. (Newspaper handy-dandy little text boxes don’t always appear, or aren’t easy to find, in the online editions of the newspaper.)
The Oregon Food Allergy Group (this is a Yahoo Group):
“This group was created to provide food allergy support, education, and advocacy to those living in the greater Portland area and Willamette Valley.We invite you to join in our online discussion and join in our monthly support meetings. At present, Portland meetings are held the 2nd Tuesday of each month at 7:30pm. Salem meetings are held the 2nd Sunday of each month at 2pm. Our calendar and postings list food allergy related events and meetings in Portland and Salem area.”
Oregon Legal Research Blog