Booksales. They're a necessary evil when it comes to "liberries." Where else are we going to get rid of the piles upon donated piles of Chicken Soup for the Dickweed's Soul, or any given Mitch Albom book? But they're a colossal pain in the ass to have to organize, physically set up, and, eventually, take down, not to mention all those people you have to turn away donations from cause they insist on trying to give you the one thing you DO NOT ACCEPT: text books. And there's the matter of the horr...
Jul 08, 2012•39 min
Of our dangerous patrons, one of the more benignly dangerous ones was Gene Gene the Genealogy Machine. And he was only dangerous because anyone near him had a far greater chance of having to gnaw their own leg off to escape the boring details of his family history than those who were not in his presence. Gene's greatest enemy, other than the neighborhood children who often encroached upon his ancestry computing time, were our computers themselves and the near dialup speeds they tended to run at....
Jul 01, 2012•23 min
Our Summer Reading program was far more stressful than most. We didn't just make kids read X number of books over X number of weeks, we also put together three hour-long programs for them each and every one of those X number of weeks, with crafts crafted, stories read aloud and snacks snacked upon. However, what made our Summer Reading even more stressful was our insistence on producing one of those hour-long Summer Reading programs on Mondays, which, as we all know from prior podcasts, are insa...
Jun 25, 2012•30 min
Over the 64 episodes of this podcast, I've told many a tale about mothers of questionable quality. Today, I present a few about the dads. Okay, so none of the dads in today's story are particularly questionable. I have to say that, cause my own dad is featured prominently and behaves admirably. But when it comes to dad stories at the "liberry" you have to pick from what's there, cause there's only a few to be found. But you do get to hear the tale of the time my dad and I nearly had to lay a bea...
Jun 18, 2012•28 min
Newbie Greenhorn Ms. S was not only an eternal newbie greenhorn, she was their queen. Never before had I met a person so willfully unwilling to burn a single calorie in the execution of her job that could have gone unburnt with her ass planted in a chair. The fact that she remained an employee as long as she did is a mystery for the ages. After hoarding away a number of the best Ms. S stories, I finally unleashed them in a weeklong torrent called L is for Lazy Week (much as Ms. S could unleash a...
Jun 11, 2012•25 min
One of the most confounding "liberry" mysteries put before me, years even before I began blogging about my adventures, was the mystery of Mr. Little Stupid. Like his near namesake, Mr. Big Stupid, Mr. Little Stupid enjoyed using our public computers. Unlike Mr. Big Stupid, Mr. L.S. was a small, meek fellow who walked around carrying a Girl Scouts binder and wanted to read the poetry of tragic figures cut down too soon. He also had the perplexing inability to remember the most basic of internet a...
Jun 05, 2012•35 min
Take a coffee cup that has a lid... and is stationary... and has no backlighting... and has a radioactive isotope inside of it that could release a molecule that has a 50/50 chance to punch a hole in the side of it, revealing whether or not it's full... and... and... Oh, yeah, did I mention the room is completely dark? Yeah, it's dark, all right. Anyway, after you think about all that for a while, listen to this week's episode featuring Mr. Hinky, a Rogue Patron who was a repeat offender at snea...
May 28, 2012•15 min
Okay, so it's a week late, but just like calling your mom for Mother's Day, better late than never. Today's episode is the sequel to last year's BAD MOTHERS DAY podcast which got rerun last week in place of this one, which was eaten by Audacity. So now, freshly rerecorded and spiffy and stuff, here's Bad Moms 2. Featured in today's episode are more tales of questionable parenting, featuring such bad parenting byproducts as Little Kayla, Holly GoHeavilly and the children of future podcast feature...
May 20, 2012•30 min
In honor of Mother's Day and because EFFing Audacity EFFing ate the Bad Mother's Day sequel file I recorded today just as I was starting to edit it . (That's okay, though. Turns out it had shitty audio cause something is set wrong on the wife's laptop. But I digress.) So instead, I present an encore reairing of last year's bad mother's day show. Tune in next week for this year's, dammit. From the cast of 16 And Pregnant to the Octomom to that Brazilian chick who said she was having, like, nine b...
May 14, 2012•27 min
Throughout my time at the "liberry" I was able to identify and classify the top five grumpiest old men in all the world. So far Mr. B-Natural and Mr. Crab (#1 and #3, respectively) have had podcast episodes devoted to them. Now we turn to Grumpiest Old Man in All the World #4: Mr. Dent. This was an older gentleman kwho closely resembled Sam the Eagle from the Muppet Show, albeit with a massive dent in the side of his head. Oh, and he was also known for his infatuation with the alleged genetic im...
May 06, 2012•27 min
They say if you're one in a million then there are 10,000 of you in the U.S. alone. And thems only 1990 census numbers. This being the case, I, and more importantly people who barely know me, have run into (or attacked, in some cases) perfect strangers who just happen to resemble me. These handsome devils I call my "clones" and they have plagued me since my days in college. One even paid me a visit at the "liberry."...
Apr 29, 2012•26 min
In honor of Earth Day, this episode presents my one and only Earth Day entry detailing one wildly irresponsible environmentally-conscious childrens' book that I regretted cold reading to a bunch of story hour kids. Additionally, this episode serves as part 2 of our cute stories about good kids series, albeit one in which some of the good kids are pretty frustrating. Guest stars include Brett Mavrick: The Card Sharp, Olive "Has No Inside Voice" Baker, and Danger Ben Stout.
Apr 22, 2012•26 min
Kids. Lots of people have them and lots of them are shits. Even thieving shits, (See: the Fagins). But once in a while you'll get a few good eggs. In fact, whole families of good eggs. After weeks (some might say 55 of them) of negativity and grief, allow me to present part one of a two part series of Tales of the Good Patrons--stories about great kids and/or great parents, who are no less entertaining than the bad ones--just in a good way....
Apr 15, 2012•26 min
This episode drops April 1 and it's all sprangy outside. In honor of that, here are a handful of stories involving the season of spring (with just a hint of winter). Highlights include appearances by Fatty Manchild and Old Man Womanlegs, plus the greatest and best shot in the world, and an unprecedented question from a patron.
Apr 09, 2012•21 min
While most newbie greenhorn employees settle into the job at some point (even some who take a year or two to find their feet) there are some who NEVER find their feet no matter how many times you train and retrain them. These are the eternal newbie greenhorns and Ms. S was their queen and, eventually, sole member at our branch. Which is odd, because Eternal Newbie "Liberry" Greenhorn Ms. S was allegedly a trained library worker with some sort of library degree to her name before she started....
Apr 08, 2012•30 min
Tales from the "LiberryCAST" enters Season 2 with some hints and details on my return to my old stomping grounds of the Tri-Metro area of small Appalachian towns--the very place that spawned the original Tales from the "Liberry" blog. In honor of a few return trips to the actual "liberry" in question, this episode also presents a few adapted tales starring the one Rogues Gallery member I've actually seen at the "liberry" nearly every time I've been back.
Mar 26, 2012•28 min
Back in Episode 10 (110), I featured some of the Open Letters I'd published to both patrons and members of the entertainment industry (both living and dead). And back in Episode 10, I said I had some more such letters to come. Today's episode, Episode 52 (that would be the one year anniversary of this show) features those other open letters. By the by, I'm gonna take a couple weeks off before starting Season 2 of TFT"LC", cause I'm moving houses and stuff....
Mar 04, 2012•22 min
I've often maintained that if a person is going to go around pointing fingers at the foibles of others (or recording podcasts adapting blog entries about the foibles of others), it's only fair for that person to occasionally point a few at some of their own. I did this pretty frequently during the course of writing Tales from the "Liberry" and even devoted an entire week to it. Adapted here are a few entries from that week, as well as dumbass things I did beyond it. Guest stars include Mr. Stank...
Feb 26, 2012•28 min
We at the "liberry" were no strangers to playing the role of "liberry" clubhouse junior detectives on occasion. But one day we were presented with a huge mystery that remains largely unsolved to this very day. On this week's podcast, you can listen to what our staff did after an older gentleman patron behaved most ungentlemanly to us by spreading lies that we had refused to supply him with copies of the founding documents of our nation, after we very much had. I give you the story of Grandpa Sam...
Feb 19, 2012•28 min
Meet Johnny Hacker, one of the "good" patrons. He was a college student living at home who was known to us only for his use of our facilities for their best possible purposes, not to mention for being an all around cheerful dude. That boy's parents raised him right, and we know cause they were usually not far when Johnny was in house. However, while his mother's good lessons of "cover your mouth when you cough" definitely stuck in his brain, common sense notions of "if you're going to give off h...
Feb 12, 2012•27 min
(NOTE FROM 2012: Okay, I don't know what happened but somehow half this episode vanished. No, the version that's been posted here, for who knows how long, had the theme music, then trailed off to silence for, like, 12 minutes, then came back in with the second and third stories and wrapped up. There was a massive gap where the first story had been and I don't know how this is even possible. It was just gone and was gone from my back up .wav copy, and the .mp3 copy, and the online copy, and the b...
Feb 11, 2012•23 min
Wedding anniversaries: for me they happen every year and this year my 12th anniversary just happens to fall on the day this episode drops, Sunday, February 5. So, because I have a sum total of ZERO football stories from the blog I could slip in here to create a different theme, and because I love my wife (those excuses may not be in the right order), I shall tell an off-blog yet-still-blog-like tale regarding a mystery anniversary concert the wife arranged for me for our 3rd anniversary, way bac...
Feb 05, 2012•29 min
As with successful TV shows that spinoff into subsequent TV shows, sometimes "liberry" programs spin off into others. However, for every Cheers to Frasier spin-off, there are twenty forgettable Friends to Joey spinoffs. I got to be the architect of two such back to back spinoffs of our weekly morning story hour program, which became evening story time projects with the unlikely acronyms of O.U.A.W and T.U.A.T. Over the course of most of a year, their attendance, and therefore success, varied wil...
Jan 29, 2012•34 min
Our troubles with the Newbie Greenhorns on staff only began with Ms. K, Ms. M and Miss F. For they were but the heralds for the coming of the great and terrible Queen of the Greenhorns: Ms. S. On paper, Ms. S seemed like a dream come true, for while she was but a newbie to our "liberry" she held in her employment history actual experience working in a larger library in a neighboring county, which meant she knew our computer system already. Sweet! Better still, she allegedly held an undergraduate...
Jan 22, 2012•43 min
One of the cast members of the Tales from the "Liberry" blog who was on the scene long before I ever worked in a public library was my cat Winston Churchill: The Infinitely Bad Kitty. Named because she looked exactly like the former British Prime Minister as an infant, Winston was one of my best friends throughout my 20s and much of my 30s. However, due to a series of most unfortunate events, she nearly didn't make it through the midpoint of my 30s. This is the miraculous story of her salvation....
Jan 15, 2012•40 min
Everybody has to start their career somewhere and usually when you start at entry level you're not very good. It takes a while to find your feet. And that was the purpose of the Newbie Greenhorn program at our "liberry". Newbie Greenhorns were allowed time to work out the kinks and master the details of their job without a great deal of initial positive expectation on the part of their coworkers. Ideally, these employees would graduate to mere Greenhorn status and then full fledged "Liberry" Ass...
Jan 08, 2012•37 min
Back for the new year are tales of everyone's favorite puffy, white, Michelin Man parka-clad, innanet crowd patron, Parka. Detailed here are tales of his repeatedly thwarted efforts to drink his coffee while chatting with his e-skanks on our computers, what it might sound like were he to have been given a microphone with which to chat with them, his deep roots into the synchronicity fields surrounding our building, and his banning from the use of our computers at the hands of... himself....
Jan 01, 2012•36 min
On this special day, on which we both celebrate the birth of our savior and worship at the altar of commerce, I bring you a Christmas story of another humble servant of God. One of the most memorable patrons we ever had to deal with was a fellow we collectively called Jesus and who I blog-dubbed Wal-Mart Jesus. How come? Cause he looked like Jesus, but wearing flowing, striped, table-clothy robes that looked as if they had been pulled directly from a roll in Wal-Mart's fabric department. He was ...
Dec 25, 2011•39 min
I loves me some Christmas Party. Yessir. Nearly my favorite kind of party due to high concentrations of fantastic food and drink and presents. Our "liberry" Christmas parties were especially fun, as we usually did them potluck style and stuffed ourselves beyond full with the amazing dishes created by the wonderful cooks I worked with (and am married to). But there are many varieties of Christmas party beyond the "liberry", not to mention just nutty seasonal crap to deal with. This week's podcast...
Dec 18, 2011•33 min
There are rogue patrons and there are Rogue Patrons and Mr. B-Natural, Grumpiest Old Man in All the World, was usually somewhere in between. Not an evil human being by any stretch, but a tremendously cranky man, except when in the presence of his beloved pooch, Bubba. Our main beef with him is that Mr. B-Natural was a guy who definitely took pleasure in annoying the bejeezus out of the library staff by blatantly breaking as many rules as he could get away with just to piss us off. To hear him te...
Dec 11, 2011•33 min
