I know, it’s unsettling. I am jumpy like a little rabbit, and when I hear voices elsewhere in the library I freeze flat against the nearest wall and wait for them to go away. :p

Oh, God, if I had to crank something to get to my books, I think I might give up. That would be a bridge too far.

I once worked at a law firm with moveable stacks–they are on a track, so they can only expand to allow space to access the books, or contract so there is no space to walk between them. And they moved via a large “Yes, master, Igor will turn” 4-handled wheel crank, which was creepy. I hated going into them. Even with the lights on.

I need to find some Doctor Who books. That’s my big media criticism gap. I’ve read tons about Buffy, and a little bit about Angel and Firefly, but nothing on Doctor Who. Sigh.

(Also: Skipton is as lovely as Teresa says. They have a nice little market, too. I met a guy there who got me addicted to lemon curd).

You’re not creeping me out – at least not any more than I already creep myself out every time I walk into that library. I can’t stop thinking about how scary it would be if I heard a noise and then the lights went out. But casting it in terms of Doctor Who makes it a fun sort of scary, rather than, like, a serial killer in the stacks kind of scary. :p

Mine aren’t on sensors, they’re on switches. But it’s timed switches, so after whatever amount of time, they switch themselves off. It’s fine as long as I don’t sit down and read in one of the aisles – which I have no inclination whatsoever to do!

Umm, I am not sure. Because one of the issues was that the girls were supposed to be dedicated to the deity before they hit puberty, and the British governing people (as well as, a bit later on, a lot of the Indian elite) were concerned that they were being forced into prostitution as kids, and it was in aid of stopping that that they passed reform laws. I’m not sure how it would work if a grown-up woman wanted to dedicate herself to the temple, in modern times.

It was interesting! I would have liked to have seen some breakdowns of party sides on different issues and how the characters advocating for each side are portrayed. Because I did sometimes feel (and I say this as a liberal myself) the conservatives weren’t getting a fair hearing.

But now it’s bugging me because there was a book I read in the last couple of years where a young woman is in a library like that and thinks someone else is in there when … the … lights … click … off. Am I creeping you out? 😉 I wish I could remember the book!

And, just so I can keep commenting forever, the library episodes totally made me sad … the ghost voices coming from the communications units. Heartbreaking! And Donna losing everything … sob! And it is truly scary.

Yes, I suppose it’s horrible of me to mock Roland Barthes’s death. Now I feel guilty. I don’t normally do that sort of thing. I just hated his criticism so much.

Homicide was based on the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, by David Simon, who later went on to make The Wire, so the two shows are kind of like companion volumes. Simon was a journalist with the Baltimore Sun, and the book is about a year he spent observing one shift of the Baltimore homicide squad. The first few seasons of the show stick pretty closely to the events of the book, even to the extent of allowing a major case that was unsolved in real life to remain unsolved in the show. Homicide is a very different show from The Wire, though. It’s more character-based, for one thing, where The Wire is more plot-based, it’s got more humor and it’s not quite as relentlessly bleak in its vision of humanity, but it’s brilliantly written and the cast is phenomenal. I recommend the book, too, by the way.

So they can’t dedicate their daughters to a deity anymore. But can a daughter dedicate herself to a deity?