A CHRONOLOGICAL CONUNDRUM: So here’s the thing: Auckland, New Zealand is, as far as I know, the first large city to celebrate the New Year, and Honolulu, Hawaii is the last. The two cities lie some 4,392 miles apart [that’s 7,072 kilometers for those of you of the metric persuasion] and in between them lies the International Date Line, a distance easily traversed today in the era of jet travel. Suppose you decide that you want to double your New Year’s pleasure and celebrate amongst the Kiwis first and then zoom off for Oahu to catch the tag end of the planet's New Year’s celebrations. At some point you will cross the International Date Line and go from the new year to the old year. At that point, what do you say? “Happy Old Year?” Would you have to forswear the singing of Auld Lang Syne since, with your crossing of the date line, the present moment would be the auld lang syne the song goes on about? Could you make an old year’s resolution, content in the knowledge that whatever you resolved to do would be null and void only a few hours after you arrived in Hawaii, and what would be the point if you did make such a resolution? The Wright Brothers have wrought a terrible paradox, I fear.

THE COOL LIBRARIANS: I see in the New York Times, and if I see it in the New York Times it must be so, right (high irony alert), that librarians are now officially hip, cool, or whatever word the kids are using these days to denote special approval. I don’t know how this happened; we were just sitting around shushing little kids (I am a champion shusher, if I do say so myself—in library school I got my best grades in the course on shushing) and telling teenagers that no, they can’t eat, drink, dance, or copulate anywhere in the library, and all of a sudden, we’re at the center of the cool universe. This is certainly very strange, especially for those of us who have been in the profession for a while. The Times goes on about how libraries are not just about books these days, that we are about packaging, for lack of a better word, information for the patrons. This sort of thing always amuses those of us who have had to do this for a bit, since libraries were never just about books even when all we offered were books. No, indeed, sometimes it's about cadavers.

It is a commonplace amongst librarians that library schools do not teach you anything useful about the actual functioning of a library. This was especially true if you planned to work in a public library. For example, I cannot remember a single instance in library school of any instructor telling the gathered cool people to be what the proper procedure for dealing with a corpse in the men’s room was. I mean, do we try to identify him? And if we do, should we check to see if he has any outstanding fines and take the money out of his wallet before we call the police? And what about the books and DVDs he has out? Will we ever see them again? No one told us and I am pretty sure that none of us in the classroom ever thought to ask. Similarly, the questions of crazed dogs, crazed junkies, crazed parents, crazed kids, and what to do with the people who are just plain crazy never crossed our minds as we learned the intricacies of the Dewey Decimal System. I am sure that if given a little time, I could probably catalog and classify any number of oddball behaviors, but what to do with the people actually exhibiting those behaviors while inside the library did not rate much discussion, as far as I remember. I had to learn how to deal with barfing dogs and paranoid schizophrenics defecating in the fiction stacks on my own and without any help from my graduate degree, which, don’t get me wrong, is always a nice thing to have, but I suspect is largely superfluous to what I actually have to do in this egregious mold pit from day to day.

CELEBRITY NEWS: People magazine, the bible of our celebrity age, asks on its cover this week who will save Lindsey Lohan from the flaming and well-traveled arc of personal and professional self-destruction she is now on. I don’t mean to sound cynical here (there’s an obvious lie) but isn’t the point of magazines like People the snide and gleeful documentation of celebrity self-destruction for the prurient and voyeuristic titillation of its readers? Celebrities with stable home lives, assuming there are any, do not make it into the pages of People simply because the magazine’s audience is not interested in any celebrity not out making a public ass of themselves. In a related story, Paris Hilton has checked into an all-inclusive resort that is definitely not the Paris Hilton, and we all may sleep sounder in our beds, safe in the knowledge that the world is now a safer place.

UPDATE: Here’s an update to the above, although it’s not really much of an update, since it’s has nothing to do with what I’ve already written, but I thought it was interesting and maybe you will, too. Bill O’Reilly pointed out a couple of days ago that the New York Times put the story of the terrorist plot to destroy JFK International Airport on page 37 of this week’s Sunday paper, for which he has gotten a lot of grief from all the usual left-wing suspects. Now, in fairness to the Times and for those of you who may not get the city edition of the paper delivered to your doorstep, page 37 of last Sunday’s paper was the first page of the Times’ Metro section. This is the part of the paper wherein the Times, which likes to think of itself as the nation’s newspaper, pays lip service to geographic reality and reports what’s going on in New York City. The Times doesn’t like covering the city beat and frankly, it shows. If you want real coverage of what goes on in New York City, read the Post or the Daily News, the Sun or the Observer; read Newsday if you want to catch what’s going on in Queens; even read a left wing rag like the Village Voice and ignore the classified ads for the transsexual prostitutes and those Korean bordellos in the West 30’s. Read almost any other newspaper coming out of New York and you will get better news coverage of the city than the Times offers. But lousy or not, the terror plot was there, on the first page of the Metro section and above the fold, too.

But, you know, the arrest of these would-be jihadis made the actual front page of newspapers all over the United States, whereas the Times, on its actual front page, had yet another Guantanamo story, poor Indian brick makers, and a piece about the gentleman who plays the violins at the violin museum in Cremona, Italy. I should point out here that I am a tremendous admirer of the Stradivari, Amati, and Guarneri families and all of their products; no one likes listening to Itzhak Perlman swing a hot Strad more than I do; but I think we would all agree that in terms of news value a disrupted terror plot beats keeping great violins in musical trim any day of the week, especially when the target of the disrupted plot lies only a few miles from the Times’ corporate offices in Manhattan and those violins do not.

ALL MODO, ALL THE TIMES: Maureen Dowd, ace girl reporter for the New York Times, is on the cover of New York magazine this week. She is everywhere these days; I can’t seem to pick up a magazine anymore without pictures of Ms. Dowd staring back at me. Now, I am told that she has a book coming out shortly and that this may well be the usual Madison Avenue p.r. blitz designed to boost book sales and earn the publisher back the advance; hype in pursuit of lucre, filthy or otherwise, is always a good thing, I think. It may also be a charm offensive sponsored by the New York Times, whose publisher, Mr. Sulzburger, manages to embody in his own person just about every argument ever made against the concept of hereditary succession, and who recently looked the other way and whistled "Melancholy Baby" as Ms. Dowd publicly sliced up another Times reporter, Judith Miller, on the Op-Ed page of Mr. Sulzberger's august journal. Perhaps having done his dirty work for him, Mr. Sulzburger wants his readers to think nice things about Ms. Dowd, seeing as how saying that you like someone (Ms. Miller)while publicly gutting them for the edification of the chattering classes and those who aspire to chatterdom seems a bit hypocritical to those of us who don't chatter for our daily bread. In any case, I do know that whoever told her that having her picture taken against a snow white backdrop was a good idea was definitely pulling Ms. Dowd’s leg, given that this cover makes her look more than a little like the Wicked Witch of the Northeast, smiling beneficently down as Toto, Hollywood’s favorite unbearably cute pooch, wolfs down a big bowl of Alpo seasoned with that yummy A-1 steak sauce and a generous sprinkling of rat poison. No, Toto, you’re not in Kansas anymore, and your chances of getting back there are none too good.