Any day at the range is almost perfect...

Maximum Effective Range of the M1 Rifle is 460 yards, maybe. What that means is that half of the bullets fired at a target four hundred and sixty yards away will hit it, with a trained rifleman. So I have been told. I made a quick composite of my day firing my first rounds down range with my rifle. Lower left the beautiful rifle itself and my almost spotting scope (no, I don't have one yet). The picture on the right is the range, farthest targets are three hundred yards - always remember that cameras can magnify a little but one's eyes are really better.

The target on the fifty yard line centered is on the upper left - three rounds, check (lower right), sight adjustment, three rounds, check (upper left out of black and getting wild), sight adjustment cut half of last move, two rounds, clip jumps out, leave bolt open and put weapon on safe. Go out and paste target, taking a picture, and move the target out to two hundred yards and plant it.

Two clips to shoot, sixteen bullets and all over everything. Still, the target if a man-sized zombie standing still or coming straight at me might die - needed a head shot don't I? Bring more bullets, concentrate and tighter shot groups, windage is flaky and hurried, but mostly the focus on the same point on the target isn't there so the vertical is very bad. I do know that an eight inch bull at two hundred yards is tiny, especially when focused on the front sight post. The military center of mass might be better. I do know that I am in love with that rifle.

Yes, there were high speed black rifles with scopes and red dots and bolt actions that will reach out and take those mountain goats on the other side of the moon - men love their rifles - but I am glad I only took twenty four rounds to break the ice - otherwise I would have stayed all afternoon until the ammunition was all gone, and that makes me think I should fire both days next weekend with the M1. But I won't, the .22 Stevens Low Wall on the first day. The M1 Garand on the second day. I need to find some discipline and get off the computer and television, this electronic death is the pits.

Institutional Library Services - what dat mean?

I need to expound on ILS, Institutional Library Services, to entice you to join in this happy fray. It won't make you younger, sexier, richer, nor more loved or celebrated than Brad Pitt and Angela, as I look at it now - it isn't going to do anything for you. Unless you are in an institution or care about someone that is... (did I get her name wrong? I did didn't I? oops!). When the current President Bush decided to attack Iraq and what ever he thought he could accomplish for History I looked up on the internet the Iraqi libraries, where they were, what they had, and such -- not very exciting, but I knew that some of them would be damaged or destroyed in President Bush the youngster's war. I haven't been back to check, I do know that with American troops come lots of reading material from supply, exchanges and family support, and we will leave much of it for the locals to read in English. I picked up lots of British publications during my trip to Saudi Arabia for the elder Bush's war. Anyway, back to institutional library services.

You have a population of people separated from America's culture and commerce, for healing and treatment or programming. This population needs access to the outside and a library can provide entertainment and education without subjecting the outside population, you, to the stress of contact with the separated persons. That could be what is going on, I am not sure, but some one has decided that a library can assist in the return of this special population to normal society. Is there empirical proof that a library can make an incorrigible into a better human being? I like to point to Red and Malcom X, but then you would have to know I chopped that story into its smallest pieces, and expect that you know not everyone goes to nor uses the library for its maximum potential. That is a disjointed effort in explaining institutional libraries, sorry.

I work in the Institutional Library Services to help provide that help in finding one's way out of the present and into a past and a better future. I know that I am called on daily to bring a change in knowledge, attitude and satisfy one's question without an answer. Do I make a difference? only in that I open the door and allow some one in, they get to open the books. That may be all the difference needed. More library keepers are needed far from the flag pole and all the glory in the Capital, the Washington State Library serves less than twenty institutions, serving over fifteen thousand or so patrons with no other library service. Of the employees in the State Library much less than a third are engaged in Institutional Library Services directly, much less, remember the guards at the border with the barbarians? Institutional Library Services