To those who do free stuff to make the world a better place: thank you.

When I was out walking yesterday, I saw that our neighborhood's Little Free Library had a sign up that Todd H. Bol, founder of the Little Free Libraries movement, had died. (See the obit at BoingBoing, the source of this picture.)

I don't have a Little Free Library because giving away books of literary criticism from rhymes-with-Luke-Luniversity-Fress isn't going to win many neighborhood hearts and minds, but still: farewell, R.I.P., and thank you, Todd H. Bol. You wanted to make the world a better place, and you did.

You might remember that last year the Radical Librarians were criticizing Little Free Libraries because they were just not quite correct enough and that they should cease to exist so that those who put them up could go advocate for more library funding--because obviously people who love books couldn't possibly do both. Obviously.


It's not an either/or with this or with other schemes for betterment.

Also, we ought to thank the people who make things for free.

For example, around the web (okay, on Twitter and comment boards) you'll see that someone has put up--for free--software on GitHub or a site that does something specific you need for research.

Let me emphasize: for free--not adware, not 30-day trials.

Most people say thanks, but a few are all "this sucks! Why doesn't it do X function that I need?"

Or "why doesn't this website have this thing I need for free?"

Or "why doesn't this transcription or site include all the metadata I need?"

Or--but you get the picture.

Now, big sites like Google Books have an obligation (says I) not to disable previously available functionality, like page numbers. Why have they done this for the preview function in many cases? No one knows. (Digression--sorry.)

Political action is important, and so is giving money. But so too is thanking the people who are trying to make the world a better place. It's not either/or.

Home is where the dishwasher is

Historiann has an interesting post up about Michelle Nijhuis's "Not one more winter in the tipi, honey." It's about the gendered division of labor that creeps in when idealistic back-to-the-land-for-a-simpler-life types experience parenthood. The glamor jobs like siding the yurt win a lot of praise whereas the realities of invisible (and repetitive) domestic work like washing diapers don't, and the division of labor that usually attends these tasks often means that women bail out first on the Arcadian dream.

I think it's partly the invisibility of these tasks, as Historiann says, and partly their lack of glamor, but also the sheer amount of mental as well as physical energy that they take. I've never done anything remotely yurt-like in terms of pure back-to-the-landness, but being in the Land of No Internets in the summertime has given me a little appreciation for that life.

I used to get impatient when whoever was in charge of cooking would ask what we'd like for dinner hours before dinner time, but I have more sympathy for that now, though I try not to ask. Once you're the person in charge of cooking, baking, and the rest, you realize that if you don't think about it in advance--first at the grocery store, since it's a long trek back there if you forget something, and then counting back from dinner time to the preparation time you're going to need--dinner and breakfast and lunch aren't going to happen.

Now, to be fair, other family members always offer to take over some of this work, especially washing the mountains of dishes, and certainly at home we have an equitable division of labor: one person cooks and the other cleans up, and so on. I've chosen to take on the more traditional role at the LoNI mostly to give everyone else more free time and because I don't have to do this permanently. I've also done this as a kind of experiment in 19th-century living and as an exercise in shifting focus from one form of work to another.

A lot of commenters over at Historiann's mentioned Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, and I'm reminded of something the character Laura thinks about in The First Four Years. In this book, she's pregnant and feeling miserable, but she realizes that "the work must go on, and she was the one who must do it."

To get back to the "not one more winter in the tipi" idea: You can put a solar panel on a yurt or not, depending on how you feel that day, but for all the domestic tasks, the work has to go on whether you feel like it or not. That makes a difference.

Big Love finale: my heck, yes!

I know this is off-topic, but I can't help writing about it as a way of getting it out of my head. If you either don't care about Big Love or haven't seen the finale yet and don't want spoilers, you don't want to read this.

Mark Olsen and Will Scheffer have already discussed why they ended the series as they did, so this is just a few random bullets of reaction.

• How early in this episode did you realize that something dire was going to happen to Bill? The Godfather-style smile with oranges was a big tip-off, of course, but really, every time Bill starts to get out from under his problems, he goes and invites another peck of trouble by angering the civil authorities, the church, his wives, the D.A., Juniper Creek, or someone else who's unimpressed with his pronouncements. See under "hubris": Bill Henrickson.
• Bill is an Everyman with a vision, and although a lot of people disliked his character, it seemed to me that Bill Paxton did well at portraying an everyman who's misguided but has a strong set of beliefs, however wrongheaded we think those are. Also, he's handy with tools, and it was one of the many nice touches in the show that he'd head for something he could handle and fix in the material world when his spiritual world was going awry. Barb wants the priesthood? Salt the patio. Barb is pulling away? Put a towbar on Lois's car. (By the way, this season had far too little of Nicki's Handy Home Repairs and Appliance Hauling compared with previous years.)
• Speaking of hubris, Spouse commented that he thought the whole series had been about hubris, which if you think about it, would make Bill a tragic hero of sorts. Does he achieve tragic status? With his vision of Emma Smith and family, Bill does achieve a kind of anagnorisis and is able to act on it just before he dies, explaining his revelation to Ben and Don and asking Barb for her blessing. Spouse pointed out that, like Joseph Smith, Bill never does get to the promised land but is murdered before he can get there.
• The Emma Smith figure puzzled me last season and in the finale at first, since she was vehemently opposed to polygamy and was vocal about it, too. Olsen and Scheffer said somewhere that that was her function--to draw attention to the flaws and give voice to the dissent about it.
• I didn't miss the characters who weren't brought back--not Joey, Wanda, and their baby (who creepily never grew to toddlerhood in 2-3 years) but were sent to the Big Mexican Compound in the Sky nor Teeny nor any of the multitude of Juniper Creekers. It was a finale, not a family reunion.
• Speaking of children, all of the Henrickson brood was seen from time to time, but with the exception of Our Spokesman Wayne, they were pretty much seen and not heard (except for singing) and never seemed to need a babysitter. Think about it, though: if the show still focused on minor domestic dramas like who's going to drive the kids to school or who's going to pick up a costume for Teeny, which was the material of the early seasons, we wouldn't be watching it because the show is done with those logistical points--and so are we.
• Nor did I think that some kind of dramatic justice demanded that Alby be the one to kill Bill. Having Carl do it--and after Bill had performed one of his rare unselfless acts and fulfilled one of his promises, for a change--made sense in that Bill was a repudiation of all that Carl stood for. Also, Bill doesn't lose to Juniper Creek, but he does lose to randomness, and for someone who mistakenly thinks he has life under control as much as Bill does, it's a perfect undercutting of his control one last time.
• Lois and Frank. Frank's recollections about their early life together--living in the trailer--didn't mention one thing: he was already married to someone else at the time, and Lois was his second wife. Is there a setting-up-housekeeping period in polygamy when the husband and new wife go off together, or was Frank being tactful (Frank! tactful!), or did the writers forget that Lois wasn't the first wife?

Your thoughts?