That's not the book I went looking for at the library today.  The book I went looking for was called "The Complete and Unabridged Index to the Sky." 
     There were the neatest clouds up there in the sky to my west last night at dusk and I wanted to know all the other places they'd been and where I could find them again today. 
     I thought maybe if I knew where they'd come from, I'd learn how you get to be so light and enchanting without compromising your basic grayness and insubstantiality. 
     I thought maybe if I knew where they were now - if I learned with certainty that they were indeed still somewhere - I'd find some reassurance that I'd still be somewhere, too, come the morrow.
     Alas, that book wasn't in. 
     And it wasn't coming back.  It was marked "lost" in the computer card file. 
     Probably stolen and mutilated by some piddly little ground fog driven mad by jealousy. 
     Or maybe it remains in the kitchen of some tea kettle steam wisp whose delusions of grandeur have prompted it to mistake this book for an illustrious family history.  I can see it now, obsessively tracing its genealogy on a dirty window pane laden with condensation.
     It's that kind of world....

     Not that my trip to the library was an utter waste.  Managed to collect a few choice facts.
     First, I discovered that the book I referred to in my Sunday entry wasn't really called "In Search of the Real Butch Cassidy" but just "In Search of Butch Cassidy."  It was written by Larry Printer back in 1977. 
     Oh, and that newspaper columnist who clued me in to the fact that the excessive JFK Jr. coverage was in part a function of members of the media knowing the Kennedys as personal friends?  That was the Toledo Blade's Roberta de Boer.
     There - credit where credit's due.

      Now about my July 24th ridiculing of the claim that Chinese coffee consumption in the last 4 years has doubled to one cup per year per person....
     I said that was unlikely, given that you either drink no coffee at all or you drink lots but you don't drink one cup a year.  Well, a chance glimpse at the August issue of Vogue explained everything.  While current annual Chinese coffee consumption of a billion cups of the stuff does indeed average one cup per person per year in China, that averaging is extremely deceiving.  Turns out that there are just 10 coffee drinkers in all of China, but they slurp up 100 million cups annually now between them. 
     Now, that makes sense.

     In other noteworthy coffee news.... 
     Yesterday was an important date.  Seems it was on July 28, 1943 that FDR announced an end to coffee rationing in the U.S.  Despite this, Americans kept fighting the Nazis and Japanese for another two years.  Talk about selfless dedication to a cause!  That's what made those Americans "The Greatest Generation" as Tom Brokaw says they were.  A lesser people would have suspended the war as soon as they'd secured their java supplies.
     Me?  I woulda stopped fighting for half a jar of instant Maxwell House. 
     It's a shame I have to live with everyday of my life....

     And hey, while I was wandering the shelf-lined corridors of my local book repository I also discovered "Hollywood Secrets Revealed!" A brief flip through its sticky pages revealed that R2D2 is actually the love child of the robot from "Lost in Space" and Rosie the Robot from "The Jetsons."  
     This same book also revealed that R2D2's grandfather seems to have had the real acting talent in the family but widespread discrimination against mechanical life forms back in the '20s and '30s cost him the role of head Munchkin in "The Wizard of Oz" among many other roles.  He ended up a sad and bitter old oscillating fan in a dark corner of the last burlesque house in Memphis. 
     Very sad. 

     Sadness, shame, and degenerate steam wisps.
     Think I better stop writing before things get real ugly here....