I agree that this is getting a bit too cluttered, but to answer some of your questions/comments:

The fat lady reference was a joke, son, a joke. No offense meant to the "fat ladies" of the world. I understand that they are not all fat and that there is nothing wrong with "women of girth".

I don't want to know your SAT scores. Another joke, son.

"Why in my day" and "is it only the one then, dear" were allusions, but to a medium you profess to disdain and probably are unfamiliar with.

I did talk to the woman face to face, she found the web references helpful. We spent much more time talking than browsing.

I did not mean to mislead you but it never occurred to me that there was more than one Oriental Institute, especially since the name seems an odd one for an institution of its nature, but I am talking about the one in Chicago, part of the University of Chicago. A reasonably reputable institution by most counts.

Cue/queue, you got me there. Touche! But isn't it more a matter of homophones than spelling?

So, I think I have your story straight now. You are an English major and a teacher in an inner city school. God bless you for that sir, God bless you. Your father works in a library. You hate cell phones, you dismiss the internet as useless (other than Bike Forum evidently), and you have an irrational hatred of Google. You often talk like a 12 year old, you often express the attitudes of an 80 year old, and you claim to be a 32 year old. What an odd, inconsistent mess you are.

And yet when I put it altogether it makes some sense. Someone who spends all day with children addicted to texting or chatting on phones is likely to have a dismal view of them and indeed many adults are little better. As a teacher you constantly have to watch for assignments copied off the internet which makes you angry with the medium. And it isn't your mother but your father and many other people in related professions who are scared to death of Google. So, yes, from your perspective you opinions make sense and are well supported by direct observation.

The trouble is that you only see the tip of the iceberg and what you have seen has jaded your opinion. Vast numbers of people in the rest of the world use cell phones responsibly, effectively, and to their profit (monetary or otherwise). The internet is a remarkable engine of professional collaboration, industry, and business. In my work, electrical engineering, it is an essential and dependable tool. That computer you like would not exist without the constant flow of information between designers, suppliers, managers and factories that the internet allows. And the same story applies to almost all product production. Your characterization of the internet is so laughably far from the truth that I have been unable express it adequately but it may make sense from your point of view. You simply don't know how much you don't know. The future that you fear actually came to pass a few years ago. It is too late to fight that war.

And then there is Google. Libraries have existed since before 3000 BC. They actually existed before writing was invented. In the beginning they were essentially repositories of accounting records, information that could be recorded using only numbers and symbols for goods and services. Libraries are little changed since that time. Writing itself has vastly changed since then as has the media and the kinds of information that a library stores. If you were to dig up an ancient Sumerian library you would instantly know what you had uncovered and if we could plop an ancient Sumerian scribe in a modern library he would instantly know what kind of institution he was in.

The thing that Google is attempting to do is an idea that I had years before the internet existed. In my vision it would have been a dial in service. I never acted on it of course. The remarkable thing is that it took someone like Google and so long for this idea to be implemented. It is the wave of the future, it is what libraries would always have been if it were feasible (Assurbanipal was one of the first to attempt to collect all human knowledge in his library). You are not going to stop it so there is no point in railing against it.

The Google ship has already sailed and a stern chase is a long chase but if your father's library and others want to thrive they are going to have to get their boats in the water soon. Google will only become an evil empire if no one competes with them. My profession has had to reinvent itself several times during my career. Adapt or die, it is a harsh reality but libraries have had an impossibly long run using ancient technology. Surely a good library knows a thing or two that Google does not, they have trusted connections with the publishing industry, it is not impossible that they could build faster boats. They'd better get started or life will pass them by. The time for whining is over, it is time to compete.

Ken