Quote:
Originally Posted by robert_utk
True gentlemen gamblers. Mark Twain approves.
I have seen--and at times taken part in--more acts of kindness at the tables than I ever expected when I first got into this business.
As for Mark Twain, he lives in my top 5 favorites. His career stretched from roughly 150 to 110 years ago, yet his prose to this day still rings as clear as a bell. He had a part in shaping what modern American English sounds like.
To my great and lasting shame, I still have 3 Las Vegas library books written by Mark Twain, overdue from
the last time I lived here. That means the books are coming up on their 20th anniversary of being overdue.
For all these years, I've been afraid of looking up the overdue fine structure, afraid of what I would find. So, just now I took the first step of seeing if there are any days of the year when Las Vegas might grant amnesty on their overdue books.
There have been 3 amnesties in the last 20 years; but hold your horses, just check out the rules from the Second Amnesty in April of 2007.
A cardholder must pay their outstanding balance in full in order to take advantage of the program.
Fines and fees for lost, damaged or overdue materials owned by the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District will be waived up to $25, upon payment in full of any remaining balance on the account.
What kind of amnesty is that? Serve your entire prison sentence and we'll commute the rest of it. Likely I'm reading the boilerplate wrong, but that's some godawful unclear writing, coming from either a librarian, or a Review-Journal reporter, or some collaboration between the two.
So it's time now to look at my fines. I don't want to be an item of curiosity and minor revulsion decades from now when some younger relative or random stranger has to return those books 50 years overdue.
It looks like it could be as little as $12. Am I reading that right? $4 max per book? It's possible that they turned me over to a collection agency. I didn't have a landline at the time, and I never gave out my cell number, so I would have been difficult to find and harass. Collection agency fees could be $10-$30; it's unclear whether it's per offense or per book. And then there's the $10 overdue fine threshold, whatever the **** that is.
Anyways, it looks like it's going to be $50 or under, so I will bite the bullet and return them on my next day off. Of course, it could be a trap. The Library Police will take me away and you'll never hear from me again.
Here's a quick piece from Twain from his early memoir/travelogue
Roughing It, from 1872.
SURFING
In one place [in Hawaii] we came upon a large company of naked natives, of both sexes and all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf-bathing.
Each heathen would paddle three or four hundred yards out to sea (taking a short board with him), then face the shore and wait for a particularly prodigious billow to come along; at the right moment he would fling his board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the board, and here he would come whizzing by like a bombshell!
It did not seem that a lightning express-train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting speed. I tried surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it. I got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but missed the connection myself. The board struck the shore in three-quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me. None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly.