The wonderful Radio National had a morning show the other day all about 'Common Sense'. What is it? Do we still have it? Are our kids being taught it????
One of the things which came up and horrified me was the story of the new City of Sydney Library.
It had apparently moved in 2005 into the magnificent heritage building, 'Customs House', on Circular Quay. It became apparent however that upon the move, only the best books were going. They were reducing the number of books in the library because of the available space in the new building. The Library was moving to smaller premises.
This in itself may not seem too bad, after all, many books date and need to be replaced and we have books on dvd and file now.....although it's somehow not the same. The real jaw dropper however was the fact that when you visited the new Library, the ground floor was laid out with a coffee shop and waist high book cases. Its called a Salon, but the author on the program explained that the beams in the floor of the new Library had been found to be structurally inadequate to carry the weight of full sized library shelves with their precious load of books.
Ergo: a new Library, with fewer books..........but a great barrista apparently.
************************************************************
On the subject of common sense, my wealth of experience with my own body and other fitness classes should have lead me to be better prepared for the rigours of yesterday's training session! And I mean prepared. All the circuit work is fine, situps, push ups, lunges, squats etc...it was the 'beep test' that did for me. All that running and quickly changing direction....
Suffice to say that of the 6 women there, I won the beep test! I got to Level 5.3 I think and might have gone further if I had not had to give in to the ravaged state of my pelvic floor and keep running straight to the *beep *beep ladies loo to 'sort myself out'!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"It wasn't the beep that beat her," hooted all the similarly indisposed middle aged ladies and mothers of many as the delightful young male fitness instructor regarded my retreating back with bemusement. Oh well, if he is going to take 'ladies groups' he's going to have to learn about these things :-D
4 comments:
Your libraries allow you to have beverages in them????? Now that shows no common sense.
That's sad about the library. I remember hearing about another library - was it in Paris? - where they built a beautiful structure full of windows but then realized that the books couldn't be exposed to sunlight that way, so now the books are stored somewhere else, dark and depressing. Doesn't anyone think about these things before they spend millions?!
Obviously not!!
Post a Comment