Take along a book to enhance your vacation

Are you plan­ning on going on vaca­tion some­time this sum­mer? You prob­a­bly want to take along books, audio books or down­load an eBook to help enhance your vaca­tion, and of course, all of those and much more are avail­able at the Delaware County Dis­trict Library. We’ve recently added a new fea­ture to our online cat­a­log to help you man­age your account when you’re out of town.

If you are any­thing like most of the library’s patrons, you often have a list of items that you reserve, such as best­sellers and block­buster movies. Even though we pur­chase dozens of copies of new movie releases and new books, it is impos­si­ble for us to buy as many copies as there are peo­ple who want to read or watch it. Putting an item on reserve ensures that the library staff will hold it for you when your name rises to the top of the list.

When you are out of town, there is the pos­si­bil­ity that you will receive a notice that your hold is ready for pick-up and you can­not pick it up. In the past, miss­ing the dead­line meant that you would have to re-reserve the title and go back to the end of the hold queue. With the addi­tion of the “freeze” option in your library account, you can now freeze you place in the hold queue for as long as you want, and then, when it is con­ve­nient for you to pick up the hold, you sim­ply “unfreeze” it. This fea­ture is also handy if you have sev­eral items on hold and you would like to avoid receiv­ing too many notices at the same time.

You can find the “freeze” option in the “View My Account” func­tion under “My Library Record” on the library’s web­site at delawarelibrary.org. And please con­sider giv­ing the library your email address for noti­fi­ca­tion pur­poses to save paper, time and money.

Is Har­ri­son Ford a cab­i­net maker?

For 15 years, Har­ri­son Ford toiled as a car­pen­ter, work­ing as a stage­hand for “The Doors,” build­ing sound stu­dios for Ser­gio Mendes and mak­ing cab­i­nets for George Lucas, then a lesser-known pro­ducer. Lucas offered his car­pen­ter a tiny role in the film “Amer­i­can Graf­fiti.” Later, as Lucas gained noto­ri­ety and needed a larger office, he hired Ford to do the con­struc­tion work. One day in the office, Lucas asked Ford to read lines for absent actors on his new film, “Star Wars.” The impromptu per­for­mance won over Stephen Spiel­berg, who offered Ford the lead role. Cur­rent Biog­ra­phy had this information.

Is the Cal­i­for­nia con­dor still endangered?

Yes, accord­ing to 100 Heart­beats: The Race to Save Earth’s Most Endan­gered Species, but their num­bers are improv­ing. Con­dors nat­u­rally have a low birthing rate and a late age of sex­ual matu­rity, so when they started to fall vic­tim to envi­ron­men­tal haz­ards such as DDT and lead poi­son­ing from eat­ing ani­mals killed with lead buck­shot, they had a hard time build­ing their num­bers back up. By 1987, there were only 22 con­dors left in the wild, all of which were cap­tured for a cap­tive breed­ing pro­gram. The pro­gram was incred­i­bly suc­cess­ful, and within only four years, researchers were able to release some of the birds back into the wild. The pro­gram has con­tin­ued to pro­duce birds in cap­tiv­ity, but the wild birds have started breed­ing on their own as well. There are cur­rently 189 birds liv­ing in zoos and 192 in the wild.

Why do gas prices end in 0.9 cents?

No one seems to know exactly where or when the prac­tice orig­i­nated, but every­one agrees gas was sold at the pump in frac­tions of a cent at least as far back as the 1920s or 1930s, when auto­mo­bile cul­ture really began to take off. What are Hye­nas Laugh­ing At Any­way? notes that the frac­tional pric­ing was intro­duced in response to fed­eral gaso­line taxes that were them­selves assessed in parts of a cent. Oth­ers say that tiny price changes of a tenth of a cent were more sig­nif­i­cant back when a gal­lon of gaso­line didn’t cost much more than a dime. What­ever its ori­gin, the prac­tice is now built in to the pric­ing sys­tem. Fed­eral and state taxes on gaso­line still work out to a frac­tion of a cent per gallon.

If you have a ques­tion that you would like to see answered in this col­umn, mail it to Mary Jane San­tos, Delaware County Dis­trict Library, 84 E. Win­ter St., Delaware, OH 43015, or call us at 740–362-3861. You can also email your ques­tions by vis­it­ing the library’s web­site at delawarelibrary.org. or directly to Mary Jane at mjsantos@delawarelibrary.org. No mat­ter how you con­tact us, we’re always glad you asked.