Morning Thoughts, Afternoon Thoughts

Bananas One of My Favorite Fruits

Yesterday, I went through the county civil service postings to find job titles to order for our civil service test books section. I am trying to match current open positions with the test books in our collection. I will also go through the Chief, the civil service newspaper for New York which has a listing of all the open civil service positions and try to better align our set of civil service test preparation books with the positions that are being offered.

We order most of the test books which people ask for. I'll be ordering the test preparation Series 7 Stock Market Exam next month because our current copy is missing. Not everybody who wants test books asks for them however. We still have to be able to anticipate what they want. We order a lot of nursing test preparation books.

The National Black Nurses Assocation is one of the largest professional associations in our city. We order a lot of test preparation books for phlebotomy, nurses aide, nursing assistant, home health aide, practical nurse, paramedic, and registered nurse. A lot of people follow a career track of first becoming a nursing assistant, then becoming a practical nurse, then a registered nurse.

One of my colleagues suggested Bananas How The United Fruit Company Shaped the World by Peter Chapman, Canongate, c2007. It reminds me a bit of the Woody Allen film, Bananas. I sometimes think quite a few political and business solutions are ridiculous.

A few more books came in for me to read. Now, I have eight books to read on my desk. Sometimes, it is hard to decide which book I will read first. The books are The Long Emergency Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century by James Howard Kunstler. Nothing like a little fear mongering to brighten your day. I am hoping it will give me a little insight. The other book is a science fiction short story collection Pump Six And Other Stories by Paolo Bacigalupi.

I finished reading Leviathan The History of Whaling In America on the train. It ends with the end of the whaling industry in America. Most of the whale hunting grounds have been depleted, and Arctic whale hunting turns into a disaster for American whalers. Whale oil is slowly pushed out of the market first with the introduction of kerosene, then with petroleum. I think there is something to be learned from reading this on how energy industries are created and die.