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Librarians are like birds following plows, for a principal joy of librarying is picking up interesting bits of information revealed by the research of others.

For example, I recently learned about the Ogham alphabet. An article about it at www.LibraryIreland.com says it’s an ancient Gaelic form of writing that predates St. Patrick’s introduction of writing by centuries.

Ogham letters “were formed by combinations of short lines and points, on and at both sides of a middle or stem line called a flesc.” The result looked something like the feathering on arrow shafts. Most of the existing examples are carved along the edges of stone boundary markers and denote personal names. It’s believed that more literary efforts in Ogham have been lost to the ravages of time.

According to LibraryIreland, “Both the native bardic literature and the ancient Lives of Patrick himself and of his contemporary saints concur in stating that he found in the country literary and professional men — all pagans — druids, poets, and antiquarians, and an elaborate code of laws.” Some scholars believe Ogham was used to record genealogies, as brief messages, and for magical incantations.

Another aspect of library work is encountering the unexpected. Sometimes this means dealing with distasteful things, but often it’s charming. A colleague was approached by a tough-looking young person recently who asked if she knew any good pick-up lines. This patron wanted to know winning conversational ploys for attracting the opposite sex, and, fortunately, AskMen.com had an article titled “10 Best Pickup Lines.”

Had I encountered this list four decades ago, I’d have been tempted by several of the runners-up, two of which my wife assures me would have been futile. They are “See my friend over there? He wants to know if you think I’m cute.” And “I may not be the best-looking guy in here, but I’m the only one talking to you.”

The other, “What’s your name?” at least had a fighting chance. No. 1 is “So what haven’t you been told tonight?”

Research on this topic also led to some advice from www.SeductionBase.com that seems suspect, at least to these old, jaded eyes. Instead of employing pickup lines, the SeductionBase experts recommend strategies for approaching women at bars which are fleshed out, so to speak, with scripts such as: “The Cologne Opener,” “The Wheelchair Opener,” and “Can A Straight Guy Date a Bi Girl.”

I can’t totally dismiss SeductionBase, however, because they do cite their sources in a bibliography, and when someone speaks dismissively of women, they recommend he “consider reading ‘The Selfish Gene’ by Richard Dawkins. Here you will learn why women’s behaviors are the way they are. You will learn such a logical perspective — remember, science rules.”

Evolutionary biologist Dawkins’ coined the term “meme,” a unit of human cultural evolution, in his book. “They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.”

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “meme” as “a unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.”

A few decades of librarying makes the ebb and flow of memes, and I admire Dawkins’ insights, but today he’s as famous, or infamous, for his strident atheism as for his scientific achievements.

More to my liking is the physicist Niels Bohr. After winning the Nobel Prize in 1922, a celebration was held at his country cottage, where a reporter, upon seeing a horseshoe hanging on the wall, asked, “Can it be that you, of all people, believe a horseshoe will bring you good luck?”

“Of course not,” Bohr replied, “but I understand it brings you luck whether you believe it or not.”

And for the record, the best pick-up line I’ve ever heard was by Mark Twain: “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.”

Greg Hill is director of Fairbanks North Star Borough libraries.