By Scott Zoback

• UNDER THE LIBRARY'S MATTRESS: Under the current downtown zoning ordinance, you can't open a strip club, sex toy shop, adult video store, or any adult entertainment business within 500 feet of the library because of what has been dubbed "secondary effects" of adult entertainment, and the number of kids that use the library. And, under the proposed revised downtown ordinance, the library restriction still holds. But what can you get inside the library? Here's a very partial list: First, nudity. There's every issue of Playboy, dating back to 1953; the movie and screenplay of The People vs. Larry Flynt; nude photography books, including several "how-to photograph nudes" volumes. Strangely, some of these are listed as "missing." There's more: Total Exposure: The Movie Buff's Guide to Celebrity Nude Scenes; The Pin-Up from 1852 to Now; Lee Baxandall's World Guide to Nude Beaches and Resorts; and Creative Techniques in Nude Photography. There are strippers: Live Nude Girls Unite, a film about the formation of a strippers' union; The Art of Mud Wrestling; and books like Ivy League Stripper and Candy Girl, the memoir of Juno author Diablo Cody from her stripper days. And books on sex? They're nearly innumerable, including A Woman's Guide to Sex, 365 Days of Sensational Sex: Tantalizing Tips and Techniques to Keep the Fires Burning All Year Long, and The Joy of Gay Sex. We could go on forever, and that's not to mention the National Geographic archives that kids have used for decades to look at more than just the articles on remote African tribes.

• WE TOLD YOU SO: Worcester District Attorney Joe Early Jr. told Worcester Magazine this week that the Worcester Law Library — located in the old Worcester Court House on Main Street — was broken into over the weekend. According to a court source, no personnel records or money was taken. Instead the burglars made off with several pieces of computer equipment. On Nov. 1, Associate Editor Chet Williamson reported concerns among some of the workers at the old courthouse that they didn't feel safe there after the court packed up and moved up the street into its new digs, leaving the Law Library behind. Looks like they weren't the only ones thinking security might be a little lax.

• INSIDE BASEBALL: Firefighters Local 1009 head Frank Raffa will never resist a dig at City Manager Michael O'Brien. So, on Tuesday night, after O'Brien joked to Raffa about public safety employees "being on the same team," Raffa took the bait: "Yeah, except your team is throwing at our heads."

• THE COLOR OF MONEY: The annual release of the Top 250 Municipal Wage Earners is always a doozy; once Mayor Konnie Lukes took the item as an opening to propose a salary freeze, the doors were wide open (Frank Raffa wondered, "How about a breather when you voted yourself a raise?" Lukes voted against the raise.) The vast majority of city councilors defended the highest wage earners, as if a horde of angry people were criticizing those earners as individuals, with Phil Palmieri saying that workers (specifically police officers with tens-of-thousands of dollars in overtime and detail pay), "are trying to work as hard as they have to for their family." And Councilor Joe Petty briefly explored the idea of releasing the list of wage earners with no names; as public employees though, that information is public. A couple of councilors, including Bill Eddy, questioned why the item was before Council at all. One reason: It was requested by the Council. Another: It's public information.

• IN THE DETAILS: One of the reasons for the strong defense from councilors is that, like every year, a lot of the attention on this year's list of top-earning municipal employees has fallen right on the police detail pay. So who are they defending? Take Police Sgt. Donald Larange, who led the department in detail pay with $61,993.63 last year. At approximately $40 per detail hour, that comes out to a little more than 29 hours a week beyond however many hours he is putting in at his $69,480 base salary. Larange also brought in $17,712.39 in overtime pay and an additional $2,849.42 in court attendance pay. No one would deny that he has put in a lot of hours, whether it's for "his family," as Councilor Palmieri said; or for the "American Dream," as Councilor Joff Smith said.

• MORE DETAILS: Larange is just one of many, though. Twenty-five police officers/officials in the top 250 earners brought in more than $40,000 in detail pay; another 35 brought in $20,000 or more in overtime.

• MAKING QUOTA: Public officials everywhere will deny it, but people will continue to believe that red-light cameras, like those proposed in Worcester, have an intended dual purpose: Not only do they serve as a deterrent and punishment system, they are fantastic for bringing in dollars without having to use those pesky traffic cops for intersection violations. Or are they? Dallas, Tex. officials are considering shutting down some of their red-light cameras at intersections because — surprise, surprise — they have been so effective in stopping violations that revenues have fallen dramatically. One of the main problems, say officials, is that the city pays $3,799 a month to the camera service provider for each functional camera. Inoperative cameras cost only a small fraction of that. So each camera must make 50 busts a month, at $75 per violation, just to break even. o