When visiting Minnesota last year, I saw a lake beginning to freeze over. Having never seen such a thing, I was fascinated by the idea that, in time, the lake would be frozen deeply enough that you could walk (and drive and, i don’t know, land a plane or something) on it. I dreamed of augers and ice fishing huts and that after-school special where the kid falls through the ice and nobody’s there to help him because he was skipping school.
This year, we went to visit Anne’s family a little later in the year, and the weather cooperated and, for the first time in my life, I got to go ice fishing.
We didn’t catch anything — I am sure this disappointed the worms (“I got stabbed and semi-frozen for this?!”) — but we were cool with it. And nobody crashed through the ice, which, according to the alarmist TV movies I remember from growing up, happens about 90% of the time people venture out there.
We were also able to witness the announcement of the lineup for the U.S. Olympic Women’s Hockey Team. The announcement took place at the Mall of America, which, as I am sure you’ve heard, has a peanut butter specialty store. It’s also unfathomably huge and has roller coasters and other rides and more cafés than Dothan.
We even built snowmen while there (well, not at the mall, but in Minnesota). My favorite snowman: this moustache-having, hat-wearing, top-heavy creation. Due to his top-heavy status, he only lived about 15 minutes.
After getting back to LA, we immediately left again, driving to Ventura for a little New Year’s quiet. We stayed at the Inn on the Beach and took the surfboards, getting out into the water just in time to meet a vicious winter storm, which was like getting into a fistfight with the ocean. Of course, that made it fun. After all the rain, late afternoon New Year’s Eve was beautiful and the weather stayed clear long enough for a gorgeous night and morning. This photo is from the afternoon of the 31st:
Here’s something unusual and kind of funny…
I recently registered my car, and the registration is valid through February of 2007. The DMV advises exactly how to put the sticker on so it can not be easily peeled off. Rather than peel it off or steal the plate altogether, a compromising sort came up with the idea of just cutting that year sticker-side of the plate off. (You’ll notice in the photo below that the last character from my plate is missing.)
This seems a lot of trouble to go through… of course, so does the probably pointless photoshopping of the tag I just did to change the numbers from what they really are. Would that really matter? Whatever. My DMV appointment for a replacement is Tuesday.
P.S. Yes, I do need to wash my car.
Anne and I were making cookies the other night… actually, Anne was making cookies and generously tolerating my attempts to pitch in… and eventually I moved to the tail end of the assembly line, adding the sugar crystals to the cookies (and the pan and the stovetop and the counter and floor), removing the cookies from the oven, and putting them on a plate when they cooled.
You know how these things happen… at first you’re going to stack a few cookies on one plate and then get another plate and continue. Then you think, “You know, I could fit more on this plate!” And then eventually it somehow became a challenge you set for yourself, to see if you can stack all of the cookies on one plate.
It looks a little like Jenga with cookies.
Books: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; The Darling; The Sweet Hereafter; See No Evil; and, on a sadder note: The Kite Runner; Fools Rush In; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Movie: Syriana
You ever get waist-deep into a book and realize there’s very little chance it can be redeemed from itself? And you think you’ve gotten this far and you might as well finish it? And then you find yourself reading it in a hurried fashion and just trying to slog through it? And you get mad and start yelling at the book?
Before you think I have anger management issues, you should realize that I am speaking mainly of The Kite Runner. If you’ve read it, you know what I mean. It makes you yell at it! That bad!
The problem is, the first three chapters lead you to believe that it’s going to be good. So its life cycle must have been:
- author wrote three chapters and sent them to a publisher;
- publisher said “Excellent! Can you print up the rest of it and have it to us on Monday?”
- author said, “Uhhhh… sure!” and had to finish it in three days.
Unfortunately, I got sucked in by all the positive reviews. Turns out all the one-star voters on Amazon were pretty dead-on with their reviews. Be sure to sort by ranking when you look it up.
What happened here? Everyone had to love it because it was about Afghanistan? Was this part of the Patriot Act? Eh, probably.
I followed this book with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. This was a bad follow-up. Luckily, reading anything lessened the sting of Kite Runner — the manual to our microwave became a gripping lunchtime read (did you know it recommends use of foil in certain situations? In case you ever decide to microwave a pork loin roast from raw and want blackened edges, now you know) — but Loud and Close proved a pretentious and wholly unbelievable read which played on emotions from September 11.
On a positive note, I should mention The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, the book I read prior to those two. It was quite good, and for a long time qualified as the “last good book I read” since those two followed. It’s a sort of coming-of-age story of an autistic boy, narrated by him. The author taught autistic children for years prior to writing this book. It’s very sympathetic and very lovingly told. I dig it.
After the dark period — I really can’t express sincerely and repeatedly enough how bad Kite Runner is — I read The Darling by Russell Banks. If you haven’t read Banks, he’s incredible. This book may not be a good “first read” if you’ve not read him before just because it is so densely packed… it really took a while to read. This narrator was a bit cagey. Banks is so good with voice — sometimes, you’ll read two books of his and wonder how the same person could have written them both. The Sweet Hereafter is particularly interesting in that the book is split into multiple sections, each from a different viewpoint. It’s beautiful.
In The Darling, Hannah Musgrave tells her story, a story of a woman of multiple aliases who flees the U.S. after being involved in the Weather Underground and an incident involving a bomb going off at the wrong time and killing a couple of people. Thinking she is being tracked down, she flees to Africa, eventually ending up in Liberia and peripherally (and occasionally centrally) involved in the process that brought Charles Taylor to power. Some character traits of the narrator end up being even stronger than her on-her-sleeve idealism, and the honesty with which she tells the story, in a way that unearths her character’s serious flaws and show how she was used by several entities, is fascinating.
If only a narrator’s character flaws were always interesting… which brings us to Fools Rush In.
While in Sarajevo, I picked up Fools Rush In (by Bill Carter) from Matt and Shannon. Oh. Dear. God. This is… well, the subject matter itself, the siege of Sarajevo, is interesting and gripping. The author is just awful. Not as a writer, but — well, I’d hate to ever be around him. If you’re tempted to read this, try to borrow it or steal it. If you have the option of skipping every passage about his now-dead ex-girlfriend — which, by the way, covers much of the book — you’ll be doing yourself a favor.
Seriously: you’ll think they knew each other for 30 years until you reach the part where he lets you know, in fact, it was less than a year. And they really hardly knew each other, at that. And her character in the book has about as much depth as the page itself… all of which helps lead to Carter being an unreliable narrator, projecting his own issues onto every situation, so much so that the story becomes more about him than about the serious issues at hand. The parts about him teaming up with U2 to broadcast reports from Sarajevo to their tour are very cool; the part where he makes a big deal about Bono not thanking him by name from the stage when performing in Sarajevo is not so cool. The part where he arranges some rocks into a message of love pointing to the sky for his long-lost love will make you want to vomit, especially with the inconsistencies between these actions and his behavior towards other women in the book.
That being said, the story of Sarajevo somehow gets through. And the story of Sarajevo is amazing. There are probably better books about it which will make the reader less angry (or, at least, angry for all the right reasons).
Well, there’s a completely uninvited post about books. By the way, just saw the movie Syriana the other night and have now picked up See No Evil, the book by which it was “inspired” or “suggested” or whatever. Just starting the book, but as for the movie: it’ll make you consider the bus. Or a hybrid, I guess.
In the past few hours, California Governor Schwarzenegger officially denied clemency for Stanley Tookie Williams. If you had no strong conviction regarding the death penalty, I believe being in the Governor’s position would be a tough one in that you would have to overlook 24 years of court rulings, jury decisions, California Supreme Court decisions, etc., in order to come to a conclusion you felt was technically defensible. That is to say I wish this Governor had a strong anti-death penalty conviction.
Not because this person “deserved” the death penalty any less or any more than any other person who is or has been on death row. I just wish California would get ahead of the curve on this one (compared to most of the rest of the U.S.) and abolish the death penalty altogether. Aside from all the usual arguments against or for the death penalty that I’ve heard over the years, two things stick out for me:
1. When I lived in Alabama, some candidate was running for Attorney General. I can’t remember his name. One of his ads described how, as a judge, he presided over a case of a man who was accused of murder. The scene cut to a video of the murder victim’s sister, a sweet looking elderly woman who said, “I was there in the courtroom, and Judge (so-and-so) didn’t blink when he sentenced that man to death.” She became steely-jawed and narrow-eyed about mid-statement. (Keep in mind this ad was in support of the judge.)
Seeing this woman made me ill. This sort of revenge does something unkind to a person (not that losing someone to murder doesn’t). I know this is a can of worms and I don’t know if I have the eloquence at the moment to argue it all the way out, but I can say for certain that:
a) I would want revenge on anyone who hurt anybody that I care about;
b) I think most anyone would honestly say the same; and
c) that’s exactly why we don’t take care of these things ourselves.
The reason we don’t take revenge because we are not the murderers. Yet I believe that the death penalty is revenge, and we are the ones doing it, through the State.
2. When we were in London a few weeks ago, we were speaking with a man who is involved in the UK Government. He pointed out that somewhere around 80% of the British public would actually support capital punishment but that it will never come to a vote in Parliament. The reason, boiled down to one idea: the country is civilized, and the death penalty is not.
If a person commits murder, therefore breaking the primary rule that allows us to be a civilization in the first place, they must face punishment and, if they are willing to be party to it, enter rehabilitation. And they do. It’s not that we owe it to the murderers to attempt rehabilitation, it’s that we owe it to ourselves as a civilized society.
So I feel that tonight just after midnight Pacific Time will be yet another sad moment. For the man dying, for the families of his victims, for California, for the country, and so on.
A few weeks ago, I noticed that my car’s front tire treads were looking a bit thin. I wondered if there was a simple way to test before going to buy 2 new tires.
Anne remembered something about a penny and some sort of test… anyway, she searched and found this: Bridgestone Penny Tire Tread Test.
So turns out I really need to go buy 2 new tires. If you’re traveling over the holidays, this test could be helpful.
The second link today is from my sister Laura. As part of her job, she attended baseball’s winter meetings. Her blog has a cool story about it and a very cool photo of her with White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen. It’s so cool to see what she’s doing and how well she is doing it! Click here for the story and a photo of LW and Ozzie.