108 posts from 2006

I liked this idea so I copied it. Here are all the places I've been this year. Via Mathowie and the, er, The Big K.

My Year in Cities, 2006

* Indicates multiple visits on non-consecutive nights.

And also:

My Year in Forests, 2006

Fern Canyon - Redwood

Mt. Tam State Park, California

Trinity Alps lake

Considering that Harper was sidelined for most of the year with a back injury, I think this is an okay list. I wish I'd managed to make it outside our nation's borders. But there's always next year.

Dale and Thomas Chocolate Hairzzlecorn
Originally uploaded by honan.

I've ordered several tins of Dale and Thomas Popcorn over the past couple of Christmases. It's delicious. However, this is the last batch I'm going to purchase. Why? Because when I stuck my fat fingers into the tin and yanked out a fistfull of Chocolate drizzlecorn, this hairball came out with it. Nobody in the household had black hair like this. I called on Friday the 23rd to complain, and again today--but I couldn't get through to a human being, and nobody saw fit to return my call. While I recognize this is more than likely an anomaly, it's freaking disgusting and without any response from the company I felt compelled to share my bad experience.

Oh, my vapors!

Show us who you'd like to kiss under the mistletoe.

Our little tree

Harper at BBB

What are your top 5 6 books of 2006?

Note: not all of these are new for 2006, even if they are new to me, and most of these entires have been purloined directly from my book blog.

The Hummingbird's Daughter

Luis Alberto Urrea

The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea was just phenominal. I was a little skeptical at first, thinking it was a cheap Gabriel Garcia Marquez ripoff. But it completely won me over, and I dwelt in its pages for far too short a time. That it's based on a true story, and one of the author's ancestors, is just gravy.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma is everything you've heard and more. I think this will be one of those life-changing books for me that alters the way you approach the world. It has certainly already affected my eating habits, and there's a huge part of me now that wants to move to the country and become a grass farmer.

True story: after reading this, I decided to go deer hunting in Alabama. Bang.

Blankets

Craig Thompson

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I spent a week without a book, and then picked up Blankets: by Craig Thompson. It was another book that I'd long been interested in, but I bought it on a whim when I was getting my friend Andy a birthday present at the comics shop. It was beautifully told and drawn, and I (like, I'm sure, many people from flyover states who move to the Big City) really found that I could relate to his story on a personal level. I finished it the same night I began, and then re-read much of it again the next day.

The Road

Cormac Mccarthy

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Motherfucker, Cormac McCarthy can write. I think I finished this book in under 24 hours. I was compelled to finish it. I had to finish it. It was one of his most disturbing works, yet with one of the most satisfying endings of any book I've ever read. I finished it a few weeks ago, and it haunts me still.

Private to Rich: keep reading.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez This is the first book of Garcia Marquez' that I've read in fifteen (count them, fifteen) years. Although I love his work so much, it seems like yesterday.

Nobody else can write a love story like Garcia Marquez. Nobody living, at least. This short little book is stunning. Hillarious and sad. The story of an old man and his great love, a fifteen year-old prostitute. It was full of so many wonderful lines, so many profound sentences. I could have read it in an afternoon, but I stretched it out intentionally, wanting to savor it like I would a glass of port.

Lunar Park

Bret Easton Ellis

Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis is the fourth book by Ellis I've read. It's very different from the others. Doubtlessly, you've heard something about this. Ellis inserted himself into the narrative. And, like almost all his books (in my opinion) it's a horror story. Or  at least, a thriller. You either love or hate Ellis, and I love his stuff. Violent, graphic, gruesome, it's all quite remarkable. As I was wrapping it up, I couldn't sleep until I finished this book, sometime around 2:30 in the morning.













And finally, the absolute worst book I read in 2006, or any other year in recent memory:

The Da Vinci Code: Special Illustrated Edition : A Novel

Dan Brown

I'm not even going to link to this piece of shit.

I hated this book. It left me with a deep sense of resentment and a feeling of overwhelming derision for those who put this turd-paper on the best-seller list.

Perhaps it's that I came off of two excellent books. Or maybe it's because of all the hype, which led me to have very high expectations. It could even be that due to a comparative religion class I took in college, I was already familiar with the gnostic gospels as well as several of the tinfoil-hat theories Brown espoused. But I tend to think it's because this fucking suckfest of a book novelized-screenplay isn't worth the match you'd use to burn it.

Reading this wormfood was about as enjoyable as a urinary tract infection. I found myself plowing my way through it just to be finished; just to put it the fuck behind me. I had wanted to read it before the culture became totally saturated by the movie. Harper warned me it would probably stink. Do you really expect anything that popular to be good, she asked. Harry Potter! I replied. Harry Potter, Harry Potter, Harry Potter!

But I was way fucking wrong. And for what it's worth, none of my complaints have to do with religion. I'm not Catholic, and I've had more "mind-blowing" revelations thrown my way by tenth-grade stoners brandishing dollar bills who can't even pronounce illuminati porperly. Here are my main beefs with this fucktarded tome:

1. It's poorly written.
   Admittedly, that's the least of the problems. I don't expect my page-turner mysteries to be Faulkner. If you have a great imagination, and no way with words, I still want to hear your story. Sure, I'd prefer it if every best-selling author could write like Michael Chabon, or even Stephen King, but for pure action-driven storytelling, your actual use of language is among the least important aspects. Yet the writing in this book was so bad that it made me aware of the fact that I was reading. It was unintentional post-modernism, in a way, although that makes it sound somewhat appealing. Which it was not.
   
   
2. The Wikipedia entries
   I know, I know. There aren't really any Wikipedia entries. But there might as well have been. It's often essential for a book to tell you a back story necessary to advancing the plot, without incorporating it into the main narrative. Yet there are both elegant and awkward ways to do this. The Da Vinci Code follows the latter method. Sometimes it seemed like Brown wasn't even trying. I felt like he should have at least have had the decency to warn me: OKAY I AM GOING TO DROP IN A PAGE FROM A TEXTBOOK ON GNOSTIC HISTORY HERE. In fact, that would have been more elegant than Brown's sudden digressions.
   
   
3. There was no mystery to this mystery
   And really, this was the unforgivable thing. It's supposed to be a mystery, dammit. And when you, as a mystery writer, give your readers enough hints that not only are there no surprises, but you leave them feeling deadened to your eventual "revelations," then you have failed. I found it odd that I figured out that the teacher was Leigh, Remy wasn't to be trusted, the knight was Newton, and the orb was an apple well before the smarty-smart-smart-smart Harvard professor did. And as to the family being the descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene? Well. If you didn't see that coming--even factoring in Brown's cheating by first telling his readers that they are not--you need to get some damn glasses. Oh. And in case you're pissed about all the spoilers in this graf; I'm only doing it for your own good.

There were other issues as well (notably plot elements left hanging), but I've already wasted enough of my life on this booger bible and now I shall endeavor to put it behind me.

So, after hearing Terry Gross threaten to physically assault her listeners, and subsequently capturing that moment with WireTap, I had grand intentions. Which I then forgot all about until today when I searched my iTunes library for "Honan," looking for a phone interview I recorded last week*.

And then I found my Terry Gross remix, in which I mashed up Terry's words and Yo La Tengo's infectious, er,  let's say melodies.

I had meant to add in all sorts of other tomfoolery and gee-gaw gulumphing from her other interviews, and to delete some of the more repetitive stuff in here. But then, my interest faded and like so many other things, what I could not do in the course of a single afternoon would, in fact, never be done at all. Yet rather than let it languish in the doldrums of my iTunes library, I thought I'd upload it for your Monday listening pleasure. And if you really love it, you can download it here for permanent and real.

Mr. Tough (Terry Gross Mix)

* The year was 1999, and this was one of the best $15 I ever spent. When used with this or this, importing interviews from the telephone into iTunes could not be easier. Also, possibilities for phone pranking: endless. 

Jason Knight
Originally uploaded by honan.

I have two requirements for a digital camera:

1. You must be able to fit comfortably in my front pocket, even when in a case.
2. You must take good pictures in low-light.

It was the fourth digicam to feel the wrath of my carelessness. (There was an early Kodak, in addition to the Nikons.) In this case, I crushed the LCD while hauling heavy luggage up four flights of narrow stairs in the East Village. The camera was in my front pocket. I rested the bag on my thigh. Snap-Pop, goodbye. Had I known it would be my final one, I would have taken a better picture.

So when we headed out for our Great Western Vacation a couple of weeks later, I replaced it with the SD600, which has an ISO speed of up to 800. (Twice the SD400). With the same small form-factor as the 400, but much better light-handling, I think I've finally found the perfect camera.

This weekend I took a bunch of pictures at a friend's party, almost all of them in low light, and in some cases in what could only be described as "the dark." They turned out great.

Girl Mauled by Captive Cougar:

A 4-year-old girl was mauled at a children's birthday party by a cougar that had been brought in by a wild-animal business to entertain the youngsters, authorities said.

The 62-pound cougar was destroyed last week so that it could be tested for rabies; it did not have rabies.

I feel terrible for the kid, but to paraphrase Chris Rock that couger didn't go crazy; that cougar went cougar

"Why do you care about James Kim?"

Somebody asked this on a bulletin board I frequent. It's a valid--if incredibly insensitive--question, I think, considering how many people die every day. This is, more or less, how I answered:

• I've met his wife a few times. I shop at her store in the Haight, it's just blocks from me. I've had a few conversations with her. She's helped me pick out a present for my wife Harper. She's nice.
  
• She's Harper's age. He's mine.
• He's a colleague, we're both tech journalists in a small insular community.
• Harper and I like to do the same kinds of things his family apparently does. We were traveling through Grant's Pass in September. It snowed on us unexpectedly in Oregon. Those kind of things make me think "there but for the grace of God go I"
• You want to root for him, especially after his family was found alive. It gives you hope that he might be. Plus, you read the things that he did. That they did. You hope you would be so brave. Or at least, I do.
  
• Say what you will about gentrification, but when her shop opened up in the lower Haight a few years ago, there were no boutiques there. It was there even before the pot clubs, as I recall. It took guts to open. I admire that.
• He was a father and a husband with two small children. You feel for his wife. You feel for his kids.
• He's a human being. He had hopes and dreams and fears like all of us. It's horrible to think of him cold and alone in the snowy wilderness. You wanted him to be okay. You want everyone to be okay.
  

On the way to lunch, I walked right by her shop. There were news crews there, and two boquets of flowers. On the way home, the news crews were gone, and now there were three boquets. There is a flower store directly across the street. I wanted to leave a fourth, but I didn't have the guts to walk in the store and act like a decent human being.