I’m puzzled by the inclusion of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I think Cory Doctorow is a plenty talented writer, but I struggled to get in to this book and never finished it. I suspect the attempt to get Boing Boinged may have had something to do with it.

Unlike my previous list, I’m not going to try to make my own, as I don’t think my Sci Fi reading history is up to the task. I’ll leave that to the Heron.

However, the writer includes a list of several more books at the bottom and I probably would have elevated A Canticle for Liebowitz but I’m also puzzled by the inclusion of Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. There seems to be a groundswell of support for this book, and while I found it entertaining and workmanly written, it was also a rehash of Starship Troopers and virtually every army movie ever made, plus Gomer Pyle.  The fact that there is a twist, that all the soldiers are genetically modified old people, does not a classic make.

Back in the day, around 2002 or so, I wondered aloud whether anyone knew of any Starbucks that had actually closed.  I was walking through the Financial District in San Francisco at the time and one of my companions said he saw where one had closed but another one opened around the corner. “That’s just moving,” I said, “and it doesn’t count.”

But apparently even the relatively inelastic demand of our nationwide caffeine/sugar combo fix can’t postpone the announcement that Starbucks will be closing 600 stores, most opened recently.  Even more interesting, the article mentions an “internal watch list.” Starbucks has been keeping an eye on its unprofitable stores without actually closing them:

They were not profitable, not expected to be profitable in the foreseeable future, and the “vast majority” had been opened near an existing company-operated Starbucks, Bocian said.

In other words, Starbucks bizzare strategy of competing with itself backfired. As usual when a company announces that it is scaling back operations and kicking employees to the curb, SBUX gained in extended hours trading.

The article did not get specifc to Sacramento, but it did get me to wondering which Starbucks locally would could be the target of a closure.  There are about 20 Starbucks within two or three miles of the Capitol.

My nominations of ones likely to get the axe (in no particular order, and not necessarily ones I think should close):

J Street and 26th. I love this Starbucks. When I lived in East Sac it had just opened and I’d always stop in on my way in to work (walking) downtown. It’s long and narrow, it’s cramped, and it’s virtually hidden among all of the other businesses along J Street. Blink and you might miss it. Which is its problem. There’s another one just seven blocks west that is far more popular.  I’ve never seen this one crowded, except maybe around Christmas.

717 K Street. This Starbucks at the light rail stop right before the train turns south, by the Westfield Mall, has an interesting mix of state workers, attorney-looking types, and their clients. It is an unfortunate Starbucks in a very unfortunate location. Given that there is another at the other end of the mall, as well as a very popular one on 9th between I and J, I’d put this one high on my list of closures.

Safeway at 19th & S. C’mon, there’s a Peets at the other end of the parking lot for God’s sake. You don’t even have to cross a street.

Which ones do you think (dear reader) are likely targets for closure? Any in the ‘burbs?

I come about this skepticism in the most obvious way: I can’t for the life of me think of a book that really changed my life. I can think of bits and pieces, small quotes, that I’ve used to piece together my personal outlook on life.  I can think of books that maybe stuck in my consciousness a bit more than others. I can think of books that made me do specific things. But an entire narrative that I can say made me make a fundamental shift like losing or gaining my religion or chucking it all to become a woodworker in Vermont? Not really.

KK’s post at Cool Tools is more optimistic:

Books still have the power to change lives. Which ones have changed yours?

I don’t mean merely great books, or memorable ones, or favorite ones. I mean books that altered your behavior, changed your mind, redirected the course of your life. Books as levers.

As a bonus, the post includes another list of lists at the end.

So, without further ado, I give you the list of books that maybe kinda sorta changed my life just a little bit in some small way and without a lot of fuss and in no particular order:

Rabbit Run, by John Updike. I was 16 and this was one of the books on the grid of books my English teacher let us chose from. Like everyone else I read Catcher in the Rye and was appropriately blown away.  I read Cat’s Cradle and felt briefly, fleetingly, clever.  But I was one of a handful who chose to read Rabbit Run, and as far as I know I was the only one who commenced to reading Updike’s entire oeuvre.  I felt sympathy for Rabbit, and even at 16 I could see the beginnings of myself in him. Caulfield would probably have considered Rabbit a phony like everyone else trying to get him to conform, but I though Rabbit was genuine in a thoughful but pathetic way.

Collected Poems by Wendell Berry.  When the woman who would become my wife and I first started dating, in fact on our first date, we found that we both had an affinity for Berry. I began reading Berry because I thought it lent credibility to my eco-intellectualism (see previous post).  This was the era (17-19 years old) when I began to get heavily into environmentalism, the budding organic movement, and the presevation of farm land (see comments on the previous post).  But Berry also spoke to the more traditional me, the one that believed in things like love, and marriage, and family.  He also spoke to the political me. His poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” pretty much says it all:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.  Hang around me long enough and you might hear me refer to a solution to a problem as a “Huck Finn solution” or a “Tom Sawyer solution.”  This refers, of course, to the sadly weak last part of Huckleberry Finn when Tom Sawyer makes an appearance and tries to talk Huck into all sorts of convoluted ways to get out of a predicament, while Finn tries to find the path of least resistance.  But the middle part, from when Huck finds Jim on the Island until he meets up with Sawyer, is a phenomenal story that parallels the maturation of a young America trying to find itself (put that on your back cover, Penguin Classics!)  Twain asked that we not analyze it, but he’s dead now.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien.  There are a handful of authors that seem to make it onto a lot of these kinds of lists. Tolkien is one.  I chose The Hobbit because, if my half-brothers hadn’t given it to me one Christmas, I may never have become the reader I am today. Because of The Hobbit I read Lord of the Rings. Then The Once and Future King, Dune, the Dragonrider novels, and Farenheit 451. Because of a summer devouring Fantasy and Science Fiction, I spent another summer reading War and Peace, then every summer after that reading a lot of books. Maybe I even majored in English because of The Hobbit.

Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis.  Lewis is another one.  I could take or leave the Narnia books.  They just didn’t grip me the way Lord of the Rings or even The Chronicles of Prydain books by Lloyd Alexander did. But this novel helped coalesce in me what was to become a key element of my personal theology, expressed best by Hamlet in the eponymous Shakespeare play: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  Essentially, how can we, beings of Earth, delude ourselves into believing we can begin to comprehend a divinity, if one exists?

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Rand is another one.  And I’m totally kidding.  You knew that right? And I can’t really comment on her philosophy because I couldn’t make it more than a hundred pages through this plodding, thick, one-dimensional novel.

Getting Things Done, by David Allen.  Groan. Yes, I am a member of this cult. But frankly, this was the first “getting organized” book I’d read (and I’d read a lot of them) that really started to make sense to me.  Allen’s system has enough room in it to tinker with it to make it your own, but enough structure that someone with a little bit of willpower could fully implement it. Unfortunately, I don’t have much willpower.

Le Rouge et Le Noir, by Stendhal.  Where do I begin with this book.  Oh yeah.  I read it in French!  En francais!  Boo-ya!

• Shallow: Recycling.
• Deep: Using less crap.
• Shallow: Buying a hybrid.
• Deep: Giving up your car.

I bring this up because of an article I read today on Yahoo! (via CNN Money): “One Way to Handle Gas Prices: Move” The article describes a school teacher who gave up her quaint farmhouse 62 miles from work and rented a place in town.  Granted, the move was motivated by economic, rather than ecological, factors, but it had the added bonus of reducing her “carbon footprint” (to use the cliche of the day) in a somewhat deep manner: she redefined what she needed to live the life she wanted.

If gas were still a buck fity a gallon she never would have made that choice.

I don’t know how big a trend this is — and the article does mention that the people making these choices tend to be renters because its easier to break a lease than sell a home.  Still, if I were in the housing market right now (wait, I am), I’d pay a premium for a home that enabled my wife and I to minimize our commuting and ideally, ensure at least one of us wouldn’t need to drive to work. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Gas prices may even drive people to buy some of the over-priced, underselling properties in the greater-downtown area. I still think they’ll need to lower their prices, but it could happen.

Maybe gas prices will renew interest in super high-density living in Sacramento. And maybe this time they’ll plan to build to a scale more suited to the area.

No, Twitter is the new e-mail because of what it does to my psyche.  When I first got email, back in 1988 or 1989, I wanted everyone to have it. I would check it often, even though up until the early 1990s the only other people I knew with email were fellow college students and checking email was so inconvenient, talking over lunch was far more efficient.  To check our email we had to go to the computer center, get onto a computer, boot up our terminal software, log in to the UNIX system, boot up pine or elm or whatever tree we were using then, and read our email in tiny text.

Twitter is far easier to use and, as a result, I find myself checking it constantly, even though I have more fingers than people I’m following.  More to the point, I’m fascinated by the mundane details that people report because, realistically, there’s only so much you can say in 140 characters.  But I want all my friends to be on Twitter.  All my real life friends, anyway, so that I can feel like I’m staying connected, even if they live in St. Louis, Little Rock, or Paris.

But really, is that such a good thing?  I already see email as somewhat impersonal, as something that will never take the place of a phone call (which is why my friend in Little Rock never hears from me).  If he Twittered his life it might be interesting, it might make me feel a tenuous connection, but realistically, isn’t it more important that I talk to him?  After all, we were close all through college, he’s the reason I got involved in politics, and I even flew to Little Rock to be an usher at his wedding (he didn’t come to mine, but we’ll let that slide for now).  Frankly, a phone call works better, no matter how many tweets I can string together.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to see what people are writing on Twitter.

(by the way, one great use for Twitter is to have constant, new, meaningless content on my blog.  Want other uses for Twitter?)

Copper River salmon is back, and it’s as expensive as ever: $29.99 a pound at Taylors. Unfortunately, at those prices, I’m almost afraid to cook it.

I first tasted Copper River salmon when I lived in Oregon where, even though we were awash in local salmon, grocery stores would hang big banners proclaiming the availability of this Alaskan wonderfish.

What makes it so great? Copper River salmon tends to have redder flesh than most wild salmon. It’s more oily, more fatty. The taste is much stronger, so if you’re not a fan of fatty fish, you might want to avoid it. I love the stuff and have it at least once, and usually only once, a year. I’ll probably wait to see who else gets it, if I can get it for a few dollars less a pound, and I’ll probably only buy a half pound (a four-ounce cut of this fish will go a long way).

It will be baked, lightly seasoned with olive oil, salt, and pepper. I won’t risk this fish on the grill.

Fremont Park was an important, if somewhat underutilized, part of my childhood, so I’ve always looked at it and its chronic problems with crime and homelessness (problems that are probably blown a little out of proportion) through rose-colored glasses.

So if you’re the kind of person who believes that the downtown/midtown residential districts should be vibrant places to live as well as to cruise through on your over-priced one-speeds as you try to look cool and groan about Starbucks, you owe it to yourself to attend.

I’ll be there if I can juggle work and family commitments:

Wednesday June 11th, 6:00pm at William Land Elementary School (12th & U)

One of the myriad ways CalTrans is suggesting people avoid the whole I-5 mess during the next couple months is by taking transit. Granted, those likely most affected by the construction will be those living north and south of town, and as we well know, RT doesn’t serve any neighborhood very well that didn’t exist prior to the early 1970s (and even then, some of those it doesn’t serve so well). Nevertheless, transit should be one alternative.

RT could take the I-5 lemons and made lemonade. It could work with the North Natomas TMA or on its own to provide additional lines of service into that area. It could put more buses onto some of the main lines affected by the I-5 closure and increase service frequency. If enough people rode these buses and found them useful, perhaps these could become permanent changes. At the very least, RT could be using Fix I-5 as a marketing opportunity — a chance to convince people to ride the bus.

Instead, RT chose to ignore the fruit basket. Like an increasing number of people, I get my information from websites. If I wanted to find out what RT was doing to play its part in helping Sacramento cope with the temporary loss of a major freeway, I would visit www.sacrt.com, and I would find…nothing. As of this evening, RT’s website does not mention the I-5 project. Even when I click on “Rider Alerts,” I don’t find any information.

Area transit services are little better. Yolobus has no information on the I-5 closure, but Etran posted the alternate information for its affected route. Yuba-Sutter Transit has a link to the Fix I-5 project, but, as far as I can tell, no additional information. The North Natomas TMA posted information about how the closure will impact its shuttle service.

With oil prices on a permanent upward trend, and with ridership already way up, here is yet another opportunity to get people to start that arduous cultural shift away from the single-occupancy automobile.

Quo vadis, Regional Transit?

Listen to the recording.