Here she comes! There she goes!

Tomorrow morning --early!!-- off to Tofino for a New Year's Eve in the wilderness.
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On the plane I read the New Yorker's fiction issue, and enjoyed both the E. L. Doctorow story Jolene: A Life and the story by Zadie Smith, The Trials of Finch.

Later, at baggage carousel 22, where I was waiting with Dos Pesos a woman asked "Is he a breed or just a dog?"

Just a dog.
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This is the second Christmas I've spent with Stewart and is the second Christmas during which I've heard him exclaim, "This is the best Christmas ever!", which he's apparently been exclaiming every year for 20 years or so.
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I just recalled the list I wrote around this time last year of the books I wanted to read in 2002 of which I have read very few. This list was culled from books I already owned but hadn't yet read. Instead of reading these, I acquired even more books, which shouldn't surprise anyone who's seen our apartment lately.

I'm just back from dinner at Zuni with Leanne and Moya and Martha, who lives a block away from me in Vancouver, but who I only see in foreign countries, running into her last in the Marais. Yesterday I ate at Ti Couz, Suriya and The Townhouse in Emeryville. And the day before that at Boogaloos and Miyako. And the day before that Limon. I've got to stop eating for a few hours. A glance into the Sub-Zero here at the Fake-Holm residence indicates that won't be happening any time soon.

Eating is a requirement of good fellowship, and may even be the basis of human society, as some anthropologists think we all met and became buddies when one guy found he couldn't eat the whole woolly mammoth all by himself.
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Lunch and dinner with smart friends I miss and adore.

Sasha recommends:

• Postmodern American Poetry, an anthology
• The Lion Bridge by Michael Palmer
• Poems for the Millenium, an anthology

and Judith recommends:

• The Impresionist by Hari Kunzru
• Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss

I just love the little navigational drawings on the Tin Hat Trio site. I suspect I would also like the Tin Hat Trio, but I haven't listened to any of their music yet. I am a future fan.
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First, sunshine so hot I had to take off my parka.
Then, pouring rain and thunder.
Then, (though it fell elsewhere) hail.
Then, outside of Sasha's window, a double rainbow.
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Derek sends along the MIT Living For Tomorrow article. Here in San Francisco, the home improvement projects at Corey's house continue apace, with window seat construction and curtain-making.
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Last night I stayed up all night reading The Diamond Cutter: the Buddha on Managing Your Business and Your Life, a book about business and how the principles of Tibetan Buddhism can be applied there. It is based on a famous Buddhist text called The Diamond Cutter, often translated as The Diamond Sutras, originally written in India 4000 years ago, which eventually found its way to Tibet 3000 years later. The author of this book, Genshe Michael Roach, was an ordained Buddhist monk whose Lama instructed him to go into business and practice Buddhist principles there, which he did, working first as an errand boy for a small diamond business begun with a $50,000 investment, which eventually had sales of over $100 million. It's an odd business advice book -- though I wouldn't necessarily know, as it's the first business advice book I've read -- emphasizing humility and compassion and integrity. Here describes the functioning of karma, a term which he avoids using because of its many misinterpretations, calling it instead 'mental imprints':

This sounds a bit like Harry Smith attributing the invention of movies to Giordano Bruno. But I digress.

A few of the Amazon reviewers of this book complained that business and making money aren't Buddhist pursuits, but I disagree. There is no domain of the world that couldn't benefit from practicing humility, compassion and integrity, and the world of business is one that could benefit most. Roach points out that the more resources you have the more good you can do. Bush, for example, is in a position to do a great deal of good, probably more than you or I could ever hope to do. So is Bill Gates.

In the U.S. most business have a 5-year plan. But Stewart said recently that some businesses in Japan create not only a 5-year plan and a 10-year plan, but also a 250-year plan. If you have a 250-year plan, you aren't going to pollute the environment, rip off your employees, maintain hostile relationships with your competitors. It's karma.
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We just rented a house in Tofino for New Years. I'm so excited! The best New Years are generally spent away from the madding crowds, and Tofino is known for its wild, windy beauty.
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The 20 Things Benefit Auction has begun, and there are 31 pieces of art for sale. 100% of the proceeds will be going to the charities listed on the site, and one of the pieces is one of mine, Anne. Bidding starts at $20 and the auction is open for a week.
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This morning the police rang my buzzer and told me that someone may have broken into my car. I went down and two cops on bikes were there, said the car was locked but that a neighbor had reported a guy in a blue hoodie in my car, and then running down the road. There was nothing missing or broken as far as we could tell, but the radio had been stolen the day before we left for Amsterdam, and we hadn't replaced it yet. The cops said that people often break into cars they've broken into a month before knowing that they have a new radio. And the same thing with houses -- new TV, new VCR, new DVD player. I didn't know this.
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Stewart was telling me about how he was at an intersection the other day and this 40ish guy in a baseball cap driving one of those BMW Z3s (that are such an obvious penis substitute I laugh whenever I see one) tore away from the light at 60 mph, and then screeched to a halt at the stop light on the next block. Most likely because he thought he was cool, but Stewart believed that, if surveyed, other people that saw that guy would not think he was cool. I suggested we make another sign to accompany the "SIGNALING IS FREE" sign we hope someday to flash at other drivers that says "NOBODY THINKS YOU'RE COOL." Since a friend of mine pointed out that Porsche Boxsters have these weird anuses in the middle of the back bumper I've never been able to unsee the Boxster anus.

Judith sends along the story of Daniel Feussner, the Microsoft employee who appears to have defrauded Microsoft of $9 million. His purchases of a Ferrari, a Jaguar, a Hummer and a yacht delineate a typical story of a guy suffering from an insecurity so deep he'd stop at nothing to alleviate his sense of his own puniness, but my favorite part of this story is this:

There's a picture of Feussner at a speaking engagement last April. I think it's safe to say that nobody thinks he's cool. (I bet his personal web site will be coming down soon, and it isn't archived by the Wayback Machine, so have a look).
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Caterina.net needs a new home. I keep paying overage charges for the traffic at he.net and DNAI, my SF provider, finally got eradicated by its parent RCN, which is no longer giving me a shell account and is limiting my storage and traffic and cgi-bin access. I've looked all over the net and taken suggestions from a mailing list I'm on, but all these places are charging like $25/mo for 10 MB -- that's MB!! -- for access and it's absurd! or are charging for traffic, which I can't abide, or some other such bilkage. If I were any kind of geek at all, I'd set up my own server, but I'm not. I'm hoping someone out there has an operation for me.

Please?
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Here is a list of books that Caterina.net readers have bought over the past three years. There are many here that I never linked to myself, and must investigate. I am delighted that The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard is at number one. Excellent choice, Caterina.net readers!
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Two blurbs from the books page:

Alphonse Daudet in the Land of Pain trans. by Julian Barnes (Non-Fiction)
More of a pamphlet than an actual book, this is a translation of Alphonse Daudet's notebooks kept while he was suffering from syphilis. Daudet, now considered a 'minor' writer, was extraordinarily famous in his day -- more famous, even, than Flaubert. In this book, Daudet notes the characters he meets at the spa in the Midi where he went for treatment, the quips of his friends and observations on the progress of his disease, but most of all, and most poignantly, he writes of his suffering. According to his friends, family and acquaintances, Daudet did all he could to spare everyone his suffering. One friend remarks that he was sitting with Daudet one day and he was doubled over in pain, absolutely paralyzed by it. The doorbell rang, and Daudet sprang up, dashed to the door, and carried on an animated conversation with the visitor, revealing absolutely nothing of the agony he was suffering. He saw the guest to the door, at which point he collapsed again in fearsome pain. The notes at the beginning and end of the book, by Julian Barnes, provide interesting contextual information about the nature of syphilis, and its historical moment in 1800s Europe.

In Youth is Pleasure by Denton Welch (Fiction)
A delightful book by the young, sensitive, gay Denton Welch, who was paralyzed at the age of 20 and rendered a complete invalid, wrote three books and many journals and who died at the age of 33. William Burroughs claims that no writer has had as much influence on him as Denton Welch. It is hard to see the connection between Welch's delight in the mundane and Burroughs' paranoia, though they do share a certain flavor of grotesquerie. Burroughs said that when students say they "don't have anything to write about" he directed them to Denton Welch, and Welch is indeed a master at teasing out the fascination and perversity of the daily life of a fifteen year old boy summering in a large hotel, away from boarding school.
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To apply for permanent resident status here in Canada, I had to go to the doctor and get tested for HIV and syphilis. I'd thought syphilis had been conquered by antibiotics, but apparently not. I'd also wondered why it seemed to inflict Europeans in the Victorian period -- Flaubert, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Schubert -- more than any other era. The bacteria apparently had evolved during that period, and began to affect the nervous system, leading to blindness, insanity, paralysis -- the dramatic effects seen in our various famous figures. Another thing I did not know was that it rarely affected women this way, and that Columbus and his crew are supposed to have brought it back with them from The New World.

According to the book I just finished reading, Alphonse Daudet In the Land of Pain, it was sometimes considered a badge of honor, viz. this bizarre, appalling euphoria of Maupassant's:

Barnes goes on to note that

One can't feel too much pity for the guy, so blithely indifferent to the fate of the "street whores and trollops" unlucky enough to encounter him.
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If you haven't been to The Game Neverending prototype for a while, you might want to go and have a look around. And if you have never been, you should go sign up. All prior data has been wiped from the database. You can now buy your own house!
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FINALLY the Ciudad Juarez story hits a major news source. This started ten years ago. The documentary about the missing women that I saw last Friday, Senorita Extraviada is available here.
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This evening, going through my files looking for bank statements, I found 103 pages of a novel I'd completely forgotten I'd written the summer of 1993 called Bird among Bats. It is alternately a work of astonishing precocious genius and unendurable bloviated whackoffery. Maybe if I excise the unendurable bloviated whackoffery...
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The other morning I found what appeared to be a lovely pink rose in the foyer. But what it turned out to be is a very rare example of chihuahua architecture.

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You too should attend the Good Experience Live conference next May in New York.
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After reading about Chogyam Trungpa on Late Night Pool, I have been reading about the six realms:

Fourteen women died on this day in 1989:

In remembrance of these women, please Learn more about what you can do to prevent violence against women and donate some time and money to some of these organizations:

• End Violence Against Women
• National Organization for Women
• National Coalition Against Domestic Violence

• Women's Rape Relief and Women's Shelter
• Women Against Violence Against Women

Dos Pesos is perfectly well again! He went back to work today.
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You may need this some day: A web browserization of the TV Test Pattern.
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The Dos Pesos Report. He's a little better today, and though he didn't do those low, terrifying moans he still spent most of the day lying by the fire, not moving much. But then I gave him one of his favorite things to chew on -- really disgusting chewy things that are rumored to be made of bull penis parts -- and he happily gnawed for an hour. We went for a really, really long walk, covering one block, during which I actually let him sniff all 56,622,364,990 blades of grass. After that he indicated that he wanted to play, but when I tossed his toy he ran halfway to get it and then gave up, and hanging his head, came back without it. He's now been treated to another disgusting chewy, since he suckered me into noticing, once again, how cute he is, the dirty dog.
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Search fluke site Equine Investor provides us with some lovely lingo poetry this afternoon:

This coming Friday, December 6, the Vancouver Rape Relief & Women's Shelter will be holding a a day in commemoration of the Montreal massacre at the Central Branch, Vancouver Public Library, 350 West Georgia , 11 am to 7 PM.

What was the Montreal massacre? On December 6, 1989, 14 young women were killed when a man with a gun entered an engineering class in Montreal and took fire on women. December 6 is a national day of commemoration and action on violence against women.

At 1pm, they will be showing a documentary about the Ciudad Juarez disappearances, which I wrote about a few months ago, and will be attending. See the schedule for the full list of events.
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Harriet Doerr died Sunday, and while I have never read her books, I admire the fact that she wrote her first novel when she was 73! Late bloomers, take heart. You don't need to be Zadie Smith. (via Prentiss Riddle, best named weblogger around)
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Just back from taking poor little Dos Pesos to get fixed. I pick him up at 2:30. He was trembling terribly when I handed him over to the vet. Snf.

Now I'm back from picking him up. He's letting out these little tiny moans, you almost can't hear them! Tiny moans. It's killing me. Poor dog. He's so droopy!
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Also from Julian Barnes' introduction to Alphonse Daudet in the Land of Pain: