Just Kristin

“Don’t worry. You will see that, in ret­ro­spect, every­thing will have been for the best.“
“Yeah, per­haps, but it is wait­ing for the ret­ro­spect that kills me.”

Indeed.

Here is a link to the top ten most out­ra­geous state­ments of 2004 as cho­sen by MediaMatters.org. Sadly, I will bet that the list of con­tenders was a long one. Let’s hope that the choice is eas­ier in 2005…

Tonight, the night between 1/1 and 1/2 is the night when the Japan­ese pre­dict a year’s for­tunes by what items appear in their dreams. “Hatsu Yume” directly trans­lates into “first dream”. The best three things to have appear in one’s dream are, in descend­ing order, Mount Fuji (because of its majesty, per­haps), hawks (due to their abil­ity to achieve great hights) and egg­plants (I really can’t say about this one — I heard one per­son say that it is because egg­plants have no hair (“ke ga nai”), which is pro­nounced the same as a phrase mean­ing to have no injuries (“kega nai”), but this seems less likely than…); the main expla­na­tion for why these are the three big­gies is that they are indige­nous to the area of Japan that was also home to the famous Shogun, Toku­gawa Ieyasu. I get the feel­ing that no one really knows for sure. I have also heard that dream­ing of a white snake fortells finan­cial gain, but I don’t know the rea­son for that one at all. In order to have a good dream, it is said that one should sleep with a pic­ture of the 七福神 (“Shichi­fuku­jin” — seven lucky gods) beneath their pil­low. Or, if you are not con­vinced that the gods can help, you can go with a “no dream is good news” phi­los­o­phy and sub­sti­tute a pic­ture of Baku, the dream eaters. I am not sure what I will do. Prob­a­bly, with noth­ing beneath my pil­low, I will have yet another dis­turb­ing chain of dreams star­ring peo­ple who both are and aren’t who they are sup­posed to be, set in places that both are and aren’t where they are sup­posed to be, throb­bing sex­ual under­tones, sur­real color schemes and sound­tracks made of both music I hate and what­ever song is com­ing out of the alarm clock when it goes off in the morn­ing. Any­one want to take a crack at inter­pret­ing that?

Waga­hai got me my very first Ama­zon gift sub­scrip­tion for Christ­mas in 1997, and using it, I made my first Ama­zon pur­chase. The sheer deli­cious­ness of book shop­ping in my pee-jays while loung­ing on the sofa lin­gered with me for days. What a fan­tas­tic thing, this online book store was!

These days, I can’t help but feel as though I am book shop­ping at Tar­get when­ever I go to their site — I am, as a mat­ter of fact, as well as at Bor­ders and Toys-R-Us and Nord­strom and tons of other retail com­pa­nies now in bed with Ama­zon. Don’t get me wrong, I am a bit of a real-life Tar­get slut, so I do not mean to sound dis­gusted. How­ever, I hate to see a book store become more than a book store (or less than a book store in the case of mall book stores like B. Dal­ton and the like). Ama­zon has also picked up some curi­ous habits and pulled some curi­ous stunts between my first visit and now:

• They put a “gold box” in the top right cor­ner that was sup­posed to con­tain offers for me, but con­sis­tently offered me jew­elry and cook­ware, two items I never have pur­chased and never will; I am con­vinced that these sug­ges­tions were made solely on the basis of my gen­der, which they know… How very 50s, and how very bro­ken a mar­ket­ing tac­tic. The Ama­zon higher-ups should seri­ously con­sider the value of a mar­ket­ing depart­ment that, despite hav­ing pur­chase his­to­ries for each repeat cus­tomer, is unable to come up with decent sug­ges­tions for them.
• They pulled a very “Cor­po­rate Amer­ica” stunt by attempt­ing to patent “one-click” online pur­chas­ing, an idea that prob­a­bly orig­i­nated in mul­ti­ple places at around the same time, but that they were first to get to the patent office. This, to me, is like try­ing to patent the check-out line. Even if they were the first to use it, how could other peo­ple using a sim­i­lar sys­tem cause them to lose money? This is a good exam­ple of the idiocy that is sup­ported and even encour­aged by US patent law.
• They will not sell books from over­seas book­sellers on their US (.com) site. This results in ver­sions of books printed over­seas going for 5x what they fetch on a book site in the coun­try of their pub­li­ca­tion. I sup­pose that this is to pro­tect the US sell­ers, but once word gets out, this will not last. There are places like abe­books that allow sell­ers from all over the world to charge what they will for a book. At the moment, they are my favorite book-buying site.

At any rate, I buy a lot less from Ama­zon now. Pow­ells and Alib­ris get use along with Abe­books as a online places to buy books (used — the only way to buy! Well, unless of course the book is brand new and so tempt­ing that you have to have it now now now…), and Ama­zon gets used as a book-review-resource/wish-list–min­der, which is about all it is good for these days.

Occa­sion­ally will come a pub­lisher whose entire cat­a­log is a source of book-lust. Tonight, a friend told me of a book he was think­ing of pur­chas­ing called The School of Whore­dom [Ama­zon]. Upon read­ing more about it, I was smit­ten, and after root­ing about a smidgen at http://www.hesparuspress.com, I found quite a few more books that have been added to my lust list:

• One Thou­sand and One Ghosts byAlexan­dre Dumas [Ama­zon]
• The Dia­logue of the Dogs by Miguel De Cer­vantes [Ama­zon]
• John the Valiant by San­dor Petofi [Ama­zon]
• But­ter­ball by Guy De Mau­pas­sant [Ama­zon]
• Pan­ta­gruel by François Rabelais [Ama­zon]
• Eureka by Edgar Allan Poe [Ama­zon]

Shoot. Even one of the books I have been most enthralled with lately turns out to have been from Hes­pe­rus: The Last Day of a Con­demned Man byVic­tor Hugo [Ama­zon]. To be hon­est, the more I peruse the Hes­pe­rus site, the more I come to think that what I really want is one of each, please.

This posts counts both as this site’s dis­claimer regard­ing con­tent, and as theft #2 of the new year. No one has put so well the way I feel about people’s reac­tions to what I put on my web­sites as Chaucer did in the pro­logue to “The Miller’s Tale”; so, to kick off this reborn blog, here it is in both Chaucer’s eng­lish and in a more mod­ern inter­pre­ta­tion: » Read the rest of this entry «

Neil Gaiman has a New Year’s wish for his read­ers that I am try­ing to wish for myself, and most def­i­nitely wish for all the peeps-o-my-heart:

May your com­ing year be filled with magic and dreams and good mad­ness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss some­one who thinks you’re won­der­ful, and don’t to for­get make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, some­where in the next year, you sur­prise yourself.

I love Christ­mas car­ols… not the new ones, so much, but the old ones. A well-done “Silent Night” makes me cry. I lis­ten to Christ­mas car­ols all year round, to be hon­est. There. My secret is out. How­ever, I have come to won­der why there are so many Christ­mas songs and not as many Easter songs, even though, accord­ing to most prac­tic­ing Chris­tians I know, Easter is far more impor­tant a hol­i­day. Why is this? I tried to come up with some ideas:

• - Win­ter is a darker time of year, and singing com­mu­nally in the cold of night is just, well, com­fort­ing some­how, or
• - there were already a lot of exist­ing songs for that sea­son thanks to the sol­stice and Mithras and what­ever else (although this argu­ment seems some­how lack­ing since there are hol­i­days and solstices/equinoxes in every sea­son), or
• - peo­ple (out­side of per­haps Mel) just don’t feel right singing about a tor­tured and/or dying and/or dead guy, no mat­ter the reason.

Any­one? Ideas? Real answers? It is going to haunt me until I know.

I hug ‘em, I admit it. For the rest of those who do, as well as those who just like unique stuff, treehugger.com is a great resource if you are hunt­ing for eco-friendly goods such as:

• Muji Card­board Speakers
• Solar Sen­sa­tions solar vibrator
• Kona Rug coconut floor covering
• The Jimi wal­let substitute
• CD hubs
• or the not-yet-available-in-the-US Ice Cream Yo-Yo.

A quick addi­tion to my com­ment on the Go for Cof­fee post:

“One mea­sure by the Paris-based Orga­ni­za­tion for Eco­nomic Coop­er­a­tion and Devel­op­ment shows that none of the world’s rich­est coun­tries donated even 1 per­cent of its gross national income. The high­est, as of April, was Nor­way, at 0.92 per­cent; the low­est was the United States, at 0.14 percent.”

http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2004/12/30/500m/index.html