Given that tomorrow is the start of the Book Project, I thought I ought to explain what the Book Project is, and how it is going to work.

The idea for the Book Project was seeded when I wrote about two food related books recently, and then reinforced when a friend asked me how many books a week I read. I threw out a number (four to 10, depending on the week and the books), but I was curious to know how many books I actually do read. And what kind of books I read, and how many books I re-read.

So, the Book Project. It’s pretty simple; I will write about every book I read in 2008, with no exceptions. If I read a cheesy piece of chicklit on a plane somewhere, I will write about it. If I study for the MCAT, you people will be the first to know. I will trash books I don’t like, and praise books I do enjoy. The idea is to have a brief review of each book, and if I reread a book over the course of the year, I might reflect on the new things I get out of it from the re-reading. I think it’s going to be interesting to trace my reading habits over the course of a year.

Within reason, I will also try to read every book you folks recommend to me. I tend to hit the library for book recommendations, in case I don’t like the books, so that I don’t have to buy them, but I should warn you that my library is not the greatest. Although it does try very hard. The point is, I may not be able to get every recommended book through the library. If you really want me to read something, you can mail it to me: s.e. smith, PO Box 2764, Fort Bragg, California, 95437. I will pledge to read every single book that is sent to that post office box. If it’s some sort of rare one of a kind book that you want returned, I will also mail it back to you, as long as you include a slip with a note indicating that you want it back, along with your name and address. This pledge holds true even I get BoingBoinged or something and end up with thousands of books to read. Which would actually be kind of neat.

I think the way in which the Book Project is going to work is pretty simple; if you have any burning questions, you can leave them in the comments. Also feel free to leave comments if you want to see Book Project posts organized in a particular way, beyond the organization system already used on the site, or if you think that they should go on a totally separate site.

And with that…happy New Year to all, and to all a happy New Year. I hope that 2008 is a better, more excellent year, in which awesome things happen and the travails of the past are sloughed away. I have a feeling it’s going to be interesting, if nothing else.

Also, please drive safely, and if you’re planning on drinking, use a designated driver or public transit!

Marines who were fighting in Iraq last year are now working alongside the Iraqis who were shooting at them; that’s got to be awkward.

Residents of a Santa Rosa neighborhood have decided to get a little more, uh, proactive about crime.

High temperatures are putting a damper on New Years Eve festivities down under.

Will Edwards take the populist vote? If he surges ahead in the Iowa caucuses, those of us who are hanging our heads at the thought of Obama or Clinton taking the nomination might perk up a bit.

Democracy is the best revenge, apparently; Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has taken the reins of his mother’s party.

So, on top of having half of my electrical system basically implode yesterday, I am also sick. And as fun as it was traipsing in and out of the house in the rain switching off breakers, I planned to spend today skulking in bed reading a book, but then I remembered that I had to order groceries, which involves dragging my desk across the floor to an outlet that works. (The electrician is coming soon to fix the electrical system, by the way; it’s kind of dependent on his other jobs, but it will definitely happen within the next three days or so.)

The thing is, when I’m sick, I tend to not eat very much. Part of it is a genuine lack of hunger, but some of it is simply because I lose the will and energy to cook. Therefore, there is a sort of set menu of foods which I tend to gravitate towards when I am sick. I think everyone has this, the list of foods that they eat when sick both because they are comforting and because they are easy to make. I thought it might be sort of interesting to compare comfort foods with you, gentle readers, since I think they are so dependent on how you are raised and where you are raised; the foods which people gravitate to in times of stress are often very revealing.

The thing that tops my list, oddly enough, is baguettes. I mean, I like baguettes at other times, but for some reason I especially enjoy them when I am sick, perhaps because my father used to drop them off at the house on Franklin Street when he knew I wasn’t feeling better, and I would eat straight bread dipped in oil, vinegar, and lemon. I should eat baguettes more often, I think, because they are pretty darn awesome. Although I do realize that our weakly American baguettes are a pale imitation of the real thing. This week I splurged and got Brie to eat with my baguettes, despite the fact that I really shouldn’t be eating dairy because it makes my sinuses sad.

I also eat a lot of soup, which makes sense, because soup is easy. I happened to have some borscht frozen, so when the fridge was out for most of the day yesterday and it started thawing, I figured I might as well use it. Baguettes are also good for this because you can tear crusty chunks off and sop up the borscht broth with them. But any soup will do, because soup is made of awesome.

Spicy food is also a given for me, which is why I got the ingredients to make spicy Thai-style (sort of) soup, and I’m looking forward to hot pot with my father and my Chinese mother on Tuesday. Her hot pot is hot in both senses of the word. I also have some peanut sauce which was kindly thawed out for me yesterday by my faulty electrical system, so I sense peanut sauce in my future. Hot foods are enjoyable for me when I’m sick both because I like hot food and because they help clear out my sinuses. I also figure that since one of the main critiques of insanely spiced foods is that the spice overwhelms the flavor, and I can’t taste anything at this point, this is a good time to eat spicy food.

I am also a fan of tea with honey and lemon. Lots and lots of tea. Another family tradition is just hot water, lemon, and honey, which soothes the throat while also encouraging bacteria to find a new place to hang out; hence my decision to order 10 lemons from Harvest this week. My throat is all raspy and foul feeling right now, so that ought to help improve matters. Juice is commonly ingested in large amounts as well.

What do you eat when you’re sick/sad/frustrated? Does your family have a tradition of particular foods, or have you developed your own comfort foods?

Twistie of Manolo for the Big Girl writes about New Year’s resolutions, and her resolution not to make resolutions about her weight.

In shocking news, Rowling says she may write an eighth Harry Potter book.

Joybubbles is profiled in the New York Times magazine.

The San Francisco Zoo is under fire. Given that it’s a pretty woeful zoo at this point, that might not be such a bad thing.

A British policewoman was recently shot in the stomach, which may not sound like big news to Americans, but is kind of interesting in a nation with very tight gun control laws.

Given that I normally post in the morning, gentle readers, you are probably wondering why I’m writing so late today. And I know that you do sorely miss the sites of interest for the day, but I swear that I have an excuse for putting an entry up so late, so never fear, all is well! More or less. I mean, I’m not dead. But parts of my house are.

One of the exciting things about living in older houses is that they occasionally have catastrophic problems. One of these problems happened to manifest today, when the power to around half of my house abruptly vanished and would not return despite my best efforts at the breaker box, so I was forced to call my landlord so that an electrician could come out. Since I’ve already been pestering my landlord about the heat situation, I felt rather awkward calling yet again, but I thought that my power might not be working because the house was about to blow up or something, so I mustered up the will.

As it happens, the power went out because I was missing a neutral, and judging from the condition of one of the “receptacles,” as the electrician charmingly calls “outlets,” there was a lot of heat in my electrical system, which is bad. The electrician is also a fireman, so he blanched visibly not only out of professional concern but out of thankfulness that he didn’t have to show up with his other hat on.

So the electrician traipsed around the house while I traipsed in and out turning off breakers, and the problem is going to require more work, which means that…only about half of my outlets work right now. So I had to perilously string a cord to one of the three working outlets in the house to write this entry. It’s kind of exciting, I feel like I’m camping out, what with the guttering candles and so forth. Fortunately the stove and the hot water heater are on dedicated circuits, and the circuit which powers the fridge has all of its neutralness intact, so I can bathe, cook, and eat, but my house is dark. And there are wires in odd places.

The electrician says that he will try and come within a few days to do the rest of the work, and now that I more or less have power for my computer and so forth, I think things will return to normal, although I am going to have to mop for around three hours to get all the mud out, given that it was raining and there was a lot of traipsing in shoes.

However, I did learn a valuable lesson today, dear readers, which is why I am posting a relatively boring story instead of a more interesting entry. And that lesson was that if I ever build/remodel a home, I am totally making a wiring plot. We could have saved ourselves several hours of work today with a wiring plot. Well, I use we in the royal sense. But, the point is, make a wiring plot. You never know when you might need it. Also, do not hide junction boxes under your house in corners that cannot be reached.

The next stop in the cemeteries of Mendocino County tour: Hillcrest Cemetery, in Mendocino. RSS readers, click through if you want to see the slideshow of photographs. You can also see individual photographs showcased on six:fourteen.

Hillcrest Cemetery, as the name implies, is on the top of the hill which Mendocino is built on, while Evergreen is at the bottom. Apparently Hillcrest also houses the “Chinese Cemetery,” although I saw no signs of any such thing, and I did find the veterans isolated in their own little corner. Navigating this cemetery is quite interesting, because it is actually rather steep; I almost twisted my ankle in one part.

I spent a lot of time in this cemetery in high school, because that’s kind of what angsty high school students like to do. Hillcrest also happens to house my all time favourite grave ever, for Manuel Jose Triguiero, who died “in the Christian and heroic attempt to save five drowning men.” That’s the kind of stuff I want to have on my headstone.

Hillcrest also has a little Irish corner, and a lot of really neat creatively decorated modern graves, with plantings of everything from rosemary to heather, along with rocks, statues, hand carved headstones, and the works. One grave is covered in statues of angels, and I mean covered. It’s extremely intense, what with the angels and the stark wooden cross. There are several people I know at Hillcrest; I popped by to check on them and everything appeared to be in order.

This cemetery houses the bulk of the Portuguese; there are a ton of Portuguese graves, with beautiful carvings. There’s also a little fenced off section for the founding fathers of Mendocino, as it were, like the McCallums and so forth. They need to fix the gate, though; it’s sort of stuck open, which doesn’t seem very dignified to me.

Lots of old excellent graves from the 1800s and early 1900s with beautiful carvings and florid sentiments. Sadly, many stones are cracked; I think that a falling tree branch damaged several graves. It’s a nice sort of cemetery to wander around in; a little crowded, a little disorganized, but basically friendly. It also has an unbeatable ocean view; somewhere, a developer must be very, very sad.

Some eco-resolutions for the coming year, in the form of monthly direct actions which can make a small difference and possibly change your lifestyle.

The Army Corps is going to test the Bay for remaining traces of oil from the spill; I’ll bet that they are going to find all kinds of neat stuff in there.

First Book is the charity of choice for the Holidailies Charity Project, and they are also just neat.

Tariq Ali offers some opinions on the Bhutto assassination.

Bethlehem was recently the site of a brawl between opposing Christian sects.

Baby giraffe! Painful cuteness alert.

“To thine own self be true,” Polonius says in Hamlet. It seems to be a quote that gets repeated a lot, especially on tacky inspirational refrigerator magnets that probably would have deeply confused poor Shakespeare, especially since we live in a society where many people seem to believe the exact opposite of this saying.

I was thinking about this the other day when I was arguing with someone about something that I feel passionately about, and I refused to back down, because I felt that it would compromise myself, that by giving in I would be giving away a little part of myself, and the person obviously didn’t understand this. Objections were rationally laid out, valid criticisms were raised, and I still held my line, because it was important to me. Because I believe that when you abandon yourself, you have nothing. I’m willing to be persuaded and to seeing new information which changes my opinion of something, but I’m not going to quietly give in for the sake of social harmony; it’s just not who I am.

I’ve noticed that a lack of a strong core seems to be a problem for much of our society. We have politicians who are unable to articulate their beliefs because they don’t have them, and people who can’t defend their beliefs because they don’t want to upset the applecart. What’s wrong with a little believing? What’s wrong with having a firm opinion on something, a line which you believe shouldn’t be crossed, and sticking to it?

Minds change and beliefs change, and that’s all well and good, part of the process of evolution. But I fail to see why people don’t stand up for themselves, why they remain silent when they want to speak, and why we criticize the people who do dare to speak out, to raise a ruckus.

When I read the news this morning and found out that Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated, I shouted the news upstairs to my friend who is visiting, and we both had a moment of silence.

“That sucks,” I said finally.

“Yeah,” she said.

It sucks that people with courage, strength, and self confidence get assassinated, both literally and figuratively.

I want each of you, gentle readers, to resolve to be more true to yourself in the coming year. When you’re in a social situation and something you don’t like is happening, say something. Or leave. Assert yourself. Remind the world that you are a human being, with feelings. When you hear someone else speak up about something, listen to them and support them, instead of telling them to be quiet for the good of the group. Break out of your culture of convenience and complacence and ruffle some feathers. Don’t do it for me. Do it for you.

Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated in a suicide bombing attack which killed 20 others.

The medical establishment is looking for new ways to identify Alzhermer’s in the early stages.

Tuberculosis is on the rise, and one of the major vectors of transmission is immigrants and refugees.

People tend to feel more charitable when they’re reminded of their mortality, apparently.

Arctic bacteria are tough little buggers.

While I was eating lunch at my father’s with my Chinese mother yesterday, she was telling us about a holiday party she had gone to with a mixed crew of local Chinese and a few of the “Buddha ladies,” as my father calls them, the pretentious white ladies who flutter at the fringes of our Chinese Buddhist community. We started out talking about the difference in culinary tastes between China and the United States; I for example love red bean paste buns, which never ceases to amaze her, since most Americans hate them.

She mentioned that one of the Buddha ladies there was awfully rude. Rather, she didn’t say that the woman was rude, but the things she told us about her made her sound like a real piece of work. Apparently she whined about all of the ethnic Chinese dishes at the party, saying things like “this is disgusting” and behaving pretty childishly, and then she corrected someone’s pronunciation of a word; as it turned out, her correction was actually wrong, but my Chinese mother didn’t realize it at the time. Not only did the woman correct someone else’s spoken English, but she went on to say that “Chinese people just can’t speak English,” which begs the question of what in the hell she was doing at a Chinese Buddhist Christmas party, but anyway.

The point was, we started talking about language, with my father and I illustrating plenty of regional variations in the way that people say words. We also pointed out that the woman’s pronunciation was actually wrong, and we talked about regional differences for the descriptions of things; what, for example, do you call a sandwich on a long, large roll? A sub? Submarine? Hoagie? Poor boy? Grinder? Cosmo? Wedge? Hero? Once we got my Chinese mother thinking about it, she recalled trips to other regions of the United States, where people speak very differently, and started coming up with examples of the difference between Chinese accents and dialects.

The evolution of languages has always been quite fascinating to me, as are the subtle differences in the ways that people speak, but I kept coming back to this woman’s behavior, because it really flabbergasted me.

I definitely think that we have come a long way from the days when Chinese people couldn’t own land in California, but in some ways we haven’t come that far if behaving like an infant at a party is considered acceptable. Either this woman didn’t think that people understood her when she bitched and moaned about the food, or she didn’t care, and that’s deeply troubling to me. I feel like one of the first things I learned when I was a kid was “if you don’t like the food, you don’t need to share that information,” and apparently this woman missed the memo.

On what planet is it okay to talk trash about the food at a potluck, especially when you didn’t bring anything? And much of this woman’s criticism was leveled along ethnic grounds, like “ew, Chinese desserts are so gross, who would eat these!” She apparently didn’t think that the Chinese guests had feelings which might be hurt when she insulted the food that they had made; and given that some Chinese desserts are complex and hard to make, she was insulting literally days worth of work in some cases.

I was also pretty shocked that she made the comment about Chinese people not speaking good English, implying that they are pathologically incapable of learning to “speak properly,” which is a joke in a country where most native speakers slaughter the language. My Chinese mother is a polite, fairly mild-mannered woman, so of course she didn’t say anything, but I could tell that it upset her by the way that she talked about it. Every time I am reminded of careless prejudice like this, it saddens me.

I suppose it’s just as well I don’t go to these sorts of things, because I think that woman would have ended up with a platter of egg rolls upended on her head.