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It's not a phrase I ever expected to construct, but I think I've chosen my favorite Starbucks. It has a big, open space with lots of windows, at least one inhumanly cheerful barista, comfy seating (although there's never enough comfy seating), and, I just discovered today, a fireplace to ward away California's midwinter chill.

(Update: this one.)

After I finished the front section of the paper, I went to the Mountain View Public Library, found myself another comfy chair in another big open space with lots of windows, and read first chapters of interesting-looking books and the Week In Review. No hot chocolate, though.

I ended up checking out Anne Ursu's Spilling Clarence, a novel about a pharmaceutical plant fire that inadvertently restores memories in a small college town. The first chapter is mostly set at the cafe of Davis & Dean, a fictional book chain (read Barnes & Noble) trying to split the difference between the factory and the university at opposite ends of the town. I was going to say something here, but I got distracted by the book's web site, which is really cool. Go look at it. Click the Davis & Dean storefront.

Ursu, according to her bio, was raised in Minneapolis, graduated from Brown University, and lives in Mountain View. Her second book, The Disapparation of James, has been on my reading list since I ran across it at Kepler's, but the Mountain View library has so far ignored my suggestion that they buy it. Even though she lives here. Hmph. Maybe I'll buy it once I'm employed again.

(Update: Here's the chapter I read.)

(no subject)

In the Sunday Styles section, conscientious objectors to "the Dating-Industrial Complex".

Every region has its tourist attractions, and what L.A. visitors want to see is disaster.

The good news was that our particular stretch of the Hollywood Hills was built on solid granite, putting it in the safest zone possible in the event of earthquake - the safest zone in Southern California, that is, which is kind of like saying it's the highest point in Atlantis.

Meanwhile, The Lord of the Rings has given (non-indigenous) New Zealanders a new sense of their land.

Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, constructs a "hall of fame of unintended outcomes," great ideas with undesirable consequences. Elsewhere is a review of his new book, which attempts to quantify genius by counting encyclopedia column-inches. Guess what--Western civilization wins! ("I think it would be a very good idea.")

Speaking of bad ideas, a look back at CIA-sponsored coups in 1950s Iran and Guatemala.

"Lies, damned lies and statistics." What's missing from productivity and unemployment measures.

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There's a bunch of stuff in the Times this week about the 9/11 memorial design proposals, and other 9/11 topics.

The most interesting to me: practical concerns about the designs.

In Oklahoma City, 18 months were spent evaluating the type of glass used to make the 168 empty chairs that are the centerpiece of the memorial to the victims of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The detailed engineering studies led to a change in the recipe for the glass, to keep it from cracking in sudden swings of temperature. The glass, so far, has held up. But the grass around it has not. So many people have visited the memorial that ropes have been hung to keep the crowds away from the chairs, contrary to the designer's intent.

There's more of that sort of thing.

Thomas Keenan writes that the designs "are relentlessly numerical, devoted perhaps first of all to the project of counting, measuring and listing" and comments on the comforts and risks of that approach.

The LMDC has provided computer animations of all the proposed designs. James Sanders reviews the history of architectural rendering and speculates a little on the future.

I don't read Maureen Dowd, but the pull quote from her piece mirrors my cursory reaction to the designs: They do too much to make an ugly memory pretty.

A long article on the EPA's management of air safety in the days following the atrocity.

Out-of-towners like me may not be aware that the WTC PATH station has reopened.

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I read the news and op-ed sections first this week, so I got all caught up on Iraq. The best pieces, I thought, were one on democracy, theocracy, and the tyranny of the majority, and one on definitive images of wars, from Iwo Jima to Vietnam to Somalia. Will the photograph of Iraq be Bush in Baghdad? Or Bush on the flight deck? Or a dead soldier sprawled on a Mosul street? Probably not.

(no subject)

Check out all these highway photographs.