(I'm back!)
Last night Shelby and I went to the Borders bookstore at The Block at Orange (OC's 'edgy' mall for Gen-X/Y/whatever types) so that she could return a book and we could do some last-minute Christmas shopping.
Browsing around, I saw to my horror that not only is The DaVinci Code still not available in paperback -- after over a year and a half! -- but they've come up with a way to dupe people who bought the hardback into paying even more money on another hardcover edition of the book -- for $35, you can now buy The DaVinci Code: Special Illustrated Edition!
I would ask "how does Dan Brown sleep at night, after bilking the worldwide reading public out of million$ for such a poorly-written unadulterated potboiler?", but I know that the answer is very well, indeed ... inside his hyperbaric oxygen chamber lined with brand-new $100 bills.
But the horror didn't stop there -- the bookstore also had a large table stacked high with copies of Miracle: A Celebration of New Life, a giant-sized $60 coffee-table book-and-CD set that's the product of a collaboration between Anne Geddes and Celine Dion! I can't think of a possible cooperative work between two 'artists' that would horrify me more, or that I'd like to see less -- unless, perhaps, Dan Brown and John Meyer got together to crank out a snappy little words-and-music coffee-table number.
The day before that, I did a bit of shopping on my own.
I started at Hills Brothers Lock and Safe in Garden Grove; we're finally getting around to replacing our house's hodgepodge of exterior door locks of various vintages and manufacturers with a new set of knobs and deadbolts all keyed alike. If you compare the price I paid there for what I could have paid for similar hardware on the Internet, we got taken -- but once you factor in the cost of shipping, the price of getting my Internet-bargain locks rekeyed, and the warm fuzzy feeling of supporting a local merchant, I think that we more or less came out even. Plus, Hills Brothers has the Lock Museum of Orange County -- they started out by cramming their retail store full of antique locks and paraphenalia, but eventually the accumulation got so big that it expanded into a seperate building next door. (And their store building still has such things as a twenty-foot high wall of doorknobs, as well as a floor completely inlaid with keys.)
After that, already being on the westerly side of the county, I headed northwest to two fondly-remembered hangouts of my youth. First I went to Hobby City, on Beach Blvd. in Buena Park. Hobby City is a ten-acre complex of independent stores catering to hobbyists of various types -- there's a store for model cars/ships/airplanes/trains, there's a stamp and coin store, there's a store for reptile fanciers, there's a store entirely devoted to cake decorating, and so forth. Hobby City used to have an excellent model train store, The Little Depot, that was probably the best in SoCal -- but I arrived to find that The Little Depot had given up the ghost for whatever reason, and that its space had been absorbed into the larger but more general model car/ship/airplane store next door. This store had grown a small train department in response -- and their selection was actually okay, but it wasn't the same. Disappointed, I moved on to my next destination, Knott's Berry Farm.
Knott's is best known as Orange County's 'other' amusement park, but there's also a complex of shops outside the park boundary. My stop was at Snoopy Headquarters, which bills itself as the largest store for Snoopy-themed merchandise in the country (even larger than Snoopy's Gallery and Gift Shop in Santa Rosa, home of Charles Schulz?) It was fun to browse, but I didn't find any Christmas gifts. As I was walking back to my car, a Scary Teenaged Punk rode his bike down the sidewalk past me, which led to an exchange between a Knott's security guard and The Punk that you'd never witness at Disneyland:
Guard: SIR, PLEASE WALK YOUR BIKE ON THE SIDEWALK!! SIR?? SIR?? PLEASE WALK YOUR BIKE!
Punk: (Starts riding his bike on the sidewalk in circles, while singing the "Mickey Mouse Club" theme song in a high-pitched-I'm-trying-to-get-your-goat falsetto)
Guard: SIR, YOU NEED TO WALK YOUR BIKE ON THE SIDEWALK!!
Punk: (Rides his bike to the other side of the street, narrowly missing being clipped by a car driving past)
Guard: SIR, YOU NEED TO USE THE CROSSWALK IF YOU'RE GOING TO CROSS THE STREET HERE!!! SIR?? SIR??
Punk: (Flips security guard the bird)
Guard: WELL, SIR, FUCK YOU TOO, SIR!!
. . . and our Scary-Looking Punk rides off into the sunset.
Posted by Kevin at December 22, 2004 11:46 PM