The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
I can’t get worked up, really, about Emmitt Smith no longer playing for the Cowboys. I’m used to this by now. In the last ten years I’ve watched Joe Montana put on a Kansas City Chiefs uniform; Jerry Rice take the field for the Raiders; Bruce Smith and Andre Reed suit up in the fine colors of the Redskins; and Thurman Thomas for — of all teams — the Miami Dolphins. This is an unfortunate side-effect of the NFL’s salary cap. But the truth is, I think the NFL’s current system is the best of any of the four major sports. Yes, it does lead teams to send their stars packing before their time is really up, but I think the NFL’s system generally leads to easier rebuilding for moribund teams; it leads to better competitive balance, which is good for fans — look at this past season, when something like twenty teams were still in playoff contention with only two weeks left. And the NFL has not suffered a labor-related work stoppage in sixteen years.
Should Jerry Jones have offered Smith more money to stay? Possibly. Is the guy who is now anointed as the starter there better than Smith, at this time in Smith’s career? Maybe, maybe not — I don’t know. Should Smith have sucked it up and accepted Jones’s offer to stay with a single team for his entire career? Maybe, maybe not. The guy’s got the right to earn what he can, but he also could have said, “You know, I’ve made enough that I’m set for life and so are my kids. I’ll play cheap for a year or two.” I don’t fault Smith either way. This is just the way things are now in the NFL.
And besides, the Cowboys stink. If and when they return to prominence and win another Super Bowl, Emmitt Smith will have since retired, anyway.
(And in a Buffalo Bills update, apparently the Bills are willing to consider trade offers for Peerless Price, who is a free agent that the Bills have designated a “franchise player”. I’m assuming the Bills would want at least a first-round pick for Price, since last year they traded their first-rounder for this year to get Drew Bledsoe. I want the Bills to keep Price, but if the choice is between keeping Price and getting an impact player for the defense, I’d have to opt for the defensive player.)
Question for the technically superior: what are some good PC programs for working with and constructing Zip archives? I had WinZip on my last computer, but I don’t have it on the current machine. I downloaded the “trial” version today, but I’m not sure I want to spend $29 to get the “permanent” version if there’s another program out there that will allow me to Zip up my files that’s cheaper. Any advice, folks?
Buffalo received national media attention the weekend before I left that city, because that’s when the “Lackawanna Six” — an alleged Al Qaeda sleeper cell — were broken up and arrested.
This week, there were arrests in Syracuse involving a charity that funneled money to Iraq.
I’m starting to feel a bit like Max Fenig, the character from The X-Files who was at the epicenter of some very strange UFO activity, no matter where he went….
I’ve been getting a few hits lately from people looking for the photo of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein, taken back in the 1980s. (I made an offhand mention of that photo a few days ago.) Anyway, anyone still looking for it can still see it on Tom Tomorrow’s blog from December.
ANNOUNCEMENT: My new blogging project is up and running. The title is Reverie and Passion, and Aaron had the right of it: 2003 is the bicentenary of the birth of Hector Berlioz, the classical composer I love above all others. So far it’s not much to look at, but I’ll get there. Hopefully.
(And I can’t imagine anything more boring than a blog about the bicentenary of Ohio…ugh.)
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Microscope image of sand from Corsica.
I saw this on MeFi and found it fascinating. I tend to imagine sand as, basically, billions of little cube-shaped particles, like table-salt or sugar — but the reality, as is usually the case, turns out to be much more interesting than that. I had no idea there were shellfish that small, for instance. The picture links to a site with a bunch of other equally fascinating microscope images of sand, from beaches around the world.
Oliver Willis has been experimenting lately with taking blogging into audio and visual dimensions. I like Oliver, even if he is a Redskins fan. I also have to admit that I figured his spoken voice would be a lot deeper and more gravelly. I’d suggest that he start smoking and drinking a lot of bourbon, but I think someone already did so on his comment section.
I got up early this morning to head to the gym for my daily workout, and when I turned on NPR in the car I heard Bob Edwards on Morning Edition talking to someone about Fred Rogers.
They were talking in the past tense.
What colossally sad news to learn at 6:30 in the morning, as the sun is rising.
My blogroll — known poetically as “Other Journeys” — keeps growing. Fantasy writer Caitlin R. Kiernan is doing a journal called Low Red Moon, which I think is about the writing of a novel by that same name. Also, there is a blog of political content called The Forge that I found by sheer chance (it happened to be one of the “ten most recently published” blogs on the Blogger main page when I signed in a few days ago, and once in a while I’ll check a few of these to see what’s interesting). It appears to be right-of-center political commentary, but I’m not entirely sure and anyway, the guy seems to have an interesting voice. It’s a very new blog, so I’m provisionally linking it. (I’m prejudiced in its favor, anyway, because the writer, Joshua Legg, is using the same template that I used for Byzantium’s Shores when I got started. Do I need a good reason for everything?!)