The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Land’s End, Cornwall, England.
I found this nice photo while looking through various sites collecting views of Cornwall, the southwestern part of England. (The photo links to the best collection of such that I found.) I find something appealing about this photo — it conveys a sense of the vast sea and the distances involved somehow. Maybe it’s the signpost. Anyhow, I’d love to travel to this place someday.
We ate dinner last night at Red Lobster. I know, it’s homogenized, corporately-designed seafood; every restaurant looks the same, et cetera. But I still love going there. The food is invariably decent, those cheddar-biscuits are wonderful (if evil), and most of all, Red Lobster meets my big criterion for a seafood place: they decorate the joint so it looks like a seafood place.
I have always been a huge sucker for theme restaurants. When I walk into a place like Montana’s, for example, and see all the timber-beams along the ceiling and the wagon-wheels on the walls and the trapping equipment and canoes on display and the branding irons and other assorted whatnot everywhere, that puts me into a kind of mood that usually involves generous helpings of red meat. Likewise, when I go into Don Pablos and note the colored lights (very large bulbs, not the twinkly Christmas-tree lights) strung about, and the faux windows and awnings and the tiled fountain in the middle of the place, I envision myself entering a Mexican sidewalk cafe — even if I know I’m really in the middle of some suburban strip in Anywhere, USA. I like restaurants that try to convey a sense of place, a certain bit of fantasy to go along with food that, while it’s probably not the best you’ll ever experience in that vein, is still pretty good.
The single best seafood meal of my life was at a Legal Sea Foods in Boston. The focus there is on the food, and spectacular it is. But I still like the other stuff, too — the theme stuff, the “other time and place” stuff. What do I want in a seafood place? Besides good food — which, in my opinion, Red Lobster has — I want to see nautical charts on the walls. (If they can do local waterways, great; in Syracuse that’s probably asking a bit much.) I want to see oars and propeller blades and fishhooks and nets. Anchors are good, and lobster-traps. Low lighting — enough to see, obviously, but not to make the place brilliantly lit, as a whaling-vessel or schooner would have been — is a must. Low ceilings too.
If the restaurant is located on water or with a view of water, that’s a bonus. This isn’t always possible, of course, but it really helps. And if it’s near the water, then it’s really cool if the restaurant is actually supported on pilings above the water, so that one has to cross a little bridge to get to the place. (Again, too much to ask of Syracuse, but….) I should hear seagulls, and a foghorn would be OK too. And of course, there’s nothing like the smell of saltwater to get one in the mood for tearing into some crablegs. Again, not in Syracuse, alas….but freshwater locales can have their own allure, too.
I tend to completely ignore music in restaurants — a byproduct of having worked in them so long — so I don’t need to hear sea shanties on the speakers. And I pay little attention to what the servers wear, so there’s no need to dress them up as captains or crew or whatnot. (Unless, of course, I’m eating at a Disneyworld theme restaurant. In that case, they’d better look the part.) I also suppose that simulating the swaying motion of a ship would be impractical and not entirely desirable.
Red Lobster gets a lot of this right. Yes, it’s fairly obviously inauthentic, but it works for the hour or so that I’m there. Works for me, anyway.
I’ve been following the terribly sad story of the girl who got the wrong transplant organs. Apparently she might have another chance today, because a donor with the right blood type has been found. That is good news.
And yet, I can’t help but wonder something else: when a family allows the harvesting of a loved one’s organs, are they told where those organs are to be used? What I’m wondering is, is there a family somewhere that, having lost a loved one, at least took some solace in the fact that their misfortune would possibly prolong the life of another, only to learn even later that their loved one’s organs will now be of no use to anyone?
I’m trying not to attach any cosmic significance to the fact that the day after I read that Google has bought Blogger, I couldn’t get into Blogger for most of the day. It’s probably just one of “those things”, and the news of Google’s taking-of-the-Blogger-mantle is sufficient to make me postpone any plans I had for switching to Movable Type (I want to see if the Blogger infrastructure does, in fact, get better). But an outage for an entire day, after the announcement? Huh?
I’ve done some general tweaking today: a new masthead image, and some additions to “Notable Dispatches” at left.
Also, updates to Byzantium’s Shores may be light this week because I have some other projects that need my attention (including winding up the first draft of the damned novel the novel-in-progress).
I started reading Jo Walton’s novel The King’s Peace this week, and I set it aside when I got about ninety pages in and realized that I had no idea who these characters were. I’ll try it again another time; I found the book’s opening chapters fairly well-done and interesting, so I’m assuming this is a case of me just not being in a “fantasy” kind of mood just now. So I’m onto Conqueror’s Legacy by Timothy Zahn, the concluding volume of a space-opera trilogy the first two volumes of which I enjoyed greatly. I do find it a bit strange that I haven’t been in a “fantasy” mood for a long time now. Fantasy has been my favorite genre for years, but more and more I’m becoming interested in science fiction and also in horror (including “dark fantasy”, a term which I find cumbersome but unavoidable). There isn’t much fantasy out there right now that I’m really hankering to read, but there’s a ton of SF and horror that I want to get to.
(Oh, and a minor rant: it occurs to me that the two epic fantasies that I’ve bounced off in recent months — The King’s Peace and Sean Russell’s The One Kingdom — are books that are set in large kingdoms with lots of traveling and such, and yet the books have no maps. Maybe I’ve come to lean on maps in fantasy books too much, as a kind of crutch, but I find them almost indispensible in fantasy these days. And come to think of it, they’re often very useful in SF, too.)
Bill Whittle, of Eject! Eject! Eject!, has written a new essay about courage and how it relates to the fate of the shuttle Columbia.
Whittle’s essay is well-written for the most part, but I do think that he tends to ramble a bit, and in some spots he could really use an editor. He includes a mini-rant on how Hollywood gets courage wrong, by citing the film Top Gun. Now, I agree with him here on this particular film, but it’s telling that he doesn’t see fit to give Hollywood credit for getting it right in films like The Right Stuff and Apollo 13. He also derails a bit into “Why we’re better than the terrorists”, which felt totally out-of-place given what he’s trying to do here. I don’t enjoy being made to feel that I have to be a conservative to admire the astronauts and other people who lay their lives on the line in the service of our country or our species, and I don’t feel that a tribute to these noble souls is the place for more ranting about what the America-hating liberals are doing to our college campuses.
But, if you skip over all that stuff, there’s quite a bit of gold in Whittle’s essay, and his concluding section — in which he describes what the last moments of Columbia‘s descent might have been like for the crew riding her to their doom — is simply haunting.
My first two reviews for Green Man Review have been posted: a review of the film Amadeus and an omnibus review of three young adult novels by John Bellairs.
(And my reviews for GMR are posted in my real name, so anyone dying to see the mists surrounding my identity dispelled should go have a look. No, my name is not Waylon Smithers; nor is it Clancy Wiggum, Montgomery Burns, Troy McClure or — gasp — Ned Flanders.)
In honor of Valentine’s Day, here are a few of my favorite romantic scenes from movies, in no particular order.
:: Witness: when John Book sings “What a Wonderful World” to Rachel and leads her in what is probably her first dance.
:: The American President: when President Shepard asks Sydney Ellen Wade to dance at the state dinner.
:: Sleepless in Seattle: when Sam and Annie meet for the first time…in the last scene.
:: Titanic: the sketching scene. (Yes, I still like Titanic. Sue me.)
:: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: the scene in the barn, when James Bond realizes he is actually in love.
:: Singin’ In The Rain: the title number.
:: My Fair Lady: “I Could Have Danced All Night”, “I’ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face”.
:: Princess Mononoke: when Ashitaka first comes to San’s rescue.
:: When Harry Met Sally…: another great last scene.
:: Rob Roy: “Do ye know how fine ye are to me, Mary McGregor?” Wow….
:: Friends: Chandler proposes to Monica. (Yes, it’s a TV show. Yes, I still watch Friends. Sue me.)
:: Flash Gordon: “Flash! I love you, but we only have eight hours to save the Earth!” (Well, OK, it’s not romantic at all. But it is my favorite corny line in a movie full of them.)
:: Braveheart: the secret wedding.
:: Attack of the Clones: the secret wedding.
:: The Simpsons: Yeah, another TV show, but Marge and Homer’s backstory is witty and touching.
:: Star Trek (The Original Series): As long as I’m in TV land, the episodes “The City on the Edge of Forever” and “Metamorphosis” are romantic masterpieces.
:: Bull Durham: Yet another great last scene.
:: An Affair to Remember: The whole damn movie.
:: Say Anything: The whole damn movie.
:: Casablanca: The whole damn movie.
MeFi has had some interesting threads lately about local delicacies, both in food and drink. It’s always fascinating to think about all of the wonderful foods I long to try, but cannot without either traveling a long way or trusting my abilities to follow a recipe for a dish when I don’t know how the dish is supposed to turn out. (I am pretty good at following recipes, though, so this isn’t as big a hindrance as it could be.)
Also interesting to me, though, is the converse: the stuff that I can’t fathom being palatable to anyone. Grits are very popular in the south, and I can’t imagine why; I’ve always found them stunningly tasteless. And lutefisk? Ugh!! I was even looking in the ice cream section at the grocery store the other day, and I came across the first flavor of ice cream I’ve ever seen that made me wince, so awful did it sound: Green Tea Flavored Ice Cream. Green Tea?? Huh?!
(By the way, the greatest ice cream in the history of ice cream is Coffee Haagen-Dasz. Oh, the wonderment of that stuff….)