The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Survivor starts its new season tonight. As with all previous incarnations of Survivor, I shall celebrate its return by watching Friends.
I’d probably be interested in Survivor if they did something like, oh, tell them they’re taking them to some tropical island, so they pack accordingly…but really drop them off in the Northern Yukon. Or, give them parachutes and push them out of an airplane…over Kashmir. Yeah, that would be fun. Yee-haw!
I’ve been paying attention to a discussion, involving several blogs and their comment threads, of the ongoing death-spasms of the recording industry, the feasibility of micropayments, and verious peripheral issues. Read here first, and then Daniel Davies’s follow-up post (one of the commenters in that thread) here. In Davies’s words:
“The issue of ‘whither the music industry in a world of reduced intellectual property’ is bound to bring out a lot of interesting opinions; I think this is because a) we don’t know what the heck will happen b) we’d all like to believe that the answer will involve us all owning loads and loads of fantastic music for next to no cost but c) we all suspect that it probably won’t.”
I think that’s exactly right. I’ve long since given up being enthusiastic about the soon-to-arrive dawn of the Incredibly Cheap Music Era, because it seems to me what most people are really trying to get at is some modified version of the “Information wants to be free” spiel, which I find utterly unconvincing to begin with. They say that death and taxes are the only two certainties in life, but I think there’s a third: that given X that someone or some group wants, some other person will figure out a way to make money on it. There will never be a time when music is free, and the sooner we realize this, the better off we’re all going to be.
TBOGG gives a transcript of a “conversation” between Bill O’Reilly and Michael Savage. It reads rather like a transcript of a Beavis and Butthead episode, oddly enough.
(Oh, and Tom, bite me. At least my city isn’t likely to end up floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean after a big-ass earthquake someday!)
I don’t really have strong feelings yet, one way or the other, for General Wesley Clark in his run for the Democratic Presidential nomination, except to hope that maybe by virtue of Clark’s candidacy, along with Senator John Kerry’s Viet Nam vet-status, we might finally begin to cut away at this idiot idea out there that Democrats are basically peacenik McGovernites who loathe the military and whose discussions of foreign policy involve sitting around a campfire, smoking pot, and singing “Give Peace a Chance”. I don’t know anything about Clark yet, and I’ll end up vocally supporting whoever ends up winning the nomination anyway.
However, I happened to be reading Eric Alterman‘s blog yesterday, and I found this quote, referring to the idea of a Dean-Clark ticket:
Don’t tell me it should be the other way around. [i.e., Dean-Clark as opposed to Clark-Dean.] Perhaps it should, but Clark’s advantages dissipate in the No. 2 spot. Nobody votes for a vice president except the immediate members of his family, and if I were Mary Cheney, I would have thought long and hard about even that.
Could someone explain to me how Clark’s advantages (which I presume heavily involve his military status) “dissipate” if he is the Vice Presidential nominee? Wasn’t George W. Bush’s pick of Dick Cheney hailed as an illustration of Mr. Bush’s intent to surround himself with good and experienced people who would help him overcome his lack of experience in foreign policy and military affairs? I don’t understand what Alterman is getting at here, unless it’s merely to suggest that Vice Presidential candidates do not, in themselves, make the difference between a winning Presidential nominee and a losing one. But that’s a far cry from saying that Clark’s advantages “dissipate”.
According to our local weather reports, the Buffalo area will receive rains from Hurricane Isabel early Friday morning, to the tune of 3-5 inches of rain. Wow. It’s kind of weird, looking out on a gorgeous sunny day right now and thinking that in less than 48 hours, we will be underneath a tropical depression.
This will be, to my knowledge, the most “direct” hit we’ve had from a hurricane since I’ve lived in this area. (Of course, it will no longer be a hurricane when it arrives here, but you get the idea.) The earliest experience I can remember with any hurricane was when I was in second grade. My family lived, at that time, in Elkins, West Virginia. It was Hurricane David that soaked us, although it had made landfall in Florida (if memory serves) and come all the way up the eastern seaboard, so by the time it got to us it was basically a big heap of rain.
Anyway, this is exciting and a bit scary at the same time. I’m sure, though, that if I lived in, say, Virginia along the Atlantic coast, I’d weight it a lot heavier on the “Scary” side of the scale. Best wishes to those who are living right in the line of fire.
More chickens, more roads.
:: OLIVER WILLIS.
Yeah Baby! After the way that chicken ran across the road, there’s no way Steve Spurrier’s not going to sign him for the Skins! Way to go, Ballcoach! That chicken sure looks….Mmmmmm, Britney….
:: JAMES LILEKS.
Sometimes, living in the Twin Cities, a breeze will stir out of the west, a breeze that smells of North Dakota. You can tell the North Dakota breeze from the South Dakota breeze, because it’s somehow more open, more trusting. A North Dakota breeze is one you’ll trust. It’s the one you feel at your back as you escort your chicken across the road.
At 11:00 this morning, a certain feeling of sadness descended upon Gnat and I, that sadness that comes of the Showcase on The Price is Right ending in a double overbid, so I put down my Mac keyboard and she put down her toys and we went to Target, because we needed handsoap. The liquid kind, in the cool dispenser that’s slightly less cool than the one you’ll find in IKEA, but that’s OK because this one was designed by Americans, not Swedes. In Sweden, the chickens don’t cross the road. That’s because the Swedes don’t have chickens.
It was a beautiful day, so I thought I should drive Gnat out to farm country. Nice thing about the midwest is you can go in any direction to get to farm country, but I decided to go west, because at least figuratively we’d be closer to the source of that North Dakota breeze, and maybe, if we stopped for a moment along the way and the air was just right and we inhaled at just the right time, we’d be able to smell Fargo. And it wouldn’t be Fargo as it is now, but the Fargo of about six hours ago when the breeze came across it; and we’d take in the aroma of a Fargo whose time has come, and gone while we were watching Bob Barker.
So Gnat and I stood there a while, drawing in deep breaths.
“Is that Fargo, Daddy?” she’d say after each one. And I would have to say, “No, that’s exhaust off I-94.” Or, “No, the wind shifted just then. That’s Mankato.” Or a hundred other places. The truth is, I’ve forgotten the smell of Fargo. It happens, when you live in the Twin Cities. So finally I told Gnat “Yes, that was Fargo,” even though it wasn’t. Because it didn’t smell like chickens.
And that’s when, as if sent by some other force, the lone chicken came. And there, ten feet away from us, it crossed that lonely stretch of farm country road and disappeared into the brush on the other side.
A short while later, in the car, Gnat’s tiny voice came to me from her rear-facing carseat (which we also bought at Target, because the Apple Store at the Mall of America doesn’t sell carseats): “Daddy, why did that chicken cross the road?”
I have no real answer for her, so I give her the classic one, the one everyone knows. “To get to the other side, sweetie.”
And I don’t tell her that the coyotes are especially bad this year. Gnat is too young for nightmares about coyotes.
SDB weighs in today on why Anna Kournikova is such a marketing hit, whereas a number of superior tennis players – – the Williams sisters, primarily – – are not. This is one of his best recent posts, and I think he’s pretty much nailed it: In an era where sex appeal seems to be the driving force behind most successful advertising campaigns, it’s simply to be expected that blond-hair-and-blue-eyes is valued above black-and-muscular-and-more-talented. It’s a tad depressing, but there it is. (I also think there’s something of the “Russian Princess” factor here that makes her a bit more exotic. If she was from Schenectady and her name was Jolene Johnson, to make up a middle-American name off the top of my head, I suspect she would have to really ratchet up the sex factor to achieve equal success.)
SDB also spends a bit of time discussing the physical attributes desirable in various sports, and I think he’s pretty much got it on a lot of those, especially in his discussion of baseball not really favoring any particular physical advantage. Sure, we had Mark McGuire, who was powerfully muscled, but Barry Bonds – – while certainly very fit – – is not nearly as muscular, and yet he’s the player of this generation, as well as probably one of the five best of all time, in my opinion. You have big, hulking players in baseball and you have little wiry guys in baseball. And with pitchers, there’s an equal disparity: Randy Johnson is something like six-foot-six, and looks like he weighs all of 150 pounds. In fact, one of my favorite baseball moments ever came in an All-Star Game in either 1993 or 1994, when the tall-and-lanky Johnson pitched to the short-and-stocky John Kruk (who proceeded to purposely strike out, so terrified was he when Johnson uncorked a 98-mph fastball over his head).
I do take issue, a bit, with something SDB says at the very end: “I am rather using her as a symbol of what I see as a basic corruption in women’s sports in general.” I’m really not sure why what he has said here pertains only to women’s sports, as opposed to sports in general. Sports marketing is all over the map, really. Definitely, in terms of women, it’s the sex appeal that drives the marketing, but I’m not sure that reflects on the sports themselves.
I’m also not sure I agree that women’s figure skaters really project an air of “virginity”. The coin-of-the-realm there is more elegance, which isn’t quite the same thing. As to when the last time a married woman won a major skating event, well – – skating has been trending toward younger competitors winning in most recent years, which is in turn something of a consequence of the increased focus on jumping in the sport. Most of the competitors who can turn in long program with six or seven triple jumps are teenagers, because all that jumping takes a toll (women’s bodies aren’t as well-suited to doing jump-centric skating as men’s bodies are), thus forcing the women into the professional ranks sooner, where jumping isn’t so important. (You won’t see Kristi Yamaguchi, who won gold in the 1992 Olympics, doing a performance with a lot of triples these days.) And given that these skaters are so young, it’s not really a surprise that they’re unmarried.
If figure-skating suggests an air of chastity on the part of its female athletes, I think that’s more a result of the sport becoming youth-skewed than an intended result of its own (and I’m far from convinced that there even is an air of chastity at all). And even then, it only really applies to the solo women skaters. In the pairs and dance competitions, you’ll often find sex appeal all over the place. Torvil and Dean, for example, had so much sexual chemistry that people ever since have assumed they were married, but they weren’t; and the Russian pairs often exude eroticism galore.
(And as far as tennis goes, I always thought Steffi Graf was gorgeous. But that’s just me.)
Time for some lazy and random acts of linkage.
:: The Lord of All Things Swank points out a collection of 404 pages…including one that appears to be the actual classic text-adventure game, Zork. Oh, the hours I used to lose playing Zork…and its even greater forerunner, Colossal Cave…those were the days!
:: Via Alexandra I find the greatest Flash timewaster ever.
:: Via Lynn Sislo I find the worst jobs in science. Ewwwwww. I hope none of these jobs exist in Buffalo.
:: Scott points out a way that one can show one’s disdain for people who think they need to drive a Hummer. I don’t know…I sympathize, but I’m not sure that offending someone who is driving a vehicle that probably wouldn’t lurch more than one might expect from a low speed-bump as it ran me over is such a good idea.
I watched about a third of Gone With the Wind last night. I hadn’t seen the movie in quite a long time, and I checked the DVD out of the library. My impressions of the film remain pretty much the same as when I first sat through the whole thing, about seven or eight years ago: I find the whole depiction of the slavery-era South as a land of undying chivalry really cloying, and offhand I can’t think of a single character in this movie who is not in need of a big dope-slap. That includes Rhett Butler, who seems to inexplicably fixate on Scarlett O’Hara the second he catches his first glimpse of her. Clark Gable’s performance is wonderful, of course, but his character alternates between being a cynical realist (telling all those Southern gentlemen that when war comes, they’re likely to get their asses kicked) and being a boob (“You’re still thinking about Ashley?”, a line that is repeated way too many times).
The Max Steiner score is wonderful as always, though, and the film is still an impressive production after all these years – – in the parts where nobody is talking.
According to John Scalzi, my wistful dreams of blogging-for-dollars or, failing that, having my blogging lead to paid writing will remain just that, wistful dreams.
Alas…but he’s probably right, in the strict “career” sense. I do think that blogging keeps the writing-muscle sharp, but that’s about it, in terms of being lucrative. But then, nobody ever really knows what the future holds.
So I’ll keep dreaming.