The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Remember the woman who got trampled at Wal-Mart last week in the mad rush for a cheap DVD player? Well, Kevin Drum passes on today that there’s more to the story: she has a history of filing injury claims in stores where she shops or works. Hmmmm.
The Buffalo News is now investigating whether this woman is in any way related to former (and very injury-prone) Buffalo Bills quarterback Rob Johnson.
Hitchens is mad (as if he is capable of any other state of mind) because liberals apparently literally believed the soldiers would be greeted with rose-petals. Yeah, that’s right, we liberals live in the Land Without Metaphor.
On the one hand, Hitchens engages in all that wonderful retrofitting-of-the-rationale that’s been going on ever since it started becoming clear that the “great WMD threat” was about that of a pop-gun; on the other hand, Hitchens’s case reduces to “None of your worst-case scenarios came true”, as if every liberal truly believed that those scenarios were inevitable, as opposed to merely possible. But then, Hitchens in my experience isn’t one for nuance. After all, why clean the Ming vase with a fine brush when a sandblaster would get the job done in a fraction of the time?
I have a feeling that if Hitchens wrote an article about why The Phantom Menace is a great movie, I’d end up disagreeing just by his sheer idiocy and tone.
(via Morat)
For the first time, Darth Swank admits to liking something I can’t stand: Popeye cartoons. I never liked Popeye, and I even have hazy memories of having temper tantrums when as a four-year-old the babysitter made us watch him. I just never grokked the whole thing — a barely articulate sailor who’s a weakling, unless he eats canned spinach, in which case he becomes a superhuman dynamo, along with his goofy girlfriend and some plump goofball who is obsessed with hamburgers.
I’ve seen sporadic rumors about the Net over the last day or two that President Bush wants to send Americans back to the moon. While I would be thrilled to see space exploration once again become, you know, important to the American people, I don’t want to see just some repeat of the Apollo missions. Neither does Buzz Aldrin. I want our space policy to reflect a long-term goal of permanent colonization, not just because the planet’s dominant Communist power is ramping up its space program. We’ve done Apollo before, and it was a staggering achievement. What is needed is a new stunning achievement, not a re-achievement of something we did over thirty years ago before we got bored and went about developing cable TV.
And reports out of the White House are that the rumors are just rumors. Of course, the White House has lied before. It’s one of the standard functions of the modern White House. So we’ll see.
OK, I’ll admit it: with Friends being re-runs the last couple of weeks and Scrubs having been moved to 9:30, I’ve been forced to watch the last two episodes of Survivor in their entirety. (Because turning off the TV for an hour and reading a book just isn’t an option, apparently. Ye Gods….) Anyway, aside from this Jon guy’s faking of his grandmother’s death (isn’t there some rule about planning things in advance, or something like that?), the show is dull as hell, and I can’t imagine why so many people still find it compelling. I mean, aside from the goofy games they play for the “Challenges”, the entire show revolves around one person going to talk to another person about who’s getting voted off and whatnot.
Jon talks to Lil about voting of Christie. (Some of these names aren’t accurate.) Lil talks to Sandra about voting off Darlene. Burton talks to Christie about voting off Darlene, and then Burton talks to Jon about voting off Christie. But wait, we’re just getting started! Sandy and Darlene together talk to Christie about voting off Lil! And then, Sandy does a one-on-one interview in which she insists that the women need to get together and vote off one of the guys! And then, Burton catches some fish and then talks about voting off Jeff, except they can’t because Jeff’s the host of the show. Blah blah blah blah….I just want to scream, “Yeah, we get it already! None of you is voting for who you’re promising the person next to you that you’re voting for! You’re all a bunch of Machievellian geniuses!”
Best moment: a throwaway shot of Rupert, by far the only interesting contestant, rolling his eyes at the stupidity of the whole thing during the “Tribal Council”.
Survivor sucks.
It was the President, in the Barracks, with….a fake turkey!
I, like the folks at TAPped, am sure glad a reporter was there to get to the bottom of this one. Heaven knows it’s more important than all that, you know, policy stuff.
BTW, I once watched a TV show that detailed how food is “sexed up” to look perfect for TV ads, when in reality the stuff isn’t even edible. For instance, those perfectly golden-brown turkeys on the Butterball commercials? They’re golden brown because they are literally dipped in shellac. It’s not even cooked. Ah, but how do they get that beautiful single cooked slice they always show being cut away from the succulent breast? Simple. They cut the uncooked slice from the uncooked turkey, and then they use a steam iron to “cook” the exposed surface of the meat so it looks right. So don’t worry if your food doesn’t look like the commercial, because if it did, you wouldn’t be able to eat it. (Has any McDonald’s ever served a Big Mac that was actually four inches high, as the pictures on TV make them look?)
A “Monowheel”, built in 1869.
A few days ago I posted a motorized, one-wheeled “hog” that I thought looked incredibly cool. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the vehicle I linked actually has a long pedigree. Monowheels have beena round for a long time. Check out the site linked by the picture above for more monowheels, including a video of the motorized version being driven! (Piloted? Aimed? What’s the word, anyway?)
(via Wil Duquette)
OK, folks, normally I wouldn’t do this. But I’m reading a fairly morbid book right now, called Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, which is a survey of the various uses — scientific and others — in which the dead play a role. (I tend to read this kind of stuff for story-inspiration, and the book certainly is providing that — I have about five stories I want to write that this book suggested.) It starts out fairly prosaically, with a discussion of forensic details and how cadavers must be studied in order to establish things like how much force bones can withstand before snapping (a detail without which, crash test dummies would be useless). It’s not a book for the squeamish, which is fine, because I tend to have a fairly high “squeam” threshold.
But the chapter on cadavers as an item of diet challenged me — with one passage grossing me out in particular.
And that’s all the warning you get. Do NOT click this link, unless you are (a) not at work and (b) possessed of a strong stomach!
Atrios lists ten movies he hates (actually, the same movie, ten times — he must really hate The English Patient). In the same spirit, here are ten movies I can’t stand. These aren’t necessarily the worst movies I’ve ever seen, because a lot of the very worst movies I’ve endured I can only barely remember (like a movie I once saw that had Gary Coleman as a homeless kid who had, if memory serves, the gift of being able to predict the horse races). Here goes, in no particular order:
1. City of Angels. The only film in which I have dozed off in the theater. There is a scene, late in this movie, that had me thinking, “Hmmm, a big lumber truck would be ideal right about now.” Sure enough, there was one. If you’ve seen this incredible snoozer, you’ll know exactly which scene I mean.
2. The Usual Suspects. The lamest trick movie I’ve ever seen. What started out as in interesting character study of a group of criminals detours into a “mystery” with a “staggering revelation” that I spotted a mile away.
3. Se7en. The second-lamest trick movie I’ve ever seen, with by far the crappiest ending I’ve ever had to endure. This movie was superb up to a certain event, and then it just totally derailed.
4. Scream. What the hell is this? A parody, like Blazing Saddles or Airplane!? An attempt to combine teen horror with the “Oh, we’re just so jaded” irony-fetish of the mid-1990s? Either way, it’s a dull and stupid movie in which nobody acts like any real person would act in any such situation. The Drew Barrymore scene is fun; too bad her scene constitutes the movie’s first ten minutes.
5. Alien. Good once. Boring after.
6. Aliens. Predictable and numbing.
7. Live and Let Die. By far the worst entry in the James Bond series, with more blatant sexism than ever before and a nice dose of blaxploitation to boot. Ugh.
8. Beaches. When I saw this in a college screening, everybody around me was crying at the end, and I’m thinking, “My God, I hate both of these women! They spend virtually the entire movie treating each other like dirt, and yet I’m supposed to cry when one of them dies?!”
9. Highlander. It takes a hell of a movie to fail completely despite the presence of Sean Connery and Clancy Brown, but this one pulls off the trick.
10. Saving Private Ryan. I’ll probably catch hell for this. A lot of the film is really superb (the D-Day stuff is outstanding, really), but the concluding act is one of the most staggering let-downs I’ve ever seen in a movie (probably the worst, if not for Se7en). William Goldman wrote an essay for Premiere that explains just how bad the ending is, and I agree completely. You can find the essay in Goldman’s book The Big Picture. I couldn’t put my finger on just why I didn’t like this film until I read it.