The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Longtime viewers of Friends remember that the gang used to occasionally gaze out the window of Monica’s apartment and follow the adventures of “Ugly Naked Guy”, a guy who lived in an apartment across the street and who apparently never wore clothes. (Ugly Naked Guy eventually moved away, leaving his apartment open for Ross. “Ironically, all those boxes seem to be marked ‘Clothes’,” Chandler observed as UNG was packing.)
Why am I bringing this up? Oh, just because….
In the middle of an update about life stuff, The Grey Bird relates a call she received from the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra’s ticket sales people. I read this with mild interest, because when we first moved from the Southern Tier to Buffalo four years ago, I actually interviewed with the BPO’s sales staff for a job, and I got to listen in on one of their sales calls, which starts with a “Hi, we’re just calling to see if you liked the concert” type of thing before awkwardly sliding into a sales pitch. (Why do companies think that sales calls can be disguised thusly? Yeesh.) But I have to say, the call that I got to hear didn’t go anywhere near as far afield as Grey Bird’s did. Wow. No way I’d be comfortable doing that.
Looking for something good to watch when all that’s on is boring basketball? Or are all the copies of From Justin to Kelly out of stock at BlockBuster? Well, Sean links a nifty list of underappreciated movies, and it really is a good list. There are 100 movies on this list, and the only ones I’d question are as follows:
Dragonslayer In fairness, it’s been a long time since I saw this one, but I recall it being pretty dour and humorless. I should watch it again, though. (Alex North’s last film score, by the way.)
Alien 3. I don’t like any of the Alien movies, but this one’s especially bad. Not even a good score (Eliott Goldenthal) saves it from being dreck.
Young Sherlock Holmes. This is two-thirds of a really good movie. The ending, in which the great detective suddenly becomes an action hero, stinks. Great score by Bruce Broughton, though.
The Mosquito Coast. I can’t say I like this one much, but it’s worth watching just to remind oneself of what Harrison Ford was capable of doing before he decided, after The Fugitive, to stop challenging himself.
Point Break. Good idea for a movie, really, and it’s fun for a while. But about two-thirds of the way through it just won’t stop taking itself so damned seriously. Scrubs fans can enjoy a younger John C. McGinley (Dr. Cox), though, as a snotty FBI superior.
The Last Boy Scout. Nope. Sorry. I love this movie’s opening credits, and the very first scene is pretty good (“Whoa, did that football player really just do that?!”), but after that it’s pretty dull and depressing. And really, I can’t get behind a movie that has Bruce Willis, after he’s defeated all the bad guys, embracing his wife and whispering “Fuck you” in her ear. Come on.
The Hudsucker Proxy. I like weirdness and flights-of-fancy and all that, but this one is just too “out there”. Good production design and all that, but we’re talking about a movie whose MacGuffin is a hula-hoop. Sure.
A couple of anime notes:
:: First of all, the big news is the recently announced DVD release of three more Studio Ghibli films. I’m looking forward to seeing Porco Rosso and Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, and I’m really looking forward to having a DVD of My Neighbor Totoro, which is quite simply one of the finest films I have ever seen. As ever, keep an eye on Nausicaa.net for Ghibli-related news, and Destroy All Monsters for general Asian pop-culture stuff.
:: Regular readers of USS Clueless know that when he’s not writing 9000-word essays about how America should be bombing into submission everything between Tunis and Calcutta (yes, I’m oversimplifying!), Steven Den Beste has quite the budding interest in anime. (“Budding” probably isn’t the word, since he’s amassed an anime library that’s apparently rather impressive.) The other day, SDB posted a helpful summation of his recommendations thus far. His post centers on the anime series he has watched — i.e., no stand alone films — which actually strikes me as being pretty helpful, since I tend to look at the anime section at Media Play and wonder which end is up.
:: Not quite anime-related, but I have a new review of an “issue” of a manga called Dragon Knights over on DAM. It’s probably not a very helpful review for those wondering if they want to read that series (for reasons I explain), but there it is.
Since I seem to be slipping into making Friday my general day of inactivity here, I may just redub the Burst of Weirdness on a permanent basis. But I don’t know yet, really. So I’ll just keep toying with expectations. Heh!
Anyway, I’ve noticed over the years that for any occupation that exists in pretty much any locale, somewhere there will be a museum and/or Hall of Fame devoted to that particular occupation. Case in point: The International Towing and Recovery Hall of Fame.
On a related thought, how long until someone puts up a “Blogging Hall of Fame” on the Web?
I can’t wait to see what happens when the right-wing of Blogistan sets its sights on this. Keyboards will be bursting into flame, no?
This, to me, is a perfect example of the Universe’s warped sense of humor. I mean, the guy’s gotta have a lawyer, but this is just too much!
Right now, five planets are visible to the naked eye from the Earth’s surface. This alignment will not recur for 32 years.
And what’s the weather like in Buffalo, for those of us who’d just love to get outside and see our planetary neighborhood? And, you know, show it to our daughters who after all will (theoretically) be off and making lots of money in her own career next time this happens?
Friggin’ cloudy, that’s what. We’ve been overcast for four days in a row.
The window for viewing all five planets closes on April 5, so hopefully there will be at least one clear night between now and then. Problem is, spring in Buffalo tends to be our worst season, weather-wise. Here’s hoping.
Sunrise on March 22 over the Western Canal in Tempe, AZ.
Taking the lazy-way out again by pilfering the Astronomy Picture of the Day from a few days ago, I just thought this one was unusually striking. The Western Canal runs directly east-to-west, so one day after the vernal equinox (the one day being due to Tempe’s latitudinal position), the sun rises exactly in alignment with the Canal, yielding this blazing image. How cool is that!
And what would Peggy Noonan, she of the ever-so-tossable (and ever-so-empty) head, have written had he done what she now insists was so clearly what he should have done all along?
I’ll tell you what, Peggy. Don’t bitch about it now. Show me that you were writing columns insisting that Bill Clinton take on the terrorists back then, when you were having your “off the record” lunch. (Pretty convenient claim, that.) Show me the columns you wrote during the 90s when you said that if Bill Clinton took us to war to get rid of Saddam Hussein, why, you’d support it one hundred percent. Or, how about a column from 1996 in which you argue that a President Dole would be a lot better at fighting terrorists?
Oh, that’s right. There weren’t any such columns. “Bill Clinton didn’t do enough to fight terrorism” isn’t much of a claim if you have no basis for the idea that “A Republican would have done so much more!” This kind of crap reminds me of what I wonder about people who insist that Nostradamus predicted the 9-11-01 attacks: “How come nobody out what Nostradamus was talking about before it happened?!”
(link via TBogg, who reads a lot more of this kind of crap than can really be healthy.)
Longtime readers of mine know that I don’t put a whole lot of stock in the idea that America has somehow “lost its manhood”, a thesis that I generally find holding sway in people who have watched too many John Wayne movies and who have the whole “gun as surrogate phallus” thing going on to a level that’s a tad creepy. (See that idiotic “Pussification” essay by Kim Du Toit from a few months back for the best — or worst — framing of the “argument”.) I tend to think that America has never been any greater a repository of “manhood” than anyplace else, and that American “manhood” is doing just fine. OK? OK.
But come on!
“Exercise guru Richard Simmons allegedly slapped a man who made a sarcastic remark about one of his videos, police said. Simmons, known for his Sweatin’ to the Oldies series of exercise videos set to songs from the 1950s and 60s, was cited for misdemeanor assault.”
Just think: there’s a man out there, somewhere, who had to tell the police that he was assaulted by Richard Simmons. Well, I hope he was a midget; otherwise, someone’s got a problem in the “testosterone” area.
(Actually, isn’t the mental image of Richard Simmons in a Greco-wrestling match with a midget kind of appealing, in a “I’d like to watch that on the USA Network at 1:30 a.m. after drinking eight beers” kind of way?)