The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
I’ve added these folks to the main blogroll, because, well, I can. (That, and they’re interesting reads.)
:: Redwood Dragon
:: Experiments in Writing, Singing and Blogging
:: Peevish
:: The Gray Monk
No descriptions; just go check them out.
Original MTV veejay J.J. Jackson has died at the age of 62. He had a heart attack. I’m one who grew up with MTV — I first saw it when I was 11, about a year after it started — and I well recall Jackson, along with Martha Quinn, Adam Curry, Nina Blackwood and Mark Goodman. There really was a time when MTV was pretty friggin’ cool, and J.J. Jackson was a big part of that.
(via Darth Swank, who had his own drive-by of the Grim Reaper yesterday.)
OK, on a pure whim, here is a quiz I’m cobbling together. Very simply, these are the last lines of books I own. (By “last line”, I mean, the last line of the story of main body of the work. No appendices, author’s notes, or anything like that. By that standard, many would have to be some variant of “This book is set in 11-point Helvenicia, a typeface designed by Sir Wadrick the Walloper of Northsandpembrokewichshire in 1644 as a result of a lost bar bet.”)
Most are fiction, but some are not. A few will be obvious, a few not so obvious. Enjoy. I’ll post the answers next week sometime.
1. “He braced himself for this big fucking scream.”
2. “End it with the ending of a night.”
3. “We’ve won it. It’s going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things.”
4. “Waves broke in swift lines on the beach, and she walked over the sand toward her friends, in the wind, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars.”
5. “Away on the horizon he could see the golden edge of a kingdom where, since he was a small child, he had always longed to go.”
6. ” ‘Boy, I’m glad all that supernatural stuff is over,’ the bat said.”
7. “To a receptive audience, it might be a kind of Second Coming.”
8. “Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.”
9. “The cannons of his adversary were thundering in the tattered morning when the Majesty of England drew himself up to meet the future with a peaceful heart.”
10. “And, in time, only the bards knew the truth of it.”
11. “Therefore, we say — speaking as living and (we think) thinking beings, as carriers of the fire — therefore, choose life.”
12. “What I have been trying so hard to tell you all along is simply that my fahter, without the slightest doubt, was the most marvelous and exciting father any boy ever had.”
13. “They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will love it no less for its obscurity and fragility. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way.”
14. “Again: If you receive this message, please respond!”
15. “So I have just one wish for you — the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.”
Archipelapogo celebrates three years of blogging today. Congratulations to Scott!
Oh, and he’s doing a bit of fundraising: donate at least $3.00 to one of three causes (he specifies them), and he’ll send you a CD-R of depressing music. Scott seems to know a lot about the contemporary music scene (something which I know perilously little about), so I have some confidence that, despite the theme of the CD, he’ll pick good stuff.
In the course of my job, I wander in and out of many departments for just moments at a time — seconds, even, if I’m just passing through. This means that I overhear bits of conversation between employees that, in some cases, are intriguing and in others make me think, “GAAHHHH, I gotta get outta here!” Here are a few from the last day or two:
1. One guy, standing on top of some very high shelves to do some stocking, calls down to his helper on the floor: “Hey, do you think those boxes will support me when I jump down?” (He was about twenty feet off the ground. The boxes stood at no higher than four feet.)
2. One woman, to another, unaware that I was anywhere near, even though I wear keys that jangle and frequently hum whilst walking: “Yeah, the doctor’s going to do an examination because he thinks my eggs aren’t implanting. And I really hate those exams, because I don’t like the way it feels when–” (At this point I feigned several loud coughs.)
3. Produce Guy #1: “I dunno, you think he’ll be pissed?”
Produce Guy #2: “Dude, she’s his sister!”
(This one, I wanted to stick around for. Alas, I couldn’t figure out a way to do it without being obvious.)
The Ardagh Chalice.
Considered one of the finest examples of Celtic art and metallurgy, the Ardagh Chalice was found in the mid 1800s (I found several different years for its finding while researching online) by a young man in Ardagh, Ireland, who was digging potatoes at the time. The Chalice dates to the 8th century AD, where early Irish church fathers used cups like this in performing Communion.
I first read about the Chalice in Thomas Cahill’s book How the Irish Saved Civilization. In describing the Chalice, Cahill describes how a worshipper drinking the sacramental wine from the cup will, in the course of draining it, tilt it toward Heaven, revealing its intricately-carved underside to God. This bit of detail has always struck me as a particularly lovely facet of ritual. I was unable, sadly, to find any images of the carved underside on the Web.
I suspect that at least a few of my readers are baffled at the fact that, at least for now, I’m genuinely happy to be working as a clean-up guy at a grocery store. Well, I actually am enjoying the work, but if you’d rather see some context in which my current job looks even better than I already think it is, feast your eyes.
That third photo just kills me. I imagine this poor guy saying “Excuse me, Captain? I was reading a book last night and it mentioned something called a tripod. Do you think we could try–” “Shut up and go hold that thing up!”
I tend to get stopped at least once a day in The Store by customers looking for stuff, and since I’ve shopped in that store for years before getting hired to work there, I pretty much know where most things are — but I can’t rattle off the aisle numbers, because I don’t know those. So, when I get stopped by customers, I’ll often tell them something like “I’m new, so I’m not really sure. But let’s see…I think they’re down this way…I’ll run and look for you…ah, yes, there they are! Can I get them down for you? Will two be enough?”
They love this. Oh yes, they do. Not that it will help them when our overlords come back to reclaim the planet…heh heh heh!