The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Last week, American Idol saw the elimination of John Stevens, the big-band crooner wannabe.
This week, American Idol‘s musical theme is….big-band crooning.
It wouldn’t be surprising to me if John is sitting at home right now, watching the show, and to crib a phrase from Alan Jay Lerner, using “language that would make a sailor blush”.
More shipwreck stuff: here’s an amazing set of photographs depicting ice buildup on a vessel in frigid waters.
The ship depicted is apparently a Coast Guard vessel that was searching for a missing fishing boat; what happens in such cold climes is that the salt spray literally freezes to the rigging and the decks and basically every exposed surface. If this ice is not cleared diligently, the ship can become top-heavy enough to capsize — which is assumed to have been the fate of the missing fishing boat. It’s a haunting set of images.
(via MeFi)
Joe Morgan Chat Day, with one of the funniest introductions to a blog post I’ve ever read. It starts with a long series of quotes relating to drink, and eventually relates them all back to Joe Morgan, the ESPN baseball analyst and onetime star of some highly-regarded ballclub or other. (Probably the Reds, I guess. Everybody seems to hail from the Reds, eventually.)
Over at Terminus, Drew is contemplating the direction of his blog. Specifically, he’s thinking of shifting from a predominant focus on politics to a focus on movie reviews and general commentary and the occasional picture of a beautiful woman. My thunder is in danger of being stolen! Put down my thunder, scoundrel!
More seriously, though, I’ll continue visiting Terminus no matter what Drew does, but I suspect he may be overanalyzing what happens in his comments. I don’t think comments are really all that good an indicator of what readership may want or respond to, for blogs whose traffic is under a certain threshold. (This includes mine.) I know that I am almost always surprised at which posts generate the most commenting activity (unless I’m specifically asking readers to comment), and it seems probable to me that the only time one really gets heavy commenting to political threads is if the blog is one of the heavy-hitters of Blogistan to begin with — I’m thinking at least a “Large Mammal” on the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem, for example.
My general suspicion is that the political section of Blogistan has pretty much “settled out”, with there being almost no chance of a new blogger ascending to Atrios or Glenn Reynolds or Kevin Drum or Steven Den Beste levels. My parallel suspicion is that bloggers who don’t focus on politics (by “focus” I mean, feature well over 50% of posts containing political content) probably will never climb to those levels either, simply because Blogistan has for good or ill become associated with cranky political commentary.
And now I’m not really sure where I’m going with this. Oh well….
Oliver Willis has joined the ranks of bloggers who have turned blogging into a real-life job opportunity.
And here I am, sitting in Buffalo, watching the Universe swirl right on by. Dooby dooby doo….
(BTW, is it just slight overkill that every entry on Oliver’s blog bears a link to Senator Kerry’s campaign?)
Oh, the searches that bring people here….like this one.
If such a thing exists, I do not want to know about it, OK?
New York grocery stores want to sell wine. I say, bring it on!
When I went to college in Iowa, I enjoyed going to the local grocery store because I could stock up on the week’s supplies: milk, chips, Ramen noodles, mac-and-cheese, and wine. Yup, wine. I enjoy wine, although my economic situation has rarely afforded me the opportunity to indulge that particular interest much beyond keeping a few bottles of red and port on hand. (Plus the small bottle of 1989 Sauternes I am aging until I sell my first novel.)
Unfortunately, in New York State, grocery stores are not allowed to sell wine. You have to go to liquor stores to get it. Now, in Buffalo, this isn’t a problem at all: we have a lot of “liquor superstores” in the region, with the Premier Group being the best-known. In fact, there are three such stores within a ten-minute drive of my home (and two of those are within five minutes, and the closer of those two is just a ten-minute walk away). It’s not like wine is hard to get in New York, unless you live in one of the smaller towns where the liquor store is just mildly less scary than a large-city bus station.
But it would still be great to be able to get wine in a grocery store — especially a store like mine, whose focus in the last couple of years has been on meal preparation and in helping shoppers to select ingredients and offer suggestions for how to cook and entertain. Wine would be an invaluable part of that focus, and I can only imagine it would be immensely helpful for shoppers who are looking to get a bottle of wine to go with the meal they’re preparing that day to be able to get that bottle of wine without having to make an additional stop somewhere else.
For serious oenophiles, I doubt that the grocery stores will ever really compete. There’s only so much shelf-space to go around, and someone whose interest lies in collecting wine or maintaining a decent home cellar probably won’t find much of use in a grocery store. Certainly that was the case at the Iowa grocery store I frequented ten years ago: the selection was all Gallo and Bolla.
One concern expressed in the Buffalo News article linked is the fear that grocers here would do the same: stock the most popular California wines and ignore the fine local producers. I would greatly hope that this would not be the case. New York State ranks second in wine production in the United States, and I for one would be greatly nonplused if I saw that local wines weren’t being stocked on the shelves of local stores.
Still, I love the idea of wine being available in the grocery stores. “Wine is food,” as the Frugal Gourmet used to say, and putting it in the grocery stores will only help to see it as such.
A while back, PZ Myers posted a snapshot of one of his bookshelves and asked that others do the same, in a close-up so that he could actually pick out some titles. I finally got around to scanning one in. It’s a pretty massive image, so I won’t post it directly to the blog; instead, here it is. [EDIT, 7-17-04: I have removed the picture, because it was really big and took up lots of space.] The picture is of the top three shelves of the tall bookcase seen on the right-hand side of a pic in this earlier post of mine. (The larger version of the picture in that post is no longer available, by the way.)
Like Dr. Myers, I gravitate toward people’s bookshelves whenever I’m in their home. In fact, my bookish nosiness goes farther than that: at The Store, if I see one of my coworkers reading a book while they’re on lunch break, I will often barge in and ask them what they’re reading. It’s just a horrible quirk of mine. Sometimes I think I could provide color-commentary for shoppers at Borders:
“OK, folks, the man and his girlfriend have entered the Science Fiction and Fantasy section, and they’re looking over the hardcovers first. The man reaches for a book — look at the confident way he sticks his hand out there, he knows what he wants! — ooooooh, he’s looking at the newest Shannara book. Swing-and-a-miss! But what’s this? The girlfriend has gone a little bit ahead of him, and she’s looking at what looks like an Octavia Butler trade paperback…but she’s holding her back to the boyfriend, like she doesn’t want him to know what she’s reading. The way he’s grokking that Robert Jordan atlas, she probably doesn’t have to worry….So let’s turn our attention for a moment to that cute girl making capuccino in the cafe, just because we can….”
Recently the Wife and I attended a get-together at a local acquaintance’s home. They live in a gorgeous new home, with something like 19000 square feet in their living room alone, eight TVs, six computers, two bedrooms for each kid, and a kitchen wherein Emeril Lagasse, Wolfgang Puck, and Mario Batali could each make a separate Thanksgiving dinner at the same time and never run into one another — and not a single bookshelf. I mean, not one. There was no evidence anywhere in that entire house — and we got the grand tour — of the presence of a single, solitary scrap of reading material beyond the Sunday paper and the phone book. It was just incredibly weird, almost creepy.
To me, a house without books is little more than a collection of walls, and a crappy apartment filled with books is more homey than a palatial house with none.
Mickey links an LA Weekly article about David Letterman and his fairly fearless and cranky (and often hilarious) bashing of President Bush. My favorite Bush clip from Letterman’s show has the President giving a speech when he says this:
“The left hand [gestures with right hand] didn’t know what the right hand [gestures with left hand] was doing.”
Letterman got a ton of mileage out of that.
(Although I’d sure hate to be whatever CBS intern has the job decribed in the article as sitting through hours of unedited Presidential news coverage. And I used to enjoy watching C-SPAN, back in the days of cable.)
