The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Morat of Skeptical Notion enters his second year of blogging, and Darth Swank was too busy at work to realize he’d entered his third. Congratulations to both are in order!
UPDATE: The Dead Parrots Society also celebrates a year of blogging….by taking a hiatus. Oh well, at least that kept their most recent link to me at the very top of their page for several days!
Since I now have not one but two people who think that my head-shot makes me look like I spend my spare time burying an axe in the skull of innocent Western New Yorkers, I rescanned the photo and spent a little time dinking around with my photo-editing software in an effort to lighten it up and make myself look a tad less evil and a bit more benign. (I would ask Robert, my professional photographer/artist friend, for help in this, but I know him too well to do so. He’d almost certainly Photoshop in a forked tongue protruding from my mouth or something. And no, this is not an invitation for all you weirdos out there to start Photoshopping my head. Not that I can stop you. Oh, crap.)
Anyway, I’m hoping that I look less murderous and more like the hippie that I was told I look like over here. I should have worn my tie-dye shirt that night.
Via 2Blowhards (in the middle of one of their “Elsewhere” grab-bag posts), I see this Lawrence Block article about signed books. It’s a fascinating article:
“James Ellroy signed the entire first printing of My Dark Places, some 65,000 books in all. He wrote two words, James and Ellroy, 65,000 times each. That’s 130,000 words, which is more than he took to write the whole damn book.”
Interesting, that.
Even more interesting is the fact that occasionally The Store will get in some cookbooks by TV chefs that are signed — such as the copy of Martin Yan’s Chinatown Cooking that I just bought today. I was going to buy it anyway, because I love cookbooks in general and Chinese cookbooks more specifically and big beautiful Chinese cookbooks with lots of color photos of the food most of all, and because I always liked watching Martin Yan on TV (“If Yan can cook, you can too!”), especially when he’d pull out his cleaver and bone a chicken in thirty seconds. All the greater was my surprise when I glanced inside the front cover to find the inscription in black marker: “Good food, good wine, good health, a wonderful life — Martin Yan”. That’s just cool, especially since I missed out on the signed Alton Brown cookbook we had in stock a few months back.
To my knowledge, this is the only signed book that I own.
Here is why I admire Senator John McCain, even though I disagree with him on most issues. (Link via Pandagon.) I see nothing necessarily pro-war or anti-war in acknowledging the names of our fallen soldiers and in seeing their flag-draped coffins brought home, with all the attendant pageantry as befits men and women who have voluntarily placed themselves in positions of tremendous risk.
A friend of mine said this, in an e-mail:
“Agree or disagree about this war, the majority of those faces last night [on Nightline] were 19-21 years of age. They should be seen. They shouldn’t be just numbers. I can not imagine why some of the families were upset about this. When I saw the black & white photo of a smiling Kirk Straseskie, the young man from Wisconsin whose death struck me so hard, it was nothing short of profound. Here was someone who always wanted to be in the Marines since he was a little kid, someone who lost his life trying to save others because it was a natural thing for him to do, he had spent his life helping so many people. He deserves to be remembered. They all do. Seven have been lost from Minnesota. One took his own life. He wasn’t included last night.”
I have yet to live in a town where there is not a granite memorial bearing the engraved names of soldiers from that town lost in some war or other. Mostly they are Viet Nam, Korea, or World War II memorials; I’ve also seen World War I memorials and in one town a Civil War memorial whose names are so worn one must angle oneself against the sun to read them.
Memory is a fragile thing that disappears all too easily. We should not confuse it with politics, lest we debase both. All names and faces eventually fade away, but we should never hasten the process.
An American hostage in Iraq has escaped from his captors and been subsequently rescued by American soldiers.
I don’t think this is any kind of omen for things in Iraq one way or the other, but it’s certainly the best possible news for one man and his family.
Angie McKaig, whose blog is always a good source of tech-related linkage, reports that she’s launching her own business: a venture called Pampered Puppy, which is exactly what it says it is. If you’re one of those dog-owners who spoils the animal, she’s got you covered.
Good luck to her.
Catherine on kids and movies:
“My eldest child has had an obsessive fear of sharks ever since my brother introduced her, at 4, to Jaws. It is so severe that I do even attempt to argue against her concerns, even in fresh water.”
My parents would not let me watch Jaws until I was a teenager, which always struck me as weird since they took me to Raiders of the Lost Ark when I was nine. (Although my father might have thought better of it had he known beforehand about all the facial-explosions at the film’s climax.) I don’t recall too much other stuff about their parental concerns back then, since my film tastes as a kid were pretty tame. I was never all that interested in going to R-movies just because they were R-movies, and they occasionally took me if I asked. I wanted to see Bladerunner merely because Harrison Ford was in it (this was when Ford was starting to become the Coolest Thing Ever), and both my mother and I ended up hating that movie, not because it was violent, but because it was boring. (I still think so, by the way. I’ve watched Bladerunner a few times since then, and I still always find it nice to look at for a few minutes but then dull-as-ditchwater.)
So, what questionable decisions have I made with The Daughter, in terms of movies? Well, a year ago I watched Titanic while in the room with her. She was playing a computer game at the time, so I didn’t think much of it, especially when she interpreted the parts when the ship’s stern is tilting up into the air and people are sliding down the length of the ship in terms of the slides at the playground. And then, a day or two later, The Wife went to give the Daughter a bath…and that’s when the paralyzing fear of water hit with full force. It took us about two months to get over that. So, I think I’ll be keeping Jaws out of her eyes for at least a few more years. And, just to be safe, I’ll do likewise with The Abyss. You can’t be too careful with those water movies, you know.
The Daughter has also seen the first two Lord of the Rings movies. I generally skip past the really violent parts, but in general I find the violence in those films to be of an almost cartoonish variety. When I get the Return of the King DVD, though, I do plan to skip past some of the opening “warping of Smeagol” stuff — especially that tight closeup of his rotting teeth as he sinks them into a raw fish. Strangely, her favorite part of the LOTR movies is the very opening of The Two Towers. She just loves the way Gandalf falls into “the hole”, and then he catches his sword and starts beating up the big mean monster. All this, of course, both appeals to me (on the basis that I’m raising her with a delightfully warped sense of humor) and appalls me (on pretty much the same grounds). Plus, well — the water movies seem to offer more in terms of a “real-world” scare. There aren’t any orcs in the world these days.
Of course, there are the Star Wars movies, all of which she’s seen. I don’t find much objectionable at all in those, although my original intent to take her to see Attack of the Clones in the theater was quashed when I realized she’d likely have nightmares if she saw the execution scene, when the three big-ass beasties come out of their cages, on the big screen with their shrieks in blaring digital sound. But then, that scene is her favorite part of the DVD, so either I was overly protective, or the TV tends to reduce stuff like that to a less frightening stature. Anyway, when Padme swings down on the chain and kicks the “mean kitty” (that’s what The Daughter calls that particular monster), well, for her that’s the biggest laugh in the movie.
In general, my approach to film selection seems to be more skewed to trying to keep The Daughter from watching bad movies than from watching ones that are too violent. It seems to me that a good movie with content a bit beyond her age level is less likely to undermine what I’m trying to accomplish, as a parent, than a crappy movie is. I’d rather her watch the Helm’s Deep sequence of The Two Towers now than, say, From Justin to Kelly at any age.
(BTW, Catherine’s oldest is apparently going to prom. I applaud Catherine’s sense of appropriate prom-attire, but all the same, when it comes time for my daughter to be thinking of such things, I hope she doesn’t mind wearing a dress that hermetically seals in the back. And the fact that I’ll be in the limo too. With a gun. And five boxes of bullets. And I don’t even own a gun presently. It seems to me they should just rent guns out to fathers on prom night.)
As is my habit at the start of each new month, I drone on a bit here about the traffic at Byzantium’s Shores from last month. Because, you know, I could accurately use for this blog the tagline “Now with even more navel-gazing!”
April of 2004 was the fourth-highest month yet for traffic here. The record is still held by January; since then, hits have trailed off by about a hundred or so each month until April, when there was a slightly sharper drop. This was no doubt due to the fact that I took a week-long hiatus. I draw encouragement from the fact that the month’s highest single day, in terms of hits, came a couple of days after I returned to posting, which I choose to interpret as the screaming hordes scrambling at the gates to get back in. Or something like that.
April also saw yet another failed attempt by me to score a link from the elusive Atrios, after I e-mailed him the news of Buffalo Congressman Jack Quinn’s impending departure, which raises the possibility of a Democratic pick-up in the House. Every few months I poke Atrios with a stick, to no avail. C’est la vie!
And finally, I note that the fact that traffic didn’t drop like a stone into the Marianas Trench after I posted my head shot at left means that I do not actually look like an axe-murderer, as some future subjects of a Chick Tract would have you believe. I win!
On with the show!
UPDATE: I have just been notified, on the Bright Weavings message boards, that I look like a hippie. I’ll take that over the axe-murderer.
It turns out, upon further inspection after the “Tristan” post below, that the University of Indiana maintains quite a few music scores online. Looking at the full orchestral score to Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, in its online version, thrills me to the core. (I have owned a copy of this score for years, but still, this is amazingly cool.)
Blogger is pretty notorious for eating posts, although I have been victimized by this less often than I sometimes think I should be, given the frequency with which I see other people saying things like “I had this great post, and Blogger ate it!”
What happens to me fairly frequently — a couple of times a month — is that a post will spontaneously duplicate on me. That’s weird.