The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Via Paul Riddell, I learn that some folks want to prepare humanity for its eventual inclusion into galactic society by introducing a form of galactic monetary currency called, naturally enough, the “Galacto”.
Hey, I think we might have found the currency on which to slap Ronald Reagan‘s visage!
I’ve been remiss in not extending condolences to Matthew Yglesias, whose mother is gravely ill. Matthew doesn’t indicate that any hope really exists for any kind of good outcome other than the kind that minimizes suffering, so for what it’s worth, I offer my hopes on that score.
In one day, MeFi has served me with notice of no fewer than three blogs or journals that strike me as highly, well, odd: one creepy, one that’s highly uncomfortable, and one that’s in such spectacularly poor taste I can’t believe my eyes.
First, the creepy one: David Berkowitz, who is the serial killer known as “Son of Sam”, is blogging about his jail-cell conversion to Christianity. (MeFi post)
Second, the one that makes me uncomfortable: a guy who, well, isn’t receiving remotely enough physical satisfaction from his wife. I sympathize with his difficulties, and even with his attempts to deal with them, but I am once again astounded at the amount of personal baggage some people feel comfortable putting online. (This one is not work safe, and neither are the others of similar bent linked in the MeFi post.)
And thirdly, the one that is in incredibly bad taste. We’re talking something that might make Ted Rall a bit queasy here, folks. Here it is. Incredible. (And possibly not work safe either, although for completely different reasons. MeFi post.)
Matthew Yglesias reports a suggestion to honor Ronald Reagan: instead of putting him on an existing coin, put him on a new dollar coin.
I actually like this idea, and that’s as a liberal who thinks very little of Reagan’s eight years and the fruits thereof. First of all, it would in one fell swoop accomplish the aim of those people who want to have something with Reagan’s visage or name in every county in America. And secondly, it might even be a way to honor Reagan’s legacy — supposed as it may be — as the “champion of smaller government”, since if we’d ever get a dollar coin out there and eliminate the paper dollar at the same time, it would save the US Mint quite a bit of money (coins last far longer than paper currency, and thus have to be minted less frequently).
Or maybe we could keep the Sacagawea dollar coin (I think the design of that coin is very beautiful), ditch the paper dollar, and then have a two dollar coin with Reagan on it. Canada has two-dollar coins, so I think we can assume that a large, modernized country can exist with big coins instead of paper currency for small denominations. And maybe all that resulting weight in the pockets would induce pants manufacturers to stop being so damned stingy with the pocket fabric. I hate flimsy pockets.
(From Reagan to pants pockets, in a single post. Yeesh.)
Rush Limbaugh: three failed marriages.
Bill Clinton: one marriage, still in progress.
When it comes time that I actually want to listen to someone tell me about family values, I think I’ll attend to the words of the person who’s actually still in a family. I guess I’m just funny that way.
Help! I’m being tempted!
(Permalinks apparently don’t work over there — scroll down to the post about Quicksilver and The Confusion.)
Macon, whom I have encountered via Mr. Meade (and in this specific case, in comments to this post of Sean’s), is trying to tempt Sean and I into reading Neal Stephenson’s latest two novels (comprising the first two installments of The Baroque Cycle, which is — I think — a trilogy with one more volume to come).
I don’t really need to be “tempted” here, per se. Reading Quicksilver is something I definitely plan to do, sometime in the next six months, I hope. The sticking point for now is that I want to be able to really clear the decks of other reading projects first, including some material I have that is for review. But Macon’s post definitely makes me want to bump the book up in the rotation.
In any event, I want to see if Stephenson has managed to squash his old bugaboo, the “99/100 of a good book, with a crappy ending” phenomenon that has afflicted him in the past. (I actually didn’t think that Cryptonomicon‘s ending was all that bad, but man, does Snow Crash ever just go wham against a brick wall on its last page.)
I don’t like manufactured neighborhoods — those manicured little developments that spring up in suburbs nowadays. I find the militant cleanliness of such neighborhoods more than a little creepy. I get uncomfortable when I’m walking past immaculate house after immaculate house, where such houses are often of identical design to the one next door, and where such houses are so big and shoehorned onto such tiny lots that the distance between one house and the next could be spanned by fewer than three Shaquille O’Neal’s laid end-to-end. And I especially don’t like when these perfectly manicured developments wherein the presence of a single dandelion in a lawn triggers a meeting of the Homeowner’s Association and, if it’s a second offence, a shunning that would make the Amish proud, is centered around a manmade lake whose perimeter is dotted with miniature trees. These kinds of places always strike me as terribly inauthentic, as if the people who live there would really rather be living in that town where they filmed The Truman Show and they just didn’t have enough money to get it there or something.
Anyway, I’m not sure if the neighborhood mentioned in this article is one of those neighborhoods or not, but I have my suspicions. I just find it kind of funny that a neighborhood’s manmade lake just drained away in a single night. Mother Nature has so many ways to give us the occasional kick in the ass, doesn’t she?
In the course of a post full of funny and slightly pithy ruminations, Lynn Sislo wonders as follows:
How come the guy sitting next to you at the stop light with his stereo turned up way too loud is never listening to Puccini?
Well, one reason is that you’re not pulling up beside me. Granted, I’m not often playing Puccini, since I no longer have a CD player in my car and am thus constrained by whatever’s on the Buffalo classical station.
Anyway, this brings to mind that a couple of weeks ago, when I got off work they were playing one of my favorite “barnburner” types of pieces: “Romanian Rhapsody #1” by Enescu. I turned the volume up quite a ways — especially for the big middle section, when the whole orchestra plays a raucous folk dance that makes me want to get drunk more than any other classical piece when I hear it — and as this passage was playing, I slowly turned a streetcorner, passing two teenaged girls who were standing on the sidewalk. And I had my hair down, and my sunglasses on, and Enescu blaring on the stereo as I drove my boxy white sedan with the red interior.
Those girls did turn their heads, but I don’t think they had any idea what to make of me. Which is fine. I am large; I contain multitudes.
In the course of looking something up on Google, I discovered that the Astronomy Picture of the Day has a terrestrial counterpart, the Earth Science Picture of the Day.
For some reason, I am incredibly biased against Earth Science. I think it traces to the fact that my high school Earth Science teacher was — well, he wasn’t a bad teacher by any means; he just didn’t make the subject interesting. At all. It’s weird, really. (Plus, he had Godawful fashion sense and he bore more than a passing resemblance to Richard Nixon.) Anyway, nearly any discussion of rocks and erosion and the like makes my eyes glaze over.
Oh, what was I looking up? Well, I looked at John Scalzi’s “cloud photo”, which he likes because he captured what he calls the “God light” — that scattering of sunlight behind a cloud into rays that seem to diverge from a single point. The technical term for this effect is “crepuscular rays”, but the name I’ve always known them by is the evocative phrase “the Rays of Buddha”. I don’t recall where I first heard this term, but there you go.