The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Retrocrush’s 100 Most Annoying Things about 2004. Pretty funny, if it does recycle jokes from elsewhere (#15, for example) and even if more than a few of the jokes are mean-spirited.
Regarding #77: Am I still the only person who likes that stuff?
(via Scott of Archipelapogo)
If you haven’t already done so, be sure to check out The Promised King, where I am serializing my novel-in-progress, at the rate of two chapters per month. And feel free to link it! I’m posting the book because I want it to be read.
Oh, and I’d like a pony.
OK, now that several days have past since the Buffalo Bills ended a pretty surprising 9-7 season with a disappointing 29-24 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers, I note that lots of folks in Buffalo are still trying to figure out what went wrong in that game. It’s interesting how, in a town like Buffalo where football is pretty much the only game in town (even moreso what with the Sabres locked out along with the rest of the NHL), the level of anger at a Bills loss as evidenced on the sports talk radio shows is at the same level on Thursday as it was on Sunday just after the game’s conclusion.
Anyway, what happened in that game? How did a team that had been on a six-game winning streak lose at home in a game where a victory would have put them in the playoffs to a team that had nothing to play for at all, and thus gave its backups extensive playing time?
My answer is: coaching. I don’t want to disparage Mike Mularkey and his coaching staff, since they certainly did better in a single year than Gregg Williams ever did in three, but he was still a rookie head coach, and it showed in the last game — especially when compared to the effort of Steelers head coach Bill Cowher (who, incidentally, has been with his team longer than any other coach currently active in the NFL). So what was the difference between the two coaching efforts? One team was ready for adversity, and the other was not.
One theme that has come up repeatedly in the newspaper articles and the talk radio shows is that when Bills kicker Rian Lindell missed a short field-goal in the third quarter, the Bills completely lost the momentum of the game. They never played well again, even though the missed FG still left them one point ahead of the Steelers. Simply put, the Bills were not prepared to deal with adversity in the “big game” situation.
The Steelers also faced some adversity in the third quarter. Leading 16-10, Tommy Maddox threw an interception, which the Bills immediately ran back for the touchdown that gave them their only lead in the game. Did the Steelers, suddenly down by a point after a bad throw, panic? Did they lose focus? Did they give up? No.
So one team was ready for adversity, and the other wasn’t. That goes back to coaching. Not the “X’s and O’s” stuff the coaches do, and not the game planning, but the pure leadership and setting of the tone that constitutes the most important part of a coach’s job.
The Bills faced quite a bit of adversity this season, and Mike Mularkey deserves a great deal of credit for steering them through it. But he couldn’t get them through one last bit of it in a game they should have been able to win. Bill Cowher, on the other hand, was able to inspire his backups to play like they meant it in a game whose outcome had no bearing on his teams’ playoffs one way or the other.
On the basis of this one game, I’ve been reconsidering Cowher as a coach.
I could swear that as I was getting dressed this morning, I heard someone on the Today Show note the fact that Indonesia boasts the world’s largest population of Muslims, and then go on to speculate that the Islamic world might well be surprised that the United States is acting with as much concern as it is over the tsunami disaster there. Assuming I heard correctly, could a dumber thing have possibly been said? Do we really need to look upon one of the most massive, if not the most massive, relief project of all time as an opportunity to score some “brownie points” with a constituency with which we haven’t been seeing eye-to-eye with lately (to understate things drastically)?
Via Craig of BUFFALOg I note the creation of new blog from Buffalo, whose name is, shall we say, problematic from the standpoint of the one, true Buffalo blog. Still, a newly-minted blog from the Niagara Frontier is always welcome.
Lynn Sislo links the 100 scariest movie scenes of all time. I haven’t seen a whole lot of these, but the ones that I have seen are certifiably scary. But of course, I have a few suggestions of my own:
:: Pinocchio. Disney movies weren’t always “warm and fuzzy”; they often had some pretty scary imagery. In the “Pleasure Island” sequence of Pinocchio, the bit where Lampwick turns into a donkey is particularly effective.
:: Castaway. There are two scenes here that freak me out. First, the whole plane-crash sequence, because there’s none of the “warning” stuff — no external shots of something going wrong with the plane, no shots of the cockpit crew saying things like “We’re suddenly losing altitude!”. Just Tom Hanks standing in the cargo area, and then BANG! the plane’s going down and all hell breaks loose.
And since Lynn notes in her post that a particular scene involving dental work sans painkiller freaked her out, there’s a similarly-themed sequence in Castaway that had me wincing something awful.
:: Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I still find the abduction of Barry Guiler unnerving, and so much of the stylistic stuff later used in The X-Files can be traced to that one scene, right down to the incoungruity of a Johnny Mathis song playing in the background.
:: Jaws. The “Top 100” list has several scenes from Jaws, but I think an overlooked scene is when the two local yokels decide to try to catch the shark with “the wife’s holiday roast”. The shark takes the roast, rips the pier free of its moorings, and while the yokel who’s fallen into the water starts swimming back to shore, the wreckage of the pier slowly comes about….
:: Dead Again. The final scene between Freddie and Inga.
:: Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Pink shaves his entire body; the marching hammers; the copulating orchids.
:: The Abyss. Jammer’s freak-out. There’s a POV shot as Jammer yanks on the rope, to find the torn end floating toward him, and the only sound we hear is Jammer’s rapidly-becoming out of control breathing.
:: The Silence of the Lambs. “It puts the lotion in the basket”. Yeeps! (Does it make me a bad person if at least once a week I have to restrain myself at The Store from coming up behind some customer who’s in the lotion aisle and uttering this line?)
:: Jurassic Park. The initial approach of the T-Rex is as well-done a sequence of this type as any I can remember.
:: In the Line of Fire. When the assassin makes a mistake in talking to some unknowing banker that might bring suspicion upon him, he visits the banker at her home.
The Buffalo News today runs a review of Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Now, I happen to think that On Writing is the single best book about writing that I’ve ever encountered, but the book came out four years ago. That’s what you call “timely reviewing”.
The News is also running a short-story contest. I’m considering entering, but the deadline is in just over two weeks, which isn’t really all that great a timeframe for me to generate a story. And their required word count is 1500 words, which is spectacularly short for me — I’ve only managed to confine myself to that level of brevity once (“The City of Dead Works”), and they supply the opening paragraph, which already hampers me since I don’t think I’d start a story thusly. But you never know.
And in one final bit of writing-related business, the News today called to inform me that they will be printing a piece I wrote for their op-ed page. It’s a pretty searing personal essay relating to the birth of Little Quinn, and I actually had the essay sitting on my hard drive for over a month while I waffled on whether to submit it or not. When the piece appears I’ll post the URL to the online version. I expect that it will be a month or so; I seem to recall waiting that long last time they accepted something of mine.
And now, gee whiz — no sooner do I decide that I’m no longer going to take the writing thing so seriously in 2005, and return to just writing for myself, that I place a piece and start to feel the juices flowing again. As Mr. King himself says in On Writing, it’s like entering your summer cottage after a long winter, turning on the faucets, and seeing that the pipes still work, even though they “creak” a lot.
Sarah Jane Elliott has an extensive, and spoiler-filled, review of the new Phantom of the Opera movie. You know, the one whose marketing campaign has been so nonexistent that I didn’t even know the movie had opened.
The Wife and I want to see the film, since back in 1999 we had what we called “Phantom Week”: we attended a performance of Phantom of the Opera at Shea’s in Buffalo, and then we went to an opening-day screening of The Phantom Menace. Now there was a fine week.
Bummer. Warren Ellis is closing down Die Puny Humans, and folding his content there into warrenellis.com. I hope he still plumbs the depths for all manner of weirdness, even if his filthy monkey no longer plans.