The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
The Unsinkable Mr. Jones reports that he has been experimenting with his beard. As in, actually growing one. I knew he’d weaken one day! Now if we can just get him to let that hair of his grow beyond 1/8 inch. What is it with guys and freakishly short hair these days?!
(Of course, Matt was always better looking than me in school, and he’s substantially more successful, from the financial standpoint. So any fashion advice from me probably shouldn’t be taken terribly seriously.)
Three years ago today I published the first post at Byzantium’s Shores. At the time I was working a telesales desk job, living with my one kid and three cats in a suburb of Buffalo. Since then, I have lost that telesales desk job, spent more than a year unemployed, seen two of those cats pass away and another enter the household, moved to Syracuse, moved back to the Buffalo area, sold some books on eBay, bought way more books, discovered new composers and new authors and new blogs, voted for the losing Presidential candidate…and watched The Wife give birth to a second child. Oh, and I’ve posted a lot of stuff here, much of it meaningless blather, and (bopefully) at least a small portion of it non-meaningless blather.
Thanks, all, for reading. Will I make it another three years here? There’s only one way to find out. Stay tuned. Go Bills!
Byzantium’s Shores is Number Three on this search.
Of course, whenever I place very near, but not quite at, the top of any strange-sounding search, I have to check out the site that beat me out for Number One. And here it is. Wow.
(Not safe for work, I suspect. And I have to note that I have never understood the, shall we say, attraction some have for the human foot.)
There’s been an awful lot of attitude lately that France basically has nothing good to offer the world, so I found this news article fairly heartening: a French surgeon has developed a technique to reverse the effects of female genital mutilation (if you don’t know what that involves, go here, but be warned: it is a stunningly nasty thing to do to a person).
And he performs his operations for no charge.
(via MeFi)
Kellie has some good news to share. Best wishes to her, and all hopes that it goes the way it’s supposed to go.
I’ve decided that I just don’t have time to get into all the various weird political things of the day. I’m talking about that professor from some obscure college who apparently holds some views that put him slightly to the left of Chairman Mao, and I’m talking about the weird way in which some guy apparently went to Kinko’s and printed up some press credentials with which he was then granted a place in the White House Press Room, and the salacious details of his life. Sure, I spend a little time reading about it, and if it’s a plus for my side I cheer the good guys and if it’s a plus for the other side I hiss the bad guys, but my new rule for if I intend to comment on it here is this:
If the scandal or issue in question seems like one that will occupy less than a single page in one of the 900-plus page tomes about the Bush Years that will hit the bookstores in 2010 or thereabouts, it probably doesn’t warrant my weighing in upon it.
Not that this has even been much of a political blog since the election, but I just have so little energy these days for tallying the outrages of the week. There’s always another week, and always another outrage. So I’m going to be picking my outrages carefully.
…there have been little hints of something now and then, but it seems like I just keep waiting for something to happen and it’s not the good, nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat kind of waiting; it’s more the hurry-up-and-do-something-interesting-i’m-getting-bored kind of waiting.
That’s pretty much my take, only I actually got bored and stopped watching the show. Or rather, I didn’t so much as get bored as I saw the boredom coming on, and allowed the show to fall off my rotation of things to watch. It’s hard to keep a show based on unexplained weirdness going for long. There’s a reason why The X-Files didn’t focus on the Mulder’s sister/Smoking Man/Smallpox vaccinations/Bees genetically engineered for nefarious purposes/Alien Bounty Hunter/Alex Krycek mytharc in every single episode; the series would have collapsed under its own weight very quickly had it attempted to do so. (Instead, it took nearly eight years before the show collapsed under its own weight — a bit of a pity, that, since the show actually ran for nine full years, but still.)
All Lost has is a bunch of people on a very weird island. Sure, some of those characters are very interesting indeed (when is someone going to realize that Terry O’Quinn can probably carry an entire series on his own?!), but the only way the show can continually invent new circumstances for them is to keep ratcheting up the way in which their island interacts with them in really weird ways. And the problem with that is very simple: sooner or later, some kind of convincing answer as to why the island is such a weird place has to be forthcoming. If not, then there’s no reason for any of the stuff that happens on the show, and a drama in which things happen for no reason is no drama, and viewers will feel cheated, and rightly so.
But then, there’s the other problem: once the island is explained, why should people continue to tune in? Presumably, to watch the characters try to deal with island/defeat it/escape it/bend it to their own purposes, et cetera. Maybe Lost will get there eventually, but it’s not there yet, and I’m not interested in waiting.
(Caveat, though: Lost seems almost tailor-made for its inevitable incarnation on DVD.)
For reasons known only to it, Mozilla decided that it needed sustenance. So it ate my bookmarks. Seriously. Every bookmark I had is now gone, gone, gone. I can reconstruct a lot of it from history or from memory (combined with Google), but there are things that I’m sure I bookmarked for future reference that are now gone, gone, gone. This, sadly, includes a few blogs that I had just started reading on a sporadic basis, at least a couple of which I was planning on linking. I don’t know if I’ll find all those again. Hopefully I will.
This is the first major “episode” I’ve had with Mozilla.
Time for a bit of brazen bandwidth theft, courtesy the United States Government!
I hope that wherever Carl Sagan is, he’s looking at images like this.
clutter
Originally uploaded by Jaquandor.
(I’m testing my new Flickr account by posting this: my primary work and reading area, which is currently a repository for an immense amount of crap. This is the main front in my War On Clutter — the moral equivalent of Tora Bora in my apartment.)