The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
According to the folks who listed this DVD set of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos miniseries on eBay, the genre for the set is “SciFi, Fantasy” with a subgenre of “Space Adventure”.
That doesn’t sound like the Cosmos I remember, unless they’re referring to the inevitable fact that some of the show’s science content is now outdated, twenty-five years after the show’s PBS debut.
Or maybe they’re just paying no attention to what they’re doing.
A denizen of Left Blogisan linked a Bill O’Reilly column the other day (this Bill O’Reilly column), and later apparently received a “Cease and Desist” letter from O’Reilly’s syndicate, demanding removal of the link. It seems that they had originally quoted directly from the column, and then removed that text at the Syndicate’s request, but now the Syndicate seems to think that they can demand the removal of a mere link, as well.
And that’s hot on the heels of the possibility that the Federal Elections Commission may decide that a blog linking a candidate’s site may constitute a contribution to that candidate’s campaign, with all the regulatory stuff that implies. But what if I don’t actually link it? Suppose I just post the URL for people to cut-and-paste it into their browsers? Or suppose I “mask” the URL by using a service like TinyURL? And what lucky government flack is going to have the wonderful duty of sitting down with Technorati and Google to find out who is linking what?
(BTW, in case you missed it above, this is the O’Reilly column they don’t want linked. Yup, I linked it. Because I’m fair and balanced.)
That’s a mock-up of a T-Rex that chased Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, according to the Creation Museum. Enjoy this walk-through of the museum. Fun for the whole family! (But is there a ride where you board a car that takes you into a cave, where a gigantic statue of King David reads all of the Psalms to you?)
(via Pandagon, in one of the most exhuastively posts touring the bizarre I’ve ever seen. Wow.
Two queries:
1. Over in the sidebar I have a link to this blog’s Atom feed. Is this sufficient for people using some kind of aggregator thingie to access posts here, or do I need to find a way to get an RSS feed going as well? (And as a follow-up, are there any good freebie RSS-feed services operating right now? I used to use one, but the one I used stopped working.)
2. How can I implement one of those “Recent posts” things that some blogs use in their sidebars? I’d like to put one of those not on the main page, but in the sidebar of individual posts, so people arriving here via links to specific posts from other blogs can see what’s going on elsewhere.
Aaron got his iPod, and just in time, since pretty soon he’s going to need it to distract him from the pleasures of iPampers, iMidnightFeedings, iBurping, and iWife saying “You take him for a while so I can nap!”
Fred Himebaugh links this news item about a pretty new phenomenon: the increasing popularity of the increasingly complex and large-scale orchestral music of computer games. Game music has come a long way since those cheerful little “beep beep boop” ditties that accompanied the cartoons that displayed in between every couple of levels on Ms. Pac Man.
I really don’t know a whole lot about game music, but it does receive occasional notice in film music circles. The big hitter right now, in terms of game music, is the stuff from the Final Fantasy series, composed by Nobuo Uematsu. I own one compilation disc of this stuff, and I don’t recall liking it all that much, but I’ll try to give it another listen one of these days. Another big name is Mamoru Samuragoch (Japanese language site), a deaf composer who was actually profiled by TIME Magazine a couple of years back. I own Samuragoch’s CD Sounds of Onimusha, which I like quite a bit.
On this side of the Pacific, the big name in game music (so far as I know) is probably Michael Giacchino, who has more recently started to break into the mainstream of film and TV scoring with work on The Incredibles, Alias, and LOST.
As I note above, I haven’t really explored game music at all beyond the two, count ’em, two CDs of the stuff that I own, but the idea of orchestras putting on concerts of game music does not surprise me in the slightest.
Now, if we can just get the Buffalo Philharmonic to host an installment of the Lord of the Rings Symphony….
In seeking care for Little Quinn, the Wife and I have had to rely in part on services provided through various government programs — including some administered by Erie County, which is now going through a budget crisis so severe that layoffs of County employees will number in the thousands when all is done.
Today, our Service Coordinator received her layoff notice.
I have no illusion that Erie County’s government is too bloated; nor do I disagree that we are overtaxed here to a ridiculous degree and the Buffalo-Niagara region will never really prosper until the high cost of doing business here is brought down.
But lest anyone feel the need to talk about issues like this in the pure abstract, allow me to disabuse them of that notion. This stuff affects real, living people — some old, some young, and some infants with cerebral palsy who have trouble breathing.
Will Duquette links a great post about the poem “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe, which happens to be one of my favorite poems as well — there’s some very troubling psychology concealed in that poem’s lilting meter and rhyme.
Back when I was doing “Poetical Excursions” as a semi-regular feature here (and which I keep intending to start doing again), I wrote about “Annabel Lee” myself. And in fact, that post still shows up a lot in search-engine referrals to Byzantium’s Shores, often spiking in September and October, or January and February — when undergrads taking “Poetry 101” or some such college course are probably encountering the poem.
No, I’m not going to be doing an Image of the Middle of the Week as a regular feature, seeing as how I’m not doing fairly well at maintaining the Image of the Week as a regular feature. But this satellite image of Central Park in New York City, taken while The Gates were up, is just stunning.
(Oh, and it’s also huge. This thing took twenty minutes to download on my 56K connection, but it was really worth it. Wow! Link via, you guessed it, Lynn Sislo.)
