The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
….to something like “Star Wars and GoogleMaps”, since that’s about all I’m doing here the last day or two. And after a hiatus! How embarrassing!
Anyway, here’s another Buffalo location: Kleinhans Music Hall, home of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s a pretty striking building from above, and its location is one of my favorite spots in Buffalo, called “Symphony Circle”. Strangely, the “Circle” isn’t as immediately apparent when you’re on the ground as it is here.
I don’t often do these kinds of things — in fact, I almost never do these kinds of things — but just this once I found it hard to resist (having seen the idea over on Scott’s blog).
You Know You’re From Buffalo When… |
When speaking “the” precedes the number or name of any highway (The Scajaquada, The 33, The 290) Snow tires come standard on your car. You can identify an “Alden” accent. You have gotton frost bitten and sunburned in the same weekend “Down south” means Gowanda You bake with “soda” and drink “pop”. Stop/Slow/Yield Signs..are suggestions. You can hold an entire conversation on the best place to go for wings, a fishfry or pizza. You see nothing wrong with watching fireworks downtown on July 2nd. You not only know what the terms “snowbelt” and “lake effect” mean – you use them on a daily basis. You save the Genny Cream Ale for special occasions. You live within 1 mile of a bowling alley. Not only do you know what it is… but you look forward to “Dingus Day” You never put your winter jacket away for the summer. You like to order beef on “weck” and are always surprised when someone doesn’t know what “weck” is. You drive over 70mph on the Thruway and pass on the right. You leave your ski lift tickets on your jacket year round. You know how to pronouce, Scajaquada, Cheektowaga and Depew. The rest of the country is snowbound in the worst blizzard of the century, but you still have to walk your kids to the corner to catch the school bus. You think nothing of crossing an international border for Chinese Food. The acid rain is clearer than your drinking water. When you stop and ask for directions … you expect to get them. You don’t think Canada is to the north … you know it’s to the West. You keep the snowplow on the front of the truck year round. You have a favorite Greek restaurant. When someone says they are from “the City” – you ask “Which one?” You think Jimmy Griffin is a “real” politician You can compute a wind chill “factor” You eat Orange Chocolate. You don’t have to attend the Friendship Festival to hear it! You know the difference between imported and real Canadian beer. You have not been on the “Maid of the Mist” – unless you had out of town company. You’ve dined at “Theodore’s on the Lake”. You immediatley change the channel when you hear “Hi! this is Goldie Gardner…”. The winter carnival gets rained out. You call them “Pilot Field” and the “Aud” – no matter what the signs say. You define summer as three months of bed sledding. Your kids have watched Sesame Street – in French and Spanish. You don’t get a coughing fit from one sip of Vernors. “Gridlock” means driving home from a football game. You wince when someone uses the abbreviation “OJ”. “Rapid Transit” means hitting all the green lights. You actually get these jokes and pass them on to other friends from Buffalo. |
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OK then. Much of this is very spot-on, believe it or not. Especially the one about frostbite and sunburn on the same day.
I’ve been doing a lot of fiddling around with Google Maps lately (some of it for future posts), and I got to thinking: what could be cooler than showing the satellite photos of the theaters wherein I first saw each Star Wars film!
(I know, I know. Believe me, I just felt a grave disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Blogistan eyes suddenly rolled, and then were suddenly silenced. Well, I refer you all to yesterday’s disclaimer.)
First up is the Westgate Theater, in Beaverton, OR. This is where I first saw both Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. I remember the main auditorium of the Westgate being very, very large, but I suspect that my memories may be skewed a bit. I’m not sure how old Google’s satellite photos are, but I am surprised that the Westgate was apparently still standing at least within the last couple of years.
I can’t show you the theater where I first saw Return of the Jedi, because it’s definitely not there anymore. But it was here, in the Center Mall in Olean, NY. See that obvious addition on the mall’s southern side, nearest the street (and not facing the creek)? That’s a JC Penney, occupying the spot once held by the mall theater. That’s where Return of the Jedi opened, when I was eleven. I saw it the second night it was out. What a freaking amazing experience that was. (The company that operated that theater later built a multiplex elsewhere in Olean, where I saw all three Original Trilogy films when their Special Editions came out in 1997.)
Fast-forward sixteen years, to the release of Episode I: The Phantom Menace in 1999. I saw that film at the Regal Cinemas outside Orchard Park, NY. This, coincidentally, was the first theater where I encountered the marvel that is stadium seating. Coincidentally, the Daughter was born exactly one month after The Phantom Menace opened. Judging by the complete absence of cars in front of the multiplex, contrasted with the large number of cars in front of the Target next door, I assume this photo was taken in the morning. This, incidentally, is where I’ll be seeing Revenge of the Sith in less than three weeks. (We’ve got a group of six guys from The Store going.)
Finally, I saw Attack of the Clones at the Flix Cinema in Lancaster, NY, which is about a ten minute drive from where I live right now. I don’t recall exactly why I went to this theater for that opening day, midnight showing as opposed to the Regal Cinema, since Flix does not have stadium seating; but Flix does have one amenity that I’ve never seen anywhere else: they let you put the butter on your popcorn yourself. Oh, my arteries took a beating that night.
(Boy — movie theaters aren’t much to look at from the air, are they? Just flat rooftops punctuated by large HVAC units. Ah, well. It’s still cool.)
So, last week witnessed the two-day event when several hundred young, athletic men learn their fate as they prepare to end their days of apprenticeship and assume the mantle of Manhood. Yup, it was the annual NFL Draft. Previously I expressed the strong hope that the Bills would draft for the offensive line, or help the line by pulling the trigger on a trade involving disgruntled running back Travis Henry for either an extra pick or an offensive lineman.
So, it of course stands to reason that Bills GM Tom Donahoe, as has been his history, did neither. In the draft’s opening day, when the Bills did not pick until late in the second round (remember, they traded this year’s first-rounder away last year to grab J.P. Losman), and then used their two, and only two, opening-day picks to take a wide receiver and a tight end.
I don’t get this. I really, truly don’t. The Bills spent their first pick last year on a WR (Lee Evans, who had an excellent rookie year), and they have two tight ends right now who, although getting over injuries, are apparently quite promising. What the Bills also have is a second-year quarterback who is stepping into the starting job behind an offensive line that really hasn’t been all that good in quite a while, and which lost one of its stalwart veterans to free agency this year (Jonas Jennings). The idea, I guess, is to surround Losman with weapons; I guess they’re not going for a “have the rookie hand it off a whole lot” approach, and that makes sense to a point, but I’m generally of the belief that football games are won or lost by the big guys you have in the trenches, and as far as I can see, the Bills are taking entirely too much of a risk in doing so little to replace the two huge guys on their lines (the other being defensive lineman Pat Williams, now a Viking via free agency).
Tell me, Steelers fans – were Tom Donahoe’s drafts for you guys as completely flummoxing?
Living in a backwater city like Buffalo, where we’re generally quite a bit behind the curve in things like technology, fashion, and the like (to say nothing of economic growth, where we’re still waiting for the dot-com bubble to lift us from the doldrums), I’m always thrilled to read an account of how someone who has spent his life in places like New York City, Boston, and now Washington, DC, is just discovering something we’ve had up here for years.
So, I laughed to behold as Matthew Yglesias discovered the CoinStar machine.
Personally, I love the CoinStar machine. Most of the grocery stores around here have them (including, yes, The Store), and I now use it fairly regularly. I’ve never really liked spending change, for some reason; I just don’t want to stand at the checkout and dig through my pockets to see if I can come up with three quarters, a dime, and two pennies. I’d rather just hand over whole bills, get out of there, and then dump the day’s accumulation of change into a bowl when I get home. I’ve done this for years, and when the bowl would get full enough, then I’d go to the trouble of rolling it up and cashing it in somewhere.
Enter the CoinStar machine, which lets me dump the contents of the bowl into a hopper and wait as the machine counts it out and gives me a receipt for the total (minus a nine-cent-per-dollar transaction fee, which I’m more than happy to pay to get out of spending large amounts of time counting and rolling coins – – I’m often more than happy to exchange a bit of money if it saves me a bit of time). Back in the fall, I used my accumulated change to buy our digital camera, and just the other day I used my most recent accumulation of change (over $160 by the time the bowl was full) to splurge on some DVDs I’ve been wanting*. The next accumulation will likely go to helping fund a trip we’re taking in July.
* For those interested, my DVD collection now includes all three Lord of the Rings films in their extended editions (I’d already owned The Two Towers, but still needed Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King); the tenth anniversary edition of The Shawshank Redemption; the special two-disc issue of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers; a two-disc set of The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers (the versions from the 1970s, directed by Richard Lester); the five-disc Errol Flynn Special Collection (actually, I bought that on Amazon); and Braveheart. And there are a few more that I still want to grab – – The Clone Wars, Cousins, and (I’m almost embarrassed to admit this) two Clint Eastwood movies that I like immensely as guilty pleasures, Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can. (Don’t laugh. Those movies rule. You’ve got bare-knuckle fighting, an incompetent motorcycle gang, an orangutan, old-style country music from before the “rockabilly” types took over, and a foul-mouthed Ruth Gordon. Those two movies have it all!)
In a pretty interesting post in which he takes issue with Hollywood’s casting of Orlando Bloom in films which are seemingly designed to be inaccessible to Bloom’s natural audience (the early teenage girl set, basically the demographic that swooned over Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic), Lance Mannion links this wonderful post on Errol Flynn.
I’d point out that Flynn’s three greatest films (Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, and The Sea Hawk) have one more thing in common than Flynn as leading man and Michael Curtiz as director. All three boast scores by Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
(Funny story: when I was fifteen, I went to the video store and rented an Errol Flynn picture I hadn’t seen, The Charge of the Light Brigade, figuring that Flynn as a British army captain couldn’t be bad. My sister, though – – English Lit grad student that she was – – took one look at the title and said something like, “Geez, you had to pick a sad movie?” TO which I sagely replied, “Huh?” She then asked: “You do know what happened to the Light Brigade, don’t you?” To which I again sagely replied, “Huh?”
So she dug out a copy of Tennyson’s poem and had me read it. Oh well. I still liked the movie, even though it was certainly a downer of an ending.
And now that I think of it, that might well have been the first time I ever read anything by Tennyson – – which means that I owe my love of Tennyson to my sister. So she made me love Star Wars and Tennyson. Shit, I should send her a “Thank You” card…)
That’s my response to all of you out there who are getting tired of me droning on about Star Wars.
(Not that anyone has either commented to that effect, or e-mailed me to that effect, or anything else. But I believe in being proactive!)
That said, go look at the life-size X-Wing fighter.
Via Nefarious Neddie.
Aaron has updated pictures of his mutant progeny. Nothing good can come of this, but then again, that’s what I told Aaron when he proposed to a woman who’s obviously a vampire, and he didn’t listen then, so I fully expect him to ignore me now.
Oh well. Cute kid, though!