The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
The other day I wrote about how spring is Buffalo’s worst season. Lest anyone care to dispute me on this point, let me present photographic proof. This is the view that greeted us outside our living room window on this fine April Sunday morning:
That’s a gorgeous view on, say, November 10. On April 3, not so much.
The following is a transcript of a customer service call once fielded in a call center in a galaxy far, far away.
OPERATOR: Good morning! Thank you for calling the Geonosis Spaceyards Customer Service Hotline. This is Operator THX-1138 speaking. How can I help you today?
CALLER: I am calling about a recent purchase I made.
OPERATOR: Are you reporting a problem with your purchase, sir?
CALLER: I am.
OPERATOR: And may I have your Account Number, sir?
CALLER: It is UIY-2249.
OPERATOR: Thank you. Please wait while I bring up your account. (typing on keyboard heard) Ah, yes. I see you bought the Eludium-Q Spherical Space Habitat, and that you chose the Extra Armor Plating option. Very good, sir. Was there a problem with your Spherical Space Habitat, sir?
CALLER: Yes.
OPERATOR: Can you describe the nature of the problem, sir?
CALLER: It exploded.
OPERATOR: I’m sorry, sir. Did you say that your Spherical Space Habitat exploded?
CALLER: The destruction was complete.
OPERATOR: That’s odd. Our Spherical Space Habitats are not supposed to explode. May I inquire as to what system your Habitat was in when it exploded, sir? If it was located in one of the Hazardous Systems as listed in the Instruction Manual for your Habitat, we are not liable for damages, as noted in Section 94, Volume 18, Paragraph 6-b of the Imperial Code.
CALLER: It was orbiting the planet Yavin.
OPERATOR: Yavin? Let me look that system up, sir. (more clicking of a computer keyboard) Ah, Yavin. Gaseous giant planet, but no known natural hazards listed on our database. Very odd…just a minute, there’s another note here. Please hold.
(Music plays for about a minute.)
OPERATOR: Sir, I see that the planet Yavin was recently the scene of a battle between the Imperial Starfleet and the Rebel Alliance. Surveillance craft have reported a significant amount of debris in the system, and a large amount of residual radiation. I am going to have to get my Supervisor, sir. Please hold.
(More music plays as the caller is put on hold.)
SUPERVISOR: Good morning, Sir. I am Supervisor TK-421. I have just accessed the private information on your account, that your first Operator was unable to read. How are you today, Senator Palpatine?
CALLER: I am Emperor now, and I dissolved the Senate.
SUPERVISOR: Ah. I will change that information on your account, and may I say, congratulations on your promotion! Now, I am told that your Spherical Space Habitat experienced a catastrophic immolation event while orbiting the planet Yavin. Now sir, I have to ask this question for legal reasons: were you using your Spherical Space Habitat in any of the ways listed in the Instruction Manual as being unrecommended?
CALLER: I didn’t read that page.
SUPERVISOR: Ah. Senator, I mean, Emperor, you really should read the instructions on all major purchases before use. On Page 9,842 of the Manual you will find a list of Unrecommended Uses for a Spherical Space Habitat. Such uses include: Transport Vehicle for Performing Popular Musicians, Transport Vehicle for Dangerous Creatures, Hunting Lodge, Space Slug Attractor Device, Spice Smuggling, Temple for Hutt Worship, and Intimidating Battle Station. Can I assume, sir, that you attempted to use your Spherical Space Habitat as an Intimidating Battle Station?
CALLER: I did.
SUPERVISOR: Ah, I see. Now, the good news, sir, is that we have recently completed design work on our Spherical Space Habitat 2.0, which can be used as an Intimidating Battle Station.
CALLER: Are all the thermal exhaust ports fully shielded now?
SUPERVISOR: They are, sir. That’s the main difference. That and the chairs are cushier. Since you are a preferred customer, I can offer you a special discount on a Spherical Space Habitat 2.0, complete with Green Ray of Death Blast Cannon. And since you’re one of our better customers, I am prepared to offer you, free of extra charge, an Intimidating Throne Room atop a high tower with a commanding view of your Space Habitat’s surface, and Demon-Drop Bottomless Shaft overlooking your Habitat’s Reactor Core. Can I interest you in that today, sir?
CALLER: Yes. I will take one.
SUPERVISOR: Excellent! And to what system would you like that delivered, sir?
CALLER: Endor.
SUPERVISOR: Excellent choice, sir. Let me type this all in. (more typing goes on) And how will you be paying for this, sir?
CALLER: Paying?
SUPERVISOR: Yes, sir. As I noted, your use of your Spherical Space Habitat 1.0 as a Battle Station voids your warranty, and you are not eligible for free replacement.
CALLER: My discount will be one hundred percent.
SUPERVISOR: Now sir, I can’t do that, I’m sorry to say.
CALLER: My discount will be one hundred percent.
SUPERVISOR: Sir, as I said, I cannot authorize that.
CALLER: Oh, really?
SUPERVISOR: I’m sorry, sir. But I am offering you a substantial discount and…er…ack…sir, I am having trouble breathing. Uh…er…ACK!…can I please…get…ACCCKKK!…another…operator…GASSSSPP! (sounds of unintelligible wheezing, followed by a crunching of bone and something large slumping to the floor)
SUPERVISOR #2: Ummm…hello, sir. I am Supervisor TK-422. Let me just review the information my predecessor put in for you. (whispering to someone else) Get him out of here before he smells! (to CALLER) Uh, sir, you know what, it wouldn’t have been that hard for us to throw in shielding for those thermal exhaust ports on the first one. I apologize for the inconvenience, and your new habitat is on us. Will that be all right, sir?
CALLER: For today, yes. Don’t make me call you for a third one of these.
SUPERVISOR: We won’t, sir. And you know what, since you’ve been such a great customer, I’m going to throw in for no extra charge an energy shield that we will put in place around your new Spherical Space Habitat 2.0 while we are building it. Trust me, nothing will get through and threaten your new Space Habitat 2.0! You can live by the Geonosis Guarantee.
CALLER: I hope so…for your sake.
(Click as call ends)
LESSON: The customer may not always be right, but he just may have the ability to choke you to death from the other side of the Galaxy.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Yes, there will be a lot of gratuitous and geeky stuff like this between now and the end of May.)
This is funny. I got a big kick out of yesterday’s Get Fuzzy, but since I don’t usually read Fox Trot, I had no idea that both strips used virtually the same script yesterday. I assume this was an April Fool’s day thing, and it’s the kind of April Fool’s thing I like, in that it’s not based on being mean or embarrassing to another person. It reminds me of a more widespread funnies-page April Fool’s joke, the Great April Fool’s Switcheroonie, when a number of strips were drawn by the artists of some other strip (for instance, Hagar the Horrible drawn by the guy who draws Non Sequitur). Very clever.
(For my money, the joke used yesterday in Get Fuzzy and Fox Trot is funnier as a Get Fuzzy joke. It’s probably the use of the word “piehole” that does it.)
I confess that even though I consider myself a good liberal, I’ve never much liked Jane Fonda. I’ve enjoyed a few of her performances — Nine to Five, mostly, although they could have cast anyone in that third-wheel of a role, seeing as how Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton are pretty much the whole show (well, them and Dabney Coleman) and On Golden Pond, pretty much — but as my dislike of her basically stems from those annoying workout videos of hers, the fact that she appointed herself head-cheerleader when the Atlanta Braves (for a short while the Greatest Force for Evil in American Sports, before that title went back to the Dallas Cowboys and thence to the New England Stupid Patriots) were beating my beloved Pittsburgh Pirates two damn years in a row in the National League Championship Series, and that little jaunt she took to North Vietnam. Granted, I was all of two or something when she did that, but it’s not one of those things that has a statute of limitations, you know?
All of which is preamble to linking this purported index to Ms. Fonda’s upcoming book, which I found hilarious. Check it out. Link via BookSlut.
I’d really like to start being able to link stories like this about Buffalo one of these days, but for now, it’s heartening for Upstate New Yorkers to see that Syracuse continues to demonstrate healthy job growth coupled with a decline in public-sector jobs. They continue to lost manufacturing jobs, but that’s the only part of their private sector that’s still bleeding jobs. So, why isn’t anyone amongst Buffalo’s “power elite” taking notice and wondering what Syracuse is doing that we aren’t? Whenever we hear about someplace else in Upstate New York, it’s invariably something along the lines of “Here’s how things are in Rochester, and they’re doing bad too”. Well, it’s another hour past Rochester to Syracuse. Let’s see what they’re doing, since their bag of tricks seems to actually be working.
In other Buffalo-related stuff, Craig took a walk around the Elmwood strip recently — I really need to get to Elmwood more often — and he took a number of pictures of development going on there. I particularly like that the new Lexington Co-op is being built right up to the sidewalk, preserving Elmwood’s walkability factor. (And looking at the first photo in Craig’s post, I note again that Buffalo’s tallest and most prominent building is also the dullest-looking damn building in our skyline. Lord. Let me know, readers: do any of you live in cities where your most prominent building looks as bad as ours?)
Is anyone besides me getting tired of the constant morbid stuff headlining the news lately? For something like the last two weeks (and probably more), the number one and number two stories on the evening news have been the Terri Schiavo death watch and the Pope John Paul II death watch, or vice versa. It seems kind of weird that for a “Culture of Life”, we’re awfully focused on death. (But then, an end to both stories will probably herald a return to Top Story Status of the damn Michael Jackson trial. Maybe it’s time to just stop watching the news altogether.)
Anyway, James Wolcott and Matthew Yglesias point out that inevitably the passing of the Pope will be politicized — in fact, James points out that FOX News already tried doing so, but had to stop the revolution seeing as how at that point the Pope wasn’t, you know, actually dead. If the Right does seize upon John Paul II as a great fallen conservative leader, I wonder how they’ll explain things like his steadfast condemnation of the Iraq war. Yes, the Pope was anti-abortion and anti-homosexual, but he had other beliefs that line up more with the Left than with the Right. So I guess we’re in for a lot of cherry-picking from the man’s life. I can’t wait.
(For the record, I’m not Catholic and am generally ambivalent about John Paul II in particular and the Papacy in general. I dislike a lot of the positions he took, and I generally find the whole idea of the position of Pontiff to be a bit odd, especially after my readings of history which indicate that more than a few Popes weren’t so much chosen by God as chosen by particularly strong European monarchs.)
Yesterday at The Store, the cafe TV was as always tuned to FOX News, and I caught one bit of hilarity while I was eating lunch. Some talking head was describing a time when John Paul II held a Mass at Shea Stadium in New York City. The FOX talking head went on to describe Shea Stadium as a baseball stadium, “but not the one where the Yankees play…there’s another baseball team that plays there, uh….” Luckily for the FOX talking head, someone was able to lean over and supply him with the name of that other New York baseball team.
Wow, is this ever cool: an MP3 directory of lectures by the late Richard Feynman, a legendary figure in late-20th century science in general and physics and particular (as well as safecracking). I’d love to see more of this kind of thing on the Web.
(via Mr. Modulator)
If you’re not raising your children in the Buffalo Niagara region, then you’re a bad parent. Take that, all you parents from Kansas City!
Jen and Alan provide details on the great things there are to do with kids in this area. I have some favorites, myself.
In terms of restaurants, Buffalo has a ton of family-friendly eating establishments. Favorites of ours include Pizza Plant in Williamsville (where, in addition to crayons, the kid can get a wad of pizza dough to play with while waiting for food) and Taffy’s in our own hometown of Orchard Park. Taffy’s is just your basic burgers-and-ice cream joint, but it’s situated on one of the Southtowns’ busier intersections, so it makes for good car-watching, and its seating consists of a whole bunch of those covered picnic benches that “rock” back and forth on two tracks. Fun place.
In terms of Buffalo shopping malls, the Galleria is the big one, and it’s got plenty of stores of interest to kids. The Boulevard Mall in Amherst is a bit better for small kids, since it has a carousel and an enclosed play area that has a bunch of play-items made out of this shiny-rubber stuff. This area in the food court is always packed with kids. (Of course, none of Buffalo’s malls approaches Syracuse’s Carousel Center, which is still the best mall I’ve ever been in short of the Mall of America itself.)
The region’s best-kept secret, as far as free places to take the kids is concerned, has to be the Charles Burchfield Nature and Art Center on Union Road in West Seneca. This is a wonderful little park, partly dedicated to the art of Charles Burchfield (a prominent water-colorist who lived in West Seneca for a time), a beautiful set of park slides, and a set of nature trails that wind back into some surprisingly dense woods and down to the side of Cayuga Creek, whose water is generally shallow enough for wading (in late summer, the water gets so low you can wade all the way across and not get wet past your knees) and swift enough to be fun to throw or skip rocks. This is one of our absolute favorite spots in the area — and it’s completely free to go there. Give it a shot, folks. On a warm day, bring a picnic lunch. You’ll be glad you did.
Lynn Sislo links The Worst April Fool’s Day Hoaxes Ever, some of which are truly eye-popping in their awfulness. What struck me is that a couple of them were perpetrated by officials or affiliates of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Looking at the apparent sense of humor that existed within that regime, a lot of stuff about recent Iraqi history starts to become clear.
Here’s Number Ten:
On April 1, 2003, as thousands of American-led coalition troops stormed across Iraq, the Iraqi ambassador to Russia, Abbas Khalaf Kunfuth, held a press conference in Moscow. Many were expecting him to announce that Iraq conceded defeat. Instead Kunfuth chose this moment to hold a gag press conference. Holding up a piece of paper that he identified as a news flash from Reuters, he read aloud from it: “The Americans have accidentally fired a nuclear missile into British forces, killing seven.” Immediately the room full of reporters went silent with shock. Then Kunfuth grinned and shouted ‘April Fools!’ Only a few days after this unexpected moment of levity, the Iraqi government completely collapsed.
Read the rest. And here’s a list of more successful April Fool’s Day pranks.
We had a couple of days of nicely temperate weather here in Buffalo this week, with temps in the upper 50s and even into the 60s yesterday. We cooled off a bit today, but it was still pleasant. What always gets me about Spring in Buffalo is the way everybody gets so hopeful on the very first day that the mercury hits the 60 mark that Spring is actually here, that it will stay warm, that snow is officially done, that it’s time to plant without fear of frost, et cetera. And those hopes always come, despite the fact that those hopes are always dashed.
The sad fact is that Spring is Buffalo’s worst season, by far.
That may sound counterintuitive, referring to a city legendary (and unfairly so) for bad winters, but as I and many other Buffalonians have noted many times, our winters aren’t that bad (in fact, they’re routinely not even the worst winters in Upstate New York), and besides, we expect winter to be a lot of snow and cold. I really wish we’d embrace our winters and market them better, in fact. We know what’s coming each year, and we’re generally fine with it.
Our summers are very nice as well: the humidity, while higher than, say, Arizona’s, never really reaches the level of elemental dampness that afflicts the northeastern coastal cities like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia; and in all the years that records have been kept, we’ve never hit one hundred degress in Buffalo. Not once. Lake Erie, which brings us lots of snow in early winter, also makes for really nice summers. (And our sunsets are wonderful.)
Autumn in Western New York, though, is simply spectacular. Seriously, this is the best place in the United States to pass an October, as far as I am concerned. It gets cooler, but not unbearably so; the hills turn color slower than they do in the heights of Vermont and stay stunning for a bit longer. We ease our way gently and pleasantly toward winter here.
So, we have three great seasons. Spring, though, is a climatological train wreck here. It tends to be very rainy, very gray, very cool to downright cold, and it’s not at all unusual to get snow well into April. Our springs are so dank that the trees don’t begin to leaf until the very end of April, and it’s late May before the hills are green again. The ground goes from frozen to muddy, and it stays muddy pretty mugh right up until summer. It’s like we endure two months of miserable, dreary weather — and then all of a sudden one day it’s summer, just like that. And yet, when we get two or three unseasonably warm days at the end of March, everyone suddenly starts hoping that it’ll stay that way, that this will be the year that Spring in Buffalo doesn’t suck. In baseball terms, we’re Cubs fans when it comes to Spring.
So anyway, we had the opportunity to take a bit of a stroll the other day, as well as allowing The Daughter to try out her new scooter. She did better on it than I thought she would, since she tends to high levels of klutziness. She didn’t fall a single time, although there were more than a few instances in which she got going slightly faster than she wanted to and then jumped off and lurched to something resembling a stop. Here she is, posing on the new device:
As for Little Quinn, we’re looking forward to taking him out in the stroller more often. After he fell seriously behind in his growth a while back — at one point he was over four pounds less than what he should have been at that age — he’s been putting on weight at last, and the constant parade of specialists has finally produced a couple of answers and solutions to particularly vexing problems. He’s on valium now (as a muscle relaxant), which has the effect of making it easier for his physical and occupational therapists to do their work with him, which can only in turn help his development. Also, the respiratory issues he was having for a long time turn out to be something called “stridor”, which also seems to have caused his problems with digestion, excessive gas, and reflux. The good news there is that we are told that the vast majority of infants with this particular problem outgrow it, and we are hopeful on that score, as already Little Quinn seems to be getting stronger and his spells of harsh breathing are becoming less frequent and less intense.
Here’s how Little Quinn as he looked in my arms the other day, while The Daughter scooted about on The Scooter:
He seems to like being outside. And here’s a good close-up of his face, just because I can:
Onward and upward….