The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
In the midst of this post, Sean complains thusly:
I keep watching for that last high in the 90s day in the 7 day outtlook and it keeps pushing back. Back to friday now. I’m melting…
Heh. Not to rub it in or anything, but as of this writing, six of the next ten days on the Ten Day Forecast upon which I rely predict highs in the upper 60s.
I’m telling you, folks, if you like the number of seasons your locale experiences to be greater than two, Buffalo’s the place to live.
I’ve seen a couple of instances lately, in reference to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, where folks on the right either imply or state outright that the “mainstream media” predicted over 10,000 dead in New Orleans, which then leads to the mindboggling charge that now the “MSM” is disappointed that the actual death toll came in much lower than that. Setting aside the obvious perversity in assuming that an entire industry would actively root for over 10,000 people to die in a natural calamity, I’m wondering just how this can be pinned on the “MSM” at all, when it was perfectly clear that the “MSM” was merely reporting what various government officials, like a Republican US Senator, were predicting all along. The causal chain appears to be this:
1. Various people, some of them Republicans, say something;
2. Media outlets report what these various people, some of them Republicans, say;
3. Various Republicans then take that bit of reportage as some kind of evidence for the media outlets making up what was said by various people, some of them Republicans, in the first place.
It’s really very head-spinning, the way the “MSM” manages to get blamed for stuff. I wonder why the “MSM” just doesn’t collectively realize that they’re damned if they report and damned if they don’t report, they might as well just report anyway and be damned for what they really are. Of course, that won’t happen.
We all have our own heroes, people on whose behalf we would shout from all the mountaintops of all the world if we could.
Dave Thomas’s hero, his grandfather, is in very bad shape. My deepest condolences to him. Watching the long-term suffering of a loved one is probably the worst thing about being human.
I’ve never been a big fan of Martha Stewart, but I do think she handled the situation surrounding her conviction and prison sentence with as much grace as could be expected. And, of course, longtime readers know that one of my two ‘reality TV’ vices is The Apprentice (the other being American Idol). So yeah, I’m watching Martha Stewart’s version of the show.
It’s about five minutes into the show, so I don’t have anything to say about it yet, except to note that I think the Eurythmic’s “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” as the theme song is a nifty touch.
UPDATE: OK, this is a first for me: I’m going to live-blog this damned thing. Some folks live-blog major speeches by the President of the United States; I live-blog episodes of The Apprentice. I’m sure there’s a statement in there, somewhere….
1. Some male contestant whose name I forgot already: “You don’t control my actions. I control your actions. Let’s get that straight.” Haven’t people watched enough reality shows by now to know that when you say something like that on national television, you only look like a complete ass?
2. The contestants have named their companies “Matchstick” (staffed by “creative types”) and “Primarius” (staffed by “corporate” types). God, those are horrible names. One sounds like a company that makes toys from balsa wood, and the other sounds like the bad guy in an old episode of The Transformers.
3. The companies’ first task: to create a children’s book based on a fairy tale they select, using a designer and illustrator. And then they’ll have to read their children’s book to actual children. And they’re all nodding and grinning, because you know, creating a good children’s book is just that easy. Yee-haw.
4. They’re in the Random House building, where one conference room is apparently called the “Rudyard Kipling Room”. The other team’s in the “Dr. Seuss Room”. Ick.
5. Some woman whose background is in publishing is the obvious choice to write a children’s book. Well, duh.
6. “Hansel and Gretel” in an urban setting could really work. I can think of a thousand ways this could work. Neil Gaiman could do wonders with that; so could Charles de Lint. (Hell, for all I know, de Lint’s already done this story, as prolific as he is.) These folks? I doubt it. All of the contestants are whining that it’s too dark a story, which tells me that these folks don’t know shit about fairy tales or children’s lit, which can be very dark stuff indeed.
7. OK, I’ve just now decided that this “Jeff” guy (tall, bald, glasses) needs to be beaten with a large stick.
8. Everyone’s saying “Kids aren’t gonna understand this.” Assuming the stupidity of kids is never the path to creating a good children’s book.
9. Awww, Martha doesn’t use “You’re fired”. She said, “You just don’t fit in. Goodbye.” But now she’s writing a personal letter to the loser? “It sucks that you had to leave. But somebody had to go, and it was you.” Wow…rub it in a bit. And according to the next-week-preview, she’s writing letters to each loser.
OK, interesting premiere. I’ll probably watch the damn thing every week. It’s my curse.
Via PZ Myers, I find this bit of instructions that I shall now execute, even though they seem to exist for no reason whatsoever:
1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
Wow. My 23rd post was over three years ago, here. Unfortunately, that post is only four sentences long! Here, then, is that last sentence:
I’ve already bought it and it has shot to the top of my “To Read” list.
The book in question is Patience and Fortitude, by Nicholas A. Basbanes. (A wonderful book, by the way.)
This week, I have done something that goes against every instinct of my being.
I’ve used Hamburger Helper for the first time.
I know. Using some kind of boxed mix to whip up a half-assed meal that’s in all likelihood loaded with enough sodium to halve the speed with which my blood arcs through my vessels. Indulging in food that’s everything Lloyd Dobler would despise: bought, sold, and processed. Consuming a product whose label might as well read, “May contain meat-like substance.”
The worst thing is that I’ll probably keep a box or two of this stuff on hand. Like Ramen Noodles, it’s an extremely easy quick meal for when I need something that’s easy and quick.
Man oh man.
For a few weeks, I’ve been getting a “403-Permission Denied” error when I tried visiting SFSignal, but that appears to have ended. I’m not sure what the problem was, but I’m glad the site’s back up. It had become one of my favorite SF-related reads.
I haven’t reposted anything in a while — or, at least I think I haven’t, hmmmmm — so here’s the meat of a post I first wrote back in February of 2004. It’s about my “rules” for good fiction, as a reader.
1. Don’t depress me. This is big: I don’t like stories that are just depressing. But this does not rule out sad endings, because “sad” does not equal “depressing”. Likewise, “dark” (or “gothic” or “downbeat”) also do not equal “depressing”. Schindler’s List is a terribly sad movie; Seven is a depressing one. I guess the difference is that sadness can still seem to serve a purpose, whereas depression is without purpose: it’s just there. I don’t want a story in which characters are subjected to just one damn thing after another, with no hope at all for a respite or even a good lesson learned beyond “Life sucks”. If I want “Life sucks”, well, I’ll just look at, you know, life.
2. Engage my emotions. This goes hand-in-hand with “Don’t depress me”. Even though I don’t want to feel depression after reading or viewing a story, I do want to feel something. A story that is the emotional equivalent of an unsalted saltine cracker is not a story for me.
3. Tie up your loose ends. Unless you don’t want to. I tried coming up with a better way to say this, but I can’t. I love both kinds of stories I’m talking about here, really: I love it when everything ties up into a neat little package, and I also love it when a story lets some things stay open, as if to suggest that the story was really just a segment of someone’s life that we’ve just watched. Guy Gavriel Kay does the latter a lot; John Bellairs does the former. Either works.
4. But if you’re gonna tie up your loose ends, be careful about it. Too often, a “no loose ends” book or movie starts to feel like one: about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through, you start to notice a relentless pace at which one thread is tied up every few pages or minutes or so. And then there’s Neal Stephenson, who leaves everything in the air until the last ten pages, and then whammo! It’s all bundled up with duct tape and baling wire. That’s not satisfying, really.
5. Great stuff along the way will make me forgive a crappy ending. But the stuff along the way had better be really great.
6. Beware the surprise ending, or the shocking revelation. I love being surprised in stories, but the surprises have to arise logically out of the content of the story, so even if I didn’t see it coming, I can still reexamine the story and see the clues and note the construction by which the surprise or revelation comes. A great example of how not to handle this is the movie Basic Instinct, whose final shot reveals whether or not a certain character is the murderer. The way the story has been constructed, it could have gone either way and made equal sense. That’s bad storytelling.
7. Show me something new along the way. Discovery is cool. And it doesn’t have to even be something totally new; it can just be a new way of looking at something really familiar. Don’t be ordinary.
8. The word “said” should comprise at least 97% of your dialogue attributions. And for the love of God, please don’t use “ejaculated” as a verb of dialogue attribution. I can’t read about someone “ejaculating” a sentence without thinking of that one scene in There’s Something About Mary.
Finally, I can probably distill all this into a single, three-part rule: Don’t bore me, don’t make me feel bad for having been told your story, and don’t do anything that breaks the spell you’re trying to weave.
I could probably come up with lots more, but you probably get the idea. You probably also get the idea that I’m a pretty permissive reader. That I am, and I’ve never made any bones about it: I tend to like lots of stories, of different kinds, told in different ways.
I was just thinking if I should revise or extend these remarks, and I’m thinking, “Nahhh.” They still reflect what I look for in a story, as a reader.
The other day I linked a thread on the FSM boards in which a raging fan of the original Battlestar Galactica show is frothing at the mouth about the current re-working of the concept on the SciFi Network (and that thread is still active, by the way, despite a call for peace by none other than Stu Philips, the composer who wrote the music for the original show back in 1978). In mentioning that thread, I noted that the BSG fan in question actually is not the most lunatic regular poster on the FSM boards; that honor, longtime readers will know, goes to a guy named Dan who is a raging Objectivist and whose fealty to the music of Jerry Goldsmith knows absolutely no bounds (we’re talking about a guy who seriously believes that Goldsmith’s score to US Marshalls — no, I never saw that movie either — is superior to John Williams’s score to Star Wars).
Anyway, if you want to see what Our Objectivist Hero is like in action, here’s a thread from the FSM “Off-topic” board, on the general subject of Hurricane Katrina. It’s a pretty political thread, by necessity, but you get a good sense of the guy’s inate creepiness. (Or, if you want to read him droning on about film music, here’s a representative thread.)
The good news is that Byzantium’s Shores is, as of this writing, the Number One result for this search. Yay, me!
The bad news is that…well, that the Buffalo Bills also looked like pansies yesterday. But then, the Bills almost always look bad when they play in Tampa. Whether they’re playing the Bucs or the Giants in a Super Bowl.
Anyhow, last Friday I was talking to a guy at The Store about my thoughts on the (then) upcoming game. I pegged it as a likely loss for the Bills, reasoning that the defense would play OK at first, but that the offense would struggle to the point of going three-and-out a lot and probably turning the ball over a bit, and that the defense would therefore be on the field for entirely too long and eventually succumb to the Bucs’ running game.
Well, aside from the turnovers — somehow, the Bills didn’t turn it over all day (although they would have if the Bucs’ defensive backs had held onto the ball) — but everything else happened exactly as so. Three-and-out, three-and-out, three-and-out. A defense that looked a bit flat at the outset only got flatter, and the Bills lost a 19-3 ballgame that wasn’t even that close. The defense was a disappointment: they seem to be able to bring all kinds of pressure when they’re nursing a lead, but when they’re playing behind, they seem almost tentative. And Jerry Gray’s supposed genius for making halftime adjustments sure wasn’t in evidence, either. In short, I was amazed at how flat the Bills’ D looked yesterday.
J.P. Losman’s play was nowhere near as good as it was in Week One; he kept missing receivers and forcing balls and, in one very costly moment, tried to throw the ball away from his own end zone — but after he’d lost track of where he was and stepped out of bounds for the safety. Ouch. However, the things that Losman did wrong are things that, as he gains experience, he’ll theoretically do wrong less often. He’ll learn how to put the right touch on a ball that he’s throwing to a receiver who’s not blanketed, but who still isn’t wide-open. He’ll learn how to look off defenders and how to account for that one guy he consistently fails to account for. And so on. This was the type of game everybody knew they’d see sooner or later from Losman, and I’m kind of glad we’re seeing it sooner. We learn in large part by screwing up, so if he’s gotta learn, I say, let him screw it up right now.
I also tend to get grumpy about the Bills’ offensive line, but even though the running game stunk yesterday, I was surprised that the Bills’ O-line only surrendered two sacks, and under special circumstances: the first was the safety when the Bills were backed up right to their own goal line and happened because Losman stepped out of bounds before he could throw the ball away, and the second came in the game’s waning minute when the outcome was decided and everybody just wanted to get the hell out of Dodge. The Bucs’ great pass rusher, Simeon Rice, wasn’t much of a factor (he had the second of the Bucs’ two sacks), which speaks well of new left tackle (or guard, I can never remember) Mike Gandy.
Receiver Josh Reed seems to be waking up again, after spending the last two years in the doldrums. Reed’s got talent, and his re-emergence is a nice thing to see. However, one thing that the Bills have missed for years is a real quality pass-catching tight end. They haven’t had one since Pete Metzelaars. I kind of suspect that this deficiency (I don’t care, Mark Campbell is average at best) also hampered Drew Bledsoe, who had his best years as a QB in the NFL when he had Ben Coates making those catches over the middle in linebacker territory. There were quite a few moments yesterday when I thought that a really good tight end roaming the middle of the field would be just the safety valve J.P. Losman could use. Sure wish the Bills had one.
And one final note on the Bills: for some reason, Willis McGahee seems to be trying this year to run in the “Squirmin’ Thurman” mode, doing a lot of east-and-west running and trying to be elusive. Where’s the more Emmitt Smith-like runner from last year, the guy who was barreling north-and-south at full speed and who was knocking defenders aside with a lethal stiff-arm? Come on, Willis — run it the way you know how. Let’s see that burst and that strength again.
That’s about all from yesterday (except, of course, hooray and a big thank-you to the Carolina Panthers, who brought the StuPats down to earth). Next up for the Bills: Atlanta’s Falcons come to town, maybe with Mike Vick at quarterback. Now that ought to be exciting….