The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Craig on the Niagara Falls International Airport:
As constantly pointed out by the airport’s boosters, Niagara Falls is the only place between Toronto and Rome, NY where the big planes can land. And with Toronto’s Pearson Airport ever-closer to high-use gridlock, the Falls facility could stands a chance to emerge as an important cargo hub. While I still can’t see much need for passenger 747 service here, developing wide-body freight shipments might really provide some economic spin-offs.
Damn straight! Done right, this could make our region, which has been an economic backwater for too long, a player again. A small player, perhaps, but a player. I’d love to see lots of cargo flights into and out of NFIA; I’d love to see warehousing facilities being built around there and more truck traffic to further disperse those goods. There’s a fancy word for stuff like that: commerce.
(Oh, and remember a few years back when the Powers That Be around here wanted to virtually sell that airport to a Spanish company? That deal got scuttled, thankfully. For some reason, that sounds familiar…selling control of a major transport facility, or a potential major transport facility, to a foreign entity…Hmmmm, I’m gonna have to think about that one for a while. I know I’ve read something like that recently, somewhere….)
I’ve just read this post about Bode Miller (via James Wolcott), with some amusement. I’m not sure I buy the analogy between Miller and President Bush, but what strikes me more is the people in the comments thread and, apparently, Tom Watson’s e-mail inbox defending Miller.
Like many other folks, I was highly annoyed by Miller’s antics at the Torino Games. I have no problem with him not winning. It’s the Buffalo Bills fan in me, I suppose, but give me a team or an athlete trying as hard as possible and not winning over a supremely gifted athlete winning with ease, any day. But Miller didn’t do either of those things: he’s the supremely gifted athlete who just decided that he didn’t care enough to even try.
Miller took an opportunity for which many athletes work hard all their lives, and only a few get — and then said, “I’m good. Getting here was enough. Now I’m just gonna drink.”
Here’s my take: I hope that, if there is any validity to voodoo at all, then whatever skier would have made the US team if not for Bode Miller is sitting somewhere with a doll of our best skier, a big box of stickpins, and a lit candle. And if the US team decided to kick Miller off, I’d be fine with that, too. As far as I’m concerned, what Miller did is only marginally more acceptable than what the Chicago “Black Sox” or Pete Rose did.
F*** Bode Miller.
A few weeks ago, Steven Den Beste moved from one city to another, thus taking his server offline for a while. And then he came back, and I wondered how long it would be before he resurrected his weird obsession with Brokeback Mountain (of which I have written before). Sure enough, it came over the weekend (dated 2-25; SDB’s current blog has no permalinks):
I think Ebert is wrong. [Ebert predicted that Crash will win Best Picture this year.] This is a year in which Hollywood will speak up defiantly. This year’s Best Picture Oscar will be a message. Hollywood is going to preach to the Heartland and try to lead the mouth-breathing peasants in fly-over country back to enlightenment. The choice won’t have anything to do with quality, or performance, or writing, or box office, or any of the factors Ebert cites.
This Oscar choice is going to be a political statement. That’s why “Brokeback Mountain” is going to win.
I guess that may be true — I don’t have access to SDB’s crystal ball, and I am thus lacking his ability to see into the hearts and minds of Academy Award voters — but even so, if Brokeback Mountain and all its surrounding hoopla comprises a sermon to the lowly “Flyover Country”, doesn’t it mean something when it turns out that the “mouth-breathing peasants” there actually want to hear the sermon?
(And I can’t help but wonder if SDB himself has bothered to see Brokeback Mountain. He’s always talked big about not following crouds and being his own thinker, but as far as I can tell, he’s doing nothing here but preaching the same right-wing orthodoxy as those with whom he has increasingly allied himself over the years I’ve been reading him.)