The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
This is probably not safe for work, but it just cracked me up repeatedly: a blog devoted to investigating the phenomenon of really attractive women being in the company of guys who are, well, a bit dorky.
(And no, I’m not discounting the possibility that I’m one of those dorky guys.)
Well, the Bartlet Administration is in its final days as it witnesses its transition period with President-elect Santos, who somehow managed to get elected despite picking an admitted alcoholic and drug addict with a history of heart trouble as his running mate, and then seeing that same running mate dying of a heart attack on Election Day. Luckily, he was able to pull out a squeaker of an election by carrying Texas and defeating a Republican nominee who had somehow won his party’s nomination despite being a pro-choice non-church goer. Well, who ever said that TV needed plausibility? All that stuff is no less plausible than all those times Data or Wesley managed to save the Enterprise by reversing the flow of dekyon particles from the ship’s Bussard collectors*.
Nothing much to say about the show, really, except that it just occurred to me that it would be funny if the very last scene of the last episode had President Santos, on his first day in office, sitting down at the Resolute Desk, taking a deep breath…and then a knock at the door:
SANTOS: Come in!
MANDY walks in, looking dissheveled and holding some kind of incredibly thick report.
MANDY: Mr. President, I know it’s taken a while for me to get this done, but I’ve been working real hard in the basement on it and…I’m sorry, who are you?
Fade out.
Yeah, I know, it’s lame. But then, I’m a guy who came away from the last episode of Happy Days wondering whatever happened to Chuck Cunningham.
* When he got the notice from Starfleet Academy that Wesley was to leave the ship and actually, you know, earn a spot in Starfleet by actually attending the Academy, do you suppose Captain Picard went alone into his ready-room and said to himself, “My God, I gotta fly this thing by myself? We’re all f***ed!”?
Another thing I suddenly thought of regarding the whole “Pharamacists versus Morals” thing: I read, a while back, that the Target Corporation was actually going to allow its pharmacists to behave in this moralizing way.
Funny thing is: even while a Target pharmacist could be denying the pill to women, the Target health products section — which is not run by the pharamacists — carries condoms.
Tell me again how this isn’t about punishing women and paternalistic moralizing.
It appears that spring has finally arrived in Buffalo, pretty much when it always does: mid-April, when the temperatures start reliably hitting the 60s more often than not and we get to see that big yellow thing in the sky more often than not.
I’ve long maintained that spring is Buffalo’s worst season, seeing as how it’s more of a gray and muddy two-month segue from winter to summer, but it is nice when the spring weather that the rest of the country is enjoying finally blossoms here.
Up for today: finding an Easter bunny, so we can take part in the pagan parts of the ritual celebration of Easter. And then, some laundry. Tomorrow, we take part in the non-pagan ritual celebration of Easter. And then, some ham and more laundry. And maybe a walk in the sun or something similar.
(And if I could trust these lumbering oafs in cat-form whom I actually suspect are some kind of fiendish crossbreed of a Siamese cat with an Irish setter to not push out the screens, maybe I could even open our windows more than an inch or two.)
Steven Den Beste reported something amusing in his referral logs. In a political debate that cropped up on this message board, a poster tries to draw a historical analogy in defense of George W. Bush:
May I remind people that Teddy Roosevelt was promptly despised and voted out of office after winning WW1.
And this person apparently hails from Texas. I guess that was one child that got left behind.
Via Bitch Ph. D I note a new wrinkle in the thing about pharmacists refusing to fill certain prescriptions to women, such as the “morning after” pill, birth control, and other women’s health drugs, on “moral” grounds: now they may be refusing to fill prescriptions for drugs they do actually carry because they don’t approve of the medical professional writing the script.
What nauseating rubbish that is. And I really wish reporters covering stories like these would ask these moralizing pharmacists if they fill men’s prescriptions for Viagra.
And frankly, the argument that pharmacies are businesses and businesses should be allowed to decide for themselves what products they’ll sell is crap. Yes, pharmacies are businesses — but they’re not like the corner 7-11, and this isn’t like Wal-Mart deciding to not stock nudie rags in the magazine section. Pharmacists are medical professionals who have to undergo a lot of schooling to attain their license, and there are ethical guidelines for medical professionals. If you don’t want to fill certain prescriptions, then don’t become a pharmacist. It’s that simple.
Over at Random Thoughts, the question is posed: Will the Bills still be here in five years?
Honestly, I don’t know. If the Western New York economy is still something resembling then what it is now, then I’d suspect they’re gone unless something very dramatic happens — say, a Tom Golisano/Tim Russert partnership buys the team. But there will be a new Governor next year, and the Buffalo Prefecture of Blogistan seems to alternate between heady optimism for the city’s future and a sense of fatalistic doom for same, so…I don’t know.
I’d pose a follow-up question, though: If the team does get moved, will you still follow the fortunes of the franchise?
And still one more follow-up: How will you react if the Bills leave town and then win a Super Bowl within two or three years of leaving?
I forgot to bitch about this a few weeks ago, but a few Thursdays back, one of our fine local TV stations ran promos all night about “an animal that has escaped from the Buffalo Zoo! Details at eleven!”
And I’m thinking, Cool!. So I dutifully tuned in at eleven, to hear all about the terror of the beastie on the loose, our mighty wayward…
(wait for it)
…peacock.
Man, talk about a letdown. A peacock was on the loose. If you want to see a peacock on the loose, just go to the Toronto Zoo — they just let their peacock wander freely around the grounds, and it’s about as threatening as a sleeping Ernest Borgnine.
I, of course, was envisioning that the escaped animal was an underfed Bengal tiger. Who’d maybe found his way into a school. A school for the blind.
Yeah, that would have been a show.
Stupid news promos: “If it bleeds, it leads — unless we got nothin’ in the ‘bleeding’ department, in which case we grab something that we can make people think might bleed.”
(And for you Buffalo viewers: how thick do you think that stack of e-mails they keep displaying on Channel 2 will get before they stop having Scott Levin hold it up every night as a display of our public outrage about the tolls on the 190? I’m thinking, four and a half inches.)
Resurrecting a series….
Alexander Borodin: String quartet #2 in D major
Bedrich Smetana: String quartet #1 in E minor, “From My LIfe”
The Cleveland Quartet
As I’ve noted in this space before, as much as I love classical music, there are great whacks of it with which I am almost completely unfamiliar. By far the largest of these realms is the giant category known as “chamber music”. I’ve always adored the large-scale symphonic works — as might be expected by my now-nearly twenty year obsession with Hector Berlioz — but the smaller scale works for small ensembles just seem to always elude my interest.
Actually, “elude my interest” isn’t even a fair way to put it. It’s not that I’m not interested in chamber music, it’s that my other musical interests so outweigh my putative chamber music interest that I just end up continually putting the chamber stuff off for another day. Well, I’ve started to slowly rectify that a bit. After all, it’s not as if I’m totally adverse to the small ensemble; much of Celtic music is performed by groups of precisely the scale one normally encounters in classical chamber music.
I’ve started with the string quartet, which is arguably the “basic” chamber ensemble, in that more music has been composed for the string quartet, much of it by the great masters, than anyone else. I actually got to hear a local string quartet live at my church’s Christmas Eve service, and I was struck by the warmth of the ensemble, the singing tone that comes from the seamless blending of four distinct voices.
Why start my quartet collection with this disc, with one quartet each by Borodin and Smetana? Well, I can’t lie: it was cheap, for one thing. Budget-price CDs are a good thing. For another, I want to save, for now, the “Mount Olympus” of string quartets (the ones by Beethoven, especially the later ones, of which I have heard naught but superlatives over the years). I’ve always responded well to the Russian Nationalist composers of the nineteenth century, and I already had a small familiarity with the Borodin quartet in D owing to its use in the James Bond film The Living Daylights. (Yeah, so what? The Bond girl was a cellist in that movie. It makes sense.) And yes, the Borodin quartet is a wonderful example of Russian Romanticism in music. I’ve already listened to the Borodin twice. It’s absolutely captivating.
I’ve only listened to the Smetana partway through, so I can’t comment much on it as of this point, except to note that it too has been used in an espionage movie: Sneakers. Small world, eh?
One thing of special interest with regard to this particular recording: at the time it was made, in 1990, the Cleveland Quartet was performing with the “Paganini quartet” instruments. These were four instruments — two violins, a viola, and a cello — owned by the great violin virtuoso Nicolo Paganini in the 1800s, and made by none other than Antonio Stradivari in the 1600s. (These instruments are now being used by the Tokyo String Quartet.) Of these four instruments, it’s the viola that is of particular interest to me.
This is the viola that, upon its acquisition, inspired Paganini to commission a work for viola and orchestra from Hector Berlioz. The resulting work, Harold in Italy, was Berlioz’s second symphony. Paganini never played it, judging the work not virtuosic enough; I’ve always found it surprising that Paganini didn’t realize in the first place that Berlioz was not particularly well suited to a concerted work. But even though Paganini didn’t perform the work, he did eventually hear it — and judged it so fine that he gifted Berlioz with 20,000 francs. Without that monetary gift, it’s unlikely that Berlioz would ever have composed Romeo et Juliet — which is my favorite Berlioz work.
So when I was listening to this CD, I was listening to the very viola that set in motion, almost 170 years ago, a chain of events that resulted in two of Berlioz’s greatest masterpieces.
There’s just so much synchronicity to be found in the following of classical music.