The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Hey, male readers! If you ever find yourselves stuck in the Middle Ages with your wife, and you get that, you know, loving feeling, and you’re wondering if you can, you know, roll in the hay with her and not be immoral whilst doing so, use this helpful flowchart:
Enjoy! Good luck storming the castle!
(Found via Mr. Sun.)
AND away we go!!!
:: J.P. Losman is not a good quarterback. Or, to please the Branch Losmanians, he is not playing in a manner in which a good quarterback plays, which leaves room for the myriad of excuses and overly-optimistic yet vague statements of “he’s improving, but the Bills need to do (enter magic bullet excuse here).” (I haven’t given up on Losman yet, but too many more days like yesterday and I will, I’m sad to say. Mainly I’m linking this because “Branch Losmanians” is pretty funny.)
:: Once in a while – not too often, mind you – once in a while… I like to listen to Bach on the piano. (Shoot me now, Ye Purists: I prefer Bach on the piano. Mainly, because I don’t like the sound of the harpsichord, and I’ve never been convinced that the harpsichord sound is essential to understanding Bach’s musical language, which is all about counterpoint.)
:: About once a year the Wicked Witch of the West and her Flying Monkey make a fly-by. (I’m not a big fan of IP-blocking, but then, I don’t have any cyber-stalkers, either.)
:: My first memories of what would become a lifelong love affair with musical theater are of, as a toddler, being extremely taken with those “operetta” episodes (or maybe it was one episode repeated) they did of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. I remember being very excited by them, and by the very basic notion, intrinsic to all musical theater, of people singing to each other instead of talking. (I used to look forward to those episodes too! According to Wikipedia, there were thirteen “opera” episodes. In various film music forums, I often encounter people who insist they can’t enjoy musicals because they can’t grok people bursting into song. I’ve never had that problem at all. Now I wonder if that’s because of Mr. Rogers.)
…
It’s not fair that producers who have to turn out 22 or 24 hour episodes of drama a year must compete with producers who complete 13 episodes in a year and a half.
(Heh, on both counts. I couldn’t decide which to use for the link, so there’s both of them. Oh, and Katherine Heigl won for Grey’s Anatomy? Ugh! Nothing against Ms. Heigl, who is lovely and all, but I hate her character, and for my money, that show’s tone is set by Chandra Wilson as Dr. Bailey.)
All for this week.
Fantasy author Robert Jordan has died. I wasn’t a fan, but lots of readers are. Condolences to family, friends, and fans.
Heavens, this was one of those games where you’re left scraping the bottom of an incredibly low barrel to find good things to say. Yeesh, that was bad. Oh well, at least my second favorite team, the Steelers, won.
Woo-hoo!
:: Terrence McGee runs the kickoffs back nicely.
:: The Bills at least play hard. What always bothered me when they stunk up the field during the Gregg Williams/Drew Bledsoe era was the way they just looked lethargic when they were getting clobbered. The current crop of youngsters actually look pissed when they’re getting beat down badly. Not that this augurs anything in particular for their future, but hey, I’ll take Lee Evans losing his cool in the waning moments of the fourth quarter and committing two consecutive unsportsmanlike conduct penalties over Drew Bledsoe’s monotone insistence in the postgame interview that he’s “so mad he doesn’t know what to do”.
:: Brian Moorman’s a good punter.
Meh.
:: The Bills’ offensive line. Pass blocking was still bad, run blocking was occasionally adequate. The Jason Peters/Derrick Dockery side was supposed to be very strong, but they allowed lots of pressure to get through.
:: Defensive effort. “Bend but don’t break” will eventually get you killed, if your offense can’t put points on the board, but those guys put forth the best effort they could. Sadly, it’s not even close to enough because their talent level just isn’t up there.
:: JP Losman. Again, he wasn’t a factor one way or the other. He didn’t have a bad game, he didn’t have a good game, I’m not sure that he even had a game. The guy has got to start making plays once in a while. Two games, and aside from a couple of nice runs, no plays made from QB. Right now he looks worse than he did last year, if only because he doesn’t look any better. If this keeps up, we may be looking at some extended playing time for Trent Edwards before this year is out.
D’oh!
:: Defensive results. I praised their effort above, but a boss of mine used to say, “Don’t confuse effort with results”. They got pounded hard, giving up over 400 yards for the second straight week. Rare pressure on the opposing QB, and when they do get pressure, it rarely results in a sack. The middle of the field is always conceded to opposing receivers. Sure, they work hard, but the results are more than 400 yards and 26 points yielded.
:: Offensive results. Three points, which resulted from a drive that began in Steeler territory after a McGee kickoff return. Receivers don’t get open. Losman can’t find anyone, and seems more and more to lack the finesse needed to make those really difficult throws. No good tight end play. The offensive line still falling apart and never looking to really exert any kind of control over the line of scrimmage.
Next up: the Bills travel to New England, which will likely be able to take a week off from cheating in order to beat up on this team. Somehow Aaron Schobel will get his usual two or three sacks of Tom Brady, since he always seems to play well against Brady, but that will be that.
Wow, this is shaping up to be a bad year.
Found this photo via Warren Ellis.
Also see this surprisingly elaborate prank some guy played on his friend. It’s fairly mean-spirited, but I couldn’t help but watch how this played out. Five hundred bucks for a prank? Wow, I wish I had five hundred bucks to blow on practical jokes.
So it’s time to continue my countdown of my 100 favorite movies, or the 100 movies that would be considered the greatest movies ever if I were the Grand Exalted Ruler of the Entire Freaking Universe, or whatever. This time, we count down from #90 to #81.
90. Henry V
The Kenneth Branagh version, actually; I’ve only seen a small part of the Lawrence Olivier version, so I can’t do a direct comparison. Branagh’s is wonderfully done; Derek Jacobi does terrific work as the Chorus, introducing the film from an empty soundstage, and when Branagh delivers the Bard’s signature St. Crispin’s Day speech, I’m ready to storm a field too. Patrick Doyle’s score is a virtual classic of Shakespearean film music.
Signature moment: The afore-mentioned Crispin’s Day speech. (Text and audio link here.)
89. In the Line of Fire
This taut thriller got overshadowed in 1993 when it came out — that year’s juggernaut hit was Jurassic Park, and the brilliant The Fugitive also stole some of Line of Fire‘s thunder. This one stars Clint Eastwood as an aging, near-to-retirement Secret Service agent who gets drawn into a game of cat-and-mouse with an assassin (John Malkovich) who is openly plotting the assassination of the President. It’s an extremely well-made and entertaining film, with first-rate performances all around. (Fred Thompson plays the White House Chief of Staff.)
Signature moment: When Eastwood figures it all out.
88. Tron
I’m not sure how well this movie plays to people who didn’t grow up at that exact moment of history, the early 80s when computers were first starting to become personal objects and when video games were all the rage. I watched it again a few years ago, and it still holds up for me. It’s not a source of great acting or anything — the “real world” sequences are fairly dull — but the stuff “inside the computer” is just wondrous, as good an example of a movie creating a visual world as I’ve ever seen. Interesting electronic music by Wendy Carlos (with a strangely out-of-place song by Journey over the end credits).
Signature moment: Is there any other choice possible? The light-cycles, obviously!
87. American Graffiti
I was completely baffled by this movie when I first saw it. I was seven or eight years old, and the film was in re-release. My parents took me to see it — they wanted to go, and I ended up along for the ride. My problem was that the film’s opening titles are done in the same font as those for the TV series “Happy Days”, and Ron Howard was in it too, so on some level I thought I was watching some kind of big-screen episode of the TV show, rather than a movie that preceded that show by several years. Anyway, I watched it again when I was in college and found it funny, bittersweet, and full of charm and wit as well as love for that era of automotive and rock-and-roll history. I recently read somewhere — I think it was a blog, but I’m not sure — that American Graffiti came out in 1973 and made people feel nostalgic for a time just eleven years in the past; can you imagine a movie coming out right now that would make you nostalgic for 1996?
Signature moment: Paul Le Mat’s soliloquy in the junk yard.
86. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
This always feels to me like three-quarters of a great movie. Disney had a real chance to do a tragic and dark ending here, but the farthest they could stretch themselves in that direction was to not give the hero the girl. Still, it’s a nicely ambitious film, with lots of large-scale numbers.
Signature moment: The introductory number, “The Bells of Notre Dame”.
85. Beauty and the Beast
This is definitely the finest of the “Silver Age” of Disney animation (i.e., the era that started with The Little Mermaid). Its story is perfectly paced, the animation is beautiful, and the musical numbers are the finest to come from the legendary team of Menken&Ashman. It’s just an outstanding film, one on which I’m hard-pressed to identify any blatant flaws.
Signature moment: “Be Our Guest” is the more famous number, but the introductory “Belle” is my favorite as it weaves together a whole bunch of separate goings-on from the town into a wonderful bit of scene-setting.
84. An Affair to Remember
Sure, it’s totally sentimental, but this film sports a nearly perfect first hour, followed by a bit of losing the way, and then ends with a scene that always makes me blubber like a little girl. Seriously, when Cary Grant suddenly puts two and two together and realizes just why Deborah Kerr wasn’t there for their Empire State Building rendezvous, I always start to lose it — and then he opens the bedroom door and finds the painting. Sigh. The film sags a bit in the second half, what with a horrible musical number involving some kids and some very unconvincing stuff with Cary Grant as a starving artist.
Signature moment: I think I just described it….
83. Die Hard
What a blast of a movie. What a total, absolute blast. And I’ve just realized that I haven’t watched it in several years. Why not? Because I’m lazy. What makes it so great isn’t just the production values and the editing — although all that is sublime — but the fact that it makes the hero and villain pretty much of equal intelligence. John McClane doesn’t just bowl his way through all the bad guys; he actually has to figure stuff out and take huge risks, and in reacting to McClane’s activities, Hans Gruber also has to figure stuff out and take huge risks of his own.
Signature moment: Hell, there are so many from this film, aren’t there? For me, the most blood-pumping sequence is when the two helicopters are arriving on the roof.
82. The Music Man
And no, not just because I went to college in Iowa! I loved this movie well before I ever even thought of going to Iowa. So there. The Music Man never seems to get enough love when the subject of the great musicals comes up, and I can never figure out why. It’s really extremely good, full of wit and hilarity and some absolutely beautiful songs.
Signature moment: My favorite musical number here is “Ya Got Trouble”, when Prof. Harold Hill launches his own personal brand of flim-flam in River City.
81. Brigadoon
It’s not long enough, jettisoning too many numbers from the Broadway show (two of them because of risque lyrics). Its focus is more on operatics than on typical Hollywood musical production numbers, befitting Gene Kelly’s more ballet-influenced style of dancing than Fred Astaire soft-shoe. But I adore its tale of the cursed town that only awakes for one day each century, and the love story that unfolds there.
Signature moment: “The Heather on the Hill”.
And there we go for now. Look for another installment whenever I get around to writing one!
Part One: The Other Day.
I’m sitting at my desk, going through some stuff. The Daughter is playing on the computer. I’ve just picked up a shopping bag.
THE DAUGHTER: Where’s that bag from?
ME: Barnes&Noble.
THE DAUGHTER: Ooooooh. I hate their commercials.
She resumes playing her game. I mull over what she’s just said.
ME: Huh?!
Part Two: Last night.
We’re driving past McKinley Mall.
ME: Interesting…I’ll bet that big area of construction there next to JC Penney is where the new Barnes&Noble is going in.
THE DAUGHTER: Ooooooh. I hate Barnes&Noble! I hate their commercials!
ME: Huh?! What commercials? I’ve never seen a Barnes&Noble commercial in my life!
THE DAUGHTER: Yeah, they have that creepy bald guy.
ME: Uhhhh…OK.
Part Three: Our bedroom this morning.
The Wife and I are talking about lots of stuff.
ME: And what was up with her rant about Barnes and Noble’s commercials? Have you ever seen a Barnes&Noble commercial?
THE WIFE: Nope. Can’t say that I have.
ME: And it wasn’t just that — she described the commercial! She said it had a creepy bald guy!
THE WIFE: Bald guy? Ooooooh!
[beat]
THE WIFE: (triumphantly) Cellino and Barnes!
[beat]
ME: Oh, wow….
Messrs. Tosy and Cosh hold forth on a list of 100 Best TV shows, so I’ll do a similar thing — but instead of color-coding shows I like, I’ll just bold shows about which I have an opinion, one way or the other. Unaltered titles are shows I’m not familiar with. Occasional commentary, of course.
And now, the list!
24
60 Minutes (I don’t much watch this anymore at all, but it was a staple in our home as a kid.)
The Abbott and Costello Show (I’ve always liked what I’ve seen of Abbott and Costello, but their show was before my time.)
ABC’s Wide World of Sports (I miss this! I remember once watching with keen interest a log-rolling competition on WWoS.)
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
All in the Family (Brilliant show, obviously. I didn’t get the social comment aspects at the time, since I was a kid.)
An American Family
American Idol (I’m totally hooked, even if I thought Melinda was robbed.)
Arrested Development
Battlestar Galactica (Wait a minute — which one? The new one, or the original? I liked the original, but I’ve only seen the pilot of the new one. I was favorably impressed by that, I admit. I also watched several episodes of the original a couple of years back on DVD, and I was surprised that I didn’t find the show to be the campy crap most people believe it to be.)
The Beavis and Butt-Head Show (I loved this! It was clever and funny, not just juvenilia. There’s an episode where the guys participate in the school fundraising candy sale, and instead of selling all of their candy bars to other people for two bucks apiece, they just keep selling their candy bars back and forth to each other, just exchanging the same two bucks over and over again. That was hilarious. Plus, the commentary on music videos which in its way presaged MST3K. And you know what? After a very late night closing a Pizza Hut, there’s nothing better than Beavis and Butthead at two in the morning.)
The Bob Newhart Show (Hi Bob!)
Brideshead Revisited
Buffalo Bill
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (A special case. I always figured I’d like it, and I watched a couple of episodes during its run and was always impressed. But its timeslot didn’t work for me, and I never felt driven to invest myself in getting up to speed on the show’s backstory.)
The Carol Burnett Show (You know, I miss the old sketch and variety shows!)
The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
A Charlie Brown Christmas (We will watch this yearly until we die, and probably after that, even.)
Cheers (What can I say? Just an amazing show, with a greater track record for consistent laughs than just about any American show ever produced, in my opinion.)
The Cosby Show
The Daily Show (But not until Jon Stewart took over. I never cared for Craig Kilborne.)
Dallas (Loved it, and I’m not afraid to admit it! I know they’re doing a movie version of it, with John Travolta as JR, and I’m ambivalent about that; I wonder if they’re doing something like the Brady Bunch movies where it’s more spoof than anything else. Personally, I think a fairly compelling movie could be made out of the Dallas backstory, where John Ross Ewing and Digger Barnes meet, wildcat for oil together, and fall for Miss Ellie. CBS did a TV movie of this, years ago, but I think it would make a neat story for a feature film.)
The Day After
Deadwood
The Dick Van Dyke Show
Dragnet
The Ed Sullivan Show
The Ernie Kovacs Show
Felicity (Meh. My general antipathy toward JJ Abrams starts here. Never got the fuss. Keri Russell is really cute, though.)
Freaks and Geeks (I saw one episode of this. And I loved that episode. So why have I never come round to watching the rest of it? Because I’m lazy and slothful, that’s why.)
The French Chef
Friends (One of my most beloved of shows, even if now I re-watch the first season and notice some of the creaks and growing pains and generic sit-com stuff. I didn’t dislike the last season, but the show did noticeably run low on steam, and probably should have ended a season earlier than it did. But I loved it just the same, and I almost think that in its whole “representative show of Generation X” persona or whatever, it’s almost become underrated as just a good comedy show. There were some inspiringly funny things that happened in its episodes, and many of them were ingeniously character-driven moments. For my money, the greatest punchline to a sitcom episode ever comes in the episode where Ross finally learns of Chandler and Monica’s relationship.)
General Hospital (Huge fan when I was a kid! How fun it was, watching Robert Skorpio and friends struggle to thwart the plans of the evil DVX! And I still remember how mad I’d get when they’d do their once-a-week episode that caught up all of the other storylines, the boring ones about which doctor is in love with which nurse or the latest fight between Alan and Monica Quartermaine or the current doings of the people living in “the Brownstone”. I never thought Laura was all that beautiful, though; Finola Hughes as Anna Devane was more my speed.)
The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show
Gilmore Girls (I should watch some of this sometime — I’ve heard lots of good things about it.)
Gunsmoke
Hill Street Blues
Homicide: Life on the Street
The Honeymooners (One of the NYC TV stations we received when we finally got cable — either WOR or WPIX — used to run this, late at night. And it was always hysterical.)
I, Claudius
I Love Lucy (I was never that big a fan, for some reason. I’ve seen lots of re-runs, and while I don’t dislike it, I’ve never quite understood all the fuss.)
King of the Hill (I haven’t seen this in a long time, but it was a favorite for a while. I still cannot drive by a place that sells propane and not think things like “I sell propane and propane accessories” and “Lady propane is a clean-burning fuel, I tell you what!”)
The Larry Sanders Show
Late Night with David Letterman (NBC) (Why not the CBS years, as well? He’s done inspired stuff on both incarnations. I love Dave!)
Leave It to Beaver
Lost (Awesome production values. Extremely well-made show, with more craftsmanship than you’ll find on lots of feature movies. Sadly, though, a story and characters that completely leave me cold. My antipathy toward JJ Abrams continues.)
Married… With Children
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
M*A*S*H (Either side-splittingly funny, or self-important windbaggery. Still, the series’s last half hour never fails to move me, when I see it.)
The Monkees
Monty Python’s Flying Circus (I could spend an entire series of posts waxing poetic about my love-affair with Monty Python. Maybe I will someday. Suffice it to say, “wink wink nudge nudge know-what-I-mean!”)
Moonlighting (Mildly amusing show that I found wildly overrated. I actually put off seeing Die Hard because I generally hated Bruce Willis’s character on this show.)
MTV 1981-1992 (If only I’d channeled those hours into something useful!)
My So-Called Life (Ahhh yes, and it’s being re-issued on DVD this fall. Gotta pick it up. It’s brilliant. I watched every episode in its initial run.)
Mystery Science Theater 3000 (Who doesn’t love this?)
The Odd Couple (I used to watch it in re-runs when I was a kid, and I thought it very funny. I haven’t seen it in years, though.)
The Office [American] (Often brilliant, but there are times — more frequently last season — where my credulity is strained such that I can’t see how Michael could possibly keep his job doing some of the things he does, no matter how good his sales record is.)
The Office [British]
The Oprah Winfrey Show
Pee Wee’s Playhouse
Playhouse 90
The Price Is Right (Sure!)
Prime Suspect
The Prisoner
The Real World (I only watched the Los Angeles, San Francisco, and London incarnations, and I enjoyed each. The London season annoyed me a bit, because of that lazy kid from Portland who spent three months living in London and basically never left the flat.)
Rocky and His Friends
Roots
Roseanne (Hated it. Unfunny, loud, boorish. Ugh.)
Sanford and Son (I used to watch this in re-runs with my father. Good times, those!)
Saturday Night Live (It comes and goes, doesn’t it? BTW, the guy they have who does George W. Bush right now is awful.)
Second City Television
See It Now
Seinfeld (The first couple of seasons are tough to watch now, but everything else after is gold, Jerry! Gold! Even the much-derided Season Nine.)
Sesame Street (Yup. Nothing else to say, really. Although nowadays…Elmo makes me want to hit the bottle.)
Sex and the City
The Shield
The Simpsons (I think this may be the reason television was invented in the first place. And animation.)
The Singing Detective
Six Feet Under
Soap
The Sopranos (I have no interest in this show.)
South Park (I haven’t seen it in seven or eight years, but I often found it quite funny back then.)
SpongeBob SquarePants (This makes me laugh a bit…but I’m never quite sure why. I suspect this show is designed to be watched while drunk.)
SportsCenter (I was watching the day Charlie Steiner lost it after they played the clip of someone singing the “Star Spangled Banner” very badly. That’s it, really.)
Star Trek (See the “Star Trek Redux” posts, linked in the sidebar.)
St. Elsewhere
The Super Bowl (and the Ads) (I watch it for the games, and use the commercials for blogging, grabbing food, going to the bathroom, etc. Usually the next morning I haven’t even seen all of the ads.)
Survivor (I don’t like it much, although we did watch two seasons because for a time The Daughter liked the games they’d do on the beach. But the constant footage of people whispering to one another about who they’re voting off gets boring very quickly, and I find that it’s hard to root “for” these people, because it seems that the kinds of personality traits that enable one to win Survivor are traits that would make one a complete jerk in real life. Really, who on Earth would want to spend quality time with Richard Hatch?)
Taxi (I remember liking it a lot. I don’t remember much of why. It’s been a very long time since I saw it at all.)
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (Johnny Carson was always class.)
The Twilight Zone
Twin Peaks
The West Wing (First two-and-a-half seasons were amazing; Aaron Sorkin started to peter out a bit for a while. The election episodes in Season Four were pretty dull. The fifth season, the first without Sorkin, was a mixed bag, with some very good stuff scattered into some very boring stuff. But the sixth and seventh seasons were excellent again, I thought.)
What’s My Line?
WKRP in Cincinnati (I loved this show. Another favorite from re-runs as a kid.)
The Wire
Wiseguy
The X-Files (I’ve discussed it before in this space. I hung in there a lot longer than most fans, but it did go on two years longer than it should have.)
Your Show of Shows
—end of list—
OK, that’s all the shows on the list. There are some, of course, that seem to be missing, as is always the case with lists like this. ER should be there, I think; its quick-fire storytelling was quite the thunderbolt when it first arrived in 1994, and no matter how bad it has become in the last few years, it was very good for most of its run before that, and often brilliant. (And it’s the only show I can think of to have not one, but two, “jump the shark” moments. That’s pretty notable.) I’m always bummed out that Barney Miller doesn’t get enough love, and ditto NYPDBlue. Recognizing the Super Bowl is well and good, but in terms of remaking the TV landscape, it seems to me that Monday Night Football is more significant.
Anyway, there it is. I watch too much teevee.
Stolen from Jason, I followed these instructions:
1. Go to http://www.careercruising.com/.
2. Put in Username: nycareers, Password: landmark.
3. Take their “Career Matchmaker” questions.
4. Post the top ten results.
OK, so here are my top ten results:
1. Technical Writer
2. Anthropologist
3. Writer
4. Market Research Analyst
5. Critic
6. Print Journalist
7. Translator
8. Communications Specialist
9. Political Aide
10. Activist
Most of these come as no surprise, I must admit — look at all the writing careers! Yay! Not so sure about technical writing, given my lack of expertise in technical stuff, but there’s a learning curve there, I suppose. Also “translator” — I’m not sure how that came about, seeing as how there were no questions about languages (and my non-English speech is limited to what little high school French I remember). I also don’t know how good a political aide I’d be, given the high level of frustration I often feel with politics as it’s practiced in this country.
Being a print journalist would be cool — I could put the “liberal” back in “liberal media”!
And now we’re back in the swing of things! Before we go on, though, the unofficial entries from the other day are the Fox Plaza in Los Angeles (which served in Die Hard as the Nakitomi building), and the West Wing of the White House (you can see the oval roof of the oval office).
That aside, time for the new entry. Here it is:
Where are we?
(Rot-13 your answers, please!)
