The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Website owner toys with a troll. My favorite bit is near the end of the exchange, when the website owner tells the troll, “You’re still going to read this”, and the troll responds, “No I won’t!” Game, set and match.
:: Check out this wonderful interactive map of Middle Earth, with zooming and clicking-and-dragging and all that. Cool!
That’s about it, actually. Not as much exciting stuff this week, unfortunately….
It’s football time, woo-hoo!
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| From Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie |
Yup, the NFL season “begins” today. That’s in quotes because last Thursday night, the Saints and Vikings played the first official game of the season. But nobody takes Thursday night seriously as a football season start. The NFL is about Sunday. And maybe Monday night. Not Thursday.
So, it’s time to watch the Buffalo Bills lace ’em up and take the field at Ralph Wilson Stadium (and once at Ye Former Skydome in Toronto) in their eternal quest to win the Super Bowl make the playoffs look respectable not suck as much as some other teams. Bills fans have had a sorry time of it for ten years now; generally speaking, we’ve had only the sporadic chance to truly utter a genuine Woo-hoo! over our football team. More often — and by a factor of at least ten — our reaction to watching football in Buffalo has been like this:
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| From Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie |
No matter how much the start of the last ten Bills seasons has felt like this…
Somehow, at the end of the year, it always ends up feeling like this…
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| From Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie |
…and not in a good way, either.
How then is this season likely to turn out? Well, as I’m a sci-fi geek, let me make a sci-fi geek reference.
One of my favorite episodes of Firefly — well, the show only had a dozen or so episodes, so they’re all my favorites, but never mind on that — has Captain Reynolds and pilot Wash getting kidnapped by a bad guy they stiffed out of some money in an earlier episode. This guy is torturing them on his own private space station, so the crew of Serenity decides, after recovering Wash from the guy, to mount a commando-type rescue operation to retake their Captain. Problem is, they don’t really know how many guards the bad guy has, or how strong his defenses are, or how good his space station’s scanners are, and so on. They’re going on a lot of guesswork, which leads Serenity muscleman and all-around brute Jayne Cobb to growl, “I smell a whole lotta ‘if’ comin’ off this plan.”
Well, that’s how I see the Buffalo Bills this year. I small a whole lotta ‘if’ comin’ off this team.
I’ve heard a lot of griping and complaining and outright bitching during the offseason about the upcoming season and the roster that’s taking shape, but my view generally is this: the last crew in command (head coach Dick Jauron and former GM Marv Levy) left the roster in a really bad spot, talent-wise. So the new guys have a lot of work to do. It started last year, actually, with what is now looking like a pretty good 2009 draft class (although we’re still waiting on first pick Aaron Maybin to start producing some pass rush, or some tackling, or just being in the general vicinity of the ball). The 2010 draft class, managed by new GM Buddy Nix and new head coach Chan Gailey, looks promising, but…well, that’s part of the ‘if’ I’m smellin’ off this team.
What it boils down to is simply this: for the Bills to have a good 2010 season, they need to hit on just about every rookie or second-year guy who is on the roster, and they need to hit on those guys pretty spectacularly. They need their two second-year guards, drafted last year, to continue to improve after looking pretty good last year. They need a flock of young receivers to demonstrate ability to get open, catch the ball, and produce yardage. They need a flock of young linebackers and inexperienced linebackers to produce (one of their starting linebackers is a converted defensive end). They need someone to become a good tight end. They need their defensive line to show some stoutness. They need Trent Edwards to finally take a step forward at quarterback. And most desperately, they need the tackles on the offensive line to not suck.
That, folks, is a lot to hope for from a young team. It’s probably too much to hope for, which is why I’m mentally penciling the Bills in for a season that will look pretty bad, if all you focus on is the won-lost record.
Now, that’s not all I focus on, and frankly, my mantra is the same as it’s been for quite a few years now with this team: I don’t mind if their record is crappy at the end, as long as I’m seeing young players making plays at times and showing improvement as the season goes on and basically as long as I’m seeing some evidence that this group of guys can grow into a pretty good team another year or two down the line. That certainly hasn’t been the case in recent Bills seasons, when at the end, I’m always thinking, “Yay, they stunk again and their young players still aren’t producing”. I don’t expect the seed to produce a full-sized oak tree this year, but it sure would be nice to see the seed sprouting. Every year it’s the same: “Hey, we got a dud seed. Need a new one for next year.”
Ultimately, I expect the Bills to finish with one of the NFL’s worst records and probably secure a draft spot in the top five. That might be the best thing, actually, for the franchise: squeeze what they can out of the young talent they have right now, and use next year’s improved draft position to plug in more talent. Buddy Nix seems to have the best grasp on players that any Bills front-office guy has shown in years, and I also like his approach thus far to rebuilding the roster. I was fine with his not drafting a quarterback last year (until the 7th round, and that guy didn’t even make the practice squad); if he truly felt that none of the guys available was lighting his fire, then his decision to not try to force one anyway but instead build a better team everywhere else and try again next year was a good one. So who knows; maybe next year we’re watching Jake Locker suit up for the Bills on opening day.
I do think that it will take a miraculous year from Trent Edwards for him to still be here next season. I’m talking big-time numbers here, even if they’re likely to be in a lot of losses because the Bills’ defense right now is pretty soft. If Edwards does anything less than, oh, start 14 games, throw over 20 TDs and under 15 INTs, and have a passer rating of 90 or above, then I don’t want him here next year. It’s that simple. We’ve seen about all we can of him, at this point. He either needs to have a big year, or the Bills need to turn the page when his lackluster year is over.
My “nightmare” scenario is another 7-9 finish, with the Bills again picking in the 11 through 15 spot next year, taking them out of consideration for the top QBs in the draft. That would be bad. But I also think it’s unlikely, because the defense is likely to give up a ton of points. The offense may improve a bit, so to me, the likely scenario is that we’ll have to endure the Bills being on the bummer end of a lot of 38-24 kinds of games. And my prediction for their final record? 4-12. You heard it here…when you heard it here, folks!
As for the rest of the NFL? My predictions, which are always wrong!
AFC
East: New England
North: Baltimore
South: Indianapolis
West: San Diego
Wildcards: NY Jets, CincinnatiNFC
East: Dallas
North: Green Bay
South: New Orleans
West: San Francisco
Wildcards: Washington, Minnesota
Random notes:
:: I really think this is the year Brett Favre’s age is going to catch up with him, and that after a lackluster season this year (I’m not even sure they’re a lock to make the playoffs), the Vikings will ultimately regret their dalliance with him. I think this is almost certainly his last season, which means that the Vikes will have to go into next year looking for a new QB. And I’m not sure how much longer their current window of opportunity will remain open. Their defense is full of guys who aren’t getting any younger.
:: For the record: I was not upset when the Bills didn’t draft Matt Leinart. I do wish Donte Whitner would start to justify that they picked him instead, though.
:: Ben Roethlisberger is a great quarterback, but he’s also an ass and I have no problem with his suspension on those grounds. I’m not at all sure why his suspension, however, is for a longer duration that Marshawn Lynch’s 2009 suspension, which came after Lynch pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor charges.
:: Every year, some playoff team from the previous year turns out to be surprisingly bad the next. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Jets are that team this year. I’m just not sold on them.
:: The Bills may be lucky in that several of the teams likely to be in their neighborhood as bad teams already have their quarterbacks of the future (for the moment). St Louis and Detroit are likely to be bad (although I think Detroit’s years as a stinkpile team may be nearly over), and they’ve got their guys already. Ditto Carolina, who drafted two quarterback prospects in 2010. The other teams most likely to finish near the top of the draft board and need to find new QBs next year are Tampa Bay and Cleveland.
:: I was confused all off-season by the legions of sportswriters assuming that Terrell Owens was pretty much done, after his worst statistical season of his career in 2009. Did they not see the guys who were throwing him the ball in Buffalo last year? No receiver’s going to put up big numbers with Ryan Fitzpatrick and/or Brian Brohm in the pocket for half the season. Owens is in the twilight of his career, certainly, but let’s not be sticking the fork in him quite yet.
:: OK, Super Bowl picks. I won’t pick New England, because (a) they just aren’t as talented as they used to be, (b) I’m unsold on Bill Belichick’s ability to run the offense and the defense, (c) I think Tom Brady is closer to physical decline than a lot of people think (a likelihood that goes up with every playoff run from here on out), and (d) I hate them. Nor will I pick San Diego, because they’ve still got Norv Turner as head coach. (What possessed them to dump Marty Schottenheimer and then go after Norv Turner as their “guy who can win the big one” is beyond me.) Likewise, I won’t pick Dallas because they’ve got Wade Phillips calling the shots. Washington will continue to be a mess, Mike Shanahan notwithstanding. New Orleans looks like they could repeat, but the last time I thought a team had a great chance to repeat (the Bucs in 2003), they ended up stinking up the joint. So that narrows me down to Indianapolis (in what I think may well be Peyton Manning’s last real shot before physical decline starts to rear its ugly head with him, too) and Green Bay.
My Super Bowl prediction: the Colts beat the Packers.
And remember, folks: now that I’m on record as having predicted all of these things, none of them will actually happen! Hooray!
I re-post this every year on this date. It is the first piece of fiction I wrote after 9-11-01.
There is never any rest for me, the Ferryman of the Dead.
I pole my barge across the black waters and up to the pier. So many wait this time, many more than usual. I wonder what has happened, what event has sent me this many. “Come aboard,” I say. “I will take your coin for passage.” One by one they file past me, each handing to me the coin that they never knew they had. It is the coin which determines where they shall be taken to rest, its metal shaped and determined by life. The coins of these dead are gold, every one of them purest gold. Six thousand come aboard my barge, and each has passage for the farthest and greatest of destinations. In that moment I know that something truly dark has happened; the gold coins are always forged in moments of darkness. I am the Ferryman. I can give them no answers to what lies behind their haunted, questioning eyes. I can only take them on this, the last of all journeys.
When they are all aboard I take up the pole and push away from the pier. The barge always feels the same, no matter how many stand upon its decks. Whether six or six thousand, it is all the same to me. I guide us out onto the River Styx. Some of the people look worried, but there is no need for fear. This river can do them no harm. They are already dead.
This is to be a long journey, I know – it always is, to this destination. As I guide the barge through the black waters, I look on the faces of those who have come to me. As different as these people all look, they all have the same expressions of shock, disbelief, and withering sadness. Here is a man of business, talking into a cell phone. He is trying to call someone, anyone, who will tell him that it’s all a dream, that it didn’t happen, that he didn’t die in a blast of fire, smoke, glass and steel. There is a mother who is explaining to her daughter that they won’t be going to Disneyland after all. And there, a group of firemen stand together, realizing that soon they will meet all their brothers-in-arms who have gone into the infernos before them. So many now – colleagues once in business and now colleagues in death, people who have never before met but now have the gravest thing in common. As the current takes hold, I look back at the pier. There are more gathering there. There are always more. They will wait. Time does not exist for the dead.
“Please,” a young man says as he turns to me, “I have to go home to my daughters.”
“You are going home now,” I reply. “To the home where all eventually return.” Two black rocks slide past on either side, the rocks that mark the passage of the circling Styx.
“This can’t be,” a woman cries out. “My mother needs me.”
“She will be with you soon enough.”
“When?” Her voice pleads, and yet there is no solace that is mine to give.
“I cannot say,” I reply. “The Ferryman has no hand in Fate.”
The tears come then, tears from the six thousand that run over the gunwales and into the river which has been fed by tears for centuries. All tears are born in the River Styx.
“Where will you take us?” someone asks.
“To the place you are promised,” I answer. I recall the words of a poet: Will there be beds for all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come.
One our left we approach the Hills of the Damned, an endless stretch of shattered lands which reach away into the blackness. The waters echo with the cries of all those who have been taken to the Hills for the agony they have brought on the living. I consider the bag of six thousand gold coins, and I realize that I will have to journey to the Hills this day. There will be a person, perhaps more, who will pay me with a coin of black tin; but not on this journey. As the hills recede behind us, the unending cries of the damned become fainter and fainter until they are drowned out by the lapping of the waters upon the sides of the boat and the marker stones that we pass. The six thousand fall silent, each realizing that it is not a dream. I would offer solace, but as ever I cannot. I am the Ferryman.
We come around a particularly dark bend, and before us lies a very wide expanse of water, as if the Styx has become an ocean – which in some sense it probably has. And beyond that expanse are the thousands of twinkling lights that I have come to know so well. One man, a fireman, sees them too. “What is that?” he asks.
“It is the City of Dead Works,” I reply. The lights of the city glow on the horizon, and every one of the six thousand turns toward them as the Styx impels us onward. As we come ever closer to the city, the glittering lights reflect off the black water.
“I don’t understand,” someone else says. “The City of Dead Works?”
“Aye,” I reply. “Behold!”
From behind us, golden light: the Sun of the Dead is rising as it always does when the dead come near the City. Above us the firmament is turning purple, then blue; soon the light of the Sun will illuminate the City of Dead Works. As the sky lightens, the true scope of that city becomes plain: it stretches away into the land, farther than any eye could see. Not even the highest-soaring raven, cavorting in the breezes and zephyrs of the dead, could take it all in. It is bigger by far than any one city ever built by the hand of men, because it encompasses some part of all of them. Perhaps it is bigger than all of the cities ever built. Now the sun’s first rays come up behind us, and the first buildings can be seen down by the water.
“That one looks Egyptian,” a woman says.
“The Great Library of Alexandria,” I tell her. “Once the greatest repository of learning the world had ever seen, now only a memory to the living and a reality only to the dead.”
A man points to a building high upon a rock. I nod.
“The Temple of Solomon,” I say.
“There are ships in the harbor,” says another. Thus for him I name the ships: Arizona, Indianapolis, Lusitania, Bismarck, Wilhelm Gustloff, Cap Arcona. And many, many others. I scan over the impossibly vast city and spot Dresden, as it was; and beside it the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And how many smaller villages, tucked into the hills beyond the City? None can say. The Sun of the Dead shines upon those hills now, and the great stone statues in the likeness of Siddhartha Gautama.
“I don’t understand,” a young man says. “Why this City? Why here?”
I only shake my head as we continue to float by the City. I do not point out the fairly small, nondescript office building that sits near the water. It is not a particularly remarkable building; nor was it, really, until the fuse was lit. The six thousand almost don’t recognize it.
Almost.
Not one word is uttered as we slide past the Alfred Murrah Federal Building. Then we turn away from the City of Dead Works, and head again down the waters of the Styx toward distant hills and the place where these people will join their brethren.
“Who lives in that city?” It is a priest in a fireman’s coat.
“No one lives there,” I tell him. “The City of Dead Works is not for people. It is for the buildings and the ships. It is for the books and the music, the sculptures and the paintings which are gone forever. It is for everything destroyed by craven people in the name of foolish wars, for everything judged forfeit in the face of transitory desires.”
The Styx takes us into the Golden Hills. Soon we will be there, and the six thousand will go where they belong. And then the Styx will complete its circle, taking me back to the pier where more dead await.
“We will be there soon,” I say. “Soon we will be at the Elysian Fields, where all heroes go – for that is what you all are. It is what you have bought with your lives, with the shaping of your coins into gold.” No one replies. We near the last bend now, and before us lie the Elysian Fields, where peace reigns and where heroes dwell; where all is light and voices are always raised in song. The Sun of the Dead shines warmly on Elysium.
But they do not see it. They, the six thousand, all gaze back behind us upon the City of Dead Works. It will soon be behind us forever as we round the last bend of the River Styx into Elysium. I know they all need one last look upon that City, and I do not grudge them that. For myself, I do not look back; the eyes of the Ferryman are ever forward. But I know. I know that the City of Dead Works is different now. I know that it has changed. I know that the people who come with me now to Elysium, the dead around me, look back on the two soaring towers of steel that now rise above the City where there had been no towers before.
I know these things.
I am the Ferryman of the Dead.
A goodly Word
Like a goodly tree,
Whose root is firmly fixed,
And its branches reach
to the heavens–
It brings forth its fruit
At all times, by the leave
Of its Lord.
–The Qur’an, 14:24
In response to the right-wing lunatic (is there another kind?) in Florida who plans to celebrate the 9-11-01 anniversary by burning as many copies of the Qur’an as he can, I will on that day post a photo of myself reading a copy of the Qur’an.
I don’t have to go far to get one, either. I keep it right on my shelf, next to the Bible.
Anybody want to join me for National READ a Qur’an Day?
I’m Into Grace is a brand-new blog (one day old, only one post) by a woman I know from college. I got to know her fairly well back then by virtue of often sitting beside each other in band and orchestra — our seating arrangements often put the Principal Trumpet (that was me) next to the Principal French Horn (that was her). She was bright, energetic, and a really good horn player. I assume she’s still two of those things — no idea about her horn playing. I hope she’s kept up on that better than I have the trumpet playing!
Anyway, she is now a Lutheran pastor in Minnesota. (Garrison Keillor’s jokes aside, it turns out that there really are Lutherans in Minnesota!) Her faith will apparently be a major theme of her blog. New blogs are always awesome, especially when they’re by old friends!
Wow…this is amazing. If you are anything like me and have therefore seen Return of the Jedi a whole lot of times over your years on this planet, then this spot is instantly recognizable. And it still looks the same as when Luke was shouting into his sister’s ear, “Quick, jam their comlinks! Center switch!”
Be it resolved: The Fugitive is a perfect movie.
This may seem a strong claim, and maybe it is. But I’m not talking about “perfect” in the normal sense of “perfect”, to indicate that The Fugitive has no flaws at all. No, I’m talking “perfect” in, if you will, the “baseball” sense of the word. In baseball, a pitcher has thrown a “perfect game” if he doesn’t allow a single opposing hitter to reach base. It’s even more impressive than a no-hitter: it’s no walks, no errors, no passed balls on third strikes, no batters hit-by-pitch, no nothing. No baserunners. At all.
And yet, you can watch any of the small number of perfect games in baseball history and, if you know baseball well, you can pick out imperfections. Maybe the outfielders are shied toward left a little too much at one point, so when a guy hits it deep to right, the right fielder has to sprint a long way to run down the ball. Or maybe the shortstop boots a grounder and only just baaaaarely manages to get the ball back up and across the field to the first basemen’s glove a tenth of a second before the runner’s foot lands on the bag. Or maybe the pitcher himself goes to a 3-0 count on a hitter before retiring him on a lazy pop-up or an easy grounder.
The game has flaws…and yet not one of those flaws matters, in the end. Not one of them has any effect on the end result. The game is perfect.
The Fugitive is like that. It has flaws. It has imperfections. But none of them matters. In the end, the movie is perfect.
Watching it again a few weeks ago, for the first time in a number of years, I was amazed at how well the suspense in the film still works. I know what happens, I know how it ends. And yet, I witnessed the whitening anew of my knuckles when Dr. Richard Kimble is scrambling about the innards of a dam, or finding escape into the crowd on St. Patrick’s Day in downtown Chicago harder than one might think, or closing in on his wife’s murderers even as the police close in on him. The Fugitive never fails to draw me in. Never, ever.
I’m sure the story is familiar: Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford), a noted Chicago surgeon, comes home one night from work, after having been called in to perform a delicate emergency surgery, to find his wife, Helen, brutally murdered (shot and bludgeoned). Worse, the assailant is still there, and in grappling with him, Kimble notices the man’s distinctive feature: he is one-armed and wears a prosthesis. The one-armed man gets away, and Kimble is left to explain all this to the police, who don’t buy any of it and quickly end up booking Kimble for Helen’s murder. Kimble’s insistence on his innocence and his fingering of a “one-armed man” as the murderer fall on deaf ears, all the way to his conviction and sentence of death. Ouch.
So Kimble is sent on a bus from court in Chicago to the state penitentiary, somewhere in the south of the state. On the way there, however, something goes awry, and the bus ends up on its side across a pair of railroad tracks. The guards and prisoners start scrambling to get out, Kimble last of all…and the light of an approaching train appears. Ouch, again.
After the massive train wreck (one of the most impressive bits of mayhem ever filmed, in my opinion), Kimble finds himself free. And he runs, following the path of a river. Soon, however, Kimble’s trail is picked up by US Marshall Samuel Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones), who is confident, competent, perceptive, and deeply intelligent. Thus begins one of the best cat-and-mouse games in movie history, and what’s so great about it is that it’s a double game of cat-and-mouse: Kimble is fleeing Gerard even as he is pursuing Helen’s murderer.
The film has lots of fine set pieces, including the train wreck, the chase through the bowels of the dam, and so on. As good as the set pieces are, though, it’s all the stuff in between that really makes the movie work as brilliantly as it does.
:: The film really leaves a lot of good stuff to the viewer. Gerard is professional to the hilt, and yet he’s put together a really good team where everyone knows one another well and respects one another. We see all this just in the way they talk to each other and they way they conduct themselves around one another; there’s never that type of bit that a less well-written film would throw in (“Geez, Sam, the way this guy keeps getting away from us really reminds me of that guy we were chasing in San Francisco that time, huh?”).
Likewise, even better, we see, without ever once having it stated, that Gerard is gradually figuring out the case behind Richard Kimble’s arrest and conviction. There is never a moment where someone says, “Hey, Gerard, you’re not startin’ to doubt this guy’s guilt, are you?” But we see this happening, slowly and gradually, as the trail Gerard follows leads him into the case and into contact with the same clues that Kimble himself is finding. He’s slowly putting the pieces together himself, even as he has already told Kimble that he’s not interested in the crime. Only near the very end of the movie, when Gerard has to shout out to Kimble, “I know you’re innocent!”, is it ever stated outright.
:: I can’t think of any moment in the film where anyone does anything that is outright stupid for the simple reason that the plot needs that someone to do that thing to keep the plot moving along.
:: Richard Kimble takes so many amazing risks in this film, risks that he thinks through as best he can and only takes when he decides that the risk is the only way of moving forward. I’m not just talking about his sneaking into a hospital early on, in order to stitch up his wounds and get clothes and put together the next part of his escape in an environment he is familiar with; and I’m not just talking about his leap from the brink of the dam, which is the only choice he has (aside from accepting recapture). For my money, the most amazing risk in the film is when he finally learns the identity of the one-armed man. Kimble tracks the man down and discovers evidence in the man’s house that ties him to other people in Kimble’s world – doctors from his former hospital, pharmaceutical executives he met at a banquet the night his wife was murdered. Kimble has found…something, but he doesn’t know what. He’s found a piece of the puzzle. He knows it’s a big piece, but he knows that he can’t put the puzzle together. So he does something amazing.
He calls Gerard from the one-armed man’s home, allowing the call to go on long enough for the trace to be completed. He knows that Gerard will come, even though he’ll be long gone by the time Gerard arrives. So what is he doing? He’s making the only move he can: he is gambling that Gerard will find the pieces and, with his own investigative abilities that Kimble himself doesn’t have, help put the puzzle together for him. And he challenges Gerard to do what he’d already said he didn’t: he challenges Gerard to care about the case.
Kimble has no way of knowing if this will work. He has no way of knowing if Gerard will start digging into the life of Sykes, the one-armed man, and uncover the man’s unsavory dealings. He has no way of knowing what Sykes’s unsavory dealings even are. Kimble knows that he can’t flush out the bad guys himself, so he hopes that Gerard will do it for him.
Amazing stuff.
:: The cinematography of The Fugitive is fascinating. Transitions and the passage of time are often signified in the movie by sweeping, aerial shots of downtown Chicago. Many of these shots have the camera looking straight down on the city streets as the buildings float by the lens, some of the taller ones coming up so high that it’s almost as if the camera may well brush their roofs or radio antennae. I’m not sure that these shots are symbolic in any way – maybe they’re symbolic of Richard Kimble’s attempts to perceive key details from a very far vantage point that is constantly moving – but they are certainly very stylish.
:: I love how the one time the film breaks away from Kimble’s chase to give us a moment of his character is when he is standing around in the Cook County Hospital ER, in his stolen janitor’s uniform, as a bunch of injured kids are brought in. He doesn’t even consider doing anything other than what he does here: grab a kid’s X-rays, make a diagnosis that the ER people have missed, and take the kid to the ER after faking a signature on the orders. (There’s even a funny medical in-joke here, referring to the legendarily awful handwriting of most doctors.) It’s not really a moment of great risk, in terms of capture, but it is a moment of risk in that it limits Kimble’s movements in the future. But he can’t think in those terms; he has to help that kid at that moment.
So what are the apparent flaws in the film? Well, a couple jump to mind. One would think that if a renegade escaped convict could elude capture and still manage to nail down the identity, location, and motive of the “real killer”, all on his own, then surely the Chicago Police Department could have turned up some evidence that maybe, just maybe, their prime suspect was, in fact, innocent. Kimble’s investigations are all pretty straightforward: he remembers damaging the killer’s prosthetic arm in the struggle, so he reasons that the killer would have to go in to have his arm adjusted. So he checks those records and finds a group of one-armed men who did just that shortly after the date of the murder. Then he follows up on each one, learning that one is dead, another is already incarcerated, and that another is…a fellow with ties to medical people. You’d think the police, or Kimble’s own lawyer’s investigators, could have come up with some of this.
Also, Kimble seems to have enough money to stay on the lam for a while, doesn’t he? Sure, he steals a wallet and borrows money from a friend (who later turns out not to be a friend after all), but he rents two different rooms, buys clothes and food, purchases stuff to make fake IDs with, and so on.
But those are really small flaws overall, in one of the most effective thrillers ever made.
After a summer that has seen a surprising amount of weather that’s been truly unpleasant — from our cool-and-rainy June to our incredibly hot-and-humid July — we finally got a welcome taste of autumnal cool this weekend. Or, as I like to call it, “overalls weather”. The highs were in the upper 50s and it was quite windy; and with The Daughter out of town with her grandparents, I took advantage of a perfect opportunity to venture out for once in overalls instead of shorts, look around my environs a bit and learn a little more about Orchard Park, the town I’ve called “home” for seven years now. This is, actually, one of my favorite pastimes.
So, yesterday, I went to Green Lake.
Green Lake is a small artificial lake in the southern part of town. It runs east-to-west, and is bordered on its northern shore by a park called Yates Park, which is the location for most of the big town festival-type events. (Except for July 4th fireworks — it’s too heavily wooded for those.) I’ve driven through Yates Park and along the north shore of Green Lake quite a few times, but I’ve never stopped to explore, until yesterday, when I learned, among other things, that in lieu of a town municipal swimming pool, Orchard Park has a swimming area in its lake.
I never knew this before. Why not? Who knows? But once again, it amazes me how many details about my own town have escaped me after a number of years living here.
Now, Green Lake is not very big. I’m not entirely sure on this point, but when comparing Green Lake on Google Maps to Thoreau’s famous Walden Pond in Concord, MA, at the same level of resolution, Walden Pond looks substantially bigger. So with Green Lake, we’re not talking about a juggernaut of a body of water. Just a pleasant artificial lake in the middle of a town.
After I parked and got out to walk, I headed for an overlook that’s caught my eye several times when driving by. But I was instead captivated by the dam that creates the lake, and the stream that the dam blocks and which spills over the dam on its way through to Lake Erie. The dam isn’t big, at all, and its back side is not a sharp drop but a long, gentle decline away from the lake to the bottom of a ravine where the stream bed lies.
The water runs down a slope of concrete that ends after about twenty or thirty feet, and then returns to a very rocky stream bed:
Actually, I suspect that those rocks were placed there and not part of the original stream bed. They seemed rather “artfully arranged” to my eyes.
At the bottom, there’s a small waterfall which spills into a pool. The water was pretty green and sufficiently murky that I couldn’t discern the depth of the pool there:
I suppose it’s probably no more than a couple of feet, which is a shame; I’d love to find a nice secluded swimming hole around here one of these years. Anyway, after the waterfall (I’m being generous here, really — the water falls no more than four feet), the stream babbles on and down, into what looks like a deep forest.
The illusion was spoiled, a bit, by the bits of trash along the stream bed (not much, but enough — a few empty water bottles, a scrap of newspaper) and the graffiti on the trees. Yes, graffiti on the trees. Who knows.
More than that, though, I knew that civilization actually picks up not far beyond that deceptive-looking forest into which the stream flows, and when I got home and checked the stream’s course on Google Maps, I discovered that this stream is the very one I often cross when driving to the nearest giant suburban shopping region (McKinley Mall). And the stream runs just beyond the property line of Ralph Wilson Stadium, on the “tunnel end” of the stadium. Eventually the stream joins another and flows through the harsh kinda-sorta wastelands of the old steel mill regions before emptying into Lake Erie.
Still, it was a lovely place to find, this small piece of nature in the middle of boring old suburbia.
And Yates Park itself seems like a nice place — it has swings…
…and cute little gazebos. Who doesn’t love a cute little gazebo?
Communists, that’s who. Seriously. Look at photographs of old Moscow during the Cold War. You know what you don’t see there? Cute little gazebos. Tell me I’m wrong!
