The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
I’m hearing some rumblings from respected sources that for some reason, Blogger’s comment system isn’t working quite as well as it should. So, I am going to open things back up to all comers, comment-wise. This is on a trial basis only. If I get irritated again, I’ll go back to requiring Google or OpenID accounts for commenting. OK? OK. (Comment moderation will still be in effect.)
(And if anyone’s refraining from Asking Me Anything! on that basis, well, here’s your chance!)
I got this quiz from Ken Levine, oddly enough!
• A-Available/Single?
Let me hear your offer first! (OK, I’m taken. Yeesh!)
• B-Best Friend?
Probably The Wife. (Crap — I screwed that up with “probably”.)
• C-Cake or Pie?
Either, really. I don’t see the point of the cake/pie divide. Carrot cake, apple pie — how could I choose? Of course, this answer assumes choosing between the two for eating purposes. I’d definitely choose a pie over a cake to take in my face…but then, come to think of it, I’ve never been hit in the face with a cake, so I don’t have a fair comparison to make. Hmmmmm.
• D-Drink Of Choice?
I don’t have a drink of choice. I’ll drink coffee or tea, Pepsi or Coke, rum or whiskey, wine or beer. I go with what I’m in the mood for. (The vast majority of what I drink, anyway, is good old water!)
• E-Essential Item You Use Everyday?
My 11-in-1 screwdriver. (I have a number of answers for this, actually: my diagonal pliers, my flashlights, my cell phone, and more….)
• F-Favorite Color?
Purple.
• G-Gummy Bears Or Worms?
Ick. Not a fan of the Gummi stuff. I don’t like the sensation that my jaw is literally bouncing off the item I’m trying to chew.
• H-Hometown?
Buffalo!!!
• I-Indulgence?
Ice cream.
J-January Or February?
January. I like when the year is new, and the football playoffs are in full swing.
• K-Kids & Their Names?
Haley.
• L-Life Is Incomplete Without?
Love, laughter, et cetera.
• M-Marriage Date?
May 17. (In 1997.)
• N-Number Of Siblings?
One.
• O-Oranges Or Apples?
I love both, I really do! I probably tend more to apples because they’re less work and they go great with peanut butter.
• P-Phobias/Fears?
You want to see me flinch like nobody’s ever flinched before? Get a rubber band and make like you’re going to shoot it at me. Seriously. For some reason, that irrationally scares the shit out of me.
• Q-Favorite Quote?
I can’t name a favorite quote, so here’s a quote: “The fate of this man or that man was less than a drop, although it was a sparkling one, in the great blue motion of the sunlit sea.” (TH White, The Once and Future King)
• R-Reason to Smile?
Any time David Caruso opens his mouth on CSI: Miami.
• S-Season?
Fall.
• T-Tag Three or Four People?
OK, they’re tagged. They just don’t know it.
• U-Unknown Fact About Me?
My favorite Friend was Chandler Bing.
• V-Vegetable you don’t like?
Well, broccoli isn’t technically a vegetable; it’s pure evil in plant form. That leaves artichoke.
• W-Worst Habit?
Not writing enough.
• X-X-rays You’ve Had?
Aside from the normal ones, I had x-rays when I broke my collarbone in seventh grade.
• Y-Your Favorite Food?
Pizza. Or wings. Or kung pao chicken. Or a nice salad. Or a taco. Or a big burger. Or…you know.
• Z-Zodiac Sign?
Libra!
Well, that was a time-waster….
Science just continues to astound:
If you grew up thinking there were nine planets and were shocked when Pluto was demoted five years ago, get ready for another surprise. There may be nine after all, and Jupiter may not be the largest.
The hunt is on for a gas giant up to four times the mass of Jupiter thought to be lurking in the outer Oort Cloud, the most remote region of the solar system. The orbit of Tyche (pronounced ty-kee), would be 15,000 times farther from the Sun than the Earth’s, and 375 times farther than Pluto’s, which is why it hasn’t been seen so far.
The idea that there may well be something that big out there that we’ve never known about until now is truly, truly awe-inspiring.
I’ll be starting to post replies later this week, but I’m still going to leave queries open for maybe the rest of the month! So if you have questions — serious, silly, whatever — go ahead and leave ’em in comments to this post (I do it this way just to keep them in one place; I discovered in the past that it’s harder to keep track when there are questions in comments to multiple posts). Or, alternatively, you can e-mail questions to either address in the sidebar. (If you don’t want to be identified when I answer on the blog, let me know; e-mail addresses will not be posted, anyway.) People on Facebook can also send questions via FB message, if that’s your thing.
Yeah, I missed last week, and I didn’t even post my standard “Sorry, no sentential links this week!” disclaimer. Sorry about that…but here we go again.
:: Overall, I have to say that I like Oklahoma in general. (My life’s travels have never taken me to Oklahoma. Maybe someday….)
:: So from now on, I think this is going to be part of my personal branding, right up there with “an analog guy lost in the digital age.” (OK, this is pretty “meta” — I’m linking a post of Jason’s in which he links me, after I said something about him on Facebook that he liked. The brain hurts….)
:: The fact of the matter is that tyranny is a serious problem, and it calls for serious solutions and serious responses. The idea that the common man is going to use small arms to fight off a modern, 21st century military organization is ridiculous. And the idea that there’s going to be widespread household ownership of the kind of anti-tank missiles and other weapons you’d need to fight such a war is also absurd. In the real world, people stand up to tyranny with nonviolent tactics of civil disobedience that let protestors fight for the loyalty of the security services’ rank and file. (I’ve got to say that I agree with this. I all in favor of the Second Amendment and gun ownership if that’s your thing — I personally want nothing to do with guns, but I personally want nothing to do with broccoli, either. But whenever I hear someone actually saying that guns in the hands of the people are part of what keeps government at bay, I just shake my head.)
:: Margaret Brundage is one of my all-time favourite pulp artists. (There’s some wonderful pulp art reproduced in this post! Quite a bit of it may not be work-safe, but do look. M.D. Jackson runs a great art-based blog.)
(OK, on the last one, since it’s an interesting topic: What I find interesting is how little overlap there is between people who are FB friends, people who read the blog, people who look at my Flickr photos, and people who follow me on Twitter. There is overlap, but I’d say the majority of FB friends I have who are friends or acquaintances in real life are folks who never, ever read the blog. Even when I set up the blog to ping Twitter when I post, which is then cross-posted to my FB wall, only a small number of my FB friends will actually click the link to read the blog post.
I have a pet theory — a hypothesis, really — no, even weaker than that, let’s call it a “conjecture” — that maybe Mark Zuckerberg thinks that privacy doesn’t really matter because, for 99% of human interactions, nobody cares. Here’s an example: except for maybe three or four people, none of the folks I’m FB friends with by knowing them from work has ever seen me outside of The Store, so they’ve never once seen me not wearing my work uniform. Of all those, only one has looked at my photos there and said, “Wow, you wear overalls a lot!” The only FB friends I have that read the blog are folks who I met online, or, oddly enough, people I knew from high school or a couple of college friends, and even they don’t comment on it all that much. I’ve pushed my own personal envelope quite a bit on what I figured I could post that might cause someone to comment or ask “Hey, what’s that about?”, and I’ve come to conclude that unless you get way out there into “Too Much Information Land”, people just aren’t that interested. Or they’re not that bothered by it, or their reaction is to note it and move on without comment.
So, it seems to me that my online life, spread basically across four main areas — Byzantium’s Shores, my Flickr photos, Facebook and Twitter — tends to auto-compartmentalize itself, without much help from me. The areas where I get the most reaction or comment are the blog and FB; I’ve always been a little bummed that my Flickr photos don’t get much comment at all, and my Twitter activity is probably a little too sporadic to really become reliable. But in general I find that I can occasionally post about things that I otherwise was once reticent to post about because I can, after years of doing this, be fairly confident that there’s not going to be much reaction at all.
None of which is to say that I’m comfortable about posting everything, because I’m not. There is a great deal of personal stuff in my life that will never, I promise you, get posted here. And I think that’s how it should be.
And now I’m not sure if that made any sense at all…hmmmm….)
Anyway, more next week!
Remember the short story where the Prince aspires to the Princess’s hand, so the King has the Prince stand before two doors, one of which leads to the Princess and marriage whilst the other leads to a really hungry tiger? And how the story ends as the Prince chooses his door and opens it? And how the story leaves unanswered the question as to which door he opened?
No?
OK, forget it.
(On a more boring note, I’d love to be able to wear these overalls in public, but there’s a hole in the butt. No, I didn’t split them, they came that way when I bought them on eBay.)
Because I don’t think up unimaginably nifty ideas like this: a coffee mug with a little spot underneath for holding cookies! One of my Flickr friends, a lovely woman named Denise, made this. How great is that! One idea like this and I am so retiring.
It interests me how the LED flash on my cell-phone camera can make me look like I have some kind of anemia. I’m really not this pale!
Oddities and Awesome abound!!!
:: OK, this isn’t really in keeping with the usual rhyme-and-reason of these posts, but it really strikes me as funny that someone arrived at Byzantium’s Shores via the Google search “the anime parts are so weird in pink floyd the wall the movie”. Well, umm…yeah, they are. Yup. Bow howdy!
:: It really irritates me to note that Cracked.com is going to get a lot more traffic for pointing out that Toto is still doomed at the end of The Wizard of Oz than I did when I pointed out the exact same thing!
:: Bibs for your shoes. This seems like a solution in search of a problem to me, but hey, maybe there are lots of folks out there who hate getting sawdust on their shoes.
:: William Shatner may rule and all, but this may well haunt my dreams for months to come. Oh, and that link over there, the one that says “don’t look down”? Please don’t click that.
(Oh, you clicked it, huh? Well, I tried to tell you. Don’t blame me.)
More next week!
In accordance with my complete lack of interest in what constitutes “fashion”, I have apparently been committing a possible fashion no-no for years, in the form of the “Double Denim”. This is a denim top coupled with denim pants. I, of course, take it one step farther by wearing the denim shirt under denim overalls (albeit hickory striped, in this case). But in general, I fail to see what this woman is doing wrong by pairing denim with denim…or this one (dance step aside)…and then there’s…well, you get the idea.
Generally, I like the way denim feels, so why not pair it? Double denim rules!
UPDATE: I would later don double denim — this same denim shirt with another pair of overalls — for my 40th-birthday pies in the face. Double denim still rules!
