The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: This seems awfully foolhardy to me.
:: Here’s an interesting article on pepperoni. It turns out that pepperoni is not an “authentic” Italian cured meat! Who knew! (And, more importantly, who cared! I am, as a rule, as uninterested in matters of “authenticity” when it comes to food as one can get. Is the food good? Yes? That’s all I care about.)
:: Burger Baby. Wow. I could totally go for a…well, never mind.
More next week!
From The West Wing, Toby Ziegler on the merits of salads:
As much as I love Toby Ziegler, I gotta disagree with him here. I love salads, and I eat them frequently. Here’s one I had for dinner just the other night:
Generally, my approach to the salad over the years has been pretty minimalistic when I make one at home: some greens and some dressing, and I like to beef things up by putting tuna on top (yes, the entire can). But lately I’ve decided to start adding more stuff to my salads, so I’ve started keeping a couple of plum tomatoes on hand at all times, for instance. I’m not a huge fan of raw tomato, but I like it just fine in stuff, so fresh diced tomato on a salad is great. I also adore banana peppers to an almost obscene degree; I bought a jar of ’em last week and I’m already a third of the way through it. Carrots are great, as are sliced mushrooms. Grated cheese? You bet. Oh, and hard-boiled eggs go great on salads. You make a nice big salad with all that stuff on it, and you don’t even need any meat.
I do tend to have a heavier hand with the dressing than I probably should, although I do balance this out by getting lighter versions. My favorite dressing is actually a light Italian, preferably made with extra-virgin olive oil. But I do like good old Ranch, too. I used to be a big fan of Thousand Island, but I haven’t had that in years, and Russian dressing can be pleasing, too. Haven’t had that in years, either. I also like to use olive oil and red wine vinegar or balsamic vinegar, and I sometimes cap the whole thing off with a torn-off piece of flatbread (pita or na’an being my favorites) to sop up what’s left of the dressing at the end.
Long live the salad!
One thing I didn’t realize, in my last few weeks’ entries, is that the word count limitation on this weekly micro-fiction bit of fun actually doesn’t include the writing prompt itself. Now, that may not seem like much — this week’s prompt is only seven words — but when such a strict word-count limitation is imposed, word choice becomes a premium. I’m really enjoying doing this thing every Saturday because it’s really good practice: it forces your hand, really, in choosing words for effect. You only have a hundred words to work with, and in the space of that hundred words, you have to establish a setting and your character(s) and tell an actual tale.
So anyway, here’s what I came up with. The prompt is in bold, within the tale.
Timmy and Tommy came bursting into the kitchen, tracking snow behind them.
“Mom! Mom! MOM!”
“Yes, boys?”
“We saw a SNOW MONSTER!” said Timmy.
“It was GREEN!” said Tommy.
“It ate a whole COW!” said Timmy.
“And it had wings!”
“And teeth THIS LONG!”
“It crushed a car with its fists!”
“And it was growing bigger by the minute!”
Mom nodded. “That’s nice, boys. Take off your things and I’ll make cocoa.”
Timmy looked at Tommy.
“Where do you think we lost her?” Timmy asked.
“‘Bigger by the minute’,” Tommy said.
“Marshmallows?” Mom asked.
“Yes, please,” said Timmy and Tommy.
Don’t forget, folks — we’re doing Ask Me Anything! this month, as is normal for February on Byzantium’s Shores. Just put your queries in the comments to this post! You can also e-mail them, if you like. Address in the sidebar. Ask me anything!
There really needs to be a movie with a Space Winnebago.
I think it’s cool that ever since I posted about the freakishly-adorable Melissa Rauch, I get a big spike in hits every time an episode of Big Bang Theory features Bernadette.
Last night’s episode had Bernadette appearing in the daydreams of an increasingly sexually-frustrated Raj, who kept imagining ludicrous circumstances under which Bernadette and current boyfriend Howard strongly encourage him to “please her sexually”. It all culminated in Raj envisioning himself and Bernadette in a Bollywood-type musical number. What a great show.
Roger Owen Green’s mother has passed away. Roger is one of my favorite bloggers, as well as one of my most reliable commenters and readers. I’d noticed yesterday that he hadn’t commented on any of my posts over the last few days, which is very odd…and when I went over to his blog, I saw a post that indicated that he was on his way to North Carolina to be with his mom, who had just suffered a stroke. Alas, she has now died.
Roger’s a good egg, a librarian (librarians rock) and a thoughtful observer of life (and he’s raising a terribly cute little girl). I’m saddened by his loss, and I offer him and his family my deepest condolences.
A Star Trek quiz-thing. Because the world needs more Star Trek quiz-things, by gum!
FAVORITE THINGS:
Star Trek Series: The Original Series, closely followed — very closely followed — by Deep Space Nine.
Star Trek Movie: The Undiscovered Country, closely followed — very closely followed — by First Contact.
Star Trek Character: Montgomery Scott.
Star Trek Pairing: The Companion and Zefram Cochrane. (Track down the episode “Metamorphosis”.)
Alien Race: The Horta.
Alien World: Rigel VII. (Love that giant purple moon.)
Federation Class Starship: The Enterprise as refitted for Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
TOS Episode: “The City on the Edge of Forever”
TNG Episode: “Yesterday’s Enterprise“
DS9 Episode: “The Visitor”. (This episode packs an emotional wallop.)
VOY Episode: The one where Janeway and company meet Q. In truth, Voyager just wasn’t terribly compelling.
ENT Episode: I never bothered watching it. By the time it came along, I was Trek‘d out.
Star Trek Quote: I’ll go with something by Q: “If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it’s not for the timid.” (Honorable mention to one of the wonderful Ferengi Rules of Acquisition: “Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.”
LEAST FAVORITE THINGS:
Star Trek Series: Voyager. It wasn’t bad; just seven seasons of “Meh”. (And no, the arrival of Seven of Nine didn’t really help matters.)
Star Trek Movie: Nemesis. It’s a painfully bad movie, a misfire on nearly every level.
Star Trek Character: When he’s being used for comic relief, Chekov. But he’s perfectly fine when he’s not.
Star Trek Pairing: Decker and Ilia. Talk about a lack of chemistry.
Alien Race: The Kazon, the villain-aliens from the first few years of Voyager, before the producers realized how lame they were and just had the Voyager flying away from them for good.
Alien World: There were some “identical Earths” in the original series that were pretty lame.
Federation Class Starship: Picard’s first command, the Stargazer, is a pretty goofy-looking vessel. In fact, ship design on TNG was generally disappointing. Even their Enterprise looked really bad from certain angles, and their Romulan Birds-of-Prey looked bad.
TOS Episode: “And the Children Shall Lead”.
TNG Episode: The second-season finale, which is a clip show, is legendarily bad. But picking on clip shows is shooting fish in a barrel, so I’ll go with this one from Season Seven where Dr. Crusher falls in love with a ghost that lives in a candle, or something like that. I remember this actor with an awful Scottish accent saying over and over, “Dinna light that cahn-dle!”
DS9 Episode:
VOY Episode: Don’t know. As I said, the whole show was meh.
ENT Episode: Don’t know.
Star Trek Quote: An intriguing episode is nearly undone by having Dr. Crusher say, “If there’s nothing wrong with me, there must be something wrong with the universe!”
CHOICES:
Trekkie or Trekker? Who the hell cares?!
Kirk or Picard? Kirk. Kirk, Kirk, Kirk. And then Sisko. (Not that Picard’s not pretty cool, too.)
Defiant or Delta Flyer? I like the Defiant quite a lot.
Tribbles or Targs? Tribbles.
Coffee, Black or Tea, Earl Grey? Coffee. I do like tea, but Earl Grey is nasty stuff. (By the way, did it bug anyone else that they make the Captain in TNG a Frenchman and then have him behave like a Brit?)
Porthos or Spot? Spot, by default. I don’t know who Porthos is.
EMH or Data? The EMH. Data was…well, I liked Data, but at times the TNG series and films were just too Data-centric.
Pah-wraiths or Prophets? The Prophets. I liked the mystery behind the wormhole aliens.
So this enormously huge storm swept (which I have dubbed Snowlapalooza 2011, in my ongoing hopes of pushing the word “snowlapalooza” into our cultural lexicon) across the country yesterday, burying many places in the heartland in snow and ice. It was supposed to do a number on Buffalo, too, but by the time it got here it had either expended too much of its energy or it had spread out over too wide an area or it was simply moving too fast to really hit us hard, so it appears that all we got was a couple of inches of snow and a manageable amount of ice. The Winter Storm Warning that was supposed to be in effect until 10:00 tonight has already, as of this writing (6:30 am), been downgraded to a Winter Weather Advisory which is in effect until 6:00 pm. Of course, this will lead to lots of crowing about Buffalo’s meteorologists, who seem to miss the boat hugely on one big storm each winter. I’m not sure I can blame this on them, since weather events do carry with them a high degree of unpredictability, but still — we were told “8 to 16 inches of snow, maybe a half inch of ice”, and we got a fraction of that.
Anyway, if you were in Snowlapalooza 2011, how bad was it? Worst weather event you’ve ever experienced?
And come to that, what is the worst weather event you’ve ever experienced?
