The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
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Your weekly dose of small amounts of linkage to carry you on….
:: I confess to being weary of Hollywood’s incessant need to “reboot” things, but I must also confess to being mildly intrigued at the notion of rebooting Columbo, that wonderful working-class detective in the crappy coat who covered up his brilliance with an “Aw shucks” style. It would depend on the casting, of course, but I’d be interested.
:: Twelve-year-old humor alert on this next one! A lot of companies auto-generate their e-mail addresses for employees by taking some specific combination of letters from the first and last names. This occasionally has some unfortunate results. (I just love when the IT guys respond “Uh, we can’t change it.” I’m always amused when IT people say that they simply “can’t” make the computers do what they want. Nobody can just go in and delete on e-mail address and manually add another one? There are no provisions for this?)
:: Want to see pictures of kitties captioned with quotes from HP Lovecraft? Sure you do.
More next week!
Whoa, I’m awfully late with this one…anyway, here’s a bit of science fiction film music. As great as Jerry Goldsmith was at his best, I had trouble with the last decade or so of his career, because a lot of the time I found his work…well, boring. He still wrote some gems in that period, though, chief among them the score to Star Trek First Contact. The action writing in that score is pretty good, but the real meat-and-potatoes comes in the music he wrote for the film’s depiction of First Contact, the moment when humans first meet representatives of an alien race (in this case, the Vulcans). The theme he came up with for that is just a wonderful musical depiction of maturity, which suits the film perfectly as the moment of First Contact is the moment when humanity starts to really “grow up”. I once had a guy tell me, on some message board or some such, that this music sounds of “mournful farewell”, and I couldn’t possibly have disagreed more. This is music that, in my ears, drips with lyrical optimism. I just love it!
Here’s “First Contact”, from the film Star Trek First Contact.
Today is the anniversary of The Day the Music Died, as it’s come to be known: the day that a small plane carrying Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all three musicians. Sheila O’Malley has an excellent post on the subject; check it out.
I went to college in that area, actually: Wartburg College is in Waverly, IA, which is roughly an hour’s drive away from the Mason City and Clear Lake area. For people in that part of Iowa, The Day the Music Died isn’t just a tragic day in the history of rock-n-roll, but rather an important and sad part of local folklore. I drove through Clear Lake a number of times, with various friends on a number of road trips, and though we never went out to the field where the plane went down, we did drive by the Surf Ballroom once or twice.
I also remember watching American Graffiti when I was in college, and there’s a line in that movie — I think the Paul LeMat character, the hot-rod race driving guy, says it — to the effect that “music’s been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died”. This in reply to someone’s positive opinion of the Beach Boys. The movie was set in the early 1960s, of course, but even though it was made in 1973 or so, the passing of Holly, Valens, and the Big Bopper was still a reasonably fresh memory, only 14 years gone. That sounds longish, but this year, 9-11 will be as far in the past. I’m not sure what my point here is, other than to note that memories of events that are history to us were once fresh wounds and became scars, in time.
Anyway, it’s always worth reflecting on the stars that pass before they really got a chance to shine with their full brilliance.
Politics below the fold.
As I tweeted earlier:
I will under no circumstances vote for you, or even listen to a single thing you have to say, if you are in any way anti-vaccine.
— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) February 3, 2015
Being anti-vaccine is for me equivalent to global-warming denialism. It automatically disqualifies you from serious consideration.
— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) February 3, 2015
What brought this on? Here’s Rand Paul saying that vaccinations should be voluntary because of freedom, some other GOP lackwit saying that we shouldn’t have an “oppressive government” enforcing vaccination, and that as a hypothetical example against “regulation”, restaurants should be able to opt out of mandated handwashing, because “the Market will sort it out.“
I always love stuff like that last one. The libertarian/rightwing types always make the Market’s sorting-process sound like the most benign of forces, as if everyone considering attending the no-handwashing restaurant will find out about it beforehand and choose accordingly. Those of us in the real world know that in a case like this, “the Market sorting it out” would involve a bunch of people with shigellosis, but as ever, the Market is an inherent good that must be preserved even in the face of avoidable and unnecessary human suffering.
And yes, vaccinations should be required by law, with all that entails.
No candidate who thinks otherwise will ever get my vote, or even a hearing, on any issue. Period.
It’s February! That means, by long-standing tradition ’round these parts, that it’s time for my twice-yearly game of Ask Me Anything!. The rules are simple: you are to, well, ask me anything. Anything at all. Questions can be serious or silly, profound or poofy. (However, the seriousness of the question does not have any bearing on the seriousness of the answer. I may give a silly answer to a deeply profound question, and I may pen a long and detailed essay in response to a silly question. You never know with me!)
Questions can be posed in any of the usual ways: in comments to this post, or via Twitter, or on Instagram, or Facebook, or e-mailed directly to jaquandor@gmail.com. No limit on questions, and every question will receive an answer of some sort! I will start providing answers in two (2) weeks, and I’ll post the occasional reminder. Until then: Ask Me Anything!
REMINDER: I do honor requests to keep things anonymous, if that is desired.
Stuff!
:: Apparently Russell Crowe is one of those people who likes to tweet the results of his workouts. Well, some dude decided that he’d start responding, with increasingly hilarious effects. Also, apparently Russell Crowe’s sense of humor is easily exhausted.
:: I only learned a few years ago that Lake Baikal in Siberia is the world’s largest fresh-water lake by volume. I always figured that would be Lake Superior, but that’s wrong: Lake Superior has the largest surface area by quite a bit (over twice the surface area of Baikal), but Baikal’s got the depths: its average depth is 260 meters greater than Superior’s.
Baikal is also apparently a very, very clear lake, which makes for stunning ice formations. Make sure to play the video at the end, when some people demonstrate some fascinating sonic properties of the Baikal ice.
:: Want to watch a surprisingly effective horror movie that only takes two minutes from beginning to end? Sure you do! (As with all such scares, it’s less effective when you’ve already seen it and know what’s coming.)
More next week, perhaps!
