Clearing out some thoughts from the increasingly convoluted and cobwebbed corners of my crainum….
:: The other day I saw one of those prompts on social media: “The title of your memoir is the last text message you sent.” I saw this at the end of my day of shoveling snow to get to work to shovel snow at work and then come home to shovel more snow so I could get into my driveway. At that point, I had been texting a friend about how I had no mental energy to make dinner, and that text turned out to be my answer to this prompt…and honestly, as a memoir for my life, this title could very well be the best option:
“Today Was a Day That Cried Out For Fried Chicken”.
Yeah, make a note of that. When I write my autobiography, that’s going to be the title. I’m calling it now. Coming someday to bookstores everywhere, Today Was A Day That Cried Out For Fried Chicken: The Kelly Sedinger Story, As Told By Himself.
:: Here’s a cool article about a series of books that I read the living HELL out of when I was a kid: the Choose Your Own Adventure books. I loved these. My first one was, appropriately enough, Your Code Name Is Jonah, in which “you” are a secret agent investigating some strange Soviet activity involving whalesongs. The combination of fun adventure stories with a kind of gameplay was oddly intoxicating. I do admit that I would often backtrack in a book if my choices led to “my” demise (each book is written in second person!), and I wondered for years if there was a secret game-play way in the UFO 54-40 book to reach the secret paradise planet.
Also, there was a fun callback to those books in Rian Johnson’s movie Knives Out, the murder mystery in which Christopher Plummer plays rich patriarch Harlan Thrombey, the movie’s murder victim. As soon as I heard his name, I thought back to a Choose Your Own Adventure murder mystery book, Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey. Rian Johnson would later admit the allusion, and I recognized it on the spot!
:: “Watching a movie on the big screen can be absorbing, even thrilling. But it’s not a religious experience.” This article has been a big thing over on Threads the last day or two. It’s a reaction to the usual type of thing: Director Martin Scorsese is again insisting that movies really must be seen on the big screen in the cinema, and that no home set-up, no matter how good, can cut it as far as presenting a movie goes. There was a time when I would have agreed with Mr. Scorsese on this point, but as someone else pointed out, Scorsese is hardly trying to get to the suburban multiplex on busy weekends and trying to budget the ever-increasing expense of movie-going alongside the ever-increasing time component required, what with each film being preceded by almost half an hour of trailers and advertising material. I used to adore seeing movies in the theater; back in the 90s, we would probably average a movie a week, and there were even a few times when we went to an early movie, did other stuff, and then on a spur-of-the-moment went to another movie at night. Also, if we really liked a movie, we might even see it twice! Those days are in the past, though. It’s simply too expensive and too great a time commitment, and I no longer think the movie-going experience is sufficiently better than watching the movie at home to bother with, much of the time. And it appears that a lot of people agree with me. I love the movies, not the theater.
:: Finally, as the Bills get ready to host the Chiefs later on tonight (they’re hosting the Chiefs! I was starting to think that the NFL had an official rule stating that all BUF-KC games are required to be played in Arrowhead Stadium), here’s how the stadium looked the other night, while the lake-effect was still going on. I was stopped at a nearby red light on my way home from picking up some fried chicken. (See above!)
Go Bills!
Bills lost. (Sigh)
Go LIONS!