The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
The Adirondack Mountains.
Now that I’m living in Syracuse, I’m much closer — about an hour’s drive, I think — to the foothills of New York’s Adirondack Mountains. These are some of the highest of the Northern Appalachians, but I’m not terribly familiar with them. I am hoping to rectify that in the near future.
Entertainment Weekly had an article a week or two ago about what’s wrong with The West Wing. I didn’t agree with everything the article said — I find the ongoing storyline about Qumar fascinating, for example — I have to agree with the article’s writer on one thing: the show now has too many characters. There are so many supporting players now, weaving and wending their way through the main characters’ lives, that it’s hard to keep track of them all and now the storylines are starting to seem rushed as nothing is really developed fully, as opposed to being briefly updated before moving on to the next thing. Now they’ve added Christian Slater to the mix, and since he’s a “Special Guest Star” I suppose that will mean more screentime for him, at the expense of…someone. I still love the show, though, and I still watch it faithfully, which is more than I can say for Entertainment Weekly. One of these days I’ll remember to cancel the subscription….
One of my favorite television shows is NBC’s Ed, about the small-town lawyer who owns the bowling alley. The show has an excellent cast of characters and a quirky type of humor that’s reminiscent of Northern Exposure.
That said, something about Ed is bugging me this season.
Remember the scene in the movie Misery, when Annie Wilkes has just read Paul Sheldon’s new manuscript, the one she’s forced him to write after he’s apparently killed Misery Chastain off in his latest novel? Annie goes into a raving rant about how when she was a child she went to the movies, one of those old serials, to see the resolution of the previous week’s cliffhanger; but the resolution was actually a cheat because the situation had been changed, and Annie was the only one who noticed. Well, something similar seems to be happening on Ed.
The backbone of Ed is the on-and-off romance between Ed and his life-long love, Carol Vescey. Last season, Carol ended up falling in love with the prickly-but-intelligent high school principal, Dennis Martino, who is a recovering alcoholic and who also has a hard time getting close to people. The key word here is “prickly”, because Dennis showed flashes of warmth and depth last year, suggesting that he was a man with a streak of kindness but who was terrified to let it show. One telling episode was when Carol begged Dennis — a former English teacher — to critique a short story she had written, and he finally relented after much resistance and basically tore the story to shreds. Then, later on, when Carol’s confidence is shaken, he writes out a list for her of opinions he’s held that are at odds with reality, to show “his history as a critic”. (The only item I remember is his onetime belief that “Aquaman will be bigger than Superman”.) And there were other examples of this as well, which made the Ed-Carol-Dennis love triangle interesting: because it involved three likable, flawed characters one of whom we knew was going to end up heartbroken.
Unfortunately, the writers of Ed have changed the dynamic of the triangle in mid-stream, so it’s becoming more irritating than interesting. What they’ve done is to change the “prickly” in Dennis to “prick”. Now we’re seeing that Dennis is a cold, manipulative jerk whose behavior toward Carol occasionally borders on the emotionally abusive. Not only does this make the whole love-triangle pretty much like every other love triangle on TV these days, but it’s doubly bad because it totally contradicts what was established last year about the Dennis Martino character. It makes it easier for things to work out the way that we “want” them to work out, but now there is a note of falsity about the whole proceedings.
You have to be consistent with your characters, folks. It’s pretty important.
Well, the Most Important Election in Modern History is over. America was at a crossroads this year, and the choice we as a nation had to make had never been more clear until yesterday. We have chosen the road that will determine the future course of our lives, our childrens’ lives, our grandchildrens’ lives….
….at least until 2004, when once again we will face the Most Important Election in Modern History as we again stand at a crossroads, when the choice before us will be clear as it has never been clear before.
And once 2004 is over? Well, it’s just four short years to 2006!
I find it strange how we always couch our election rhetoric in the most dire language possible, as if every election that comes along is a moment in time like The Lord of the Rings, when the Third Age is ending and the Elves are leaving and the final reckoning with Sauron is at hand — but at the same time, we also console ourselves with the other great meme of democracy: that if we decide we don’t like what the folks we just put in office do, we just vote them out next time around. Democracy, for all its wonders, is a pretty schizophrenic thing, both profound and banal, both momentous and mundane. Democracy requires us to hold two contradictory beliefs: that everything depends on what choice we make today; and a wrong choice is pretty easily fixed down the road.
I’m a registered Democrat, so yesterday’s results are disappointing to me, but they were not totally unexpected. The Democrats seemed to view winning yesterday not so much as a goal to be sought and worked toward, but rather a cosmic reality that demanded lip-service and hushed reverence. They constantly talked about the fact that the party controlling the White House almost always loses seats in Congress come the mid-terms, and yet no one considered the historical reason for that fact: it’s generally a corrective act on the part of the public, a reaction to a new Administration’s invariable over-reaches and foul-ups. The problem for the Democrats here was twofold: they already managed to take control of the Senate a year and a half ago, providing that very correction; and a war erupted. So in the former case the Democrats were partly victims of their own success; in the latter case, the Democrats simply messed up by acting the part of opposition in foggy, undefined fashion that never looked all that genuine (except in the case of Paul Wellstone).
So the Democrats over the last two years — since the inauguration of President Bush — have been a party of “against”, of “opposition”, of “No”. All those have their place, but the election was a time for them to be “for” something and to advance real, alternative ideas. The “I’m not that guy” strategy, in politics, is always risky: just ask Doug Forrester, the Republican Senate candidate in New Jersey, whose entire strategy was “I’m not Torricelli” — and whose entire strategy evaporated when Torricelli bailed out. “We’re not Bill Clinton” was the Republican strategy in 1998, and it was a disaster. “I’m not Bill Clinton” was the unstated premise of Al Gore’s campaign, and he’s now a private citizen (although not by much). George W. Bush also used “I’m not Bill Clinton”, but he did it in a positive way (and, anyway, he really lost). So, along came the Democrats with their “We’re not Republicans” strategy this year. OK, fair enough — but they never offered any answer to the follow-up question, “So what are you, then?”
Yes, I found yesterday’s results disappointing. No, I don’t see them as unmitigated disaster. Democrats who act as if the country has just made some horrible turn to the right and that liberalism is dead are as wrongheaded as Republicans who act as if they’ve just been given the Keys to the Kingdom. For all the sports metaphors we inject into our political debate in this country, the fact is that democracy is not the Super Bowl. The game is not over. The game is never over. So, Democrats, stop acting like you’ve just lost everything you’ve ever dreamed of. And Republicans, stop acting like you’ve just won everything you’ve ever dreamed of. Both of you, get up off the damn bench and get back in the game, because the game never ends. Only the players do.
POETICAL EXCURSION #9
“Arms and the Boy”, by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918).
Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.
Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-heads
Which long to muzzle in the hearts of lads.
Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth,
Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.
For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.
There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
And God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.
:: The dates of Owen’s life make his fate fairly obvious: he was killed in action during World War I, ironically just a week before the formal cessation of hostilities. I am not certain as to when this poem was written, but it definitely appears to spring from Owen’s “anti-war” period, which began roughly around 1917 and formed the last year of his life.
What interests me here is Owen’s concept of human nature. Since humans are not equipped by nature for war, we must create our weapons ourselves: our teeth are not suited to fighting, we have no talons for shredding the bodies of our enemies, and our heads do not sport antlers. Owen says more than this, though, through his personification of the weapons that we have made. It is not that we long for war and thus create these things to fight it; it is that the weapons themselves that are “keen with hunger for blood” and “long to muzzle in the hearts of lads”. The implication is of war as an unending cycle: we create the weapons, whose desire for blood we must then fulfill. War becomes less a means by which grievances between nations are prosecuted and matters of good and evil are settled, and more a primal thing: war not as necessity, but as appetite, and cruel appetite it is, a type of bloodthirst against “lads” who would be better eating apples.
It’s Election Day, and a lot of voices in the Blogiverse have been analyzing issues and candidates and telling us to get out and vote. If I may be so bold, allow me to offer a differing view, courtesy of George Carlin:
You may have noticed that there’s one thing I don’t complain about: Politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says, “They suck”. But where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. No, they come from American homes, American families, American schools, American churches, American businesses, and they’re elected by American voters. This is the best we can do, folks. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.
….I have solved this political dilemma in a very direct way: I don’t vote. On Election Day, I stay home. I firmly believe that if you vote, you have no right to complain. Now, some people like to twist that around. They say, “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain”, but where’s the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent politicians, and they get into office and screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You voted them in. You caused the problem. You have no right to complain.
I, on the other hand, who did not vote — who did not even leave the house on Election Day — am in no way responsible for that these politicians have done and have every right to complain about the mess that you created.
(from Napalm & Silly Putty by George Carlin.)
It’s a funny thing about gyms.
One of the nice benefits of the apartment complex in Syracuse where I now live is the presence of a gym, which we are able to use at will as part of our rental agreement. It’s not a big gym: two treadmills, a recumbent exercise bike, a stairclimber, a Nordic-track like device, and a universal weight machine. It’s a basic gym, but big enough and nice enough for my needs. The only thing missing that I would like to see is a set of free-weights.
The funny thing is that I think I may have uncovered a law of nature regarding gyms: in any gym, no matter where the gym is or how restrictive its clientele, there will be a regular person at the gym — always a man, by the way — who works out in jeans and a flannel shirt, who grunts and grimaces and moans his way through a workout which consists of benchpressing as much weight as he possible can, as quickly as he can, and slamming the weights together as loudly as he possibly can. This guy will, in between sets, wander around the room windmilling his arms and doing that useless stretch that every pseudo-athlete does: the one where you stand on one foot while reaching down and tugging on your other ankle, presumably stretching the quadricep or something like that. Why this guy does that stretch, and no other, is a mystery as his workout regimen is geared exclusively to his upper body.
I truly believe that if one were to open a gym in the wilds of the Yukon, accessible only by dog sled or water-landing plane that takes off from the lake ten miles away, that gym would have a guy like this as a member.
Well, I’m finally starting to get some hits from people searching Google for, well, “naughty items” — such as this. Of course, I’m sorry that these potential readers are going away unfulfilled — I think.
Memo to Tom Golisano:
Stunts like this do not lend credence to you as a man of Gubernatorial timber. I don’t much care whether or not you run, or if it inconveniences the Democrats in New York — they’re the ones who nominated a lackluster candidate and watched as he ran a half-assed campaign against a popular and generally decent Republican governor, after all — but lord, this “I’ve got a BIG ANNOUNCEMENT! and that BIG ANNOUNCEMENT is: See you on Tuesday!” stuff is just plain lame. It’s almost as bad as Perot’s infamous “I’m dropping out because George Bush had his former CIA minions try to disrupt my daughter’s wedding” bit from 1992.
And speaking of Golisano, I have to note that I generally find “independent” candidates dull and uninteresting. That Golisano built a company in New York that generated a good number of jobs is a laudable accomplishment, but I’m tired of the standard “Independent Businessman Candidate” claim: I created jobs, so I’m the right choice for Governor / President / Congressman / Coroner / Whatever. So your company did well; that’s all well and good. But that’s not enough: I need to see some evidence that you’re also an expert on the public policy needed to create jobs. It’s a different animal, so stop telling me that one equals the other. I’d also be glad to see one of these “independents” actually admit after the election that they got clobbered, and that running was basically a waste of time. The whole meme of “I got three percent of the vote, but that’s a victory because it sends a clear message that we don’t want business as usual!” is really rather tiresome. It’s the political equivalent of the NFL-coach-on-a-rebuilding-team: “Yeah, we lost 44-3, but we showed some improvement on special teams and our punter had a career day.” I’d like, just once, to see the political equivalent of Jim Mora after a loss (when Mora would occasionally shout “We SUCK!” into the microphone at the post-game press conference).
I’m also noticing more of those political signs — the ones that show up on busy street-corners, or in peoples’ yards — that don’t even mention what office the candidate named on the sign is running for. This is just one more indicator that politics is about branding. Pataki is no longer a candidate for Governor, but a product. His signs consist of his name and, in smaller print at the bottom, the URL of his website. Not “Pataki for Governor”, not “Re-elect Governor Pataki”, not even “Four more years”. Just “Pataki”. We’ve reduced politics to advertising shorthand.
Well, now that the first Sunday in November is done, all I have to say is: Can I have October back? Anyhow, some sports notes:
:: I’ll take Reality Checks for $500, Alex!!
That resounding thud heard yesterday resonating through the Lower Great Lakes region was the Buffalo Bills in their first meeting of the year with the defending Super Bowl Champion New England Patriots. (I could barely force my fingers to type those last six words….) A lot of Bills fans were set for a possible “changing of the guard” type of victory yesterday: the Bills were 5-3, they were on a three-game winning streak, their defense had performed well in those three games, they were at home with their new star quarterback facing the team that dumped him last year for the first time, the Patriots were reeling, they had lost four in a row, yada yada yada. Insert the voice of Chris Berman here: “That’s why they play the games.”
On Friday I predicted a Pats victory in yesterday’s game, because I figured they needed it more and they were still, position for position, more talented than the Bills. Plus, while I’ve made no secret that I don’t regard Bill Belichick as the next incarnation of George Halas, I do think that he is a more experienced and more wily coach than Gregg Williams, so he was more likely to have his team ready for what they were to face than Williams. Nevertheless, I predicted the game to be a squeaker. Instead, the Pats jumped out quickly and in the end turned it into a blow-out. Ugh.
What did not surprise me about yesterday’s loss was the fact that the Bills’ defense got riddled. Their recent success came against young teams starting inexperienced quarterbacks (Houston/Carr, Miami/Lucas (in place of regular starter Jay Fielder), Detroit/Harrington), so they were able to use a combination of blitzes and shifting coverages and misdirections to gain the upper hand in those games. That strategy didn’t figure to work against a more experienced, battle-ready opponent like the Pats, and it didn’t work at all. The Pats knew what the Bills would try on defense, so they came in with a game-plan full of screens and dump-offs and junk plays, almost all of which worked. At one point, those plays were being so effective that the color guy on CBS, Phil Simms, actually said something like “I guarantee that in the next three plays the Patriots will run a screen pass”….which they went on to do. Add to that some generally bad tackling by the Bills and their characteristic pass rush (which produced the staggering total of one sack of Tom Brady), and you pretty much have a defensive melt-down. So, the Bills’ only real hope was to turn this sucker into a shoot-out.
And that’s where the actual surprise of yesterday’s game happened. The Bills were in the Red Zone at least five times that I can remember, and they came away with exactly seven points. That’s it. They moved the ball well; Drew Bledsoe threw for three hundred yards, with his only interception coming midway through the fourth quarter when the game’s outcome was no longer in doubt; Travis Henry averaged 4.8 yards per carry, although the running game fell by the wayside as the Bills fell behind; Peerless Price had nine catches, et cetera. But they couldn’t score, which is the first time we’ve seen the Bills have that particular problem all year. It didn’t help, of course, that kicker Mike Hollis missed all three of his field goal attempts, but the Bills’ inability to get the ball in the end zone yesterday was shocking.
This game, then, really exposed the status of the Buffalo Bills: they are a good team in the making, but they are at least a year away and they are in need of some serious defensive upgrading before they can be considered any kind of real contender. Next week the Bills are off, and then after that they start the tough part of their schedule: in their last seven games, they have to play road games at Kansas City, the Jets, New England, and Green Bay. Of course, they won’t lose the rest of their games: they close the season against the Bengals.
:: The AFC East race is, as usual, tightening up. The Dolphins appear to be starting their annual swoon (although this year’s edition is a bit more cruel, resulting from injury to Jay Fiedler). The Patriots are at .500 and a game behind the Bills, but their remaining schedule is not as hard as Buffalo’s. Look out.
:: The Raiders’ defensive players are probably the most exhausted people in the United States today. Between the 49ers’ final drive in the fourth quarter (which ended in a missed field goal as time expired) and their game-winning drive in overtime (after they won the coin toss and received the kickoff), the Raiders’ defense was on the field for thirty-five consecutive plays. Wow.
:: My picks for the Super Bowl both won yesterday, and both are leading their respective divisions. The Steelers came back to beat the Browns and are now a solid 5-3, threatening to pull away from the rest of the AFC North. They also appear safe as far as home-field advantage goes: they won’t have it, which bodes well for them to get to the Super Bowl. The Eagles also won at Chicago (well, at Champaign against Chicago). Home-field advantage is actually important in the NFC, and the Eagles are in a log-jam at the top of the conference. But they’re solidly in front of their division, with a two-game lead on their nearest competitors.
:: In two of the Cowboys’ last three games, it’s turned out that scoring consisting of three field goals was enough to beat them. Considering that the Bills’ Mike Hollis missed three field goals yesterday, I guess it’s a good thing that the ‘Boys aren’t on the Bills’ 2002 schedule. (In Hollis’s defense, one of those kicks was a fifty-yarder, and another involved an odd snap so that the ball wasn’t planted very well by the time his foot contacted pigskin.)
:: The most oft-repeated words in Cincinnati yesterday: “Thank God for expansion!”
:: If you’re going to wear green jerseys for a game, at least pick a nice, dark shade of green. Say, hunter green, like the Philly Eagles. Bright green, grass-green, just doesn’t work. Just ask Notre Dame. (Oh, and thanks, Boston College! You’ve saved us all!)
:: New York City is bidding to host both a Super Bowl and the 2012 Summer Olympics. I seriously doubt they’ll get a Super Bowl, since the NFL is loath to hold the game in a northern city unless that city has a domed stadium. There have been thirty-six (or, in NFL parlance, XXXVI) Super Bowls, only two of which have taken place in northern cities (XVI in Detroit, and XXVI in Minneapolis). As far as NYC’s Olympic bid is concerned, I don’t know what cities around the world are in the running, but I wonder where they’d build an Olympic Stadium and an Olympic Village. (I’m genuinely curious here. I don’t know NYC’s geography very well at all.) Perhaps, if NYC wins the bid, this could be how Steinbrenner finally gets his new stadium — if NYC does what Atlanta did after its Olympics and converts the Olympic Stadium into the new ballpark. Of course, that’s assuming that Steinbrenner is willing to wait until after another ten years have passed before he gets his mits on a new park.
:: NBA weirdness: Karl Malone was held scoreless yesterday by the Sonics. He’s played for eighteen years and is a lock for the Hall of Fame, and yet he was shut out for probably the first time in his life yesterday. I don’t pay a lot of attention to the NBA — well, to basketball in general — but Malone being held scoreless is worthy of a visit by Agents Mulder and Scully.