The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
I’ve been meaning to link this for three days, and I’ve forgotten each day: Alexandra (the force behind the fine blog Out of Lascaux), who has been reposting her own oldies-and-goodies, has a fascinating post about anime and its roots in Japanese art. Anyone with an interest in anime should read this post.
(And Alexandra? If you want to write that book, write it. I’d read it!)
Sara Donati has an interesting blog about storytelling, which she has adequately titled Storytelling. She described an interesting exercise the other day, which I’ve done before. But when I did it, it wasn’t part of a writing workshop or class, but rather one of those goofy games that managers like to do to start off meetings where people don’t know one another. Usually I detest games like this, but this one appealed to me because it actually requires creativity.
What happened was this: During the standard “Go around the room and tell us your name and something interesting about yourself” phase of the meeting, we actually had to tell three things about ourselves. The catch, though, is that two of the three things were to be true, but one was to be false. And then the others in the group would try to quiz you and find out which was the false bit of biography. If you were good – – i.e., creative with a good eye for detail – – you could baffle the guessers.
This was easily the best “meeting icebreaker” I ever got to do, and I never thought of it as a writing exercise. Cool.
(Sara Donati, by the way, is the writer of a series of romance novels that my wife likes and which I’ve always been tempted to read. Maybe I will, this winter.)
Often while watching football games on TV, I’ll have to brief the Kid on which team we’re rooting for and which team we want to lose, as you might expect. These discussions usually take the form of “the white guys” (i.e., the team in white or “road” jerseys) and then the “blue” guys or the “orange” guys or whatever color jersey the home team is wearing. OK?
So yesterday, after the Giants disposed of the Jets in OT, we cut to the Redskins and the Cowboys, not a game I really care much about, but it was the only late game we had, so that’s what we watched. I informed her that we don’t like the Cowboys, who were “the guys in the white shirts”, or for short, “the white guys”. Then she asks me about the other team, and I shrug and said the following (keep in mind that the Redskins’ dark jerseys are brown in color):
“Well, yeah, we hate the Cowboys, but we don’t really care about those brown guys much either, because they’re the Redskins.”
Now, there‘s a sentence I never thought I’d say. For a second I felt like I was a Klan member.
And now for some randomly collated thoughts about yesterday’s football action….
:: The Bills, of course, were off yesterday, which accounts for my lack of rage and heart-palpitation this morning. In fact, the Bills had a good week even by not playing, because two of their three division rivals lost (the Jets and Dolphins, to the Giants and Colts respectively), and the third (the Patriots) could lose tonight when they play the Broncos. Thus, the idle Bills gained ground on one of the teams ahead of them and got some breathing room over the division cellar-dweller. Good news for everyone.
:: I suspect that Steve Spurrier’s days in Washington may be numbered. The guy just looked totally bewildered yesterday against Dallas; he had no answers and nothing to offer while his offensive line, which might be the worst line I’ve ever seen, kept allowing young quarterback Patrick Ramsey to get tossed around like a rag-doll.
:: Readers who don’t skip over my weekly football posts will recall that I’ve criticized the Bills for being too reliant on passing the ball in game-situations that would normally call for running it. This syndrome is sometimes referred to as “going pass-wacky”, and it’s a real thing. Buffalo News columnist Bob DiCesare had an excellent column in yesterday’s paper about Bills’ offensive coordinator Kevin Gilbride, who, it turns out, has always been pass-wacky. It’s a good column. Check it out. (A telling stat is that the Bills have faced third-down between the 20-yard lines 56 times this season, and they have passed on every one of them. Come on!)
:: Speaking of pass-wackiness, Tony Dungy and the Colts came perilously close to losing yesterday against the Dolphins because of it. Leading 23-17 with about three minutes to go, the Colts got the ball deep in Dolphins’ territory. This was the perfect situation to just pound the ball on the ground, letting the clock run and forcing the Dolphins to spend their final timeouts before getting the ball back, on a day when the Dolphins hadn’t been moving the ball consistently. (And if the Colts pound the ball on the ground and get a first down, the game’s over.) But the Colts decided to go pass-wacky, which (a) doesn’t grind enough time off the clock and (b) even worse can result in an interception, thus giving the Dolphins back the ball in the red zone. In this case, scenario B is exactly what happened: instead of running Edgerrin James up the middle (yeah, it was third-and-seven, but the clock is more important here), Peyton Manning goes back to throw and gets picked off. Dolphins’ ball, at the 15-yard line, and if they score a touchdown and make the PAT, they probably win, unless they give Indy enough time to drive for a game-winning FG.
But maybe Tony Dungy knew what was going to happen. Maybe he looked across the field, spotted Dave Wannstedt on the Dolphins’ sideline, and remembered that Wannstedt has put his own virtual trademark on “going pass-wacky”. The Dolphins had all the time in the world to score the touchdown, they had Rickey Williams in their backfield…and yet, after rushing him just once, Wannstedt sends in a passing play. Dolphins QB rolls right, never sees Colts DE Dwight Freeney coming up behind him, gets sacked and fumbles the ball, which is recovered by the Colts. Game over. But then, what else to expect of Wannstedt, who in a low-scoring, tight game like this only had his offense run the ball 14 times in the entire game.
I don’t care how good your defense is, Dolphins fans. Your boys aren’t going to win the Super Bowl this year.
:: The Vikings have now fallen to defeat twice. My pick to win it all, the Bucs, are looking more ordinary with each passing week. I haven’t checked the standings yet today, because I have the uncomfortable suspicion that not one team I picked to win a division is in the lead. Ugh.
Next week, the Bills travel to Dallas to take on the hated Cowboys. It’s a must-win game (they all are, from this point on). Ought to be a good one. (I’ve pretty much become convinced that Bill Parcells is the greatest coach in football history.)
Demosthenes brings up the subject of President Reagan and the Cold War.
I’m no fan of Reagan’s, the original “family values” crusader whose own family was a train wreck, and the original “tax cuts are the solution to everything” President. Like Demosthenes, I’ve grown rather weary of the persistent habit of the American political Right to attribute any positive development in American life after January 20, 1981 to Reagan (which parallels their same habit of attributing any negative development since January 20, 1993 to Bill Clinton). And, like Demosthenes, I’m tired of the simplistic myth that has Reagan winning the Cold War single-handedly, by ratcheting up the rhetoric and the weapons-building, after the preceding seven Administrations had bumbled their way through four decades of appeasement, containment, détente, and other lackluster policies. Demosthenes is correct in noting that Gorbachev’s rise to power was a far bigger factor in bringing about an end to the Cold War than is typically admitted, and may actually be a more important factor than anything Reagan did.
But I don’t totally dismiss Reagan, though. For all the guy’s inane “Evil Empire” blatherings when he took office, Reagan at least was able to recognize the opportunities a guy like Gorbachev presented, and though he was wary, he still took advantage of them and embraced the changes evident in the Soviet regime. I do think that Reagan tends to get way too much credit for the end of the Cold War. But he wasn’t a passive watcher, either.
This was a fascinating time in history, not just for what happened but for all the “What ifs”: What if Hinckley’s bullet had struck home, elevating George H.W. Bush eight years earlier? What if Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, or any of the others hadn’t died? What if Gorbachev had never risen to power, or what if he had been more of a hard-liner? Food for thought, probably, for the Harry Turtledove’s of tomorrow.
Sheila has just encountered a word for the first time. The word is “Luddite”.
Reading her post, I’m struck by a couple of things. First, I agree with her that a lot of times the “intelligent folks” can get really condescending and arrogant, although I’m not sure if that’s the case with the William Gibson article she links (it’s an AOL-only article, which makes me lazy since I’m an AOL subscriber but I didn’t care to sign in to read it). And “Luddite” has definitely taken on a connotation of “enlightened dismissal”; it’s commonly meant to be an insult.
However, I was surprised that Sheila had not encountered the word until relatively recently (within the last year). I know that she reads and writes a lot (man, does she write a lot!), but maybe she doesn’t read the kind of stuff where the word “Luddite” comes into play. Similarly, I suspect that a lot of medical terminology that she knows fairly well would be totally alien to me, a guy whose medical vocabulary derives from watching a lot of ER and CSI. It’s a fairly common error to assume that certain things that are common knowledge in our experience are also common knowledge outside that sphere of experience. (This is also part of why I don’t believe that “common sense” really exists.)
How can SDB routinely spend 6000 or more words to explain US foreign policy, but only about 2500 to explain General Relativity? Surely the Bush Administration’s policies aren’t more complicated than Einsteinian physics!
(I’m just kidding here. Really. I love it when SDB writes about science, except for when he rains on the “space elevator” parade. It’ll work. You’ll see!)
I just want to thank everyone for stopping by. To my great surprise, October turned out to be my best traffic month ever, and by quite a margin, too — the hits in October eclipsed the previous best month, September ’03, with a week to spare. That’s two months in a row I’ve set new records here, and four times in the last seven months. Woo-hoo!
Mike Finley has put his blog on the back burner, which isn’t that big of a surprise considering his sporadic posting and his previous comments on a general sense of ennui. I hope his hiatus doesn’t last long.
Ditto James Capozzola, whose real life has also intruded.
Mike’s Baseball Rants has gone on permanent hiatus…but in a good way. He left BlogSpot and took up Movable Type, so now he’s writing…well, Mike’s Baseball Rants. (I also just scanned through Mike’s Halloween-day post…Holy Tabular Data, Batman!)
Finally, I should pass on to my loyal readership that I am planning a hiatus of my own for Thanksgiving. My current scheme is to not post from the day before Thanksgiving until the Sunday after, but who knows, I may just take an entire week off. It would be nice to do that without it being because we’re moving from Buffalo to Syracuse, or back again.
I see that the film ALIEN is in re-release right now, and that over on AICN everybody’s in a lather because the most fanboy-wankish project of all time, Alien Versus Predator, is apparently going to be a bad movie. (That they are surprised by this defies my imagination. How could a movie like that not suck?)
Anyway, I figured this would be a good time to drop an earth-shattering bombshell upon my loyal readers: I hate the ALIEN movies.
Yeah, I know, the first one’s a classic of horror, but it just doesn’t do it for me. Sure, it was effective the first time I saw it, but the couple of times I’ve bothered to watch it again it was rather like riding “Space Mountain” with the lights turned on: a movie whose entire reason for being is gross-out stuff and “beastie jumping out from behind things” scares loses something when I know what’s coming. And unlike, say, Jaws, which has other strengths going for it – – theme, character – – ALIEN is like the wind-up toy that is a lot less interesting after playing with it for five minutes.
Then there’s the sequel, ALIENS, which, again, everybody loves but me. It’s slick and well-made, but the plot is just one predictable complication after another, so even while I was watching the first time (on video, in college) I found myself ticking off every culmination of ham-handed foreshadowing early in the movie. And quite frankly, the entire last third of the movie just drags on and on and on. In his review, Roger Ebert likened this part of the film to a roller coaster ride that lasts for half and hour. Personally, I liken it to one of my favorite lines from The West Wing: “I’m sorry. I hung in there as long as I could, but you’ve long since past the point where I stopped caring.”
Finally, there was the third one, in which we go right back to beasties jumping out from behind things and lots of nastiness and drooling and whatnot. I never bothered with the fourth one. So, there you go. My deep, dark secret is out.
Oh, my God.
You know how we (well, a lot of us) try to avoid consuming tuna that is caught with nets that also endanger dolphins? Well, the Japanese have figured out an ingenuous solution to the problem. They hunt the dolphins directly. They lure and confuse the dolphins into coves where men in boats can easily kill them with sickles, spilling so much blood that the water literally turns red. (Warning: the link contains graphic pictures of bloody water which seem to have been Photoshopped to make the water red to an absurd degree. Personally, I find the pile of dolphin cadavers in the boat as damning as the bloody water.)
As much as I love the Japanese and Nordic cultures, their insistence on hunting marine mammals (and let’s not indulge the fantasy that these animals are killed for “scientific research” reasons) disgusts me to the core. (I should note a bit of “balance” here, as there’s a lot about my own culture that disgusts me to the core.)
(Link via John Scalzi.)
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer