The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Writing update: my word count is now over 50000 words on the novel-in-progress, and it’s coming along nicely. The storyline is starting to come into focus in my head, and rather nicely too, if I do say so myself. I am writer, hear me roar.
(Of course, it’s not nearly so impressive as some folks who kill three deadlines each week and toss off 8000 words each day on four different books…harumph!)
Rush Limbaugh has resigned from ESPN, after the storm of controversy surrounding his incredibly goofy statements about Donovan McNabb and race in the NFL last Sunday. Of course, it’s one of those “non-contrite” acts of contrition: “I’m sorry what I said was taken the way it was, because, you know, I didn’t really mean it the way you took it. So I’m in trouble because you’re a bunch of overly-sensitive fuddy-duddies.”
And then, Limbaugh apparently went on his own radio show and gave this interpretation of events:
“All this has become the tempest that it is because I must have been right about something,” Limbaugh said. “If I wasn’t right, there wouldn’t be this cacophony of outrage that has sprung up in the sports writer community.”
Yup. Now one can determine the correctness of one’s beliefs by the level of outrage they inspire. Jesse at Pandagon has a pretty good takedown of this line of “thinking”.
Yesterday on the Jim Rome show, a caller asked of this whole affair: “Why are we surprised?” That’s about right. What Limbaugh said about McNabb pretty much falls right in line with things he has said on his own program, for years. The only thing I wonder is how much of what he says he actually believes, and how much is said simply because he’s one of those who likes to toe the line of controversy. Personally, I suspect it’s both.
Ionarts has been running a six-part interview with Carol Berger, who is the founder of the Millennium Wagner Opera Project, which is in turn an extension of an organization dedicated to a multi-disciplinary approach to the works of Richard Wagner. Check it out, if you’re interested in opera in general or Wagner in particular.
(Link is to Part Six of the interview, which in turn contains links to parts one through five.)
This has been making the rounds of Left Blogistan in the last two days, and it’s pretty funny, I guess, but I gotta admit that I’m growing tired of the current fad of translating the language of one’s political opposites into Gollum-speak. I don’t know, but it’s starting to seem…yesterday, I guess. Actually, I think it lost its cachet when Ben Shapiro did it some months ago. Now there’s a guy who could suck the coolness out of the Fonz.
If you’re in need of a bit of Flash-fun, may I present the greatest Flash thingie ever:
2001: A Space Odyssey explained. Sit back and feel your mind expand. And before watching it, you may wish to practice your best Keanu “Whoa”.
(filched from I Love Everything)
One of the hard things about being a sports fan is that occasionally the Powers Above will align the stars in such a way that two teams you don’t like end up playing one another, so you’re forced to root for a team that ordinarily you’d never root for. My all-time worst instance of this was in the early 90s, during the Bills’ Super Bowl run, when one year the Miami Dolphins, who are the Bills’ biggest rival in the division, traveled to play the Dallas Cowboys, who are the greatest force for Evil on the planet. (Well, in the non-lethal sense of “evil”.) As a Bills fan, I was forced to root for the Cowboys — who ended up beating the Bills in that year’s Super Bowl. Ugh.
So now I have the Chicago Cubs in a playoff series against the most evil franchise in baseball, the Atlanta Braves. Now, I have no overriding reason to choose one team over the other, as I did in that Dolphins-Cowboys tilt, so I’m holding my nose and rooting for the Cubs, even though I think a Cubs championship would unravel the threads of time, as well as elevate the nation’s millions of inexplicable Cubs fans to apocalyptic levels of annoyance. My long-standing policy is to root for whomever the Braves are matching up against.
And if you’re wondering what sin the Braves could have committed at some hazy point in distant baseball memory, remember that I am a Pirates fan, and check out Number Six on this list. To this day, that night remains the only time a sporting event has left me nauseous. (Not even the missed-field-goal in Super Bowl XXV made me sick at my stomach. But Sid Bream beating the throw? That did it.)
It’s not surprising that I didn’t hear about this story until yesterday, since this is Buffalo where sports coverage consists of “BILLS BILLS BILLS BILLS BILLS BILLS Sabres Sabres BILLS BILLS oh and there are 31 other teams in the NFL”.
Apparently, Rush Limbaugh thinks that Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb has never been particularly good, and the only reason he’s been in the starting lineup at all is because of the NFL’s desperation to have a successful black quarterback. You know, like Warren Moon and that guy who threw five touchdowns in the second quarter of Super Bowl XXII for the Redskins.
Or, maybe he doesn’t think that and is simply seeing just what he can get away with, which is what I suspect Limbaugh of doing a lot of the time. Of course, that doesn’t imply anything better, because that’s basically a choice between “racist twit” and “craven cynic”. Maybe I’ll flip a coin.
James Capozzola has a rundown of Philly op-ed writers on this.
(By the way, Limbaugh used to be a fairly vocal Steelers fan. I don’t suppose anyone has ever heard him spouting a similar opinion of Kordell Stewart, who attained a much lower level of success than McNabb has?)
If you are anything other than a fiery liberal Democrat, you will not find this funny. If you are anything other than a fiery liberal Democrat, you will find it, at best, mildly unfair and at worst downright slanderous.
Be either amused, or be warned.
I’d love to rely on my hometown newspaper’s website for news more than I do, but The Buffalo News‘s site is, to my way of thinking, a train wreck, and a barely functional one at that.
First, the site is so “busy” as to be unpleasant on the eyes. But as annoying as that is, what bugs me is that the site is not updated with the day’s new content until around 9:00 am, which seems to me rather late. I like checking the news when I get up, which is almost always before nine. I suppose they might be thinking that if they update too early, then more people won’t bother actually picking up the physical paper. And even then, their updates are always problematic: some stories don’t load until well after the update on the main page. Ugh.
Come on guys, the Web’s not a new thing. Let’s work out the kinks.
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer