The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
If my readers needed any more proof that my sense of humor can be, well, a bit “out there”, I laughed heartily at this item I found over at SFG this morning.
It seems that the Guiness Book people have listed the World Trade Center attacks as “Most Individuals Killed In A Terrorist Act”. The “dark humor” comes in at the bottom of the entry.
Guys, for this particular entry you might wish to remove the “Break this record” link. Just a thought.
Just a few short notes and bits o’ lazy linkage, as I have a lot on the plate today:
:: The other day I mentioned Buffalo’s Shakespeare in Delaware Park festival. Over the last few nights, the Festival’s theatre was vandalized, thus requiring the cancellation of at least one performance. Disgusting.
:: Jesse of Pandagon is 21 today. In his comments, I suggested something he could do with his newfound legal status, but I suspect he won’t be taking me up on it.
:: Two gems via Matthew Yglesias: A chart depicting how unimpressive the current economic recovery really is (in terms of jobs), and a CNN article revealing that Texas Republicans weren’t always of the view that running away for reasons of parliamentary procedure is a terrible, terrible thing. Heh, on both counts.
:: Andrew Cory (on his web log) and Aaron Johnson (in my own comments section) point out that SDB’s take on the new Harley isn’t right. I have no informed opinion, per se, since I’m not into motorcycles. But the thing looks manly enough to me:
:: SDB also has an interesting post today about some excursions he made into anime recently. I’m not familiar with pretty much anything he discusses, with the exception of Princess Mononoke, which is an utterly astounding film, as he writes, and is astounding for pretty much the same reasons that SDB lists: the way the characters are established and developed, the way the plot develops out of the characters’ actions and real concerns, et cetera. The film’s theme is ecological in nature, but it’s not a Luddite ecological message. And the film sports Joe Hisaishi’s finest film score.
:: Terminus returns to his ongoing survey of Oliver Stone’s films with an essay on what is my favorite Stone picture, JFK.
:: Michael Lopez has been talking a bit about the need to test for better teachers, and today he cites one of those tests from the 1800s that purportedly reveals just how far we’ve fallen in our expectations. I don’t know…I’ve seen these kinds of tests cited before, but no one ever seems to cite just what the typical scores were back then, so the assumption that everyone actually knew this stuff may not be warranted. Anyway, here’s what Snopes.com has to say about just this phenomenon.
:: Best wishes that Roger Ebert’s radiation therapy is only a minor speed-bump for his health.
:: Peruvians are returning to a form of agriculture called “waru waru”, which was last practiced by the Incas.
:: Useless political trivia: Barring some weird circumstance, the 2008 Republican ticket will be the first since 1972 to not include a man named George Bush or Bob Dole.
:: Posting may be light this coming weekend, as we will be attending the Erie County Fair. Consumption of kettle corn, glazed nuts, Italian sausage sandwiches, and ice cream is expected to be heavy.
SDB wrote a throw-away piece on a new motorcycle Harley-Davidson is building to attract a European market. And now, some folks are annoyed with him, for reasons I really can’t discern. I’m amazed he’s written not one, but two responses to critics of this post, thus using more words than he did in the first place! Wow. I chalk this up to the likelihood that his tongue wasn’t so obviously in his cheek here as it was when he brought up the Discordians in an earlier post. Sort-of. (He uses the Discordians to make an actual point, but uses some humor along the way. It’s subtle. Real subtle. So subtle you might miss it.)
Anyway, yeah, it’s regrettable that Harley is making a “kinder, gentler” chopper for the Euro-set. (And I’m not even one to foam at the mouth on matters European, like SDB can do if he’s gone too long without eating fiber.) But then, Harley doesn’t have quite the cachet it used to in the US, either. Here’s George Carlin on the subject. (WAV file, profanity alert.)
I made a hard decision the other day. I’ve decided that in the interests of productivity, I have to try and abandon my old practice of writing my first drafts in longhand. At least, for my “major” works — the novels, mostly. I may keep doing short fiction by hand, just to switch things up and keep things fresh. But I’ve decided that I need to start striving toward a daily word count, and doing it longhand just takes me too long.
My current goal is a thousand words a day on The Finest Deed. In longhand, that would take several hours which I just don’t have, between all the other things I’m trying to get done.
The problem, therefore, lies in surmounting the original reason I switched to writing longhand in the first place: I literally couldn’t think as fast as I could type, which resulted in long passages of, well, rambling crap. Using the fountain pen allowed me to slow myself down and let the words come as they should, and it made me feel like writing was more of a “physical” process than it seems when I’m typing away on the computer. (Writing longhand also was appealing when I was working my telesales job, because quite frankly it’s hard to work up the desire to sit down in front of a computer after eight hours of sitting in front of a computer during the day, even if the writing is pleasurable. Which it always is.)
So, I’m forcing myself to write at the computer now. How am I coping with the old problem of a sluggish brain? Well, there’s the old standby of coffee and lots of it (and I applied for a job at Starbucks this morning, so that might spike even higher!). I’m also keeping browser windows open so I can switch back-and-forth between web-surfing and writing. Yeah, that’s unorthodox; all the books say to concentrate on writing, avoid distraction, et cetera. I’ve pretty much concluded, though, that distraction is a constant in my life, and instead of working on shutting out the distractions (and likely getting annoyed at the lack of success thereof), I figure I’m better served by simply incorporating the distractions. No, that’s not for everyone. But it might be for me. We’ll see.
You know, sometimes I wonder if the chasm between conservatives and liberals can ever be bridged, because I can’t begin to fathom the moral calculus that posits Bill Clinton as a worse figure in American history than Timothy McVeigh. Not to mention Ted Bundy and Charles Manson. What on Earth is going on here?!
Of course, being less snarky, it could be that people don’t normally think of individuals like Manson and McVeigh as historical figures, so much as persons who achieved notoriety in isolated incidents. But since the list includes both, I just don’t feel like being that charitable.
(Via Pandagon.)
The Department of Weird Convergences has been underworked lately, so they’ve decided to take on new duties as the Department of Weird Convergences and Useless Dichotomies. Their first entry under the new charter is this:
There are two kinds of Chinese take-out restaurants: those that attempt to give themselves a poetic-sounding name (maybe Chinese, maybe not), and those that don’t. Here in Buffalo, we have the China Sea restaurant, the Great Wall restaurant, the Nine Pearls restaurant, and that Tai Pei restaurant. Those are the “poetic” ones. In the “non-poetic name” column, we have the China One Buffet, several places simply called “Oriental Buffet”, a flock of places starkly marked “Chinese Take Out”, and this morning I drove past a place called “Taste Good”.
The Department would also like to note a peculiar non-convergence: in the town where we used to live, our favorite Chinese take-out place was called “Lake View”. Not only was there no lake anywhere in view, there isn’t even a lake within ten miles of the town. Of course, who cares, as long as the food is good, right?
GOAK (don’t ask) is apparently interviewing prospective housemates this week. He provides some tips as to what kind of questions he’ll ask, but I rather expect one of his interviews to go roughly like this.
Good-night! dingdingdingdingdingdingdingding….
I think I got all of my political outrage and anger out of my system for a short while last week, so I’m ready for more fun, non-angry posting. The sun is out after a rainy weekend, I’m showered and caffeinated, President Bush is on vacation — all signs point to a lower blood pressure this week. So I think I’ll just hop over to AICN and see what’s up….
AAAGGGGHHHHHH!!!!
Yup, they’ve gone and put up new installments of their “Jedi Council” series of round-table discussions (or, in another accurate term, “circle jerks”), here and here. Oh, lordy….
(My original responses to this stuff are here and here.)
I won’t recreate my earlier blatherings, because all of my points still stand. I do, however, note a couple of “bullet points”:
:: At one point, someone complains that having Wookiees in Episode III is going to suck because it will be like the army of Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. Interesting, given that a pretty common fan complaint for years has been that Lucas went with Ewoks instead of Wookiees in the first place in the earlier film. Sure, whatever. (Lucas was originally going to have Wookiees as his non-technological race that ended up taking down the Empire, but then he changed his mind when he realized that by postulating Chewbacca’s technological abilities in the first two films, he had already ruled out the Wookiees as a pastoral race. It wasn’t a scheme to sell plush toys.)
Oh, and Moriarty says that Chewie’s entrance in A New Hope is “the greatest entrance”. Huh-whuh? He’s in the background of virtually every shot in the cantina in which he appears!
:: One smart soul makes the point that it’s entirely appropriate for Anakin to talk like an idiot teenager, accounting for all the ridiculous lines he has. (Once more, I remind everyone that all of the ridiculous lines in Attack of the Clones come from Anakin’s mouth, which suggests design to me.) This point is totally ignored by Moriarty’s couch-buddies who want to slag the movie.
(Incidentally, in his comment on AOTC in this year’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Gardner Dozois complains that Anakin spends most of the movie acting like a spoiled teenager. That’s because he is a spoiled teenager. O for a point, that I might miss it completely…!)
:: Does every gathering of annoyed Star Wars fans have to lead off with a complaint about Greedo shooting first? I don’t like it either, but my God, get over it. I hope that future AICN Jedi Councils stipulate that the first person to complain about this has to pay for the pizza.
:: One of Moriarty’s couch-buddies complains about the Jedi in AOTC, saying, “These are some of the worst Jedi I’ve ever seen!” Welllllll….I’m not sure how many Jedi this guy has seen, because by my count, prior to AOTC, I’ve only seen three in action (Qui Gon, Obi Wan, Luke Skywalker). Four, if you count Darth Vader. (I don’t count any of the ones in The Phantom Menace, because they’re councillors and do not act. Likewise with Yoda.) So, exactly where this guy got his “Jedi-judging” street-cred is beyond me.
And besides, here’s another “That’s a feature, not a bug” moments” that seem to be completely missed by Lucas’s detractors. I mean, no less an analytic mind than Steven Den Beste missed this one, so they’re in good company, but the thing is: These aren’t the best Jedi ever. Not even close. That’s the entire point: the Jedi Order has become a shadow of its former glory, which is in large part what allows Palpatine to succeed. So they’re supposed to look beatable. Duh.
:: Oh, goody! We’re back to the “Let’s blame George Lucas for every movie his name’s ever been on that we don’t like” game. George Lucas is to blame for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (which I’ve actually come to like a lot, more than Last Crusade, over the years), which is quite a feat given that he neither wrote the screenplay nor directed the film. (He has the film’s “Story” credit, and the difference between a story and a screenplay is the difference, to crib from Mark Twain, between a lightning bug and lightning.)
:: “A friend of mine who knows what he’s talking about” says that Lucas is scrawling dialogue on a notepad minutes before the scenes themselves are actually shot. Sure….
:: The movies are sanitized in their violence, we are told. Interesting, given that The Phantom Menace gave us an actual spray of blood when Darth Maul gets bissected and AOTC shows a beheading (sans the actual head, but there is a shadow and the headless body slumping to the ground). But more to the point, who gives a shit? Really, who cares if the violence is incredibly lifelike or not? At the end of Casablanca, I don’t need to see blood oozing from a bullet-hole in Major Strasser’s body. In all those Errol Flynn swashbucklers, I don’t need to see Basil Rathbone or anyone else spitting up blood and bile when they get run through. My God, folks.
(Now, I do think that Anakin looked a bit too hale-and-hearty when he awoke from his lightsaber-amputation. That one, I’ll grant. But the others? Nah.)
:: And finally, here we have the point where my last bit of respect for Moriarty may have just vanished into the luminiferous aether, when he says this of Episode III: “A lot of this is just going to be a third act of Scooby-Doo where it’s pulling masks off.”
Ach, I canna take it nae longer. I need a dram o’ Scotch….
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer