The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Here’s an awesome baseball trivia question: Is it possible for every hitter on a team to finish a game (full nine innings, an official game, not an exhibition) with the exact same batting average as when the game started? If so, how?
The answer is in this fine article.
(Thanks to Greg for the link.)
Two more days in Short Fiction Month. Ah, well….I hope I pick good ones for the last couple of days.
:: Michael Chabon may become one of my favorite writers. I was entranced by his juggernaut of a novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, and in the last week I read two of his stories: “The God of Dark Laughter” and “In the Black Mill”. These are atmospheric horror tales in the Lovecraft vein, and both are excellent. Chabon has a gift of language that’s a pleasure to behold: not only do his stories entrance, but the sentences themselves are works of art. Chabon is an author whose work I want to explore more deeply.
:: Graham Masterton is another author I want to explore more. He’s actually been on my radar screen since I read a brilliant short story of his four or five years ago, “The Secret Shih-Tan”, which is about a chef and his encounter with a secret cookbook whose recipes are, well, demented in their ingredients. That story isn’t horrific in any supernatural way, and nor is the one I read the other night, “Pig’s Dinner”. Both stories are, though, quite gory. Masterton doesn’t seem to be a guy who shies away from blood and guts in his fiction. I often find gore in print ineffective; you can tell me, “blood gushed from the place where his arm used to be”, and I won’t react much at all. Print has a way of lessening the impact of blood-and-guts. Masterton, though, knows how to do it. “Pig’s Dinner” actually had me going, “Ewwwwwwwww!!”
:: One sub-genre I’ve always enjoyed is the “Stuffy English Explorer” tale, in which our hero sets out from his stuffy club (where he and his fellow explorers sit in overstuffed leather chairs drinking Port) to go and find some mythic or lost item. Lisa Goldstein’s “The Fantasma of Q——” is just such a story. In these stories, the denouement can almost always be predicted very early on. But that’s not the point. This was a good one.
:: A general note: I can’t speak too highly of the annual Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror collections, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. I think they’re up to number fifteen, which will be coming out in another month or two. The fiction in these books is of invariable high quality, and for anyone interested in these genres, the books are worth their price for the introductory “Year in Review” essays alone. (The companion Year’s Best Science Fiction series, edited by Gardner Dozois, is of comparable quality.)
I’m proud of the fact that, as a high school and college student, I never descended to reading Cliff Notes for the various literary works I was assigned. I’m less proud of the fact that, more often than I care to admit, my solution to the “Holy crap, I can’t understand this book at all” problem was to simply not read it and bluff my way through class discussion, a talent which I honed to an unfortunately high degree of effectiveness. But a lot of times, I really did read the book, even if I was hopelessly incapable of really appreciating it. (I’ve often wondered if forcing Shakespeare upon unwitting ninth graders is really a sound educational policy, but that’s a digression for another time. Jason, this is precisely the kind of question you might consider on your blog….hint, hint….)
I understand the idea behind Cliff Notes, as an educational aid. What I didn’t understand was the way students actually used them, which struck me as a tacit admission like this: “Man, there’s no way I’m gonna read that book. But just the same, I’m afraid of looking like a dunce if Mrs. Wigglesby calls on me.” I was always thinking, “Be honest! Bluff your way through, and if you get caught, admit you didn’t read the damn thing! What’s she going to do?”
And yet, my ability to academically bluff somehow never translated to being able to bluff in a card game. Go figure.
Why am I rambling about this? Well, someone recently arrived here via a Google search for the Cliff Notes to a book. What book? Not Pride and Prejudice. Not Ulysses. Not even A Farewell to Arms or The Grapes of Wrath. No, someone was looking for the notes on a Stephen King book. And not The Stand or ‘Salem’s Lot, either. They were looking for King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
On the off chance that this person is reading this, please hear me out: On Writing is a terrific book, and it’s a short one (288 pages in my hardcover edition, not a doorstop by any means). It’s insightful, funny, and toward the end (when King discusses that encounter with a reckless driver that nearly killed him a few years back), downright moving. Instead of looking for the Net to do your homework for you, read the damn book. For Christ’s sake.
End of complaint.
(Note to self: be more careful about following Joseph Duemer‘s links in the future.)
It’s Caption Time! Have at it:
(Yes, I’d probably experience the same result riding one of these damn things.)
(UPDATE: For some reason — fairness, I guess — I feel I should note that I enjoy “funny Presidential pictures”, no matter who the President pictured happens to be. There’s just something inherently funny about a President of the United States, dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, wiping out on a Segway. I laughed when Bill Clinton got knocked down by his over-exuberant dog a while back [albeit he was out of office at the time]. Watching the video of Ronald Reagan calling Princess Diana “Princess David” always makes me chuckle, and if I really want to laugh, all I need do is form the mental image of Jimmy Carter trying to beat off a homicidal rabbit with a canoe paddle. So I’m not posting this to make fun of this particular President, much as I might like to. [Well, I do think it’s funny that this happens the day after Rachel Lucas informs us that Bush’s greatness is a function of his returning of manhood to the office.] )
Best Pun-based Headline for a Blog Post Ever.
(And anyway, if you have any love for baseball at all, you should be reading this guy’s blog.)
Here’s a creepy news story about the suicide epidemic in Japan, and how the Internet is partly affecting (and being affected by) that epidemic.
If you have geotags on your web log and an RSS feed (which I do — heh), and you ping Weblogs.com each time you post, you’ll show up on The World as a Blog, a map of the world that shows the physical location of blogs as they update. Pretty nifty.
(To use Weblogs.com, after you register you’ll be able to ping the site via a special form, which means that you’ll appear on Weblogs.com’s continually-updated list of recently-updated blogs. To make this easier, as soon as you’ve pinged them — after you get the “Thanks for your ping” message — bookmark that screen. Then, to ping you just load that page from your bookmarks. That’s it.)
Here’s another Star Wars putz. Grab they bucket of over-ripe tomatoes….
(Courtesy TF.N, which I religiously click every day despite my pledge a couple of weeks ago to try to remain “spoiler-free”. I canna do it, Cap’n!)
I seem to recall Carnak the Magnificent once lamenting his long wait for a certain movie to come out on DVD.
Is this the one?
(He probably already knows, but I’m looking for space-filler here….)
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer