The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
I don’t have much to say about American Idol, except to note that Josh Gracin made a classy exit. My money is on Kimberley Locke to exit next week, with Clay Aiken then winning the showdown with Ruben Studdard.
But then, I’m a guy who picked the Buffalo Bills to win three of the four Super Bowls they lost, so don’t take my prediction to Vegas.
Judging by the amount of sheer tension that marked last night’s episode of The West Wing, I move that Aaron Sorkin be subjected to one of the following two fates: (a) chained to his desk and forced to keep writing TWW, or (b) chained to his desk and forced to write the third season of 24 (or at least join that show’s more-than-competent corral of writers). I wonder if Sorkin’s hasty exit from the show had anything to do with the NBC and Warner reaction when they got the bill for last night’s episode, what with tons of special effects and location shooting.
That last shot, of Leo McGarry walking briskly through the corridors, and then breaking into a run as he races across the Oval Office and out onto the hallway to the residence, was absolutely chilling. (But, to resurrect my old complaint, how much better would it have been if NBC hadn’t cut all those promos a few weeks back touting “The fall of the Vice President…and a kidnapping!!!“. Dumb-ass NBC….)
Oh, and while I’m not as down on Mary Louise Parker as I used to be — I’ve warmed to her and her character substantially — I found it incredibly hard to believe that a woman working in the White House, as the First Lady’s Chief of Staff, would dress like Erin Brockovich while on duty. That strained credibility to a pretty big extent.
Here’s a specific complaint I have about Glenn Reynolds: a post in which he complains that no one protests against Saddam, but everyone protests against the United States.
This is a standard complaint by the right/warbloggers — SDB raises it often, for instance — but it’s simply not true, judging by the amount of mail I started receiving from precisely the left-wing groups like Amnesty, International and others when I subscribed for a single year to Mother Jones. I got mailings detailing all manner of atrocities and disgusting behavior by dictators all over the world, including detailed descriptions of what the Taliban was up to before they leapt to the Head of our Anger Class by getting behind 9-11-01. People have been protesting these tyrants for years, and anyone claiming that they haven’t is either ignorant or lying. In Reynolds’s case, I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume the former, with the full implication that maybe when he bitches about the left he should extend a bit more effort into, well, knowing just what he’s complaining about.
And if it seems as if these organizations are a bit louder about their demonstrations here, well, perhaps (a) it only seems that way because these organizations and their protests simply don’t receive that much coverage unless they happen to be protesting something going on here, and (b) perhaps they’re under the impression that the United States, being a democratic nation, not only sanctions people demonstrating against their government but in some ways actually endorses it. Some people consider such dissent as part-and-parcel of citizenship, much to the apparent chagrin of those whose idea of citizenship involves marching lock-step behind the President, no-matter-what.
I’m a sporadic reader of comics these days; it’s just too expensive anymore to follow any of them on a monthly basis. I remember fondly when new issues were sixty cents; I could scrounge about for three bucks in change, head to the bookstore, and walk out with five new comics to read. Them’s was the days….
Anyway, the comics reviewers at AICN have, in their own peculiar idiom (basically involving lots of sarcasm and profanity), done a bit of traipsing down memory lane for the best X-Men stories of all time. Ah, the memories…the Mutant Massacre…the Dark Phoenix saga…when there were only three “mutant-centric” series in the Marvel lineup (Uncanny X-Men, X-Factor, New Mutants), but the stories would be told in multi-issue crossovers amongst all those series…what fun it was. I could have done without X-Factor, actually — and its ham-handed resurrection of Jean Grey. But still, it was all a lot of fun.
My archenemy, before holding his pinkie to his lips and demanding one million dollars from the UN, has dug up some of the first reviews of The Empire Strikes Back. It’s useful to remember that no one thought that TESB was superior to A New Hope in 1980; the consensus view of TESB‘s superiority didn’t form until some time later — a few years after Return of the Jedi came out, at least. This reminds us that critics, while useful, are generally little better equipped to assess a work of art than anyone else, because, like everyone else, they can’t see the future and know how influential the work is likely to be.
One can complain about what one perceives to be a work’s faults as much as one wants, but when it comes to deciding what’s going to stand the test of time, well — it’s all a crapshoot. There is no best, there is no “canon”, and artistic favor comes and goes. So there.
Apparently the losses at the Iraqi National Museum are not as bad as originally feared. If I’m reading this right, the really special stuff — the items kept in the glass cases, for all to see — were taken to “special secure repositories”, whose locations we are now keeping secret so as to protect them. This is good news. But I’m afraid I don’t take much solace in the fact that looting was apparently largely confined to the basements where “more commonplace” items were kept, because it’s later admitted that most of that stuff was not cataloged or photographed.
That means that we really don’t have any idea what the hell was down there.
History is replete with all manner of precious, even priceless, items sitting unnoticed in uncataloged library archives, all over the world. Just recently, some manuscript work by JRR Tolkien was found in precisely such a state. So I have to say, even if it’s not as bad as originally feared, it’s still pretty horrible.
And I’m not sure what to make of the fact that we now apparently know the locations of Iraq’s art treasures to a much greater degree of precision than the locations of those WMDs that we invaded to find in the first place.
Charles Stross’s SF-writing brother-in-arms, Ken MacLeod, has a blog. He apparently doesn’t update all that frequently — probably because he’s an actual published, working writer. Thus, I hate him.
A standard fixture of urban downtowns used to be the big, multi-level department store. It still is, actually, in many of the larger cities — Macy’s, Filene’s, Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh, etc. — but in Buffalo, the downtown department store closed years ago. It used to be AM&A’s (which stood for “Adam Meldrum and Anderson’s”), which was then bought out by the chain Bon-Ton. Bon-Ton still exists in the region, as anchor stores in most of the malls, but the downtown Buffalo location was finally closed six or seven years ago. The building was bought incredibly cheaply by a Buffalo businessman named Richard Taylor, who tried opening a new store; but he couldn’t attain profitability in Buffalo’s current downtown climate when the only real shoppers are the downtown workers coming in during their lunch hours. So Taylor’s closed, and the building’s been dormant ever since.
Well, in the absence of anyone wanting to run a store out of that building, now there is movement to convert it into a school. This would actually be a special school, called a “charter” school, and there is a waiting list to get in. It would cater to talented and gifted students, would have a partnership with Buffalo State College, and would bring about 400 students plus the teachers and staff to downtown on a daily basis. Just about everyone admits that what downtown needs to get revitalization going again is people for more than just a few hours on weekends for special events. Just about everyone.
Everyone, that is, except a few business people who have suddenly decided that the building would be better served being demolished and replaced with a spiffy new office tower.
Just why this need suddenly exists now, when the school is trying to get set up for the 2003-2004 academic year and when the building has sat unoccupied for most of the last decade, isn’t exactly clear. Just why a new office building is needed at that site, as opposed to any of downtown’s many other vacant sites, isn’t exactly clear. Just why these businessmen think that schoolbuses and such near the school would add to the currently non-existent downtown congestion isn’t exactly clear. (Check this downtown webcam sometime to get an idea of what traffic is like during business hours in downtown Buffalo. This isn’t the same street the school would be on, but it’s very close, and it’s what traffic is always like downtown.)
Cities that thrive do so by giving their children reasons to stay. Cities that wither and limp along, from decade to decade, do so by continually ignoring the future in favor of short-term projects that benefit a few rich people and by continually giving their children reasons to leave the nest.
Buffalo needs to decide which damn type of city it wants to be.
Kevin Drum complains about unopenable cereal boxes, which makes me wonder what’s going on in Orange County. Here in Buffalo, the cereal boxes are very easy to open — you just slide your thumb in there, in the middle, and then slowly move your thumb toward the side, thus breaking the spot of glue holding the box shut on that side. You then repeat this action, on the other side. Voila — an open cereal box, no fuss, no muss.
But we’ll exit this topic right now, before I move onto the #$&%*!!! plastic bag inside the no-fuss cereal box.
(Actually, Kevin’s framing of the question reminds me of all those “If we can put a man on the moon…” complaints, which connected with the “sealed food” issue in the first place reminds me of an excerpt from MAD Magazine‘s parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey:
BOWMAN: What’s for dinner tonight?
POOLE: There’s a glass of steak, a glass of corn, a glass of potatoes, and a glass of bread with butter.
BOWMAN: Anything to drink?
POOLE: Yeah — a piece of coffee.
Ah, to be ten again and reading MAD Magazine….)
Time for a few random notes….
:: My ISP had some trouble with the servers this morning, which is why the template was buggered for a bit. For once, this wasn’t because I forgot to pay them. Things appear to be back to normal, though.
:: My RSS feed is now up and running. And despite the fact that I now have a functional RSS feed, I’m still a little bit fuzzy on just what an RSS feed is supposed to do. My understanding is that it’s useful to people who use something called an “aggregator”, which turns out to not be a device used to clean out clogged bathtub drains, as I had previously believed.
:: According to one search engine, Byzantium’s Shores is number five on this search. Purely accidental, obviously, but still — I’d love to know just what this search subject is about — it sounds like a cross between a special episode of Dateline and a James Patterson novel. Anyone?
:: SDB has finally returned to writing about what drew me to USS Clueless in the first place: the logical genesis and ramifications of atheism.
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer