The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
[superstitious sports fan mode ON]
On the last full day that I lived in Syracuse, that town’s biggest sports entity — the men’s basketball team at Syracuse University — won its first NCAA Championship, after several previously unsuccessful trips to the Final Four.
So maybe I should plan on moving again next time the Bills get to the Super Bowl….
[return to rationality]
VIRGIL BRIGGMAN BACK ON THE AIR
Lest anyone not recognize that bit o’ pop-cultural reference, yes, the move is complete. Actually, when I say “The move is complete”, I mean that it is “complete” in the sense of, “All our crap has been removed from the Ryder truck and all of said crap is now strewn about our apartment, with walkways whittled through the stacks of cardboard boxes, with none of said walkways being more than eighteen inches wide”. Good thing I lost all that weight; it makes negotiating an apartment that is in the mid-stages of “moving-in” at least somewhat easier.
I also can’t resist one final knock on the weather of Syracuse: I’ve never lived in a place that received less sunlight than Syracuse. It was constantly overcast in a way that made me think of the Scottish Highlands, or of those dank moors in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Now that we’re in Buffalo, both of the last two mornings have yielded brilliant, cloudless sunrises. And for all of Buffalo’s charms, this city will never be known for its sunlight.
I wish I could say that my experience living in Syracuse had been better; I’m sure my impression of this city has been unfairly colored by the fact that we moved here just in time for a pretty harsh winter, and on the last weekend of our stay here — the weekend during which we had to get everything packed up and finalized — the Central New York region (actually, much of upstate and other regions as well) was hit by an ice storm that knocked out power to thousands of people, including us.
Thus it came to pass that we were packing by candlelight yesterday; we were reduced to a tiny hand-held radio that I bought for carrying on walks for contact with the outside world; we weren’t able to shower for two days; we couldn’t open the fridge for fear of letting the warm air into it (until we later got some ice at a minimart and stuffed the thing full, which made me wonder whatever happened to the word “icebox”). Et cetera and so forth. We did get out to eat, finding an Applebee’s that had electricity (the place was packed, and it also happened to be the lunchtime choice for two dozen or so electric-company workers) and later going to the Carousel Center (Syracuse’s main mall) to indulge in the delights of the food court and dessert at the Cold Stone Creamery. (This is one of those ice-cream places where they put a hunk of ice cream on a marble slab and then fold a bunch of goodies into it before serving it in a waffle-bowl.)
So: I hated the weather that we endured while living here, and I didn’t live here long enough to get to know the city or find those “hidden treasures” that every local knows about but visitors so often refuse to either investigate or even admit their existence in the first place. I still think Syracuse is too small a pond for me, personally, but as we get ready to leave, I can’t help but think that maybe I could have learned to like this place a lot, even if I’m not sure I ever would really have loved it.
Farewell, then, Syracuse. All of my griping aside, I had a lot of fun here, and I do hope to visit again…once in a while. Especially in 2031, when I expect DestiNY USA to actually be up and running.
Here begins my hiatus until the move is complete. I hope to be back posting on Wednesday, but more likely Thursday. Until then, feel free to check out the fine folks in my blogroll, filed under “Other Journeys”. And visit them often, so that they notice me in their referral logs and link back to me! (Yes, I’m a blog slob. Woe….)
Good luck, phasers on stun, Kirk out.
(Oh, yes, I almost forgot: Hey, people of Syracuse! Good luck on that other little thing that’s occupying all of your minds right now…)
Journalism in wartime is a difficult endeavour — and it’s a particularly dangerous one if you happen to be a reporter working from the actual battlefields. Many great writers and newspeople have achieved their greatness through their work during wartime, people like Bill Mauldin, Walter Cronkite, and Eric Severeid; and some journalists have died in the course of their reportage — most famously, Ernie Pyle, who was killed during the opening days of the American campaign to take Okinawa in WWII.
War is no less dangerous for the journalists today than it was back then. Today, two journalists were killed in separate incidents: Michael Kelly (American, editor-at-large for The Atlantic Monthly) and Kaveh Golestan (Iranian, photo-journalist and 1980 Pulitzer Prize winner). The willingness to go into harm’s way is admirable, whether it is a soldier who does it because he’s ordered to do it or a reporter who does it so that we, at home, can understand why and how. I admire these people, and I grieve at their deaths.
As the baseball season gets underway, here’s an intriguing set of predictions as to how the season will go. There’s a lot of methodology here — they use a slew of computer stats to play the season something like 50 times, and then they average out the standings to generally predict where each team should end up. Of course, it’s about this time that Chris Berman says, “That’s why they play the games”, but this is as good a summation of where the teams stand on paper that I’ve seen.
My favorite living fantasy author (a distinction I have to make so as to avoid appearing to diss J.R.R. Tolkien), Guy Gavriel Kay, has a new book of poetry coming out this weekend, Beyond This Dark House. That’s an Amazon.ca link; I’m not sure when the book will show up in the US, but Amazon.ca will ship to the States, as I understand it. (Of course, those of us fortunate enough to be living in cities fairly close to the Canadian border can always just hop on over and pick up the book at Chapters…which I’ll be doing next month, probably, when we make our annual trek to Toronto for, among other things, dim sum in Chinatown.)
I missed out, unfortunately, on winning a signed copy of the book via a limerick-writing contest on the GGK site, Bright Weavings. Everyone who hangs out on the forums there was allowed to submit two limericks pertaining to GGK’s books; my entries, predictably, were placed in the “also-ran” column. I’m just not a good poet…
(Out of respect for, well, the English language I’m not going to archive my entries here. Suffice it to say, they’re available on said forums; anyone sufficiently intrigued should do their own searching!)
North of Syracuse there is a town called Oswego, which is right on the shores of Lake Ontario. In the time we lived here, we never managed to trek up there and see what that town is like, but the poor town was mentioned prominently on the TV news during just about every major bit of winter weather that came through. It seemed, to this dispassionate and soon-to-be-former observer, that for every inch of snow Syracuse received, Oswego received nine.
So in the insult-added-to-injury department, Oswego got shut down by the weather again last night, although it wasn’t snow. This time it was lots and lots of freezing rain.
While I’m plugging Dominion, he’s got a good cautionary post directed toward parents who may be considering getting a pet rabbit for the kids at Easter.
A few days ago, the left-wing blogosphere held a special “Make Fun of Dick Cheney” day, in support of the parody site Whitehouse.org, which a while back received some correspondence from the Office of the Vice President’s Counsel because someone over there apparently didn’t like being made fun of, or something.
Anyhoo, my favorite bit of “Make Fun of Dick Cheney” stuff is over at Dominion’s blog, where he has collected a selection of funny jokes about Cheney from the likes of Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and even George W. Bush himself.
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer