“YOU OVER-OFFICIOUS JERK!” (or, Happy 100th Birthday, Marv Levy)

Posted on August 3, 2025 by ksedinger

Marv Levy, the great football coach who guided the Buffalo Bills to four consecutive Super Bowls from 1990-1993 during his Hall-of-Fame career, is 100 years old this day.

Those Bills teams hold a strong place on my emotional life, even now that the last Super Bowl appearance is more than 30 years in the past, and at this point we’re nearing the entire run of Coach Levy’s time with the team being 30 years in the past. Those Bills teams were my touchstone for home when I was in college, nearly 1000 miles away from home; when I got homesick, there were the Buffalo Bills. Watching Levy on the sideline, occasionally laughing and more often shouting (and there were times when his lips were very easy to read). Levy’s erudition was always a matter of note and humor around the team; he was noted for including lengthy discourses on historical battles in his gameday pep talks. He would give a long story about a battle and then he’d sum it up by noting that the guy who lost the battle “couldn’t win on the road”. But he also clearly knew some much shorter words, and was not afraid to use them sometimes, even if he was on camera.

Levy also attended Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which is an hour and a half south of Waverly, Iowa, where I went to school at Wartburg College. I don’t recall Coe being one of the schools Wartburg played on a yearly basis…but we drove right by Coe several times a year when passing through Cedar Rapids while on the long drives between home and school.

No, Levy never did manage to get the team over the hump to win the Super Bowl. Did that say something about him as a coach? Maybe a little…but as those years and those teams have passed farther and farther into memory (and some of those players have even left us entirely), the question of “Why did they lose all four!” fades farther into memory as well. All that really matters is the good times of watching those games. I remember the moment in the AFC Championship Game in January 1991, where the Bills earned their first trip to the Super Bowl by beating the Raiders 51-3. At the end, in the last few minutes, quarterback Jim Kelly (who had left the game already, since it was a blowout) was chatting with Levy on the sidelines…but in actuality, Kelly was the straight-man, the distraction to keep Levy from realizing what was coming from behind: the inevitable dumping of the Gatorade. Levy’s look of “Oh, come on, how did I fall for this!” is classic Marv Levy. (You can see the whole moment, including a slow-motion analysis by Dick Enberg, at the 1:55 mark here.)

The best tribute to Marv Levy that I’ve seen came a few years ago, courtesy of former wide receiver Andre Reed, who included this passage in his speech when he was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame:

There wasn’t a better teacher than our head coach Marv Levy. He was the definition of ‘speak softly, but carry a big stick.’ He became our father figure, very much of a father figure, and he became even more of a father figure to me when I lost mine. In 1996, when I lost my father, he told me just take as much time as you need. Marv, I’ll always remember those words, your compassion you gave me when I needed it the most. You had to deal with so many egos, I don’t know how the heck you did it. [At this point, the cameras caught Levy on stage, muttering “Neither do I!”] Those big words you used, yeah, we needed dictionaries. We actually needed a thesaurus, too. But one thing we admired about you as a coach was that word respect. We respected the heck out of you. When you respect your coach, you’ll do anything to win for him. I love you, Marv.

I thought about titling this post with the quote that Levy is most known for, something he has made his trademark phrase, which he has used time and again over the years, especially when addressing fans at the stadium: “Where on Earth would you rather be than right here, right now?” But I suspect that chestnut is getting a lot of work today, so I decided to go with another at least quasi-famous Levyism. This one’s from when he coached the Kansas City Chiefs (another reason I can’t totally hate the Chiefs, even if they’re close to 2010s-era Patriots levels of annoyingness):

And finally, I don’t want to allow the 100th birthday of a great football coach to pass without also noting his other great skill, which makes one wonder if a great Broadway composer and songwriter was lost when he decided to go into coaching football instead:

Well…maybe not.

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Coach Levy! I’m glad you’re still right here, right now.

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A brief thought on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

Posted on August 2, 2025 by ksedinger

Killing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a particularly galling move. True, I knew it was coming, but even so…it’s just so frustrating watching Republicans kill everything that actually made this the country I grew up in, as they set about creating some stupid fantasy cosplay version of the country they WISH they grew up in (and which a lot of them are going to realize is a country that sucks, once they’re actually LIVING in it).

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Something for Thursday

Posted on July 31, 2025 by ksedinger

I just finished a remarkable novel the other night, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, by Oscar Hijuelos. The book is a slow burn of a novel about the life of a man (told as a series of memories as he looks back on his life during his last hours, in a seedy hotel in New York City) who, along with his brother, was once a major figure in Cuban music (particularly Mambo music) in the 1950s. Cesar Castillo remembers his childhood with his brother, Nestor, in Cuba, and he remembers the loves they had there before they came to New York, hopefully to establish a life and then move their families and their loved ones along later. Cesar and Nestor become musicians and their lives…well, their lives go on. I don’t want to say a whole lot more than that, because the book is as effective at showing life for what it is–a sequence of things that happen to us, few of which we have any control over–and there are turns along the way that we don’t see coming. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is not a novel that grabs right away…in fact, I was wondering if I’d bother finishing it just after fifty pages or so. But it grows in the mind, and by the time I was in the last hundred pages or so, I honestly couldn’t stop thinking about it. I read the book slowly, savoring as it went, enjoying Hijuelos’s chapter-less structure and his very long paragraphs, sometimes extending over several pages, and his long parenthetical asides as one of Cesar’s memories triggered another one, barely related, that took place at some total other point in his life.

The Castillo Brothers’ biggest hit is a song that Nestor writes about the love of his life, a woman he can’t forget even though she is back in Cuba (and their relationship didn’t work out anyway), named Maria. Nestor pens a song called “Beautiful Maria of My Soul”, and this song’s success marks their high point as a musical act and it also somewhat haunts Cesar for the rest of the novel. And thanks to the fact that the book was adapted for the screen in 1992, in a film simply called The Mambo Kings, we can hear the song. It is sung by Armand Assante and Antonio Banderas, who star in the film as Cesar and Nestor Castillo. I have never seen the film, but the song is quite good.

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A guest in our milkweed

Posted on July 30, 2025 by ksedinger

A much hoped-for phenomenon has come to pass: there is a little friend making a major change in his life, and he’s doing it in the milkweed outside our front door.

(OK, he hasn’t started his actual transition yet. But it’s coming!)

On a photographic note, there’s no way I could have captured this just a couple of years ago. Photography continues to excite and energize me.

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The Tones of Tuesday

Posted on July 29, 2025 by ksedinger

UPDATE: Apparently my fingers weren’t doing things right when I wrote this post, as I came up with two different spellings of “Respighi”. This has been fixed. Weird how some words and names just defy our fingers, for those of us who type quickly in an untrained fashion!

Concluding (or maybe just continuing, I haven’t decided yet) our rather capricious look back at the classical music of one hundred years ago is another work that arrived in 1925. While I had never heard this piece before, I am familiar with the composer: Ottorino Respighi, the Italian composer of such spectacular orchestral showpieces as The Pines of Rome. This work, Rossiniana, is a four-movement orchestral suite that derives from four piano pieces written by Giacomo Rossini. If Rossiniana sounds much less “modern” than we would expect for a work from 1925, that’s the reason: Respighi’s source material dates from the 1850s and 1860s.

That’s a useful reminder, I think: art is often as much about looking back as it is about looking ahead. Respighi updates these salon pieces by Rossini, orchestrating them with his own flair for orchestral writing. The result is something that is somehow old and a little modern. Maybe just a little modern.

Here is Rossiniana by Ottorino Respighi.

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I don’t have much to say today but I did learn a random fact I didn’t know so now I’m sharing it with you, because I care!

Posted on July 28, 2025 by ksedinger

Harland Sanders, the famous “Colonel Sanders” of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame, lived his last fifteen years or so not in Kentucky or anywhere you might expect. He lived in Mississauga, Ontario, which at that time was a suburb of Toronto. (Now Mississauga is so large that it’s a city in its own right.)

Did you need this information? Probably not. Are you happy I shared it with you? I hope so!

Posted in The More You Know | 1 Comment

At the Faire….

Posted on July 27, 2025 by ksedinger
Front gate of the Sterling Renaissance Festival, Sterling, NY. Guess what the theme weekend was!

Yesterday, The Wife and I made our annual pilgrimage to the Starling Renaissance Festival in Sterling, NY. We left Friday night, actually, and stayed in a hotel in Rochester, driving the rest of the way to the Festival yesterday morning; we drove all the way home after the Festival day was ended, with a stop at a fried chicken place we like a lot in Webster, NY (a suburb of Rochester, northeast of the city).

We’ve been going to the Sterling Festival for years. I want to say our first year of attendance was 2001, but I may be off by a year or two. We’ve missed a few years since, but we’ve mostly made it. So it’s interesting to compare mental notes, and also to note that there are still ways for the Festival to surprise me. Here are some notes on our experience this year:

::  It used to be that buying tickets online was the quick way to get into the Festival, while everyone else queued up at the ticket booths. You can tell from the photo up top that this is no longer the case! That’s the line for entry, and the ticket booths are off to the side, on the right, out of frame, and nobody’s there. The line moved pretty quickly, though; once we got in line, we were checking in and inside the grounds in about ten minutes. This gave me time to make sure I had my base camera settings good to go and to look around at our fellow fair-goers.

::  They say you’re allowed to bring in an empty water bottle, but there are no actual filling stations; for filling you’re supposed to use the faucets in the privies. The Festival might want to consider actual filling stations. (Plus, nobody checked our bags as we entered. I had on a small over-the-shoulder back bag, and The Wife had her small purse. Nobody looked. We could have absolutely filled our water bottles with ice. I’m noting that for next year.)

::  Food at the Festival has always been cash only, until this year; now it’s card only. This is not a problem, and we knew about it going in. The Festival seems to have spent quite a bit of money improving its online infrastructure, so transactions were generally much easier. Cell service is very spotty at the Sterling Festival, so vendors who used to rely on things like a Squarespace thing for transactions often had to awkwardly wave their phones or tablets around to get the best signal. One year a vendor accidentally tapped my amount in with an extra zero, so I had to go back and get that reversed. This year, there were no such problems and most transactions were painless.

::  But, I did notice some apparently staffing issues along the way. There were some food booths that were no open at all, which had been open in the past. The turkey leg booth, which is very popular, only had one customer-facing worker, so there was a long line there. Also, we noticed a distinct lack of roaming food vendors. The pretzel guy, the pickle lady, the popcorn girl–we saw none of these. The only one I saw all day was the jerky dude. Again, I wonder if there were simply not enough applicants this year.

::  My fit yesterday? As you might expect:

:: “But Kelly!” you might ask. “Isn’t that outfit a bit warm for a July day at a Renaissance Festival that’s built on the side of a hill and therefore involves almost literal hiking to get around?”

Why yes, yes, it is. Now, I’ve found that my relationship with hot weather has changed over the years: I can function in heat now that used to reduce me to a sweat-puddle. And I find that overalls, believe it or not, actual feel cooler to wear than shorts or something similar, because of the lack of a waistband that allows air flow. There’s a reason why civilizations in very hot climes often wear long, flowing clothing that protects from the sun and allows air to flow to deal with the heat.

And in recent years, we’ve been lucky in that while yes, July in Upstate New York is generally warm and humid, our visits to the Sterling Festival haven’t been too bad in that regard. Yesterday, however, saw that lucky streak end. The last weather forecast I saw predicted low-80s and partly-to-cloudy skies. Instead we had upper 80s and full sun most of the day. It was straight-up hot and humid, and in a lot of ways the day was a physical struggle with the heat. Add to this that the Festival owners apparently had a lot of dead trees removed from the grounds, and there were places that were once shaded which now are not, and…yeah. This is just the way the ball bounces, unfortunately. All we can do is hope for a better weather day next year.

I saw someone on social media last week or before opine that no Renaissance Festival should happen outside of fall, and I’d be inclined to agree, except that we already have late summer and early fall pretty well packed with stuff we like to do. It just works out for our calendar that our Renaissance Festival happens in July (and it does go into August, so there’s that).

::  I always love seeing people in their costumes. Some were as amazing as always, and I’ll be sharing some photos of great costume work once I get the day’s photos edited, so look for another post. I note that while the Festival purports to be an Elizabethan-era village called Warwickshire, no one expects costumed revelers to be completely period-authentic. (And the Festival does have a theme weekend where they encourage anachronism and other costume approaches, like steampunk.) But, come on, folks: at least try to stay at least kind of on theme. One guy was wearing a hot-dog costume. Like, the thing someone wears to provide human advertising for the hot dog sale at church or the local minimart. That bugged me, I must admit!

::  When we first started going to the Festival, I noticed that a common thing–and an annoying one, at that–is visitors walking around offering up a constant run of quotes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Then, a few years alter, quoting The Lord of the Rings was all the rage. Sure, maybe it’s funny the first time, but hearing “You shall not pass!” is a lot less funny the twelfth time. Luckily, I heard no such thing this year. Huzzah!

::  Every year the grounds are populated by a “cast” of regulars who are portraying the actual people of Warwickshire, and they engage in all manner of improvisatory frivolity. It gives the day a particular fun twist, to know that you might happen on an impromptu performance someplace. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention, but I didn’t see as much of that this time, either. I wonder if there were staffing issues there, too.

::  The Joust used to be emceed by a guy I always referred to as The Impressive Scotsman, and he hasn’t been there the last few years. He’s an older gent so I chalked it up to retirement; the replacement was fine, but he wasn’t the Impressive Scotsman, though. Imagine by joyous surprise when the Joust began and out rode the Impressive Scotsman! Now featuring an Impressive Beard.

:: During the Joust I noticed a few moments when The Queen was speaking and when the Impressive Scotsman talked over her. I wonder if they were having a bit of struggle in the script department. No problem, though.

::  We watched one performer who noted improvements made to the stage he usually uses: “A couple of years ago I fell through a hole in the stage, and they didn’t fix it. Then two weeks later an audience member came up to greet me after the show and they fell through the hole, and then they fixed it!” As I walked through the Festival grounds I noticed quite a few places where the age of the rustic wooden infrastructure was starting to show the results of accumulated years and elements. Now that the Festival has invested a lot in its electronic infrastructure, I think it may be time to invest in its physical infrastructure. The places really needs carpenters and painters.

::  Finally, it may or may not be known that every year at the Festival we buy new mugs from a certain pottery vendor. Do we need more mugs? Of course not! Do we buy new ones anyway? Of course we do! Here is my mug from this year. I don’t have a photo yet of The Wife’s new mug, but I’ll get on that.

We’ll see you in 2026, Sterling Renaissance Festival! Until then, God save the Queen!

Posted in On Travels and Adventures | Tagged | 3 Comments

Something for Thursday

Posted on July 24, 2025 by ksedinger
Chuck Mangione, 1940-2025.

(Normally I try to wait longer than just under four months before I do a re-post of something I’ve already written here, but Chuck Mangione has died, and I like what I wrote about him and this song back in March, so here it is again. I’m listening to it anew as I write this. Thanks for the music, Mr. Mangione!)

So for Tuesday Tones the other day, I went to feature a piece of music that I know I’ve featured here before but I couldn’t remember how long it’s been, so I looked it up. I featured it less than six months ago. So I chose something else.

Today I want to feature a piece of music I know I’ve featured here before, but I can’t remember how long it’s been. So I looked it up. Almost fifteen years.

Time is weird, y’all.

Anyway, here’s something I discovered after music camp one year. I was playing in the jazz band and we did a number by Chuck Mangione, called “Land of Make Believe”, and it was a really catchy tune, upbeat and happy with a relentless figure underneath it that will make only the deepest comatose people fail to react with toe-tapping glee. At that point I had heard the thing a number of times, always in the instrumental, but at the camp we included vocals. The lyrics at the time struck me as kind of syrupy and childish, but then our band director started pointing things out–the saxes quote “Old McDonald” here, the trombones quote “Farmer in the Dell” there–and gradually it started to make sense why this thing was so peppy and childlike.

Those actually aren’t bad things at all, unless you’re putting up a jaded front.

After the camp ended for that year, I embarked on a usual project of mine after a musical experience in which a new work captivated me: I sought out recordings of the pieces we had played, at least, the ones that I had particularly enjoyed. One was, indeed, “Land of Make Believe”, which I found on a Mangione compilation tape. (Yes, this was in the era of cassettes. Sue me!) But where the version we’d played at camp had been six minutes long or so, this one was over twelve minutes. It had a lot more vocals, it started with a long slow intro (the version we played started with the up tempo part), and it had more solo sections than the version we’d played (which only featured one solo, for trumpet/flugelhorn).

And there was more of those lyrics.

Here’s how it begins:

When you’re feelin’ down and out, wond’rin’ what this world’s about
I know a place that has the answer, it’s a place where no one dies
It’s a land where no one cries and good vibrations always greet you

How I love when my thoughts run to the Land Of Make Believe
Where ev’rything is fun forever
Children always gather ’round Mother Goose and all her rhyme
They fill the air with sounds of laughter

And another sample, farther in:

I once asked the Wizard of Oz for the secret of his land
Now just between us he said “Just take a look around here”
Seven Dwarfs and Little Boy Blue, Uncle Remus and Snow White too
Now just between us, that’s what’s known as integration

Silly? Sentimental? Simplistic?

Yeah, maybe. But if you want to illustrate for someone what the sentimental side of the 1970s was like, I think you can do a lot worse than play Chuck Mangione’s “Land of Make Believe” for them.

A note about this particular performance: it was recorded live, with Mangione and his band being backed by the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra (Hamilton, Ontario). Not only did you have Mangione and his own talented band on stage, but in the Hamilton Philharmonic at the time were five brass players who would go on to be the founding members of the Canadian Brass, one of the most famous chamber music groups in the world.

This is just over twelve minutes long, so give yourself some time…and give yourself permission to go where this music wants to take you. Here is Chuck Mangione (born in Rochester, NY!) and friends with “Land of Make Believe”.

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Cosmic

Posted on July 23, 2025 by ksedinger

A few nifty photos from NASA:

Via, via, and via.

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Tuesday Tones

Posted on July 22, 2025 by ksedinger

It’s been fascinating, looking back a hundred years at the classical music that was brand new in 1925, one hundred years. I’m not quite done with this little project yet, but I’ve had an almost avant-garde piece, a piano concerto steeped in jazz and Tin Pan Alley, a sensuous Spanish ballet, and now, a work that seems like an updated version of Antonin Dvorak.

Leoš Janáček was almost exactly that: like Dvorak, he was a Czech composer who was deeply inspired by the folk dances and rustic melodies of the rural lands of that region. The two men were contemporaries for most of their lives: Dvorak lived 1841 to 1904, while Janáček lived 1854 to 1928. Janáček was influenced heavily by Dvorak, but later in his life he turned to the folk songs of his country, deriving much more literal inspiration from them than even Dvorak did. The result is music with a much more rustic tone than Dvorak’s, and Janáček’s Lachian Dances, which we hear today, seem a direct answer to, and extension of, Dvorak’s famous Slavonic Dances.

The Lachian Dances were actually an early work of Janáček’s, but he reworked the piece and re-issued it in 1925, hence its presence here. Listening to it now, it is clearly firmly rooted in the 19th century…but with key differences that make it feel much more earthy and clear. This is music that reflects the 20th century’s post-Romantic insistence on real life, and it is a delight to hear.

Here are the Lachian Dances by Leoš Janáček. I found this work an absolute joy.

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