The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
All right, you get two jokes today because I forgot to post a joke last week.
Joke the First: Why does a milking stool only have three legs?
Because the cow has the udder!
(hat tip to Roger, who e-mailed me that one)
Joke the second: Two antennas met on a roof, fell in love, and got married. The ceremony was just OK, but the reception was awesome!
Theodore Bikel died yesterday, at the age of 91. My main memories of him are a couple of guest appearances on Star Trek: The Next Generation (he played Worf’s adoptive human father), and his memorable single scene in My Fair Lady as Zoltan Karpathy, former student of Professor Henry Higgins who is described by servant Mrs. Pierce as “that dreadful Hungarian”. That role is interesting, actually: Bikel is onscreen for all of five minutes of a nearly 3-hour film, but he makes the most of it, creating this slightly smarmy character who is nevertheless sharp enough to realize that there’s something off about this “Miss Doolittle”.
Anyway, here’s something interesting. It should embed as a playlist, if I did it right. It’s Bikel singing Yiddish folk and theater songs. This is music I know very little about.
This post seems to be having a viral moment, and deservedly so. It’s an elegy for an old tree.
People never had trouble finding our house.
“It’s the one with the giant maple in front,” I’d say, “the one with the tire swing.”
That was enough. They’d see the tree, massive, 60 feet tall and almost as wide, then behind is, hiding, our 1905 farmhouse.
The tree was one of the oldest in Northbrook: easily 125 years old, and was perhaps the best feature about our place. A living link to the 19th century.
“I bought the tree,” I’d tell visitors, “and the house came with it.”
Read the whole thing. It’s a lovely piece of writing; elegiac and affirming at the same time.
An early episode of South Park established that if Cartman hears the tiniest snippet of “Come Sail Away” by Styx, he has to sing the entire song. I suspect we all have a song that we just have to finish if we hear its beginning, no matter where we are…call it a “Stay In The Car” song. What’s yours?
I’ve pretty much been of the opinion for years, even though I don’t think I realized it until more recently, that I honestly don’t ever want to live more than a few hours from one of the Great Lakes. This region has been my home since 1981, and you might make a case for before that, since Pittsburgh certainly falls within the “few hours from the Lakes” category. These five inland seas encompass so much beauty and history and character, all of which are sometimes overlooked in our seemingly forever-ongoing “North versus South” thing in this country.
There’s a children’s book I read not long after we moved to Allegany, NY, in 1981. I don’t recall exactly when I read it, or the circumstances under which a copy found its way into my hands; I don’t recall if I owned it or if it was a library book. The book’s title is Paddle To The Sea, by Holling Clancy Holling. If I owned this book, it vanished from my personal library years ago. However, I found myself remembering it recently, so I availed myself of the Erie County Public Library and checked it out.
The book came out in 1941, and it tells a simple story: a young boy living in Canada carves a wooden Indian in a canoe, names him “Paddle To The Sea”, and sets him afloat on a river that empties into the northern reaches of Lake Superior.
From there, Paddle follows the long and improbable journey through every one of the Great Lakes, until he finally reaches the St. Lawrence River and the Atlantic Ocean. Paddle’s journey is mainly a narrative frame, though, which supports Holling’s real goal: exploring the nature of these five enormous lakes.
Along the way Paddle encounters various obstacles and dangers, such as the huge cargo ships on Lake Superior, the enormous waterfalls at Niagara, and a sawmill, whose operation Holling depicts:
I also love the fanciful ways Holling interprets the shapes of the lakes themselves. Lake Superior as a wolf’s head is pretty obvious, I suppose, but the others are impressively creative, and I have thought of all the Great Lakes as these shapes ever since I read the book when I was ten or eleven. I remember a conversation with some college mates, trying to explain to them this particular interpretation of the shape of Lake Huron, and I remember wishing I had a copy of the book then to show them.
Holling’s prose is somewhat dated at this point, but that’s to be expected, and I wonder how Holling would depict the Great Lakes now, since the region endured a period of extended decline that began not terribly long after this book came out and which some might still think is going on. But it’s still a region of nature and industry often side-by-side, all of it dominated by these enormous bodies of water.
Paddle To The Sea is a wonderful piece of Great Lakes lore, and I’m glad I took the time to revisit it.
A few oddities and randomments for the lot of you:
:: One night, while we were sitting around at home reading stuff, The Wife came across this, and mentioned it to me. I said, “That can’t be right,” but lo and behold, apparently it was. The thing? Well, you know those incubator things they put premature babies into, so as to keep them nicely warm while they develop after their births? Apparently the guy who invented those had no luck convincing the scientific community of their validity, so he did the next best thing: he set up a sideshow at New York’s Coney Island to display them to the public. Babies and all.
Sometimes human progress happens so strangely.
:: Want to get some kind of notion of the scales of the distances in space? Say, the scales the NASA people were working with in flying New Horizons to Pluto? Check out If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel. Space is big, yo.
:: For the record: the perpetrator of this prank was not me.
That is all.
(Oh, and the bit of advice in question from Mr. Simon? I’m not sure if I follow that or not, to be honest. I tend to write until I’m tired and don’t want to write anymore. On reflection I think I very well might follow this advice, but I’ve never really thought about it. I’ll pay more attention next time I’m working on something new.)
An old favorite of mine: the Mendelssohn violin concerto. I love this piece to death. Make sure you pay attention at about the 2:40 mark, when the soloist (Hilary Hahn, in this case) soars to a lingering very high note and then descends all the way back down to the lowest register on the instrument, and then holds that low note as a pedal while the woodwinds sound the magical second theme of the first movement. This entire concerto is utter magic.
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
