Sunday Stealing

Posted on April 21, 2024 by ksedinger

It’s early and I’m on my first cup of coffee, so I figured I’d do one of these occasional quizzes from Sunday Stealing. (The quizzes are weekly, it’s my participation that’s occasional. Roger participates every week!)

Here we go!

1.    What was the best toy you ever owned?

Goodness. You know, I oddly can’t recall a favorite or “best” toy. I did have some great stuff as a kid, though. There was something called, I don’t know, Treehouse Family or some such thing; it was a big plastic tree where the leaf canopy (basically a big inverted green bowl) lifted up to reveal the “house” inside, and you could then play with the little people in their treehouse lives. Or the battery-operated mine car thing that ran on a track and picked up “coal” (little black plastic balls) and dumped them off elsewhere on the track.

You’d think I had a ton of Star Wars toys as a kid, but I didn’t, really…just a few here and there, though I did have more space toys with which I supplemented my Star Wars play. Yes, in my 6-year-old 1978 head canon, there was a ship in Star Wars that looked a lot like the space shuttle.

2.    When in your life have you felt the loneliest?

Wow, that took a turn for the serious. I’ll answer 2007, and I’m not going into why.

3.    What is your strongest emotion?

OK, after the toy question, this quiz has gone uber-serious on me. I find that sadness is always lurking in the corners, and I’m hoping that’s not just a creeping-age thing that gets worse. We’ll see, said the Zen master….

4.    When were you the most disappointed in yourself?

2007. Not going into why.

(Interestingly, Roger took the exact same approach to this question.)

5.    Which law would you most like to change?

Lifetime tenure for Supreme Court judges. Oh, and to hell with the Second Amendment.

6.    Who is the person you have hated the most in your lifetime?

I really don’t like admitting to hate. That said, I find myself pining for the day that our 45th president can only be spoken of in past tense, and I make no apology for that. The man has done nothing at all in his years on Earth but pervert everything he touches.

7.    What has disappointed you the most?

The formation of a gigantic cult around our 45th President.

8.    What’s the best possible attitude toward death?

It’s gonna happen, why worry about it? (I try to maintain this attitude. I am not always successful.)

9.    What’s been the longest day in your life?

November 28, 2005.

10.  What is the biggest coincidence in your life?

Honestly, I’ve no idea.

11.  What’s the oldest you’d like to live?

If I can reach a relatively active and dementia-free mid-80s, I think that’s good.

12.    Who is the most amazing woman you know personally?

That one. [points at The Wife]

13.    What was your best experience in school?

I joined Band in 5th grade, mainly for kicks because the band teacher (Mr. Beach) asked me to. I didn’t take it seriously at all, and it showed in my effort and results…until sometime in 7th grade, and I don’t even recall when this happened, when I decided to start taking it seriously and work at it.

14.    What’s the most meaningful compliment you’ve ever received?

A boss of mine once had to sit me down for a real “Come to Jesus” moment, because I had genuinely been kind of rudderless at best and spiraling downward at worst. (To my credit I had already recognized this and was already striving to turn that shit around, but it hadn’t really manifested yet outwardly, and a single individually-mild screw-up on my part was sufficient for the “WTF is wrong with you?!” discussion behind a closed door.) Less than a year later he sat me down again to tell me that I had really turned that shit around and to keep it up. This happened more recently than I like to admit.

Also, a few times in my life I’ve had people who I know to be better writers than me tell me that I’m a good writer. That always feels good.

15.    What is the most you’ve spent on something really stupid?

Well, I’m really glad that it didn’t turn out to be the camera that I dropped a chunk of money on last year! It might be a pair of overalls that I paid honestly more than I should have to discover that they didn’t quite fit, despite the sizing tag. There were also a couple of computers I’ve bought, one a desktop and one laptop, that I bought out of necessity when a previous machine died, neither of which I was really happy with. I suppose it’s good that while I do spend more money on stuff than I should, I don’t tend to blow it on shit.

OK, that was way more introspective than I expected!

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Scritches

Posted on April 20, 2024 by ksedinger

Because, scritches.

Carla wanted scritches.
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At the Gardens

Posted on April 19, 2024 by ksedinger

Last week my Brother-in-Law visited us, and one of the things we did was go to the Botanical Gardens, which is always a terrific time, as well as a great place to practice photography! I organized my edited shots from that day into this Flickr album, but here are my favorites from that day:

 

From the front steps of the Gardens, you can see the looming edifice of Our Lady of Victory Basilica.
A mobile of Japanese umbrellas in the main rotunda. This took a bit of editing, but I like how it came out!
In the time we’ve been going to the Gardens, I’ve probably taken at least two dozen attempted mirror selfies in this wonderfully ornate mirror. Somehow they usually don’t turn out, mainly because I always try to do these quickly before someone comes along. This time I said the hell with it. I’ve really developed something of an ability to say “I have this camera and I’m getting my shot!” of late….
This Buddha statue, in the wonderful Tropical Plants room, is not only my favorite subject at the Gardens, but it’s one of my favorite photographic subjects anywhere in the area. I always take multiple shots of this statue when we’re there. This one turned out pretty well! The key here was the leaf in the foreground, partially shrouding the Buddha and giving the photo some depth. The fact that I’m getting shots like this is a sign, I hope, that I’m leveling up as a photographer!

I have a lot more photos from last weekend that I haven’t even edited yet! If you’re looking for a hobby that will eat some time, photography’s the one, folks.

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Something for Thursday

Posted on April 18, 2024 by ksedinger

We recently watched The Holiday, a rom-com written and directed by Nancy Meyers, and we liked it a great deal, despite our inability to quite buy into the idea that both Kate Winslet and Cameron Diaz are lovelorn women with zero luck in love. I enjoyed the movie for many reasons, one of which is the score by Hans Zimmer. Zimmer is not always the first thought people might have when thinking about scores for rom-coms, but he has some chops in this regard! One of my favorite Zimmer scores is, after all, his wonderful work for As Good As It Gets, and now I’m enjoying this one. Here’s a selection.

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New video: My photographic journey, thus far

Posted on April 17, 2024 by ksedinger

New video on my YouTube channel! Watch! Like! Subscribe!

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Posted on April 16, 2024 by ksedinger

Composer Eric Whitacre, whom I have featured several times in this space before, is an always fascinating voice to return to. I had, in fact, forgotten about him until the week before the eclipse, when I looked up classical music selections inspired by space (that were not Holst’s The Planets, which is a work with which I’ve had a strained relationship over the years). Whitacre’s name came up for a piece called Deep Field, which sounded interesting. It turns out that the background of Deep Field is even more interesting.

If you’re up on your Hubble Space Telescope lore, you’ll recognize the title Deep Field as referring to one specific image: the “Hubble eXtreme Deep Field”, and here it is:

Bigger versions are available here. By way of background:

This image, called the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), combines Hubble observations taken over the past decade of a small patch of sky in the constellation of Fornax. With a total of over two million seconds of exposure time, it is the deepest image of the Universe ever made, combining data from previous images including the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (taken in 2002 and 2003) and Hubble Ultra Deep Field Infrared (2009).

The image covers an area less than a tenth of the width of the full Moon, making it just a 30 millionth of the whole sky. Yet even in this tiny fraction of the sky, the long exposure reveals about 5500 galaxies, some of them so distant that we see them when the Universe was less than 5% of its current age.

The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field image contains several of the most distant objects ever identified.

It’s one of the most awe-inspiring images of our Cosmos ever captured, particularly when you realize that (a) this comprises just the tinies part of what we can see from here, and (b) the Cosmos looks like that in every direction. The vastness of space-time captured here and implied by the strange smallness of this specific infinity is utterly humbling.

The XDF image inspired the making of a film celebrating the years of Hubble’s service to astronomy, and Mr. Whitacre was brought in to score the film. The result is an amazing ethereal work that builds and builds and builds with intensity, before subsiding with the entrance of a choir. The work is open and yet dense, peaceful and yet driving…it’s music that stands alongside our images of the depths of our universe.

Grammy® award-winning American composer Eric Whitacre’s symphonic work Deep Field was inspired by the world’s most famous space observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope which celebrated its 30th year in orbit in 2020, and its greatest discovery – the iconic Deep Field image. The film – Deep Field: The Impossible Magnitude of our Universe – illuminates the score by combining Hubble’s stunning imagery, including never-seen-before galaxy fly-bys, with bespoke animations to create an immersive, unforgettable journey from planet Earth to the furthest edges of our universe.

The film is a first-of-its-kind collaboration between Grammy® award-winning composer & conductor Eric Whitacre, producers Music Productions, scientists and visualizers from the Space Telescope Science Institute and multi award-winning artists 59 Productions. The score and film paint the incredible story of the Hubble Deep Field. Turning its gaze to a tiny and seemingly dark area of space (around one 24-millionth of the sky) for an 11-day long period, the Hubble Space Telescope revealed over 3,000 galaxies that had never previously been seen, each one composed of hundreds of billions of stars.

Here is Deep Field, first performed in concert at the Royal Albert Hall, and then the film with the work alongside it. This is amazing stuff.

 

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Edgar Guest on Taxation: a poem

Posted on April 15, 2024 by ksedinger

Today is April 15, Tax Day! And it’s still April, National Poetry Month, so after a few minutes of Googling “poems about taxes”, here’s one that’s actually not entirely pessimistic about whole affair. I could go on for a bit about Americans and their attitude on taxes, but I won’t, except to note that somehow American conservatives have managed to convince a great many Americans over the last few decades that the thing holding them back is what government takes out of their paychecks, which is a handy way of also getting Americans to now wonder what their employers aren’t putting in those paychecks in the first place.

Anyway, here is “Taxes” by Edgar Guest, a poet once called “the People’s Poet”, and whose work isn’t highly regarded these days, if indeed it ever was; Dorothy Parker once quipped, “Id rather flunk my Wasserman Test than read a poem by Edgar Guest.” Ouch. (Yes, I had to look up what a Wasserman Test is.)

When they become due I don’t like them at all.
Taxes look large be they ever so small
Taxes are debts which I venture to say,
No man or no woman is happy to pay.
I grumble about them, as most of us do.
For it seems that with taxes I never am through.

But when I reflect on the city I love,
With its sewers below and its pavements above,
And its schools and its parks where children may play
I can see what I get for the money I pay.
And I say to myself: “Little joy would we know
If we kept all our money and spent it alone.”

I couldn’t build streets and I couldn’t fight fire
Policemen to guard us I never could hire.
A water department I couldn’t maintain.
Instead of a city we’d still have a plain
Then I look at the bill for the taxes they charge,
And I say to myself: “Well, that isn’t so large.”

I walk through a hospital thronged with the ill 
And I find that it shrivels the size of my bill. 
As in beauty and splendor my home city grows, 
It is easy to see where my tax money goes
And I say to myself: “if we lived hit and miss
And gave up our taxes, we couldn’t do this.”

(Text via)

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“I’ll take ‘KINDS OF RAMAS’ for $1000, Ken”

Posted on April 14, 2024 by ksedinger

The answer: “This type of widescreen photograph can be created in Lightroom by stitching together multiple photographs from a single vantage point.”

“What is a panorama?”

Last Sunday I was at Chestnut Ridge park on a wonderfully clear day, and thus I was able to take a series of shots of the entire Buffalo-Niagara region, with visibility all the way to Niagara Falls, ON and beyond, and I was further able to experiment with creating a panorama in Lightroom. And here it is:

I know, that’s…tiny, as presented here. For the full-size enlargeable version, go here. I’m very happy with how this turned out! For one thing, I never realized that the OLV Basilica in Lackawanna can be seen clearly from up there.

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Checking in! And here are some tabs!

Posted on April 13, 2024 by ksedinger

Hello, everyone! As noted several days ago, we have company from out of town and we’re having a good time doing the usual “cheerful visit from out of town” stuff, hence the lack of posting. Things should start normalizing tomorrow…but meantime, some stuff and a clearing of the open tabs:

::  My newest Substack newsletter is out! It’s about baseball in the movies (and a couple of teevee episodes). And see if you can spot the glaring error in my first few sentences! Oops!

::  Variety did a wonderful profile of John Williams a while back:

Over the decades, he was aware of how the great film composers before him had a reputation for being cranky at best or tortured at worst. “Alex North, David Raksin, Jerry Goldsmith and others — brilliant, beautiful talents. All unhappy.” Most had barely suppressed ambitions to write concert music or symphonies instead of scoring movies. They believed that they were, in a sense, slumming it and laboring for directors who they described as “imperious and obstructive.” 

“I thought, ‘Well, that’s not a complaint that I want to have to live with.’ So I went about it not to try to compete with Igor Stravinsky or the great classical composers, but to learn from the process of doing — the best school of all.”  

Williams also notes that times have changed. Today, orchestras are happy to play film music. “If you went to the New York Philharmonic 40 years ago, they would be condescending about playing anything from Hollywood,” he says. “So I’m lucky that I’m living in a different period.” 

Williams’s career has spanned the final decade of the “Golden Age” of film scoring and everything since, so the changes he has seen are amazing to consider.

::  Did I link this one already? I think I may have linked this one already, but the tab is still open, mainly for my own reference, so possibly here it is again: Fifteen essential New York City books. NYC is one of the most fascinating places on the planet to me, and I love reading about it and looking at photos of it and seeing movies about it or set in it. And that’s with the sum total of time in my life actually spent in NYC totaling less than one week! (This is something I hope to address in the next few years.)

::  Not long ago, somehow they were able to project scenes from Star Wars onto the Empire State Building. How? Like this!

::  Whenever you criticize the idea of the Electoral College, someone will invariably protest, “But without it, ‘small states’ won’t matter at all!” Uhhh…no:

Though honestly, in this day and age when everybody is walking around with a gizmo in their pocket that gives them access to all the information (and misinformation) in the world, the idea that any voter should be making their decision based on a local campaign event is increasingly nonsensical. I’m always annoyed whenever anybody tells me that Hillary Clinton lost because she didn’t campaign enough in Wisconsin, as if that absolves the Wisconsin voters from executing their responsibility to the country.

::  A Man Goes to the Movies: Matthew Zoller Seitz looks back at Roger Ebert’s annual Top Ten lists. One of Ebert’s best qualities was his willingness to go against the grain a lot of the time, or if not go against the grain, to at least follow his own personal tastes in guiding his love of film.

All for now! And just like that, my browser is actually pretty manageable again. Yay!

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Tone Poem Tuesday (and light posting ahead)

Posted on April 9, 2024 by ksedinger

We are currently entertaining a visit from my brother-in-law, so posting will likely be light here until the weekend. That being the case, it’s time for Franz von Suppe! Here is the Poet and Peasant Overture.

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