The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Don’t forget, folks — we’re doing Ask Me Anything! this month, as is normal for February on Byzantium’s Shores. Just put your queries in the comments to this post! You can also e-mail them, if you like. Address in the sidebar. Ask me anything!
There really needs to be a movie with a Space Winnebago.
I think it’s cool that ever since I posted about the freakishly-adorable Melissa Rauch, I get a big spike in hits every time an episode of Big Bang Theory features Bernadette.
Last night’s episode had Bernadette appearing in the daydreams of an increasingly sexually-frustrated Raj, who kept imagining ludicrous circumstances under which Bernadette and current boyfriend Howard strongly encourage him to “please her sexually”. It all culminated in Raj envisioning himself and Bernadette in a Bollywood-type musical number. What a great show.
Roger Owen Green’s mother has passed away. Roger is one of my favorite bloggers, as well as one of my most reliable commenters and readers. I’d noticed yesterday that he hadn’t commented on any of my posts over the last few days, which is very odd…and when I went over to his blog, I saw a post that indicated that he was on his way to North Carolina to be with his mom, who had just suffered a stroke. Alas, she has now died.
Roger’s a good egg, a librarian (librarians rock) and a thoughtful observer of life (and he’s raising a terribly cute little girl). I’m saddened by his loss, and I offer him and his family my deepest condolences.
A Star Trek quiz-thing. Because the world needs more Star Trek quiz-things, by gum!
FAVORITE THINGS:
Star Trek Series: The Original Series, closely followed — very closely followed — by Deep Space Nine.
Star Trek Movie: The Undiscovered Country, closely followed — very closely followed — by First Contact.
Star Trek Character: Montgomery Scott.
Star Trek Pairing: The Companion and Zefram Cochrane. (Track down the episode “Metamorphosis”.)
Alien Race: The Horta.
Alien World: Rigel VII. (Love that giant purple moon.)
Federation Class Starship: The Enterprise as refitted for Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
TOS Episode: “The City on the Edge of Forever”
TNG Episode: “Yesterday’s Enterprise“
DS9 Episode: “The Visitor”. (This episode packs an emotional wallop.)
VOY Episode: The one where Janeway and company meet Q. In truth, Voyager just wasn’t terribly compelling.
ENT Episode: I never bothered watching it. By the time it came along, I was Trek‘d out.
Star Trek Quote: I’ll go with something by Q: “If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it’s not for the timid.” (Honorable mention to one of the wonderful Ferengi Rules of Acquisition: “Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.”
LEAST FAVORITE THINGS:
Star Trek Series: Voyager. It wasn’t bad; just seven seasons of “Meh”. (And no, the arrival of Seven of Nine didn’t really help matters.)
Star Trek Movie: Nemesis. It’s a painfully bad movie, a misfire on nearly every level.
Star Trek Character: When he’s being used for comic relief, Chekov. But he’s perfectly fine when he’s not.
Star Trek Pairing: Decker and Ilia. Talk about a lack of chemistry.
Alien Race: The Kazon, the villain-aliens from the first few years of Voyager, before the producers realized how lame they were and just had the Voyager flying away from them for good.
Alien World: There were some “identical Earths” in the original series that were pretty lame.
Federation Class Starship: Picard’s first command, the Stargazer, is a pretty goofy-looking vessel. In fact, ship design on TNG was generally disappointing. Even their Enterprise looked really bad from certain angles, and their Romulan Birds-of-Prey looked bad.
TOS Episode: “And the Children Shall Lead”.
TNG Episode: The second-season finale, which is a clip show, is legendarily bad. But picking on clip shows is shooting fish in a barrel, so I’ll go with this one from Season Seven where Dr. Crusher falls in love with a ghost that lives in a candle, or something like that. I remember this actor with an awful Scottish accent saying over and over, “Dinna light that cahn-dle!”
DS9 Episode:
VOY Episode: Don’t know. As I said, the whole show was meh.
ENT Episode: Don’t know.
Star Trek Quote: An intriguing episode is nearly undone by having Dr. Crusher say, “If there’s nothing wrong with me, there must be something wrong with the universe!”
CHOICES:
Trekkie or Trekker? Who the hell cares?!
Kirk or Picard? Kirk. Kirk, Kirk, Kirk. And then Sisko. (Not that Picard’s not pretty cool, too.)
Defiant or Delta Flyer? I like the Defiant quite a lot.
Tribbles or Targs? Tribbles.
Coffee, Black or Tea, Earl Grey? Coffee. I do like tea, but Earl Grey is nasty stuff. (By the way, did it bug anyone else that they make the Captain in TNG a Frenchman and then have him behave like a Brit?)
Porthos or Spot? Spot, by default. I don’t know who Porthos is.
EMH or Data? The EMH. Data was…well, I liked Data, but at times the TNG series and films were just too Data-centric.
Pah-wraiths or Prophets? The Prophets. I liked the mystery behind the wormhole aliens.
So this enormously huge storm swept (which I have dubbed Snowlapalooza 2011, in my ongoing hopes of pushing the word “snowlapalooza” into our cultural lexicon) across the country yesterday, burying many places in the heartland in snow and ice. It was supposed to do a number on Buffalo, too, but by the time it got here it had either expended too much of its energy or it had spread out over too wide an area or it was simply moving too fast to really hit us hard, so it appears that all we got was a couple of inches of snow and a manageable amount of ice. The Winter Storm Warning that was supposed to be in effect until 10:00 tonight has already, as of this writing (6:30 am), been downgraded to a Winter Weather Advisory which is in effect until 6:00 pm. Of course, this will lead to lots of crowing about Buffalo’s meteorologists, who seem to miss the boat hugely on one big storm each winter. I’m not sure I can blame this on them, since weather events do carry with them a high degree of unpredictability, but still — we were told “8 to 16 inches of snow, maybe a half inch of ice”, and we got a fraction of that.
Anyway, if you were in Snowlapalooza 2011, how bad was it? Worst weather event you’ve ever experienced?
And come to that, what is the worst weather event you’ve ever experienced?
Yup, folks, it’s February, which is the anniversary month for this blog’s kick-starting, back in 2002. It’s also my traditional month for one of my favorite blogging past-times, Ask Me Anything!. This is when you readers get to…well, put questions to me. Any questions you like. Serious questions, silly questions. I will keep question-submission time open for two weeks (until Feb 15), at which time I’ll start answering them. A great time is always had by all! (But keep in mind that questions may be answered in non-serious fashion. Because I tend to be non-serious!)
So, go ahead and put your questions in comments on this post. I look forward to doing this every year — so much so that last year, I did it again in August — and I hope this year’s queries are just as fun, probing, insightful, or just plain goofy as every other year I’ve done this!
The mike is yours, folks: Ask Me Anything!
I’ve been meaning to do this for a few weeks, ever since Sheila did it first. It’s a series of photos of my bookshelves, nice and close-up.
You’ll probably notice, rather instantly, that my organizational approach to my bookshelves is, roughly put, “Getting as many books as I can on the meager shelf space that I have”. I’d love to have enough shelf space to actually group things, and have books by the same author kinda-sorta in the same general area, but for now, I don’t much have that luxury. Aside from my Guy Gavriel Kay books and my copies of The Lord of the Rings, stuff is mostly scattered all over the place.
You will also note all the extra stuff I pile onto my poor bookshelves. Clearly I operate in more of a “Chaos that could erupt at any moment” kind of book-organizing paradigm.
And with that…the shelves. Below the link.
Whew….
John Barry, one of the most distinctive film composers of all time, has died.
Barry could often, for me, be a “hit or miss” kind of composer, but when he hit — which in my experience was more often than not — oh man, did he hit. He’s probably best known for his work on the James Bond series, but Barry had a very long career of composing. He had a seemingly inexhaustible ability to come up with lush, gorgeous melodies, and he had an approach to film scoring that was all his own (and which, sadly, fell out of favor in the 1990s).
I could probably come up with dozens of examples of Barry’s music, but I don’t have time this morning (I’m writing this before work, because I don’t want to go all day without acknowledging his passing), so here are just a few.
Farewell, Mr. Barry.
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