The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Favorite Flower
Well, in general, I don’t think about flowers a whole lot. I pick some up when I think to, for The Wife, but in general, flowers aren’t that huge of a deal to me. I like flowers, but I’m no expert and I have no strong opinions.
So, for the purposes of this quiz, I’ll say African violets.
This week on American Idol it was “Inspirational Songs Week”, which turned out to be less than inspirational. My annotated Facebook ramblings:
:: I got home from Panera too late to hear Casey sing, so I don’t know how he did. I still hate Lee, though. I hate his neck-bobbing as though he’s got a hairball, I hate his voice (until Joe Cocker dies, he’s the only one who gets to sing like Joe Cocker), and I am unimpressed by his ability to sing a song whose lyrics are 60% the word “La”.
Seriously, more than half of Lee’s song consisted of “La la la la la la laaaaa”. It was really grating. The judges gushed, but I thought it was awful. But at this point, I can’t stand Lee at all and have no idea what everyone sees in him.
:: Oh, Tim, Tim, Tim, Tim, Tim. He tries so hard. He’s like a basketball team of five-foot-tall guys trying to play the Lakers. Too bad the result is what you’d expect from a team of five-foot guys playing the Lakers.
Tim did some song by the Goo Goo Dolls, about whom I should really know a lot more seeing as how I’m from Buffalo. The kid has no chops at all.
:: Oh goody! It’s Aaron, who I’ve just realized is actually Ryan from “The Office” at the age of 16. I don’t care what he does with this song, because I hate this song. Not that big a fan of Aaron’s, either.
Aaron did “I Believe I Can Fly”, that ghastly R. Kelly ditty from the movie “Spacejam”. It’s a terrible, terrible song, and Aaron’s an incredibly unconvincing singer.
:: All of my doubts about Randy Jackson have just been confirmed. When did “I Believe I Can Fly” become this enormous titan of a song? It’s a crappy ballad from a forgettable 1990s movie with Michael Jordan. Come on, judges.
The judges all spoke of this song in reverent tones, referring to it as a “big song” that took a lot of guts for Aaron to sing. It’s a mawkish and stupid song from a movie barely anybody remembers anymore and was more notable for generating lots of merchandise for sale at the old Warner Bros. Stores in the malls, before they all went belly-up.
:: Started the stopwatch as soon as Siobhan started singing. 58 seconds until she screeched. I guess this is an OK performance, but the song is crap.
She didn’t screech the entire second half of her song, like she usually does, but she did some screeching. I didn’t care for the song, so I didn’t think much of Siobhan tonight. But then, as soon as she stopped singing and the criticism started — with the most pointed criticism coming from Simon — well….
:: And once again with Siobhan’s “What? Criticism? Unpossible!” facial expression. And why is she getting this long a rebuttal period? Did we stumble from Idol into a Presidential Election Debate?
Whenever she gets criticized, Siobhan’s face reflects her utter astonishment that anyone doesn’t like what she’s just done. And they gave her something like ninety seconds to ramble on and on about why she was actually 100% right to sing the song she’d chosen even though the song was crap!
It was roughly around this time that I realized that the week’s theme, “Inspirational Songs”, was leading to a lot of annoying and cloying and fakey performances, so I opined thusly:
:: OK, these “inspirational” songs are getting on my nerves. I wish one of these contestants would do Monty Python’s “Always Look On the Bright Side of Life”.
So Michael Lynch was next….
:: Michael: For the love of God, Simon’s complaining about Mike doing a song from “Spiderman”. Nobody said anything about that stupid-assed song from the Looney Tunes and Michael Jordan movie! Dumbasses. (Oh, and Mike was just OK. Didn’t light my fire, but didn’t douse the coals with a bucket of water, either.)
Apparently Mike’s song was from Spiderman. This vexed Simon, for some reason; apparently songs from superhero movies are somehow lesser songs, whereas idiotic songs from movies in which basketball players interact with cartoons are Big Powerful Songs That Idol Contestants Should Attempt At Their Own Risk. Give me a break.
:: Crystal: Finally someone picks a song that doesn’t suck! (Well, the Goo Goo Dolls song didn’t suck either, but Aaron sucks, so that’s a wash.) This is one of my favorite songs of all time.
In Crystal’s little “session with the celebrity mentor” video that precedes the performance, she indicated that she was doing “People Get Ready”. I was ready to crown her the night’s victor at that moment. “People Get Ready” is, as I noted, an all-time fave of mine. And then Crystal sang:
:: Crystal just beat the other contestants up, took their lunch money, went back in time, invested their lunch money in Microsoft in 1979, came back to the present, cashed in her stocks, and then bought a dump truck to carry away the wreckage of the other contestants’ dreams. THAT WAS THE BEST THING I’VE HEARD THIS SEASON ON IDOL.
Seriously, she was amazing. It was far and away better than any of the other performances.
To wrap up, here’s the great Rod Stewart/Jeff Beck cover of “People Get Ready”, from the mid-80s:
Next week…jeez, can I keep this up….
Lynn is shocked that there are people in the world who have not seen “The Trouble with Tribbles”. I’ve known of these poor souls for a long time, and it really is sad; it’s like growing up without pants. How does that happen?
Anyway, one of my ever-present wishes is for someone to mention “storage compartments” to me in any context whatsoever, just so I can immediately reply, “Storage compartments? Storage compartments?”
(Just watch the episode if you don’t get the joke. It’s right here. We’re talking about one of the greatest episodes of any teevee show ever, period, full stop, end of line.)
It appears that the troubled times at MGM have claimed a victim: James Bond. MGM has been on the selling block for a while, and yet no one has stepped up to buy the studio, so their ability to develop projects is pretty much toast right now.
Here’s hoping this situation is resolved sooner rather than later, what with the Bond franchise having received an enormous creative rejuvenation in the last couple of films (and having found a terrific actor in Daniel Craig as Bond to boot).
Pictures of your Room
My room? Well, the bedroom is pretty boring, and I don’t take many photos in there because it’s generically private, isn’t it? So I’ve taken new photos of my office/study area at Casa Jaquandor. This is at one far end of the living room of our apartment. Right now, it’s an utter disaster.
Here’s the whole thing, as one approaches from the kitchen:
Starting with that big shelf there, we’ll proceed around, left to right:
Yeah, I need some more space. Say, Nebraska.
I’m just now getting round to writing this, so if anyone has already been here and gone I hope you’ll be back again, but thanks to Lance Mannion for selecting Byzantium’s Shores as his favorite blog of the day. It’s always gratifying to get a link from someplace else, and I’ve been reading (and linking) Lance for years now. So, Mannion-readers, welcome to my little corner of Teh Interweb. Feel free to stay a while. Up above, just below the masthead, you’ll find links to lots of stuff I’ve written in the past, such as my favorite posts for each year I’ve been doing this (back to 2004, anyway); that’s as good a place to start as any.
Stick around!
Linkage….
:: Generally, the annual lice letter goes something like this:
Dear Parents,
This letter is to inform you that you a student in your child’s class has lice. Please check your child’s head frequently and be alert blah blah blah etc…
HOWEVER, it does not matter what is actually said in the lice letter, EVERY parent reads it like this:
Dear Parent,
Panic. Panic loudly and any language is appropriate. Flail your arms around a little. Yeah, that’s the way. Good. Your child has lice.
:: Yes, it’s probably blasphemy to put the Claremont/Byrne era of the X-Men this low on the list, but trust me–when you actually go back and read them, you find that all of Claremont’s annoying little tics as a writer (his over-narration and purple prose, his borderline creepy obsession with his female characters, his habit of having everyone reiterate their major personality traits for the reader every few pages) didn’t start when he returned to the series in the 21st century. (Isn’t that the truth. When I re-read the “Dark Phoenix Saga” a few years ago in the Marvel Essentials volume which contains it, along with a whole bunch of issues preceding it and a few coming after, I was struck by Claremont’s tendency to have Wolverine say things like “And now to use my unbreakable Adamantium claws!”, or Cyclops say things like “Whoa, that was close! Thank God I have this ruby quartz visor to contain the awesome lethality of my optic blasts!”, or Storm say things like “I must be careful when I summon the fury of the weather against my foes lest I kill my teammates with the lightning that I control!” in every single issue. Maybe this was to make it easier for people just joining the story to figure things out, but wow, when you read a whole bunch of those back-to-back-to-back-to-back, it gets awfully tiresome.)
:: Nevertheless, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say “never,” because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form. (I’m not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but let me say that I found Ebert’s arguments on this subject unconvincing several years ago when he first advanced them, and I find them unconvincing now, mainly because in all of his eloquence, I just can’t see where Ebert’s criticisms of video games as art don’t simply reduce to “I don’t like them, ergo, they are not art.” I think what’s ultimately at work here is that considering games art is to open a new concept of art as non-passive on the part of the person experiencing it, and that’s a big part of Ebert’s discomfort — he seems to prefer a definition of art in which a creator or group of creators produces a work of art complete in itself, and then the viewer — or listener, or reader, or whomever — experiences the work, complete in itself. Games-as-art requires a view of art that allows for a much greater degree of participation on the part of the player in shaping the artistic experience than has really ever been the case before in art. Unlike Ebert, I am not prepared to rule out the idea of games as art on that basis. I’m rather more interested in the idea of where that takes art in the future.
But still: can cooking be art? I’ve always thought it is, and yet, the diner exerts a great degree of control over their perception of the final dish, simply in the order they take the bites, how long they linger between bites, how often they sip their drink in between bites, et cetera. I’m being serious here. Cooking, to me, is art whose goal is to stimulate the sense of taste, which doesn’t seem to me qualitatively different from music being an art whose goal is to stimulate the sense of hearing.
Of course, I’ve always worked on a pretty inclusive definition of art as “any activity whose primary goal is the provoking of an aesthetic response”. By that metric, it certainly seems to me that games are art.)
:: I mention all of these other issues because I believe these aren’t just individual events, bloopers of a thoughtless politician or pundit, but rather a pattern of racial insensitivity that needs to be continually looked at in the broader context. (Maybe instead of having “Confederate History Month”, we can just roll up every American traitor in history into an “American Traitors Month”, so we can “honor” the deeds of Timothy McVeigh, John Walker Lindh, Benedict Arnold, the Rosenbergs, and all the other traitors alongside those who took up arms against their own country so their states could continue to own slaves. Seems fair to me.)
:: I left KFC feeling as though I had won. The sandwich had proved to be a much easier, tastier foe than I had imagined. Little did I know that the war was still raging on inside my stomach. Over the next few hours, stomach cramps and lethargy washed over me. My only option was a nap. (I swear to God that I will never eat one of these. I just can’t bring myself to this level of culinary insanity. The Double Down shall never claim me as a victim!)
More next week!
Oddities and awesome abound!
:: Wikipedia has an article on chicken hypnotism. Seriously. Make sure you scroll down to the list of famous people who have publicly discussed their preferred methods of hypnotizing chickens.
:: On the day that Albert Einstein died, a LIFE Magazine photographer took a bunch of pictures from Einstein’s office and at the funeral. The photographs were never published, until now. Einstein’s desk is particularly poignant to me — the desk is covered in papers and there’s still stuff scrawled all over his blackboard, but the uppermost bookshelves are already empty. The scene suggests a guy trying to get some work done before the end, and he didn’t quite make it.
:: For some reason I almost never read The Onion — no real idea why, other than that I’ve never formed the habit of checking it out — but this headline, cited by a Facebook friend this morning, cracked me up. I know it’s almost ten years old, but it’s new to me.
:: Cracked.com is always a source of hilarity for me; I tend to go there once every couple of weeks so I can read a lot of new content in one shot. I particularly enjoyed 6 baffling things every teevee ad assumes to be true, and the 10 greatest fictional sports.
More next week!
Again from SamuraiFrog. Let’s talk Star Trek!
1. What is your favorite Star Trek movie? (not including STXI)?
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. I love the character interactions, the Spock-as-Holmes stuff, the large-scale storyline, the tense space battle between the Enterprise and the Klingon Bird of Prey that can fire while cloaked, and I adore the sign-off signatures of the original cast members at the end.
2. What is your favorite scene in STXI?
I prefer to think of this movie as Star Trek 2009, as opposed to Trek XI. Favorite scene? The whole opening, culminating in the birth of James Tiberius Kirk, is the movie’s masterstroke.
3. When were you first introduced to the Star Trek franchise?
I don’t even remember. It was beginning its long life in reruns when I was born, in 1971; I do have very vague memories of the show being on in the house where we lived. For some reason, the very earliest Trek memory of mine is the end of the episode “Friday’s Child”; in fact, the earliest teevee memory in general of mine might well be Dr. McCoy saying “oochie woochie coochie coo” to the baby at the end of the episode.
4. Is there anything Star Trek around the room in which you’re currently sitting?
Ummmm…aside from a couple of DVDs of the movies (and I don’t even own them all yet), nope. I have digital copies of the movies and the scores on my external hard drive, so that’s something. I’d like to have a small Enterprise to go with all my little Star Wars ships, but I haven’t seen one in stores and I haven’t shopped online at all for one.
5. Vulcan ears are: A) cute, B) sexy, C) neither, D) both.
Huh. Never thought much about it. Both, I guess? On the right person?
6. If you could be any other species than human in the Star Trek universe, you would be:
Bajoran. Because I like their noses and ear-rings.
7. Which pet would you rather have: a sehlat or a tribble?
Oh, come on. Who wouldn’t want a “teddy bear” with six-inch fangs? Tribbles just eat and purr and sleep. They’re less-mobile cats.
8. Who might you cast in the role of reboot Nurse Chapel? Khan? Other reboot character?
Nurse Chapel should be played by…well, I have no idea. Any talented young actress would be fine. Khan? I do not want to see Khan. At all. Never again. He’s been done. No Borg, either. New stories, please!
9. Kirk and Spock are:
You know, the degree to which these two characters have been misunderstood by the masses over the years is really staggering. The friendship of Kirk and Spock is not the defining character thing in Star Trek; it’s the friendship of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. Kirk and Spock are two-thirds of a triad. Leonard McCoy is essential; without him, Kirk and Spock are two guys.
10. If you could give any Star Trek character a chance to be captain of the Enterprise, who would it be?
You know, everybody got the Conn of the Enterprise at some point, except Uhura. That should have happened at some point.
BONUS. Think fast! Give one Star Trek quote from memory.
This has been TOS-heavy, so here’s one from TNG: “If you had earned that uniform, you would know that the unknown is what brings us out here.”
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
