The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Lots of folks have noticed lately that the Word Verification CAPTCHAs on Blogger (and others) are less random concatenations of letters nowadays and more things that seem like they may be, or actually are, real words. Sometimes these are pretty funny, such as this one with which I was confronted a few minutes ago whilst leaving a comment over at SamuraiFrog‘s place:
Could Blogger be, I don’t know, telling me something?
Some time ago I read a book called A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict, by John Baxter. The book is a memoir of Baxter’s years as a book collector and sometimes dealer, and it’s full of amusing anecdotes about that craft. Here’s one of them:
One in a row of three-storey detached homes built in the Twenties, the house and garden had the shabby look of a place run to seed, belying the red MGB sports car parked in front. The car’s owner opened the door, a young man of the type known as “Hooray Henry”, in yuppie uniform of pressed jeans, flannel shirt, Hush Puppies, no socks, and — my God! — a cravat.
“You’re the book chaps, yah?”
“Yah,” I said. “I mean, yeah.”
“Come in, come in. Haven’t much time. Lots to do.”
He led us into the front room, lined floor to ceiling with big books in uniform leather bindings. Sorting papers was a girl dressed in the female equivalent of his outfit; same jeans, same shoes, same no socks.
“These are the book chaps, sweet,” he said.
She spared us an uninterested glance and went back to the papers.
“The house belonged to my fiancee’s father,” he said. “I’m helping her with the sale. Now these,” he went on, waving around the walls, “are not for sale. A valuer from Sotheby’s will be here tomorrow. That understood?”
Martin nodded enthusiastically, groping at the same time for his tobacco pouch and the makings. I looked around the books with my best poker face. Even I knew that bound volumes of the Proceedings of the British Dental Association were worth about as much as telephone directories. Both he and Sotheby’s man were in for a mauvais quart d’heure.
“The rest are upstairs.” He led us up the staircase. At the top was a large room lined with empty shelves, in the middle of which was a neat parallelepiped, two meters by one by one, of the books that had been on them. “You can have any of these. See if there’s anything you want. I’ll be downstairs.”
As his steps receded, Martin, nodding with pursed lips, as if listening to an unheard voice, picked up one of the books. It was a first edition of P.G. Wodehouse’s The Heart of a Goof in its original gaudy dust wrapper with its gold motif. I’d seen one less good in a catalogue at a hundred pounds.
There were more underneath, all in their wrappers. Eric Ambler novels, Sapper, Taffrail, John Buchan — and Graham Greene; my heart jumped as I spotted the near diaphonous wartime cover of A Gun for Sale and the plain cream one of his first novel, The Man Within.
“Boots rebinds,” Martin said, peeling off the Wodehouse wrapper to reveal the plain cloth cover. “Boots rebound everything, but they kept the dust wrappers. At the end of the year, they put them back on and sold the books at a shilling each.” He turned the spine to me, showing the “one shilling” label.
“What are they worth?”
“The books? Ten quid each, maybe. The wrappers…” He shrugged. “Hundreds.”
“Each?”
“Well, the Wodehouses anyway. And the Greenes. The Buchans…”
We tried to calculate a total, but hadn’t got far when the young man bounded up the stairs again.
“Well, what do you think? Anything here you can use?”
“Oh dear, oh dear…” Martin muttered. In moments of stress, he betrayed his middle-class origins by descending into a variation on the maiden-aunt’s fluster that sat oddly with his boho look. He didn’t quite wring his hands, though he came close. “I suppose…two hundred quid for the lot?”
Said with more confidence, the sum might have seemed almost insulting, but Martin’s nervousness, not to mention his wardrobe, suggested that £200 was all he had in the world.
“And you’ll take them away — tonight?”
“Car’s outside,” I said, not revealing that it was a Fiat with the cubic capacity of a shoebox. I took out my chequebook. “Who do I make it out to?”
We spent an hour ferrying the books to the car, convinced that at any minute he’d realize the treasure he was giving up. Each trip just made the experience more intense. If there is anything more pleasurable than not giving a sucker an even break, I don’t know what it is.”
How fun it would have been to hear the chuckling of the Sotheby’s valuer the next day, huh?
I got this from Kerry, who dubbed this a “dumbass quiz”. Strangely, the word “dumbass” appears nowhere in the quiz. Odd….
1. 3 living things you treasure
The Wife, The Daughter, and as of right now, Abe Vigoda.
2. 3 non-living things that you treasure
My 11-in-1 screwdriver, my laptop, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
3. favorite time of the year and why
Fall, because temps become nicely comfortable, the world gets prettier, and the Bills start playing…oh wait, forget that last one.
4. favorite things to wear
This question is too hard to answer.
5. are you a perfume wearer? If yes, which one?
No. Nor do I wear cologne, musk, or any other “manly” scent. Sometimes, though, I smell of sawdust.
6. favorite animal
Killer whales.
7. top three events in your life (so far)
Two births and a wedding.
8. top three small pleasures
Coffee, alcohol, pizza.
9. top 3 favorite places in the world you have visited
Toronto
Boston
Chicago
10. top 3 favorite sounds
Music by Rachmaninov
The ignition of a lightsaber
The sound my circular saw makes when it engages with the wood
11. top 3 favorite things to eat
Pizza
Ice Cream
All things that are good tasting and currently bad for you until someone does a study that indicates that eating it a little bit on a daily basis may be good for you.
12. 3 small ways someone has made your day lately
Direct deposit went in the day before yesterday!
Someone asked me to do something and then decided to do it themselves
Someone showed me how to do something I didn’t know how to do before
13. 3 small habits/quirks
I always have to resist the urge to buy more flashlights at Home Depot
I color-sort Skittles before consuming them
Wednesday is Donut Day!
14. describe your life using 6 words maximum
PAST: Probably shouldn’t have given up music
PRESENT: Books! Movies! Power and Hand Tools!
FUTURE: Danger! There be dragons.
15. favorite books, films, and music… list 3 in each category:
OK, I’m ducking this one, as this entire blog tends to be about this stuff.
16. name 3 words that you hate, and 3 that you love:
HATE: Copacetic, Libertarian, Didactic
LOVE: Golden, Mist, Fountain
17. what are a few of the goals you have for your future and how do you plan on making them a reality?
Writing a story; I plan to finish a story that’s already in progress.
18. what is the best piece of advice you’ve ever heard?
“Never a day without lines”; “Measure twice and cut once (but don’t measure at all if you don’t have to)”; “Wear safety glasses when cutting or drilling”; “Use slow speed and a lot of pressure when drilling metal”; “Do or do not”; “It’s just one word after another”.
19. what is your favorite quote and why?
Can’t pick a favorite, but here’s one, from Captain Jack Sparrow: “The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can’t do.”
20. have any regrets?
A few, but too few to mention…something something, without exemption….
That’s it.
Cheddar cheese so sharp it makes you pucker
Sesame crackers
Our azalea plant
Our ivy plant
Cats
Get Fuzzy
My blog
Other peoples’ blogs
George Lucas
Star Wars
My dining room table
Klein screwdrivers
LED flashlights
William Shatner
Sela Ward
Mary Stewart’s Arthurian trilogy
Stephen King
The hardware store in my old hometown
The glory years of the Buffalo Bills
Watching Star Trek: The Next Generation every night at college
Surprising The Daughter with a new Webkinz
Ms. Pac-Man
Sergei Rachmaninov
The Beatles
Van Halen
Baked pasta dishes
Pizza
Cookies
Harry Potter
Guy Gavriel Kay
Big, thick poetry collections
Small, artfully illustrated poetry collections
My drill
Fried chicken
Italian sausage
The Amazing Race
Elections
Aaron Sorkin when he’s on his game
Chess
Firefly
The Mentalist
Tasting something good at a restaurant and figuring out how to make it at home
Ice cream at the roadside place down the road
The County Fair
Libraries
JRR Tolkien
Bib overalls
Route 20-A in the fall
Sandals
Using the scissor jack at work
Pies on the table
Pies in the face
Monty Python
Aquariums and science museums
The Origin of Species
Complete collections of Shakespeare
Thick, fuzzy socks in the winter
Eggs
Daniel Craig as James Bond
George Lazenby as James Bond
The Y
My MP3 player
The Daughter learning the string bass
John Williams
Hector Berlioz
Toronto
Roast turkey
Chicken wings
George Carlin
Hayao Miyazaki
Baby Fiona
Little Quinn
The Daughter
The Wife
The other day in Sentential Links I linked two different bloggers who made a list thusly:
This list means nothing, except to me. It’s a list of 50 movies that gave me pleasure over the past decade. I can say without reservation that I would watch any of these again. Would I say that all of them are great films, however great films are supposed to be defined? Probably not. But that’s nothing you need to worry about. Because it’s my list.
So, here’s my list of such films. Some of these I’ve written about before, and I briefly considered digging back to find their respective posts, but in some cases I’ve written about these films multiple times and I really don’t feel like doing all that work. Sorry for that, but there is a search function on this blog if you’re interested! These are in no particular order, just the order in which I think of them whilst writing this post. (I usually italicize film titles in my posts, but since this is literally a list of titles, I’m eschewing the italics for now.)
1. Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
2. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
3. The Lord of the Rings (all three films)
4. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
5. Love, Actually
6. Catch Me If You Can
7. Finding Nemo
8. Spirited Away
9. Sunshine
10. Kingdom of Heaven
11. Almost Famous
12. Elizabethtown
13. 3:10 to Yuma
14. Anchorman
15. Blades of Glory
16. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
17. Casino Royale
18. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
19. Batman Begins
20. Cast Away
21. The Emperor’s New Groove
22. Spiderman 2
23. Monsters, Inc
24. Millennium Actress
25. Chicago
26. The Count of Monte Cristo
27. Possession
28. Road to Perdition
29. Whale Rider
30. Across the Universe
31. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
32. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
33. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
34. X2: X-Men United
35. Before Sunset
36. Finding Neverland
37. The Incredibles
38. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
39. The 40-year Old Virgin
40. Little Miss Sunshine
41. Serenity
42. Brokeback Mountain
43. Tristan and Isolde
44. Nanny McPhee
45. A Prairie Home Companion
46. The Simpsons Movie
47. Stardust
48. Juno
49. Atonement
50. Star Trek
Anyone else? (If you do this, probably best to quote the paragraph reproduced above and link back to the original blogger.)
Folks, I’m seeing a general up-tick in the number of spam comments making it through the CAPTCHA here over the last few weeks. It’s only been about one comment a day, so I can keep manually erasing them when they happen, but if the frequency picks up much more beyond that, I may decide to turn on Comment Moderation (which would mean that all comments would be “held” until I get ’round to publishing them). I’ll make that announcement if it becomes necessary, but there it is.
By the way, I’ve also noticed something that Will Duquette noticed: occasional spam comments that are actually “on topic”, and only include a commercial link either in their signature or at the end. For my purposes, unless you’re someone I know trying to point out a product or website that may be germane to a specific post, I will assume that any comment containing an obviously commercial link is a spam comment and delete it. My decision’s a bit more Draconian than Will’s, but he’s probably nicer than I am, anyway.
For more information, see my official comments policy.
A grab-bag of brief notes on some nonfiction books I’ve read recently:
:: I’ve checked Infrastructure by Brian Hayes out of the library several times, because it’s really very fascinating. Subtitled “A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape”, the book is a guided tour through the man-made objects that dominate the landscape of our daily lives. Basically, if you’ve ever wondered things like why cell-phone transmission towers are triangular in shape, or how shipping ports are designed for maximum efficiency, or what all those objects attached to the power line pole actually are, or how raw materials are extracted from the earth, then this is the book to check out. It’s a wonderfully produced “How Things Work” kind of book. (It’s also a coffee table book, loaded with photographs illustrating its various points about the engineering that surrounds us in our world.
:: The View from the Bridge is a memoir by filmmaker Nicholas Meyer, who is best known for his work on the Star Trek franchise. He directed Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, as well as partially writing Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. While that was clearly my main area of interest in reading his book, Meyer has also done a great deal of other film and teevee work, such as the post-nuclear war teevee movie The Day After and the wonderfully entertaining time-travel film Time After Time (in which Jack the Ripper escapes capture in 19th century London to 1979 San Francisco by using a time machine invented by friend-who-doesn’t-know-his-friend-is-a-serial-killer, H.G. Wells). Meyer tells many of the same kinds of stories we hear from other filmmakers who pen memoirs, describing the long efforts it took for him to break into the business and the friends and enemies he made along the way. Meyer is refreshingly candid about his own screw-ups, which is always nice to see in a book like this.
:: Made From Scratch by Jenna Woginrich is part-memoir and part-manifesto about one woman’s desire to step back from modern technology and all its “improvements” of life, in many respects, and get back to a state of being where many of the things in her life are things she does for herself. Things like growing her own food, making her own clothes and music, and so on. It’s a very engaging read – Woginrich has a very friendly writing style, and she brings a great deal of verve and enthusiasm into her project. She doesn’t just evangelize for the “do it by hand” movement either, but she also describes the places she has screwed up along the way (such as failing to factor the presence of her dog into her decision to raise her own chickens from hatchlings). The book isn’t full of technical details, although Woginrich does give lots of advice on how to get started in many areas and provides resources for further research. The main value in the book, I found, is in the way Woginrich is able to give insight into a “Made from Scratch” kind of lifestyle in a world of advanced technology. The book is not Luddite in its attitude; Woginrich is a web designer by trade and she maintains a blog, Cold Antler Farm, where she continues to write about the themes of her book.
Of particular interest to me is that she wrote the book while she lived in Sandpoint, ID, the little ski-resort town way up north in the Idaho panhandle which happens to be where my in-laws lived for many years (and where my brother-in-law still resides). While she no longer lives there, I can certainly attest that Sandpoint would be an ideal locale for anyone desiring the kind of lifestyle she writes about in her book.
SamuraiFrog comments on Entertainment Weekly‘s list of the 20 Greatest Animated Movies, and I figure I’ll do the same thing. EW is pretty good for generating lists for bloggers to talk about, after all.
20. Ghost in the Shell
Haven’t seen it.
19. Waltz with Bashir
Nor this one. I’m not off to a good start here….
18. Pinocchio
Only #18? This is really one of the greats: it’s Exhibit A for the existence of the seriously dark side of the Disney of old.
17. Kiki’s Delivery Service
I love Kiki, but it’s simply not as good as My Neighbor Totoro, and it’s nowhere near as good as Laputa or Princess Mononoke. I suspect this one’s cited on the basis of accessibility: it’s the kind of anime people can watch if they don’t want to deal with all that weird Japanese stuff.
16. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut
Haven’t seen it. I’ve never been able to figure out if I like South Park or not.
15. The Iron Giant
Why the hell is this so low? Probably because it still isn’t that well known.
14. Akira
Haven’t seen this either, although I should.
13. Chicken Run
Huh. I’d forgotten about this movie, although it’s really pretty terrific.
12. The Triplets of Belleville
Geez…haven’t seen it.
11. Dumbo
Hmmmm. I like Dumbo. I like it a lot. But I’m not sure I like it more than Pinocchio, and I sure as hell don’t like it more than Snow White.
10. Coraline
OK, doing this list was a bad idea. Haven’t seen it. I liked the book. Although I’m not sure the movie’s been around long enough to warrant this kind of reverence.
9. Bambi
I was just thinking about Bambi today, while listening to guys at work talking about their success or lack thereof in their hunting exploits. (Hunting season just opened up.) It’s one of my favorite of all Disney movies, and it’s certainly deserving of this list.
8. Toy Story 2
Really, really good movie. I love its resonance — every adult I know remembers some long-lost toy they wish they hadn’t dumped in a box somewhere — and I love the little digs it makes at the collecting hobby world, the little pop culture references (especially to Star Wars), and…well, everything.
7. The Incredibles
If Pixar had to do a sequel for their next one, I’d rather see an Incredibles II than Toy Story 3. It’s a terrific superhero movie, and it’s so sure about itself. The sequence where Mr. Incredible is sitting at the computer console, scrolling past the history of the bad guy’s development of his evil robots, is utterly chilling.
6. Beauty and the Beast
This should be higher. It’s a great, great film, full of magic and brilliant characters and outstanding songs and music. Yeah, it’s too low.
5. Persepolis
Haven’t seen it. But I assume it’s roughly as good as the book, and since the book is brilliant….
4. The Lion King
I’m sorry, but I have to call foul here. The Lion King just isn’t this good. It’s very entertaining and fun and all, but I’ve never seen it as the classic everyone else seems to think it is. I can name probably a dozen Disney films that I think are better than this. It’s not a bad movie, but there’s no way it’s the supreme Disney achievement.
3. Up
WAY too soon to be on a list like this. I just saw it last week and will post more about it later on, but I loved about two-thirds of it. Roughly until it set aside its magic and wonder in favor of another villain who needs to be defeated.
2. Spirited Away
This movie isn’t high enough. It’s just so, so, so brilliant.
1. WALL-E
Have I ever blogged about this movie? I’m of mixed mind on it, and generally, I view it as I do The Lion King: a generally good movie with some wonderful parts (WALL-E and Eve’s “dance” in space is as amazing a piece of imagination as I’ve seen in a film) but also some parts that left me cold. To be honest, I felt a lot of the air of the film go out when the humans showed up. It almost felt to me as if the filmmakers didn’t quite have the courage of their convictions and had to have something conventional happen sometime. (The same problem afflicted Up.) I wouldn’t have this movie this high up, and I in fact might not even have it on the list.
What other movies do I miss from this list? Well, there’s not room for everything and I’m not about to re-write the whole thing, but…Fantasia. Snow White. (That one’s omission is just weird.) Finding Nemo (still my favorite Pixar film). Princess Mononoke. The Emperor’s New Groove. (Yes, I’m serious. It remains the only Disney film that’s ever come close to channeling the spirit of Chuck Jones.)
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
