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Jacks and sockets and lugnuts, oh my!

There’s nothing like getting a phone call from The Wife at 11:30 pm, during which she informs me that she’s stuck on the side of the road with a flat tire, sustained after driving over a piece of metal of some sort. Of course I had to drive out to her assistance, although I could have done without the particular location at which she finally had to pull over. She was on the side of Interstate 90 in Buffalo — called locally “the Mainline 90”, which indicates its general levels of traffic — and of course, it was the front driver’s side tire, which meant that I’d be just a few feet away from the passing traffic as I made my attempt to change the tire.

Sadly, my attempt was unsuccessful, owing to the fact that her vehicle — a Dodge Caravan — is nine years old, and thus the spare tire, mounted underneath the damned thing, was so rusted and corroded that it couldn’t be removed. Which led to a tow truck. This annoyed me, because I was able to get the wheel off the van with no problem. I am very glad that I decided, some months ago, to buy a quality jack; this I purchased when I decided to start doing my own oil changes. I’ve never much liked the jacks that come with vehicles — they always look slightly rickety to me. Not quite trustworthy. A little shifty, even. Better that I was able to use my new jack, which is rated for two tons and comes with jack stands and everything.

Of course, none of that mattered because of that damned spare. Now, twenty-three hours later as I write this, the van’s fine and it has a new tire in the place of the damaged one. We plan to get a full-size spare (those “donut” tires are stupid) and just keep it in the back of the van, because why chance things? But, after waiting for tow trucks and waiting for them to winch the van onto the flatbed (making me wonder what ever happened to the two trucks that would just lift up your vehicle’s front end and pull it on its back wheels), and getting the van to the tire place for us to call this morning, and then finally getting home, it was 1:30 in the morning. I staggered through today on about four hours of sleep, so naturally I’m still up and blogging.

No real point here, except that I’m a bit irritated that I wasn’t able to get the tire-change job done. I hate when I can’t get a job done!!!

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Instead of running onto the field, they should all pile out of a clown car.

It’s just about time for the NFL to kick off its 2009 season, so it’s time for me to do a little football blogging. My plan this year is to put up this “predictions” post, and then I’ll weigh in here and there during the regular season with various thoughts and such. I won’t be doing weekly examinations of each game the Buffalo Bills play, because while I still enjoy the game, I’m just not nearly as enthusiastic about football as I once was. In fact, last season I actually stopped watching the Bills for the last three weeks of the year and only learned of the disastrous things they did in those games through print media and web video and stuff like that. If this season goes the way I think it very well could, I’ll end up doing the same thing again. You reach a point where spending three hours every Sunday watching something you don’t really enjoy watching starts to seem, on balance, a little stupid.

But anyway: what’s the state of the NFL and what’s the state of the Buffalo Bills?

Well, the Bills are a mess. Pure and simple. This season has the potential to be one of the biggest train wrecks in franchise history. They have a completely new offensive line, which (as of this writing) will be starting two rookies. They tried rolling out a new offensive scheme in the preseason, which performed so poorly in five preseason games that they fired their offensive coordinator just two days ago. Their quarterback is a once-promising young talent, a smart player with all the physical tools, who has been regressing since his debut two seasons ago. They are led by the same coaching staff that has piloted the team to a 7-9 finish three years in a row. They are managed by the same front office that has been stocking the team with lackluster talent for nearly a decade now. They are owned by the same pigheaded owner who seems to loathe being in the same room as someone strong-willed and intelligent, which is why his best general managers all get fired eventually.

I’ve come to see the worst day in Buffalo Bills history as the firing of Bill Polian, the guy who built the teams that went to the Super Bowl four years in a row. Polian went from the Bills to the Indianapolis Colts, a long-moribund franchise at the time. All Polian’s done there is turn the Colts into a perennial powerhouse.

The list of things wrong with the Buffalo Bills is pretty long, but for me, that’s where they start: in the front office. This team just does not have a good football operation in place. Head Coach Dick Jauron is generally the public face of the team’s recent ineptitude, so his is the name that is vilified the most every time this team goes out and stumbles all over the place, but to me, it’s terribly galling to see that despite picking in the upper half of the draft every year for a decade, the Bills have still failed to find top-flight talent in most cases. Three years ago, people were saying that the Bills were two or three drafts away from being good. Now, after those two or three drafts, guess what? They’re still two or three drafts away from being good.

Why the hell is this?

Well, it’s a double-headed monster of a problem. The Bills don’t scout talent terribly well, and they don’t make picks intelligently, either. One prime example is their recent obsession with drafting numerous defensive backs each and every year. The thought is, apparently, that in a league where there are so many good receivers, “you can’t have too many defensive backs”. Well, along the lines of that old canard stating that “Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting different results”, the Bills get ripped apart by teams with good passing games each and every year, no matter how many talented DB’s they have. Maybe they should try something else – like, say, addressing the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball.

They’ve made some half-hearted efforts at this over the years, but never enough. This year they finally realized that the offensive linemen at whom they threw large amounts of money three years ago weren’t getting the job done, so they drafted two guards high in the draft (one in each of the first two rounds). While I was happy they finally made linemen a priority (the good teams are always drafting linemen and developing them), they should have been doing this three years ago, when they were actually rebuilding. Instead, they decided to do things like trade up to get John McCargo, a defensive lineman whose play on the field has been spotty enough that the Bills actually tried to trade him away last year. Or they picked safety Donte Whitner with the eighth overall pick, a choice everyone at the time thought to be a stretch – nobody had Whitner going before the middle-first round at the earliest, and nobody had McCargo going in the first round at all, so the Bills could have traded down in the first round and possibly added another second round pick, and still picked Whitner and McCargo if those were the guys they really wanted.

(Of course, they shouldn’t have taken Whitner at all – they should have taken DT Haloti Ngata, who has become a rock in the middle of the line for the Baltimore Ravens. But at the time, the Bills were fascinated by the notion of a defensive line consisting of small but fast guys, where Ngata is a giant behemoth. That’s why they passed on him and went with Whitner instead. But after two seasons of seeing their small-and-fast defensive line ripped apart by good running teams, the Bills had to trade last year for Marcus Stroud, a big guy for the middle of their line. Oops. And even if safety had been a logical place to go in that draft, Whitner has never in my mind justified his being taken that high. To my way of thinking, if you’re taking a safety with the eighth overall pick, you’d better be getting Bob Sanders, or Ed Reed, or Troy Polamalu. Whitner isn’t close to being mentioned in the same breath as those guys.)

Of course, the Bills didn’t want to come out and admit three years ago that they needed to do some serious rebuilding by starting with the basic building blocks. There’s another constant problem here: the belief, always prevalent in the team brass, that they’re just a few good players away from contending.

The Bills’ approach to rebuilding has never been to once-and-for-all address the team’s fundamental needs and then build from there; instead, each season they look at one of two things and then draft according to those. They either (a) replace the biggest free agent who just left, or (b) address whatever the most glaring problem from the most recent 7-9 season might have been. That’s why they do things like draft Marshawn Lynch in the first round right after dumping Willis McGahee, or pick Leodis McKelvin right after Nate Clements is sent packing. And this approach goes back to the Tom Donahoe era, when the team’s management decided that they were sufficiently talented to use their first-round pick in 2003 as a “luxury” pick, taking a running back (McGahee) who was coming off a wicked injury and who thus would have to spend a year not playing. But that was the way Donahoe approached things: get the replacement for the next big free agent before they leave. (The McGahee pick made keeping Travis Henry irrelevant; a year later, the Lee Evans pick made Eric Moulds eventually “expendable”. Smart? Well…not really. The Bills were never talented enough to be able to take such a luxurious approach to the draft.)

On the other hand, the Bills have tended to use the draft as their only real way of addressing major team problems. Last year’s team had a horrible pass rush, so this year, they drafted Aaron Maybin, a collegiate pass-rush specialist. As a rookie, Maybin is unlikely to turn in amazing pass-rush numbers, but there it is. Last year’s glaring problem was the lack of height in the receiving corps, so they drafted James Hardy and pronounced the receiving corps “rebuilt”. Never mind that receivers notoriously take two to three years to develop into quality players, and that receivers who excel as rookies are rare.

And then, in a category by itself, we have the teams’ long-to-the-point-of-Quixotic quest for Jim Kelly’s successor as the next great Bills quarterback. Trent Edwards may be the most promising prospect the team has had since Kelly retired, but the Bills have misfired a whole bunch of times on finding the next QB, using three first-round draft picks on quarterbacks over the last ten years. They traded a first-rounder to Jacksonville to get Rob Johnson in 1998 (thus getting themselves out of a draft round that saw guys like Vonnie Holiday, Alan Faneca, Randy Moss, and Fred Taylor taken). They sent New England their 2003 first-rounder to get Drew Bledsoe (they got a pick back with another trade later on, getting Willis McGahee from a round that saw Troy Polamalu join the Steelers). They sent their 2005 first-rounder to Dallas so they could get JP Losman in 2004 (thus sparing themselves the opportunity of taking DeMarcus Ware, Shawne Merriman, or Aaron Rogers). And if you want to, you can even go farther back to 1995, when they used a second-rounder on Todd Collins. (But then, Collins is still in the league.)

What does all this have to do with 2009? Simply, the Bills have been misfiring and/or grabbing at straws for ten years now, when it comes to picking talent. Now, they’re not the Lions or the Rams of recent years, picking outright bad players, but they’ve either missed entirely or they’ve picked small guys who play hard but simply aren’t playmakers in the NFL. The roster simply does not have the talent to compete with the best teams in the AFC. I think that’s the ultimately frustrating thing about watching the Buffalo Bills this decade: the continual sense that they’re not that far off. Not really. They have decent players who would be even better if they could just find some real stud playmakers. But they never do.

In this day and age in the NFL, a bad team can become a good team very quickly. The Miami Dolphins went from 1-15 in 2007 to 11-5 in 2008. The Baltimore Ravens seem to alternate good years with bad ones – 13-3 in 2006, 5-11 in 2007, 11-5 in 2008. The Packers were in the NFC title game two years ago, and after a rough year last year look ready to compete again. The Eagles had some rough years, but last year they rebounded to get to the NFC title game and this year they look really good. In a blog post today, Buffalo News columnist Jerry Sullivan provides this stat:

Since the Bills last appeared in the NFL playoffs, there have been 57 instances of teams making the postseason after missing the previous season. That means more than half of the 108 playoff spots in a nine-year stretch were occupied by teams that had missed the season before.

Last year, seven of the 12 playoff teams were differerent from the year before. That included the Dolphins, who went from one win to 11; Atlanta, which improved by seven games; and Baltimore, which went up by six. So clearly, there’s a lot of playoff turnover from year to year, and teams can bounce back from poor seasons in a hurry. In light of the evidence, it’s even more amazing that the Bills haven’t made it nine years in a row.

And you don’t even have to stop at mere playoff appearances. On a hunch, I looked through the last ten Super Bowls, and I discovered something interesting. Here are the matchups of each of those games, winners listed first:

1999: Rams*, Titans*
2000: Ravens*, Giants*
2001: Patriots*, Rams
2002: Buccaneers, Raiders
2003: Patriots, Panthers*
2004: Patriots, Eagles
2005: Steelers*, Seahawks
2006: Colts, Bears*
2007: Giants, Patriots
2008: Steelers*, Cardinals*

What do the asterisks mean? They indicate the teams participating in each Super Bowl that had posted a record of 8-8 or worse just two years before that Super Bowl appearance. It just doesn’t have to be this way, and yet in Buffalo, it is. Ugh!

For me, the most illustrative franchise of this simple fact — it doesn’t have to be this way — during the Bills’ current era of futility has been the New York Giants. Let’s compare how it’s gone for these two teams since 2000, when the Bills started to sink after being good or great all through the 1990s.

2000

Bills: 8-8, fourth place.
Giants: 12-4, first place, NFC Champions.

2001

Bills: 3-13, fifth place.
Giants: 7-9, third place.

2002 (first season with four-team divisions in the NFL)

Bills: 8-8, fourth place.
Giants: 10-6, second place.

2003

Bills: 5-11, fourth place.
Giants: 4-12, fourth place.

2004

Bills: 9-7, third place.
Giants: 6-10, third place.

2005

Bills: 5-11, third place.
Giants: 11-5, first place.

2006

Bills: 7-9, third place.
Giants: 8-8, third place.

2007

Bills: 7-9, second place
Giants: 10-6, second place, playoff berth, Super Bowl champions

2008

Bills: 7-9, last place
Giants: 12-4, first place

So, in the span of the last nine seasons, the Giants started off better than the Bills, then they got worse than the Bills, and then they quickly rebuilt to get better than the Bills again – so much better that they got a Super Bowl trophy in the process.

My ultimate point is this: in today’s NFL, being bad for more than, say, two or three years is a sign of either awful luck or total mismanagement. And if your run of badness runs to more than five years, then I think luck can be ruled out as well. Nine years of being mediocre at best with occasional drops into outright badness? That is pure mismanagement.

Obviously, then, I don’t hold out much hope for 2009. Trent Edwards looked smart and confident when he first arrived on the scene, but just two years later he is looking tentative, unconfident, and downright fearful. The Bills constantly say things like “We have to take what the defense gives us”, which is a totally frustrating thing to hear from offensive players – you’d never hear anybody from the Patriots’ offense saying anything like that – and insist that they’re confident, which is surely why their leading receiver is almost always the running back catching the quick dump-off pass. The offense will likely be awful, which will lead to lots of playing time for a defense with a bad pass-rush (Maybin’s potential notwithstanding) and a very thin linebacking corps. There is serious potential for this year’s Bills squad to be awful.

Ahhh…but what about Terrell Owens? Well, what about him? Full disclosure: I’ve always liked T.O., and I’m glad he’s here. But he’s not a miracle worker. He can’t make his quarterback confident. He can’t make the young offensive line better. And he can’t play defense. This is not a team that was sufficiently talented at the outset to be made better by T.O.’s arrival. And for all the negative press given to T.O.’s locker room antics over the years, I frankly look forward to the injection of some kind of passion into the Bills’ locker room. For years the Bills have come out after bad losses acting like the guy at the office who just had a day where the printer ran out of toner every time he tried to print. To be quite honest, I will find it refreshing if somebody in the Bills’ locker room explodes if they’re sitting at 2-6 halfway through the season.

All right, so it’s time for some actual predictions. For the record, I am predicting that the Bills will finish 6-10 and in last place in the AFC East. If this happens, look for a complete overhaul of the organization next offseason. My nightmare scenario, though, is that they are able to put together a sufficiently positive season to convince owner Ralph Wilson that they need “continuity” and thus keep this front office and coaching staff around another year. A 9-7 finish would probably do it; or maybe an 8-8 year if they have lots of injuries. Hell, I can even see a fourth consecutive 7-9 finish resulting in Jauron-and-friends sticking around. How? Well, if the Bills start out bad – say, 0-4 or 1-5 – and then win enough over the rest of the year to “claw their way back” to 7-9? Or maybe if they have a stronger December than usual? Especially if the young O-line plays better late in the year? I can totally envision a number of scenarios under which the current management team and coach staff is retained, and many of those scenarios do, in fact, involve the team being mediocre and out of the playoffs yet again. Such is life. The team needs new management and new coaching, and the only way I see those things coming to pass is if the team is unquestionably bad this year. Ugh, indeed.

And when that happens, what then? It’s not like we’ll ever see Ralph Wilson open up his wallet and bring in, say, Bill Cowher or Marty Schottenheimer. Yes, I’ve joined the “The Bills are doomed” club. Sue me.

So, onto the rest of the league. Here’s how I see the divisions turning out this year (with the proviso that in the past, I have never been more than fifty-percent right about these):

AFC

East: New England
North: Pittsburgh
South: Indianapolis
West: San Diego
Wildcards: Baltimore, Houston

NFC

East: Philadelphia
North: Green Bay
South: New Orleans
West: Arizona
Wildcards: NYGiants, Dallas

I’m almost certainly wrong here, of course. Every year somebody seemingly comes out of nowhere to win a division, which will probably happen again. But on paper, that’s how I see the most likely result. And the Super Bowl?

Super Bowl XLIV:

Pittsburgh over Philadelphia

The Steelers’ defense is still awesome, while their youngish offense is still improving; Ben Roethlisberger is just entering his prime, when he already has two Super Bowl wins under his belt. The AFC is always tough, but I think the Steelers’ upside is better than most of the other AFC contenders. Tom Brady’s health is going to be a concern in New England, I think; Indy’s got a new coach and I think Peyton Manning’s physical decline is about to begin. As for the Chargers, yeah, they have a great roster, but until Norv Turner is actually holding up the Lombardi Trophy as confetti swirls about his head, I won’t believe he’s a good playoff coach.

In the NFC, the Eagles look most balanced to me. I think Green Bay is up and coming, and the Saints can outscore most teams. I don’t think Arizona is primed to repeat as NFC champs, but their division is pretty bad, so there they are.

Some final bullet points on my thoughts on the 2009 NFL season:

:: The Vikings will ultimately regret the Brett Favre maneuver, and it could very well be detrimental to the club for years to come.

:: The Browns will ultimately regret the hiring of Eric Mangini, who looks worse as a coach every year.

:: How many times do New England assistant coaches have to stumble badly as head coaches before everyone realizes that maybe they shouldn’t hire New England assistant coaches to be their head coaches?

:: My nomination for NFL Moron of the Decade is Plaxico Burress.

:: It is my hope that every single NFL player devotes his efforts this year to honoring the single greatest exemplar of courage in the history of professional sport, Tedy Bruschi.

That’s it. Let’s kick it off!

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Thrusters and Blasters and Spaceships, oh my!

Notes on a couple of space opera reads I’ve done lately:

:: I greatly enjoyed Andre Norton’s Moon of Three Rings a few months back, so more recently I read another by her, The Zero Stone. Where Moon of Three Rings was more planetary romance than space opera, The Zero Stone actually is full-on space opera.

Murdoc Jern is a jeweler by trade, who has learned the ropes of the business from his father and is now traveling the galaxy with a business associate, trading in rare gems from many different worlds, when his associate is killed and Jern has to make his escape by taking refuge aboard another ship. Jern also possesses a ring whose stone is deeply powerful and deeply mysterious — the “Zero Stone” of the title — and it soon becomes clear that everyone is basically after him for the stone.

Eventually his only trusted companion is a brilliant psychic cat named Eet. (Well, he’s an alien who is very cat-like, not an actual cat.) With Eet at his side, Jern must evade numerous villains and adversaries in order to win his freedom. I don’t want to say more than that, because the story is fairly rollicking and wide-ranging, despite its mere 221 pages in the old edition that I own. The story takes us to odd worlds and shows us interesting aliens, all the while telling a fairly gripping tale about greed and peril and freedom.

I find reading older science fiction novels refreshing, in a way. The authors of the 1950s and 1960s had to take a “get in, tell the tale, get out” approach to storytelling, packing their galaxy-spanning notions along with interesting characters and drama into much shorter books than are the norm today. I love a florid and long epic as much as the next person, but there’s often something just invigoratingly pleasant about reading a book that has an epic story in less than half the length of an almost-standard novel today.

(I’ve now discovered that The Zero Stone has a sequel called Uncharted Stars, which I just happen to already own. Huzzah!)

:: More modern, and thus more epic and thus longer, is In Conquest Born by CS Friedman. This is a big story told on a very large canvas. Two races, the Braxana and the Azeans, have been at war for a very long time as their respective empires have spread across the stars. Our focus is on one warrior from each culture: Zatar from the Braxana, and Anzha from the Azeans, who find themselves endlessly opposing each other, bringing the endless war to a deeper and more personal level. This book is as much character study as it is story, alternating between Zatar and Anzha as their respective lives become more and more intertwined as the book progresses.

While I liked In Conquest Born a great deal, I must confess that I wanted to like it more than I did. The characters are well-drawn and well-developed; they are complex, with motivations that aren’t always easy to understand. The main problem I had with the book was that it often felt somewhat disjointed. There are times when the book doesn’t feel so much like a novel as a collection of inter-related short stories and novellas about the same characters. Also, there are quite a few plot threads that never seem to go anywhere or get visited again. Those aren’t deal-breaking quibbles, though; I greatly enjoyed In Conquest Born and recommend it.

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Sentential Links #183

The Labor Day edition. Say, anybody ever wonder why we don’t have “Management Day”?

:: The kids with those books in their hands may look like they’re reading but what’s actually going on in their heads is that they’re watching television or going to the movies. There are plenty of books that aren’t meant to be read only skimmed in a way that allows readers to remind themselves of things they’ve seen on a screen of one size or another. The trick of these books isn’t to stimulate imaginations, it’s too trigger memories of the most familiar cinematic cliches. A lot of books supposedly aimed at adults are like this. Most mysteries and thrillers, for instance, even ones by the supposedly best writers. Michael Connelly writes excellent screenplays that he publishes in the form of novels. I think it would be better if the students were given a list to choose from, a junk-less list that was truly eclectic and took into account that most twelve and thirteen year olds are not like I was.

:: As a comic book, From Hell elevates the comic book medium. As a graphic novel, it diminishes the comic book medium, in the same way Margaret Atwood insisting A Handmaid’s Tale isn’t science fiction diminishes science fiction. Both situations encourage those who don’t know what a comic/sci-fi is to believe the comics/sci-fi they’re consuming is something else. They are given no incentive to seek out good comics or sci-fi, because they aren’t interested in comics and sci-fi. The fact that they just enjoyed those very things is immaterial to their future reading choices, because they don’t understand what they just read was the very thing they’re predisposed to believe they’ve no interest in reading.

:: So long as Disney keeps out of the creative content of Marvel Comics this should be nothing but good news, right?… right?

:: Again, ladies, take away the fact that he’s a vampire. Now here’s what you have in this entire conversation (paraphrasing): “I’m fascinated by you because you’re so much different than everyone else. I worry about you when I’m gone because you’re so clumsy and stupid that you can’t take care of yourself. I need to watch you like you’re a toddler because you can barely stand on your own, so I follow you around all the time. I’m a dangerous creature who you should be very, very frightened of, so I’m going to hang around with you as much as I can and force you to let me treat you like this is the Victorian Era. I could kill you, and in fact I really want to kill you, so much so that it makes me uncomfortable to be around you, but I also kind of like you and it amuses me to watch you pretend to be on my intellectual level. Here, put on my jacket.” (SamuraiFrog continues to do yeoman duty in establishing why Twilight is so staggeringly awful.)

:: Did you have a good Mootday? We sure did. The traditional Mootday Breakfast of cold cereal and milk was enlivened this year with the addition of dried raspberries. And there was much rejoicing.

:: There’s been a lot of talk about Archie’s proposal to Veronica, and most people tend to fall on the pro-Betty side of the debate. And while we all know that pretty much everyone in Riverdale sucks, I think we should consider what it’s like to hang out with Veronica.

All for now. Tune in next week for more.

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A Query for Tech-heads

(I’m going to be keeping this post at the top of the page through the rest of Sunday. Newer content will appear beneath it, later on.)

I posed this question on Facebook, and I thought I’d throw it up over here as well, since not everyone who reads me here is over there.

Basically, my laptop — nearly two years old — has worn out its battery. (No, not its welcome! Just its battery.) The battery still charges, but its full charge now lasts less than an hour, which means that it’s time for me to investigate a new battery. All well and good.

Now, this machine is a Dell Inspiron, and the Battery Life meter makes the bold claim that I should only use Dell batteries and nothing else. And of course, Dell batteries are only available through Dell. But I’ve found some third-party batteries available out there, for quite a bit less money than the Dell ones, so I’m wondering: are there any actual consequences to using a third-party battery, or is it OK to do so? Such as, are Dell machines specifically set up to only charge Dell batteries, so if I get a different brand, is there a possibility that the thing doesn’t charge?

Also, a respondent over there — Sean, actually — tells me that he believes usage of a battery while a laptop is plugged into the AC outlet tends to shorten a battery’s lifespan, and my best bet is to get the new battery and then only use it for when I’m actually in need of battery power, and use the old one when I’m plugged into the wall. (In truth, I’m plugged in more than ninety percent of the time, anyway, when I use the laptop.) Is this the case? I figure if I get a new battery and get about three years out of it, by that time I’ll be in the market for a new laptop anyway. (This machine is working just fine, with just a couple of hiccups that are so minor I barely notice them anymore.)

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Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Oddities abound!

:: I think we can officially call the “Coming Up With New Stuff to Deep Fry” craze over, with the advent of deep-fried butter. What else is there besides deep-frying stuff that will literally kill you? Bring on the deep-fried arsenic!

:: If you’ve ever looked around Blogistan and thought to yourself, “Hmmmm, there needs to be a blog that does nothing but contrast the way foods look as prepared versus the way they look in the picture on the packaging”, well, look no further! It’s Food In Real Life. This is nothing new, obviously; I remember my intense feelings of disappointment the first time I got a Big Mac at McDonalds and noted that the burger I got wasn’t the four-inch-tall behemoth pictured in the commercials.

:: Note to self: avoid Jericho, Arkansas. Hoo boy, what a mess they’ve got brewin’ down there!

:: Want to see what a molecule looks like?

More next week!

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No, I don’t kill my pets.

For no real reason, here’s one of my favorite scenes ever from The West Wing. This is when President Bartlet decided to hire the whip-smart Republican woman who came out of nowhere to make Sam look like an idiot on national teevee:

I loved this scene, and it points out one of the show’s real flaws. Aaron Sorkin would create some wonderful characters and then underutilize them awfully. Ainsley Hayes was a terrific character who only appeared a handful of times after her introduction to the show. That was a shame — as was the fact that the show always had her in scenes with Sam afterwards, when in fact her best chemistry was with Leo. Oh well. I still love this scene — the repartee between Ainsley and Leo is just fantastic.

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“Under Heaven” (again)

I somehow missed this at BrightWeavings.com, but here’s the text of the Penguin Group regarding Guy Gavriel Kay’s upcoming novel Under Heaven:

The world could bring you poison in a jeweled cup, or surprising gifts. Sometimes you didn’t know which of them it was…

Penguin Group (Canada) is pleased to announce the new novel from World Fantasy Award Winner and international bestseller Guy Gavriel Kay

UNDER HEAVEN will be published in April 2010, and takes place in a world inspired by the glory and power of Tang Dynasty China in the 8th century, a world in which history and the fantastic meld into something both memorable and emotionally compelling.

In the novel, Shen Tai is the son of a general who led the forces of imperial Kitai in the empire’s last great war against its western enemies, twenty years before. Forty thousand men, on both sides, were slain by a remote mountain lake. General Shen Gao himself has died recently, having spoken to his son in later years about his sadness in the matter of this terrible battle.

To honour his father’s memory, Tai spends two years in official mourning alone at the battle site by the blue waters of Kuala Nor. Each day he digs graves in hard ground to bury the bones of the dead. At night he can hear the ghosts moan and stir, terrifying voices of anger and lament. Sometimes he realizes that a given voice has ceased its crying, and he knows that is one he has laid to rest.

The dead by the lake are equally Kitan and their Taguran foes; there is no way to tell the bones apart, and he buries them all with honour.

It is during a routine supply visit led by a Taguran officer who has reluctantly come to befriend him that Tai learns that others, much more powerful, have taken note of his vigil. The White Jade Princess Cheng-wan, 17th daughter of the Emperor of Kitai, presents him with two hundred and fifty Sardian horses. They are being given in royal recognition of his courage and piety, and the honour he has done the dead.

You gave a man one of the famed Sardian horses to reward him greatly. You gave him four or five to exalt him above his fellows, propel him towards rank, and earn him jealousy, possibly mortal jealousy. Two hundred and fifty is an unthinkable gift, a gift to overwhelm an emperor.

Tai is in deep waters. He needs to get himself back to court and his own emperor, alive. Riding the first of the Sardian horses, and bringing news of the rest, he starts east towards the glittering, dangerous capital of Kitai, and the Ta-Ming Palace – and gathers his wits for a return from solitude by a mountain lake to his own forever-altered life.

—

About the Author

Guy Gavriel Kay is the author of ten novels and a volume of poetry. His eleventh work of fiction, Under Heaven, will be published by Viking Canada in April 2010, and by Penguin US and HarperCollins UK in May 2010.

Kay’s fiction has sold over 3 million copies and been published in more than 25 languages around the world. He is the winner of the 2008 World Fantasy Award for Ysabel, which has been optioned for feature film release by Maryke McEwen of Kinetic Productions, the Gemini-winning producer of Street Legal and The Diary of Evelyn Lau and Jeanne Strømberg and Alan Hausegger of StrømHaus Productions, who created the film adaptation of Linda Svendson’s Marine Life starring Cybill Shepherd.

Kay’s novel The Lions of Al-Rassan has also been optioned for feature film and is being developed by director Edward Zwick (The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond) and Cathy Schulman (Crash) of Mandalay Pictures.

Kay is a recipient of the International Goliardos Prize for his contributions to the literature of the fantastic. At the outset of his career, he was retained by the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien to assist in the editorial construction of Tolkien’s posthumously published, The Silmarillion.

I’ll have to beef up my selection of Chinese music before this book arrives. Gotta have the right ambience!

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"Double dumb-ass on you!"


"Double dumb-ass on you!", originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

So I was watching Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home last night, and one little detail caught my eye during the scene where Kirk and Spock are riding the BART bus over to Sausalito so they can visit the Cetacean Institute and plot their rescue of two whales. This very brief shot comes right after Spock nerve-pinches the rude punk-rocker. Why did I screengrab this?

Because if you look close, you can see that a rider over on the left there, a couple of rows in front of Kirk and Spock, is holding a copy of the late and long-lamented OMNI Magazine. If I could resurrect a single periodical publication, at the same level of quality as at its height, I’d choose OMNI. That mag was such a fun read. The only thing now that comes close is WIRED, but WIRED lacks OMNI‘s willingness to go right into areas of pure speculation, if not outright mysticism.

Maybe now that they’ve brought whales into the 23rd century, Kirk and company could bring OMNI into the 21st!

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The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer

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