The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
In exactly six months, we’ll have a new President. The Reign of Monstrous Ineptitude is almost over.
(Although I’m really dreading the bag of tricks the current guy is going to open up once we’re in the post-election, pre-Inauguration phase. I’m sure his list of pardons is going to be a fun-fest, not to mention the Executive Orders he’ll push through.)
[Broken link fixed]
Oddities for a hot Sunday afternoon (Lord, I hate July; I don’t know how you people south of the 42nd parallel do it):
:: The onward march of technology has had a lot of impact on architecture and the way our cities and towns look; one of the more notable effects is the erection of broadcast towers everywhere. The effect is especially pronounced in “old world” European cities like Prague; check out this TV tower there, rising above the staid old buildings.
But that tower’s not even the weird part, oh no. Scroll down for a closer look at the things attached to that tower….
(via)
:: The wonderful world of Russian advertising through the years.
:: Not weirdness per se, but wow, the teaser poster for the new Star Trek reboot movie is awful. Seriously, that is one bad poster, and not “bad” as in “good”. How many people, other than hard-core geeks, even recognize the StarFleet insignia anymore? About the only real iconic thing from Trek anymore is the Enterprise herself, and apparently that’s being kept under wraps. I remain, as ever, unenthusiastic about this whole project, and this poster does nothing to get the blood pumping.
All for this week….
Here we go. I think we’re all caught up now: UI 44 is the MI6 Headquarters in London, England; otherwise known as the Home Base of James Bond, 007. (Although they didn’t start showing this building in the movies until GoldenEye; prior to that, Bond’s part of the operation — if not MI6 in its entirety — operated out of some other building, using the corporate name “Universal Exports” as a front.) And UI 46? That’s the 18th green at Augusta National, where some prominent golf thing is held yearly. The Masterfuls, or something like that. It’s the one where you get to wear a vermillion jacket if you win, I think. Two thousand Quatloos to the winners!
And now for the new one:
This is probably quite easy too, but you never know! Where are we? Rot-13 your guesses, folks.
So there’s this meme-thing percolating about in which you go through and pick your favorite album from each year you’ve been alive up to the present; I’ve been kicking that around for a while, long enough that now you’re supposed to do the same thing with movies. So, I guess I’ll combine them into one single post, although I won’t be picking exactly favorites, but things I’m very fond of from each year. (A few may be favorites, though.)
A key resource here is Wikipedia’s Years in music and Years in Film articles. In each case I’ll list an album first, followed by a movie. For albums, though, these aren’t necessarily albums I own, since the lists are heavily skewed to pop and rock. Rather they’re albums with which I am at least fairly familiar. And for the movies, just to make things a bit more interesting, I will not do the extremely obvious and pick the Star Wars movies released in 1977, 1980, 1983, 1999, 2002, or 2005. OK? OK!
1971
Tapestry, Carole King
The French Connection (I almost named Harold and Maude, which I saw for the first time just last week…I’ll be commenting on that film soon.)
1972
Hot August Night, Neil Diamond
The Poseidon Adventure
1973
The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd
American Graffiti
1974
Rush, Rush
The Three Musketeers (Tough choice here!)
1975
Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen (chosen after a coin flip; the loser was ABBA by, well, ABBA.)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (GAHHH! This year was tough!)
1976
Boston, Boston
Rocky (I haven’t seen much from that year, apparently)
1977
Bat Out of Hell, Meat Loaf
Saturday Night Fever (If you haven’t seen this, and you think it’s just camp disco fluff, see it. It’s one of the most cynical and bleak films I know.)
1978
Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack (It’s got “How Deep Is Your Love” on it….)
Superman (still the best superhero movie ever made…but that could change very soon now, with what I’m hearing about The Dark Knight….)
1979
The Wall, Pink Floyd
Time After Time (Just a terrific movie! I almost picked Moonraker, just because that was the first Bond movie I ever saw.)
1980
Flash Gordon, Queen
The Blues Brothers (Cheating, I guess, since I’ve only seen it in bits and pieces but lots of times, so I’ve probably seen well over eighty percent of it but I can only vaguely stitch it all together in my head into a whole movie.)
1981
Face Value, Phil Collins
Raiders of the Lost Ark (Had to go with this. No contest.)
1982
Nebraska, Bruce Springsteen
TRON
1983
Sports, Huey Lewis and the News (yeah, I liked these guys.)
Brainstorm
1984
MCMLXXXIV, Van Halen (DLR’s swan song with the band)
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension
1985
No Jacket Required, Phil Collins
Back to the Future
1986
Invisible Touch, Genesis (One of my favorite albums ever. Almost went with 5150 by Van Halen; I refuse to choose between DLR and Sammy. Both were terrific for different reasons.)
Laputa: Castle in the Sky (I had no idea the movie was that old)
1987
The Joshua Tree, U2 (Not a huge U2 fan, but I really like this album)
Broadcast News (“I’ll meet you at the place by the thing where we met that time” is one of my favorite movie lines ever. That, and “A lot of alliteration from anxious anchormen placed in powerful posts.”)
1988
Irish Heartbeat, Van Morrison and the Chieftains
Die Hard (even though I didn’t see it until it came out on video)
1989
Indigo Girls, Indigo Girls (I had a hard time with this year, and picked this because I remember liking them some years ago, but I haven’t given the Indigo Girls a second thought in a long time.)
The Abyss
1990
Reflections of Passion, Yanni (Shut up.)
Dances With Wolves
1991
The Silence of the Lambs, score by Howard Shore (I couldn’t pick anything from the album list)
Grand Canyon (Wow, that was a good year for movies…lots of titles on there I like a lot, so I picked this one randomly from the ones I like.)
1992
Unplugged, Eric Clapton
Unforgiven
1993
Tuesday Night Music Club, Sheryl Crow
The Fugitive (But this was a good year for movies! I nearly picked Jurassic Park or In the Line of Fire.)
1994
Live at the Acropolis, Yanni (I’m serious, folks. To this day I love this album.)
Legends of the Fall (I really think this movie is underrated.)
1995
The Tyranny of Beauty, Tangerine Dream (I used to really love TD, but I haven’t listened to them in a long time. They’re about due for a re-exploration, I think.)
Apollo 13 (Wow, there were a ton of good movies that year. I could as easily have picked Braveheart, Rob Roy, and a bunch of others.)
1996
Falling Into You, Celine Dion (Because, hey, as if my credibility wasn’t already circling the drain….)
That Thing You Do! (Did anybody besides me really like this flick? I remember mentioning it at work when it was out, and everybody in earshot went Ewwwww! What gives?!)
1997
Princess Mononoke, film score (Nothing on the pop list stood out for me…but I can’t believe it’s been that long since Pat Boone’s heavy metal experiment. I thought that was just a few years ago!)
Titanic (Yeah, yeah….)
1998
Shakespeare in Love (movie and score)
1999
Tears of Stone, the Chieftains
The Iron Giant
2000
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (score)
Almost Famous
2001
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (movie and score)
2002
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (movie and score)
2003
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (movie and score)
(OK, I know, that probably seems to be cheating, especially when up above I swore I would eschew the Star Wars movies on this meme-thing. Oh well. My blog, my rules!)
2004
Beyond the Sunset: The Romantic Collection, Blackmore’s Night (my first Blackmore’s Night album. This group rocks my world.)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2005
Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (score by John Williams. I didn’t say I couldn’t pick the score albums for the music portions of this quiz!)
Kingdom of Heaven
2006
The Village Lanterne, Blackmore’s Night (See?)
Casino Royale
2007
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (movie and score)
For the most recent years, I should point out that I tend to be quite behind-the-times as far as the latest stuff to come out. I rarely explore stuff as it happens, preferring to follow a few things I like a lot but in most cases allow a consensus to form as to what’s really worth my time. (And even then, I’ll often ignore that consensus anyway.)
So there you are: my life in music and movies, or something like that.
It’s been a while since I bitched about For Better or For Worse, and since the strip is apparently “ending” sometime soon (next month, I believe), I won’t have too many more opportunities.
So! One of the annoying tics of this strip (one of oh so many) is the way Lynn Johnston so often seems to find it funny to close out a strip with a really lame pun, like so:
And when these lame puns take place, everyone involved in that strip ends up standing there, grinning like idiots at the lame wordplay. It took me a while to figure out what this reminded me of, but it finally hit me a few hours ago: these are the comic strip version of the final scene of an episode of CHiPS! Skip to the three-minute mark and you’ll see what I mean.
Of course, this kind of thing was done definitively on Police Squad!:
I should figure out a way to end my posts with lame freeze-frames!
A man I went to college with, Rick Tibbott, died the other day. He’d been battling cancer for some time, and the cancer finally won. Rick was older than me, by a year or two or three. That means that he was too damned young to go.
Rick and I were more than acquaintances, although we were never really friends either; we shared some good friends in common, but he and I were never particularly close. Sometimes I even got the feeling that he plain didn’t like me all that much, which frankly wouldn’t bother me, given what I know of the person I was in college. To this day I’m amazed to have reached graduation with a number of friends and a future wife.
Rick and I were in the band together, and we were both music majors for a time (before I switched to Philosophy). We shared the trumpet as our major instruments, although our band director had the odd habit of converting a trumpet player or two to the euphonium if that section was hurting for players, so as far as the band went, Rick was our lead euphonium player. I don’t much recall that I ever got to hear his trumpet playing, but I recall him being pretty decent on the euphonium.
(For those only familiar with symphony orchestras, you’ve likely never seen a euphonium before. It’s kind of an odd instrument, meant I suppose to add another voice to the brass choir in the typical concert band or wind ensemble. It is sometimes called the “baritone”, and that’s pretty much what it is: a valved instrument whose sound is a sort-of cross between a trombone and a French horn.)
I’m trying hard to come up with stuff to say about Rick. He’s a person I knew, and I well remember his face and his voice. He was the director of the college Pep Band for the time he was there, and he used to get freakishly angry with me when I would ignore his tempos and charge ahead on my own; the rest of the band would follow me because I was the loudest player there, and Rick would fume and fume and fume some more. (With good reason, obviously. Like I said above: in college I was, putting it mildly, a putz.)
Rick was also the utter stereotype of a small-town Iowa kid. He wore overalls a lot, and when I started wearing mine as well a few years later, more than a few people asked me if I was going for the “Rick Tibbott look”. He also was the small-town person who had never been to a large town of any sort until his college years. When I was a sophomore, our annual band tour’s itinerary was announced one day, in some detail. That year we were touring mainly in Colorado, with a couple of stops on the way in Nebraska, the first of those being Omaha. Our day in Omaha was to include a visit to the Omaha Zoo, and on the itinerary, the guy planning the tour, who was one of Rick’s best friends, had written: “Ricky has never been to a zoo before! Wheeeeee!” Upon reading that in the band rehearsal, Rick immediately raised his hand and insisted that he couldn’t possibly be the only member of the band (eighty or so members strong) to have never been to a zoo. Rick was not amused when the show of hands he demanded failed to materialize. He really was the only person in the band who had never seen a zoo before. I think he enjoyed it. It was more than eighteen years ago, but at that time at least, the Omaha Zoo was pretty impressive.
I don’t really know what became of Rick after he graduated, aside from that he became a music teacher somewhere in Iowa. I think I saw him last the next fall after his graduation, when he returned for Homecoming. Maybe once more too, but I don’t know. For some reason he always found it important to try and remember the name of my hometown (Allegany), and when I saw him that Homecoming, he greeted me: “Allegany, right? I found it on a map!” I was never sure why that interested him so, but it did. I think that Rick was genuinely surprised that the town I came from, in New York, wasn’t much bigger than the town he’d grown up in himself. My town was closer to more stuff, and that’s pretty much the entire difference.
Over the last week or so, I’ve received a number of forwarded e-mails from people in Rick’s circle that his health was deteriorating, that he’d entered hospice care at his home, and finally, on Sunday afternoon, that he had finally died, also at his home. He died too damned young, but he at least died surrounded by people who loved him. So, in the end, Rick Tibbott got about the only real consolation prize this life of ours offers.
So long, Rick. I’ll think of you next time I’m walking around a zoo.
(Since writing this I’ve filled myself in on details from Rick’s life from his obituary. I didn’t know he had three children. Sigh.)
UPDATE: Broken link fixed (thanks, Paul!).
As part of my “Less of me in 2008” regimen, I’ve adopted quite a few healthier eating habits, one of which is leaner protein obtained from more diverse sources. So here are two of my newest loves, in one plate: two filets of tilapia (lightly floured and then pan-sauteed in herbed oil), served atop a bed of Quinoa. I’m really digging Quinoa: its texture is very close to that of couscous (which I adore), with a nuttier flavor that also soaks up sauces very well (like barbecue). Quinoa is also a good source of protein. Yay protein! (No, I’m not on any kind of Atkins diet, but I have upped my protein intake and lowered my carbohydrate intake accordingly.)
On another food note, I’ve been amused by the existence at Wendy’s of a burger called the Baconator, which has two beef patties, two slices of cheese, and six slices of bacon. One of these burgers has 830 calories. Yeah, I want to have one someday. But only under very special circumstances — such as, say, if I find myself on Death Row and I’m picking my last meal.
But I’ve despaired of having a Baconator, because a burger of that bacony magnitude can’t be washed down with a mere large Coke, right? A burger like that cries out for a beverage also sent from the highest slopes of Mt. Olympus.
Well, such a drink exists. Behold, my friends, the Large Heath Shake from Baskin Robbins.
A large one of these, at 32 oz, contains 2,310 calories. Imagine that: there is a drink in existence at a prominent national chain that has almost three times the calories of the Wendy’s Baconator.
That would be a meal to end all meals, wouldn’t it? I mean, literally. If I’m ever on Death Row, this is my last meal: a Baconator and a large Heath shake. Of course, if I wanted to do this meal right now, the burger would be pretty easy, since there’s a Wendy’s a mile down the road. Unfortunately, my nearest Baskin Robbins is…hmmmm, it’s only about 4 miles away…and there’s another Wendy’s right near there….
Gotta go.
Here we go:
:: Add this to the potpourri of border crossing identification options available to people crossing between the US and Canada by land. (This may be right up my family’s alley; the only “international travel” we ever do is to drive to Canada on occasion. Obviously if we’d have to get real passports if we were to ever do some real international traveling, but I don’t foresee that happening anytime in the foreseeable future, so maybe we’ll look into these.)
(BTW, Alan: your commenters are lunatics. When did that happen, anyway? And why are the post titles of WNYMedia blogs displayed using some kind of Flash player thing, thus disabling Firefox’s handy-dandy right-click menu? Specifically, its “Copy Link Location” function? That’s kinda goofy, if you ask me. Which you didn’t. Oh well….)
:: Skipping this particular aspect of traditional schooling (i.e., the preoccupation with and emphasis on looks, teen trends, and the rest) has been good for my wallet, I’ll tell you. (The Daughter has never yet become afflicted with the whole “fashion” thing…but I’m sure it’s coming, he said with dread….)
:: I AM self-centered. I LOVE writing about myself, and my thoughts. It is WHY I do it. If you don’t like that kind of writing, then that is totally cool – but don’t get angry at me because I don’t sit in a pile of my own outrage every day after reading the New York Times and then blog about it. (Elsewhere in this post Sheila says that she keeps 98% of her life off her blog. I’m not sure how to feel about that, because she’s so amazing in the way she writes about that little two percent…but then, many things are better when their mysteries are kept as such, no?)
:: What did the drummer get on his IQ test ? (Ahhh, musician jokes! Sheets full of these were always passed around various rehearsals back in the college days. My favorite was “What’s worse than a flute?” New blog found via Lynn, by the way.)
:: Somehow I can’t imagine the Apple design engineers all getting together and saying, “Women won’t date us for some completely unknown reason. What can we do to get back at them?” (I’ll bet that’s exactly what happened!)
:: Next time y’all hear from me, I’ll be a Mrs. (Well, we still haven’t heard from her, so she must not be a Missus yet, right? No? That’s not how that logic works? Oh well…congrats and best of all possible wishes to Erin and Rand. I’ve not met Rand personally, but Erin sure is a swell person, so that’s at least one half of a terrific couple.)
All for this week. Back next week with more. Unless I come to my senses.
No guesses on UI 44 yet? That’s odd, especially considering how many times the world has been saved by a guy who works here….
But UI 45 was pegged, as I thought it would be, as Land’s End in Cornwall, Great Britain. Five hundred Quatloos to the winner!
And now for this week’s location. It’s immediately obvious what kind of location this is, so we’re looking for the most specific answer possible:
Where are we? Rot-13 your guesses, folks.
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
