All Buffalonians need to read this Matthew Yglesias post, which I found to be utterly hilarious. (Unintentionally, no doubt — but I was truly tickled at Matthew’s epiphany here. He’s in Chicago now for YearlyKos, but the post has nothing to do with politics.)
Poetical Excursion
I’m thinking of resurrecting this old series of mine, wherein I once in a while posted a poem that’s particularly meaningful to me. Here is Robert Burns’s “My Luve is Like a Red, Red Rose”:
O my Luve’s like a red, red rose,
That’s newly sprung in June.
O my Luve’s like the melodie,
That’s sweetly play’d in tune.As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I,
And I will luve thee still, my Dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry.Till a’ the seas gang dry, my Dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun!
And I will luve thee still, my Dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.And fare thee weel, my only Luve!
And fare thee weel, a while!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho’ it were ten thousand mile!
“Till a’ the seas gang dry”. It should always feel like that.
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Walkability
I’ve seen this walkability test in a number of places, and I finally was able to get my neighborhood’s score: 42 out of 100. Oh well.
Of course, this doesn’t imply that there aren’t places to walk. I’ve been walking nearly every day this summer, roughly for an hour at a time, in part of an attempt to start living more healthily. There are plenty of places to walk about. If “walkability” denotes being able to walk to conduct normal errands, then yeah, I don’t live in the most walkable of locales. But walking for the sake of walking? I’ve got it made.
(Well, almost. One of the only great flaws I can see in Buffalo’s Southtowns region, which I love dearly and never want to leave, is the lack of a nice paved bike and walking path down here. The River Path in Tonawanda and the Ellicott Creek paths are nice, but they’re at least ten miles away from Casa Jaquandor. West Seneca has a wonderful soccer field facility that’s ringed by a mile-long paved path, but for change-of-scenery, it gets a little old — and when the soccer tournaments get going, the place gets incredibly congested. (Which reminds me, people: the path is a path, not a place to set up your folding chairs. Grrr.))
Several days a week, if I want to get my walking in, I’ve had to get up at five in the morning to do it. I detest getting out of bed that early, really and truly, but I love the way the world looks in the hour just before dawn. This past Monday, when I got up it had finished raining just minutes before and was then clearing off, so everything was slightly damp, and mist was rising from the lawns and fields. To the East, the sky was reddening with the approaching dawn, and to the West, the full moon — now red and hazy — was sinking toward the horizon. One way the Sun, the other way the Moon.
Forty-two out of one hundred? On that morning, I gave my neighborhood a perfect walkability score.
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Good thing the Devil didn’t go to Carnegie Hall….
For some reason, the local country station — which I hear occasionally at work — plays “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” daily, which drives me nuts because I consider it to be one of the worst songs in the history of musical expression. And not just human musical expression. Human song, whale song, Vulcan song, Gungan song…”Devil Went Down to Georgia” is worse than all of it.
First of all, the whole idea’s just goofy; second, there’s the sad fact that the fiddle playing in that song is, well, crap. I always break out laughing when I hear what’s supposed to be this astonishing playing by the Devil, which turns out to be this scratchy shit that would get jeered off the stage at just about any place where anyone knows anything about good fiddling or violin playing. Seriously, the Devil is so bad that it’s no surprise that “Johnny” beats him; frankly, the Devil couldn’t even rosin the bow of a Natalie MacMaster or an Alison Krauss or an Eileen Ivers, and Itzhak Perlman could blow the Devil right off the stage just by playing a C-major scale.
Anyway. “Devil Went Down to Georgia” is the worst song ever.
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Unidentified Earth 13
Here we go again! Last week’s entry only merited a single guess, which was of course correct, since it was a fairly easy one: the Atomium in Brussels, Belgium, which is one of the coolest buildings anywhere.
And now for this week’s entry:
Where are we?
(Rot-13 all answers, please!)
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Lord….
OK, I need all of my readers from Minneapolis to chime in here, as soon as possible. Let me know you’re all right.
UPDATE: This is the bridge that collapsed:
Here’s the bridge’s location in relation to downtown Minneapolis. The bridge is at the far right; that’s the Hubert Humphrey Metrodome near the middle, and downtown Minneapolis dominating the lefthand side of the image.
How horrible.
(I’ll keep this post at the top of the blog until tomorrow.)
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A brief quiz thing
Stolen from Incurable Insomniac:
1. If there were no blogs, what would you be doing right now?
Reading and writing. Being more productive.
2. If you had to spend one year living alone in a remote cabin, what would you spend your time doing?
Reading and writing. If I have electricity, listening to music and watching movies and stuff on DVD. Seeing how long I could grow my beard before I finally gave in and trimmed it. (I’m guessing, not very long. I get antsy when it approaches a half-inch in length.) Chop firewood. Learn to fish. Sleep. Swim fully-clothed in remote mountain streams. Drink tea. Sing at the top of my lungs.
And that’s what I’d do by ten in the morning!
3. If you could go back in time, what one piece advice would you give yourself?
To when? If I’m talking to my five-year-old self, I’d say, “Smile when they take the damn picture.” If I’m talking to my thirteen-year-old self, I’d say, “You know, maybe that guy’s not blowing smoke up your ass when he mentions that you should be on the swim team every time he sees you.” If I’m talking to my seventeen-year-old self, I’d say, “You’re barely going to remember her in ten years, so stop acting like an idiot stalker and move on.” If I’m talking to my twenty-one-year-old self, I’d say, “Start writing now.” If I’m talking to my twenty-six-year-old self, I’d say…actually, forget that one, it’s a bit kinky. If I’m talking to my thirty-year-old self, I’d say, “Don’t take that telesales job, and call back that grocery store.” If I’m talking to my thirty-three-year-old self, I’d say, “Get ready, because this is when it all gets worse.”
If I’m talking to myself yesterday, I’d say, “Life starts when you damn well say it does.”
4. “If you really knew me you would know that…”
I’d walk through fire if you asked me to.
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“High school is a battlefield for your heart.”
Well, while I’m waiting for the still-unannounced release of Season Three of Once and Again, this fall’s reissue of My So-Called Life, by the same creative team, should tide me over. What a great show that was…all nineteen episodes of it.
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When special places become a bit less special
A few years ago, when I discovered that other people in Buffalo were blogging, a community of sorts started to develop, in fits and starts. Gradually that community got larger and larger, and as it did so, it started to separate itself out a bit into somewhat-discrete groups, ultimately with two “collectives” basically becoming the big wheels of it all. Now one of those collectives has caught the other behaving badly, and is itself behaving as though it has pulled off some kind of grand journalistic expose of the kind you used to see in the heyday of Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes.
Meanwhile, I’m sitting here at my computer, plugging away at the only blog I’ve ever owned, as the only person who’s ever written the posts here, wondering why it is we never have BloggerCon’s anymore. Now I know. We stopped being a bunch of happy people with blogs, and instead declared ourselves — well, some of us, anyway — “citizen journalists”, pratting on about “New Media” and “Information for the 21st Century” and all that jazz.
Oh well. Obviously the Buffalo blogging community couldn’t stay the way I liked it forever — but it would have been nice had it stayed that way a little longer.
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Sentential Links #108
One hundred eight and counting:
:: I swear, that ramp-up to the final battle felt like Mousecateer roll call (“And now here’s Oliver Wood, who we haven’t seen hide-ner-hair of since Book 3, come to join the fray!”). (Remember how lots of people complained about too many “Classic Trilogy” characters showing up in the Star Wars Prequels? No such complaints about the Potter books. Spoiler filled post; new blog to me.)
:: I couldn’t help but wonder why people live in some of those spots…what took them there? What holds them? (I’ve often perused the map of Oregon and wondered the same thing.)
The real men for them are the civilians on 24 torturing suspected terrorists for an hour each week, keeping the lil’est tough guys safe from harm with hard sadism and easy answers. That’s where this wingnut war is really being fought. With popcorn.
:: The first step into making the hollow book is to select a book. (Crap, and I sold my copy of Atlas Shrugged years ago! It would have been perfect, since in terms of content it’s already hollow. Still, this looks like a really cool project. I may have to make one of my own someday.)
:: The FCC is so concerned about protecting the public from indecency that it doles out huge fines for swear words that accidentally go out over the air. And God forbid for one nanosecond America sees Janet Jackson’s breast. Our whole nation could collapse. If terrorists really want to bring down this country they should organize suicide streakers. (Had I read this post yesterday, a couple of the links therein would have made the Burst of Weirdness. Naughty language, but on a “meta” level.)
:: With you here, I’d still be happy. (For some reason I’m drawn to stories of heartbreak like a moth to a candle these days.)
All for this week.