Posts

Posted on

Inspiring? Moi???

Judith Heartsong has bestowed upon me the Inspirational Blogger Award, which is rather like the Thinking Blogger Award, only it rewards, you know, inspiration. I’m tremendously flattered, inasmuch as I find it amazing anyone would be inspired by my blatherings in this space, but hey, I’ve always found it prudent to undervalue my own contributions to as great a degree as possible. And really, I’m glad that it wasn’t called the Perspirational Blogger Award. (Which, in normal summertime temps, I could win in a walk, to be honest. Hence the fact that I generally never wear the overalls between May and September.)

So where was I? Well, as part of the Inspirational Blogger gig, I now have to name five recipients myself. The following inspire me (as do many others):

:: Belladonna’s Mind Muffins, whose spirit of life-as-adventure (or slapstick!) makes her blog a daily read of mine.

:: Mrs. Mental Multivitamin, whose simple three-word philosophy might have been admired by Moses (it would, after all, have fit onto a single — and smaller — stone tablet).

:: Erin, who likes words.

:: I very much doubt she’ll accept this tag, but I find Dorcasina‘s blogging terribly inspiring, in the face of circumstances that I wish weren’t so.

:: He’d probably think it weird, but PZ Myers‘s fiery commitment to science inspires me.

So there we go. Inspiring, no?

Share This Post

Posted on

Sentential Links #107

Installment One Hundred the Seventh! Let us commence!

:: I got through surgery and had my gallbladder removed. (You know, I was remiss in wishing Shamus well before his surgery, so I’ll toss him a Sentential Link after it. Because that’s totally the same thing. Best to him for his recovery!)

:: Don’t even get me started on the gnashing of teeth and gouging of eyes I am reduced to when ‘impact’ is used as anything but a noun. (You know what’s weird? Every person I’ve ever heard expressing this sentiment is Canadian. Is there something in the Canadian water that so impacts the linguistic centers of their brains?)

:: My marriage, unfortunately, is hanging on by a thread – a frazzled one at that. (My commiserations. And your five questions are on the way!)

:: Is this really a breast cancer blog? (Brand new blog to me. Check it out. In an odd coincidence, I’ve also started faithfully reading Funky Winkerbean over the last couple of weeks. I hope that this blogger’s breast cancer tale has a better ending.)

:: If you’ve ever taken a creative writing class, you probably had to do that assignment where you take a line from a famous poem and build your own poem out of it. (Oh thank God, no, I didn’t. But then, it now occurs to me that I’ve never taken a creative writing class. Another brand-new blog to me this week.)

:: I’ve said this before but I cannot stress this enough: I have an irrational fear of mayonnaise. I cannot abide the stuff. When that commercial for squeezable mayo comes on television, I mash my eyes shut and plug my ears and go “LA LA LA LA LA!” I can’t handle it. (Yet another brand new blog to me this week! I’m certainly becoming quite the out-going denizen of Blogistan, eh?)

:: But how did you discover Superman and Satan were the same person? (I swear I didn’t make this up.)

:: The whims of fate have tossed us like tumbleweeds. Now we have lived in this place for what seems like our average stay in a community. Out of sheer habit, I’m feeling like it’s time to move again. (Well, Buffalo always needs good people! You’d always be welcomed here. And we have seasons and stuff.)

:: The format doesn’t need to be perfect, but seriously don’t switch back and forth between stage play and screenplay format. (Are you allowed to do spec scripts in stage play format? Because, truth to tell, I hate writing in screenplay format. Hate it. It makes me feel as though seven of every ten keystrokes are hitting the TAB key to get things in the proper place.)

:: He said of his wife, simply, “I can’t live without her.” (I don’t care that this post is almost three years old. Read it, if nothing else from this batch of links. Blogging politics is one thing. Blogging a love story is something else.)

And so we wrap up for this week.

Share This Post

Posted on

Deathly Hallowing

Time for some first impressions on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which I finished reading about an hour ago. I’ll color-obscure the text here, so you’ll have to highlight to read it.

Oh, and for the purposes of the comments thread for this post, I grant full spoiler power, seeing as how I’m writing spoilers in the post itself. So if you don’t want spoilers, don’t highlight the text below, and don’t read the comments, either!

These are all just random thoughts, which I’m plopping out there as they come to me.

:: I love that Rowling had it come down to Harry versus Voldemort, for all the marbles, in front of everybody. That was a masterstroke.

:: There’s a little too much deus ex machina in the front half of the book. Too many times Harry and company seem to get the key bit of information by sheer luck, with one particular instance — when they just happen to be huddling somewhere in the countryside under the Invisible Cloak when a group of people who happen to know an awful lot about what’s going on just happen to pick that exact spot to sit down and have a long conversation — standing out.

:: Hey, David Weber! This is how you stop your final battle in order to have an infodump. JK Rowling has her stylistic faults, but she is the simple best writer on the planet at conveying plot information without grinding everything to a halt while she does so.

:: The single best thing in the book, and maybe the best moment in the entire series, is the moment of Severus Snape’s death. He expires as he gazes one last time in Lily Potter’s eyes (since we’ve been told many times that Harry has Lily’s eyes).

:: Snape was a good guy after all. I always thought so. Except for when I didn’t. However, it didn’t play out the way I thought it might: turns out that Dumbledore didn’t need to swear Snape to an unbreakable vow in order to commit Snape to killing him. (Of course, the interesting question there is, what if Dumbledore had not been already doomed to die?)

:: At times, the Death Eaters seem like Imperial Storm Troopers, don’t they?

:: Well, a Weasley had to die sooner or later, right? I’m surprised Rowling didn’t mine that for one last bit about everyone’s inability to tell them apart.

:: I knew Neville would have some big role to play! Yay!

:: I was completely wrong about the Dursleys! Boo! I thought for sure there’d be some small way in which they turned out to be important in the end, but not so much. Just a bit of character growth for Dudley. (But I do think Rowling missed an opportunity here. In the Epilogue, it would have been cool if another of the new students heading to Hogwarts had been Dudley’s, yes? Another Muggle-born?)

:: I liked that the events of Dumbledore’s life as depicted in the tell-all book are true, and that it’s all left up to interpretation.

:: What’s next for JK Rowling? Hogwarts: The Next Generation? Something else entirely? Or will she just put down her pen and bask in the fact that she’s made Harold Bloom’s life miserable? No idea, here — but for my part, thanks, Ms. Rowling. You told a hell of a tale here.

And there it is. So long, Harry. It’s been fun.

Share This Post

Posted on

Sunday Burst of Weirdness

Different kinds of weirdness from the week gone by:

:: I knicked this photo from this post by Neddie Jingo, because I thought it was hilarious. For all I know, this may be one of those types of graffiti that are known the world over and which I somehow have completely missed, but anyway:

In conjunction with this John Scalzi post, I envision John just standing there, hitting the button over and over again, chortling like a Vegas gambling addict who can’t stop putting money in the slots, as he basks in vending-machine bacony goodness.

:: I work with this guy at The Store:

Here he is again, in a longer one, with some other guy:

:: Remember in Wayne’s World, when Wayne and Garth engage in the pastime of lying face-up about twenty feet from the leading edge of one of O’Hare’s runways? Well, check this out:

Here’s another, and note the dust and wind that gets kicked up by the jet’s wake:

MeFi has an entire thread about this kind of thing right now. That airport has a really short runway, with water pretty much flanking in on all sides. Here’s the cockpit’s point of view of that same approach:

And here’s an entire gallery of landing sites to test the mettle of any pilot. Frankly, as neat as the St. Maarten Island landing looks, this one would scare the living crap out of me.

I wouldn’t land there with Han Solo at the controls!

Share This Post

Posted on

The Interview Meme, yet again! (Part Deux)

Roger hit me with some questions from the Great Interview Meme, and I’m now getting ’round to answering them. Because I am just that prompt, let me tell you!

1. So what ARE the other bloggers, other than yourself, specifically griping about when they talk about “the folks in Albany”?

It’s generally a short-hand for the state government, which in our state is rife with patronage, corrupt, devoted to maintaining the status quo of power, et cetera and so forth. Basically, “the folks in Albany” is a shorthand for “the giant f***ing albatross that’s been hung around the neck of a region (Upstate NY) that is getting really really tired of shipping all of its homegrown talent elsewhere, like we’re the Pittsburgh Pirates of the nation.”

In truth, I don’t even think of Albany as a place, in the sense that there are people living there who need to get groceries and fix the lawn mower and who worry about their back pain or get nervous about the fact that the car they just paid off three months ago is now making a suspicious knocking noise. A couple of years ago I received for review from GMR several CDs by a Celtic band from the Albany era (Hair of the Dog, to be precise), and I actually remember thinking, “Wow, they have music in Albany?”

So yeah, Albany is basically Mordor. With freeways running through it.

2. There’s a new movie, You Kill Me, with Ben Kingsley as a Polish mob hit man from Buffalo. Is there a Polish mob in Buffalo, and will you see the movie?

If there’s a Polish mob here, I know nothing about it. Really, I have absolutely no idea. Maybe one of my Buffalo readers can say something here? As for the movie, I kind of doubt it. Mob stories just tend to not interest me much.

3. How do you think the current and upcoming restrictions on travel between the U.S. and Canada affect the border economies, particularly the Buff/NF area?

Alan Bedenko has been all over this, but generally I think it’s a whole bunch of incredibly stupid policy, which makes it perfectly in sync with the rest of the current Administration’s “War on Terror”. I’m a fan of trade and open borders (as open as possible), and in a time when the Niagara Frontier is suffering economically during an era of ever-greater globalization, sticking us behind a fence just makes me very sad.

4. How do you feel about the image of Buffalo as a loser? Four Super Bowl losses in a row (four more games than some teams have ever been in), snowy (even though Syracuse, on a year-to-year basis gets more), economically depressed (well, OK, there’s something to that).

No other way to say it: it pisses me off. I get really tired of “media narratives”, whether they’re in politics or regional stuff like Buffalo’s rep. It’s just laziness: “Oh look, it’s snowing in Buffalo again. Send a camera crew!” Bah.

5. Do you know the lyrics to “Erie Canal”? Did you learn them in school, or where? Have you heard the Springsteen version? Does it sound different to you from the one you learned?

I don’t know the lyrics any longer, but we did do that song way back in grade school. Funny thing is, I distinctly remember doing that song at my grade school in Portland, OR, which makes me think that the historical significance of the Canal is sometimes undersold. As for the Springsteen version, I don’t know it, but will look it up.

OK, if anyone else wants any questions, feel free to ask, since this rescusitates the Great Interview Meme!

Share This Post

Posted on

I win!

Well, the tenth time was the charm: last week’s Unidentified Earth location has remained Unidentified, which means I win, and therefore I get all your Quatloo’s. Heh!

As for the solution, the two hints probably weren’t as helpful — but the second one, referring to the movie that used that location coming out in 1969, pinpoints my favorite James Bond film, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The location is Piz Gloria, a revolving restaurant that sits atop the Schilthorn in the Swiss Alps. In the movie, Piz Gloria was the hideout of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, where he was masquerading as “Count Balthasar de Bleuchamp”, and using Piz Gloria as a facility for “allergy research”. (Turns out he was really developing a biological weapon for his next diabolical scheme.)

The construction of Piz Gloria was actually partly funded by the film’s production company, in exchange for exclusive filming rights. As you look at the Google satellite, shot, the round conical shape is the roof of the restaurant, while the circular platform off to the left (connected by walkway) is a helipad. Piz Gloria is also accessible by cable car from below.

I think the location was also obfuscated a bit by virtue of the location having been apparently imaged during summer, when the Alps are quite a bit less snowy, except on their shadowed north faces. The almost “lunar” look to the location helped make it a lot different from in the film, when it’s all snow as far as the eye can see (which it had to have been, really, since James Bond could hardly have escaped from Piz Gloria on skis had it been otherwise).

So there you go.

Share This Post

Posted on

But what’s the deal with THE DURSLEYS???

Cracked.com’s “Six Questions the Final Harry Potter Book Had Better F***ing Answer:

It’s expected that the main narrative of The Deathly Hallows will be about Harry’s hunt for the remaining Horcruxes before his final confrontation with Voldemort. If this is true, it means that the final Harry Potter Book will have the same plot as basically every RPG ever made, what with Harry having to “collect the Seven Important Things” to defeat the “loosely explained magic barrier” which will allow him to access the “final dungeon,” and in the end he’ll still be a “massive nerd.”

Geez. I hope we didn’t come this far to have JK Rowling end up channeling Terry Brooks. Wouldn’t that be a let-down.

Personally, I think it would be funny if the book ended with Harry and friends sitting around a table at the Hogwarts dining room, munching Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans, wondering if at any moment one of Voldemort’s agents would burst in and kill them all — and then the last page ended in mid-sentence, with seven or eight blank pages following thereafter, making people wonder if their book was somehow affected by a screwup by the publishing company….

Share This Post

Posted on

Toonz

Apparently I was tagged the other day by Paul on a quiz-meme thing where I’m supposed to write about between 5 and 10 “songs” (which I loosely interpret as, well, any musical work at all) that have had a large impact on me. Hmmmmm…well, I’ll try to stay away from my “usual suspects”, i.e., works or songs that I’ve waxed poetic about in this space before. With maybe one or two exceptions.

:: “Building the Barn”, by Maurice Jarre, from Witness. OK, Witness is one of my all-time favorite movies. I think it’s damned near flawless. The only faults I personally find with it are that (a) the subplot with Hochleitner’s (Alexander Godunov) jealousy of John Book’s relationship with Rachel is just slightly overplayed, and (b) the score by Maurice Jarre is, with one giant exception, disappointing brooding synthesizer crap.

The one exception, though, is absolutely remarkable: the cue that underscores the wonderful barn-raising set piece. I almost wonder if Jarre intentionally made the rest of his score as nondescript as it is, so this one cue would stand out, but stand out it does. At the outset it sounds almost like a retread of Pachelbel’s Canon in D, but then it goes into its own thing.

On a more personal note, whenever I listen to this track now (a stunning version for full orchestra, as opposed to synth, can be heard on this album), I think back to this day, and the time I spent doing something rather like a barnraising, and at the side of my best friend.

:: “Wonderful World”, by Sam Cooke. Featured in the other great scene from Witness (although in a version not sung by Cooke). I love Sam Cooke, and this is my favorite of his songs.

:: Symphony No. 2 in E minor, by Sergei Rachmaninov. OK, here’s one that I’ve waxed poetic about before, but I can’t help it. I often hear Ravel’s Bolero described as “erotic” or “sensual”, but damned if I can’t ever hear those qualities. But you know what? I was listening to the Rachmaninov Second a week or two back, and, well, I can’t help but use adjectives like that to describe it, the way it constantly ebbs and flows, the epic nature of its emotion. I don’t usually describe music in such stark terms, but in the Rachmaninov Second I hear the distillation of love itself. I don’t know how to say it any other way.

:: Irish Tune from County Derry, by Percy Grainger. This was the first piece we played in band, on the first day of my freshman year of college. I think my love of Celtic music was born here. I love this lush and gorgeous setting, with its ingeniously concealed dissonances.

:: “The Portrait”, by James Horner, from Titanic. Bite me, Titanic haters. I love this movie, and that’s a fact. The music, however, is another story — there’s some awfully good stuff here from Horner, as well as some tremendously lazy stuff, and the “action” writing during the sinking is mostly rhythmic thrashing. While I don’t hate “My Heart Will Go On”, I will certainly admit that it’s been played to death to the point where it’s pretty much a complete cliche of a song. However, the solo piano rendition of that theme, heard during the scene where Jack sketches the nude Rose, is soft, tasteful, and delicately beautiful.

:: “The Grand Finale”, by Danny Elfman, from Edward Scissorhands. I’m not the biggest Elfman fan in the world, but he’s had his moments, and this track contains about nine of them.

:: “Inside Your Heaven”, by Carrie Underwood. The tune’s nothing groundbreaking, and the lyrics are pretty much your standard insipid pop-ballad poetics. And yet, I love this song so. Shoot me. Right now.

:: “I Dreamed a Dream”, from Les Miserables. How I want to see this show, someday, seeing as how I know every note in its score from listening to the complete recordings for so long. “No song unsung, no wine untasted….”

:: “One for my Baby (and One More for the Road)”. Classic song. I love the version by Frank Sinatra off his Only the Lonely album. Can’t listen to that album too much, though. It’s never an easy listen, and these days, it would probably drive me to either suicide or body-piercing. Maybe even a tattoo or something.

OK, that’s all. I guess I’m supposed to tag people now, but I think all the people I’d normally tag have already done this one, so feel free to grab-and-go, folks.

Share This Post

Posted on

Unidentified Earth 11

Since last week’s entry ran on Friday instead of Thursday, I’m going to leave that one unidentified until tomorrow. I can’t believe one made it almost an entire week! Yay, me!

But for now, I’m getting back on the Thursday schedule, which means a new installment. I have a feeling this one will be quite a lot easier than last week’s.

OK, where are we?

(Don’t forget to use rot-13 to encode your answers, folks!)

Share This Post

ForgottenStars.net

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

Skip to content ↓