The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Time for this week’s edition of Unidentified Earth, wherein my readers identify satellite images of cool stuff on Earth. With astonishing speed, I might add.
Last week’s was probably too easy; it was the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This week’s is probably just as easy, but hey, you never know. Here it is:
Well? Where are we?
Yes, I’m going to complain about American Idol. Scroll past this if you’d prefer to believe that a smart and level-headed fellow like myself shouldn’t be watching such pop tripe.
Melinda Doolittle blows Blake off the stage every time she opens her mouth to sing. Blake is a one-trick pony, and it’s not even that great a trick to begin with. Ugh.
OK, I’m done.
It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.
Why quote this monologue of Samwise Gamgee’s from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers? Well:
I know, there’s no chance it can happen. But there is a chance, isn’t there? Sure there is.
And if that bit of movie dialog seems a bit overblown for something so prosaic as a hockey game, howzabout this:
When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up.
Those first three games? The castles that sank into the swamp.
OK, I’m stretching here. But still: one win is in, and the Sabres have home ice for two of the remaining three that they have to win.
(BTW, I was listening to Mike Schopp and the Bulldog this afternoon — for you non-Buffalo folks, those are two sports radio guys — and Bulldog made the point that the only real hope he was clinging to was the admitted stretch that the Boston Red Sox pulled off a comeback from a 3-0 deficit in the American League Championship Series in 2004. Schopp rejected this, on the basis that hockey is completely different from baseball in that the key matchups pretty much stay the same from one hockey game to the next, where in baseball, in the next game you always have a new pitcher for the next game; and therefore, series momentum means far more in hockey than it does in baseball.
But if that‘s the case, shouldn’t baseball have seen more than one example of a team coming back from a 3-0 series deficit in its hundred-plus year history? Prior to the Sox doing it in 2004, there were only two instances of teams coming back from such a deficit in a best-of-seven series in all of pro sports. Those two were in…hockey.)
Seems like two weeks since I did one of these…oh yeah, it’s been two weeks since I did one of these. At least I had a reasonable excuse for letting down my loyal and constant readers!
:: I’m not showing you the rest of this strip, because these panels perfectly set up the Dennis the Menace strip we’d all like to see, the one where Mr. Wilson murders Dennis with a pair of garden shears. (Yeah, two from the same blog. I couldn’t choose which to use, so I tossed all of my self-imposed rules aside and used ’em both. Because I can.)
:: Sometimes, those of us who choose to find joy or (at least refrain from dwelling on all that is somehow less than what we had hoped or dreamed) are dismissed as being less transparent or true than others. (Is anybody besides me getting the vibe that M-MV might be winding down? That would be…bad.)
What I am is a You-ist.
:: As I’ve said before, I do not deny the existence of God, but there are some things that I do deny. Many of them actually assume that God exists, so what I mean then is that “if there is a God, I deny that he is like x.” (I’m becoming interested in “spiritual journey” blogs lately. This one, which I found a couple of weeks ago although I don’t recall where, is by a person who has left the Mormon church.)
:: There is only one major issue on which I stand completely alone, reviled by all. And it’s this: Budweiser (by which I mean the real Budweiser, the beer which has been sold under that brand by Anheuser-Busch since 1876) is really quite a good beer. (I was all set to note that I’ve never understood the nearly universal loathing for Bud that I hear from people who drink beer, but then I remembered that to the best of my recollection, I’ve never actually had Bud. I’ve had Bud Lite, but that’s not the same thing. And besides, Yeungling’s better anyway, so I have no use for Bud.)
:: I hate Budweiser because it is lousy beer. I’d say it tastes like crap, but the flavor isn’t strong enough to even say that. It’s the weak instant coffee of beers — a horribly bland vaguely beer-like beverage with a hint of crap. Cold Bud and warm Coors Light are what is on tap in Hell. (And here, a rebuttal to the Budweiser post from above.)
:: I could really get used to “sissy camping”. (Remember that early episode of The Brady Bunch when the newly-united family went camping, and after Mike and the boys failed to catch a bunch of fish for dinner, Carol and the girls popped up with the baskets they’d packed full of fried chicken and such? And when Mike Brady’s about to tuck into a chicken leg, a horrified Greg yelps out, “Dad! That’s sissy food!” OK, you had to be there…and maybe since I’m now citing The Brady Bunch in this space, I should consider taking a long, long hiatus….)
All for now. Tune in next week, or the puppy gets it.
UPDATED BELOW
UPDATED AGAIN
(I’m keeping this post at the top of the blog’s main page until Monday; after that, I’ll let it slide down and put up new posts on this subject as events warrant. Newer content appears below this post until then.)
In the course of learning various maintenance-related skills at The Day Job, I’ve learned that it’s better to have more tools than fewer. You’re pretty limited if all you have is two kinds of screwdrivers, a single size pair of pliers, one hammer, and maybe an allan wrench.
Likewise, as a proto-writer, I’ve long known that since words are my tools, the more words I know, the more tools I have. However, real life in the last couple of years has forced certain words upon me, words that I suppose are useful but I frankly could have lived long and happy without knowing, tools or no. Such words include G-tube, fundoplication, cerebral palsy. And now the last few days have added some more words and phrases in that unwelcome category: incompetent cervix, premature dilation, viability.
For those wondering where on Earth I’ve been, the answer is that I’ve been spending most of my time at The Wife’s side as she reclines in a hospital bed where she is confined for the time being. There she rests because right now, only gravity and luck are keeping what we had hoped would be our second healthy child inside her womb. The strangest thing about this scenario is the reversal of the standard hopes: the longer she is in the hospital, the better it is for the child’s ultimate chance of survival. The odds we are facing are very long, but we’re going to face them anyway. What else is there?
Posting here will be sporadic for the time being. Oddly, this is mainly because I’m not at the computer much; I’m finding that I still have the same amount of stuff to babble about, and just not as much time to babble about it. (Maybe someone should do a study of blogging as psychological defense mechanism.) Also, I again note the reversal of the typical medical hospitalization scenario: we are hoping for as long a hospital stay as possible, as we are some weeks away from “viability” (what an awful word). However, hospital stays are expensive, and if by some miracle we do not lose this child before she comes to full term, The Wife will have endured a hospital stay of four months.
So what I’m saying here is that if anyone out there has any inclination to hit the tip jars in the sidebar — Amazon or PayPal available — now would be the time, and it would be greatly appreciated. Believe me, this is not the way I’d wanted to announce to Blogistan that we were expecting; fact is, I didn’t want to announce to Blogistan that we were expecting at all. What I wanted to do was post a photo of our new daughter just after her late-September birth. Her name, though, is decided, no matter when she comes. She will be Fiona Quinn.
That is all. Further bulletins will be made as events warrant.
(I will also be keeping this post at the top of the blog for a few days, so any newer content I manage to post will appear beneath this one probably until at least Monday, unless disaster strikes and The Wife is able to come home before then.)
UPDATE 5-11-07: Well, this is a strange kind of update: one in which I have nothing new to report. But in this current version of We Do Stuff the Hard Way at Casa Jaquandor!, having nothing to report is actually desirable. For now, Little Fiona is right where she should be.
Thanks to those who have offered and continue to offer kind words, thoughts, and deeds. All are welcome — especially the monetary donations, for which I hate to ask but for which I also need to ask. Every little bit helps.
UPDATE II, 5-13-07: Nothing’s changed, thank goodness. Fiona still in her gestation chamber. Me going through money like Grant went through Richmond. And so it goes.
Thanks again for the continued well-wishes and the shekels tossed in our direction!
UPDATED BELOW!
Several items:
:: Oh, come on. Did Marvel Comics really sanction this? Talk about reinforcing stereotypes of comic book readers. Yeesh. (May not be work-safe. Via.)
:: Belladonna sent me a link to this very odd video. Again, I’m a fan of the old edible missile — but teeny-tiny ones shot by trebouchet at insects? Huh?
:: Not weird, actually, but very cool: a video inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry. (The entire tapestry can be perused on this site.)
UPDATE: Wow, I forgot the weirdest thing from this past week — this page of old print advertisements. Lots of times old ads are fun to peruse because they have an oddly touching air about them, as if to say, “Wow, the things they thought products could do!” But as demonstrated at that link, from the perspective of today, many old ads aren’t nostalgically touching but downright creepy. Here’s just one example:
Some of these really gave me the willies.
(I don’t remember for the life of me where I first saw this, so credit is due to somebody. If it’s a blogger on my blogroll, let me know!)
John Scalzi gets all gracious in losing the election for SFWA President. I’d say kudos to him for a clean campaign, but I was really turned off by the ads the Swift Spaceship Veterans for Truth ran in LOCUS on his behalf. Sure, he claimed to have no involvement in those ads, but we know better, don’t we?
And the graciousness of Scalzi’s concession is especially cloying. I am so sick of the “reaching across the aisle” stuff that follows every election, for anything! What we need is more reaction like that of Ray Patterson, who after his election defeat for Sanitary Commissioner of Springfield, came back when his successor (Homer Simpson) screwed everything up only to say:
Oh…oh, gosh…you know, I’m not much on speeches, but it’s so gratifying to leave you wallowing in the mess you’ve made. You’re screwed, thank you, bye.
Democracy sucks.
Time, I guess, for a little SF book blogging!
:: Here’s one of the great all-time opening paragraphs:
This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying…but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice…but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extre,es, a fascinating century of freaks…but nobody loved it.
When I note that SF has had to scrape and fight for every tiny morsel of respect it’s ever been grudgingly offered by the Keepers of the Literary Canon, and I contrast that anti-SF attitude with writing like that paragraph, I invariably end up wondering if the Keepers of the Canon actually ever bothered reading any SF. Seriously, folks, Alfred Bester could write.
We’re talking Bester’s novel The Stars My Destination here, one of the great masterworks of all science fiction. Crammed into this fairly short book — my hardcover copy, a recent reissue of the book by the SFBC, ticks in at 212 pages, and toward the end of the book when Bester hits his stride with some of the more mind-bending stuff, he engages in some typographic pyrotechnics that take up entire pages — is a revenge tale, a love story, a mystery, another mystery, some space opera goodness, more mystery, a depiction of a massively corporate society, yet more mystery, daring escapes, and an iconic anti-hero twenty years before Stephen R. Donaldson introduced us to Thomas Covenant.
After a brief and fascinating introduction to the world of the novel (if you’re going to start your novel with an infodump, you’d better be as good a writer as Alfred Bester), we make the acquaintance of Gulliver Foyle (“Gully” for short), a mechanic’s mate on a space ship who also happens to be the sole survivor of the ship’s destruction. He’s floating along in space, eeking out a survival of sorts for months within the flotsam of the ship’s wreckage, when another ship comes by and…flies away again, leaving Foyle to die. Foyle becomes driven by the need to exact revenge upon this ship, the Vorga, and its crew who abandoned him without a single attempt at a rescue. From there the story barely pauses as the single-minded revenge story gradually increases in scope until Gully Foyle himself turns out to be…nah, I’m not going to spoil it here. Read the book.
I knew coming into this book that Bester was a great writer, having enormously admired a number of his short stories (“Fondly Fahrenheit” is of particular note). Even so, I wasn’t prepared for how good The Stars My Destination is.
:: From there I turned to Leigh Brackett and her book The Coming of the Terrans, which is a collection of five novellas set on Mars. But not the Mars we’d recognize today; this is the Mars as imagined by writers who toiled twenty years before the Viking landers unmasked the Martian landscape. (In fact, in a brief foreword passage inside the book’s front cover, Brackett notes that the astronomers of her day were quickly “reducing these dreams to cold, hard, ruinous fact”. This collection was published in 1967, a full ten years or so before the Viking landers touched down.) Brackett’s Mars is still a world of canals, ancient civilizations, deserted alien cities set at the side of long-dry oceans, and newer cities where the upstart humans from nearby young world Earth mingle with the Martians whose dying world boasts a history measured in millennia.
Strictly speaking, Brackett’s work here isn’t space opera, but its cousin, planetary romance. (I tend to think of planetary romance as space opera where nobody goes to space.) All of the tales in this book have an elegiac tone, and several have as main characters scientist-types who are searching for some kind of glory amongst the artefacts of long-dead Martian cities. For an idea of the kinds of stories that await within this book, one only need note the titles of the novellas within. They include “The Beast-Jewel of Mars”, “The Last Days of Shandakor”, and my favorite, “Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon”.
Well, maybe not: those titles sound pulpy in nature, but Brackett was no pulp hack as a prose stylist. Some might argue that a writer of her talent should have aspired to better than these kinds of pulp tales, but to my way of thinking, somebody‘s got to be writing the pulp tales, and a pulp tale by a good writer is always preferable to a literary tale by a hack.
I also find that with stories like this, it’s no real difficulty to summon up the suspension of disbelief necessary to buy into a Mars that has actually been inhabited for centuries by fabulous societies of aliens, any more than I find it hard to grant for the purposes of a story that many ages ago there was a land of heroism and darkness called Middle Earth whose only surviving records to our day were in the form of a Red Book found in Westmarch. Your mileage may vary. Suspension of disbelief is a tricky thing, after all.
:: I’ll be reviewing this book for GMR in a week or so, but I just wanted to note a wonderful observation within its pages, by Harlan Ellison:
An observation: it is my theory that the full and total explanation of the behavior of babies and kittens is that they spend all their time trying to make that which is moving, stop; and that which is stopped, move.
Now that is as true as anything I’ve ever read, anywhere.
I have to admit that a split of the first two games would not have shocked me. But going down 0-2 in the first two games does surprise me. Wow. So the Sabres are facing the biggest test of these playoffs yet.
I remember reading an article toward the end of last year’s football season that predicted that the Colts would win the Super Bowl, despite the fact that at that point they were heading for the third seed in the playoffs. The idea was that a bunch of times in recent years, teams in various pro sports have posted amazing records one year, taken the top seed in their sport, exited the playoffs early, and then won it all the next year despite a less productive season. So maybe there’s precedent for the Sabres to come back next year and —
Oh, screw that. We want the Cup this year, right? Nobody should utter a single syllable of “Wait ’til next year” until the Sabres have taken their fourth loss in a series, and that ain’t happened yet.
So how to take heart? Well, how about the 1996 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Atlanta Braves? The Braves took Game One, 12-1. And then they took Game Two, 4-0. And then? The Yankees took the next four in a row and the World Series trophy. (Not a perfect example, as Atlanta won those first two in their own park as opposed to in Yankee Stadium, but it’s still a 2-0 lead in a best-of-seven that came to nothing.)
Or last year’s opening round of the NHL playoffs, when the Carolina Hurricanes (boo hiss) honked the first two games at home to Montreal before winning the next four to advance. The Hurricanes (boo hiss) went on to win the Cup, beating the Sabres on their way there.
And even if the Sabres lose Game Three to go down 0-3, well — remember the Boston Red Sox and the 2004 ALCS!
It just isn’t over, folks.
Sometimes in life, the wrong people get promoted to positions of management or authority or, in the military, to command. It happens. We don’t always put the right people in charge, and lots of times, people who demonstrate that they may have the makeup for leadership turn out not to once they’re asked to actually lead. This explains how Michael Scott gets to be the boss on The Office.
This even happens in the United States Navy, where ship commanders can be fired “for many reasons, including fostering a poor command climate, breaking wartime rules of engagement, or failing to enforce safety measures”. And sure enough, the Navy this week has had to remove two commanding officers from their posts. One was removed from his command of the USS Higgins, a destroyer that is headed for the Persian Gulf. The other was relieved of command of the USS Constitution, which is…the famed War of 1812 vessel that sits in dock in Boston Harbor as a tourist attraction.
One has to wonder just what this man did to warrant causing the Navy to lose confidence in his ability to command a ship that never sails. (Well, it rarely sails, and even then, not very far. It’s not like he has to navigate the vessel from Boston to Roanoke and back.) Obviously it has to do with his administrative duties, and the Navy’s decision is, I’m sure, warranted. It’s just that there’s some cognitive dissonance over the Navy losing confidence in the command abilities of the skipper of a ship that literally never goes anywhere.
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