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Hey Bills fans….

Here’s something. It’s well-established that the Bills’ receiving corps consists of stud Lee Evans, and then a whole bunch of “meh” possession guys after him. The Bills didn’t take a receiver in the draft, so this is still a need.

And now, Keyshawn Johnson is available. Should the Bills go after him? At 35 and already on record that he wants to play another couple of years so he can get to 1000 career catches, I can’t imagine he’d be terribly expensive.

In fact, what about Keyshawn Johnson, anyway? I remember when he arrived in the NFL, he was basically a boorish ass, but guys who are boorish asses at the age of 22 or 23 when they have the world handed to them do sometimes turn into mature, OK guys when they’re 35 and the world is now being handed to new guys who were in junior high or younger when the old guys were all the rage. I didn’t hear much about Johnson last year, so is he still a boorish ass, or has he come into his own as a role-player wherever he ends up?

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Men of Character

Two fine character actors have died today: Dabbs Greer, whose most famous role was Reverend Alden on Little House on the Prairie, and Tom Poston, who could always be found lurking around the corner in any show with Bob Newhart on it. Both men were quite old, but so what — I enjoyed watching both of them.

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Stalkin’

A week or so ago I finished reading Deathstalker by Simon R. Green as part of my space opera obsession. This book was a mixed bag for me — sufficiently positive that I’ll grab the next book at some point, but since I know the series has six or seven books in it, the quality will have to improve a bit if I’m going to commit to the whole thing.

As our story begins, there’s a guy named Owen Deathstalker who lives on some backwater planet, where he’s happy to go along his everyday life and not worry too much about the workings of the politics of the Empire in which he lives. His life is shattered when the Empress Lionstone (great name, that) declares him an outlaw and strips him of his hereditary title as head of the Deathstalker clan. Owen finds himself with a series of questionable companions with whom he plans to form a rebellion against the Empire.

Now, there’s some other stuff that happens, too — lots of time is spent detailing the various intrigues within the Imperial court and the clan loyalties that swirl around the Empress. In fact, Green spends too much time on that aspect of his story, so much so that at one point Owen Deathstalker, the title character in this inaugural book in a long and ambitious series about this character, disappears from the book for about 150 pages or so as we follow the trials and tribulations of Clan Wolfe and Clan Campbell.

Other things are problematic as well; Green’s tone shifts all over the place. At times the book is a riveting space opera adventure, but at other times it almost reads like a parody of a space opera adventure. Our main villain, the Empress Lionstone — commonly referenced as “the Iron Bitch” — gets her first major opportunity to vent her imperial wrath and show her lethal teeth when some resistance fighters infiltrate one of her parties and humiliate her with, of all things, a pie in the face. That’s a good indicator of how odd this book feels at times: it’s an at-times graphically violent space opera that takes us to many worlds in its 500-some pages, follows multiple plotlines involving a pretty large cast of characters, gives us warriors who can spontaneously summon tremendous powers from within themselves, gives us clones as secondary citizens and oppressed telepaths, features ancient weapons and artefacts of alien origins, has ships hyperspace-ing from one end of the galaxy to the other at will, and…pie-throwing. Um…OK. Nothing against pie-throwing in principle, of course — I’m a fan of the old edible missile — but here it just had me thinking, “What?”. Some reviews I’ve read indicate that Green is working at actual parody or pastiche here, but I must have missed an awful lot of the jokes.

Other things with the characters don’t fare so well. The Empress basically comes off as your standard autocratic ruler who is sadistic and brutal in her eagerness to remain in power, but that’s about it. There’s nothing to grab onto as a character there. The most sharply-drawn characters are people who seem like they should be minor characters, and the guy whose name is on the front of the book — Owen Deathstalker — gets kind of short-shrift for much of the work. (It gets better at the end.) Also, certain surprising revelations aren’t handled terribly well; one is absolutely no surprise at all, and the other is a surprise but then doesn’t seem to matter when the character in question dies soon thereafter.

But still, for the most part Green keeps the pages turning, and he’s got some gift for prose (I quoted the first couple of paragraphs here, and I still maintain that that is one heck of an opening passage). I just hope the series either (a) settles down a bit in the next few books, or (b) throws caution to the wind.

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Slava

Tim Page on Mstislav Rostropovich, who died the other day:

Mstislav Rostropovich died this morning in the city he had always considered his home — in Moscow, where he had been flown from Paris by private jet in February after it became apparent that he could not long survive.

“Music and art are a whole spiritual world in Russia,” he once said. “In Russia, when people go to a concert, they don’t go to it as an attraction, as an entertainment, but to feel life.”

I don’t currently own any of Rostropovich’s recordings, but I owned several of him conducting various works back when my music collection was in its LP-and-cassette days. I also performed Leonard Bernstein’s concert overture Slava! one year at music camp, a typically joyous and jazzy Bernstein piece along the lines of his far-more-famous overture to Candide.

For now, here’s something eternal: Rostropovich performing the Prelude to Bach’s Suite No. 1 for Unaccompanied Cello.

Bon voyage, Slava.

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Let’s not let this become a quadrennial event.

May 1, four years ago:

Today: Al Qaeda is getting stronger. The “surge” isn’t working yet. Four years into the War on Terror, terrorist attacks are sharply up. More than 100 soldiers in Iraq dead this month alone. Setting self-defense and self-policing aside, Iraqis are increasingly unable to reconstruct their own country. Four years after we “ousted” the Taliban, we’re still launching major offensives against them. American dead in Iraq outnumber American dead in the attacks on 9-11-01, with no end in sight.

Four years. There’s your legacy, Mr. President: a stunt flight, a banner, bombs, death, and failure.

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Sentential Links #97

Ninety-seven. That’s the frequency — well, 96.9 — of a Buffalo radio station. Other than that, I’m not sure what ninety-seven signifies. So on with the links.

:: If you’re in a team of hundreds of people building a skyscraper, you can probably sneak off for a nap and let everyone else pick up your slack. But if you’re the only bricklayer working on a particular house then goofing off is just self-defeating. The carpenter isn’t going to start laying bricks when he sees you dozing.

:: Now only a sucker would let themselves get hooked on a Fox show early on: chances are if it’s good, they’ll can it.

:: I don’t sense a sense of panic, or even a feeling of fear, amongst the Buffalo faithful. The general feeling of those I have talked to is simple: the Rangers needed double-overtime at home to pull out a win in a must-win game. (Well, some people I talk too sound a bit jittery, so can anyone confirm for me what a friend told me this morning: No NHL team has ever run the table in the playoffs, going 16-0 on their way to the Cup?)

:: I’m all for hugs, but I’m just not sold on this angle, is what I’m saying. (What is it about Family Circus that demands that I read it?!)

:: Remember that others quite different from you are also looking for a place of love and shelter behind a hedge guarding them from a hostile world. (Link to this blog originally via David Trowbridge. I find the Quaker faith enormously appealing on a number of levels, although I haven’t as yet done any exploration of it at all. But one of my favorite spiritual vignettes comes from Quakerism: Someone walks into a Quaker church and asks a Quaker, “When does the service begin?” And the Quaker responds: “When the worship ends.” I love the sentiment there.)

:: While I was upset at losing the little one that I saw on those ultrasounds, it did not feel even 1/100th of how I’d have felt if we’d lost my then 17 month old daughter. Not even close.

:: And I tell him, “I want you to remember that a liberal atheist has forgiven you today. I don’t want you to ever forget that, as long as you live, do not forget what happened here. I don’t have God behind me, but I speak for myself, and I forgive you for myself, and for you. Never forget this.” (Actually, read this post first for the whole story. If you watch the YouTube clip, be aware that were this a film, the rating would be R.

:: And now I am nearly forty-three, and it feels as young as dandelions and unopened presents and a new straw hat. (Happy birthday to one of my unfailing daily reads — “unfailing” in that I never fail to read her, and she never fails to make me either smile, think, or want to step away from the computer and pick up a book.)

:: In other news, Kelly and I are expecting our first baby, and the new arrival should be here around Thanksgiving. (I just hope he doesn’t get confused at grilling time…new babies and big hunks of brisket look disturbingly similar….)

All for this week. Keep the faith, or something like that….

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Hey! I know them!

The folks on the front page of the Buffalo News looked familiar to me, and sure enough, they were: Kevin and Val were there, as part of an article on how Blogistan has abetted the efforts of Sabres fans in building a virtual community therein. Very cool, and congrats to them; I always assumed that if Kevin and Val made the front page of the News, it would be as they were carried away in handcuffs by police officers after they protested something George Bush did.

UPDATE: OK, I just perused the article online, and only then did I realize that while the article specifically mentions Kevin and Val prominently, the name of their blog is never mentioned, nor is a URL given. And down the page, they again omit a URL — for the Sabre Rattling blog — even though they at least mention that blog’s name.

Come on, Buffalo News. If you’re going to mention a blog, you have to mention the blog names, and you have to give the URLs. Someone is going to read that story and wonder just how they can find all these nifty Sabres blogs, and they’re not going to know how. This is basic stuff. Could we please get it right, someday?!

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Gettin’ drafty in here!

While I wait for the Sabres to dump the Rangers (they’re in OT right now as I write this), I figure I should toss up some reaction to the NFL Draft. Because hey, it’s the NFL Draft. Wheeeee. (Usually the draft is more exciting around here, but right now, the Sabres have such a command on the Buffalo sports consciousness that I truly think that if it were announced that Jim Kelly had been cloned and then the Bills had drafted him, the reaction around here would be, “That’s nice. Now how ’bout that Sabres power play!”)

First, about the Bills: Looks like another standard Bills draft. Some needs filled, others not so much. What’s nice is the general lack in the Marv Levy era of the old standby of Tom Donahoe’s drafts: the general focus on solid athleticism on the part of the guys they pick, and the general sense that the organization has done its homework, come into the draft with a group of players in mind, and then gone about the task of getting as many of those players as possible without making a lot of gonzo trades with draft picks. Yes, they did move some picks around in order to grab the guys they wanted, but none of it really struck me as insane moving around.

So, the good: they got their new running back (Marshawn Lynch) and stud linebacker (Paul Posluzsny). As is a long-standing practice of theirs, they took a defensive back in a later round (safety John Wendling, sixth round) who is apparently a very fine athlete. In fact, the drafts of the 90s under Bill Polian and John Butler tended to emphasize strong athletes in the lower rounds, guys who could be groomed into starters over a couple of years, and it was that draft strategy in part that had the Bills as one of the league’s best teams of that era. Tom Donahoe didn’t seem to draft those kinds of prospects very well, which is one big reason the Bills haven’t made the playoffs since the Donahoe era began. (It should be noted here that Butler, not Donahoe, presided over the Bills’ 2000 draft, which may well be the worst draft in team history. Not a single one of those players panned out, and in the NFL today, if you have an entire draft fail to pan out, it usually spells several years of disaster for a franchise.)

The not-so-good: the Bills virtually ignored the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball, not taking a single lineman until their second pick in the seventh round, when they took a defensive lineman who may have already peaked. True, the Bills signed several new offensive linemen already, but they’ve been very poor at developing O-line talent in this decade (Jason Peters is the lone standout), which is a trend that has to reverse if the team really wants to be a power again in the NFL.

:: The Miami Dolphins are getting older and older at the positions that make a good football team. That organization’s in trouble.

:: Does Matt Millen not remember that he was an offensive lineman? And does he not remember spending his final year as a player on the 1991 Redskins, the team that had the best offensive line I’ve ever seen? Why does Millen keep insisting that taking wide receivers in the top five is a good idea? Why does Millen still have a job? What is going on in Detroit?!

:: Boy, Bill Belichick really thinks he’s some kind of football deity, doesn’t he? The StuPats have traded for Randy Moss, of all people, who is an aging player with bags of character concerns; plus, New England drafted in the first round a guy who also comes with bags of character concerns. This, plus Belichick’s boorish behavior after his boys choked in the AFC Championship Game and the slide of Tom Brady’s halo over the last few years make pretty clear that if the StuPats win the Super Bowl this year — and they very well might — they’ll look more like the Cowboys of the 90s in doing so, when everybody starting hating them.

:: Geez, now the Sabres and Rangers are in the second OT. I’m going to wrap this up now.

:: And as I wrote that sentence, apparently the Rangers won. Well, that’s OK. The Sabres let the Islanders have a win in their series, too. That just means we’ll take ’em in five.

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Ow! My credulity! It burns!!

Just a brief note about tonight’s episode of The Office: this show had better come up with a really convincing explanation of just how Michael avoids getting fired for this debacle. I often have trouble maintaining my suspension of disbelief regarding Michael’s ability to get away with some of the stuff he does, but tonight? The only people in real life who screw up this badly and keep their jobs work for George W. Bush.

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

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