The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
I got ’em all in three minutes, forty seconds.
I remember a similar running joke on an episode of Friends, when Joey was proud because he was able to name fifty-six states, and later made fun of Ross, who’d been stumped at forty-six, as “Mr. I forgot ten states”.
Glenn Greenwald on Ann Coulter, who continues to get the plum speaking engagements when members of the Right get together:
[T]he single most prestigious political event for conservatives of the year is a place where conservatives go to hear Democrats called faggots, Arabs called ragheads, and Supreme Court justices labeled as deserving of murder — not by anonymous, unidentifiable blog commenters, but by one of their most popular featured speakers.
…
But we should, at the very least, be able to have a moratorium on all of the scandals driven by their claims to be so offended and upset when anonymous commenters on a blog say mean things, or when bloggers use curse words, or when Senators transparently botch a joke. The ugliest and most obscene sentiments are openly expressed not by their blog commenters or even bloggers — though that is true — but by their most admired and successful political leaders, the ones whom their presidential candidates desperately seek to embrace and for whom their most committed throngs cheer wildly.
…
She is the face of what the hard-core Republican Party has become, particularly during the Bush presidency. That is why she holds the position she holds in that movement. That’s why Mitt Romney was giddy with glee when her name passed his lips. He knows that her endorsement is valuable precisely because she holds great sway within the party, and she holds great sway because the hard-core party faithful consider her a hero for expressing the thoughts which they themselves believe but which other, less courageous Republican figures are afraid to express.
This is not about a single comment or isolated remark. The more Ann Coulter says these things, the more popular she becomes in this movement. What this is about is that she reflects exactly what sort of political movement this is. She reflects its true impulses and core beliefs. If that were not the case, why would she continue to receive top billing at their most prestigious events, and why would she continue to be lavished with rock star-adoration by the party faithful?
I have nothing to add, really.
UPDATE: Still nothing really to add, except to note the fact that the Right gets the vapors whenever left-wing bloggers swear, and yet they cheer this kind of stuff. By current American standards, Democratic presidential candidates can’t hire people like Amanda Marcotte but Republican candidates can accept the endorsement of Ann Coulter even as she calls prominent Democrats “faggots”.
It seems that Republican “civility” mainly means “We can say whatever we want, but you can’t.”
Today was the quarterly Used Book Sale at the local library. I always find some treasures there — and even treasures within the treasures themselves — but today was an even better haul than usual, with far better pickings in the SF department than usual. Behold:
And those are just the books I bought for myself. I also picked up five books each for The Wife and The Daughter. And the grand total spent?
Nine dollars.
Folks, if you like to read and if you like to own books, then you really have no reason to not be frequenting your local library’s used book sales. It’s just that simple.
Since I’ve been away from blogging for a few days, I’ve therefore failed thus far to acknowledge good news for the guy whose blog inspired me to launch this blog in parlaying his long experience of blogging into paid work: Sean Meade will be Project Editor for the Aviation Week website, concentrating on defense tech (if I’m reading it correctly). I guess that means Sean will now be the resident expert in flying machines that can kill us all? That’s very cool, and I wish him the best of luck. It’s always nifty when a person gets to make money doing something that’s genuinely interesting to them.
I will, of course, be closely following Sean’s work over there to see if he manages to sneak in anything like “Maybe smart bombs don’t exist, but rather subsist!” (That’s an unimaginably lame in-joke that only the six people who were in a certain class in college with Sean and I will get.)
Anyhow, go give Sean some congratulations. Or he’ll sic the bombers on you. He can do that now. (I’m a little surprised that they send out launch codes to any G-mail address, but hey, Google probably had the launch codes years ago.)
Sorry for three days away from Ye Olde Blogge. It’s been a busy week in “real life”, what with Lenten potluck dinners and services at church and Friday fish fries and trips to the library on Thursday night and a fairly large project at The Store and a new novel by Guy Gavriel Kay to read. But I’m back now, more or less. (Sometimes less is more, after all.)
This woman loves her husband:
Twenty-two years ago today, Mr. M-mv gave me an engagement ring. I was surprised about how and when he proposed, yes, but the idea of marriage? No surprises there. He had already told me that we would be getting married. He announced this about two weeks after our first date.
Silly boy.
So does this woman:
In our early days together his friends and family were all shaking their heads, figuring my man was going through some sort of middle age crazy to hook up with “that head-in-the clouds hippie girl” and my pals were wondering what in the world I was doing with some straight Republican cowboy with good manners when they knew me to generally have a strong preference for bad boys in leather on motorcycles who never called anyone Mame. Clearly, by most accounts, our being together made absolutely no sense.
But when I’m in the crook of this guy’s arm I feel like all the planets have lined up and the universe is smilin’ on my soul. After twenty five years of marriage we’ve learned to compromise and negotiate a plenty. Some of the differences have been quite humorous, and a few have caused frustration, disappointment or outrage. But through it all, there’s never been any question that our spirits were meant to fill each other up.
Ahhhh, l’amour!
More answers to recent questions posed by Persons Who Reade Thysse Blogge:
:: A couple of queries from Roger:
If you were to live anywhere else, where would you be? What are your favorite 5 or 10 cities?
Call me crazy, but I really like Upstate NY. So I’d be happy in Rochester, and I could probably even live happily in Syracuse. Longtime readers will recall that for a time we did live in Syracuse, from September ’02 until April ’03. I didn’t find that a long enough period living there to really form an impression of the place, but coming from Buffalo Syracuse felt…familiar, and small. Outside of “rush hour”, it’s possible to drive from one end of the Syracuse “metro area” to the other in less than twenty minutes.
Casting my net wider, I really love the entire Great Lakes region and the Upper Midwest. I could live happily in Chicago, Milwaukee, the Twin Cities (not Great Lakes cities, but on the cusp of the region). And if I had to live abroad, I’d be thrilled to dwell in Toronto.
As a kid we lived for a handful of years in Portland, OR, an area which I loved dearly at the time. However, it’s close to twenty-six years since I’ve been back there, so I don’t know. My parents used to comment on how it seemed to them that people in that region had some kind of inferiority complex, in that they’d always say things to my parents like, “Aren’t you glad you don’t live out east anymore?” But I don’t know if that’s really the way things are anymore. Having become used to the fact that living in Buffalo, we can take daytrips to so many cool places, I suspect the main problem I’d have with living in Portland again would be that in that part of the country, distances are so much greater, and it becomes a day trip just getting to someplace else. But again, I don’t know how much that would bother me. I do know that I’d dearly love to see Portland again, and visit some of the places I remember — the ones that are still there, anyway. And I’d love to walk the sands of Cannon Beach and gaze upon Haystack Rock again.
I guess I’d just like to be able to travel more.
Valentine’s Day: a wonderful opportunity to show love and affection or a capitalist ruse?
A bit of both, I suppose. We’re pretty low-key with it in our family (it helps that The Wife’s birthday is less than two weeks after Valentine’s).
(And here’s a small rant: it never bothers me much when stores put Christmas merchandise out on display in early October. But what does irritate me is how Valentines stuff starts showing up on December 21, and how they start rolling out the Easter shit on February 10. Who the hell buys Valentines candy eight weeks before Valentines, and then just keeps it around? Don’t retailers get that Valentines shopping is of the “Oh crap whatamIgonnagetforher!” variety?)
You know what is a friggin’ ruse, though? If you live outside of my part of the country, you may not have heard of Sweetest Day, which was cooked up by a bunch of candymakers decades ago. It’s celebrated almost exactly six months after Valentines Day. Every time Sweetest Day rolls around, I end up thinking of the fake greeting card-company created “Love Day” from The Simpsons.
What’s bigger, Wyoming or Colorado?
Colorado, by about sixteen thousand square kilometers. But Wyoming feels bigger, because it’s got a lot less stuff in it.
(“I thought I was dead once. Turns out I was in Nebraska.” – Little Bill from Unforgiven)
If you were forced to give up overalls, what would you wear, and would anyone have the faintest idea who you were?
Khakis, I guess. And shorts. I used to be the kind of guy who wears shorts year round, although in recent years my body’s thermostat has set itself to “pants in winter”. Oy.
I’d hope people would recognize me! People at work, by definition, rarely see me outside of work, so I suspect I’d look stranger to them in overalls than anything else. If I were to cut the hair, though — and maybe even shave — then I’d be well-night unrecognizable. I look at photos of my former short-haired, clean-shaven self, and I think, “Jee-bus, I looked like an idiot.”
(Oddly, I don’t like regular old blue jeans, and I almost never wear them. I only own two pair. I’ve never found jeans all that comfortable.)
:: Belladonna also had more than one query:
What piece of writing are you most proud of and why?
The obvious answer is my “Twelve Presidents” story that won the Buffalo News contest a few weeks back, but I’m just not sure. There are a number of stories sitting on my hard drive that haven’t appeared anywhere of which I am very fond; I suppose both of those will end up in this space at some point. And The Promised King is the largest-scale thing I’ve done (using a fairly broad definition of “done”, of course, since it’s not done).
“Graveyard Waltz” is special to me because it’s the first story I ever submitted for publication. It was rejected, of course, but the rejection slip — my first ever — at least garnered a brief hand-written note from that particular editor, scrawled in the corner of the form letter. That first rejection slip didn’t feel bad at all; in fact, it felt kind of good in a weird way, because it meant that I was in the game. Kind of like the young pitcher who gets his first start in the Majors. Sure, he gives up eight earned runs in two innings and gets yanked as soon as he walks the first two batters in the third, but hey, he’s in the Majors.
And there are lots of posts here of which I am quite proud, and it’s on the behalf of those posts that I’m always a little frustrated that my traffic here so stubbornly remains exactly where it’s been for so long now. A representative example here would be “Diary of a Ring”. That post was a lot of fun to write, and yet it came and went with little notice at the time. Alas.
If you could meet any one person, living or dead, who would it be?
The most obvious answer here is Jesus, but since I’m all about eschewing the obvious, I would have loved to spend an evening talking music with Leonard Bernstein.
More answers to come. I think I’m almost done.
With this installment, there is one Sentential Links post for every key on a standard piano. (But I’ve got four more to go for one of those extended bass Bosendorfers.)
:: Am I the only person who really believes in the Matt/Harriet relationship? (Probably. I think they’re the worst couple since Lea Thompson and Howard the Duck.)
:: W. H. Auden’s 100th birthday is this week.
:: Watching Joe Quesada and Mark Millar destroy the Marvel universe has been no fun at all. (I haven’t read any of this “Civil War” thing, but I also haven’t read anything positive about it.)
:: “Speaking of rape, let’s discuss your possible boyfriends.” (Yeah, what an awful moment that was….)
More next week.
A few days ago I finished Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson, which is the first book in the fantasy mega-series The Malazan Book of the Fallen. I can’t say I loved the book, but I found it highly compelling, and I definitely plan to continue reading the series. Just not for a while.
This is epic fantasy, no doubt about it. Boy howdy, is this book epic. The sense of scale in this book is, to my way of thinking, even more vast than in George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. In fact, Erikson has given himself a canvas here that is so big that for much of the book, I barely knew what was going on.
So a word of warning: if you like moral clarity in your fantasy, with heroes fighting against all odds against the Horrible and Magical Villain who is firmly ensconced in the Giant Granite And Iron Citadel that squats at the exact center of the blasted region where nothing grows that he has called his own, don’t bother with Gardens of the Moon. This ain’t that kind of fantasy.
But if you have at least some taste for following characters without knowing just who the good guys are, or if you like not knowing if the 700-page volume you’re reading even has “good guys” in any general sense of the term, then Gardens is for you.
There also isn’t much plot here, in the traditional sense; the book follows a more “situational” path. There’s a continent called Genabackis, which is the subject of a military conquest campaign by the Malazan Empire, and the book follows the exploits of a fairly large cast of characters as they react to events shaped by the Malazan invasion. Some of the characters are military officers, some are soldiers, some are mages, some are assassins, some are thieves, some are unclassifiable, and some are gods.
I mentioned last week that Gardens of the Moon contains almost nothing by way of the traditional infodump, which only serves to heighten the reader’s sense of being at sea here. There really is no place in the book where anyone sits down to give a lengthy precis of the history involved, so the reader has to be pretty attentive. In the short run, this makes the book rather hard to follow as the lack of a “big picture” hampers things a bit. But in the long run, as the various details that are handed out piecemeal throughout the narrative begin to fall into place, the tale becomes quite a bit more satisfying.
(My understanding is that Gardens is something of a stand-alone novel.)
Can there be any doubt? By far the biggest Weird Thing to cross my radar screen this week as Conservapedia. Nothing else even came close, and nothing else to date has so perfectly illustrated for me the tendency of much of the Right in this country to wall itself off from reality in as complete a way as possible. People who think this is a good idea truly live in a dream world.
UPDATE: From their entry on the Moon:
Throughout man’s existence, the Moon has had the same size as the Sun when viewed from Earth. This creates a beautiful symmetry and permits phenomenal eclipses to occur. The odds of that symmetry occurring by chance are too small to be considered possible. That symmetry will not last forever.
…
There is no plausible non-creation theory of origin for the Moon at this time.
…
Our solar system is one of the few that has only one sun. Only one sun and only one moon: this uniqueness may reflect the existence of only one God.
On unicorns:
The existence of unicorns is controversial. Secular opinion is that they are mythical. However, they are referred to in the Bible nine times,[1] which provides an unimpeachable de facto argument for their once having been in existence.
And compare the Conservapedia entry on algebra to the Wikipedia entry on the same topic. One of these contains interesting and helpful information, with sources; the other reads like Coach from Cheers when he had to learn facts about Albania for a night class:
Albania!
Albania!
You border on the Adriatic!
Your land is mostly mountainous,
and your chief export is coal!(to the tune of “When the Saints Go Marching In”)
What an absolute joke.
UPDATE II: God, I can’t stop. From their entry on Albert Einstein:
Nothing useful has even been built based on the theory of relativity. Only one Nobel Prize (in 1993 and not to Einstein) has ever been given that even remotely relates to the theory of relativity. Many things predicted by the theory of relativity, such as gravitons, have never been found despite much searching for them. Many observed phenomenon, such as the bending of light passing near the sun or the advance of the perihelion in the orbit of Mercury, can be also predicted by Newton’s theory.
(I suppose I should note that the nature of a wiki-based site like this means that the text of entries can change, and that therefore some of the quotes above may in time disappear from the linked entries. I could go to the trouble of creating screen shots, but I hope you’ll all take my word for it. I’m just cutting and pasting.)
UPDATE III: On second thought, here are screenshots of the current state of the articles linked above:
Read ’em and weep.
UPDATE IV: Ach, wouldn’t you know it. All these years, and I’ve had Coach’s “Albania” song in my head wrong. The chief export isn’t coal, but chrome. Watch the clip here.
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
