The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Time for a potentially embarrassing admission: I’ve been a sporadic reader of the comic strip For Better or For Worse for years now. Used to be I’d read it faithfully for a while, then stop for a while, then pick it up again, stop again, and so on. This pattern started when I was in college. I’ve been reading the thing on a daily basis now for the last year or two, and man, now that Lynn’s announced that the strip will end sometime next year, is it ever starting to suck. She’s clearly getting all her characters in line for their happily-ever-afters, and it’s getting nauseating:
“Oh no! Elizabeth just got attacked on the job by a creepy guy!”
“But look! Anthony, the guy who’s been in love with her since she was six, just showed up to beat the crap out of him!”
“Oh no! Michael’s apartment just burned to a crisp!”
“But look! He saved his laptop with his book manuscript!”
“Oh no! Michael has to move with his family back in with his parents!”
“But look! Michael’s just got a $25,000 advance for his next book!”
“Oh no! Elizabeth just got dumped by the guy she basically treated like crap!”
“But look! That guy who’s been in love with her since she was six is single again!”
“Oh no! Michael’s been told by his boss to fire some people at work!”
“But look! Michael’s taking a moral stand by resigning himself!”
“Oh no! Michael has just deprived his family of his income!”
“But look! His wife will pick up the slack by returning to her own high-income career!”
Why do I get the feeling that FBoFW is going to spend the rest of its run tracking its characters as they repeatedly step into buckets of shit and come out smelling like a bed of roses?
Here we go with the second bout of answers for Ask Me Anything! version 2.0….
:: Starting with something Star Wars, Simon asks:
While I, too, will rally to the defense of the Prequel trilogy, who would have been better suited to write dialogue for the scripts so that they didn’t sound like a smarmy high school drama class production?
Unsurprisingly, I don’t grant Simon’s premise; I never found the dialogue in the Prequel trilogy all that bad. It’s true that Anakin sounded like a smarmy high-school drama kid, but I always figured that was intentional, since he is a smarmy high-school drama kid. I particularly note how most of the really really awful lines, if not all of them, are given to him. I don’t think George Lucas ever intended anyone to take his “I don’t like sand” pickup line as anything other than a terribly awkward attempt by a very immature kid to impress a girl some years his senior.
And there are good lines scattered all through the Prequel Trilogy, especially in Revenge of the Sith. So for punching-up of the dialogue, I’d have maybe brought in Frank Darabont, or brought back Lawrence Kasdan. It’s tempting to say Joss Whedon, but I don’t think the tone he tends to achieve in his scripts would have worked terribly well with Star Wars.
:: Roger asks:
Presidents’ Day is coming. Who are the five best and the five worst Presidents?
Well, Presidents’ Day is over, but anyway, briefly, here’s how I’d rank them.
The best, in order of their service:
1. George Washington
2. Thomas Jefferson
3. Abraham Lincoln
4. FDR
5. Harry Truman
and the worst, also in order of their service:
1. James Buchanan
2. Richard Nixon
3. Jimmy Carter
4. Ronald Reagan
5. George W. Bush
Honorable mentions to Thomas Whitmore, Josiah Bartlet, and David Palmer.
:: Belladonna asks:
What was your favorite toy during childhood?
Hmmmm. You know, that is really a hard one. I mean, that one is really hard. The few Star Wars action figures I owned were favorites, of course. I had a couple of remote-control cars that I remember fondly, and a small chemistry set that was quite a bit of fun. I never did much with Hotwheels or similar toy cars. The best bath toy I ever had was a wooden boat with a paddle-wheel that was driven by a rubber band; you rotated the paddle-wheel manually to tighten the band, and then you released the boat in the water, whereupon the rubber band unwound and made the paddle-wheel spin. That thing was cool.
There was also the model railroad set-up that we started building, but never much got beyond the construction of the table and the layout of the track itself. We never decorated the thing, which I look back on as one of the bigger missed opportunities of childhood. To this day, I find something magical about a good model railroad layout.
This is weird! I’ve never thought about it much, but I really don’t remember too many of my toys at all. The books, though — now those, I remember well.
(And you want to know what’s really freaky? I was just thinking of the old handheld electronic game “Merlin”, which I liked a lot, and just minutes later, on My Name is Earl, Earl and Randy visit their childhood bedroom whereupon Randy picks up his old Merlin and says that he’s been practicing his Tic-Tac-Toe! That kind of thing always spooks me out. Whhhoooaaaaa….)
:: She also asks:
How do you determine what is private and what you are willing to publicly disclose on our blog?
Well, one easy rule is the “Would The Wife kick my ass if I posted this publicly?” policy, which is always a good one to follow. I also try to generally avoid posting too much about The Daughter, because her life is her own. And of course I resolutely never post about work.
I pretty much go on a case-by-case basis on these sorts of things, and there are many things about my life that never show up here. That’s not to say many of those things never will show up in this space; I’ve got a number of proto-posts stashed away that I started writing and later decided against posting, and there are other things in my life that I don’t post about directly but toward which I allude vaguely around here sometimes, mainly so readers may see those things and go, “Hmmmmm….”, or maybe, “Huh-whuh?!”
More to come over the next few days!
(Updated below, and updated again.)
Here are thirteen first lines of spoken dialogue from some movies I like a lot. Try and guess the titles.
1. “Whenever I get gloomy about the state of the world, I think of the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport.”
2. “Echo Three to Echo Seven! Han old buddy, do you read me?”
3. “I’ve been saying for years, sir, that our special equipment was obsolete; and now, computer analysis reveals an entirely new approach: Miniaturization.”
4. “With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas.”
5. “The poison is still fresh, three days. The Hovitos are near.”
6. “I’m just going to get some flowers, dear. I’ll be back in twenty minutes. It’s tulip season today. I’m so happy.”
7. “Liberty’s moving.”
8. “Sixty knots? No way, Barnes.”
9. “In ancient times, the land lay covered in forests, where, from ages long past, dwelt the spirits of the gods.”
10. “I don’t feel anything.”
11. “The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the Earth. I smell it in the air.”
12. “T minus six zero three and holding, laser positive, latch compressors.”
13. “Freddy, go and find a cab.”
Guess. I dare you. Heh!
UPDATE 2-24-07: As of this morning, Nos. 6, 9, 10, 12, and 13 remain unidentified. Answers will be posted tomorrow morning.
UPDATE II 2-25-07: Below are the answers, in pseudo-invisitext, so you’ll have to highlight them to read them (unless you’ve got great eyes).
1. Love, Actually
2. Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
3. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
4. Casablanca
5. Raiders of the Lost Ark
6. As Good As It Gets
7. The American President
8. The Abyss
9. Princess Mononoke (English dub)
10. Say Anything
11. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
12. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension
13. My Fair Lady
And there you go.
A few political items I’m thinking about:
:: When regular surveys show that shockingly-low percentages of Americans know things like when the Civil War was fought and who the Presidents enshrined on Mount Rushmore are, why should we care about a poll in which Americans rank the Presidents?
:: Richard Mellon Scaife is pining for the Clinton days? Really? Wow.
:: I didn’t watch the right-wing version of The Daily Show, and nor do I intend to, but I’m hearing pretty universally that it isn’t funny (unless you’re the type of person who found Rush Limbaugh’s godawful TV show back in the day funny). A professional comedy writer explains why it’s not funny:
I hate to keep explaining this, but if it seems like the Republicans have been suffering the comedic brunt for the last six years, this is because they have been in power, and comedy’s job is to kick power in the junk.
More revealing is the idea of using “talking points” in a comedy show. This is obviously someone who’s never worked a real comedy writer’s room. For topical runs, you start with “okay, what happened today,” and you look at everything. Everything. This is because comedy has maybe a 10% success rate on the pitch, and that’s just for joke-like objects, never mind actual functioning funny jokes. To fill a show with a couple dozen funny jokes, you don’t have the time or luxury to stick to talking points. You need to find the funny. Unless you’re not worrying about funny — in which case, you get the 1/2 Hour News Hour.
:: By pure chance, I saw that one ugly term being bandied about in reference to Islamic persons is “Muzzie”. Jee-bus, there are some messed-up people in this country.
OK, the time has come to start answering the questions posed in Ask Me Anything! version 2.0.
I’m answering these in Order By My Whim, which means, in whatever order I want to. So there!
:: Someone going by the handle “Opus” asks this technical film music question:
I just found your blog via google, as I was searching for some comment on James Horner’s Apollo 13 score. So as long as you’re entertaining questions, here’s mine: Have you ever noticed that, in the last moments of the last scene of the movie (on the Iwo Jima), Horner moves chromatically away from the tonic, thus ending on a chord that bears no relation to the tonality he’s been working on for at least the last 20 minutes of the film? If you haven’t noticed it, do you know where I can find fellow fanatics who would be driven as crazy as I by this nonsense?
No, I hadn’t noticed that. Next!
Actually, though, there’s a more serious point to be made here. When I listen to music, I’m quite good at hearing melodic motifs and the relationships between them, as in leitmotif-based scores like Lord of the Rings; I’m also very keen on instrumentations and rhythms.
But with tonalities? Not so much.
I can hear that the chords that begin Tristan and Isolde are dissonant, and I can hear the dissonances at work in lots of Percy Grainger’s music. But I’ve never been good at being able to tell by ear when a work modulates into a subdominant key, to name one example. I can tell that a modulation has occurred, but I’ve never been good at identifying the destination key or at identifying the new key’s relation to the old key.
I’m honestly not sure why this is (other than that I probably didn’t put enough effort into my ear-training classes in college). Has this level of listening ever been the norm?
(And for a suggestion as to where to go on the Web to meet listeners who are equally attuned to keys, I’d probably pose either the Filmus-L mailing list or the FilmScoreMonthly message boards, where a number of fairly astute listeners hang out. I like to think of myself as an astute music listener, but in this case, I’m pretty much impotent.)
:: Chris Byrd from IndaBuff asks:
Why does Jimmy crack corn?
AND…
Why don’t people care that he does?
Well, I have no idea, either. And that means, to the Google-cave, Batman! It turns out that “Jimmy Crack Corn” was originally a slave song from the pre-Civil War days.
Via Wikipedia:
There has been much conjecture over the meaning of “Jimmy Crack Corn and I don’t care.” One possibility is “gimcrack corn,” cheap corn whiskey; another related theory is that it refers to “cracking” open a jug of corn whisky; another is that “crack-corn” is related to the (still-current) slang “cracker” for a rural Southern white.[7] Another, and possibly the most popular, is that the chorus refers to an overseer who, without the master, has only his bullwhip to keep the slaves in line. Most etymologists support the first interpretation, as the term “cracker” appears to predate “corncracking”, and “whipcracker” has no historical backing.[8] This suggests that the chorus means the slaves are making whiskey and celebrating. Pete Seeger himself was said to explain the true lyric was “Gimmie cracked corn–I don’t care”,[9] a reference to a form of punishment for something very bad, in which a slave’s rations were reduced to cracked corn and nothing else. In this case, the author seems to have decided that even this punishment is worth it, since the master is now dead and gone.
Most of the theories about who Jimmy is and what he’s really doing agree that whatever he’s doing, the slave doesn’t care about it because his master is gone. Whether he’s gleefully carefree or woefully despondent is a point of dispute, depending a bit on which of the two main theories you subscribe to:
1.”Cracking corn” is opening a bottle of corn liquor; the phrase is self-referential and means “I’m Jimmy, I’m upset, I’m drinking, and I don’t care.” Well, that sense of crack is certainly old enough, but I can’t find any evidence of “corn” being used independently of the phrases “corn liquor” or “corn juice.” And if Jimmy is really talking, why use “I” in the second part of the sentence, but be Bob Dole-like in the first part?
2.”Cracking corn” really is crushing corn, and it means that someone named Jimmy, presumably a fellow slave, had to start grinding corn for food because of the penury visited on him after the master’s death. This is as plausible as any other piece of speculation, but it’s not a satisfactory answer to who Jimmy is and why he suddenly turns up in the refrain.
I found a lot more along that vein.
Basically, “Jimmy Crack Corn” is a very old folk song that arose from the plantation life of the antebellum South. As such, it’ll probably never be conclusively established just “jimmy crack corn” means, but apparently he doesn’t care because his master’s gone. What’s interesting is that depending on interpretation, he may be happy that his master is dead, or he may be sad.
More answers to come!
One oddly endearing thing I always forget about when I go to Rochester, until I see it again, is the Inner Loop. This is an expressway that runs tightly around the city’s downtown core, presumably built for easy commuter access to downtown. I’ve done a bit of Googling, and I find that like many such expressways, it’s seen as a barrier between the downtown and the outlying neighborhoods, creating an artificial barrier to development or whatnot.
Parts of the Inner Loop are below the normal street level (I’m not sure what the actual term for this is), but if we’re worried about the barrier to neighborhoods and streetscapes posed by their crossings of expressways, I’m reminded of a unique solution they did in Columbus, Ohio.
Expressways can be dividers in cities. But there’s nothing that says they have to be.
UPDATE: More photos of the Columbus I-670 cap here, from the streetscape level. You literally never know you’re crossing an expressway.
A good time was had by all yesterday, for the holiday known as Presidents’ Day. After we lit memorial candles for Zachary Taylor, Chester Alan Arthur, and Warren Harding, and after we sacrificed six live weasels in hopes of securing the favor of The Gods of Rodents for George W. Bush*, we took The Daughter to Rochester to visit the Strong Museum. I’ll have pictures up on Flickr in a week or two (I need to upgrade my account before I do more uploading), but for now, let me note that if you haven’t been there in a long time you should definitely go again. It is one of the classiest places I’ve ever been, and it’s actually been significantly improved since then, what with the addition of an entire new wing and an amazing butterfly habitat exhibit. We were there for more than five hours, and we still didn’t see everything before we staggered back out for the drive home. The admission prices are very reasonable, and the parking is free. So those of you with kids, what are you waiting for???
And wouldn’t you know it, but at one point while we were there, we rounded the corner to head into the Sesame Street-themed exhibit area when I was stopped by a woman who asked, “Hey, do you have a blog?” I answered affirmatively, and it turns out that she’s a regular reader of Jennifer‘s, her name is Tracy, and she’s just launched her own blog, LitMama. Again, Blogistan turns out to be a very small place! (I can’t imagine how she recognized me, though. You wouldn’t think that long-haired guys wearing tie-dye and overalls would stand out that much.)
Anyway, more connections are being made all the time! What a world.
* No, we didn’t sacrifice weasels. What kind of ogres do you think we are!
Now we’re onto the “All-Stars” edition of The Amazing Race. Thus far I can only say this:
Rob and Amber are evil and must be destroyed.
Seriously: since they’ve been on Survivor twice and they’ve already been on The Amazing Race once, this is their fourth shot at winning a million bucks. Why doesn’t CBS just cut them a check and be done with it? Sheesh.
Best exchange amongst contestants on tonight’s episode: “It sure is nice in Peru.” “That’s nice, but we’re in Ecuador.”
Worst thing said by a contestant: “We need to go more ‘rapido’. Not less ‘rapido’.” Said in an exaggerated Latino accent.
I’ll probably be away from the computer most of the day tomorrow (Monday — Presidents’ Day), so here are this week’s Sentential Links, one day early.
:: Boy, the early years were rough on Jerry, weren’t they? 17 episodes in and he’s only had four girlfriends, really. We’ll check back in with the next season soon. Things might pick up for him then! (Schmoopy! Yes, he’s blogging his way through Jerry’s history of love on Seinfeld. Hilarity should ensue.)
:: Being a kid means feeling afraid, feeling sad, feeling lost and confused, feeling let down, feeling alone, feeling sad, feeling bad for reasons you can’t name for yourself. (One of those posts Lance uncorks on a regular basis that makes me wonder why on Earth I’m blogging in the first place. Criminy.)
:: Pig, the last animal of the zodiac, is considered a very good sign to be born under. They are sincere, gregarious, diligent, generous sensualists. (Personally, I’d rather call it the Year of the Boar, but hey, it’s my year! How about it, readers? Am I a sincere, gregarious, diligent, and generous sensualist? According to the placemats at Chinese restaurants, I’m noble and chivalrous, and while my friends will be lifelong, I am prone to marital strife. [No comment. -Ed.] I’m also supposed to marry a Rabbit, which The Wife is not. Hmmmm.)
That’s it for now. Back next Monday.
The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
