The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Today The Family and I are off to the Erie County Fair for a day of gazing upon farm animals and farm machinery, watching the riding of bumper cars by The Daughter, perusing all manner of goods being hawked by artisans and capitalists galore, and consuming All Things Battered And Deep-Fried. Huzzah!
And don’t forget, folks — I’m open to questions for two more days on Ask Me Anything!. Bring ’em on!
Bringing this year’s iteration of Ask Me Anything! to a close, we have a cluster of queries again from Roger. He put these all into a single bloc, but I’m breaking them up to make them more manageable.
OK, it occurred to me that I don’t know that much about your childhood. If you’ve blogged about it, it was before I found your corner of the Internet.
Well, while it would be nicely poetic if I could claim a childhood full of traumas and hardships, that just wasn’t the case. It wasn’t a remarkable childhood at all.
So: how many people were in your household growing up? What was the birth order of you and your sibs, and age differentials? What jobs did your father and mother have outside the home? What were your parents’ names, and what did you call them? Did you get along with your sibs?
The Main Family Unit included four people: Father, Mother, Older Sister, and Me. Not a huge family, so I can’t complain that I was lost in the shuffle of all those kids. No “middle child”, Jan Brady-esque histrionics for me. Likewise, no only-child psychological baggage to carry around. Alas.
My sister was six years and change older than me. (Actually, that’s not likely to change, is it? That should be present tense.) So, we were far enough apart in age so as not to be close in all particulars, especially since when I was starting to find my own personality and such, she was entering her teen years. One difficult thing in growing up was my failure, understandable though it might have been, to comprehend the degree to which her interests at twelve years of age would differ from mine at six. All things considered, she and I got along fairly well. There were fights and arguments, and moments when I was utterly convinced that everything always went her way; I’m sure there were moments when she thought, “Jeez, Mom, you sure coddle that twit brother of mine” as well.
My sister is now a professor and a Shakespearean scholar in Colorado. She’s freakishly smart, way smarter than me. Oh well.
My parents were both teachers, with my father teaching on the collegiate level (except for two years when he worked as a programmer, I think, with a computer company outside Portland, OR), and my mother at the elementary level (although she eventually left the classroom and became a school librarian). I called them Mom and Dad, although (embarrassing admission warning) I’m told that as a very small child, I fancied myself being Batman, which made my mother Robin. I have no memory of this, thankfully.
Both of my parents are still alive and in good health. I got my liberal politics from them, among many other gifts that I didn’t realize were gifts at the time.
Did you all have dinner together? Who sat where? Was the table square, rectangular or round? (This may seem like a peculiar question, but I’ve seen it, in person, be quite revealing.)
We had dinner together more often when I was younger than when we were older, if memory truly serves. We were never the Happy Days style of family, with us-as-the-Cunninghams all sitting down to the meal Mother had made at the same time every night, but we did eat together fairly frequently. My mother is a good cook, although a standing joke is her tendency to cook in larger quantities than our family size would have seemed to warrant; my father terms this as her need to feed the entire Russian army. We also ate out together a lot. I remember my father occasionally making a stew in the crockpot, and he’d also put together an impressively gigantic salad that would sit in the fridge in a wooden bowl for several days afterward while we grazed at it.
Funny food story: my mother attempted making homemade pita bread once. Apparently the procedure involved putting the individual flatbreads on a table, beneath a towel, while the gases inside forced the bread to form a cavity inside. Well, there’s a rule of nature that states that given a soft surface freshly laid down, a cat will lay down upon it. So the cat laid down on the towel with the flatbreads beneath, causing the pockets in the pocket bread to fuse shut. Oops. (That cat had a habit of sitting on things he wasn’t supposed to, to a degree unusual even for cats, who as a species love to sit on things. A few years later the SOB sat on the box containing my birthday cake.)
We also once lived in a house where the oven’s actual temperature was about 125 degree lower than the temperature displayed on the knob, so that year, our Thanksgiving dinner took place at something like 8:30 pm. I remember that night we ended up going to a park in nearby Beaverton (this was when we lived in Hillsboro, OR), where a trail wound around a lake. We’d often go there for my parents to jog on the trail while my sister and I would walk and do whatever; often we’d take bread to feed to the ducks who lived there. Well, there we were, at this park on Thanksgiving Day at 6:00 pm, because at home our turkey was just starting to cook.
(And thanks to the magic of Google, I found that very park!
I wonder if SDB knows where it is? I think he lives in those parts these days.)
Dining room table shapes? We’d have a rectangular table for a few years, then get a round table, then back to rectangular, and so on. The table they have now is rectangular. “Grace” was almost never said, except on holidays, although we now say it before every meal ever since The Daughter got in the habit of doing so. (No “improvised” prayers, we just say what is apparently for Lutherans called the “Common table prayer”. For the longest time I was pretty uncomfortable with the concept of prayer before meals.)
(Our own table, by the way, is rectangular. The Wife usually sits at the “head” of the table, when we eat at the table at all. Lots of times we just dish up food and head to the living room to eat. A bad habit, maybe, but eating takeout at the table feels wrong somehow. A particularly pleasant ritual is to get takeout and eat in the living room in front of the teevee while we watch a movie together.)
On the playground, were you a bully, were you bullied, or did you manage to stay out of the fray? What were your best and worst subjects in school?
Was I bullied? Occasionally, but really, not that often. I never got my ass kicked, although I came close a few times, and I must now admit that my own mouth was often a factor in whatever incidents of possible bullying I may have found myself enmeshed within. I didn’t bully, either, although there were times when the temptation was somewhat strong, I must admit. For the most part, I avoided that whole fray, although there were rare instances of fisticuffs.
There was one incident of clear-cut bullying that resulted in me having a broken bone for a chunk of summer; that sucked. Oddly, though, I didn’t rat the kid out. In retrospect, I should have, but in my school, there was this odd stigma attached to being a tattletale (or a ‘narc’ as they called it).
I think I’m done now.
Thank goodness!
And with that, Ask Me Anything! 2008 comes to a close. Thanks to those who asked questions. For reference, here are the questions asked (albeit rephrased slightly) and answered previously, with the links to the posts involved:
Go ahead! Rant about the Patriots! You know you want to! All the cool kids are!
Why didn’t you just name this blog Jaquandor’s Blog?
OK, time for a couple more answers. Now, when the football season ended, I was content to limit to a single, brief post my gloating over the massive THUD with which my most loathed sports team on the planet hit the ground in their supposed quest for perfection, but since this series is called Ask Me Anything!, I have to answer the questions, two of which dealt with the New England Patriots. So, any Pats fans in the audience, you might want to just skip this post entirely. (Ditto for people who don’t give a rip about football, or for people who do give a rip about football but who don’t like to read the ravings of lunatics like me.)
Will the loss by the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl have an effect on the sale of hoodies?
I haven’t the faintest idea, but since I actually like hoodies (although I hate the word “hoodie”), I hope not. And to be quite honest, the thing about Bill Belichick that bothers me the least is the way he looks on the sideline. I find his hoodies preferable to the gaudily-colored golf shirts that most other coaches wear.
OK, there, I said something nice about Belichick. Now to rip him and his whole rotten disgusting vomitous retchworthy team to shreds!
Should we consider the Patriots as being 0-4 in Super Bowls for the decade? Given the revelation that the Patriots have been cheating since 2000, how happy/sad does this make you feel?
Well…no. Not yet. There just isn’t enough evidence right now to make any definitive statements, one way or the other, and in any event, the Patriots’ cheating was of the “gain an edge” variety — meaning, it’s not quite on the level of the Black Sox scandal. I don’t think they won those Super Bowls because they cheated, although it may have helped a bit, if they were taping the other teams’ practices. But really, their videotape shenanigans didn’t make Mike Martz decide to pigheadedly stick to his gameplan of having Kurt Warner throw the ball all over the field and ignore the presence of the NFL’s best running back (at that time), Marshall Faulk, on his own roster. (It’s unforgivable that in a game that close, Faulk only had seventeen carries against a team that was very suspect against the run.) The Patriots’ videotape shenanigans didn’t make John Fox go for two-point conversions in bad situations, or the Panthers’ kicker send a kickoff out of bounds just after they’d tied the game at 29-all. Their videotape shenanigans didn’t make the Eagles play a fairly flat game or make Andy Reid lose sight of the most important element of any football game, the game clock.
I don’t have any idea how the entire issue is going to play out, but I have few hopes that even if there was a program of significant videotaping in place in New England it will come out and the guilty parties disciplined. The NFL has already destroyed the pertinent evidence that it had at hand, and there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of clamoring for this matter to be got to the bottom of. The main sentiment I’ve heard seems to be “It’s in the past and it’s settled now.” Shockingly, everyone seems to be going for that. I contrast that attitude with that expressed when baseball’s Mark MacGuire told Congress that he “wasn’t there to discuss the past”; some cite that performance on Capitol Hill as the main reason MacGuire hasn’t yet made the Hall of Fame.
I’m also highly disappointed in the media’s approach to the whole Cheating scandal, as it illustrates anew the media’s fixation these days with narrative as opposed to actual journalism. No one has really done any significant digging into the Cheating scandal. The entire story just vanished utterly after Roger Goodell basically said “Nothing to see here folks, and by the way, I destroyed the evidence the Patriots gave me. Let’s move on.” Instead, the focus turned, as it seemingly always does, to treating the Patriots with bizarre worshipful reverence, which is why I ended up seeing article after article after article from various sportwriters insisting that the Patriots should be loved by all football fans (case in point). I remember reading Buffalo News sportswriters on the News‘s blog section writing in one post that their job was to be objective and dispassionate regarding reporting on the Bills, but in another post openly admitting to rooting for the Patriots to pull off the undefeated season. And even when the Patriots had lost the Super Bowl, there was Jason Whitlock insisting that they should still be loved and revered, that they’re still one of the greatest of all teams, and that the Giants were merely Super Bowl champions. Okay.
So what’s going to happen? I suspect that the extent of the Patriots’ cheating will never be known. It’s too late, too much has been allowed to slip through the cracks, and no one seems terribly interested anyway. But the scandal, along with the Patriots’ loss in Super Bowl XLII, has had one terribly beneficial effect: it’s pretty much put to bed the notion that this is the greatest of all dynasties. Put it this way: the Steelers of the 1970s dominated the NFL with one of the greatest defenses of all time. The 49ers of the 1980s dominated with the greatest quarterback in history. The Cowboys of the 1990s dominated with the best running back in history. The Patriots of the 2000s dominated with…videotape.
Setting dynasties aside, here’s an article by John Czarnecki listing the greatest single season teams ever. Maybe it’s churlish of me, but as a Buffalo Bills fan, I have been told by other NFL fans ever since Super Bowl XXVIII ended that the Bills could not be considered one of the great teams because they didn’t win the Super Bowl. Well, if that’s the logic, then it also applies to the 2007 Patriots, shouldn’t it?
(A brief aside: it always shocks me when I read articles like this, and I see that the single best team that I have ever seen since I started paying attention to football, the 1991 Redskins, again forgotten. Why does that team get so little love? That team scored 485 points and only gave up 224, which is a staggering differential; both their offense and their defense were in the top five that year; they went 14-2, with their losses coming to rivals within their division, then the toughest division in football, and those losses by a combined five points; their offensive line gave up nine sacks all year (compare to this year’s Pats, almost universally cited as the contemporary Gold Standard of O-line play, who gave up twenty-one sacks). The 1991 Redskins were just amazing, and I say that as a Bills fan who had to watch them get blown out in the Super Bowl. I suspect that one reason the 1991 ‘Skins aren’t often remembered is because of their quarterback. Mark Rypien had a career year in 1991, but within two years he was gone from Washington and spent the rest of his career as a journeyman. If Rypien had had a Hall of Fame career, instead of being really good for a couple of years and then fading, I’ll bet the ’91 Redskins would be remembered a lot better than they are.)
Also, we can set aside the notion, voiced constantly over the course of 2007, that we were seeing the greatest quarterback in history at the peak of his career. Sorry, but Tom Brady is still not the equal of Joe Montana in my mind. Montana never lost on the biggest stage. When Montana twice went into a Super Bowl against a clearly inferior opponent, he blew them out (including the biggest blowout in Super Bowl history, 55-10 in Super Bowl XXIV), and those two inferior teams were themselves quarterbacked by future Hall of Famers (Dan Marino and John Elway). When Montana came into the final moments of a Super Bowl facing a three-point deficit, meaning he had to either score at least a field goal or go home the loser, he didn’t just get the field goal; he got the touchdown to win the game. True, he had more time in his score-or-die scenario (two minutes versus fifty-some seconds), but he also had more ground to cover (he took the field with his team at its own eight-yard line). Brady’s got rings, but rings don’t create football myth. Situations create football myth, and Brady’s situations simply don’t compare to Montana’s.
(But let’s be clear: Brady’s a clear Hall of Famer and one of the best of all time. I’m not presenting an argument that he sucks; just that he’s overrated.)
Another odd notion that seems to be falling aside a bit is the canard that the Patriots are somehow special, that they rise above the fray and that they are just a bunch of humble guys who have set aside their egos to form this astonishing team. Well, having watched these guys for years, I’m not sure where the humility idea comes from. This year I saw Junior Seau dancing around obnoxiously after every play he made, no matter how pedestrian. I saw Vince Wilfork get fined multiple times for dirty plays, including his hit of JP Losman on the knee. (No, I don’t for one second believe that he wasn’t going for Losman’s knee. There’s no reason at all for his arm to be extended in that way if he wasn’t.) I’ve seen Rodney Harrison make dirty hits for years. When Richard Seymour was called out for trash-talking at the Super Bowl, when the Patriots were still up 14-10 in the final minutes of the fourth quarter, does anyone seriously believe that such un-humble behavior was really out of character for this team? And then there’s Randy Moss, who somehow gets credit this year for being on his best behavior, which is his history as a player, when he is winning. If Moss resigns with New England, and he’s still with them in two or three years, let’s see how happy he’s acting if the team is 10-6 and making an early exit in the playoffs. I have a strong feeling that we haven’t seen the last of the “I don’t play hard all the time” Randy Moss.
Finally, what does the future hold for the Patriots? Lots of people think that as long as Brady’s around, they’ll be a juggernaut. Brady himself recently said that he’d like to play as long as Vinny Testaverde did. I think that’s unrealistic, and it’s more likely that Brady’s longevity will be a victim of his success. The problem for him there is the amount of playoff action he’s seen. Brady has started all seventeen of the Patriots’ playoff games over the last seven years. Since an entire football season is only sixteen games, that means that Brady has literally played the equivalent of eight seasons of football in seven years. That takes a toll, and in football terms, it takes its toll fairly quickly. Brady’s still pretty robust, and he’s probably good for another four or five years, but there’s no way he plays into his forties. (And I’m not just ripping on Brady here, either. The same can be said of Peyton Manning, who has fourteen playoff games under his belt.) Playoff football is just as physical as regular football, and guys who make a lot of deep playoff runs in a short period of time tend to fade quickly when they do. And even the guys like John Elway and Dan Marino, who are poster children for longevity in the NFL, had to pay the same piper. With one more playoff game, which is probably a dead certainty barring injury, Brady will equal the number that Marino had for his entire career. He’s got only five more to tie Elway, and six to catch Montana. But those guys didn’t pack their playoff appearances into so short a period as Brady has, either; better comparisons might be Jim Kelly (17 career playoff games in nine years), Troy Aikman (16 career playoff games in nine years), and Steve Young (14 career playoff games in seven years, although he also appeared in six playoff games before that in relief of Joe Montana, all of those in late-game, mop-up situations). Basically, I doubt very much if the Tom Brady era has more than four or five seasons left in it, and the more deep playoff runs he makes, the shorter it’ll be.
OK, so that should put all of that to bed. There, that didn’t hurt so much, did it?
Some replies to Ask Me Anything! 2008 queries. Here we go:
Roger, who asked a ton of questions this time out, kicked things off thusly: How has the events of the past year figured into your faith journey, however you define that?
Tough question, this; very tough question. My “faith journey”, if it can be termed as such, is pretty much directionless. I’m not sure this is a bad thing, really, unless we take the concept of a “faith journey” to have a predetermined destination, and I’m not sure that I do, in the usual sense. Put it this way: if we define the destination of a faith journey as a specific physical location – say, Niagara Square in Downtown Buffalo – and we further define my personal journey as starting out from some other physical location – say, John O’Groats in Scotland, then what I’m doing isn’t so much trying to get from John O’Groats to Niagara Square as roaming the world starting with John O’Groats and seeing where I end up. If I get to Niagara Square, fine, but if I don’t but I see lots of the world and I make lots of friends and I learn a whole lot about the world, is it such a bad thing if I don’t make it to Niagara Square? Especially if, and here’s the rub, I either am not sure or simply don’t know if Niagara Square is where I should be heading at all?
This is why I have such a hard time, as I noted last week, with the sentiment expressed in John 4:6. Who am I to say that the faith journey undertaken by a person in Tibet, a person who lives his whole life in that country and lives his whole life under the precepts of Buddhism, is any less valid than that undertaken by me? And given my strong belief that religions are at least in part, if not in their entireties, formalized expressions based on the experiences of a certain group of people in a certain time or place, how can it be wise for me to assume that they are wrong, that in their time on this world they have learned nothing and that they therefore have nothing at all to offer a searching soul like me? So I can’t assume that.
This, I well know, renders my own spirituality something of a smorgasbord, and for now I’m fine with that approach. There are so many things in Christianity that draw me, and there is so much power in its narrative. Believer or no, I think it’s impossible to look at the life of Jesus, with his message and his act of self-sacrifice, and not stand a little bit in awe of it all. But I also see so many things in every other faith to draw me, and so much power in their narratives as well.
So, back to the original question: the events of the last year. The honest answer, even though it won’t satisfy, is that I don’t know. For one thing, the things that have happened in my life (and in those of my family) are still so recent that I can’t imagine to have any answers worked out right now, and even though out own personal circumstances are what they are, the question that rises at all times is not a new one at all. In fact, from my perspective, it may be this very question that gives rise to religious and spiritual thought in the first place. In our case, it’s “Hey, God, you let people who are complete jerks, boobs, ne’er-do-wells, and incompetents have beautiful healthy babies, and you visit beautiful, healthy babies upon people who don’t deserve them and who in some cases may actually contribute to the lives of these babies being nasty, brutish and short. So how come we, who play by the rules and do everything as well as we can, have a single living child who is outnumbered by her deceased younger siblings?”
This type of question, though, can be asked by anyone at all, can’t it? And with varying degrees of what we might call “seriousness”, but in the end, it’s the same type of question. “God, all we needed to do was get this space shuttle back onto the ground, so why did you let the heat-shielding tiles rip away and destroy us?” “God, couldn’t you have just nudged that stupid football over three feet, instead of letting it go wide-right?” “God, why did you make it so that the one day my husband doesn’t stop for coffee on the way to work so he could be in his office twenty minutes earlier was the day you let those guys highjack those planes so one of them could crash into my husband’s office!”
The questions come in reverse form, too, and we’d do well to never forget it. I was watching an interview the other day with David Crosby, and he pointed out, “I lived the same way that Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix did, and yet I’m still here and I don’t know why.” A coin gets tossed, and it’s Richie Valens on the plane instead of Hank Williams Jr. This house gets destroyed by the tornado; the one next door just gets all its windows broken. That editor’s looking to buy one manuscript today, and he reads this writer’s submission early in the morning when he’s still on his first cup of coffee, but he reads that writer’s work in the late afternoon, after he’s supposed to have gone home, sat through a bunch of useless meetings, and had a bad call from his ex. Does that matter? Maybe, maybe not.
So where am I going with this? Ultimately I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to say with a strong feeling of conviction, “I am a [insert religion here]“. It seems that any time one says I am this, there is an implied galaxy of I am not thats. I don’t know where my journey is leading me. All that I know (apologies to Messrs. Lerner and Loewe) is that I’m on my way.
:: Roger also asks: Have you forgiven me for rooting for the Giants against the Bills? If the Giants don’t beat Buffalo, they don’t get into the playoffs to knock off New England.
Heh. Nice logic, that: by losing that game, the Bills actually set in motion the series of events that later resulted in the Patriots falling short of Their Glorious Season of Conquest. OK, fine, you’re off the hook. I suppose I should also forgive Eli Manning for that tantrum he and his family threw back at the time of the 2004 Draft; if he doesn’t scream bloody murder and get himself traded to New York, Philip Rivers would have been the starter in that game. Not that would necessarily have been a bad thing, as the 2004 Class may go down as the best quarterbacking class in draft history. Four years into the careers of those guys, and the three quarterbacks taken in Round One of that year have sixteen playoff games, four Conference Championship Game appearances, and two Super Bowl championships among them. Wow.
(What’s that? You say there was a fourth quarterback taken in the first round in 2004? Nah, you surely must be mistaken.)
Interestingly, of the three teams that beat the Bills in the Super Bowl, the Giants are the one that I didn’t dislike at the time or decide to dislike after their win. Maybe I should have, since that Giants team gave the world Bill Belichick, but at the time, I didn’t hate the Giants for winning against the Bills. Also of questionable historical interest is to look at the coaching careers of the three head coaches who beat the Bills after those games. It turns out that beating the Bills in the Super Bowl would be, in each case, the last great thing those guys would ever do as head coaches. What does that mean? Nothing, really. It’s just mildly intriguing to me that within a year of beating the Bills in the Super Bowl, Bill Parcells, Joe Gibbs, and Jimmy Johnson were all out of coaching, at least temporarily, and when each one returned, none of them could win the Super Bowl with their new teams. (OK, it’s not that interesting. I just like to demonstrate my command of useless NFL trivia.)
Belladonna asks: My question should come as no surprise…how did the pie thing start for you?
Heh! What she’s referring to is a mutual interest of ours – well, one of several mutual interests, but definitely the oddest: we both take delight in that staple of slapstick comedy, the pie in the face. (She’s even made a birthday tradition out of it, and our mutual appreciation thereof has led her to put me on her own “bucket list”. I’m well and truly honored!)
Anyway, I remember seeing this funniest of fates befall people on many teevee shows I used to watch as a kid: Sesame Street and The Electric Company (example — yes, that’s Morgan Freeman on the receiving end), You Can’t Do That on Television (example), game shows like an incredibly goofy one called The New Treasure Hunt (example — hey, I was five when I was watching this stuff, and it was the 1970s anyway), and variety shows like The Mike Douglas Show (example featuring, appropriately enough, Moe Howard). I don’t know why, but a face full of whipped cream (or not — ouch!) really hits my funnybone on the sweet spot. Go figure. (Which is why I hated that “Ginger versus Mary Ann” ad from a few years back — not because it was gross or sexist, but because it wasn’t funny.)
Well, that was quite the range in topics in a single post, huh? From matters of faith and God to pie throwing. Wow.
(And yes, I’ve been pied in the face myself.)
Time for a couple of easily answered questions!
An anonymous reader asks: Whom do you prefer: Francis Crawford of Lymond or Nicholas DeFleury? Sadly, I have no preference, because I have not yet read any of the works of Dorothy Dunnett. This is a gaping hole in my reading life, I am ashamed to admit. I desperately need to get into her. (She is one of Guy Gavriel Kay’s influences, for one thing.)
Michelle (no link, so I’m not sure which Michelle) asks: What is your favorite time of day and why?
In terms of preferred times of day, I’m really pretty schizophrenic. I can pick reasons for liking every time of day. I used to loathe mornings, but years of getting up early have made me attuned to morning’s charms. There’s a crispness in the air on a fall morning, and on a humid summer morning, if you get up early enough, the mist hangs around the ground and dampens the sound of the world. I love watching the sky shift from night to morning light, and I love the stars early in the morning. A sunrise is as beautiful as a sunset, and sometimes, on certain mornings, I’ll be driving to work when I see a jet plane rising into the air from the Buffalo Niagara airport (about seven or eight miles more distant) in such a way that it catches the glow of the rising sun and shines like a sliver of new sunlight, arcing into the sky.
Besides, coffee smells the best in the morning, and that’s when waffles and maple syrup and eggs and bacon and sausage smell best.
Evenings and nights? I love them, too. These are times for delving into different worlds via books, when the moon rises and the stars shine again. Here in Buffalo we get wonderful sunsets. At night, steaks and pastas taste their best, and night time is when ales and lagers and rums refresh their best.
My problem is that I’m both a morning and a night person, which means that I end up burning that particular candle from both ends. So what does that mean as far as afternoons go? They’re for sandwiches and naps.
Oh, and every time of day is the perfect time of day for a good book and beautiful music.
Aaron asked, So, is Unidentified Earth coming back or what? Well, yes! And so far it appears to be a stumper. Apparently this particular hawk’s eye view is a difficult one. Hmmmmm!
More answers forthcoming!
Actually, I missed it; the official Blogiversary for Byzantium’s Shores was on Friday, February 15, but I was too busy that night to post in honor of it, so I’ll do it now.
And this gives me a good time to start with the answers to the current round of Ask Me Anything!. Becky poses this query:
How did you come up with the name of your blog? (I was reading Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine last night and he likes to compare the town of his youth to Byzantium.)
I’ve actually given this answer before, but not in a while — four years, in fact, on the occasion of my second Blogiversary. Here’s the relevant portion of that post:
About two years and a month ago, I was lazily doing some Net surfing and engaged in one of my common Net timekillers: doing Google searches for former high school and college classmates. On this particular occasion, I decided to check what was up with a former fellow Philosophy major from the college days, whom I knew had gone into ministry. Thus I found Sean Meade’s blog, the discovery of which made me think, “What on Earth is a ‘blog’?” I quickly surmised that it was some kind of online diary or journal or something. Seemed like a nifty idea.
And then a week or two later, an article appeared in TIME Magazine, the gist of which was “Hey, there’s these really cool things now called ‘blogs’! And you can get one for free! Here’s how you do it!”
I mulled this over for another week or two, thinking that this would be pretty cool indeed. At the time I was still quite active on Usenet, although I was getting really tired of basically staying “on topic” and thus repeating the same things I’d said over-and-over again. The idea of a “blog” was really appealing, since I’d occasionally considered setting up a personal site where I’d put up essays and such on a sporadic basis, but never come ’round to actually doing so. But the confluence of finding Sean’s blog and that article about blogging in TIME basically clinched it.
So I signed up with Blogger and BlogSpot, created my first blog, decided I didn’t like the title, scrapped it, and launched a different one. I needed a title, though, and I was having trouble coming up with one. I didn’t want to have something like “Jaquandor’s Rants”, since I don’t rant all that often; I wanted something mildly poetic that would basically convey the fact that I would write about anything that interests me (and a lot of stuff interests me). But I had trouble with the title: When writing fiction, I rarely start with a title. Instead, I write for a while until the story’s title “comes” to me, but obviously this approach wouldn’t work for a new blog that would go unread by, well, millions. I wanted something with at least a little cachet, and This Blog To Be Titled Later had about as much cachet as a shopping mall food court Chinese eatery. (Now, there is Chinese food that leaves me hungry an hour later, if only because it’s so bland I can never finish it.)
About that moment, my eye fell upon my copy of Stephen Lawhead’s novel Byzantium (which I really need to go back and re-read, since I never finished it the first time, and not because I didn’t like it). And this was just after I’d finished reading Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Sarantine Mosaic, with its depiction of a fictional Byzantium: a cosmopolitan place wherein all of the world’s traditions and cultures met, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. So I had half the title (Byzantium by itself seemed incomplete), and then I thought of sea shores — again, places where differing worlds come together, and places where some journeys begin and others end. “Eureka!” shouted I, disturbing the cat. “Byzantium’s Shores! The very pinnacle of human coolness on Earth!” [Some details in this account have been embellished.]
And that’s how the blog came to be. So, now we’re onto Year Seven. How much longer can it go on? Who knows? I’m still enjoying things, so we’ll see. This is definitely one of the oldest entrants in the Buffalo Prefecture of Blogistan, and it may actually be the longest active-at-one-URL blog in the Buffalo Prefecture. (I can’t really say why that matters to me, but for some reason it does. I guess I’ve become the guy who keeps plugging away at what interests him, not paying a whole ton of regard to other trends that come along and pass into memory.)
What’s funny to me now about reading those first entries from back in February of 2002 (I don’t recommend that you do so, but hey, I can’t very well stop you) is that in some cases I think, “Wow, what a pretentious ass that guy was”, while in others, I think, “Wow, that’s certainly me writing that stuff — a younger, dumber me, but certainly me.” It took quite a bit of time before I settled in on my “blog voice”, and in some ways I’m still looking for it. But when I do find it, I’ll let you all know.
For now, though, thanks as always to everyone who reads this blog. Your overalls-clad hippie narrator appreciates your patronage!
(Yeah, that’s basically what it looks like. It’s a guy in overalls sittin’ at a computer. Wheeeee!)
Just one final shout-out for Ask Me Anything! 2008. Any stragglers, leave your questions in comments on that post! All questions welcome.
Seeing as how we’re coming up on the sixth anniversary of the birth of this blog, I figured it’s time to play the old game, Ask Me Anything!, in which you, the readers, get to Ask Me Anything!. So, go ahead, in comments, ask away: silly questions, profound questions, brain teaser questions, whatever. Try to trick me into saying something bad about George Lucas (it won’t work), or something nice about Bill Belichick (like that’ll ever happen!). I’ll collect questions for a few days, maybe until Monday or Tuesday, and then I’ll start answering.
So, Ask Me Anything!
(The last iteration of Ask Me Anything! can be found here.)
