The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Oddities and Awesome abound!…but not so much this past week, which was busy and led to a lot of time not spent in front of the computer looking for things Odd or Awesome.
But here’s something: a brief tour of Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s workspace. This guy is very rapidly becoming a hero of mine.
That desk lamp is in the running for Best Thing Ever. I want one! (And heck, I could probably make one!)
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Ramen Rater is a blog that reviews ramen noodles. This is awesome. Trust me. (If all you know of ramen is the super-ultra cheap stuff that sustained you in college because those fifty cents you found in the cushions of your couch represented five ramen meals, believe me, you don’t know your ramen!)
:: Least Helpful is a blog that gathers examples of Amazon and other online reviewing gone seriously awry. How awry? Well, on reviewer actually thought “Go the F**k to Sleep” was a real children’s book.
:: This is really cool: it’s a timelapse movie of a period of time on the waterfront of Vancouver, BC.
Woodwards 3303, 10th Sep 2011 from abonstu on Vimeo.
I love the ferry boats that come and go, always following the same route; one zips away, and another zips in. Great stuff!
More next week!
Oddities and Awesome abound!!!
:: Twenty beautiful personal and private libraries.
I’ve seen most of these before online, but it’s always fun to revisit them. Some of them look way too impersonal and antiseptic for me; the only ones that really look like places I’d like to hole up and work in for long stretches of time are the very first one, the one belonging to Neil Gaiman, and, of course, the one at the Skywalker Ranch. I really don’t think I’d like the staircase one, where the books are actually stored in the spaces betwixt the stairs. I just know that dirt from my feet would end up co-mingling with the books, and that’s not a good thing.
Still, if ever we have a Place Of Our Own, I will be constructing a better storage facility for my books than my current ‘stacks everywhere one looks’ thing that I’ve got going on.
:: It’s Oscar night (no, I’m not watching), so check out this animated-GIF montage of the reactions of people who lost the awards for which they were nominated. As much as I like graciousness in defeat, there’s still something oddly refreshing about the occasional “Oh, f*** that guy!” reaction.
:: Guy meets girl. Guy dates girl for a week or so. Girl gets guy’s face tattooed on her arm. Facebooked hilarity ensues!
More next week!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Want to take a few minutes and study a picture for all the SF-geek references within it? Sure you do. (It’s mostly Star Wars references, but there’s other stuff in there, too. I wish you could resolve it even larger….)
:: Roger Ebert reviews the new movie The Vow. This doesn’t sound like anything I’d watch unless I’m in my fairly rare mood for whatever the Tearjerker Of The Day happens to be, but this closing paragraph of Ebert’s caught my attention:
A footnote. The movie is said to be set in Chicago. It struck me as strange that it has such a large number of second-unit shots of the city: skylines, elevated trains, the Music Box movie theater. Yet the couple itself is rarely seen in them. There is one nice shot of the newlyweds running from the Art Institute across a footbridge into Millennium Park and ending up under the Bean, but otherwise something fishy is going on. Yes, the movie was shot mostly in Toronto. Poor Toronto. Poor Chicago. Poor Paige and Leo. Poor Jeremy, even.
I don’t get this, really. I mean, I get why movies would film in Toronto — it’s cheaper to do so. But why go to the trouble of establishing its setting as Chicago with some second-unit stuff? Why not just set the movie in Toronto? Are we that afraid that Americans might say, “Hey, here’s a movie we can see…oh wait, no, the movie’s set in Toronto, not any good American city. Forget that!”? I just don’t get this.
:: I may have linked this before, but if so, well…I’m gonna link it again. Check out NASA’s current highest-resolution photos of our entire planet. You can look at both hemispheres. Amazing!
More next week!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Want to learn how to make a whole lot of mixed drinks? Just follow the diagram! (Although probably not after you’ve had a few. You’d end up with some seriously awful drinks, or some seriously amazing drinks that you will never be able to replicate.)
:: Ever wonder what things look like from the perspective of the Hula Hoop? Wonder no more!
(via)
That’s about it. Tune in next week for more!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: The Fifteen Most Embarrassing Tom Brady Photos. Because mocking St. Tom never gets old! GO GIANTS!!!
:: In the unlikely event that I ever own a bookstore of my own, it will have a cat.
:: Here is the newest leader in my ongoing quest for the Greatest Thing Ever:
More next week!
Oddities and Awesome abound!!!
:: Seventy-five years ago, a whole bunch of special beer was brewed in Britain on the occasion of the coronation of King Edward VII. But that coronation never took place, because the King abdicated so he could marry the woman he loved (thus bringing a stutterer to the throne…note to self: write blog post about The King’s Speech). So the beer was left in a cellar and forgotten…until now.
:: In Siberia, a diesel truck ended up in a river. The river was deep enough to completely submerge pretty much the entire truck except for the cab and the engine compartment. The truck won.
One of the YouTube comments dubs the truck “Truck Norris”. I find it hard to disagree.
:: Nick Mamatas doesn’t think too highly of some common bits of writing advice. I tend to pretty much ignore all of it myself, by this point, and simply try to do the very best that I can on the story that I want to tell. Of course, I’m still an unpublished schlub, so who cares what I think, right?
More next week!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: No. No no a thousand times NO.
:: Charles Stross predicts the future, part one and part two. Fascinating reading, even if I personally find his vision of the future a little…depressing.
:: A bit of ‘inside baseball’ on this one…but fine Buffalo blogger (whom I’ve known for years now) Alan Bedenko has been waging a somewhat mercurial campaign against Buffalo News food critic Janice Okun, whose writing tends to be harmlessly facile. The campaign seems a bit odd to me, but then, one would hope for better food writing in the region’s most prominent regular publication, and that we don’t have it seems to reinforce notions of Buffalo being a parochial backwater locale where the restaurant scene is too dominated by the likes of Applebee’s. But whatever…a month ago, Alan wrote a post in which he noted that some odd factual claims by the owner of a restaurant Okun reviewed went unchecked, with hilarious results. Somehow — and there’s no doubt Alan didn’t expect this — he scratched the surface of something whose underbelly is very seedy indeed, and the comments on that post have been raging ever since. It’s quite a thing to behold.
More next week!
Oddities and Awesome abound!!!
:: I wonder if this guy has a partner-in-crime named ‘Rama Lama Dingdong’.
:: Here’s an interesting article about Choose Your Own Adventure books. If you’re a certain age — my age, perhaps — you remember these books somewhat fondly. Told in second person, you’d read a few pages and then be presented with a choice, whereby you turned to page X if you chose to do A, or page Y if you chose to do B, and so on through the book, until you came to one of usually between 25 to 30 endings. “Interactive fiction” at its most basic, I suppose, but still, quite a bit of fun. My favorites were some of the space opera ones (of course), as well as a spy book called Your Code Name Is Jonah, a quite scary one called The Mystery of Chimney Rock, and…well, most of ’em were pretty fun. You could also learn from these, such as the one where you’re lost at sea on a rowboat and you’re parched with thirst and the sea water looks so appealing, so you choose to drink some. Bad idea, that!
Here’s another cool site about the Choose Your Own Adventure series that actually graphs out some information about each book and how the endings are distributed.
Incidentally, I’ve always been irritated that there really, truly is no way to get to the “Ultima” ending of Inside UFO 54-40 without just stopping reading and flipping to it. I remember that there is no traditional way of doing it, but I’d always hoped there was something overlooked in the book…maybe a page where each line starts with letters that spell out “Turn to page 101 to get to Ultima”, or something like that.
:: I honestly wasn’t wondering what Sylvester Stallone has been up to…and yet, now I know, anyway. Yeesh.
More next week!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Via Michael Dean Jackson, I see that the newest meme-thing to be sweeping the Interweb is “Unimpressed Astronaut”. I, of course, had to make a few of my own:
On that last: it always amuses me when people complain about a NASA mission that fails, such as lost probes to Mars. One of our standard cliches for indicating that a given task isn’t as hard as someone is making it out to be is, “Hey, this ain’t rocket science!” And yet, we get mad when people fail, even though they are actually doing rocket science. Anyhoo….
:: Hate Actually: the romances of Love, Actually tallied out and scored by pros and cons. I’m due for my annual viewing of Love, Actually soon….
More next week!
