The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Syracuse had an Ironman triathlon thing the other day, and participants who completed the course were awarded this medal:
Yup, they got that beautiful medal for completing a triathlon. In Syracuse.
Because completing a triathlon is an accomplishment. In Syracuse.
One wonders, then, why the medal features the skyline of…Rochester.
Oops.
Some stuff from recent days!
:: A kinetic sculpture featuring eleven thousand marbles. This kind of thing delights me to ridiculous degrees.
:: JAWS is 40 years old!
:: Speaking of Speilberg blockbusters, I saw this on the road the other day. I assume it’s a promotional thing. Note the license plate.
As for the deeply sad story that’s been dominating the news this week…I’m not addressing it here. I’m simply worn out by such things. My thoughts tend to mirror Jason Bennion‘s, though, for what it’s worth.
Know, all who see these lines,
That this man, by his appetite for honor,
By his steadfastness,
By his love for his country,
By his courage,
Was one of the miracles of the God.— Guy Gavriel Kay
Well, how do you do, young Willie McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile ‘neath the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the great fallen in 1916,
I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
To that faithful heart are you forever 19?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enshrined then, forever, behind a glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
The sun’s shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard that’s still No Man’s Land
The countless white crosses in stand mute in the sand
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man,
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
And I can’t help but wonder, no Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did they really believe when they answered the call,
Did they really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
The killing and dying, was all done in vain,
For young Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The Daughter has, this past week, watched Schindler’s List in school. I don’t know if this is because of Holocaust Remembrance Day, or if it’s a coincidence that their study of the WWII and the Holocaust period happened to line up with today. Schindler’s List is a favorite film of mine, a deeply human testament to the evil that can arise out of simple human nature and the good that can also arise out of the same thing. What begins for Schindler as an easy way to make money over time becomes a mission to save as many lives as he can, and he’s never even aware of the shift; there’s no moment when he sits down and says, “I am going to save them.” He just…does. By the time his mission has become humanitarian, all the Nazis around him are so utterly convinced of his skill as a businessman that it never even occurs to them that he’s not making money and that he is literally buying their lives.
Likewise, the film’s flip side is the staggering banality of its evil. Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), kills sometimes because he is enraged and sometimes because he clearly loathes the Jews, but other times, he is shown killing because he has nothing else to do. He’s up one morning and shooting Jews with his rifle and then he leans back to pop his spine a few times and then he shoots a few more and then he goes to the bathroom and so on. Much has been written over the years of how the Nazis managed to elevate their evil to industrial levels, and no scene establishes that in this movie quite so well as the scene when Goeth is ordered by Berlin to have his men dig up the mass graves and cremate the bodies instead. The shots here are jaw-dropping in their horrific nature: giant piles of bodies being set aflame, and a conveyor belt thing being used to drag them from the carts and dump them on the pyre. A horrified Oskar Schindler arrives on the scene, and Goeth turns to him and says in the tone of an annoyed and overworked office worker, “Can you believe this? As if I don’t have enough to do, they come up with this?” That’s when it hits me, in this movie: the Nazis didn’t just make one of the most egregious evils of all time into an industry. They made it people’s jobs. People showed up to work, punching a clock and bitching about their workloads at lunchtime, to kill six million Jews.
Here is the scene where the war has ended and Schindler, technically a fugitive, must go on the run. It’s my understanding that this did not happen in history. I don’t care.
It turns out that I’m far from the only person to use Pi Day as an impetus for a pie in the face, which is actually kind of nice to learn. I mean, I want to be weird, but not ridiculously out there, if you know what I mean. Anyway, here are a few examples of folks who put their faces on the line for mathematically-initiated silliness!
A reporter makes a bet with the quarterback of the Tennessee football team as to how many digits of Pi he can rattle off. He wins.
Yes, today is Pi Day! I don’t usually do much to observe Pi Day, but this year’s is a special edition, since this is the only year in this century when the digits will line up so perfectly.
And how would a goof like me mark the occasion? Well, it would start with this:
And end like this:
Today is the anniversary of The Day the Music Died, as it’s come to be known: the day that a small plane carrying Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all three musicians. Sheila O’Malley has an excellent post on the subject; check it out.
I went to college in that area, actually: Wartburg College is in Waverly, IA, which is roughly an hour’s drive away from the Mason City and Clear Lake area. For people in that part of Iowa, The Day the Music Died isn’t just a tragic day in the history of rock-n-roll, but rather an important and sad part of local folklore. I drove through Clear Lake a number of times, with various friends on a number of road trips, and though we never went out to the field where the plane went down, we did drive by the Surf Ballroom once or twice.
I also remember watching American Graffiti when I was in college, and there’s a line in that movie — I think the Paul LeMat character, the hot-rod race driving guy, says it — to the effect that “music’s been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died”. This in reply to someone’s positive opinion of the Beach Boys. The movie was set in the early 1960s, of course, but even though it was made in 1973 or so, the passing of Holly, Valens, and the Big Bopper was still a reasonably fresh memory, only 14 years gone. That sounds longish, but this year, 9-11 will be as far in the past. I’m not sure what my point here is, other than to note that memories of events that are history to us were once fresh wounds and became scars, in time.
Anyway, it’s always worth reflecting on the stars that pass before they really got a chance to shine with their full brilliance.
Politics below the fold.
As I tweeted earlier:
I will under no circumstances vote for you, or even listen to a single thing you have to say, if you are in any way anti-vaccine.
— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) February 3, 2015
Being anti-vaccine is for me equivalent to global-warming denialism. It automatically disqualifies you from serious consideration.
— Kelly Sedinger (@Jaquandor) February 3, 2015
What brought this on? Here’s Rand Paul saying that vaccinations should be voluntary because of freedom, some other GOP lackwit saying that we shouldn’t have an “oppressive government” enforcing vaccination, and that as a hypothetical example against “regulation”, restaurants should be able to opt out of mandated handwashing, because “the Market will sort it out.“
I always love stuff like that last one. The libertarian/rightwing types always make the Market’s sorting-process sound like the most benign of forces, as if everyone considering attending the no-handwashing restaurant will find out about it beforehand and choose accordingly. Those of us in the real world know that in a case like this, “the Market sorting it out” would involve a bunch of people with shigellosis, but as ever, the Market is an inherent good that must be preserved even in the face of avoidable and unnecessary human suffering.
And yes, vaccinations should be required by law, with all that entails.
No candidate who thinks otherwise will ever get my vote, or even a hearing, on any issue. Period.
Oy.
That was fun.
And by “fun”, I mean, “This is the kind of shit that makes people want to live in weird places whose names end with ‘exas’ or ‘zona’ or ‘ida’ or ‘arolina’.”
The lake-effect snow that started the other day? It just kept on coming…for three days. My town has received over 70 inches of snow, and other places nearby have received even more than that.
At least our personal larders were well and truly stocked, so at no point have been even close to going hungry. We never lost power, and our heat has been fine (especially once we saw warnings about the exhaust vents on high-efficiency furnaces, and started making a major priority of keeping them clear). I haven’t been to work since Monday, which stinks, but it is, as they say, “what it is”. Not a big thing in the greater picture.
How did we occupy our time? Reading, fretting, hanging on the Interwebs. Making geeky jokes about Imperial walkers in my backyard and more Frozen references than anyone need hear. Oh, and shoveling. Lots of shoveling. Holy shit, the shoveling.
The storm came in two “waves”, with about twelve hours between the first wave (about 4-5 feet) and the second (another 2-3 feet). So, after the first wave we dug out as much as we could, just to give ourselves a fighting chance of digging out after the second. Shoveling that much snow is really hard, not just because it’s difficult to begin with, but when the snow piles get to be almost as tall as you are, it gets hard to figure out where to put the stuff as you shovel it. As it is, I have completely barricaded both of our garage doors, so we won’t be getting out of those any time soon. (We haven’t been using a garage for a car at all, so that’s not an issue until Tuesday, when I have to take the garbage out.)
And then there was the stuff at the foot of the driveway, the Plow Pile, which is the broken clumps of icy stuff blasted up by the passing snow plows. We’re lucky that our street was plowed each and every day this week, when other people we know still haven’t seen a plow. (We’re wondering if some town official or another lives on our street.) That was insanely hard to shovel, but the guy next door let us use his snowblower for a bit, which did help. The kicker there is that a snowblower actually came with the house! It’s in my parents’ garage. One main order of business, once we’re cleared out, is me figuring out if it works, how to use it, and getting it into my garage, so I’ll be able to deploy it in everyone’s favor. I’m not generally a big fan of snowblowers, but they have their moments.
Let’s see, what else? Not much. All those snow days were stressful and worrisome, which meant that they were awful for writing. I don’t have much hope of being a NaNoWriMo winner this year, but them’s the breaks. Princesses III is still on the way!
And now, because I’m tired and I don’t feel like writing a nice transition to the “here’s a bunch of pictures” part of this post…here’s a bunch of pictures. I’ll arrange them roughly chronologically so you can see the progression. And note the dee-oh-gee action; turns out he loves this stuff. What a weird dog.
Oh wait! One geeky thing that struck me as funny, although no one reacted when I posted it a couple of times to social media. Our “official” snowfall total ended up being 71 inches, which I decided to convert into other units. I thought about light-nanoseconds and other such items, but then I settled on…the smoot. What’s a smoot, you ask? Well, fifty years ago, some guys were pledging a fraternity at MIT, and as part of their pledge, they were ordered (MIT is legendary for its pranks) to measure a local bridge, using as their measuring stick a guy named Smoot. Mr. Smoot is 67 inches tall, so that’s one smoot. Therefore, my town officially received 1.0597 smoots of snow.
And now, pictures.
