The personal blog of author Kelly Sedinger, chronicling the adventures of one overalls-clad wanderer.
Grownups should also pay close attention to their own voices of conscience, showing maturity and wisdom by walking away from those things that cause them to stumble. It is also the responsibility of mature adults to protect young, vulnerable, untrained minds from encountering things they are not yet prepared to process, consider, interpret and respond to. To buy technology that claims to do it for us is irresponsible, naïve, and ultimately … a cop-out.
Amen.
...I was struck once again by the presence of a characteristic I frequently notice amongst the winger noise machine -- an oddly distorted rictus of the mouth that makes it freeze in inappropriate positions, causing a smile to look not so much like the expression of joy as a symptom of gastric indigestion.
Heh! Indeed!
Somewhere along the line, he looked at the worldwide gross of Phantom Menace and looked at the worldwide gross of Attack of the Clones, and saw a $200 million differentiation. And then started quizzing people, and going 'well, what do you think it is?' And they could be like, 'well… have you thought about reading the Internet, George?' And he might have checked out some people's opinions.
I genuinely doubt that this is the case. First of all, I remember an interview Lucas gave to Premiere Magazine back before TPM came out, and in that interview Lucas predicted that each prequel would do less business than the one before. I suspect he was totally prepared for what happened. Especially when you consider that what Lucas continues to do is not so much try to give fans what they want, but give them what he wants to give them, whether that matches what the fans want or not.
They also talk a bit about a common criticism of the Prequels that there's no character like Han Solo, which I find to be a fairly benign critique -- I'm thinking, "So what?" -- except that it's always framed thusly: "There's no one for me to identify with." And that's when I just lose the train of thought, because I frankly have never really understood the whole "identifying with characters" thing. Maybe I'm just a weirdo, but I was always more emotionally invested in the entire story, and the setting in which it takes place, than in the travails of any one character. When I played Star Wars on the playground, I was never one of the "I wanna be Han Solo!" or "I wanna be Vader!" types. I just wanted to play Star Wars. (Which maybe explains why, when I was writing Star Wars fan fiction, what I did was to steal Lucas's entire plot and have characters of my own act it out, as opposed to do something like having myself show up as the Rebel pilot to save the day.)
You Know You're From Buffalo When... |
When speaking "the" precedes the number or name of any highway (The Scajaquada, The 33, The 290) Snow tires come standard on your car. You can identify an "Alden" accent. You have gotton frost bitten and sunburned in the same weekend "Down south" means Gowanda You bake with "soda" and drink "pop". Stop/Slow/Yield Signs..are suggestions. You can hold an entire conversation on the best place to go for wings, a fishfry or pizza. You see nothing wrong with watching fireworks downtown on July 2nd. You not only know what the terms "snowbelt" and "lake effect" mean - you use them on a daily basis. You save the Genny Cream Ale for special occasions. You live within 1 mile of a bowling alley. Not only do you know what it is... but you look forward to "Dingus Day" You never put your winter jacket away for the summer. You like to order beef on "weck" and are always surprised when someone doesn't know what "weck" is. You drive over 70mph on the Thruway and pass on the right. You leave your ski lift tickets on your jacket year round. You know how to pronouce, Scajaquada, Cheektowaga and Depew. The rest of the country is snowbound in the worst blizzard of the century, but you still have to walk your kids to the corner to catch the school bus. You think nothing of crossing an international border for Chinese Food. The acid rain is clearer than your drinking water. When you stop and ask for directions ... you expect to get them. You don't think Canada is to the north ... you know it's to the West. You keep the snowplow on the front of the truck year round. You have a favorite Greek restaurant. When someone says they are from "the City" - you ask "Which one?" You think Jimmy Griffin is a "real" politician You can compute a wind chill "factor" You eat Orange Chocolate. You don't have to attend the Friendship Festival to hear it! You know the difference between imported and real Canadian beer. You have not been on the "Maid of the Mist" - unless you had out of town company. You've dined at "Theodore's on the Lake". You immediatley change the channel when you hear "Hi! this is Goldie Gardner...". The winter carnival gets rained out. You call them "Pilot Field" and the "Aud" - no matter what the signs say. You define summer as three months of bed sledding. Your kids have watched Sesame Street - in French and Spanish. You don't get a coughing fit from one sip of Vernors. "Gridlock" means driving home from a football game. You wince when someone uses the abbreviation "OJ". "Rapid Transit" means hitting all the green lights. You actually get these jokes and pass them on to other friends from Buffalo. |
You've hit at the core of the difference between lefties and righties. Lefties believe people who disagree with them are bad people and are hopelessly "lost", both morally and intellectually. This is why you hear so little of conservative views on NPR and the like-it's a kind of snobbery, as Tom Wolfe pointed out years ago. Righties think people who disagree with them are wrong but are not any better or worse, as people than anyone else, since we're all sinners. Lefties don't believe in sin but they sure as heck believe in poor taste!
Is that right. Well, you'd never know it to look though examples of "Righty" tolerance like this. The Left, so far as I can tell, has nothing on the Right in either the department of intolerance or that of self-delusion.
(BTW, Pandagon is back up and running.)
(Also BTW, another of Lynn's commenters reports this convention for deciding whether to leave a comment on someone else's blog or to post to his own blog, with a link back:
I have what I call the "3 paragraph rule". If a comment I'm writing stretches more than 3 paragraphs, I'll generally take the whole thing back to my place & use it as a post (with a link back, of course).
I think that's exactly right. I tend to do a lot more commenting-via-posting here than commenting directly on other blogs.)
It's not as if Democrats have been filibustering all of Bush's nominees -- they've confirmed over 200 and blocked about ten. Nor is it as if the other 200 judges were nice, squishy liberals and the Democrats are filibustering the only real rightwingers in the bunch. So going nuclear takes us from a position where Bush has packed the district and circuit courts with rightwingers, to one in which the district and circuit courts are slightly more packed with rightwingers.
So next time Bill First or Tom DeLay or anyone else tells me that we have to get all of Bush's judges seated on the bench, or else the entire conservative agenda will fail, my reaction will be – once again – a skyward rolling of my eyes.
And I further learn that the model pictured on that album cover has her own website, www.whippedcreamlady.com. She appeared on some other album covers, but the whipped cream one is clearly the best. And that's because whipped cream rules. Even if it's probably shaving cream in the photo, a substance which doesn't rule nearly as much as whipped cream.
(But only the real thing, whipped up in a very cold bowl from heavy cream, or Cool Whip in a pinch. That aeresol can stuff sucks, except for use on top of coffee or hot chocolate.)
Simon could not achieve the popularity he'd have liked with his mysteries partly because he could not give in to readers' expectations of blood, gore, sex, and violence. He had too much artistic integrity.
But now as a blogger he's become what he steadily resisted being as a novelist.
A hack.
In the same post, Lance also provides this wonderful paragraph:
The other problem Simon has had in breaking into the top tier is taste---he has too much of it. Tact, too. He can't be vulgar enough. He holds back on the kinky sex and graphic violence. But he's not writing Agatha Christie style Murder Among Nice, Staid Dull People Living in Cozy Little Villages Where Just the Mention of Sex Causes Grown Men to Blush and Women to Feel a Little Faint Who Done Its. He's writing Tough Guy Working the Mean Streets and Getting Laid A Lot When They're Not Getting Beaten to A Pulp pulp style murder mysteries/thrillers. There are rules, and Simon doesn't follow them.
Full disclosure: I've never read a Roger L. Simon novel, and I only read his blog when some other blogger that I do read links him, and that's not that often. I just found this post pretty well constructed.
(And it occurs to me that if you just change a few of Lance's phrasings around to alter the genres from mysteries to Science Fiction, it could be about Orson Scott Card. But I suspect that Card's a better SF writer than Simon is a mystery writer.)
I just read your blog entry that mentions conductor Semyon Bychkov, whom I have admired for quite some time. I have a local reason, however: I live in Buffalo, and in the late 80s Bychkov was music director of our Philharmonic. His tenure here saw the BPO undertake a European tour and several well-received concerts at Carnegie Hall, and he displayed an affinity for Shostakovich even then – the Fifth Symphony was a staple of BPO repertoire of the time (and it was the first piece Bychkov recorded, with the Berlin PO).
I actually met Bychkov once when, while still in high school, I attended a BPO concert which included Dvorak's "New World" Symphony. The second movement was played wondrously, but the performance was marred by the most horrible outbreak of audience coughing and throat-lozenge unwrapping I have ever heard. It was so bad that Bychkov actually addressed the audience after the movement was done, scolding them on their lack of decorum and then saying, "For those of you who missed that movement the first time, we will now play it again."
I mention that anecdote because it actually plays into your post's theme about the "Behind the scenes" stuff appearing in reviews. In this case, I remember an article in the Buffalo News mentioning Bychkov's repeat of the movement, noting that doing this required the orchestra musicians to be paid overtime for going over by twelve minutes or whatever. I personally found that fascinating.
I don't get the attitude you encountered about "behind the scenes" stuff. In addition to classical music, I'm also a sports fan, and sports fans are in my experience always fascinated by the "back room" details -- things like how trades get done, why this player is drafted instead of that one, why this play is called instead of that play, why the defense lines up in one formation instead of another, et cetera. I can't imagine why the classical music press would assume that all classical music lovers are interested in is the music itself, and not interested at all in the mechanics of bringing it to fruition. One of the most fascinating books I've ever read is on precisely the "behind the scenes" stuff in a symphony orchestra: "Season With Solti" (the author's name escapes me). The book is thirty years old by now, so I assume the picture it paints of a big-city symphony is no longer anything close to the way things actually are, but it's still amazing to me, and I can't imagine that classical music lovers wouldn't be equally fascinated by this kind of thing.
I once pitched a freelance article - - not commissioned, alas - - to a local magazine that would have been "Behind the Scenes" at the BPO. I wanted to profile what the orchestra librarian does. I wanted to see how program notes are compiled, and how rehearsals are held, and so on. I even envisioned a series of such articles, going behind the scenes at other art locales - - art galleries (ever wonder about the guy who actually has to physically hang the paintings?), theaters (what's the life of the costume maker like?) and so on.
Of course, that's not what ACD decides to address at all – he instead decides to make fun of the Entertainment Weekly readership, as if Sandow is suggesting that classical music needs to appeal to that crowd or some such thing. He's not. It's not about the classical music version of "celebrity gossip"; Greg Sandow isn't hankering after which conductor is sleeping with which pianist or whatever. It's about things like Helen Radice's posts about the day-to-day concerns of a harpist. Or Forrest Covington's recent adventures with getting a simple thing like a copy of a CD with his own music on it. Or Scott Spiegelberg's thoughts on teaching the next generation of musicians. Or Fred Himebaugh's writings about the concerns of a composer of choral music. Or Ilka Talvi's postings about the operations of a symphony orchestra. In fact, that last is probably the perfect example of what Greg Sandow is getting at.
Either ACD knows this, and he's just being pissy for the sake of being pissy, or he doesn't know that, in which case he has completely missed the point. In either case, it's advantage: Sandow. As near as I can tell, ACD simply skimmed Sandow's post, saw the words "Entertainment Weekly", and fired off his post without devoting one more second of thought to it than that.
Public libraries might be an example of an institution designed for an earlier time that doesn't make as much sense now as then. It's perhaps just another luxury we've grown accustomed to. We're used to its being free -- the knee-jerk response is why should I pay for something that the government will give me. Maybe it shouldn't.
Let me be blunt here: as much as I adore the Buffalo area, if this community decided to do away with its libraries entirely, that would be my official last straw. I'd leave as soon as humanly possible.
What a society values, a society is willing to pay for. The fact that we're still willing, albeit less so and more grudgingly lately, to pay for free access to books, periodicals, government documents, films, and music recordings says to me that we still value those things and view their widespread availability as a good thing. There would, I think, be a very big fundamental difference between a society that views reading as sufficiently important and universal a right to pay for libraries and one which takes the view that your reading should be limited to only those books you can afford.
It's easy to say things like "Look at all the books available for free on the Web!" and "Look how cheap you can buy just about any book on Amazon!" But really, that's not at all the same thing. To take the first claim: sure, there are sites like Project Gutenberg that make the texts of many public domain books available online. But they're not free, not really: I still have to pay for my computer, and I still have to pay for the Internet access I use to access Project Gutenberg. That's not free - - at least, it's not in the same sense "free" for me to read Anna Karenina on Gutenberg that it would be "free" for me to walk down to the library and check the book out with my library card. And as ubiquitous as the Web seems to those of us who get to use it every day, the cost of being able to go online is a very real cost indeed. I know people who simply can't afford Internet access.
(And this is to say nothing of the fact that there are nowhere near the same number of books available for free online as there are at my own local library branch, much less the entirety of, say, the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library system.)
As for books being cheap on Amazon or other online sources, well, that's a troubling thing to say, in my opinion. I don't make enough money to buy every book I want to read. That's a simple fact of life: I will probably never make enough to buy a copy of every book I want to read. So, when it comes to buying books, I have to be pretty selective. (The high price of graphic novels is a real sticking point with me - - those damn things are absurdly overpriced, in my opinion, which annoys me because there are a lot of them that I would like to read.) But that's just buying books. When it comes to reading books, I don't have to be so selective, because there's the library. My personal reading life would be severely hampered if I had to limit myself to reading only those books which I could afford to buy. And I'm not even that badly off: I have a roof over my head, and I can still get to Borders every now and again. But I don't buy nearly as many books as I used to, because I have other things to buy: food, drugs for Little Quinn, diapers, cat litter, et cetera. Because of the library, though, I don't have to limit my reading. That's a big thing to me: the fact that I don't need to own every book I read opens up huge vistas of reading to me.
Frankly, I'm always astonished when people tell me that they never go to the library because they like to own every book they read. That attitude completely baffles me. If there's a service that can provide you, free of charge, with access to more books than you could ever read in a lifetime, why rigidly insist upon owning every book you want to read? Just from the standpoint of not having paid for every book I've checked out and not liked, I think I end up ahead. I hate buying a book that turns out to be a stinker.
Here is what it boils down to: I view reading as probably the most fundamental right that exists, beyond the "biggies" of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Free access to books is, as far as I am concerned, an essential part of a democratic society, and it's absolutely essential to a society that maintains its belief that anyone can accomplish anything as long as they work hard at it. The day we decide that reading is something that must be paid for by each individual reader is, to me, the day we decide that we're no longer a democratic society. There are people out there, many of them, real people, who don't have enough extra pennies in their budget per month to afford more than a single mass-market paperback novel. The idea that these folks can still go to their library and check out a hardback copy of, well, any book at all signifies to me a big part of the greatness of this country.
Maybe America will eventually decide that libraries are, as Craig suggests, a mere luxury. But it would be heartbreaking to me to learn that my country had decided that reading is a mere luxury. And make no mistake: that's what it would mean if we collectively decided "No books, unless you can pay for each one." This is a tough country we got here, folks - - we've built a nation around a mix of egalitarianism and libertarianism, which is not always the best of mixes. But as far as I'm concerned, when it comes to reading, the more egalitarian, the better, and free libraries are the best way to accomplish this that I know.
(Now, the issue of whether the B&ECPL system is too bloated is an entirely different one. I think it probably is. But shutting them entirely? To me, that's pure insanity.)
For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.
Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.
We're talking about lost writings by men named Sophocles, Hesiod, Euripides...and maybe some lost Christian Gospels. Now that ought to be interesting stuff.
I wanna hang a map of the world in my house. Then I'm gonna put pins into all the locations that I've travelled to. But first, I'm gonna have to travel to the top two corners of the map so that it will not fall down.
...
This product that was on TV was available for four easy payments of $19.95. I would like a product that was available for three easy payments and one f--king complicated payment. We can't tell you which payment it is, but one of these payments is going to be a bitch. The mailman will get shot to death, the envelope will not seal, and the stamp will be in the wrong denomination. Good luck f--ker. The last payment must be made in wampum.
That made me laugh something fierce. Read the whole thing.
[Insert work here] is like ironing the farts out of a dozen pairs of old trousers, sucking them into a bottle and then trying to sell it as a new perfume. This is such an arse-burgling zombie horror of a thing that I don’t even want you to steal it.
What's he actually talking about? Find out here.
