The personal blog of author Kelly Sedinger, chronicling the adventures of one overalls-clad wanderer.
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
An early episode of South Park established that if Cartman hears the tiniest snippet of "Come Sail Away" by Styx, he has to sing the entire song. I suspect we all have a song that we just have to finish if we hear its beginning, no matter where we are...call it a "Stay In The Car" song. What's yours?
Monday, July 20, 2015
Five Lakes (and one book)
I've pretty much been of the opinion for years, even though I don't think I realized it until more recently, that I honestly don't ever want to live more than a few hours from one of the Great Lakes. This region has been my home since 1981, and you might make a case for before that, since Pittsburgh certainly falls within the "few hours from the Lakes" category. These five inland seas encompass so much beauty and history and character, all of which are sometimes overlooked in our seemingly forever-ongoing "North versus South" thing in this country.
There's a children's book I read not long after we moved to Allegany, NY, in 1981. I don't recall exactly when I read it, or the circumstances under which a copy found its way into my hands; I don't recall if I owned it or if it was a library book. The book's title is Paddle To The Sea, by Holling Clancy Holling. If I owned this book, it vanished from my personal library years ago. However, I found myself remembering it recently, so I availed myself of the Erie County Public Library and checked it out.
The book came out in 1941, and it tells a simple story: a young boy living in Canada carves a wooden Indian in a canoe, names him "Paddle To The Sea", and sets him afloat on a river that empties into the northern reaches of Lake Superior.
From there, Paddle follows the long and improbable journey through every one of the Great Lakes, until he finally reaches the St. Lawrence River and the Atlantic Ocean. Paddle's journey is mainly a narrative frame, though, which supports Holling's real goal: exploring the nature of these five enormous lakes.
Along the way Paddle encounters various obstacles and dangers, such as the huge cargo ships on Lake Superior, the enormous waterfalls at Niagara, and a sawmill, whose operation Holling depicts:
I also love the fanciful ways Holling interprets the shapes of the lakes themselves. Lake Superior as a wolf's head is pretty obvious, I suppose, but the others are impressively creative, and I have thought of all the Great Lakes as these shapes ever since I read the book when I was ten or eleven. I remember a conversation with some college mates, trying to explain to them this particular interpretation of the shape of Lake Huron, and I remember wishing I had a copy of the book then to show them.
Holling's prose is somewhat dated at this point, but that's to be expected, and I wonder how Holling would depict the Great Lakes now, since the region endured a period of extended decline that began not terribly long after this book came out and which some might still think is going on. But it's still a region of nature and industry often side-by-side, all of it dominated by these enormous bodies of water.
Paddle To The Sea is a wonderful piece of Great Lakes lore, and I'm glad I took the time to revisit it.
There's a children's book I read not long after we moved to Allegany, NY, in 1981. I don't recall exactly when I read it, or the circumstances under which a copy found its way into my hands; I don't recall if I owned it or if it was a library book. The book's title is Paddle To The Sea, by Holling Clancy Holling. If I owned this book, it vanished from my personal library years ago. However, I found myself remembering it recently, so I availed myself of the Erie County Public Library and checked it out.
The book came out in 1941, and it tells a simple story: a young boy living in Canada carves a wooden Indian in a canoe, names him "Paddle To The Sea", and sets him afloat on a river that empties into the northern reaches of Lake Superior.
From there, Paddle follows the long and improbable journey through every one of the Great Lakes, until he finally reaches the St. Lawrence River and the Atlantic Ocean. Paddle's journey is mainly a narrative frame, though, which supports Holling's real goal: exploring the nature of these five enormous lakes.
Holling's art in this book alternates between pencil drawings accompanying the text on the left-hand pages, and full-color plates on the right. In this way Holling traces paddle's voyage, which doesn't even begin to follow any kind of straight line.
Along the way Paddle encounters various obstacles and dangers, such as the huge cargo ships on Lake Superior, the enormous waterfalls at Niagara, and a sawmill, whose operation Holling depicts:
I also love the fanciful ways Holling interprets the shapes of the lakes themselves. Lake Superior as a wolf's head is pretty obvious, I suppose, but the others are impressively creative, and I have thought of all the Great Lakes as these shapes ever since I read the book when I was ten or eleven. I remember a conversation with some college mates, trying to explain to them this particular interpretation of the shape of Lake Huron, and I remember wishing I had a copy of the book then to show them.
Holling's prose is somewhat dated at this point, but that's to be expected, and I wonder how Holling would depict the Great Lakes now, since the region endured a period of extended decline that began not terribly long after this book came out and which some might still think is going on. But it's still a region of nature and industry often side-by-side, all of it dominated by these enormous bodies of water.
Paddle To The Sea is a wonderful piece of Great Lakes lore, and I'm glad I took the time to revisit it.
Sunday, July 19, 2015
Sunday Somethings
A few oddities and randomments for the lot of you:
:: One night, while we were sitting around at home reading stuff, The Wife came across this, and mentioned it to me. I said, "That can't be right," but lo and behold, apparently it was. The thing? Well, you know those incubator things they put premature babies into, so as to keep them nicely warm while they develop after their births? Apparently the guy who invented those had no luck convincing the scientific community of their validity, so he did the next best thing: he set up a sideshow at New York's Coney Island to display them to the public. Babies and all.
Sometimes human progress happens so strangely.
:: Want to get some kind of notion of the scales of the distances in space? Say, the scales the NASA people were working with in flying New Horizons to Pluto? Check out If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel. Space is big, yo.
:: For the record: the perpetrator of this prank was not me.
That is all.
:: One night, while we were sitting around at home reading stuff, The Wife came across this, and mentioned it to me. I said, "That can't be right," but lo and behold, apparently it was. The thing? Well, you know those incubator things they put premature babies into, so as to keep them nicely warm while they develop after their births? Apparently the guy who invented those had no luck convincing the scientific community of their validity, so he did the next best thing: he set up a sideshow at New York's Coney Island to display them to the public. Babies and all.
Sometimes human progress happens so strangely.
:: Want to get some kind of notion of the scales of the distances in space? Say, the scales the NASA people were working with in flying New Horizons to Pluto? Check out If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel. Space is big, yo.
:: For the record: the perpetrator of this prank was not me.
That is all.
Friday, July 17, 2015
Neil Simon on how to finish a day's work
There are a lot of other videos from this same interview on YouTube; I plan to watch a bunch of 'em this weekend. Hat-tips to Mark Evanier, where I first saw the video, and Roger, who notified me of its existence via electronic pony express thing.
(Oh, and the bit of advice in question from Mr. Simon? I'm not sure if I follow that or not, to be honest. I tend to write until I'm tired and don't want to write anymore. On reflection I think I very well might follow this advice, but I've never really thought about it. I'll pay more attention next time I'm working on something new.)
Thursday, July 16, 2015
Something for Thursday
An old favorite of mine: the Mendelssohn violin concerto. I love this piece to death. Make sure you pay attention at about the 2:40 mark, when the soloist (Hilary Hahn, in this case) soars to a lingering very high note and then descends all the way back down to the lowest register on the instrument, and then holds that low note as a pedal while the woodwinds sound the magical second theme of the first movement. This entire concerto is utter magic.
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
A Ransom Wednesday Conversation Starter
Asking this question with no hint that it is relevant to anything going on in my life today whatsoever...what's the most expensive car repair you've ever had to pay for?
I'll sit back and glower at the replies. (For no reason, really.)
I'll sit back and glower at the replies. (For no reason, really.)
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
It may be my year....
A new Star Wars movie and a new James Bond movie. I'm releasing my second book. Overalls appear to be coming back into fashion. and now this appears in the New York Times.
Setting aside the fact that lemon meringue is, in fact, a terrible choice for facial dispatching, this is still quite a thing to read in the Gray Lady.
2015 may well be my year!!!
Ah, the thrown pie. Among the sweetest delights in life is the sight of an airborne cream-and-crust concoction finding purchase. It is the great leveler, a puncturing of pretension, and those who find pie throwing beneath their refined comic sensibility deserve nothing more than a lemon meringue treat, smack in the kisser.
Setting aside the fact that lemon meringue is, in fact, a terrible choice for facial dispatching, this is still quite a thing to read in the Gray Lady.
2015 may well be my year!!!
Monday, July 13, 2015
Sunday, July 12, 2015
The Whitening
White overalls. Oh yeah, babe.
I've wanted a pair of white overalls forever, and I even got a pair a while back, by Carhartt. My problem, though, was that most white overalls are made for painters, and for some reason, the bib pocket on painters' overalls is almost always that triangular shape, as opposed to the "traditional" style of bib pocket, which I prefer. Finding a pair like this has been mostly fruitless -- they exist, and they occasionally show up on eBay, but they're pretty rare and I've never seen a pair in my size. So I did the next logical thing: I took an older pair of blue ones that I owned already and bleached them. This is the result. Score!
By way of technique, I used a big 5-gallon bucket, filled it about two-thirds with water, and then added some bleach. I didn't measure the bleach, but my concentration was no more than 1 part bleach to 3 parts water, and likely even less strong than that. I submerged the overalls, stirred them around a bit, and then left them in there a while. After an hour or so, I changed the water and repeated, and then waited another hour, whereupon I changed the water again. I think I went through four changes of water altogether, and the result is that almost all the blue is gone. There's a tiny bit remaining, if you know to look for it, but functionally, these are white!
After the final removal from the bleach water, I rinsed them with the garden hose and wrung them out, and then I washed them twice. First trip through the washer I used no soap at all, so it was essentially two rinses, and then a full washing in cold water with soap. After that, an air drying on our line, and that was that.
Not that I'm wearing overalls much in July, but fall will be here soon enough!
I've wanted a pair of white overalls forever, and I even got a pair a while back, by Carhartt. My problem, though, was that most white overalls are made for painters, and for some reason, the bib pocket on painters' overalls is almost always that triangular shape, as opposed to the "traditional" style of bib pocket, which I prefer. Finding a pair like this has been mostly fruitless -- they exist, and they occasionally show up on eBay, but they're pretty rare and I've never seen a pair in my size. So I did the next logical thing: I took an older pair of blue ones that I owned already and bleached them. This is the result. Score!
By way of technique, I used a big 5-gallon bucket, filled it about two-thirds with water, and then added some bleach. I didn't measure the bleach, but my concentration was no more than 1 part bleach to 3 parts water, and likely even less strong than that. I submerged the overalls, stirred them around a bit, and then left them in there a while. After an hour or so, I changed the water and repeated, and then waited another hour, whereupon I changed the water again. I think I went through four changes of water altogether, and the result is that almost all the blue is gone. There's a tiny bit remaining, if you know to look for it, but functionally, these are white!
After the final removal from the bleach water, I rinsed them with the garden hose and wrung them out, and then I washed them twice. First trip through the washer I used no soap at all, so it was essentially two rinses, and then a full washing in cold water with soap. After that, an air drying on our line, and that was that.
Not that I'm wearing overalls much in July, but fall will be here soon enough!
Friday, July 10, 2015
Bad Joke Friday
Ack! Somehow this week got away from me and I almost forgot this. But it's still Friday (where I live, anyway) which means I'm only quite late instead of missing entirely. So here's a bad joke I saw on Facebook the other day:
What is Forrest Gump's computer password?
1FORREST1
Ha!
Thursday, July 09, 2015
Something for Thursday: Percy Grainger
Yesterday I got in the car to drive home and switched to the classical station (because the sports guys were talking hockey, and I've had my fill of hockey talk for a while), and I switched to hear the very opening bars of Percy Grainger's Lincolnshire Posy. This piece is about 15 minutes long, and my drive home is about ten, if traffic isn't outrageous. The solution, therefore, was to take a slightly longer route home so I could hear the whole thing.
I've written about Grainger before in this space, but it turns out that yesterday was his birthday, so I'm going to honor him again right here! Grainger was a very creative, and even innovative composer; he was almost exactly a contemporary of Igor Stravinsky, and there are moments in his music which are every bit as "wild" as the great Russian modernist. Grainger's music also looks back, though, at the same time it looks forward, because he was very deeply committed to English folk music. Thus, many of his most famous works are settings of English folk songs that he transcribed in his wanderings through England. He was also quite the wanderer: Born in Australia, educated at a conservatory in Germany, lived in England until 1914, and then moved to the United States where he lived out the rest of his long life. Grainger's curiosity fills his music with a constant sense of discovery. You listen to him and even in the most "normal" of his works, you still never quite know where he's going with things.
Here are a few pictures of Grainger's scores and parts. Note his free use of time signatures, and note even more his instructions. Grainger didn't mess around with the traditional Italian words like "crescendo" or "fortissimo" or "andante" or "non troppo".
Here is Lincolnshire Posy. This work has never stopped sounding fresh in my ears. I think it's because Grainger didn't try to work the folk tunes he learned from regular people into standard time signatures and rhythms; he learned the songs he collected from people in all walks of life, and I'm sure that more than a few of them couldn't carry a tune or a rhythm to save their life. Nevertheless, he strove to preserve that experience of folk song, so nothing sounds refined or fixed. This is the character of what you might hear when someone says, "Hey, there's this song I heard and it kinda goes like this" and they start singing without any heed for actual rhythm or, sometimes, even the tune.
Here's some more Grainger. Just an amazing composer.
I've written about Grainger before in this space, but it turns out that yesterday was his birthday, so I'm going to honor him again right here! Grainger was a very creative, and even innovative composer; he was almost exactly a contemporary of Igor Stravinsky, and there are moments in his music which are every bit as "wild" as the great Russian modernist. Grainger's music also looks back, though, at the same time it looks forward, because he was very deeply committed to English folk music. Thus, many of his most famous works are settings of English folk songs that he transcribed in his wanderings through England. He was also quite the wanderer: Born in Australia, educated at a conservatory in Germany, lived in England until 1914, and then moved to the United States where he lived out the rest of his long life. Grainger's curiosity fills his music with a constant sense of discovery. You listen to him and even in the most "normal" of his works, you still never quite know where he's going with things.
Here are a few pictures of Grainger's scores and parts. Note his free use of time signatures, and note even more his instructions. Grainger didn't mess around with the traditional Italian words like "crescendo" or "fortissimo" or "andante" or "non troppo".
Here is Lincolnshire Posy. This work has never stopped sounding fresh in my ears. I think it's because Grainger didn't try to work the folk tunes he learned from regular people into standard time signatures and rhythms; he learned the songs he collected from people in all walks of life, and I'm sure that more than a few of them couldn't carry a tune or a rhythm to save their life. Nevertheless, he strove to preserve that experience of folk song, so nothing sounds refined or fixed. This is the character of what you might hear when someone says, "Hey, there's this song I heard and it kinda goes like this" and they start singing without any heed for actual rhythm or, sometimes, even the tune.
Here's some more Grainger. Just an amazing composer.
Wednesday, July 08, 2015
A few random thoughts on STAR WARS stuff
:: I am officially in SQUEEE!!! mode for The Force Awakens. That's all about that.
:: How about Star Wars: Rogue One? I'm more intrigued by this than SQUEEE!. I'm not really sure that this is a story that needs telling, but it might be interesting. I'm more on the fence about the idea of a gritty war movie in the Star Wars universe. The gritty. shades-of-gray type of space opera war story has already been done to perhaps canonical effect in the Battlestar Galactica reboot series. As always, the proof will be in the doing.
:: The newest news this week ('newest news' is a really bad turn of phrase, but I'm going with it) is that the next "Anthology" movie (which is what they are collectively calling the stand-alone, non-episode Star Wars movies) is a Han Solo movie. I'm guessing that this will be something of an origin story, showing us the young Han. This will be interesting stuff, to be sure; it's clear in the original movies that Han has quite a history, and we didn't learn much of it at all. This could be very interesting, indeed.
The real issue with the Han Solo movie will be tone. It seems to me that this one might need to be the most purely fun movie of the coming flood of Star Wars movies. I hope that we don't get a story that posits some kind of traumatic childhood for Han, or that postulates some other kind of massive tragedy in his youth that leads to him being the cynical pirate he is when we meet him in A New Hope. The thing is, he's not all that cynical; it really doesn't take much to get him to stick around long enough to bail Luke out at the Battle of Yavin. Han's cynicism is more selfishness than the defeated fatalism of Captain Malcolm Reynolds of Firefly.
In fact, I wouldn't mind not having much of an "origin" story at all. Why not just have an early adventure of Han's? We don't necessarily need to see Han meet Chewbacca, either. All those story beats are really obvious, aren't they? Not that I wouldn't be happy seeing them, but I think it would be a blast to have the movie open with Han and Chewie already together, already having adventures, and maybe -- in the very first scene, maybe the very first shot -- Han plays the hand at cards that wins him a new ship. Maybe he doesn't like the new ship very much at first.
I hope there's a lot of the Millennium Falcon in the Han Solo movie.
:: Oh, and one more thing? The Han Solo movie must be titled Star Wars: Never Tell Me The Odds. This is not negotiable, Disney and Lucasfilm!
I also have some thoughts on the current run of Star Wars comics, but those deserve their own post.
It's a fun time to be a Star Wars fan, innit?
A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
Startin' to get a little warm, innit? So recommend to me some cold summer dishes! Salads, fruit dishes, adult drinks, non-adult drinks, whatever!
Monday, July 06, 2015
Openings
Hey! Want to read the opening paragraph of GhostCop? Here it is!
(You may need to click through to embiggen.)
I've written about eighteen dozen variants of this opening, which means that I'll almost certainly change it again. Openings drive me crazy. There needs to be something there, something to "grab", or so I'm told. Fact is, I don't remember ever putting a book aside on the basis that the opening sentence or paragraph didn't "grab" me. I always give books longer than that to start to work their magic on me. But a great opening is kind of magical, and when you can cast that spell that early in the proceedings, that's something special. That's why I always work hard on my openings, and why I'm almost always disappointed in how they turn out.
Anyway, opinions on this one?
(You may need to click through to embiggen.)
I've written about eighteen dozen variants of this opening, which means that I'll almost certainly change it again. Openings drive me crazy. There needs to be something there, something to "grab", or so I'm told. Fact is, I don't remember ever putting a book aside on the basis that the opening sentence or paragraph didn't "grab" me. I always give books longer than that to start to work their magic on me. But a great opening is kind of magical, and when you can cast that spell that early in the proceedings, that's something special. That's why I always work hard on my openings, and why I'm almost always disappointed in how they turn out.
Anyway, opinions on this one?
Sunday, July 05, 2015
Yay! Stuff! Yay!
I wrote a new post at the Official Site updating everyone on where I stand with certain projects!
Cal needs help picking which caption goes with a photo better!
SamuraiFrog appreciates Maria from Sesame Street!
My favorite "Maria Moment" from Sesame Street, for obvious reasons!
Roger comments on country music albums!
John Scalzi thinks things about gay marriage!
Alton Brown surprises with both his favorite cut of steak AND his preferred method of cooking it (but I'll try both)!
Lynn Sislo has a new catchphrase!
Finally, what better way to spend July 4 than a Major League Baseball game followed by fireworks? At least, that's what people thought in 1985 when they went to see the Braves play the Mets. The fireworks took place at 4:00 am, after the game took 19 innings and saw 29 runs scored off 46 hits.
Cal needs help picking which caption goes with a photo better!
SamuraiFrog appreciates Maria from Sesame Street!
My favorite "Maria Moment" from Sesame Street, for obvious reasons!
Roger comments on country music albums!
John Scalzi thinks things about gay marriage!
Alton Brown surprises with both his favorite cut of steak AND his preferred method of cooking it (but I'll try both)!
Lynn Sislo has a new catchphrase!
Finally, what better way to spend July 4 than a Major League Baseball game followed by fireworks? At least, that's what people thought in 1985 when they went to see the Braves play the Mets. The fireworks took place at 4:00 am, after the game took 19 innings and saw 29 runs scored off 46 hits.
Saturday, July 04, 2015
Friday, July 03, 2015
Thursday, July 02, 2015
Something for Thursday
Yesterday was Canada Day, so here's something by Canadian composer Howard Shore. From the film The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, it's a song titled "Evenstar". This plays during the reverie sequence in the middle of the film when Elrond is telling Arwen how hopeless her love for Aragorn is.
Wednesday, July 01, 2015
A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
I'm always wary of people who claim to have 'OCD', but I do believe that we all have little OCD tendencies. Here's one of mine: I always try to arrange the eggs in the carton in such a way as to be symmetrical.
What are you 'OCD' about?
What are you 'OCD' about?
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