Cold pizza: yay or nay?
The personal blog of author Kelly Sedinger, chronicling the adventures of one overalls-clad wanderer.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
I love this guy.
You'll need volume for this. Content-wise, it's safe for work, but it could be misinterpreted by someone walking by the cubicle at the right (or wrong) time as being not-so-much....
I'm not sure I recommend recording one's passions for all to see in quite this way, but there really is something to be said for having something in your life that makes you as happy as this fellow.
I'm not sure I recommend recording one's passions for all to see in quite this way, but there really is something to be said for having something in your life that makes you as happy as this fellow.
Monday, January 21, 2013
Sentential Links
OK, let's try and get back to some semblance of normalcy around here, shall we? Linkage!
:: When someone, or several someones, say and do stuff that I think is crazy, I can yell and scream at them, but I have found this to be singularly unhelpful in getting rid of my frustration. It just doesn’t make me feel better, but rather, gives me the sense that I’m as out of control as they are. (I admire Roger's ability to calm himself down in such situations. I've never much been tested thereof; I can only remember one such instance when someone shouted something to me from the safety of their moving car, and it was so stupid that I just stood there laughing. It was a kid who commented on my hair by yelling something like "Nice mullet!", when my hair isn't even a mullet. Cracked me up. But it gives me pause that I, a long-haired dude more often than not decked out in outfits that are less than fashionable, get this kind of thing less than a black guy. I'm pretty sure that I'm more odd than Roger. Strange world we live in.)
:: I am not one of those people who leave the TV on as “background noise” but there’s something about football noise that is sort of… I don’t know… comforting, I guess. It’s a relatively steady noise - the crowd noise and the constant chattering of the commentators. Sometimes the noise will go up in reaction to something happening in the game but overall there’s a uniformity to it. It’s almost like music. (This is true...plus there's the fact that outside of one-sided blowouts, with most football games you can usually be assured that at some point, something of at least mild interest will take place on the field. Sure, you might miss a great play here and there, but few sports lend themselves to rejoining after not paying a lot of attention like football. That said, I watched less football this season than I have in many years -- I have not watched a single game all the way through, and most weekends not a single play, since Week Four. I'm not sure if my general interest is waning or if it's just the cumulative effect of thirteen years of my team being lousy, but even most years I can gin up interest in other games, here and there. Now, I'm not even sure I'll bother watching the Super Bowl.
All that said, I am, as usual, insanely happy to see St. Tom the Overrated walk off the field a loser in his last game of the season!)
:: I'm trying to come up with a word to describe my feelings about this movie, and the word I keep coming up with is "ordeal." This was an ordeal. This was less a film than an endurance test. What do I get for surviving it? (SamuraiFrog did not find Les Miserables to his liking. My review is forthcoming. It will be a tad more positive than his!)
:: I seem to remember epic snowfalls like this from my youth but maybe it just looked like a lot of snow because I was a smaller person. (There's something to this, I think. Many a time I've revisited places I remember from my youth that I recall as being huge only to discover that they are, in fact, quite small.)
:: Oh the proverbial ‘pie in the face’ act. That gag never seems to go out of style. I guess you could say this was one of our ‘Why not?’ to-do’s. Fun for the sake of fun. It was either that or bathe in a tub full of jello, which John wouldn’t go for, so a pie in the face it was. (A wise choice, I think. Pies in the face are fun and whacky. A tub full of jello is...ewwww.)
:: I miss him. There is so much I still would love to say to him. I had always hoped (and, frankly, assumed) that we would get close again. I assumed our drifting apart was a phase. (He had drifted away from many of us in his last 3 years or so.) Unfortunately, I will never get that chance now. But I love him, and I will always love him: for who he was then, and for the many years of friendship that followed. He was the best. Truly the best. (I hope, when I am gone, that someone can write about me that way.)
:: So dear friends, live your life like it's fiction. Love like a romance novel, seek like a good mystery, hope like an underdog story and fight like a fantasy warrior.
More next week!
:: When someone, or several someones, say and do stuff that I think is crazy, I can yell and scream at them, but I have found this to be singularly unhelpful in getting rid of my frustration. It just doesn’t make me feel better, but rather, gives me the sense that I’m as out of control as they are. (I admire Roger's ability to calm himself down in such situations. I've never much been tested thereof; I can only remember one such instance when someone shouted something to me from the safety of their moving car, and it was so stupid that I just stood there laughing. It was a kid who commented on my hair by yelling something like "Nice mullet!", when my hair isn't even a mullet. Cracked me up. But it gives me pause that I, a long-haired dude more often than not decked out in outfits that are less than fashionable, get this kind of thing less than a black guy. I'm pretty sure that I'm more odd than Roger. Strange world we live in.)
:: I am not one of those people who leave the TV on as “background noise” but there’s something about football noise that is sort of… I don’t know… comforting, I guess. It’s a relatively steady noise - the crowd noise and the constant chattering of the commentators. Sometimes the noise will go up in reaction to something happening in the game but overall there’s a uniformity to it. It’s almost like music. (This is true...plus there's the fact that outside of one-sided blowouts, with most football games you can usually be assured that at some point, something of at least mild interest will take place on the field. Sure, you might miss a great play here and there, but few sports lend themselves to rejoining after not paying a lot of attention like football. That said, I watched less football this season than I have in many years -- I have not watched a single game all the way through, and most weekends not a single play, since Week Four. I'm not sure if my general interest is waning or if it's just the cumulative effect of thirteen years of my team being lousy, but even most years I can gin up interest in other games, here and there. Now, I'm not even sure I'll bother watching the Super Bowl.
All that said, I am, as usual, insanely happy to see St. Tom the Overrated walk off the field a loser in his last game of the season!)
:: I'm trying to come up with a word to describe my feelings about this movie, and the word I keep coming up with is "ordeal." This was an ordeal. This was less a film than an endurance test. What do I get for surviving it? (SamuraiFrog did not find Les Miserables to his liking. My review is forthcoming. It will be a tad more positive than his!)
:: I seem to remember epic snowfalls like this from my youth but maybe it just looked like a lot of snow because I was a smaller person. (There's something to this, I think. Many a time I've revisited places I remember from my youth that I recall as being huge only to discover that they are, in fact, quite small.)
:: Oh the proverbial ‘pie in the face’ act. That gag never seems to go out of style. I guess you could say this was one of our ‘Why not?’ to-do’s. Fun for the sake of fun. It was either that or bathe in a tub full of jello, which John wouldn’t go for, so a pie in the face it was. (A wise choice, I think. Pies in the face are fun and whacky. A tub full of jello is...ewwww.)
:: I miss him. There is so much I still would love to say to him. I had always hoped (and, frankly, assumed) that we would get close again. I assumed our drifting apart was a phase. (He had drifted away from many of us in his last 3 years or so.) Unfortunately, I will never get that chance now. But I love him, and I will always love him: for who he was then, and for the many years of friendship that followed. He was the best. Truly the best. (I hope, when I am gone, that someone can write about me that way.)
:: So dear friends, live your life like it's fiction. Love like a romance novel, seek like a good mystery, hope like an underdog story and fight like a fantasy warrior.
More next week!
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: For lunch today I made one of these, and I feel no remorse about it whatsoever. I won't do this on a regular basis, but boy howdy, was it ever good!
:: Some writer disses Richard Marx. Richard Marx takes offense. Hilarity ensues.
:: The complete ACME Products Catalog. Sadly, there is no ordering information for any of the items listed.
More next week!
:: For lunch today I made one of these, and I feel no remorse about it whatsoever. I won't do this on a regular basis, but boy howdy, was it ever good!
:: Some writer disses Richard Marx. Richard Marx takes offense. Hilarity ensues.
:: The complete ACME Products Catalog. Sadly, there is no ordering information for any of the items listed.
More next week!
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Friday, January 18, 2013
A book in the mail
For those who don't follow me on Twitter or see my drivel on Facebook, the proposal for Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) went into the mail today: three chapters, a synopsis, and a SASE that I hope will go unused in favor of a short e-mail reading, "Please send us the entire manuscript".
Now begins the part of the project over which I have almost zero control. I pray, I pray, I pray that someone out there likes this book!
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
Would you ever consider running for political office? If so, which one?
How I'd fix the Bills and the NFL (but really, screw sports, anyway)
OK, I’m finally getting back to the “Gimme a Title!” game that I launched way back a couple months ago before I got all “Meh, I got a book to finish!” and stuff. I got two suggestions that were quite similar, so I’m folding them into one: I’m the new commissioner of the NFL, here’s my plan and How I’d fix the Buffalo Bills.
Well, fixing the Bills is easy. The way the NFL works nowadays, fixing any team is easy. The job involves just two steps:
Of course, that first step is kind of a killer. As advice goes, this is about as useful as my old college music theory professor’s chestnut, “Playing the piano is very easy. Just strike the keys in the right order and the piano does the rest.” If only!
Anyone who pays even slight attention the the Bills knows that they have not really been good at the quarterback position since Jim Kelly retired after the 1996 season. (In fact, anyone who paid attention to the Bills that year might make the case that they haven’t been good at quarterback since before that season, but that’s neither here nor there.) Why is this? Well, because they’ve made a series of epic blunders at the position. There’s no need to go into the history of it all, but suffice it to say...they’ve been terrible at the game’s most important position.
And they’ve been bad at that position in a football era in which the rules favoring offense in general and passing in particular have made the position even more important than ever before. So that’s where it starts: find a great quarterback. And how do you do that? Scout ‘em all. Draft at least one quarterback every single year until one succeeds. Lather, rinse, repeat. Be hard-nosed in your evaluations and unafraid to make deals if you need to move up in the draft, and equally unafraid to cut guys’ careers short if you have to. Two years ago, the Carolina Panthers took two quarterbacks in the draft, including one in the first round: Jimmy Clausen and Tony Pike. The next year, armed with the first overall pick, they took Cam Newton, regardless of the two picks they’d spend on QBs the year before. That’s what the Bills need to do: focus on QB with laser-like precision.
Until then, nothing else matters...except maybe linebacker. Boy Howdy, are they bad at linebacker. But once you figure out QB, then it’s easier to slot in the pieces around that guy. Let a great QB make everyone else better, instead of doing what the Bills have been doing -- relying on everybody else to make the QB better.
As for the NFL in general...well, I hate to say this, but I think that my passion for football in particular and for sports in general is waning pretty severely. I find it harder and harder to enjoy football, knowing more and more that these players are doing things to their bodies which destroy their future lives -- in some cases entirely, what with the increasing rate of retired-player suicides in which the victims later turn out to have suffered brain damage from repeated hits. The game’s attraction was always that it was kind of ‘cartoon violence’; sure, players got seriously hurt once in a great while, but those were freak occurrences. But it’s just harder to see it that way now, and I’m especially disheartened to hear other fans say things like “Well, they signed the contract. Nobody forced them to play football.”
Well, you know, that’s something that needs to be rethought in general in our society, I think. There are more ways to force someone to do something other than holding them at gunpoint. The lure of a huge paycheck -- or, in some cases, any paycheck -- can be a compelling force too, I think.
My other problem with football isn’t so much with football but with sports in general now. It took me a long time to get there, but I am increasingly of the mind that the amounts of money involved are insanely high, and that’s just going to go up. We build these palatial stadiums for teams, almost always involving public financing in some way, when it’s got to be one of the worst-kept secrets in the world that sports facilities just don’t generate large amounts of economic impact. And there’s this sense of entitlement the sports leagues seem to have, because they know that as a society, we have collectively decided that sports is one of the most important things we have.
Here in Buffalo, the community’s sports fervor has switched over the last ten years from football to hockey. Once a rabid football town, Buffalo is now a stalwart hockey city that sells out its beloved Sabres almost every single time they play. And time was when I found that exciting and fun to behold; hockey as a game is a joy to watch, and over the last few years I’ve started liking it more and more. (I never really learned the rules years ago, so I never understood it all that well, and I haven’t had too much opportunity over the last decade owing to our not having cable.) But the just-concluded NHL lockout has left a very sour taste in my mouth for the sport, to the point that for the most part, I may well be done with sports in general.
Again, it comes back to money. While my instinct in labor disputes is to always side with the folks who do the work over the people who ‘foot the bill’ (and thus profit hugely by it), it was very difficult to justify rooting for one side in this dispute over the other. It wasn’t the Haves versus the Have-nots; It was the Have-a-ton’s versus the Have-a-bit-less-but-still-more-than-I’ll-ever-see’s. At one point I heard some player talk about how this was about “how are we gonna feed our families”, and I wanted to vomit. If you gave me a single NHL player’s one-year salary, say $2,000,000, as a one-time bonus, and said to me, “This is all the money you are allowed to use to feed your family every week for the next fifty years,”, you know what? That single check would allow me to more than quadruple my current weekly food expenditures for my family. Two million divided by fifty years divided by fifty-two weeks? Yeah, I think I can feed my family extremely generously on $769 a week.
The money involved makes it harder than ever for me to maintain any kind of interest in sports, because that money’s not just coming from the sky. Nor are owners paying it out of their own personal fortunes. The teams are in business to make money, and the make it from teevee advertising and from fans who buy tickets. That’s what I find most disturbing. One refrain I hear constantly whenever any one sport suffers a labor-related stoppage is that “The owners and players will make out fine, it’s the fans who get screwed!” And yet, when the stoppage ends and play resumes, the stadiums still sell out. The Sabres just announced a record for ticket sales in a single day, for the start of a lockout-shortened season. As I said on Facebook: If this is the fans getting ‘screwed’, I sure hope that the Sabres at least left a little something extra on the nightstand on their way out the door.
(I wrote this post yesterday, but on my way into work this morning, the radio guys were discussing this very topic, with one of them opining that to just decide "to hell with hockey" is to "cut your nose off to spite your face". Well...no. Not really, no. It's not like I'd be sitting around for three hours staring at the walls when I might have been watching hockey. I'm finding other stuff to occupy my time with. It can be done. Really. Might be hard for a couple of guys who are paid to talk about sports all day to imagine, but I can fill the sports-sized hole in my life just fine.)
Ultimately, though, I find sports less fun than ever before, with the exception of the Olympic Games. I dislike the idea of using sports to foster civic identity, and in any event, that’s rather overblown anyway -- witness the number of Notre Dame fans you meet in regular life who have never been within five hundred miles of South Bend. I don’t identify with these teams, and it seems silly to, as one local radio host proudly proclaims, “Root for the shirt, regardless of who’s wearing it.” More and more I find sports in general to be a dreary affair, regardless of who wins or loses. This year I haven’t watched a single play of any football game since week four -- where in years past, even after I gave up on the Bills I would watch a game here or there involving some good team or other. I haven’t watched a baseball game in its entirety in nearly two decades. Hockey? Basketball? No and no. And so it goes.
But you know what I do still like about sports? The writing. I can read good sports writing until the end of days. I guess I can pretty much do without the sports themselves, though.
(Nothing I have written here should be taken as a newfound ambivalence toward Tom Brady. Because, really: screw that guy!)
Well, fixing the Bills is easy. The way the NFL works nowadays, fixing any team is easy. The job involves just two steps:
1. Draft a great quarterback.
2. Profit!!!
Of course, that first step is kind of a killer. As advice goes, this is about as useful as my old college music theory professor’s chestnut, “Playing the piano is very easy. Just strike the keys in the right order and the piano does the rest.” If only!
Anyone who pays even slight attention the the Bills knows that they have not really been good at the quarterback position since Jim Kelly retired after the 1996 season. (In fact, anyone who paid attention to the Bills that year might make the case that they haven’t been good at quarterback since before that season, but that’s neither here nor there.) Why is this? Well, because they’ve made a series of epic blunders at the position. There’s no need to go into the history of it all, but suffice it to say...they’ve been terrible at the game’s most important position.
And they’ve been bad at that position in a football era in which the rules favoring offense in general and passing in particular have made the position even more important than ever before. So that’s where it starts: find a great quarterback. And how do you do that? Scout ‘em all. Draft at least one quarterback every single year until one succeeds. Lather, rinse, repeat. Be hard-nosed in your evaluations and unafraid to make deals if you need to move up in the draft, and equally unafraid to cut guys’ careers short if you have to. Two years ago, the Carolina Panthers took two quarterbacks in the draft, including one in the first round: Jimmy Clausen and Tony Pike. The next year, armed with the first overall pick, they took Cam Newton, regardless of the two picks they’d spend on QBs the year before. That’s what the Bills need to do: focus on QB with laser-like precision.
Until then, nothing else matters...except maybe linebacker. Boy Howdy, are they bad at linebacker. But once you figure out QB, then it’s easier to slot in the pieces around that guy. Let a great QB make everyone else better, instead of doing what the Bills have been doing -- relying on everybody else to make the QB better.
As for the NFL in general...well, I hate to say this, but I think that my passion for football in particular and for sports in general is waning pretty severely. I find it harder and harder to enjoy football, knowing more and more that these players are doing things to their bodies which destroy their future lives -- in some cases entirely, what with the increasing rate of retired-player suicides in which the victims later turn out to have suffered brain damage from repeated hits. The game’s attraction was always that it was kind of ‘cartoon violence’; sure, players got seriously hurt once in a great while, but those were freak occurrences. But it’s just harder to see it that way now, and I’m especially disheartened to hear other fans say things like “Well, they signed the contract. Nobody forced them to play football.”
Well, you know, that’s something that needs to be rethought in general in our society, I think. There are more ways to force someone to do something other than holding them at gunpoint. The lure of a huge paycheck -- or, in some cases, any paycheck -- can be a compelling force too, I think.
My other problem with football isn’t so much with football but with sports in general now. It took me a long time to get there, but I am increasingly of the mind that the amounts of money involved are insanely high, and that’s just going to go up. We build these palatial stadiums for teams, almost always involving public financing in some way, when it’s got to be one of the worst-kept secrets in the world that sports facilities just don’t generate large amounts of economic impact. And there’s this sense of entitlement the sports leagues seem to have, because they know that as a society, we have collectively decided that sports is one of the most important things we have.
Here in Buffalo, the community’s sports fervor has switched over the last ten years from football to hockey. Once a rabid football town, Buffalo is now a stalwart hockey city that sells out its beloved Sabres almost every single time they play. And time was when I found that exciting and fun to behold; hockey as a game is a joy to watch, and over the last few years I’ve started liking it more and more. (I never really learned the rules years ago, so I never understood it all that well, and I haven’t had too much opportunity over the last decade owing to our not having cable.) But the just-concluded NHL lockout has left a very sour taste in my mouth for the sport, to the point that for the most part, I may well be done with sports in general.
Again, it comes back to money. While my instinct in labor disputes is to always side with the folks who do the work over the people who ‘foot the bill’ (and thus profit hugely by it), it was very difficult to justify rooting for one side in this dispute over the other. It wasn’t the Haves versus the Have-nots; It was the Have-a-ton’s versus the Have-a-bit-less-but-still-more-than-I’ll-ever-see’s. At one point I heard some player talk about how this was about “how are we gonna feed our families”, and I wanted to vomit. If you gave me a single NHL player’s one-year salary, say $2,000,000, as a one-time bonus, and said to me, “This is all the money you are allowed to use to feed your family every week for the next fifty years,”, you know what? That single check would allow me to more than quadruple my current weekly food expenditures for my family. Two million divided by fifty years divided by fifty-two weeks? Yeah, I think I can feed my family extremely generously on $769 a week.
The money involved makes it harder than ever for me to maintain any kind of interest in sports, because that money’s not just coming from the sky. Nor are owners paying it out of their own personal fortunes. The teams are in business to make money, and the make it from teevee advertising and from fans who buy tickets. That’s what I find most disturbing. One refrain I hear constantly whenever any one sport suffers a labor-related stoppage is that “The owners and players will make out fine, it’s the fans who get screwed!” And yet, when the stoppage ends and play resumes, the stadiums still sell out. The Sabres just announced a record for ticket sales in a single day, for the start of a lockout-shortened season. As I said on Facebook: If this is the fans getting ‘screwed’, I sure hope that the Sabres at least left a little something extra on the nightstand on their way out the door.
(I wrote this post yesterday, but on my way into work this morning, the radio guys were discussing this very topic, with one of them opining that to just decide "to hell with hockey" is to "cut your nose off to spite your face". Well...no. Not really, no. It's not like I'd be sitting around for three hours staring at the walls when I might have been watching hockey. I'm finding other stuff to occupy my time with. It can be done. Really. Might be hard for a couple of guys who are paid to talk about sports all day to imagine, but I can fill the sports-sized hole in my life just fine.)
Ultimately, though, I find sports less fun than ever before, with the exception of the Olympic Games. I dislike the idea of using sports to foster civic identity, and in any event, that’s rather overblown anyway -- witness the number of Notre Dame fans you meet in regular life who have never been within five hundred miles of South Bend. I don’t identify with these teams, and it seems silly to, as one local radio host proudly proclaims, “Root for the shirt, regardless of who’s wearing it.” More and more I find sports in general to be a dreary affair, regardless of who wins or loses. This year I haven’t watched a single play of any football game since week four -- where in years past, even after I gave up on the Bills I would watch a game here or there involving some good team or other. I haven’t watched a baseball game in its entirety in nearly two decades. Hockey? Basketball? No and no. And so it goes.
But you know what I do still like about sports? The writing. I can read good sports writing until the end of days. I guess I can pretty much do without the sports themselves, though.
(Nothing I have written here should be taken as a newfound ambivalence toward Tom Brady. Because, really: screw that guy!)
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
A few book notes
Just briefly:
:: Cetaganda is the next book up (for me) in Lois McMaster Bujold's ongoing saga of the adventures of Miles Vorkosigan, and as usual, a fine book indeed, full of politics and intrigue and adventure as our Miles gets embroiled in the internal politics of the Cetagandan Empire, and drags his poor best friend, Ivan Vorpatril, along for the ride. I really enjoy these. I can't really say a whole lot more than that -- these books are just good, character-driven entertainment. At this point in the series, Miles is still pretty young and inexperienced, so it's fun seeing him gain in those areas.
:: Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet series is, apparently, full-throttle military science fiction, following Captain John "Black Jack" Geary as he takes command of the fleet in a failing war effort and vows to bring it home. Trouble is, Geary was recently resuscitated after spending a hundred years in hibernation after completing a battle victory that has made him a legend. Thus he has to deal with the fact that his own officers treat him with worshipful reverence, which strains his relationships and fills him with dread for how morale will suffer when they realize that their hero is as human as they are.
The first book in this series, Dauntless, starts with a huge BANG, and the pacing rarely drops after the third or fourth page. Military SF doesn't always ring my bell, but this book was terrific. I can't wait to read more of this series!
:: Praise seems to be uniformly good to great for John Scalzi's Redshirts, which is why I hesitate to report that I just didn't like it. I must qualify that, however: Scalzi's skill with characterizations and for keeping the pot boiling is still in evidence, so ultimately, I think that my reaction to this book is less a reaction to any deficiency in the execution and just that, well, this type of story just isn't my cup of tea. Redshirts is a very meta kind of tale, meditating on the oft-cited (and equally oft-mocked) way that the poor guys in red shirts on Star Trek almost always met awful ends. Redshirts is even more 'meta' than Galaxy Quest, believe it or not. If you like that sort of thing, then this book will probably be up your alley. I'm not a big 'meta-fiction' fan, so this book just didn't do much for me, alas.
It's not you, Mr. Scalzi. It's me. But I'll keep reading your stuff!
:: Cetaganda is the next book up (for me) in Lois McMaster Bujold's ongoing saga of the adventures of Miles Vorkosigan, and as usual, a fine book indeed, full of politics and intrigue and adventure as our Miles gets embroiled in the internal politics of the Cetagandan Empire, and drags his poor best friend, Ivan Vorpatril, along for the ride. I really enjoy these. I can't really say a whole lot more than that -- these books are just good, character-driven entertainment. At this point in the series, Miles is still pretty young and inexperienced, so it's fun seeing him gain in those areas.
:: Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet series is, apparently, full-throttle military science fiction, following Captain John "Black Jack" Geary as he takes command of the fleet in a failing war effort and vows to bring it home. Trouble is, Geary was recently resuscitated after spending a hundred years in hibernation after completing a battle victory that has made him a legend. Thus he has to deal with the fact that his own officers treat him with worshipful reverence, which strains his relationships and fills him with dread for how morale will suffer when they realize that their hero is as human as they are.
The first book in this series, Dauntless, starts with a huge BANG, and the pacing rarely drops after the third or fourth page. Military SF doesn't always ring my bell, but this book was terrific. I can't wait to read more of this series!
:: Praise seems to be uniformly good to great for John Scalzi's Redshirts, which is why I hesitate to report that I just didn't like it. I must qualify that, however: Scalzi's skill with characterizations and for keeping the pot boiling is still in evidence, so ultimately, I think that my reaction to this book is less a reaction to any deficiency in the execution and just that, well, this type of story just isn't my cup of tea. Redshirts is a very meta kind of tale, meditating on the oft-cited (and equally oft-mocked) way that the poor guys in red shirts on Star Trek almost always met awful ends. Redshirts is even more 'meta' than Galaxy Quest, believe it or not. If you like that sort of thing, then this book will probably be up your alley. I'm not a big 'meta-fiction' fan, so this book just didn't do much for me, alas.
It's not you, Mr. Scalzi. It's me. But I'll keep reading your stuff!
Monday, January 14, 2013
Almost there...almost....
The manuscript is done, locked, completed. I'm just working on the synopsis now.
I'm almost there, folks.
I'm almost there, folks.
Friday, January 11, 2013
More Writing!
Well, just a short while ago this evening I completed the newest batch of edits to Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title), which pretty much means that the book is in the final form in which editors will give it its Yay or Nay. (Except for, maybe, the first sentence. I think I'm going to tweak that a bit. I want it to be just perfect, and my gut tells me it ain't there yet.)
What's left? Formatting the manuscript for submission (which I've already done; that's easy), and writing a synopsis, for those publishers who take their submissions in the "Three chapters and a synopsis" format. Then we're on track to get the thing out there. It's time for this thing to fly. As a great pilot once said, "I am a leaf on the wind...watch how I soar!"
I honestly can't convey how much I have invested in this story. I'm all in on this one, folks. This is my "Go big or go home" project. After this? A week or so of not thinking about writing fiction...and then it's time to finish the NaNoWriMo book I started, and after that, time for the sequel, Princesses Still In SPACE!!! (not the actual title).
For right now, though, it's rum o'clock.
What's left? Formatting the manuscript for submission (which I've already done; that's easy), and writing a synopsis, for those publishers who take their submissions in the "Three chapters and a synopsis" format. Then we're on track to get the thing out there. It's time for this thing to fly. As a great pilot once said, "I am a leaf on the wind...watch how I soar!"
I honestly can't convey how much I have invested in this story. I'm all in on this one, folks. This is my "Go big or go home" project. After this? A week or so of not thinking about writing fiction...and then it's time to finish the NaNoWriMo book I started, and after that, time for the sequel, Princesses Still In SPACE!!! (not the actual title).
For right now, though, it's rum o'clock.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Something for Thursday
I'm on something of a Russian classical music kick of late, so here's a fascinating piece by one of the most idiosyncratic composers ever, Alexander Scriabin. Scriabin was something of a light unto himself. He doesn't fit into any of the usual convenient labels for music. Scriabin is too Romantic to be modern, but too free in his formal approach and his choice of thematic fare to be really Romantic. He exists in his own soundworld, and what a soundworld it is. I tend to think of him as being most spiritually attuned to the French Impressionist composers (Ravel, Debussy), than the Russian tradition (Tchaikovsky, and later, Stravinksy). But even those categories don't hold him very well.
The best word for Scriabin is probably 'mystic'.
Here is Scriabin's symphonic tone poem "Le Poeme de l'extace", or "The Poem of Ecstasy". This work is as astonishing to me now as it was when I first listened to it in college. I really try to avoid making visual and literary associations with concert music, but sometimes I can't avoid it. This is one such work. It sounds to me like the union of a god with a goddess...and a universe springing to being afterward....
The best word for Scriabin is probably 'mystic'.
Here is Scriabin's symphonic tone poem "Le Poeme de l'extace", or "The Poem of Ecstasy". This work is as astonishing to me now as it was when I first listened to it in college. I really try to avoid making visual and literary associations with concert music, but sometimes I can't avoid it. This is one such work. It sounds to me like the union of a god with a goddess...and a universe springing to being afterward....
Wednesday, January 09, 2013
A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
You can resurrect any shopping destination at all, from any point in your lifetime, as it was at the height of your memories of the place. What is it? A store? A particular shopping center or mall? A downtown street?
Monday, January 07, 2013
Light blogging ahead....
OK, folks, I'm in the final home-stretch of editing Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title). I have less than a hundred pages to go, and I have an outline to write, so I can get my submission packet ready to go for January 15, my self-imposed deadline. This means that I'll be posting less frequently here until all that is done. No hiatus, but there will be less new stuff here for a few days. Thanks!
Sunday, January 06, 2013
Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Probably not safe for work...but it's hilarious. Cats that look like pin-up girls.
:: Wonder what Mars looked like when it was still a watery, verdant world? Wonder no more! Amazing.
:: Emotions for which English has no words. I find this interesting to consider -- if we did have words for such feelings as these, would English poetry be less interesting?
More next week!
:: Probably not safe for work...but it's hilarious. Cats that look like pin-up girls.
:: Wonder what Mars looked like when it was still a watery, verdant world? Wonder no more! Amazing.
:: Emotions for which English has no words. I find this interesting to consider -- if we did have words for such feelings as these, would English poetry be less interesting?
More next week!
Thursday, January 03, 2013
Something for Thursday
Regular readers of long duration will know that an annual New Year's tradition at Casa Jaquandor -- not yet indulged this year, but likely Saturday night, when The Wife is home from work -- is the viewing of the New Year's From Vienna concert, which features the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and various other artistic groups, most often ballet artists, in a wonderful concert of music by the Strauss family. It's invariably a magical evening, and one of my greatest dreams is to attend it in person one day. (One of my great dreams of youth, now ruled impossible by choices I've made since, was to actually conduct the concert. But that was always unlikely....)
The concert always ends with three encores: a galop or polka chosen by the conductor, and kept secret until the concert itself, followed by a waltz, and then closing with the Radetzky March, which is the Austrian equivalent of The Stars and Stripes Forever. That waltz? Not just any waltz, but the most famous waltz ever written: On the Beautiful Blue Danube.
Most years, the concert footage of Blue Danube is combined with ballet footage, but a couple of years ago, they did something different, using the waltz to trace the flow of the river itself, from its headwaters in Germany all the way to where it empties into the Black Sea. How utterly captivating! Here is On the Beautiful Blue Danube (conducted by Georges Pretre).
And hey, why stop there? From the same concert, here is that final encore number, the Radetzky March. Note the snare drum opening, before our conductor even reaches the podium, and note the audience participation, with our conductor indicating when they should clap softly and when they should clap loudly.
Let 2013 commence proper!
(For those interested, through January 16 you can watch this year's concert broadcast here.)
The concert always ends with three encores: a galop or polka chosen by the conductor, and kept secret until the concert itself, followed by a waltz, and then closing with the Radetzky March, which is the Austrian equivalent of The Stars and Stripes Forever. That waltz? Not just any waltz, but the most famous waltz ever written: On the Beautiful Blue Danube.
Most years, the concert footage of Blue Danube is combined with ballet footage, but a couple of years ago, they did something different, using the waltz to trace the flow of the river itself, from its headwaters in Germany all the way to where it empties into the Black Sea. How utterly captivating! Here is On the Beautiful Blue Danube (conducted by Georges Pretre).
And hey, why stop there? From the same concert, here is that final encore number, the Radetzky March. Note the snare drum opening, before our conductor even reaches the podium, and note the audience participation, with our conductor indicating when they should clap softly and when they should clap loudly.
Let 2013 commence proper!
(For those interested, through January 16 you can watch this year's concert broadcast here.)
Wednesday, January 02, 2013
Tuesday, January 01, 2013
A quiz-thing, huzzah!
I don't do as many quiz-things as I used to. So here's a quiz-thing, stolen from Cal.
1: What eye color do you find sexiest?
Blue, I guess. Never really thought of it before.
2: White, milk, or dark chocolate mocha?
No idea. Not off to a promising start here....
3: If you could get a Sharpie tattoo on your back, what would it be?
Label where my internal organs are.
4: Did you grow up in a small or big town? Did you like it?
Small town. I liked it well enough, but even then it was slowly dying away, and while the area is physically beautiful, there's really nothing there now. At the time I didn't really understand "the rules" of interacting in a small town, so I got bullied a lot. To this day I'm unsure as to how much I liked it, but I did enjoy the people a good deal, despite not having a hell of a lot in common with any of them.
5: Your favorite adult as a child? (and not your parents, if they were your favorite)
Huh. Probably any teachers who took active interest in whatever talents I had. Regrettably, these were more infrequent than they should have been.
6: What kind of smoothie sounds really good right now?
Blueberry. I love me some blueberries. Or pomegranate. Or orange-vanilla. Or...anything but banana, peach, or mango. I don't like those flavors in things, even though I love the respective fruits. What can I say, I'm strange.
7: Most embarrassing moment from your elementary school years?
Well, when you're the kid who tends to get bullied a bit and you make the mistake of writing on the cover of your notebook that you like some girl and one of the bullies finds the notebook...yeah, that's kinda mortifying.
8: Most embarrassing moment from your middle school years?
Writing a brief love-note to the girl I was crushing on turned out to be a less than good idea. She let me down gently, though. Good on her!
9: Most embarrassing moment from your high school years?
Don't worry, it didn't involve girls. I think. I actually mostly managed to get through high school with a minimum of embarrassing stuff happening.
10: Pirates or ninjas? Why?
Pirates. There are lots of cool, notorious pirates, and they drink lots of rum and get lots of wenches. Ninjas? They wear masks and anonymously dish out death as part of a collective.
11: Have you ever climbed a tree more than twenty feet off the ground?
Yes! Tree climbing is fun. I'd be great in the Amazon rain forest.
12: Did you like swinging as a child? Do you still get excited when you see a swing set?
Oh yeah, I loved swinging. In fact, it's still fun, if the swing is big enough.
One time I'm swinging away, nice and high, and some toddler wanders right into my path. I managed to jump off while holding on, dragging my feet and knees and generally hurting all manner of body parts -- and the little shit's mother comes over to get him and gives me a dirty look for almost hurting her precious little angel. Stupid woman.
13: If you could have any pet in the world, illegal or not, what would you get?
A Persian kitten. No, two Persian kittens. Because Persian kittens are so adorable that it makes me cry.
14: What’s your most favorite part of your body?
Is Jadzia Dax would say of Leonard McCoy, "He had the hands of a surgeon...."
15: What’s your most favorite part of your personality?
My increasingly-strong ability to not give a crap.
16: Madonna or Lady Gaga? Neither? Both? Who cares?
Madonna, although I do think Gaga is cut from the same cloth. I still think Madonna can bring it -- her Super Bowl halftime show was one of the greatest things I've seen in years, for sheer gonzo lunatic spectacle.
17: Have you ever watched the Superbowl all the way through?
Every year since SB XXIII (SF 20, Cincinnati 16), except for: SB XXIV (at college, busy that night, everybody knew SF would clobber Denver), SB XXXV (Baltimore beats crap out of Giants, dull game, missed second half driving home from party), SB XXXVIII (again, driving home from party), SB XLV (again, driving home from party). Most times when we've gone to Super Bowl parties, they've been really far away, and it takes a big chunk of the second half getting home.
18: Have you ever watched any major sporting event drunk?
No.
19: What’s the most delicious food you’ve ever eaten in your life?
I'll say something different each time you ask this, so for right now, I'll say...my mother's turkey dinner.
20: Margarine or butter? Which did you grow up with?
Now, butter. I don't recall what we used when I was a kid. I think that margarine is pretty awful stuff, though.
21: Whole, skim, 1%, or 2% milk? (Did you know they make 1 1/2% milk?)
Skim, although I'll use others for recipes, depending on what's called for. I prefer whole or half-and-half for creamy soups.
22: Which continents have you been on?
North America. Travel has not been in the cards for me much to now, aside from the States and Toronto.
23: Do you get motion sickness? Any horror stories?
Not really, but I'm chicken about inverting roller coasters. I want no part of those.
24: Backpacks or satchels?
Satchels, unless I'm walking through the wilderness. Then a backpack.
25: Would you wear a rainbow jacket? A neon yellow sweater? Checkered pants?
No on all three counts, but I'd be most likely to do the neon yellow sweater.
26: What was your favorite cartoon growing up?
Bugs Bunny and company.
27: If you had to have a cow or a pig, which would you take? Why?
The pig, because of bacon.
28: If you had to look at one city skyline for the rest of your life, which would it be?
Toronto's. I love that city! (Close seconds: NYC and Chicago.)
29: Longest plane ride you’ve ever been on?
Boston to Phoenix, as part of our journey across the country for my mother-in-law's funeral. It took 6.5 hours. I'm better equipped for such a flight now; I'd load up my tablet with a movie or two and watch away. I did have my laptop, but I could barely get it opened in those tiny seats.
30: The latest you’ve ever slept?
Noon, once or twice in college following an almost all-nighter. (I never once pulled an actual all-nighter, although one night we went to bed at 5:30 am.)
31: Would you buy a sweater covered in kitten pictures? Would you wear it if someone gave it you for free?
As much as I love kitties...probably not. Unless I wore it under overalls, which would conceal some of it.
32: Do you pick at scabs?
Ewwww! No! (But when I was a kid...yeah.)
33: Favorite kind of bean? Kidney? Black? Pinto?
I love beans of nearly every variety. I honestly couldn't pick a favorite.
34: How far can you throw a baseball?
Ugh! I suck at throwing. Never practiced as a kid.
35: If you had to move to another country, where would you move?
Toronto, ON, CA.
36: Have you ever eaten Ethiopian food? Vietnamese? Korean? Nepalese? How was it?
No, yes, no, no. I'd love to, though. I wish more ethnic restaurants weren't all in the farther-from-home 'burbs of Buffalo.
37: Small, liberal arts school or public university? Why?
I went to a small liberal arts school, but I think I'd have been fine in a larger place, too. I love the collegiate atmosphere, actually.
38: A relationship with love or one with sex?
Love. Without it, the other thing is pointless. Fun, I imagine, but pointless.
39: Do you eat enough vegetables?
No, but I'm getting better at it.
40: Do you like horror movies? How about thrillers?
Horror, no. Too often they're about shock and gore. Thrillers, absolutely! Some of my favorite movies are thrillers. Silence of the Lambs, for example.
41: Would you scratch a crotch itch in public?
Erm....
42: Do you swear in front of your parents?
I try not to, because it feels kinda odd, to this day.
43: Coolest thing you’ve ever been for Halloween?
Captain Marvel. Zap! Pow! (My mother made that costume, and it was awesome.)
44: If you could change your natural hair color, would you? To what?
I'd let it go. I'll be a Gandalf-like gray within five to ten years.
45: Do you want to get married? Have kids?
No, because to do that, I'd have to divest myself of the current marriage, and I don't have a whole lot of desire to do that.
46: Do you use a reusable water bottle? If not, you should.
Yes. Weird question.
47: City or nature person?
I think I'm a city person with a nature person looking to get out. Or maybe the other way around. I could be a nature person as long as I'm within, say, 45 minutes of a city.
48: Have you ever used something other than “makeup” as makeup? (Like paint? Markers?)
Unless whipped cream and coconut custard count, no.
49: Can you walk well in high heels? Even if you’re a guy?
Never tried. Heels do look nice on women, but I don't think they're likely worth the hassle and pain. I don't think they elevate a woman's appearance so much that I'd miss them if every woman just said "Oh, frak these things" and shuffled them off to the dustbin of history, like powdered wigs.
One thing I see fairly regularly is women wearing heels who clearly don't wear them very often. There's no mistaking that particular awkward gait.
50: Post 5 awesome things about yourself. BRAG AWAY!
I write well. I love to learn new things. I can cook. I'm good with cats. And I'm ready to step in and take over writing chores for Star Wars Episode VII on a moment's notice!
1: What eye color do you find sexiest?
Blue, I guess. Never really thought of it before.
2: White, milk, or dark chocolate mocha?
No idea. Not off to a promising start here....
3: If you could get a Sharpie tattoo on your back, what would it be?
Label where my internal organs are.
4: Did you grow up in a small or big town? Did you like it?
Small town. I liked it well enough, but even then it was slowly dying away, and while the area is physically beautiful, there's really nothing there now. At the time I didn't really understand "the rules" of interacting in a small town, so I got bullied a lot. To this day I'm unsure as to how much I liked it, but I did enjoy the people a good deal, despite not having a hell of a lot in common with any of them.
5: Your favorite adult as a child? (and not your parents, if they were your favorite)
Huh. Probably any teachers who took active interest in whatever talents I had. Regrettably, these were more infrequent than they should have been.
6: What kind of smoothie sounds really good right now?
Blueberry. I love me some blueberries. Or pomegranate. Or orange-vanilla. Or...anything but banana, peach, or mango. I don't like those flavors in things, even though I love the respective fruits. What can I say, I'm strange.
7: Most embarrassing moment from your elementary school years?
Well, when you're the kid who tends to get bullied a bit and you make the mistake of writing on the cover of your notebook that you like some girl and one of the bullies finds the notebook...yeah, that's kinda mortifying.
8: Most embarrassing moment from your middle school years?
Writing a brief love-note to the girl I was crushing on turned out to be a less than good idea. She let me down gently, though. Good on her!
9: Most embarrassing moment from your high school years?
Don't worry, it didn't involve girls. I think. I actually mostly managed to get through high school with a minimum of embarrassing stuff happening.
10: Pirates or ninjas? Why?
Pirates. There are lots of cool, notorious pirates, and they drink lots of rum and get lots of wenches. Ninjas? They wear masks and anonymously dish out death as part of a collective.
11: Have you ever climbed a tree more than twenty feet off the ground?
Yes! Tree climbing is fun. I'd be great in the Amazon rain forest.
12: Did you like swinging as a child? Do you still get excited when you see a swing set?
Oh yeah, I loved swinging. In fact, it's still fun, if the swing is big enough.
One time I'm swinging away, nice and high, and some toddler wanders right into my path. I managed to jump off while holding on, dragging my feet and knees and generally hurting all manner of body parts -- and the little shit's mother comes over to get him and gives me a dirty look for almost hurting her precious little angel. Stupid woman.
13: If you could have any pet in the world, illegal or not, what would you get?
A Persian kitten. No, two Persian kittens. Because Persian kittens are so adorable that it makes me cry.
14: What’s your most favorite part of your body?
Is Jadzia Dax would say of Leonard McCoy, "He had the hands of a surgeon...."
15: What’s your most favorite part of your personality?
My increasingly-strong ability to not give a crap.
16: Madonna or Lady Gaga? Neither? Both? Who cares?
Madonna, although I do think Gaga is cut from the same cloth. I still think Madonna can bring it -- her Super Bowl halftime show was one of the greatest things I've seen in years, for sheer gonzo lunatic spectacle.
17: Have you ever watched the Superbowl all the way through?
Every year since SB XXIII (SF 20, Cincinnati 16), except for: SB XXIV (at college, busy that night, everybody knew SF would clobber Denver), SB XXXV (Baltimore beats crap out of Giants, dull game, missed second half driving home from party), SB XXXVIII (again, driving home from party), SB XLV (again, driving home from party). Most times when we've gone to Super Bowl parties, they've been really far away, and it takes a big chunk of the second half getting home.
18: Have you ever watched any major sporting event drunk?
No.
19: What’s the most delicious food you’ve ever eaten in your life?
I'll say something different each time you ask this, so for right now, I'll say...my mother's turkey dinner.
20: Margarine or butter? Which did you grow up with?
Now, butter. I don't recall what we used when I was a kid. I think that margarine is pretty awful stuff, though.
21: Whole, skim, 1%, or 2% milk? (Did you know they make 1 1/2% milk?)
Skim, although I'll use others for recipes, depending on what's called for. I prefer whole or half-and-half for creamy soups.
22: Which continents have you been on?
North America. Travel has not been in the cards for me much to now, aside from the States and Toronto.
23: Do you get motion sickness? Any horror stories?
Not really, but I'm chicken about inverting roller coasters. I want no part of those.
24: Backpacks or satchels?
Satchels, unless I'm walking through the wilderness. Then a backpack.
25: Would you wear a rainbow jacket? A neon yellow sweater? Checkered pants?
No on all three counts, but I'd be most likely to do the neon yellow sweater.
26: What was your favorite cartoon growing up?
Bugs Bunny and company.
27: If you had to have a cow or a pig, which would you take? Why?
The pig, because of bacon.
28: If you had to look at one city skyline for the rest of your life, which would it be?
Toronto's. I love that city! (Close seconds: NYC and Chicago.)
29: Longest plane ride you’ve ever been on?
Boston to Phoenix, as part of our journey across the country for my mother-in-law's funeral. It took 6.5 hours. I'm better equipped for such a flight now; I'd load up my tablet with a movie or two and watch away. I did have my laptop, but I could barely get it opened in those tiny seats.
30: The latest you’ve ever slept?
Noon, once or twice in college following an almost all-nighter. (I never once pulled an actual all-nighter, although one night we went to bed at 5:30 am.)
31: Would you buy a sweater covered in kitten pictures? Would you wear it if someone gave it you for free?
As much as I love kitties...probably not. Unless I wore it under overalls, which would conceal some of it.
32: Do you pick at scabs?
Ewwww! No! (But when I was a kid...yeah.)
33: Favorite kind of bean? Kidney? Black? Pinto?
I love beans of nearly every variety. I honestly couldn't pick a favorite.
34: How far can you throw a baseball?
Ugh! I suck at throwing. Never practiced as a kid.
35: If you had to move to another country, where would you move?
Toronto, ON, CA.
36: Have you ever eaten Ethiopian food? Vietnamese? Korean? Nepalese? How was it?
No, yes, no, no. I'd love to, though. I wish more ethnic restaurants weren't all in the farther-from-home 'burbs of Buffalo.
37: Small, liberal arts school or public university? Why?
I went to a small liberal arts school, but I think I'd have been fine in a larger place, too. I love the collegiate atmosphere, actually.
38: A relationship with love or one with sex?
Love. Without it, the other thing is pointless. Fun, I imagine, but pointless.
39: Do you eat enough vegetables?
No, but I'm getting better at it.
40: Do you like horror movies? How about thrillers?
Horror, no. Too often they're about shock and gore. Thrillers, absolutely! Some of my favorite movies are thrillers. Silence of the Lambs, for example.
41: Would you scratch a crotch itch in public?
Erm....
42: Do you swear in front of your parents?
I try not to, because it feels kinda odd, to this day.
43: Coolest thing you’ve ever been for Halloween?
Captain Marvel. Zap! Pow! (My mother made that costume, and it was awesome.)
44: If you could change your natural hair color, would you? To what?
I'd let it go. I'll be a Gandalf-like gray within five to ten years.
45: Do you want to get married? Have kids?
No, because to do that, I'd have to divest myself of the current marriage, and I don't have a whole lot of desire to do that.
46: Do you use a reusable water bottle? If not, you should.
Yes. Weird question.
47: City or nature person?
I think I'm a city person with a nature person looking to get out. Or maybe the other way around. I could be a nature person as long as I'm within, say, 45 minutes of a city.
48: Have you ever used something other than “makeup” as makeup? (Like paint? Markers?)
Unless whipped cream and coconut custard count, no.
49: Can you walk well in high heels? Even if you’re a guy?
Never tried. Heels do look nice on women, but I don't think they're likely worth the hassle and pain. I don't think they elevate a woman's appearance so much that I'd miss them if every woman just said "Oh, frak these things" and shuffled them off to the dustbin of history, like powdered wigs.
One thing I see fairly regularly is women wearing heels who clearly don't wear them very often. There's no mistaking that particular awkward gait.
50: Post 5 awesome things about yourself. BRAG AWAY!
I write well. I love to learn new things. I can cook. I'm good with cats. And I'm ready to step in and take over writing chores for Star Wars Episode VII on a moment's notice!
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