A Saturday Morning Quiz Thing

Posted on November 15, 2025 by ksedinger

Here’s a quiz from Sunday Stealing! I’m doing this because it’s early Saturday morning and I’m sitting here with a mug of tea and I don’t really want to do anything productive quite yet but I need to post something (I’m sitting on a nice little string of consecutive days posting stuff!), so here we go:

What 10 Questions Can Tell You the Most about a Person

1. If you were an animal, what animal would you be?

Well…I’m prone to long periods of inactivity punctuated by short bursts of activity, and I can be motivated by food, so I guess I’d be a greyhound. Huh.

2. Are you generous?

I certainly hope so! I constantly wish I had more resources to support all the things that need supporting. (And people.)

3. Of the following, which consistently gives you the most pleasure: a) music, b) money, c) books, d) science, e) spirituality, f) food and wine, g) movies?

Sheesh, I love all those things! Maybe not spirituality, but I suppose it would depend on how we define that. I certainly enjoy the sense of community and participation in humanity that all the other things bring. And money isn’t something I love, but I sure love that having it brings the ability to pursue all the other things. Oh, and I’d add photography and other visual arts, too.

(By the way, maybe this belongs in a longer essay, but “Money can’t buy happiness!” is complete and utter bullshit and anyone saying it should be laughed out of the room.)

4. Describe your dancing ability.

I don’t have any. I probably could, as I have a fine sense of rhythm, but I have never danced much. Now, if I was to ever take an actual class in dance, I suspect I’d be OK at it. At least, not “Elaine Benes” bad.

5. What do you think your worst enemy really thinks of you?

“That guy is a liberal pinko weirdo with no fashion sense and isn’t manly enough.” (Now, I have no idea who is thinking this, but if I had a “worst enemy”, this is probably at least part of their thought process.)

6. Can you tell when someone is lying to you?

Depends on the person and the lie, doesn’t it?

7. Describe how it feels to fall in love.

Well, your brain kind of goes all foggy and your thoughts go all “What if I did this weird thing I would never otherwise do? Would that impress that person?” and people are often doing the snapping-fingers-in-your-face thing to get your attention because once again you’re thinking about the oh-so-cute thing that person did the other day and how you really want to revisit the lovely conversation you had with them that time so you cook up all manner of weird conversational gambits to get that topic back again. Oh, and there can be uncomfortable bloating, too. Be careful. A thing of Tums helps.

8. In deadly peril, what three people would you want in a foxhole with you?

Superman, Wonder Woman, and Captain America.

9. What is your greatest weakness?

Well, my sweet tooth doesn’t do me any favors. And I’m likely to pay a lot less heed to your character flaws if you look good in a pair of overalls.

10. If you were to live out the rest of your life as your favorite fictional character, which would you choose?

I could cheerfully live as Bilbo Baggins, in all honesty. Books and food and warm fires? And some of the hobbits wear something similar to overalls!

Posted in Occasional Quizzes | Tagged | 1 Comment

“Momentary masters of a fraction of a dot”

Posted on November 14, 2025 by ksedinger

Earth, from the rings of Saturn:

“In this rare image taken on July 19, 2013, the wide-angle camera on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has captured Saturn’s rings and our planet Earth and its moon in the same frame. It is only one footprint in a mosaic of 33 footprints covering the entire Saturn ring system (including Saturn itself). At each footprint, images were taken in different spectral filters for a total of 323 images: some were taken for scientific purposes and some to produce a natural color mosaic. This is the only wide-angle footprint that has the Earth-moon system in it.”

Via, with more info, here.

Posted in On Science and the Cosmos | Tagged | Leave a comment

Something for Thursday

Posted on November 13, 2025 by ksedinger

We all have those movies, don’t we? They’re the movies where we’ll be going about our day, doing stuff that we’ve planned out and intended to get done…but then we’ll see that one of those movies is on teevee or something, and that’s that, screw the To Do List, we’re watching that movie again!

One of those movies for me is The Hunt for Red October, that wonderful submarine thriller based on the Tom Clancy novel. (I never read that particular Clancy book. I read a couple other ones and honestly, I wasn’t super-impressed beyond an appreciation for his plotting. My drug-of-choice for late-80s-early-90s spy fiction was Robert Ludlum.) Hunt came out in spring 1990, and I remember a bunch of friends and I in college going to see it. The movie rocked my world even then, and it has never declined in my estimation. It really is a masterpiece, as far as I’m concerned; it sets up every single plot twist in advance but doesn’t do so in such an obvious way that you can see the foreshadowing as it happens. It’s incredibly well-acted and superbly paced, and for an action adventure thriller, it has some absolutely crackling dialog. I just love it.

The music is also great, by the wonderful Basil Poledouris. Its main melodic material is distinctly Russian, and he makes extensive use of choir throughout, along with some techno material in the tense parts of the film. Here is a suite culled together from the soundtrack.

Posted in On Movies, On Music | Tagged | Leave a comment

What about a very tall garden shed?

Posted on November 12, 2025 by ksedinger

There’s a social media account called “Terrible Maps” which is exactly that: absurd maps, where the absurdity either comes from the weirdness of the information being mapped, or just plain meta-absurdity. Here is a version of the latter:

And here is a version of the former:

Now, I like the fact that this one doesn’t include the caption, because you’re probably wondering what on Earth Florida, Louisiana, and Illinois have in common. What could possibly group those three states, and no others?

Here, I’ll even provide a bit of quiz-show music to play while you think about it:

Give up?

Think altitude.

Got it yet?

The map depicts states where, if you stand atop that state’s tallest building, your elevation will be higher than if you stood on that state’s highest natural point. Apparently this is only true in these three states. Illinois is pretty obvious: the Sears Tower (Willis Tower? Something else? Nah, Sears Tower it is) is taller than “Charles Mound”, the state’s highest hill. Now, having driven through Illinois a lot, I found this a little surprising when I considered the hilly terrain along the state’s western side. But those hills are actually plateaus with valleys from the rivers and streams forming the Mississippi River watershed. And the southern part of Illinois is too far west to benefit, elevation-wise, from the Appalachians.

I didn’t look up Louisiana or Florida’s tallest buildings, but their natural high points are quite low: Driskill Mountain’s 535 feet and Britton Hill at 345 feet, respectively. Florida is so flat that I’ll bet there are a lot of buildings that reach a higher elevation than Britton Hill there. Even NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building is taller than that.

I would have thought there were more states that fit this bill, to be honest. Iowa, for example. It turns out that Iowa is short-changed (ha!) by the relative lack of height in the Des Moines skyline, but if Iowa wanted to join the other three here, it wouldn’t take much: one building in Des Moines just 86 feet or more taller than that city’s current tallest building would do it. (For the purposes of this post, I assume that meeting the challenge would involve the state’s biggest city. They could build a tower that tall in Mason City, after all…but that would be really weird.)

Could New York do it? Unlikely, as New York State’s highest point is a mountain in the Adirondacks that is more than 5300 feet high. Nobody’s building a mile-high building any time soon, I think.

So, just thinking about this, which states could do this most realistically? Well, I assume the entire Western seaboard is out; nobody in California, Oregon, or Washington is going to build a tower that gives greater elevation than Mts. Whitney, Hood, or Rainier, respectively. I thought maybe Massachusetts could do it, but it turns out that the western end of that state is more rugged than I remember (I haven’t been to Massachusetts in 28 years). How about Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Delaware? Those are flat, aren’t they? Well, not really:

  • Connecticut: Mt. Frissell, 2380 feet
  • Rhode Island: Jerimoth Hill, 812 feet
  • New Jersey: High Point (creatively named!), 1803 feet
  • Delaware: Ebright Azimuth, 448 feet (rounded up)

The biggest cities of each are elevated as follows:

  • Hartford, CT: 59 feet
  • Providence, RI: 75 feet
  • Newark, NJ: 30 feet
  • Wilmington, DE: 92 feet

Well, it’s pretty obvious that Hartford is not going to be erecting a 2322-foot skyscraper anytime soon. Neither is Newark likely to build a 1774-foot building. But all Providence would need is a 738-foot building to get this job done (their current tallest building is 428 feet, so this would dominate the skyline). And looking things up, I wonder if Delaware actually does belong on this list! The base elevation is 92 feet, and their tallest building is 360 feet, which means that, assuming the base of 1201 North Market Street is at the 92-foot elevation mark, its roof must stand at 452 feet, a whole 4 feet higher than Ebright Azimuth. Hmmmm.

Now I’m wondering how much of this the Terrible Maps folks actually researched. I’m also wondering why I’ve spent so much time on this.

Posted in On Things I Find Funny | Tagged | 1 Comment

Tuesday Tones

Posted on November 11, 2025 by ksedinger
Looking across the Niagara River
Miranda (Lumix FZ1000ii)
f/7.1, 1/1000sec, ISO 250

Continuing our self-guided tour of classical music inspired by water, we have perhaps one of the two greatest works ever directly inspired by a river (well, maybe three, depending on how strongly we consider Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen to have been inspired by the Rhine). The other work will surely show up in this series, but for now, we’ll stick with Bedrich Smetana’s Vltava, known to English-speaking audiences as The Moldau.

The work opens with a quiet shimmering that evokes the flow of Vltava, the longest river in the Czech Republic. Written as part of a cycle of tone poems evoking Smetana’s homeland, called Ma Vlast (“My Fatherland”), Vltava is the most well-known of the group and is often performed on its own. Its main melody is one of the great tunes in all classical music, an earworm for the ages, but Smetana’s orchestration is marvelous throughout as he casts the work with sonic effects that evoke the flowing waters and the country through which it flows. Smetana himself wrote of the work:

“Two springs pour forth in the shade of the Bohemian Forest, one warm and gushing, the other cold and peaceful. The forest brook, hastening on, becomes the river Moldau. Through thick woods it flows, as the gay sounds of the hunt and the notes of the hunter’s horn are heard ever nearer. It flows through grass-grown pastures and lowlands where a wedding feast is celebrated with song and dance. At night, wood and water nymphs revel in its sparkling waves. Reflected on its surface are fortresses and castles — witnesses of bygone days of knightly splendor and the vanished glory of fighting times. At the St. John Rapids, the stream races ahead, winding through the cataracts, hewing out a path with its foaming waves through the rocky chasm into the broad riverbed — finally, flowing on in majestic peace toward Prague and welcomed by the time-honored castle Vyšehrad. Then it vanishes far beyond the poet’s gaze.”

Here is Vltava by Bedrich Smetana (in a particularly wonderful live performance).

Posted in On Music | Tagged | 1 Comment

“When the waves turn minutes to hours”

Posted on November 10, 2025 by ksedinger
Sunset over Lake Erie

Fifty years ago today, one of the most notorious maritime disasters in American history happened when the Edmund Fitzgerald, a mighty freighter of the Great Lakes, foundered and sank near the eastern end of Lake Superior. The story is well known, of course: the huge ship with the long and distinguished career, famous for being one of the biggest ships on the Great Lakes, and the way it sailed into one of the most ferocious storms in memory, finding itself in a more and more harrowing position, and striving against time to reach the relative safety of Whitefish Bay, and Captain McSorley’s haunting last radio message–“We are holding our own”–likely send just seconds, maybe minutes, before the ship went down with all hands.

The exact cause of the Edmund Fitzgerald‘s sinking has never been precisely determined. Can it be, at this point? I don’t know. It would likely take a lot more inspection of the wreckage on the bottom of Lake Superior, but there have been no expeditions to the ship in thirty years and I don’t imagine it’s exactly anyone’s priority. There are a number of theories: the ship’s hull might have been damaged when she hit a shoal, or the ship might have been swamped by a set of rogue waves that overwhelmed her. One account I once read (I can’t remember where, unfortunately) speculated that the Fitz encountered seas so violently rough that she plowed downward into the trough of a giant wave and then…kept plowing down. According to this account, the ship went straight down so fast that the engines were still running as it surged downward to the bottom. I find that prospect rather terrifying, to be honest. The Edmund Fitzgerald is haunting, I suspect, partly because its wreck is so unexplained and because it happened so quickly. This was no sinking, like the Titanic, that played out over an hour and a half and allowed for human dramas based on class to take place. The crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald had no time to think about their fate and to consider their impending mortality. The sinking was likely so quick that at least some of the crew didn’t know what was happening until they were already underwater.

Like all shipwrecks, large or small, the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald provides yet another data point supporting one of my favorite adages: “Nature always bats last.” No matter how strong the fruits of our industry may be, nature will always have the final say. It may take years and years, centuries even, but eventually nothing made by the hand of humans can withstand the forces of the universe. And if you want to see those forces in action, well, just go look on any of the Great Lakes.

I’ve lived near the Great Lakes, in one way or another, for most of my life. Except for the years we lived in Hillsboro, OR when I was a kid, one Great Lake or another has pretty much always been at most a few hours’ drive away. Of course, since 2000, I’ve lived minutes away from Lake Erie, a stretch broken only in the winter of 2002-2003 when we lived in Syracuse, closer to Lake Ontario. These waters are easy to take lightly…but they are what they are. They are inland seas, and any of the five are capable of plunging a ship to the depths with all on board.

Plaque honoring Gordon Lightfoot’s classic song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald“, on display at the Ripley Aquarium, Toronto, ON
Posted in On Nature, On People | Tagged | Leave a comment

Here it comes! (A somewhat annual thought on snow and The 716)

Posted on November 9, 2025 by ksedinger

As I write this, it is Sunday morning, 9 November 2025. Outside it is cold and cloudy and rainy, but according to the local weather predicting folk, that rain will be turning to snow later today, for our first actual snowfall of the 2025-2026 wintry-weather season. Now, longtime readers will know that I, for one, love the snow and the winter and I welcome our wintry overlords, but as happens every year, social media is alive with WNYers saying things like “Ugh, here it comes!” and “Stop saying the S-word!” (as if “snow” is the weather equivalent of “Lord Voldemort”).

I’m not going to lecture people as to why they should embrace the snow, but…yeah, I’m gonna do that, actually. Buffalo and WNY have a lot of problems and there are many things that need to happen if this region is ever to truly rebound, and this one probably isn’t the most important one on the list, but I quite firmly believe that self-image matters, and the degree to which the people of a region communicate their love of their region matters. And like it or not, snow is a big part of living here. It just is. And I don’t think it sends a great message to the rest of the country if a lot of people living here seem to convey that for at least a quarter of the year (and, I’ll be honest, as much as a third of the year), they’d rather be living someplace else.

So once again, Buffalo, let’s embrace the snow. Let’s make it a positive part of our identity instead of making it sound like the “mushy peas” part of our year. Let’s embrace warm clothes and colorful sweaters and fuzzy hats and hot beverages and winter wonderlands, shall we? It’s coming anyway.

DISCLAIMER: I reserve the right to complain about any snow that arrives after St. Patrick’s Day. I have adopted March 17 as my personal cut-off point.

Posted in On Buffalo and The 716 | Tagged , | 1 Comment

It wasn’t me. I have an alibi.

Posted on November 8, 2025 by ksedinger
Posted in On Pies In Faces | Tagged | 1 Comment

A quick and random thought about Josh Allen

Posted on November 7, 2025 by ksedinger

The Buffalo Bills beat the Kansas City Chiefs last week, which they do just about every season when they play each other. But the last bunch of years, when the two teams have met again in the playoffs, the Chiefs have won. Two of those have come in the AFC Championship Game, and one of them is one of the most notorious playoff games in NFL history, the epic shootout in which the Bills took a 36-33 lead with 13 seconds left in the 4th quarter, but somehow they allowed the Chiefs to get to field goal range in those 13 seconds, tying the game and sending it to overtime, where the Chiefs promptly scored a touchdown to win 42-36. (In an illustration of the NFL’s ongoing stupidity when it comes to overtime rules, if the first team with the ball scores a touchdown, it’s game over…so Josh Allen never touched the ball again after he left the field with a lead.)

Even though Josh Allen has played very well in all of those playoff games, the narrative has formed: Allen is basically nothing until he beats the Chiefs in the playoffs. None of his accomplishments matter until he beats the Chiefs in the playoffs. He’s just another guy until he beats the Chiefs–no, until he beats Patrick Mahomes–in the playoffs. Try to point out that he has played more than well enough to win every one of those games, and it’s been the defense allowing Mahomes and the Chiefs the victory every time, and you get ignored. No, Allen has to beat the Chiefs. Allen has to beat Mahomes. So it must be, or he will forever be judged as less than.

Setting aside the increasingly annoying tendency in American sports discourse to vastly overrate championships as the only things that matter, the only true marks of greatness, and the only valid measure of worth…it’s been very strange to me to see this clunky narrative be forced upon Josh Allen and the Bills. It has almost reached a point where I genuinely believe that if the Bills (a) put together a playoff run, reached the Super Bowl and won it, but (b) didn’t meet the Chiefs in the playoffs during that run, the country’s sports discourse would put a virtual asterisk on the Bills’ win. I really believe that the Bills could win multiple Super Bowls, but if they somehow don’t beat the Chiefs during any of those title runs and get beat by the Chiefs every other time, their accomplishments would be downgraded. It sucks, but that’s just the way it is. It would literally almost be better for the Bills to beat the Chiefs in the playoffs but not win a Super Bowl, than to win the Super Bowl but never knock the Chiefs out.

Basically, American sports discourse is simply insane. I guess that’s reflective of the society itself, innit?

Posted in On Sport | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Something for Thursday

Posted on November 6, 2025 by ksedinger

We’ve been rewatching Mad About You lately.

Mad About You is a sitcom that aired in the 1990s for seven seasons. It was about the day-to-day life of a young couple in New York City, Paul and Jamie Buchman, played by Paul Reiser* and Helen Hunt. The show tended to be very down-to-earth in its concerns, almost mundane; in a way, Mad About You was better at being a “show about nothing” than Seinfeld was. We loved Mad About You when it first aired. The Girlfriend (now The Wife) discovered it before I did, but it quickly became a bonding thing for us during the ten or so months after I graduated college that we were doing a long-distance thing. Mad About You, at its best, had a lot of wonderful things to say about love and marriage…and I’ll have done there, as I want to write a longer piece about the show and What It Meant To Me, probably for the upcoming newsletter relaunch.

So, instead of a music selection, here’s a comedic sequence from Mad About You. This is from the show’s second season, when it really hit its stride; its best seasons were probably its second and third. To understand what’s happening here, all you need know is that Paul Buchman is a documentary filmmaker by trade who often finds himself doing film work he finds “beneath” himself (but he grits his teeth and does it because he knows he has to eat). Here he’s been working on a film called A Day At the Zoo. The rest of this should be easy to understand. This scene never comes out and says what’s on “the tape”, but we know, don’t we? And the comedic timing here is just amazing. Reiser and Hunt had the kind of chemistry together that many actors playing parts of fictional partnerships dream of achieving.

(Oh, and this scene ends at the episode’s first commercial break. The complications pile up after this.)

* By the way, what was up with sitcoms in the 90s featuring standup comedians in the lead playing dudes with the same first name as themselves? In Mad About You Paul Reiser plays Paul Buchman. In Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld plays…another version of Jerry Seinfeld. Jonathan Silverman starred in The Single Guy, as Jonathan Eliot.

Posted in On Teevee | Tagged | 3 Comments