Sunday Stealing, and an announcement!

Posted on February 22, 2026 by ksedinger

First, the announcement: I sent out a new installment of the newsletter the other day! This one was in remembrance of actor/director/playwright Tom Noonan, who died recently. Please check it out and subscribe! I try to send it twice a month, with usually a long piece or essay.

Now, for the weekly quiz-thing that I don’t always do weekly but this week I am because it’s prompt-based, which is interesting. Here’s the details:

This week we’re playing word association as suggested by a blogger named Dawn Camp. She said these words “tickled her fancy,” and let’s see if they inspire you. Feel free to answer with either a single word or a thought/memory. It’s up to you.

Word Association. Share what comes to mind when you hear the word …

OK, this sounds interesting! Here we go!

1. Biscuit

OK, where to go with this one? I love biscuits…here we’re talking about the American kind, the fluffy pastry-layered ones with wonderful buttery saltiness. But I learned quite a while back that this is not what British people mean by “biscuit”…but right now, I’m actually thinking of something I read many years ago in a book called The Musician’s World, which is a collection of excerpts from the correspondence of great composers. One of Richard Wagner’s letters, to poet Mathilde Wesendonck (with whom he was cheating on his first wife, Minna), thanks her for a gift of biscuits. Now, this is in translation, so I’m still fuzzy on what exactly Wagner is describing here, food-wise, but here’s an excerpt of the letter. I like this because it shows how weirdly capricious creative people can be about what enables them to get the work done:

Child, child! The biscuits did help; they suddenly jerked me out of a bad path where I had been stuck for a week, unable to go further. Yesterday my attempts to work were miserably unsuccessful. I was in a shocking humor, and gave it vent in a long letter to Liszt in which I informed him that I had come to the end of my composing days…

When the biscuits arrived, I realized what I had been lacking; the biscuits I had here were much too salty, so they could not give me any sensible ideas; but when I took the sweet ones I had always been accustomed to, and dipped them in milk, everything suddenly fell into place. And so I threw aside the revision and went back to composing, on the story of the woman physician from far away…Heavens, how much can be achieved by the right sort of biscuits! Biscuits! that is the proper remedy for composers when they get stuck–but they must be the right kind.

Richard Wagner was a really strange dude…but I’m lying if I didn’t admit that my own creative juices are not sometimes jump-started by some food or another.

2. Crayon

People my age may remember that the big box of Crayolas (the 64-pack, the one that came with the sharpener in the back of the box) would include a color called “Flesh”, so you could color the people in your pictures with the proper flesh color…making certain specific assumptions, obviously, as to what a “proper” flesh color is.

Well, more recently, this seems to be the way of things now:

Not everything is getting worse!

3. Warmth

It’s late February in Buffalo. Warmth is an envied commodity! My main need now, in terms of warmth, is a pair of gloves that (a) keeps my hands comfortably warm, and (b) allows for easy operation of the buttons and dials on my camera. I haven’t looked too deeply for this sort of thing yet, but I imagine I will sometime next year as the temps start falling again. I have a pair of warm gloves that have fingertips that allow for operation of touchscreens, but they’re not super reliable on that score, and I have another pair of gloves that is super reliable on that score, but they’re not particularly warm. I also have a pair of mitten-gloves: the mitten part is actually a flap that folds back, exposing your fingers if you need access. This is currently my best option. I have seen gloves optimized for photographers where the individual fingertips open up and fold back, allowing for operating camera controls, but I haven’t tried them. We’ll see.

4. Flip

Wilson?

Or the cocktail? A flip is apparently (I’ve never had one) a mixture of a spirit, egg, sugar, and spice. (Add cream and you have a nog.) I don’t know that these are made much these days; I’d have to look them up. But I remember reading about the original flip, in a history book I have that centers rum (God, I love history writers!). The original flip was a mixture of beer, rum, and sugar, and you served it hot after heating it by sticking a red-hot iron in it! Yes, that sounds gross. Yes, I would taste it if offered, but I wouldn’t pay for the pleasure.

5. Slush

This will be the dominant landscape feature of my region starting sometime in the next three or four weeks, and likely remaining so until May. Stupid WNY spring, I hate it.

6. Wing

What else?

These are the wings (well, some of them, I fried up a 5-lb bag containing 40-some pieces of wingy goodness) I made on Super Bowl Sunday. And we don’t even watch the game! But being non-observant doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy the same kind of yummy not-that-good-for-you food that that day brings to all. No, these aren’t Buffalo-style wings; I don’t make those at home. No particular reason, really, other than the fact that everybody around here makes good Buffalo wings, so why make here what I can get when I go out? Maybe I’ll write a post on how these got made sometime soon…or maybe it’ll end up in video form, I did make some footage. We’ll see. But these were very tasty. The wing is a wonderful part of the bird! (In terms of home wing making, I prefer grilling to deep-frying.)

7. Candle

OK, here’s a random Star Trek word association! There’s an episode from the seventh, and final, season of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Sub Rosa” in which Dr. Crusher falls in love with a ghost who was her grandmother’s lover, or some such thing. It’s a very strange episode that is sufficiently disliked by fandom to often be cited as a good example of the worst Trek stories. I’ve only seen the episode one time, when it originally aired, and I remember it being a really goofy episode indeed. And because this is Trek and there’s nothing truly supernatural in Trek, the ghost is an alien who lives inside a candle. In the first part of the episode, there’s a Scottish groundskeeper–I swear I am not making this up–who tells Dr. Crusher several times, in warning, and also in a really exaggerated Scottish brogue, “Dinna light that cahhhhn-dle!”

To this day I often think of that guy when I go to light a candle.

8. Cinnamon

Oooooh, I love cinnamon! I just love it. It’s probably my favorite spice after black pepper and maybe garlic, if we’re considering garlic a spice. (Technically garlic isn’t a spice, but in most culinary uses it functions as a spice.) I like to add it to the coffee grounds to add flavor to the brew, or also dose my applesauce (we buy the natural stuff with no added sugar) because apples and cinnamon were clearly invented to go together. One reason we love Pastitsio so much is that it contains cinnamon, and I exceed the recipe’s specified amount by a lot. More recently I’ve started taking cinnamon supplements because I’m told that cinnamon is good for blood sugar, and though I’m not generally a fan of black tea, I’ve recently discovered this stuff, following a recommendation by YouTuber Faith Connally:

I really really REALLY love this tea, and I have actually started drinking a mug of this on weekends after my initial cup of coffee, instead of having two cups of coffee.

Goodness, this one turned more extensive than I expected it to!

Posted in Newsletter Announcements, Occasional Quizzes, On Food and Cooking | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

“That’s what I’m f*cking talking about!”

Posted on February 20, 2026 by ksedinger

No, I do not care that Alysa Liu dropped an f-bomb on live teevee. How could I? I personally tend to swear like a sailor, and honestly, her statement perfectly captured that moment, didn’t it? She just skated out onto the ice and proceeded to execute on the kind of flawless level we only expect from the very greatest of athletes. We’re talking, oh, that game in the NBA finals that year when Michael Jordan just started raining down three’s against a hapless opponent (I think it was the Trail Blazers). The only thing I’ve seen like Liu’s performance yesterday was Brian Boitano’s 1988 long program.

I’m trying hard not to read a lot of significance into the fact that an American woman won a medal, Gold no less, in the first Winter Olympics after my mother’s death. Mom loved figure skating, and I often watched it with her. I still remember some of her caustic commentary through the 1990s…”Another goddamned boring Russian in a fru-fru shirt!” She really, really, really did not like the string of Russian men who won Gold every time out in the 90s. I can occasionally see her point…I will never believe that Viktor Petrenko outskated Paul Wylie in Albertville, but I didn’t hate him. Alexei Urmanov, though? That dude was soporific. And I had a healthy dislike of Evgeni Plushenko, but honestly, he was an amazing skater. I suppose my “dislike” was based on him being a skater for them.

Would Mom have liked Alysa Liu? I honestly don’t know. Her lip piercing would have bugged Mom, as would Liu’s two-toned hair; for as much a staunch leftist as my Mom was, she could be downright prudish when it came to women and their appearance. She used to kvetch about Kirstie Alley’s hair on Cheers, for God’s sake.

And yet, as I watch Liu perform, I couldn’t help hearing my mother’s voice: “Atta girl!” after every jump, “Yesss!” when she spun, “She’s cute,” at some random point. And Mom would have loved “That’s what I’m fuckin’ talkin’ about!”

“Good for her,” Mom would have said. Good for her.

Posted in On Sport | Tagged | Leave a comment

Something for Thursday (I’m sick and just not in a great mood edition)

Posted on February 19, 2026 by ksedinger

Last week I featured Donna Summer. This week, I’m going to do so again. This one’s pretty trippy: It’s a suite of three songs, joined together to make one big nearly eighteen-minute suite. The main attraction is “Macarthur Park”, a song that weds an amazing tune to some of the weirdest lyrics ever written. But the way Donna Summer sings this stuff…I’d listen to her sing the Alphabet Song, to be honest.

And I’ve just learned that “Macarthur Park” is the music for figure skater Alysa Liu’s long program, so I might hear it tonight! Don’t spoil the results for me!

Here’s Donna Summer. Sorry for the brief post, but I’m busy trying to get rid of an obnoxious cold and this is all I got.

Posted in On Music | Tagged | Leave a comment

Tuesday Tones (Black History Month)

Posted on February 17, 2026 by ksedinger

Courtney Bryan is a composer from New Orleans, born in 1982, who is currently a professor of music at Tulane University. She holds a doctorate and was a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. She is also, by the evidence of the piece featured here today, an amazing composer with a thrilling approach of mixing Gospel, jazz, and soundscapes to create something modern and new.

Sanctum is meditative and haunting, which is almost certainly exactly what Dr. Bryan was attempting to achieve. The following is from her website:

Sanctum, for orchestra and recorded sound, explores the sound of improvisation in Holiness-preaching traditions. I drew inspiration from recorded sermons: The Praying Slave Lady by Pastor Shirley Caesar, The Eagle Stirs Her Nest by Reverend C. L. Franklin, and Reverend Charles Albert Tindley’s hymn, Stand By Me. Included are the voices of Marlene Pinnock and of activists in Ferguson, Missouri from 2014. Sanctum is my artistic response to recent events of police brutality. By employing techniques of layered repetition, rhythmic intensity, sounds of moaning and whooping, and voices of the past and present, Sanctum invokes solace found in the midst of persecution and tribulation. Sanctum was commissioned and premiered by American Composers Orchestra with the generous support of The Jerome Foundation and The Peter Heller Fund. The chamber version was commissioned by the London Sinfonietta.

The performance of Sanctum featured below, by the London Sinfonietta, takes place at a socially-distant concert from 2020, if you’re wondering why the audience is so sparse. I recommend listening on earphones or earbuds, if you can; the work is deeply immersive with its blend of live musicians and recorded sounds. 

Posted in On Music | Tagged | Leave a comment

S!

Posted on February 16, 2026 by ksedinger

OK, I’m a bit behind on my posting this week because I usually write at least some of my posts ahead of time on the weekend, especially Sunday, and this week we went to Rochester for a day of fun and buying stuff at Trader Joe’s. (Yes, we have a Trader Joe’s in Buffalo. We actually have two Trader Joe’s, but we don’t like the main one (actually the store itself is fine, but its location on Niagara Falls Boulevard is really a pain to get to) and we haven’t been to the new one that opened a few months ago yet.) So for tonight’s post, I checked Sunday Stealing to see if it was an easy one…and it is! Five things I love that start with S! How hard can that be?

[taps chin]

[drums fingertips on the table]

[looks up at the ceiling]

Well, maybe this one’s a little harder than I thought…but let’s see what we can come up with. As always, I have no compunctions about cheating on Internet quizzes.

1. STARS.

This is no secret, right? I love the stars…particularly the stars of winter. Here’s my boy Orion the Hunter, shrouded by clouds, taken just last week.

2. Symphonies!

I should get back to featuring full-length symphonies here. There’s no doubting that my favorite long form in music is the symphony. A great symphony is a musical world unto itself, regardless of how long it is; Mozart’s 40th is as magnificent a journey as Mahler’s 1st, even if the former is half as long as the latter.

3. The sea.

I mean…it’s the sea. ‘Nuff said.

4. Straps.

You can’t have overalls without them!

5. Shoresy.

Season Five will be on Hulu next week!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

This may be my laziest post ever.

Posted on February 15, 2026 by ksedinger

Yesterday on Threads, someone posted a simple request: Whats one meme that makes you laugh every time you see it?

This was my submission:

And here is a small selection of other submissions that made me laugh (the thread had several thousand replies!)

Posted in On Things I Find Funny | Tagged | Comments Off on This may be my laziest post ever.

Something for Thursday (Black History Month)

Posted on February 12, 2026 by ksedinger

The other day, someone posed an interesting question over on the Threads platform:

Dear white people, It’s Black History Month. Who made you see us? Who was your first Black celebrity crush?

It didn’t take me long to figure out my answer, because it was Donna Summer. What follows is the post I wrote when Donna Summer died. I remember that day very well, and when I learned she was gone, I had to go outside and…well, here’s the post.

Donna Summer was my Whitney Houston.

I never realized that, until earlier today, when I went outside toward the end of my work day for a last brief break. I pulled out my phone, and before I even realized I was doing it, brought up “Last Dance” on it. And then I stood there, listening to that great disco song, for all eight minutes of its long version. It was a gorgeously sunny day, and there in the cool shade I listened to a song that I’ve loved since I was seven or eight years old, over the tiny speakers on my phone. The sound wasn’t very good, of course. The phone’s not designed for that. It sounds nice as a portable music player over earphones, but the speakers on the phone don’t produce any bass to speak of. It did not do Ms. Summer justice.

And she still sounded utterly, utterly astounding.

Because of my unusual relationship with pop music, I never owned a recording of Donna Summer’s, aside from “Last Dance”, until only just in the last few years. I rarely listened to rock or pop as a kid, preferring to stick with film music and, later on, classical. In fact, I didn’t really start to engage with pop music until I was already actively engaging with classical music. Interesting that both interests blossomed right around the same time…but just because I wasn’t buying pop and rock records or tapes until I was 14 doesn’t mean that I had zero idea of what was going on, mainly because of my sister, who listened to a lot of pop and rock (in addition to classical herself). The soundtrack of my world back then had that music in it, and I keenly remember hearing a lot of Donna Summer for a few years.

But she’d first come to my attention cinematically, through her acting debut in the disco movie Thank God It’s Friday (which I may well watch again this weekend in her memory). In the movie Ms. Summer plays Nicole Sims, an aspiring disco singer who is trying to get her big break by getting the deejay at the disco in the movie to let her sing. He refuses, and refuses, and refuses; he tries to kick her out of the disco and she keeps getting back in. Of course, there’s no doubt in our minds that she’s going to get her shot, but Summer plays her ably as a kid with some skill and just enough confidence to stick with it but also a bit of fear that once her shot is done, that’s it. Finally, the deejay realizes with horror that he has to kill a few minutes of airtime until the Commodores show up, and he’s got nothing to fill it with…so Nicole takes over and starts singing. What’s she singing? “Last Dance”. And of course, after a rough start, she comes into it, and it becomes a performance that has the entire disco dancing and cheering and so on.

Yeah, it’s predictable as hell. But Donna Summer is so beautiful and vulnerable and cocky and confident and willing to stake her life on this one opportunity that doesn’t so much present itself as make itself available to be stolen, that the moment totally works.

And it helps, of course, that “Last Dance” is such a great, great, great song.

Yes, it is. It really is.

Look, it’s fun to laugh at disco, and for a whole lot of reasons. It was music of excess and rhythm-above-all, music that seemingly existed for no reason other than to trumpet a very casual approach to sex that would seem not just quaint but downright dangerous just a few years later. The music, the clothes, the discos with their glowing lights in the darkness, all of it. But there’s never been anything, not one thing, that no matter how fierce the backlash against it, didn’t produce at least something worthwhile. And that was Donna Summer.

“Last Dance” has been a favorite song of mine ever since I saw that bad-but-fun movie (that a seven-year-old kid probably shouldn’t have been watching, but thank God for liberal parents). It sounds like typical overlong disco, with its throbbing beat. But it has real melody behind it, and its master stroke lies in its slow introduction, where Ms. Summer imbues the lyrics with more than a touch of sadness.

Last dance
Last dance for love
Yes, it’s my last chance
For romance tonight

I need you by me
Beside me, to guide me
To hold me, to scold me
‘Cause when I’m bad
I’m so, so bad….

The way Ms. Summer sings this, it’s not a woman trying to be seductive. It’s a woman feeling desperate. She is being seductive, but she’s also pleading. How many others have there been this night? It doesn’t matter; this is the last one. She needs you, but not because of anything special about you…it’s just the fact that the place is closing and they’re playing the last song of the night. This is it — last call, the last dance.

The beat starts now, and the dance part of the song begins.

So let’s dance the last dance
Let’s dance the last dance
Let’s dance this last dance tonight

The lyrics repeat, now over the thumping disco beat and the synths and the strings and the brass. This all plays out like a dance on the floor, quick and thumping and seductive, but then there’s a very brief B section where Ms. Summer sings this:

I can’t be sure
That you’re the one for me
But all that I ask
Is that you dance with me….

That bit right there, that brief, brief moment, elevates the song to something more than just a “Hey let’s dance and then go screw” kind of song. (And the fact that the short version that you hear on the radio omits that part is a major reason why that short version should never be listened to by anybody.) The song takes on a secondary melody, with a break of several seconds in the singing between the second and third lines. What Ms. Summer is saying here is: “I’m looking for someone, I’m looking for the one…and I don’t know if you’re the one and for right now, I’m not asking you to be.” The dance is all there is…the dance on the floor, and maybe the dance to come, the one in bed.

That tiny B section is so blunt in its desperation, and Ms. Summer sounds so vulnerable as she sings it, that “Last Dance” rises, right there, above its genre and its poor reputation that lingers to this day.

The song includes a second slow section, which repeats the lyrics of the opening. It’s an interesting structural shift, and I wonder if it’s not partially meant to depict that second dance, the one that the singer hopes the last dance is leading to. As the song shifts back yet again to the faster tempo, Ms. Summer delivers one of the most amazing high notes I’ve ever heard from a singer (at about the 6:20 mark in the song). It’s the perfect, glorious, vocal climax of a wonderful song.

Donna Summer’s voice was an absolute miracle, as was the complete and utter command she had of that instrument when she was at the peak of her powers. Here’s how good she was, just three years ago, performing “Last Dance” live:

And here she is performing The Star-spangled Banner before a Red Sox game. I didn’t know this performance existed until just tonight.

Donna Summer was a beautiful, transcendently wonderful singer and artist. I truly, deeply hate that she’s gone from this world, and it’s people like her that make me wish so hard that there’s a next one.

Posted in On Music, On People | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Tuesday Tones

Posted on February 10, 2026 by ksedinger

I kind of screwed up my calendar this year, which means that I missed the start of Black History Month when posting last week’s selection. For the last bunch of years I’ve been using this month to feature Black music in this space, and I’ll be doing that for the balance of February here (and probably into March). As is often the case, I’ll be featuring composers I’m not familiar with but should be. I’m starting with a work that is featured on an album that was suggested to me by the YouTube Music algorithm, and now, reading about the composer as I write this, I’m struck by the sad experience of this composer’s life and the fate of her music after her life ended. The composer is Margaret Bonds, and the piece is Montgomery Variations (1964).

Margaret Bonds (1913-1972) was among the first generation of great Black American musicians to achieve genuine renown in the classical music world. She was a close friend of Langston Hughes as well, to the point that his death plunged her into a depression that she never really managed to overcome. Bonds died of a heart attack at only 59 years of age, and because she had no will, the disposition of her archives–her compositions and her papers–was messy, to put it mildly. Many of her compositions were lost and some were literally rescued from refuse piles. To this day the copyrights of Bonds’s surviving works are murky, providing a stark example of the absurdity of extending copyrights as long as we have. Margaret Bonds has been dead for over fifty years, and she has no living descendants or heirs…and yet, we are still over a decade from the earliest her works might reach the public domain.

The work today, Montgomery Variations, is just that: a series of variations on a theme, in this case the Black spiritual “I Want Jesus To Walk With Me”. Bonds composed this work as tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. after visiting Montgomery, AL in 1963. Montgomery was a key location in the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s, and the Montgomery Variations are a meditation on those struggles and the way they played out. Bonds wrote her own program notes for the work (via):

“The Montgomery Variations” is a group of freestyle variations based on the Negro Spiritual theme, “I want Jesus to Walk with Me.” The treatment suggests the manner in which Bach constructed his partitats – a bold statement of the theme, followed by variations of the theme in the same key – major and minor.

The words are as follows:

I want Jesus to walk with me.
I want Jesus to walk with me.
All along my pilgrim journey,
Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me.

In my trials, Lord, walk with me.
In my trials, Lord, walk with me.
When my heart is almost breaking,
Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me.

When I’m in trouble, Lord, walk with me.
When I’m in trouble, Lord, walk with me.
When my head is bowed in sorrow,
Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me.

[Bonds continues:] Because of the personal meanings of the Negro spiritual themes, Margaret Bonds always avoids over-development of the melodies.

“The Montgomery Variations” were written after the composer’s visit to Montgomery, Alabama, and the surrounding area in 1963 (on tour with Eugene Brice and the Manhattan Melodaires).

In December 1960, “The Ballad of the Brown King” was dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr., and presented at Clark Center, YWCA in New York, by the Church of the Master and Clark Center as a benefit to Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Langston Hughes, the author of the text, was present on this occasion.

Decision
Under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. and SCLC, Negroes in Montgomery decided to boycott the bus company and to fight for their rights as citizens.

Prayer Meeting
True to custom, prayer meetings precede their action. Prayer meetings start quietly with humble petitions to God. During the course of the meeting, members seized with religious fervor shout and dance. Oblivious to their fellow worshippers they exhibit their love of God and their Faith in Deliverance by gesticulation, clapping and beating their feet.

March
The Spirit of the Nazarene marching with them, the Negroes of Montgomery walked to their work rather than be segregated on the buses. The entire world, symbolically with them, marches.

Dawn in Dixie
Dixie, the home of the Camellias known as “pink perfection,” magnolias, jasmine and Spanish moss, awakened to the fact that something new was happening in the South.

One Sunday in the South
Children were in Sunday School learning about Jesus, the Prince of Peace. Southern “die-hards” planted a bomb and several children were killed.

Lament
The world was shaken by the cruelty of the Sunday School bombing. Negroes, as usual, leaned on their Jesus to carry them through this crisis of grief and humiliation.

Benediction
A benign God, Father and Mother to all people, pours forth Love to His children – the good and the bad alike.

Here are the Montgomery Variations by Margaret Bonds.

Posted in On Music | Tagged , | 2 Comments

2025: The Year in Books! (A video! Gasp!!!)

Posted on February 9, 2026 by ksedinger

Last year was a good year for reading, but it was also partly a struggle for reading. But I read a lot! Here, in a new video on my YouTube channel, I discuss last year’s reading adventures. Enjoy!

Posted in On Books, Vlogging | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on 2025: The Year in Books! (A video! Gasp!!!)

Let’s do a quiz and cheat on the rules!

Posted on February 8, 2026 by ksedinger

Sunday Stealing has a quiz that imposes a rule: One word answers only. Well, I’m going to ignore that: Five-word answers only. Every answer will be five words (and yes, I use the hyphen to cheat a little). Got it? Here we go!

1. Where is your cell phone?

It’s sitting right here. Why?

2. Tell us about your hair. 

I wish it was thicker.

3. What’s your favorite thing? 

Nesting-doll of a sailor’s family.

4. What room are you in?

Dining, I guess? Near kitchen.

5. Where did you grow up?

All over. Mostly Allegany, NY.

6. What aren’t you good at?

I cannot draw. Essay forthcoming.

7.  Your favorite drink?

Mojito, Manhattan, Cuba Libre, Margarita

8. Where do you want to be in 10 years?

Retired, photographing, writing, overalling, pie-throwing.

9. Your mood.

I am feeling defiantly OK.

10. Last time you cried.

Probably Stranger Things: Eleven’s fate.

That was fun! And I only hyphen-cheated twice!

Posted in Occasional Quizzes | Tagged | 1 Comment