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This quiz oughta take up some time….

Sometimes the Sunday Stealing is really short, and sometimes it’s…not….

The Alphabet Meme

Answer these questions with anything from a single word to a paragraph or two. It’s up to you.

A is for Age.

50-mumbly-mumble.

B is for your Booze of choice.

Rum. Or bourbon. Or scotch. Tequila’s nice on occasion. Gin works, as does vodka (though I prefer flavored vodkas). And I love me some orange liqueur! (I actually don’t drink nearly as much as my booze roster suggests.)

C is for Career.

That’s what you do instead of the thing you really thought you’d actually be doing. Nothing wrong at all with Facilities Management at a large retail store, but it’s not really a job anyone sets out to do, is it? Meanwhile, writing and photography remain tantalizing possbilities.

D is for your Dog’s name.

Carla and Hobbes. I should post some new-ish photos of those two one of these days….

E is for Everyday Essentials.

Water, vitamins, daily meds, coffee, and overalls.

F is for your Favorite Food.

Burgers. Or pizza. Sausage is lovely, in many ways. Waffles! Chicken in so many forms. Special appreciation for the wings. Cake, cookies, ice cream. Pie.

G is for your favorite Game.

I honestly play very few games. I’d like to play more, but I dare not allow myself to become a videogamer. Tabletop would be fun, but I need other players….

H is for your Hometown.

Let’s just go with Buffalo.

I is for an Instrument you play. 

I used to be a really good trumpet player. Those were the days…and I often think that if I could re-do one decision, leaving music would be the one.

J is for your favorite Jam or Jelly flavor.

Grape. Or strawberry. Or blueberry. I just bought a jar of bacon-onion jam yesterday, I’ll have to report when I open it and put it on something. And hot pepper jelly is oooooh Lord where has this been all my life!

K is for Kids.

One living.

L is for the Last show or movie your watched.

Last night we watched Riding in Cars With Boys, a memoir-type movie starring Drew Barrymore. It was pretty good, for a movie where everybody in it is an ass in one way or another.

M is for your Most prized possession.

Honestly, I’m not sure. I have a lot of stuff. I should probably start looking to wind down on stuff someday in the not-too-distant future.

N is for the Name of your first crush.

There was probably one before her, but whatever, she’s the first one I remember and this was third grade in 1980, in Hillsboro, OR. What are the chances? Beth Kornegay was cute as hell, if I remember correctly. (No, I have not investigated her at all, nor do I plan to, nor do I want anyone else do so in my stead. I’d be stunned if she had any memory at all of who I was, especially since we moved away a year later.)

O is for what you Observe from your window.

Oh look! Carla wants to come in. [reaches over to pull open the sliding door so Carla can come in]

P is for Phobias.

I love to swim, but I have to be able to see the bottom. Deep water where the bottom is out of sight? Nope. 

Q is for your favorite Quote.

I’ll name a different one each and every time I’m asked this, so right now I’ll go with the first one that pops into mind: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” (Groucho Marx)

OK, fine, one more, a bit more cynical but I come back to it a lot these days: “I believe if you vote, you have no right to complain. People like to twist that around. I know, they say, they say: “well if you don’t vote you have no right to complain”. But where’s the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent people, and they get into office and screw everything up, well you are responsible for what they have done, YOU caused the problem, you voted them in, you have no right to complain.” (George Carlin)

R is for Regret. 

Oops, I mentioned that up above. Leaving music. I really think I should not have done that.

S is for Sweets.

Too damn many, I tell you what.

T is for the Time you wake up.

Too damn early, I tell you what. I’m almost never up any later than 7, and during the week I’m up right around 6.

U is for Underwear.

What about it? It’s there.

V is for your favorite Vegetable.

OK, don’t be getting all biological on me here, got it? I know it’s technically a fruit, but I’m going with tomato. Onions are also awesome, as are peppers of many, many varieties. Potatoes are lovely. Corn, too. I’ve even come to like asparagus, though only if it’s grilled. Brush with olive oil, sprinkle with salt, and grill it? Ooooh, that’s good.

Broccoli and cauliflower can be ejected into the sun.

W is for your Worst habit.

I have a terrible sweet tooth, and I swear like a sailor. Also, I often have sufficient difficulty just getting motivated to do stuff that I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t be well-served getting tested for something like AD-HD.

X is for X-rays. 

I had them for my teeth a few times, and for my collarbone when I broke it in school. (By the way, a dental tech discovered the hard way that I have a really sensitive gag reflex when she stuck her fingers in my mouth to put the X-ray film in place without explaining first what she was doing. I have never once felt any guilt over that.)

Y is for your Yummiest recipe.

Pastitsio, which I make once or twice a year to this day. (I thought I did a more recent post of the recipe but I’m not sure where it is; this link is from the very early days of this blog when it was still on BlogSpot.)

Also Buffalo Chicken Soup. As soon as the weather starts getting the slightest bit cold, my family starts clamoring for this stuff.

I cook and make a lot of stuff; maybe I should do more of that content along the way…I also make a lovely whipped cream pie, but honestly, while you probably could slice it and serve it, it’s actually designed for a different use entirely….

Z is for your Zodiac sign. 

Libra, though I do not truck with astrology at all. It’s fun, but it’s total nonsense. (Year of the Boar in the Chinese zodiac, by the way.)

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716 Day!!!

Today is July 16, 7-16, or…716 day! Which means it’s time to celebrate the 716!

Here is a bunch of photos that I have taken since the last 716 Day. Long live the 716!!! It was hard to pick which ones to use…I limited myself to two photos from any Flickr album I have devoted to images taken of or at a 716 location. (So, no Ithaca or Toronto or Letchworth photos here, among other places!)

I truly believe in the beauty of this region and the loveliness of its people, and I hope my photos capture that.

Lord, I love this area….

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Something for Thursday

Linda Ronstadt
Linda Ronstadt

Singer Linda Ronstadt turned 80 yesterday. She’s been a fixture for my entire life, though I have to admit that I don’t know her musical output very well at all. In retrospect I kind of wonder why this is; she sang in genres of music that my parents listened to a lot when I was a kid, and she sang those genres very, very well…and yet, somehow, I don’t recall any of her music ever getting played much at home, so she was relegated to whatever got played on the radio when we were out and about. It’s a shame, then, that for me she’s always been a person of whom I think, “OMG, who is that singing?!” and the answer, supplied by a DJ, is along the lines of, “That was Linda Ronstadt.” Apparently she is now permanently retired from singing, due to an ailment that has rendered her unable to do so, which is very sad; we could use a musical elder stateswoman or two right now.

I am also belatedly discovering what a stunningly beautiful woman she is and always has been!

Linda Ronstadt
Linda Ronstadt

Here she is with one of her best-known performances. This song is just stunning.

And finally, how could I not feature this image? I think I need to track down a photo book of Linda Ronstadt’s looks in the 70s and 80s….

Linda Ronstadt, rocking Lee overalls!
Linda Ronstadt, rocking Lee overalls!

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“Timeline? This is no time to talk about time! We don’t have the time!…what was I saying?” (Cmdr. Deanna Troi, STAR TREK FIRST CONTACT)

OK, fine, I guess I’ll put all of my thoughts on Daylight Saving Time here, since there’s a really good chance we’re going to adopt Permanent DST in the United States, which seems to me a terrible idea. This is in no particular order and is not structured in any way.

Photo by Laura Lautner on July 14, 2026. May be an image of text that says 'NEW YORK IF DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME BECOMES PERMANENT JANUARY JULY SUNRISE 8:32 AM SUNRISE 5:31 AM SUNSET 5:42 PM SUNSET 8:43 PM'.

::  It is simply beyond dispute at this point that from a standpoint of human health, maintaining permanent standard time would be the best option. Circadian rhythms are best reflected by standard time, and doing away with the disruptive effects of twice-annual clock changes would also be a good thing. There is simply no questioning the biology on this.

::  Americans worship a lot of things: cars, guns, the military. We also worship sunlight, and oppositely, we generally do not like the night very much. This is a very odd cultural artifact that leads us to doing things like pushing for permanent Daylight Saving, on the basis that “I want to have a little light when I get off work!”

To that I ask, “Why? For what?”

Taking those times in the image above: my work shift starts at 7:30am and ends at 4:00pm. Now, I’m rarely actually out of work at 4pm; there’s usually a bit of wrap-up time, and quite a few days I have to stick around to do a bit of shopping. So, many days it’s close to 4:30pm by the time I actually depart work. At that point, by this time in the graphic above, there’s 1 hour, 12 minutes left of daylight.

My commute is about 15 minutes. Now, by the time I get home, there’s less than an hour of light. I have to bring in anything I’ve purchased, put it away, grab the mail, let the dogs out, greet The Wife if she’s working from home that day, and then change clothes and shower. By the time all of this is done, the available daylight is down to well under 30 minutes.

And there’s something else: note when all this is taking place.

January.

An extra hour, on the back end of my day when that hour is already taken up by post-work rituals, during the coldest time of the year. And I’m to believe this is a benefit? Give me a break.

::  As a matter of public policy, there is a lot to criticize about time in the United States. I’d say the biggest fish we could fry here wouldn’t even be fixing DST, but fixing time zones. A lot of New England should probably be on Atlantic time. Part of the problem with the discourse here is that we have a geographical situation where on January 1, someone in Portland, ME is watching the sun set at 4:15pm. Someone else in Kalamazoo, MI will watch the sun set at 5:21pm…and both cities, which are nearly a thousand miles apart, are in the same time zone. This is absurd.

::  No, I don’t know how we fix the time zone issue. Smaller time zones, separated by half an hour? Maybe. But I’ve always noticed that people I encounter online who really like Daylight Saving Time and who think keeping it year-round is a great idea are people who live in the eastern reaches of their particular time zone, making sunset earlier for them than most others. I get that concern, really.

::  The strange argument I keep hearing is along the lines of “Now you’d have more daylight to spend with your kids!” and “Now you’ll have an hour to enjoy your day!” Where did we get the idea that you can’t do any of those things if it’s not light out? Where did we get the idea that the only fun and enjoyment we can have in life can only take place in sunlight? Are we all coming home in utter darkness to sit, lonely and dejected, staring at a wall by the light of a single guttering tallow candle?

The one genuine, and kind of convincing, answer I’ve ever received to my eternal question of “What the hell do you all need all this LIGHT for at the end of the day, anyway?” came from a local friend who is also a sports coach for young people. In reply to a version of that question, he simply answered, “Playing baseball.” I really can’t argue that particular point. If the park you play in has no lights, and you want to play a lot of baseball, then yes, later summer light is clearly your friend.

But I keep coming back to my original thought: WHAT IS SO DAMNED AWFUL ABOUT NIGHT AND DARKNESS? Seriously, why do we venerate sunlight and hate the night so much in this country? I will never understand the American fixation on sunshine and light. Is the night not beautiful? Is it not wonderful to watch the world at Golden Hour become the world at Blue Hour and then see the night?

::  In the end, fixing the problems created by DST, and by changing the clocks twice a year, is likely more complex than this one simple bill will achieve, and it’s pretty clear to me that this bill will just make things worse. Sadly, we are not living in a time when American government is particularly oriented toward making nuanced policy changes. To the extent that we are able to address policy at all, our approach seems to often boil down to: “We have to do SOMETHING, and THIS is SOMETHING, so therefore we have to do THIS.”

Over the past few days I’ve seen a bunch of Congress people and Senators posting to social media: “Look what we did! We’re fixing an issue! Yay!” And look, I’m never one to get deep in the weeds of “Why are you thinking about X when Y is so much worse,” but…seriously, this was a priority, but fixing just about any other issue was not.

Anyway, I hope this bill dies and if it doesn’t and it becomes law, well, I reserve the right to point back at this post when a whole lot of the country concludes that this was, and is, a bad idea. Sadly, this being America, it won’t be the first time.

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Tuesday Tones

Tuesday Tones! (The title of the music series over a bit of music score.)

Continuing our exploration of Japanese composers, we dig back now to one of the early voices of Japanese classical music. (By “early”, I mean, the period when Japan, relatively newly opened to the influences of the Western world, started producing music in what we recognize as “Classical music”. None of this is to suggest that Japan was a culture devoid of music until the West came along.) The composers of that early period tended, therefore, to reflect that new Western influence in their music, perhaps to the exclusion of anything that would make it particularly and uniquely Japanese. Such is the case with today’s work, which to my ears sounds like it could have sprung from the pen of any of the fine post-Romantic or early-Modern composers.

Kosaku Yomada lived 1886-1965, so in his lifetime he witnessed a transformation of Japanese culture, for good and bad, that must have been a constant source of astonishment. Yomada studied music both in Japan and in Europe and the United States; among his teachers were Max Bruch, so the Western stamp upon his music was indelible. He did not completely eschew Japanese influence in his music, however; he was one of the first musical voices in Japan to start the work of expressing Japanese thoughts in a Western musical language.

This piece, the Chromatic Symphony “Maria-Magdalena”, is derived from a ballet Yomada wrote based on a play by a Belgian playwright. In this work you can hear most readily the European influences on Yomada’s early work: Wagner, Strauss, and even Scriabin seem to be the main influences here. This is not criticism, by any means; the work is dramatic and effective in a way that makes it highly compelling. The development of classical music in Japan seems to have followed, at least in part, a similar track to American music: heavy European influence before the indigenous and new elements arose to have their own influence.

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An aspirational goal…

…is to have a personal library so grand that after you’re gone, the entire thing is preserved, as-is. One prominent example is the personal library of Samuel Pepys, which now resides at Magdalene College in Cambridge. Not only are all of Pepys’s personal books–over 3000 of them–collected there, but they are kept in the arrangement that Pepys devised, in the bookcases he had built for them. I would love to visit this library someday, which is open to the public (though not right now as the building is undergoing preservation and restoration work).

There’s a new notable personal library that has been preserved, and this one, at more than 32,000 volumes, exceeds the Pepys one tenfold. It’s the famous personal library of Umberto Eco, which now resides at the University of Bologna.

The collection was donated to the Italian state by Eco’s heirs in 2020, on condition that it be placed on permanent loan to the University of Bologna.

Before the move, the library was surveyed shelf by shelf in Milan, with the position of every volume, thematic groupings and connections between authors and disciplines carefully documented, so that the new premises in Bologna could reproduce Eco’s original arrangement exactly, down to which books he kept lying flat and which stood upright.

That arrangement follows the “good neighbour” principle developed by art historian Aby Warburg, which Eco adopted for his own shelving: placing seemingly unrelated texts side by side so that unexpected connections between them could emerge.

The library’s themed rooms, covering subjects from mediaeval philosophy to popular fiction, comic books and occultism, allow visitors to trace the same interdisciplinary connections that shaped Eco’s own research and writing.

Eco’s library is one of the most famous personal libraries of the last century, even now, ten years after Eco’s death. Nicholas Basbanes wrote about Eco in his amazing book Patience and Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture:

Before taking up residence in a sprawling suite of rooms overlooking the historical Castello Sforzesco fortress in a picturesque district of Milan, Umberto Eco had twice been forced to give up comfortable quarters elsewhere because he owned too many books. “The floors were about to collapse,” the world-renowned semiotician, medievalist, philosopher, essayist, educator, cultural critic, and author of three best-selling novels said as we walked about the beautifully appointed apartment where he and his wife, Renate, are surrounded by thirty-thousand volumes, and where the concept of a personal library takes on an almost bewildering aspect. The floors in the the stone-faced building Eco now calls home, once an elegant hotel, were constructed to bear considerable weight loads; the ceilings, moreover, are high, allowing the placement of shelves that can accommodate eleven tiers of books. To help him reach the highest levels, Eco had several ladders mounted on steel tracks that move effortlessly from room to room. His own writing is done at the rear of the apartment in a secluded cove surrounded by another complex of bookcases, arranged almost like a fantastical maze. Eco insisted that I note the depth of the shelves, which had been designed to his specifications. A quick examination indicated about nine inches of space, just enough room for one book per slot. “No more guessing,” he said, arching his eyebrows for emphasis. “Never again will I have two books deep. Never. Now I can see every title I have at a glance. Everything is in a single line.”

Well, that’s another dream, isn’t it!

Apparently there exists a full-length documentary about Eco and his library. I should watch it.

 

 

 

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Sometimes being responsible sucks!

After three years of shooting on Miranda (my Lumix FZ1000ii), I’m finally reaching the point where I’m ready to upgrade to a full body-and-lens system. I’ve been doing my research and planning and saving for a possible purchase later this year.

So of course, tonight I see a package deal for one of the leading contender camera bodies, with a lens I’d been planning to start with, and a whole bunch of useful accessories. Oh, how tempting it was to tap “Buy it now!” on my phone…but I did not. I chose to keep waiting and planning and saving. Who knows if this deal will be available in a few months…but I’m better off waiting, even if I end up paying a bit more for the new kit.

But still! New stuff! Shiny! Sigh….

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The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer

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