Monthly Archives: May 2015
Today the merry merry month of May has its final appearance in locations worldwide. If you managed to miss all 31 shows you’re out of luck for the remainder of the season and will have to wait until it hits the road for the 2016 tour. (Hint: order your tickets now; they go fast.)
It’s been a slightly strange month in Minnesota. Temperatures have shown strong indicators towards summer, but winter’s chill has been persistent. Last night’s low was 44 degrees (Fahrenheit), and it’s only 66 degrees here late in the afternoon.
Even the deer are acting strange!
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16 Comments | tags: Angie Harmon, Battle Creek, deer, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In, Lina Leandersson, Lisa Edelstein, Lucy Liu, Michael Chiklis, Minnesota Twins, Rise: Blood Hunter, Sebastian Gutierrez, The Twins, Tomas Alfredson, Toronto Blue Jays, Twins 2015, vampires, Win Twins | posted in Baseball, Life, Movies
This blog is nearly four years old (I started on July 4th, 2011). This post makes it exactly 500 posts here on Logos Con Carne. To commemorate it, I’m giving myself the 500 Odometer Award (which I built myself from various electrons I had laying around).
As part of the party, this post consists of miscellaneous odds and ends that have intrigued me lately. I’ll leave it to you to decide which are the odds and which are the ends.
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19 Comments | tags: All of Me, Comic Sans, George Winston, Jon Schmidt, light, light speed, Linus and Lucy, Minnesota Twins, Monty Python, NASA, SDO, skydiving, The Piano Guys, Tom Scott | posted in From My Collection, Life, Music, Science, The Interweb, Writing
I don’t reblog very often (in fact, I don’t believe I’ve ever reblogged a post by someone else). But this is so much more important than movies or science fiction or baseball. Please take a moment to read charmarie221’s humbling post. Life… is a hell of a thing.
Rambling Is Therapeutic
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This month there is a big focus on Tuberous Sclerosis Complex (TSC) with the culmination being Global Awareness Day today, May 15th, and a campaign to hear all of the stories at #IAMTSC.
I don’t know that I’ve ever consciously thought of the disease as a Global Issue, although obviously it is as the numbers reveal that it affects people everywhere. I’ve thought of it in the National sense because we’ve lived in different states and have had different experiences with doctors and clinics and support groups and schools, all of which have had varying experiences with the condition. I receive publications and information from the National Tuberous Sclerosis Alliance. And I’ve thought of it locally when we’ve taken part in the Step Forward To Cure TSC which is a fundraiser in the form of a Walk in Frisco (as well as many other cities nationwide) each year…
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2 Comments | tags: #IAMTSC, TSC, Tuberous Sclerosis Complex | posted in Life
If they completely collapsed right now, fans of the Minnesota Twins would still have seen a better season than they have since 2010. If they could somehow continue playing at their current level, they could win 90+ games rather than losing that many as they have every season since then.
If they just win every other game (playing .500 ball), they’ll win 83 games and still end up with a much better record than they’ve seen in four years. They’re currently four games above the .500 mark — something fans haven’t seen since the end of 2010!
Whatever the case, the last few weeks have us jumping for joy!
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8 Comments | tags: Brian Dozier, Major League baseball, Minnesota, Minnesota Twins, MLB, Paul Molitor, Target Field, The Twins, Trevor Plouffe, Twins, Twins 2015, Win Twins | posted in Baseball
Movies, for a variety of reasons, are hard to make. They’re even harder to get right. Science fiction and fantasy are also hard to get right — in addition to all the other challenges of storytelling, they require much more imagination and invention than fiction based on reality or history. This, in large part, accounts for the truth of Sturgeon’s Law.
So it’s not often that a science fiction movie gets all the notes exactly right. Many are lucky if they have just a few good ones that make the film worth seeing. A very rare few get enough right to make an SF film notable. (For my money, Elysium and Oblivion are recent good examples, and Ender’s Game and Edge of Tomorrow weren’t bad.)
And once in a blue moon a film gets it so right that the horse sings.
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20 Comments | tags: Chris Pratt, Drax, Galaxy Quest, Gamora, Groot, Guardians of the Galaxy, I am Groot, James Gunn, LA Story, Marvel comics, Marvel movies, Peter Quill, Rocket Racoon, science fiction, science fiction film, Star Lord, The Fifth Element | posted in Movies, Sci-Fi Saturday
One Million Dollars!
Sometimes — and I guess I should count my blessings that it’s only sometimes — I’m really slow on the uptake. Slow, as in not noticing something that’s right in front of my face. Embarrassingly slow. For example, it took me forever to get the joke behind the Charmin bears hawking toilet paper.
And as much as I love puns, some of them have sailed right over my head without mussing my hair. For someone who tries hard to pay attention to stuff, it really lets the wind out of your sails.
So just imagine my chagrin when I was halfway through the second movie before I realized they both had “million” in their titles!
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2 Comments | tags: A Million Ways to Die in the West, baseball movies, Charlize Theron, cricket, Dinesh Patel, Jon Hamm, Lake Bell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Million Dollar Arm, Rinku Singh, Sarah Silverman, Seth MacFarlane, The Million Dollar Arm | posted in Movies
Minnesota Twins fans have enjoyed a wonderful four-day weekend to begin the merry month of May! After a very rough and disappointing first week, the Twins have been playing increasingly better baseball, and topped it off by sweeping the Chicago White Sox in a four-game home stand.
The icing on the cake was an absolutely gorgeous spring weekend with sunny skies and temperatures in the 70s. The Thursday and Friday evening games were a little cooler with temps in the mid-60s, but Minnesotans are hardy people. We wear shorts and tee-shirts in 40-degrees!
The question with the Twins these days is: Can this possibly continue?
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13 Comments | tags: Chicago White Sox, Detroit Tigers, Major League baseball, Minnesota Twins, MLB, The Twins, Twins, White Sox | posted in Baseball
For my money, Sir Terry Pratchett is the greatest fantasy author ever. That includes Tolkien, Verne, Wells, Burroughs, and Howard. (Martin isn’t even in this conversation to my mind, but then neither is Lucas.) Pratchett’s work has incredible social relevance. His keen sense of people, his deft hand with humor, and his ability to weave a rich, textured story as engaging as it is fantastic, gives his work a substance that sticks to the soul.
A recurring theme in Pratchett is the power — and the reality — of belief. Is Superman real? Or Sherlock Holmes? If millions believe in them, if so many stories are told about them, how can they not be real? One might say the same of all the gods we worship.
There’s also the bit about the frogs.
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84 Comments | tags: Agnes Nutter, American Gods, bromeliad frogs, Diggers (novel), Good Omens, Johnny and the Bomb, Johnny and the Dead, Johnny Maxwell, Neil Gaiman, Only You Can Save Mankind, Terry Pratchett, The Bromeliad, Truckers (novel), Wings (novel), xkcd | posted in Sci-Fi Saturday
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