About Wyrd Smythe
The canonical fool on the hill watching the sunset and the rotation of the planet and thinking what he imagines are large thoughts.
Way back when (over eight years ago!) I shared a picture of some wild hail. Last night another big boomer passed through the Twin Cities, and the hail was the biggest I’ve personally yet experienced:
Some folks apparently got baseball-sized hail. (I saw a picture in a local news article — hail stone side by side with a baseball. That would do some serious damage. The stones I was getting were plenty loud as it was!)
I just had to step outside (in my underwear) and grab a few of the bigger ones. Stuck them in my freezer. Maybe I’ll actually put them in a soda or something. (Or just take them out and admire them once in a while.)
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For a couple of hours, it was quite a lightning show. No major ground strikes around me (and thankfully no power outages like a few weeks ago). I do love it when the lightning never stops — constant electrical activity!
I just love weather!
Stay safe, my friends! Wear your masks — COVID-19 is airborne!
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4 Comments | tags: hail, hail stone, rain storm, thunder storm | posted in Life
Synchronicity pops up a lot in my life. Between working on drafts about my disappointment with a science fiction series, I took a break to read my news feed and saw an article asking why so many popular SF TV series are so awful. The article made a number of points that resonated a lot with me.
The article calls out Westworld (season three), Star Trek: Picard, and Devs, as examples of awful science fiction television, which seems to match what I’ve read. By which I mean, just about everything I’ve heard, both negative and positive, doesn’t incline me towards these shows (I might check out Devs at some point).
Unfortunately, I don’t think the author answered the question.
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20 Comments | tags: Gene Roddenberry, science fiction, science fiction TV, SF, Star Trek | posted in Sci-Fi Saturday, TV
Hooray!
Baseball is back (but kinda weird), and my Minnesota Twins are off to a very good start. After eleven games, they have a 9-2 record (.818), and they’re the number two team in the American League. (The bad news is that our long-time nemesis, the damn Yankees, are number one.)
It’s going to be a very short season (60 games rather than 162) with an extended postseason — just over half the 30 teams (16, rather than the usual 10) will get at least one postseason game. And, of course, none of it is being played in front of fans.
Just one more aspect of our COVID-19 world.
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15 Comments | tags: Minnesota Twins, Target Field, Twins 2020 | posted in Baseball
I planned to post about buying five Erle Stanley Gardner Perry Mason novels Apple had on sale for $2.99 each. I read lots of those in grade school and have loved courtroom dramas ever since. But that will wait for another Mystery Monday, because I’ve got something better today.
A bit after 10 last night; been watching stuff on Hulu and was ready to pack it in. The main screen pushing a movie, Palm Springs. Stars Adam Samberg, to me an Idiot Clown, so first impression this is Hulu’s Just Go With It. (No thanks!) Lucky for me, news feed headlines I’d seen suggested otherwise.
I’m so glad I decided to watch the trailer. And then the whole movie!
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10 Comments | tags: Adam Samberg, Andy Siara, Cristin Milioti, Groundhog Day, J.K. Simmons, Max Barbakow, Palm Springs (movie) | posted in Movies
My last post was about my disappointment in the science fiction novel series, The Expanse, starting with book four. As it turns out, for me, that’s just the start of my disengagement — it goes seriously downhill from there. To be clear I’m speaking strictly in terms of my personal taste. As the saying goes, ‘One person’s mead is another person’s poison’ (not that I’m a fan of mead).
Given the steep downward trend, book four seems better in comparison. While I like it much less than the first three, I like it much more than what follows. It has some good protomolecule bits, and frontier colony stories are pretty standard science fiction fare.
But I’m particularly struck by what the TV version changed and added.
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25 Comments | tags: adaptations, Babylon 5, science fiction, science fiction books, science fiction TV, SF, SF Books, The Expanse (TV series) | posted in Sci-Fi Saturday, TV
I feel like a jilted lover. Or a very disappointed one. I found what seemed a delightful bit of science fiction color in an otherwise increasingly grey and dismal world. I let myself get attached (despite a few alarm bells going off in my head). I thought I’d found something truly worthwhile — something to invest myself in.
And it seemed really good at first. There was all the excitement of exploring something new and interesting. But after that great start, there came a most unwelcome left turn into a stinking swamp I want no part of.
This isn’t a Sci-Fi Saturday post or a TV Tuesday post… this is a spleen vent.
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28 Comments | tags: hard SF, science fiction, science fiction books, science fiction TV, SF, SF Books | posted in Books, TV
I just finished Time Travel: A History (2016) by science historian and author James Gleick. The New York Times Book Review, Anthony Doerr described it as, “A fascinating mash-up of philosophy, literary criticism, physics and cultural observation.” I agree with that description minus the word fascinating. I would have said tedious.
This is not the book’s fault. I’m not saying it’s bad. There was nothing I disagreed with. There were even a few parts I got into. The problem is I found it ambling, rambling, and meandering. It wasn’t incoherent, but it seemed disconnected to me.
Overall, I found it easy to put down and hard to pick back up.
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16 Comments | tags: Doctor Who, Edith Nesbit, H.G. Wells, James Gleick, Robert Heinlein, The Time Machine, time, time travel | posted in Books, Sci-Fi Saturday
Maybe you saw the article about putting a pickle in a (cheap) beer to make the beer taste — so we are told — much better. I’ve read three articles now recommending it. To be frank, the idea utterly horrifies me, mainly because I can’t stand pickles. Also because I love beer.
However, human tastes in foods and beverages span a vast range. I suspect very few people like everything that gets put on the worldwide table. (Despite my Norwegian upbringing, I wouldn’t touch lutefisk with a ten-foot pole. It’s up there with pickles on the list of stuff I Will Not Eat.)
But apparently some love a pickle in their beer.
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14 Comments | tags: beer, craft beer, drinks, food, parameter space, pickles, salt | posted in Basics
It’s been a while since the last Wednesday Wow. Life got strange the last several months; every day had some sort of real-life wow. (Not that we’re out of these weird woods by any stretch.) It made ephemera like this fall by the wayside.
But we must soldier on, one foot in front of the other. Speaking of which, on this morning’s walk, at 6:30 (AM, of course), it was 59° (Fahrenheit, of course). We had a heat advisory Saturday — temps in the high 90s with equally high dew points.
That’s one beauty (and insanity) of Minnesota: the weather!
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10 Comments | tags: lightning, Mike Olbinski, rain storm, The Slo Mo Guys, thunder, weather, YouTube | posted in Wednesday Wow
In a previous life, when I had a small stepson, he asked his mother if she was “happy at him.” This prompted a grammar discussion that confused him because sometimes she was “mad at him” so why was “happy at him” wrong? It stuck with me as one of those out of the mouths of babes views of life.
It prompts a bit of thought about which emotions go with which propositions. We’re happy with, but mad at. On the other hand, we can be angry with or angry at someone, but only pleased with them.
We can also be happy, glad, angry, pleased, mad, or sad, about someone.
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5 Comments | tags: anger, emotions, happiness | posted in Life
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