The LDS is in the books, the next round is underway, and all ready my predictions are looking to be half-baked at best.
Welp.
It’s time to delve into just exactly what these series are all about. October continues, y’all.
Well, I’m one for two. (I’m also standing beneath Jon Lester in that picture.)
The Wild Card games were dominant pitching affairs, and consequently, we bid farewell to the New York Yankees and to the Pittsburgh Pirates. It’s time to turn to the next round, the best of five League Divisional Series. These are usually quick affairs, settled in decisive order as the best/hotter team wreaks havoc on the lesser/less-hot team.
But first, a few thoughts on the National League Wild Card Game…
It’s here. The scent of pumpkin spice lattes wafting from the corner of every other muffaka on the planet. The sound of leaves crunching as you walk down the sidewalk. The Bears losing in September. Autumn has arrived, and with it…the baseball postseason.
So, in spite of what the scheduling gods and MLB marketing wizards may have told you, the postseason races this year have been, well, rather uninspired. I say this while living in the heart of Cub-Fandom on Earth – most of those involved have been decided for several weeks at least. It’s exciting and great that teams like Toronto and Kansas City are pushing each other for home field advantage, but at the moment, the only race is for who will win the AL West and which team will get to face the Yankees in the Wild Card play in.
So, on that note, here’s my picks and reasoning for the MLB awards.
Here at the Addison Recorder, I make no bones about it – I’m a huge fan of David Ortiz. The heart and soul of the Red Sox, he is the only man alive to have played on three World Series winning teams from Boston. And on Saturday night, he further cemented his legacy as one of the all-time great power hitters by slugging his 499th and 500th home runs.
There is a casual tendency to observe the entirety of human culture as one long progression towards an evolved singular form – a belief that early art influenced the next wave influenced the next and so on, each form building on what came before it and improving it, making it better in pursuit of the ultimate form. There are truths and fallacies to this, to be sure – musical techniques have come a long way since Gregorian chants, but to say that the ultimate evolution of music ends with, say, “Uptown Funk” is to oversimplify the position. Music grows and changes, but is never a “set form” – there is no textbook end-all-be-all summation that says that this is the pinnacle of musical achievement, that it does not and will never get better than this.
Anyway, that’s all moot, because while Dave Grohl may not be the pinnacle of rock and roll evolution, he’s really fucking good at rocking out.
Yours truly took in the Foo Fighters at Wrigley Field on Saturday night, August 29th, 2015. Standing in the field, buffeted by rain, spilled beer, and thousands upon thousands of fans with no clear concept of concert etiquette (SERIOUSLY, YOU CANNOT COME ANY FURTHER FORWARD, BACK UP ALREADY, FOH CRAZY LADY), some friends and I took in three opening acts before having our minds melted and reforged into explosive particles by Dave Grohl’s band for two and a half hours. To recount this on a song by song basis would trivialize the night – so here’s the setlist if you’re curious about which greatest hits were rolled out. (Spoiler alert – all of them) [Read more…]
So, by now, you’ve all seen the trending topic on Facebook/Twitter/theonering.net/wherever. Basically, a Lord of the Rings fanatic cum architectural profession has, along with a bevy of colleagues/friends, started an Indiegogo fundraiser titled “Realise Minas Tirith“. Their goal – to build a living, working real-live version of the fantasy city from Tolkien’s epic trilogy.
I’m sure this has raised some questions amidst the neophytes and non-architecturally inclined. Fortunately, as the Recorder’s resident Tolkien scholar (insert grain of salt here), I can provide answers to these questions.
Well, it’s been a fun summer hiatus. Some of us have moved, some of us have started new jobs, others have finished old jobs, and still others have stayed exactly where they are. Were I a writer of lazy sensibilities, I would talk about how this turbulence is reflected by the chaos of the Major League Baseball season. However, not only is this turbulence a part of life for any and all, it is also an annual rite of August baseball that teams’ fortunes are in a perpetual state of rise and fall.
There’s a certain subset of the populace that The End of the Tour, a new movie from director James Ponsoldt, is specifically designed to appeal to. During one portion of the film, David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) describes the ideal reader for his novel Infinite Jest to writer/reporter David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg): white, male, upper middle class, and “obscenely well educated”.
First of all, spoiler alert.
The Jurassic Park franchise has historically been a major draw. The original 1993 film was the largest grossing movie of all time until Titanic came along four years later. The second film, though largely sub-par when compared with the first, held the record for the largest opening weekend until 2001, when some movie about a little boy wizard came along and took over. These were original event pictures, massive draws that were required summer viewing for the young millennial generation. Dinosaurs are cool, and people love seeing dinosaurs.
That seems to be holding true for Jurassic World, the latest entry in the series. Originally forecast to make something in the vicinity of $125 million in its opening weekend, the movie made nearly that on Friday alone. Early reports have the movie taking in an opening weekend haul of $204 million, which puts it at the third best opening of all time. Meanwhile, across the world, the film took in a staggering $511 million dollars, an all time world record. People still love their dinosaurs.