A friend of mine posted something on Facebook that really hit me where I live today. I’m going to quote it in it’s entirety here cause I do NOT want to forget this. I’ve looked it up. The source is the book “The Pilgrimage” by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho. You can find this on a page of his blog. I’m going to look into reading “The Pilgrimage” and his novel “The Alchemist” which I read a lot of raves about. Anyway, on to the quote… Continue reading Can you resurrect dead dreams?
“The deep and lovely dark. We’d never see the stars without it.”
The Doctor — Doctor Who S08E04 ‘Listen’
The Doctor at the end of a speech about the “superpower” of fear, and the reasons to harness and use it. The character Clara summarizes and expounds on this idea near the end of the episode:
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you? Fear is a superpower. Fear can make you faster and cleverer and stronger. … You’re always going to be afraid, even if you learn to hide it. Fear is like a companion, a constant companion, always there. But it’s okay because fear can bring us together. Fear can bring you home. Fear makes companions of us all.” Clara — Doctor Who S08E04 ‘Listen’
Started re-watching the latest season (season 8 of the new series) of Doctor Who, as the last episode should be coming out in a couple of days. For the most part, I haven’t been a big fan of most of this season, but the first several were pretty good. And the second to last one kind of grabbed my attention too. It’s interesting to note that most of the episodes that I have liked from this season were written or co-written by Moffat. The other episodes haven’t necessarily been bad. They had great acting and production values as usual. It’s just that the writing (the plot and banter) just did not grab me and hold my interest. The first time watching many of them, I got involved doing something else while watching. Still there are quite a few episodes, this one included, that grabbed my from the get go and wouldn’t let go.
“You’ve got to play the cards life deals you. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But at least you’re in the game.” Vic Fontaine – Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, S07E10 “It’s Only a Paper Moon”, Teleplay by Ronald D. Moore.
“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Richard Biggs as Dr. Stephen Franklin in Babylon 5
Dr. Stephen Franklin: “I realized I always defined myself by what I wasn’t… Always what I wasn’t, never what I was. And when you do that, you miss the moments. And the moments are all we’ve got… I can’t go back, but I can appreciate what I have right now. And I can define myself by what I am instead of what I’m not.”
Captain John Sheridan: “What are you?”
Franklin: “Alive. Everything else is negotiable.”
Babylon 5, S03E21 “Shadow Dancing” – written by J. Michael Straczynski
My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars First Published: June 2011 Read from: Jun 22 to July 3, 2014 Awards: Nominated for 2012 Hugo Awards for Best Novel and the 2012 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction
“Leviathan Wakes” My Appetite For Cool Space Opera
“Humanity has colonized the solar system – Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt and beyond – but the stars are still out of our reach.
Jim Holden is XO of an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, “The Scopuli,” they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill for – and kill on a scale unfathomable to Jim and his crew. War is brewing in the system unless he can find out who left the ship and why.
Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to “The Scopuli” and rebel sympathizer Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything.
Holden and Miller must thread the needle between the Earth government, the Outer Planet revolutionaries, and secretive corporations – and the odds are against them. But out in the Belt, the rules are different, and one small ship can change the fate of the universe.”
Leviathan Wakes on the whole was a VERY entertaining bit of space opera science fiction, with some tantalizing bits of “hard sci-fi”, “horror”, “detective story” & “military sci-fi” thrown in. The book is the first in the highly acclaimed Expanse series, written by James S.A. Corey – a pen name for the collaboration of Albuquerque, New Mexico authors Ty Franck & Daniel Abraham, the last of which also is known to work closely with George R.R. Martin. Read My Full Review →
One of the things I like about the silliness & craziness of the later incarnations of the Doctor in Doctor Who is that when he suddenly turn serious, angry or threatening, it carries VASTLY more weight. You know he’s serious when events manage to crack his child-like persona. Calling this a personality trait of the later Doctors though is a little untrue, as the Second Doctor played by Patrick Troughton was the first to start to exhibit those childlike personality quirks.
Anyway, one of my favorite examples of the crazy Doctor suddenly turning deadly serious is in the episode The Doctor’s Wife featuring Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor. Continue reading Basically, RUN!
U.S. Army soldiers wade ashore on Omaha Beach as part of the Normandy landings of World War II.
“We do not know or seek what our fate will be. We ask only this, that if die we must, that we die as men would die, without complaining, without pleading and safe in the feeling that we have done our best for what we believed was right.” — Lt. Col. Robert L. Wolverton, CO 3rd battalion, 506th PIR.
Memorial Day and such is all well and good. But sometimes we need to remember specific days, so that we don’t forget… So we don’t forget the tragic consequences of our human darkness, our imperfection and evil. And so we don’t forget our human light, the self-sacrifice and bravery of those who helped bring us out of the dark, becoming casualties in the process. Continue reading Into the Jaws of Death – 6/6/1944
Beethoven composed a short (15 minutes long) orchestral work called “Wellington’s Victory” or “The Battle of Vitoria” (Op. 91) in 1813. Wellington’s Victory is now often compared to another famous “battle piece”, namely Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture”, as both call for the use of a large “percussion battery” including muskets and artillery, and by opposite “sides” of the orchestra playing the national themes of the opposing armies.
Like a lot of Beethoven’s work it has been called a hodgepodge of styles and an “atrocious potboiler”. I of course love it! You can listen to it here (with full muskets and cannons, performed by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by the Herbert Von Karajan,) and judge for yourself.
The reason I bring it up is that I happened to discover a response by Beethoven to similar criticism to this piece that he was receiving in his day. Read on for Beethoven’s Surprising Response→
Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey
4 out of 5 stars
One of the things I like about the silliness & craziness of the later incarnations of the Doctor in Doctor Who is that when he suddenly turn serious, angry or threatening, it carries VASTLY more weight. You know he’s serious when events manage to crack his child-like persona. Calling this a personality trait of the later Doctors though is a little untrue, as the Second Doctor played by Patrick Troughton was the first to start to exhibit those childlike personality quirks.
