Category: Entertainment

Irreverent. Heretical. Fabulous.

Those are the first words that come to mind after seeing An Act of God at the Copley Theatre in Aurora, the latest show in their Bold series. The basic premise is that God is delivering a message directly to us, rewriting the Ten Commandments to clarify and modernize them, with the assistance of archangels Michael and Gabriel. That’s the entire cast, by the way, just those three people. God does most of the talking.

A three-person play is always going to be challenging, even with a short run time of 90 minutes. I suspect a three-person comedy where half the audience isn’t laughing is doubly so for the actors. Early on in the performance, I noticed that there were loud pockets of laughter in some parts of the small theatre (ourselves included) and other pockets of stone-faced theatregoers. At the end of the show, the artists received half a standing ovation, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that before. I suspect many of the sitting half would have walked out had there been an intermission.

Live performances in particular are supposed to make you think, so hopefully those people who weren’t laughing were at least given an interesting line of thought to pursue. As to whether you should see it, I suppose that depends on how literally you interpret the Bible and whether you’re comfortable looking at it from a different perspective. Obviously, I quite enjoyed it.

I have mentioned several times that we enjoy attending Bristol Renaissance Faire each year. But in last year’s post, I also mentioned some unpleasant waits… in particular, the hour it took us to get from the highway exit (after driving more than an hour to get to that point) to actually walking through the gates of Faire. That was compounded by arriving after the food lines started getting long – because of the traffic delay – with the perennial problem of finding somewhere to sit, knowing that finding a place with a table is unlikely. So we approached this year a little differently, specifically stopping to eat lunch most of the way there, which allowed us both adequate seating (with a table!) and a minimal delay from the highway into Bristol’s parking.

Since we had already eaten, it was easy to select snacks at less crowded times, and we even found seating at one point in what used to be the Kid’s Kingdom. As an added bonus, arriving later meant we had energy to stay until almost closing, catching different performances from some of our favorite acts, such as Cirque du Sewer’s Fire Show, which includes a cat jumping through a flaming hoop. In a stroke of luck, we had near perfect weather for opening day (as opposed to the next day, which had storms that shut down some shows for safety and eventually the Faire itself).

Assuming the prices don’t continue to rise astronomically – ticket prices increased last year, and the parking jumped from $10 to $15 this year – we’ll probably follow this approach in future years.

We attended Capricon last weekend, building a box fort (again!), hanging out with friends, and attending and/or participating in various panels. I’ve written about Capricon multiple times over the years, as it’s by far my favorite science fiction convention. Smaller conventions – say under a couple thousand people – give you plenty of opportunity to connect with your friends and random encounters with other people, including making new friends.

I’ve mentioned the parties a lot the last couple years, since we started running The Box Fort party at Capricon. While those fill my late night hours (and my nights are definitely later than normal when I’m at conventions), there are a lot of options during the day as well. There are panels on a wide variety of geeky subjects, including a writer’s track for existing and aspiring authors. There’s a gaming room with an extensive library – it was open Thursday evening, then re-opened Friday morning and stayed open until Sunday afternoon. The filk track had both a variety of scheduled events and open jam times.

There were several shopping opportunities between the dealer’s hall, art show (I sold some crocheted items), and author signings that were located just outside the dealer’s hall. Any art show items that receive three or more bids end up at the art auction; this year that included a good selection of board games from our friend Marinda’s collection, donated to support the convention’s designated charity for the year.

Alas, at least one event on the calendar was cancelled because of the weather. The annual “Snow Goons!” (a tribute to Calvin & Hobbes) outing relies on actual snow; last weekend was surprisingly warm. Regardless, a convention like this is a great opportunity to let your geek flag fly, with whatever fandoms you’re inclined to include on that flag.

Well, actually, it’s a WNDR Museum – drop the vowels in “wonder”. It’s an interactive, one-way art museum, where you proceed along a marked path from entrance to exit. Technically, it’s one of four: there are locations in San Diego, Boston, and Seattle, as well as the one we visited in Chicago.

Admission is purchased online – if you arrive, as we did, without tickets, there’s a QR code to scan where you can select the date and time for your tickets. As you’re admitted, you also have the opportunity to purchase drinks to take with you along the path. There are also QR codes along the path to explain how to interact with some of the exhibits. We scanned a couple, but didn’t feel a need to scan every one. Here are some of the photos I took in the time we explored the museum.

In addition to the exhibits, several of which were reactive to movement of one sort or another, there were two poets stationed in the museum who were writing poems on the spot for whatever topic you threw at them (they had tip jars), and a magician near the end performing some stunning sleight of hand (no tip jar there). And, of course, a gift shop.

It’s been about 18 months since Wordle began appearing on my social media feeds, those green and yellow boxes asking for an explanation. I discussed Wordle variants soon after that. While I still play Wordle daily, the variants I play has shifted. I still play Daily Quordle, and its own variant Daily Sequence, which has four words that must be solved in order. While I enjoy Octordle (8 words) and Sedecordle (16 words!), I play on my phone, so managing 8 or 16 words was cumbersome.

Among the variants I’m enjoying are Connections, another puzzle hosted by The New York Times, and Keyword, hosted by The Washington Post. Keyword looks like part of a crossword puzzle – you’re given 6 vertical words, each missing one letter lined up in a horizontal row; your goal is to find the missing word in as few guesses as possible. (A perfect score is 6 letters.) It usually has a mix of easy and hard words. For example, “?ARROT” is probably CARROT, but “RI?E” could be any number of words. When you enter the correct letter, the square turns green; a wrong answer turns it pink. Either way, it shows a count of how many guesses you’ve taken on that letter.

Connections takes a whole different approach, presenting you with a four-by-four grid of words. Your task is to determine what the connections are between the words, correctly grouping them in sets of four. What makes this difficult is the combination of overlapping categories – there’s usually a couple words that could fit into different categories, even once you successfully identify the categories. For example, yesterday’s Connections included the word “Duds” in the Slang for Clothes category, which was also a fit for the “Failures” category.

As you complete each grouping, the words move into a colored box; the different colors indicate the level of difficulty. You have up to four mistakes, so you want to be careful with your selections. On the plus side, it won’t let you submit the same erroneous group of four again. Sometimes the problem I have matching the categories is a lack of context, such as MTV shows or NFL players, which are both outside the scope of my fandoms and general knowledge.

Like Wordle, both Keyword and Connections provide a handy summary of your result that can be shared with friends without revealing the answers. Which are your favorite Wordle variants?

A couple weeks ago, a friend of mine in Janesville reached out to let me know about a small Renaissance Faire in Wisconsin: the (not surprisingly) Janesville Renaissance Faire (JRF). You may wonder what differentiates small and large Renaissance Faires; most comparisons will be to the Bristol Renaissance Faire (Bristol), since that’s the only other one I’ve attended recently. Primarily, the differences are affordability and permanence.

At the JRF, parking is free and, if you arrive early enough, fairly close; admission was a mere seven dollars (six if you brought a non-perishable food donation). In contrast, Bristol parking is five (general) or ten (preferred) dollars, and admission is up to a whopping forty dollars this year.

In terms of permanence, most vendors at Bristol display their wares in actual buildings at a location dedicated solely to the faire. In contrast, JRF vendors work out of pop-up tents at the Traxler Park, occupying it for just one weekend a year. Scrolling through the JRF’s sizable vendor list, I half expected a larger location, but the vendors made good use of their space.

There was, of course, entertainment, spread across four different stages. One, conveniently, was located in the midst of the food vendors, which was perfect while patiently waiting for lunch or dessert. As expected, there was a fine variety, ranging from musical groups such as Bardmageddon and Bounding Main, to comedy acts and even fire eating. Similar to Bristol, there were more events that we wanted to see than we could possibly attend, though the lunch line placement did help a bit.

The main difference we noticed was the shopping. While there’s no shortage of shopping opportunities at Bristol, sometimes we want to find small groups of gifts – think something in the one to five dollar range – and there were far more of those available at JRF than at Bristol. I suspect this is a combination of the lower entry cost for vendors and the sheer variety of merchandise, as not everything sold at JRF was strictly adhering to the Renaissance theme.

All told, it was a fun day and worth the drive… when the weather is good. We had a lovely sunny – yet not too warm – day, but I understand that it snowed for the event last year. I expect we’ll attend again, and continue to attend Bristol as well.

At first glance, Leap! is a feel good kids’ movie from 2016 about an orphan girl who flees her rural orphanage with her best friend to pursue her dream of becoming a ballerina in Paris. And it is absolutely that, a fairly typical underdog works hard to overcome obstacles story.

There are a couple surprises that made this movie stellar. For starters, the U.S. version of the movie adds lines for an otherwise silent character, Luteau, voiced by none other than Mel Brooks. I mean, how can you go wrong with that sort of talent? (For reference, the original release was a France/Canada co-production titled Ballerina.)

We have a tendency to watch shows and movies with subtitles on at home, largely because of how much the sound quality varies across platforms. That’s why we noticed early in the movie that the subtitles don’t match the vocals. This isn’t a case of somebody mistyped a word or two, as we frequently see… there are entire sentences in the subtitles that aren’t spoken.

In hindsight (with Google’s help), it appears there was some rewriting of the dialogue for the U.S. version of the movie. I’m guessing the subtitles weren’t updated to match, which made for an entertaining evening as we compared the vocals to the text. All in all, it’s a fun movie with either set of dialogue.