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Laurel Krahn's weblog since August 1998.

Three Twins made the AL All-Star team. Torii Hunter is the first Twin voted to be a starter in the All-Star game since Kirby Puckett. Catcher A.J. Pierzynski and closer Eddie Guardado were also named to the team. Yay!

I'd hoped pitcher J.C. Romero might make the team, too, but he didn't. There are only so many slots after all.

How'd I manage to miss the launch of Richard Thompson's official website? Very cool. Must remember to check it regularly to check on tour dates. And I love the Song-O-Matic, where you can search a database of RT lyrics. Whee!

It's not too early to pre-order new books by Steven Brust and Jonathan Carroll:

White Apples by Jonathan Carroll comes out in October 2002.

The Paths of the Dead by Steven Brust is due out in November 2002.

Have I mentioned the new Dragaera mailing lists here yet? Discussion lists for fans of Steven Brust's Dragaera books. Run by cool people (and friends of mine) David Dyer-Bennet, Corwin Brust, and Felix Strates. With Steven's authorization and cooperation.

If you live in the Twin Cities metro area and/or will be in that area on July 4th and/or 5th and are interested in attending one o' my birthday shindigs, email me for details or to be sure you're on the list of folks I'll be emailing shortly.

You can vote for which players you'd like to see play in this year's major league baseball All-Star Game online, up to 25 times. Deadline is June 27th (online).

(I just placed 25 votes for Torii Hunter and Jacque Jones as AL outfielders. And A.J. Pierzynski as AL catcher. Among other votes. Those are the Twins I'd most like see make the team. Well, we should have at least one relief pitcher make the team, given how great they've been. I've voted a lot at the ballpark, too, of course).

I'm going to try to update the Minnesota Science Fiction Society (Minn-StF) website at least weekly from here on out, with news and events and like that which are of interest to fans of science fiction (especially those in the Twin Cities metro area). Gads. Could I use any more web projects?

Now if only I could find a project that would actually pay. (My unemployment extension runs out soon). :::Sigh:::

I actually remembered to update my wishlist about a week ago. Go me.

Birthday plans are afoot for July 4th and 5th. More on that later, maybe. It's been at least a couple of years since I was home for my birthday, so I hope to see a lot of my friends and family this year to make up for those I missed the last couple of years.

I can't believe it's approaching so rapidly. Both CONvergence and the Winnipeg Folk Festival aren't all that far off anymore. Hope to see some of you there. I'm on a couple of panels at CONvergence so I'm easy to find there if you don't know me/wouldn't recognize me. And I'll be hanging out/helping out with the Minneapolis in '73 party on Friday and Saturday nights.

Jeff Simon of Buffalo News makes the case that "'Homicide' isn't dead, it's just moved to cable TV":

There is life after death. You see it all the time on cable TV.

Take the tough, long-canceled NBC series "Homicide," one of the crowning glories of '90s TV, no matter what the idiot Emmy voters always thought. It is, of course, gone except for Court TV reruns. But its talents and spirit live on.

And, along with it, a hair-raising and entirely new breed of TV cop has been born - not to mention a new breed of weekly TV drama.

He goes on to talk about The Shield (which airs on FX, Monday nights at 9pm and 10pm Central time). Clark Johnson (who played Meldrick Lewis on Homicide) directed three episodes of the series (including the first one). Other people who directed episodes also directed episodes of Homicide (Gary Fleder, Leslie Libman, Nick Gomez, Stephen Gyllenhaal). Reed Diamond (who played Kellerman on Homicide) has a major role on the series, Max Perlich (who played Brodie on Homicide) guest stars in the first episode. It's a fascinating and addicting show.

Jeff Simon also talks about The Wire, which airs on HBO on Sunday nights. It was created by David Simon, the former reporter now TV producer/writer who wrote The Book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, which was the basis for Homicide. Clark Johnson also directed the pilot for The Wire. It's set and filmed in Baltimore.

He gets a few little details wrong, he makes it sound like Tom Fontana started doing Oz after Homicide went off the air, when actually he started that show while Homicide was still on.

But he does make some good points (behind the obvious personnel connections I mention here) about Homicide's legacy. He concludes:

The point to all this? You can kill a good TV show but not what it stands for. Not in the cable era you can't. There are way too many networks and too many hours to fill; you can't send guts and creativity on a 10-year holiday, the way network TV could 25 years ago.

"Homicide" took us deeper into the marshes of guilt and innocence than TV cop shows had ever done. Its death signified that when you're talking about major- league prime time, we want law and order and lots of it. But on cable, we want things to delve deeper, to shine a flashlight into the basement of the soul and the sewers of bureaucracy.

Welcome to the New Cop Shows - "The Wire" and "The Shield."

I've been meaning to mention this for a while here, too.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden on Attack of the Clones:

Let me just say that Attack of the Clones is an intelligent, well-considered, complex, and artful piece of work that keeps being mysteriously interrupted by actual human actors wandering into the screen and speaking terrible lines of dialogue. No, really.

Word.

I'm sometimes conflicted when recommending the movie (yet I keep recommending it). Usually I'm all about the words, I'm in love with dialogue. If a movie has crummy dialogue, it's rare that I'd recommend it, I know that it'd turn off most of my friends. But the movie is so gorgeous to look at and the story is more complicated than most you'll find on film, and there are so many cool things in it. It felt like a novel come to life, at times, just without the good dialogue. But then Anakin is just a kid and Padme hasn't been in love before and so of course their words may be trite. The movie worked for me. I'm not in love with it like I was Empire, but it's still pretty nifty.