Day 19: Fringe goodbye

Saturday after a long week. A few things of note from today.

I watched the series finale of Fringe this morning, as my evening at the Guthrie Friday stretched too long to catch yesterday evening. It was a fitting end for the series, full of the oddball science and outsized familial emotions that have marked the show through its five-year run. This season felt like an odd coda, as the creators wrapped up the major storyline at the end of last season (a smart choice, as a fifth season for the low-rated show was a nice surprise, not a foregone conclusion).

There were some twists along the way and plenty of references back to earlier episodes, including a raid on a bad-guy facility that included nods to the very first episode. It ended with another time-bending reset - essentially where we left the characters at the end of season four - but one that indicates that happiness may finally be in the cards for our heroes.

After flailing around with book ten of the Wheel of Time, Crossroads of Twilight, throughout the week, I decided to take some drastic action and skimmed a huge chunk of the middle of the book (about 400 pages in all), not restarting to fully read until the central character, Rand, made his first appearance. That it happened around page 650 (!!!) says about everything you need to know about the book. Knife of Dreams, the last one Robert Jordan wrote before his death, is proving to have a stronger spark in the early going, so hopefully something more than chess-piece moving is going to happen here.

And after reading an interesting article on the Van Halen song "Running with the Devil" on the AV Club, I ended up listening through the David Lee Roth albums. The band was big through middle and high school back in the early and mid 1980s, with 1984 absolutely dominating the hallways of my high school during freshman year. I had moved on a bit musically by then, so I didn't indulge in a copy. I do remember one of the girls in my class (one of those who usually sat in the back of the room and likely spent the time before school in the smoking area in the parking lot; ah the '80s were a lot different) saying that the rest of the album wasn't going to be as wimpy as opening single "Jump."

Other thoughts? There's a lot of filler on these records, which usually don't last much longer than half an hour. Diver Down is the worst. There are only four fully fledged Van Halen songs here, the rest being covers or little instrumentals. 1982 wasn't a good year for sleazy hard rock (see also Aerosmith's drugged-out tragedy Rock in a Hard Place.)