I is for Illinois, Ibanez and Imago

 Good morning  and welcome to  a new week  of the A to Z challenge. This year I chose 3 themes for the challenge: Limericks, MLB sluggers in my lifetime, and A to Z wordles. For more information about these themes click here. 

Part I: A to Z Limericks

If me, you want to annoy

Go ahead mispronounce Illinois

Please be compliant

Let the s remain silent

And no, I am not being coy

The first 4 lines of that limerick stayed on my open computer screen all night as I could not think of an adequate final line.  This morning I asked my wife who volunteered the closer.  Thanks Amy. How fitting that the limerick dropping on our 24th wedding anniversary  shows yet another example of how wonderful it is to be on a team with you.

Part II: A to Z Homerun hitters of my lifetime

When I was thinking which homer smasher I would choose for the letter I.  I did not immediately think of Raul Ibanez.  I immideiately thought of Jason Isringhausen, forgetting for a moment he was   and gave up far more homers (85 in a 16 year career) than he hit (2).  My thoughts then went to Pete Incaviglia for a moment before settling on Ivan (Pudge) Rodriguez. With 311 dingers, Pudge does have more homers than any other I player.  I was pretty settled on I-Rod when I did a little more stat surfing.

In the period between 1988 and 1999 Incaviglia hit 149 bombs. Pudge only hit 109.  In the period of 2000 through 2010 Rodriguez hit 161 homers while Raul Ibanez slammed 204 (99 for the Mariners, 55 for the Royals, and 50 with the Phillies ). That means that I-Rod was the I with the most homers in either time period.  Ibanez hit only 6 less (305) career homers than I-Rod so I decided to give not to Raul.

Part III: Wordle Starting Words from A to Z

Note: Correct letters in the correct places will be shown in bold. Correct letters in incorrect places will be shown in italics.

In March when I was going alphabetically to pick my opening wordle words some were just random, and some held a great bit of meaning to me. Imago was one of the latter.

For several years my family and I went to the local college film festival called the Imago Film Festival click  on Wikipedia for more information about this festival.

I M A G O - Got M and O but in wrong places.

M O U N D-  M and O were correctly placed on my 2nd guess and I added n as well.

M O R O N- I felt a little like a moron not getting any more info from my 3rd guess as I did on my 2nd. 

M O N E Y -Throwing money on your problems, doesn't always solve them.  This maxim came true on guess 4, but I did get my N in the right place.

M O N K S - 5th guess got me no further than the fourth.

M O N T H - This was not the only 6 guess wordle I have had.  But it's the only one that took me a month to get.

For more A to Z challenge click here.  

 There are many great things I like about the early Spring.  The beginning of baseball season,  gearing up for the Blackhawks (and sometimes the  Bulls) playoff runs,  my wedding anniversary, and Easter Sunday are just a few of them.

For the past 3 years Judson University's Imago Film Festival   has become one of those great things I associate with the beginning of Spring.  I came home  just a few hours ago from the fifth and final evening of the 12th annual festival and want to relate my experience of the event.

The Mission statement for the festival states that  they showcase independent films that deals with faith issues that emphasize image and story. I attended each night of the festival this year and the 15  

official selections that were screened certainly met the missions statements criteria.  

Terrence Wandtke stated several times in festival literature and at the festival itself, that many of the years selections dealt with themes of love and loss.  He was certainly correct in that assertion, and the 4 winning films all dealt with that topic in one way or another.

My favorite film of the 4 winners,  Not the End,  won the Audience Choice award.  

The 2nd runner up as decided by the Judges was Speed Dating.

The 1st runner up was Persimmon.

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Best in Show was the Oscar Nominated short, We can't live Without Cosmos.

$2,000.00 was divided unevenly between the winning 4 films.

I am sure you will be able to find all 4 movies on line at some point, if you have interest in viewing them - perhaps even at Imago's You Tube Channel.  However, my week at Imago reinforced my belief in the importance of the communal experience of watching movies.  I encourage any of you in the Chicago area to come to Elgin next year to experience Imago 2017 with me.  

If any of you were wondering why it took me 2 hours after coming home before I wrote this review, It is because after all that film watching I wanted to do some more.  I just finished watching my first full length feature on someone else's blog post.  From time to time someone will put a link to an entire movie from you tube on their blog. On Friday I saw a link to the movie Angel and the Badman, a 1947 John Wayne film.  I had not seen it before so have been watching it after the festival for the past 2 nights.  It is a film that deals with faith issues and emphasized image and story.  So it was a perfect post Imago activity.  Perhaps soon, I'll review it here.   Before that happens, I plan to screen the film for an audience, my family.

O is for Oreos

It has been a while since I participated in Friday Fragments at Half-Past Kissin' Tim. So I thought I'd give it a try.  If you are not familiar with Friday Fragments, last week's offering is very typical of the genre: a few short fragments of posts that don't have any cohesiveness or unity.  I am also doing A to Z blogging this month, so my first fragment will be a thing that begins with the letter N.  This is in keping to my A to Z theme of nouns

Fragment 1: O is for Oreo.

When I was a kid there were sandwich cookies like the kind my parents brought at grocery store and then there were Oreos.  Boy were they different!  The sandwich cookies didn't look like Oreos,  hey didn't separate like Oreos and they sure didn't taste like Oreos. Oreos were reserved for special occasions because the store brand cookies sure didn't cost as much as Oreos.

Boy have things changed! These days store like Target and Aldi have their own brands of sandwich cookies.  We call them Fake Oreos.  They still don't cost as much as Oreos, but I am happy to report that they look like Oreos, separate like Oreos, and they even taste like Oreos.

Fragment 2 K-Love Pledge drive

Our family really enjoys listening to Christian music and the station K-Love is often on in our car as we drive back and forth through that thing called life.  A few times a year they have a pledge drive.  I have a strange sense of humor, and like to over analyze things.  So I pulled my vlog Dave Out Loud out of mothballs and made this video about K-Love and the pledge drive.

Pledge drive, in all seriousness has been fantastic this year.  God is doing so many wonderful things just through people listening and giving to the station.  To give K-love a listen click here..

Fragment 3: Age of Ultron

I was looking through some old posts this week and I came across this one (also a Friday Fragment post) from 4 years ago entitled I thought Super Hero Movies wer for kids.  Just like the fake  Oreos situation,  things have got better for kid-friendly super hero .  Since I wrote that movies like Thor, Captaian America, and Avengers have produced movies I enjoy and will allow my kids to watch and love.  Avengers 2 comes out in 14 days and  a majority of our family is psyched.  Here's a short featuette that came out on youtube yesterday ...



Fragment 4 Imago Film Festival

I promised before the A to Z challenge started to tell more abot ut my experiences at this year's Imago Film  Festival.  Here is the trailer for Believe Me, a film I saw at the festival.



That's all the fragmments we have time for today. Go back to whence you came by clicking on A to Z Or Friday Fragments we have time for today.