WHEN THE LEVEE BREAKS by Led Zeppelin, the #4 song on my list of 500 all-time favorites, had an interesting history with me. Since it came out as the final track on the British hard rock band's fourth, untitled album in the early 1970s it had been a regular staple on album rock radio...I would often listen to the lengthy, relentless instrumental buildup at the start, only to switch stations when singer Robert Plant finally broke in. This went on for years until the band...already broken up for a decade after the death of drummer John Bonham...came out with their box set CD compilation in late 1990. My local rock station, WRUF/Rock 104, decided to play the entire set and I listened to much of it, realizing in the process what a remarkably talented and creative band Led Zeppelin was. Among several of the tracks that I liked a lot, When the Levee Breaks stood out and quickly became a song I couldn't get enough of...I crowned it my "song of the year" for 1991 twenty years after it came out and afterward also had it as my number one top all-time favorite song for some two decades. The song was originally written and recorded by blues artists Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie following the devastating Mississippi flood of 1927...the broken levees around New Orleans due to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 brought on a revival of the Led Zeppelin cover on TV and radio. Their version features brilliant harmonica work throughout, and the drumming is echoing and booming. Sometimes I'm irritated by Plant's forays into high-pitched, screeching singing on many of their songs, but he's more subdued on this piece and fits in perfectly with the instruments. The song speaks of a flood and broken levees, but it extends to all of the storms people experience and this year's pandemic is no exception. There isn't a weak moment in it, from the drum, harmonica and guitar intro, Plant's verses, the riveting mid-song instrumental break with one of the all-time greatest harmonica solos, and that long, trailing conclusion. By the way, When the Levee Breaks may well be the only song in my all-time favorite Top Six that you've heard...I have never heard any of the upcoming three songs on my list played on either radio or TV, although in my estimation they all should have been monumental hits...
Monday, November 30, 2020
Sunday, November 29, 2020
Newspaper Archives a Fun Portal into History
With my ability now to research old newspapers at different times in recent history, I am afforded the opportunity to investigate how different ongoing events were being reported. I'm compiling a list of some interesting times that I'm looking into during the next few weeks:
--Sunday newspaper opinion pages just preceding each presidential election
--The summer of 1914 after Austrian Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Bosnia, with subsequent events leading to the outbreak of World War I.
--Stories about Japanese-American relations in the weeks before Pearl Harbor.
--The early weeks in the Korean War, 1950.
--Civil rights stories in the 1950s and 1960s.
--The American reaction to the Soviets' Sputnik launch in October 1957.
--The Cuban revolution under Castro and early events of his regime in 1959.
--The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.
--Lyndon Johnson's statements about Vietnam as president in 1964, and the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
--The Democratic Party presidential race in 1968 up to the California primary and Robert Kennedy's assassination.
--George Romney's candidacy for president in 1968 and his disastrous "brainwashing" comment.
--Stories about the breakup of the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s.
--Any articles with "experts" predicting the future.
--Retroactively politically incorrect articles deemed acceptable in the times they were published.
Well, that's just a few of what I'm looking at...besides old comic strips, advertisements, and puzzles, that is. Since I was a history major in college, this archival exploration is pure joy for me...must have been kind of like how old Gandalf felt in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring when he paid a visit to Minas Tirith's old library archives to read up about "magic rings" from the ancient past....
Saturday, November 28, 2020
Some Pandemic Musings at Starbucks
Wednesday I was sitting at a Starbucks...the one here on NW 39th Avenue in northern Gainesville that I first frequented twenty years ago back in 2000 when it first opened. As is the case around town...and I suspect throughout the country, Starbucks has for the time being banned indoor seating while keeping the outdoors open...my hindsight instincts tell me that this should have been their policy since the coronavirus outbreak in spring instead of completely closing down: of course, if local and state governments are mandating lockdowns, there's not a whole lot to be done about it. The other Starbucks I go to...much closer to my home...a few weeks ago actually had gone as far as eliminating the spacing between their indoor seating that they had instituted after finally opening back up. I had gone in there a few times and was taken aback at how close together people were sitting...always with several of them not wearing masks and no apparent limit on the number of indoor customers. The last time I visited this place, though, they had closed their indoor area off. I almost always order my coffee (venti iced with vanilla and cream) on my mobile app from home and then pick it up at the store, foregoing the line. I also park as close to the store as possible...if all the outdoor seats are taken, I can just roll down the windows and drink (and write) in my car. I'm hoping that these new vaccines will be effective and finally eliminate this need for distancing and mask wearing...although it seems that many people are still living their lives in a cloud of denial, social irresponsibility and callousness for their fellow Americans' health by refusing to do either. It especially distresses me to see this utter disregard for others' lives with some people I regularly encounter who have stubbornly refused to wear protective face coverings, even though the number of positive cases around me and the country as a whole has drastically spiked. This pandemic experience has certainly opened up my eyes to the state of the society I'm living in as well as certain individuals I have to interact with, and I'm not liking what I'm seeing at all...
Friday, November 27, 2020
Quote of the Week...from Carl Sagan
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never give it back. ---Carl Sagan
Thursday, November 26, 2020
Happy Thanksgiving Day to All
Wednesday, November 25, 2020
Weekly Short Stories: 1965 Science Fiction, Part 4
With my reviews of the following three stories I conclude my examination of some of 1965's finer sci-fi short stories, as selected by editors Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Clark for their anthology World's Best Science Fiction: 1966 (the series regrettably puts the year of publication in the title instead of the year of focus). Unlike with the previous anthology series featuring Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg as editors which came out in the late 1980s and early 90s while covering much earlier stories (from 1939 through 1963), Wollheim's series offers no such distant hindsight, selecting their stories the very next year after they came out. I bring this up because in a later article I'll be discussing the difference, but for now here are my reactions to the three final '65 tales...
Tuesday, November 24, 2020
Rereading George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire Series at High Speed
Monday, November 23, 2020
My #5 All-Time Favorite Song: Time to Pretend by MGMT
TIME TO PRETEND, by the Connecticut-based indie band MGMT, was the opening track to their debut album Oracular Spectacular, which came out in 2007...but didn't begin to catch my attention until the following year. My local alternative rock station, WHHZ/100.5/"The Buzz" by 2008 had completely abandoned their earlier indie/alternative format in favor of mainstream rock acts like Nickelback and Shinedown, which they had previously ridiculed, so I in turn abandoned them and listened instead to my TV cable service's Music Choice alternative channel...which is where I was introduced to Time to Pretend. Eventually I got the album...Kids was probably the most famous track from it. MGMT is essentially the project of college roommates Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, with others hired to complete the band. When I finally got around to watching the video to Time to Pretend I was swept away...it's one of the great music videos of all time, playing off more on the song's wistful title than its much darker and more somber lyrics. On one level the song talks of the notion of sinking into a fantasy life while on another...accompanied by some explicit lyrics...it deals in ironic fashion with young music stars who jump unreservedly into a drug-drenched hedonistic lifestyle and pay for it all with an early death: the final line is a severe slap in the face and reminded me a little of Bad Company's similarly-themed hit Shooting Star. But I was much more intrigued by Time to Pretend's unique instrumentation with its special synthesizer accompaniment. The song starts out sounding like an anthem but ends as something completely different...there are a lot of ways the listener can treat it: I strongly recommend its far-out fantasy collage video. Back in 2008 I deemed it as my top song of that year and have always held it in high regard ever since...
Sunday, November 22, 2020
The United States Presidents Who Owned Slaves
As I've mentioned in a few of my recent blog articles, I now enjoy an Internet service that allows me to rummage through old newspapers online...I've been focusing on October, 1956...the month of my birth...using the Miami News as my source. Beginning September 27th of that year, they had a daily feature focusing on the American presidents, starting with George Washington and ending with the then-current one, Dwight D. Eisenhower just before the presidential election. The insets...the above one is of Andrew Jackson...summarized each succeeding president and not only informed me of their respective lives and administrations, but also of the prevailing social and political climate of 1956. For example, in none of the articles was it mentioned that a president owned slaves...yet with the first 18 presidents, 12...or two thirds...were indeed slave owners at one time or another, not to mention 10 of the first 12. Here's the list of presidents who in at least one point of their lives owned slaves, as it appeared in Wikipedia:
Saturday, November 21, 2020
Just Finished Reading Gregor the Overlander by Suzanne Collins
Before Suzanne Collins wrote her celebrated young adult science fiction series The Hunger Games, she produced a five-volume children's fantasy series titled The Underland Chronicles. They feature young Gregor, a New York City boy who one day discovers a secret passageway to "Underland" through a hole in his family's basement laundry room. This special hidden place under the Earth's surface is populated by humans and various human-sized, English-speaking animals like rats, bats, cockroaches and spiders...that aspect of it reminded me of Roald Dahl's 1961 children's novel James and the Giant Peach while the underground secret world made me think of Neil Gaiman's 1996 adult book Neverwhere ...click on the titles' links to access my reviews of them. I just finished reading the first book, Gregor the Overlander, from 2003. Gregor, whose father mysteriously disappeared two years earlier, is stuck at home caring for his little baby sister Boots...the two accidentally fall through the hole and they're suddenly in the thick of all the ongoing drama, with a mysterious prophecy portending the unfolding of events. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for stories with secret portals to other realities, but I wasn't too thrilled with talking roaches and rats...still, I get it: this is a children's series. By far my favorite parts of the story were when Boots was featured, acting in such an endearing, spontaneous manner as a little baby full of wonder at the new world around her...and sometimes full of impetuous, selfish angry outbursts as well. I'm planning on sweeping through this series in the next few weeks, spacing my readings between other books. Collins wrote the installments quickly, to her credit: if you're a little kid and read the first book that came out, you don't need to be waiting three-to-five years for the next one: she finished writing the last book in 2007, a year before she began her Hunger Games project. Yes, even at 64 years I'm a sucker for children's books and this series promises to be entertaining...
Friday, November 20, 2020
Quote of the Week...from Soren Kierkegaard
There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. Soren Kierkegaard
Soren Kierkegaard was an 19th century Danish existential philosopher, essayist and Christian scholar. I found his above quote in a posting on Facebook by local radio (WKTK) announcer Storm Roberts: its message couldn't be more applicable in today's world of alternative facts, bizarre conspiracy theories, habitually-leveled accusations of hoaxes and rigging, insulated information bubbles within social and broadcast media, out-of-context reporting, gaslighting, cancel culture, retroactive political correctness, historical revisionism, and foreign-inspired disinformation campaigns...to name a few of the ongoing trends. In his quote Kierkegaard distinguishes between two types of being fooled. I think both are commonly in play in our contemporary society that is loaded with the aforementioned avenues through which deception is routinely conveyed. But I think the Danish academic left out another important way to be fooled. Talk show hosts on radio and TV...as well as Facebook and Twitter advocates...regularly present their own political and social philosophies in terms of well-grounded, appealing principles while attacking their opponents personally or through sound bites and anecdotes...the aim is present those "other guys" as having no principles at all. The solution as I see it is for any broadcaster who wants to be seen as fair to allow for principled discussion of the issues in our time with an implicit understanding that the participants to lay off the personal invective. We actually did have such shows in the past like William F. Buckley's Firing Line and the Dick Cavett Show...where the quests, regardless of their viewpoints, were afforded the time...without repeated interruption as is usually the case nowadays...to lay out their visions and philosophies. I suggest that if you ever find yourself listening to talk radio or TV to practice discerning what they're up to...I actually am quite open to listening to people defending their worldviews by espousing the principles behind their beliefs. It's them tearing into their perceived adversaries that leaves me cold...a major reason why I steadfastly avoid late night "comedy" talk shows on TV. If you're letting them be your major source of news then you're fooling yourself...
Thursday, November 19, 2020
Just Finished Reading Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick
Martian Time-Slip is a 1964 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick, the twelfth book I've read of his so far. Its time setting is 30 years into the future, i.e. 26 years ago in 1994. Mars has been explored and settled for several years and it seems humanity has transported its nationalism, prejudices, and mental illness straight over to the new world...which they have discovered is already inhabited by a human race called the Bleekmen: apparently both Earth and Mars were seeded with humanity around the same time by an outside source hundreds of thousands of years ago. A repairman recovering from a schizophrenic episode on Earth has moved to the Red Planet with his family in order to find some mental peace from the masses of people crowding his planet of origin. He finds himself drawn into a complex web of relationships between a bigoted wealthy businessman, that man's wife, his neighbors which include a trader in the thriving black market and his autistic son...and the psychiatrist treating the boy. The narrative is presented from the various characters' perspectives, and this becomes pretty interesting when the autistic boy is featured...he suffers from the problem of dealing with a time that flows much more quickly for him than for the "normal" people around him. Also, he is a precog, which is someone who can see into the future. This piques the businessman's interest and he seeks to use the boy's talents for his own purposes. Mars is presented as a bleak, unfriendly world where no one in their right mind should want to live...in this at least I thought the author probably got it right. Dick, however, treated schizophrenia and autism in this story as two forms of the same thing and presented them as vehicles for enlightenment...from what I've read about him he, too, suffered some some kind of mental illness. That he would have Mars already being colonized by 1994 isn't really surprising since transportation technology and exploration had been in a state of explosive growth during the span of the previous few decades...it's more far-fetched...and much more disappointing...to me that we're now in the year 2020 and haven't left low Earth orbit in 48 years! Martian Time-Slip wasn't one of my favorite Philip K. Dick stories, but the idea of somehow becoming disengaged from the normal flow of time is an intriguing subject that he treated very well here...
Wednesday, November 18, 2020
Weekly Short Stories: 1965 Science Fiction, Part 3
Here are my reactions to four more short stories from 1965 appearing in the anthology World's Best Science Fiction: 1966, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr. I found the below tales to be most interesting, especially the first one which blew me away. I've been generally impressed with the editors' picks for the year's best...I just wished they'd synced the year on the anthology's title with the actual year the stories were released. In any event, here are my reviews for this week...
Tuesday, November 17, 2020
Constellation of the Month: Cassiopeia (the Queen)
Last month I was standing out in our backyard with Melissa one clear evening, pointing out the visible planets and some stars with their constellations. She looked around and pointed to a close group of moderately bright stars in the northern sky, roughly shaped like an "M". I answered that it was Cassiopeia, representing the queen and mother of Andromeda in the Greek mythical tale of Perseus...several constellations from this story dominate the autumn evening sky. I picked Cassiopeia as my constellation of the month for November for that reason: its easy visibility, at least from northern hemisphere skies. It's not that large as constellations go, but it represents the northern seasonal counterpart to Ursa Major's asterism the Big Dipper, which dominates in the springtime. As a kid, I always learned to draw it as a sort of upside-down chair or throne including one of the fainter stars...my above pictured drawing reflects this. Star maps usually "connect the dots" with it looking like a "W"...or "M" when it reaches its peak above Polaris, the North Star. As you can see, the five M or W stars of the constellation are designated by the first five letters of the Greek alphabet, something that Atlantic tropical storm followers are probably well acquainted with after this record-setting hurricane season of 2020. The additional star I connected is Kappa, and just a few degrees from it is located the remnants of one of the greatest observed supernova explosions in recorded history. Officially known as SN 1572 for its year of occurrence, or Tycho Brahe's supernova after the famous astronomer of that time, it was around 8-9,000 light years distant but its peak brilliance reached a magnitude of -4, making it as bright as Venus back then, 448 years ago...the remnant is now only detectable through strong optical, x-ray and radio telescopes. There are a couple of other constellations I could have picked out for November...let's see how long I can string out this monthly blog feature: I'd like to eventually cover all 88 of them...
Monday, November 16, 2020
My #6 All-Time Favorite Song: Firewood by Regina Spektor
FIREWOOD, by Regina Spektor, is my #6 all-time favorite song, but I wonder whether you've even heard of it. It's from her 2012 album What We Saw from the Cheap Seats. I have never heard it played on the radio, although it should have been a huge number one hit for several weeks. As a child Regina immigrated with her family in the 1980s to America from Soviet Russia and is a classically-trained pianist...that instrument dominates her recordings, including this masterpiece. Firewood's lyrics seemed aimed at an ailing soul, in a hospital and thought to be dying...but what kind of affliction is it, mental or physical? "Rise from your cold hospital bed, you're not dying...everyone knows you're going to live, so you might as well start trying". This song has always been a treasure for me to listen to, but it's also been painful as it is the sort of song that can remind listeners of people they personally know in their own lives who have gone through really tough, tough times...possibly themselves. It's yet another slow-moving song on my top ten list...and not the last Regina Spektor piece on it, either: another one ranks higher! To me, Regina Spektor is far and away my favorite solo musical artist of this century and has seven studio albums so far...of course I own them all and am impatiently awaiting her next one. The melody to Firewood is the kind of listening experience that a you might find yourself doing a double take on...there's something timeless to it, as if it had always been out there instead of only for the past eight years...
Sunday, November 15, 2020
Trump's Presence to be Felt Beyond the Election and Biden's Inauguration
Saturday, November 14, 2020
Four Astronauts Slated for Space Launch from Cape Canaveral Sunday Evening
Friday, November 13, 2020
Quote of the Week...from Alex Trebek
I think what makes 'Jeopardy!' special is that, among all the quiz and game shows out there, ours tends to encourage learning. ---Alex Trebek
Alex Trebek, the host of the wonderful Jeopardy! game show since it was brought back in 1984, sadly died last Sunday of pancreatic cancer, a condition that he had shared with his faithful viewing audience long before...still, his passing doesn't make it any easier. I had watched the original Jeopardy! series (1964-75) while growing up through childhood and my teen years...Art Fleming was its very capable host. On both runs, Jeopardy! was structured the same, with three contestants playing two rounds with different subject categories in each of them and a final, single answer round: "answer", because this quiz show phrases its questions in the form of answers, to which the correct response is a question... I always had a problem with that. Say the "answer" on the screen is "Its capital is Caracas". The correct response is "What is Venezuela?", but if I walked up to someone and asked the same question, that answer wouldn't help me at all. Still, it has been fun trying to beat the ultra-smart and knowledgeable contestants to the correct answer. And even if the category at hand is on a subject with which I am totally unfamiliar, the clues sometimes will steer me to get the "question" right. I don't watch Jeopardy! every day because of my schedule, but if college football permits I can view it Saturday evenings at 7:30 on my local Channel 4 station. It has been clear to me that Jeopardy! was a labor of love for Alex Trebek, and my sympathies and wishes are for his family and friends. As for his above quote, the wide gamut of topics discussed on the show demonstrate...as well or better than any encyclopedia can...interesting areas that people can involve themselves in, including science, technology, music, literature, history, geography, language, mathematics...it goes on and on. I hope that this show will always stay true to its high standards and never sink into appealing to vulgarity as do shows like Family Feud and Match Game...
Thursday, November 12, 2020
Eta Striking Through North Central Florida Today
I have an app on my phone called Wordscapes, which is a scrambled word game. One of the three-letter word combinations is a-e-t, from which you can form tea, ate, eat...and the Greek letter eta (small η, capital Η). And Eta, incidentally, is the name of the current tropical system (Greek letters being used for names after exhausting the traditional list) that had been situated in the eastern Gulf of Mexico...although its bands have been affecting us in north central Florida for the last five days with rain and gusty winds. Because of a cold front descending from the northwest, Tuesday evening the hotshot weather forecasters changed their projection to having it hit today around Cedar Key and as a strong tropical storm and then make a beeline for my Gainesville area. Tuesday night's forecast had Eta slowing down until possibly even Saturday after passing over us in northern Florida, but subsequent notifications have had it entering the Atlantic Thursday night. Also, they noted on The Weather Channel yesterday that it seems surrounding dry air has been entering the storm and weakening it...for a while early yesterday it was classified as a weak hurricane. I haven't been too thrilled with the weather we've been experiencing lately, but it could have been a lot worse: just ask the folks in south Florida and the Tampa area. Eta, which earlier had developed into a Class 4 hurricane with 150 mph winds and struck eastern Nicaragua before emerging into the Gulf out of Honduras, then wound its way...first eastward and then northward...through Cuba. Then it brushed (and flooded) south Florida and swung back into the Gulf of Mexico...and here we are now, stuck with this Greek freak of a storm. I hear there's another one, named Theta naturally, brewing out in the eastern Atlantic while a new area of tropical disturbance is in the Caribbean where Eta once began its twisted journey, following its original path toward Central America: let's all hope its trajectory is straighter than Eta's..
As I mentioned, it's currently 9 in the morning and Eta's center is slightly northwest of Gainesville as it heads toward Jacksonville at 13 mph. The rain and winds at this time are nothing for concern, and I expect conditions to have improved before I set off for work in three hours...
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
Weekly Short Stories: 1965 Science Fiction, Part 2
Tuesday, November 10, 2020
Just Finished Reading Matilda by Roald Dahl
Ever since that Jeopardy! episode a few weeks ago that devoted an entire category to British children's books author Roald Dahl, I've been exploring his collected works, believing then that I was unfamiliar with anything he had done. Sure, he wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, from which the early 70s movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was made, and I'd heard of his James and the Giant Peach. But I'd never seen a movie or read a book of his...until the other night when I got out my own DVD of the 1967 James Bond thriller You Only Live Twice and discovered that Dahl had written the screenplay! Well, I felt it was time for me to read another of his books, so I picked his 1988 novel Matilda...I wasn't disappointed. Once again we have a Dahl story in which a child...Matilda, of course...is the heroic protagonist and a mixture of adults, some of whom are sweet and compassionate and some of whom are beyond nasty in their meanness. Matilda is a four-year old girl, a genius who has taught herself to read as well as a great deal of math. She befriends the local librarian, who has introduced her to great books in literature and has already read many. But her negligent parents belittle her and refuse to recognize her talents...when she finally starts out in school she discovers friends, a compassionate teacher...and a thoroughly abusive principal. What distinguishes Matilda in this tale is her spunk and refusal to take any abuse lying down...here is someone who knows how to even the score! It was all very entertaining...sadly, Dahl passed away back in 1990. To me, he and Neil Gaiman are my two top favorite British contemporary authors...I plan to read all of their works. In 1996 the film version of Matilda came out, but I haven't seen it or nor do I plan to...I don't want my own visualizations of Dahl's story and characters to become supplanted by an altered version...
Monday, November 9, 2020
My #7 All-Time Favorite Song: Building a Mystery by Sarah McLachlan
Sunday, November 8, 2020
Just Finished Reading The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins
Saturday, November 7, 2020
Deliberately Avoided Election Results As Long As Possible
Friday, November 6, 2020
Quote of the Week...from Bob Newhart
The only way to survive is to have a sense of humor. Bob Newhart
Bob Newhart, the great television comedian known for his two popular sit-coms The Bob Newhart Show (1972-78) and Newhart (1982-90), is definitely a survivor...he's 91 and still pluggin' along. However, if you put his name into a search engine you're bound to come up with death reports...he supposedly just died either on September 21st or October 30th, depending on the website. From what I can tell, this is a hoax and the soft-spoken humorist is still alive and well...which brings me to the above quote. I suppose you really are a survivor if you outlive your own death notices! My favorite Bob Newhart Show episode...and there were many I liked as I regularly watched it back in the 70s on Saturday evenings following Mary Tyler Moore...was the Thanksgiving episode from 1975 in which Emily leaves on a trip and Bob is left spending the holiday with others, including his highly neurotic patient Carlin, in his apartment as the turkey gets burnt in the oven and Bob orders Chinese while everyone ends up getting inebriated. One element of his series that I loved was how a simple joke or turn of phrase from early on would come back later on and get amplified and humorously twisted...this particular episode was a great example, with knock-knock jokes taken to their funniest. Let's all hope that Mr. Newhart got a good laugh at his "demise" and will continue enjoying his life to the fullest. By the way, there's something on the internet called WikiObits that produces makeshift obituaries of famous people even if they're still alive. They did one for Newhart and I tested it out by doing a search on Beyoncé...their false obit of her stated that she died possibly of a fireworks accident. This all illustrates something I've hit upon before: if you Google something, it will respond by providing you what it "thinks" you want, not necessarily what is true...
Thursday, November 5, 2020
Some Interesting Newspaper Articles from October, 1956
Wednesday, November 4, 2020
Weekly Short Stories: 1965 Science Fiction, Part 1
Tuesday, November 3, 2020
On This 2020 Presidential Election Day
So here we find ourselves again, four years later as Donald Trump goes into Election Day as an underdog against his Democratic opponent for president. I'm inclined to agree with progressive activist Michael Moore that Trump voters are underreported in the public opinion polls, this year as they were four years ago, and that this election between him and Joe Biden will be closer than most polls currently indicate. If that's so, then once again...for the sixth straight presidential election...it will all come down to the uninformed, pain-in-the-neck undecided voters who will...as they have since 2000...allow late-hour "news" stories and phony campaign ads to sway their votes in one direction or the other and decide our collective fate for the next four years. My vote was cast weeks ago and I had wanted to steer mostly clear of the no-holds-barred political warfare going on in the media, but the sad truth is that no matter which channel I watched on TV I was barraged with those horrendously annoying and often patently cynical campaign ads. Tonight and beyond they'll be tabulating and releasing the results: my sincere, deepest hope is that no matter which candidate you supported, you haven't invested so much emotionally into the campaign and the candidates that the results devastate you if they don't go your way. For me, I have fulfilled my responsibility as an individual American citizen by informing myself and casting my single vote...on this runaway train where the most easily manipulated voters routinely end up electing our national leaders, I can only brace myself for what's to come, for better or for worse: I suggest you do likewise. Regardless who wins, I suspect it's gonna get "pretty ugly" out there for the next eleven weeks until Inauguration Day, 2021...I want no part of it...
Monday, November 2, 2020
My #8 All-Time Favorite Song: For My Lady by the Moody Blues
Sunday, November 1, 2020
Just Finished Reading House of Salt and Sorrows by Erin A. Craig
House of Salt and Sorrows is a 2019 young adult fantasy/horror/romance novel by Erin A. Craig...if the combination of those three genres within a single story sounds strange, please keep in mind that many of our famous old fairy tales do the same thing. And this novel is a fairy tale in its own right as a family of twelve sisters finds itself in a nightmare as they begin to die through mishaps or illness, until when the narrative begins they are only left with eight, ranging from late teens to little girls. Annaleigh, the second oldest survivor, is the story's protagonist as she tries to unravel the mystery of the most recent death of one of her sisters. The family, headed by a widowed wealthy shipping magnate who has remarried, lives on an island within a chain of islands on a fantasy world where humanity is in pretty much the same technological state as in other fantasy works like Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. The impression I got when I started it was that it was a mystery novel of sorts and that although in a fantasy setting the real world's parameters generally prevailed. But as I read on, it became more and more clear that the author was prolifically adding magic, the paranormal...and ultimately supernatural mythological characters...into the mix. To me as a reader I felt a little cheated as I was first presented with a situation and then the explanations at the end weren't remotely available to me until Craig decided to throw them into the story. It also played with my sense of what was real and what wasn't...the reader needs to be able to have at least some anchor of reality to help navigate them through the book: it's a problem I also had with celebrated writer Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House. But keep in mind that my subjective criticisms may not be the same as your own reactions, and you might really like this novel which seems to have met with widespread approval and enthusiasm. In any event, I always appreciate a writer's efforts and I understand that Erin A. Craig is coming out with another book in 2021, which I intend to read...