Wednesday, March 31, 2021
Weekly Short Stories: 1969 Science Fiction, Part 4
Tuesday, March 30, 2021
Game of the Week...Hidato
Monday, March 29, 2021
Just Finished Reading The Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell
The Girl Next Door is a 2014 novel by English mystery writer Ruth Rendell, the last to be published before her death. It's one of those stories that start out going in one direction but transform into something substantially different. In 1944 in an English town the children there like to play in the "tunnels" underneath a hillside...eventually revealed to be an unconstructed house's foundation. Michael, one of the kids, has as parents a mother who carries out sexual escapades with various men and a father who by all measures is a pure psychopath...one day he decides to murder his wife and her lover, cut off their hands and save them in a tin box...pretty gross and disturbing, right? I don't think I'm giving away the story, though, as this all happens in the beginning. After ridding himself of his wife, the father ships Michael away for his sister Zoe to take care of...the story then shifts sixty years into the future as the children are now around 70 and the creepy old dad is approaching 100, living in a luxurious senior's home after living his whole adult life off the labors and inheritances of others. The bulk of the rest of the book deals with the relationships between these elderly "tunnel children": besides Michael there is the "girl next door", Daphne, who attracts Alan...one of those tunnel kids and a later teenage flame...into leaving his longtime wife Rosemary for her. There are other subplots with other characters, but the essence of the story is the lives of the grown children, now on the other end of their life spans. It lays forth the notion that life goes on with all its complications and drama far into old age...I'm not sure what to think about this since I'm 64 now! As for my reaction to the novel, I didn't particularly like Rendell's emphasis of the relationships in all their tawdriness over the story's underlying murder mystery...the tone reminded me of J.K. Rowling's "adult" novel The Casual Vacancy: is this a kind of "English" thing in fiction? Ruth Rendell's novels are pretty much split in number between her standalone books and those in the Inspector Wexford murder mystery series: I think I'll focus more on the latter category in the future...
Sunday, March 28, 2021
Great Old TV Episodes...from SpongeBob SquarePants
Saturday, March 27, 2021
My Favorite Songs So Far in 2021
Friday, March 26, 2021
Quote of the Week...from Toni Sorenson
Thursday, March 25, 2021
Constellation of the Month: Hydra (the Sea Serpent)
Wednesday, March 24, 2021
Weekly Short Stories:1969 Science Fiction, Part 3
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
Game of the Week: Cryptograms
Monday, March 22, 2021
Just Finished Reading Gregor and the Code of Claw by Suzanne Collins
Gregor and the Code of Claw, published in 2007, is the fifth and final volume in Suzanne Collins' children's fantasy series The Underland Chronicles: beware, I'm bound to throw in some plot spoilers here. Gregor, the title character, is a twelve year old boy living in New York City with his mother, father, and two sisters. He and his family have a secret: there is, deep beneath the ground, another world where descendants of human settlers from centuries past interact...sometimes in friendship and sometimes in war...with the native creatures there, all human-size, intelligent, and speaking versions of our rats, bats, cockroaches, mice, spiders, fireflies, ants, and so forth. The series, like way too many in the fantasy genre, has devolved into a dire winner-take-all war between the opposing camps of the humans with their allies (the bats, cockroaches and mice) and the rats. The final battle has the rats...led by the now-insane, giant albino Bane...invading the final human stronghold "down under", as Gregor...stuck down there with his mother and eventually both sisters...discovers that the prophecy in question has him, the so-called "Warrior", dying before it is all over. He finds himself falling in love with the human princess Luxa while trying to save their home territory from the invaders. He also finds himself pitted against the manipulative human military commander Solovet, Luxa's grandmother and a forerunner (in my opinion) of the author's later Hunger Games character of Alma Coin from District 13. Part of the final conflict revolves around breaking the rats' special code of communication: the Code of Claw. The most compelling character in this book...and the series as a whole...is Ripred, the tough, colorful rat who is the humans' greatest ally. I found this concluding book a little tedious, knowing pretty much what to expect: like I said before, there is the typical (yawn) epic final battle, along with the attempt on the part of the author to tie up the loose ends of the series. When it does get to the end, I was pleased to discover that it is Ripred who not only, by revealing his attitude about those aforementioned prophecies, enlightens young Gregor, but also with Gregor and Luxa presents a reasonable resolution to the conflict. Still, it wasn't close to being my favorite fantasy series...but hey, it's for kids anyway and I enjoyed it on that level, having once been one myself...
Sunday, March 21, 2021
Great Old TV Episodes...from Honey West
Saturday, March 20, 2021
About Where We're Going with COVID
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea that, after all this time of lockdown, social distancing and mask mandates regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, people who are fully vaccinated...along with those who have contracted it in the past and recovered...cannot finally return to some semblance of normal life and shake off the distancing and masks: I'd also like to be able to browse the shelves of my local public library again some day, thank you...if it ever opens to the general public again. The other day Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) was arguing with disease expert Anthony Fauci over the need for those recovered or vaccinated to continue wearing masks, Paul taunting those already vaccinated for even wearing double masks just for show...I'd been wondering the same thing myself. Fauci's response was, to me, chilling: it's the variants of this coronavirus out there across the world that is the reason for continuing this, and that "herd immunity", which seems to be the standard for completely reopening the society, will always be questioned as long as there is any place on Earth where the disease is still active...because of these new variants they keep discovering, you see. Of course, in Texas they've already completely done away with any government-mandated masks or restrictions even though we're still in the thick of the fight to prevent COVID's spread: that's way too early! But there will have to be a point...maybe sometime this summer...when everyone in the U.S. wanting vaccines has had access to them and that booster shots for variants are in full swing: can we then please go back to sitting inside Starbucks and participate in running races, concerts and assemblies, or has a sea change occurred in our society and we're now and forever going to be germophobes with hand sanitizer dispensers around every corner and doing Detective Monk imitations while feeling we're constantly on the verge of new restrictions? Sean Hannity, someone I generally loathe, recently tweeted...with the lead-in comment "HERE WE GO"... a link to another disease expert who was extolling the idea of social distancing and mask-wearing every flu season from now on. I received my first Pfizer vaccine three days ago and will get my second one early next month. I will continue to respect the mask and distancing guidelines while they are in place as I already have, going on a full year, because I take this terrible scourge seriously. But at some time in the not-too-distant future, this country will have a reckoning as to which direction we're going with this all...it doesn't make me feel any better to find myself even only in partial agreement with both (ugh) Rand Paul and (mega-ugh) Sean Hannity, the latter whom I regard as an anti-American fascist because of his past support for overthrowing the free and fair 2020 presidential election in favor of his cult idol: dictator-wannabee and pandemic-denier Donald Trump...
After Yesterday's Opening Round Play in the NCCA Men's Hoops Tourney
As apparent by all the upsets occurring in yesterday's opening round of the NCAA men's basketball tournament, my bracket strategy of going with all the higher-seeded teams fell apart...as I knew it would since, as I said, upsets do happen. That still doesn't mean that I wasn't going with the best probability for success, considering that it's next to impossible to determine which games will be upsets. Besides, on Thursday with the four "First Four" games, the teams facing off each had the same seedings: my strategy couldn't apply to them and I would have needed to delve into each team's rankings to predict their outcomes (which I didn't do). Friday afternoon, fortunately for us Gator alumni and fans, the University of Florida, seeded 7th in their region, managed somehow to defeat Virginia Tech, 10th, in overtime 75-70 to advance against one of those upset winners, Oral Roberts, seeded 15th, who stunned 2nd seed Ohio State 75-72. UF should...I said should...get past them Sunday to make it to yet another Sweet 16 round. Although after getting home from work I watched some of the games on TV...they're spread out over multiple channels (at least for this round) like CBS, TNT, TBS, and TrueTV (which I don't get), while at work I got to listen on my Android to the game of my choice using the excellent TuneIn Radio app. There's more action for today...let's see if Florida State can't advance as well: they're playing UN-Greensboro this afternoon. This is a "bubble" tournament, with all the games in various sites in central Indiana and the players and staff sequestered...you'd think Purdue would do well here, but they, a 4th seed, were knocked off yesterday by North Texas, 13th. After Monday it should clear out considerably, with the remaining schools trimmed from 68 to 16 teams...
Friday, March 19, 2021
Quote of the Week...from Franz Kafka
A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. ---Franz Kafka
Ever since I began this blog nearly 14 years ago, I have felt that writing like this has greatly helped me sort out my thoughts and feelings, sharpening those that I conclude are worthwhile while disposing of those that don't pass the test of rational examination. Kafka was a famed early twentieth century Czech/German writer who is said to have injected surrealism and social commentary into much of his work: this was certainly true from the one book of his I've read so far: Metamorphosis. Sometimes I observe how thoroughly deluded and irrational people express themselves on TV and in social media, and I wonder whether a daily writing habit might not help some of them learn to use better judgment when it comes to discerning truth from fantasy and displaying a more civil, sociable demeanor in what they say to others. Along with this blog I have recently begun a daily journal...for my eyes only...to document the day-to-day happenings in my personal life and further assist me in more sanely reacting to the often invasive world that seems to come down on me from different sides. The very act of formulating sentences and connecting trains of thought is therapeutic, and I sure that as a result my perspective on reality and society has greatly benefited, regardless whether other readers would agree or not with the words I've put down. I found Kafka's above quote from a search I did on the excellent book review site Goodreads, which posted an excerpt from a letter he wrote to Max Brod in the 1920s...
Thursday, March 18, 2021
My 2021 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament Bracket...in a Nutshell
For the 2020-21 season with the NCAA men's basketball championship tournament slated to begin today, it's become an annual tradition for people to fill out intricate brackets predicting who will advance to the next round...and then who will win that round, all the way to the championship game. Naturally, once you get a game's result wrong, it upsets the whole bracket...and upsets do happen. Still, I think the most reasonable bracket I could fill out respects all of the seedings. So if you want to know "my bracket", let's skip the complicated chart and follow two principles: I always predict that the higher seed within a region wins, and then in the final four...presuming all number one seeds advance...I go with the pretournament national rankings: #1 Gonzaga, #2 Baylor, #3 Illinois, #4 Michigan. This method has the advantage over traditional brackets by renewing itself with each new round in the tourney...if in the Final Four two teams with different regional seedings are playing each other I go with the one with the higher regional seed. By the way, on the women's side with their tournament, I know next-to-nothing about the teams involved...but my "bracket" follows the exact same principles. Yeah, I know, upsets always happen...but how am I supposed to magically sort them out from the expected results?
Got COVID Vaccine First Dose Yesterday Morning
Wednesday, March 17, 2021
Weekly Short Stories: 1969 Science Fiction, Part 2
Tuesday, March 16, 2021
Game of the Week: Pong
Monday, March 15, 2021
Just Finished Reading They Do It with Mirrors by Agatha Christie
They Do It with Mirrors (alternate title Murder with Mirrors) is a 1952 murder mystery novel by the late, prolific writer Agatha Christie. It's the seventh book of hers I've read so far and only the first featuring the elderly English amateur sleuth Miss Marple...all but one of the others have spotlighted Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Miss Marple meets up with an old school friend, Ruth Van Rydock, who tells her of her concern about her younger sister Carrie Louise Serrocold and the goings on at her family estate back in England...and wouldn't she as a personal favor visit and stay with them a while to see if she can discern what the matter is. Upon arriving, Miss Marple discovers many family members around, as well as a school for juvenile delinquents...run by Carrie's third husband Lewis. Carrie Louise has married three times and has an eternally optimistic personality, attractive to all. Yet it appears that someone is trying to poison her...and what's going on with Lewis' young stuffy assistant Edgar Lawson, who appears to have become dramatically more resentful and paranoid? Then there is young, pretty and flirtatious Gina, Carrie Louise's granddaughter visiting with her unhappy American husband Walter Hudd and who has attracted the affection of Steven, son of her second husband (the family relationships here are very convoluted). But when Christian Gulbrandson, the son of Carrie Louise's first husband and who is in charge of administering that family's vast wealth, visits with intense concern about her state of health, the tipping point is reached and finally...well into the novel...the expected murder occurs. Just about everybody at the estate could be a suspect, but going on only what the author mentioned specifically just before the act, I realized very early on who the guilty party was. Still, I enjoyed the book and recommend it. Agatha Christie has written so many mystery novels that I could simply focus on her collected works and it would occupy me for years...
Sunday, March 14, 2021
Great Old TV Episodes...from The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Saturday, March 13, 2021
Just Finished Reading Gregor and the Marks of Secret by Suzanne Collins
Since Suzanne Collins' 2006 children's novel Gregor and the Marks of Secret directly ties in with The Underland Chronicles' previous book, Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods, my review here will necessarily involve some plot spoilers...you may want to stop and catch up reading the series for yourself first. After the previous book's plague has been resolved, Gregor, a boy who with his mother and baby sister Boots has voyaged deep under the Earth's surface in response to an urgent plea from the human inhabitants there, finds himself the subject of yet another prophecy...this one is held secret from him, though. Down here the animals are human-size, intelligent, and speak his language...how convenient. A war is developing between the rats, lead by an albino called the Bane (read book #2), and pretty much everyone else...including spiders, cockroaches, people, bats...and especially the mice, caller "nibblers". Gregor and his party set out to see about rescuing the persecuted mice and make some grisly discoveries. The ending segues directly, I'm sure, into the final book of this five-part series. Not exactly my favorite series in this genre of children's fantasy fiction, but Collins has skillfully built up the suspense and presented the characters to the point where I care about what happens to them at the end of it all...so of course I'm checking out that last volume...
Friday, March 12, 2021
Quote of the Week...from Haruki Murakami
I'll be happy if running and I can grow old together. ---Haruki Murakami
From an Internet search about running quotes, I got a good article by Norbert Juma listing a few...click here to read it. One of the listed quotes, many of which were great (and which I might use in the future), is the above one from award-winning Japanese writer Haruki Murakami...guess I'll have to check out a book or two of his now. I get his drift: it would be great to continue being able to go out on runs as I age and even participate in races when they come up in my area. Back in January 2011 I ran...and eventually walked the last seven miles due to an IT band injury in my leg...the only marathon I ever officially entered in a race. Because I was hobbled in the last half of this race, I encountered many slower runners passing me...many of them in advanced years. The experience, while humbling, made a deep impact on me: I want to be like them and be able to keep on running as long as I live...which hopefully will be for a considerable time in the future. So I'm not as keen on running fast as I am on covering long distances and maintaining this activity for years to come. I don't control everything that will happen to me...nobody does...but to the extent that I can I will continue this great activity. I'd love to be running half-marathons, 15K and 10K races as long as they're still holding them...
Thursday, March 11, 2021
Just Finished Rereading Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga Series
Wednesday, March 10, 2021
Weekly Short Stories: 1969 Science Fiction, Part 1
Tuesday, March 9, 2021
Game of the Week: Jeopardy!
Monday, March 8, 2021
Just Finished Reading The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury, from 1929, is probably the most famous of American writer William Faulkner's novels. Set as usual in a fictional locale within his home state of Mississippi, the story is presented from four separate viewpoints: Benjy, Quentin, Jason...brothers within the Compson family...and a third-person narration at the end very similar to Faulkner's style in the three other novels of his that I have read so far. Three of the parts are set within a three-day period of April, 1928 while Quentin's necessarily goes back much further, to 1910 when he was attending college. Through the "stream of consciousness" lenses of the three brothers...and finally through that of the "impartial" narrator...the reader supposedly can piece together the puzzle of what's really going on in their lives and their family: good luck with that! Benjy is a severely intellectually-challenged man who sees everything literally, with his emotions springing up spontaneously in reaction. Quentin is, on the other hand, intellectual and sensitive, spending much of his thoughts reliving past moments of his life and agonizing over them. Jason is more, I believe, like most of us: rooted in the real moment like Benjy, but putting his own cynical editorial stamp on everything and everyone around him while excusing his own questionable behavior as a matter of habit. The central character, Caddie...sister to these three brothers...gets no narration but is revealed by the attitudes of her siblings. Family honor, apparently a big thing within Southern white families of slaveholding lineage, gets a lot of treatment here as Caddie's mother feels scandalized by her daughter first becoming pregnant out of wedlock and then being abandoned by her husband. Benjy is unaware of any of this and only wants his sister back, Quentin feels extreme guilt and personalizes it all, and Jason scorns and ostracizes his sister while secreting away the support payments she makes for her daughter, also named Quentin. It's a pretty big mess with a lot of miserable people stuck in their own heads...the mother is a perennial, manipulative hypochondriac and causes much of the family division. Only Caddie and the Compsons' black employees and family seem to think rationally and act in a socially functional manner. I was fascinated with how Faulkner used this stream of consciousness approach to divide the population into these three types: the literalist Benjy, the neurotic, fantasizing Quentin, and the cynical, rationalizing Jason. And then then there is Dilsey, the family's housekeeper and her own family's matriarch, who is the one unrecognized person in the story who keeps both the Compsons and her own together and functioning. In the first two narratives the reader finds himself often instantly transported back and forth in time as the protagonists relive moments from their pasts...Jason's, though, as I earlier said, is rooted in the present real world (of 1928). The Sound and the Fury is loaded with racism and racist epithets...not from Faulkner's beliefs, but rather from the characters and social climate he tried to realistically depict from life in rural Mississippi in the early twentieth century. If you can get past all the "N" words...and it can get overbearing at times...this novel might provide an interesting reading challenge...
Sunday, March 7, 2021
Great Old TV Episodes...from Sesame Street
Saturday, March 6, 2021
The "Shoe on Other Foot" and "What Goes Around" Arguments in Politics
Political nearsightedness is running rampant in our America of recent years, and at no time has it been more on display than in the last few months. It seems that the overwhelming majority of politicians in Washington speak and act as if their ruling side will be in power forever and that any election or piece of legislation has catastrophic, world-ending consequences if it doesn't completely go their way...and of course the "other side" is run by corrupt extremists. People-at-large have their own legitimate political orientations, and they usually subscribe to either the conservative, Republican camp or the liberals, with the Democrats as their group. It would help all of us, regardless of what we want to see done...or not done...in Washington, to realize that the two parties go back and forth between being in power or in opposition every few years or so. Losing a round of elections isn't the end of the world...unless you're talking about an authoritarian, ultra-narcissistic sore loser like Donald Trump, who has still refused to concede the 2020 election to the winner, Joe Biden. On January 6th some two thirds of the Republican House representatives rose up in opposition to officially counting the Pennsylvania presidential election results, which Biden won fair and square. That's far beyond a simple show of protest and portends a future in which possibly a party holding majority power in Congress can undo a national election that the other party's candidate won...and it could happen as soon as 2025 if the Republicans win back the White House in a close contest and the Democrats still run the House and Senate. It would help if each of us stood back and took the long view on things, considering what it would be like if the shoe instead were on the other foot and it was the Democrats objecting to a free and fair result last November that handed Trump reelection. Precedent is a very big thing in politics and the Republican grandstanding over the 2020 election is a very bad one. Other bad precedents that ignore the "shoe on the other foot" and "what goes around comes around" principles have been the removal in the United States Senate of 60-vote thresholds to advance and confirm presidents' nominations, the Democrats starting it in 2014 and the Republicans extending it to Supreme Court nominees in 2017. Now talk is about for the Democrats to end the legislative filibuster, something that Republican Leader Mitch McConnell resisted doing while Trump was president and his party controlled the Senate. I say keep things the way they are...what good is it to pass a bunch of controversial bills on 51-vote majorities and then have them automatically reversed when the other party gets into power as soon as 2-4 years later? Better to work on and achieve compromises on legislation between the two sides that will stand for years, something the Democrats are sadly skirting with this COVID relief bill they are currently forcing through by means of a convoluted legislative process called budget reconciliation, and something that the Republicans tried when they attempted a few years ago to end Obamacare (failed) and pushed a huge tax reform bill (passed). The notion of packing the Supreme Court by adding four new seats to give the more liberal wing 7-6 majority status is another bad, bad idea doomed to backfire. Again, what goes around comes around...
Friday, March 5, 2021
Quote of the Week...from Madeleine L'Engle
Thursday, March 4, 2021
Filled in Gaps on My Reading List by Rereading Patterson and Grafton Novels
Wednesday, March 3, 2021
Weekly Short Stories: 1968 Science Fiction, Part 4
Tuesday, March 2, 2021
Game of the Week: Flag Football
My exposure to the game of football as a kid...and after that I never played it...was in elementary and high school when we would play it as flag football in physical education class (or "recess" as they called it in the younger years). Unlike tackle football with players geared up wearing pads and protective helmets designed to shield them from hits and tackles, flag football removes most of that hard contact as each player wears a belt around their waist, with a long, removable plastic strip attached by Velcro on each hip. During any play in the game, any player holding the ball can then be brought "down" by pulling off one of his or her flags. The only actual instruction I ever received in football at school happened during our opening session at Nova Elementary School in the 4th grade in the late summer of 1965 when our P.E. teacher, Mr. Tilton, gave the assembled boys a brief clinic on how to punt a football. Nothing about the actual rules of the game, which to me would have helped since I had never played it before...coaches in classes like these tended to show off a kind of phony bravado, acting all military-like and presuming everyone in the class was an athlete already well-versed in whatever activity was on the agenda (and if you were weren't athletically inclined then you were a nobody). Although I was one of the fastest runners around and NEVER dropped a football when it was passed or kicked to me, I rarely got to be a receiver, instead being repeatedly told to "block" on each offensive play. So I quickly became a preferred defensive player since that part of the game placed fewer limitations on what I could do with my talents...I tended to be a team leader in "tackles", i.e. pulling off the opponent's flag...often by simply chasing down whoever had the ball...and was known to stand in the way and intercept passes as well. Since kids tend to cheat and contest calls, I'm glad we played flag football instead of the touch variety, which involved the defensive player having to place a hand on each of the ball carrier's hips to bring him down...enforcing such a rule without an third party referee constantly monitoring the action and calling each play would have required more of a sense of honor than many kids had (and probably still don't as adults). I looked for photos off the Internet I could include here of flag football, but they seem to mostly be of "official" looking games with stripe-suited officials and uniformed teams on yard-marked fields...I never played any football game on such a level. The last time I played a flag football game was in September, 1973 in a high school P.E. class...I had caught a pass and was running for a touchdown when the desperate defender pushed me down from behind when he saw he couldn't get to my flag in time. I fell on my hands which miraculously weren't broken, but I never returned to play this game that could have been fun had the players not acted like such jerks...
Monday, March 1, 2021
My February 2021 Running Report
For February I ran a total of 97 miles, missing two days of running in the month with 4.8 miles being my longest single run. With walking I also covered 97 miles...probably a bit more but that's what I actually measured. This past month has seen me continue in my holding pattern regarding my running, and it's due to the continuing COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions around us...resulting in the lack of public races that are usually scheduled this time of year. And that includes Gainesville's big February long-distance running extravaganza: LifeSouth's Five Points of Life marathon, half-marathon and 5K events. Maybe if things go well they'll hold it once again starting in 2022, but I've found no reference to any such plans while searching the Internet. In any event I'm hopeful that toward the end of this year we'll see those restrictions ease up along with the danger of the disease. I'm also looking forward to visiting my local gym...when they reopened last year following the spring lockdown I went a couple of times but was dismayed at the crowding and lack of distancing between cardio machines...and that's not cool. I'm thinking of once again going out weekends around my neighborhood and the adjacent ones on long, slow runs just to have regular long-distance running experiences...the courses are already laid out for me. March should be interesting. Speaking of LifeSouth, the chief nonprofit organization around here for blood collection, yesterday I donated blood...for the first time ever...which accounts for one of my two non-running days of the month (they discourage exercise for 24 hours after a donation). I'll be getting some feedback in the next few days about my blood type, cholesterol, and whether or not I have antibodies for COVID...still haven't yet had access to a vaccine...