Wednesday, June 30, 2021
Weekly Short Stories: 1973 Science Fiction, Part 3
Tuesday, June 29, 2021
Game of the Week: Ice Hockey
Monday, June 28, 2021
Planning to Start Weekly All-Time Personal Favorite Movies Feature
Sometime in July I'm planning to start another weekly feature on this blog, this one a countdown of my all-time favorite full-length movies. As was the case with my "Top 500" list of all-time favorite songs I revealed and discussed from August 2019 to the end of 2020, each movie will be selected for the personal effect it had on me and not always with the aim of evaluating its artistic value...although with many, I'm sure, both factors will be in play. My interests in film are wide: westerns, action flicks, cartoons, documentaries, drama, comedy, mystery, dramatized history, science fiction, horror, and young adult, to name the more prominent categories. It should be fun to brainstorm a bit and list all the movies I like, and then to sit down and figure their relative value. I don't yet know how many movies I plan to list, but I think that when I do begin the weekly "countdown", I'll be confining my attention to one excellent, memorable film per week. Hint: I'll be mentioning one of my top favorites in this week's Friday "quotes" article...
Sunday, June 27, 2021
Great Old TV Episodes...from Perception
Saturday, June 26, 2021
Just Finished Reading The Terror by Dan Simmons
Having already gone through his four-volume science fiction series Hyperion Cantos and his historical novel about Dickens titled Drood, I already considered Dan Simmons to be a very good author. His attention to detail in his stories shows the fruits of someone who has put in considerable research of his topic, and his 2007 novel The Terror...which I just finished reading...is a great example. Another historical novel, it is based on the real, doomed voyage of two British ships Erebus and Terror in 1845-48 as they sailed through the icy waters of northern Canada, in search of the elusive Northwest Passage to the Pacific. The ships get themselves stuck in ice and the mission becomes a matter of survival instead of discovery. Besides the terrible cold, dwindling supplies including contaminated food, and mounting scurvy, they are bedeviled by a monstrous, murderous creature resembling a polar bear but much, much larger...and more intelligent. The captains of Erebus and Terror, Sir John Franklin and Francis Crozier, respectively, present their experiences through alternating chapters that also include other characters, most notably surgeon Harry Goodsir. Their first encounter with the native eskimos turns tragic as an old man is mistakenly shot and killed, leaving his young adult daughter...missing a tongue...for the explorers to care for. As the story progresses it seems clear that the outside beast terrorizing the expedition has some sort of connection with "Lady Silence", as Captain Crozier calls her...and he seems to have an unspoken mental link with her through his dreams. Without revealing what happens in detail, let me just say that it is a story of suffering and attrition, going into great detail about the various issues involved in surviving under the brutal conditions of the far north. But the story does undergo a remarkable transformation toward its end, and brings forth a theme I've noticed in other fiction: that different cultures' myths have underlying literal truth to them. You see this in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, Neil Gaiman's American Gods, Stephen King's Pet Sematary, and Harlan Ellison's short story The Whimper of Whipped Dogs, among many others. Eskimo mythology figures into this story, which sharply contrasts their views on life and death with those of their European counterparts as well as their strategies for survival. There is an awful lot of suffering in The Terror, but before long I realized what a noble, honest, and courageous character Francis Crozier was and that the story was worth pursuing to its end if only for his sake. I recommend The Terror in spite of the misery contain within its pages...
Friday, June 25, 2021
Quote of the Week...from Carl Friedrich Gauss
Thursday, June 24, 2021
Just Finished Reading Start by Jon Acuff
Start's full title is Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work That Matters...after recently reading Jon Acuff's 2017 book Finish and since he referred to his earlier 2013 book a number of times in it...sometimes critically...it intrigued me enough to check it out myself. It's all about self-motivation and how people can get hold of their purpose(s) in life and set out on the narrow road to "awesome" as opposed to the "average" path the vast majority of people take. Start is loaded with all kinds of advice, as well as discussing the various stages to achieving mastery in an area: learning, editing, harvesting, and then guiding. He says that we should be cognizant of the various irrational fears and notions obstructing us from setting out on accomplishing our goals and immediately write them down whenever we think of them. He tends to be very numbers-oriented in his approach, drawing upon his personal experiences as a "success" in social media, blogging, and publishing...using the numbers of his followers and sales as a yardstick to that perceived success. That emphasis to me was a little too self-centered and limited: many of us don't give a whit about that sort of thing, but we still have our own individual dreams. In comparing the two Acuff books Start and Finish, I felt that the latter was much more profound and realistic, reflecting positively on the author's developing maturity and deeper understanding of the subject matter...if you read only one book, read Finish! In Start I also grew increasingly irritated at Acuff's fawning compliments of financial advice media mogul Dave Ramsey, for whom he once worked and who greatly facilitated his career. Although I agree that Ramsey has some sound ideas of personal money management, he was a pandemic-denying anti-masker when he had the opportunity with his radio show to contribute to the public's heath interests during this pandemic...I wonder what Acuff's take on Covid has been? In Start, Jon Acuff stresses that there is no shortcut to mastery of a field...it takes hard, hard work as well as the need to put other things on the sideline and not spread one's self out too thinly or act like a jerk to others...not exactly stuff that was new to me. It's not a bad book per se, but it doesn't hold a candle to his later work...and you can get plenty of inspiration (and sounder advice) for starting projects from Finish. Acuff has written other books as well, his 2015 release Do Over to be my next reading project from him...
Wednesday, June 23, 2021
Weekly Short Stories: 1973 Science Fiction, Part 2
Tuesday, June 22, 2021
Game of the Week: Jigsaw Puzzles
Monday, June 21, 2021
Just Finished Reading The Alienist by Caleb Carr
Sunday, June 20, 2021
Great Old TV Episodes...from The Three Stooges
Saturday, June 19, 2021
Just Finished Reading The Case of the Fabulous Fake by Erle Stanley Gardner
Friday, June 18, 2021
Quote of the Week...from John Boehner
Thursday, June 17, 2021
Constellation of the Month: Ursa Minor
Wednesday, June 16, 2021
Weekly Short Stories...1973 Science Fiction, Part 1
Tuesday, June 15, 2021
Game of the Week: Crossword Puzzles
Monday, June 14, 2021
Just Finished Reading On the House by John Boehner
Retired Ohio Representative and former Speaker of the House John Boehner has just published a memoir of his life and times in the U.S. House of Representatives, titled On the House, and which I just finished reading. He wrote it with pretty colorful language, echoing his speaking style. Boehner never pulled any punches as a politician: he said what he thought and I always respected him for that...much unlike the slimy worms slinking through the legislative halls of Congress and state legislatures nowadays: guess he's not the only one using colorful language! The book's title is a play on words about a free drink, and the author, known for his drinking affection...at least for red wine...also hearkened back to his father's profession as a barkeeper and his own work decades before in the family business. I was interested in this book because I remember Boehner from his House Speaker days when Obama was president...especially in regard to the two times he had to negotiate with the White House over continuing government funding resolutions. It shed light on his frustration both with Obama...who would agree to a hard-slogged-out deal with Boehner and then back out on it...and with the Tea Party faction of his own caucus, spurred on in the 2013 negotiations that featured the interference of new senator Ted Cruz, for whom he shows nothing but the greatest contempt. And of course the book wouldn't be complete without John Boehner's take on Donald Trump, with whom he had golfed before: like myself, he was taken aback at the massive reality denial...spurred by Trump...of most of the Republican Party, both politicians and members-at-large, of Joe Biden's legitimate 2020 election victory. Boehner also blamed Texas representative Tom Delay for the GOP's move to impeach Bill Clinton...it was a cynically-designed ploy to give the Republicans election gains in 1998, which backfired. Boehner himself, while decrying the "crazies" of the Tea Party movement and later of Trump's idolizers, started out in the House making waves by exposing its own banking scandal...but he admits up front that he's a "jackass": my opinion of Donald Trump would go up drastically were he ever to admit the same about himself. I happen to like John Boehner and wish that his type of conservative politics were what the Republican Party stood for instead of the fascist personality cult going on there now. It's a very funny, brutally honest book...I think you'll like it unless you're one of those Trump worshippers...
Sunday, June 13, 2021
Great Old TV Episodes...from Beavis and Butt-Head
Saturday, June 12, 2021
Ran Depot Parkrun 5K This Morning for First June Race in 11 Years
Friday, June 11, 2021
Quote of the Week...from Jon Acuff
Thursday, June 10, 2021
My Take on Senator Manchin's Present Senate Role
Wednesday, June 9, 2021
Weekly Short Stories: 1972 Science Fiction, Part 3
Tuesday, June 8, 2021
Game of the Week: Miniature Golf
Monday, June 7, 2021
Just Finished Reading And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
And Then There Were None was a 1939 mystery novel by Agatha Christie, one of her most famous...and perhaps most vilified. Ten people find themselves together on small Soldier Island off the coast of England...it has a mansion after an American businessmen bought it, but the present owner seems to be a mysterious "Mr. Owen" who has either invited the present guests or hired them on as staff. Soon after their arrival it is revealed, through a record played to the assemblage, that each of them is guilty of murder and that justice will be served against them...and then their own murders begin, one by one. Behind it all is an old nursery rhyme Ten Little Soldiers, that lists each one's manner of demise and concluding with "And then there were none". It's this verse that caused problems for Christie and the novel as the rhyme and the book originally had a rather racist title...not just for now but for back then as well. Later on it was changed to "Ten Little Indians", but now "Soldiers" works well instead and doesn't have all the negative connotations. Instead of an Inspector Poirot on the scene to unravel the mystery of who is doing the killings...only the ten targeted people are there...it is up to these to figure things out before one of them becomes the next victim. It's all neatly explained at the tail end of the story. An underlying premise here is that many, many murders are committed that never get reported as such, with the perpetrators getting off free and not even suspected or accused. On the other hand, there were a couple of "murders" described in the story for which, in my estimation, it was a stretch to describe them as such (although the behavior was objectionable). I can see why this novel has been so popular...soon after its publication it was made into a movie...
Sunday, June 6, 2021
Great Old TV Episodes...from I Love Lucy
JOB SWITCHING, from the classic comedy series I Love Lucy, is one of the funniest episodes in television history. Originally airing in the series' second season in September 1952, four years before I was born, as with most of the episodes it stars the foursome of Lucille Ball (as Lucy Ricardo), Desi Arnaz (Ricky Ricardo), Vivian Vance (Ethel Mertz) and William Frawley (Fred Mertz). The wives get into a spat of sorts with their husbands, each "side" putting down the difficulty of the other's roles...in this traditional setting, then, Ricky and Fred take their turn at housekeeping while Lucy and Ethel get paid jobs at a chocolate factory. It's the scene at the factory's conveyor belt where they're required to package every piece of chocolate candy whizzing by that is the most hilarious part of the show...see the above picture. Lucille Ball was brilliant at slapstick comedy, and it doesn't get any funnier than this. As a little kid I got to watch a lot of this series...after all, it was a favorite of my parents as well. I always thought...even from early on...that it was pretty cool for Ricky to be a singer in his Cuban band and that Cuba itself was a pretty cool place. Maybe this wasn't all that helpful, though, as there was a lot of disparity and corruption there at the time that would give rise to Castro's leftist revolution in the late 1950s...and more trouble afterwards. But it was Lucy with her brashness and penchant for getting into the worst, most embarrassing situations that stole the show and made it the great success it was during its run from 1951 to 1957, followed in the next three years by several hour-long specials and later by new series focusing on just Lucille Ball. If you haven't seen I Love Lucy before, you can't go wrong with the Job Switching episode...
Saturday, June 5, 2021
Just Finished Reading Where are the Children? by Mary Higgins Clark
Mary Higgins Clark, the prolific and highly successful author of thriller novels, just passed away last year at age 92. I had read three of her works, and just finished reading her breakthrough book Where are the Children? from 1975 that launched her writing career. Loosely based on a news story she had followed about a woman accused of the deaths of her two missing young children, Clark expanded and fictionalized it by having her protagonist from California go through trial and conviction of murder, only to be released after that conviction is reversed on a technicality and her first husband gone after leaving a suicide note that expressed deep remorse over her crime. Now it's seven years later and she had disappeared into the society, remarrying and with two new young children on the seashore at Cape Cod, Massachusetts. But the anonymous peace she has gained over time is about to be harshly interrupted when a newspaper is delivered throughout town with a photo showing her as the original Nancy Harmon after conviction...and then her present children, Mike and Missy, go missing, making her once again the prime suspect. I'm not giving anything away by stating that she is not guilty...the true culprit in all this has his own chapters, and early on as the reader I thought I knew his identity...but great mystery writers like this one are masters at throwing in "red herring" clues. Eventually all is resolved, but to what end? Guess you'll have to read it to find out: I did enjoy it, though. These novels of Clark are written in plain language and short enough not to be a major reading commitment...they're thus perfectly suited to be inserted between some of my more serious reading ventures...
Friday, June 4, 2021
Quote of the Week...from Groucho Marx
Thursday, June 3, 2021
Just Finished Reading The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Little Prince, in its original French version Le petit prince, is a short 1943 novel by French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-44). The author's profession comes out strongly here as the narrator has crash-landed his plane in the Sahara Desert and only has a few days...with his water supply dwindling...to repair it. In the middle of the desolation he encounters a young boy who identifies himself as the prince of a very small planet. The prince asks him to draw a sheep, to which the narrator replies that his drawings have never been good since when he himself was a boy and tried to draw a snake swallowing an elephant...all the grown-ups thought it was a picture of a hand. He does the same with this new drawing and is surprised by the boy knowing it to be a snake and elephant. And with this the story progresses to reveal the fundamental difference in thinking between children and adults, even translating to the narrator's highly technical focus on his means of locomotion while the Prince never mentions his, as if it is inconsequential to his own thought processes. Instead the boy from space recounts about his own home planet with its three little volcanoes, his special talking flower, and the need for a sheep to keep a planet-destroying plant from proliferating. He travels to other neighboring small planets, each populated by a single adult with personalities and attitudes reflecting those of vast groups of adults on Earth. The narrator's reality is dominated by science and technical details, while the boy-prince has his own reality that reflects his own assumptions such as that he just "visits" other worlds and talks with plants and animals, among other fanciful ideas that fade away with growing older. It's a very whimsical...and a bit sad...little tale and I can see why it became so popular. I don't think the author meant for us to forsake our own maturity and dependence on science but rather to integrate the memories and essence of our own respective childhoods into our adult being, thereby keeping joy in our lives and preventing us from becoming like those misled grown-ups whom the Prince had visited...
Wednesday, June 2, 2021
Weekly Short Stories: 1972 Science Fiction, Part 2
Tuesday, June 1, 2021
Game of the Week: Soccer
Starting in the summer of 2014, I became an avid fan of professional soccer when the World Cup was held in Brazil that year in which Germany won the championship with an exciting 1-0 overtime win over Argentina. In the fall I began following the English Premier League and Mexico's Liga MX, both of which I could regularly view ongoing matches, the former on NBC-Sports and the latter on Univision. For the EPL I started off as an Arsenal fan but gradually gravitated toward supporting Leicester City, while with Liga MX it was the Tigres of Monterrey-based UANL...I still consider these my two favorites to follow. My soccer memories didn't just begin seven years ago, though: as with most kids when we were in recess, a.k.a. "physical education" class at school, soccer was often on the agenda. Although the games weren't structured, we didn't use goal nets, and the balls weren't really official soccer balls but rather those commonplace maroon-colored all-purpose bouncy balls. Still, it was a game in which I excelled, partially because I was such a fast runner at the time but also because I seemed to have an innate talent for predicting where the ball was going in a game and being there at the crucial moment, then breaking off and dribbling it toward the goal: I was also an accurate kicker. I never did play the kind of highly structured, positional soccer they taught in youth leagues, though, where passing and teamwork are emphasized. A few years ago I'd also play makeshift soccer games with my son and daughter in our back yard with segments of the surrounding fence marking off the goals...that was fun! Like basketball and unlike baseball...and to an extent football, soccer is a game/sport that I have memories of not only participating in myself, but also of being reasonably good at. Still, watching others play it on TV can be frustrating, especially when neither of the two teams in a game is very good at passing and controlling the ball. But the English and Mexican premier league teams usually put on entertaining matches...alas, sometimes the same can't be said for the level of play in our American/Canadian league known as MLS (Major League Soccer)...