Monday, January 31, 2022
About Responsibility for Other People's Experiences
Sunday, January 30, 2022
Just Finished Reading Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
English author Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein ushered in an era of horror/science fiction writing that still continues today. In it an ambitious young scientist relates to an English explorer, who has rescued him in the frigid far north, his tragic story of creating a brand new human being...then abandoning him in horror and leaving him to fend for himself, ostracized as a terrifying-looking monster by those encountering him. Victor Frankenstein's creation isn't far off visually from his depiction in the movies, but unlike the film versions, the Frankenstein monster in Shelley's original account has two years to learn English quite well and has developed a sophisticated worldview, albeit one steeped in offense and desire for revenge. The Mel Brooks comedy Young Frankenstein is a takeoff of the old Boris Karloff movie and not of the book, which spends little time in the laboratory...and there's no "Igor" here. Shelley seems to have used this story to illustrate how people are unfairly categorized and stigmatized and not given an equal chance to pursue their own lives of happiness and prosperity, a more general social commentary than shown on the big screen. Dr. Frankenstein creates his human as a science project but never acknowledges that humanity...he is the story's true villain as the "monster", never shown any level of love or acceptance in his brief life, cannily turns rejection into murderous vengeance against his creator. A sad story, but one very well written and eye-opening...I wish they had made a movie truer to this excellent book, which I have to admit that I liked a lot more than Bram Stoker's Dracula, which I also recently read...
Saturday, January 29, 2022
Not a Cold Weather Runner
Watching the Weather Channel this morning makes me feel like a wimpy Floridian complaining about this weekend's frigid temperatures where I live in Gainesville...low 30s this morning with winds of 20-30 mph (22 degrees wind chill) and expectations of a dip into the mid-20s Sunday morning. Of course, that's a lot warmer than in the northeastern U.S. with its temperatures in the teens and everything essentially snowbound. That being said, keep in mind that I grew up in south Florida where a dip into the upper 40s is a major winter event. This all relates to my running as I try to engage this basically solitary activity in a more social setting by entering local races. For the past three weeks the temperatures have spiked downward on Saturday into the 30s...and I've had it with shivering to death outside early in the morning under these conditions waiting for the race to begin. Both my first half-marathon (in 2010) and my only marathon (2011) took place with the temperatures in the mid-20s...why, oh why do they always insist on holding these races during the absolutely coldest conditions in the dead of winter? A few years ago a 10K race was held in March in the nearby town of Tioga...what I loved about it was its time: Saturday afternoon at 4! I am more of a moderate-to-warm weather runner...my longest training run (26.6 miles) was accomplished with temperatures in the sixties and I've run more than ten miles on a number of occasions when it was in the upper 80s and even the low 90s...although truth be told in recent years I've tried to avoid the extreme heat as well. My only caveat with running under warmer conditions is that I try to avoid high humidity...which usually dissipates as the morning advances and the sun rises. I had planned to run a 5K race a couple of weeks ago and the Newnan's Lake 15K this morning and was confident of doing well in them, but the weather had a different idea. Next month I'd like to try Gainesville's Five Points Half-Marathon race on the 20th, but if it dips down to this level of coldness then I'll be passing on it as well...enough is enough. Well, there's a "backup" half-marathon on the Hawthorne Trail that's set to take place in April and I might just go for it...
Friday, January 28, 2022
Quote of the Week...from Nelson Mandela
Thursday, January 27, 2022
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer to Retire This Year
Wednesday, January 26, 2022
Weekly Short Stories: 1981 Science Fiction, Part 2
Tuesday, January 25, 2022
Football and Tennis Dominate My TV Watching
Monday, January 24, 2022
About Procrastination...and Rob Dial's Podcast on the Subject
Sunday, January 23, 2022
Just Finished Reading Dracula by Bram Stoker
The mythos of the vampire monster may have been part of Eastern European folklore for centuries, but when English writer Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in 1897 it forever placed the topic in the setting of a remote Transylvanian castle in Romania, with the Count being an urbane but ultimately predatory and evil bloodsucker, converting his victims into fellow vampires. A solicitor, Jonathan Harker, is sent to his castle from London to finalize arrangements for Dracula's purchase of a house in the city's outskirts...before long he is deep in danger as three vampire women set their sights (and very sharp teeth) on him...saved from their clutches at first by Dracula and later abandoned to them, the story takes a turn in its setting to the English coastal town of Whitby, where Harker's friends and associates...along with suitors of a friend of his fiancée's...begin to encounter a strange and unwelcome presence among them. As the story progresses, a Belgian professor, Abraham Van Helsing, recognizes the signs of vampire activity and joins them in combating Dracula...naturally I left out gobs of plot because I don't want to give away the story. Let's just say that many of the "rules" governing what vampires can and cannot do are laid out here, as well as how one can finally "kill" them...although in a manner of speaking they are already dead. The much more recent Stephanie Meyer Twilight series pretty much adopts all of this while making "her" vampires equivalent to humanity in their ability to choose between good and evil: Stoker's Dracula and his ilk, on the other hand, are completely evil and separated from God. Dracula's narrative is unconventional, consisting of a succession of journal entries and letters written by the various characters involved...beginning with Harker's accounts. I enjoyed the book, marveling that at my relatively late age I hadn't yet learned the fate of Count Dracula and those involved in the literary story. In childhood I saw him on the drive-in theater screen in the movies Horror of Dracula (from 1959) and Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966): Christopher Lee played the Count in them, with Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. Now I'm on to another great old monster classic: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley...
Saturday, January 22, 2022
My Picks and Preferences of Rest of NFL Playoffs
With the 2021 National Football Season playoffs, held in 2022 to confuse future sports historians looking back on it all, now past the wildcard games, we have four contests to look at this weekend. Of the eight remaining teams, here are my preferences:
Friday, January 21, 2022
Quote of the Week...from Mitch McConnell
Thursday, January 20, 2022
How About Digitally Switching James Bond Actors in Old Films?
Wednesday, January 19, 2022
Weekly Short Stories: 1981 Science Fiction, Part 1
Tuesday, January 18, 2022
Where I Stand on Voting Rights and Election Reform
In both 2018 and 2020 we had national elections, the latter including a presidential race. In each election occurred what I see as big problems regarding the integrity of the vote and outcome. In 2018...in California...ballot harvesting, illegal over most of the country, was in full swing and tipped a number of close congressional elections from Republican to Democratic. In ballot harvesting, party operatives canvas neighborhoods before the election is over to selectively visit voters in their own party with absentee ballots. If the voter hasn't mailed theirs in yet, the operatives will let them fill it out and promise to deliver it themselves. The result is batches of large amounts of ballots dumped into the mix at the end to be counted...I find this highly unethical, rendering election results dependent on the efficiency of political party machines instead of the will of the voter. In 2020 the notion of automatically sending absentee ballots in certain states to each and every eligible voter likewise gave me pause...I believe that voting at least on some level should require an effort on the part of the voter: the more passive the process is, the more likely abuse will occur. The worst effect of 2020, though, was Donald Trump's Sore Loser philosophy, transformed from a morally-bankrupt individual's hangup to his entire party, as the Republicans tried to undo the free and fair election results that had elected Joe Biden to be the next president. Then, in 2021 a number of Republican-controlled state governments enacted laws that tightened their election and voter laws...most of them I'm fine with, but sadly they also codified Trump's Sore Loser creed by enabling the partisan politicians to overthrow any elections that go the "wrong" way...this in my opinion is pure authoritarian fascism...
Now the Democrats in the U.S. Senate are trying to get two recalcitrant senators from their own party, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, to join them in a partisan voting bloc to temporarily suspend that body's filibuster for their voting rights bill. Although Manchin and Sinema have expressed support for the submitted legislation, they are balking at the notion of suspending the filibuster...I kind of agree with them. The bill's provisions set Federal standards for voting across the country and supersede state and local laws...that's the problem that Republicans have with it. I don't know of anything in the proposed 800-page law that prohibits states from engaging in "Sore-Loserism" and overturning elections because of baseless fraud claims, and it allows for universal ballot harvesting...if you have further information on these two points I'd appreciate you letting me know...
In my view, the single most important determiner of election results is voter turnout, and it's interesting to note that the Democratic (my) Party is the one that tends to suffer the most from off-year voter apathy, with state legislatures and governorships...even in so-called "blue" states...going consistently to Republican control, largely because so many Democratic voters simply sit on their hands and won't vote unless it's for president. The previous two Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton in 1994 and Barack Obama in 2010 saw their congressional majorities drastically swing to Republican control just two years into their respective administrations, hampering their ability to effectively govern...and it was largely due to their supporters refusing to vote in those elections, not because they were being persecuted in some way. I see the same thing happening in 2022, only instead of decrying voter apathy and irresponsibility I predict the media talking heads will say it was all because of voter suppression....
Monday, January 17, 2022
Rob Dial's Take on Fear and How to Deal With It
Sunday, January 16, 2022
Watching the Australian Open Tennis Tournament Starting Tonight
The 2022 edition of the Australian Open, the first of four Grand Slam professional tennis tournaments held throughout the calendar year, begins in earnest today with the opening "Round of 128"...coverage begins this evening at 7 on ESPN-2 (Gainesville Cox Channel 27). I'm not sure whether the matches to be shown are live or tape-delayed since Australia's time is half a day out of sync with ours here in the eastern United States. I got into watching tennis last August and September while recovering at home from surgery...the U.S. Open was exciting, with Daniil Medvedev winning the men's title and Emma Raducanu the women's. I was looking forward to seeing men's number one-ranked Novak Djokovic, who lost to Medvedev in that tourney's finale, defend his 2021 Australian Open championship...but Covid vaccination concerns ultimately led to him not being allowed to stay in Australia for the tournament. I still plan to watch it all, though. A funny thing happened while I was searching the Internet for the channel carrying it: I picked up that in a different country, either Britain or Canada, only Discovery Plus, a premium subscription channel, would be showing it and thought that was applicable to me here in America. We took Discovery Plus up on their 7-day free trial period and while browsing their programming lineup I was delighted to see that they carried old seasons of the Morgan Freeman-hosted science series Through the Wormhole, which I had watched when we had the Science Channel on our cable lineup. But this afternoon I tuned in to watch an episode and found out they had cut the series from their menu. Couple this disappointment with the fact that I discovered my earlier mistake and that ESPN and/or ESPN2 would be showing the tournament instead on "regular" TV, and it's "Goodbye, Discovery Plus"! The Australian Open will be on through January 30th...
Later...Melissa showed me that the Wormhole series (some of the seasons) are actually still on Discovery Plus, but they're buried in the search engine. I watched a couple of the second season (first season unavailable on this channel) last night...
Saturday, January 15, 2022
Constellation of the Month: Auriga (the Charioteer)
Friday, January 14, 2022
Quote of the Week...from Martin Luther King, Jr.
Thursday, January 13, 2022
Stunned and Dismayed by Dolphins' Firing of Head Coach Brian Flores
The other day I was browsing through the Microsoft news feed on my computer...admittedly not always the best way to get unbiased or accurate news...and came across an article listing the most likely new head coaching prospects to fill in a vacancy from an unsuccessful National Football team this year. I expected this kind of article immediately after the regular season and 18 of the league's 32 franchises didn't make the playoffs, although they all set their sights on them. Among the list of available possibilities was Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores...that can't be right, he's only just completed his third year. But no, Flores was fired the day after his team defeated their rival New England for the second time in a season and finished with a winning record of 9-8...that's significant because with 2020's 10-6 season it marks the first time since 2003 that the Dolphins have enjoyed two consecutive winning seasons! This after Flores' first season in which the team's management decided to divest themselves of their core, star players including quarterback Ryan Tannehill and planned to tank at 0-16 in order to garner high draft picks. Perhaps this was the time in which Brian Flores began to incur the wrath of Miami Dolphins management with their owner Stephen Ross and general manager Chris Grier because the newly hired coach scrapped and struggled with this inferior team throughout his 2019 debut season and actually pulled off 5 unexpected victories. And to turn it completely around the next year and win 10 was incredible! Flores, formerly the Patriots' defensive linebackers coach, has the much-needed talent of making his players believe in themselves and work hard to win games as a cohesive unit...yet Dolphins management just dumped him! For me, I'd have liked them to make the playoffs, which they just barely missed the last two years. But to see them in 2021 undergo their 7-game winning streak, coming back from an early injury-marred 1-7 start, made me feel that with Brian Flores the Miami Dolphins had finally found a true leader that could sustain them over the years. Second-year quarterback Tua Tagovailoa had suffered an early injury this season, but by its end was transforming into a very competent NFL quarterback. There seemed to be some sort of disagreement about his future with the team as owner Ross was the prime mover behind Tua's being drafted in the first place and Flores wanted to obtain a quarterback he felt could win more games for them. Well, the Dolphins blew it when they sacked Brian Flores....expect him to go on an become a Super Bowl-winning legend for ANOTHER franchise and expect the Miami Dolphins to return to their losing ways. Let's see if they can't go 0-17 this time around...I'm sure that would thrill owner Ross...
Wednesday, January 12, 2022
Weekly Short Stories: 1980 Science Fiction, Part 4
Tuesday, January 11, 2022
Just Finished Reading The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye, from 1970, is the first novel from award-winner author Toni Morrison...after reading Tar Baby I thought I'd check out some of her other works. Morrison is masterful with her intense and intricate characterizations...it seems that no one in her stories escapes scrutiny, much of it condemnatory yet at the same time exculpatory as she unravels the reasons why many people do bad...really bad...things to other people. The industrial belt city of Lorain, Ohio...close to Cleveland...is the setting in which the lives of two black girls, one from a strict-but-loving family and the other from a terribly broken one, are spotlighted. Claudia and her sister Frieda live in a tightly-knit nuclear family with both parents...Claudia sees everything and everyone through skeptical and often cynical eyes, sensitive to both the racism and sexism around her. Her friend Pecola, on the other hand, lives in a broken home with parents who physically abuse each other...the father has little-to-no moral compass in his life. She has a brother, Sammy, who repeatedly runs away...not at all the kind of material you might see in an old '80s' TV sit-com. Pecola believes the dogma that her own mother and the world around her has pounded into her psyche: that she is ugly, very ugly...and that those with lighter skin and blue eyes are better-looking...and generally better people than her. If only she had blue eyes, she grows to believe, her life would be so much better! Of course, Claudia is revolted by Pecola's perspective but loves her as a friend and tries to help her. Through the course of the story, Morrison goes back and forth in time to explore the origins of the various cast of characters, including both girls' parents and an itinerant pseudo-preacher with his own peculiar moral hang-ups. And moral hang-ups are something that the grownups here have in no short supply. It all supposedly takes place in twentieth century post-Depression America, and even though Lorain is nowhere near the Jim Crow Deep South, blacks and whites are still segregated and divided, with much antagonism and distrust between the two groups. The Bluest Eye is difficult to read, not because of the language or writing style but rather because it exposes the often sordid private lives and thoughts of people. In this sense it steps out of an ethnocentric story about a specific demographic group and becomes universal, and although I appreciate learning about diverse people's attitudes and experiences I also look for that universal application to humanity. We humans are indeed a pretty pathetic lot, hiding our dirty linen often in plain view of those around us while entertaining delusional self-images that greatly diverge from who we really are...and who we should be striving to become. This book is very disturbing, but it's also very honest and intimate with its characters...looks like I'll be reading another Toni Morrison novel soon...
Monday, January 10, 2022
Three Ways to Learn and Read Faster, According to Rob Dial
On a recent The Mind Mentor podcast, motivational guru Rob Dial listed and discussed three ways he believes folks can learn and read faster. The first I already do...kind of. He recommends Kindle for reading and then purchasing the Audible version option when obtaining books...still cheaper in his opinion than buying the paper hardcopy, and then the reader can simultaneously employ their eyes and ears (through Whispersync), helping them to better retain the material they cover. He also advocates using the Highlighter function that enables readers to filter out the most significant areas of the books they read. Along with this he points out that public libraries offer the Overdrive (or Libby) app that enables one to check out, for free, audiobooks to listen to on their computers or smartphones. Dial's second tip for learning and reading is to employ the Pomodoro technique of time management whereby one engages in intense, focused activity for 25 minutes and then fully rests from it for 5...and then returning to the cycle: he maintains that this resonates better with people's peaking during prolonged directed learning activity: I usually do something like this without the formality of the 25:5 time ratio. And finally, the Mindset Mentor suggests that whenever we learn something we immediately turn around and teach it to someone else...this is an old Stephen Covey point that runs counterintuitive to a lot of us. After all, knowledge and skill are often regarded as commodities that set us competitively above others and give us an edge over them...but sharing what we learned will greatly reinforce and strengthen it within us, making us even more knowledgeable and skillful. At the end of the podcast, Dial touts the use of YouTube as a great source of teaching...I know what he's talking about as you can learn just about anything on it. This was a good podcast, although I still see some use in good old-fashioned paper books even in this age of Kindle and Audible, especially since many of them are older and not yet offered in those formats...
Sunday, January 9, 2022
More About the Beatles' Get Back Sessions and Their Walk Through 1969
I've been continuing my slow watch of the Beatles' Get Back documentary on Disney Plus, a few sometimes painful minutes at a time. It's still just a few days into the project in early January, 1969 at their London Twickenham Studios site. It's been interesting hear Paul McCartney playing out fragments of songs that would later appear on the Abbey Road album (Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight) and as a solo artist two years later after the Beatles breakup (Another Day). George Harrison came into the studio with his own material as well...I Me Mine, The Inner Light and For You Blue were standouts. But John Lennon didn't seem to have any new songs to throw into the mix besides Gimme Some Truth (his Across the Universe was a holdover from the '68 White Album sessions) and Paul openly confronted him on this...John often appeared disheveled and out of it. At one session they sat around and speculated about the site of the project's closing concert, including a strange remote ancient stadium in northern Africa...only Paul seemed enthusiastic about even putting on a show. As for Ringo Starr, the Beatles' drummer, although rarely partaking in the band's musical creative process, he was consistently present and agreeable. If you didn't know anything about the Beatles' history you might think from what's been shown so far that it was Paul and George leading the creative process with Ringo and John providing the support. I know the outline of events that would transpire after this project in 1969...the Beatles would hire Allen Klein in February as their manager over the objection of Paul, who wanted his own soon-to-be own father-in-law for the job. Paul and John would respectively marry Linda Eastman and Yoko Ono in March and at the same time George would be arrested for pot possession with his wife Patti. The band recorded the Abbey Road album from February through August, it was released in September, and in the same month they signed a new long-term recording contract...soon after which John announced to the others his departure from the Beatles. That fall the hoax that Paul McCartney was dead from a 1966 car accident and was replaced by an imposter took hold in the popular culture...Paul's isolation with Linda at their rural estate compounded the mystery. The public at large would still believe that the Beatles were still together until McCartney's announcement with the release of his first solo album in the spring of 1970 that the band was finished. Ironically, a few weeks later the Let It Be album, based on the very Get Back sessions I've been watching, was released, boasting on its jacket that it was a "new phase" Beatles album. Living through 1969 as a 12-13 year old, I just remember what a cool, kick-ass song Get Back was...
Saturday, January 8, 2022
About the NFL Final Regular Season Weekend
Today and tomorrow mark the final weekend in the 2022 National Football League regular season. The number of games each team plays has increased this year from 16 to 17...unless you've experienced a tie game (like Pittsburgh) there will be no more 8-8 seasons: either you're a winner or a loser. And that's how the roller-coaster Miami Dolphins stand, at 8-8 with a home game against New England Sunday afternoon. After beating the Patriots in the season opener, Miami then proceeded to lose 7 straight games...and then abruptly turned around and won 7 straight, putting them at 8-7 and right in the middle of playoff contention. Then last week they went to Tennessee and completely folded against the Titans, 34-3...eliminating them from playoff contention. So their contest against the Pats will be to salvage a winning season, which I think they're very capable of accomplishing as long as they decide to show up for the game. Most of the rest of the games this weekend figure into the playoff scenario, with the AFC wild card slots up for grabs among several teams while the NFC has San Francisco and Philadelphia vying for the final spot. Although I'm working this afternoon and evening and will miss the Kansas City-Denver and Dallas-Philadelphia games, I plan on enjoying the league's final Sunday of regular season play...
Friday, January 7, 2022
Quote of the Week...from Melody Beattie
Thursday, January 6, 2022
About the January 6th Insurrection, One Year Later
Wednesday, January 5, 2022
Weekly Short Stories: 1980 Science Fiction, Part 3
Tuesday, January 4, 2022
How About an "Automatic Passenger" for My Car
Monday, January 3, 2022
Eight Things to Leave Behind for 2022, According to Podcaster Rob Dial
One of motivational coach/speaker Rob Dial's latest shows on his Mindset Mentor podcast had him listing and describing eight things to leave behind as I move into 2022: toxic relationships, negative self-talk, not following through on tasks and projects, reacting in the moment instead of taking time to breathe, people-pleasing, guilt about my past, doing things because I "should", and never asking for help with anything. As with his other shows, I find his presentation loaded with good advice, but often with some important caveats. As I had written in an earlier article, sure, I want to avoid those who always seem to be in a negative, critical, or manipulative frame of mind...but also recognize that perhaps me being around them could help them in their own lives as a counter-influence. It's true that I tend to take a cynical view of a lot around me, but I also tend to undersell my own abilities as well with what I tell myself. Not finishing what I started has been a big sticking point...Dial's "hundred days" project whereby I list a small number of changes in my life that I prioritize for that period of consecutive days (click here my 12-20-21 article) is a good tool for dealing with this. I could also work on not instantly reacting to various provocations I see around me...our "mentor" suggests setting a few moments aside when this happens and take a few deep breaths while doing a mental re-set. As for people-pleasing, since I'm already very sensitive to when others are trying to manipulate me, I tend to avoid trouble in this area. With the irrational burden of past guilt, Dial quoted someone as follows: "The mountains you're carrying you were only meant to climb", meaning that mistakes are intended as a means to ultimately become a better person, not for self-condemnation. I'm also somewhat immune to the guilt-mongering involved in "should" behavior: Dial puts it poignantly by saying we should stop "shoulding" all over ourselves. And finally, that part about not asking for help is sadly a deeply ingrained part of my personality, going back as far as I can remember...even into early childhood. So sometimes I have to pick and choose different Mindset Mentor podcasts, just as you probably have to go through some throwaway articles of mine to find something useful...hey, even my famous bands like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin have album tracks I regularly skip over. But I respect Rob Dial's talent in verbal expression and his wisdom is usually spot-on. I'll check in on another of his podcasts next week...
Sunday, January 2, 2022
Just Finished Reading Calculating the Cosmos by Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart is a prolific popular science writer...he's a British mathematician and has also dabbled in science fiction writing. I just finished reading his 2016 book Calculating the Cosmos, in which he goes through selected interesting topics concerning our solar system, galaxy, the universe...and their respective origins, laying out the different historical viewpoints as well as the current scientific perspective, including ongoing disputes. Like the other popular science book I just read, David Sumpter's The Ten Equations That Rule the World, Calculating the Cosmos...while generally easy to follow...does dip into some rather technical jargon that loses me for a bit until I can regain my footing. More than about math, though, this book is an excellent introduction to the fields of astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology, discussing interesting (to me) topics such as how Earth got its Moon, the various planets and their satellites, the Kuiper Belt, Oort Cloud, the nature of black holes, the big bang theory, the cosmic radiation background, dark matter and dark energy. Along the way Stewart surprised me by claiming that some of these concepts aren't necessarily established truths and that his colleagues are coming up with alternative theories to explain observations without involving them, especially dark matter and dark energy...I found that pretty provocative. And, as was the case with Sumpter's book, I intend to reread Calculating the Cosmos...nonfiction that has a lot of technical content has to be approached differently than with regular fiction. I'm also interested in checking out some of Stewart's other works...
Saturday, January 1, 2022
My December 2021 Running and Walking Report
In December 2021 I ran a total of 148 miles, running on every day of the month with 14.4 miles being my longest single run...albeit accomplished very slowly. I managed to enter and finish my first race since my July heart surgery: Gainesville's weekly Depot Parkrun 5K on the 4th. With walking I didn't need to be as intentional as with running...my job automatically involves much of it, and I finished the month with 142 miles. As for January, I'd like to continue with this level of running and walking while participating in two races: another Depot Parkrun early in the month and the Newnan's Lake 15K in far eastern Gainesville on the 29th...I've run both multiple times before. This, of course, hinges on the new Omicron upsurge in Covid-19 and whether or not the event organizers follow through with holding them or decide to cancel out. Regardless, I want to continue with my running and walking even if they are more or less solitary endeavors...