Melissa and I were to start a two-week vacation today...we still have still the time off, but our more ambitious plans were scuttled until a later date when we both fell ill this week...we're still smack dab in the middle of recovery, making progress with it. When we're better, we can see about some alternate plans for the remainder of this period...for now it's rest, rest, rest. I'd mentioned in an earlier article that this blog would probably get a bit of a break during this time. I still plan to take a brief vacation from it, but who knows: if I feel the urge to write and post something, don't be surprised. But if not, I should be back by the end of the first week of August...
Saturday, July 22, 2023
Friday, July 21, 2023
Quote of the Week...from Ernest Hemingway
Thursday, July 20, 2023
Podcaster Lays Out Ways to "Hit Goals"
Wednesday, July 19, 2023
Weekly Short Stories: 1992 Science Fiction, Part 3
Tuesday, July 18, 2023
Constellation of the Month: Draco (the Dragon)
Monday, July 17, 2023
Work or Vacation, It's All Good
Sometimes it's a good idea to just sit here and write some free-flowing stuff. Right now, it's midmorning on a Monday, my workweek ahead of me before I begin a two-week vacation. But I have found that, within my daily normal routines...and that includes going off to work...I can find a sense of purpose, balance, relaxation and refreshment in my life that many tend to believe can only happen with an absence of structure and accountability. For me, a vacation is a break in my routines, time to experience something new and different, and possibly go on an adventure. Whether I'm traveling or not during this period, I am content with the time off, as well as when I return to the "old grind" when it ends. Structure's good...but so is adventure. Things like this blog, foreign language study and an assortment of other daily routines I'm engaged in may take a brief break during that time, but there is also fun living in that present moment and experiencing whatever gets thrown my way. It's all good...
Sunday, July 16, 2023
Just Finished Reading Hot Six by Janet Evanovich
Picking back up Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum mystery book series after several years, it took me a little bit of time to recall all the main recurring characters and circumstances...but after reading High Five last week, I felt that the next book would be a quick work of reading...it was. In Hot Six, almost comically incompetent bounty hunter Stephanie Plum, who works for a Trenton, New Jersey bail bonds company to bring in people missing their appointment court appearances, still plies her trade...with the typically mixed results. The story's main theme is the disappearance of her mentor Ranger, a mysterious man who seems to be always on the edge of the law and more of a James Bond type. Ranger is being implicated in the murder of one of the sons of an aging local gangland boss. One of Stephanie's competitors gets her company's assignment to capture and bring in Ranger...Stephanie herself cannot belief that Ranger could be a murderer and sets out to find him and investigate the killing on her own. Weaving through the plot, as usual, is her family...including feisty Grandma Mazur who lives with her a spell, her friend Lula who works at the bail bonds office, and her cop/lover Joe Morelli, who seems secretly involved in the investigation as well. Plus, Bob the golden retriever may have made his series debut here after Stephanie ends up virtually adopting him. And as usual, others are hounding her, including a creepy pair of men tailing her everywhere and often threatening her: they're after Ranger as well. As good mystery books go, the plot undergoes a couple of interesting twists before it all gets turned upside down at the end. I was okay with Hot Six, enough to go on to the next installment of Evanovich's series. I enjoy the earthy first-person narration of protagonist Stephanie Plum, and the humor here is top-notch. It does, however, portray violence as a more common, everyday occurrence than I'd like to imagine....
Saturday, July 15, 2023
Enjoying My Day Off with Family and Learning
I've been enjoying my day off, first of two, with Melissa and my grown children...as well as exploring the learning opportunities provided by three Internet applications, one of them only instituted late last year. As I've already written on this blog, YouTube is loaded with interesting educational content, and you can find out just about anything...as long as it isn't invasively personal...by searching their site. While browsing them a few weeks ago, I came across polyglot Steve Kaufmann's endeavor of LingQ, a language-learning site designed to teach languages the right way (at least the way I see it), by gradually building a large passive vocabulary in the target language through reading and listening, with graded lessons and opportunities to insert my own material from the Internet. They also provide tutors and teachers online, and the range of available languages for study is wide. I may use this blog to write regularly about my progress here, much as I have done with my past running. It's all very interesting and has become even more so through the very recent innovation, an AI chatbox called ChatGPT that searches the Web for textual material to formulate answers to an incredibly wide variety of questions. It was on Kaufmann's YouTube channel that I first heard about ChatGPT...I asked it to write a couple of stories that I plan to translate into the languages I'm studying and then transfer them over to LingQ for study...pretty impressive stuff. I am also going back to the very beginning of this blog, back in April of 2007, and translating those articles I wrote to my target languages and studying them on the LingQ site: since this blog has more than 5000 articles, there is an endless supply of stuff from it I can use. I also use the Kendra Listening Practice YouTube channel to improve my listening skills, as well as listening daily to brief segments of radio broadcasts in the languages I'm studying. I can tell I'm making progress, but it's a long journey to proficiency and confidence in them...that's okay with Steve, whose observations and philosophy on language learning pretty much resonate with mine: his main emphasis is making it all interesting and fun...
Friday, July 14, 2023
Quote of the Week...from Ringo Starr
Well, actually here are two quotes from the great drummer for the Beatles, one short and one comparatively long:
Thursday, July 13, 2023
Some Wimbledon Comments as End Nears
Wednesday, July 12, 2023
Weekly Short Stories: 1992 Science Fiction, Part 2
Today I continue my look at short stories from 1992 as they appeared in Gardner Dozois' anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Tenth Annual Collection. 1992 was a presidential election, and just a year earlier it looked as if incumbent George H.W. Bush (known back then as just George Bush) would glide to an easy reelection, his poll numbers being so high after the successful Persian Gulf War. But the economy tanked into a recession, and the entry of populist businessman H. Ross Perot most likely took away more votes from Bush than from his Democratic Party opponent Bill Clinton...the later easily won election although he only garnered some 43% of the popular vote. But back to more of those stories from that year...
Tuesday, July 11, 2023
Weather Here Still Sucks, By the Way
Let's see, the last article on this blog I wrote about the local weather sucking was on June 25...don't get any ideas that anything's gotten better: it hasn't. The heat/humidity combination is the worst I've experience here in Gainesville, and it's been bad in summers past. We're also getting bombed with torrential rains coming seemingly out of nowhere. Early yesterday afternoon I was driving in sunny weather to work, planning to stop off at the Publix right next to my workplace. But as I got to about a mile from my destination, I saw a rapidly moving zone of darkness in the sky headed straight toward me...suddenly I was in the middle of it, struggling to see through my deluged and foggy windshield on managing to finally park it at my workplace, abandoning any hope that day for a grocery visit. And even though the rain finally abated some, the localized flooding it created made me have to walk through some suddenly very deep puddles just to get into my building. Conditions like these recently have also contributed to my personal respiratory allergies, as weeds and other allergen-producing plants are rapidly growing out of control. The only relief from this I see is to confine myself to air conditioning...and take a vacation out of the area starting July 23rd: looking forward to that...
Monday, July 10, 2023
Wimbledon Net Snub Set in Advance, Wrong Player Blamed
Victoria Azarenka is from Belarus, and her opponent this past Sunday in the Wimbledon's women singles tournament was Elina Svitolina, from Ukraine. After their match, which Svitolina won, Azarenka did not walk up to the net to congratulate the winner...and the crowd booed her, reacting as if her actions were politically motivated because of the ongoing war being Russia and her country on one side, and Svitolina's on the other. Of course, Belarus, is the ally of invading Russia, and Ukraine is the land and people being ravaged in an old-style imperial land-grab, the likes of which haven't been seen since Saddam Hussein's Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the horrible conflicts in former Yugoslavia during the following decade. Svitolina, as Azarenka later pointed out in her own defense, had already announced that she would refuse to socially interact with any players from the two aggressor nations, even if they had given up their national affiliation as the Wimbledon authorities had demanded as a precondition of them returning to play after last year's ban. I cannot judge Svitolina...what would I have done in her place...but neither can I criticize Azarenka, who is in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" position. On some level, these three countries will always neighbor one another, so I would prefer that individual citizens from them display a higher level of mutual compassion and respect for each other, even if their politicians...and I'm speaking mainly about the Belarus and Russian autocrats...don't. Just the other day I wrote that EVERY match ended with the two sides, winner and loser, meeting at the net with friendliness, congratulations and encouragement. Oh well, so much for that...
Sunday, July 9, 2023
US Supreme Court Stacked, Ideological, Unprincipled
The recent rulings by a politically partisan, stacked United States Supreme Court have made a sick joke of our supposedly highest level of jurisprudence. It was all foreseeable after Senate Majority Leader, Republican Mitch McConnell stole away a Barack Obama Democratic nomination in 2016 (nine months before that year's presidential election) on the excuse that "the voters should decide" who gets to nominate the new justice while in 2020 forcing through a Donald Trump Republican nomination just days before that year's election...which Trump incidentally lost. And guess what? McConnell's very proud of what he did. Now let's look at two rulings and focus on this court's leader, Chief Justice John Roberts. In the 6-3 ruling striking down the Democratic Biden administration's planned forgiveness of up to ten thousand dollars of college student debt, helping 43 million Americans in the process...not just "billionaires" as Republican opponents like to argue...Roberts wrote that Congress had an appropriate role in the president's actions, which he claimed was denied them. Yet back in 2010 when he ruled with the conservative SCOTUS wing to strike down a Congress-passed electoral reform bill that sought to properly regulate campaign financing, he had no problem interfering with both the legislative and executive branches, equating spending money with "freedom of speech" protected by the First Amendment. As a matter of fact, this pretense version of a Supreme Court seems to like to invoke free speech whenever it wants to rule one way or another. Another recent ruling, playing that First Amendment trump card, was to make an expansive ruling that a Colorado software entrepreneur was legally entitled to deny services to a gay couple due to the businessman's personal beliefs about their lifestyle. Yet John Roberts, from the beginning of his tenure as Chief Justice, always stressed that for a case to be held as worthy of a court hearing, the plaintiff needed to establish standing, meaning that some party had actually done something to them. That didn't happen in this case, as our Chief Justice conveniently chose to ignore his cherished standard in favor of ideology. And, sad to say, of all the six conservative justices sitting on the high bench, it is John Roberts who I regard as the most fair-minded! Like I said, the US Supreme Court is stacked, ideological and unprincipled...truly a sick joke...and I haven't even started to discuss the alleged corruption on the part of Justices Thomas and Alito...
Saturday, July 8, 2023
Just Finished Reading High Five by Janet Evanovich
Janet Evanovich is a prolific fiction writer whose Stephanie Plum mystery series has been very successful: Janet is eighty years old and just came out with the thirtieth Plum novel. I began reading the series myself six years ago but drifted away after the fourth book. I'm not sure why that was, since I liked the characters even if they seemed a little too much of a "Jersey thing"...it's all set around Trenton, and you might think from the dialogue that some of the characters just might be related to those on Jersey Shore. Protagonist Stephanie Plum is a spunky if not very adept bounty hunter...too many of her efforts at dragging in bail jumpers on behalf of her cousin Vinnie's bail bonds agency end in failure, often dismally. There are some ongoing back stories transferring from novel to novel, including her friendship with Lula, an ex-prostitute working now as Vinnie's clerk and who seems to possess more common sense than most of the other characters...especially Stephanie. Then there's Morelli, a cop who's her main love interest and Ranger, a mysterious dude who helps her with some of the more daring, armed aspects of her trade. In High Five, lots of different stuff is going on: Plum is assigned to bring in Briggs, a "little person"...of course, she botches it up and although he is turned in, his lawsuit threat causes Vinnie to temporarily house him with her in her apartment...that's hilarious. The bad dude Ramirez (from the first book) has been let out of jail and is stalking our heroine for revenge...naturally, her ineptness prevents her from ever detecting him. But what turns into the main story is the mysterious disappearance of her uncle Fred, who vanished in broad daylight while doing ordinary chores in town. I liked the informal first-person narration by Stephanie Plum and the irreverent banter throughout the story was very funny, for the most part...especially with Briggs and Plum's inimitable Grandma Mazur. High Five is a good, solid mix of humor and mystery...and of course, while there's danger you know that Stephanie will always be around for the next book. Maybe I'll stick around longer to read the rest of Evanovich's series...if my reading can catch up with her speedy writing, that is...
Friday, July 7, 2023
Quote of the Week...from Robert Heinlein
Thursday, July 6, 2023
Enjoying Following Wimbledon Tennis This Year
Wednesday, July 5, 2023
Weekly Short Stories: 1992 Science Fiction, Part 1
Tuesday, July 4, 2023
Happy Fourth of July
Whoopee, I'm off from work! Now that I got that off my chest, let me just wish you and your loved ones a happy American Independence Day. Stay safe with the firecrackers and on the road. As a dear recent president would say on many occasions, "God bless you, and God bless the United States of America." And may I just interject one little word of advice to those getting carried away with politics and perceived conspiracies: set aside a little, teensy-weensy bit of time in your hectic schedule to try first to get your facts straight, and then to try to see things...if only for a couple of minutes...from the other guy's point of view. I think if enough folks did that, it would make my beloved country stronger and healthier...whad'ya say, all you patriots out there?
Monday, July 3, 2023
Podcaster Spells Out Ten Mistakes Language Learners Make
Although I've only recently been listening to Steve Kaufmann's podcast, I have access to many he's done in the months before I heard of him. Kaufmann is a polyglot...he speaks some 20 languages at last count...who founded a subscription-driven website, LingQ, that uses his techniques of language learning and offers it to others: I recently signed up and like it. One of his earlier podcasts, from a couple of months ago, dealt with mistakes that language learners make. Listed, they are:
(1) Expecting you can learn fast (don't have unrealistic expectations).
(2) Expecting to never forget words or grammar patterns you have learned (but learning is itself a process of forgetting and relearning).
(3) Trying to master the grammar rules in detail up front (nothing wrong in looking them up from time to time, though).
(4) Expecting the language to become clear too soon (patience, patience).
(5) Sticking with learning content that is too easy (good for review but need to challenge with more difficult material).
(6) Thinking you can get by with just a few words (once a native speaker starts to talk back to you then you'll realize you need to learn a lot more).
(7) Thinking you should speak well even if you don't speak often (it takes a lot of practice).
(8) Being afraid of making mistakes when you speak (Kaufmann just came back from Poland where he gave two interviews IN POLISH and laughed about all the mistakes he made).
(9) Speaking with only non-native speakers (non-native speakers tend to limit the range of their vocabulary).
(10) Dealing with the challenge from native speakers when they want to practice their English on you (either find some willing to speak in your target language or make an arrangement to alternate languages with those wanting to speak English).
Steve Kaufmann impressed me by his emphasis on the gradual assimilation of large amounts of words by reading and listening. From time to time, I'll let you know how I'm doing on the LingQ site...