Favorite Song #1

When the Levee Breaks by Led Zeppelin (from Led Zeppelin (IV), 1971)

By the time I heard my first Led Zeppelin song (Whole Lotta Love) in January 1971, this British hard blues-rock band had already issued three albums. I didn’t like Whole Lotta Love (I still don’t), and only heard three subsequent songs, Livin’ Lovin’ Maid, Immigrant Song, and Black Dog, until one day in 1973 when I heard Stairway to Heaven in its entirety. Like many others, I grew to consider it as a favorite of mine, and looked forward to hearing new Zeppelin songs. At the end of 1973, D’yer Maker was released, and I liked it as well. As the 70s wore on, album-rock radio stations (like 103.5 WSHE and 94.9 ZETA-4 in South Florida) saturated their playlists with Led Zeppelin songs. One of them had an exciting instrumental beginning and lead-up, but once singer Robert Plant started singing, I’d switch stations. Back then, I never listened to this song all the way through. It was When the Levee Breaks, the final track on their heralded “Fourth” album. It wasn’t until a period of Led Zeppelin revival in 1989-1991 that I heard it in its entirety, and by that time I was impressed! As a matter of fact, I’ve considered it to be my all-time favorite song since 1991!

When the Levee Breaks is actually a cover, rearranged to a great extent, of an old blues song with the same title by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie. Its subject is the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which affected the Mississippi River area and caused great damage, more than 200 deaths, and a great dislocation of people. After Katrina, this song was played a lot as a fitting tribute to those suffering from the effects of the broken levees in New Orleans. It begins with a powerful, loud drum beat followed by a shrill, whining harmonica that keeps the listener company off and on throughout the song. Robert Plant’s singing, Jimmy Page’s guitar work (with bassist John Paul Jones), and John Bonham’s relentless pounding on the drums fill When the Levee Breaks with a sense, to be sure, of blues and foreboding, but also of endurance and survival. And I suppose that it’s this, on top of the dazzling music that this song is filled with, that’s made it my favorite for so long. From beginning to end, there isn’t a weak moment anywhere.

As Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham collaborated in a way that other bands could only dream of, with an uncanny sense of what worked and what didn’t. I own all of their studio albums now and am very familiar all of the material on them. My other “Zep” favorites are Your Time is Gonna Come, Dazed and Confused, Ramble On, Bring It On Home, Hey Hey What Can I Do, Traveling Riverside Blues, Friends, Gallows Pole, Bron-Y-Aur Stomp, Bron-Y-Aur, Battle of Evermore, Misty Mountain Hop, Four Sticks, Going to California, The Song Remains the Same, Over the Hills and Far Away, Dancing Days, No Quarter, The Ocean, In the Light, Candy Store Rock, In the Evening, Poor Tom, and Wearing and Tearing. If I had done my “Top 30 Favorites” fifteen years ago, many of them would have been Led Zeppelin songs. Although my interest in them has settled a little, I still greatly respect this band and their works. And When the Levee Breaks still tops everything!

With Fans Like These

There’s nothing to me like sitting back and watching a good sporting event, be it a football game, basketball game, the Olympics, one of the Triple Crown races, the baseball playoffs, or other events. It’s fun to watch how the different sports are played. But to really get into them, I need to be rooting for somebody to win (and against their opponents). Naturally, being from the state of Florida, I tend to root for teams that represent my state. If I lived in, say, New York, I’d be pulling for teams from that area. And within Florida, I support the University of Florida because I’m a UF alumnus and I happen to live here in Gainesville (where it’s located). It’s a good feeling when my teams win and it’s a bad feeling when they lose. But the effect, however I look at it, is short-lived and I go on afterward with other things in my life. That doesn’t seem to be the way some others handle sports, though.

Back in the early 1980s, the Florida Gator football team was making a comeback to prominence under Coach Charley Pell. One year, they were getting toward the end of the season and had a home game scheduled against cross-state rival the University of Miami, who were also doing well under their coach Howard Schnellenberger. Before the game, most fans here thought that UF was the slightly better team, but as the game wore on, the Hurricanes began to pull away from the Gators. Toward the end of the game, Miami had built up a 28-7 lead over Florida. Some Gator fans in the stands apparently thought that their opponents were “bad people” for beating their team, so they began throwing objects, including glass bottles, at the Miami bench. This so infuriated the Miami coach that, at the very end of the game when Florida fumbled the ball deep in their own territory, he had his team kick a field goal, just to run the score up on them. Afterwards, most of the outrage expressed in Gainesville was not about the fans’ behavior, but about the last-second field goal! I just don’t get it. Why do people get carried away so much like this? When the U.S. played soccer against Mexico in Mexico, the fans there behaved horribly against the Americans. And in 1971, an actual war broke out between El Salvador and Honduras because of rioting associated with a soccer game between those two countries. But the worst example of people getting carried away with their teams in sports has to be the Olympic Games, not only in how fans behave, but also how the teams are covered in television. How many times have you heard the phrase "America’s hopes in such-and-such an event are---" in the course of the Olympics? It’s almost embarrassing to me how the American fans at Olympics, whenever the U.S. is hosting them, whoop and holler whenever their team is doing well. Why not applaud excellence, regardless what part of the world it’s coming from? Whether my country of 300 million wins a medal in ski jumping or not, what difference should that make for me? The nationalism in this respect borders on jingoism, as far as I’m concerned. And it’s not just the fans. If you are from—say Norway, or Japan, and you win the Gold medal in something, then you are a celebrity in those countries. But in the U.S., no one knows or cares who you are. However, if an American pulls in the Gold, then rest assured that there are all sorts of lucrative endorsements and advertising deals in the works because that athlete showed that the U.S. better than all the other countries, at least for that event. Coverage of different events tends to be skewed toward areas where the U.S. is in the running for a medal. And I’ve actually watched coverage of events that virtually ignored the foreign leaders and instead concentrated on the Americans who were back in the pack. Aside from that, the American athletes are always given more human interest coverage in special interviews and “life stories”, although in recent years, they’ve tried to include some athletes from other nations as well.

Once, many years ago, I was at my local YMCA, which had an elementary martial arts class for little children. I was watching while the kids were paired off against each other to perform their exercises. There was a small, competitive girl there who was matched with a boy who had little experience. As they did their little mock fight-exercise, I heard a frenzied woman, apparently the girl’s mother, yell out, “Kill him!” To me, that says it all. If this is the direction that sports is taking us, then I’d rather foreswear it all and just stick to other interests. Yes, maybe I’ll just go down about five spots on my TV dial from ESPN to Home Shopping Network, where everybody’s a winner and they don’t care where you’re from (as long as you have money to spend on their merchandise)!

Moving On Up

Part of having a happy, meaningful life is making goals for oneself and fulfilling them. Some goals may be personal in nature, with only the person directly involved knowing them, perhaps along with close family members. With other aspirations, though, fulfillment may be expressed in a public environment, with titles or awards bestowed that give the achiever a sense of moving up in a social sense. A prime example of this is someone who graduates from college and can then attach abbreviations like B.A., B.S., M.A., M.S., Ph.D., M.D., etc., to their names. Getting a doctorate in anything entitles them the use of the socially honorific title “doctor” before their names as well. In the workplace, promotions up the hierarchical ladder or organizational flow-chart (or any other model that works for you) produce a similar effect. Sometimes such a person, who gets the feeling of “movin’ on up” (like the characters of George and Louise Jefferson in the 70’s sitcom The Jeffersons), will manifest this change by drastically changing his or her lifestyle to reflect the perceived rise in status. And, unfortunately, that change may also involve dumping friends who are perceived as belonging to the previous “level” (or at least changing the relationship with them to a more condescending tone).

Regrettably, I have experienced this sort of put-down in the past, particularly when I attended high school and during the immediate years thereafter. In school, I was moderately successful, with slightly better than average grades, but not to the point where I was winning special awards or competitions. This cut across both academics and athletics. After they attained greater acceptance and recognition from both teachers and fellow students for their achievements, a small number of my friends began to regard me as an unequal when I was around them. And being pretty sensitive to this sort of thing, I began to avoid them and to no longer regard them as friends. It’s sad that this sort of thing happens, because after graduation and the students disperse and go down their own personal paths through adulthood, often it is the last impressions one has about a fellow student that one holds on to through the many years to follow. I’d like to be an optimist and hope that some maturity and humanity may have filtered down through the years on some of my former friends, and maybe this has happened, who knows.

However, having said that about my own personal grievances, it also bears noting that those in any workplace setting who were formerly equal-status colleagues but now may have a supervisory or managerial position must, at least on the job, change their professional relationship with their colleagues. This is understandably a very touchy thing, since it’s within the nature of the work structure that superiors give orders to subordinates, and each change in the relationships in that regard involves some adjusting and maturity from both ends. That, however, is quite different in nature than the experiences I related from my school years.

But all that aside, I hope that my old buddies (the ones who are still with us, that is) have found the things in life that bring them happiness and meaning. Sure, I feel some resentment about the past, but I also know that sometimes “moving on up” in life entails some “moving on” as well. It’s good to work toward goals that bring rewards and titles. And attaining them is something that is worth sharing with friends and loved ones, whether I’m the one attaining them or the one being shared with. And that is also something that I have personally experienced (and am continuing to experience)!

Six Billion Points of Light

When we look out at a cloudless, moonless night sky far from city lights, it’s amazing how many stars there are visible to the naked eye. Even the planet Uranus is visible in this setting (if it’s above the horizon). But one of the more remarkable things in the sky is the Milky Way, which is just a view from our perspective of the more densely stellar-populated sections of our own galaxy. We can directly see how stars are distributed in the sky, at least above the horizon, and extrapolate what they are like below the horizon (for example, if the Sun on a hot summer noontime is above me, then it, at midnight, is straight down below). Just because stars “set” in the west doesn’t mean that they disappear, although as a child I emotionally felt that, even though I intellectually knew better. With this in mind, I’d like to play an “imagination game” for a few minutes.

Every living human being on earth is, at this moment in time, located in a specific place. From where I am, I can theoretically point to any individual on Earth (or even the few that are supposedly undergoing alien abductions out in space). Naturally, for nearly the entire Earth’s population, I would have to do this without the benefit of sight, since people are hidden because of factors like distance and physical obstacles (including the Earth’s curvature). But if somehow every human being emitted a type of light that passed straight through opaque matter, how would the distribution of humanity appear from my own perspective, where I am now located? I submit that the effect would resemble our night sky, except that the lights would be from below instead of above. Also, since the nearest people would emit the brightest lights, those brightest individual lights would be at or slightly below the horizon. They would also be clustered together in certain zones that reflected densely populated areas. And as I looked further down and around, I would see something like the Milky Way representing more distant densely populated areas. But as long as I stay put where I am, then, unlike the night sky, these human “stars” will not rise and set like the celestial ones. Instead, the brightest will change their positions and brightness very erratically, while the lower “Milky Way-like” hazes will remain largely unchanged.

If I looked straight down, there would be no lights, but with me facing north, a little to the left of straight down would show increasing clusters of lights, indicated that my imaginary gaze is sweeping eastern across Australia. About sixty degrees north of straight down, there would be an enormously bright patch of “human haze”, representing the Far East. Another bright patch, reflecting Western Europe and its dense population, would be much closer to the horizon, in the northeast direction. America’s own population centers would shine just below the horizon from my north-northeast to the west-northwest. But most of the area below me would be empty or almost empty, reflecting our vast oceans and sparsely population areas. Indeed, although humanity is very adaptable to vastly different living conditions and climates, we tend to bunch up together to an extreme level in some places!

Now what is the point of all this? Aside from the fact that I have a tendency to drift off into reverie, this exercise points out that humanity is “out there” like the stars, even if we can’t see it. As humans, we tend to be tribal by nature, ascribing traits of legitimacy and importance more to those we can see and be around the most, while those who never cross our sights don’t seem quite as “real”. I think this is one of the problems we have when there is a war going on somewhere in the world, but all we seem to care about are the casualties that our own country accrues, which, although they are important to be sure, usually pale in comparison to the amount of suffering incurred by the population at the site of that conflict. And wars that we don’t have forces directly involved in? They might as well not exist, for all of the attention we give them. The same goes for natural disasters as well. In 1969, Hurricane Camille devastated coastal Mississippi, bringing about 259 deaths, a tragedy no doubt. But the following year a hurricane (cyclone) hit East Pakistan (soon to be Bangladesh), killing around 100,000 people! But very few people over here even knew that this occurred, much less cared about it! Nowadays, though, the situation has changed somewhat (but not enough). Look at the extensive coverage given the tsunami that killed more than 100,000 in Southern and Southeast Asia in 2005. This is due, of course, in large part to the more speedy and mobile communications technology that is progressively binding the population of our planet together more tightly and intricately. To the extent that we can respond more appropriately to emergencies affecting others not in our own area, this is a good thing. Anything that helps us to see the others dwelling on Earth with us as equally legitimate and valuable individual human beings, no matter how disconnected in distance or culture they may seem to us, only bodes well for our future collective survival and prosperity.

Novelty and the Norm

It seems that there is always something on the horizon in our lives that isn’t quite within our grasps, but it sure would desirable to have it. Whether it’s the latest new phone/computer/MP3/game system, the newest car/minivan/SUV/pickup truck, the next book or movie in a popular series, or anything else that rings novel to us, obtaining it seems so important at first. But our nature as humans is such that we instinctively and unconsciously adapt ourselves to things that enter our lives and linger. We take whatever around us that is unusual and, without thinking, accustom ourselves to it to the point where it is no longer a novelty, but rather has become the norm. While this human trait carries with it survival value for us, it also presents a dilemma that many of us apparently do not and, perhaps, will never understand.

Do you remember as a child going shopping with your family and seeing a toy somewhere that was so new, so different, that you absolutely had to have it? Even to the point when, long after you’ve left the store, you would dwell in your thoughts on how much you wanted it? And then, behold, on your birthday or at a holiday like Christmas, there it was, yours at last! And do you also remember playing with it a while until, after the novelty wore off, you lost interest and put it away, rarely to be seen again? Well, as children, this sort of infatuation with the new is common, but it lasts throughout our lives as well. Just look at all those people who lined up recently to purchase the new iPhone. But as adults, we get quickly accustomed and finally jaded to technology that will seem obsolete within five years. Every new computer model seems to have more new bells and whistles to make it the “next big thing”. I remember thinking how cool it was in 1988 to have my own personal computer that I could run programs and store information on 3½ inch diskettes. What a relic that machine is now!

So this quick ability to adapt to the new can inadvertently create a sense of restlessness in society. Doesn’t it seem that, with each new product that quickens things for us, people end up just becoming more impatient? There may be a microwave to quickly cook our food, but it’s a drag if we have to wait our turn to use it!

Conversely, humans have the capacity to adapt to adversities as well, even to the point of tolerating situations that would normally seem completely intolerable. I am always amazed when I read something or watch a show about how the European Jews who, having to live under Nazi domination and horrible persecution during World War II, living under excruciatingly deplorable conditions in ghettos or, worse, concentration camps, nevertheless would have their own daily routines and patterns. This, on one hand, helped them to survive through their ordeal, but on the other hand gave a perverse sense of normality to their wretched treatment. And speaking of wretched, who at one time or another hasn’t heard of a home being discovered whose owner lived surrounded by scores of emaciated animals living in unbelievable filth and stench? In a case like that, it may have just started out with one or two dogs or cats, and through progressive negligence, the owner just got used to the situation and never really consciously noticed the deteriorating living conditions.

So, being able to adapt to the new is both a blessing and a curse. Like any tool, it can be used or abused. Part of growing into adulthood involves learning to be able to discern the limits to which a principle may apply, and to beware of situations that may call for different lines of action. Doing things solely for the sake of novelty just desensitizes people to novelty. Doing things solely for maintaining the norm just desensitizes people to what the norm really is. Better to learn to abide by more meaningful guidelines when making decisions, don’t you think?

Languages on My Blog

During the late 1970s, there was an interesting small magazine called Quinto Lingo, which was devoted to languages. Not linguistics per se, but the actual study of foreign languages and publication of foreign language material that various contributors sent in. In any particular issue, there would be several articles about different languages, some in the languages themselves, along with some elementary material from time to time about a particular language’s grammar and vocabulary. There was also a readers’ letter section, which was pretty illuminating. Hardly an issue went by when at least one letter didn’t point out mistakes in an article from a previous issue. It got to the point where I would just presume that any article from Quinto Lingo that I read would not be "perfect". Which was all right with me! I was just happy to be able to peruse a publication that celebrated languages. And in that spirit, I intend to write, from time to time on this blog, material about foreign languages, material in foreign languages, and a record of my studies learning certain foreign languages.

To be able to do this in the way that I intend, I will need to familiarize myself with other fonts. Russian uses the Cyrillic script, which I’ve been adept with since 1976, but not on a computer keyboard. For Chinese and Japanese, I may need to confine my writings in those languages to their Romanized versions, at least until I can figure out how to put characters and syllabaries on the computer screen. Even with the Romanized Chinese pinyin script, though, I’ll need to delineate tones in an effective way. Languages such as French, German, Spanish, Polish, and Vietnamese have special diacritic marks. I am hopeful that eventually I’ll be able to write on this blog material in these languages that is in their full scripts as they would be read by their own native speakers.

I already have a lot of study material in these aforementioned languages in my possession at home. I plan to dig them up and create an organized study plan using them and a few more items that I plan to purchase. Also, I plan to make use of material, both printed and audio, off the Internet.

My piano teacher just recently told me that learning to play the piano is just like learning to speak a foreign language. And that hit me hard, since I believe I’m making a pretty good amount of progress with piano, but over the years have allowed my foreign language study to slide. But no more! There’s nothing quite like learning how to do something and practicing to the point when, suddenly it seems, a threshold is reached beyond which a much greater level of understanding and ability is attained in that endeavor. As Bilbo Baggins said in Lord of the Rings as he was about to board the elfin boat, “I think I’m quite ready for a new adventure!”

So, at some time in the future, you may see a blog entry apparently written by me in another language. If you happen to know that language well, you’re welcome to submit any constructive comments about my bedraggled attempts at it (or just laugh a lot, if that’s your preference). Oh, by the way, there seems to be a project to resurrect Quinto Lingo, but this time it would be on the Internet. I’m looking forward to seeing how that turns out!

Favorite Song #2

Building a Mystery by Sarah McLachlan (from Surfacing, 1997)

Building a Mystery is a song that sneaked by me when it came out in 1997. It had a lot of cross-over appeal and was played on radio stations of widely different formats, from pop-rock to contemporary adult to alternative rock. It wasn’t until early in 1998 when it hit me like a rock how incredibly good this song was. And I had heard it many times before! I think that tastes in music do change over time, which may account for part of my turn toward liking Building a Mystery, but also this song has, in my view, many interesting elements to it. The narrative has Sarah singing to her lover, a man who has charted his own path of spiritual discovery that captivates, and at times, bewilders and frustrates her. The melody is beautiful in itself, and the instrumental accompaniment is appropriate to the song’s mood. And Sarah McLachlan’s voice, to me, is matchless: she is one of today’s very few performers whom I actually would look forward to seeing in a live concert (and I despise concerts as a rule of thumb). But more than any one contributing factor, it was the combined effect of everything just mentioned that created a feeling of eeriness along with sweet intimacy that sold me on Building a Mystery. And I bought the album Surfacing as a result. It contains some other good tunes, most notably Sweet Surrender and Adia. Sarah McLachlan led a very successful concert tour series in the late 1990s called the Lilith Fair, which spotlighted female performing artists such as Sheryl Crow, Jewel, Fiona Apple, the Indigo Girls, Paula Cole, and Lisa Loeb, among many others. Sarah has come out with some other songs I like, such as I Will Remember You and Fallen. A couple of years ago, I saw her compelling performance of Fallen on one of the late night network shows. She is, to me, the greatest popular singer around today. And I just love Building a Mystery more and more each new time that I hear it!

Next favorite song: #1 !

Equal-Area and Equal-Shaped Surface Sectors on Spheres

During times when I’ve been engaged in mundane, repetitive chores or assignments, there’s been a tendency for me to speculate on things that don’t necessarily connect directly with my life, but still hold some interest for me. For example, I’ve allowed myself to be nagged with an apparently trivial problem that someone out there (maybe one of those math “educators”) has probably trained himself or herself well to be able to solve. And that problem is the following:

If you take any globe and divide it by lines of latitude and longitude, then you will notice four things:

--Each line of latitude intersects each line of longitude at right angles.

--All latitude lines run parallel to each other.

--All longitude lines converge at the North and South Poles.

--The areas bounded by these lines (separated an by equal number of degrees) are greater the closer one gets to the Equator and smaller the closer one gets to the Poles.

Now my question is this: How can I devise a way of dividing a globe (or sphere) into sectors (of the surface) that are shaped in the same way and have the same area? Other then completely disregarding latitude and dividing sectors by lines of longitude, I can see no apparent solution to this. I’ve read about geodesic spheres, but the projections on their surfaces are not all equal to each other, only approximate at best. Is there an intuitive answer that would have been obvious had I not been trained to be oriented toward straight lines and two-dimensional grids? Could this be just one example of shortsightedness when it comes to training children in spatial perception and reasoning? Well, I’m throwing out the problem to some of you hard-working homework-doing alumni/scholars out there! Comments, either in the form of solutions or perplexed reactions, are welcome!

And there are a couple of other questions that I’d like to toss out while I’m at it. What, mathematically, is the difference between the celestial “sphere” as I look around me in any direction (counting “looking” down at the Earth as part of it) and the surface of a three-dimensional sphere? And furthermore, is there really such a thing as an absolute shape (since it appears that any shape depends upon the perspective of the observer)?

There is actually rhyme and reason behind these questions. There is a certain disconnect I see between the real world as I perceive it and the way people have been trained under formal education to quantify and analyze it. First we learn to count numbers and model our reality as if it were a one-dimensional number line. Then, the more advanced we go into math education, the more we learn to interpret reality as a two-dimensional plane. This would be suitable if we all lived in Flatland! Even our so-called computer-generated three-dimensional models are only projections onto a two-dimensional screen. We seem stuck in a two-dimensional framework with straight lines and an “objective” frame of reference that denies the perspective of the observer. It is the transcending of these limiters to thinking that interest me a great deal. I want to think with a subjective three-dimensional understanding on a complex level. In other words, nothing less than a complete overall of how I view things!

Release of Final Harry Potter Book

I usually get off from work at midnight. Last night, when the clock struck twelve, I rushed to my car, tore down the road (in a legal manner, of course), miraculously made all of the traffic lights (about twelve of them), and pulled into the Books-a-Million (on NW 13th Street) parking lot, eventually finding an empty space far from the store. There were ecstatic people going to their cars from the store, swinging around white plastic bags containing their prizes: the last Harry Potter book by J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I had come by here two years ago at the same time to pick up the previous Potter book, but instead of going inside to stand in line, this time there was a long line going down the sidewalk outside the store! I got in line at 12:16 AM, and after entering the store and snaking around in line through several aisles all over the store, I finally redeemed my voucher ticket 35 minutes later and walked out the door ecstatically, swinging my white plastic bag with my prize, in the tradition of the silly fans who preceded me! While in the store, I noticed that, without exception, everyone was in good spirits. You could tell that Books-a-Million had put a lot of planning into this event. There was plenty of staffing, and everyone seemed to know exactly what to do to facilitate the book’s speedy distribution. They even had some characters running around the store playing Sirius Black (who looked more to me like “Weird” Al Yankovic), a Death Eater, and an unknown wizard. Their antics were hilarious, and they made the waiting more fun. There was a relatively small number of customers who dressed up playing different Potter characters, including one little boy who looked like a dead ringer for Harry Potter from his first year at Hogwarts.

Well, once I did get home, I began reading this seventh and final Harry Potter book. And you won’t get anything from me about what happens. Since I was off yesterday (Saturday), I could devote some time reading it, covering 334 out of 759 pages. All I will say is that so far, Rowling has written a very exciting, suspenseful novel! She has stated before that this would be her final Harry Potter book, and that’s all right by me. But, as far as I’m concerned, I feel duty-bound to read whatever she comes out with in the future. If the rest of her works are only half as good as her Harry Potter series, then it will have been worth it!

Hurricanes Donna, Cleo, and Betsy

From 1957 to 1977, I lived in South Florida, first in a little town northwest of Miami called Opa-Locka (1957-60) and then in Hollywood (1960-77) a larger city lying a few miles further north. The first three (and only) hurricanes that I directly encountered during my childhood occurred in the relatively compressed span of 1960 to 1965. The first, Donna, hit while I lived with my family in a modest apartment complex in 1960 while I was three. I remember very little from the storm, except that my parents seemed a bit wary of it. Fortunately for the Miami area (and unfortunately for others), Donna sideswiped us, although it did cause a lot of wind damage in the area.
A few months after Donna hit, we moved north to a house in West Hollywood (annexed in 1965 by Hollywood). In 1964, Hurricane Cleo made its way across the Atlantic, devastated Hispaniola, and then cut through Cuba, making a direct beeline toward Miami (and West Hollywood). Fortunately, we’d already had awnings installed on most of our windows, and we boarded up or taped the rest. Like Donna, Cleo struck at night, and it appeared at one time during its worst part that it would blow down our front door! Unfortunately, we got the hurricane’s eye and the associated severe eyewall. And even though our house was situated on a slight elevation, water nevertheless seeped through and covered our (fortunately) tiled floors. I remember being moved to the back bedroom with my sister and listening to hurricane updates on the portable radio. The station we listened to was 1580-WWIL out of Fort Lauderdale (a little to our north), which a few years later would change its name to WSRF and its format to cool rock music. But we and our house survived Cleo. A few weeks later, Hurricane Isbell crossed the state from the Gulf side, but, although we experienced stormy conditions, we escaped most of that hurricane’s fury.
The next year, I was ready for some more hurricanes, with my tracking map ready. I’d keep up with each new storm that appeared. And it didn’t take long for a doozy of a storm to appear on the scene. Betsy had a very strange path that gave forecasters fits. Twice, in the western Atlantic, it appeared to be making a turn toward the north away from Florida, and each time it made a 360 degree loop. Finally, it bore down on the Miami area. But it was more like Donna than Cleo in that its worst area went though extreme south Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico (eventually to hit New Orleans). Betsy, it turned out, was the only really prominent storm in a short season that year.
Not being a particularly happy camper at school, I found myself keeping up with hurricanes in the news during the next few years. But, alas, my hopes of getting time out of school went unrealized when none came close to striking the South Florida area (except maybe in October 1973, when Gilda flirted with the possibility for a little while). My subsequent encounters with named tropical storm systems would be as a resident of Gainesville, here in north central Florida.

Bumper Stickers

Bumper stickers are an example of symbols that people identify themselves with and exhibit publicly in order to give themselves a sense of relevance in society. Whether it’s one’s favorite sports team, a candidate for political office, or just a view on the issues (like “I’m already against the next war”, “Your ‘choice’ takes my life” (anti-abortion), or “Your ‘heritage’ is my slavery” (against use of the Confederate flag)), they identify not only themselves, but whoever happens to be driving the vehicle as well, with that particular point of view. And that may cause others who disagree with the sticker’s message to feel uncomfortable driving that car. That is one pitfall of slapping stickers with messages on cars. There are others as well. This is supposedly a free country, with the First Amendment apparently guaranteeing freedom of speech, but I once heard a policeman say that he and his colleagues, when on patrol, would be much more likely to pull over a driver whose car carried provocative bumper stickers than one that didn’t. The reasoning was that such a car might be more likely to contain illegal controlled substances. Also, if somebody puts on a sticker trying to persuade the public to vote a certain way or adopt a certain opinion about an issue, then he or she had better drive in a competent and courteous manner, else the other annoyed drivers may just automatically lean toward the opposing point of view! I remember just before the Presidential election of 1988 being very abruptly cut off in traffic by a driver in a car which had a “Dukakis for President” sticker on its back fender. I’d already decided how I was going to vote, but if I were teetering as an undecided voter, that just might have put me over into the Bush camp (and I resented that driver, since I was supporting Dukakis, too!).

I, for one, don’t want drivers behind me to get so distracted trying to read my bumper stickers that they lose their train of concentration behind the wheel. And there are some drivers who can’t resist the temptation, once started, of plastering sticker after sticker on their car. To me, when I see a car like this, it reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man, whose main character, played by Rod Steiger, was cursed with “skin illustrations” covering every square inch of his skin below his chin (except for a mysterious blank spot on his back). As for me, I have a small UF Gators decal on the back windshield, and that’s it. Personally, as long as people who want to slap stickers on their cars don’t do it to the point where it interferes with their vision as drivers, then I really couldn’t care less about the content, unless, of course it contains extremely offensive language or overtly hateful material aimed against certain groups.

Air Conditioning and Breathing

I grew up from infancy to nearly eighteen without enjoying the luxury of air conditioning in my home. This is notable, especially since my home was in hot, sunny South Florida! And the first three years of my elementary school education were spent in classrooms with windows that were usually wide open to the outside. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t until I was almost nine that I ever spent any appreciable amount of time in air conditioning. But this deprivation didn’t seem to have any detrimental effect on me. Since then, though, I’ve developed some allergies, and I wonder if this doesn’t correlate to an extent with the fact that I spend a great percentage of my life in air-conditioned buildings. Breathing the outside air is different from breathing recycled, closed-in air with its mold and fungal spores. Cumulatively, this has to have an effect on people. I’ve known people who, later in their lives, have developed respiratory problems such as allergies and asthma. Part of their coping strategies usually involved confining themselves to an air-conditioned environment, away from what they would consider to be harmful airborne substances. But could it possibly be that, in continually breathing old moldy air that this may be one of the contributing factors in their afflictions?

Being interested in this, I did a little research on the Internet and only found articles pointing to air conditioning as a positive environment for those already suffering from respiratory afflictions. Of course, the systems had to be kept clean to avoid fungal buildup. But I still wonder whether prolonged exposure to this artificial environment somehow weakens the body to the point where it cannot handle the natural outside air anymore, but must instead exist in a more controlled respiratory environment.

I remember reading a long time ago a short science fiction story from 1953 titled Crucifixus Etiam by Walter M. Miller, Jr. It was written long before we really knew anything about the Martian atmosphere. The story centered on the hard physical labor that workers (in the future, of course) performed on Mars, with its imagined thin, difficult-to-breathe atmosphere. The problem of breathing had been dealt with by supplying the workers with special machines that they could put on that sent the needed oxygen directly into their system without them have use their lungs. They could then work in comfort, but their bodies became so accustomed to not actively breathing that their lungs atrophied from disuse to the point where they would be forced to use these machines for the rest of their lives. Although this is not an exact analogy, this story does express a concern I have.

If we, as a people, keep insisting on controlling our environment to shut out all the “bad” things (such as pollutants and pollen) out there, then instead of these things causing some minor discomfort when breathed, the body will, over time, become unable to withstand them and eventually, exposure to them can precipitate a crisis, such as an asthmatic attack or an allergic reaction. In other words, someone may create their own ideal environment, only to eventually discover that they have created their own prison.

I can’t really say, in individual cases of people who developed respiratory trouble, that this applies to them. There are many other factors that determine these sorts of ailments, such as genetic and developmental factors, as well as exposure to poisons found in substances such as tobacco products, asbestos, or coal. But I can look at my own life and reflect upon the fact that my allergies seem to correlate well with my increased exposure to air conditioning and concomitant decreased exposure to outdoor air.

With Friends Like These

Little Big Man (1970), starring Dustin Hoffman, is one of my all-time favorite movies. It is a western set in the American Great Plains during the decades immediately following the U.S. Civil War. In it, a family of white settlers is ambushed and massacred by rogue Indians, leaving a surviving young boy and his elder sister orphaned and abandoned on the open plain. A little while later, a Cheyenne warrior happens upon the carnage, finds the two, and brings them to his camp. They are treated well, but the big sister escapes in the night, leaving little Jack Crabtree alone with his hosts. The Cheyenne adopt him as one of their own, training him as a fellow Cheyenne. Jack’s identity becomes one with them, but they find themselves sucked into warfare with the U.S. Army, which is attempting to push the Indians into reservations in order to clear more land for white settlement. In this context, Jack and a fellow Cheyenne youth are out in the woods one day when they are attacked by an Indian from a tribe that has allied itself against the Cheyenne and with the whites. This Indian is about to kill Jack when he notices that, underneath the makeup, Jack is white. Suddenly, the attacker is very obsequious and friendly to Jack. He runs over to Jack’s groggy comrade, raises his knife, and tells Jack that he will kill that bad Indian (because he wants to be a friend of the white man). Jack then proceeds to shoot an arrow through him, killing him and saving his true friend. Jack henceforth is given the name “Little Big Man”, and the story goes on from there.

That segment from Little Big Man is one example of people who represent themselves as friends doing harm, either intentionally or unintentionally, in the name of that friendship. Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, which I’ve just finished reading recently, contains another example of the adage, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?” A physician who has just moved to a new house with his family makes friends with an elderly man from across the street. There is no confusion that their friendship is real; nevertheless, that neighbor drags (unintentionally) the good doctor into a troublesome mess (I don’t want to give away the story).

In the political world, sometimes a politician may get support from an unwelcome source. I remember when Ronald Reagan, just before his election to the Presidency, received the Ku Klux Klan’s endorsement (which he immediately rejected). On the international level, the U.S. keeps touting its friendship with countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, although they are the sources of a great percentage of the Al-Qaeda membership. And I don’t believe that the U.S. has been a very good friend in the past toward some of its Latin American neighbors, having supported military coups against democratically elected leaders as well as, in my opinion, hurting countries like Colombia and Bolivia with our “war on drugs”.

On a more personal level, it’s always good to have friends! But, still, we should be able to place certain boundaries around ourselves that we feel we have the right to expect others to respect. One such violator of this principle is someone who takes some offhand comment I make (or simply discerns my apparent feeling about something) and then goes around behind my back (without my knowledge) and tries to “fix things” with others. Some friend, right? People who go around like this behind my back may think they have “my back”, but I just want them to “back off”. Let me be responsible for my own problems, and if I need help, then I am competent enough to reach out to the appropriate parties myself! Another example of a “friend” who oversteps boundaries is one who applies their own standards in some area to me and then chastises me for not living up to them. What is it that Michael Stipe sang in that classic REM song? “Oh, life is bigger, it’s bigger than you, and you are not me…” An extension of this is the person who thinks in terms of hierarchy and that we all need to “move up” to the highest level we can reach. So someone like this who is “up there” in an organization or maybe in a more prestigious (to them) profession may berate me (as a friend, of course), for not being as good as them (since their sense of personal worth is tied up with their perceived status and position). I don’t need friends like these.

Having said this, I recognize that nobody’s perfect and we all stumble a bit trying to be each other’s friends. It’s important to maintain a feeling of good will with others, at least up to a point. As Max Ehrmann’s poem Desiderata says, “As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.” But all in all, I think that if people showed a little more respect toward each other and a little less condescension, then the friendships between them would carry more substance.

Favorite Song #3

Flaming by Pink Floyd (from Piper at the Gates of Dawn, 1967)
Back during the mid-1990s, I went on a tear, collecting old albums of various artists whose works I knew and liked from the radio play of their bigger hits. I thought that there may be some hidden treasures in these albums. And there were! Among the artists I did this with was Pink Floyd. When they first hit the big time, they had put out some hit singles (in Britain) like See Emily Play and Arnold Layne. Their singer and main creative force was Syd Barrett, who would suffer a severe mental breakdown (and never fully recover until his recent death) following the release of their first studio album (and their best, in my opinion) Piper at the Gates of Dawn. If you’re accustomed to the later Roger Waters tunes with Dave Gilmour’s rough voice and virtuoso guitar work on Pink Floyd’s 1970s albums, then you may find that Syd Barrett’s version of the band was quite different. There was a very strong psychedelic bent to the songs he was involved with, but also they purveyed a feeling of simple joy and innocent wonder at the world, much the way a happy, wide-eyed giggling little child may see things. And Flaming, the third track on the album, is just such a song. It’s a typical case of Barrett letting his imagination run wild while putting out one vivid, bizarre image after another. To me, Flaming is just a strange, happy, pretty song that celebrates the imagination. And I didn’t hear it for the first time until almost thirty years after it came out!

After Syd Barrett left Pink Floyd, Dave Gilmour replaced him (in a manner of speaking, no one could replace Syd) and bassist Roger Waters gradually assumed more of the band’s creative direction, coming out with progressively more cynical and autobiographical material. Ironically, my second favorite Pink Floyd album, Wish You Were Here (1975), was their tribute to their friend and former bandmate, Syd Barrett himself. Every track from that album is a favorite of mine. Other Pink Floyd songs that I like are Remember a Day, Fearless, Pigs (Three Different Kinds), Goodbye Blue Sky, and Run Like Hell.

Next: favorite song #2

Framing

A few weeks ago, I was listening to my local public radio station (89.1-WUFT) early in the evening. The weekly program Alternative Radio was on. This show presented speakers and topics from a generally leftist perspective, so whether I agreed with what was said or not, it was still interesting. That evening, they rebroadcast speaker George Lakoff’s presentation of his thesis that conservatives have been winning the political and public relations battles with liberals because they learned how to frame issues in a way that predisposed people to agree with their positions. And framing is very important. Here are some examples:

--The Bush administration has always framed the Iraq War as part of the War on Terror. Opponents of the President’s policy hold that Saddam Hussein’s role as abettor to Al-Qaeda was negligible, especially contrasted to that played by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan (our “allies”).

--In the abortion debate, pro-lifers frame the issue around the fetus and its right to live as a human being, while the pro-choice advocates emphasize the fact that the woman is carrying the fetus in her own body, and that because of this she should be in a position to make her own reproductive decisions.

--The issue of gay marriage has been framed by its opponents as “saving the institution of marriage”. Proponents say that it is an issue of civil rights and accuse opponents of bigotry against gays.

--In political campaign seasons, the winning party has usually framed the election issues more to their advantage. For example in 1992, the country bought the Democrats’ “it’s the economy, stupid” line, blamed George H.W. Bush for the recession, and brought in Bill Clinton as President. Only two years later, in 1994 the Republicans took over both the House and the Senate largely because future House Speaker Newt Gingrich promoted a “contract with America” that resonated with the public and defined the campaign. More recently, in 2004, the Republicans retained the Presidency and Congress by successfully equating the War in Iraq with the War on Terror and by making the election a referendum on cultural issues, especially that of gay marriage (which had special referendum votes placed in several states, including the crucial “swing “ state of Ohio). And last year, the Democrats regained Congress largely by framing the election as a referendum on Republican corruption and inaction. Whoever more successfully frames the issues in 2008 in a politically palatable form will more likely than not win that election.

--A sports coach or manager may, once a season begins to go sour with too many losses and too few wins, attempt to reframe that season as being one of rebuilding, and how much the fans should encourage and appreciate the team’s efforts.

--A talk show host may frame himself or herself as being “for the people” by deliberately picking easy news stories to rant indignantly about. Prime example: Bill O’Reilly with his diatribes against the “war on Christmas”, profane and demeaning rap lyrics, and judges he perceives as too lenient toward sex offenders. Not only is Bill looking out for you, but he also can avoid addressing more divisive issues that have a lot of gray areas and subtlety to them. Other hosts use this tactic of self-framing, too, but O’Reilly is utterly shameless about it.

--Although I think that global warming is a real phenomenon, I am tired of politicians and other public figures framing it around punctuated events such as heat waves, forest fires, and hurricanes. In 2004, Al Gore tried to blame global warming (and Bush because he didn’t sign the Kyoto Protocols) for the unusual number of hurricanes that hit Florida that year. Earlier this year, I heard Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid blame the Western forest fires on global warming while he was speaking on the Senate floor.

--For many decades, political struggles in Third World countries were framed according to the ongoing Cold War between the West with its leader the United States and the East with its leader the Soviet Union. It was only after the USSR’s collapse in 1991 when internal struggles within these nations began to be interpreted as internal matters of the nations themselves. Now, though, with the struggle between the West and extremist movements within the Islamic nations, those types of struggles are once again beginning to be framed in terms of which elements are more pro- or anti- West.

Framing is important because it determines how an issue is going to be presented and discussed. And this is where bias in different self-proclaimed unbiased or “balanced” media organizations most insidiously rears its ugly head. Also, an issue is usually framed very differently, depending on which side of it one is viewing it from. Just watch Congress in session on either C-Span 1 or 2 when they are debating a bill. Sometimes, from hearing the speakers from both sides of the aisle, you get the feeling that they are talking about two completely different issues. That is usually due to the fact that each side has framed the issue in their own way that serves their own interests. Framing is always going to be here, so it’s a good idea for people to learn to discern how and why issues are framed in certain ways, who is responsible for it, and what’s in it for them. Only then, I believe, can we slog on through the bias in our media and then begin to put together a more objective picture of what’s really going on in the world and our country.

SpongeBob SquarePants

I am a big SpongeBob SquarePants fan. In the beginning, one of my children would have the TV tuned in to the Nickelodeon Channel and there, out of the corner of my eye, I’d see this gross looking cartoon of a walking, talking, dressed yellow kitchen sponge and his pals on the sea bottom. Peripheral glances don’t always reveal to one the true picture, though, and one day I actually sat down with my kids and watched an episode. It didn’t take me very long to see that this cartoon series was special! By that time, three seasons of the series had already come out, and I spent a bit of time trying to catch up with the rest of the “Spongeheads” out there! It’s hard to decide which parts of the show I like most. The setting is a town called “Bikini Bottom” (ha-ha). There’s the home neighborhood, where gregarious, irritating, squeaky-voiced SpongeBob and dumb, big pink starfish Patrick (who sounds a lot like Ed Norton of the Honeymooners) live on each side of the ultimate comic fall guy: Squidward, a vain, cynical, and selfish octopus/squid who cannot stand his next door neighbors’ loud and innocent exuberance. Another setting is the Krusty Krab restaurant, owned by skinflint Mr. Krab and staffed by Squidward at the register and SpongeBob at the grill. Then there’s the beach (with lifeguards), where fish have to be careful not to get in the water (?) too deep and surfing contests are commonplace (yes, at the bottom of the ocean). And I can’t leave out Jellyfish Fields, where SpongeBob and Patrick take out their little nets to try to catch horrible, stinging jellyfish (who horribly sting them). SpongeBob is also a perennial boating student who never can pass his boating exam and keeps attending Mrs. Puff’s (a puffer fish) boating school, to her unrelenting anxiety. Other characters like Sandy Cheeks (ha-ha), a squirrel (who lives in a clear, solid domed bubble), arch-villain Plankton (who is always trying to steal the Krabby Patty formula), and SpongeBob’s pet snail Gary (who meows like a cat) round out the main lineup.

The characters in this series are very well defined by their personalities. In an earlier entry, I wrote about the four personality types and how people’s personalities could be classified in different ways. One way is to take a good series like SpongeBob SquarePants and classify people by which character their personality most resembles.

Aside from the astute characterizations, SpongeBob SquarePants is a great example of farce in comedy. And if anything, then I am a sucker for that genre (Marx Brothers, Three Stooges, Monty Python, Airplane!, I Love Lucy, you get the picture). It doesn’t look like they’re going to stop making new SpongeBob episodes anytime soon, and it doesn’t look like I’ll stop watching them either!

Luring the Enemy

I grew up while the War in Vietnam was continuously going on (at least as far as direct American combat was concerned) from when I was eight years old until I was sixteen. The picture that I had of war then was one based on the conventional model of gaining geographical territory and pushing the enemy back into a smaller and less defensible position. I believed that in Vietnam, our armed forces were doing just this: gradually pushing the enemy back into North Vietnam. And I think that the people across the U.S. believed pretty much the same thing. We just had to be patient, and supporting the troops meant supporting the war. This is why the Tet Offensive in early 1968 had such a stunning effect on people’s attitudes about the war: the enemy was in our midst (in South Vietnam, that is) everywhere, especially in “territory” that was supposedly liberated from them. It wasn’t until after the war that I became more aware of its reality and our strategies. For example, I saw a map of South Vietnam that showed, according to our military’s own assessment of which side controlled the territory there as of late 1967, after U.S. forces had been fighting for more than two years. It showed almost the entire territory controlled by the Viet Cong/North Vietnamese, while only cities and their immediate surrounding were under South Vietnamese authority. But the most interesting thing I learned was how American foot soldiers would be transported deep into known enemy-held land by helicopter, deliberately to expose them to the enemy, draw their fire, and reveal their locations for air assaults. It’s no wonder that surviving Vietnam veterans had such problems with flashbacks and coping with civilian life after the war. The movie Platoon showed this (in my opinion) horrible and cynical tactic that the military leadership used to deliberately put our fine young soldiers in harm’s way. Apparently, our strategy was to win the war by killing all of the enemy. What other purpose would this have served?

But the strategy of drawing the enemy’s fire is not limited to warfare. I believe that there are situations in our civilian lives where this occurs as well. For example, there may be an executive in a corporation who fears that there are some ambitious underlings who may be try someday to replace or jump over him in the company’s hierarchy. It may well be in his interest to send a “dummy” policy change down the authority chain, just to track which employees take it up with fanatical, ambitious zeal. And once those overaggressive subordinates are identified, they can be dealt with one by one. I saw a perverted version of this tactic in the movie The Killing Fields (about the Cambodian holocaust of the 1970s) when a Khmer Rouge reeducation camp leader suddenly announced to the assembly that the nation was in need of trained doctors and professionals. A couple of people in the crowd decided that their time had come for “advancement” and rose up to identify themselves. They were guided away to applause. Later, they were ignominiously executed as enemies of the people (which was the whole idea behind the announcement in the first place). The game of chess is another example of “drawing fire”, when one player appears to leave one of his pieces exposed, but actually is luring the other player to move a piece in order to clear the way for a major attack.

Drawing the enemy’s fire is an example of misdirection. The enemy forces in Vietnam, when they acted according to the U.S. strategy, mistook the American ground actions as the main thrust, thus revealing their positions. The same type of thing applies in the corporate, Cambodian, and chess examples. Subterfuge and intrigue often run rampant in large organizations and situations where power is the big prize. It’s tough to go through life with the feeling that we are just pawns in someone else’s power struggle. But if we can identify what’s going on, then we can least be empowered not to fall into traps such as “luring the enemy”.

Al Franken and Norm Coleman

I never did think that Al Franken was very funny when he appeared many years ago on Saturday Night Live. And, a few years later, I was taken aback at his bad taste in titling one of his books Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot. So the guy already had two strikes against him, as far as I was concerned. But about four years ago, I was getting so sick of hearing only one side (the conservative side) of the issues on my radio that one day, while browsing through my local Books-a-Million (sipping on my flavored coffee), I actually picked up his (then) new book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them and began to thumb through it. A few minutes later it was mine, in the car with me on the way to my workplace, where I proceeded to read it from cover to cover on my breaks. It radically altered my opinion of Mr. Franken.

I still believe that Al Franken has a mean streak embedded within him, and he’s not beyond tweaking the facts to emphasize a point. For example, he criticized right-wing extremist Ann Coulter because she once incorrectly referred to a journalist (with last name Thomas) as Socialist Norman Thomas’s son. But he failed to mention that the journalist was actually his grandson, which would have showed her slip to be minor. Instead, he implied that the two were unrelated (slyly, without coming out and saying it). Because of this sort of thing, I don’t entirely trust Franken at his word. But when he defends the actions of those whom he supports (such as liberal politicians and others), his words resonate with more meaning. He has eloquently defended the Clinton Administration’s policies concerning the military and terrorism, showing that the former President placed both at a high place of importance in his priorities. Franken was also a friend and ardent supporter of Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone and his 2002 bid for reelection to another term.

During that campaign, Wellstone was running neck-and-neck with Republican (former Democratic Minneapolis mayor) Norm Coleman. The campaign was winding down to the last few days. Then, Wellstone was killed in a plane crash while campaigning. Former Senator and Vice President Walter Mondale was picked to replace him on the ballot. Wellstone’s memorial service was very emotional, and some of his supporters got a little carried away when they got before the microphone. The right-wing media turned the memorial into a last-minute election issue against the Democrats. Coleman defeated Mondale in the election while the Republicans narrowly regained control of the Senate. In Lies, Franken correctly defended the Wellstone memorial service but incorrectly criticized Coleman (whom he derisively referred to as a “suit”) for resuming the campaign after Mondale was selected as Wellstone’s replacement. Of course, Coleman had to campaign!

Now, after another book (The Truth) and a stint on Air America as early afternoon host, Al Franken has apparently decided that he is going to run against Norm Coleman in 2008 for that Senate seat. I don’t know how he stands within the Democratic Party (or whatever goofy name they call it there) in Minnesota. He may have some opposition there. But if he does get the nomination, it should make for a very interesting campaign. Franken is very witty at times, but he’s going to have to watch his language and also tone down the rhetoric if he wants to be taken seriously. His strength, as I see it, lies with his passionate promotion of liberal values, while his weakness shows when attacking his opponents on a personal level. As for Coleman, he always sounds like a Bostonian who took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in Minnesota. He is a very good speaker and, although (in my opinion) he tends to tow the Republican and Bush Administration line on too many issues, I believe that he is a decent, hardworking public servant who has made a good case for reelection. I was impressed a few years ago how he went after the United Nations in the so-called “Oil-for-Food Scandal”. In any case, I think that Al Franken is going to find out that Norm Coleman is much more than a “suit”. It’s too bad that they’re running for the same seat; I’d like to see them both in the Senate!

Coffee Shops

I am one of those folks who hang out different places drinking coffee, and I've been doing it since I was about two years old (yes, you read it correctly). Back then, when my mother would take me with her to the apartment section down and across from ours to daily visit her friend Betty, we’d all sit together in Betty's kitchen and have a cup of coffee. Only then I called it my “cossee”, which my mother later told me was mostly milk and sugar with a little “cossee” thrown in. But back then I thought I was hobnobbing with the big shots on their level! And as the years passed, I retained my affection for coffee, which I mainly drank at home in the form of a heaping teaspoon of instant coffee dumped in a cup of hot boiling water with a little sugar and milk thrown in for good measure. It’s amazing to me, even now, how cheap coffee is to make and drink at home, while people will go out and dump a wad of dough to drink essentially the same product at a place like Starbucks. The only problem with that amazement is that I’m one of the fools who do that! Why?

I can’t speak for other people as to why they go out and spend a lot of money to drink in a coffee shop, other than it’s obviously a good, informal setting for friends or associates to get together in public. I mainly go out to coffee shops by myself (although sometimes I’ll take my wife and/or children as well). My reasons are personal: I am by nature a reclusive soul who has no problem with solitude and a great problem with the public. Not that I dislike the public per se: I usually just dislike being IN it. And because of that, I discovered many, many years ago that if I sat out in a public place (such as a coffee shop) to read, study, or just think, than I could much more easily rivet my thoughts on the task at hand (and away from the annoying surrounding environment). Fortunately, though, I’ve been able in recent years (with conscious effort) to transfer some that mental focus to when I’m at home (like right now!). But I habitually still like to go out (sounds a bit paradoxical, doesn’t it?). And nowadays I have many more choices than ever of places to go.

Starbucks is the biggest coffee shop company around in Gainesville, with several places to go, spread all over town. I generally go there, not because their coffee is the best (in my opinion, it isn’t), but because this corporation understands that its customers count and that it’s important not to keep them waiting endlessly in line for their orders. If someone ahead of me in line has a large order, then while that’s being taken care of, someone else will get my order going. In other places, like Books-a-Million or one of those mom-and-pop locally owned shops, one customer could hold up the line for several minutes with one person behind the counter who has to see each order from beginning to completion before going on to the next one. That’s why I switched to Starbucks. I still go to the other places sometimes, because I like their flavored coffees (especially Books-a-Million’s Streusel Cake coffee and the many different delicious flavors at Corner Cup, a locally-owned Gainesville coffee shop). Border’s bookstore has a good coffee café section, with usually at least two people working behind the counter (and good coffee, too), but it’s inconveniently located for me. Other places I usually avoid because of the “one person behind the counter” policy that they have. I’ll probably never stop going out for coffee, but I have become more comfortable at home with my “thinking”, so who knows, I may someday even start boiling water again and make instant “cossee”!

Dave Allen At Large

Back in the early 1980s, my local Gainesville Public Television station, WUFT-Channel Five, carried several British comedy shows. Some were farcical like Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Not the Nine O’Clock News, and Benny Hill. Others were sitcoms like Fawlty Towers and Butterflies. They showed the original British mini-series version of Douglas Adams’s classic A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (done so well that I don’t have any inclination to see the recently made big-screen version). And there were several other good British shows as well. At the time, indeed, Gainesville Public TV was so much better than anything else that, for a while, I had my cable TV service removed and just watched local stations. The best of WUFT’s offerings in this regard was Dave Allen At Large, featuring, of course, Irish comedian Dave Allen. Dave was a master joke/storyteller, and he would intersperse hilarious skits that poked fun at everything, especially organized religion, life in Ireland, and British politics (Margaret Thatcher era), with segments when he’d just sit in a chair (holding a drink or a cigarette), and spin the funniest jokes that he, with his talented delivery, turned into side-splitters. His demeanor and comedic style reminded me a bit of Johnny Carson (another comedic genius who could have me rolling on the floor with uncontrollable laughter). Dave Allen died a few years ago. I’ve looked around unsuccessfully in local stores for a DVD collection of some of his old shows, but I did find an Internet site that sold them. YouTube carries clips of some of his funnier monologues and skits, but it’s best to just sit back and take in one entire show at a time (if your sides can stand it!). But I’m still holding out some hope that one of those many TV channels out there devoted to old series will dig up his fantastic series and put it back on (TV Land, for one, could stand a radical revamping of its program line-up!).

Favorite Song #4

Landslide by Fleetwood Mac (from Fleetwood Mac, 1975)

Although the band Fleetwood Mac gets the official credit for this beautiful song, I always think of it purely as a Stevie Nicks tune. Whatever her personal reasons were for writing it the way she did, I have my own personal reasons for loving it as I do. Landslide is a song about growing older and reassessing relationships. To me, it hits the hardest when I remember myself growing up through adolescence and into adulthood, seeing my own children go though the same process, experiencing the aging of my parents and those of my wife, the death of my mother 4½ years ago and of my mother-in-law this past March, and finally my own aging. In this, I see it much like the Cat Steven song Father and Son (#6 in my countdown), but with an entirely different feeling about it. Landslide is a very introspective song that also emphasizes that just getting out somewhere away from it all for a little while can break the limiting patterns and ruts in one’s life, enabling one to refocus on the more important, truly valuable things. Stevie Nicks has always been one of my favorite singers, and some of her songs, like Rhiannon, Gold Dust Woman, Sara, Gypsy, Seven Wonders, Stand Back, Long Way to Go, and Silver Springs are favorites of mine. Fleetwood Mac as a group also came out with a few good ones such as World Turning, Never Going Back Again, Don’t Stop, Big Love, and Peacekeeper. They got together for a reunion concert in 1997 and recorded it as their CD The Dance. The version of Landslide that they did then became a radio hit, but I prefer the original studio version. Other artists, such as Smashing Pumpkins and the Dixie Chicks, came out with their covers of Landslide, but I’ll always value the special touch that Stevie Nicks gave to it back in 1975. Fleetwood Mac owes much to Stevie Nicks and her former “partner” Lindsey Buckingham for transforming this moderately successful British blues-rock band into an international pop-rock icon. I always thought Christie McVie was pretty cool, too!

Next favorite song: #3

Running on the Eights

One of my favorite TV channels (especially in the thick of the hurricane season) is the Weather Channel. That is, when they’re not obsessing on the weather in places like southeastern Montana or east-central New Mexico. On the other hand, I imagine that folks watching from other parts of the country wonder why they make such a big deal whenever a dinky tropical storm threatens the Florida coast (actually, I do, too). After all, a 50 mph tropical storm isn’t really all that much. I remember in 1984 when tropical storm Isidore passed directly over Gainesville in the middle of the day without anyone in town paying it the slightest attention. But that aside, what I like the most about the Weather Channel is their feature titled “Local on the Eights”, meaning that at :08, :18, :28, :38, :48, and :58 each hour they give the local forecast and radar. So despite what’s going on in other places, the viewer can be assured of some local attention.

I think this idea has pretty good carryover value to my life. There are various projects that I’ve begun recently, and it’s a good idea to update my progress in them from time to time. And doing so at eight-week intervals seems to be a reasonable span between reports. So, here’s my first report of this kind, this time about my adventures in the exciting and sometimes painful world of running.

Since May 14, I’ve gradually built up my distance and speed, running almost exclusively on treadmills at my nearby YMCA. It’s only been recently that I’ve begun to run on a regular surface, and that has presented a few problems. One, it’s usually pretty hot down here in north-central Florida at this time of the year, with temperatures usually creeping into the 90’s with high humidity. Two, the treadmill sets my pace and thus relieves my mind of that burden. Three, I feel that the very act of running on ground or track is slightly different than treadmill running, emphasizing some muscles over others. So, recently, I’ve begun to mix my workouts between treadmill and track, with me still searching for a good cross-country type course to practice on. Also, I’ve made a point of giving myself one or two days of rest between runs at this stage. I plan to begin using the YMCA’s cross-trainer on days I’m not running, at some future point. My running records so far are pretty modest, and they probably will be for a while. Well, here’s my training record so far:

DATE DAY MILES TIME SURFACE
5-14-- mo-- 0.25 --3:43-- treadmill
5-17-- th--- 0.25-- 2:57----- “
5-19-- sa--- 0.25-- 2:32----- “
5-22-- tu--- 0.25-- 2:23----- “
5-25-- fr--- 0.25-- 2:19------ “
5-27-- su--- 0.25-- 2:09------“
5-30-- we-- 0.35-- 3:44----- “
6-01-- fr----0.50-- 4:40----- “
6-03-- su-- 0.50-- 4:33------ “
6-06-- we-- 0.50-- 4:14----- “
6-08-- fr--- 1.00-- 9:28----- “
6-11-- mo-- 1.00-- 9:07----- “
6-13-- we-- 1.50- 14:38----- “
6-15-- fr--- 0.50-- 4:05----- “
6-19-- tu-- -2.00 -19:35----- “
6-21-- th----3.11- 30:00----- “
6-24-- su--- 3.11- 28:38------ “
6-27-- we--- 3.11- 28:15------ “
6-29-- fr---- 0.25-- 2:30-- asphalt
7-01-- su--- 3.11- 28:09---treadmill
7-05-- th--- 0.25-- 2:07--- asphalt
7-05-- th--- 0.25-- 1:52------- “
7-08-- su--- 3.11- 27:19---treadmill

Geography and Maps

Ever since I can remember (long before I could read), I had a strong sense of geography. For some reason, it always seemed to be an important matter to know exactly where I was. And when I knew where I was in a lot of different places, I built up a large storehouse of geographical points in my head and made up an internal map, with the cardinal directions (north-south-east-west) all pointing in the conventional directions. Even when I was two or three years old, I would follow attentively whichever route we took to get anywhere. Around my home town of Opa-Locka, Florida, I was then attuned to the location of places like the library, my sister’s elementary school, the house where some elderly friends of my parents lived, a little store that my sister and I would walk to (past a ferocious dog), the giant billboard with a giant on it on NW 27th Avenue, and an airport lying west of our home, which was at one end of a string of small apartments. Whenever we went to the beach (usually Haulover Beach, almost directly east of Opa-Locka), I would watch the landmarks out of the rear car window, carefully holding on to a small looped strap hanging down in front of me (to be safe in case of an accident!) with no seat belts, of course, in our ’55 Chevy family car. Once we took a long road trip to Albany, Georgia, where many of our relatives lived (I was three then). Although it was hard staying awake for long stretches, I was very much interested in seeing the Suwannee River when we crossed it.

This extensive orientation toward geography made me a natural at reading maps. One thing I liked to do as a little kid was to get the family U.S. road atlas and follow a particular numbered highway route from one end to another. It was no big jump to go on to the world atlas, so at a very early age, I was intimately acquainted with the names of the states, capitals, and world nations and territories. There was only one problem. The world atlas we had then reflected the world at the end of World War II, with large sections of Africa and Asia colored off as colonies of European countries (mainly Great Britain, France, and Portugal). So when Lyndon Johnson announced the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964 (in almost Pearl Harbor-like tones of outrage), I was concerned, even at seven years old. But what was this “North Vietnam” that our President was referring to as the bad guys? The only maps I had showed a place called “French Indochina”. But that was the way it was with many places. After World War II, Britain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, and (later) Portugal granted independence to an overwhelming majority of their old colonies and more recent trusteeships, causing much turmoil in some regions (especially Indochina, India/Pakistan, Congo, South Africa, and Israel/Palestine). A plethora of new, independent nations popped into existence over a span of the subsequent few decades, necessitating that I radically update my picture of the world.

In 1970, when I was in the eighth grade, my picture of the world was radically changed again when I checked out a book titled Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings by Charles Hapgood. In it was revealed the astonishing record of very old, accurate maps that often showed areas in the world before they were discovered! Many of these maps were based on portalanos, which were maps used by seafarers and which often were much more accurate than the maps seen often in academia. There were two old maps which showed Antarctica, the earliest being from 1512 (Antarctica wasn’t officially discovered until the nineteenth century!). And there was another old map that appeared to record a glacial advance into northern Europe, something that would go back thousands of years ago! Now the author theorized that features like this were probably copied from previous maps without the copier actually knowing what they signified. Hapgood believed that in ancient times, there was a great seagoing culture, typified by the Phoenicians, that explored and documented much of the world that we currently believe was only discovered during the last six centuries or so. That certainly seems to me to be more plausible than talking about lost continents or ancient astronauts to account for perceived historical discrepancies (although Hapgood was interested in Atlantis and Mu, as well as the notion that shifts in the Earth’s axis caused cataclysmic changes in the past).

My proclivity toward maps also made learning about the constellations and how to use celestial maps to find them relatively easy. I also heard a few years ago that there was a planetarium (I believe it was in Atlanta) that could show the night sky from the point of view of other known stars. I must have been mistaken about this, though, because the factors of the speed of light with the associated enormous distances, along with fainter stars closer and visible to the “target” star that are invisible to us (and which therefore could not be included), would seemingly have made this an incredibly complicated task. Actually, the idea of having a viable “three-dimensional” map of space, encompassing stars up to a galactic level, is something that the late science fiction writer Isaac Asimov had already revealed in his wonderful Foundation series about humankind’s “future” history on a galactic level. But it showed all of the stars with a “simultaneous” point of reference that disregarded the speed of light, faster-than-light travel having been made possible in Asimov’s fictional realm.

Finally, a discussion of maps would be incomplete without reference to the great advances in map access and quality we have through the Internet. I use MapMyRun.com to look for and measure, at my computer, running courses. My Works program has a map section as well. But it’s GoogleEarth that is totally amazing! I love to check out different spots in Florida, the U.S., and the world that interest me. Looking down on where I live from space, I can actually make out the two doghouses that are in my back yard! Some places, mainly the rural ones, don’t have very good resolution, but GoogleEarth is an ongoing work in progress. As is Google’s similar project to map the Moon in pictures!

Stung by the Devil Rays

Last Thursday night, I was listening on my local 99.5-WBXY talk station to the Greg Knapp show when, suddenly, it was time for Tampa Bay Devil Rays baseball! I said to myself, why not just check out this team (which I’ve never followed before) and see what they’ve got going on this season. So, I stayed tuned in.

Aside from the announcement of that night’s game in Boston against the Red Sox, the main issue being discussed during the pre-game segment was the fact that the Devil Rays had lost ten games in a row. Their manager, Joe Maddon, was on the show and talked about it, saying that he was encouraging his team to go out there and act as if they’d won ten games in a row. I can just see somebody like Tony LaRussa with that kind of attitude toward his players’ substandard performances. But just the same, I realized beforehand that Tampa Bay historically has had losing baseball teams and that it might be healthy for me, after the recent dazzling successes of my Florida Gator football and basketball teams, to follow a team with a more humble record and outlook.

So, I attentively listened to the play-by-play at the beginning of the game. The top of the first inning saw the top of the order in the Devil Ray batting lineup. The first batter struck out. The second batter struck out. The third batter struck out. Then it was the bottom of the first inning and the Red Sox were at bat. They proceeded to score six runs in that inning and I switched stations, swearing off the Tampa Bay Devil Rays as a team that even remotely merited my following. Later I checked the final score and they lost that game, their eleventh in a row, 15-4. I guess the Rays went into their game last night pretending to be riding an eleven game winning streak! But they did win, 6-5, against the lowly Kansas City Royals. I have a proposal: they should only broadcast games that the Devil Rays play against lower division teams!

Presuming Innocence

I think that one of the biggest “social” mistakes that I habitually make is when I am in the situation where I feel victimized by some transgressor and automatically bestow properties of malice, negligence, greed, or just plain meanness to the party in question. And there are people who fit these descriptions (and worse) in some of the things they’ve done, to be sure. But it does neither me nor anyone else any good to make a premature judgment about another, just because they are a party to a situation that has an unfavorable outcome for me (and sometimes I’m also in error in interpreting the outcome as being unfavorable).

There is a problem that can arise when different sources of distraction, none directly related to each other, come at me around the same time, creating a state of anxiety disproportionately higher than called for by its causes. The (wrong) tendency is for me to overemphasize then any negative reactions I have from any of the parties that I believe are imposing on me, instead of treating them in a more even-handed manner.

There are many types of scenarios in traffic in which suspending judgment, at least for a while, can save a driver a lot of anguish. There are many reasons people may drive too slow, too fast, in the wrong lane, or not move at all. And some of these reasons are legitimate (most of which I’ll never know), while virtually all of them really have nothing to do with me personally. Even when I discern that a driver is misbehaving on the road, it is pointless for me to get into a stew over it. All that would accomplish is impair my own driving!

An especially common and insidiously evil form of rushing to judgment instead of initially presuming innocence is that of prejudice (from “pre”, “judgment”), or bigotry. It’s very important that we avoid tainting our estimation of the degree of guilt of a suspected offending person on the basic of his or her demographic classification. Unfortunately, this appears to still be a pervasive problem that may be a remnant of the ancient times when people would band together in small tribes or other groups and regard everyone else as outsiders, and not worthy of the same rights and privileges as their members (including the right of due process, which includes the presumption of innocence, of course).

In any situation where there is a hierarchy of authority, the one who is “above” may not have everyone’s best interests under consideration when making decisions. Often, just talking with that person about it instead of expressing criticism (or condemnation) can diffuse a potentially bad outcome. The working relationship between the two parties can strengthen because of this, for even if the one in authority sticks with the unfavorable decision, mitigating reasons can be shared and a greater understanding achieved.

The bottom line is that there are many more great things that I can occupy my mind with than dwelling on who’s guilty of what. Projecting guilt on others as an act of habit only serves to bog down one’s thoughts. Getting over offenses releases oneself to be able to focus on what’s really important in life.

Sudoku and Grand Masters

I love Sudoku! And not the easy, medium, or even hard varieties of this fun puzzle. Only Sudoku labeled as diabolical, evil or fiendish will do for me. Almost always, wherever I go I carry in my pocket a few puzzles to work on during idle moments. I am rarely ever stumped on a puzzle, even with the more difficult levels. My main problem is in carelessly filling them out and making stupid mistakes because I was going so fast that I didn’t see a certain number in a square.
When I started out, I used a website titled Websudoku.com, which has all levels and even times you and lets you know if you made a mistake (if you want to know that). But I found it more convenient to just go out and buy one of the many good Sudoku puzzle books out there. My all-time favorite so far is the New York Post book of Fiendish Sudoku, by Sudoku “Grand Master” Wayne Gould.
So, you may already be asking, “What in the world is a Grand Master in Sudoku?” Well, if you’re asking me, you’re asking the wrong guy. I know there are Soduku competitions and there’s also some guy on the Web who calls himself the world’s only Sudoku Grand Master. As for me, who cares? Either you enjoy doing Sudoku or you don’t. The whole concept of “Grand Master” is a bit of a puzzle to me in itself, so I decided to investigate its usage. First let me say that I am the most familiar with the term from its application to young chess Grandmaster Gabriel Schwartzmann, who a few years ago chose to live here in Gainesville and had the opportunity to write a compelling and informative weekly column about chess in my local newspaper, the Gainesville Sun. But I figured that Gabriel achieved his status most likely by racking up enough points in sanctioned matches and tournaments to give him the needed rating. But how do you do it in Sudoku? I sure don’t know of any Sudoku tournaments where I live, and I don’t see any Sudoku on ESPN (to me, it seems just as valid a sport as poker). So where does the title come from?

Apparently, the term “Grand Master” originates with the designation applied to leaders of guilds, most notably the Masonic Lodge (Wikipedia, “Grand Master”). Other than that, it denotes the highest achievement in some sports (and chess, of course). But to come out and say you’re a Grand Master in Sudoku? O.K., if you say so…

Although I love Sudoku, I think that when I finish Wayne Gould’s “fiendish” book (I have about ninety more puzzles left to do in it), I’m going to switch over to try my hand at Kakuro puzzles, which appear to be a bit more challenging. Who knows, maybe I’ll become a Kakuro Grand Master … NOT!!

I Hate Buses

My feeling of abject antipathy for buses has very deep roots. They go back to my fourth grade, when I had to ride a bus to get back and forth from my new elementary school. Actually, though, at the very beginning it was a kind of cool novelty, and I felt a bit of camaraderie with the kids I rode with. But as years ground on, riding buses, too often overcrowded with three students per seat, became a grueling exercise in discomfort and humiliation that neither prepared me well for the coming school day nor relaxed me for coming home afterwards. Let me list some more gripes I have about buses.

--If you’re behind one (or just standing there when one passes by), the exhaust coming out of the back is overwhelming (and I live in the 21st century, having to breathe this black smoke!).

--Buses are mostly bone-jarring, loud-rattling contraptions that have an uncanny ability to transmit any change in the road level to the passenger, at times giving the effect of being on a wooden roller coaster (without any of the fun).

--Buses have enormous blind spots. Quite often there will be a report about someone, usually a child, which is run over or hit by a bus because the driver wasn’t in a position to see (and never can be completely). Once when I was in school, a school bus nearly hit a younger co-student who was pushed in front of the bus just as it was moving forward.

--There are no seat belts on school or city buses (at least in Gainesville). Yet the bus often comes to screeching, sudden stops that can lurch the passengers forward. Once, again in school, the bus did this and I hit my head on a metal bar in front of me, narrowly avoiding serious injury.

--I mentioned school bus overcrowding, but it is often worse on city buses, which at busy times are often full of people standing. If you’re lucky, though, I guess that’s better than the bus just passing your stop by because it is already filled to capacity.

--I have waited on many different occasions for the city bus, having gotten to the bus stop on time, and it would never show up, at least not until the next bus came 30 minutes to an hour later.

--When I went to school, the bus, along with the bus stop, was the favorite hunting place for the school bullies, who made life miserable for others. Many fights took place at bus stops.

--If you’re driving behind a bus, you often have to stop every few hundred feet when it stops.

--Sometimes, a bus will only pull off the road partially, clogging up that lane and leaving it useless.

--I’ve ridden Greyhound some, and they haven’t exactly been joy rides, either. One time I took a Greyhound down to South Florida. I was supposed to be let out at about 7 AM, but the driver, apparently anxious to get finished with his run, tore down the road and dumped me and my co-passengers out a little after 5 AM, in the middle of pitch darkness, with my ride not expecting to pick me up until 7! Another time, I was sitting in the local Gainesville Krispy Kreme donut store (open 24 hours) at 2 AM (another story) when a Greyhound bus, loaded with passengers, pulled into the parking lot. The driver got out and came in the store. Several passengers got off the bus as well, many going around the corner to use the restrooms. After getting his coffee, the bus driver then proceeded to get back on the bus and drive off! I saw people coming back around the corner, tearing off in panic after the bus, yelling at it! Eventually they all got back on the bus a while later after the driver was notified by radio that he had left a large contingent of his passengers stranded in doughnut land!

So, I don’t, as you can see, care too much for buses. But I realize that many people depend on them for their transportation and that overall they perform an important function in society. As for the drivers, it’s hard to fathom how they can maneuver around in traffic like that with such large vehicles and stick to rather precise schedules (that one speeding Greyhound driver notwithstanding). That job must require a lot of skill and poise under pressure. I was able to use the Gainesville bus system to take me to classes at the University of Florida, although one time I tested how long I took by riding my extremely cheap bicycle there. I live five miles from campus, and I beat the bus there on the bike! I think my main problem with buses is that I spent way too much time in my youth riding them back and forth from school, and also spent way too much time waiting for them in the morning at my bus stop and way too much time sitting in them at school in the afternoon waiting for them to leave.