There was something rather subversive about my track practice in high school, specifically involving practice for middle and long-distance running. First, let me preface by stating for the record that I was not exactly one of the “shining lights” on the team. I have always believed that the only reason they let me stay on it was that, during that season, my school bestowed physical education credit on students going out for athletic teams (it was called “Varsity Sports”), and they let me “hang on” for that purpose. Compared to the general population, though, I was a very fast, good runner.
The runners on the track team generally alternated practices between days when they’d do interval training (relatively short, fast bursts around the track with very short breaks between runs) and long, cross-country runs (which all the middle and long distance runners would do together). We would run different courses in our long runs, but usually they involved running around the public schools near us, through fields, or along roads. But sometimes someone would come up with a new course that involved going down a dirt path that ran through obviously private property. So in many of our runs, we actually trespassed on other people’s property. There was even once when we, in doing this, came across some orange trees and then proceeded to split into two camps, having an impromptu orange-throwing war (with someone else’s oranges, of course). Eventually, our school began receiving irate complaints from its neighbors about the trespassing, and it was curtailed (but not completely). That put me in a bit of a bind: do I show loyalty to the team and participate in the trespassing, or do I respect others’ property rights and break off from the team? My answer was to stick with the team but be low-key about my presence. Chicken!
But there’s still something to be said for running down a seldom-traveled back road and then just going off down a mysterious dirt path branching out of it. Many of these dirt paths criss-cross each other, and if you made a couple of path-switches without maintaining your point of reference, you stood a chance of becoming hopelessly lost! But, at least for me, there is something rather exhilarating about stepping off the beaten path and running an unconventional course through land that may not be all that hospitable. One of my running teammates dubbed the dilapidated old back road running behind my high school as “Rickity-Rack”, a nonsensical name that sounded good and stuck. That was back in the early 1970s, though. Since then, that road has completely changed, and many of the mysterious pathways through the countryside around my old school have disappeared with the extensive development that has gone on in that area. I can’t imagine the current cross-country and track team runners there today having anywhere near the fun that we experienced back then! Of course, I don’t believe that I’d have the guts nowadays to just go down one of those dirt paths if they were still there (knowing what I know now about human nature).
Friday, August 31, 2007
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Favorite Songs of 2007 (Through August)
In one of my earlier entries, I had mentioned discussing my favorite songs from more recent years. So, each week I will go back in time and list the music that I liked the most from year to year (progressively going back in time). Today, I begin with 2007. The artists are given in parentheses.
Think I’m in Love (Beck)
Suffer Well (Depeche Mode)
Phantom Limb (Shins)
Starlight (Muse)
Lazy Eye (Silversun Pickups)
Bohemian (Dandy Warhols)
Hang Me Up to Dry (Cold War Kids)
Lost in Boston (The Walkmen)
Ocean Man (Ween)
Sunshine (World Party)
Working Class Hero (Green Day)
Smile (Lili Allen)
Supermassive Black Hole (Muse)
Hey There Delilah (Plain White T’s)
Black Mirror (Arcade Fire)
Most of the above can be heard from AOL’s music archives, along with the videos. Of the bunch, my biggest favorites are Muse’s Starlight and Supermassive Black Hole, along with Lazy Eye by the Silversun Pickups, Dandy Warhols’s Bohemian, and Green Day’s excellent cover of John Lennon’s Working Class Hero. I also liked the love ballad Hey There Delilah, but it seems to have become a major nationwide hit and is being overplayed to death over the air. Every song on the list is on the playlist of 100.5-WHHZ “The Buzz”, a local independent/alternative radio station whose playlist has pretty much defined the genre of music I’ve been the most interested in for the past four or five years. When I listen to some of the mainstream hits on other radio stations, I realize how severely my tastes in music have begun to drastically diverge from those of others. Fortunately, WHHZ has, on their website, a section where they list the specific songs that they’ve played over the course of the day. Otherwise, I’d be clueless as to the identities and artists of half the songs on my list!
Think I’m in Love (Beck)
Suffer Well (Depeche Mode)
Phantom Limb (Shins)
Starlight (Muse)
Lazy Eye (Silversun Pickups)
Bohemian (Dandy Warhols)
Hang Me Up to Dry (Cold War Kids)
Lost in Boston (The Walkmen)
Ocean Man (Ween)
Sunshine (World Party)
Working Class Hero (Green Day)
Smile (Lili Allen)
Supermassive Black Hole (Muse)
Hey There Delilah (Plain White T’s)
Black Mirror (Arcade Fire)
Most of the above can be heard from AOL’s music archives, along with the videos. Of the bunch, my biggest favorites are Muse’s Starlight and Supermassive Black Hole, along with Lazy Eye by the Silversun Pickups, Dandy Warhols’s Bohemian, and Green Day’s excellent cover of John Lennon’s Working Class Hero. I also liked the love ballad Hey There Delilah, but it seems to have become a major nationwide hit and is being overplayed to death over the air. Every song on the list is on the playlist of 100.5-WHHZ “The Buzz”, a local independent/alternative radio station whose playlist has pretty much defined the genre of music I’ve been the most interested in for the past four or five years. When I listen to some of the mainstream hits on other radio stations, I realize how severely my tastes in music have begun to drastically diverge from those of others. Fortunately, WHHZ has, on their website, a section where they list the specific songs that they’ve played over the course of the day. Otherwise, I’d be clueless as to the identities and artists of half the songs on my list!
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
[WARNING: MAY CONTAIN PLOT SPOILERS]
One late night in the early 1980s, I was channel-surfing on my minuscule black and white television and came upon the very beginning of an interesting-looking Clint Eastwood western that I hadn’t seen before. Knowing that I’d have to be at work the following morning, I decided to go ahead and watch this movie and go to bed immediately afterward. This turned into a disaster, at least in terms of getting any sleep that night, because the movie I was watching was The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. And it lasted nearly four hours (including all of the interminable commercials)! But it really was a terrific movie, in spite of its never-ending nature. Like other “spaghetti” westerns like A Fistful of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More, Eastwood plays a quiet, brave, scheming, and sharpshooting drifter from the Midwest who wears the rough and dangerous wild west lifestyle as if he were born to it. In this movie, the plot centers around the struggle between three tough, ruthless individuals (including Eastwood’s unnamed character) to find hidden treasure that was earlier stolen and buried by some Confederate soldiers. Which brings me to what makes The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly such a great movie: while the three are engaging in their exciting, brutal quest, in the background the U.S. Civil War is going on unabated. And as the movie chugs along, the War’s role in the plot increases until it becomes clear that the overriding message this film means to convey is the futility and horror of war. The musical soundtrack was outstanding and appropriate, too. And the ending to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is truly a classic in the history of cinema, spoofed many times since. As to the title’s meaning, Eastwood played the “Good”, Lee Van Cleef played a ruthless, cruel paid assassin called Angel Eyes as the “Bad”, and Eli Wallach as Mexican bandit Tuco played the “Ugly”. Although Eastwood got top billing, it was Wallach who stole the show with his unforgettable performance.
Although it was pure fiction and filmed in Europe, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly showed the hard edge of life in the southwestern U.S. during the Civil War. The movie contained several flaws, which I enjoy laughing at every time I see them! I liked it so much that I got the DVD (without the obnoxious commercials). In spite of the movie’s extraordinary length, there is an even longer, uncut version occasionally shown on television that I recommend the most. Just make sure you’ve had enough sleep before watching!
One late night in the early 1980s, I was channel-surfing on my minuscule black and white television and came upon the very beginning of an interesting-looking Clint Eastwood western that I hadn’t seen before. Knowing that I’d have to be at work the following morning, I decided to go ahead and watch this movie and go to bed immediately afterward. This turned into a disaster, at least in terms of getting any sleep that night, because the movie I was watching was The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. And it lasted nearly four hours (including all of the interminable commercials)! But it really was a terrific movie, in spite of its never-ending nature. Like other “spaghetti” westerns like A Fistful of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More, Eastwood plays a quiet, brave, scheming, and sharpshooting drifter from the Midwest who wears the rough and dangerous wild west lifestyle as if he were born to it. In this movie, the plot centers around the struggle between three tough, ruthless individuals (including Eastwood’s unnamed character) to find hidden treasure that was earlier stolen and buried by some Confederate soldiers. Which brings me to what makes The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly such a great movie: while the three are engaging in their exciting, brutal quest, in the background the U.S. Civil War is going on unabated. And as the movie chugs along, the War’s role in the plot increases until it becomes clear that the overriding message this film means to convey is the futility and horror of war. The musical soundtrack was outstanding and appropriate, too. And the ending to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is truly a classic in the history of cinema, spoofed many times since. As to the title’s meaning, Eastwood played the “Good”, Lee Van Cleef played a ruthless, cruel paid assassin called Angel Eyes as the “Bad”, and Eli Wallach as Mexican bandit Tuco played the “Ugly”. Although Eastwood got top billing, it was Wallach who stole the show with his unforgettable performance.
Although it was pure fiction and filmed in Europe, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly showed the hard edge of life in the southwestern U.S. during the Civil War. The movie contained several flaws, which I enjoy laughing at every time I see them! I liked it so much that I got the DVD (without the obnoxious commercials). In spite of the movie’s extraordinary length, there is an even longer, uncut version occasionally shown on television that I recommend the most. Just make sure you’ve had enough sleep before watching!
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Exclusivity and Acceptance Between Religions
Religions tend to be exclusive in nature: if you believe in one of them, then that belief tends to reject the validity of others. Now I acknowledge that there are sects like the Baha’is, the Unitarian Universalists, and Unity, who tend to promote the idea of a more universal legitimacy for religions. There are also more liberal forms of the traditional religions that tend to promote a more ecumenical acceptance of other religions. The predominant aspect of religions, however, is their intolerance of divergent beliefs, at least as far as doctrine is concerned. It doesn’t matter whether one is referring to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism , or the multitude of other faiths: if you’re a “true believer” within a particular group, then to you, all of those outside the group are "in error", “astray”, “lost”, or, worse, “pagans”, “heathens”, or “infidels” (with all of the negative connotations).
But that’s not the entire picture. Within each group, be it Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, there is a splintering off into subgroups (sects, denominations), which often regard the other groups with scorn and rejection, even when they are supposedly under the same religion’s “umbrella”. Thus you see conflicting doctrinal claims of legitimacy between Protestants, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox (Christianity), Reformed, Conservative, and Orthodox (Judaism), and Sunni and Shiite (Islam), to mention a few of the more prominent faiths.
Keeping in mind that statistically, the most reliable predictors of an individual’s adherence to a particular faith are his or her family background and geographical location, making knee-jerk judgments about followers of “outside” religions doesn’t make very much sense, at least to me. It’s one thing to believe strongly in a doctrine and that other doctrines have serious flaws in contrast to one's own: it’s another thing to divide the human race into good and evil based on which side of the religious fence one sees another as being on. So, I see no problem with missionaries of any religion going to any other part of the world to peacefully promote their faith and doctrine. To me, that kind of activity is part of one’s free and legitimate practice of his or her own religion. But I do have a problem with groups insisting that their worldview be imposed on everyone, or else they are somehow being made the target of religious persecution.
Since burgeoning global trade, as well as increasing international travel and almost instantaneous worldwide communication through the Internet and satellites is “shrinking” our world and bringing more and more people from different backgrounds and different “exclusive” religious beliefs in contact with one another, it appears obvious (at least to me) that there exists a dire need for a new creed of “social maturity” whereby people, either as individuals or in the groups of their own choosing, may believe and promote their own belief systems, but at the same time show the utmost respect for those “outside” of their own spheres of faith. Which sometimes includes both hearing doctrines different from their own as well as seeing some of their own religious taboos unknowingly broken by “outsiders” without going ballistic!
But that’s not the entire picture. Within each group, be it Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, there is a splintering off into subgroups (sects, denominations), which often regard the other groups with scorn and rejection, even when they are supposedly under the same religion’s “umbrella”. Thus you see conflicting doctrinal claims of legitimacy between Protestants, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox (Christianity), Reformed, Conservative, and Orthodox (Judaism), and Sunni and Shiite (Islam), to mention a few of the more prominent faiths.
Keeping in mind that statistically, the most reliable predictors of an individual’s adherence to a particular faith are his or her family background and geographical location, making knee-jerk judgments about followers of “outside” religions doesn’t make very much sense, at least to me. It’s one thing to believe strongly in a doctrine and that other doctrines have serious flaws in contrast to one's own: it’s another thing to divide the human race into good and evil based on which side of the religious fence one sees another as being on. So, I see no problem with missionaries of any religion going to any other part of the world to peacefully promote their faith and doctrine. To me, that kind of activity is part of one’s free and legitimate practice of his or her own religion. But I do have a problem with groups insisting that their worldview be imposed on everyone, or else they are somehow being made the target of religious persecution.
Since burgeoning global trade, as well as increasing international travel and almost instantaneous worldwide communication through the Internet and satellites is “shrinking” our world and bringing more and more people from different backgrounds and different “exclusive” religious beliefs in contact with one another, it appears obvious (at least to me) that there exists a dire need for a new creed of “social maturity” whereby people, either as individuals or in the groups of their own choosing, may believe and promote their own belief systems, but at the same time show the utmost respect for those “outside” of their own spheres of faith. Which sometimes includes both hearing doctrines different from their own as well as seeing some of their own religious taboos unknowingly broken by “outsiders” without going ballistic!
Monday, August 27, 2007
2007 NFL Predictions
I’ve been looking over the different teams in the NFL this season, and I don’t think that I’ve ever felt so strongly about the parity within the league between different teams. Every division (except the NFC North) seems to be up for grabs, with two or three teams looking very strong within each one. Here are my predictions for each division:
AFC EAST
1-Miami Dolphins
2-New England Patriots
3-Buffalo Bills
4-New York Jets
AFC SOUTH
1-Indianapolis Colts
2-Jacksonville Jaguars
3-Tennessee Titans
4-Houston Texans
AFC NORTH
1-Pittsburgh Steelers
2-Baltimore Ravens
3-Cincinnati Bengals
4-Cleveland Browns
AFC WEST
1-Denver Broncos
2-San Diego Chargers
3-Oakland Raiders
4-Kansas City Chiefs
NFC EAST
1-Dallas Cowboys
2-Philadelphia Eagles
3-New York Giants
4-Washington Redskins
NFC SOUTH
1-Tampa Bay Buccaneers
2-New Orleans Saints
3-Carolina Panthers
4-Atlanta Falcons
NFC NORTH
1-Chicago Bears
2-Detroit Lions
3-Green Bay Packers
4-Minnesota Vikings
NFC WEST
1-Seattle Seahawks
2-San Francisco 49ers
3-Arizona Cardinals
4-St.Louis Rams
But what do I know? Still, it’s fun to speculate how things will end up. Please forgive my unwarranted optimism about the Miami Dolphins: they are THE team that I root for the most, not just in the NFL, but in all sports! Virtually everyone else seems to think that the Patriots are the team to beat this year, but I disagree, Dolphins or no Dolphins. I personally believe that the AFC East will be the most ferocious, well-balanced division in the NFL, while the NFC East will be a close second in that regard. And once again, being an old Dolphins fan, I’ll be waiting for the moment in mid or late-season when there are no more undefeated teams left (keeping the 1972 Dolphins “perfect” season unmatched).
So, how’s it all going to end? Who knows, but I’ll give it my best shot: Dallas defeats Denver in the Super Bowl!
AFC EAST
1-Miami Dolphins
2-New England Patriots
3-Buffalo Bills
4-New York Jets
AFC SOUTH
1-Indianapolis Colts
2-Jacksonville Jaguars
3-Tennessee Titans
4-Houston Texans
AFC NORTH
1-Pittsburgh Steelers
2-Baltimore Ravens
3-Cincinnati Bengals
4-Cleveland Browns
AFC WEST
1-Denver Broncos
2-San Diego Chargers
3-Oakland Raiders
4-Kansas City Chiefs
NFC EAST
1-Dallas Cowboys
2-Philadelphia Eagles
3-New York Giants
4-Washington Redskins
NFC SOUTH
1-Tampa Bay Buccaneers
2-New Orleans Saints
3-Carolina Panthers
4-Atlanta Falcons
NFC NORTH
1-Chicago Bears
2-Detroit Lions
3-Green Bay Packers
4-Minnesota Vikings
NFC WEST
1-Seattle Seahawks
2-San Francisco 49ers
3-Arizona Cardinals
4-St.Louis Rams
But what do I know? Still, it’s fun to speculate how things will end up. Please forgive my unwarranted optimism about the Miami Dolphins: they are THE team that I root for the most, not just in the NFL, but in all sports! Virtually everyone else seems to think that the Patriots are the team to beat this year, but I disagree, Dolphins or no Dolphins. I personally believe that the AFC East will be the most ferocious, well-balanced division in the NFL, while the NFC East will be a close second in that regard. And once again, being an old Dolphins fan, I’ll be waiting for the moment in mid or late-season when there are no more undefeated teams left (keeping the 1972 Dolphins “perfect” season unmatched).
So, how’s it all going to end? Who knows, but I’ll give it my best shot: Dallas defeats Denver in the Super Bowl!
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Language Learning Strategy
Back on July 25, I wrote an entry hinting of future foreign language entries on this blog. And that’s still my intention. However, I’ve recently gone through some of my old material, and I’ve found that I’m a bit rustier in them than I had thought! So, what I’m going to do, at least for the immediate future, is set up a study schedule in the languages I’m learning. Then, every eight weeks, I’ll report my progress in them on this blog. At some point, I’ll begin to write entries in some of them, with an open invitation for any readers fluent in them to correct mistakes in grammar or usage. In the meantime, I can also figure out how to use the fonts supplied by my Windows software on my computer that correspond to the languages I want to write in. But, like I said, that’s a bit off in the future. For now, I’m going to plod along with my studies and report on what I’m doing and the progress I’m making. The languages, once again, are Spanish, French, German, Polish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese. I’m also adding Latin to the list because my daughter has it for a class at school. There is some study material I need to obtain, particularly with Vietnamese, but with the great bookselling companies on the Web, that shouldn’t be a problem. What I’m really uncertain about is the best audio study method around (for the price, that is). I’ve heard Rosetta Stone is good, but expensive (especially if you’re talking about multiple languages). However, I believe that once a language student gets a good sense of how a language is spoken and sounds (and I already do with the languages I’m studying), then the real daunting task is to build up a good working vocabulary of thousands of words in each of them. And, of course, the details of grammar as well, especially when I’m writing articles in them!
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Saturday Newsbreak: 8/25
Here are a few observations from the past week:
--The overwhelming attention paid by the media to Hurricane Dean, in comparison to the torrential floods in Ohio, the parching drought in northern Alabama, and the searing heat wave affecting much of the country (including Gainesville), makes me wonder: what’s in a name? It seems that the mere bestowing of a name on something, even if it is completely inanimate, gives it a legitimacy and importance that is often more than it merits, especially in comparison with other concerns. Maybe they should also come up with names for floods, heat waves, droughts, fires, and blizzards!
--Gainesville, the home of the University of Florida, has swollen up with an unprecedented student population in the past few days. The traffic around here is much worse than any I experienced in South Florida earlier this month. It looks like they’re going to have to open up a few new Starbucks to accommodate the increase!
--Speaking of coffee shops, I’m dismayed to have to report the closing of Corner Cup, a locally-owned quality coffee shop (and small restaurant) which had the best tasting coffee in town. It had different owners from time to time, but this time, the new owner is switching the store’s format more in the direction of fabrics, something that I’ve never been able to get interested in!
--Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards, for some unknown reason, is waging a war of sorts against the Fox News Channel. Any reasonable person would acknowledge the pro-right bias of Fox, but it is nevertheless a very popular forum that is open for guests of all political persuasions with nationwide exposure. And those liberals who have appeared on Fox, such as Joseph Biden and Charles Rangel, have come off quite well. I’m convinced that one big factor leading to John Kerry’s defeat was his refusal to be interviewed on Fox when the offer was extended both to him and President Bush (who accepted, appeared, and won) just before the election. And Edwards shouldn’t have even brought up the name of pathetic Ann Coulter, who, if she just is let free to speak her mind openly, can do more for the Democrats than they could themselves.
--It’s getting to be the time in the major league baseball season when teams in close races either begin to surge or fade. The two teams I’m following seem to be going in opposite directions: the New York Yankees seem to be peaking at the right time, while the Atlanta Braves seem tired and ready to fall back in their division.
--Google is reportedly now offering a view of space from the computer screen as a companion service to their GoogleEarth. One supposedly will be able to use material taken from the Hubble Space Telescope to see galaxies and other phenomena in deep space.
--The overwhelming attention paid by the media to Hurricane Dean, in comparison to the torrential floods in Ohio, the parching drought in northern Alabama, and the searing heat wave affecting much of the country (including Gainesville), makes me wonder: what’s in a name? It seems that the mere bestowing of a name on something, even if it is completely inanimate, gives it a legitimacy and importance that is often more than it merits, especially in comparison with other concerns. Maybe they should also come up with names for floods, heat waves, droughts, fires, and blizzards!
--Gainesville, the home of the University of Florida, has swollen up with an unprecedented student population in the past few days. The traffic around here is much worse than any I experienced in South Florida earlier this month. It looks like they’re going to have to open up a few new Starbucks to accommodate the increase!
--Speaking of coffee shops, I’m dismayed to have to report the closing of Corner Cup, a locally-owned quality coffee shop (and small restaurant) which had the best tasting coffee in town. It had different owners from time to time, but this time, the new owner is switching the store’s format more in the direction of fabrics, something that I’ve never been able to get interested in!
--Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards, for some unknown reason, is waging a war of sorts against the Fox News Channel. Any reasonable person would acknowledge the pro-right bias of Fox, but it is nevertheless a very popular forum that is open for guests of all political persuasions with nationwide exposure. And those liberals who have appeared on Fox, such as Joseph Biden and Charles Rangel, have come off quite well. I’m convinced that one big factor leading to John Kerry’s defeat was his refusal to be interviewed on Fox when the offer was extended both to him and President Bush (who accepted, appeared, and won) just before the election. And Edwards shouldn’t have even brought up the name of pathetic Ann Coulter, who, if she just is let free to speak her mind openly, can do more for the Democrats than they could themselves.
--It’s getting to be the time in the major league baseball season when teams in close races either begin to surge or fade. The two teams I’m following seem to be going in opposite directions: the New York Yankees seem to be peaking at the right time, while the Atlanta Braves seem tired and ready to fall back in their division.
--Google is reportedly now offering a view of space from the computer screen as a companion service to their GoogleEarth. One supposedly will be able to use material taken from the Hubble Space Telescope to see galaxies and other phenomena in deep space.
Friday, August 24, 2007
A Beautiful Mind and the War on Terror
[WARNING: CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS FOR A BEAUTIFUL MIND]
A few years ago, I saw the movie A Beautiful Mind, directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe as brilliant, schizophrenic mathematician John Nash who, upon coming of age and prominence in the Cold War years immediately following World War II, succumbs to numerous delusions and hallucinations due to his illness. One of these hallucinations is a U.S. secret government agent, William Parcher (played perfectly by Ed Harris) who enlists Nash in a top-secret counterterrorism project to prevent the smuggling across the northern U.S. border and detonation of a nuclear bomb by a splinter Soviet terrorist group. This movie (which was made just before 9/11 and released shortly thereafter), portrays his delusion about the terror plot he is working against as an extreme flight of paranoid fantasy. Even after Nash has been confronted with his delusion, he still harbors deep feelings that it is all real. And, after he lets his anti-schizophrenic medication lapse, he begins to see Parcher again. Parcher, in turn, confirms to him the reality of the plot, ratcheting up its crisis level (the bomb is already in the country, in its final stage). Once again, it’s all up to John Nash, with his unique, gifted code-breaking talent to save the day for everybody!
After the horrendous terrorist attacks on our nation on September 11, 2001, our Executive Branch, through agencies such as the Justice Department and Homeland Security, began to broadcast terror alerts to the country. A lot of the alerts simply consisted of pushing up a color-warning system to a higher level without revealing any substantive information about a threat. Other times, a rumor about a threat to a particular area would leak out. And of course, whatever the detailed facts were behind these warnings, this greatly alarmed many people in the general public who had no idea of what to do about them. The threats, in their details, were all top-secret, like William Parcher and his “bomb-plot”. Only instead of one sad, mentally ill person having to absorb the troublesome news, it was an entire nation! There were several occasions in those years immediately following 9/11 that I felt manipulated (rightly or wrongly) by my government, much in the way that Nash was manipulated by Parcher.
A Beautiful Mind is a great movie that contains many truths on many different levels. The acting is incredible and the plot unfolds like a Hitchcock movie, full of sudden twists and surprises. Having said this, it needs to be noted that this movie, based on the book with the same title by Sylvia Nasar, diverges from that book in some crucial areas that would have interfered with the movie’s culminating “moral” message. So, I’d advise anyone who’s seen the movie that the book will “straighten you out” in some areas of John Nash’s story!
A few years ago, I saw the movie A Beautiful Mind, directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe as brilliant, schizophrenic mathematician John Nash who, upon coming of age and prominence in the Cold War years immediately following World War II, succumbs to numerous delusions and hallucinations due to his illness. One of these hallucinations is a U.S. secret government agent, William Parcher (played perfectly by Ed Harris) who enlists Nash in a top-secret counterterrorism project to prevent the smuggling across the northern U.S. border and detonation of a nuclear bomb by a splinter Soviet terrorist group. This movie (which was made just before 9/11 and released shortly thereafter), portrays his delusion about the terror plot he is working against as an extreme flight of paranoid fantasy. Even after Nash has been confronted with his delusion, he still harbors deep feelings that it is all real. And, after he lets his anti-schizophrenic medication lapse, he begins to see Parcher again. Parcher, in turn, confirms to him the reality of the plot, ratcheting up its crisis level (the bomb is already in the country, in its final stage). Once again, it’s all up to John Nash, with his unique, gifted code-breaking talent to save the day for everybody!
After the horrendous terrorist attacks on our nation on September 11, 2001, our Executive Branch, through agencies such as the Justice Department and Homeland Security, began to broadcast terror alerts to the country. A lot of the alerts simply consisted of pushing up a color-warning system to a higher level without revealing any substantive information about a threat. Other times, a rumor about a threat to a particular area would leak out. And of course, whatever the detailed facts were behind these warnings, this greatly alarmed many people in the general public who had no idea of what to do about them. The threats, in their details, were all top-secret, like William Parcher and his “bomb-plot”. Only instead of one sad, mentally ill person having to absorb the troublesome news, it was an entire nation! There were several occasions in those years immediately following 9/11 that I felt manipulated (rightly or wrongly) by my government, much in the way that Nash was manipulated by Parcher.
A Beautiful Mind is a great movie that contains many truths on many different levels. The acting is incredible and the plot unfolds like a Hitchcock movie, full of sudden twists and surprises. Having said this, it needs to be noted that this movie, based on the book with the same title by Sylvia Nasar, diverges from that book in some crucial areas that would have interfered with the movie’s culminating “moral” message. So, I’d advise anyone who’s seen the movie that the book will “straighten you out” in some areas of John Nash’s story!
Thursday, August 23, 2007
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
When I was eight years old, I began to watch The Man from U.N.C.L.E., one of the American responses to the successful British James Bond movies. In it, secret agents Napoleon Solo (played by Robert Vaughn) and Illya Kuryakin (played by David McCallum) worked for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, a.k.a. U.N.C.L.E.. Their nemesis was the evil organization THRUSH, similar to James Bond’s enemy SPECTRE. U.N.C.L.E.’s chief was an elderly man named Mr. Waverly (played by Leo G. Carroll). Most of the episodes, titled as “affairs”, revolved around Solo and Kuryakin being given assignments to unravel and foil sinister plots by THRUSH to do naughty things to the world: in other words, pretty much like James Bond, but in the U.S. on TV! From late 1964 through most of 1966, this series was my favorite show on television. The stories were well-written and they brought top-notch stars to play various guest roles. I would list and memorize the titles for each episode, going through old issues of TV Guide to find episodes that I had missed (they used to list episode titles back then). One Christmas, I got a toy Man from U.N.C.L.E. kit, complete with toy gun, ID badge, and “official” membership card.
The quality of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. gradually began to dip as the years wore on, and I began to lose interest in the series. It seemed to me, even at my young age, that the producers had decided to make the episodes more juvenile to appeal more to a younger audience. This was especially true with its spin-off series The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., which ran for a relatively short span. After the original series was cancelled in 1968, I expected to be seeing reruns in a few short years, as was the case with other old series. But this mysteriously did not happen, and it wasn’t until 1986 that I was able to see a rerun of my old favorite show on a cable TV channel. As it turned out, MGM Studios, which owned rights to the series, had withheld it from syndication for all these years, in spite of its popularity. The turkeys!
Now, for some time, AOL has been showing old episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. from its television “In2TV” service. And I’ve had a great time getting back into the series! From my vantage point in 2007, I get a kick out of seeing U.N.C.L.E. headquarters’ huge “advanced” computer with its rows of buttons, switches, and flashing colored lights, along with the “pen” phone/radios that the agents used to talk to Waverly or each other. Nowadays, of course, with cell phones shrinking and even “disappearing” with innovations like Blue Tooth, Napoleon Solo wouldn’t have a prayer of a chance of impressing a pretty young woman with his then-seemingly-magical pen-phone.
When I discovered that AOL was rerunning some shows from the old series, I checked out a good website called The Man From U.N.C.L.E. episode guide that listed and described all of the episodes. And something hit me: I remember that, in late 1966, I had seen a really good two-part U.N.C.L.E. (The Concrete Overcoat Affair, co-starring Jack Palance and Janet Leigh), but my recollection of watching the series afterward is very vague. Upon seeing the list of episodes in the sequence that they were broadcast then, I discovered my “two-parter” was followed by probably the two worst episodes of the series. And one of them, The My Friend the Gorilla Affair, has been described as not only the worst episode of the series, but also one of the worst episodes in the history of television! So, of course I’m now waiting for AOL to offer that one! But I wonder whether the effect of watching this episode was so traumatic for me back in December 1966 that I wiped it and subsequent episodes from memory!
The quality of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. gradually began to dip as the years wore on, and I began to lose interest in the series. It seemed to me, even at my young age, that the producers had decided to make the episodes more juvenile to appeal more to a younger audience. This was especially true with its spin-off series The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., which ran for a relatively short span. After the original series was cancelled in 1968, I expected to be seeing reruns in a few short years, as was the case with other old series. But this mysteriously did not happen, and it wasn’t until 1986 that I was able to see a rerun of my old favorite show on a cable TV channel. As it turned out, MGM Studios, which owned rights to the series, had withheld it from syndication for all these years, in spite of its popularity. The turkeys!
Now, for some time, AOL has been showing old episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. from its television “In2TV” service. And I’ve had a great time getting back into the series! From my vantage point in 2007, I get a kick out of seeing U.N.C.L.E. headquarters’ huge “advanced” computer with its rows of buttons, switches, and flashing colored lights, along with the “pen” phone/radios that the agents used to talk to Waverly or each other. Nowadays, of course, with cell phones shrinking and even “disappearing” with innovations like Blue Tooth, Napoleon Solo wouldn’t have a prayer of a chance of impressing a pretty young woman with his then-seemingly-magical pen-phone.
When I discovered that AOL was rerunning some shows from the old series, I checked out a good website called The Man From U.N.C.L.E. episode guide that listed and described all of the episodes. And something hit me: I remember that, in late 1966, I had seen a really good two-part U.N.C.L.E. (The Concrete Overcoat Affair, co-starring Jack Palance and Janet Leigh), but my recollection of watching the series afterward is very vague. Upon seeing the list of episodes in the sequence that they were broadcast then, I discovered my “two-parter” was followed by probably the two worst episodes of the series. And one of them, The My Friend the Gorilla Affair, has been described as not only the worst episode of the series, but also one of the worst episodes in the history of television! So, of course I’m now waiting for AOL to offer that one! But I wonder whether the effect of watching this episode was so traumatic for me back in December 1966 that I wiped it and subsequent episodes from memory!
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Hollywood, Florida
From the time that I was four in late 1960 until the time I moved out in 1977, I lived in the city of Hollywood, Florida. Well, actually, from 1960 to 1965, it was West Hollywood until Hollywood swallowed it up, for reasons I have yet to fathom. On its own, Hollywood stands as a pretty big-sized city, but it’s sandwiched between the giants of Fort Lauderdale and Miami/Dade County. Hollywood, many years ago, had its own hometown paper, the Hollywood Sun-Tattler (which went under long ago), and as far as I can see, now has little representation in the media down there. When we moved there in late 1960, we were on the western fringes of the populated area in South Florida, with little to our west except cow pastures and the Everglades. Now, however, I’d say that my childhood home lies slightly to the east of the center of population! It’s certainly gotten very congested, to say the least! Even the old elementary school two blocks from my house, where I went to from the first through third grades, has almost completely plugged up its formerly spacious playground area with more school buildings.
Some of my most vivid memories of Hollywood involve riding with my family eastward down its main artery, Hollywood Boulevard, going either to the railroad station (running parallel to Dixie Highway) to pick up or see off my visiting grandparents or to Hollywood Beach to spend a sunny weekend day in the ocean, on the sand, and along Hollywood’s Boardwalk. The most notable aspect of our trips, to me, was going around the three huge circles on the Boulevard, each spaced a couple of miles apart from each other. Driving east toward the first circle, which contained the winter home for Riverside Military Academy (based in Gainesville, Georgia), I looked around and could see many large fields full of slash pines. Recently, the same view yielded a large, ugly (to me) glass building where Riverside used to be and nothing but buildings lining the Boulevard where the fields used to be. And going around the circles is an art in itself: one has to be very careful to stay in the correct lane (which is largely guesswork) in order not to be suddenly diverted onto a different road.
The most notable change I noticed along Hollywood Boulevard between then and now is how they’ve completely renovated the downtown area between Dixie Highway and the easternmost (Young) circle as a very pedestrian-friendly, pretty shopping and dining area. Once east of Young Circle, very little has changed over the years. As a kid, coming off the last circle, I would also get excited looking toward the end of Hollywood Boulevard at the looming Hollywood Beach Hotel, which signified the beach to me. It had an almost Oz-like feel to it, going down that road. We’d cross the draw bridge, turn north on A1A, and almost always park near the big water tower that was a little up the road. Then, to the boardwalk and beach!
The Hollywood Beach Hotel later became Florida Bible College. More recently, Ramada took ownership and has renovated this old hotel. My family and I stayed there a couple of nights earlier this month. We weren’t too happy with their parking arrangements, and the room we had booked had a problem with the air conditioning. But the staff allowed us to switch rooms and we pretty much enjoyed our stay there. But I still got a creepy Stephen King-like feeling (The Shining, 1408) walking down their hallways. There was a small food court in the lobby which had a “Hong Kong” Chinese restaurant and a Pizza place. They both had excellent food and service!
Outside, the ocean and pool were both very, very warm. They always seemed to have a live band cranking out music at an open restaurant off the Boardwalk on the hotel’s ocean side. And we walked down the Boardwalk at night, which was a pretty interesting experience in itself.
I miss the old Hollywood, but I’m realistic enough to recognize that change can be good as well. It seems that the city has taken great pains in making its eastern side as attractive as possible while letting urban sprawl run rampant in its western half. Still, I think overall, Hollywood has done a better job over the years of making itself a pleasant place to visit than some of its adjacent communities (although I think I’d go nuts if I had to live there again!).
Some of my most vivid memories of Hollywood involve riding with my family eastward down its main artery, Hollywood Boulevard, going either to the railroad station (running parallel to Dixie Highway) to pick up or see off my visiting grandparents or to Hollywood Beach to spend a sunny weekend day in the ocean, on the sand, and along Hollywood’s Boardwalk. The most notable aspect of our trips, to me, was going around the three huge circles on the Boulevard, each spaced a couple of miles apart from each other. Driving east toward the first circle, which contained the winter home for Riverside Military Academy (based in Gainesville, Georgia), I looked around and could see many large fields full of slash pines. Recently, the same view yielded a large, ugly (to me) glass building where Riverside used to be and nothing but buildings lining the Boulevard where the fields used to be. And going around the circles is an art in itself: one has to be very careful to stay in the correct lane (which is largely guesswork) in order not to be suddenly diverted onto a different road.
The most notable change I noticed along Hollywood Boulevard between then and now is how they’ve completely renovated the downtown area between Dixie Highway and the easternmost (Young) circle as a very pedestrian-friendly, pretty shopping and dining area. Once east of Young Circle, very little has changed over the years. As a kid, coming off the last circle, I would also get excited looking toward the end of Hollywood Boulevard at the looming Hollywood Beach Hotel, which signified the beach to me. It had an almost Oz-like feel to it, going down that road. We’d cross the draw bridge, turn north on A1A, and almost always park near the big water tower that was a little up the road. Then, to the boardwalk and beach!
The Hollywood Beach Hotel later became Florida Bible College. More recently, Ramada took ownership and has renovated this old hotel. My family and I stayed there a couple of nights earlier this month. We weren’t too happy with their parking arrangements, and the room we had booked had a problem with the air conditioning. But the staff allowed us to switch rooms and we pretty much enjoyed our stay there. But I still got a creepy Stephen King-like feeling (The Shining, 1408) walking down their hallways. There was a small food court in the lobby which had a “Hong Kong” Chinese restaurant and a Pizza place. They both had excellent food and service!
Outside, the ocean and pool were both very, very warm. They always seemed to have a live band cranking out music at an open restaurant off the Boardwalk on the hotel’s ocean side. And we walked down the Boardwalk at night, which was a pretty interesting experience in itself.
I miss the old Hollywood, but I’m realistic enough to recognize that change can be good as well. It seems that the city has taken great pains in making its eastern side as attractive as possible while letting urban sprawl run rampant in its western half. Still, I think overall, Hollywood has done a better job over the years of making itself a pleasant place to visit than some of its adjacent communities (although I think I’d go nuts if I had to live there again!).
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Maintenance and the Throw-Away Culture
Once, many, many years ago, the telescopic antenna on my shortwave radio broke. A friend of mine, upon seeing it, asked me why I didn’t replace it. My response was that the radio still worked fine for my purposes. I believe his reaction, if my memory serves me correctly, was to just shake his head, grinning. And, for better or (probably) for worse, that’s pretty much been a pattern in my life: buy something, and after it gets partially broken or damaged, just keep using it until it’s completely useless! And then get it replaced!
Robert Pirsig, in his philosophical/autobiographical work Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, divided the world between people who took care of their possessions and those who just wore them out and replaced them. The case in point was how different owners took care of their motorcycles. He was one of the “maintainers” and promoted the value of treating one’s possessions with respect and care. This in turn would promote a nurturing nature that would carry over into one’s relationships with other people. And Pirsig demonstrated this in Zen and the Art with his devotion for his son in their cross-country quest.
And there really does seem to be a correlation of sorts between the materialistic throw-away culture we live in and the apparently more expedient and expendable relationships that people nowadays tend to form with one another. There seems to be an ever-shortening, ever-deafening beat pounding within people as time marches on, prodding and stressing them to the point where only one thing counts, the precious commodity known as NOW, with too many demands (or temptations) competing with each other for ascendancy in the all-important “present moment”. All too often, the needed maintenance of possessions (and relationships) dims in importance compared to flashier, more transitory distractions. As mature human beings, we need to decide what’s really important to pay attention to in our present moments and, just as importantly, what to reject as well. And one pathway to that, at least as far as my own personal experiences has shown, is for me to pay more attention to fostering better habits of taking care of my material possessions, like Robert Pirsig in his wonderful story. But it won’t be easy!
Robert Pirsig, in his philosophical/autobiographical work Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, divided the world between people who took care of their possessions and those who just wore them out and replaced them. The case in point was how different owners took care of their motorcycles. He was one of the “maintainers” and promoted the value of treating one’s possessions with respect and care. This in turn would promote a nurturing nature that would carry over into one’s relationships with other people. And Pirsig demonstrated this in Zen and the Art with his devotion for his son in their cross-country quest.
And there really does seem to be a correlation of sorts between the materialistic throw-away culture we live in and the apparently more expedient and expendable relationships that people nowadays tend to form with one another. There seems to be an ever-shortening, ever-deafening beat pounding within people as time marches on, prodding and stressing them to the point where only one thing counts, the precious commodity known as NOW, with too many demands (or temptations) competing with each other for ascendancy in the all-important “present moment”. All too often, the needed maintenance of possessions (and relationships) dims in importance compared to flashier, more transitory distractions. As mature human beings, we need to decide what’s really important to pay attention to in our present moments and, just as importantly, what to reject as well. And one pathway to that, at least as far as my own personal experiences has shown, is for me to pay more attention to fostering better habits of taking care of my material possessions, like Robert Pirsig in his wonderful story. But it won’t be easy!
Monday, August 20, 2007
The Levels of Potter
There is a dilemma I face every time I want to discuss a book, movie, or TV episode. In the first place, I want to stimulate interest in whatever I’m talking about. So, those who haven’t yet read the book or seen the show can’t be told of their outcomes. But it’s often the outcomes that I want to discuss! This is particularly annoying when I want to bring up something that happened within a series, such as Harry Potter, for example.
The Harry Potter series is especially obnoxious in this regard, since there are people at all kinds of different levels therein. First, there are those who’ve never read any of the books nor seen any of the movies. Then, there are those who are in various in-between stages. Finally, we have people who’ve passed the fourth book/movie Goblet of Fire but have yet to read the fifth installment Order of the Phoenix, people who’ve passed that level but still haven’t complete book #6 The Half-Blood Prince, people who’ve gone from #1 through #6 but haven’t completed book #7 The Deathly Hallows, and finally people who’ve read it all (like me)! I abhor plot-spoiling (I heard that movie critic Roger Ebert once gave away the ending of a movie on his movie review show). And the fact that this series is so spread out makes it almost impossible for two people in a group to discuss it without a third person being told something they hadn’t yet gotten to.
The only thing I know to do about this is to put a warning about plot spoilers right after my entry’s title and just before the body of the article. Then I could feel free to write my articles like the literature assignments I did in high school. Of course, when I did my book reports back then, I didn’t have to concern myself with spoiling the ending for the teacher. The idea was to describe the setting, characters, plot, and, above all, what I as a reader came away with from the story. And since I’ve done that so many times in the past with books that I did NOT want to read, I think it’s only fitting that I catch up a little and write a few reports about some books that I actually wanted to read. With the prefaced assumption, of course, that you, the blog reader, like my teachers of old, have already read the same material (or seen the same movie or episode). I know that if I had written a book that many people had enjoyed reading, then I would like nothing better than for them to freely discuss it a lot among themselves, without fear of “giving it away” to others!
With this end in mind, I will put a disclaimer “THIS ARTICLE MAY CONTAIN PLOT SPOILERS FOR ______” so that you can avoid having the story given away to you accidentally. The subsequent review then may not necessarily be comprehensive, and it might not even give away much of the plot, either (but better safe than sorry). And, of course, what I write on it are MY reactions. Each of us has our own personal take on what we read or watch, and that is equally valid as well. I’m looking forward to seeing how this works!
The Harry Potter series is especially obnoxious in this regard, since there are people at all kinds of different levels therein. First, there are those who’ve never read any of the books nor seen any of the movies. Then, there are those who are in various in-between stages. Finally, we have people who’ve passed the fourth book/movie Goblet of Fire but have yet to read the fifth installment Order of the Phoenix, people who’ve passed that level but still haven’t complete book #6 The Half-Blood Prince, people who’ve gone from #1 through #6 but haven’t completed book #7 The Deathly Hallows, and finally people who’ve read it all (like me)! I abhor plot-spoiling (I heard that movie critic Roger Ebert once gave away the ending of a movie on his movie review show). And the fact that this series is so spread out makes it almost impossible for two people in a group to discuss it without a third person being told something they hadn’t yet gotten to.
The only thing I know to do about this is to put a warning about plot spoilers right after my entry’s title and just before the body of the article. Then I could feel free to write my articles like the literature assignments I did in high school. Of course, when I did my book reports back then, I didn’t have to concern myself with spoiling the ending for the teacher. The idea was to describe the setting, characters, plot, and, above all, what I as a reader came away with from the story. And since I’ve done that so many times in the past with books that I did NOT want to read, I think it’s only fitting that I catch up a little and write a few reports about some books that I actually wanted to read. With the prefaced assumption, of course, that you, the blog reader, like my teachers of old, have already read the same material (or seen the same movie or episode). I know that if I had written a book that many people had enjoyed reading, then I would like nothing better than for them to freely discuss it a lot among themselves, without fear of “giving it away” to others!
With this end in mind, I will put a disclaimer “THIS ARTICLE MAY CONTAIN PLOT SPOILERS FOR ______” so that you can avoid having the story given away to you accidentally. The subsequent review then may not necessarily be comprehensive, and it might not even give away much of the plot, either (but better safe than sorry). And, of course, what I write on it are MY reactions. Each of us has our own personal take on what we read or watch, and that is equally valid as well. I’m looking forward to seeing how this works!
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Kakuro
The Thursday evening before last, I was relaxing in my comfortable chair in the corner of my living room, with severe storms brewing outside, reading that day’s edition of my local newspaper The Gainesville Sun. It’s one of the benefits of living in Gainesville that I am able to have such a good newspaper as this! Anyway, I happened upon their weekly Kakuro puzzle and I said, what the heck, let’s see how far I can go in it before I get stymied. And, as the thunder outside was booming and lightning was crashing loudly right outside my window, I focused on the puzzle and, to my amazement, completed it successfully! It was my first Kakuro victory! I decided then to hit some sites on the Web that had more Kakuro, and I completed four more that stormy night.
The following days, when I had some free time available, I would sit down and try my hand at a Kakuro puzzle. Inevitably, I’d reach a point in the puzzle where I’d end up with the same two numbers in a row (which isn’t permitted in the rules). This was due to carelessness on my part. I went through about six puzzles like this. And then, a couple of nights ago, as storms were once again descending over my area, my concentration went into full throttle forward again and I zipped successfully through two more puzzles!
George Noory, the paranormal-accepting host of the late night radio show Coast-to-Coast AM, repeatedly claims that there are no such things as coincidences. But my gut instincts tell me that’s a lot of nonsense. Sure, sometimes there really is a cause-and-effect relationship between two hitherto-believed-to-be unrelated phenomena, and sometimes the events are tied together by their connections with a third, unknown event. But much of the time things just happen at the same time! Still, it’s a little spooky to me that my mental concentration was more enhanced when their seemed to be more electricity in the air! Needless to say, this bears more observation before I can make any reasonable conclusion about a connection.
I had written earlier that I would finish my Fiendish Sudoku book (I still have more than fifty puzzles left) before starting Kakuro, but the opportunity presented itself and I’m now glad that I’m doing Kakuro, too. Both puzzles are specialized logic problems with their own particular appeals. Kakuro does, however demand a certain elementary competence with adding numbers. So, if you’ve successfully completed the first grade, I think you’re qualified to start Kakuro. Obviously, it’s a bit more involved than that, but like anything worthwhile, you pick up insights and skills as you go along and gradually get better at it. I’m just wondering whether I’ll reach the point where it’s too easy (assuming I’ve overcome my tendency to make careless mistakes). Until that moment, which may never happen, I’ll enjoy my newly-found hobby!
The following days, when I had some free time available, I would sit down and try my hand at a Kakuro puzzle. Inevitably, I’d reach a point in the puzzle where I’d end up with the same two numbers in a row (which isn’t permitted in the rules). This was due to carelessness on my part. I went through about six puzzles like this. And then, a couple of nights ago, as storms were once again descending over my area, my concentration went into full throttle forward again and I zipped successfully through two more puzzles!
George Noory, the paranormal-accepting host of the late night radio show Coast-to-Coast AM, repeatedly claims that there are no such things as coincidences. But my gut instincts tell me that’s a lot of nonsense. Sure, sometimes there really is a cause-and-effect relationship between two hitherto-believed-to-be unrelated phenomena, and sometimes the events are tied together by their connections with a third, unknown event. But much of the time things just happen at the same time! Still, it’s a little spooky to me that my mental concentration was more enhanced when their seemed to be more electricity in the air! Needless to say, this bears more observation before I can make any reasonable conclusion about a connection.
I had written earlier that I would finish my Fiendish Sudoku book (I still have more than fifty puzzles left) before starting Kakuro, but the opportunity presented itself and I’m now glad that I’m doing Kakuro, too. Both puzzles are specialized logic problems with their own particular appeals. Kakuro does, however demand a certain elementary competence with adding numbers. So, if you’ve successfully completed the first grade, I think you’re qualified to start Kakuro. Obviously, it’s a bit more involved than that, but like anything worthwhile, you pick up insights and skills as you go along and gradually get better at it. I’m just wondering whether I’ll reach the point where it’s too easy (assuming I’ve overcome my tendency to make careless mistakes). Until that moment, which may never happen, I’ll enjoy my newly-found hobby!
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Saturday Newsbreak: 8/18
A new weekly feature that I’m starting on this blog is my short take on some interesting (to me) stories out there, not in any particular order of importance. Nor do I plan to be comprehensive about “covering the news”. So, here goes….
--Much is being made in Gainesville of University of Florida football coach Urban Meyer’s recent statement to the press that (referring to his team) “we stink!”. But Gainesville Sun sports writer Pat Dooley (one of my favorites in the paper) noted that other coaches are doing essentially the same thing: openly criticizing their own teams before the media, apparently to get them to focus harder on coming together in preparation for the season, which for the Gators begins on September 1. But I think most of us take the criticisms with that in mind, and not as the coaches’ true sentiments. I’m looking forward to an exciting football season this year, with Florida hopefully being able to play for the Southeastern Conference championship at year’s end. I’m also hoping that Florida State and Miami can recover from their disappointing seasons last year and resume being the nationally-recognized powerhouses that they’ve been over the past few decades.
--Tropical Storm Erin just hit the southern Texas coast, and now the main forecasts have Hurricane Dean plowing into the same area in the middle of next week. It looks, at least at this point, like the western Gulf of Mexico is getting the same kind of “attention” that Florida received in 2004 with its four hurricanes.
--Arupa Freeman (a local advocate for the homeless) wrote a compelling piece in the editorial section of the August 17 Gainesville Sun about Gainesville’s recently-adopted policies against the homeless, which include evictions from public lands and anti-panhandling ordinances. She decries these actions and others, although the article’s title, “Gainesville’s reign of terror against the homeless”, is a bit on the melodramatic side. Freeman brings out a lot of information in the article, nevertheless, and if you can find a copy of it, I’d recommend you read it as well, for its message can apply to any other community in the nation. She correctly points out that some of Gainesville’s homeless have criminal records, which simultaneously makes them pariahs as homeless people and unable to get a decent job that could pull them out of their situation. Many of their crimes were drug-related. I don’t rightly understand why we have to force those who have been convicted of a crime to have the infraction “stamped” on them the rest of their lives, even after they have served the legally-prescribed penalty for it. This is a national-level problem that can only be solved through national leaders (or grass-roots leaders attaining national status). And our nationwide policy of processing mentally ill people through institutions and spitting them out onto the streets is, to me, nothing short of barbaric (I guess I’m starting to get a little melodramatic, too)!
--I saw Presidential candidate and Illinois Senator Barack Obama on C-Span the other day, speaking and answering questions outdoors somewhere in one of the three “pampered” states that perennially seem to be sites of the early campaigns. After hearing him, I came to the stunning realization that I agreed with everything that he said! I still think that Hillary Clinton would be a O.K. President and has been unfairly vilified in some parts of the media, but Obama has something that I see is invaluable to being a truly effective President that I don’t see in any of the candidates from either party (Republican Mike Huckabee is the only one coming close): he is a great communicator, in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. Some have added Bill Clinton to that list, but I think that Obama is better than him at both persuading and even exciting an audience.
--It's dismaying to see the deaths and casualties accruing from the efforts made to rescue the trapped miners in the collapsed Utah mine. Don't we have technology available to supply each miner with a tracking or homing device that would make it much simpler to find them in the event of an accident like this? The last thing rescuers need is to spend any more time than is absolutely necessary down there looking for people.
--Much is being made in Gainesville of University of Florida football coach Urban Meyer’s recent statement to the press that (referring to his team) “we stink!”. But Gainesville Sun sports writer Pat Dooley (one of my favorites in the paper) noted that other coaches are doing essentially the same thing: openly criticizing their own teams before the media, apparently to get them to focus harder on coming together in preparation for the season, which for the Gators begins on September 1. But I think most of us take the criticisms with that in mind, and not as the coaches’ true sentiments. I’m looking forward to an exciting football season this year, with Florida hopefully being able to play for the Southeastern Conference championship at year’s end. I’m also hoping that Florida State and Miami can recover from their disappointing seasons last year and resume being the nationally-recognized powerhouses that they’ve been over the past few decades.
--Tropical Storm Erin just hit the southern Texas coast, and now the main forecasts have Hurricane Dean plowing into the same area in the middle of next week. It looks, at least at this point, like the western Gulf of Mexico is getting the same kind of “attention” that Florida received in 2004 with its four hurricanes.
--Arupa Freeman (a local advocate for the homeless) wrote a compelling piece in the editorial section of the August 17 Gainesville Sun about Gainesville’s recently-adopted policies against the homeless, which include evictions from public lands and anti-panhandling ordinances. She decries these actions and others, although the article’s title, “Gainesville’s reign of terror against the homeless”, is a bit on the melodramatic side. Freeman brings out a lot of information in the article, nevertheless, and if you can find a copy of it, I’d recommend you read it as well, for its message can apply to any other community in the nation. She correctly points out that some of Gainesville’s homeless have criminal records, which simultaneously makes them pariahs as homeless people and unable to get a decent job that could pull them out of their situation. Many of their crimes were drug-related. I don’t rightly understand why we have to force those who have been convicted of a crime to have the infraction “stamped” on them the rest of their lives, even after they have served the legally-prescribed penalty for it. This is a national-level problem that can only be solved through national leaders (or grass-roots leaders attaining national status). And our nationwide policy of processing mentally ill people through institutions and spitting them out onto the streets is, to me, nothing short of barbaric (I guess I’m starting to get a little melodramatic, too)!
--I saw Presidential candidate and Illinois Senator Barack Obama on C-Span the other day, speaking and answering questions outdoors somewhere in one of the three “pampered” states that perennially seem to be sites of the early campaigns. After hearing him, I came to the stunning realization that I agreed with everything that he said! I still think that Hillary Clinton would be a O.K. President and has been unfairly vilified in some parts of the media, but Obama has something that I see is invaluable to being a truly effective President that I don’t see in any of the candidates from either party (Republican Mike Huckabee is the only one coming close): he is a great communicator, in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. Some have added Bill Clinton to that list, but I think that Obama is better than him at both persuading and even exciting an audience.
--It's dismaying to see the deaths and casualties accruing from the efforts made to rescue the trapped miners in the collapsed Utah mine. Don't we have technology available to supply each miner with a tracking or homing device that would make it much simpler to find them in the event of an accident like this? The last thing rescuers need is to spend any more time than is absolutely necessary down there looking for people.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Dorsal Lateral Prefrontal Cortex
Allstate Insurance Company just recently ran an ad in magazines explaining why young people seem to be greater risks for insurance. It seems that a part of the human brain called the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex doesn’t usually completely develop until one gets into their mid-twenties. This part of the brain, according to the ad, is largely responsible for people being able to discern long-range consequences of their actions, and its immaturity reputedly implies that their ability to render serious judgments concerning the affect of their actions on their lives and on others is relatively impaired if they are still in their late teens or early twenties. To which I muttered to myself, “H-m-m-m!”
So people aren’t really capable of making truly responsible decisions concerning their own lives until their mid-twenties, huh? Then, why oh why, do we as a society push young people into making major career decisions right in the middle of this age group? Why do we insist on recruiting soldiers from them? Why is it such a great thing to see young adults marry in their early twenties and rush off to have children?
I believe that, along with the development of said part of the brain, the young person needs experiences that progressively enable him or her to properly integrate physical growth with personality, including emotions, intellect, and ethics. Both colleges and the military seem to recognize, and at least on some level, acknowledge, that their students or recruits receive beneficial training in handling stress and making decisions under varying degrees of supervision. Both societal institutions emphasize personal growth of the individual into a more responsible citizen in their appeals for enrollment. And I’m not against early marriage per se: I just don’t think people should be getting married because it’s “time to”.
People should not be put into pressure-cooker situations where they feel that it’s now or never, that whatever they decide at a particular “window” in time commits their lives inexorably in a certain directions and shuts out other possibilities or opportunities. And I believe that’s the situation that too many young adults find themselves having to deal with, but with their growth still too incomplete to enable them to get a better, more farsighted perspective on their true situation (and how much freedom they really have in their lives). I also believe that, in a more primitive or traditional social setting, there would have been a greater role attached to the sagely elders, whose advice to the youths would both have been more forthcoming and more accepted. Nowadays, though, it seems that young people are, in a sense, being encouraged to grow up at earlier and earlier ages, while their physical (and dorsal prefrontal lateral cortex) development still takes just as long as ever to mature.
So people aren’t really capable of making truly responsible decisions concerning their own lives until their mid-twenties, huh? Then, why oh why, do we as a society push young people into making major career decisions right in the middle of this age group? Why do we insist on recruiting soldiers from them? Why is it such a great thing to see young adults marry in their early twenties and rush off to have children?
I believe that, along with the development of said part of the brain, the young person needs experiences that progressively enable him or her to properly integrate physical growth with personality, including emotions, intellect, and ethics. Both colleges and the military seem to recognize, and at least on some level, acknowledge, that their students or recruits receive beneficial training in handling stress and making decisions under varying degrees of supervision. Both societal institutions emphasize personal growth of the individual into a more responsible citizen in their appeals for enrollment. And I’m not against early marriage per se: I just don’t think people should be getting married because it’s “time to”.
People should not be put into pressure-cooker situations where they feel that it’s now or never, that whatever they decide at a particular “window” in time commits their lives inexorably in a certain directions and shuts out other possibilities or opportunities. And I believe that’s the situation that too many young adults find themselves having to deal with, but with their growth still too incomplete to enable them to get a better, more farsighted perspective on their true situation (and how much freedom they really have in their lives). I also believe that, in a more primitive or traditional social setting, there would have been a greater role attached to the sagely elders, whose advice to the youths would both have been more forthcoming and more accepted. Nowadays, though, it seems that young people are, in a sense, being encouraged to grow up at earlier and earlier ages, while their physical (and dorsal prefrontal lateral cortex) development still takes just as long as ever to mature.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Changing Rules Retroactively
When the 1981 major league baseball season began, there was a real danger of a strike in the middle of the season if management and the players’ union couldn’t come to a new collective bargaining agreement. But while the two sides were coming to heads against each other both behind the scenes and in front of the press, the teams went on with their schedules and played ball. Until about one third of the way through the regular season, that is, and then the strike began, ultimately consuming the middle third of the 1981 regular season. When the strike finally ended and play was to resume, the owners, trying to regenerate interest in all of the baseball cities, declared 1981 to be a split season. Whoever was ahead in each division at the end of the retroactively-declared “first season” was declared that division’s winner and was eligible for the post-season playoffs, which would also include the newly-invented second-half’s “winners”. The result was that the team with the best overall major league record that year, the Cincinnati Reds (66-42), missed the playoffs, while a team with an overall losing record, the Kansas City Royals (50-53), made the playoffs! All because of an expedient change of the rules without regard to the fact that none of the teams, up to the moment of the strike’s onset, had any inkling of the stakes involved in being ahead at that moment. So, in the National League West, Los Angeles had a 36-21 record while Cincinnati, feeling pretty good about themselves (Their ace pitcher Tom Seaver was having a banner year) was only ½ game behind at 35-21. Unfortunately for them, the greedy folks in charge of baseball changed the rules in mid-stream. Houston barely beat out the Reds in the “second season”, shutting the best team in baseball out of a chance to go to the World Series that year.
I think everybody gets a gut feeling of injustice when something like this happens. The ground rules are set for something in a particular arena of society, people act according to those rules, and then, after the fact, the rules are changed to effect a different outcome.
The 2000 Presidential Election is another example of this occurrence, with transgressions instigated from both sides. In the crucial, incredibly close state of Florida, Democratic lawyers, soon after the election, initially pushed for manual recounts only in the three South Florida counties that went for Gore, hoping that counting rejected, misread, and uncounted ballots in those counties would tip the scales for their candidate. In my opinion, this was a big strategic error on their part, in two ways. One, these actions tilted public opinion against Gore and for Bush. Two, they wasted too much time trying to do this when the only fair, viable option was a statewide manual recount, which the Florida Supreme Court finally mandated. But then the US Supreme Court stepped in, and in its Bush vs. Gore decision, overruled the State Supreme Court’s decision and halted the recount, effectively electing Bush to the Presidency. This, too, was changing the rules after the fact, since it was Constitutionally a state’s mandated responsibility that it decide for itself how it was going to choose its electors to represent it in the Electoral College! In the midst of all this grew the feeling that it wasn’t the people who mattered, but rather which side had the most aggressive lawyers and well-positioned judges acting on their behalf.
As a kid, have you ever found yourself playing a game of tag with another kid who refused to ever allow you to win? You’d be “it”, and, just as you’re about to tag him or her, the sore loser of a brat would suddenly find something to touch and declare it to be “base”. But the kid wouldn’t respect it if you did the same thing. That’s the impression I get of the people who pull the rug out from under others by changing rules after-the-fact. They’re immature, sore losers who have no right to be in positions of leadership. The only thing they’re good at is creating “bases” to shield themselves from accountability for their actions.
I think everybody gets a gut feeling of injustice when something like this happens. The ground rules are set for something in a particular arena of society, people act according to those rules, and then, after the fact, the rules are changed to effect a different outcome.
The 2000 Presidential Election is another example of this occurrence, with transgressions instigated from both sides. In the crucial, incredibly close state of Florida, Democratic lawyers, soon after the election, initially pushed for manual recounts only in the three South Florida counties that went for Gore, hoping that counting rejected, misread, and uncounted ballots in those counties would tip the scales for their candidate. In my opinion, this was a big strategic error on their part, in two ways. One, these actions tilted public opinion against Gore and for Bush. Two, they wasted too much time trying to do this when the only fair, viable option was a statewide manual recount, which the Florida Supreme Court finally mandated. But then the US Supreme Court stepped in, and in its Bush vs. Gore decision, overruled the State Supreme Court’s decision and halted the recount, effectively electing Bush to the Presidency. This, too, was changing the rules after the fact, since it was Constitutionally a state’s mandated responsibility that it decide for itself how it was going to choose its electors to represent it in the Electoral College! In the midst of all this grew the feeling that it wasn’t the people who mattered, but rather which side had the most aggressive lawyers and well-positioned judges acting on their behalf.
As a kid, have you ever found yourself playing a game of tag with another kid who refused to ever allow you to win? You’d be “it”, and, just as you’re about to tag him or her, the sore loser of a brat would suddenly find something to touch and declare it to be “base”. But the kid wouldn’t respect it if you did the same thing. That’s the impression I get of the people who pull the rug out from under others by changing rules after-the-fact. They’re immature, sore losers who have no right to be in positions of leadership. The only thing they’re good at is creating “bases” to shield themselves from accountability for their actions.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Reading on the Eights
Yes, I’m applying this recurring “on the eights” theme to my reading as well as running and piano. So, what’s been going on for the past eight weeks with my “pleasure” reading? As I mentioned on June 20, I had been reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Earth, the fifth book of his Foundation series. Once I reached the surprise ending to this book, I decided to go back and read novels of his that were set in the same fictional “universe”, but whose stories predated the era recounted in the Foundation series. I started by reading his collection of robot short stories titled The Robot Collection. You may have seen the movie The Bicentennial Man (starring Robin Williams), which was based on a story with the same title in this collection. After finishing this, I started on his The Caves of Steel, a full-blown robot novel. There are more novels to come after this, covering the “Robot” era, the “Empire” era, and finally the pre-"Foundation" period. Plus, Asimov came out with novels that had a glancing connection to the others. Naturally, to be reading all of these works, I have to enjoy his writing style, which Asimov himself had described as plain. And that style worked for Isaac Asimov.
Plain is the opposite, though, of the style of another favorite author of mine. Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes is, for me, as much a celebration of the English language as it is a story about life, death, fear and love. I’m curious as to how anyone would go about translating Bradbury’s almost flow-of-consciousness way of describing things into another language. His style in this novel reminded me of his book Dandelion Wine, another of my favorites. Something Wicked is a novel that merits a more detailed analysis at a future time.
I’ve also been continuing my Stephen King readings, finishing his puzzling short novel The Colorado Kid and reading From a Buick 8, Pet Sematary, Rage, and Gerald’s Game. Of all of these, Pet Sematary was easily the best as well as the scariest. Rage was an earlier “Richard Bachman” work that King had pulled from publication because of violent student shooting incidents in high schools. From a Buick 8, I suspect, may somehow be tenuously connected to some of his other works, but that’s just idle speculation on my part (if you ever read Hearts in Atlantis, you may know where I’m driving at). I just finished Gerald’s Game and, to be perfectly honest, I found it to be the most difficult and wrenching of his works to get through so far. King used a total solar eclipse that cut through Maine in 1963 as a theme in both this story and Dolores Claiborne as well as making it a nexus linking the two stories’ protagonists with each other.
Finally, the crowning moment of my readings this past eight weeks has to be J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. What a great, exciting, fitting end (if it is truly the end) to this series! I was one of those fanatics who spent every free moment I had reading it, starting as soon as I arrived home with it in the wee hours of July 21. Truly, The Deathly Hallows was her best work of the series.
When browsing through bookstores or the book sections in grocery and department stores, I’m tempted to just start reading a completely different author, such as Nora Roberts, for example. Who knows, there may be a writer out there who says it all for me!
Plain is the opposite, though, of the style of another favorite author of mine. Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes is, for me, as much a celebration of the English language as it is a story about life, death, fear and love. I’m curious as to how anyone would go about translating Bradbury’s almost flow-of-consciousness way of describing things into another language. His style in this novel reminded me of his book Dandelion Wine, another of my favorites. Something Wicked is a novel that merits a more detailed analysis at a future time.
I’ve also been continuing my Stephen King readings, finishing his puzzling short novel The Colorado Kid and reading From a Buick 8, Pet Sematary, Rage, and Gerald’s Game. Of all of these, Pet Sematary was easily the best as well as the scariest. Rage was an earlier “Richard Bachman” work that King had pulled from publication because of violent student shooting incidents in high schools. From a Buick 8, I suspect, may somehow be tenuously connected to some of his other works, but that’s just idle speculation on my part (if you ever read Hearts in Atlantis, you may know where I’m driving at). I just finished Gerald’s Game and, to be perfectly honest, I found it to be the most difficult and wrenching of his works to get through so far. King used a total solar eclipse that cut through Maine in 1963 as a theme in both this story and Dolores Claiborne as well as making it a nexus linking the two stories’ protagonists with each other.
Finally, the crowning moment of my readings this past eight weeks has to be J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. What a great, exciting, fitting end (if it is truly the end) to this series! I was one of those fanatics who spent every free moment I had reading it, starting as soon as I arrived home with it in the wee hours of July 21. Truly, The Deathly Hallows was her best work of the series.
When browsing through bookstores or the book sections in grocery and department stores, I’m tempted to just start reading a completely different author, such as Nora Roberts, for example. Who knows, there may be a writer out there who says it all for me!
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Top-Down and Bottom-Up
It’s always interesting to me how many different aspects of society are presented one way when in reality, they are the diametric opposite. One of the areas that this is so is when processes are presented as top-down or bottom-up, but in reality are the opposite. For example:
--In most elections for Congress, Governor, or President, it is the Party apparatus that usually stands behind a small number of candidates, who then campaign in the “democratic” process. In Presidential elections, the parties’ nominees have usually already been essentially selected before most people even have the opportunity to vote in a primary. On Election night, we’re all supposed to be so grateful that we live in a land where we can freely choose our leaders from “amongst ourselves”!
--In the old USSR, there were two parts to the State: the Communist Party, and the official government. Ostensibly a bottom-up democratically-elected representative body, the “government” consisted of elected candidates hand-picked behind-the-scenes by the Party (and the Party members were always answerable to their leaders (whom they supposedly “elected”) not the other way around).
--The more channels proliferating on the TV dial give the impression of a diversity of sources through which one can receive information and entertainment. In truth, most of the channels are owned by a very small number of large media corporations who coordinate what programming goes on their channels.
--Many forums that appear to involve popular voting, such as American Idol, in truth allow that only at the tail end of the process. The auditioning of participants is a completely top-down operation, with the final picks of winners the “veneer” (making it similar to our political electoral process). Many game show and reality show contestants do not reflect the "people" but rather the image that the media corporation wants to project as "the people".
--Corporations often maintain the fiction that they are democratically run by the stockholders, who in reality do not usually have any say in the managerial operations and decisions of the corporations.
--A corporation may often hold surveys among its employees, ostensibly to give them a “voice” into the corporation’s operation. In actuality, the survey results are often selectively interpreted to affirm whatever policies that corporation’s leaders want affirmed.
--During a heated election campaign, a supposed “grass roots” political action committee forms, putting on ads attacking one of the candidates. In truth, the opposing campaign is behind the PAC, itself a creation of that campaign’s chief strategists.
It’s not whether something is run top-down or bottom-up that I object to: it’s the deception involved in misrepresenting the process that I find manipulative.
--In most elections for Congress, Governor, or President, it is the Party apparatus that usually stands behind a small number of candidates, who then campaign in the “democratic” process. In Presidential elections, the parties’ nominees have usually already been essentially selected before most people even have the opportunity to vote in a primary. On Election night, we’re all supposed to be so grateful that we live in a land where we can freely choose our leaders from “amongst ourselves”!
--In the old USSR, there were two parts to the State: the Communist Party, and the official government. Ostensibly a bottom-up democratically-elected representative body, the “government” consisted of elected candidates hand-picked behind-the-scenes by the Party (and the Party members were always answerable to their leaders (whom they supposedly “elected”) not the other way around).
--The more channels proliferating on the TV dial give the impression of a diversity of sources through which one can receive information and entertainment. In truth, most of the channels are owned by a very small number of large media corporations who coordinate what programming goes on their channels.
--Many forums that appear to involve popular voting, such as American Idol, in truth allow that only at the tail end of the process. The auditioning of participants is a completely top-down operation, with the final picks of winners the “veneer” (making it similar to our political electoral process). Many game show and reality show contestants do not reflect the "people" but rather the image that the media corporation wants to project as "the people".
--Corporations often maintain the fiction that they are democratically run by the stockholders, who in reality do not usually have any say in the managerial operations and decisions of the corporations.
--A corporation may often hold surveys among its employees, ostensibly to give them a “voice” into the corporation’s operation. In actuality, the survey results are often selectively interpreted to affirm whatever policies that corporation’s leaders want affirmed.
--During a heated election campaign, a supposed “grass roots” political action committee forms, putting on ads attacking one of the candidates. In truth, the opposing campaign is behind the PAC, itself a creation of that campaign’s chief strategists.
It’s not whether something is run top-down or bottom-up that I object to: it’s the deception involved in misrepresenting the process that I find manipulative.
Monday, August 13, 2007
It's the Lines, Stupid
Three years ago, my family and I paid a visit to Disney World for a few days. We stayed at their Coronado Resort and were able to visit most of their parks (although we missed out on Animal Kingdom). The hotel was comfortable, its swimming pool was fantastic (with a fun waterslide), and we had no trouble getting around to and from the parks we visited. Over the span of the stay, we visited Epcot Center, Magic Kingdom, MGM Studios, and Blizzard Beach. Throughout our visits, whenever we went on rides, we thoroughly enjoyed them. The key word in the preceding sentence is whenever. Because, although they had a system whereby one could make appointments for rides to avoid long lines, there were crushingly long lines everywhere, including many of the times that we had made appointments! I remember going (with an appointment) on MGM’s Tower of Terror ride with my son. We both liked it enough to try it again later that day, but had to stand in the regular line for two hours to enjoy our two minute ride! Fortunately, I had a list of items that I was memorizing and my son had brought a pocket video-game player, so we weren’t just standing there like so many others were, staring off vacantly in space. One day, we had gone to Blizzard Beach, which was loaded with very long lines and no “appointment” system. After going on a couple of the rides, storm clouds began brewing and we left the park. But I hadn’t yet experienced their vaunted Summit Plummet extreme waterslide ride, so one morning I got my son up early and we went to Blizzard Beach at its very opening. When it opened, we rushed in, stopping only to put our stuff someplace safe. Then we rushed, as fast and as safely as possible, to Summit Plummet. And we still had to wait in line 15-20 minutes!!
Sometimes I like to watch the Travel Channel when they have shows spotlighting various theme parks. Disney World, of course, is one of the regular features. Apparently, when Disney World was being designed, the flaws experienced earlier in Disneyland over in California were taken in account. Since Disney World’s Magic Kingdom was divided into different areas that had different themes, they didn’t want employees from one area crossing another area in their costumes, messing up the “atmosphere”. So, they built what we experience as Disney World’s Magic Kingdom on top of an entire underground network that connects the entire park without anyone down there ever having to walk on the surface. Thus, a costumed employee in, say, Frontierland could go straight down without crossing other areas. They went to all this trouble in order to make the park look “right”. But to me, I couldn’t care less about that issue. So, to the big shots running Disney World, here’s one tourist’s input: I see one overriding eyesore at your parks: it’s the lines, stupid!!!
Sometimes I like to watch the Travel Channel when they have shows spotlighting various theme parks. Disney World, of course, is one of the regular features. Apparently, when Disney World was being designed, the flaws experienced earlier in Disneyland over in California were taken in account. Since Disney World’s Magic Kingdom was divided into different areas that had different themes, they didn’t want employees from one area crossing another area in their costumes, messing up the “atmosphere”. So, they built what we experience as Disney World’s Magic Kingdom on top of an entire underground network that connects the entire park without anyone down there ever having to walk on the surface. Thus, a costumed employee in, say, Frontierland could go straight down without crossing other areas. They went to all this trouble in order to make the park look “right”. But to me, I couldn’t care less about that issue. So, to the big shots running Disney World, here’s one tourist’s input: I see one overriding eyesore at your parks: it’s the lines, stupid!!!
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Homebodies
The renown eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, famous for his works on reason, was a notorious homebody who spent many years in his hometown of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia), following exacting routines. It was said that the locals around town could set their clocks by Kant’s actions. And yet he was the author of a series of travel guides! Kant understood an important principle that many people just don’t seem to get: it doesn’t matter that much where you go to do things, but rather what things you do wherever you are. I’ve come to be a believer in Kant’s (or Manny’s, as I like to call him) philosophy, at least that part of his philosophy reflected in his lifestyle. Especially in today’s world of digital cable TV, cell phones, Blockbuster Video, and the Internet with its e-mail, blogs, shopping, Wikipedia, and search engines, it’s becoming less and less necessary to go traveling all about in order to accomplish things. Still, I’m kind of disappointed that virtual reality technology hasn’t developed enough to where I can just slip on a helmet-like device and “transport” myself anywhere I have the machine programmed for. There’s got to be a huge demand for this: why hasn’t it exploded into the marketplace yet? I remember Disney World’s Carousel of Progress, where Grandma (in tomorrow’s world) is shown playing a virtual reality video game using special “goggles”.
There is an irony to traveling: although one often travels to get a sense of freedom and mobility, much of the time is spent confined and immobile, waiting in lines or for departure or arrival times. There are often prescribed tours, schedules, and routes that limit the traveler in both time and space to a much greater extent than if he had stayed home. Plus, the traveler is restricted, often severely, as to what he can take with him. Still, I recognize that there are certain places that my family and I want to go see, and I’m willing to forgo my comfort in the interest of the experience and new memories. But it still goes against my instincts!
Even when I’m traveling, I’m a bit of a homebody, but I think this may have more to do with common sense than personal predilection. I see no point in being shuttled around on whirlwind tours that give me no time to get a sense of the place that I am visiting. And usually, tours of that type are more expensive than just going someplace and staying there for a while (and really getting to know it).
I don’t need to go back centuries in time or even to another country to find an example of someone who, although a visionary, preferred a relatively “stationary” life. The late Isaac Asimov, author of about 500 books and confirmed New Yorker, was also a homebody. But his scope was a little different than “Manny’s”: “Ike” wrote books on a galactic scale!
There is an irony to traveling: although one often travels to get a sense of freedom and mobility, much of the time is spent confined and immobile, waiting in lines or for departure or arrival times. There are often prescribed tours, schedules, and routes that limit the traveler in both time and space to a much greater extent than if he had stayed home. Plus, the traveler is restricted, often severely, as to what he can take with him. Still, I recognize that there are certain places that my family and I want to go see, and I’m willing to forgo my comfort in the interest of the experience and new memories. But it still goes against my instincts!
Even when I’m traveling, I’m a bit of a homebody, but I think this may have more to do with common sense than personal predilection. I see no point in being shuttled around on whirlwind tours that give me no time to get a sense of the place that I am visiting. And usually, tours of that type are more expensive than just going someplace and staying there for a while (and really getting to know it).
I don’t need to go back centuries in time or even to another country to find an example of someone who, although a visionary, preferred a relatively “stationary” life. The late Isaac Asimov, author of about 500 books and confirmed New Yorker, was also a homebody. But his scope was a little different than “Manny’s”: “Ike” wrote books on a galactic scale!
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Campaign Gripes
Doesn’t it strike you as completely asinine that people seeking the office of President in the 2008 election have had to campaign so early? I try to put myself into the positions of the candidates themselves and I see some problems. For one, the Democrats all feel as if they need to comment on anything and everything that President Bush is acting upon (or not acting upon). It’s not so much that they want to seem like nitpicking, chronic critics: the media that they struggle for access to and exposure in brings up these issues to them, demanding a response. Since I’m of the opinion that, Republican or Democrat, the President is going to act similarly in many situations, it forces opposition party candidates to often take unreasonable stances on issues, as well as creating the impression that they are all doomsayers and that every “silver lining” has a “cloud”! You don’t hear too many of them saying, “Yes, I agree with Bush on this issue” very much, do you? Republican candidates, it seems to me, don’t have the same problem as the Democrats, for whether or not they agree with the President’s actions on specific issues, they can opt for “supporting the office” of President by restraining their criticism of his performance. Democratic front-runners like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards, on the other hand, seem to have the irreconcilable task of simultaneously having “important” things to say in order to stay in the media spotlight while looking “presidential” all the time. But part of the image of a President is that he or she is a calm, wise, deliberative soul who weighs options, listens to sagely advice, and then acts decisively. The campaign, at this early stage, belies that image for which the candidates are trying to project about themselves. And in the midst of it all, they are all seeking money contributions, also belying a myth that we still like to entertain in America that it’s we the people who choose our President and elected representatives.
Funny thing, though, I have rarely ever voted in a primary election when the nomination wasn’t already pretty much wrapped up. I thought that, this time, all of the primaries had been moved up to prevent states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina from having an idiotically disproportionate role in the nominating process. So where are all the candidates campaigning this time around? Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina! I even heard that lagging Democratic candidate New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson proclaimed that the state of Iowa was a major target for terrorists (so they obviously need all sorts of extra Federal funding). I don’t suppose the impending Iowa caucuses had anything to do with that statement! What was the point of all the other states moving up their primaries several weeks if Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina move their votes up to stay ahead of them? I don’t know about you, but I’m really getting tired, in this nation of 300 million people, of the same obnoxious curmudgeons in small Iowa and New Hampshire towns being pandered to by my future “national” leaders! And Iowa’s isn’t even a legitimate primary election!
Funny thing, though, I have rarely ever voted in a primary election when the nomination wasn’t already pretty much wrapped up. I thought that, this time, all of the primaries had been moved up to prevent states like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina from having an idiotically disproportionate role in the nominating process. So where are all the candidates campaigning this time around? Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina! I even heard that lagging Democratic candidate New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson proclaimed that the state of Iowa was a major target for terrorists (so they obviously need all sorts of extra Federal funding). I don’t suppose the impending Iowa caucuses had anything to do with that statement! What was the point of all the other states moving up their primaries several weeks if Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina move their votes up to stay ahead of them? I don’t know about you, but I’m really getting tired, in this nation of 300 million people, of the same obnoxious curmudgeons in small Iowa and New Hampshire towns being pandered to by my future “national” leaders! And Iowa’s isn’t even a legitimate primary election!
Friday, August 10, 2007
On-The Spot Storm Reporting
This hurricane season is about to get into high gear and I’m getting ready for my enjoyable hobby of sitting in front of my television set, watching foolish reporters standing on location in the direct paths of approaching dangerous tropical storms, and then letting the storms, when they arrive, soak them completely and buffet them all over the place (while they tell the viewers how dangerous this all really is). But because they’re in front of a camera, reporting for a TV station or network, that makes it O.K., I suppose. I’m still waiting for the time when somebody like the Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore is standing outside in the middle of a hurricane and is suddenly lifted up in the air, the last thing anyone seeing of him is his tiny, dwindling body disappearing in the clouds above. Maybe then, and only then, will this foolhardy competition to see who can get soaked and blown around the most on TV yield to more prudent (and informative) reporting. But I think this is really a deliberate strategy on the part of commercial broadcasters to bring in viewers. It’s the same kind of draw that an auto race has, where spectators may be ostensibly there to “follow the sport” and their favorite drivers, but furtively are there in the hope that they’ll see firsthand a terrible, spectacular crash (after all, the accidents are the big “highlights” shown on TV sports shows).
In spite of the danger of being in the midst of powerful storms, I think that the weather news organizations that send out these people sometimes overhype their on-the-spot coverage. I remember one recent storm somewhere on the East coast when a correspondent was on a beach babbling how the weather was deteriorating and how dangerous it was becoming. But you could see, all around him, people going about their own business as if nothing were happening. Finally, a man pushing a baby in a stroller walked close by the “intrepid” reporter, making his presence on that beach appear utterly ridiculous. And, as I recall, nothing of import did happen there.
Apart from the Weather Channel, the station I like to follow for good hurricane coverage is Channel 2-WESH in Orlando/Daytona Beach (which my cable service thankfully provides). WESH goes out of its way to provide detailed coverage, often going well outside its local area, if that’s where the biggest story is. My local Channel 20-WCJB doesn't seem to be as staffed as WESH, although it can help out with reports on flooding and other local conditions in Gainesville. But even with its meager staffing, WCJB also has sent people out to stand in the middle of storms. I guess it’s a case of nobody wanting to be left out.
So far, we’ve had a pretty light hurricane season. But it only takes one severe hurricane hitting at the worst possible place to turn a mild season into a calamitous one. I hope the brave souls in broadcasting will show a little common sense and not push their luck with their on-the-spot storm reporting too far. But I realistically expect them to make complete fools out of themselves once again, hopefully to my amusement and not my horror!
In spite of the danger of being in the midst of powerful storms, I think that the weather news organizations that send out these people sometimes overhype their on-the-spot coverage. I remember one recent storm somewhere on the East coast when a correspondent was on a beach babbling how the weather was deteriorating and how dangerous it was becoming. But you could see, all around him, people going about their own business as if nothing were happening. Finally, a man pushing a baby in a stroller walked close by the “intrepid” reporter, making his presence on that beach appear utterly ridiculous. And, as I recall, nothing of import did happen there.
Apart from the Weather Channel, the station I like to follow for good hurricane coverage is Channel 2-WESH in Orlando/Daytona Beach (which my cable service thankfully provides). WESH goes out of its way to provide detailed coverage, often going well outside its local area, if that’s where the biggest story is. My local Channel 20-WCJB doesn't seem to be as staffed as WESH, although it can help out with reports on flooding and other local conditions in Gainesville. But even with its meager staffing, WCJB also has sent people out to stand in the middle of storms. I guess it’s a case of nobody wanting to be left out.
So far, we’ve had a pretty light hurricane season. But it only takes one severe hurricane hitting at the worst possible place to turn a mild season into a calamitous one. I hope the brave souls in broadcasting will show a little common sense and not push their luck with their on-the-spot storm reporting too far. But I realistically expect them to make complete fools out of themselves once again, hopefully to my amusement and not my horror!
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Beatles Breakup
When I was thirteen years old, in the late spring of 1970, I was dismayed to find out that the Beatles were breaking up. I had heard rumors of breakups going back to 1966, but nothing had come of them and, perhaps, nothing would come of this, either. But it happened anyway. Back then, I didn’t know what caused it, but it came out when Paul McCartney released his solo album McCartney that year and revealed in a self-interview in its notes that he was leaving the group. Later, he filed a lawsuit against the Beatles’ manager Allen Klein has well as against his bandmates John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. Why? McCartney had a number of reasons that he gave, such as that Phil Spector tampered with his song The Long and Winding Road on the Let It Be album and that the Beatles tried to interfere with his solo career by asking him to delay the release of his album so that it wouldn’t coincide with Let It Be’s release. But the real reason was pretty obvious: Paul was fed up with his manager, whom he vehemently opposed but was hired by the other three by a three-to-one vote. He resented the fact that the Beatles no longer performed publicly, something that Paul always felt was an energizing and fulfilling activity. He was also tired of the other Beatles who, one-by-one, had walked out on the group at various times, threatening to quit. I believe that Paul took to heart that John was serious about breaking up the band when he started ranting about wanting a “divorce” from the Beatles during a meeting the previous year. I also think that Paul disliked Yoko Ono and her constant presence with John whenever the band was together. He was used to informally collaborating with Lennon and putting out ideas for songs. But John had pretty much isolated himself with Yoko, whom he had recently married. John, likewise, expressed contempt for Paul’s new wife, Linda, and her family, the Eastmans, whom Paul had promoted to manage the band but had shown themselves to be both too snobbish and pro-Paul (so they were rejected in favor of Klein). George also had been in an antagonistic stance against Paul because he believed that Paul was trying to take over the band during recording sessions and interfered with his guitar playing on songs. Also, George resented that only two of his own compositions would be allowed on Beatles albums, in spite of his increasing critical acceptance. It seemed at the time that only Ringo was enthusiastic about keeping the Beatles together. But instead of trying to bring the bickering members together, he chose to take sides with John and George against Paul, giving Paul the excuse to consider himself as the isolated “victim”, justified in seeking legal recourse to his predicaments.
There is, despite the little feuds and resentments breaking out among the band members, no reason why the Beatles could not have stayed together as a band, at least until their contract expired in 1977 (or, for that matter, indefinitely). Even if they were not on speaking terms with each other, they could have recorded tracks on their own with an agreed-upon producer (why not George Martin?) putting everything together to give it a feeling of coherence. They had already been doing this for a lot of their recordings toward the end, anyway. George could have had his desired four songs per album, which I believe (since I like his music) would have only enhanced the quality of the albums. For some reason, Paul and John both seemed to feel in 1970 that they were on the spot, and it was now or never as to what had to be decided then. Nothing could have been further from the truth! The Beatles had lived under extremely tightly spaced, tightly scheduled conditions for several years and were understandably tired of each other. Why not have them all agree to take a year off (like 1970) do their own solo projects and their own “things” away from each other, and agree to meet together on such-and-such a date in 1971 to put together a new album? Then, they could disperse again, do their own solo work (and Paul could perform publicly to his heart’s content, still enjoying his popularity and status as a “Beatle”), and return sometime in 1973 to crank out another Beatles album! And so on, indefinitely. It would only have taken a few weeks out of every two years to do this. This is the type of pattern that wiser bands, like the Rolling Stones, adopted. And I challenge anybody to find a group that fought among themselves like they did! Yet they’ve endured as a band to this day.
The year 1970 would have been a very good time for each Beatle to take a “time out” and get as far away from the others as possible. And they did, but not enough. They couldn’t see that time was on their side, and because of that we’ve missed out on many good things that they would have contributed to popular music had they stuck together as an group.
There is, despite the little feuds and resentments breaking out among the band members, no reason why the Beatles could not have stayed together as a band, at least until their contract expired in 1977 (or, for that matter, indefinitely). Even if they were not on speaking terms with each other, they could have recorded tracks on their own with an agreed-upon producer (why not George Martin?) putting everything together to give it a feeling of coherence. They had already been doing this for a lot of their recordings toward the end, anyway. George could have had his desired four songs per album, which I believe (since I like his music) would have only enhanced the quality of the albums. For some reason, Paul and John both seemed to feel in 1970 that they were on the spot, and it was now or never as to what had to be decided then. Nothing could have been further from the truth! The Beatles had lived under extremely tightly spaced, tightly scheduled conditions for several years and were understandably tired of each other. Why not have them all agree to take a year off (like 1970) do their own solo projects and their own “things” away from each other, and agree to meet together on such-and-such a date in 1971 to put together a new album? Then, they could disperse again, do their own solo work (and Paul could perform publicly to his heart’s content, still enjoying his popularity and status as a “Beatle”), and return sometime in 1973 to crank out another Beatles album! And so on, indefinitely. It would only have taken a few weeks out of every two years to do this. This is the type of pattern that wiser bands, like the Rolling Stones, adopted. And I challenge anybody to find a group that fought among themselves like they did! Yet they’ve endured as a band to this day.
The year 1970 would have been a very good time for each Beatle to take a “time out” and get as far away from the others as possible. And they did, but not enough. They couldn’t see that time was on their side, and because of that we’ve missed out on many good things that they would have contributed to popular music had they stuck together as an group.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Sequels and Series
When I was a kid, I rarely saw a movie on its first run, and there were no videos or DVDs to rent out, either. I would just have to wait until the movie I wanted to see was shown on TV, and if it wasn’t shown on TV, then I was out of luck. Even if it was, I could still be out of luck if it was opposite something that my parents wanted to see. There was a very popular science-fiction movie that came out in the late 1960s: so popular that four sequels were made, as well as a later spin-off TV series and a more recent remake of the first movie. But the strange thing about it is that the entire world on which everything in the movies was based gets utterly destroyed at the end of the second movie! With three more movies to go! That’s some trick! What else could they do but go back in time? That reminds me of one of the funniest skits I ever saw on Saturday Night Live. John Belushi played the captain of a wayward ship who was completely bonkers. The skit was narrated as if it were taken directly from a book told in the first person, with the skit itself being “Chapter One” of the story. At skit’s end, the narrator stated (more or less), “Stay tuned for Chapter Two: ‘I Was Eaten By Sharks’”!
Sequels are of two types, as I see it. One is the deliberate continuation of a series that the creator has envisioned from the start. The other is the tacking on of later stories, resulting from the unexpected big success of the original story. One can usually tell by the ending of the first movie or book whether or not it was intended to stand on its own as a complete work or as just the opening “round”. I believe 2001: A Space Odyssey was an example of a movie/book that author Arthur C. Clarke had designed as a work unto itself. It was only later, I believe, that he created an extended story line that completely changed the direction of the narrative. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is another example of a work standing on its own, followed up on its success later by the outstanding trilogy Lord of the Rings. But it’s obvious that J.K. Rowling had a series in mind after the first Harry Potter book came out; what isn’t so clear is how far ahead she envisioned its scope or outcome at that early time. The movie The Matrix, with its open-ended ending, gave promises of one or more future sequels to come. After some years of waiting, the two culminating movies came out in rapid succession and seemed to completely change the tone and direction of the story from the first movie. And, finally, there is the ultimately strange sort of sequel, which is one that takes place in a different, alternate reality from the original. To an extent, this is what happens in each of the four Space Odyssey stories that Clarke cranked out. The prime example of this strange phenomenon is with Stephen King’s two novels The Regulators (written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) and Desperation. It’s not exactly that these stories happen in any order: no, they happen simultaneously, in different universes! But with the same cast of characters in both stories (but with different attributes)!
I think that, a lot of times, an author, trying to break into the big time, will write a novel that deliberately leaves some things hanging at the end, just in case the fans and the publisher decide that more needs to be written! If that happens, then the author is faced with the daunting (but pleasant) task of creating a world much greater in scope and detail to accommodate a larger series.
But sometimes, the promise of a successor to a work goes unanswered. Alas, when the Beatle’s album Let It Be was released in 1970, its jacket contained the proclamation (and promise) that “This is a new phase Beatles album.” And then, they broke up and….no more Beatles (although I did have a dream one time that I heard an entire “Lost Beatles Album” in minute detail. Of course, I rapidly forgot the songs soon after I had woken up)!
And, finally, the screwiest sequel is the sequel that nobody knew was one when it came out (with a different name at that) in 1977: Star Wars IV: A New Hope!!! Who knows the limits to the creative and sometimes mangled ways people can devise sequels? I’m sure that there are more exotic, if not outright silly, forms in the offing!
Sequels are of two types, as I see it. One is the deliberate continuation of a series that the creator has envisioned from the start. The other is the tacking on of later stories, resulting from the unexpected big success of the original story. One can usually tell by the ending of the first movie or book whether or not it was intended to stand on its own as a complete work or as just the opening “round”. I believe 2001: A Space Odyssey was an example of a movie/book that author Arthur C. Clarke had designed as a work unto itself. It was only later, I believe, that he created an extended story line that completely changed the direction of the narrative. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is another example of a work standing on its own, followed up on its success later by the outstanding trilogy Lord of the Rings. But it’s obvious that J.K. Rowling had a series in mind after the first Harry Potter book came out; what isn’t so clear is how far ahead she envisioned its scope or outcome at that early time. The movie The Matrix, with its open-ended ending, gave promises of one or more future sequels to come. After some years of waiting, the two culminating movies came out in rapid succession and seemed to completely change the tone and direction of the story from the first movie. And, finally, there is the ultimately strange sort of sequel, which is one that takes place in a different, alternate reality from the original. To an extent, this is what happens in each of the four Space Odyssey stories that Clarke cranked out. The prime example of this strange phenomenon is with Stephen King’s two novels The Regulators (written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman) and Desperation. It’s not exactly that these stories happen in any order: no, they happen simultaneously, in different universes! But with the same cast of characters in both stories (but with different attributes)!
I think that, a lot of times, an author, trying to break into the big time, will write a novel that deliberately leaves some things hanging at the end, just in case the fans and the publisher decide that more needs to be written! If that happens, then the author is faced with the daunting (but pleasant) task of creating a world much greater in scope and detail to accommodate a larger series.
But sometimes, the promise of a successor to a work goes unanswered. Alas, when the Beatle’s album Let It Be was released in 1970, its jacket contained the proclamation (and promise) that “This is a new phase Beatles album.” And then, they broke up and….no more Beatles (although I did have a dream one time that I heard an entire “Lost Beatles Album” in minute detail. Of course, I rapidly forgot the songs soon after I had woken up)!
And, finally, the screwiest sequel is the sequel that nobody knew was one when it came out (with a different name at that) in 1977: Star Wars IV: A New Hope!!! Who knows the limits to the creative and sometimes mangled ways people can devise sequels? I’m sure that there are more exotic, if not outright silly, forms in the offing!
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Vacation Hiatus
Later today, my family and I begin a vacation trip to South and Central Florida. We shouldn't be back until this Wednesday. I don't foresee any new blog entries until then, but you never know: an opportunity may arise unexpectedly! But most likely, my next entry will come on Wednesday evening.
Bombardment and Prisonball
When I was going to elementary school from the fourth through sixth grades, we had our customary recess/physical education period. And one of the games we used to play was Bombardment. This game used the typical outside, asphalt-surfaced, full basketball court, but instead of using the baskets, a bowling pin was placed underneath each basket on opposite ends of the court. The class was divided into two sides, each side relegated to one half of the court. The object of the game was to knock down the opposing team’s pin using those red, lightweight basketball-sized balls (usually with about four or five used per game) that were commonly used in elementary schools. In the process of the game, if someone got hit by a ball thrown by the other side before it bounced, they’d be out of the game (until the next game started). Unless they caught the ball, in which the opponent who threw it would be out of the game. So, as a game of Bombardment went on, fewer and fewer players would be actively involved, while more and more would be off the court. While “out” of the game, students would often make up their own games, talk with each other, or play on the monkey bars nearby. Apparently, to the faculty involved in overseeing this, that meant too much student freedom and not enough control, so a new game was later devised and called Prisonball. It was exactly the same as Bombardment, except that when you were “out”, instead of leaving the game, you had to stand in a small square inset on the opponent’s end of the court and wait for a ball to come to you (which rarely happened). If you were lucky and got hold of a ball, you then had to hit one of the opposing players with it to be “redeemed” and go back to your end to play. Can you guess what happened? As the game wore on, more and more players became “prisoners” and were cramped together, sometimes resembling “Black Hole of Calcutta” conditions, in the respective “prison” squares (with the more aggressive students jostling with others for positions on the outside). But this misery for the students was joy for the faculty, who once again had the students all under their thumbs. And it got to be that, at the beginning of a game, a teacher would loudly proclaim that it was to be Prisonball, not Bombardment. So one of my favorite games at school quickly turned into my most hated game there. Those responsible for this could control my participation, but they couldn’t control the contempt I felt for them then. It just made me, in the long run, less trusting of any school authority and more likely to go down my own paths, for better or for worse.
Friday, August 3, 2007
Minnesota Bridge Collapse
The day before yesterday, during early evening rush hour traffic, the I-35W bridge spanning the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota, suddenly collapsed, dropping traffic on it sixty feet down to the river and into it. As of this writing, searches for bodies are still ongoing, but there are already four confirmed deaths in this terrible tragedy, with the number expected to rise. When something like this happens somewhere, it’s not just a local problem, but one that has national ramifications. The Interstate Highway System, begun under the Eisenhower Administration during the 1950s and constructed over the next twenty-some-odd years, is beginning to age. And, other than resurfacing, or repairs to obviously damaged sections (the area of I-75 that runs through Gainesville is especially prone to sinkholes), what has really been done to assure that the integrity of these roads has withstood the long march of time? In particular, what about the countless overpasses one crosses, not just going down one of these Interstate Routes, but also those, many in number, that other roads cross the Interstate with? To be sure, the stress on a short overpass wouldn’t necessarily be as severe as one spanning a big river, but some of the larger interchanges in big cities contain some extreme examples of road design. In the middle of these enormous, intricate confluences of highways, there are usually long stretches of road that are elevated (sometimes very high up), giving them the equivalence with a bridge going over a river, as far as stress factors are concerned. The day after the collapse, I saw on WGN-Chicago that Illinois Governor Blagojevich had ordered a special statewide detailed inspection of Illinois bridges, and I suspect that this sort of reaction will be duplicated throughout much of the country. But that still leaves the question of whether bridges and overpasses that are decades-old shouldn’t just be torn down and rebuilt after a specified period of years, just as a matter of course. After all, car manufacturers urge owners to get various parts of their vehicles replaced after a specified period, so why not the same with crucial sections of road as well? The bridge that collapsed Wednesday was forty years old and had passed previous inspections. Which brings up another question. Since I’m only a layman and not an engineer, please forgive my ignorance if I ask how one can determine and certify the safety of a bridge or overpass on the strength of inspections, anyway.
I suspect that, after the news of this tragedy begins to fade, first from the headlines, and then from the news altogether, that any common sense proposals to effectively renovate our highways, especially where bridges and overpasses are concerned, will be quietly tabled or watered down to a point where they are meaningless. In the meantime, my heart goes out to those directly affected by this Minneapolis bridge collapse as well as their families and friends.
I suspect that, after the news of this tragedy begins to fade, first from the headlines, and then from the news altogether, that any common sense proposals to effectively renovate our highways, especially where bridges and overpasses are concerned, will be quietly tabled or watered down to a point where they are meaningless. In the meantime, my heart goes out to those directly affected by this Minneapolis bridge collapse as well as their families and friends.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
The Mission and the Corporation
When the United States made a full-blown effort in the 1960s to land humans on the moon and return them safely, with the end of the 60s being a self-imposed deadline, it was a mission requiring the devoted, self-sacrificial efforts of great minds and talents. The watchwords for this project could have been “only the best”. Scientists, engineers, astronauts, assemblers, and technicians were all to be the absolute best in their fields, for the success of the mission outweighed everything else. There was a sense among those involved that everyone had an indispensable role that contributed to the mission’s realization. And indispensable they were, looking back on the successful landing and return of Apollo 11 in July, 1969 and the gargantuan leaps in science and engineering required to reach this goal.
Since that era, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had become more of a corporation in its organization than the facilitator of an ambitious mission. And in the business world, part of the philosophy is to structure one’s company so that, whether one speaks of its capital, its labor force, or even its product lineup, the elements thereof must be replaceable, or modular in nature, in order to insure the smooth continuous operation of the business in the midst of expected changes in those areas. In other words, corporations are structured with the rule that those employed by it are dispensable! This is the diametrically opposite sense from the view projected toward and held by the original Mercury-Gemini-Apollo mission workers! It’s not enough for today’s NASA executives to tack up a plaque on the wall or put something on a website giving an obligatory “mission statement”: the real mission of NASA nowadays is its self-perpetuation. Its scientists, engineers, technicians, and laborers are all expendable and replaceable as a deliberate corporate policy. But even worse than this, I believe that it regards specific missions as dispensable, temporary means to justify its own continuance as an organization. So, instead of having an organization established to coordinate the implementation of approved missions, we have now missions established to serve the purpose of serving the organization. The Hubble Telescope, satellites, planetary probes, special missions to asteroids and comets, the Space Shuttle, the Space Station, an envisioned return to the Moon, and an eventual manned trip to Mars are all examples of missions that NASA uses to justify its own existence. But I don’t think it’s in such a big hurry to bring them into fruition, do you? Just like a big corporation that plans the introduction of innovative products into the consumer world in a gradual, piecemeal manner, so NASA has now become an organization that’s always got something new going on to tease the public. But seen with greater scrutiny, their big accomplishments don’t seem to be serving a greater mission.
Now, NASA may think of itself as being like a corporation, but its income depends not upon the marketplace, but rather funding through Congress. And its decisions as to what kind of product it puts out, likewise, don’t depend on the marketplace, but rather on what the Executive Branch (and ultimately, the President) mandate for it. So, as a people, it’s up to us to come to a sense of collective understanding as to where we really want our space program to go and to hold our representatives accountable for implementing it. Conversely, as leaders, our elected officials can play a role by presenting visions of the future in space that can inspire us to support their efforts in bringing them about.
Since that era, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had become more of a corporation in its organization than the facilitator of an ambitious mission. And in the business world, part of the philosophy is to structure one’s company so that, whether one speaks of its capital, its labor force, or even its product lineup, the elements thereof must be replaceable, or modular in nature, in order to insure the smooth continuous operation of the business in the midst of expected changes in those areas. In other words, corporations are structured with the rule that those employed by it are dispensable! This is the diametrically opposite sense from the view projected toward and held by the original Mercury-Gemini-Apollo mission workers! It’s not enough for today’s NASA executives to tack up a plaque on the wall or put something on a website giving an obligatory “mission statement”: the real mission of NASA nowadays is its self-perpetuation. Its scientists, engineers, technicians, and laborers are all expendable and replaceable as a deliberate corporate policy. But even worse than this, I believe that it regards specific missions as dispensable, temporary means to justify its own continuance as an organization. So, instead of having an organization established to coordinate the implementation of approved missions, we have now missions established to serve the purpose of serving the organization. The Hubble Telescope, satellites, planetary probes, special missions to asteroids and comets, the Space Shuttle, the Space Station, an envisioned return to the Moon, and an eventual manned trip to Mars are all examples of missions that NASA uses to justify its own existence. But I don’t think it’s in such a big hurry to bring them into fruition, do you? Just like a big corporation that plans the introduction of innovative products into the consumer world in a gradual, piecemeal manner, so NASA has now become an organization that’s always got something new going on to tease the public. But seen with greater scrutiny, their big accomplishments don’t seem to be serving a greater mission.
Now, NASA may think of itself as being like a corporation, but its income depends not upon the marketplace, but rather funding through Congress. And its decisions as to what kind of product it puts out, likewise, don’t depend on the marketplace, but rather on what the Executive Branch (and ultimately, the President) mandate for it. So, as a people, it’s up to us to come to a sense of collective understanding as to where we really want our space program to go and to hold our representatives accountable for implementing it. Conversely, as leaders, our elected officials can play a role by presenting visions of the future in space that can inspire us to support their efforts in bringing them about.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Piano on the Eights
It’s been eight weeks since I began taking piano lessons, so in the footsteps of my previous “running on the eights” entry, here’s my first “eights” about piano!
My lessons are based on three books right now. The first book, geared for beginning adult players, gradually introduces basic music concepts (such as the staff, notes, time signatures, and rests), fingering, keys, and chords. I’ve been introduced to the major keys C, G, and F along with their corresponding I, V7, and IV chords. Along the way, of course, I’ve been familiarizing myself with reading and playing music according to which key it’s in. It’s a gradual process, to be sure; I’ve been devoting an average of 30 minutes daily to practice. I suppose I could have been more fanatical and have practiced more, but I believe in the power of the mind to assimilate new things overnight in one’s sleep. Each new day has pretty much borne this out for me with piano.
My second book contains popular show tunes like Meet the Flintstones, Music Box Dancer, Star Wars, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and This Land is Your Land. The third book contains adapted, simplified versions of some classical excerpts. So far, I’ve worked on Debussy’s Clair de Lune, Beethoven’s Für Elise, Chopin’s Prelude (Op.28, No.4), and Bach’s Menuet in G Major (BWH anh. 114).
My teacher is very attentive to my playing, correcting and encouraging me at the appropriate times. She’s pointed out that I need to play in a louder, more flowing way and pay more attention to ties and repetition of the same notes.
Each time I start learning a new piece (especially the classical ones) it feels like I’m starting over from scratch. But I know, despite this, that I’m making progress. I just wish I’d pass one of those thresholds beyond which I suddenly display more confidence and skill! It will come, though, if I keep working at it. One thing I’ve been doing, though, is to look ahead a bit in my lessons, just to be more prepared for them during my class time. And class time is pretty intensive and breakneck, with gobs of material covered during each weekly half hour period.
So, I’m forging on ahead, keeping up with my assignments, and expecting some breakthroughs in the future. I do feel I’m making progress and enjoy practice (especially when I get it right)!
My lessons are based on three books right now. The first book, geared for beginning adult players, gradually introduces basic music concepts (such as the staff, notes, time signatures, and rests), fingering, keys, and chords. I’ve been introduced to the major keys C, G, and F along with their corresponding I, V7, and IV chords. Along the way, of course, I’ve been familiarizing myself with reading and playing music according to which key it’s in. It’s a gradual process, to be sure; I’ve been devoting an average of 30 minutes daily to practice. I suppose I could have been more fanatical and have practiced more, but I believe in the power of the mind to assimilate new things overnight in one’s sleep. Each new day has pretty much borne this out for me with piano.
My second book contains popular show tunes like Meet the Flintstones, Music Box Dancer, Star Wars, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and This Land is Your Land. The third book contains adapted, simplified versions of some classical excerpts. So far, I’ve worked on Debussy’s Clair de Lune, Beethoven’s Für Elise, Chopin’s Prelude (Op.28, No.4), and Bach’s Menuet in G Major (BWH anh. 114).
My teacher is very attentive to my playing, correcting and encouraging me at the appropriate times. She’s pointed out that I need to play in a louder, more flowing way and pay more attention to ties and repetition of the same notes.
Each time I start learning a new piece (especially the classical ones) it feels like I’m starting over from scratch. But I know, despite this, that I’m making progress. I just wish I’d pass one of those thresholds beyond which I suddenly display more confidence and skill! It will come, though, if I keep working at it. One thing I’ve been doing, though, is to look ahead a bit in my lessons, just to be more prepared for them during my class time. And class time is pretty intensive and breakneck, with gobs of material covered during each weekly half hour period.
So, I’m forging on ahead, keeping up with my assignments, and expecting some breakthroughs in the future. I do feel I’m making progress and enjoy practice (especially when I get it right)!
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