My January 2016 Running Report

In January I ran a total of 280 miles, usually spreading out the mileage over more than one run each day.  And I did run on every day of the month.  My longest single run was the 9.3 miles I ran in the Newnan's Lake 15K race here in Gainesville, which took place yesterday (see my previous article about it).  I skipped the Ocala Half-Marathon I had planned to run in on the 17th because of severe weather over the area...

Next month, on the 21st, will be the Gainesville Five Points Half-Marathon.  I should be fine running in it as long as the weather holds up.  My emphasis of late with my running is not to go for personal records, but rather to regain confidence in covering long distances without regard to how fast I run...this seems like a good direction for me to go for the future.  Not that I won't still enter races from time to time, but I'll be going more for the experiences than the results...

Ran the 2016 Newnan's Lake 15K Today

When I decided to run in this morning's 9.3-mile Newnan's Lake 15K race, east of Gainesville off Hawthorne Road, I had also decided to deliberately tone down the competitive aspect of the event and just concentrate on going at it with the intent of finding my running "groove".  If you're familiar through personal experience with distance running, you know what I'm talking about: there is a certain pace, unique to each individual, at which runners can push themselves while still able to run indefinitely without the dreaded lactic acid buildup that can ruin a run.  In the previous two races I've participated in, I foolishly went out from the starting line with the notion of speeding up my pace: each attempt left me struggling at the end.  For this run, though, I made a point of deliberately going slower than my normal pace for about half the race...and then increasing my speed to the point where I was comfortable while yet pushing myself.  I stuck to this plan, which resulted in a much slower overall run (1:31:20) and a next-to-last placing in my male/55-59 group. The irony of this is that, long after I had finished the race with my slow run, many participants in other gender/age groups were still on the course.  Apparently, the male/55-59 group is one of the more competitive categories here in Gainesville, where running is very popular...

The temperature at race time (8:30 AM) was about 40 degrees...as the sun rose on this clear day, with no breeze to speak of, the temperature rose into the 50s by race's end...and the air became drier and more pleasant.  The course for this race was more or less flat, with a little sloping in sections that only a flatland-Floridian like me would even notice. Near the start and close of the race, I could look over to the side while running and see pretty Newnan's Lake. Almost all of the race was done on asphalt roads, with a little part about a third of the way through going down a dirt path...

Although my finishing time was about 13 minutes slower than my effort here a year ago, I am more satisfied that I resisted the temptation to get hypercompetitive, especially early on.  When I did pass other runners, it was simply because the pace I had set for myself dictated it.  I think this is the way to go with future races, especially those that are 10K, 15K, and half-marathons.  Next month on February 21 will be Gainesville's Five Points of Life Half-Marathon, which I've run in 2010, 2014, and 2015.  With my renewed confidence in my ability to discipline my pacing in competitive situations, I'm looking forward to another go at it.  My main goal with distance running is to be able to sustain a reasonable degree of activity for as many years possible as I age...

Here is a link to the results from the 2016 Newnan's Lake 15K...

Just Finished Reading James Patterson's Along Came a Spider

Perhaps you have seen the movie Along Came a Spider, starring Morgan Freeman as police detective/psychologist Alex Cross.  I haven't, which made reading the book an easy choice for me.  The author of Along Came a Spider, published in 1993, is James Patterson.  It is the first book of his long ongoing series featuring Alex Cross, with some movie adaptations along the way.  Cross and his police partner John Sampson are based in Washington, D.C. and have to deal with the discrepancy between how crime on poor minorities and that which victimizes those in wealthier and more powerful circles is viewed and treated.  Case in point: two prostitutes and a little boy, all black, are found brutally murdered in a southeast D.C. apartment.  Cross angrily fumes at the injustice as he is taken off this case and put on the investigation of a kidnapping of two white children with famous parents from their private school.  But as he comes to discover that a sadistic serial killer may be involved in both cases while increasingly becoming more emotionally involved over the plight of the children, Cross commits himself to finding them as well as capturing their abductor.  In the process, he befriends a Secret Service agent named Jezzie Flannagan, the two forming an intimate relationship.  And no, I am not going to tell you everything that happens in the story, which I guess you'll just have to read for yourself (or maybe just watch the movie)...

One thing I will mention, though, is that Patterson, through Alex Cross, makes use of some interesting ideas in psychology that have come to be controversial.  One is the notion of multiple personality and the other is regressive hypnosis.  By the early 1990s, multiple personality had been used more than once in criminal trials where the claim was made that the defendant was innocent of the crime charged because he or she was a different "person" when it happened.  At about the same time, regressive hypnosis got a bad reputation when it was abused to implant false childhood memories in several people of past Satanic cult abuse, helping to foment a mass hysteria about the subject.  As for me, I'm a bit dubious about the validity of either multiple personality or regressive hypnosis...but they've clearly been convenient devices for fictional works such as Along Came a Spider and the movie Spellbound...

My verdict on Along Came a Spider is "thumbs up", although I have to admit to liking Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone character more in her detective mystery series.  Alex Cross, although likable, nevertheless tends to be a bit too self-righteous at times to me.  But he is interesting, and he has his own mystery about his recently murdered wife to solve...something I expect to come up in the future with this series as I read through each successive book...

Plan to Run Newnan's Lake 15K Race This Saturday

Last year I ran eastern Gainesville's Newnan's Lake 15K (9.3 miles) race on a chilly morning.  It looks as if it will be chilly again this year at race time, with temperatures predicted to dip into the thirties.  And, again, I'm looking forward to running in it.  I had been planning to run in the Ocala Half-Marathon a couple of weeks ago, but the winter storm swept through the area that morning with its rain and especially high winds...I'll leave that one to run next year.  So now my last chance to run a race in January comes this weekend...and this local event seems to be the logical choice.  For one, it's very cheap to enter ($20 without a tee-shirt) and for another, I'm already familiar with the course, more or less.  I plan to take it slowly this time around and am aiming to simply complete it as a "social" training run.  Although the start of the race (and before) will be bothersome with the cold conditions, once I've run a little distance the chill in the air should begin to work heavily in my favor.  Not that I won't be left behind again in a cloud of dust at the starting line by all of the fanatical Gainesville runners!  Should be fun...

Denver Broncos Earn My Support By Beating Patriots Twice

I have to admit to some disillusionment about the National Football League Denver Broncos when they were so quick to dump their starting quarterback Tim Tebow after he led the team in 2011 to their first playoff appearance in several years...and then won the first playoff game for them (well, the rest of the team had something to do with that, too).  But Tebow has had his opportunities with other teams since then and, in my opinion, has limited his professional football options by refusing to play in a lower league or letting himself, as Ohio State star Braxton Miller did, be used in other positions.  Besides, Tim seems to be doing quite well in broadcasting.  But back to Denver...

The Broncos already earned a degree of support from me this 2015 season when they ended New England's run for an undefeated season.  The Patriots were already 10-0 when they played Denver...the last thing that I, a Miami Dolphins fan, wanted was for my hated divisional rivals, defending Super Bowl champions that they already were, to run the table and win all of their games.   But Denver stood up and defeated New England in a close game.  And yesterday they knocked the Patriots out of the playoffs by winning 20-18, in the process earning them both the American Conference championship and my gratitude and support...

Not that anyone in Denver would recognize this, but I would also like to point out that my Miami Dolphins, as bad of a season that they had this past year, still beat New England in their final regular season game.  That result insured that the Broncos won the home field advantage over the Patriots for the playoffs, a very crucial factor helping them in their close victory Sunday...
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So in the upcoming Super Bowl between Denver and the Carolina Panthers, I'm rooting for the Broncos.  However, this is a matchup between two teams that I am neither passionately for nor against.  H-m-m, maybe there will be an interesting soccer match on another channel during the game...

Just Finished Reading James Patterson's The Thomas Berryman Number

Since I like to delve into mystery stories from time to time, and have reached the current limit of my favorite author of that genre...Sue Grafton...I decided to try another writer.  I picked James Patterson because of his popularity...I've read that he is the best-selling author today.  That in itself is no guarantee of quality, though, but at least his novels are at least worth looking into.  Several years ago, I do remember reading one of his Women's Murder Club mysteries (you know, the ones with numbers in their titles) but my memory of it is vague.  Patterson has well over 100 titles to his name, although many if not most of them are collaborations with other authors.  He is probably best known for his Alex Cross and that Women's Murder Club series, but I decided to start my Patterson readings with his very first published novel, The Thomas Berryman Number, from 1976...

The "number" in The Thomas Berryman Number is jargon for a hit job on the mentioned person, and Thomas Berryman is a hit man.  Which doesn't quite make sense, since it implies that the hit man is the target of a hit...which is an important twist in the story.  The main character, a middle-aged Tennessee journalist named Ochs Jones, is investigating the recent assassination of Jimmie Lee Horn, the first elected black mayor of Nashville.  Circumstances seem to indicate that one man was the shooter, but with tips he has received, Ochs starts to suspect someone else: a young man named Thomas Berryman.  It is his search for Berryman and the people he meets and experiences he collects along the way that make up the bulk of the story, along with flashbacks told from other characters' points of view, particularly Berryman's...

I liked The Thomas Berryman Number.  The plot was a little convoluted and the characters seemed a little stereotypical, but all in all it was a well told story with a sympathetic protagonist that held my attention and kept me in suspense until the end.  So now I'm on to the Alex Cross series, which Patterson began writing in the early 1990s with the first book, titled Along Came a Spider.  That one was made into a movie, so I might watch it after I finish reading the book, which I'm about 60% of the way through so far...

Snow Flurries Here in Gainesville This Morning

This morning I slept in, as usually is the case on Saturday mornings.  Melissa had some interesting news for me when I finally did drag myself out of bed: there were snow flurries outside!  I knew from yesterday's forecast that today it would be very cold (for northern Florida, that is) all day long, and that flurries were possible as far south as I-10...about 50 miles north of my Gainesville.  When I stood outside on the back porch to see the snowfall, I had to train my eyes a little...but there it was: little white specks fluttering down in different directions, blown about by the strong winds.  I've been told that we also had snow flurries about five years ago...but I don't remember seeing any then.  As a matter of fact, speaking just of Florida, the last time I experienced snow was here in Gainesville one morning just before Christmas in 1989. The quite substantial amount of snowfall, not just flurries, came on the heels of a long, stormy night with sleet freezing the roads and coating windshields thickly with ice.  When I got off from work on my graveyard shift that morning, it took a while to clear my windshield...and then I had to very carefully drive home on the icy roads.  After finally reaching my house, the snowfall began.  We also had icicles hanging from our bushes everywhere.  Even now, 26 years later, nothing this "wintery" has again occurred in north-central Florida...

It's interesting to see snow in Gainesville, even it it's just flurries.  Still, I am grateful to live in a place that is usually dry when the temperatures get below freezing.  My heart goes out to all those in the eastern U.S. who are struggling with the blizzards, frozen roads, and cancelled flights during the historic winter storm currently going on...

Just Finished Reading Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman

Last year there was a great amount of controversy in the book publishing world when it was announced that Harper Lee, the author of the classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, had, 55 years later, come out with a sequel to it, titled Go Set a Watchman.  This was quite a surprise to many, considering that Lee had not published anything since that first book and was now in her late eighties with several disabilities, including poor eyesight.  It turned out, though, that her new attorney had seized upon the manuscripts of Go Set a Watchman from a safe and got the author's permission for publishing...HarperCollins jumped on it, heavily promoting it as a Mockingbird sequel, and watched the sales soar.  But the popular reaction of many readers was very negative: To Kill a Mockingbird's hero lawyer/father Atticus Finch is portrayed, two decades after the original story takes place, as racially prejudiced.  Well, I just had to see things for myself...and just finished reading Go Set a Watchman...

First of all, when discussing all of this, we need to realize that we are dealing with two different time frames: one is the real world's and the other is that of Harper Lee's stories.  In the real world, she had written Go Set a Watchman as the first draft for her (first) novel and submitted it to her editor...who had several reservations with it, making numerous suggestions.  Over the next three years, she rewrote her story while continually consulting with her editor.  The final product, To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960.  Also note that, in the "real world", the famous U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education ruling on desegregation was issued in 1954, sparking a great deal of white backlash in the South.  Now to the time within Lee's stories...

To Kill a Mockingbird is set in 1935 in the town of Maycomb, Alabama.  Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, the fictional narrator and main character of that story when she was a little girl, in Go Set a Watchman returns to her childhood community twenty years later after pursuing a career in New York.  Her father, Atticus Finch, is a lawyer in Maycomb known for his sense of fairness and compassion for the blacks there.  In 1935, he takes on a case defending a black man accused of raping a white woman: this becomes the central story woven into To Kill a Mockingbird.  Yet in Go Set a Watchman, when this important case and trial comes up for discussion, its outcome and specifics contradict those of the "earlier" story.  Go Set a Watchman, set closely following that aforementioned Supreme Court ruling, has Atticus expressing views on race that he never even remotely gave a hint of believing throughout Mockingbird.  Jean Louise, who had idolized her father for his open-mindedness and being "color-blind" regarding others, is shocked upon discovering his bigotry...their struggles over this issue constitute the core of Go Set a Watchman...

I read Go Set a Watchman in the author's fictional time frame...hence, I read it as a sequel.  But it was written BEFORE To Kill a Mockingbird and is, in essence, a very different story.  Not only is Atticus Finch distinctly different between the two stories, but so is Jean Louise.  To Kill a Mockingbird mixes several interesting story lines together and creates an atmosphere of suspense for the reader...Go Set a Watchman is a rather boring treatise on how someone can idolize and hero-worship their parent in childhood but eventually must reconcile that internalized "fantasy" picture with the reality of that parent, flaws and all.  But I didn't need to read through the whole tedious book to get that lesson...I imagine that Harper Lee's original editor back in 1957 saw the same thing when he asked her to rewrite her story.  There's a good reason why Go Set a Watchman, written in 1957, wasn't published during all these intervening years...and I suppose that, with the ensuing financial windfall for the interested parties, there's also a good reason why it was eventually published last year.  Go ahead and read it if you want, but realize that it was never written to be a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird...

2016 Florida Primary Date and Voter Registration Deadline

Being someone who has repeatedly criticized the voting populace for its apathy and lack of consistency in showing up to the polls on election day and voting (the last two local elections had 12% turnout), I thought I might make a point of reminding folks that the Florida Presidential Preference Primary for 2016 will be held on March 15, with early voting allowed on March 5-12.  If you haven't yet registered to vote in Florida or want to change your party affiliation, the deadline to do that is February 16...

I know it's tempting to rationalize to yourself that your one vote won't tip the scales and decide anything.  But remember, when your elected leaders do something that you don't like, that they got to where they can make those bad decisions because of the people who took the few minutes necessary to vote.  And also, that perhaps they got there in part because of people who would have voted for someone else but didn't think it was worth the bother... 

If you need to register or update your information, here is the link to the Florida Division of Elections.

The Republican Presidential Candidates, Part 4: Cruz, Carson, Rubio, and Kasich

I had planned to write about the rest of the major 2016 Republican presidential candidates on an individual basis, but quite frankly, they aren't as interesting to me as the aforementioned Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, or Rand Paul.  Right now, it looks as if only Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Ben Carson (and maybe, just maybe John Kasich) are the only ones left to challenge opinion polls leader Donald Trump for the nomination. Of course, no one's actually VOTED yet, but Trump is so far ahead nationally that he will have to seriously stumble for anyone else to catch up with him.  Although maverick Texas senator Ted Cruz is solidly in second place, he has a tendency to antagonize the very party establishment he needs to court for their support...this tendency to make bellicose speeches on the Senate floor against his own leaders, ironically, has given me a much higher opinion of him than before.  Dr. Ben Carson, a renown pediatric neurosurgeon (retired now), seems at a loss in the political world...a phenomenon I've seen all too much in my lifetime where an individual shows great genius and accomplishment in one particular area but seems completely clueless in others.  Yet Carson...sadly like so many I know...seems to think that every word he says is profound wisdom.  It's really the same paradigm with Trump: Carson's a successful neurosurgeon, so believe him about everything because of that...Trump's a rich and successful businessman, so believe him about everything because of that.  Well, I don't on either account...

Which brings me to Floridian Marco Rubio, who rode to election in 2010 to the US Senate by allying himself to the Tea Party movement but now wants to be seen as a mainstream Republican leader.  The problem I see with Rubio, who is a very impressive speaker and has a youthful appearance and appeal, is his flip-flopping on issues...something that ended up hurting 2004 Democratic nominee John Kerry in that year's general election.  Rubio actually co-wrote a Senate bill on immigration reform and then voted against his own bill when he drew flack from the right wing media's talking heads.  Still, Rubio would be a formidable opponent should he eventually get the nomination.  His being potentially the "first" Latino president would help to counter Hillary Clinton's appeal as the "first" woman president and possibly cut into the Democrats' large lead among that Hispanic demographic.  And the state of Florida, always a swing state in recent decades, would be more winnable with Rubio as the nominee...this is the same advantage that Ohio governor John Kasich would bring into the general election, as his state also is usually crucial to victory in November. Kasich, who comes across to me as constantly angry and disgusted at the stupid people around him, however, is low in the national polls despite doing well in New Hampshire...

At this point, it looks as if the Republican nomination is Donald Trump's to lose and he strikes me as being electable in the general election against (most likely) Hillary Clinton.  The only other candidate I see winning the presidency this time around is Rubio...Cruz is too ideological and Carson seems too...well, too confused...

Just Finished Reading Herman Melville's Moby Dick

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville, is widely considered as one of the classics of American literature, but I never had gotten around to reading it.  Until just recently, that is.  The main reason I think I waited for so long is that I felt that, due to the many references to this story that I've heard over the course of my life, I already had it figured out.  After all, isn't it pretty much common knowledge to most of us that Moby Dick is the name of the whale that mad, vengeful Captain Ahab seeks to confront and destroy, consequences be damned?  Well, I figured that there were a few details to fill in for this tale, and I set out to read it...

Herman Melville was obviously well acquainted with sailing on the high seas, especially with regard to the thriving whaling industry of the early-to-mid 19th century (Moby Dick was first published in 1851).  He devotes large sections of his narrative, told in the first person by a sailor named Ishmael, to describing whales in their biology and variety, whaleboats, and all of the tools and strategies of those involved in the killing of whales and the processing of their products (especially oil).  These passages were sometimes interesting and enlightening, but much of them left me lost as I knew little about sailing ships of the past and their parts and functions.  These "educational" sections were interspersed with the actual story of the Pequot, a whaling ship that Ishmael signs up with at Nantucket harbor on its doomed encounter with the giant whale.  The plot is largely driven from the viewpoint of various characters, most notably Ahab, his first mate Starbuck, the second mate Stubb, the Polynesian harpooneer Queequeg, and others...Ishmael himself is only involved in the pre-launch beginning of the story...and at its very end.  It was the dialogues and monologues of the characters, with their own peculiar regionalisms and slang, that I liked the most about Moby Dick. There is also a lot of introspection about people's motivations as well as an exploration into how people from completely different backgrounds relate to one another. 

As the whaling ship Pequot goes on its quest for Moby Dick...first through the North and then South Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean, through Dutch Indonesia to the Pacific, and eventually to the final encounter...there is a series of encounters with other whaling vessels, with Ahab and his crew touching base and exchanging information (called a "Gam") with the other boat's captain and crew.  These "Gams" take up another large part of the book.

The final dramatic battle between Captain Ahab and Moby Dick takes up a rather small section at the very end of the story...a surprise to me, since I had always pictured to myself that last struggle as THE BOOK. You may already know what ultimately happens, even if you never read it.  Still, I was a bit taken aback at what "went down" at the end...

Moby Dick is generally thought to be based on a true battle between a giant sperm whale and a whaler in the South Pacific around 1820.  Ron Howard, with undoubtedly his own creative embellishments, produced and directed a movie about this called In the Heart of the Sea, which is in theaters now.  I'm thinking about going to see it, if only to give me a better visual picture to all of the often very arcane technical information that Melville gave in Moby Dick...   

Rain Clouds Darken My Plans to Run Sunday's Ocala Half-Marathon

I was looking forward to participating in this Sunday's Ocala Half-Marathon race, but for the past several days weather forecasts have had the entire area under rain for that morning.  Seeing that I don't even go out and run on my own neighborhood streets where it's wet outside, I sure don't see myself running 13.1 miles on unfamiliar, slick, and sloping roads while constantly feeling like I just climbed out of a swimming pool.  I guess, in that sense, that might seem in some people's minds like I'm not as committed to the sport as I should be...well let them think what they want.  I have to make my own decisions for myself, and part of that is setting up boundaries that I deem are in my own best interests...

Today was supposed to be another day full of rain, according to the meteorological prognosticators, but after some early morning showers the sun came out and it is now expected to be rain-free the rest of the way.  So I ask myself, why should I automatically presume that Sunday morning will be rainy when they couldn't even get today...which is considerably closer in time...right? 

I plan to get up early Sunday morning and check to see what the weather is like then.  If it appears promising, then I'm going to Ocala.  If not, I'll stay home and plan to run two weeks from now in a Gainesville 15K (9.3 mile) race.  Fortunately, I didn't preregister for the Ocala race and therefore won't be out any amount of money if I do decide to skip it...

Just Finished Reading Stephen King's The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

Every few years, my favorite author Stephen King will come out with a collection of his short stories.  Most of them were previously published in magazines or in e-books/Internet releases.  His November, 2015 release, The Bazaar of Bad Dreams with its eighteen short stories and two poems, is no exception.  Still, the only one of these I had previously read was Blockade Billy, a baseball story that had been published a few years ago in its own very small book (I once read it off the shelf at my local Books-a-Million store).  If there is one theme that tends to permeate these tales, it is mortality and how we deal with it under different circumstances.  The psychology of stress and how people handle it is another common theme as well.  As a matter of fact, the most compelling thing about this book is how well King gets into the minds of his very believable characters, who are thrust into often unbelievable situations, and reveals their motivations and rationalizations for their actions...

I didn't like all of the stories in The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, but most were interesting.  My favorites were the opening piece Mile 81 (yet another King yarn about a monster car), Batman and Robin Have an Altercation, Ur, The Little Green God of Agony, That Bus Is Another World, Obits, and Drunken Fireworks.  And I suppose that of these, the very disturbing (and rather short) That Bus Is Another World is the best...with the hilarious Drunken Fireworks following it closely and Obits a distant third...

Not only did I generally enjoy Stephen King's The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, but I keenly appreciated his comments prefacing each entry.  It's true that good writers will put some of their own lives into their stories, and King acknowledges doing this as well.  But he is wise enough to let his characters take on their own "lives", fictional as they may ultimately be.  Now, when is this dude going to come out with another blockbuster novel like 11/22/63?

Nick Saban Reconsidered

Nick Saban is the head football coach at the University of Alabama and has been since 2007.  I am keenly aware of this fact since, in December of 2006 at the close of the Miami Dolphins regular season, a team he said he was committed to coaching to success, he was coaxed into walking away from them and taking the offered Alabama job.  Along with masses of other Dolphins fans, I felt betrayed by Saban.  As it turned out, he had insisted on so much control over Miami that, when he left there was a great void that needed to be filled.  The next year, they went a dismal 1-15, almost going winless until a late season victory over Baltimore.  This hurt was compounded by Saban taking a job with a school that was a conference rival to my hometown Florida Gators.  And then, at the close of the 2009 season, his Crimson Tide beat my Gators in the SEC championship game on the way to the first of his four national championships with Alabama.  Ouch!

Forgiveness is divine, but I'm only human and I've held this grudge against Nick Saban for too long.  Look, any ambitious football coach will have certain dream jobs in his sights, and the opportunities have to be taken when they arise...which are usually rare.  Coaching at Alabama, a venerable football school with Bear Bryant's tradition of winning championships, was clearly an offer that Saban felt he couldn't refuse.  And he didn't actually renege on his contract with Miami to join them: the Dolphins owner acquiesced with Saban's departure and wished him the best.  Now he has been with Alabama for nine years and has settled well into the position that he had been striving for during his professional life.  As for the Dolphins, in 2008 they actually did make the playoffs, making one of the greatest one-season turnarounds in NFL history.  But for the past seven years they've neither made the playoffs nor had a winning season...I can hardly hang that dismal performance over time on Nick Saban.

Nick Saban is quite a control freak, and coaching college recruits in Tuscaloosa gives him more power over individual lives than he had coaching grown-up professionals in Miami.  He coached two years for the Dolphins in 2005 and 2006 and suffered through both seasons with untimely key injuries and poor decisions about who he wanted playing for his team.  College football suits Saban's temperament, and he was wise to recognize this and act on it.  Since leaving Miami he has won four NCAA national championships.  Does anyone seriously propose that he could have accomplished anything similar in the same time span with the Dolphins?  And had he stayed with the pros...well, I only need to look at happened to former New York Giants coach Tom Coughlin...

Tom Coughlin, a certainty to be ushered into the NFL Hall of Fame, during the same 2007-15 period that Nick Saban has been coaching Alabama, coached his Giants to two Super Bowl victories, a feat that almost any other league team would envy...I know my Dolphins would, not having won a league title going on 42 years running.  But because, lately, his team has had two or three off-seasons, the Giants owner decided to ditch him...only he had him "resign" to make himself look better.  But that's the way it is in the NFL with coaches: they come and go more quickly and the job security is often hard to come by...it often has more to do with whether the owner personally likes you or not than how well your team performs.  So I'm finally reconciling myself to Saban leaving Miami to coach Alabama.  I just wish they hadn't put up that very creepy statue of him outside their stadium...

British Rock Legend David Bowie Dies

British rock musician David Bowie has passed away of cancer at age 69.  He was known in his early fame for his flamboyant onstage performance of Ziggy Stardust, his alter ego...at least until his 1980 song and video Ashes to Ashes finally laid that character to rest.  In the late 1960s he changed his last name to Bowie when he realized that David "Davy" Jones of the Monkees and he shared the same name.  The first time I heard anything of his was on South Miami's 790/WFUN radio station around 1970 or 1971, when they played Space Oddity...it blew me away.  That song, which initially was generally ignored by stations at its first release in 1969, was reissued in 1973 and finally enjoyed its deserved popularity...it is one of the two great songs of Bowie that I love.  The other great David Bowie song...here I'm just speaking of my own opinion...is Changes, released in 1971 and then again in 1975.  This song is one of the all-time greats, with very compelling lyrics speaking of youth, introspection...and inevitable aging.  Brilliant...I remember singing it to myself when I would go running long distances back in early '75 around the old three-mile perimeter block that my old high school and the adjacent community college was situated on.  Bowie would later produce a string of popular singles and best-selling albums, but although I generally liked them (with the notable exception of his inexplicably popular song Fame), they didn't resonate with me very much just the same.  Oh, there's one other song I liked a lot with which he was involved: the late 70s collaboration he did with the group Queen, titled Under Pressure...

I understand that David Bowie, even in his death, has a new album out...I'm sure that the songs on it are good as I have heard some positive reactions to it already in the media.  But I have to admit that he had already summed up everything quite well with that early song Changes.  So long, David...

Cincinnati Bengals Self-Destruct in Another First-Round Playoff Loss

In the National Football League, teams are expected to win...else, the management, especially the head coach, gets fired and replaced.  At least that's how it usually works.  Take "my" Miami Dolphins over the past seven years.  In that span, they haven't enjoyed even one winning season, much less reached the playoffs.  And coaches have come and gone, as they should have.  It's been disappointing to me, especially considering their long history of success in the previous century.  Yet in spite of my problems with the Fins, the letdown I feel about them must pale compared to what Cincinnati Bengals fans must be going through right now...

Cincinnati has made the playoffs in the last seven years...certainly they've done a lot better than Miami in that regard.  And so they've retained their head coach Marvin Lewis throughout the period.  But the Bengals haven't won a single playoff game, going out in the first round for seven straight years.  But just a couple of hours ago, it looked as if they were going to end their playoff woes, having coming from 15 points down to Pittsburgh in the fourth quarter and taking a 16-15 lead with less than two minutes to go.  And then victory seemed sealed when the Bengals intercepted the ball, now with the chance to run out the clock deep in Steeler territory.  But on their first offensive play, they fumbled the ball right back to Pittsburgh.  The Steelers drove downfield but were still about 15 yards from field goal range.  Then, on an incomplete pass, a Bengal defender ran his helmet into that of the Pittsburgh receiver, putting the Steelers into marginal field goal range.  And then, during the ensuing arguments, another defender earned another personal foul penalty, giving Pittsburgh, who had run out of time-outs with only 18 seconds left, an easy field goal...and they won 18-16.  Throughout the last few seconds, Coach Lewis might as well not have been there, just standing there watching his players self-destruct in front of him.  I know that Cincinnati has enjoyed more success than Miami has, but some of Cincinnati's players seem completely out of control...and the head coach has to bear a great degree of responsibility for their behavior.  I'm just glad that I'm not a big Cincinnati fan...I tend to root for Baltimore when it comes down to their AFC North Division.  I doubt Lewis will remain their head coach after this debacle...

Just Finished Reading Sue Grafton's "X" Mystery Novel

As I've repeatedly mentioned on this blog, I am in the process of reading through mystery writer Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone series, with the titles progressively featuring a letter of the alphabet...starting with "A" is for Alibi, "B" is for Burglar, and so on.  I just finished reading her latest, simply titled "X".  It may have been hard for Grafton to come up with a word to accompany this letter, but she managed to make it relevant anyway...a couple of new characters in the novel have the Greek surname Xanakis...

"X" weaves three subplots together...one concerning Kinsey's troublesome new neighbors, one involving a violent, malevolent psychopathic stalker, and one about that aforementioned couple...formerly married but now estranged...with a valuable painting in the ex-husband's possession, surreptitiously sought after by the ex-wife.  Kinsey gets dragged into all the stories, although as a professional private investigator she stands to gain little or nothing with these three "cases"...and may well lose everything.  Although I won't give away the ending, I will hint that one of these stories, not having as yet been satisfactorily resolved by book's end, may well continue into one of the final two volumes in the series...

And I am looking forward to the last two books in this wonderful "alphabet" series by Sue Grafton...only now I'll have to just sit and wait until they come out.  Let me guess: the next one will feature the letter "Y"...

Griffey, Jr. and Piazza Elected to Baseball Hall of Fame

Two players on different sides of the performance-enhancing drugs saga of the turn-of-the-century in  Major League Baseball, Ken Griffey, Jr. and Mike Piazza, have been elected to this year's Baseball Hall of Fame by the designated sports writers.  Griffey, who had hit 630 home runs over the course of his illustrious career, avoided the steroids, human growth hormone, and other supplements that others used to enhance their statistics and prolong their careers.  Piazza, while not engaging in anything illegal or prohibited, did nevertheless reveal later in his autobiography that he used a then-legal muscle-building substance during his playing days.  But to me and many others, he was not cheating but rather using the resources that were then available to him.  He was one of the best hitting catchers of all time, hitting 427 career home runs...

Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds, two players with amazing careers but both with serious allegations of having used performance-enhancing drugs levelled against them (neither officially convicted of the infractions), were also on the ballot but neither could muster enough votes for election.  They both will have the opportunity to try again...for another six years...before their names get removed from consideration.

I wish the whole steroid/HGH scandal never happened in Major League Baseball...it certainly cast a shadow over the vaunted season and career home run records, now dominated by suspected abusers.  I will say one thing at least about career records, though: baseball is a peculiar business...in the early 1920s they introduced a livelier ball to enhance run production...which happened to coincide with the start of Babe Ruth's amassing of his 714 home runs.  Then, following the 1968 season, heavily dominated by pitching, the pitching mound was lowered in order to give batters more opportunities for hits.  In both of these times, career statistics were naturally affected.  In the early 1960s the regular season was expanded from 154 to 162 games.  And with expansion over the years, the number of teams grew from 16 to 30...giving a lot more opportunities for statistics to be padded while playing against mediocre competition. But the greatest factor I see that makes me want to place a caveat on career statistics in baseball is the racial segregation that ruled the sport until Jackie Robinson's entry in 1947.  Babe Ruth may not have used steroids, but he also didn't play against the best competition in accomplishing his feat, either.  And those blacks who were excluded from the majors all those decades will never achieve the deserved recognition of their skill and accomplishments due to this injustice.  If we're going to talk about Barry Bonds hitting 73 home runs in a season or having 762 career round-trippers and whether those records are legitimate, I say let's first have a discussion about all of the records made during the vast segregation era...

The Republican Presidential Candidates, Part 3: Rand Paul

Of all the Republican candidates for president this time around, I admire and respect Kentucky Senator Rand Paul the most...although I often differ with him on the issues.  Paul is more or less following in the ideological footsteps of his father Ron Paul, who has run for president on a number of occasions with a strict libertarian message.  As far as the libertarian movement is concerned, I agree that we should have freedom of speech, religion, and association...but that big government is not the only danger facing us.  Businesses can also get big enough to where they are considered "too big to fail" and as such should be regulated...especially if their failures end up subsidized by us taxpayers as was the case in 2008.  Also, as Americans we need our "big" government to protect us from outside threats, be they major powers or terrorist movements.  And whether the Pauls like it or not, we do have embedded within our collective expectations a viable system of safety-net programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid...with that problematic "big government" administering them.  Also, I strongly believe that it is in our national interests (as well as my own personal) to have collective bargaining and labor unions as important elements of our society and economy.  Libertarians tend to hate unions...which explains why they tend to identify with the Republican Party...

That all having been said, Rand Paul is a very smart, reasonable guy who is a very eloquent and forceful speaker.  I saw him defend his views on many occasions on the Senate floor (watching on C-Span2) and he is not the kind of politician (as sadly are too many of his GOP rivals) who will just take a position on an issue to gain a political advantage.  So I think he has the integrity to stick to his principles...and he, unlike the previous Republican president, won't get us stupidly bogged down in an unwinnable foreign military adventure.  But alas, Rand Paul doesn't stand a chance, this election year...or any, for that matter.  If I were a Republican (and I was once, for about seven or eight years), he would now easily be my first choice far above the others.  But I'm not, and he isn't.  Still, I wish him the best in this campaign, his political career, and life...

Transferring My Study of Foreign Languages to Computer

A few days ago, I wrote that I had added Cyrillic (Russian) script to my computer.  Now I've added a few more languages to it, including Chinese (I use the traditional characters).  What I'm trying to do here is continue my foreign language study, but take it from books, paper and pencil to screen and keyboard.  My resources are almost boundless on the Internet, and with the scripts now available I can begin to realistically compose my own sentences (and eventually articles) in the languages I am learning...

I am continuing with my Duolingo study of Russian (mostly a review) and have begun studying Turkish, just to get a feel about how this application teaches new concepts.  It reminds me a little of the programmed method of instruction that I experienced back in high school when I studied trigonometry.  I like learning that way...

Melissa will soon be starting her course in Biblical Greek, and I'm going to study it with her.  I will definitely be putting that script on my computer, too.  Also, besides Duolingo, Quizlet provides a great way to study lists of items and test myself on them.  And the Google (or Bing) translator option is going to be a big help, too...

用計算機學別的語言很有意思！

NFL 2015 Regular Season Ends Today, My Playoff Preferences

Today the National Football League 2015 regular season ends...at this writing, only the Sunday night game between Green Bay and Minnesota is left to be finished.  Regardless of that game's result, the twelve teams making the playoffs this year are set...it's just in the National Conference that the upcoming games are still in a state of uncertainty...

In the division that concerns me the most, the American Conference East, today's games satisfied me to no end.  First of all, my Miami Dolphins, already doomed to the cellar this year, stunned perennial division champion New England on the last day, 20-10.  That result, combined with Denver's hard-fought win (featuring the return of Peyton Manning) over San Diego, means that New England, although enjoying a first-round bye in the playoffs, may have to play the conference championship game (if they get that far) on the road if it's against the Broncos.  That's a victory of sorts!  The other "victory" was seeing Buffalo knock off the New York Jets 22-17 and out of the playoffs, combined with a Pittsburgh win over Cleveland.  Not that I particularly care for the Steelers, either...but if you're the fan of a team in the AFC East, you just automatically tend to despise the other three teams and wish them no success...

So in the AFC, Denver and New England are seeded #1 and #2 respectively and get first-round byes.  The first round games will have Cincinnati hosting Pittsburgh and Kansas City visiting Houston.  In the NFC, Carolina and Arizona are seeded #1 and #2 respectively and will each also get a pass on the first week of the playoffs.  The other four teams...Seattle, Green Bay, Minnesota, and Washington...will play next week, but the outcome of tonight's Packers/Vikings game will determine who plays whom and where.  As for my preferences...well, why don't I just rank all twelve teams according to my liking, and then when two of them are playing each other you can easily determine which one I'm rooting for:

1 Seattle
2 Kansas City
3 Green Bay
4 Carolina
5 Cincinnati
6 Arizona
7 Minnesota
8 Washington
9 Denver
10 Houston
11 Pittsburgh
12 New England

Note from the above that I am generally heavily biased in favor of NFC teams...I don't exactly know why this is the case, other than that the Dolphins' biggest rivals are in the AFC...

Ushering in the New Year at Daytona Beach

For the past couple of nights, Melissa and I were at Daytona Beach, staying at one of the oceanfront hotels we like.  Thursday evening we took a stroll out on the beach...and then ended up hiking down the shoreline to their famous "Oceanwalk", which included a performance at the bandshell by some country & western band, lots and lots of tired-looking and sweaty thronging visitors (it was warm and humid that night), some rides (slingshot, rollercoaster, tilt-a-whirl), and some free-lance fireworks displays.  The two of us just walked through it all and, upon reaching the pier, took a small break and headed back. Later on, leaning out of our seventh-floor hotel balcony around midnight, we saw some more fireworks...this seemed to be the "official" show...set off from a boat just offshore near the pier. The next day we enjoyed outdoors by the pool and on the beach, with the sky still overcast but temperatures milder...I ran 7.3 miles up and down the coast.  Friday night, the cold front we had been waiting for passed through and it became much cooler and very windy...the next morning, as we prepared to leave, conditions were still dreary but pleasant.  We saw very little "blue" in the sky throughout our visit...the above photos I took this morning.  After we checked out, Melissa and I ate lunch at the Black Sheep Pub and Eating House on A1A in Ormond Beach...it has a deliberately British/Irish atmosphere, definitely worth a return visit...

Added Russian Script to My Computer: Замечательно!

The other day Melissa told me about a free language-learning application, Duolingo, that she was using on her computer to study Spanish.  She set up the application for me on mine, and I began with their Russian lessons.  Only one problem: Russian uses a different script, the Cyrillic, from our Latin writing system and I had to type in the English-to-Russian translation answers using Latin transliteration.  I solved this glitch by adding Russian as a second language on my computer...and can now toggle back and forth between the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. I learned the Russian system of writing back in 1976, even to the point where I can easily write "in English" using а Latin-to-Cyrillic transliteration I devised for myself.  So the following passage "И ам студыинг руссиан анд уоулд лике то ачиеве флуенсы ин ит" is actually in English...see if you can "decode" it!

In any event, it's fun having Cyrillic on my computer...I may find myself slipping in a Russian word here or there on my blog every now and then...