My May 2016 Running Report

For May 2016 I ran a total of 106 miles, more than I had expected when I had inauspiciously begun the month recovering from a nagging upper respiratory viral infection that had me going through sporadic coughing fits for days on end.  But, although I missed out on running at the beginning of May, I did end up running on 26 of the days.  My longest single run was still relatively short, at 4.2 miles...but I did manage to participate in a public running race, albeit a short 5K event.  That happened on Saturday evening, the 14th, in Tioga: the May Day Glow Run, which I promptly wrote about after running it.  Here's my link to that article...

Although I'd eventually like to step up my distance per run, the hot summer weather here in north Florida is working against that goal.  Sure, six years ago I defied common sense and ran long distances in the heat of the day, more than once running past the ten-mile mark when the temperature was in the nineties.  I don't think I want to do that anymore, though...

If I can continue consistently running for about three to five miles per day for the next few months without incurring any injuries, that may just be about the best I can reasonably do.  I could also enter some more 5K races whenever they come up in the Gainesville area.  Maybe this fall I'll be able to resume running half-marathons, my preferred racing distance (13.1 miles).  This past season I was only able to run a couple of 10Ks and one 15K (9.3 miles) event (besides that 5K race I mentioned).  We'll see...

On This Memorial Day

On this Memorial Day of 2016, I remember and honor the fallen soldiers in our nation's wars, past and present.  I am one of those folks who respect their sacrifice for the sake of the mission and their fellow combatants...whether or not I personally think that the military action in itself was called for.  After all, it is the democratically-elected, civilian President who serves as Commander-in-Chief...and who is ultimately responsible for whatever combat results from his orders.  The soldiers are highly trained to actively support the mission to the best of their abilities, and to be willing to lay their lives down for it and for the safety of their fellow soldiers.  Sometimes I feel that this important distinction has been muddled in the past...the Vietnam War and the Iraq invasion and occupation come to mind.  Some of the mostly well-intentioned people who slapped "Support Our Troops" decals on their vehicles a few years ago may not have been doing so with the sole intent of honoring our brave men and women in the line of duty.  I think, sadly so, that this motto had an additional meaning for them: whatever the President decides (at least one with their political outlook) has to be supported because the troops who carry out those policies are in the line of fire.  The problem with this is when a president...such as Democrat Lyndon Johnson with Vietnam or Republican George W. Bush with Iraq...sends his forces into an untenable situation abroad and exposes them to death and injury without a viable strategy for ultimate victory and eventual withdrawal.  It, in my opinion, is an act of support for those troops sent into harm's way for Americans to openly express opposition to decisions that put them there without the "end-game" having been properly thought out.  Instead, I respect a president who is careful about committing our precious and courageous young men and women to dangerous situations to the point where he or she works ceaselessly to achieve positive results without having to do so...

Let's honor those brave American heroes who died for our country...and work to keep that list from growing needlessly... 

Soccer: Mexico's Liga MX Championship Finale Tonight

I've been following Mexico's premier professional soccer league, commonly known as Liga MX, for two years now.  That means four actual "seasons", for each year is divided into two parts: fall's Apertura mini-season and winter/spring's Clausura...each one has its own league championship series.  Out of Liga MX's 18 teams, 8 make the championship tournament, known as "Liguilla".  The paired-up teams play each round with two matches, one at home and one on their opponent's field, with the team accumulating the most aggregate two-game goals advancing (there is a tie-breaker system, too).  Tonight the 2016 Clausura season will come to an end with the closing game of the championship round between the Liguilla's two surviving teams: Pachuca and Monterrey...

In last week's first game between the two, Pachuca won at home 1-0 against Monterrey.  Tonight the Rayados, who had the best league record during the regular season, will be the hosts.  I watched the Apertura finale back in December between UNAM Pumas and UANL Tigres...it was a heart-stopping match!  I can't wait to see what happens tonight.  Regardless who wins, it will mark the fourth different team to win the title in each of the seasons from the last couple of years (I've previously witnessed Club America, Santos Laguno, and Tigres walk away with the Liguilla championship).  In other words, I've never seen a league in any sport that is so distinguished by the parity between the teams that comprise it as Liga MX.  The game starts around 9:30 pm Eastern Time and is being shown on the Univision and UnivisionDeportes channels in Spanish.  Unilike the previous finale, which had me pulling for Tigres, I'm not taking sides this time around...I just want to enjoy the high caliber of play.  I hope it's a close match!

Just Finished Reading Five More Kuttner and Moore Short Stories

Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore were a husband and wife writing team who specialized in science fiction, occasionally dabbling in fantasy or horror.  Sometimes they wrote solo, but many of their works were collaborations using pseudonyms, the best known of which was Lewis Padgett.  Their mainstay was the short story, with which over the course of the mid-twentieth century they were very successful at selling to science fiction magazines.   The book Two-Handed Engine, named after one of the stories contained within, is a collection of their best short literature.  I have been reading it off and on for the past few months...more "off" than "on", I'm sad to say...but I've just finished reading five more of its stories...bringing the total read so far to thirteen.  Their titles are: The World is Mine, When the Bough Breaks, The Cure, The Code, and Line to Tomorrow.  Although distinctly different tales, all five are distinguished by the subject of time travel and an examination into the nature of personal identity and consciousness...

The World is Mine, the most humorous of the lot, plays around with time travel's paradoxes and how people (and some rabbit-like Martians) get carried away with coveting power over others.  In When the Bough Breaks, a superman/mutant sends agents back in time to his infancy in order to better train him for his future of destiny...probably not the best of ideas. The Cure involves a businessman who experiences moments when he feels he is in another place and time...and maybe is even a different person.  The Code has two scientists experimenting with a rejuvenation drug on one of their fathers...the results bring on a comparison to the legend of Faust and Mephistopheles...meaning that if you're not already acquainted with that tale, then this story is probably going to be lost on you!  The last of the bunch is Line to Tomorrow, where someone keeps getting a misdirected phone call...from the distant future...

I'm just guessing here, but it seems that stories about time travel and personal identity must have been very popular back in the 1940s, when these stories were first published.  And if you were a writer back then, pounding away at the typewriter and struggling to come out with material that would sell...and provide you a reasonable living in the process...then you would most likely pay attention to magazine editors and publishers when they told you what worked (and what didn't).   And the result, at least with Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore, was a steady stream of popular short stories with some very similar themes...

NASA, Its Missions, and the Candidates

Having discovered that neither Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, nor Bernie Sanders seem to care at all about our space program, I am wondering whether or not the eventual winner of this November's presidential election will continue our current president's vision for its future...especially with regard to manned space travel to Mars.  After all, not long after he himself took office, Barack Obama went back on his campaign promise to Floridians that he would continue his predecessor's ambitious program to establish a moon base.  It seems that NASA is a political football, kicked around from one administration to the next with each president either ignoring it or drastically changing its goals.  That is because NASA is a federal agency under the direct authority of the president.  Congress only has the power to fund or defund it and cannot directly set its agenda...

Maybe one of these candidates will surprise us and show some proactive interest in our space program...although Sanders seems downright hostile to space exploration.  Regardless, I plan to research NASA's website and watch the NASA channel on TV in order to keep up with its ongoing missions and future plans.  With this in mind, I also plan to write about these missions.  One of the more immediate with be the Juno probe to Jupiter, while should arrive at that planet in July.  More on Juno in an upcoming article.  I will also be looking the history of our space program as well as what is going on with those in Europe, Russia, China, and Japan.  Should be enlightening...

The Major League Baseball Regular Season So Far

The Major League Baseball regular season has played enough games, around the mid-forties in number, for me to look at the standings and notice trends.  The division leaders right now, listed in order from the American League East-Central-West to the corresponding National League divisions, are the Boston Red Sox, Chicago White Sox, Seattle Mariners, Washington Nationals, Chicago Cubs, and San Francisco Giants.  The cellar-dwellers, in the same order, are the Tampa Bay Rays, Minnesota Twins, Houston Astros, Atlanta Braves, Cincinnati Reds, and San Diego Padres.  Minnesota, Atlanta, and Cincinnati are having truly horrendous seasons while the Cubs and Giants have put distance between themselves and their divisional challengers.  All of the other divisions are close, with Baltimore, Cleveland, defending World Series champion Kansas City, Texas, defending NL champs New York Mets, Philadelphia, and Miami having winning, competitive seasons.  The Marlins at this writing are 24-21, a marked turnaround so far from their dismal 72-90 season last year...they're in fourth place right now, but only 3.5 games from the lead.  The Rays, "my" other Florida team, are struggling at 21-23, just percentage points in last place but still solidly in the running...

It's hard to predict how things will wind up this year. An injury to a key player can devastate a team, and sometimes a team will go into prolonged hitting or pitching slumps...or the opposite can occur and one or more of them can suddenly surge in the standings.  I can't see a lot to interest me in baseball right now...maybe it's because I've seen in recent years my favorite teams cave in and go into those aforementioned slumps.  Will that happen again, or will either Miami or Tampa Bay (or both) break the pattern and finish as winners?

Sanders, Clinton, and Superdelegates

Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders has his own talking points that he brings up during his campaign rallies.  Being a socialist and a staunch believer in state control over the economy, he has continually criticized Clinton's ties with Wall Street...as if business and banking were the enemies of our country.  Well, if you're of his political persuasion, then good luck with the standard of living you are enjoying (and probably refusing to acknowledge) in this early twenty-first century...a historically high standard of living that owes itself, in great part, to business and banking...Sanders' enemies.   But that's not what I want to focus on here...rather it is another of Bernie's favorite talking points: the superdelegates...

Bernie Sanders constantly brings up the superdelegates, who were not selected during the primary season.  They are composed instead, at least in part, of the Democrats already elected in the House of Representatives, the Senate, and as state governors...a total of 261 out of 715 superdelegates.  In other words, these are Democrats who have been successful at winning general elections against Republicans.  Along with these popularly elected delegates are allotted 20 who were past presidents, v.p.'s and honored party figures from the past.  That leaves 434 superdelegates who owe their selection to having been elected by the Democratic National Committee.  Now I am all for the Democrats in the electorate being able to choose their nominee through primary elections.  And the historical trend has been more voter inclusion in the process, not less.   Not only is the number of superdelegates relatively small against the backdrop of total of 4,132 delegates, but as I have already stated, 261 of them were also elected by the people...albeit indirectly to their political offices.  The problem I have with the superdelegates as they pertain to the 2016 campaign is of a different nature...

Senator Sanders is right when he complains of nearly all of the superdelegates, supposedly "unpledged", nevertheless committing themselves to supporting Hillary Clinton even before the campaign season ever began.  This put Sanders in a virtually insurmountable position long before there was ever a primary or caucus...and feeds into the narrative that the process is rigged in advance against him and for Clinton.  Sanders has gone on a campaign to try to convince superdelegates from states he won to switch their allegiance to him.  He also claims that Clinton benefited throughout the primaries by receiving votes from people perceiving her as the "inevitable" nominee.  That may be true in some cases, but I believe that, by NOT being widely perceived as the eventual nominee, Sanders has been spared a great deal of the scrutiny and criticism (and attacks from Republicans) that have been focused on Clinton...ultimately detracting from her popularity.  I remember this phenomenon happening in 2008, when Obama, the frontrunner, was getting the lion's share of criticism and even Rush Limbaugh was urging people to vote instead for Hillary.  That's just the way the process works: the leader is the main target...

Historically, state primary elections were not the dominant element in determining party nominees for president.  After all, in 1968 Hubert Humphrey,the eventual nominee, didn't campaign in a single primary...there were precious few back then anyway...it was the states' "insider" party apparatus that selected delegates.  During that campaign season they weren't yet called "superdelegates"...but that's what the overwhelming majority of delegates were, as we interpret the term.  But now we're in 2016 and not 1968, and the expectations are that the nominee should be the one who won the most popular votes.  And, regardless what kind of spin Bernie Sanders wants to place on it, that candidate is Hillary Clinton, not him...

Just Finished Reading the InterWorld Trilogy by Gaiman and Reaves

In other recent blog articles here, I alluded to the fact that I was in the process of reading Neil Gaiman's teen-level fantasy trilogy titled InterWorld.  That wasn't entirely accurate: Gaiman tops the writing credits, but this series was really a collaboration, first between him and Michael Reaves, and later with the addition of Michael's daughter Mallory Reaves when his worsening Parkinson's Disease made typing unfeasible.  In truth, as far as I know it, Gaiman himself had little to do with InterWorld other than meeting with the Reaves and making creative suggestions to them.  But, you know, if you have an established brand backing your product...and Neil Gaiman is definitely established and highly respected...you can't go wrong...

The story with this trilogy involves a teenage boy named Joey Harker who one day, during a high school social studies class field assignment, finds that he can "walk" into other dimensions where there are Earths different from his own.  And on many of these Earths, the composite total of which comprises the "Altiverse", there are other "Joeys", albeit with different names and biological forms.  The common trait that they all share is their unique (at least for each one's home world) ability to walk from one Earth to another.  Now, the Altiverse  is shaped like an arc, and on each end is an enemy empire fighting against the "good guys".  One regime, the Binary, is computer-based and relies on science while the other, called HEX, is oriented to magic.  They are both mortal enemies of the "Joeys" because they use the essences of walkers, after their bodies are killed off, to power their respective ships and machines.  "Our" Joey discovers his peril right away as he is detected by both sides and pursued. He is rescued by another manifestation of himself from a different Earth and is eventually brought to InterWorld, the home base of all the walkers.  The three books involve themselves with InterWorld's campaign of resistance against the Binary and HEX, while later on in the series inter-dimensional travel is complicated by the insertion of time-travel (and time agents) into the story line...

InterWorld is written for young readers, and it has a lot of action sequences in it.  I felt that the speculative ideas about interdimensional and time travel were interesting, but nevertheless eventually felt overwhelmed by the strangeness of it all.  But since this series is a combination science fiction/fantasy tale, what should I have been expecting, anyway?  All in all, though, I enjoyed reading it and liked Joey and his fellow walkers from all the different Earths.  The three volumes are titled InterWorld, The Silver Dream, and Eternity's Wheel...

My next Neil Gaiman book: American Gods...

What Kind of Hurricane Season Will We Have in 2016?

The 2016 Atlantic hurricane season will officially begin on June 1, although there has already been a full-blown hurricane: Alex, which haunted the northern Atlantic Ocean way back in January.  Meteorologists with an inside track on the data and their interpretation seem to be of the opinion that, due to their prediction of the El Niño effect giving way this summer and fall to La Niña, the number of named tropical storms as well as hurricanes will increase from last year's total.  That's not to say we'll have anything like 2005, when terrible storms like Katrina, Rita, and Wilma struck the American mainland...but tropical storm activity should pick up in the area.  Since 2005, not a single hurricane struck the state of Florida, while a few hit elsewhere: in Texas, Louisiana, North Carolina...and the northeastern coastal states.  I don't see this period of good luck for us Floridians continuing much longer, but if it's in the cards for us to be spared such an traumatic experience for yet another year...then deal me in!

The first names for tropical storms/hurricanes in the Atlantic for 2016 are: Alex (already used), Bonnie, Colin, Danielle, Earl, and Fiona.  Even if the number of storms is high, we need to keep in mind that most of them just run through their existence completely at sea, hundreds of miles from the mainland, posing threats only to islands (like Bermuda or the Azores), shipping...and careless east coast beach-goers and boating enthusiasts who ignore warnings about strong storm-generated waves and rip current...

I think we'll have a better grasp of what kind of season 2016 will be once the storms coming off the western African coast cross the Atlantic and approach the West Indies.  In years conducive to hurricane development, they continue more or less to strengthen until they hit the mainland or pass over mountainous terrain in some islands like Hispaniola or Cuba.  On the other hand, these storms have recently had a tendency to run into strong weather systems that shear the storms and diminish them into relatively harmless low pressure zones.  I'm hoping that the latter scenario prevails this time around...

It will also be interesting to see where the predominant source of hurricane development occurs.  I've already mentioned the eastern Atlantic, but also some of the worst storms in our recent memory (like Camille in 1969 and Wilma in 2005) developed in the warm waters of the western Caribbean and then moved northward.  I'm keeping my eye on both regions...

The Wild Card Zone in Major League Baseball Games

Many years ago, a Major League Baseball team would feel pretty confident if it had a good starting pitching rotation and a consistently effective closing relief pitcher.  And having one or two really dependable middle-relief pitchers would just be icing on the cake.  But nowadays, with the pressure to limit the number of pitches that starters can throw in a game...even to the point where a manager will sometimes pull a starter who is pitching a no-hitter (it happened with the Marlins earlier this season)...there has arisen a substantial portion of the game when the "big-money" starting pitchers have been yanked and that lineup of middle-relief pitchers comes into play...and this happens in the vast majority of games.  These pitchers usually don't exactly have the best records at keeping batters from reaching base...which is why they're middle relief, after all!  Yet they collectively play a crucial role in determining the outcome of games.  A starter is usually approaching the magic number of 100 pitches, unless of course he's having a career game, by around the sixth or seventh inning.  And even if the pitch count is lower, the manager is very sensitive to observe any signs of fatigue, reflected in pitch speed and accuracy...and of course whether or not the bases are being kept empty.  I've seen many games in which the starter was doing well and then ran into a little trouble in the 5th, 6th, or 7th innings and the manager, rather than see if he could get himself out of the inning, instead called upon a middle-relief pitcher with less of a reputation for effectiveness.  And too many times in these situations, the reliever would give up runs, with them often charged to the starter.  I've been suffering in recent seasons with my Florida teams Tampa Bay and Miami as I've seen leads disappear and losses ensue on a number of occasions when effective starters are replaced with less-capable relievers...

I've recently heard that pitchers throw warm-up pitches before each inning (up to 8 are allowed per inning)...and if there is any kind of delay, they're allowed more.  I wonder, though, how necessary these practice throws are and if they don't contribute to the starter's fatigue in later innings.  I heard the same viewpoint expressed by someone recently on a sports talk radio station, and then read an article echoing his viewpoint online...I wonder if it was the same person.  After all, the later you can keep your best pitchers in the game, while keeping the number of innings with middle-relievers to a minimum, your chances of winning should be greatly enhanced.  But I don't foresee any drastic changes concerning warm-up pitches anytime soon.  Instead, those middle-to-late innings will continue to be the "wild card zone" in games, when just about anything might happen...

Just Finished Reading Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane

British fantasy/science fiction writer Neil Gaiman is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors.  Currently I'm reading through one of his "juniors" series titled InterWorld...maybe that one is a tad too juvenile...but I just finished reading a more adult novel: his 2013 The Ocean at the End of the Lane...

In The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a man in his late forties returns to where he lived as a seven-year-old boy forty year earlier, in a rural Sussex area (in England, of course).   While walking down the lane connecting his former home (now long demolished) and its end, where the Hempstocks lived, he begins to gradually remember his past.  Finally, looking out on the Hempstock's pond, he recalls that little Lettie Hempstock, a girl four years his senior, referred to the pond as an "ocean"...and the past memories flood in, launching this tale of childhood adventures, fears, and regrets...

It's always a bit difficult to know how much to tell in a book review and how much to leave out.  Maybe it's just better to give some general impressions of mine and leave the story's outcome to you, the prospective reader.  One sense I got from reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane is that it initially feels as if it belongs in the "young adult" genre of fiction...like Divergent, Twilight, or Hunger Games...but the themes embedded within are much more adult in nature, once you get past all of the magic, fantasy, and adventure.   I also picked up that Gaiman was writing about the helpless feeling that children often get when they have to interact with grown-ups, who often wield so much power over them and insist on always being "right".  Whoa...that one struck a strong chord with me as I recall, over the course of my own childhood, how much I deeply distrusted...and even feared...adults.  There is a sinister housekeeper reminiscent of the wicked nanny who takes over the household in the movie The Omen, and later in the story appear monstrous flying entities who "clean things up" and are remarkably similar to those in Stephen King's The Langoliers...

The Ocean at the End of the Lane was published in 2013 and won numerous awards for Neil Gaiman.  It is a disturbing novel in that, while it seems like a child's fantasy tale on the surface, there is some pretty deep stuff underlying it all.  Why not try it out and see for yourself?

NBA Playoffs Down to "Final Four"

Although I'm disappointed that "my" San Antonio Spurs and Miami Heat didn't quite make it to their respective conference finals, I still enjoy watching the National Basketball Association playoffs...but I'm glad I was at work last night and didn't witness the horrendous 31-point blowout that Cleveland put over Toronto in their opening round game for the Eastern Conference championship.  Still, it's "best of seven" and I recall, just recently, when San Antonio did something similar to Oklahoma City in their first game...only to see the Thunder win the next four out of five and the series.  Still, I have trouble comparing the Raptors, an admittedly talented team, with Oklahoma City and its superstars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook along with the crucial supporting cast of players Serge Ibaka, Steven Adams, and Enes Kanter.  The latter two shut down the Spurs offense in the "paint" during the previous series and have to be given a great amount of credit for the team's playoff surge so far.  Also, I'm starting to hear kudos deservedly being given to Thunder first-year head coach Billy Donovan.  And if upsetting favored San Antonio wasn't enough, Oklahoma City then shocked everyone by coming from behind in the second half to beat the heavily favored Golden State Warriors in the first game of the Western Conference finals, 108-102...

I don't think that a team like Golden State, headlined by its two-time MVP guard Stephen Curry, will buckle under to the Thunder.  Still, by beating them on their home court, Oklahoma City has definitely earned their attention and respect.  Who knows what will happen in the next game, which will begin tonight at nine (on TNT).  As it stands now, my favorite team of the remaining four is Oklahoma City, followed in order of preference by Golden State and Toronto, the latter of which I'm afraid is a lost cause against the mighty Lebron James-led Cavaliers.  I happen to like Lebron and the way he unselfishly works with his teammates.  What I don't like about Cleveland is the way that this city acts as if it has some kind of proprietary claim on him, just because he grew up in the area and played for the Cavaliers during his early NBA years.  I don't see people in other American cities acting this way toward NBA players from their area who are on teams in other towns.  If the Cavaliers were playing in a different city, I'd probably be rooting for them instead of against them...

Currently Reading Some of Neil Gaiman's Works

Neil Gaiman is a contemporary English writer, very popular for his graphic novels, comics, and fantasy/science fiction books.  His output has been prolific, to say the least...I'm just getting started with his works, although I'm not interested in the graphic novels and comic books.  I've previously read Neverwhere, as well as Gaiman's collaboration with Terry Pratchett titled Good Omens.  And now I've just finished reading The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a 2013 fantasy novel.  I'll probably write about it in a couple of days or so...

I have just begun reading Gaiman's three-part fantasy series InterWorld, targeted at the young adult reading audience...a group to which I occasionally pretend to belong.  And further along, I plan to read his novels American Gods and Stardust.  He is an excellent writer who can spin a yarn as well as anyone and who knows how to present realistic and sympathetic characters.  I'm probably going to end up reading just about all of his works... except for those graphic novels/comics, that is...

Ran Yesterday's 5K May Day Glow Run in Tioga

Having missed out on running a race in April, in spite of all the opportunities available, I was eager last week to see whether any local events were being offered this month.  I was happy to discover that a 5K race was to be held the coming Saturday, and at a familiar site...

Two months ago, on a Saturday afternoon, I ran the 10K Run for Haven race held annually in Tioga, a few miles west of Gainesville off Newberry Road.  Yesterday, a different race took place at the same location: the May Day Glow Run 5K, organized by Newberry Christian Community School.  It is called "Glow Run" because it starts in the evening at 8:30, and the participants are offered plastic sticks containing luminescent coloring that they can twist into necklaces and bracelets for themselves while running.  The course is identical to the 5K version of the Run for Haven course, which includes the portion of their 10K run that is residential and excludes the 10K's three-mile diversion through the woods...that's good since there's no way any of us could have seen anything out there, "glowsticks" or not...

For the most part, I was impressed with the way this race was organized and presented.  For example, they didn't fool around with the asinine meal/beer tickets that the Haven organizers offered...and which I didn't use because of the ridiculously long lines of people waiting to redeem them.  Instead, it was a race, pure and simple...well, maybe not all that simple: at its start, they set off fireworks that were close to the near-stampeding runners and sounded like bombs going off: not one of their better ideas! And it was a near-stampede at the beginning, as is just about any 5K event with a lot of runners.  So, as usual, I found myself slowing down just to avoid running into others...or trying to get out of others' ways.  Also, although we were running down residential streets with streetlights, they still seemed too dark...and the occasional slow-bumps in the road were hard to make out, with the sudden changes in slope being rather disconcerting.  Still, I was happy to not have to contend with a glaring sun and the heat of the afternoon: just a short time earlier it was in the upper eighties...by race time it had gone down ten degrees while the humidity was still low and pleasant...

I ran the race as a training run, sticking to a comfortable pace much slower than what I would have run had I been competing to beat others.  I finished the 3.1 mile distance at 28:51...that is a 9:21/mile pace, about the level I now prefer during my training runs.  The folks at the finish line were very positive, encouraging, and complimentary...I appreciate little gestures of kindness like that.  Upon finishing, there were liberal quantities of cold water and bananas available...nothing extravagant, but then again sometimes I think they go a little overboard with the amenities for these races.  I was also impressed by the portable restrooms provided: lit up, flushable, and with a sink and hand soap.  Now that I did not expect...

Here are the race results, posted on the Internet.  Turns out they gave me a better finishing time, at 28:36...apparently, it took me 15 seconds to reach the starting line in this mass of around 700 entrants.  I finished 112th overall, and 8th in my gender/age group (out of 18).  All things considered, I enjoyed the May Day Glow Run and would like to try it out again next year...

Just Finished Reading 2nd Chance by James Patterson

During the past few months I've begun to explore the fiction of popular American writer James Patterson.  So far, I've read his first-ever two novels as well as the first books in his Alex Cross and Maximum Ride series.  I also recently read 1st to Die, the first volume in his ongoing Women's Murder Club mystery series with increasing numbers with each successive title...I believe he's gotten to book #15 by now.  And the other day I just finished reading 2nd Chance...

So far, it's no contest: the Women's Murder Club series is Patterson's most compelling fiction, and 2nd Chance only bolstered my opinion in that regard.  The stories are based in San Francisco and feature homicide investigator Lindsay Boxer as the main protagonist.  She has three close women friends: an investigative report (Cindy), a medical examiner (Claire), and an assistant district attorney (Jill).  The four meet often and discuss their personal problems and relationships...and more importantly...the developing mystery in the ongoing story.  In this book, someone is apparently committing hate crimes by selecting African-American targets for their serial murders.  Lindsay, thanks in large part to her friends in the "club", discovers a connection between the victims and the police...leading her to investigate who might have a grievance from the past with San Francisco law enforcement.  She also keeps seeing a strange recurring image, while investigating the crimes, of a two-headed beast with a snake's tale: a "chimera".  What does the chimera have to do with hate groups and the murders?  Guess you'll have to read 2nd Chance to find out!

In 1st to Die, Lindsay has her own personal crisis, a rare blood disease, to deal with.  In 2nd Chance, another personal issue comes to the forefront when her father, a former SF cop who abandoned her and her now long-diseased mother twenty years earlier, resurfaces and tries to mend their relationship.  Patterson skillfully managed to weave this subplot into the story's main theme of the murder mystery...

I heartily recommend 2nd Chance and plan to read this series through to the end, just as I have been doing with Sue Grafton's "alphabet mystery" series featuring California private eye Kinsey Millhone.  Both series have very sympathetic protagonists...and you're never quite sure the mystery is completely solved until the very end, when most likely a surprise finish awaits you...

There was a brief television series titled Women's Murder Club, comprising only 13 episodes and featuring the same characters as the books.  It aired from the fall of 2007 to the spring of 2008.  I'll not be making any attempt to watch it, as I am already greatly disappointed in other recent books-to-TV adaptations, most notably The Magicians and Game of Thrones...

My Favorites Having Trouble Advancing in NBA Playoffs

A few days ago, when I previewed this year's National Basketball Association championship playoffs, I acknowledged that Cleveland and Golden State were the most likely teams to face off (again), as conference champions, in the league title series.  But I also held out hope that my favorites in each conference, namely Miami in the East and San Antonio in the West, could at least give the Cavaliers and Warriors a run for their money, if not actually upset them.  Sadly, the Spurs couldn't even get to the conference championship round to play Golden State: Oklahoma City blew past them in six games.  The consolation here is that Thunder head coach Billy Donovan, still very popular here in Gainesville for bringing two NCAA championships to the University of Florida, is going to rise in esteem as an NBA coach...although I have yet to hear anyone on the sports talk shows give him any credit for his team's phenomenal playoff success so far.  In the East, the Heat are behind Toronto three games to two and face elimination if they can't pull off a home victory in tonight's game (8:00 on ESPN).  Even if Miami does win this one, they'll still have to go back to Canada to play the seventh game on the road. At this point I'm not holding out much hope, but the Heat, with Dwyane Wade and supporting cast, do have the playoff experience, over the course of many years, to come back and win this series.  But then again, I could have said the same about San Antonio...

Just Finished Reading Lev Grossman's Magicians Trilogy (for 3rd Time)

I remember, a few years ago while browsing in my Gainesville Borders bookstore (which has sadly gone out of business) and looking for an interesting book to buy, coming across a display of The Magicians, a fantasy novel by fiction critic Lev Grossman...to be the first in a series. It turned out to be a great book, a fantasy story that managed to span both an imaginary world and our own "real" world while paying tribute to great authors of the genre...most notably C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling.  Each time a new book came out...it eventually broke that Grossman would be producing a trilogy...I eagerly read it.  And then a period of time passed, and I reread the series.  What prompted me to just recently pick it up a third time and read it was the Syfy Channel's adaptation of The Magicians to a TV series.  When I saw how much it was diverging from the author's original story, I gave up watching it...and instead began reading the books a third time...

When it comes to the genre of fantasy literature, the norm seems to be for the author to expand the story line into a series of books.  Sometimes the effort results in a compact, limited series with a small number of main characters and the subplots kept to a disciplined minimum.  I prefer these series and their authors, the most notable being the aforementioned Magicians by Lev Grossman, The Dagger and the Coin by Daniel Abraham, and Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson.  Unfortunately, some other fantasy writers, upon seeing the "cash cow" inherent in prolonging their series, went down a different path and dramatically expanded the scope of their stories while introducing many new characters and subplots...making keeping up with the increasingly complex and confusing story more and more difficult.  The classic example has been Robert Jordan with his Wheel of Time series...he was so bogged down with trying to finish this eventual 14-volume saga that he died while writing the final book, which had ballooned to 2000 pages.  Brandon Sanderson then stepped in and, while incorporating Jordan's ideas for the ending, smartly wrote the last volumes and presented a complete work that managed to tie up many loose threads and produce a satisfactory conclusion.  In our time, we have another fantasy writer with pretty much the same problem that Jordan had: George R.R. Martin with his A Song of Fire and Ice series...more commonly known by its first book, A Game of Thrones.  Martin has already taken many years to produce his first five volumes, but in recent times has been further distracted by the HBO TV adaptation and has continually been delaying the publication of the sixth book.  Instead, the TV show (which incidentally also greatly diverges from the written story) has actually surpassed the book series' timeline and has introduced plot changes that would have been revealed in the sixth book...had Martin ever gotten around to writing it.  In this series, as was the case with Robert Jordan's, there are way too many new characters continually being added along with new sub-stories.  I have just about given up on George R.R. Martin: he can take his oh-so important series and stuff it...

Obama May Campaign for Successor on Unprecedented Scale

In the upcoming campaign for president in the general election for 2016 President Obama has promised to be fully engaged in the discussions.   To openly participate in the campaign for one's successor, which one might expect to be the norm for an incumbent president planning to leave office, is actually...at least in recent years...a relatively rare phenomenon.  Of course, this scenario doesn't exist in every presidential year: in my lifetime (I was born in 1956) it has only happened in 1960, 1968, 1988, 2000, 2008...and this year.  In 1960, incumbent President Eisenhower was reportedly kept from campaigning for Richard Nixon through the intervention of his wife Mamie, who was concerned about her husband's wealth...he did, though, step out at the end to speak on behalf of Nixon.  In 1968, Lyndon Johnson was very unpopular nationally and as such was considered a liability by Hubert Humphrey.  In 1988, Ronald Reagan broke the pattern by campaigning for George ("the first") Bush, but again in 2000, Al Gore rejected the offered help of incumbent President Clinton...a decision that many felt cost him this extremely close election.  In 2008, George W. Bush was very unpopular and was also considered a liability by his nominated successor, this time Senator John McCain.  But Barack Obama, while currently only at about 50/50 in the national popularity polls, still is seen as a powerful voice to mobilize his party.  During the coming months leading to the election, we may well see the sitting president intervening in the campaign on a scale unprecedented in modern memory...

My Running Starting to Pick Back Up Again

After a relentless upper respiratory illness forced me into a period of inactivity, I have recently begun to run again, picking up the distance from day to day.  My goal is to daily run a 3.3-mile loop through my neighborhood and the adjacent subdivision.  Also, should the opportunities arise over the next few months, I may participate in a local 5K race.  It just so happens that there is one coming up this Saturday, an evening race in back of the Tioga Town Center off Newberry Road, just a few miles west of Gainesville.  Whether or not I run it depends largely on the level of progress I feel I've attained by then.  Oh, and if the weather is bad Saturday, they can just forget about me being there...

Race or no race, I plan to focus on my daily running routine and maintain a good level of fitness.  Watching what I eat would also go a long way to that end...

Mexico's Liga MX Soccer Playoffs Set to Begin

Mexico's premier professional soccer league, commonly known as Liga MX, is set to begin its Liguilla championship playoff series for this Clausura split-season in the 2015-16 year.  In last fall's Apertura split-season, the UANL (Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León) Tigres, based in suburban Monterrey, won the Liguilla, although they were only the fifth-seed out of the eight top-finishing teams.  This season, Tigres, which also is my favorite team in the league, barely qualified for the Liguilla as an eighth-seed after winning its final regular season contest.  No problem: a year ago in the Clausura playoffs, it was eighth-seed Santos Laguna that caught fire and stormed through to that championship.  UANL's opening-round match will be against Monterrey, winner of the Clausura regular season and the top-seeded team in the Liguilla.  Also, had the Liga MX run things as they do in Europe in the English Premier League, Spain's La Liga, or Germany's Bundesliga...none of these leagues have a post-season championship playoff system nor do they break up the year into two split-seasons...Monterrey would have won the 2015-16 title as the team with the league's best cumulative regular season record...

This will mark the fourth Liguilla series I've been following as my second year of interest in Mexican soccer comes to an end.  I've noticed that the level of play in Liga MX, while not of the caliber of the English Premier League or Bundesliga, does seem a bit better than our North American MLS.  The Monterrey-Tigres round in this Liguilla should be a classic: not only is it a "derby" (a match between two same-city clubs), but the winner could well go on to win the title: it pits the regular season champs against the defending playoff champs.  The Liguilla, composed of four rounds with two matches per round (team with highest two-match score advances), will begin on May 11, with the final championship match to take place on the 30th...

Look In SE Sky Around Midnight to See Mars, Saturn, Scorpius

When I pull up in front of my house after my work shift, it's usually around 12:15 am.  Sometimes I'll look out of my car window at the sky...at least when it's clear...and see what the star patterns are.  Lately, I've been noticing, looking at that time just above the southeastern horizon, the Zodiac constellation Scorpius rising up into the sky.  It is marked by the three-star "claw" on its western end, with the first-magnitude red giant star Antares further down the line in the constellation.  Antares is so big, by the way, that if it were centered where our Sun is, then our Earth would be inside it!  I remember, back in the late spring of 1964, right after I had learned from my father about the constellations and their brightest stars, of waiting late into the night to see Scorpius rising.  And I'm experiencing it again 52 years later, but with a couple of notable exceptions: the presence of the planets Mars and Saturn...

Saturn, situated a little to the left of Antares as you're looking at it in the sky, is its usual brightness, which is nowhere as bright as Venus or Jupiter (the latter is also visible at night, situated in the constellation Leo), but still a standout in the night sky.  Mars, on the other hand, is now much, much brighter than it usually is: in astronomical terms, this is attributed to it currently being in "opposition".  Anyway, when I first saw it a few days ago in Scorpius, I was taken aback: the Red Planet clearly dominates this section of the sky...

If the sky is clear later tonight, why not step outside and look to the southeast?  I drew a map of the small section I'm writing about: you can see, on the right, Scorpius,with the prominent stars connected by broken lines to show the constellation's pattern.  The three stars of the "claws" are at the top as it rises, and Antares is below, closer to the horizon.  You'll also notice that Mars, Saturn, and Antares form the vertices of a right triangle: looks like one of those 3x4x5 triangles from my old junior high math days...

Melissa and I Enjoyed Our Brief Beach Trip

For the last couple of days, Melissa and I stayed at Ormond Beach, in a modest hotel we have been going to off and on for decades.  It was a good trip, although one might have thought that we wouldn't need to be wearing winter clothing during an early evening beach stroll!  But on Friday afternoon, the wind suddenly shifted direction and became a lot stronger and colder...not exactly what you would expect in early May...

Well, we're back in Gainesville again...just in time for the weekend!

Stage Now Set for Clinton vs. Trump General Election

Now that Senator Ted Cruz has dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination following his big loss yesterday in the Indiana Primary, Donald Trump has little opposition left on his way to a delegate majority at the Cleveland convention this summer.  As for the Democrats, Hillary Clinton looks to achieve a majority of delegates in a few weeks...this despite Bernie Sanders claiming there will be a contested convention.  I don't blame him...I believe that the Vermont Senator, who still works in his Senate office under no party affiliation while at the same time running for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, can't really at this late point be harboring delusions that he can mount a miraculous comeback at the end of the primary season.  Instead, I think, as do many others, that Sanders wants as many delegates as he can get into the Democratic Convention in order to influence the party's platform.  But he has to stay in the race with claims of possible victory in order to win some of the final state primaries. Sounds good to me, although at some point Sanders will need to work to bring the party together.  A Clinton/Sanders ticket makes sense to me...

As far as Donald Trump is concerned, I believe he would be a disaster as president...especially regarding his foreign policy stances (let Russia run rampant in Syria...be neutral between Israel and Palestine...let countries like South Korea and Japan develop their own nuclear weapons...threaten to leave NATO...never give assurance that the U.S. would refrain from dropping a nuclear bomb, etc.).  I despise his entire approach to the campaign, which is basically standing behind a podium with a microphone and cameras and then making a chain of off-the-cuff remarks full of vague promises and nasty personal insults when he isn't tweeting tasteless comments against his opponents.  But I don't despise Trump himself: he is simply doing what the polls and primary results say works for him.  Instead, I cringe at the masses of American voters who have taken to his message and methodology...and wonder (and fear) whether there will be enough of them in November to actually reward this person for his campaign shenanigans by electing him to the highest office in the land for the next four years.  I've stated before that I'm not a fan of Hillary Clinton (I would have preferred ol' Joe Biden), but in this election she's the only rational choice...

Leicester City Beats 5000-1 Odds, Wins England's Premier League Title

Last night, when Chelsea, the defending English Premier League (in soccer) champion...disappointed at their status in the middle of the standings this year...nevertheless got to play the spoiler and fought to a 2-2 draw with second-place Tottenham, the result mathematically assured first-place Leicester City of the league's championship.  In England, as in most of the countries in Europe, there are no playoffs after the regular season: the top finisher IS the champion...

In 2013-14, Leicester City, nicknamed the "Foxes", weren't even in the Premier League: they then played in the second-level Football League Championship.  They won that league's title that year and were promoted into the Premier League the following season.  But as late as April, 2015, Leicester was mired deep in 20th and last place in the standings, almost certainly guaranteeing that they would be relegated back to the lower league the following year.  Instead, they suddenly got hot and won seven of their last nine games, moving considerably higher in the standings and able to remain in the top league.  For this 2015-16 season, an established coach was hired, Italian Claudio Ranieri, and he further enhanced the team's culture of winning.  From the start, the Foxes shot straight up to the top of the standings, spurred on largely with the goal-scoring performance of striker Jamie Vardy.  Eventually, the high-powered offense cooled off and it looked in mid-season as if Arsenal, a London team, would catch up and pass them.  But then Arsenal went into a small slump and Leicester City transformed itself into a strong defensive team, winning several low-scoring matches.  By season's end, it was only Tottenham, another London team, with a chance to catch them.  And yesterday's draw with Chelsea...a third London team (actually, there are currently five London teams in the Premier League)...handed the title to the Foxes...

Outside the United States, the Leicester City championship is a major, major news story.  Inside our borders, it's still a big sports story...at least to anyone with an interest in soccer.  To be deeply in last place just the year before, make an unexpected season-end turnaround, and then win it all the next year is incredible!  Congratulations, Leicester City!

Some Thoughts About the Presidential Campaign Season So Far

It looks to me as if the presidential campaign season is reaching a resolution, at least as far as the two major parties' nominees are concerned.  Although he likes to cite raw numbers for total primary votes and number of states he has won, Democratic contender Bernie Sanders is still behind Hillary Clinton in both of these categories...as well as in the number of pledged delegates.  The system of proportional assignment of delegates in primaries, according to current Democratic Party rules, will make it well-nigh impossible for Sanders to surpass Clinton in pledged delegates: this was the one scenario by which the Vermont senator could appeal to those super-delegates supporting Clinton to switch their allegiance to him.  Hillary is also making statements to the effect that Sanders should drop out of the race, but she has to be careful in order to avoid the "hypocrisy" accusation: in 2008 she fought Barack Obama from behind to the bitter end, even trying to gain an unfair advantage over the eventual nominee and president by trying to get extra delegates from the Florida primary, which Obama and John Edwards had avoided after the Party ruled that Florida had illegally scheduled its vote too early...

As for the Republicans, Donald Trump is clearly on the path to a majority of delegates and the nomination.  Ted Cruz, who has made Indiana a crucial battleground state for himself, has recently displayed desperation, both in his meaningless "deal" with rival candidate John Kasich for each to focus on states they're stronger in, and in his selection of Carly Fiorina as his vice-presidential running mate...bringing back to mind Ronald Reagan's desperate ploy of picking a liberal GOP congressman as his running mate in 1976 to "balance" the ticket and gain an advantage over eventual nominee, President Gerald Ford.  Cruz is still talking as if he will win Indiana, although the latest poll has Trump expanding his lead over Cruz in that state to 15 percentage points.  Fiorina, predictably, reacted to that news by trashing the poll and the pollsters: even more desperation...

There are two notions coming out in this presidential race that I would like to puncture.  One is that candidates like Sanders and Cruz, who claim more ideological purity than their opponents, are because of that rigidity somehow more noble than the others.  I couldn't disagree more.  It's easy for these two to sit in the U.S. Senate and make a lot of fine-sounding speeches enunciating their respective doctrines...it's entirely another matter to work with people who have a different outlook on things in order to achieve results that work in the real world.  The other fallacious notion I see in the campaign this year (and have in past elections) is that many people at-large seem to think that the president is like a king (or queen) and as such, can simply decree their agenda into law...I think many people who voted for Obama the first time back in 2008 were disappointed in him because of this mistaken idea.  The truth is that, regardless who gets elected this year, it's going to take a lot of work and compromise to get anything done...nobody gets to wave a magic wand and automatically put all of their policies into effect...

Just Finished Reading Garth Risk Hallberg's City on Fire

I admit to never having heard of the writer Garth Risk Hallberg until I read a tweet of Stephen King a few weeks ago extolling his latest novel City on Fire, which King himself had just finished reading.  So, on his recommendation, I found myself a copy and have been struggling through this very lengthy and overly serious novel...which also happens to be Hallberg's very first...

When I say that City on Fire is overly serious, I mean by that that the author takes himself and his writing too seriously.  Also, the subject matter, which is how various New York City residents, divided or connected by class, family, race, sexual orientation, nationality, and culture, interact with each other amid the context of the 1976-77 Bicentenial/Blackout time, with the focus on that infamous blackout in July of '77 that was marked by such rioting and burning, leaves precious little room for any kind of levity...

Hallberg introduces in his ambitious work many "main" characters, and I often had trouble sorting through their relative significance in his story as it progressed.  I suppose the top protagonist, all things considered, is a disillusioned young artist named William Hamilton-Sweeney.  Much is made of his break with his wealthy family and their business empire, as well as his homosexuality and problematic heroin use.  And speaking of drugs, just about everyone in this book partakes of them liberally in one form or another: the implicit message here is that "normal" people snort cocaine, smoke pot, or shoot up heroin...a notion with which I completely disagree...

Aside from introducing a plethora of characters with whom I had difficulty relating, the author likes to jump around in time a lot, too: it might be in the early 2000's, or is it 1976 or 1961 or 1981 or 1977?  Each character seems to be in a perpetual state of brooding and self-examination, stuck in their pasts with all of their own personal traumas, grievances, and regrets:  a strategically-placed joke every now and then would have done wonders for this gloomy story...

Having unloaded my criticisms on this novel, however, I would like to compliment Hallberg on creating a sense as to what Manhattan was like back in the mid-to-late 1970s...an era very different from when I finally got around to visiting it in 2010, long after mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg cleaned it up.  But in 1977 there was more an atmosphere of violence, anarchy, and underground counterculture steeped in illicit drug use...especially in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side.  I have a feeling that City on Fire would carry a much deeper meaning for readers who had lived there back in that time...