My June 2019 Running Report

In June I ran a total of 157 miles, missing one day with 9 miles being my longest single run.  It's been a struggle against the outdoors oppressive heat and humidity...and the heavy rainfall we've recently experienced has been an impediment to me.  Whether or not this trend of increasing mileage keeps up for me depends on how my body reacts to it all...I'm probably going to need to take more days off from running for recovery in the future as a set policy.  I didn't run in any races this past month, and although 5K free races are held at Gainesville's Depot Park every Saturday morning and July 4th will feature the annual three-mile Melon Park at Westside Park, as of now I don't feel any special desire to participate in any of them. Looks like it won't be until the fall before I run any public races...

Just Finished Reading Four Three Two One by Courtney C. Stevens

Usually when I visit my local public library (Millhopper on NW 43rd Street) I browse around the cart that contains "Play-Around" audiobooks. They are basically listen-only MP3-like small cartridges containing an entire book, with me only having to supply my own AAA battery and earphones.  The other day I ran across the 2018 young adult novel Four Three Two One, by Courtney C. Stevens, in this format and checked it out.  I just finished it and, although it probably wasn't targeted at my age group, I still came away from it thinking that it had a universal message that applies to everyone...

Golden, or "Go", Jennings is a seventeen-year-old survivor of a New York City bus bombing the summer before that killed nineteen...including the young psychopathic bomber...and spared only four, including Go.  The other survivors are her boyfriend Chandler from Kentucky, Rudy...who had flirted with her just before the disaster, and Caroline, the bomber's girlfriend.  One of the first-responders who helped save the four has started a college scholarship drive for them, had the destroyed bus rebuilt from its ruins, and is staging a reunion in New York to celebrate them and their lives.  The story line, told mainly from Go's point of view, examines how each of the four survivors struggle with the torment of guilt, not only of surviving the attack when others didn't, but also of their common believe that each of them in their own way contributed to the disaster and are therefore unforgivable.  It is the ongoing interaction...much of it in conflict...between these four and others that sets the theme of the story.  And Go's new friend Vicky gives a classic lesson on how to be supportive of survivors in situations like this.  It's a timely tale, very appropriate in this sad time of public shootings in schools and workplaces, and addresses the all-too-often occurrence of suicide on the part of survivors.  A good read, I recommend it...

Quote of the Week...from Charlie Daniels

So I jes' reached out an' kicked ol' green-teeth right in the knee. ---Charlie Daniels

The above quote...if you're from my generation...is probably one you're familiar with.  It's from the Charlie Daniels Band 1973 hit Uneasy Rider, one of the funniest songs ever recorded.  It relates the experiences of a long-haired traveler of the time who finds himself in a "redneck-lookin'" Mississippi bar, surrounded by hostile locals making disparaging comments about his appearance and looking for a fight.  The quick-thinking narrator, sensing his impending beating, thinks up a distraction and kicks one of the "regulars", then going off on a rant about green-teeth infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan and working undercover for the FBI.  It's good enough for him to escape and reroute his trip to L.A. "via Omaha".  This song came to me as I already knew that Joe Biden, although not possessing any green teeth that I know of, was destined to figuratively be kicked in his knee during last night's second Democratic presidential candidates' debate...the question was who would be doing the kicking.  I had thought Cory Booker would have gotten the assignment, but alas, he was separated from ol' Joe after being placed in the first debate on Wednesday.  So it turned out that California senator Kamala Harris did it, repeatedly and directly criticizing Barack Obama's hand-chosen two-term vice-president on the issue of race, even dredging up his opposition forty-plus years ago to forced school-busing.  The mainstream media reaction to their onstage exchange was that Biden had lost and Harris had rebooted her campaign, in which she had fallen nationwide to around the fifth-place level among the contenders.  Now don't get me wrong: I am not at all critical of Kamala Harris for her strategy of going after Biden...any more than the dude kicking that guy with the green teeth was wrong for using misdirection to get out of his own predicament.  My problem is with the spin going all around in the media about how great she was and not pointing out the so clearly obvious and cynical motivation behind her action.  One of Joe Biden's greatest assets so far has been his relative popularity above the other candidates among the African-American community...besting even Booker and Harris, both black.  The debate ploy that Harris used was intended to chip away, if not destroy, this level of support and bring green-teeth's Biden's polling numbers down and elevate her own among this demographic group.  Like I said, this is politics and I don't disparage her having done so...but I'm getting the feeling that the "fix" is on and the media talking heads out there don't want the former vice-president to be the Democratic Party nominee.  We'll see whether this turns into a trend and whether I begin to echo the current White House occupant that it's all rigged...

My General Reaction to the First Democratic Debate Last Night

I didn't hear all of the first Democratic presidential debate last night, which featured half of the field of twenty candidates achieving at least 1% in polling.  But I did listen to the first hour and as such got a pretty good idea about these ten people and their strategies with their respective campaigns.  Most of them seemed to feel that it was necessary to practically shout out their answers to the posed questions in order to establish their credentials as being passionate...Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Jay Inslee, Bill de Blasio, and Tim Ryan stood out in this regard. Beto O'Rourke and Tulsi Gabbard seemed clueless and unprepared...no surprise to me there.  And I appreciated the thoughtful answers from Amy Klobuchar and John Delaney, although the latter had an annoying tendency to go way beyond his allotted time and even ignored the moderator's call for him to stop.  A lot of people seemed to think Julian Castro did well...compared to O'Rourke I suppose he did. Most of the contestants seemed to be in a competition to assert their own far left ideological supremacy over the others...once again it was Klobuchar and Delaney who stood out in contrast to them with their own more reasoned, nuanced answers.   Personally, I think the debate helped Elizabeth Warren probably more than anyone else and put Beto O'Rourke in big trouble from which I doubt he will recover.  From what I did hear, I thought the panel of questioners did a pretty good job of sticking to the issues and away from personalities. Should be interesting to hear the rest of the field debate tonight...

Weekly Short Stories: 1948 Science Fiction, Part 3

I concluded my look back to 1948 at the year's best short science fiction with the final four tales from the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 10 (1948).  A dismal outlook on humanity's future and aberrant children are their themes...pretty standard sci-fi fare.  They're not my favorites, but each has its own message.  Here are my reactions...

IN HIDING by Wilmar H. Shiras
Timothy Paul is a thirteen-year-old boy who seems the prototype "average kid"...B-grades in school, doesn't isolate himself socially...but his teacher is concerned about Tim's growing absentmindedness and senses something's wrong, contacting Peter Welles, a psychiatrist.  Most of the story is about how Dr. Welles coaxes Tim to open up about his own life, and it soon becomes clear that he is at super-genius level and has been deliberately concealing that fact in order to avoid trouble with others in society...especially his own grandmother, who is now his guardian after his parents died years earlier from radiation sickness.  And here is where I see a major problem in society: someone begins to stand out with their intelligence and talent and others resent their superiority and set out to "put them in their place". I wonder how many of us as children employed Tim's strategy of concealment...and how many are still doing it, as adults...

KNOCK by Fredric Brown
Knock is a quirky short, little tale about a vastly different alien race that wiped out all animal life on Earth as a preparation for their own settlement, but before they doused the planet with poison spray they took samples of different species for their "zoo"...including two humans.  Walter Phelan finds himself being one of them and has been isolated for two days since the attack, other than his contacts with the strange conquering creatures, who treat him well in his confinement and whom Walter always calls "George".  The horror of such a disaster befalling our planet is only magnified when Walter discovers that since the aliens themselves don't reproduce sexually, many of their "samples" will die off since they don't have both males and females to perpetuate the species.  And he wonders about the other human left alive...

A CHILD IS CRYING by John D. MacDonald
Another story about a super-genius kid, the setting reveals what happens when he...unlike Timothy's concealment in the story In Hiding...openly reveals his talents: the military buys him off from his parents.  The officers, in the midst of nuclear tensions and conflict, seek to extract as much information from him as possible.  This is problematic since little Billy can mentally suggest people to hurt themselves if they get too aggressive...sounds a bit like Stephen King's novel Firestarter, doesn't it?  But when they discover that Billy's incredible reasoning ability gives him the power to predict the future, his interrogators cannot hold themselves back as they desperately seek to discover their own fates...

LATE NIGHT FINAL by Eric Frank Russell
Another conquering race from the stars...this one so humanoid in nature that they can pass for ordinary people, lands on Earth on the outskirts of a small Wisconsin country town in the form of several warships.  Their militarist commander wants the glory of forcefully subjugating the population, which confounds him by being friendly and hospitable.  His own men gradually lose their sense of discipline and loyalty as they encounter the locals and interact with them.  The reader may initially get the impression that this is all a story about the present time, but that's not the case at all.  It felt a bit like a "reverse" Mars is Heaven by Ray Bradbury, which I reviewed last week...but the ending is vastly different and carries a statement about where humanity's best chances for long-term survival lie...

Next week I begin my examining of the best science fiction stories from 1949 as I continue reading this anthology series...

Plan to Listen to Upcoming Democratic Presidential Debates

I have a choice with this ongoing presidential campaign between just sticking my head in the sand ostrich-like and trying my hardest to ignore all of the noise around me or becoming as well-informed as I can be regarding the different candidates and their character, ideology, and positions on the various issues. I've decided on the latter strategy and as such will be listening to the Democratic Party debates being held tomorrow and Thursday evening from 9 to 11.  Broadcast from Miami, each debate will feature ten candidates...drawn at random from those polled at 1% or higher...and will be shown on the NBC channels as well as being available with online streaming from NBC.com and other sources.  I said "listening" because I'll be at work or driving home for most of each debate's duration. Of course, I already know that my purely audio impressions often differ from those I get from both listening and watching, as they did during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and Trump's State of the Union addresses...

Even if you're not a Democrat and plan to support Trump in next year's election, you probably might want to tune in as well...I'm sure Limbaugh and the other conservative opinion makers will be doing so.  Looks like Cory Booker, Beto O'Rourke, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar will be headlining the Wednesday debate while Thursday's will feature Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris.  And the others, of course, will be looking to capitalize on their brief moment in the national spotlight to kickstart their campaigns and gain some recognition.  As for me, I've always liked Klobuchar for her intelligence, reason, and pragmatism and am repelled by a few candidates who are more into political correctness and emotionally manipulating the electorate...for now I'll leave these unnamed.  And I'm more than a little skeptical about those espousing pie-in-the-sky solutions to our nation's problems that have virtually no chance of becoming law during their administrations should they find themselves elected...

I'm also interested in hearing how the questions are posed and whether they are fair to the candidates or more slanted and tailored to play "gotcha" against one or more of them.  Yes, I'll be tuned in...how about you?

Working on Rebuilding Running Endurance

I've been increasing my outdoor running workouts as I gradually expand my own created course around my neighborhood and the adjacent ones here in far northern Gainesville.  Yesterday I covered 5.5 miles in midday 93-degree conditions while taking regular interspersed walking breaks along with a sports drink to sip on.  Although it got a little grueling at the end with the heat, I feel I made some good progress with my running and plan to go out again likewise tomorrow morning...maybe for a little bit longer as I continue to build up my distance.  I used to have a course that stretched through Northwood Pines, Northwood Oaks, the NW 53rd Avenue trail between 34th and 43rd Streets, NW 37th Street and the neighborhoods past that church, NW 43rd Street past Talbot Elementary and into the subdivision on 62nd Avenue, Felasco Park past the TV-20 WCJB station, NW 52nd Terrace, NW 53rd Avenue to the shaded, winding neighborhood of big homes off NW 57th Way...and back again.  Depending on how long I felt like running (or had some outside limit placed on me such as actually having to go to work), I could end up running quite some distance, topping 15 miles a number of times and achieving 26.6 once (at 4 hours 23 minutes).  But my long distance running endurance has admittedly dwindled a bit over the past three or four years and I'd like to return it to where I was running down all those convoluted roads and pathways and racking up the big miles: should be interesting...

Just Finished Reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac

My experience with beatniks has always been very limited...since they're pretty much extinct by now I suppose that puts me in a better position to discuss them than most people nowadays, although my "contact" was through the early sixties sitcoms Beverly Hillbillies and Dobie Gillis.  Yet the characters in these shows satirizing the Beat aren't all that far off the mark...I know because I finished reading Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel On the Road, which defined the movement.  The Beverly Hillbillies beatnik I remember the most from the two or three episodes that focused on them was the dude who just lied there on his back and never talked...now that's the acting role I was born for!  And in Dobie Gillis, goateed beatnik Maynard, played by future Gilligan Bob Denver, stole the show with his antics and speech.  So I had a pretty generally favorable view of the Beat Generation as people who had their own special lingo and appearance, were totally immersed in the present moment and people around them, and had a special thing for jazz.  That pretty much describes Kerouac's experiences as well as he...in the guise of narrator Sal Paradise...crisscrosses the USA...and later Mexico...hitching rides, taking buses, and using other means of locomotion while describing his friends and the land and people they encounter.  And of all his friends, it's Dean Moriarty who epitomizes the beatnik: totally irresponsible with his friends and lovers, he bounces off one experience into another...and then expects everybody else to follow him as he follows only his own whims.  Which they do, including Sal...much to my consternation: you see I have a strong antipathy to loud and aggressive personality types who expect me to fall in behind them as a passive follower.  So no, using the Beat movement's parlance, I didn't "dig" ol' Dean one bit...but it was interesting to see how others in the story kept forgiving him for his many offenses since he had such a charismatic sway over them...

With On the Road I was initially impressed by the author's vivid, detailed imagination of the different settings, characters, and experiences until I later read that he had actually pretty much lived through it all himself and that the "fictional" characters had real-life counterparts.  It all takes place around 1947-49 as millions of young men, back from World War II, are in states of flux and uncertainty about their futures, with the G.I. Bill being enacted around this time to subsidize their college educations and their eventual upward social mobility into conventional, middle class prosperity.  In the meantime, though, many just drift around, some even adopting the hobo lifestyle traveling by boxcars...something narrator Sal keeps expressing his desire to do himself without ever getting around to it.  There is a peeling away of some of the old gang from Sal and Dean as they marry, get stable jobs, and have children.  But Dean never seems to change as he "keeps the faith"...

The other night I saw a CNN show about the 1960s which examined the hippie counterculture movement in the second half of that decade and how it had its origins in the Beat movement of the fifties and early sixties.  But they also showed a clip of Jack Kerouac criticizing hippies, and I get what he was saying.  Beatniks were into experiencing everything on its own terms, not rejecting everything, while those in the later counterculture movement seemed intent on reinventing their own lives apart from the rest of the real world. Hippies were preachy and superior...beatniks were just cool.  I never did care too much for all that crap that went on in San Francisco and Woodstock, but I always kind of dug beatniks....but not Dean Moriarty...

Press and Rivals Playing Gotcha with Politicians' Comments

Did you ever see the 1970 movie Patton, starring George S. Scott as the brash World War II general?  There were scenes in it where he is allowing the press to ask him questions, and his off-the-cuff, careless answers are almost always taken out of context to paint him as a brutish villain who even sympathized with the Nazis...nothing could have been further from the truth.  I remember this film because I see something going on nowadays...not only with President Trump, whose offhand remarks have become his trademark, but also about politicians on the Democratic Party side.  Leftist freshman representative  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, already known for her flamboyant rhetoric and an outspoken critic of former vice-president Joe Biden on several issues, was recently asked in an interview a pointed question about his well-documented tendency in the past to get all touchy-feely-huggy out in public and that it disturbed some women. AOC...as she is commonly referred to...responded in what I thought was a restrained and respectful way toward Biden. Yet the later headlines made it look as if she were trying to resurrect the issue.  Biden was also criticized by rival Democratic candidate Cory Booker for having commented that even back when there were segregationist senators they were all able to get along better with each other than the broken, polarized situation in that body today...Booker failed to see the point of Biden's argument and instead accused him of praising segregationists.  Biden then angrily replied that he never had a racist bone in his body. Ocasio-Cortez then commented that it was Biden who owed Booker an apology for defending himself against his accusation.  Trump, of course, gets no respect and is even ridiculed for comments he makes that are obviously taken far out of context.  For example, he tweeted that the moon was part of Mars and the jokesters went wild with his supposedly incredible ignorance when all he was saying was that going back to the moon was to be seen as part of the plan of eventually going to Mars...to laugh at him for this reveals one's own stupidity, in my opinion.  Donald Trump may not like Bob Woodward's book Fear, which described the workings of the beginning of his presidency, but it fairly showed that he is tends to impulsively change his mind a lot, has a very short attention span, and is pretty sloppy with his speech and Twitter...all making it very easy for his critics to come up with material.  It's no secret that I dislike our current president...and I'm not all that fond of AOC or Biden, either.   But when they express themselves I try to understand the main ideas they are trying to impart and not just play "gotcha" while trying to distort their message into one that politically harms them...

Quote of the Week...from Stephen Covey

I am not a product of my circumstances.  I am a product of my decisions.   ---Stephen Covey

Stephen Covey is the author best known for his bestseller Seven Habits of Highly Effective People a few years ago.  He is a major advocate of people being proactive and not reactive with their lives.  In truth, the way I see it, we are products of both our circumstances and our decisions.  Albert Einstein once wrote, "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." In other words, genius begins with one's reasonable recognition of their own abilities and limitations...that's not being negative, for making such an assessment can point to the areas where their genius and talents can instead be fully realized.  Also, folks tend to get into the habit of living their lives according to narratives of self-victimization, that is they either dwell on mistakes others made in their upbringing or identify closely with a demographic group that has been (or still is) maltreated in society and, well, why bother trying when the system is rigged against you? My response is while discrimination has always been a problem and sadly will probably continue to be one, and just about all of us can find some negative things in our own personal pasts to blame someone else for, sometimes it's better to lay that aside and focus our thoughts and efforts on our own behavior.  For when I look back on trials and setbacks in my own life, my memory tends to focus more on how I reacted to them than the events and situations themselves...including those who may have perpetrated some wrong against me.  But that involves me, for the sake of effective living, ridding myself of the notion that my circumstances define me and instead orienting myself around my own decision-making, which in the long run by far determines who I really am and where I will go in life...

Just Finished Reading Ulysses by James Joyce

Back in the late 1970s, when I attended the University of Florida here in Gainesville as a student, I would go to the Reitz Student Union to relax...it's been rebuilt two or three times since.  But then on the first floor, on the west end of the building, was a student lounge area where we could sit back in big comfy cushioned swivel chairs and watch TV.  On the opposite wall was a painting that looked as if anyone at random had just taken their brush and thrown up different colors...an abstract work, but one that "experts" in the field no doubt thought possessed a high degree of aesthetic value.  That's kind of how I felt after reading Irish writer James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses: it's widely considered by many in the literary field to be one of the greatest works in English language literature...but it often left me scratching my head in confusion...and a little anger.  The main characters are compelling enough: Leopold Bloom, a Jewish Dubliner in his middle ages, is portrayed going through "a day in the life".  He knows about  his wife Molly's infidelity and hides from her suspected lover whenever their paths cross.  The secondary protagonist is Stephen Dedalus, who is frustrated with his manipulative roommate and struggles to make a name for himself as a writer and a scholar of Shakespeare.  Joyce presents these characters and others they meet by revealing their streams of thought...which usually meander in all kinds of directions, causing at least with me a sense of drift and uncertainty as to who is doing the thinking and often wondering what happened to the general story line.  Many times while reading Ulysses I had to stop and ask myself whether the narrative was the real progression of the plot or an imagining of one of the characters: Joyce seemed not to care how he presented his story, and I suspect he probably deliberately obfuscated it to encourage a sense of mystery and intrigue to provoke readers and scholars to analyze it more deeply.  Also, I was not in Joyce's Dublin at the time and do not know the different references to contemporary personalities nor the political and religious divisions and issues of the time, other than that Ireland had been seeking independence from the United Kingdom after an armed insurrection and was negotiating an agreement.  The language in dialogue is often steeped in dialect and as such difficult to comprehend. Much is made of Bloom's Judaism and his place in an Irish society with Catholicism being the dominant religious presence. Joyce named his novel after Homer's The Odyssey and the characters Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus supposedly correspond to Homer's Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus, respectively...and the book's chapter titles reference sections from the ancient Greek epic.  I had read The Odyssey beforehand, thinking that it would help me better understand Ulysses: didn't work...

All that having been said, I felt that there was a lot of humor in Ulysses, and I concentrated on following the sections of narrative in bite-sized chunks instead of trying to integrate everything I encountered into the larger story.  This book was initially declared obscene in the United States due to its often explicit sexual references, and although it was first published as a complete novel in 1922, it wasn't until the mid-1930s that it became available for general reading in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.  Well, if you're going to write with the view of recording people's real thoughts, then I guess you're probably going to throw in a bit of sexuality as well, humans being wired as we are...I had no problem with the sexual content, but then again I'm looking at it from the vantage point of 2019 and our society's values, not 1922 and theirs.  Ulysses is a difficult book to read, for sure...I'm glad I read it but am also glad that the other books I have read were mostly written with more consideration for me as their reader...

An afterthought: I mentioned before that Ulysses was about "a day in the life" of Leopold Bloom.  I wonder whether the late Beatles great John Lennon had been influenced by Joyce and his defining work, since he also had a tendency to play around with words, both in his own literature and his song lyrics...including, of course, A Day in the Life...

Weekly Short Stories: 1948 Science Fiction, Part 2

I continued my review of selected science fiction short stories from the year 1948 as they appear in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 10 (1948) with an interesting observation: the length of these stories tends to be quite shorter than those from earlier anthologies which at times were more novellas than short stories.  There are six listed below, all relatively brief...but that doesn't make them any less significant or worthy.  Here they are...

MARS IS HEAVEN by Ray Bradbury
The first ever manned expedition to Mars lands with its crew of seventeen...on a lawn of green grass.  Why, outside the ship it looks like one of the quaint small towns that Bradbury was always writing about, and furthermore, people are coming out of the houses to greet the long distance voyagers: their own deceased relatives and old friends, now looking quite alive and well.  The shock of experiencing this has its effect on the crew which is overcome with joy and abandon, and only Captain John Black begins to suspect something's amiss here.  While reading it I wondered to myself how clueless this crew must be and then I thought, that's the whole point...how many dubious things do we incorporate unquestioningly into our own personal narratives because they "fit" them and resonate with us on an irrational, emotional level?

THANG by Martin Gardner
For such a short, short, story (one page long) this is an exercise in imagining scale on an extremely large level. The title character is an entity who feeds on star systems...but that's not the end to it.  In my view, I get what the author was trying to express but sometimes a story can, well, just be TOO short...

BROOKLYN PROJECT by William Tenn
It's sometime in the future and, like so many science fiction scenarios, society has become more totalitarian with the State pretty much running everything, including science.  The big project at hand is to employ a time machine that can take pictures of its surroundings at intervals of millions of years...starting with the Earth's beginning.  A dissident group of scientists had warned of the consequences of meddling with the past like this, but of course they are all "silenced" in one way or another.  The time machine is activated and the observers note the pictures coming back from the past through each interval.  Only something isn't quite right...although none of them can detect it.  But it's pretty clear to the reader, which is what makes this story memorable...

RING AROUND THE REDHEAD by John D. MacDonald
This story delves into another common science fiction theme, that of entering into other dimensions of reality.  A tinkerer/inventor is on trial for murdering his next door neighbor, whose only remains seem to be small fragments of brain tissue in the shrubbery between their houses.  Our hero, convinced of his own innocence, knows everything that happened and insists on taking the stand, to the consternation of his own lawyer.  It seems there is a ring-shaped device that he came upon when a room in another dimension opened up suddenly, and through it he can explore other dimensions and extract things...and people (including a beautiful redheaded woman) through them.  Where does the neighbor fit into all this and what happens?  Guess you'll have to read it to find out...

PERIOD PIECE by J.J. Coupling
A man with memories of a past hundreds of years gone by is carted around from one social gathering to another off in the distant future and relates to his listeners what it was like "back then", as he is deemed a time traveler. Along the way he begins to entertain doubts as to why he is being handled in this way...and ultimately about his own identity.  I've wondered myself whether we can be truly certain that there ever was a past since we're all imprisoned in the present moment and our very memories of a supposed past are accessed in the "now" as well...

DORMANT by A.E. Van Vogt
It is the present...that is, it's 1948...and a U.S. Naval destroyer goes to a remote small Pacific island where they believe the Japanese had stored supplies for the war that just recently ended.  On it they discover a massive rocklike formation...and it seems to be moving up the island's mountain!  It's actually an alien creation that feeds on radioactivity...and wouldn't you know it, they've been testing atomic bombs in the Pacific.  And now this ominous thing is beginning to wake up from its dormancy of millions of years and resume its mission...and you really don't want to know what that is...

That's it for this week...next week I conclude my look at short science fiction from 1948...

Congratutations to St. Louis Blues and Toronto Raptors

Being a vicarious sports fan...meaning that I follow all these sports I never participate in myself...I have to congratulate a couple of teams for winning their respective leagues' championships a few days ago: the National Hockey League's St. Louis Blues and the National Basketball Association's Toronto Raptors, neither of them expected to go the distance.  The Blues struggled in their series against both the Dallas Stars (I thought Dallas was the better team in that one) and San Jose Sharks and were clear underdogs facing the Boston Bruins in the Stanley Cup finals...but came out on top in an exciting seven-match series.  As for the Raptors, most of the NBA's Eastern Conference attention was on Philadelphia and Milwaukee, yet under the leadership of Kahwi Leonard, along with a great supporting cast including the underrated Kyle Lowry, Pascal Siakam, Marc Gasol, Danny Green, Serge Ibaka...the list goes on...they overcame the 76ers winning the final deciding game of the series as Leonard broke a tie with time running out, shooting a three-pointer that bounced four times off the rim before settling in the basket.  Against the Bucks, the Raptors were even more impressive, earning the right to face twice-defending champion Golden State in the final series.  The Warriors, sadly, were hobbled throughout the finals: their star Kevin Duran was recovering from injury for the first four games and was out...in game five he played one quarter and blew out his achilles tendon and is now expected to miss the next season.  DeMarcus Cousins rejoined the squad for the series after his own injury and was effective in helping them to stay in it.  But what sealed the coffin for Golden State in their quest to win a third straight NBA championship was Clay Thompson's two injuries in the series, the last one leaving only Stephen Curry as the team's truly effective outside shooter and he could not overcome the Raptors' defensive pressure as Toronto won the sixth and final game 114-110 to secure the championship.  Both Toronto and St. Louis, although each franchise has a long record of regular season success, count this year's championships as their first ever...I'm looking forward to seeing how they do next year.  With the Raptors, their success may come down to whether Kawhi Leonard stays in town or moves elsewhere to play...

Some States' New Electoral Vote and Ballot Laws Seriously Misguided

When I heard of the movement of some Democratic-controlled state legislatures to enact laws giving their presidential electoral votes to the candidate receiving the highest popular vote total nationwide I initially thought that it was relatively meaningless, considering that all states passing these laws had clearly gone for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election anyway...it would only have teeth if swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan would go for it or if the states with more Republican leanings would go against their political instincts.  In other words, I initially concluded that giving one's own state's electoral votes to the popular winner needs most of the country to go along with it to be truly effective, something that simply is not going to happen.  However, a more recent development has been going on in some states as they have passed laws barring any presidential candidate from their ballots if they won't release their income tax returns.  The U.S. Supreme Court in the past has struck down such restrictive laws and I expect (hopefully) that they will again.  But in the meantime, an ugly scenario is being created by the mix of these two different laws.  Let me explain...

Take a look at California, by far the most populous state in the country, and which has both the law giving its massive amounts of electoral votes to the popular winner and that banning a candidate from its ballot who refuses to reveal his or her tax returns.  Then even though voters will be able to write in that candidate's name on their ballot, the effect will be to artificially drastically diminish his or her vote total...not just within California but also for the entire nation's popular vote tally.  And all these other states are by their own laws depending on the viability of that popular vote figure to determine their own electoral votes.  If the tax/ballot restriction movement isn't quashed by the courts, then I fear that Republican-controlled state legislatures would pass their own retaliatory laws having the effect of banning top Democratic candidates, using their own criteria in doing this. These two different laws simply do not mix...frankly, I wish neither of them had ever been considered in the first place...

Enjoyed Watching the U.S. Open Golf Tournament This Weekend

I hadn't planned on watching any golf on TV this weekend...I hadn't done so in years.  But I was captivated by the beautiful Pacific Ocean, harbor, and beach background to the Pebble Beach golf course on the mid-Californian coast...where the annual PGA United States Open is held, one of the major golf tournaments.  The leader at the close of Saturday was Gary Woodland, who had only a one-stroke lead over Justin Rose and at age 35 was still looking for his first ever majors victory.  Brooks Koepka, who had won the U.S. Open the previous two years, was also in contention.  By the time the leaders reached the final holes today, Rose had faded while Koepka had surged to second place, finishing his round two strokes behind Woodland.  But Woodland, who was previously 0 for 7 when defending a tournament lead going into the final day, showed exceptional poise and consistency, getting a long birdie at his turn on the 18th to finish with a three-stroke win over Koepka...

I've never played any "regular" golf although I've always been pretty good at miniature golf...at 62 I'm probably not going to go buy a set of clubs at this point.  But it was fun to follow the sport, something I used to do when I was much younger and stars like Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Gary Player, and Tom Watson were consistently on the leader board.  And for some reason, as I watched golfer after golfer drive the ball off into the rough yesterday and today, I thought of the scene in that old James Bond movie Goldfinger when 007 plays a major prank on the title villain while playing against him.  Like horse racing or next month's Tour de France bicycle races, some sports I follow only during major events...maybe I'll be checking out golf like this, too.  Let's see...the next major tournament will be the British Open on July 18-21, to take place at Dunluce Course in Northern Ireland.  Now that I recognize some of the players it should be fun to follow...although I'm expecting the scenery to not be as good as Pebble Beach...

USA Women's Soccer Antics Remind Me of South Park Episode

I've watched the cartoon satirical series South Park over the years...most of the episodes, especially recently, have been off the mark but a few are ingeniously brutal in their lampooning of our society's various foibles.  The 2006 episode Stanley's Cup is a case in point: nine-year-old Stan Marsh needs his bicycle to earn money with his paper route, but one day it is towed away.  He goes to the bureaucrat-in-charge to plead it back, but is told he'll have to do the favor of coaching the local Pee Wee hockey team first.  So Stan tries to coach a group of very young children who can barely balance on their skates or even nudge the puck in the general direction of the goal.  At the end of this convoluted tale, they find themselves playing the final period of an NHL game against the Detroit Red Wings after the scheduled team, the Colorado Avalanche, put them in instead.  Detroit essentially massacres the helpless little Pee Wee players en route to a 32-2 rout...and with each goal the Red Wing players whoop it up with grandstanding celebrations, as if they were actually accomplishing anything worthwhile.  That's the kind of reaction that I and most other observers had when our United States women's national soccer team won their first World Cup group stage match against Thailand 13-0, scoring several goals in the closing minutes to run up the score and acting like "Cartoon Detroit" with their boisterous post-goal jumping, screaming, and hugging.  I'm not against them winning 13-0 since the first tiebreaker in the group stage is the three-match aggregate goal differential...I don't think Team America will need to worry about that anymore.  But there is a point when excessive celebration in the middle of a rout becomes poor sportsmanship.  No, the Thailand team wasn't at all like South Park's Pee Wee hockey...it was still a competitive contest in the first half and they clearly had their own skilled players.  One of the U.S. players stated that the Thailand players wouldn't have a problem with their behavior...I think it's a mistake to presume graciousness on the part of someone whom you may have offended, though.  I'm still rooting for the good ol' USA, but a little more decorum and maturity...and grace...would help them more in their public relations efforts to promote this sport that grossly underpays them for their outstanding talent...

Quote of the Week...from Maya Lin

Math...it's a puzzle to me.  I love figuring out puzzles.                 ---Maya Lin

Maya Lin is the architect and artist responsible for the design of the Vietnam Memorial wall in Washington, D.C., which was initially considered controversial but is now widely esteemed as one of the greatest memorials anywhere...Melissa and I were very impressed when we visited it last October. Lin's above quote resonates with me as I have always thought that mathematics was taught in schools incorrectly.  If the puzzle-like nature of this field were emphasized in school instead of making it all a solemn judgment of the poor student's abilities and work ethic, than I believe we'd see a lot fewer people...including those with a high intellect...suffering mental blocks over the subject.  As for me, whenever I do pick up one of my several Shaum's Outline Series books on mathematics...and this series covers just about every course imaginable...I regard their "problems" as fun puzzles to work out, and the answers are provided along with explanations as to how to solve them.  And since I'm not going to school, there's no verdict coming down on me being a dumbass because I got a wrong answer.  So many people nowadays like to do puzzles such as Jumble, Sudoku, Kakuro (my favorite), Hidato, Crosswords, and others... I'm also a fan of jigsaw puzzles.  But believe it or not, picking up a Schaum's book about a particular field in math and going through it can be its own kind of fun puzzle experience...and who knows, you may discover that you're not as mathematically-challenged as you thought.  But keep it secret if you do this, otherwise folks will be asking you what you're going to do with your new mathematical learning while if you stick with the more "standard" kinds of puzzles they won't bug you over it...

Rainy June

June has seen a huge upward spike in rainfall for the Gainesville, Florida area, especially after the pretty dry conditions we experienced the previous month.  I'm not quite as averse as other people to walking out in it for a few minutes without an umbrella, but I do have an issue with oversaturation of the ground, along with puddles and slippery roads...and the associated proliferation of potholes.  I tend to avoid running outdoors when it's raining or has been recently because road surfaces...sometimes mixed with oil from parked vehicles...can seriously interfere with traction and vision.  Another problem is the presence at times of lighting, which was in the news recently when a young Floridian man riding a motorcycle on the interstate was directly struck by a lightning bolt and killed.  A few years ago I was running along Daytona Beach when a sudden, severe thunderstorm swept through and it was a race for me to get back to my hotel with lightning crashing around...a scary experience I don't want to repeat.  So while I acknowledge that in my northern Florida area the ground conditions had been getting dry enough for folks to begin sounding alarms about potential forest fires and the recent rains have "dampened" those concerns, I'm still looking forward for some drier weather...although that's not going to come anytime soon if the prognosticators are right...

Weekly Short Stories: 1948 Science Fiction, Part 1

I continued on with my look back at excellent short science fiction from the past as I moved to the year 1948, using the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 10 (1948).  Here are my reactions to the first six tales from that book...

DON'T LOOK NOW by Henry Kuttner
"Don't look now" is the frequent comment made by what appears to be a very paranoid and delusional man to a reporter in a bar.  He is convinced that Martians have invaded and infiltrated Earth and are all around us...third eye and all, just like that old Twilight Zone episode made a few years later.  He uses the kind of fervent, detailed language paranoids use that often gets listeners hooked on their narrative, which can be pretty farfetched.  How it all ends...this story is pretty brief...I leave it for you to possibly read...

HE WALKED AROUND THE HORSES by H. Beam Piper
This is a story about an alternative history.  In 1809 Prussia a British diplomat traveling to Vienna in the midst of conflict with France's Napoleon walks around the horses at a stable...and disappears.  That causes enough consternation for the people around him, but from the perspective of the new, parallel world he has entered that has no Emperor Napoleon in it, the people there are just as confounded by his sudden unexplained appearance and historically absurd rantings.  It's a good history lesson if you're unfamiliar with this era and even delves back into our own Revolutionary War...

THE STRANGE CASE OF JOHN KINGMAN by Murray Leinster
One of those psychiatrists of the time who was into the trend of applying electroshock therapy to their patients has his eyes set on John Kingman, diagnosed as a delusional paranoid who has been a patient at a mental institution as far as anyone can remember.  The doctor goes back into the records and discovers he was first admitted in the late 1700s! And what about those six fingers on each hand and his tendency to sketch highly technical drawings that illustrate science and engineering principles yet undiscovered?  The story draws a line between true science and "pop" science and suggests that not knowing the difference can bring some regretful consequences...

THAT ONLY A MOTHER by Judith Merril
This is a somber apocalyptic tale about a young woman carrying and giving birth to her baby daughter in an post-nuclear war environment where a large percentage of the newborn have serious birth defects and infanticide runs rampant as a result.  The most disturbing story by far in this group...

THE MONSTER by A.E. Van Vogt
Earth has been decimated by war, wiping out all life.  Aliens bent on conquering the planet for their own can resurrect life from the ashes.  Looking for the causes of the catastrophe they keep trying to bring back people from the past, but none of them can provide any answer.  Finally they resurrect one of the most recent humans...and he instantly vanishes!  And then the fun starts...this is the only story I know of that paints an optimistic picture of humanity after its complete self-annihilation...

DREAMS ARE SACRED by Peter Phillips
The third story of the six about an paranoiac, an institutionalized famed fantasy writer has slipped into his own fantasy dream...unwakeable...and the attending doctor enlists the aid of his pragmatic friend to enter that dream and bring the writer back to reality.  Uh...does this possibly remind you of the movie Inception, which is based on people entering and messing with others' dreams?  Seemed like a great original idea when I first saw it, but Peter Phillips had already laid it all out back in 1948...

That's it for this week.  More sci-fi short stories from 1948 next week...

2019 Women's World Cup in Soccer Underway

The 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup in soccer has begun its group stage, with 24 nations divided into six alphabetized groups of four...the USA is in Group F along with Thailand, Chile, and Sweden.  Chile and Sweden begin this group's play today while the United States will face Thailand.  All matches in the World Cup will be held at various locales throughout France.  Sixteen teams will quality from the group stage to enter the knockout rounds, culminating in the finale to be held on July 7th in Lyon.  The American team features Megan Rapinoe, Carli Lloyd, and Alex Morgan and are defending champions.  I'm looking forward to following the matches and hope you are, too...

This morning on the United States Senate floor, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer decried the disparity in pay between the American men's and women's national soccer teams.  He pointed out that the men's team was rewarded with a $5.1 million bonus for getting into the Round of Sixteen in their last World Cup...not the one most recently held in Russia since they didn't even qualify for it, while the women's team was given a paltry $1.7 million after they WON the World Cup in 2015...one third of the men's take.  Furthermore, women have already won three World Cups. The men, by contrast, have never even come close to winning a World Cup.  And you see a similar discrepancy in pay for men and women's league soccer.  But then again, this relegation of women's sports as secondary to men's isn't just in soccer...in the recent French Open in tennis the women's semifinals were exiled to secondary courts in order to focus the primary ones on the men.  It's too bad we live in a world like this...I think we'll be hearing more about this gender-based inequity in the days to come as the Women's World Cup coverage intensifies...

Later: USA beat Thailand 13-0 with Alex Morgan scoring 5 goals.  I originally got the match's date wrong...imagine my surprise when I finally got off from an extended work day only to see it being replayed on FS1...

Just Finished Reading A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul G. Tremblay

I follow Stephen King on Twitter, and he uses it a lot to express himself on different issues...more often than not to bash Trump.  Another thing he does a lot on it is recommend books to read: Paul G. Tremblay's 2015 horror novel A Head Full of Ghosts is one he has promoted...so I checked it out and just finished reading it.  My reactions...

If you want to create a scenario of true horror, then combining different scenarios horrible in their own right...like demon-possession, exorcism, paranoid ranting, and reality television...makes for a pretty explosive formula.  Yet as revolting as much of Tremblay's tale was, he deftly crafted it into an unexpectedly rational narrative whose ending made a kind of terrible sense...although it was very, very, disturbing and upsetting.  On the surface the story features a "typical" American family, with the father, mother, older sister (Marjorie) and younger sister (Merry) going through their typical American middle-class lives...until, that is, Marjorie starts to display disturbing behavior, which she claims is coming from voices speaking to her within her head.  The parents are at a loss and completely at odds with each other on how to deal with Marjorie's worsening apparent psychosis: the father, immersing himself into an offshoot sect of Christianity, seeks exorcism, convincing himself she is possessed while the mother, who rejects organized religion, wants secular medical treatment. The father wins out and then a reality TV show is set up to film the family through their ordeals, providing them with money to help with their burgeoning expenses.  The story, told from a future time by an adult Merry to a writer she is entrusting with her experiences, is centered around little Merry's place in the family and as Marjorie's main confidant and friend...as well as the chief witness to some of her scariest acts.  Their family crisis was difficult enough to read through, but having to put up with cameramen, directors, and producers traipsing though their house and rooms...along with the angry protesters lined up outside...lent the story a creepiness that verged on the obscene.  This is a tale of severe psychological warfare and I definitely do NOT recommend it to anyone with insomnia, nightmare issues, or weak constitutions.  Still, as I said before, the author crafted the whole thing very well: after all, this is a horror story. Read it at your own risk...if you read Stephen King's Thinner and were upset with how that one turned out, then you probably don't want to pick up A Head Full of Ghosts.  As for me, I think I'll be a little more circumspect about Mr. King's literary endorsements in the future...

Yesterday's Belmont and NHL, NBA Playoffs

Although I knew that the Belmont Stakes, thoroughbred  horseracing's third jewel in the Triple Crown, was taking place yesterday, I put the event to the back of my mind for a couple of reasons.  One was that I was driving down to Orlando and back to pick up Melissa from the airport and didn't think we'd be back in time for me to watch it.  The other was that very few horses from the earlier two races were competing...I was only interested in Tacitus and the Preakness winner War of Will.  As it turned out, I happened to be in the takeout section of my nearby Piesano's restaurant back in Gainesville when I tuned in to the race on my cellphone around 6:40 pm. It was pretty exciting to watch and very close...the eventual winner, Sir Winston, was at 10-1 and its rider skillfully rode past much of the field around the final turn, hugging the rails. And when he was blocked at the end he maneuvered to the outside and took the lead.  Had the race been a few feet longer I think favored Tacitus, who was closing in fast, would have overtaken him.  Although it was fun to watch, I doubt many people will remember this race...I only wrote about it here because I had written about the Kentucky Derby and Preakness and didn't want to leave the last one out...

We're nearing the closing of two pro sports league seasons for 2019, the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association.  Both are in their final playoff series for the championship and the underdogs are in a position to close them out.  Tonight the St. Louis Blues will try to win their first ever NHL Stanley Cup championship as they play the favored Boston Bruins at home with a 3-2 series lead.  And tomorrow the Toronto Raptors, with a 3-1 series lead over two-time defending champion Golden State, will host the injury-plagued Warriors on Monday.  Will Kevin Durant return to the court after his left knee injury rendered him absent for the end of the Clippers series, all of the Trail Blazers series, and the Raptors series to date?  I'd like to see his return, but only if he's capable of playing at the high level that he needs to be at to keep his team in the series...

So that's it for sports...I also watch baseball games when they're on, which is good since we're running out of other major sports to watch...

Just Finished Reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Gilead, a 2004 novel by Marilynne Robinson that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year, came to my attention after Melissa was assigned to read it for her current class.  The title refers to the fictional small Iowa town of Gilead where John Ames, a third-generation Congregationalist pastor, is in his late seventies and, realizing that his remaining time on Earth is running out due to a recently-diagnosed heart ailment, is writing the narrative as a letter to his seven-year-old son.  In it he reminisces about both his father and grandfather, vastly different personalities with diverging views on what it means to be a Christian.  Grandfather Ames is a fiery warrior who takes up arms supporting abolitionist John Brown in Kansas before the Civil War and then serves the Union cause during that conflict, losing one of his eyes in the process.  John's father, on the other hand, has a serious falling out with the grandfather and turns into a staunchly anti-war pastor during World War I, even tempted once to deliver a sermon describing the raging and deadly flu epidemic of the time that was killing so many young men as a blessing from God that would prevent them from going overseas and committing murder as soldiers.  The author also described how life was in this part of the country during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  His older brother Edward, whom he has always looked up to, becomes an atheist and their relationship tests both his own faith as well as that of his father...John Ames is continually examining his own beliefs as to their veracity instead of blindly adhering to a doctrine etched in stone. The narrative continues as John describes his own tragic first marriage when his wife Louisa dies giving birth to his daughter Rachel...who also dies soon thereafter.  Many years later he remarries, to Lila who is much younger than him and who bears their son in 1949...this narrative letter is set in the year 1956.  That's the general background for the story, but the ultimate focus is his relationship with the "black sheep" prodigal son figure of John "Jack" Ames Boughton, son of his longtime friend and Gilead's Presbyterian pastor who had honored him by giving his newborn son his name.  He is suspicious of Jack's motives for hanging around his family and befriending his son and wife...both men know of Jack's past waywardness on many levels and John feels very uncomfortable and defensive around him.  The relationship takes a turn for the worse when Jack begins to intensely question the pastor's Calvinist theology, especially with regard to the concept of predestination...he can come up with no satisfactory response.  I think, with all the text's postulating on different concepts, that it helps the reader to better understand Gilead if he or she has studied theology, been brought up in a religious family, or served in a pastoral capacity in a church...I struggled a lot with it.  But the historical references, along with the issues of conscience, belief, sacrificial love, and grace emphasized in the story made it worthwhile and it merits my recommendation to others.  Still, that theology stuff...do they really have to make it that complicated?

Quote of the Week...from Donald Trump

Listen to those incredible people back there.  These people are so amazing, and what they don't realize is that, I'm holding them up because of this interview. But that's because it's you.
                                                                       ---Donald Trump.

You need to know the above quote's context to understand its meaning.  President Trump was in France yesterday to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Allies' D-Day invasion of France during World War II to liberate it from Hitler's Nazi regime.  He was at the site of the ceremony, where hundreds of veterans were attending, and while awaiting the arrival of French president Macron by helicopter was giving a TV interview to FoxNews' Laura Ingraham.  It was to her that he made his comment, and she felt the need to stress at the airing of the taped interview that he hadn't caused any delay and that their cue to end the interview was the sound of Macron's approaching helicopter...I'm referring to an article by Justin Baragona for The Beast, reprinted on the MSN newsfeed, for this information.  As it was, the French president was late enough to give them the time to finish their interview, and Trump was there waiting for him when he arrived.  I'm making the point about this quote because it so clearly exemplifies Donald Trump's penchant for making up things and spewing them out as he goes along, without weighing their truth value or the effects his careless words might have on others or himself.  His 2016 late-campaign rhetoric praising WikiLeaks for publishing stolen Democratic Party e-mails, as well as his off-the-cuff comments at different times to interviewer Lester Holt and the Russian ambassador regarding why he fired FBI director James Comey...all matters increasing suspicion that he was colluding with the Russians...fit this foolish behavioral pattern of his, in my opinion.  All Trump cares about, when he goes running his mouth off like this, is to make an impact on the listeners and get more publicity and he does not try to think ahead to the consequences of his words.  Between him and the cringe-worthy campaign speeches being delivered by current Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden, this is going to be one very long, tedious campaign season...

Can PopVox Improve Constituent Engagement?

I tuned in to C-Span2 this morning with the forlorn hope of watching the United States Senate in the act of actually doing something.  But no, they had already decided last night to adjourn all the way to next Monday afternoon...last one out off the lights!  Instead, the channel that faithfully broadcasts their proceedings...when there are proceedings...was showing a House committee hearing on improving constituent engagement.  I wasn't quite sure of this idea, since although senators and representatives have their town hall meetings and can already be reached by e-mail and social media, they tend to vote in lock-step with whatever their glorious leader...be it McConnell, Schumer, Pelosi, or McCarthy...dictates to them, regardless what their constituents back home are saying.  Still, I found it intriguing enough that when PopVox co-founder Marci Harris, who spoke at the hearing, said that her site was determined to consolidate people's federal, state, and local elected officials on one dashboard and expedite communications with them, I decided to sign up myself and see what it was about.  I soon discovered that PopVox is a work in progress...they only had my two Florida senators (Rubio & Scott) and House representative (Yoho) on it.  On the right side of the screen, every single legislative active these three were directly involved in was listed, the latest listed first...I found that instructive.   But since I was disappointed that they didn't show my state senator, state representative, and local county and city commissioners, I wrote them an e-mail.  The response, by Ms. Harris, was that they are testing a more vertical federal-state-local site in six locations this year and plan to implement it nationwide in 2020...that's cool, I'm willing to wait a little...

I like to be able to better know what my elected representatives are really up to on their jobs besides their often deceptive spoken rhetoric.  As for giving them my opinions as one of their constituents, I think that what usually happens is that a senator or representative will claim to be attentive to our concerns but will then cherry-pick and use only those comments that dovetail nicely with their  already-decided direction.  So whereas I welcome more information from them coming to me on a site like this, I'm a bit skeptical about my elected leaders caring a whit about my information going out to them...

By the way, just going by the title, what exactly did you think this article was going to be about?

Weekly Short Stories: 1947 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I conclude my look back at the year 1947 in short science fiction literature with my reactions to the final six stories from the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 9 (1947).  Here they are...

WITH FOLDED HANDS... by Jack Williamson
At some time in the future humanity has already explored and settled other star systems and robotics (or "mechanicals" as named here) are a big part of the economy.  One day, out of the blue, a new "humanoids" store is standing, ready to sell their uniform models to each and every person...and they're all tied in to the central intelligence form the home planet, adhering to the principle that no harm befalls any human being. This is one of those stories that gets me reflecting in different directions on its messages. On one level, there is an ominous level of prophecy at our increasing dependency on artificial intelligence as device after device makes assumptions as to our liking or well-being, whether we happen to agree or not.  Another is that even before AI began to make its presence felt, our society has been involved in efforts to restrict people's freedoms based on them avoiding activities and consumption deemed harmful to them. A pretty profound tale, especially coming from 1947. Then again, Prohibition was the law of the land from 1919 to 1933 and the "war on drugs" began almost immediately thereafter...

THE FIRES WITHIN by Arthur C. Clarke
This very short story reminds me of Hal Clement's Proof from back in 1942.  In both the author puts forth the proposition that there may be other forms of intelligent life going on undetected for the only reason that its physical and chemical structure and location are so vastly different from our own that we're not looking for it.  A scientist hits upon a device that uses sonar technology to examine to several miles underground to determine what the composition of inner Earth is like...and makes an astounding discovery.  But some things...as the end reveals...are better left covered and hidden...

ZERO HOUR by Ray Bradbury
Little children all around, to the amusement of their parents and other grownups, have invented a new game they call "Invasion", and they claim that Drill, an alien from another dimension who has befriended them, is trapped here and needs to be freed.  You can quickly tell where this story is going...I wanted to scream at the adults to stop acting like a collective bunch of dumbasses...

HOBBYIST by Eric Frank Russell
A stranded spaceman...along with his talking macaw partner, explores the world he thinks he'll almost certainly be spending the rest of his life on: little to no hope of rescue.  He discovers numerous plant and animal life forms...but they are all singular in nature.  And what about that golden column of light, filled with what looks like stars, that roams the area at night?  This is a story whose implications dramatically expand from a simple tale of survival to speculation about the ultimate nature of our existence...

EXIT THE PROFESSOR by Lewis Padgett
This story reminded me a little of the old  1960s Beverly Hillbillies TV series where the "sophisticates" in the Big City continually underestimate the strengths and talents of a family from the backwoods.  Exit the Professor is like Beverly Hillbillies on steroids...very, very funny...

THUNDER AND ROSES by Theodore Sturgeon
The anthology closes with this, perhaps the most somber of all the post-nuclear war apocalypse stories ever written...and that's saying something considering the inherently somber nature of the topic.  There has been a nuclear exchange between us and the "other" side, but we didn't fire our bombs in response...it's the only thing that's kept Earth from being completely sterilized of life from radiation.  A famous singer visits an military base to put on a last show and plead for life and not hate.  Very touching...and once again, here's a story about nuclear war written when the United States still had a monopoly on the atomic bomb...

Next week I'll begin my look at excellence in science fiction short stories from the year 1948...

Just Finished Reading Bullet Point by Peter Abrahams

Bullet Point is a 2010 standalone novel by Peter Abrahams, an American writer of books in the young adult genre, most of them being in series. It's about a teenage boy Wyatt who lives in an economically-depressed small town in a western state.  How economically depressed? Due to layoffs and the consequential drop in property taxes funding the local high school, they decide to drop baseball as a sports option...just when Wyatt, an enthusiastic and talented player, was about to join up.  He's also in an antagonistic relationship with his stepfather...his own biological father whom he never met, Sonny, is away in prison for murder.  With little in his hometown, other than his mother and little half-sister, to keep him there, he secures a transfer...effected by his school's former baseball coach...to a school down the road, one that has a baseball program.  Unfortunately, due to a technicality in the rules he must wait out a year residing there before he can qualify to play.  Wyatt is disappointed, but goes to his classes at his new school, doing the best he can.  He meets a young woman, Greer, with whom he quickly jumps into a very physical relationship...much to the consternation of just about everyone around him.  Greer's father is at the same prison as Wyatt's, which incidentally is on the outskirts of his new hometown.  Through Greer and her father Sonny contacts Wyatt by phone and the two begin to talk for the first time ever.  Greer thinks Sonny may be innocent and helps Wyatt investigate the original crime and trial...you're welcome to take over from here as a reader since I don't want to give away the story...

After reading Bullet Point, I checked out the Goodreads website to see what others thought about it.  The reactions were generally consistent: they liked the general flow of the story and the characters...until the ending that is, which was almost universally panned for its content and brevity.  I, on the other hand, thought that Abrahams was ingenious with this story's resolution, while I had trouble identifying with the character of Wyatt, who seemed to me to be something of an oversized crybaby with chips on both shoulders about his lot in life. Still, I recommend it although many of the topics are more adult in nature than you'd find in a typical "teen", "junior", or "young adult" genre novel.  One other thing: the author inserted references to Shakespeare's tragic play Hamlet throughout the story as a theme, making me wonder whether I might take a tour of that famed English bard's collection of works sometime in the future...

2019 Atlantic Hurricane System Underway

The 2019 Atlantic hurricane season officially began the day before yesterday, and it behooves those living in vulnerable coastal areas to start taking steps early on to prepare for potential power outages, closed roads and stores, and problems pertinent to their homes and locations.  Last year Hurricanes Florence (category 4) and Michael (category 5) slammed through the Carolinas and the Florida panhandle respectively, each causing more than 50 deaths and around $25 billion in damage.  Although there were 15 named tropical storms in 2018 and most of them flourished and floundered in the open Atlantic waters, all it takes is one to thoroughly mess up your life.  As for 2019, AccuWeather's official forecast is for 12-14 named storms and 5-7 hurricanes, with 2-4 of them being major.  The El Niño effect, which tends to create wind shear that limits tropical storm development, should be present through the main hurricane months of August, September, and October...but they're not completely sure on this. And on their map of more likely landfalls, the Florida peninsula is highlighted in red...here's a link to that AccuWeather forecast: [AccuWeather]...

In 2019 so far, Andrea briefly formed last month near Bermuda in the western Atlantic as a subtropical storm, becoming the first named storm of the year.  Here are the names for 2019:

Andrea, Barry, Chantal, Dorian, Erin, Fernand, Gabrielle, Humberto, Imelda, Jerry, Karen, Lorenzo, Melissa, Nestor, Olga, Pablo, Rebekah, Tanya, Van, Wendy

May none of these names gain infamy for representing storms causing loss of life or catastrophic damage.  But we haven't been so fortunate the last couple of years with Atlantic tropical systems...best to keep up with what's going down in the area...

Trump, Meghan, Nasty, and Royalty

This is starting to sound like a broken record: I'm no fan of President Trump, but...

In advance of President Donald Trump's visit to Great Britain next week, he was interviewed by some Brit journalist and asked about Meghan Markle, the American actress who married Prince Harry and last month gave birth to their first child.  Markle, it was revealed to Trump, had made some disparaging comments about him as a candidate during the 2016 campaign and the interviewer wanted the President's reaction.  Trump replied, repeatedly expressing his goodwill and support for the new Duchess of Sussex and that he hadn't heard anything about earlier criticism from her.  At the end he used the word "nasty" to describe the comments that he only just heard of secondhand from the interviewer.  And now you would have thought he was insulting the entire British royalty by his comment, which I thought he was provoked into making...

Whatever negative things you might want to say about Donald Trump, he has always made himself available for interviews and has been willing to address questions head-on without evasion.  The journalist in this interview kept prying at him for some kind of interesting reaction about Meghan Markle, and Trump wouldn't oblige...the "nasty" remark was blown way out of proportion, just to make him look bad.  Although I think he has a low moral compass and seems think the universe revolves around himself, as an American I am sick and tired of folks on the other side of the Atlantic acting as if we're somehow obligated to kiss up to their royalty and all the rituals and rules associated with it...didn't we fight a war of independence to break away from that nonsense?  So go ahead, Britain, and deride our president with your asisine big orange balloon and keep showing that clip of him actually standing in front of the queen at one point...I'll say it right now: I couldn't care less about British or any other brand of royalty...to me there is much more nobility and dignity in the masses of people...be they in America, Great Britain, or elsewhere...who have to get out of bed each morning to go to work in order to take care of themselves and their families than a small group of folks born with silver spoons in their mouths who expect the rest of their society to enrich and practically worship them.  So Brits, thanks a lot for actually making me have to stoop to the level of defending Donald Trump...

My May 2019 Running Report

In May I ran a total of 130 miles, missing three days...the longest single run was 8.1 miles.  I ran the May Day Glow Run 5K on the 4th (in the evening) in Jonesville, a few miles west of Gainesville off Newberry Road.  As the year progresses into the summer months, the temperatures are rising...we've seen them spike into the 100s this past week.  So when I do go outside to run around my neighborhood I am careful to take short walking breaks throughout my runs as well as carry a low-sugar sports drink with me for rehydration as I go along.  Healthwise I don't see anything impeding me from continuing along with my running, and I would like to increase my endurance by the fall season to half-marathon level again.  In June there are no public races here other than the weekly Depot Park 5K Parkrun, held each Saturday morning at 7:30 at that east Gainesville park.  It's free but you need to preregister at their website to obtain the barcodes necessary to record and post your finishes.  Here's a link to that site: [Parkrun].  I've run it twice so far this year...it's just tough for me, more an afternoon/evening person...to get up that early on a Saturday morning to run a race.  My main running emphasis in June, though, will be to get out and run some of my own personally-designed courses at a more subdued pace...and pile up the mileage while being careful about the heat.  In years gone by, I used to report for work later in the afternoon, according me more time for longer runs...my reporting time now is 1:30 pm, so I've often had to curtail my runs just to get to work on time.  Looks like I'll just have to start getting up and out earlier if I want to increase my mileage...