My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #450-441

Here are the next ten songs on my personal list of all-time favorites.  The years of these selections span from 1967 to 2015...a pretty wide range, although most of them are more from my youth than recent years.  Still, I'm not averse to noticing when something new and special comes out...#448 is one such example.  Well, here they are...

450 THEY JUST CAN'T STOP IT (GAMES PEOPLE PLAY)...the Spinners

This was a radio hit in the second half of 1975 with the Spinners, a real classy act with a string of successful singles in the early-to mid 1970s performing what I believe to be their best song of all...I loved it at the time of its popularity. Its lyrics portray the up-and-down emotional trials of a man who first thinks it's all over between him and his love...and then at the end of the day sees that all of his suffering was for naught: turns out she's still with him after all, go figure...

449 WHITE RABBIT...Jefferson Airplane

San Francisco sixties psychedelic band Jefferson Airplane's lead singer Grace Slick has always maintained that this song's lyrics, which include references to taking some kind of mushroom, are anti-drug.  But at the time of its fame I doubt many listeners heard it that way.  I didn't dig the drug references, but Grace's powerful singing and the way White Rabbit builds up to its final crescendo was breathtaking...to me it's another great piece of music with cryptic lyrics, this time alluding to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland...

448 HOLLOW MOON (BAD WOLF)...Awolnation
Hollow Moon is a powerful rocker from 2015 by Awolnation, an alternative band that has made a name for itself recently within that genre.  Its lyrics make very little sense to me, but the mood is one of optimistic defiance in the face of whatever kind of persecution the singer seems to be experiencing.  I loved how the song would transition from one musical theme to another...and bring it all back together at the end.  There's a lot screaming in Hollow Moon near the end and this makes it both interesting and funny...and a little bit crazy...

447 LOVE ROLLERCOASTER...Ohio Players
I was a moderate radio listener in the mid-seventies when the soul band Ohio Players, which had been together for years, finally hit the big national scene, first with the single Skin Tight (which I liked) and then with Fire (which I didn't).  And then this brilliant song of theirs came out...the music itself sounds like a rollercoaster ride.  In the nineties the Red Hot Chili Peppers covered Love Rollercoaster reasonably well, but there's nothing like the original...

446 PRIVATE EYES...Hall and Oates

This duo had been around for years until they seemed to reach a higher level in the early 1980s...Private Eyes represented the time period I think they peaked.  It's a real catchy, upbeat-sounding song...during a largely upbeat time in my life (the fall of 1981)...but with sinister lyrics: "Private eyes are watching you, they see your every move" sounds a bit creepy, doesn't it? 

445 RECKONER...Radiohead
Of all the Radiohead songs that might have translated into mainstream singles success, Reckoner stands out to me...singer Thom Yorke delivers one of his best vocal performances in a tune that Marvin Gaye should have liked...it seemed to be his style.  It's from their 2007 In Rainbows album and was a part of my "Radiohead running mix" that I would shuffle on my mp3 player and listen to during long distance training runs a few years ago.  Reckoner is one of those tunes that I find myself unconsciously snapping my fingers to...  

444 DAYS...David Bowie
After David Bowie's shocking death from cancer in January 2016 just two days following his acclaimed Blackstar album release (as well as his 69th birthday), I decided to explore his catalogue of recorded music...all 27 studio albums spanning nearly 50 years.  From Bowie's 2003 Reality album comes Days, a Beatlesque song that expresses his personal humility to his love...a real sweet, compelling song that I now see as one of his best.  Like Radiohead's Reckoner, this song would have done well as a singles release, in my opinion...

443 LOVIN' YOU...Minnie Riperton
Nowadays it's common for singers to show off their vocal range, but none have ever remotely approached 1970s artist Minnie Riperton for combining that multi-octave skill with such intense feeling.  When I first heard Lovin' You on the radio in the spring of 1975 I couldn't believe what I was hearing, as if a whole new type of music had just been created.  Basically a happy love song, some of the lyrics are a little suggestive...but I think my favorite line is simply "La la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la do do do do do a-a-a-a-h".  Sadly, early in 1976 Minnie was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer and passed away at the decade's end while only in her early thirties...what a tragic loss...

442 TENNESSEE FLAT TOP BOX...Rosanne Cash

When I first worked at the post office in the late 1980s they would let us listen to radio headphones...I started out with a cheap model that could only pick up the strong local country and western station.  My luck: that's how I heard this great cover by Rosanne Cash of her father Johnny's hit song from the early 1960s.  To me this is country music at its best, and the lyrics tell a great story of how a little backwoods country boy, through his own persistence and skill, is able to achieve his dream of success...

441 WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS...the Beatles
The Beatles' White Album...actually officially simply titled The Beatles...was released in 1968 but I didn't get around to listening to this double-LP in its entirety until the fall of 1972, when a friend lent me his copy and then I went out and bought my own.  Many of the tracks on it were cathartic to me as then I was in the middle of what I can now only conclude was a moderately severe depression...listening to this album helped me get though it all.  One of the best of its songs was While My Guitar Gently Weeps, composed and sung by George Harrison and enlisting the help of his friend Eric Clapton on guitar...

Next week I'll cover numbers #440-431...

Lost: One Atlantic Tropical Storm

It's become a common practice in the morning for me to flick on the Weather Channel and hear what they have to say about the tropical weather, focusing on any real or potential tropical disturbances that might have an impact on Florida down the line.  Last week they were discussing Tropical Storm Karen, which had dumped a lot of rain on the Puerto Rico/US Virgin Islands area before entering the Atlantic east of the Bahamas and traveling northbound.  The forecasters then showed computer models that had it slowing down over the weekend and then dramatically shifting westward...directly toward my dear homeland of Florida and with a projected wind strength of 60 mph.  Well, I've heard that song before when just a few weeks earlier they had Dorian going through the Bahamas at the same intensity...before it actually strengthened to 185 mph and devastated the area!  So I was interested yesterday morning as to what was going on with Karen when I tuned in...NOTHING!  They were discussing Hurricane Lorenzo, much further east in the Atlantic and posing no threat to anyone but shipping, but where this "Karen" was supposed to be as a tropical storm and getting ready to turn toward us: nothing but empty space on the map.  And I didn't hear the announcers even refer to it having ever existed.  So I'm putting out an all-points bulletin: if you happen to be out and about and notice a confused-looking tropical storm hovering over you, let the authorities know your location so they can put it back on the weather map...

Just Finished Reading The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie

Mild-mannered, psychologically-perceptive Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is the featured sleuth in the Agatha Christie novel I just read, The Mystery of the Blue Train, from 1928.  It involves the mystery of the strangulation murder of young Ruth Ketterling, a rich American heiress, on the French Blue Train while destined for the country's southeastern Riviera.  Aside from Poirot, who conveniently happened to be one of the train's passengers at the time of the crime, the main character is Katherine Grey, a young level-headed Englishwoman who has just inherited a tidy sum of money from an elderly woman for whom she had been a caretaker for several years.  Poirot enlists Katherine's help in solving the case, a mystery I had partially figured out early on in the story.  After all, I do like puzzles like Sudoku, Kakuro, Crosswords, Wordscapes, etc,, and once I know the game's pattern I can better infer the solutions.  Mystery stories are like puzzles, with their own pattern: it's important to introduce the culprit early on while highlighting a number of obviously suspicious characters to distract the reader...but since I'm "hip" to the author's strategy I tend to dismiss the early suspects outright.  Also, the mystery writer will often insert a seemingly irrelevant bit of information that doesn't seem to fit the ongoing flow of the story, and that worked for me as well here when the revelation that the victim's personal maid had disembarked in Paris struck me as being a bit random...

Aside from Katherine Grey, I thought that Derek Ketterling, the victim's estranged husband and a prime suspect, was the most interesting character as he was sympathetic and candid about himself and his admittedly heavily flawed lifestyle of gambling and hedonism.  I think you'll like this story if you're into mystery fiction...I found it to be one of Agatha Christie's better stories that I've read so far...

Quote of the Week...from George W. Bush

I want America to be an ownership society, a society where a life of work becomes a retirement of independence.                                                           George W. Bush

An Associated Press article appearing February 2, 2005 on the NBC News website gives the above quote of then-sitting president George W. Bush, who was promoting changes in the Social Security law to allow for people to opt for personal retirement savings accounts.  Later in the article Bush...when he was Texas governor...was also quoted as saying "Ownership in our society should not be an exclusive club...Everyone should be part owner in the American dream".  Taken together these two quotes reveal a lot about the philosophy of our former president...a philosophy that appeals to me while scaring others...

There's a lot of rumbling going on in Washington about Social Security becoming insolvent in a few years as the Baby Boomer generation settles into retirement.  I think it's a good idea for Americans to think ahead years before their retirement, the earlier the better, and invest more of their earnings into retirement investment accounts that...even accounting for periods of recession...will yield in the end far more than the Social Security check they will receive from the government.  I hope that Social Security will always be there for those who need it, but perhaps it may not look the same in a few years...hopefully the two major political parties will somehow be able to work out a reasonable solution without demagoguing the issue while their eyes are on the next election as they usually do. A lot of the "99%" have an instinctive aversion to capitalism and look down on investing in stocks and mutual funds for their retirement, yet they seem to fail to understand that the hated "1%" invests and invests and invests...

In a more general sense I also agree with Bush's emphasis for people to feel a sense of ownership about their lives.  If you're parents then you will want each of your children to feel a special responsibility about their individual contributions to the home upkeep through regular chores...this fosters a sense of "ownership" that in future years will transfer to the workplace.  And in that workplace...speaking solely from my own personal experiences in different jobs...managers would be well advised in team settings to give specific, regular assignments to each worker instead of throwing them all together into a common rotation pool...the latter is almost always certain to bring down performance while the former gives each employee that crucial sense of ownership over their responsibilities, for which they know they will be held accountable.  If this sounds overly obvious to you, let me just say that there are others who just don't get this example of plain common sense...

A Begrudging Article about Politics

I have deliberately held back for the last several days from writing overtly political articles, and with good reason.  If you follow the news to any extent you know that much of what passes for "news" is one political party and its leaders and supporters trashing those from the opposing political party.  And since presidential election season seems to now be in perpetual mode with no letup it only intensifies this sideways bickering.  I got home from work last night and CNN and FoxNews were discussing the same issue...only from their differing approaches you would think they were completely separate in nature.  Back while he was vice-president Joe Biden's son had some business dealings in Ukraine...and Biden may or may not have intervened to try to get a prosecutor there fired.  The Trump side suspects conflict of interest on the part of Biden on behalf of his son and wants it investigated while the Democratic side says it's already been looked into and there's nothing there.  Well, here's my problem: If your party's controlling the government and there's alleged corruption within your ranks, the tendency is to circle the wagons and resist any investigations while attacking those who are doing the alleging.  On the other hand, if your party's controlling the government and there's alleged corruption on the part of some within the other party, then if you want to investigate that you're accused of engaging in improper campaign activity (remember, the campaign season is now perpetual) and abusing your power.  Hence NO investigation of any corruption is permissible by any functioning government except when one or both houses of Congress is run by the opposition...and then THEY seem to be empowered to investigate everything (about the OTHER party, of course) to their hearts' contents.  The Republicans certainly did this during the Obama administration with numerous investigations and hearings (Benghazi and the IRS stand out in my mind) while the current House of Representatives, now controlled by the Democrats, are scrutinizing with a microscope anything and everything that Trump has done or might have done.  As an American citizen more concerned with the serious issues actually affecting us and our future than all this crap, maybe you can then understand why I've been staying away from the political articles.  And I only see it getting worse as the perpetual election season intensifies...

How about instead discussing issues like...

---The future of Social Security and Medicare
---Border security
---Sustaining and encouraging economic growth
---Working against gun violence
---Lowering the high cost of prescription drugs
---Dealing with the opioid epidemic
---Climate change
---Police-citizen relations, especially with minorities
---Fair international trade, especially with regard to China
---Dealing with adversaries Iran and North Korea
---Keeping as law health insurance guarantee for preexisting conditions
---America's role as international policeman
---America's relations with its allies
---Homelessness and mental illness
---How much to build up our national defenses
---Maintaining national security against terrorism

And I'm sure that there are many more issues as well...it's too bad that with all of their resources the major media outlets continually go for all this sideways political bickering and controversy...

Weekly Short Stories: 1951 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I conclude my look at some of the more notable short science fiction from 1951 as they appeared in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 13 (1951).  Here are my reactions to the final five tales in the book...

THE QUEST FOR ST. AQUIN by Anthony Boucher
In a crumbling post-apocalyptic world the official Church is outlawed and in hiding from the intrusive Technarchy and its Loyalty Checkers.   The Pope sends out Thomas, one of his priests, to search and find the body of St. Acquin, a reputed miracle worker whose discovery he hopes will start a major revival in the faith.  He provides for Thomas a donkey to ride on...well, not exactly, for the ass is robotic and speaks...it's called a "robass".  As Thomas and his robass ride on down the road toward their destination, they discuss many things, among them whether or not robots themselves are sentient beings and may need a savior as well.  The story progresses to the end, and quite frankly I was rather bored by it all...I really don't think you need a science fiction setting to discuss theological matters, but that's just me: a lot of other people at the time of this story's publication praised it to "high heaven"...

TIGER BY THE TAIL by Alan E. Nourse
A woman at a department store is caught putting several aluminum items in her handbag, clearly far too many to actually fit in it.  But when apprehended, her bag is empty...where did the aluminum go?  Scientists studying the bag conclude that it contains an opening to another universe, and the aluminum is crucial to building that opening...the woman had apparently been mesmerized somehow to provide that aluminum.  One scientist, working on his own, rashly decides to test whether he can drag out part of that other universe in order to close the opening, with alarming results: hence the story's title.  I think this one would have made a good Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode...

WITH THESE HANDS by Cyril Kornbluth
This was one of Kornbluth's better stories and raises a very important and pertinent issue in our times, much more so than even in 1951: the obsolescence of skilled human endeavor in the face of technology that easily "improves" on it.  A sculptor by trade in a future New York City finds that no one will commission him for his works, instead relying on a machine-generated innovation called Stereopantograph for their art.  He is reduced to barely getting by through teaching art classes and sees the extinction of his craft in the near future.  It's a sobering tale applicable to today's digital age as one profession after another falls victim to the advent of technology.  Once in my youth I considered training to be a professional translator...what a joke that would be today with the instant translation software that anyone with a smartphone can carry around with them...

A PAIL OF AIR by Fritz Leiber
Leiber skillfully describes a nightmare scenario for Earth when a dark star invades the solar system and gravitationally spirits our planet away, freezing its atmosphere and condemning to death almost all of its life.  Yet one family is left struggling to survive as the father, himself an engineer, has devised a way to at least forestall their eventual demise.  To get the oxygen…which lies frozen on top of the frozen atmosphere, he sends out his son with a bucket to climb up, collect the solid oxygen, and bring it back where they warm it and breath...what a bizarre picture.  The family's prospects certainly don't look "sunny", yet...

DUNE ROLLER by Julian May
A meteorite hundreds of years ago strikes a Michigan lake and breaks up...in the process breaking up into little stone-like pieces a totally alien life form.  It's this entity's dangerous attempts at reunification that place a biologist studying marine invertebrates there directly in its way as he first tries to discover its true nature and then devises a plan to keep it from causing any more mayhem.  In our age of respect for the diversity of life, this 1950s "us vs. the space monster" story doesn't quite fit...but it's a good story nevertheless, and I thoroughly enjoyed the last paragraph...

Next week I start my look back at the year 1952 in short science fiction...

Just Finished Reading (for the 3rd Time) 11/22/63 by Stephen King

When I've read the same, pretty lengthy book three times in seven years...well, you can be pretty sure that it's one of my favorites.  That's the case with Stephen King's 2011 time travel novel 11/22/63, the title of which clearly alludes to the John F. Kennedy assassination in Dallas, Texas on that tragic Friday afternoon.  After just finishing reading it once again, I was reminded of what King repeatedly refers to as the obdurate past...

The protagonist, relating the story in the first person, is Jake Epping, a high school English teacher in a small Maine town.  He has a friend, Al Templeton, who owns and runs his own small diner down the road and sells the best-tasting burgers for miles around at an impossibly cheap price.  What Jake doesn't know is that Al has long been aware of a time portal at the back of his pantry, through which he can slip back in time from 2011 to 1958...and back again.  He goes there, picks up his high-quality ground beef in the past at an extremely cheap price, and brings it back...a pretty uninspired use of something as significant as a door through time, I say.  Al eventually agrees, seeing that 1958 isn't that far off from 1963, when John Kennedy was assassinated, and decides to do something to change history.  But circumstances of his own flagging health catch up with him and he asks Jake to perform the task of saving the president.  Only one problem: the past is obdurate, i.e. it stubbornly resists change and puts obstacles in front of our hero in proportion to the degree and pivotal significance of the change being sought...

Back in 2012 I wrote that it's not only the past that is obdurate, but also the future.  My rationale was that it seemed that every time I made a concerted effort to overhaul my life and significantly improve it, all kinds of challenges would arise to stymy me, challenges that seemed to randomly come out of thin air.  It was as if time were telling me what direction I had to live my life in and that it would not tolerate any deviation from the "plan".  Of course, you don't have to get too metaphysical about time being obdurate to changes in your life's goals and habits: people themselves tend to be resistant to others around them changing.  It reminds me of the great 1960s song Both Sides Now that Joni Mitchell wrote and Judy Collins turned into a big hit: "But now old friends are acting strange...they shake their heads, they say I've changed".  Whatever or whoever the cause, reality around us resists our proactive efforts to change ourselves and our environment...and you don't have to go 53 years back through a time portal to see that...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #460-451

This week's selected songs span the early 1970s to the late 1980s...keep in mind that I'm in my early sixties!  Yet further down the line as this ascending personal top 500 list progresses you'll notice quite a few songs that are relatively recent.  But not this week...here's the next ten on the list...

460 I KNEW YOU WERE WAITING FOR ME...Aretha Franklin and George Michael
Back in the late 1980s Aretha Franklin was making a career comeback (remember Freeway of Love?) and George Michael had catapulted into superstardom after a string of hits with Wham and then as a solo artist.  I wouldn't have paired these two together with a song, but as it turned out their collaboration was perfect...simply beautiful with Aretha wailing her best at the end.  I recognized each of their individual musical talents but still never took to their songs...until this one came out.  It saddens me that both giants in the industry have passed on...George in 2016 and Aretha just last year...

459 THE BED'S TOO BIG WITHOUT YOU...The Police
More than anything, the Police...who produced five excellent albums from 1979 through 1983 and then broke up...were a reggae rock band, with the emphasis on "reggae".  This deep track from their second album Regatta de Blanc is perhaps their most reggae song...as well as being very relentless.  Slow-paced and dreamy, I detect a little of frontman Sting's jazz origins in his singing as well.  Definitely a great mood piece...

458 CHEESEBURGER IN PARADISE...Jimmy Buffett
A very happy 1978 tune during the summer of that year, Cheeseburger in Paradise is a celebration of dietary political incorrectness as Jimmy lays out the lyrics describing his big love..."I like mine with lettuce and tomato, Heinz 57 and French fried potatoes, big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer, well good God almighty which way do I steer?".  I love cheeseburgers, too...the funny thing is I remember when I was about five and my grandmother visited us from Georgia.  We sat at the local Walgreens diner on Taft Street in Hollywood and she ordered a cheeseburger...I was revolted: how could she ruin a perfectly good hamburger put putting cheese on it?

457 W-O-L-D...Harry Chapin
This is one of those common examples of a song from my past conjuring up a vivid, associated memory that has nothing to with the song itself.  Chapin was a masterful storyteller with his songs...you may have heard Cat's in the Cradle or Taxi.  W-O-L-D was a minor radio hit late in 1973, but for some inexplicable reason I associate it with running the elevated dirt path, designed for horse riding, stretching west of my high school's (Nova in Davie) track alongside SW 39th Street for a few hundred feet. So I'm listening to this tune about a has-been middle-age disc jockey and I'm transported to my old running course...go try to figure the sometimes odd workings of the mind...

456 RAEL...the Who
Sometime back in the mid-1990s I visited Hyde and Zeke Records across from UF on University and found the Who's first four albums in vinyl...and bought them all at a steal.  Rael is the final track on their third, titled The Who Sell Out (and one of their very best albums) and is a precursor to the Tommy era with the actual Underture theme from that rock opera dominating the song's second part.  When I first heard the abrupt transformation midway through Rael I was impressed...still am.  There's another version of this song floating around, but my favorite is from the original album...

455 WE CAN WORK IT OUT...the Beatles
Reconciliation and working out problems together stand as the message of this Beatles singles song from the mid-sixties, the flip side of their hit Daytripper.  Unfortunately, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who composed it, ultimately didn't take their own words to heart and the band bitterly dissolved in 1970.  I always thought that they had a way out of their disagreements, but when you're in the middle of all the turmoil it's sometimes difficult to see that while you're holding on to your positions and "rights" as tightly as possible and looking upon the others as the "enemy".  Still, I always liked the song's message and the music, another example of Lennon and McCartney each giving their creative input in a collaborative spirit...

454 BULLET THE BLUE SKY...U2
There are two versions of this song...I much prefer the original studio recording from U2's 1987 Joshua Tree album over their live Rattle and Hum version.  It's a different kind of U2 song, painting a trance-like dystopian tour of a wild, out-of-control America as singer Bono tended to see our country at that time...before 9/11 and his subsequent embrace of the Bush administration. I tended to disagree with his politics back then...including his support of the Sandinistas...but this song is simply mesmerizing and I also believe that expressing one's criticisms of the United States doesn't necessarily mean that they hate my country...on the contrary I think folks like Bono and his band loved America and were fascinated by it...

453 CONVOY...C.W. McCall
Citizens band radio, originally designed for licensed operators acting in the public service especially for times of emergency, exploded on the popular scene in the mid-1970s as just about everyone had to get a CB radio in their car or truck as well as invent their own special "handle" and subscribe to the activity's special lingo.  McCall glorifies it all in Convoy, the movement's unofficial anthem, spouting out one incomprehensible term after another while playing the role of a truck driver in a massive convoy determined to get past the "Smokeys".  I wonder whether Burt Reynold's Smokey and the Bandit movie series would have ever happened had this song never come about...

452 MY SHARONA...the Knack
I really disliked this song when it began as a monster number #1 radio hit during the summer of 1979, but later came to realize that it played a positive role in helping to push back the suffocating presence of disco that had dominated radio for years and restore good ol' rock n' roll music to supremacy.  The guitar riff is unique and unforgettable...I'm not so keen on the lyrics, which to me border on the misogynistic, but the music grew on me through the years.  The Knack is an example of a band that laid out one great tune and weren't able to successfully follow up on it.  Still, God bless 'em for helping to bring down disco...

451 STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU...Stealers Wheel
I'm standing there after school one late afternoon in  April 1973 during high school track practice and somebody's got a radio there...loudly playing this song by Stealers Wheel. It's another example of a song that immediately provokes a specific, vivid memory.  Gerry Rafferty, who passed away eight years ago, was the lead singer in this band and later went on to solo success with Baker Street and a couple other singles.  I've always felt that he had the potential to become a major superstar but circumstances apparently conspired against this along with Rafferty's aversion to performing live.   In the mid-nineties Sheryl Crow had a hit in All I Wanna Do, which brazenly ripped off Stuck in the Middle With You...

Next week: #450-441...

Our Chicago Hotel Area and Walking the Downtown Streets

When Melissa, Will, and I visited Chicago, Illinois last month we stayed at the Hampton Inn in their North Loop zone, off Wacker Street near the Chicago River.  I thought the building looked somewhat modern, and when I looked outside our room's window facing Michigan Avenue I saw what looked to be an ancient structure: the Old Republic Building, pictured above.  However, both buildings were constructed back in the 1920s and have undergone renovations over the years...ours apparently the more recent.  Curiously, we had previously booked a room at the Congress Plaza Hotel overlooking Grant Park but had switched before our trip because of the rumors that it was haunted...we had originally mistakenly thought that it was the locale of Stephen King's short story 1408...which was adapted to a movie starring John Cusack and Samuel Jackson...but King was thinking of another hotel, in Manhattan, for his story.  Nevertheless, we decided to leave "haunted" buildings for Scooby Doo and instead chose Hampton because we liked their consistent quality as well as the location.  The irony of it all was that the room they chose for us was 1407...just one number off King's haunted room, which was just around the corner down the hall.  But nothing amiss occurred during our stay there...the room was a little more cramped then we were used to at a Hampton Inn, but then just about everything else in downtown Chicago seemed a little cramped as well...

Walking up and down the streets of downtown Chicago had some similarities...and well as differences...with our trip to Manhattan, New York back in 2010.  There were plenty of panhandlers throughout the area, although we never felt in danger of being accosted by anyone.  Unlike in Manhattan, where the buildings seemed to merge one into another, there were substantial gaps between buildings in downtown Chicago, and consequently lots of creepy-looking alleyways to walk past...I felt a little safer back in NYC.  As the evening wore on in Chicago...unlike New York...businesses shut down and the streets became much quieter.  And I didn't see so many dressed-up executive workers like in the Big Apple...folks out on the streets here were mostly either tourists or more casually-attired locals.  Drivers were equally rude and aggressive in both cities and sometimes we felt rushed walking across streets even when the lights were with us.  Chicago didn't seem as oriented for tourists and entertainment as was New York, but I have to qualify that statement with the admission that we only got there late on Sunday and left early Wednesday, hardly enough time to explore anywhere near what it had to offer.  Is a return trip on the table? Well, if there's a specific reason to go back, sure...but I think given the choice I'd rather travel to someplace else...

Just Finished Reading All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr is an American writer whose 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See was a big award-winning hit.  It is set mainly in France and Germany during World War II and the years just preceding it.  A French girl, Marie-Laure, develops cataracts early in childhood and is blind for life...she lives in Paris with her father, a locksmith working for the Museum of Natural History.  There is a mysterious diamond stone there, the Sea of Flames, that purports to guarantee immortality to whoever possesses it while cursing those around them.  Meanwhile, in Germany lives young Werner, a boy gifted about electronics and tinkering who, with his younger sister Jutta, grows up under the oppressive and racist rule of Hitler's Nazi regime as it militarizes and prepares for war.  He is sent to a boy's academy while Marie-Laure and her father flee Paris to coastal Saint-Malo (where her great-uncle Etienne lives) when the French capital city is occupied by the Germans in the spring of 1940.  The story goes down three paths: one, Marie-Laure's story, two, that of Werner as he eventually finds himself drawn into the war as a technician, and three, the fate of that valuable Sea of Flames as a terminally ill Nazi officer is hell-bent on finding it for himself.  I guess that's about as much as I feel comfortable saying about what happens in the book...no need to be a plot spoiler...

This is another novel exposing the horrendous conditions civilians and soldiers alike experienced in Europe during World War II.  In Hitler's totalitarian Nazi society young Werner has to choose between his own survival and compromising his values, just one example of millions of Germans forced to bear the shame of the Nazi atrocities.  Marie-Laure's father had constructed for her exact scale-model replicas of both their neighborhoods in Paris and Saint-Malo...she uses them as an aid to get around as well as understanding her environment.  I loved how she treasures her braille books, especially Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Werner and Jutta's forbidden shortwave radio listening brought back memories of when I was a kid and would listen to my own radio late at night for distant AM stations.  I thought All the Light We Cannot See was well-written and gave an empathetic, compassionate treatment of some people just struggling to endure this terrible war, both from the viewpoints of the occupied and the occupier...

Quote of the Week...from Emil Zatopek

You can't climb up to the second floor without a ladder. When you set your aim too high and don't fulfill it, then your enthusiasm turns to bitterness. Try for a goal that's reasonable, and then gradually raise it.                                                                    ---Emil Zatopek

You've probably never heard of Emil Zatopek...unless you're from Czechoslovakia or are steeped in the history of early-to-mid-twentieth century distance running.  At the 1952 Olympics representing his country he won three gold medals...including the marathon, which he had never before run.  His personal training regime was brutal and he exemplified what ultramarathon star and guru Dean Karnazes called "running with your heart"...I've always admired Zatopek.  His above quote is something I believe in as well...it's fine to have "ultimate" goals in life as long as you realize that as you develop your skills and "climb the ladder", it may take you to a different and better place.  When I think my life at any given time is stagnating in an area, I often ask myself what can I do to take it to a higher level.  And accomplishing that almost always involves making small, specific adjustments of my habits and routines instead of drastically overhauling my life's direction...in that sense I'm what you might call an incrementalist. Still, I think it's fun to daydream every now and then and picture myself in one of those "aim too high" areas...I guess that's a little of the "Walter Mitty" in me...

Our Recent Visit to Chicago's Willis (Sears) Tower

On Tuesday August 13th Melissa, Will, and I finished our dinner at downtown Chicago's Walnut Room high up in Macy's on State Street and set out to explore the much higher environs of that city's tallest structure (and the tallest in the country for a few years until One World Trade Center was recently built): Willis Tower, formerly and probably better known as Sears Tower, on the west side of the downtown Loop on Wacker Drive.  Since we're all into walking, getting there by foot was no problem although it was several blocks down the road from where we started.  Unfortunately, there was construction going on around our destination and we had to follow a circuitous, rather non-scenic route to get into the building...when we later left I had us take a shortcut through the building's main lobby to get back on the street.  After going through admission and standing in lines, we finally crowded into an elevator to take us to the top.  I've been on thrill rides like Dr. Doom's Fear Fall at Universal's Islands of Adventure where brave souls strap themselves in and are rapidly thrust up and down on a tower...this elevator ride was like that...without the restraints or view...as we rapidly sped upward in a matter of seconds to the 103rd floor.  When we got out we joined the throng of sightseers crowding the panoramic windows looking down on the city, with a souvenir gift shop conveniently situated in the middle...just like at Universal when you exit one of their rides.  The photos above display different nighttime views of Chicago...it's amazing how some skyscrapers that looked so tiny from our Willis Tower vantage point seemed so tall just a little while later when we walked back past them to our hotel.  There's also a transparent "ledge" that visitors can stand on and look straight down at the streets below them...they took our photo and gave us only a few seconds to snap our own shots, quickly bustling us out so that the next party in the very long line could get their moment in the sky...the rushing reminded me of the movie A Christmas Story when Ralphie stood in a similarly long line in a department store to see Santa and was prodded and pressured when he finally got to see the "big guy"...it all seemed so comical to me...

I enjoyed looking out the windows on top of Willis Tower, but I'm no fan of long lines and if I go back I think I'll just skip that "ledge" part of the tour.  It always strikes me how I can look up and see something that doesn't seem that high up, but when I'm actually up there it seems excessively high...this effect is noticeable to me even when I'm standing on a short ladder or on a low diving board.  Do heights affect you the same way?  Well, overall we enjoyed our little sojourn to Willis Tower and walked on back in the night to our hotel.  More about our recent Chicago visit in a future article...

Weekly Short Stories: 1951 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here's week #2 in my look back at notable science fiction from the year 1951, reading through the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 13 (1951).  This excellent series, spanning the best in short sci-fi literature from 1939 through 1963, actually came out much later than the years they covered, with a new book published every few months starting in the late 1970s and ending with editor Isaac Asimov's death in 1992.  One of my favorite parts of each volume is the Introduction, which capsulizes not only the main historical developments of the year in focus, but also what was going on in other areas like entertainment, sports, and literature...for example, this volume mentioned the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, possibly my all-time favorite science fiction movie.  It also suggests some science fiction novels to read...maybe I need to go back and start reading them all.  Here's my reaction to the next five stories in the 1951 book...

ANGEL'S EGG by Edgar Pangborn
This story's "lesson" bothered me to no end, and it all comes down to the double meaning of the word "save".  An honorable man, partially disabled from service in World War I, owns and tends his farm and one day discovers one of his chickens sitting on a strange, translucent egg.  It hatches and from it arises a diminutive young woman...with wings.  She communicates with him telepathically and relates her origin from a distant world where the population transmits its memories and experiences down through each succeeding generation...by completely "saving" their memories through a painless process that ultimately empties the subject's mind and causes a peaceful death.  When she tells our protagonist that she had just "saved" his prized chicken as he looks down upon its dead body...well, maybe you can see where I am starting to have a problem with this story and where it's going.  Most of us think of "saving" in terms of rescue or salvation, but here it's more like saving a computer file.  Maybe Angel's Egg is a little ahead of its time in this respect, but I personally don't want to go down that road, thank you. The author seems on the "angel's" side: I strongly beg to differ with his opinion...

"BREEDS THERE A MAN--" by Isaac Asimov
In this tale Asimov speculatively (I don't think he actually believed it) entertains the notion that instead of looking at the great Golden Ages of our past in which humanity seemed to make giant leaps in knowledge, science, the arts, and philosophy in just a very short timespan being cut short by the onset of calamitous events time after time, to look at the idea that it was the Golden Ages themselves and quick advancements that caused the onset of the disasters.  Dr. Ralston, a gifted engineer with the knack for intuitively fixing highly technical problems, becomes suicidal and knows why: the atomic warfare project he is on is progressing too fast and the "powers that be" are fighting back by rendering those working on it mentally disabled.  I recommend this story for Asimov's theory...in a way it's true but on a much smaller scale: when I was a kid and displayed my intelligence in the presence of others, adults and children alike seemed to go out of their way to stymie me and put me down...

PICTURES DON'T LIE by Katherine MacLean
A radio decoder for the Army stumbles upon extraterrestrial television signals and not only makes first contact but develops a rapport with his alien spaceborne counterpart.  And now all of Earth is in a state of excitement and anticipation as the first spaceship from another world will soon land in a clearing.  Their TV shows make it clear that they are humanoid in form with a few minor differences, and they seem to be culturally similar to us.  And pictures don't lie...as the title suggests...do they?  Yet there just be something beyond the pictures that nobody ever got around to thinking about...

SUPERIORITY by Arthur C. Clarke
Two interstellar societies are at war with each other in a future time, and the "home" world...already gradually winning the conflict through higher numbers and attrition...thinks that it can institute innovative research to develop a new, overpowering military technology.  But research and development takes time and resources, diverting from the ongoing war effort and empowering the enemy, who begins to turn from defense to offense.  Where this all leads is a repudiation of the notion that superiority in advanced technology will always prevail in armed conflicts, as was evident in Vietnam and seems to be coming true right now in Afghanistan (it sure didn't work for the Soviet Union there back in the 1980s).  Of course, R&D from both sides during World War II produced superweapons that affected the war...the German V2 rockets and the American atomic bomb, so Clarke's notion isn't necessarily always applicable...

I'M SCARED by Jack Finney
Set in the present (1951, that is), a 66-year old retiree living in New York is fiddling around on his radio when suddenly, for a few moments, a broadcast from 25 years earlier interrupts his listening.  Thinking it to be a glitch of the broadcaster, he brushes it off until he begins to hear strange reports from other people who had experienced incidents with time displacement of objects, animals...and even people.  He collects well over a hundred of such reports and becomes frightened...not for himself in his old age but for the future of humanity as the collective anxiety of people in this age of nuclear threats and war has caused the very fabric of time itself to begin to tear. As the anthology's editors remarked, the 1950s is often seen nostalgically as the "good old days", but remember that in '51 the Korean War was going full throttle, the Russians had just exploded their own atom bomb, and the future was very much in doubt in the minds of many...this was to be, after all, the decade of the family bomb shelter...

Next week: more stories from 1951...

Just Finished Reading Hope Never Dies by Andrew Shaffer

Andrew Shaffer, a young American writer with liberal leanings (that's important) and who has written for the Huffington Post, last year came out with what might be the single funniest book I've read in years: Hope Never Dies.  In it Barack Obama and Joe Biden, both now in retirement following their respective eight years as president and vice-president, team up to solve the mystery of the death of a Delaware Amtrak conductor whom Biden had known for years and formed a friendship with from his many past Senate commutes from his home state to Washington and back.  Biden presents the narrative in the first person and is the story's protagonist while Obama pops in from time to time to lend his support.  If you've read Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes short stories, usually presented from the esteemed detective's colleague Dr. Watson's perspective, you can get an idea how Hope Never Dies reads.  Obama is almost like Superman in his fearlessness, wisdom, and knowledge while Biden is the man of the people, always chatting with folks around him and showing his compassion and interest while impulsively diving into dangerous situations, often against Barack's advice.  The actual mystery story stands well on its own, but when you add these two well-known public figures and fictionalize their lives to this extent...well, it all just cracked me up.  I think you'd like this book even if you disliked the previous administration, although I need to warn you that it tends to make Obama and Biden out to probably be better than they really are and also throws quite a few critical barbs at the current Republican administration.  Still, I recommend it as a well-conceived farce...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #470-461

Once again Monday has rolled around, meaning that it's time to me to list the next ten of my all-time favorite songs, in ascending order, starting from #470.  Today's songs are interesting in that, aside from #464, they are all from the period 1966-73...which not so coincidentally corresponds to when I was 9-16 years old.  I notice the musical tastes of some of my millennial friends around me and see that they're probably rooted in the same impressionable periods of their own lives.  Whether you're a millennial or younger, an old fogey like myself, or somewhere in between, if you see a song below and haven't yet heard it, why not give it a try...usually you can pick up a version on YouTube or another site...

470 GOODBYE...Mary Hopkin
Paul McCartney played an important role in Mary Hopkin's musical stardom, having produced her two biggest hits Those Were the Days and the much shorter Goodbye, which he actually wrote.  I much prefer the latter, from 1969.  She has such a sweet, plaintive voice...the only other song I heard from her was her cover of Que Sera, Sera, which was played on Miami's 940/WINZ in their song rotation during the summer of 1970...

469 EVERY NIGHT...Paul McCartney
This is my favorite track from McCartney's self-titled debut album in 1970, on which he announced his departure from the Beatles.  A lot of folks got angry at him for that...including the other Beatles...and probably as a result didn't cut any slack in criticizing his LP.  I liked Every Night...it's a simple song that would fit well on any Beatles album...plus, we don't hear his wife Linda's off-key attempts at harmonizing anywhere on it as she did on so many of his other songs...

468 HAPPY JACK...the Who
Although the Who broke through into U.S. stardom in the early 1970s with their Tommy, Who's Next, and Quadrophenia albums, I think some of their best works were in the mid-to-late sixties.  For some reason their singles success then just didn't carry over from England to America...Happy Jack is a great example, with Keith Moon taking over the song with his typically dominant drumming...

467 GOD ONLY KNOWS...the Beach Boys
I was never that much of a Beach Boys fan, but when this minor singles hit came out in '66 I instantly knew it was part of a new direction the band was taking.  Much later I found out that it was from their Pet Sounds album, which reportedly inspired the Beatles to take their own creative risks and make Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  The beautiful harmonics reminded me of Simon and Garfunkel's masterpiece Scarborough Fair...

466 BALLAD OF THE UNEASY RIDER...Charlie Daniels Band
This song puts a big grin on my face every time I hear it...you have to listen to the full-length version to get it all.  A long-haired traveler with a peace sign decal on his car gets a flat and has to wait at a Jackson, Mississippi bar to get it fixed.  Meanwhile he has a run-in with the local drunken roughs and quickly concocts an escape strategy.  My favorite line?  The guy he calls to repair the tire tells him to "just stay where yer at" and Charlie says "and I didn't bother to tell the durn fool that I sure as hell didn't have anyplace else to go"...

465 RAINY NIGHT IN GEORGIA...Brook Benton
Some songs evoke strong mental imagery and this slow, gripping hit, performed by the incomparable Brook Benton, always brought back memories I had of times that it never seemed to stop raining.  Although this sad song came out in 1970, I began to relish it a couple of years later...during a forlorn time in my youth...when during the spring of 1972 the rain began and didn't seem to let up for weeks. I'd sit out evenings on our back porch and watch our backyard gradually transform itself into a rain forest...

464 HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY...Radiohead
Another wonderful track from Radiohead's greatest work, their 2000 Kid A album, but I think it's one that you have to develop a taste for.  Singer Thom Yorke repeats "I'm not here, this isn't happening" as if to mentally remove himself from a very difficult place and time he finds himself in.  Don't we all feel that way sometimes? This is a great "running zone" song when covering the long distances...

463 PICTURES OF MATCHSTICK MEN...the Status Quo
The Status Quo are an English rock band which had only one American hit but have been very popular and prolific in their home country, still producing albums to this day.  That one U.S. hit, Pictures of Matchstick Men, came out in 1968 and was one that I quickly took a liking to, with its psychedelic sound and pioneering use of the process of phasing.  I honestly don't have a clue to what the lyrics mean, but like man, I dug the sound...and still do...

462 CLASSICAL GAS...Mason Williams
It was in 1968, on the Sunday night Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on CBS, that Mason Williams' one hit, the guitar/orchestrated instrumental Classical Gas, was played to a succession of rapidly-changing images depicting the difficult times the country was passing though back then.  Just recently I found out that Williams was a comedy writer on the show and later went on to write for Saturday Night Live.  This serious, brilliant piece seems as incongruous with comedy writing as Al Franken's stint as U.S. senator seemed with his...or Jim Nabors' operatic baritone singing voice contrasted with his hokey comedic Gomer Pyle character.  Classical Gas will always stand to me as one of the greatest "air guitar" songs...

461 GARDEN PARTY...Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band
I'm not sure of the exact nature of former Ozzie and Harriet Show teen heartthrob Ricky Nelson's gripe that inspired him to write this 1972 song, but I knew it had to do with a performance of his at New York's Madison Square Garden.  He "played them all the old songs, thought that's why they came, but no one heard the music, we didn't look the same." My favorite line from this big country-flavored hit from the fall of that year? "You see you can't please everyone, so you got to please yourself"...

Next week I'll write about songs #460-451...

Our Chicago Visit to Its Museum of Science and Industry

Melissa, Will, and I on our final full day visiting Chicago, Illinois last month decided to divide it between exploring their Museum of Science and Industry and experiencing the top of Willis (formerly Sears) Tower.  We got on the Metra line...separate from the Chicago Transit Authority trains...to take us to the Hyde Park area south of downtown, where the University of Chicago lies to the west and Jackson Park, the site of our museum destination as well as a short strip of Lake Michigan beach, on the east side of our rail station.  On the train the conductor...unlike on the C.T.A. rails...punched our tickets like Tom Hanks did on The Polar Express, but alas, no words like "Believe" or "Learn" appeared on them.  And dang it, no hot chocolate either...but I still liked the more traditional train ride experience.  At the museum we first descended to a lower floor where the story of the U.S. Navy's capture of an intact Nazi German U-Boot (U-505) in August 1944 during World War II was elaborately presented...after the war they even took their prize around the country for display.  Then we entered a large room where we discovered the actual submarine...much, much bigger than I had imagined it to be (see first photo).  The Museum of Science and Industry has a lot of different areas to explore...we had to pick and choose, watching a planetarium-style presentation of what it's like to be hit by a tornado, reliving the great Apollo 8 moon flyby in 1968 with the spacecraft itself on display, exhibits about elements of life prolongation, the innovation of vertical urban farms, different types of bicycles (including an inexpensive-but-resilient cardboard bike, description in second photo), genetics (including a display showing newly-hatched chicks), the history of transportation, and electricity...to name a few.  There were countless stations for visitors to interact with, and we felt that...as was the case with our Washington, D.C.'s Smithsonian museum visits last October...a full appreciation that what this place has to offer required a much greater investment of time than we were able to make...

After leaving the museum, before returning to our Metra rail station, the three of us walked eastward to the beach area, which you can see in the third and fourth pictures.  Melissa said that Lake Michigan was very cold...not surprising...but there still were folks out in the water enjoying it all while a lifeguard watched over them.  At least with their fresh water they didn't have sharks, although rip current presents a danger there as it does on our Atlantic beaches.  We made our way back to the station and decided to have dinner at a downtown restaurant that Melissa's friend had recommended: The Walnut Room, on an upper floor within Macy's.  As we were seated for what would be an excellent meal, I looked southward out the window and, lo and behold, on the building across from us was a huge, beautiful mural of the late blues great Muddy Waters, finished three years ago by Brazilian artist Eduardo Kobra...spectacular, of course my final photo is of that mural...

Later in the evening we three trudged on down the road to Willis Tower...sightseeing like this in Chicago was greatly aided by the fact that we all are seasoned walkers.  Besides, there's usually more to see and experience when you're moving more slowly.  I'll write about Willis Tower in a future article...

Just Finished Reading Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

Back in 2015 I read Paula Hawkins' psychological thriller The Girl on the Train, which was later made into a hit movie...here's a link to my review of that novel: [Girl on Train].  I've just finished reading her follow-up book, Into the Water, from 2017.  The setting is a rural northern England town where a winding river flows, with a bend of it forming a pool of water, nicknamed the Drowning Pool, lying under a high cliff. It's a cliff with a reputation for murder and suicide...chiefly of women...over the centuries.  And just this year it has claimed two more victims, each one apparently making the fatal leap "into the water" voluntarily.  The latest victim's sister, Jules, arrives in town from London to care for Nel's orphaned teenage daughter Lena, who is hostile to her (and the world in general) on a number of levels.  Jules herself has barely-submerged issues with her late sister going back to childhood, and the author fully airs them out throughout the story.  Lena's best friend Katie was the other suicide, and the mystery of its cause as well as that of Nel's demise apparently weren't enough to complicate the story as Hawkins then delves into the death of another women in the pool some two decades earlier.  The story, ostensibly about what happened on the cliff and what or who caused the deaths, progresses into a character study of life in this community from the viewpoint of many different people, each one either directly or peripherally involved with the ongoing mysteries...

I found Into the Water a bit unsettling as it reminded me more, not of Hawkins' The Girl on the Train, but rather J.K. Rowling's "adult" novel The Casual Vacancy, which like this book examined the attitudes...from their own perspectives...of an English town full of its own problems.   Into the Water is loaded with angry exchanges full of angst, accusations, and misunderstandings as we see that just about everyone involved is, to a great extent, broken and dysfunctional in their abilities and willingness to relate to each other.  They seem totally immersed in their respective pasts and have lost any awareness of the fact that the present should also be an important part of their lives.  This was unpleasant to read, yet in my opinion it was to the author's credit that she wrote like this because it reflects how so many people around us stagger through their lives obsessed with the burdens of bygone slights and regrets.  Still, if you're looking for a mystery thriller like The Girl on the Train you're bound to be disappointed with this one.  I'm glad I read it, and Paula Hawkins is excellent with her character development.  To any prospective readers I say go for it, but be prepared to get a bit muddled with all the characters...

Quote of the Week...from Don Shula

The superior man blames himself.  The inferior man blames others.       ---Don Shula.

Don Shula is the legendary former coach of the National Football League Baltimore Colts from 1963 through 1969 and the Miami Dolphins from 1970 to 1995, when he retired.  In that thirty-three-year span his teams suffered through only two losing seasons (winning a respectable six games in each of them), made the Super Bowl six times, won two of them...and in 1972 accomplished the only completely undefeated NFL season.  Being a fan of the Dolphins I am keenly aware, in light of their mediocrity for the past few years, of the "good old days' when Shula was on the sidelines and I knew I could expect his team to give it their all and play in a disciplined manner...they were consistently one of the least-penalized teams in the league, year after year.  Sometimes he would be rebuilding and yet managed to get his players to play above their talent level...there never was a "tank" season under his tenure.  It saddens me to see "my" team go down this path and, what's worse, some of their players...following Miami's 59-10 season-opening home drubbing at the hands of the Baltimore Ravens...seem to have given up and want to be traded.  I understand that teams need to rebuild, but deliberately stripping your team of all its talent and starting from scratch is a horrendous strategy and dishonors your fan base, saying in effect that you expect them to continue to shell out money for tickets and maintain loyalty while you thumb your nose at them.  Well, now that I have all that off my chest, let me get to Coach Shula's above quote, which I would expand to include both women and men...while focusing on those who would be leaders...

Don Shula was always soft-spoken in public, especially with the press.  He recognized as a coach that he could only control that which he himself had authority over, and to that extent he applied strict standards to his profession.  There was no Twitter back then, but if there were you wouldn't be reading Tweets of Shula railing against this official, that player, or some sports commentator...to do so would go against the grain of his character.  He sounds like a good, standout role model in this sorry age of politicians and media stars running off about how it's always the other guy causing all the problems while never seeing anything about themselves meriting correction...

My Take on Trump's Firing of NSA John Bolton

President Donald Trump just fired his third National Security Advisor after just a little more than two and a half years on the job, and in the typical Trump way as Bob Woodward described in his book Fear.  John Bolton apparently realized that he was on the "outs" with the President and offered his resignation, but Trump urged him to wait until the next day.  Meanwhile, a few hours later he went behind Bolton's back and publicly Tweeted that he was letting him go.  This undignified and disrespectful manner of handling subordinates by Donald Trump has been well-documented and anyone who joins up with his White House team is only engaging in self-deception if they think they will be treated any better...they must all be gluttons for punishment...

I admit to not being a fan of John Bolton's penchant for promoting military solutions to international problems.  On the other hand, his presence in the Trump Administration's inner circle gave both a sober, honest appraisal of our adversaries like Putin's Russia, North Korea, Iran, and the Taliban as well as an accountability check...if only in advisory status...to Trump's proclivity to suck up to autocrats. His advice about potentially going to war was just that: advice, and the President was always free to reject it...at least on this level I am grateful that Trump does not want us to become further entangled in protracted wars abroad...good for him!  But with Bolton's departure Trump has once again shown that he does not welcome a diversity of informed opinions on policy matters, but rather sycophants who will jump to agree with whatever he says...even when he misrepresents the facts or wildly changes his mind.  You may or may not think highly of Barack Obama's presidency (although I supported him in both 2008 and 2012 I've expressed my own share of criticisms) but he did consistently surround himself with informed advisors espousing opposing views and did not take dissenting policy opinions personally.  For whatever shortcomings in his governing style and policy decisions there may have been, I miss this quality of the previous president...and quite frankly, of just about all the others who preceded him from either party...

Weekly Short Stories: 1951 Science Fiction, Part 1

I began my look back at some of the more highly regarded science fiction short stories in 1951 by rereading the paperback anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 13 (1951). The five stories I'm discussing below all have familiar names as authors, so without any further delay let's take a look at them...

NULL-P by William Tenn
William Tenn, whose real name was Philip Klass and was an professor of English at Penn State, was known to go a bit off on the satirical side in his stories, and this one is a case in point.  Following a disastrous world war that nearly destroyed the planet, everyone gets taken up with George Abnego, whose statistically average scores on just about any test done on him has revealed the return of the "normal" to the world...to its collective delight.  I can't help but think of Warren G. Harding's slogan of "Return to Normalcy" in his wildly successful isolationist presidential campaign of 1920 following World War I. A few folks, however, see only mediocrity instead of  "normalcy"...or normality as it is more properly called, and Tenn lays it on thick showing post-war society exalting the mediocre normal as he takes this trend to its logical conclusion...

THE SENTINEL by Arthur C. Clarke
This tale was the forerunner to Clarke's great work 2001: A Space Odyssey, on which he collaborated with Stanley Kubrik.  There are notable differences: in The Sentinel humanity doesn't get a piercing sound coming from the monument left on the moon (like in the later movie), which leads to a different reaction and a possibly foreboding ending...

THE FIRE BALLOONS by Ray Bradbury
Father Peregrine, on his first assignment to an already-settled Mars in the future (from both 1951 and now), is eager to save souls and squash sin.  But when he arrives he discovers intelligent, sentient disembodied native life in the form of spheres of light...or "fire balloons".  They are elusive, but present themselves in emergencies to rescue humans from accidents...Peregrine recognizes this and sets out with his skeptical colleague Father Stone to present the Gospel to them.  But what can he use to first attract them for an audience and then how can he illustrate his message?  An interesting speculative tale with something positive at the end...

THE MARCHING MORONS by Cyril Kornbluth
The premise of this story, which was very popular at the time of its first publication... is bogus: that intelligence is primarily hereditary and that certain demographic "groups" produced smarter offspring than certain others...you can probability guess which groups the author had in mind...sigh.  It is many centuries off into the future and the world has a human population primarily with an average IQ of 45...constantly cared for by a superintelligent minority which is based at the poles and whose members conceal their caretaker role to the "dummies".  They want to discover how to rid themselves of their "problem" and finally find their answer from the ideas of an average human who had been in a state of suspended animation for centuries.  This story has so many things wrong with it that this anthology's editors took care to dissociate themselves from it, finally deciding to begrudgingly include it because it had made the Science Fiction Hall of Fame...

THE WEAPON by Fredric Brown
A little more than two years ago I discussed this very short but very profound story...here's a link to that article: [The Weapon].  A scientist is developing a new doomsday weapon for his government.  A pleasant stranger visits him and his mentally arrested son, befriending them both while pleading with the scientist to halt his work for the sake of humanity.  Read it: the final line is unforgettable...

Next week I plan to continue discussing more science fiction short stories from 1951...

Our Visit to Chicago's Navy Pier

While Melissa, Will, and I were visiting Indiana and Illinois a few weeks ago in August, the weather down here in our hometown of Gainesville was horrendous, with storms and heavy rain making life miserable for its human inhabitants...although the frogs were probably hopping with delight over it all.  We travelers had better luck as it was pretty in Indiana and didn't get around to raining in Chicago until midday on Monday.  We took the Architecture boat tour that morning and in the afternoon explored some of the shops in the Wicker Park area.  By evening time, when we boarded the C.T.A. Red train at our nearby Lake/State station, there was a distinct probability of some more rain...no problem, we each had an umbrella.  With the Navy Pier our destination, we left at the Grand Street station and took our free trolley ride to the attraction's entrance.  We had "high" hopes of riding the famed Ferris wheel...which was invented in Chicago in time for its 1893 World Fair (the current one is a much smaller version)...and after entering the building full of shops and eateries, eventually made our way to the mini-park on which the huge wheel stood.  We bought our tickets, posed for a picture, and got seated...the rain at this time was a comfortable drizzle.  I looked out the compartment's window and saw several people going around on a swinging carousel ride that resembled the Yo-Yo ride at Valdosta's Wild Adventures theme park, but bigger...I thought I'd like to try it out after the Ferris wheel ride.  As the passengers boarded, the wheel turned and we found ourselves going around our first cycle very slowly.  By the time everyone was aboard, though, the bottom fell out of the sky and it was raining heavily...so they shut down the ride and let us out (and refunded our money) after only one cycle.  Still, we got some good photos of the Pier from high up on the wheel.  After disembarking we decided not to let the rain spoil our outing, so we took out our umbrellas and walked the southside outer walkway down to the end of the pier, while occasionally looking leftward into the building and its restaurants and bars.  At the very end I snapped a picture of Melissa and Will facing Lake Michigan...that's the next to last photo above...and turned around to get the easternmost building from the pier's end.  While standing out there we ran into a young couple who were going to fly to England the next day to attend a friend's wedding...it was almost surreal, we complete strangers just standing there alone in the pouring rain at the end of the 3,330-foot pier, chatting with one another as if we were all close buddies!  We finally decided to part company and began to make our way back, first on the outer north side and then through the inside of the building...ending up at their gift shop and then making it back to the trolley and eventually our rail station...

Our Navy Pier visit was, to be sure, marred by inclement weather, but by deciding to make the most of an adverse situation we ended up creating some interesting experiences and memories.  The next day there would also be some rain, but we also walked right on through it as well...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #480-471

As I continue unraveling this list of my personal all-time favorite songs, I need to reiterate that even at this "low" stage of the list, the songs appearing here carry a lot of meaning to me. This should be apparent when you consider the thousands of songs I've heard over the past several decades...I first became a serious pop music listener in early 1964 at the age of seven as I would assiduously switch back and forth between Miami's WQAM and WFUN to hear the next song.  Also, a lot of songs get a higher ranking not because of their innate artistry or greatness, but rather because I associate them with certain events or a period in my past...isn't that how it works with you, too?  Here are the next ten songs, all of which you can search and hear online...

480 VICARIOUS...Tool
When you consider all the gratuitous violence and killing that has gone on for decades on TV and the big screen and how the depiction of wholesale slaughter of others...especially with the component of terror involved...seems to attract a bigger audience response, then you're all set for this brutal verbal indictment of people's sick vicariousness. It's musically arranged in such an unsettling, beautiful way that, with my acknowledged lack of training in music theory, seems to border on the complexity of classical music...a pretty complex piece of heavy metal music.  Whether it's for the message or the music, this one's a "can't miss"...back in 2006 I picked Vicarious as my favorite song of the year...

479 I'M COMING HOME...Johnny Mathis
I'm Coming Home was a big Adult Contemporary hit for Johnny Mathis, who had a long, illustrious career before this 1973 song that I used to listen to on 97/"A1A Radio" back in South Florida.  The lyrics are about the singer moving away to make his name and fortune and, after finding that achieving success involved too many compromises on his own character, wearily and beaten he decides to go back home.  It's sad and sweet, and Johnny made the listener feel that these were his own experiences...and I never forgot it...

478 HOCUS POCUS...Focus
Also in 1973, during the springtime, an previously unknown band named Focus came out with one of the weirdest hard rock songs ever: Hocus Pocus features, among all the severe electric guitar riffs, yodeling and whistling.  At the time listeners either loved it or hated it: I picked the former.  There's a long album version and a shorter, singles version...I own the single, which pretty much says what has to be said...which as far as I can tell, is nothing but a lot of nonsense.  But Hocus Pocus is an exquisitely unique, strange kind of nonsense...

477 SIT DOWN, I THINK I LOVE YOU...the Mojo Men
I had always liked this short, feel-good love song from 1967, but as is the case with many other songs on this list, I came to better appreciate it years later on for the pretty background keyboards and mandolin.  Also, I never knew that Stephen Stills wrote it and that his band Buffalo Springfield first recorded it...albeit without the lush instrumentation that the Mojo Men provided...

476 IDIOTEQUE...Radiohead
Back in late 2010 I was much more fanatical with my distant running, often going out on 15+ mile jaunts through personally-designed courses up and down streets in far-northern Gainesville.  What does this have to do with this song?  I had Radiohead's albums all on my MP3 player and I would randomly listen through their catalog of tracks while running...so I automatically associate Idioteque with being on a long run.  On its own merits, this is another successful musical experiment from their 2000 Kid A album, .  No, I don't know what the lyrics mean, but the whole flavor of the song hints of a dystopian, impersonal future...not that I'm in any hurry to go live there...

475 WALK DON'T RUN...the Ventures
Walk Don't Run was a big radio hit in 1964 and I heard it a lot on Miami's 560/WQAM.  I always looked forward to them playing it and wonder whether it might not have been more popular had there been some singing on it.  It's basically a guitar rock n' roll band displaying their guitar virtuosity while staying true to the song's compelling melody.  According to Wiki, jazz guitarist Johnny Smith wrote it years before and yes, there are lyrics to it...although singing wasn't the Ventures' "bag"...

474 LONG LONG TIME...Linda Ronstadt
Linda Ronstadt's big career breakthrough was the 1967 hit Distant Drum, which she sang as a member of the group Stone Poneys.  As a solo singer she would record a number of hits during the seventies...Long Long Time was the first of these and came out in 1970.  But I didn't fully appreciate this song until years later...she put everything she had into this agonizing ode to love and heartbreak and although I liked some of her later works, I was always looking for a "Long Long Time Part 2" that never happened.  What a talent...

473 SILENT LUCIDITY...Queensryche
Through the late 1980s and early 1990s I'd be listening to my local "hard" rock station here in Gainesville, Rock/104, and one hard rock band after another...after registering moderate hits with their hard rock songs...would inevitably come out with a slower, ballad-form song.  This would usually become their most popular piece, although I usually despised these ballads which I regarded as the bands selling out for the sake of popularity.  The one major exception was Queensryche: Silent Lucidity is by far the best song I've heard from this Seattle forerunner of grunge.  When Rock 104 would play it, I'd have to stop what I was doing so I could listen to it with all my attention...well, I'm not quite as nuts about it now, but I still like it a lot...

472 SHE'S LEAVING HOME...the Beatles
I usually preferred the Beatles songs in which it's clear that both Paul McCartney and John Lennon were full, participating partners.  She's Leaving Home, a deep track on their acclaimed 1967 Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, is one such example with the former writing and singing the song's verse and the latter doing likewise with its chorus.  The "third" Beatle responsible for recording this song...George and Ringo weren't involved...was producer George Martin, who arranged the instrumentation and, after their retirement from touring after 1966, was a Beatle in everything but name. When I was a kid during this era I had retreated a bit from the Beatles and, although I dug their singles hits All You Need is Love and Hello/Goodbye,  I wouldn't return as an "album" fan until the early 1970s when my sister and I began to collect their later LPs.  Later on, though, I came to like this song, schmaltzy lyrics and all...

471 HOW CAN I BE SURE...the Young Rascals
Yet another 1967 song I didn't fully appreciate until years later...I never understood the substantial contribution that the Young Rascals, who later shortened their name to just the Rascals, made to the American popular music scene.  They'd keep unobtrusively coming out year after year with blockbuster hits while seeming to avoid the celebrity status and scrutiny that other, bigger names were receiving.  Yet they produced some fantastic songs..."How can I be sure in a world that's constantly changing" totally captured the angst some of us were beginning to feel in an ever-quickening world with its wars and impending disasters...

Next week: #470-461...

Just Finished Reading Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a renowned, award-winning author of many books, going way back to the late 1960s...she is currently 81.  When I checked out her novel Hazards of Time Travel, I came to two early mistaken conclusions: one, that this was a budding writer within the genre of young adult dystopian fiction and two, that since much of the future dystopia that Adriane, the young protagonist, finds herself struggling in has been based on a drastic elimination of personal liberties following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, so it must have been written soon thereafter.  But as I stated before, Oates was already well established and the story was published just last year...

The setting is the year 2039 and what used to be the United States, Canada, and Mexico has merged into a "democracy" that in practice is a plutocracy...government by the very wealthy for their own benefit. The State uses the "threat" of impending terrorist attacks as a pretext to clamp down on free speech and inflict punishment on "traitors", that is anyone who even slightly raises any questions or doubts about the world they live in.  Adriane finds herself arrested for preparing a valedictorian high school graduation speech that asks forbidden questions and as a result is sentenced to "exile" for four years, as a college student in a small liberal arts school in Wainscotia, Wisconsin...back in the year 1959.  She is prohibited from revealing her status as an exile from the future to anyone there on penalty of being instantly vaporized...or "deleted" as they call it.  But Adriane cannot resist the temptation to search around for others who are suffering through the same exile...and here is where I leave you, the potential reader of this novel, to discover for yourself what happens.  I will say something, though, that perhaps if you're planning to read this book someday, might be construed as a plot spoiler...so potential reader, look away from the next paragraph...

After finishing Hazards of Time Travel, the ending of which was totally unexpected, I began to reflect on some possible sources of inspiration for the author in writing it...especially with regard to that problematic conclusion.  So, with SPOILER ALERT printed in capital letters, I'll just say that the movies The Matrix and Inception...especially the role of a totem in the latter...have within them elements that closely sync with the story.  There...hope you didn't read that if you planned to read the book, but I did warn you...

Oates not only wrote of a dystopia that makes a mockery of democracy and eliminates freedom of speech, but also of a society in the not-so-distant future where the racial divisions and prejudices we've been struggling against for so many years have once again became entrenched and institutionalized, even to the degree of a rigid, stratified caste system.  Maybe she thinks this is the sad direction we're heading toward now...I sure hope she's wrong.  I looked through some of the reviews on Goodreads and found that readers either loved Hazards of Time Travel or hated it...it's that kind of story...