Weekly Short Stories: 1969 Science Fiction, Part 4

Below are my reactions to the final three stories appearing in the retrospective anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1970, containing selections by editors Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr of what they deemed the best from 1969.  That year saw me become something of a spectator sports fanatic as I followed local teams the Miami Floridians (the American Basketball Association) and the Miami Dolphins (American Football League), along with pretty much the entire 1969 Major League Baseball schedule.  I followed most of the games on the radio...even with the Dolphins their home games were blacked out on TV.  I got to know the '69 Chicago White Sox pretty well since the local station, WKAT, broadcast their games.  That was a tough time in my life as I was an awkward, messed up young adolescent, and since then I've grown to appreciate how sports can help to get people away from dwelling on themselves: it was difficult, I'm sure, for a lot of folks last spring when the pandemic abruptly shut everything down.  But I digress: here's my take on those last three stories...

SHIP OF SHADOWS by Fritz Leiber

This novella examines...from the viewpoint of one of its residents...a large spaceship that has been out there so long that its origins are lost to those dwelling within it.  Spar, a seemingly elderly man who has lost much of his vision as well as his teeth, works at the ship's Bat Rack, its version of a bar, while a talking cat (Kim) has adopted him and dispenses its own very blunt criticisms.  Talking animals, vampires, zombies, space travel, apocalypse...it's all here for you the reader to decipher (if you can) as much of the story's mystery is in figuring what the heck's going on here.  But don't worry, it all explains itself in the end, which didn't make me feel much better about the general state of things...especially that dismal view of the ugly big orange round thing outside the ship's window.  I thought Leiber did a great job here of describing how people might adapt over time to a zero-gravity environment...

NINE LIVES by Ursula K. LeGuin

Libra is a distant planet suitable for little else besides mining, especially for the much needed large amounts of uranium this seismically-active world has in abundance.  Two advance engineers, Pugh and Martin, have been there on assignment for some time and have discovered the ore and laid the foundations for the development party to extract it...their isolation, though, has left them lonely and testy.  But this incoming crew, which turns out to be a ten-person clone of a renowned, deceased engineer, makes matters worse as they are all into each other (on a number of levels) and demonstrate little desire for any meaningful interaction with the "old hands".  But one day while the clones are all down there with the uranium a severe earthquake happens and the demographic equation drastically changes...

THE BIG FLASH by Norman Spinrad

Reading this story you might think "This could never happen", but since it is all about mass hypnosis with people voluntarily submitting themselves to mind control, sadly something similar is going on today with the manipulation of whole segments of our population by media, both of the mass and social varieties.  Set ostensibly in the "present" time period around 1969, the U.S. government is considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons to decisively beat back the enemy in southeast Asia...but the president is aware that the general population strongly opposes such a strategy.  Meanwhile, a new rock band,, aptly named The Four Horsemen, with an apocalyptic message and show, is storming the country and becoming wildly popular.  After noting that their use of atom bomb explosion graphics in their concerts is swaying the public's opinion in favor of atomic warfare, the president decides to stage one of their concerts in a desert where he will set off a nuclear bomb, hoping to tip the tide of public opinion behind his proposed SE Asia policy.  But the plot gets out of hand because of that mass hypnosis...you can manipulate a mob to a certain point beyond which you lose control over it, a lesson for our times as well...

Next week I begin looking at the year 1970 in short science fiction...

Game of the Week...Hidato

Hidato is a numerical logic puzzle invented by an Israeli engineer several years ago.  I first encountered it while browsing my excellent (but sadly now closed) local Borders bookstore a few years ago in the puzzle book section...I walked out buying a couple of Hidato books.  For a stretch of time it was also featured on my Hewlett Packard printer's daily puzzle page: of late, though, I haven't done Hidato.  Its premise is simple enough: starting with the numbers already given on the puzzle's grid, connect them together in a sequenced counting string, going left, right, up, down, or diagonally.  Above is pictured an excerpt from an old newspaper puzzle section some 10-11 years ago containing a Hidato puzzle in the corner. Like all puzzles of this sort, it's more fun for me to avoid the "hints" section and figure out shortcuts and strategies for myself.  Of course, nothing is preventing me from going online and ordering for myself another Hidato book, but since I do have online newspaper archives at my disposal I thought I'd go down that avenue first...

Just Finished Reading The Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell

The Girl Next Door is a 2014 novel by English mystery writer Ruth Rendell, the last to be published before her death.  It's one of those stories that start out going in one direction but transform into something substantially different.  In 1944 in an English town the children there like to play in the "tunnels" underneath a hillside...eventually revealed to be an unconstructed house's foundation.  Michael, one of the kids, has as parents a mother who carries out sexual escapades with various men and a father who by all measures is a pure psychopath...one day he decides to murder his wife and her lover, cut off their hands and save them in a tin box...pretty gross and disturbing, right?  I don't think I'm giving away the story, though, as this all happens in the beginning.  After ridding himself of his wife, the father ships Michael away for his sister Zoe to take care of...the story then shifts sixty years into the future as the children are now around 70 and the creepy old dad is approaching 100, living in a luxurious senior's home after living his whole adult life off the labors and inheritances of others.  The bulk of the rest of the book deals with the relationships between these elderly "tunnel children": besides Michael there is the "girl next door", Daphne, who attracts Alan...one of those tunnel kids and a later teenage flame...into leaving his longtime wife Rosemary for her.  There are other subplots with other characters, but the essence of the story is the lives of the grown children, now on the other end of their life spans.  It lays forth the notion that life goes on with all its complications and drama far into old age...I'm not sure what to think about this since I'm 64 now!  As for my reaction to the novel, I didn't particularly like Rendell's emphasis of the relationships in all their tawdriness over the story's underlying murder mystery...the tone reminded me of J.K. Rowling's "adult" novel The Casual Vacancy:  is this a kind of "English" thing in fiction?  Ruth Rendell's novels are pretty much split in number between her standalone books and those in the Inspector Wexford murder mystery series: I think I'll focus more on the latter category in the future...

Great Old TV Episodes...from SpongeBob SquarePants

 

GRAVEYARD SHIFT, from Season 2 of the enduring Nickelodeon hit cartoon series SpongeBob SquarePants, is one of my all time favorites.  This series, which I took to around 2002-03, features the title character as an annoyingly expressive sponge (in yellow kitchen sponge form) living at the bottom of the sea with his best friend Patrick (silly starfish), next neighbor Squidward (cynical octopus) and boss Mr. Krabs (greedy, stingy crab).  He works with Squidward at the Krusty Krab fast food joint...in this episode Krabs discovers he can make more money if his place never closes: hence, the graveyard shift.  Squidward can't stand it, and SpongeBob thinks it's the greatest thing ever..."Wow, we never have to stop working!".   Fed up with his coworker's unbridled enthusiasm, Squidward decides to play a joke on him and dreams up a ghost story about the "Hash-Slinging Slasher", supposedly a former employee who accidentally cut off his hand, got run over by a bus, and will come back to "Get you!"  It works on SpongeBob, who shrieks repeatedly until Squidward tries to shut him up by telling him it was just a joke...then he switches to  laughing repeatedly (see above picture).  Later that night the clues that Squidward laid out about the Slasher's return start coming true, and the two are left shaking in terror as the sinister figure holding a spatula enters the restaurant...

I have worked the graveyard shift on three different jobs: a weekend shift as a clerk in a traffic management office in Miami Shores, a very brief stint at a Gainesville convenience store, and for around 18 years as a clerk at the post office.  There something just not quite right about leaving for work late in the evening and getting off when the sun has just risen in the morning...I never completely got used to working those hours, and on my off days I would sleep the late night/early morning as if I had more normal hours.  The world outside gets eerily silent in those wee hours of the morning and you can hear some pretty distant sounds...all sorts of nocturnal wildlife like to make their appearance then as well.  Nowadays with my afternoon/evening work schedule it's a major chore for me to just get up at 7 in the morning, much less work all night long.  SpongeBob's Graveyard Shift episode is loaded with laughs...unfortunately, although this series continues on to this day with new episodes, I don't think the ones after the fourth season are very funny: if you haven't seen it yet, I'd focus on those early seasons if I were you...

My Favorite Songs So Far in 2021

For most of my life my favorite music in any particular year coincided with what was newly released, played, and popular at the time.  This changed in 1991 when I rediscovered Led Zeppelin and explored their catalog of music, coming up with some gems going back two decades.  Since then some of my favorites from year to year are from earlier times...for example, my "song of the year" for 2018 was from 2006: Lazy Eye by Silversun Pickups.  Last year many of my favorites were from the late, great Prince, many going back to the 1980s: this year my favorites range from 2014 to the present...yet in my mind they are "2021" favorites.  Below is my list of favorite songs for the first three months in 2021.  Check them out...YouTube is a good starting place.  Each song is listed by title, artist, and year of original release...

1 LADY'S GRACE...Kerani (2015)

2 WHITEOUT CONDITIONS...the New Pornographers (2017)

3 PILLS...St. Vincent (2017)

4 PLAY MONEY...the New Pornographers (2017)

5 THE ASCENSION...Sufjan Stevens (2020)

6 ILLEGAL FIREWORKS AND HIDING BOTTLES IN THE SAND...Jeff Rosenstock (2020)

7 PALOMATRONICS...Green Isac (2014)

8 NOBODY ELSE WILL BE THERE...the National (2020)

9 HIGH HOPES...Panic! at the Disco (2018)

10 KOMBUCHA...Winnetka Bowling League (2021)

11 SVANIRE...Angele Dubeau (2015)

12 VENDETTA...Ice Age (2021)

Quote of the Week...from Toni Sorenson

When you run, the road belongs to you.                                    ---Toni Sorenson.

Toni Sorenson is an author of novels with faith-based themes...she apparently is also an avid runner to have come out with the above quote, which I agree with.  When I'm out on the road running...and I'm talking about residential streets or walking pathways, not major highways...I feel that it's my road, which I'm willing to share with others (as long as they don't get in my way).  While generally socially compliant by demeanor, I tend to get into a much more assertive frame of mind when I'm out there pounding the pavement, with a sense of proprietorship and belonging as I have made this setting part of my world and embrace it.  I have vivid recall of different running courses I have trained on, past and present...there is, though, one funny exception to Toni Sorenson's quote for me.  Back in April 2010 while visiting Manhattan with my wife and daughter, I got up in the morning at our Times Square hotel and went out onto Broadway for a jog...not such a cool idea.  The streets were, of course, crowded with people, many of them in business attire, and here I was in a tee-shirt and sweat pants skirting in and out among them.  Because I didn't want to have to wait at intersections, I made the ill-advised decision to turn the corner at each red light...eventually finding myself hopelessly lost among the skyscrapers.  Somehow I stumbled back onto Broadway after meandering around for blocks east of my area.  So no, the road doesn't always belong to you when you run...I did the remainder of my running that vacation high up in the hotel's exercise room...

Constellation of the Month: Hydra (the Sea Serpent)

 

It was tough for me to pick March's constellation of the month: Canis Minor, although possessing a first magnitude star in Procyon, is pretty tiny with two generally visible stars...that's still better than Cancer, loaded with very faint stars and a cluster called the Beehive.  Then there is Carina, but nearly all of it is below the horizon unless you happen to be living around the Equator or points south.  Instead I picked Hydra, which starts as an evening March constellation at its western end (right, looking south) that represents the sea serpent's small head and winds its way eastward as April and May constellations...it's just south of the Zodiac constellations of Cancer, Leo and Virgo.  One way to find dim Cancer...besides interpolating in the empty space between the brighter constellations of Leo and Gemini...is to locate Hydra's very visible head and then go straight northward. Alphard, the brightest star in Hydra, is also prominent in the evening March sky...it is a 2nd magnitude giant at about 177 light years distance.  On the other end of Hydra are two Messier objects: M68 is a globular star cluster while M83 is a spiral galaxy.  When considering a constellation as stretched out as Hydra...to me an example of celestial gerrymandering...I think they could have come up with a better way of "connecting the dots" and created constellations easier to recognize and identify.  But this is convention, and we're stuck with the current system for better or for worse.  In any event, other than those Messier objects I mentioned, the most interesting part of Hydra is its west end from Alphard to the serpent's head, this smaller segment in itself worthy of selection as my constellation of the month.  Next month's pick is much more clear cut, although my second choice is pretty prominent, too...

Weekly Short Stories:1969 Science Fiction, Part 3

Here are my reviews of three more sci-fi short stories from the year 1969 as they appeared in the "year's best" anthology World Best Science Fiction 1970, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr...science fiction storytellers in their own right...with their selections from the previous year.  Richard M. Nixon was sworn in to be president in January, and the news from the tumultuous year of 1968 seemed to settle a bit...although we were still mired in the Vietnam conflict.  The first human landings on the moon happened in July and November...I remember reading something in a '69 newspaper article quoting Vice-President Agnew as predicting a manned Mars landing by 1990.  That seemed a lot more realistic to me than what really happened, with America eventually cutting short its Apollo moon mission program and spending the last 48 years in low Earth orbit with the capability to go much farther...can you imagine any science fiction writer predicting that scenario?!  Well, here are those reviews...

SIXTH SENSE by Michael G. Coney

A most brilliantly conceived story, it is unrelated to the later ghost movie starring Bruce Willis.  Set many generations into the future, a telepathic man has deliberately moved into an isolated life as an innkeeper in a remote area on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea.  A party of two families with their own peculiar relational hang-ups arrives for a stayover. As they reveal their stories, much of it through the innkeeper's psychic abilities, you think the story is going in one direction: one couple's teenage daughter seems to be telepathic as well.  Then the ending comes and everything is turned upside down, making the reader go back and read everything in a completely different light...including the story's title.  This one's a winner...

A BOY AND HIS DOG by Harlan Ellison

This is a very brutal story of a future dystopia divided between constantly warring violent hoodlums...either in gangs or alone...separated from isolated pockets of throwback civilization deep underground, the tone reminiscent of the movie A Clockwork Orange (based on the Anthony Burgess novel).  It is far into the future...in the year 2024 (!)...as following a nuclear apocalypse the world's surface is run by violent, rapacious thugs, of which the story's protagonist, a fifteen-year old young "man", is one of the worst as he relates his story in stark, profane terms.  He has with him a dog, one with specially developed telepathic abilities, and their bond is strong...just how strong is revealed in the story's ending, which makes all the preceding atrocities in the narrative seem tame by contrast.  This is NOT a tale for the faint of heart...

AND SO SAY ALL OF US by Bruce McAllister

In a grossly shortsighted push to use mental patients thought to have paranormal powers to promote America's agenda in the ongoing cold war during the story's time setting in the near future (from 1969), a government-contracted scientist focuses on one particular patient with known telekinetic and telepathic abilities and works to resolve his inner multiple personality conflicts through telepathic suggestion: the unintended result bodes ill for the world at large as parapsychology, mental illness, and religion merge together within one intellectually-challenged but very powerful mind...

Next week I conclude my look at some of 1969's science fiction short stories...

Game of the Week: Cryptograms

 

Cryptograms are encoded puzzles, often appearing in grocery store variety puzzle magazines...the above photo is of one of these.  Each letter in a message is encoded with another letter...the trick is to find certain patterns of letters and pick out the more common words like "the" and some of the two-letter words.  Then, after getting some of the more common letters like e, s, t, r, l, ....you know, the ones Wheel of Fortune automatically gives its final puzzle contestants...I should be able to piece the rest of the cryptogram together.  There is always a threshold I reach after decoding a certain number of letters beyond which I can go back to the beginning of the message and then plow right through it.  Although I enjoy the process of solving cryptograms, the resulting message is often a disappointment.  Unsolved on the page, they all look very intellectual and profound...much like how an unknown foreign language sounds...but like another language, they are in the end just transformations of things whose meanings we are already acquainted with.  The first puzzle above, for example, turned out to be a silly, corny joke while the next one was a serious, positive motivating statement from a famous figure in history.  Once I bought a book of cryptograms at a used book sale.  Unfortunately, many of the quotes therein were by Benjamin Franklin: it got too easy to pick out his name at the bottom of those cryptograms and almost instantly translate the puzzle.  The longer the cryptogram the generally easier it is to solve...the same goes to putting the name of the individual who said it at the bottom.  There are variations to cryptograms as well...one that I like has a category at the top and then lists come coded words that fit it...these also tend to be in those variety puzzle mags...

Just Finished Reading Gregor and the Code of Claw by Suzanne Collins

Gregor and the Code of Claw, published in 2007, is the fifth and final volume in Suzanne Collins' children's fantasy series The Underland Chronicles: beware, I'm bound to throw in some plot spoilers here. Gregor, the title character, is a twelve year old boy living in New York City with his mother, father, and two sisters.  He and his family have a secret: there is, deep beneath the ground, another world where descendants of human settlers from centuries past interact...sometimes in friendship and sometimes in war...with the native creatures there, all human-size, intelligent, and speaking versions of our rats, bats, cockroaches, mice, spiders, fireflies, ants, and so forth.  The series, like way too many in the fantasy genre, has devolved into a dire winner-take-all war between the opposing camps of the humans with their allies (the bats, cockroaches and mice) and the rats.  The final battle has the rats...led by the now-insane, giant albino Bane...invading the final human stronghold "down under", as Gregor...stuck down there with his mother and eventually both sisters...discovers that the prophecy in question has him, the so-called "Warrior", dying before it is all over.  He finds himself falling in love with the human princess Luxa while trying to save their home territory from the invaders.  He also finds himself pitted against the manipulative human military commander Solovet, Luxa's grandmother and a forerunner (in my opinion) of the author's later Hunger Games character of Alma Coin from District 13.  Part of the final conflict revolves around breaking the rats' special code of communication: the Code of Claw.  The most compelling character in this book...and the series as a whole...is Ripred, the tough, colorful rat who is the humans' greatest ally.   I found this concluding book a little tedious, knowing pretty much what to expect: like I said before, there is the typical (yawn) epic final battle, along with the attempt on the part of the author to tie up the loose ends of the series.  When it does get to the end, I was pleased to discover that it is Ripred who not only, by revealing his attitude about those aforementioned prophecies, enlightens young Gregor, but also with Gregor and Luxa presents a reasonable resolution to the conflict.  Still, it wasn't close to being my favorite fantasy series...but hey, it's for kids anyway and I enjoyed it on that level, having once been one myself...

Great Old TV Episodes...from Honey West

THE SWINGIN' MRS. JONES was the first episode in the half-hour private eye series Honey West, which lasted only one season on ABC from late 1965 through early 1966, with 30 episodes in all.  It starred Anne Francis as the sultry blonde detective with martial arts skills along with John Ericson as her associate Sam Bolt...and Bruce the ocelot.  When TV Guide came out with the three networks' fall lineup issue in August or September of 1965, as a nearly nine-year old television fanatic I studied it intensely.  One of the featured new series was Honey West, and I instantly fell in love with its star just from the pictures.  Tragically, when it was time for the new season to start, my local ABC affiliate in Miami, Channel 10 WLBW, wouldn't show this series for some reason and Palm Beach's ABC Channel 12 just didn't come in on our rabbit-ears-antenna TV set.  So I never got to see it back then...as a matter of fact I only saw my first episode, this one, a few weeks ago because it was on YouTube!  In it Honey West has been hired by a wealthy middle-age married woman being blackmailed for indiscrete behavior at a resort with one of the attractive young men hanging out there.  She goes undercover as a young married, rich woman looking for some action when her husband wasn't around and quickly discovers that the resort itself is running the ring.  The acting is top-notch and funny...it reminded me of a great concurrent series with the same theme from Britain: The Avengers, starring Patrick MacNee and Diana Rigg.  Before writing this article I read up on the Honey West series and discovered that they not only wanted the Avengers' original star Honor Blackman (who played the role of Pussy Galore in the Bond flick Goldfinger) to play the Honey West part, but that the network decided after a year of Honey West that it would be cheaper to cancel it and just import the wildly popular British series and stick it in that same time slot.  The irony of it all is that Honey West was critically acclaimed and Anne Francis was nominated for an Emmy for her performance.  Francis was already an established actress...I've seen her also in the old Twilight Zone episode The After Hours (about mannequins) and as a villainess in a couple of early Man from U.N.C.LE. episodes.  During that era while I was 9-10 years old I had a string of crushes on pretty female celebrities: besides Anne Francis as Honey West there were Julie Newmar as Catwoman in Batman, Monica Vitti as Modesty Blaise from that movie, and Nancy Sinatra as...well, Nancy Sinatra.  Now that I've finally seen an episode of Honey West from my 64-year old perspective, I wonder how I would have reacted to it had I been able to see it way back then... 

About Where We're Going with COVID

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea that, after all this time of lockdown, social distancing and mask mandates regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, people who are fully vaccinated...along with those who have contracted it in the past and recovered...cannot finally return to some semblance of normal life and shake off the distancing and masks: I'd also like to be able to browse the shelves of my local public library again some day, thank you...if it ever opens to the general public again.  The other day Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) was arguing with disease expert Anthony Fauci over the need for those recovered or vaccinated to continue wearing masks, Paul taunting those already vaccinated for even wearing double masks just for show...I'd been wondering the same thing myself.  Fauci's response was, to me, chilling: it's the variants of this coronavirus out there across the world that is the reason for continuing this, and that "herd immunity", which seems to be the standard for completely reopening the society, will always be questioned as long as there is any place on Earth where the disease is still active...because of these new variants they keep discovering, you see.  Of course, in Texas they've already completely done away with any government-mandated masks or restrictions even though we're still in the thick of the fight to prevent COVID's spread: that's way too early!  But there will have to be a point...maybe sometime this summer...when everyone in the U.S. wanting vaccines has had access to them and that booster shots for variants are in full swing: can we then please go back to sitting inside Starbucks and participate in running races, concerts and assemblies, or has a sea change occurred in our society and we're now and forever going to be germophobes with hand sanitizer dispensers around every corner and doing Detective Monk imitations while feeling we're constantly on the verge of new restrictions?  Sean Hannity, someone I generally loathe, recently tweeted...with the lead-in comment "HERE WE GO"... a link to another disease expert who was extolling the idea of social distancing and mask-wearing every flu season from now on.  I received my first Pfizer vaccine three days ago and will get my second one early next month. I will continue to respect the mask and distancing guidelines while they are in place as I already have, going on a full year, because I take this terrible scourge seriously.  But at some time in the not-too-distant future, this country will have a reckoning as to which direction we're going with this all...it doesn't make me feel any better to find myself even only in partial agreement with both (ugh) Rand Paul and (mega-ugh) Sean Hannity, the latter whom I regard as an anti-American fascist because of his past support for overthrowing the free and fair 2020 presidential election in favor of his cult idol: dictator-wannabee and pandemic-denier Donald Trump...

After Yesterday's Opening Round Play in the NCCA Men's Hoops Tourney

As apparent by all the upsets occurring in yesterday's opening round of the NCAA men's basketball tournament, my bracket strategy of going with all the higher-seeded teams fell apart...as I knew it would since, as I said, upsets do happen.  That still doesn't mean that I wasn't going with the best probability for success, considering that it's next to impossible to determine which games will be upsets.  Besides, on Thursday with the four "First Four" games, the teams facing off each had the same seedings: my strategy couldn't apply to them and I would have needed to delve into each team's rankings to predict their outcomes (which I didn't do).  Friday afternoon, fortunately for us Gator alumni and fans, the University of Florida, seeded 7th in their region, managed somehow to defeat Virginia Tech, 10th, in overtime 75-70 to advance against one of those upset winners, Oral Roberts, seeded 15th, who stunned 2nd seed Ohio State 75-72.  UF should...I said should...get past them Sunday to make it to yet another Sweet 16 round.  Although after getting home from work I watched some of the games on TV...they're spread out over multiple channels (at least for this round) like CBS, TNT, TBS, and TrueTV (which I don't get), while at work I got to listen on my Android to the game of my choice using the excellent TuneIn Radio app.  There's more action for today...let's see if Florida State can't advance as well: they're playing UN-Greensboro this afternoon.  This is a "bubble" tournament, with all the games in various sites in central Indiana and the players and staff sequestered...you'd think Purdue would do well here, but they, a 4th seed, were knocked off yesterday by North Texas, 13th.  After Monday it should clear out considerably, with the remaining schools trimmed from 68 to 16 teams...

Quote of the Week...from Franz Kafka

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.                       ---Franz Kafka

Ever since I began this blog nearly 14 years ago, I have felt that writing like this has greatly helped me sort out my thoughts and feelings, sharpening those that I conclude are worthwhile while disposing of those that don't pass the test of rational examination.  Kafka was a famed early twentieth century Czech/German writer who is said to have injected surrealism and social commentary into much of his work: this was certainly true from the one book of his I've read so far: Metamorphosis.  Sometimes I observe how thoroughly deluded and irrational people express themselves on TV and in social media, and I wonder whether a daily writing habit might not help some of them learn to use better judgment when it comes to discerning truth from fantasy and displaying a more civil, sociable demeanor in what they say to others.  Along with this blog I have recently begun a daily journal...for my eyes only...to document the day-to-day happenings in my personal life and further assist me in more sanely reacting to the often invasive world that seems to come down on me from different sides.  The very act of formulating sentences and connecting trains of thought is therapeutic, and I sure that as a result my perspective on reality and society has greatly benefited, regardless whether other readers would agree or not with the words I've put down.  I found Kafka's above quote from a search I did on the excellent book review site Goodreads, which posted an excerpt from a letter he wrote to Max Brod in the 1920s...

My 2021 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament Bracket...in a Nutshell

For the 2020-21 season with the NCAA men's basketball championship tournament slated to begin today, it's become an annual tradition for people to fill out intricate brackets predicting who will advance to the next round...and then who will win that round, all the way to the championship game.  Naturally, once you get a game's result wrong, it upsets the whole bracket...and upsets do happen.  Still, I think the most reasonable bracket I could fill out respects all of the seedings.  So if you want to know "my bracket", let's skip the complicated chart and follow two principles: I always predict that the higher seed within a region wins, and then in the final four...presuming all number one seeds advance...I go with the pretournament national rankings: #1 Gonzaga, #2 Baylor, #3 Illinois, #4 Michigan.  This method has the advantage over traditional brackets by renewing itself with each new round in the tourney...if in the Final Four two teams with different regional seedings are playing each other I go with the one with the higher regional seed.  By the way, on the women's side with their tournament, I know next-to-nothing about the teams involved...but my "bracket" follows the exact same principles.  Yeah, I know, upsets always happen...but how am I supposed to magically sort them out from the expected results?

Got COVID Vaccine First Dose Yesterday Morning

Very quickly after Florida's Governor DeSantis lowered the eligibility age for the COVID-19 vaccine from 65 to 60, effective March 15th, my local Alachua County Health Department messaged me to make an appointment...I just received my first Pfizer dose yesterday morning at the nearby Trinity United Methodist Church.  After seeing the initial problems on TV in various places across the state and country with elderly people waiting outside for hours, I was hoping that they had the bugs all worked out...and they did!  My appointment was for 9:30, I got there a few minutes early...and by my appointed time I was already in my post-vaccination 15 minute waiting period.  My second dose is scheduled in the same place three weeks from now...

It's been a year since our society went off on a major freak-out lockdown panic over this pandemic...unfortunately, the way I see it the lockdown part in hindsight was a bit overly draconian while I distinctly remember our nation's Surgeon General strongly urging folks NOT to wear masks at the time...he did a fast turnaround on that issue the following month, but the damage was already done.  Along with our then-President's cavalier, mocking attitude toward both the coronavirus and masks, tens of millions of Americans denied the severity of the outbreak, which to date is responsible for over half a million deaths over just a year's span in this country alone.  It is a modern miracle of partnership between science, technology, business, government and academia that a number of effective vaccines have been developed and produced on such a mass scale in such a short time span against a novel contagion like COVID-19.  The U.S., lagging behind the world with its lack of compliance and safety measures among the general population, is nevertheless leading it...along with the United Kingdom...in vaccinating its population.  But as our disease experts point out, the world's population needs vaccination as well because it is here where vaccine-resistant variants of the disease are arising.  I'm resigned to getting booster shots in the future if need be...just set up my appointment time and place.  I've also had my eyes opened wide as to the callousness and utter disregard for my health and that of my loved ones from those people around me who have refused to do a simple thing as wearing a mask in my presence while smiling in my face...

Weekly Short Stories: 1969 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here are my reactions to four more short stories from the anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1970, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr and covering the previous year's selections.  As I mention below, 1969 was the year that man first landed on the moon...by the time of the Apollo 12 landing later that year the American public was already becoming jaded over it all: President Nixon would end up "nixing" the final planned Apollo missions after Apollo 17 in 1972, and of course we've never been back.  As for me, I continued my anxiety-ridden young teen life and actually enjoyed a brief period in early fall of '69 at the start of the eighth grade when I was a very diligent and productive student...an experience inspiring me to this day...

ONE SUNDAY IN NEPTUNE by Alexei Panshin

This reminds me of Robert Heinlein's stories about space exploration with an upbeat, "can-do" theme about humankind's progress and intrepidness.  Stationed on Neptune's moon Triton, a couple of spacemen get the idea to explore the "surface" of Neptune for signs of life: the real goal is to gain some permanent mention in the annals of space exploration.  They do, but for a reason they hadn't expected.  This story anticipated the boredom that the general public would feel about space ventures...and it came out the year that man first landed on the moon...

FOR THE SAKE OF GRACE by Suzette Haden Elgin

In a sci-fi universe with human civilizations sprouting up independently on different worlds in different star systems, one such society is critically examined for its overbearingly discriminatory rules against women and their roles in it.  I couldn't help coming out of the reading feeling that the author was targeting Middle Eastern traditions here, since the characters' names had an Arabic bent to them.  A father has to return to his home planet to chastise his wife for her public "misbehavior", but finds himself distraught when his own daughter enters the esteemed Poet examinations: failure in this for a woman results in solitary confinement for the rest of her life...

YOUR HAPLOID HEART by James Tiptree, Jr.

There are certain species of animals on Earth...jellyfish is an example...that alternate generations between reproducing asexually and sexually...this story examines a humanoid society on a distant planet that functions similarly.  The only problem is they're eager to be classified by the visiting human galactic federation scientists as also "human" but they don't seem to meet the criteria because of their reproduction methods.  One group, the Esthaans, are the generation reproducing by budding, producing little baby Flenni, who reproduce as we humans do...their "babies" are little Esthaans.  But the Esthaans have created an extreme taboo about the process, not recognize their Flenni counterparts as an essential part of their own species and instead seek to wipe them out.  The federation team of Pax and the narrator Ian have to figure it all out and save the day...

THERAPY 2000 by Keith Roberts

Travers, living in the nightmarish year of 2000 with its extreme congestion and noise, resorts to extreme measures to stuff his ears and give himself relief from the nonstop assault on his hearing.  Only during the wee hours of the morning do things ever quiet down, and it is during this time that he mentally drifts into an idyllic relationship with a woman, Deidre, who comforts him...usually in a beach setting totally alien to his crowded, high-decibel New York life.  "Noise, noise, noise"...reminds me of an old Twilight Zone episode, The Mind and the Matter, starring comedian Shelly Berman whose character Archibald Beechcraft lives and works under similar circumstances and is totally fed up with all the "people, people, people" around him...he finds a mental way to help himself as well.  For myself, I have always been sensitive to loud crowds, a few years ago taking to wearing disposable ear plugs in such settings...the problem has thankfully alleviated somewhat.  Here's another tale of the "future" that is receding into our past...

Next week I continue looking back at the year 1969 in short science fiction...

Game of the Week: Pong

 

Back in the fall of 1977 when I was a student at the University of Florida, one of my dormitory roommates brought his video game player which he connected with the room's television set.  One of the available games was Atari's Pong, which I took an instant liking to.  With the controls two can play at this primitive video game that roughly emulates a ping pong match (or more accurately an enclosed handball court where the ball can ricochet off the sides), with each side maneuvering their bar up or down to catch the "ball" shooting their way and send it back to the opponent's side...or one can choose to play alone against the machine.  As video games and the technology behind them became more complex over the decades, I simply did not keep up...although my two children quickly became adept at them and nowadays as adults enjoy playing very intricate interactive games over the Internet: I'm still pretty much at "Pong" level, sad to say.  I even downloaded the free Pong app onto my Android phone and from time to time will find myself playing a game or two...the above pic is a screen shot of a game in progress: the "ball" in the middle is about to shoot to the right where I'm to hit it back by moving the bar up and down.  One thing I like about Pong is that as a rally progresses, the ball's speed increases...making it a game testing one's reflexes.  No, there's not a whole lot of reasoning or knowledge application going on here...just a brief, fun diversion: perfect for someone with extreme attention deficit disorder...

Just Finished Reading They Do It with Mirrors by Agatha Christie

They Do It with Mirrors (alternate title Murder with Mirrors) is a 1952 murder mystery novel by the late, prolific writer Agatha Christie.  It's the seventh book of hers I've read so far and only the first featuring the elderly English amateur sleuth Miss Marple...all but one of the others have spotlighted Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.  Miss Marple meets up with an old school friend, Ruth Van Rydock, who tells her of her concern about her younger sister Carrie Louise Serrocold and the goings on at her family estate back in England...and wouldn't she as a personal favor visit and stay with them a while to see if she can discern what the matter is.  Upon arriving, Miss Marple discovers many family members around, as well as a school for juvenile delinquents...run by Carrie's third husband Lewis.  Carrie Louise has married three times and has an eternally optimistic personality, attractive to all.  Yet it appears that someone is trying to poison her...and what's going on with Lewis' young stuffy assistant Edgar Lawson, who appears to have become dramatically more resentful and paranoid?  Then there is young, pretty and flirtatious Gina, Carrie Louise's granddaughter visiting with her unhappy American husband Walter Hudd and who has attracted the affection of Steven, son of her second husband (the family relationships here are very convoluted). But when Christian Gulbrandson, the son of Carrie Louise's first husband and who is in charge of administering that family's vast wealth, visits with intense concern about her state of health, the tipping point is reached and finally...well into the novel...the expected murder occurs.  Just about everybody at the estate could be a suspect, but going on only what the author mentioned specifically just before the act, I realized very early on who the guilty party was.  Still, I enjoyed the book and recommend it.  Agatha Christie has written so many mystery novels that I could simply focus on her collected works and it would occupy me for years... 

Great Old TV Episodes...from The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

 

THE PROJECT STRIGAS AFFAIR...All episode titles in the sixties spy series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. are in "The ___ Affair" format.  The one in this article was from their first season, initially aired in November 1964.  Although at age eight I would become an ardent fan of the series starring Robert Vaughan as agent Napoleon Solo and his Russian sidekick Illya Kuryakin, played by David McCallum, I'm not sure if I saw this specific episode at that time...more likely later in the spring of 1965 as a rerun. In it, sounding more like a Mission: Impossible undertaking, Solo and Kuryakin are assigned to discredit a politically surging warmongering diplomat from a fictional Balkan nation.  Making up an imaginary "Project Strigas" to tempt their adversary's interest, they enlist the aid of a chemical engineer-turned pest exterminator as the phony head of this convoluted plot to lead the ambassador on.  I picked this episode to discuss because of the presence of two very familiar faces, as you can see from the above photo taken from it during a party: Star Trek's William Shatner (playing the exterminator) and Leonard Nimoy (as the Balkan ambassador's assistant) are hobnobbing with Vaughn as Shatner's character has had a little too much to drink.  Star Trek wouldn't begin its three-year run until the late summer of 1966: here's a sneak preview of its stars! Of course, back then I wouldn't have known that...it's fun to go back in these old series (The Twilight Zone is another good source) and notice guest actors who would later star in their own shows and movies, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is loaded with these examples.  For the entire year of 1965 and well into 1966, I was nuts about The Man from U.N.C.L.E.: it was by far my favorite television series of that time.  Unfortunately, after its run...unlike with Star Trek...those possessing its rights refused to release it into syndication for many years.  Still now this series, very popular during its time, is extremely hard to find on TV.  So I decided to buy the entire series on DVD off Amazon at a huge discount using some of my gift card balance...nice!

Just Finished Reading Gregor and the Marks of Secret by Suzanne Collins

Since Suzanne Collins' 2006 children's novel Gregor and the Marks of Secret directly ties in with The Underland Chronicles' previous book, Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods, my review here will necessarily involve some plot spoilers...you may want to stop and catch up reading the series for yourself first.  After the previous book's plague has been resolved, Gregor, a boy who with his mother and baby sister Boots has voyaged deep under the Earth's surface in response to an urgent plea from the human inhabitants there, finds himself the subject of yet another prophecy...this one is held secret from him, though.  Down here the animals are human-size, intelligent, and speak his language...how convenient.  A war is developing between the rats, lead by an albino called the Bane (read book #2), and pretty much everyone else...including spiders, cockroaches, people, bats...and especially the mice, caller "nibblers".  Gregor and his party set out to see about rescuing the persecuted mice and make some grisly discoveries.  The ending segues directly, I'm sure, into the final book of this five-part series.  Not exactly my favorite series in this genre of children's fantasy fiction, but Collins has skillfully built up the suspense and presented the characters to the point where I care about what happens to them at the end of it all...so of course I'm checking out that last volume...

Quote of the Week...from Haruki Murakami

I'll be happy if running and I can grow old together.        ---Haruki Murakami

From an Internet search about running quotes, I got a good article by Norbert Juma listing a few...click here to read it.  One of the listed quotes, many of which were great (and which I might use in the future), is the above one from award-winning Japanese writer Haruki Murakami...guess I'll have to check out a book or two of his now.  I get his drift: it would be great to continue being able to go out on runs as I age and even participate in races when they come up in my area.  Back in January 2011 I ran...and eventually walked the last seven miles due to an IT band injury in my leg...the only marathon I ever officially entered in a race.  Because I was hobbled in the last half of this race, I encountered many slower runners passing me...many of them in advanced years.  The experience, while humbling, made a deep impact on me: I want to be like them and be able to keep on running as long as I live...which hopefully will be for a considerable time in the future.  So I'm not as keen on running fast as I am on covering long distances and maintaining this activity for years to come.  I don't control everything that will happen to me...nobody does...but to the extent that I can I will continue this great activity.  I'd love to be running half-marathons, 15K and 10K races as long as they're still holding them...

Just Finished Rereading Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga Series

Stephenie Meyer wrote and published the core four volumes of her blockbuster vampire/romance series Twilight Saga in the years 2005 to 2010.  I read the books back then but wasn't as attentive to reviewing them on this blog, which I started in 2007.  Having forgotten a lot of the events and characters, I decided to do what I recently did with George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire ("Game of Thrones") series: I checked them out in audio form on my Libby app and listened to them at 2.5X speed...worked again!  Here are my impressions of each book...oh, by the way, plot spoilers abound here so don't read my summaries if you haven't read the series or seen the movies and plan to...

TWILIGHT...Bella Swan moves from Phoenix...where she lived for years with her divorced mother...to rain-plagued, dreary Forks, Washington to stay with her father Charlie and finish high school there.  At school she notices an isolated group of very pale, beautiful-looking students: the story is that they are the Cullen family and they are rich, drive fancy cars and live out of town in a big house.  Bella instantly gets caught up with Edward Cullen, who attends classes with her.  They fall in love as Bella discovers he and his family are "immortals", i.e. vampires...and that all of them are long-lived, but that this family abstains from ever drinking human blood and only maintain themselves through hunting in the woods for animals.  Naturally, from here on Bella has this secret of theirs to keep, but she discovers that there exists outside of town an Indian tribe that knows about the Cullens...one of them, Jake Black, becomes good friends with Bella despite her courtship with Edward.  The story's climax centers on the Cullens' encounter...with Bella present...with three vampires who drink human blood.  Their leader, James, fixates on Bella as a target and tracks her while the Cullens try to protect her...I thought it was suspensefully written, but Bella's subsequent desire to become a vampire alienated me from her perspective...

NEW MOON...After Bella's eighteenth birthday party at the Cullens during which. after a minor accident involving broken glass and Bella spilling some blood, Jasper Cullen freaks out and endangers her, the family...including Edward...decide they are too dangerous to Bella and they move away, leaving her devastated and depressed.  Her father Charlie encourages her to get out and socialize, with little success until she goes out to where the Indians live and becomes close friends with Jake, who sees her as his girlfriend now that his rival is gone.  But the Indians...with a legend about them shapeshifting into wolves...have their own secret to hide, and when Jake comes of age, a trigger event causes him to transform, changing the dynamics of his relationship with Bella.  The Indians apparently have had a peace agreement with the Cullens that the "werewolves" and vampires would not fight under certain stipulations, but now feel liberated with their departure.  But Victoria, the vampire mate of James from the first book, is bent on revenge for his demise at the hands of Edward and is now pursuing Bella...when our heroine dives from a cliff that the Indians use, she sees in the water what she later understands was Victoria's red hair.  But that dive brings another danger...it is misreported that Bella had committed suicide...Edward reacts by going to Italy where the "head" vampires dwell in order to relinquish his existence: the race is on with Bella and Alice (her closest Cullen other than Edward) to stop him before it's too late...

ECLIPSE...The Cullens move back to Forks and the rivalry between Jake and Edward for Bella's affection heats up considerably with Victoria still on the loose and a puzzling series of murders piling up in nearby Seattle.  There is a lot of background story discussed in this book as well as (in my opinion) way too much indulgent dialogue between Jake and Bella and Bella and Edward about their respective relationships...I got how things stood early on and hearing it all repeated over and over again got to be very tedious.  The story's climax happens when it's revealed that Victoria was responsible for the Seattle murders, happening as a byproduct of her creation of "newborn" vampires for her army...and now they're coming to Forks.  Allied with the Jake's pack, the Cullens take on the invaders, but afterwards Jake is devastated and flees when he overhears Edward and Bella discussing their upcoming marriage and her transformation as a vampire...

BREAKING DAWN...Bella graduates from high school, she marries Edward, and the two honeymoon on a special island off the the coast of Brazil.  They find that sex between them...which they had been abstaining from over the course of the series...was possible and enjoyable but that Edward with his prodigious strength had still bruised Bella's body: he resolves to avoid lovemaking until she undergoes the transformation.  But before that can happen, she gets sick and they discover she is pregnant with Edward's child...it progresses at an accelerated pace as they return to Forks.  Jake breaks from the Indians who see the upcoming baby as an abomination to be destroyed...slowly a sort of alliance, if not friendship, develops between Jake and Edward.  The birth happens, the baby is born, and due to the damage to Bella's body her earlier choice to become a vampire is now a matter of survival: Edward injects the venom and she changes.  With newborn Renesmee "Ness" Cullen as a warm-blooded, beating heart human/vampire hybrid, the rest of the Cullens are wary that Bella is not yet conditioned to resist drinking human blood and keep her away until she can demonstrate her self-control, which they are astounded to discover that she has in abundance.  Meanwhile, the ultimate threat is on the horizon: that ruling vampire group from Italy, upon hearing of Renesmee, are coming to Forks en masse to kill her as an abomination...setting up a giant confrontation between the Cullens and their allies and the enemy...

Whew, this should help me a little when my memory of this series begins to cloud again.  I didn't watch the movies, but maybe I'll try out Twilight whenever it's on TV.  Throughout the series I had a big problem with Bella's desire to become a vampire, but hey, this more than everything is a teenage romance series, so love and hormones rule supreme here...

Weekly Short Stories: 1969 Science Fiction, Part 1

If 1968 was a tough year for me growing up, 1969 was even tougher...I was going through all the trauma and turmoil of early adolescence, twelve going on thirteen, and both my peers and the authority figures around me let me down pretty badly...I'll just let that go for now.  In science fiction, though, the short stories were good, and today I'm reviewing the first three from the anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1970, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, and covering the previous year's output. Actually, that third story below is a novella, which accounts for the fact that I'm only reviewing three.  Here they are...

A MAN SPEKITH by Richard Wilson

A moderately successful disc jockey gets hired by a company with space connections and finds himself alone in orbit on a spacecraft with an advanced computer for company when the Earth simply rips itself apart one day, killing everybody...except our hero.  He continues along, putting out an audio journal describing his ongoing feelings and memories of his former life and doomed planet.  Meanwhile the computer has its own narrative going on as it describes some facets of the circumstances unavailable to the isolated DJ, who is unaware of its existence.  The story's resolution is one of the best I've read in a while...  

AFTER THE MYTHS WENT HOME by Robert Silverberg

Around the year 12,240 the highly technologically advanced humans on Earth have discovered ways to call up famous figures from the past, but eventually they get tired of listening to Churchill and Einstein and they devise a way to call up all the old gods.  If the god in question has his or her roots in a real person, then they will cast a certain aura about them...surprisingly all of them do, but the jaded people of our future, full of their own self-sufficiency and luxury, grow bored of them as well and send them all back after only about fifty years.  Not wise, considering what happens next...

DEATH BY ECSTASY by Larry Niven

In this novella Niven saw ahead to the time when organ transplants would be commonplace, extending people's lives and paradoxically causing life to be valued less since people's healthy bodies had become economic commodities...organized crime gets in on the act and people are kidnapped in order for their organs to be harvested.  An investigator, formerly a miner in the Asteroid Belt, finds that one of his old buddies has died on Earth of an apparent suicide due to current addiction.  Knowing that his old friend would never do such a thing, he undercovers a major scam.  Current addiction is something the author brings up in his 1979 novel The Ringworld Engineers, and he imbues the protagonist and his helper with specific psychic abilities, crucial to the story's outcome.  I enjoyed Niven's story here more than his longer works...

Next week I continue my look at short science fiction from 1969...

Game of the Week: Jeopardy!

 

Jeopardy!, my all-time favorite television game show, is still on the air despite the recent tragic passing of its long-time host Alex Trebek from pancreatic cancer.  It's not the host, though...although I liked Trebek...that attracts me to Jeopardy!.  After all, for several years of my childhood from the mid-sixties into the early seventies, I used to enjoy watching it when Art Fleming hosted it.  It's essentially a trivia game between three contestants who have already been prescreened to demonstrate that they're not complete dunces.  Each round...there are two in each game...consists of six categories of topics, each with five answers of increasing monetary value.  The questions read as "answers" to which a contestant must formulate the appropriate question.  For example, an "answer" might be shown as "The most prevalent element in Earth's atmosphere" to which the correct question would be "What is nitrogen?". After the main part of the show is over there is a final Jeopardy answer for which the contestants wager in advance however much they want to from the money they've accumulated so far...the total money winner at the end gets to continue playing in the next episode.  It's fun for me to see how much I know and how I match up with the contestants...there are definitely some categories for which I am pretty ignorant!  For the past few weeks on the show's current run they have been featuring guest hosts, but I usually only have the opportunity to view it Saturday evenings, and at that time they're almost always showing reruns from when Trebek was hosting it.  May Jeopardy! endure for many more years and maintain its present dignified format and tone.  I've written about this show a couple of times in the past on this blog: click on the title to read the article: Jeopardy Wagering Strategies (8/3/14) and Quote of the Week...from Alex Trebek (11/13/20)....

Just Finished Reading The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury, from 1929, is probably the most famous of American writer William Faulkner's novels.  Set as usual in a fictional locale within his home state of Mississippi, the story is presented from four separate viewpoints: Benjy, Quentin, Jason...brothers within the Compson family...and a third-person narration at the end very similar to Faulkner's style in the three other novels of his that I have read so far.  Three of the parts are set within a three-day period of April, 1928 while Quentin's necessarily goes back much further, to 1910 when he was attending college.  Through the "stream of consciousness" lenses of the three brothers...and finally through that of the "impartial" narrator...the reader supposedly can piece together the puzzle of what's really going on in their lives and their family: good luck with that!  Benjy is a severely intellectually-challenged man who sees everything literally, with his emotions springing up spontaneously in reaction.  Quentin is, on the other hand, intellectual and sensitive, spending much of his thoughts reliving past moments of his life and agonizing over them.  Jason is more, I believe, like most of us: rooted in the real moment like Benjy, but putting his own cynical editorial stamp on everything and everyone around him while excusing his own questionable behavior as a matter of habit.  The central character, Caddie...sister to these three brothers...gets no narration but is revealed by the attitudes of her siblings.  Family honor, apparently a big thing within Southern white families of slaveholding lineage, gets a lot of treatment here as Caddie's mother feels scandalized by her daughter first becoming pregnant out of wedlock and then being abandoned by her husband.  Benjy is unaware of any of this and only wants his sister back, Quentin feels extreme guilt and personalizes it all, and Jason scorns and ostracizes his sister while secreting away the support payments she makes for her daughter, also named Quentin.  It's a pretty big mess with a lot of miserable people stuck in their own heads...the mother is a perennial, manipulative hypochondriac and causes much of the family division.  Only Caddie and the Compsons' black employees and family seem to think rationally and act in a socially functional manner.  I was fascinated with how Faulkner used this stream of consciousness approach to divide the population into these three types: the literalist Benjy, the neurotic, fantasizing Quentin, and the cynical, rationalizing Jason.  And then then there is Dilsey, the family's housekeeper and her own family's matriarch, who is the one unrecognized person in the story who keeps both the Compsons and her own together and functioning. In the first two narratives the reader finds himself often instantly transported back and forth in time as the protagonists relive moments from their pasts...Jason's, though, as I earlier said, is rooted in the present real world (of 1928).  The Sound and the Fury is loaded with racism and racist epithets...not from Faulkner's beliefs, but rather from the characters and social climate he tried to realistically depict  from life in rural Mississippi in the early twentieth century.  If you can get past all the "N" words...and it can get overbearing at times...this novel might provide an interesting reading challenge...

Great Old TV Episodes...from Sesame Street

ABOVE IT ALL and GROUCH GROCERY STORE  were my two most favorite segments from the long-running children's series Sesame Street.  These weren't technically "episodes" in the classic sense but were features within the show's often chaotic-seeming sequence as it would progress each day.  Above it All is a short cartoon animated by Sally Cruikshank and first appearing on the show in 1988 (episode 2559).  A bespectacled female lizard/alligator spins the little propeller on her hat and joyfully flies over the land and sea, musically pointing out all the creatures and things below her...until she looks up and discovers she's "below" as well, this time to a friendly bird!   Grouch Grocery Store was in episode 2937 (1992)...Gordon and his son Miles go down into the garbage can with Oscar to see how a Grouch grocery store is run...to side-splitting results.  "This" Gordon, a character played over the years by different actors, puts in a great comedic performance with his exasperation over the Grouch store clerk's antics, including demanding their party take a number...which turns out to be the same one he's handed out to everyone else in the store!  I first saw Above It All in a re-airing in the early 1990s, coinciding in general time with Grouch Grocery Store and my son Will's toddler years.  I never watched Sesame Street until I had kids (I was a teen when it first aired)...I guess that's the way it for folks in general, sharing childlike things with our own children...

The "Shoe on Other Foot" and "What Goes Around" Arguments in Politics

Political nearsightedness is running rampant in our America of recent years, and at no time has it been more on display than in the last few months.  It seems that the overwhelming majority of politicians in Washington speak and act as if their ruling side will be in power forever and that any election or piece of legislation has catastrophic, world-ending consequences if it doesn't completely go their way...and of course the "other side" is run by corrupt extremists.  People-at-large have their own legitimate political orientations, and they usually subscribe to either the conservative, Republican camp or the liberals, with the Democrats as their group.  It would help all of us, regardless of what we want to see done...or not done...in Washington, to realize that the two parties go back and forth between being in power or in opposition every few years or so.  Losing a round of elections isn't the end of the world...unless you're talking about an authoritarian, ultra-narcissistic sore loser like Donald Trump, who has still refused to concede the 2020 election to the winner, Joe Biden.  On January 6th some two thirds of the Republican House representatives rose up in opposition to officially counting the Pennsylvania presidential election results, which Biden won fair and square.  That's far beyond a simple show of protest and portends a future in which possibly a party holding majority power in Congress can undo a national election that the other party's candidate won...and it could happen as soon as 2025 if the Republicans win back the White House in a close contest and the Democrats still run the House and Senate.  It would help if each of us stood back and took the long view on things, considering what it would be like if the shoe instead were on the other foot and it was the Democrats objecting to a free and fair result last November that handed Trump reelection.  Precedent is a very big thing in politics and the Republican grandstanding over the 2020 election is a very bad one.  Other bad precedents that ignore the "shoe on the other foot" and "what goes around comes around" principles have been the removal in the United States Senate of 60-vote thresholds to advance and confirm presidents' nominations, the Democrats starting it in 2014 and the Republicans extending it to Supreme Court nominees in 2017.  Now talk is about for the Democrats to end the legislative filibuster, something that Republican Leader Mitch McConnell resisted doing while Trump was president and his party controlled the Senate.  I say keep things the way they are...what good is it to pass a bunch of controversial bills on 51-vote majorities and then have them automatically reversed when the other party gets into power as soon as 2-4 years later?  Better to work on and achieve compromises on legislation between the two sides that will stand for years, something the Democrats are sadly skirting with this COVID relief bill they are currently forcing through by means of a convoluted legislative process called budget reconciliation, and something that the Republicans tried when they attempted a few years ago to end Obamacare (failed) and pushed a huge tax reform bill (passed).  The notion of packing the Supreme Court by adding four new seats to give the more liberal wing 7-6 majority status is another bad, bad idea doomed to backfire.  Again, what goes around comes around...

Quote of the Week...from Madeleine L'Engle

You have to write the book that wants to be written.  And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.                                       ---Madeleine L'Engle

I got the above quote by Madeleine L'Engle, who wrote A Wrinkle in Time and other children's books, through an online search for quotes about writing.  There are two components to her quote, one of which is that the sensitive writer will discern needs on the part of the readership that point to a new direction, thereby seeming like a book that wants to be written.  The other component pushes forth the notion that writing about difficult subjects does not automatically translate into writing that is difficult to read.  On the contrary...as L'Engle implies, the writer should put forth his or her agenda in a simple and plain manner and if at all possible let it be expressed through the characters and narrative.  And that sometimes books written for children contain the most potent and significant wisdom: I've certainly discovered this for myself, which is why you'll often find me reviewing books of that genre.  So write the book that needs to be written and please go easy on the reader, who has already signaled a personal commitment of their own time (and often expense) by simply picking up your book and opening it...

Filled in Gaps on My Reading List by Rereading Patterson and Grafton Novels

While I was compiling my reading list for the past few years, I came across a couple of obvious gaps with long-running series by authors James Patterson and Sue Grafton.  The first, Patterson's Women's Murder Club series that he co-authored with other writers, progressively goes up the number scale with its titles, while the late Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone mystery series did the same with the letters of the alphabet: I was missing the "4th" and "B" books respectively although I knew I had already read them, so I just finished rereading both and here are my reactions...

In 4th of July, written by Patterson and Maxine Paetro, San Francisco police investigator Lindsay Boxer finds herself confronted with two different series of brutal killings...upon discovering the perpetrators of the first, she and her partner Jacobi are gunned down when they carelessly shoulder their guns while assisting two teenager suspects out of the car they were in on a high-speed pursuit and crash.  Both good guys recover, but Lindsay finds herself on the end of a massive lawsuit from the father of the girl whom Lindsay had to shoot dead in self-defense...this subplot continues throughout the story as she discovers that a earlier cold case seems to be repeating itself in other grisly homicides involving apparently harmless, affluent suburban couples in the area. The story culminates in the resolution of both the lawsuit and that murder case. And I don't know why I never got around to writing a review of it earlier...

The same feeling came to me after rereading Sue Grafton's "B' is for Burglar...no earlier mention of it in my blog archives, but I definitely did read it back then.  Kinsey Millhone is a twice-divorced 32 year old private detective, formerly a cop in Santa Teresa, California where she still lives and works.  An affluent woman commissions her to find her missing sister Elaine in order to obtain a signature releasing inheritance money from a recently deceased relative...seems pretty routine, but Kinsey soon discovers her object has disappeared off the planet, leading her to visit a second home in Boca Raton, Florida while the apartment next to Elaine's back in California, where a burglary-turned-murder had occurred just a few months before, keeps increasing in significance.  With this reading I was brought back to Kinsey's fictional home town with her 80+ year old landlord/baker/crossword puzzle creator Henry Pitts, her assorted routines including her morning three-mile jogs on the beach, Rosie's nearby restaurant where the owner cooks up wild, scary Hungarian dishes, and a budding off-and-on romance with Jonah Robb, a local cop.  Naturally, I had read this book before so the ending wasn't a surprise when I went through it again...but it was fun reading anyway.  Now excuse me while I go back on my blog to last month's cumulative reading list and fill in a couple of gaps: Lindsay and Kinsey in California....

Weekly Short Stories: 1968 Science Fiction, Part 4

This week I finish my look back at 1968 regarding science fiction short stories, reviewing the final four from the anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1969, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr and covering their favorites from the preceding year. As for me, 1968 was a troubling year to live through (I was 11-12 years old) and I don't miss it a bit...but it's still fun looking back and muse over the memories, both good and bad.  That year was also the very first presidential election I followed, and from early in the primary season at that.  President Johnson, anticipating an easy road to the nomination, was stunned early by challenger antiwar senator Eugene McCarthy (my mom's favorite) in the New Hampshire Primary, Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy, and LBJ suddenly decided he wasn't running for president again, opening up the Democratic field.  On the Republican side Richard Nixon, with his secret plan for ending the Vietnam War while emphasizing law and order, was the clear favorite with Nelson Rockefeller challenging him from the party's liberal wing and Ronald Reagan jumping into the race late. Meanwhile, segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace ran a populist third party race, with Nixon squeaking out a close win over eventual Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, on election night.   But enough of that: here are those stories...

TOTAL ENVIRONMENT by Brian W. Aldiss

This is more of a novella than a short story and is one of those peculiar ones set in a future which is now our receding past: the year 2000.  Total Environment is a unique project, located in India, set up ostensibly to study the effects of overpopulated, cramped living conditions and their long-term effects on individuals and societies...but the real reason is to ascertain whether such conditions would develop physic abilities in people.  The protagonist is an investigator sent to live in Total Environment, set in a massive tower housing generations of unbelievably cramped people of multiple generations since 1975.  Aldiss makes some interesting suppositions about humanity and overcrowding here as well as comparing the Eastern mindset with that of the West... 

THE SQUARE ROOT OF BRAIN by Fritz Leiber

Two unnamed individuals, simply referred to as the Modest Young Man and the Undistinguished Old Man, attend a party full of guests espousing their own imagined paranormal and cosmic connections and powers...our two protagonists are polite but aren't buying into it all. At the end they leave the gathering and reveal to the reader who they really are...didn't surprise me.  The author interspersed this story with dubious clips from the Universal American Encyclopedia that provides its own version of misinformation.  It's all about how society fills itself with a lot of false crap masquerading as factual truth...gee, that sounds like today, doesn't it...

STARSONG by Fred Saberhagen

I've reviewed recently three other Saberhagen short stories (Fortress Ship, The Life Hater and Masque of the Red Shift) from his Berserker series of tales involving an ancient fleet of automated warships that prey upon humanity as it reaches out in exploration and settlement throughout the galaxy.  The concept here seems to have be adopted in an original Star Trek episode as well as Star Trek: the Next Generation's Borg invaders.  In Starsong the Berserkers have taken existing human captives and plugged their nervous systems into their own machines...the extent of their grotesque atrocities become revealed when Earth forces taken over one of their key installations.  Here is the tragic story of a young married couple: the wife carelessly exposes herself to capture by the foe...the newlywed husband who pursues her into enemy space is a famous lyricist and singer... 

FEAR HOUND by Katherine MacLean

In a future New York an organization called the Rescue League is dedicated to finding powerful psychic people called Archetypes...capable of unconsciously influencing the masses around them...who are in dire personal trouble.  The city of late seems inexplicably weighed down by fear and anxiety, and Ahmet, the league's best agent, takes on his new partner as the two hunt for who's causing the disturbance.  A pretty cool premise for a story...and for a series, for that matter: it would have translated well on TV.  I enjoyed reading about various sections of Manhattan I traveled through back in 2010...

Next week I begin examining science fiction short stories from the year 1969...

Game of the Week: Flag Football

My exposure to the game of football as a kid...and after that I never played it...was in elementary and high school when we would play it as flag football in physical education class (or "recess" as they called it in the younger years).  Unlike tackle football with players geared up wearing pads and protective helmets designed to shield them from hits and tackles, flag football removes most of that hard contact as each player wears a belt around their waist, with a long, removable plastic strip attached by Velcro on each hip.  During any play in the game, any player holding the ball can then be brought "down" by pulling off one of his or her flags. The only actual instruction I ever received in football at school happened during our opening session at Nova Elementary School in the 4th grade in the late summer of 1965 when our P.E. teacher, Mr. Tilton, gave the assembled boys a brief clinic on how to punt a football.  Nothing about the actual rules of the game, which to me would have helped since I had never played it before...coaches in classes like these tended to show off a kind of phony bravado, acting all military-like and presuming everyone in the class was an athlete already well-versed in whatever activity was on the agenda (and if you were weren't athletically inclined then you were a nobody).  Although I was one of the fastest runners around and NEVER dropped a football when it was passed or kicked to me, I rarely got to be a receiver, instead being repeatedly told to "block" on each offensive play.  So I quickly became a preferred defensive player since that part of the game placed fewer limitations on what I could do with my talents...I tended to be a team leader in "tackles", i.e. pulling off the opponent's flag...often by simply chasing down whoever had the ball...and was known to stand in the way and intercept passes as well.  Since kids tend to cheat and contest calls, I'm glad we played flag football instead of the touch variety, which involved the defensive player having to place a hand on each of the ball carrier's hips to bring him down...enforcing such a rule without an third party referee constantly monitoring the action and calling each play would have required more of a sense of honor than many kids had (and probably still don't as adults).  I looked for photos off the Internet I could include here of flag football, but they seem to mostly be of "official" looking games with stripe-suited officials and uniformed teams on yard-marked fields...I never played any football game on such a level.  The last time I played a flag football game was in September, 1973 in a high school P.E. class...I had caught a pass and was running for a touchdown when the desperate defender pushed me down from behind when he saw he couldn't get to my flag in time. I fell on my hands which miraculously weren't broken, but I never returned to play this game that could have been fun had the players not acted like such jerks...

My February 2021 Running Report

For February I ran a total of 97 miles, missing two days of running in the month with 4.8 miles being my longest single run.  With walking I also covered 97 miles...probably a bit more but that's what I actually measured.  This past month has seen me continue in my holding pattern regarding my running, and it's due to the continuing COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions around us...resulting in the lack of public races that are usually scheduled this time of year.  And that includes Gainesville's big February long-distance running extravaganza: LifeSouth's Five Points of Life marathon, half-marathon and 5K events.  Maybe if things go well they'll hold it once again starting in 2022, but I've found no reference to any such plans while searching the Internet.  In any event I'm hopeful that toward the end of this year we'll see those restrictions ease up along with the danger of the disease.  I'm also looking forward to visiting my local gym...when they reopened last year following the spring lockdown I went a couple of times but was dismayed at the crowding and lack of distancing between cardio machines...and that's not cool.  I'm thinking of once again going out weekends around my neighborhood and the adjacent ones on long, slow runs just to have regular long-distance running experiences...the courses are already laid out for me.  March should be interesting.  Speaking of LifeSouth, the chief nonprofit organization around here for blood collection, yesterday I donated blood...for the first time ever...which accounts for one of my two non-running days of the month (they discourage exercise for 24 hours after a donation).  I'll be getting some feedback in the next few days about my blood type, cholesterol, and whether or not I have antibodies for COVID...still haven't yet had access to a vaccine...