Walked Gainesville's Depot Parkrun 5K This Morning

2024 has developed into a very trying, tragic year for me and my family.  Melissa was diagnosed in May with an aggressive variant of breast cancer.  Although she was blessed with a speedy early diagnosis and the surgery performed on the 30th that month removed the cancerous tumor (and presumably the cancer from her body), she is now on a succession of difficult chemotherapy cycles that will last into the fall...followed by radiation treatments.  In the midst of all this my dear son, Will, died on July 18th...nine days ago.  So with our bereavement for Will and my care for Melissa, my normal, routine existence to which I had grown accustomed has been drastically altered.  But some things can still be done and it's a healthy thing, I think, to continue with the Depot Parkrun I had been doing regularly before all this hit us.  This morning it was 73 degrees with 100% humidity...but clear skies...and I had already planned on speed-walking the 3.1-mile course through pretty Depot Park, some four blocks south of downtown Gainesville.  The goal was simply to walk as fast as I could and to keep some semblance of proper race-walking form.  The spirit among the volunteers and runners/walkers seemed very positive, and that was a help to me.  I sweated a bit from the walk after it ended, but wasn't even remotely tired...my finishing time was 38:19, some 30 seconds faster than my previous best 5K speed-walk.  You can read the results by clicking HERE.  Next month...although not next week...I'd like to continue this helpful habit with another summertime speed-walk at the park...

For My Dear Son Will

My dear son Will passed away at his home this past Thursday.  I miss him so much. He was the kindest, most generous person I've ever known...and he was my son.  What a blessing, and what a terrible loss, as if someone came along and cut out a huge part of my life.  This wound I know will be with me throughout my life, or at least its scars on my soul.  I will always treasure the memory of Will, from his birth in 1990, childhood, and as a wonderful and deeply caring, responsible adult.  God bless you, my dear, sweet Will, and may you enjoy His peace...

Family Tragedy, Blog Interruption

A tragedy occurred in my family today, the loss of a dear life close to me.  I am beside myself in grief and don't feel it appropriate to elaborate any further in this matter.  At the same time, I don't see how continuing to put out daily blog articles about various topics for public reading is appropriate, either.  Yet I want to maintain my daily writing habit throughout this sad and distressing season.  So I am making this blog...hopefully temporarily...only available to read by myself, the author.  I know of some dear regular readers and I regret this action for both their and my sake, especially the one who is so kind with her comments.  So, for a season of time you will not be able to read this blog.  Hopefully, though, when and if I think it's time to resume its public availability, I intend to return, along with a backlog of dated material to read...

Weekly Short Stories: 1997 Science Fiction, Part 4

It's time for another weekly look at science fiction short fiction that appears in the series The Year's Best Science Fiction, edited by the late Gardner Dozois.  The year in focus is 1997 and the specific volume is titled Fifteenth Annual Collection.  My local public library doesn't have this series for checkout and to buy them hard-copy would be way too cumbersome since there are a lot of them in the series and each one is pretty thick.  So the advance of Kindle has really helped me in this ongoing project: I have all fifteen of the first books in the series with easy digital access, and I can read stories conveniently at different opportune moments during my day.  But let's now delve into the next three stories...

ITSY BITSY SPIDER by James Patrick Kelly

The setting is the year 2038...only 14 years from now but 41 from when this story was published.  A woman visits the father who abandoned her in her childhood many years before, full of bitterness at him but feeling responsible to her recently deceased mother, who inexplicably maintained some affection toward him and bequeathed him some money.  At his home she encounters a robot girl who looks and sounds uncannily like she did as a little girl.  As she talks with her long-lost deadbeat dad, who has declined cognitively, she realizes why his robot assistant/caretaker is the way she is...and why her mother wanted her to see him.  I wonder how close we'll be to this scenario with AI when 2038 gets here...

A SPY IN EUROPA by Alastair Reynolds

Off in the reasonably distant future when the solar system has been settled and humans genetically transformed to adapt to different environments, the balance of power has shifted from Earth to the outer planets...mainly Jupiter...as two competing factions based on moons Europa and Ganymede play a life-and-death struggle to dominate the other.  A spy from the latter is sent to pick up special information from an agent they planted in Europa...lots of crazy plot twists and double-crossings here, enough to make my head spin.  And a bit of hard sci-fi, especially with regard to biology, is thrown in for good measure...

THE UNDISCOVERED by William Sanders

An alternative history story has William Shakespeare one night fleeing pursuers in London while drunk.  He finds a ship and climbs aboard to sleep it off and then discovers the next day he's on the high seas, headed for what would become America.  This story is told from the vantage point of a Cherokee leader who befriends Shakespeare...now a slave won from another tribe in a skirmish.  The language barriers are immense, but the two reach a basic level of communication and Spear-Shaker, as he is called, even stages a play with the community actively participating.  A funny story, but ultimately I failed to see where the author, a Cherokee himself, was getting at other than maybe showing how crazy they thought white people were...no argument from me...

Next week: more sci-fi adventures originally published in 1997...

Just Finished Reading You Like It Darker by Stephen King (Part 2)

Below are my reactions to the final six tales appearing in the recently published short story and novella collection by Stephen King titled You Like It Darker.  Overall, I was very impressed by this effort of his...

RED SCREEN (short story)

A New York City detective is investigating a man's murder of his wife, who he claims was no longer in her body and had been taken over by an alien.  The suspect further elaborates that he knew of this extraterrestrial conspiracy by going on the Dark Web, and that a spouse's nit-picking, nagging behavior is a sign of being possessed.  The detective returns home to his own wife, who recently has been stepping up her own nagging of him: guess where this goes...

THE TURBULENCE EXPERT (short story)

A man seems to be in a special "black ops" organization, going on special assignments that seem to carry some extremely unpleasant and scary elements with them while he enjoys special privileges and amenities from the "organization".  With great trepidation he boards a passenger jet flight, and as it goes into extreme turbulence he knows he is about to die...and reveals the reason for his job in the first place.  I thought the story's premise was extremely cool and it was one of my favorites in the collection...

LAURIE (short story)

After an elderly Floridian man's wife dies of brain cancer, his rather pushy-but-well-meaning sister gets him a dog to care for, against his wishes. Gradually he warms up to Laurie's presence although the pooch seems to have some difficulties with her "toilet training".  One day he and Laurie are out on a walk and encounter a big, mean old gator in the worst way.  A "man's best friend" story where Lassie descends into the Twilight Zone...

RATTLESNAKES (novella)

Related in setting to King's Duma Key novel and plot and characters to his Cujo work, this novella provides closure to the trials undergone in that latter book by characters Donna and Victor Trent...and their son Tad.  In Rattlesnakes, it is several decades gone by and Victor, alone now, is staying on a southwest Florida key at his friend's for a while.  He encounters a woman who is always pushing a stroller with the empty clothes of her long-diseased twin boys, who died from rattlesnake bites some forty years before.  Victor soon discovers that the "boys" aren't exactly gone, and they've decided they just might like to hang out with him...

THE DREAMERS (novella)

A celebration of sorts of the writing style of H.P. Lovecraft, a reclusive amateur scientist hires as his assistant and stenographer an embittered Vietnam veteran to investigate different experimental subjects for their dreams after placed under hypnosis.  Need I say that the experiment goes horribly awry?  The experiment goes horribly awry...

THE ANSWER MAN (novella)

This is the story of a man's life, a New Englander who is just on the verge in pre-World War II America of making crucial decisions about his upcoming marriage and where they will live.  While driving he encounters a roadside man who dubs himself "The Answer Man"...with the answers he gets, our protagonist then plunges into the war and beyond, only to encounter the Answer Man decades later...and with a different set of answers.  I loved the tail ending of this story, which I think was probably the best one of the twelve in the collection...

Just Finished Reading You Like It Darker by Stephen King (Part 1)

You Like It Darker, published just a couple of months ago, is Stephen King's latest collection of novellas (5) and short stories (7).  I just finished reading it, and I'm happy to report that he hasn't lost a bit of his touch when it comes to spinning a good yarn.  His writing, to me, is so far and above that of the science fiction authors featured in Gardner Dozois' annual "best of"  collections.  Below is a list of the first six stories as they appear in the book, followed by brief commentary from me...

TWO TALENTED BASTIDS (novella)

Two rural Maine friends, one a mediocre writer and the other an equally average artist, suddenly find themselves catapulted into fame for their skills and outstanding works...what was the pivotal event changing their lives? As the story progresses, the answer leads to a fateful outing in the woods they experienced.  Ultimately this is a tale about artistic talent...and doing things for their own sake (as I am currently doing)...

THE FIFTH STEP (short story)

A retired widow lives a life of routine in upper Manhattan, regularly taking his morning walk to northern Central Park.  One day he is sitting on a bench there and is annoyed by a young man who sits next to him, and who then begins to explain he is working on his drinking problem with A.A....and could he get help fulfilling Step #5 of the Twelve Step program they have?  Not for the faint at heart, but we are talking about a Stephen King story, right?

WILLY THE WEIRDO (short story)

Willy is a cruel little boy who tortures bugs and likes to look at dead things...he is drawn to his paternal adoptive grandfather, who spins many impossible tales of his experiences in the distant past going back to the US Civil War at Gettysburg and even to Cleopatra's time.  The ending makes you wonder about the people among us...well, not really... 

DANNY COUGHLIN'S BAD DREAM (novella)

The longest story in the book, Danny Coughlin is a custodian at a Kansas high school who has a recurring, horrible dream of a remote, abandoned gas station and a corpse's arm sticking out of the ground, with a feral dog going after it.  His pursuit of the mystery leads him to become the chief suspect of a grisly murder, and the chief inspector, patterned after Victor Hugo's Javert in Les Miserables, just won't let up on his persecution.  A story more about fickle human nature than a murder mystery...didn't change my mind about how people generally are...

FINN (short story)

A boy seems destined to live a life of bad luck...one improbable disaster after another.  Then, as his fortunes are apparently beginning to change, he has his own doubts that things are really going to improve. I thought the story was a bit incomplete and could have closed a little more clearly, but that's just my take...

ON SLIDE INN ROAD (short story) 

A great character study on the people in a family, three generations of them, as they visit the grandfather's sister who is dying from cancer.  The father is embarrassed by his irreverent father, but his son respects him and is interested in his baseball talk.  The car lands in a ditch, where a gruesome sight is witnessed by the little boy...and then they run into some very unsavory dudes and true character and courage is revealed among the family members...

Tomorrow I'll continue with my discussion of Stephen King's new book, covering the six remaining stories...

About the Summer Olympics and How I See the Various Sports

The Summer Olympics will be beginning in Paris, France on July 26, lasting into the first couple of weeks in August.  I've watched some of the American qualifying trials in various sports, and have found that they can be divided in three different ways.  First of all, there are the sports that are objectively scored...races of all sorts like swimming, running and walking get specific finishing times that rank the contestants.  Others like jumping and throwing get minutely-measured distances to their credit.  Then there are the events that, like America's Got Talent, require a panel of judges to deliver the scores subjectively...gymnastics, diving, and synchronized swimming belong to this group.  Since many of the first type have special limiting rules requiring judges at them (walking and special swim-stroke races), we see a mixture of the two types there.  The second way they are divided is into individual and team events.  Sports like soccer, water polo, field hockey, basketball and baseball all are heavily dependent on that subjective judging element yet ultimately come down to which side has the most goals or runs.  The third way the Olympic events are divided is a bit more subtle, but in my opinion just as important.  Some events have a widespread following and participation aspect to them: soccer, basketball, running, and jumping are in this group.  Others, like gymnastics, swimming, race-walking, water polo, and golf...to mention just a few...are either not very popular among the masses, are relatively exclusive to more privileged elements of society, or require fashioned settings not available in many places.  To get that gold medal can have different meanings based on whether the winner was raised in a "privileged" sport without much competition, or maybe the sport is so unknown and unpracticed that this limited the degree of competition as well.  But my big problem in all this is that first division, between subjectively and objectively-scored sports.  In the trials I tended to avoid sports like diving and gymnastics for this very reason.  I'll probably follow whatever happens to be on TV at the time when the Games begin, but my clear preference will be for the sports that (1) are objectively scored, (2) are individual in nature, and (3) have been popular with widespread availability.  And oh, by the way, I'm no flag-waver...I'm eschewing nationalism although if the US wins, that's cool, too..

Some Running, Walking...and Weather...Talk

I skipped the Depot Parkrun 5K again this morning...just wasn't feeling all that well, and to tell the truth, getting off from work at 10 pm the night before doesn't exactly predispose me to getting up early the next morning!  But since I don't run in order to race...it's the other way around...the rest of today is open for me to do just that.  On a related note, I've been noticing the excruciatingly hot temperatures elsewhere in the United States over the past week, and I just have to chuckle to myself at the notion I had once entertained of bypassing Florida's summer heat by signing up for a July or August long distance race somewhere up north...I remember one held in scenic western Wyoming.  Well, that place...among others...is currently deep into a severe heat wave that would make us down south feel like we're in air conditioning by contrast.  Weather does what it wants to do, and where and when it wants to do it.  Of course, human-caused climate change isn't helping any.  But returning to running, I was planning to walk that race earlier today, and would like to get in some practice with that as well.  I'm starting a new daily regimen...weather be damned...of walking the .7 mile loop around the block my house is on and recording the time.  I speed-walked (for me) the first one yesterday at a time of 8 minutes 47 seconds, and plan to try it again today, rain, snow, sleet, hurricane, heat wave, torrential flood notwithstanding.  The idea behind this is to continue to gradually improve my walking form to make the motions more efficiently and to accustom myself to the kind of exertion I experience while running...

Quote of the Week...from Ron Desantis

I think the country's on the wrong track.                  Ron Desantis

And I think that regardless of which major political party you're looking at, the most popular figures within are bound to be tagged with the label "divisive" by their opponents, and our Florida governor Ron Desantis certainly fits the bill there.  When he successfully ran for that office in 2018 and reelection in 2022, I voted against him both times.  The last was primarily as a reaction to what I considered his failure to adequately protect the population of this state, which has a heavy demographic tilt toward susceptible elderly people, from the COVID pandemic that ravaged the state.  Yet I haven't always agreed with the opinions and actions of the politicians I've supported over the years, and I believe that Desantis is a decent, intelligent man who has a kind of integrity and character to his personality that would better suit him as his party's presidential standard bearer than the jerk currently running the show over there.  Also, he is very good at getting his points across lucidly...in contrast to our also decent...but declining...president.  This isn't a campaign ad for Ron Desantis, and if Donald Trump inexplicably picks him as his vice-president running mate for 2024 I'll be voting against him for the third time.  But if Desantis were the one residing in the Oval Office, I'd feel the country would be on a better track than it would be with the Orange dude in there....

Podcaster's Time Management Strategy

I've written in the past about Rob Dial's Mindset Mentor podcast, and the various topics he's presented regarding personal development.  Sometimes he's on point and sometimes not...and I'm finding more and more that he's repeating the same things that I've heard in the past.  That last thing is something I would have expected and embrace...at least in the areas that resonate with me.  And time management is one of these.  The other day he broke down his strategy of managing a day in his own life with four key points: mastering one's to-do list, mastering one's schedule, employing the Pomodoro Technique of 25 minutes focused work on ONE thing with 5 minutes rest, and then reviewing the day at the end.  I tried it the other day and pleasantly discovered that I was actually getting ahead of my plans, finishing tasks earlier than expected.  Yesterday I didn't do it and...it didn't work out so well.  Everyone's different and I doubt that Rob Dial would even recognize my own interpretation of his suggestions...I always take what he says with a grain of salt: I think he'd like that...

Weekly Short Stories: 1997 Science Fiction, Part 3

It's once again that time of week when I discuss what I've been reading in the world of short fiction. I'm currently going through the year 1997 and the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Fifteenth Annual Collection, highlighting the genre from that year. As has been the case in this series, Dozier as editor shows a predilection for longer "short stories" and novellas. Here are my reactions to the next two appearing in the book...

WE WILL DRINK A FISH TOGETHER by Bill Johnson

This is a quirky alien contact story set in, of all places, Indian country in South Dakota. The high-level human security officer, originally from that culture, is assigned to protect the alien ambassador to Earth.  He has a conflict of interest...his brother has died and he decides to quit rather than miss his funeral and burial. It's all about keeping true to one's "line", and the story gets further complicated when the wolverine-looking ambassador shows up at his local bar. A fun read...

ESCAPE ROUTE by Peter F. Hamilton

Full of impressive "hard" science fiction technical talk, this novella is set far in the future when humanity, still prone to war, oppression, capitalism and rebellion, has reached out and settled (and exploited) other star systems.  An enterprising private starship captain takes on a special collaboration with some shady characters to harvest precious metals ..and discovers an ancient alien outpost. Full of intrigues and plot twists, this story...in my humble opinion...tried to do a little too much...

Next week I plan to continue with sci-fi from '97..

Listened to a Couple of This Year's Albums...by The Smile and Green Day

After writing on yesterday's article about how I wanted to check out some of this year's music, I started out by listening to The Smile's Wall of Eyes album.  The Smile is for all practical purposes a kind of Radiohead band, with that group's Jonny Greenwood and vocalist Thom Yorke teaming up with drummer Tom Skinner to produce what is essentially Radiohead music.  Greenwood wanted to produce more material and his original band was going too slow...hence The Smile.  Two songs I liked a lot from Wall of Eyes: I Quit and Read the Room.  The other album I began listening to was from another, more established trio: the punk rock Green Day's Savior, and its opening track is a piece I've already heard: The American Dream is Killing Me.  It's refreshing to hear good old fashioned rock with the heavy guitar riffs and Billy Joe Armstrong's trademark working class voice, but the opening lyrics for that song were especially gripping and true: "The American dream is killing me, the American dream is killing me, when it's all double talk and conspiracy".  The song continues along this line, spelling out a grim assessment of where people in our country have come down to...my instincts tell me, though, that this is a worldwide phenomenon: the insanity has spread!  I didn't care too much, though, for the rest of this album: onward to the next of several from 2024...

Time to Check Out Some Good Music from 2024

After Melissa showed me how I can use our Amazon Prime to get Alexa to play commercially-uninterrupted music on my phone, I've been using most of 2024 so far focusing on my favorite acts, like Radiohead, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, the Who, Regina Spektor, Seals and Crofts, Electric Light Orchestra, Yes, Rush, and Metric...just to name a few.  Should I decide to focus on one artist or group, I can now pretty much listen to their entire discography this way...very convenient.  But one consequence of this great opportunity has been that I haven't exactly been keeping up with music of 2024, that is, songs that will mark this year for me in my memory.  So, it's still July with a lot of time left in '24, and I think I'll check out the new albums released so far by artists I like...should be interesting.  It's worked well for me in the past this way...in 2023 I discovered my favorite songs for that year this way, including my "Song of the Year" for 2023: Oil by Gorillaz.  Time to look for some more musical magic!

Beryl Poised to Hit Texas Coast

At this writing early Sunday evening, Beryl is still a strong tropical storm, predicted to reach minimal hurricane status just before it makes landfall on the Texas coast between Corpus Christi and Galveston early tomorrow morning.  I had written in a previous article that I intended to follow Atlantic tropical storms more this year after it was predicted to be an unusually strong season. Beryl earlier had been a Class 5 Hurricane, attaining at one point sustained 165 mph winds at its center, as it churned westward through the Caribbean.  In its wake Beryl has been blamed for 11 deaths so far, and it caused widespread damage in the West Indies, especially in the Grenadines and Jamaica, before hitting Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and passing through it greatly weakened.  There are predictions of strong storm surge as the storm intensifies and eventually goes ashore.  And then there will be a lot of flooding as Beryl's remnant makes its way inland.  I had the TV on The Weather Channel all day and have enjoyed watching their meteorologists like Paul Goodloe and Molly McCollum...among others...presenting their live reports along various places on the Texas coast, Paul at Rockport and Molly in Corpus Christi...

Difficult, Hilly Course on Recent Melon Run

Not to belabor the point, but that Melon Run at Westside Park on Thursday the Fourth did take a lot out of me, and I was wondering why.  After all, I have been more or less doing 5K runs at Depot Park each week under similar weather conditions.  And then it hit me: of course, the terrain for the Melon Run course is almost constantly sloping, if not outright hilly!  With the finishing time I had under those circumstances, there is no doubt that I doubly exerted myself, much more than with those Depot Park runs.  I'm doing fine now and, although I'm still planning to emphasize more walking in the near future with my races, I know myself well enough to know that I'll probably throw in some runs as well.  But the Dog Days of Summer are definitely here, and I'm definitely grateful for the air conditioning we've been blessed with...

Quote of the Week...from Friedrich Nietzsche

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.                    Friedrich Nietzsche

Once in college I wrote a paper about the great nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.  Before I turned it in, a fellow student who expressed his liking for Nietzsche asked me if he could read it.  Afterwards, he disdainfully handed it back, giving me an unpleasant expression and walking away...I don't think he ever spoke to me again.  I guess I should have been walking when I wrote that paper...but I did at least get a "B" on it, and my teacher stayed on good terms with me.  As for walking, I have gradually come to believe that not only is it good for thinking, but as the ancient Greek health guru Hippocrates once wrote, it is the greatest medicine as well.  I say this as the summer here in northern Florida continues to set new records for combined heat and humidity, and after I ran a blistering three mile race at Gainesville's Westside Park. I probably should have walked it instead, for although I felt fine immediately thereafter, a few hours later my legs were both cramping up awfully and my general recovery was slow.  I think that walking is great, and during the next two months plan to do my outdoor races as a walker, leaving my running during this period confined to the nicely air-conditioned indoors.  Besides walking for sport and exercise, I am also a habitual pacer, going up and down the floor thinking...it's always a good idea to have paper and pen handy when doing this...

Ran the Jack Gamble 3-Mile Melon Run This Morning

As in previous non-pandemic years, the Florida Track Club held its annual Fourth of July Melon Run, recently named in honor of Jack Gamble.  I've run the event three times before, the last one being quite a ways back, in 2016.  It is held at Albert Massey (Westside) Park)...at least that's where the race starts and ends with the course running around the block enclosing the park and then looping eastward down NW 8th Avenue past the uniquely picturesque outdoor planetarium, the walkway through Loblolly Woods Park, west down NW 16th Avenue, and finally returning down NW 31st Drive to the finishing line near the entrance to the park's pool.  Every year at this time the combination of summer temperature and humidity is stifling, and 2024 was no exception: 77 degrees, 94% humidity and 76 degrees dew point...ugh!  I didn't feel all that well this morning and was a little apprehensive about finding a parking space...no need for concern on both accounts: I quickly adjusted to the race and there were plenty of spaces, since I got there in plenty of time.  I started the course, hillier than my normal weekly Depot Parkrun 5K, holding a little back. But after a mile or so I cranked it up and finished strongly with a time of 26:55, better than anticipated.  There were a whopping 307 finishers in this race and the competition was fierce, with some of Gainesville's fastest runners...and walkers...participating.  I'm glad I went...click HERE to see the results...

Weekly Short Stories: 1997 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here is my second weekly installment of brief reviews from the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Fifteenth Annual Collection, featuring the editor's picks of short sci-fi from the year 1997.  During that time I was in my tenth year working for the USPS, and this year happened to be a "kindler and gentler" period in which I was a manual letter clerk, throwing scheme and SCF mail on Tour I...don't worry if you don't know what I'm talking about, most of it is "insider" talk.  Anyway, how about those next stories...

STEAMSHIP SOLDIER ON THE INFORMATION FRONT by Nancy Kress

In this story of how a pervasively digital communications culture takes over a society that thinks itself as "normal", a man whose entire livelihood and relationships are entrenched in being "connected", is concerned about his teenage son, who doesn't seem to have the same inclinations and would rather just sit back and contemplate things.  What young Charlie does know is that his father's information age is about to be transformed into a new one with different priorities. Very applicable to our current times...with our next era hopefully as Charlie has envisioned...

REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL by Greg Egan

This is a great example of hard science fiction, where the story itself introduces the reader into a deeper look at real science, with a consequential deeper understanding of how reality works.  A boy has a brain tumor that causes an unchecked release in his brain of a chemical causing happiness...he is constantly ecstatic even with his state of dire peril.  After the successful operation to remove the tumor, that chemical's production is completely suppressed, leaving him in a chronic state of despair.  After years of this, as a young adult he musters up the courage to undergo a new treatment that could restore his happiness. He now must decide what, in his future, he will choose to be happy about...an intriguing question.  If you could so choose, what would you do? 

MOON SIX by Stephen Baxter

An astronaut on the Moon's surface keeps seeing heat shimmers that transport him to alternate realities with alternate Moons...and alternate human histories.  Two threads wind throughout the story. One is the nature of quantum mechanics and its relationship to alternate worlds...and the author's suggestion that a technology using it could backfire in that regard.  And the second is the massive area on the Moon's surface called Mare Imbrium, and the timing of the asteroid/meteor collision that caused it. I've read a lot of alternate reality stories...this one resonated with me, partially because it alluded to the needless suppression of manned space exploration in recent years as well as how space exploration technology has transformed our world...

Next week: more stories discussed from '97...

Popular Vote Winners in Last Eight Presidential Elections

Here are the popular vote winners in the American presidential elections since 1992.  Since we're supposedly a republic governed by the people's voice in democratic elections and a fair, unbiased system of laws, you might think that our policies and government would reflect the below trend...but you'd be wrong...

1992    DEMOCRAT

1996    DEMOCRAT

2000    DEMOCRAT

2004    REPUBLICAN

2008    DEMOCRAT

2012    DEMOCRAT

2016    DEMOCRAT

2020    DEMOCRAT

Now in 2024, do you think anyone really cares about what is going on in this campaign except within a small number of swing states like Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan and Pennsylvania?  Because of our electoral college system, if you live in California, Texas, Florida or New York...our country's most populous states...no one cares about your opinion.  A losing president can call the chief elections officer of a state he closely lost and ask him to manufacture nonexistent votes to turn the results around, or the losing party can maneuver in states they lost...but legislatively control...to have those legislatures overturn those results.  Who cares what the rest of the country thinks, as long as they get their power.  Of course, as an individual my degree of influence is strictly limited, which is why I haven't been ranting and raving on this blog like others do on their social media outlets.  After all, we now have a Supreme Court that treats one side as its client interest: even if the doddering and incoherent incumbent nobody had a voice in choosing this year as the nominee wins those swing states, will they turn around and negate the results? Democracy is an illusion, both in Russia and now, sadly, here in America.  I have my own life, with the choices I can make that actually have effects on myself and my loved ones...electoral politics provide no hope in that regard...

Strong Hurricane Beryl Crosses West Indies

After seeing the early forecasts for an extremely active, dangerous 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, I decided to be more intentional on the blog with noting them.  Already in June we've had three named storms...Alberto hit Texas earlier with tropical-storm-force winds while causing some flooding in southeastern Texas.  Then Beryl, a trans-Atlantic storm, only a few days ago rapidly intensified into a strong hurricane...at this writing it's passing through the West Indian Grenadines...with Grenada on the south and St. Lucia and St. Vincent to the north...with a tightly wound center harboring maximum sustained winds of 150: a Category 4 storm unseen at this time of year...and its rapid intensification is unprecedented since records have been kept, both for the time of year and for its eastern Atlantic location.  Beryl's projected path currently has it crossing the Caribbean Sea and eventually hitting Mexico in the eastern Yucatan area, our cruise destination back in early March.  Meanwhile, while all the attention was on Beryl, Tropical Storm Chris was named just off the eastern Mexican coast around where Alberto had been, and then promptly moved inland and dissipated.  There's another disturbance, called Invest 96L, in Beryl's former path between it and Africa...it'll probably strengthen as well.  Since the waters down south in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico are all very warm, wind shear and land itself may be the only factors that can weaken these potentially monster storms.  More later...