NBA Needs to Relegate Worst Teams to Preserve Game's Integrity

As I look at the current National Basketball Association standings, with teams having only two-to-four games left to play in the 82-game regular season, I see that there are still a few playoff spots open for contention in both the Eastern and Western Conferences.  In the East we have five teams vying for the last three spots and two in the West competing for the last spot there.  Here they are, as they currently stand, with their win-loss records:

EASTERN CONFERENCE

#6 Milwaukee (39-40)
#7 Boston (37-42) (wins tie-breaker)
#8 Brooklyn (37-42)
#9 Indiana (36-43)
#10 Miami (35-44)

WESTERN CONFERENCE

#8 New Orleans (43-36) (wins tie-breaker)
#9 Oklahoma City (43-36)

Each day, whenever these teams are playing, their scores are significant as to who eventually gets into the playoffs and who has to wait for next year.  However, some of the games they are playing are against teams that have failed miserably this year and have a motivation to lose, not win, since having a worse record will gain them better prospects in the upcoming college draft.  But if the NBA employed a system of relegation and promotion the way that most of the international soccer leagues practice it, they could have a second-tier league to which the worst teams would be relegated (i.e., demoted) while the best finishers in that league would be promoted to the NBA for the following season.  That way, those teams at the bottom of the standings would also have very meaningful games ahead of themselves that they would feel pressure to go all out and win.

Suppose that the two teams in the NBA finishing with the worst win-loss records were relegated to the hypothetical "lower" league...in other words, the teams with the 29th and 30th positions for the league as a  whole.  Then, this is how their situation would present itself as the season draws to a close:

#27 Los Angeles Lakers (21-58)
#28 Philadelphia (18-61)
#29 Minnesota (16-63)
#30 New York (15-64)

Last night, the Lakers played Minnesota and beat them in a meaningless game (except for the draft), 106-98.  But if "my" relegation system was in effect, that game would have had major repercussions as winning it freed Los Angeles from the prospect of being demoted while the Timberwolves, on their way to relegation, could have gotten themselves closer to Philadelphia in the standings had they won. I'm getting tired of seeing teams giving up halfway through the season, even benching their star players.  Not only are their fans being ripped off, but the integrity of the sport is being challenged as the level of competition artificially slackens off with certain teams...  

Once Again Reading Ultramarathon Man by Dean Karnazes

One book that I have read, reread...and keep rereading, since 2010, is Ultramarathon Man by Dean Karnazes.  Karnazes, who goes by the nickname "Karno", just turned 52 and, since he was 30, has been running races longer than the traditional 26.2-mile marathon length: hence the term "ultramarathon".  He's even gone as far as running a 199-mile event, and has ranged from marathons in the Death Valley under intense heat to the frigid cold in a run to the South Pole in Antarctica.  However, I have no intention of emulating his extreme running, either regarding the long distance or the climatic conditions.  But I do want to continue running long distance races like the half-marathon, and eventually get myself back in condition for regular marathons.  I'm having my annual medical check-up in a couple of weeks, and if I get the "thumbs up" from my doctor, I plan to work for the next few months to strengthen my body, lose weight, and increase my running endurance...and then see if I can't handle a marathon this upcoming fall or winter...

I think that's why I like reading Ultramarathon Man so much: it has a positive "can do" type of message to it that is infectious and inspiring...

Facebook As I See It

I have to admit that, although I am technically active in Facebook with a few Facebook friends, I'm not very versatile or prolific about the various forms of posting, such as YouTube or linking from other people's posts.  Nor am I very adept at the quick picture-taking-and-posting from my cell phone that I see so often on this site.  No, I confine my Facebook use to either passively looking at others' posts or putting (usually daily) links to my own personal blog (to which this article belongs).  And I enjoy seeing posts with positive, uplifting messages on them!  However, I see, from time to time, some of the users venting on a more personal level about hardships they are going through, usually either about relationships, health, or money.  That used to bother me more than it does now, but social media like Facebook provide a good emergency outlet for people if they feel the need to call out in distress about troubles they are facing in life.  However, it's important to be careful about using this site to verbally attack others (unless they're critiquing public figures like politicians or entertainers...and even then there has to be some self-restraint). Posting in the middle of extreme anger is probably a bad, bad idea...

Facebook has a feature on it that lets the one who posted an entry know who "liked"  the  posting.  This tends to make it more of a social encouragement  and popularity site, in my opinion.  I'd rather they had an option that users could click on that simply stated that they read my blog articles. Whether the reader agrees or disagrees with me about what I wrote is secondary...I'm more interested in the readership, and I always leave plenty of room for comments, which I welcome...although readers are also welcome to maintain anonymity, if that is what they wish.  If you see Facebook as a site to encourage your friends, then as a Facebook friend please encourage me by reading my blog!

This Blog: 8 Years and 2,522 Posts Later

Today marks the eighth anniversary of the beginning of this blog of mine, on which I have tried, with mixed success, to write something at least on a daily basis.  Sports, news, society, personal, politics, history, languages, weather, memories, running, books I've read, television and radio...these have tended to be the general themes of my articles.  And they're all still there, in the archives on the left side of the page...going back to April 8, 2007.  From time to time I look back on some of my writings and discover that I tend to hold to the opinions I had back then...although sometimes they have changed.  And almost always I'll find a ridiculous spelling or grammatical error I had committed, and correct it...

I do this blog as a personal daily discipline to engage my mind in writing, and I think it has been a very constructive experience.  I encourage others to do the same: there's a lot out there to write about! Since last year I have been placing a link to this blog on Facebook and like to hear when folks have read it, although that's not really necessary.  The main thing is that I engage my brain and write something, silly as it might turn out from time to time...

My Take on This Year's Major League Baseball Season

Last Sunday, the 2015 edition of Major League Baseball began its regular season with the supposedly revamped and drastically improved Chicago Cubs once again stumbling and losing to the St. Louis Cardinals.  Oh well, they have 161 more games to try to pick things up!  The main teams I have decided to follow this year are few in number: just the Florida teams: Tampa Bay Rays and Miami Marlins.  The Rays lost their long-time manager Joe Madden to the Chicago Cubs this year and don't seem, by anyone's estimation, to have any bright prospects this year...most likely they'll finish last.  The Marlins, on the other hand, have been greatly hyped in the media as being an upcoming team that could sneak into the playoffs as a wild card entry.  Who knows what will ultimately happen...we have six full months of games before we'll know how they end up.  I just decided to follow these two, for better or worse, because of the simple fact that reruns of their games will usually be televised after I get home from work a little past midnight.

I did watch some so-called baseball experts on of the sports channels, and they seem to think that Washington, St. Louis, and Los Angeles are the teams to beat in the National League, while Seattle, the Chicago White Sox (?), and a resurgent Boston should prevail in the American.  For me, it seems that Baltimore and Toronto are the best in the American League East while Detroit should win the Central.  The AL West should go to the Los Angeles Angels...who gets the wild card spots for the playoffs is something I'm not ready to predict, for either league.  In the National League, I tend to agree with the "experts" about the divisional winners, except perhaps in the West.  There the Dodgers should face stiff competition from defending World Series champion San Francisco and a new-look San Diego.  It should be an interesting season, but I don't think I'm going to spend as much time and effort following it as I did last year...

One-and-Done Rule Unfairly Exploits Players

According to Frank Deford, the University of Kentucky men's basketball team this 2014-15 season had nine ready-to-go NBA prospects on its roster...meaning that, for all practical purposes, we've had a team in "college" basketball that should have been in a class by itself.  The NCAA rule that a player must spend at least one year in college before turning pro not only creates these artificial one-and-done teams like the Wildcats have had during the past few years, but it is grossly unfair to players whose money-earning craft in life lies not in academics, but rather in sports talent and achievement.  How much money has the University of Kentucky, greater Lexington, and the overall "UK Nation" made from these young men, who have spent their "year" working for nothing but a promise...but still subject at any moment during that span to potentially career-destroying injuries?  John Calipari, the Kentucky coach who went all out for the best players as soon as he saw the implications of the new rule, himself has stated that he opposes it, and other coaches like Mike Krzezewski of Duke have begrudgingly recruited, albeit to a lesser extent, these one-year-pro prospects right out of high school who have no intention of sticking around...

Let's face it...amateurism in sports is an antiquated joke, and the butt of it is the young athlete who aspires to fame and wealth through his or her efforts, but has to play this charade of being an "amateur" for a designated period...while the media, gambling industry, sports paraphernalia industry, and the local economy feeds and rakes in the money for themselves.  The professional leagues should follow the example of what baseball has done with their minor league system or how soccer in other countries has an infrastructure of multiple layers of leagues, allowing the aspiring athlete to develop within the sport...and get paid from the start.  As a matter of fact, you can see in many countries, most visibly Mexico, that several top-level professional soccer clubs themselves are affiliated with local colleges...

The bottom line is that, if others are making money from your efforts, following their own economic bottom line, then you should be paid as well.  And a "scholarship" means nothing if everyone knows you will leave college in only a year...

Final Four Just Started, Rooting for Underdogs Tonight

The NCAA Men's Basketball Championship Tournament, now down from 68 teams to 4, will whittle that number further to 2 after this evening's games, first between Michigan State and Duke, and then between Kentucky and Wisconsin.  My overriding wish at this stage is to see Kentucky, "my" Florida Gators' biggest basketball rival, out of it and finished with their hopes for an undefeated season.  So to this end, I want underdog Wisconsin, a team toward which I normally have no opinion, pro or con, to beat them.  As a matter of fact, should the Badgers manage this improbable feat, I'm prepared to make them a favorite team of mine out of sheer gratitude...even for the next few seasons!  But only if they beat the Wildcats.  As for the other game, Michigan State is traditionally a school I support while Duke is one that I don't...so the Spartans, likely to lose this contest, still get my nod.  So I want Wisconsin to face Michigan State for the championship game to be played Monday evening...but in all likelihood it's going to be Kentucky vs. Duke...

Just Finished Reading Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth

In 1931, writer Pearl S. Buck published The Good Earth, which I just finished reading, a story which explores the lives, beliefs, and traditions of a Chinese farmer and his family, set from the late 19th century and apparently projecting ahead beyond 1931 (which can be a bit historically problematic, as I'll explain later).  You can see in the above map of China, politically divided into its provinces, the story's locale of Anhui province highlighted in red.  And just east and slightly to the north is Jiangsu province, where protagonist Wang Lung, his wife O-Lan and their fledging family once moved to escape a famine in their homeland.  At the southwestern edge of Jiangsu lies Nanjing (back then called "Nanking", which is probably the "big city" described in the novel and takes on the meaning of the numerous references to the way things are "in the south".

The Good Earth reads like an Old Testament narrative, from Genesis, in that the language is simple and unadorned.  It depicts life from the viewpoint of Wang Lung, initially a poor Chinese farmer, as he first sets out to buy a wife (or "slave"...women in his society tend to be referred to as "slaves") from a nearby rich family's estate.  So he ends up with O-Lan, a faithful, industrious, but plain country woman who performs the functions he is primarily concerned with: she works tirelessly and bears him children...although he wants boys to further the family name, not girls, which he (as was the traditional Chinese custom back then) sees as a burden on the family, not an asset.  Buck very clearly sets out in The Good Earth to depict many of what we would now see as backward and unjust attitudes toward women in the context of how ordinary people in that culture saw things without thinking.  Wang Lung, for his part, although enmeshed in his particular culture's traditional views, is also in a sense a universal character in how he seems ashamed of his poverty...but quickly assumes an air of arrogant superiority over others once events turn in his favor and he gains wealth...

How far should I go in this review telling the story?  Well, I'm writing this not for an high school or college English class grade, where the teacher who would be reading this already knows the ending.  Instead, this article is to encourage prospective readers to pick up this good book and explore it for themselves.  So, I'll just leave the ending for those readers to discover and just bring up a couple more points...

Pearl S. Buck achieved great fame and accolades when The Good Earth came out, and she ended up winning a Pulitzer Prize for it.  She followed up on it in the following four years with two more books.  You may want to read up on her interesting life afterwards, as she was active in various causes.  I'm not sure whether I'll read the other two books, but I'm leaning in favor of it...

Another point is that, although based in historical reality, this book chronologically projects itself into a future that never existed: Japan began its brutal invasion of China by starting with Manchuria in 1931.  By 1937 they occupied both Jiangsu and Anhui provinces, the setting of The Good Earth, drastically altered the landscape, and massacred hundreds of thousands of people.  The occupation there lasted until the war ended in 1945...and then there was the Chinese civil war between the Nationalists and Communists until 1949, when the latter ultimately prevailed.  The story line seems, however (and correct me if I'm wrong), to project itself into the future when all this tumult and disaster was happening...without acknowledging any of it.  But of course, how could the author in the early 1930s know of the upheaval that lay in store for China...or for the rest of the world, for that matter...

A Little Wary About New Sufjan Stevens Album

Independent/alternative musical artist Sufjan Stevens, who made his first CD back in 1998, has a new one just released, titled Carrie and Lowell.  It is his first album since Carrie, his mother, died in 2012 and is said to be very introspective and stripped of much of the instrumentation has been typical of his music.  I'm probably going to buy it, even though I was disappointed with his previous two albums All Delighted People and The Age of Adz.  My initial interest in this highly talented and creative artist stems from three albums he made from 2003 to 2006: Greetings from Michigan, Illinoise, and The Avalanche.  I consider each of these to be a masterpiece and was amazed to hear the depth of orchestration he used in the songs.  But on the last two albums, Stevens largely replaced standard musical instruments with electronic bells and whistles, and the sound quality suffered badly as a result. I had wanted him to return to the previous albums with their beautiful instrumental virtuosity, but at least I won't be treated to another arcade-like experience...at least I'm hoping I won't...

Nationalistic Fan Misbehavior at Soccer Matches

During one of those soccer matches between national teams, a horrendous event occurred recently.  Russia was playing on the road at Montenegro (in former Yugoslavia) in one of those interminable world or continental tournaments...this one had something to do with the "national" team European championship (as opposed to the "league" team tournament).  Shortly into the match, someone from the stands fired a flare at the Russian goalkeeper and hit him, burning him.  He was taken off the field, in great pain.  The match was resumed and a little while later, another Russian player was hit with something...and the referee then wisely ended the game. This is another example of why I deplore the national team format in international sports competition: it brings out the worst in people...

Still, that doesn't preclude nationalism from creeping its ugly head even into league contests, despite the fact that league teams, especially those at the top of competitive standards, tend to recruit their players from all over the world. The other day I sat down to watch a Major League Soccer match between the Salt Lake City and Toronto teams, held in the town of Sandy, Utah.   Before the match, as is customary, both Canada's and the United States national anthems were played.  While Canada's was going on, the stadium continued to be very noisy, with the fans seeming to ignore our northern friend's anthem.  But when the Star-Spangled Banner was played, respectful silence, only interrupted by some loud, enthusiastic cheers, took over the stadium.  I found this behavior, albeit obviously not on the same level as hurling flares and objects at the opposing team, to still be highly jingoistic and disrespectful.  Sure, be a true-blue American and honor your own national song, but also as a host show courtesy to the other side as well...

My March 2015 Running Report

In March, I ran a total of 322 miles, spreading my mileage out over each day with few long individual runs.  My longest distance for a single run in the month was only 6.3 miles...I ran 6.2 when I finished the difficult Tioga Run for Haven 10K on March 14 on an unseasonably hot and muggy Saturday afternoon.  I found running not as enjoyable as usual for most of the month, and my right foot began aching toward the end.  But taking a couple of days off from running, stretching before runs and running only with my thick-soled shoes seem to have alleviated the problem.  As it was, those two days were the only ones in March in which I didn't run.

I'm not sure which direction I'm going with my running.  We are entering the "hot" season here in northern Florida and the long-distance races that I am more inclined to enter are pretty much gone until well into the fall season.  But I can still continue my "one race a month" string by running in local 5K events, of which there seem to be a preponderance around Gainesville year-round.  Melissa likes to walk in them, so we can find one this month to our liking and do a run/walk together.  As for how many miles I want to tally up running, I may consider doing less...

Sad to See Congress Polarized Against Country's Greater Interests

I have been watching the United States Senate floor proceedings off and on for the last few weeks on C-Span2, which on my Gainesville cable TV lineup is on channel 81.  As you may already know, after last November's elections, the Republican Party regained majority operational control of this body and now holds a 54-46 advantage over the Democrats.  This puts them in line with the House of Representatives, which has been with a GOP majority since 2011 and places Congress as a whole in opposition to President Obama.  They can pass bill after bill that they want, but if it's something that the President opposes, he'll most likely veto it...and it's highly improbable that either the House or Senate will be able to muster the two thirds super-majority to override...so what we have here is a stalemate if either side decides to take a strictly ideological stance.  Unfortunately, that seems to be what the Rebublicans have done, first by inserting (and later withdrawing under pressure) provisions overturning Obama's recent executive action concerning illegal immigration within a crucial Homeland Security funding bill...and most recently putting anti-abortion language into a human trafficking bill, language that the Democrats would very predictably oppose.   Now Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said that he will retaliate for the Democrats holding up that bill by refusing to bring to the floor the nomination of Loretta Lynch as Obama's choice for Attorney General to replace outgoing  Eric Holder...despite the fact that Lynch seems to have the votes for confirmation and is more highly regarded by the political right than is Holder.  The atmosphere in both bodies is becoming more heated and contentious, with each side drawing their own lines in the sand and refusing to step across.  It's more than a little disheartening to me when I see grown adults, who supposedly represent the highest elements of our society as they have been democratically elected to represent us in a constructive and mature manner, behave this childishly when they are in a position of such responsibility and authority to work together for the greater good...

Just Finished Reading Susan Hill's The Man in the Picture

If you've ever read anything by H.P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allen Poe and enjoy that genre of fiction, you might just want to get a copy of Susan Hill's 2007 short novel The Man in the Picture.  Simply described as "a ghost story", this engrossing tale traces the history of a mysterious, sinister painting of a Venetian carnival scene as it passes from one owner to the next.  The chief setting is Cambridge University in England, where Oliver, the primary narrator and an alumnus from years gone by, pays a social visit to Theo, his old professor, by now into his seventies and who has lived on campus for decades...and currently possesses the art work.  This picture has the quality of riveting observers' attention and creating the impression that different people depicted in it are looking back out at them in a calling, beseeching sort of way...as well as changing from one viewing to the next.  There is a background story to this painting, told first to Oliver by Theo and and then, as Theo relates, to himself years earlier by a former owner in her nineties, named Lady Hawdon.  As each account unravels, the forboding feeling of the story intensifies...and the ending is not a letdown in this regard..

The Man in the Picture is only 145 pages long, a very quick read.  I just happened to be browsing the bookshelves at my local (Millhopper) branch of the Alachua County Library, caught sight of it and checked it out...maybe it was "calling out" to me!  Sometimes you can strike gold perusing the shelves this way...it seems to have worked this time!  I recommend it if you're someone who's into that gothic horror/Night Gallery kind of storytelling...

NCAA Men's Basketball This Weekend: To the Final Four

Now the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament is temporarily down to eight teams, and that number after tomorrow night will be four.  Today, Wisconsin plays Arizona and Notre Dame plays Kentucky.  Tomorrow, Louisville faces Michigan State and Duke battles Gonzaga.  Of these teams, my top two favorites are Louisville and Michigan State (in that order)...naturally, they have to play each other, dang-it.  Still, should the Fighting Irish knock off my Florida Gators' nemesis, the UK Wildcats, I'll be rooting for them to win it all, just out of gratitude...I've been pulling for the New York Giants, for a similar reason, since 2008 when they ruined New England's quest for a perfect season with their last-minute Super Bowl victory.  Notre Dame has been a giant-killer before: they ended UCLA record 88-game winning streak in the early 1970s...let's see if they can do it again!  As for the other games, I'd like Arizona (another Wildcats team) to win, but it won't hurt my feelings if  the Badgers prevail as long as they put up a good fight against Kentucky should the opportunity present itself.  And Duke vs. Gonzaga...when I see such good teams playing down to the Final Four, I think to myself that Kentucky has some pretty high hurdles yet to clear before it can finally lay claim to its "perfect" season...

Today's two games are broadcast, starting at 6 this evening, on TBS.  Tomorrow's will begin around 2 in the afternoon and are on CBS.  Should be quite entertaining...

Just Finished Reading Daniel Abraham's The Widow's House

I have finally caught up with fantasy writer Daniel Abraham's progress in his presumably five-part series The Dagger and the Coin after just finishing the fourth book, titled The Widow's House.  I say "presumably" because series authors' best intentions regarding that "final" book can often unexpectedly change...not to mention the temptation to write prequels or even begin a "new" series based on characters and/or events from the original.  Still, I'm looking ahead for the fifth installment, due to be released in August this year, to also be the last.  And I also plan to promptly get a copy and read it, because to me this has been one of the best fantasy genre series I've read so far...

Daniel Abraham has left, after The Widow's House, a core of interesting characters who share of web of experiences and relationships and slip in and out of alliances and conflict.  The main thread in the story deals with the threat caused to the world (Abraham's imaginary one, that is) by a continually war-mongering "tainted" people...tainted by little spiders in their bloodstream (how utterly gross).  The source of this contamination is from an ancient, apparently long-dead dragon named Morade (you see, dragons used to rule this world thousand of years earlier, with humanity serving as their slaves).  Morade did this to create a weapon in a war he was involved with against another dragon, named Inys.  What happened to Inys is something that I would prefer any prospective readers to find out for themselves, as I am not in the habit of giving away stories.  Suffice to say that the series title refers to how history can be influenced by both the dagger (representing armed warfare) and the coin  (representing banking and commerce)...and that either aspect can be ignored only at one's peril.  Another interesting feature of this series, to me, is the presence of the wild-card character of Geder Palliako, whose ultimate role in the story's final resolution is a profound mystery...I'm thinking that, although he has allied himself with the villains for most of the series, he will play a crucial part at the end contributing to their downfall.  Should be interesting to see whether I'm right...

Interesting Four Games This Evening in NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament

Tonight's four games in the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship Tournament should be interesting.  Were I not at work, I'd most likely be watching them (they'll be on CBS and TBS).  North Carolina vs. Wisconsin, Xavier vs. Arizona, Wichita State vs. Notre Dame, and West Virginia vs. Kentucky all are worth watching, and anybody can win...despite some who predict that Kentucky will easily glide on to a perfect 40-0 championship season.  My preferences in these games are for North Carolina, Arizona, Wichita State, and West Virginia, but should Wisconsin, Notre Dame, or Xavier prevail in their contests and end up being the team that finally beats Kentucky...well, they'll suddenly become one of my favorite teams, too!

Mexican Soccer Premier League's Relegation System Questionable

In professional league soccer, during the regular season, standings are determined by the point system.  If your team wins a game, they get 3 points, lose and they get 0 points.  If a draw occurs, then each team gets 1 point added to their total.  In most leagues around the world, if there are one or more lower-level leagues around in a country, they have a process called "promotion and relegation" that rewards the lower league champions and punishes poor performance in the upper league.  In it, the worst-performing team(s) from the higher league in a particular season is/are demoted (or regulated), while an equal number of outstanding teams from the lower league get promoted. So in English soccer, we have three teams, Burnley, Queens Park Rangers, and Leicester City, who are at the bottom of their 20-team Premier League standings as the current 2014-15 season is winding down.  If nothing changes in the standings, they will be relegated for next year to the second-tier Championship League, while the top three teams in that league will get a shot at the Premier League.  I like the relegation system as it makes the late-season games more meaningful and that teams which aren't doing well can't just write off the season and expect to be rewarded with high draft picks, as is the case in many American professional sports leagues.  Unfortunately, in America, there is no relegation system as of yet in professional soccer, although there are three tiers of leagues here.  In Mexico, there is relegation, but the system seems confusing and unfair to me...

The top-tier Mexico pro soccer league is called Liga MX, with 18 teams in it.  They annually promote into it the winner of the second-tier league Ascenso's championship from the previous year and send back, through relegation, their own most poorly-performing team.  But in the Liga MX, relegation is determined by going back from three entire years of a team's performance and calculating the average points per game it has.  If a team has been in the league less than that time, like the newly promoted Universidad de Guadalajara Leones Negros, only the time they've been in the Liga MX is counted.  So a team like Morelia, which did well three years ago and tabulated a lot of points back then, but is by far the worst team in the league this year, hopelessly rock-bottom in the standings, is safe from relegation because its three-year average is higher than others.  Puebla and the Leones Negros, on the other hand, are doing reasonably well this year, far from the worst in the league...yet it is they who are battling each other to avoid demotion.  Puebla is actually the last in the relegation table right now, meaning that were the season to end today, they would be relegated down to Ascenso.  But at the same time, they are also in position to qualify for the league championship playoffs for the winter/spring Clausura season...and could conceivably win the Liga MX championship for the 2014-15 season while at the same time be demoted to the next lower league!  Now there is something  awfully, awfully wrong with such a system...

Foot Strain Necessitates Break from Running

For the past few days, my right foot has felt a little tight and twisted, and a little swelling may have been going on there due to a strain.  In any event, I've indefinitely put off my running, starting yesterday, until it feels better...and then I can gradually build my mileage back up again.  In times like this, the wisdom of cross-training comes to the surface of my thinking, and while I am recovering I'm going out on some short bicycling excursions.  The main thing is to stay in as high a state of conditioning as possible while resting my foot from the high-impact running.  It's been a while since I rode my bicycle, which I deliberately bought cheap, as usual, for around ninety bucks at Wal-Mart (or was it Target) a few years ago.  I had to re-inflate the tires, lubricate it a little, and wipe off the acculumated grime.  But it's sitting out there, locked to my gate (we've had two bicycles stolen off of our property since living here), and waiting for a little ride around the neighborhood.  I'm also thinking of re-incorporating the elliptical machine (which is available at my local 24-hour gym), into my regular exercise routine, along with a light daily no-impact session designed to stretch my body and exercise most of my body's muscles, all of which need activity to avoid deterioration over time and to help prevent damage to joints and soft tissue in the long run.  There was a promotional show on PBS-TV the other day featuring a woman who sells DVDs in which she leads exactly this kind of workout: I think I'll check into it and get a copy...

...Well, I just finished a 6.3 mile ride around my neighborhood on my old ramshackle bicycle...a nice little workout on a lazy Sunday afternoon...

Recently Read Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf

During the first few decades of the twentieth century, there was a movement in the arts, be it music, art, or literature, to shed the more traditional forms of expression and create new structures.  Sometimes this resulted in works whose meaning and significance were shrouded in ambiguity and uncertainty.  German writer Hermann Hesse's novel Steppenwolf is a case in point.  Written during the interwar Weimar period in the late 1920s,  Steppenwolf is a curiously constructed hodgepodge of psychological, political, and philosophical analysis focusing on the fictional character of Harry Haller, a middle-aged intellectual whose life has become that of a recluse and whose cynical view of the bourgeois society around him, with its nationalistic, pro-war fervor and its petty day-to-day concerns, has caused a personal crisis to come to a head.  This crisis is between his inherently benevolent nature and the Steppenwolf personality he has stylized to describe what his experiences have taught him and led him on as a singular entity, apart from society but passing through it just the same.  Unable to reconcile the two, as he considers his nature to be two-fold,  he is contemplating suicide as an option.  Then, he chances to meet in a bar a prostitute named Hermine (either her real name or the name he gives her) and she leads him on a convoluted path to self-discovery.  But it's a bit more complicated than that, for the author chooses to present his story in a form that belies understanding...

First, incredibly (looking back after reading the story), Hermann Hesse, in his preface to Steppenwolf that was written decades after its initial publication, decries the degree of misunderstanding that readers have come away with regarding his intended message.  Well, I say in response, if you're going to deliberately present your message in such a cryptic and cloudy format, what do you expect?  It begins with the third-person account about Haller from the viewpoint of a co-tenant who lives a conventional "bourgeois" existence and who sees Haller as rather disagreeable, with slovenly habits.  While snooping through the latter's apartment one day, he finds his personal journal and presents it in his account.  Then we progress to Haller's own words as he describes in detail, from his journal, the terribly cynical view in which he regards the world around him.  One day, as he relates, he comes across a peddler of "magic", who hands him a pamphlet, highly improbably titled "Treatise on the Steppenwolf"...which names Haller and goes into minute detail psychoanalyzing him with brutal detachment.  One of its premises is that each person, in refutation to  Haller's assumption about his own two natures, is composed of a multitude of "souls".  After presenting this "Treatise" in full, Hesse goes back to Haller's narrative and recounts his meeting with Hermine and her introduction to the other primary characters Maria and Pablo.  Initially critical of the two, Haller comes to appreciate aspects of himself that they represent, but which he has repressed.  In the context of a "magic show" with assorted fantasy experiences behind different doors that Pablo has concocted, Haller comes to more fully understand the treatise's view of the multiplicity of souls within each person, and there is much more to life than the simple and pessimistic model that he had constructed for himself, embodied within the Steppenwolf role.

It is unclear whether Hermine, Maria, and Pablo are "real" characters or just constructed aspects of Haller's own self...the story delves into the area of magical fantasy and, as such, the traditional literary notion of plot, based on some semblance of reality, breaks down.  This left me with a profound sense of dissatisfaction after I had finished reading it.  As for the message I came away with, who knows whether or not Hermann Hesse would agree?

To some, the Steppenwolf persona represents going one's own way against the flow of the world.  Combine that with the book's implied endorsement of mind-altering drugs like cocaine, opium, and hallucinations, along with abolition of restrictions on sexual behavior, and you come up with a cocktail custom-mixed for the counterculture movement of the 1960s...which may explain why a rock group in that era changed its name to Steppenwolf...

Close Games Characterized Yesterday's NCAA Hoops Tournament

60-59, 60-59, 66-65, 66-65 (in overtime), 67-65, 69-65, 57-56, 56-53...and 75-72 (in overtime).

These are the amazing scores of yesterday's NCAA Men's Basketball Championship Tournament.  There were, to be sure, other games with wider margins, but the sheer number of these nail biters was incredible...and even the identity of scores as well.  I did get to see a couple of them, but had to be at my job during the late afternoon and evening games.  Not that I would have spent all of my time glued to the TV had I been off, mind you. Still, this flood of fantastic, competitive games is something to behold, and it continues today...

One of the above contests was a "sad" pairing for me: LSU against North Carolina State.  For although I wanted the Wolfpack to win (which they barely did), I also would have liked to see the Tigers advance further in the tournament.  Today I see another such matchup, with Georgia set to play Michigan State at 12:30...I'm going for the Spartans with the same degree of melancholy, knowing that one of these two teams won't be going any further.  But right this minute, I'm watching New Mexico State going up against Kansas, a team I generally root against...

March Madness: NCAA Basketball Tournament in Full Swing Today

After the initial four-game elimination round yesterday and Tuesday (one of which saw the only Florida entry, the University of North Florida Ospreys, losing their game), the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship Tournament begins in earnest, with sixteen games today and sixteen more tomorrow.  Right now, as I get myself ready to go to work (reporting time 3:30 PM), I'm toggling back and forth between TruTV and CBS as I watch the University of Alabama at Birmingham-Iowa State and Northeastern-Notre Dame contests, both very competitive and close so far in spite of the fact that they are both 3-14 seed pairings.  UAB is even leading at halftime against their favored opponent, but I expects both favorites to eventually win and advance.   Unfortunately, I'll miss the bulk of the schedule today and tomorrow, but should have more opportunities this weekend as the field gets narrowed down, after Sunday's games, to the "Sweet Sixteen"...

My Favorite and Least Favorite Teams in NCAA Men's Hoops Tourney

Yesterday I mentioned on this blog that I had a group of "favorite" college basketball teams that I tend to root for during the NCAA men's basketball tournament.  Well, here's the list of those teams, in order of preference.  Florida wasn't good enough to make the tourney this year; still, I put them (and any other schools I like that didn't have a good season this year) on the list...

1 Florida (not in tournament)
2 North Carolina
3 North Carolina State
4 Louisville
5 Michigan State
6 Florida State (not in tournament)
7 Miami (not in tournament)
8 Other Florida colleges (this year it's just North Florida)
9 Tennessee (not in tournament)
10 Virginia Commonwealth
11 Georgia Tech
12 Villanova
13 Georgetown
14 The Rest of the SEC Teams (except Kentucky)...this year it's Texas A&M, Georgia, LSU, Mississippi, and Arkansas (in no particular order)
15 Wake Forest (are they in the tournament this year?)
16 Virginia

At the other end, representing teams I root against the most, is this list:

1 Kentucky
2 Kansas
3 Connecticut (not in tournament)
4 Notre Dame
5 Michigan (not in tournament)
6 Duke

Note that nowhere are there any Pac-12 teams...I used to go against UCLA, but, since the "experts" seem to think that they don't belong in the tournament this year, I might support them this year just for the sake of being obnoxiously contrary...

I don't have any predictions for the tournament, but plan to keep up with it and pull for "my" teams!

Brackets, No Gators, and the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament

Last year at this time, bracket fever had swept into Gainesville for basketball's NCAA Men's Basketball Championship tournament, which comprises 68 teams in single-game eliminations for the next few weeks until only the champion is left standing.  I would hear conversations going on around me like "Have you done your bracket yet?" and people discussing which teams they thought would upset others.  There was then (and most likely now) a prize offered nationwide to whoever had filled out their bracket perfectly.  That possibility ended very early in the tournament in 2014 with some highly unlikely upsets early on.  Oh, maybe you're unfamiliar with the concept of "filling out a bracket".  Basically, it involves taking the initial games in the first round, picking the winners of those games, and based on that, go to the next round and pick those winners...and then the next round...and then the next, this way until you are left with the last two teams...setting up the championship finale, for which of course you pick the winner.  In the end, you have a sheet of paper predicting exactly how the 67-game tournament will go.  So "bracketology" was such a big deal with many people in my good ol' home town of Gainesville last year.  Why doesn't it seem very popular this year?

In 2014 at the start of the NCAA Tournament, the University of Florida was ranked #1 in the nation and was on a long winning streak, so enthusiasm and interest for college basketball was at a peak in its surrounding community of Gainesville.  This year, though, the Gators not only weren't ranked highly: they didn't even make the tournament!  Moreover, they didn't even get invited to the "runner-up" National Invitational Tournament with its field of 32 teams.  Probably ending up with a 16-17 win-loss record had something to do with that.  So Florida wasn't in the running this time around...and the area's interest in the tourney dried up, with only the regular basketball fans carrying on with the brackets.  As for me, I began following the NCAA tournament in earnest back in the early 1980's when Florida didn't have a very good basketball program, so my enthusiasm wasn't based on what kind of season they were having.  I enjoyed the Atlantic Coast Conference back then, with my favorite teams being North Carolina and North Carolina State, and over the years I've tended to root for them tourney-time...as well as a few others I've picked up along the way.  This year, Kentucky, Florida's arch-rival in the SEC East Division, is undefeated...and that is unacceptable to me.  Somebody, anybody, must knock them off in the tournament!  They'll have six chances, for that is the number of games the Wildcats will have ahead of them to win in order to finish the season at an unprecedented 40-0...

The tournament begins today and Wednesday with the field being whittled down to 64, and then on Thursday and Friday 32 games will reduce it further to 32.  By Monday they will be down to the last 16 teams left, hence the "Sweet Sixteen".  In the meantime, basketball will dominate television.  Incidentally, UF may not have made the tournament this year, but my son's alma mater, the University of North Florida, did!  Go Ospreys!

Gainesville City Commission Election Tomorrow: Go Vote!

Tomorrow in Gainesville we'll be experiencing one of those oddball out-of-season March elections in an odd-numbered year, this one for two city commission seats.  One is specifically for District 1, which comprises the eastern part of town (I'm in District 2, so I won't be voting in it).  The other is a city-wide at-large seat...so anyone who lives in Gainesville and is registered to vote has something to choose...and an opportunity to exercise their civic duty to actively participate in this representative democracy of ours by going to the polls and casting their ballot.  Not that I expect more than a trickle of the electorate to do this, though, although I'm sure that many of the overwhelming majority who choose to stay away from their precincts tomorrow won't have any problem complaining about their high utility bills or the often neglected, crumbling streets we have to drive our cars and trucks on...two issues that are at the top of the discussion list for the candidates.  I know...democracy isn't perfect and it's often a guessing game as to which candidate will do the best job once he or she is in there.  But it is a lot better than authoritarian government by decrees, with those issuing them having no sense of accountability to the people.  Why not instead put your apathy and cynicism on hold for just a few minutes sometime tomorrow and vote...once you're finished and safely back outside your precinct's doors you can go back to not caring again...

Ran Yesterday's Tioga 10K Run for Haven Race

Tioga is a small community a few miles west of Gainesville.  They staged a 5K/10K race yesterday (March 14th) that drew a moderately small number of participants.  Seeing how nuts my home town of Gainesville is about running, I was a little surprised that there weren't more, but then I realized that Jacksonville was also holding its Gate River Run 10K the same day...the real hard-core fanatics probably went there instead.  My race started and ended at the Tioga Town Center, a sizable shopping center large in proportion to the surrounding population...I have gone to its Starbucks a number of times over the years.  At the start/finish  area is also a stage where Natalie Nicole Green, an emerging local country artist, performed before and after the race.  She sang very well and didn't confine her act to country and western, diplomatically choosing to include some rock songs (like Fleetwood Mac's Dreams) in her act.  There was also free food and drink (including beer) for the runners (not exactly "free"...you had to pay to run the race).  There were a lot of runners dressed in green (for St. Patricks Day)...I inadvertently wore my green Tom Walker Memorial Half-Marathon running shirt without thinking. The race started at 4:30 in the afternoon, which normally in the middle of March isn't so bad temperature-wise...except that we're currently in a mini-heatwave (for this time of year) and it had gotten up into the mid 80's.  And the humidity, officially at 57%, felt more like it was in the 70's to me...very, very muggy.  So I knew from the start that the race would present a  challenge...

When the race began, both the 5K and 10K runners set off together for about a mile through the residential subdivision behind the Town Center.  Then, at an intersection, the 5K-ers veered down a street to the right and stayed in that subdivision the duration of their 3.1-mile race, while we 10K runners headed on straight ahead down a dirt path...into the woods.  For more than three miles, we kept going down a maze of crisscrossing, curving, and sloping dirt pathways.  I completely lost my bearings out there and had only my watch to give me any semblance of distance covered. The dirt surface was bad, too, giving my shoes poor traction...in places it was like running on soft beach sand.  But the worst part was the heat and mugginess...and the refreshment stations set up along the way every mile or two only provided water, not Gatorade.  In this weather, not providing electrolyte replenishment was a big mistake on the organizers' part.  Although I struggled through the entirety of the run, and wondered when the trek through the woods would ever end, I did manage to keep up with the runners I was around...until one would stop running and just walk...and then the next...and the next.  As a matter of fact, I can't recall ever running any race, including half-marathons, in which such a high percentage of runners just flat-out had to stop running.  It became a mental struggle for me to keep going, in spite of all the mileage I've built up in practice.  But I kept pressing on, and as I drew near the finish line, I was running strong.  I finished with a time of 56:24, not my best in a 10K race by a long shot, but still better than my Turkey Trot time last Thanksgiving by 32 seconds.  As for my age group (55-59), I won it...of course, I was the only one in it!

I didn't know whether the race organizers were giving out awards for age group winners or not, and immediately after the race I didn't know how I did compared to others in my group, so I didn't linger around...getting back in my car and driving home after getting a couple of slices of "free" Dominos pizza. Besides, it had begun to rain...

Although this race was something of an ordeal due to the heat and humidity, it was refreshing to finally not be hopelessly boxed in by other runners for a good stretch of the race as I have had to endure in the previous few.  I imagine, though, that had I chosen to run the one in Jacksonville instead, I would have been boxed in that entire hopelessly overcrowded race!  Now my string of one race per month has been increased to five straight months.  I don't know exactly when or where my next race will be, but I think I'll make an effort to pick an EARLY MORNING one!

Just Finished Reading Robert Jordan's Book Winter's Heart

As I continue to plod my way through Robert Jordan's fourteen-part fantasy Wheel of Time fantasy series, I just finished reading the ninth book, titled Winter's Heart.  Once again, we have here our main characters of Rand al'Thor (the "Dragon Reborn"), his boyhood friends Mat Cauthon and Perrin Aybara, and their allies fighting against his foes, who are numerous and seem to spend about as much time and effort fighting each other as they do against the "good guys".   In this volume, Rand is trying to free the male source of magic of the taint placed upon it by the supremely evil Dark One by gathering his allies and performing a special, elaborate ritual...this is how the book ends.  In the meantime, subplots and minor characters reign supreme...this flood of characters and story lines is by far the main gripe I have with this series.   I did enjoy the greater emphasis given to my favorite character Mat, one of the main protagonists (he was completely omitted from the previous book), and how he encounters the Daughter of the Nine Moons, whom he knows he has been prophesied to marry...

I have five more books in this series to get through, but only two that were written by Jordan himself.  He died after writing the eleventh book, and the series was completed by another fantasy fiction writer, Brandon Sanderson...an author I respect from his Mistborn series that I read a few months ago.  It should be interesting to see how he manages to to tie up the myriad loose ends Robert Jordan left...

Orlando City Team Doesn't Provide Radio Play-By-Play

With the 2015 Major League Soccer regular season opening last weekend, I was grateful to be able to watch Orlando's expansion team play its first game ever on TV...ESPN-2 showed it.  Besides that network, FoxSports and the Spanish-language Univision Deportes are showing live games of the MLS this year.  That's wonderful...but where is the radio play-by-play coverage?  I searched high and low on the Internet, and for the Orlando City MLS team, I found only "Real Radio"/104.1 in Orlando claiming to be the Orlando team's station...and they're only featuring a commentary show, not live play-by-play.  Now you might be asking why would I want radio when I have TV?  For one, even with the three channels broadcasting MLS games weekly, my team isn't always going to be featured.  For another, I may be in the car or elsewhere without access to a television...and I'm not one of those folks with their eyeballs constantly glued to their cellphones with all the sports apps.  And yet further...although it may seem counter-intuitive, you can sometimes pick up more from the radio than you can from TV...

When I was a kid, in the fall of 1968, I discovered that the relatively new American Basketball Association was starting a franchise in Miami (dubiously nicknamed the Floridians).  Since I was in the habit at the time of fiddling around on the radio to find interesting stations to listen to, one evening I came across a weak 250-watt AM station, WOCN, transmitting out of Miami on 1450 kHz.   Normally a station that played only elevator music, WOCN surprisingly was broadcasting a Floridians game play-by-play.  I remember the team they were playing that first time I heard them: the Minnesota Pipers.  From then on, I would listen to the broadcasts and soon got to know all of the players on the team, even the subs.  Why?  Because the announcers, given the fact that listeners couldn't see the game, had to describe everything in detail.  So although I didn't get a complete picture of what was going on, in some ways I ended up with much more information!  I don't think I ever did watch a Miami Floridians game on TV (the lack of the ABA on television probably did more to sink it than anything else), but I did follow them on the radio.  Nowadays, it seems things have reversed themselves, with TV access easy and radio often difficult to find.  I think that's a shame and counterproductive for the franchise as well:  radio is a relatively cheap way to promote your team and build up a fan base.

Maybe Orlando will come up with a radio play-by-play option eventually.  But I think they have already made a big mistake by not have one from the beginning.  Of course, with satellite radio being what it is now, for all I know they may do play-by-play there.  But that would miss the entire point of exposing the product to the general public to generate interest...

Recognizing Cognates an Early Help in Learning Some Languages

In studying various languages, knowing a few things in advance can help.  For example, many languages have many cognates, i.e. words that are similar in pronunciation, writing, and meaning that an English speaker can quickly use to expand their vocabulary.  Sometimes, though, these "copied" words, when processed through the particular foreign language's phonetic and writing systems, can still seem strange.  Japanese cognates of English are a case in point. Their assimilation of English terminology is quite large, but other languages, particularly in the Germanic and Romantic (or Latin) branches of the Indo-European language family, contain treasure troves of similar vocabulary, easily learned...although endemic to those languages and not "borrowed" from English.  If you've ever studied Spanish, French, Portuguese, or Italian, for example, you've probably hit upon the fact that most nouns in English ending in -tion have counterparts with at least a similar (if not identical) meaning in the Romance language.  With Dutch and German, many words are cognates of English due to their common origin.  I've also noticed with German that they have also made use of many Romance cognates that are recognizable to English speakers. So, with some languages at least, using cognates can help the beginner to attain a good degree of experience and confidence...which is doubtless why many textbooks in some foreign languages will have an early section on them...

Other languages like Russian, Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic still have some cognates, but not anywhere to the degree that the aforementioned languages do. But regardless which foreign language one is studying, the core of the vocabulary is going to come down to words that are truly unfamiliar to the native speaker of English...

Sports and Studying Foreign Languages

It doesn't seem entirely appropriate somehow, lumping these two topics together in an article.  For me, I happen to like both.  With sports, I like to run, sometimes competitively, but with anything else I'm content with being a spectator (mainly of the couch-potato-in-front-of-the-TV type), with my preferred sports being soccer, baseball, basketball, and football.  As for studying foreign languages, I am no gifted polyglot but instead am very interested in them, having studied several to varying degrees over the course of my adult lifetime, up to the present.  As for how society regards these pursuits of mine, I find it interesting how differently they are treated...

With sports, one can be interested in many of them without actually participating in any of them.  I can go anywhere and strike up conversations about what's going on in the current sport of interest, and being able to remember statistics and other facts only contributes to the discussions in a positive way.  In fact, sports analysis can get to be quite abstract, if you check out the "standings" tables in your local newspaper and see the arrays of columns of numbers next to each team or athlete.  That's quite a departure from actually being out on the field, court, rink, or track and actually participating in the sport yourself.  With the study of foreign languages, on the other hand, my experience has revealed a different attitude on the part of others...

I don't have to be considered as an athlete myself in order to enjoy some kind of social acceptance in the context of being knowledgeable or interesting about sports.  Yet with foreign languages, if the topic comes up with others, no matter what aspects of a particular language I'm talking about, the person I'm trying to communicate with almost inevitably personalizes the conversation by trying to elicit my fluency level and what am I going to do with my study of said language.  Once, when discussing an aspect of Polish grammar with a fellow student in a Polish class, he refused to listen to me because that wasn't how HE learned languages (so why was he in that class, I should have asked).  That was a negative interaction, but almost the entire rest of the time, people express disinterest in the more passive, impersonal analysis, acceptable with sports, whenever foreign languages come up for discussion.  Instead, it gets real, real personal...and I don't like it.  When I'm sitting there studying Vietnamese like I was once in a nearby Starbucks (where I also happen to be writing this article right now) and an acquaintance entering the store notices what I'm doing, I don't want the cop-out question "What are you going to do with it?", which is what I got at that time.  Instead, why not ask, "Gee, what's Vietnamese like?".  Now that would be a "sports"-like question inviting me to share my not-inconsiderable (but still very incomplete) knowledge about that language. And along the way in that "better" conversation, I would most likely slip in some personal information, such as that I used to work in a local Chinese restaurant that had several freshly-arrived Vietnamese immigrants whom I befriended and with whom we practiced speaking each other's native language...and I didn't want what I learned back then to slip away. I admit that most folks don't want to discuss languages on a more analytic level for the same reason they wouldn't want to talk about mathematical topics: they don't want to be shown to be ignorant in the area (and people, especially in this university town, are so, so excessively prideful about their levels of educational attainment).  With sports talk, that doesn't seem to be a problem, though...

So if you see me studying a foreign language somewhere, you're welcome to interrupt my train of thought and ask the boneheaded, implicitly accusatory question, "So what are you going to do with it?", if that soothes your pride somehow.  But instead, why not put me "off" the spot and ask me to describe the language I'm studying?  Who knows, you'll probably end up finding out what I'm going to "do with it" anyhow, plus you might then actually learn something...as well as maybe, just maybe, find a new area in your life that piques your interest...    

Warm Winter in Gainesville Has Its Ups and Downs

In spite of all of the winter storms afflicting the eastern part of the United States north of Florida, in this state, at least, it has been yet another remarkably warm winter.  There have been very few nights here in Gainesville (in the northern part of the state) when temperatures got down to freezing...although in many years past we would go through spells when it would plunge into the 20's, sometimes for several nights at a time.  And now, still technically in the winter, we have a forecast today for a high of 87 degrees...with little change in the next few days!  I suppose that I should be grateful that we haven't experienced the almost continuous sequence of severe snow and ice storms, with their accompanying drifts and treacherous roads, that has caused so much hardship in the states north of us, and also that during this very mild winter here it has rained to a good degree...that will help forestall springtime forest fires that have plagued us in the past.  But with the warmth here also comes an increase in pollen, something that affects people like me who suffer from respiratory allergies.  Also, I am not a gardener by nature and would just as soon spend my time doing things other than working in the yard, so I'm not looking forward to the outdoor trimming and maintenance facing me earlier than usual due to the warm weather's vegetation growth spurt...

Senators Talking Past Each Other in Labor Rules Changes Debate

The National Labor Relations Board, a Federal government agency, recently updated its rules concerning holding elections in businesses to determine whether or not their employees want to form a union and engage in collective bargaining with their employers.  It had been several years since any changes in the rules were made, and the stated aim of the revisions was to bring the Board's policies more in line with the computer technology so prevalent today in communications.  The Republican Party has taken issue with these changes, as I saw the other day in a US Senate debate on the subject (shown on TV's C-Span2).  Speaker after speaker, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, would get up and refer to the actions as authorizing "ambush" elections with their new 11-day deadline for elections to be held once the employer is notified...and that something more reasonable like 30 days would be fair for both sides.  That sounds reasonable to me, but then the Democratic senators got up in opposition to the Republicans' proposed rescinding of these new rules and, instead of focusing on the new 11-day limit, kept going on and on about how important in this day and age unionizing elections need to be electronicized to keep up with how business is now almost universally done...and why do the Republicans oppose the newly-authorized use of e-mail and the Internet for this application?  They also repeatedly recited the history of the labor movement and emphasized how important collective bargaining had been for the growth of the American middle class in the last century...and how the National Labor Relations Board, begun under Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, was instrumental in ensuring a fair process.  Then Republican Senator Lamar Alexander got up and said no, that the new rules were against the middle class because it put the several hundred thousand franchise owners at a big disadvantage...with a different part of the rule changes that seemed to force the umbrella company to unionize if a smaller franchise site did.  H-m-m...

I'm no expert on government regulations and labor law...and I didn't read the proposed Republican Senate bill.  So I'm not in a position to judge the merits of these arguments, although I will say that in recent years, the Republican Party has become virulently anti-union and would like nothing better than to see all unions abolished and the organized labor movement destroyed.  But I do recognize when two sides in a debate are doing little other than talking past each other at the special interests to whom they are beholden.  It seems to me that with this proposed legislation, whose outcome I don't know about, it would have been better served going first to a Senate committee where the two sides could express their biggest objections and a compromise could have been reached that would have received enough votes to pass and get the President's signature...

Major League Soccer's Orlando City Plays First Ever Regular Season Game

I just finished watching, on TV (ESPN2) the very first regular-season game for both of Major League Soccer's expansion teams this year, Orlando City and New York City, as they faced off in Orlando's Citrus Bowl to more than 62,000 spectators.  It was an exciting contest with the level of play better than I had expected.  Of course, I was rooting for the Iron Lions, the nickname that Orlando goes by. Their star player is a Brazilian with one of those funny stylized singular names, Kaká, who plays midfield and is whom they consider as their "striker".  Orlando looked dominant in the first half, but couldn't manage a score due to the New York City goalkeeper's several excellent saves.  In the second half, NYC managed a goal to take the lead, and when Aurélian Collin, one of Orlando's defenders,was ejected with a red card and the team was reduced on the field to ten players, it looked dismal for them.  But just past the 90-minute mark, they were awarded a free kick near the goal and Kaká was able to punch it through for the score, with the ball deflecting in transit off a New York defender.  So the game ended as a 1-1 tie.  I was impressed with both the fan support and the team's play, and hope they both continue strong through what promises to be a challenging first season.  I definitely want to get down there and watch a game or two...

Just Finished Reading Daniel Abraham's The Tyrant's Law

Reading Daniel Abraham's The Dagger and the Coin fantasy series is, in some ways, the antithesis of that of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time.  The former keeps the characters and story lines limited in number and easy to follow, while the latter is overly encumbered with minor characters often dominating the text for long passages.  I definitely prefer Abraham's work, and just finished the third volume, titled The Tyrant's Law...and have already gone a few chapters into the next one, The Widow's House...

I read up a little on Daniel Abraham on the Internet, and if what I uncovered is to be believed (and I don't have any persuasive reason to think otherwise), he is primarily a science-fiction writer who decided to try out writing a fantasy series like his friend, writer George R.R. Martin.  He reportedly got together with Martin and some other writers to get down the essence of this genre...and subsequently laid down an outline for this five-part series.  Now that's something I doubt that Robert Jordan ever did.  There are a lot of derived themes in The Dagger and the Coin, such as a distant past with dragons once dominating the picture, but also there are two innovations as I see them.  One is the diversity of humanity in the form of thirteen distinct races...and they are much more different from each other than the so-called human "races" we think of in our real world and over which have created such a fuss throughout history (and even now, sadly).  The other is the corruption of a segment of humanity with little spiders running through their veins, the effect on them being that they can distinguish truth from lie as well as giving them Jedi-like powers of persuasion.  Well, maybe that last feature WAS derived, wasn't it?  This conspiratorial group drives the story line in the series as they try to take over Abraham's imaginary world...

As in other fantasy series, the main characters of Cithrin (a young female banker), Geder (the "tyrant", besotted with Cithrin), Clara (widow to a nobleman who unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Geder), Marcus (war hero from bygone years who goes on various adventures), and Kit (an apostate from the spider-people group who is on his own quest to destroy them) spend the book crisscrossing the lands and seas in their various narratives.  Even with the welcome limitation of characters, it can get to be a little bit tedious trying to keep up with all these wanderings, but I am holding out the hope that the author will stick with his plan to conclusively tie it all up in that yet-to-be-published fifth book...

Changed Shift Times at My Workplace

This morning, when I finished my work shift at six and walked out of the building, it ended a two-year long stint working the late-night/early morning "graveyard shift".  Since the post office needs to process the mail passing through it in a prompt and efficient way in order to assure timely delivery, many of its workers in the mail processing section have these shifts.  It's what I started out doing in 1987 when I began my employment there and I worked these difficult hours for fifteen of my first sixteen years.  However, I never did get used to it and had much difficulty getting enough sleep.  Also, I believe it made me more susceptible to illness.  From 2003 to 2013, I was able to switch to an afternoon/evening shift and my sleeping patterns normalized, with my general health improving.  But due to my organization's sweeping consolidation decisions in the past few years,  my position with this preferred schedule was abolished...and I chose the best available post for me back on the late night shift.  Only this time, I was determined to stabilize my sleep by going straight to bed soon after I got home from work in the morning.  Still, on my days off I would revert back to sleeping like most of the world during those late night hours.  Although I handled this better than in the early years, I still felt that I was getting sick way too often.  So when the opportunity recently presented itself for me to switch back to an afternoon/evening shift, I jumped at it and got the position.  After a couple of days off, I will begin it this coming Monday afternoon...

Just Finished Reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad is one of those classic writers whose works inevitably find their way into high school and college English class reading assignments.  It happened to me in the tenth grade when I was instructed to buy a paperback copy of his novel Lord Jim at the school bookstore, read it, and then summarize it.  I neither bought nor read it...although my summary paper garnered me a "B" grade (talk about winging it).  Since then, 43 years have passed and I finally got around to reading some Conrad, this one his short novel Heart of Darkness.

The 1902 story Heart of Darkness, on which Francis Ford Coppola based his epic 1979 movie Apocalypse Now, differs from the latter in that Conrad's setting is the deep recesses of the Belgian Congo as his hero Marlowe travels up river to encounter the enigmatic ivory trading agent Kurtz (whom I constantly envisioned as looking like Marlon Brando as I read it).  Yes, the quest is similar to the film adaptation's Cambodia-based quest for Colonel Kurtz, there an American renegade soldier...although Coppola was obviously going for a heavy political statement about the American war effort in Vietnam.  In Heart of Darkness, Marlowe is a seaman who wants adventure in his life...and plunging into the depths of Africa's "heart of darkness" to find the ailing Kurtz is irresistible to him.  Along the way he discovers the reprehensible way that the native blacks are treated by the colonialists, with disease, near-starvation, and gross overworking just the most glaring symptoms of their exploitation.  In this sense, this novel was an important eye-opener into how native populations were being abused by occupying colonial powers...in this case the late nineteenth-century Belgium Congo, as run by their King Leopold, being one of the most extreme abusers...

Eventually, as in the movie, Marlowe (or the cinematic character played by Martin Sheen with a different name) meets up with Kurtz and discovers him to be a fascinating combination of idealism, charisma, and utter disregard for others' lives.  The local people living under his rule, also as in the movie, adore him and fear losing him as the traveling party (through Marlowe) convinces him, as he is dying, to go back down river with them.  There is a curious character in the book, a Russian, who, like a similar hippie-like character in the movie, who has lived with Kurtz in his strange, reclusive new society and regards him as a great genius with a flare for poetry, teaching...and instilling terror. Despite knowing what a murderer Kurtz is, Marlowe can't help admiring him and comparing him favorably to the other, more petty-minded traders around him. It is this strange approval of such a sinister character that gave me pause, considering the villains of similar ilk that have victimized the world during the century following the publication of this story... figures like Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Che Guevara, Charles Manson, Jim Jones, and others...who entranced those around them with their presence but who ultimately were agents of destruction and darkness.  Hence, the double meaning of the title "Heart of Darkness".  In one sense, it refers to going to an extremely remote, isolated place, in the middle of an area unfamiliar to most of civilized society.  In another sense, it can mean how one's own heart can be made full of darkness. Perhaps one lesson, intended or not, that can be taken from it all is that trying to effect great changes, no matter the idealism or good intentions behind them, by isolating oneself from the "corrupt" world, also removes the good from that very same world and gives evil and darkness an opening to work its own aims within one's soul...

My Running During the Past Few Months

The past few months have seen me both increase my overall running mileage and participate more in middle-to-long distance races.  Here are the races I've run during the last four months (three of the four in Gainesville):

11/27.....10K Turkey Trot...Time 56:56

12/21.....Starlight Half-Marathon (in Palm Coast)...Time 2:03:30

1/31.....Newnan's Lake 15K...Time 1:18:21

2/15.....Five Points Half-Marathon...Time 1:58:48

Now that I have unwittingly set a pattern of one race per month, I now feel compelled to continue it.  The obvious choice for March is a 10K Saturday afternoon race to be held on the 14th in Tioga, a small community a few miles west of Gainesville.  As for any more half-marathons, I'll have to think about a possible late March or April race that would be held within a reasonable driving perimeter. Let's see...there's a combination marathon, half-marathon, and 5K race March 29 in Ormond Beach and also a combo half-marathon, 12K, and 5K race in Clermont on April 25.  Well, I'll have to see how things stand as these dates approach, I suppose...

Looking back on the four races I've done recently, I have to state that they all tended to be rather frustrating efforts, at least at the start of each event.  This is because of the problem of "runner congestion", when I repeatedly found myself boxed in due to slow runners around me who also would make no effort to offer any opening for me to get around them.  In the last half-marathon, I was nearly halfway through it before the path finally opened up for me! As for how I physically felt during these races, I seemed to hold up well, although I experienced some aches and cramps at various moments...the most serious being the leg cramps near the end of the Five Points race.  Perhaps better electrolytes/hydration (i.e. more Gatorade) will alleviate this problem in the future.

After April, the prospects for long-distance races in the northern Florida area disappear with only the 3.1-mile 5K event available from time to time. If I continue running monthly races from May through September, I'll have to stick with this shorter distance...unless I begin to travel to places further north and/or west where the longer races are held that time of year...

Reading Sue Grafton's Series from "A" to "Z"

As I had mentioned in a blog entry a few weeks ago, I have begun reading mystery writer Sue Grafton's "Alphabet Mystery" novels...this time in alphabetical order.  I've been hopping around the "letters" indiscriminately, beginning several years ago with the book "L" is for Lawless.  Since each book's story is complete in itself, jumping around the series out of order isn't in itself such a bad thing, although its main protagonist, Santa Teresa, California private detective Kinsey Millhone, does undergo changes in her personal life and relationships progressively with each successive book.  The main drawback with what I've been doing is that I have lost track as to which books I've already read and which ones I haven't.  And since I truly love Grafton's writing in this series and like the Kinsey Millhone character a lot, I decided to just go back to the beginning, to "A" is for Alibi, and read on through "W" is for Whatever (I don't know the title offhand), her latest book.  Grafton plans to end the series with "Z" is for Zero.

As it turns out, I had already read "A" is for Alibi a while back and knew who the main culprit is (there is more than one guilty party in this story).  So although I knew roughly how it would turn out as I reread it, it was interesting to see how the author introduced the villain early into the story and how she laid down hints of his culpability at various points while at the same point inserting other suspicious characters into the narrative.  All in all, I enjoyed the second time around as much as the first!  Oh, and I counted in it four different times that Kinsey went out jogging, something I particularly identify with...

Now it's one to the next book, titled "B" is for Burglar...

MercyMe Concert at Yesterday's Florida Strawberry Festival in Plant City

Yesterday, Melissa and I drove down a few miles west of Tampa to Plant City, where they have been holding their Florida Strawberry Festival.  Naturally, strawberries are a big focus of the event, but as is the case with county fairs elsewhere, there's a lot going on.  Rides, stands selling food of any kind you can imagine, and crafts exhibits dominate the landscape.  Also, there's a stadium there where they hold concerts.  That's convenient, because at 3:30 yesterday afternoon the Christian contemporary band MercyMe held a concert there that we attended.  I've heard them before, especially that big hit of theirs If I Could Only Imagine from a few years back, but I didn't realize what good musicians they truly are.  The selection of songs they performed during the slightly more than one hour they were up there went across the spectrum of musical styles...I was impressed!  I'm going to have to get hold of some of their material to listen to on my MP3 player...

Yesterday morning before we set off, I checked out the Weather Channel website on my computer and it had for the Plant City forecast a 25% chance of "showers" and a high of 72.  I looked at the radar map for central and northern Florida and saw a small band of clouds around the Tampa area, a very big clump of clouds heading for Gainesville...and a wide swath of clear skies in between.  Instead, though...in the real world...it rained all the way from Gainesville to Plant City...and throughout almost the entire MercyMe concert.  But speaking of "mercy", it did let up afterwards and Melissa and I spent the next hour or two walking around the fairgrounds...and of course we had to try out some strawberry shortcake!  Also, there was a stand selling fresh-popped kettle popcorn...you can see above a picture of me holding my "prize catch".

Almost from the moment we got back into the car to drive back home, it had resumed raining...all the way back to Gainesville with only minor periods of respite.  Well, the rain was tough, but the fair, and especially the company, was great!

My February 2015 Personal Running Report

In February 2015 I managed to run through a series of upper respiratory colds, somehow getting my total mileage for the month to 314 miles, despite physically feeling crappy much of the time.  I ran on every day of the month, and my longest single run at one time was during the Five Points Half-Marathon (here in Gainesville) on the 15th, when I covered 13.1 miles with a time of 1:58:48.  That was good enough in my Men's 55-59 age group for 5th place out of 23.  I felt pretty good about that, especially when, close to the end of the race, I was wondering whether I'd even be able to finish it due to leg cramps.  For an entire day, though (on the 21st), I managed once to cover 32 miles by spacing apart several smaller runs.

Starting the second week in March, my work schedule will change from the "graveyard" late night/early morning shift to a late afternoon/evening shift.  This should greatly aid with my sleeping patterns, and might help me to better withstand these viral cold attacks I've been suffering lately.  As a matter of fact, if my unscientific memory serves me correctly, I've generally been more healthy and less often sick when I used to work the hours that I'll soon be returning to.  Time will tell if that works for me again...

Just Finished Reading Tad Williams' Shadowheart

I just finished reading the book Shadowheart by Tad Williams, which is the concluding volume to the four-part Shadowmarch fantasy series.  This was a rather difficult series for me to get through because, although I normally expect fantasy series to contain a reasonable portion of magic and the supernatural (hence the name "fantasy"), Shadowmarch is overwhelmingly loaded with it.  As such, it was difficult to read it while keeping at least one foot set in reality.  Other writers like George R.R. Martin, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Daniel Abraham seem to realize this need to primarily base the story line in some semblance of reality in order to make the occasional "magic" seem more special.  But when it's all out of the ordinary, at least for me, the reader's mind gets numbed to it after a while.  Nevertheless, in Shadowheart, Mr. Williams does manage to tie up all of the threads he had loosened earlier in the series, and the ending is quite satisfactory with the bad guys getting their comeuppances and the heroes and heroines largely receiving happy endings...if they weren't killed off earlier, that is.  Naturally, I'm not telling what happened since I want you to try this series out for yourself...and for you to give your own feedback to it...

I will give Tad Williams the credit for having the self-discipline, apparently lacking in Robert Jordan in his The Wheel of Time series and George R.R. Martin in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, to limit the scope of his characters and story.  I think there must be a temptation in fantasy fiction writing to want to keeping on creating and creating within your own devised "world"...but for readers this can get to get very cumbersome to keep up with.  With the Shadowmarch series, the core characters remain the same throughout...with the greatest focus given to the two preeminent ones: Princess Brienny and her twin brother Prince Barrick.  I'd also like to give Williams kudos for his well-done character development.  It's obvious to me that he put a lot of himself into writing this series, which can put the reader into a kind of funk in some of the tediously depressing sections but still represents a very interesting story with compelling protagonists (and very nasty villains)...

Unnecessary Homeland Security Bill Senate Filibuster

The Republican-controlled US House of Representatives has passed a  Department of Homeland Security authorization and funding bill to keep the crucial department fully funded through the end of the year.  However, included in the bill is a repudiation of President Obama's executive action giving partial amnesty to illegal aliens (or "undocumented immigrants", if you want to tip-toe through political correctness land).  This bill has now been brought up before the Senate, where Democrats are filibustering it to keep it from being submitted to the floor for debate, amendments, cloture, and a final vote.  As was the case tith the recently passed Keystone XL Pipeline bill, it has no chance of being signed into law by the President, and there is no hope of overriding a presidential veto.  So I ask myself, regardless of anyone's opinion about the propriety of the Republicans' actions attaching the anti-exucutive action part to the bill, why can't it be brought up to the Senate floor for debate as the Keystone Pipeine bill was?  I'm not a Senate insider here, with my own connections and news sources.  But I have a sneaking suspicion...

Back in January when the Keystone bill was openly debated, amended, and voted on, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid was absent due to an accident that he was being treated for.  I his place, Minority Whip Dick Durbin stood in and ran his party...and allowed the bill to pass through the normal legislative process.  But the minute that Reid came back, though, presto!...here comes the filibustering...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell  has proposed splitting up the Homeland Security reauthorization bill into two parts, one being a "clean" bill that funds the department without reference to Obama's recent immigration executive action, and the other a section on whether that action should be accepted or rejected.  That sounds quite reasonable to me, but I have my doubts about even that great concession on the part of the majority Senate leadership being accepted by morose and spiteful Senator Reid, sad to say.  Still, there is hope now for this important bill to be passed and the needed funding to continue.  The next day or two will tell what happens...

Oh, by the way, after I had posted this article and looked back up on its title "Unnecessary Homeland Security Bill Senate Filibuster", I realized that it could be taken two different ways.  No, the Homeland Security bill is necessary, but the filibuster against it isn't...

MLS Brings Premier-Level Pro Soccer to Orlando

One of the interesting things about how international professional soccer is set up is that it is now a year-round sport.  Most of the leagues around the world play from August through May, while in North America the established premier league, Major League Soccer, has their season starting in March and going on to year's end.  So as the English Premier League and Mexican Liga MX wind down their respective seasons, pro soccer in the United States and Canada is just getting underway.  This year, MLS will be eliminating one team and expanding with two.  The bygone franchise is L.A. Chivas while the two new ones are another New York City team (there's already the New York Red Bulls) and Orlando (as the Lions).  The fact that, right when I'm getting interested in following soccer, a big time team gets established within reasonable driving distance is pretty cool.  If the ticket prices are reasonable, I'd like to go down there and see them play in person. Major League Soccer's season will kick off on March 6, so I'll be alternating then (at least for two or three months) between three leagues...

Soccer on TV Highlights Day of Recovery

While recovering from sickness on my day off, I spent much of yesterday resting, reading...and watching television.  I've discovered that, on Saturdays this time of the year, if you don't have much else to do at the time, you can spend much of the day watching soccer on TV if that's the sport you like to follow.  And since that was the case with me yesterday, I ended up watching five different matches...

The first two were from the English Premier League.  League-leading Chelsea was expected to run up the score on floundering Burnley, which is fighting to avoid relegation (demotion) to the next lower league next year.  Chelsea, after getting an early 1-0 lead, couldn't build on it and Burnley managed to score a late goal to tie it, to the surprise of everyone.  The second game featured defending champion Manchester City plastering their opponent Newcastle 5-0 with excellent passing and shooting.

The final three games were from the Mexican Liga MX, their premier soccer league.  The first of these was a classic confrontation between Cruz Azul, based in Mexico City, and Guadalajara Chivas.  The former was undefeated so far in this second half "Clausura" of the split 2014-15 season and expected to continue against Chivas, which was also fighting to avoid relegation to the next lower league.  Cruz Azul took a 1-0 lead and held it almost to the end, but Guadalajara jolted them with two lightning-quick goals in rapid succession around the 80-minute mark and upset them.  What a great game that was!  Then, disappointing Monterrey still managed to pull out a 2-1 win over Queretero, followed by the Monterrey-based Tigres "Tigers" bowing to the Chiapas Jaguares "Jaguars" 1-0.  That finale was a little disappointing to me since I was expecting Tigres, which nearly won the first split season "Apertura" championship this year, to be stronger than they have been of late...

Well, today I don't expect to be camped out in front of the TV set, and I have other things to do anyway.  Still, I need to rest a little more before I go back to work this evening, and if a soccer match happens to be on...

Repeated Colds a Burden This Winter

For some reason, this winter I have been repeatedly afflicted with colds...one of which I am suffering right now.  Ugh. Usually, I manage to avoid them since I practice a good deal of care with hand washing and avoiding contact with other sick people.  But this time around, I don't know if it is because my body is somehow weaker or because there are just more germs floating around than usual...they keep coming back at me.  I think this has also diminished my ability to run effectively in my races, although almost miraculously all three of them have come between episodes.  Nonetheless, now here I am again with headaches and congestion..fortunately, I have the weekend off from work to stay at home and recover some.  That's not so bad, but out of respect for others, when I am sick like this I try to minimize being out in public and as a result miss out on healthy social interaction.  But since I tend to have a reclusive nature anyway, it probably doesn't affect me as much as it would others...

Just Finished Reading Robert Jordan's The Path of Daggers

The Path of Daggers is the late Robert Jordan's eighth book in his extensive, fourteen-volume The Wheel of Time fantasy series (Brandon Sanderson wrote the final three books after Jordan's death).  I just finished reading it, and, sad to say, my two most positive reactions from it are (1) it is the shortest book in the series and (2) I am now past the halfway-point, one book closer to the end.  Besides this, it's pretty much the same fare as before, with the protagonists crisscrossing Jordan's fantasy continent from one kingdom to another in various states of peril and freedom/captivity.  The main hero, Rand al'Thor, is just as unlikeable to me as ever.  His hometown friend, Mat Cauthon, who along with Perrin Aybara are the only two characters I care for in the series, wasn't even in this book...despite the fact the previous one,  A Crown of Swords, ended with him left behind in a newly conquered city (by enemy forces) with his future in doubt and suspense.  So I suppose I'll just have to wait until the ninth book in this interminable series to find out what happens to him...which I suppose is that he'll experience some kind of tribulation in that occupied city, get out somehow, and then go on some trek to who-knows-where else, like all of the other characters. What really gets me is Jordan's device of having a group of villains, called "The Forsaken", who have the ability to pop in and out of thin air anywhere and anytime they want to stir up trouble.  This lack of order in the ongoing narrative, to me, serves to destroy its integrity when certain characters can behave without limitations.  But maybe, just maybe, the author is going somewhere with all this...who knows.  Another major problem I have with this series is that Jordan keeps introducing scores of new characters and spends a large section of the text discussing them.  There is way too much to have to keep up with here...

I'm still going to trudge along with this frustrating series to the bitter end.  At least I have THAT going in my favor: it definitely will end!