A Rising Flood of 2016 Presidential Candidates

Former Arkansas governor and FoxNews fixture Mike Huckabee has announced that he is once again running for president.  Huckabee joins Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson, along with several earlier announced candidates, in what is amounting to a flood of candidacy declarations...and this a year and a half before the 2016 election.  When they all finally get there in the ring, I wonder how they're going to handle the logistics of holding debates between them.  I do know that watching news channels is going to be an even greater ordeal than usual, with these faces going to whatever lengths they can to grab headlines...or their opponents trying to put them in a negative spotlight.  Groan...

I can't believe that most of these candidates are so full of themselves that they think they will slip through and get their party's nomination, so there must be other reasons for them to run for president.  But I do think a lot of them ARE full of themselves and see an opportunity here to be the focus of attention.  Others may be running for vice-president or the cabinet of the ultimately successful candidate, hopefully from their own party...and think that by running for president this will give them more political leverage with their ambitions.  And then again, some may be running for a FoxNews job down the line!  Who knows...although each and every one of them is putting out the narrative that they just love their country and want to change it in a better direction.  I suppose, though, that the ones who last the longest in the campaign will find that their stated agendas will support the specific agendas of the wealthy organizations and individuals pouring money into their campaign funds, not necessarily those candidates who are willing to make the tough decisions to make this country stronger and give its people hope for the future...

Considering Return to Marathon Running

When I was struggling through my only official 26.2-mile marathon, the Ocala Marathon, back in 2011, I was forced to walk the last seven miles due to an IT-band injury, just below my left knee, that became excruciatingly painful to run on.  At the 19-mile mark, I asked a race worker if I could just end the race and get a ride back to the start where I was parked...she replied that I should stick it out and finish the marathon, even if I had to walk the rest of the way.  I did just that, although I felt a bit humiliated when slow runner after slow runner trudged past me.  Some of them were also rather advanced in years, well past social security retirement age.  I thought to myself then that these folks had forged for themselves a very active lifestyle and were, for their age, athletes in their own right with their marathon running...even if they were considerably slower then the younger "whippersnappers".  After that race, which I did manage to painfully finish, I decided to first heal from my injury and then focus instead on half-marathons...I've finished nine of them so far.  But that memory of the slower, elderly runners completing that marathon has stuck with me...

I'm not getting any younger myself, and in regard to running, I'm not planning on getting much faster, either.  No, I think that just perhaps now might be the time for me to redirect my efforts toward distance, even if it entails me running a bit slower in the process.  Of course, I'll need to be careful to avoid those pesky injuries that tend to plague runners.  Still, I can see me becoming a regular (albeit slower) marathon runner the way I've been doing the half-marathons for the past few years...

Major League Soccer Standings Misleading

I was looking through the sports section of today's Gainesville Sun when my eyes fell upon the Major League Soccer standings.  I saw that "my" Orlando City Iron Lions were a bit down among the teams in the East with a 2-4-2 record (with MLS, the numbers represent wins-losses-draws, while with other leagues the order is wins-draws-ties).  Down at the bottom of the division were two teams: the Philadelphia Union and the Montreal Impact.  Philly had a 1-6-3 record while the basement-dwelling Canadian team was 0-2-2.  I had to do a double take when I saw this, for this meant that one team had already played 10 games while the other had only 4. I already knew that the Impact were deeply involved in the CONCACAF (Americas) tournament involving league teams in the Western Hemisphere and had made it to the championship round.  No doubt some of its MLS regular season games had been rescheduled to make room for its tournament games...the same happens for the European leagues as well with their various extra-league tournaments.  But that still doesn't account for the wide disparity in games played.  Of course, eventually all of the MLS teams will finish the regular season having played the same number of games.  But since, on any given day, standings are computed based on 3 points per win, 1 per draw and 0 per loss, a team with fewer games played will tend to be down in the standings while one that has more games under their belt than others will have a more favorable position. Although this may present an illusory impression about the respective teams' successes, mid-season coach firings and player trades may result, based on popular reaction to the different teams' positions.  So I'm a little bit disconcerted that the various teams have such a wide range in games played, but perhaps this is unavoidable given various circumstances (including the aforementioned tourney).  Still, regarding the ongoing standings, they instead could go by an indexing system whereby the total accumulated points, divided by total games played, would determine the relative positions of the teams.  In the end it would amount to the same thing when all teams have played the same number of games, but during the course of the regular season it would give a much more accurate indication of how well or bad different teams are doing...

A Bit Out of Shape on My Bicycle

I went out again this morning on my bicycle, riding around my neighborhood for 3.4 miles.  It was clear and relatively cool for this time of year, and the air seemed drier than usual as well.  But it seemed that, no matter which direction I was riding in, I was getting the wind coming at me...and believe me, I wasn't going fast enough to cause the effect with my riding speed.  Also, in spite of the fact that my neighborhood is, for all practical purposes, as flat as a table top, I felt as if I were continually fighting my way up a gradual slope.  I think there's probably a reasonable explanation for this all: I'm out of training on my bicycle...and anything that might possibly contribute to me having to make an extra effort is going to be magnified in my mind.  But I'm going to keep grinding away and gradually step up the mileage.  The irony is that I could run the same course I just rode my bike down and come away from it with a different reaction...but I'm used to running a lot and I haven't biked regularly since 1995...even though, from time to time, I've taken the rusty old contraption out of the storage shed and wheeled around on it...

Just Finished Reading (Again) Sue Grafton's "C" is for Corpse

I'd written a little while back that I was a fan of mystery writer Sue Grafton's "alphabet" mystery series, with each book going through a letter in the alphabet, starting with "A" is for Alibi.  After skipping around from book to book in no particular order, I found myself wondering which books I had read and which I hadn't...so I decided to go back to the beginning and read them all in alphabetical order...whether I had read them already or not.  So I've read  A, B, ... and, now, the C book ("C" is for Corpse), and so far they're all books I've read before.  Still, each story was interesting, and I had the advantage of knowing in advance who the killer was...so I could examine how Grafton inserted them and certain clues earlier on in the novel.  The next Grafton book is "D" is for Deadbeat, but right now I'm in the middle of reading three other books: The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne, The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke...

My April 2015 Running Report

In April, I kept up with my total running mileage while limiting the lengths of individual runs, managing this with multiple runs per day.  My total mileage for the month was 309, with my longest single run being for only 5.3 miles.  I ran on 29 of April's 30 days, in spite of suffering a pretty severe rear-end collision on my car on the 20th and spending the day two days later at the hospital undergoing medical tests for a life-long condition.  With both of these, I emerged with no injuries or complications...so onward with the running!

I wasn't able to run in a race this past month, but then again races are secondary for me to the daily running itself.  Maybe I'll pick and choose some races during the next few months to enter...most likely they'll be of the 5K sort.  I also got out my old rusty, cheap bicycle a couple of times and rode around my neighborhood.  Just for the sake of recording it, I rode a total of 8.3 miles with 5.0 miles being my longest ride.  Next month, though, I intend to do much more bike riding and combine that with my running...so I look forward to greatly increasing the mileage there...

Just Finished Reading Edith Wharton's Novel Ethan Frome

Published in 1911 and set in that time period in a rural New England community, Ethan Frome, a short novel by Edith Wharton (and one of those books that tend to be high school English class reading assignments), tells the story a man beset by a feeling of entrapment as he struggles between his true feelings and his strongly held sense of duty and pride.  Ethan Frome is a relatively poor farmer, intelligent and talented but duty-bound to care for his ailing parents instead of pursuing education and a career in engineering, his true calling.   After the death of his father, he hires a nurse, Zeena, to care for his mother until her death...after which he marries Zeena, who in turn takes on the role of an invalid (albeit a hypochondriac invalid).  Kattie, a young cousin of Zeena's, comes to stay with them at their farm and helps with chores while Zeena retreats further and further into her self-absorption with her own imagined illnesses.  Ethan's feelings for Kattie grow stronger and stronger, which of course causes great internal turmoil as he wrestles with jealousy over how other men treat her and his own guilty feelings about betraying his wife.  These three people are the focus of the story, and their interrelationship develops to drive the narrative to its climax...which produces a surprise ending.  

I got several different impressions while reading Ethan Frome.  The story begins from the viewpoint of an outside character who is visiting the area on a work assignment.  He sees and meets Frome, and then discovers the reason for his terrible limp: a terrible accident he suffered 24 years earlier when he was 28.  That accident, its causes, and its ramifications are the climax of the tale...although throughout the story the reader knows it is coming as part of an extended flashback narrative dominating the body of the novel.  But aside from getting a good sense of what life was like in rural New England in wintertime just before the advent of the automotive age and becoming thoroughly depressed with the dismal lives of the characters, the main thing I got out of Ethan Frome, intended or not, is that some families seem to have the need within them for someone to play the role of "invalid"...even when no one is ill or incapacitated.  Frome's mother is the invalid first and Zeena, the nurse, cares for her.  After the mother's death, the "invalid" role becomes vacant, so to speak, but then Zeena rushes in to fill it with her hypochondria.  And to confirm this, the surprise ending to the story, which I won't reveal (in case you decide to read it), further affirms this curious phenomenon in another way. Did the author mean to express this idea with this tale of a very dysfunctional family or not? Who knows, but it made a big impression on me...

Coffee Shops Like Starbucks Starting to Bug Me

For many years, I used to like to go out to diners and coffee shops...and just sit there and read, write, and study.  And after Starbucks opened its Magnolia Parke store here in Gainesville in 2000, I've gone there a lot, along with other Starbucks locations.  But in recent years I've grown tired of going out like this...besides, with so many people also going to these locations (especially to Starbucks), I often find that there is no place to sit.  I also find myself more and more irritated by the crowds and the noise, so why bother when I can stay at home and accomplish the same things while drinking better tasting and less expensive home-brewed coffee?

I'm sure that one of the big contributing factors to my discomfort at coffee shops is the fact that, now with the omnipresent Internet, customers will take their tablets and laptops there and sit for hours upon hours...making it difficult for me to find a spot for myself.  I don't want to sound like a hypocrite, though: that's what I used to do, too, and for decades before the Internet was ever an option...

Went to Yesterday's Friends of the Library Sale in Gainesville

Yesterday my son and I went to the Friends of the Library book sale on Main Street, here in Gainesville.  Will wanted to get there early on the first day of the sale, which lasts through Wednesday.  I'm glad he was keeping up with it, for I had forgotten about the sale.  We drove over there and found that parking was a bit of a problem, but managed to find an available space a healthy walking distance from the site.  When we finally walked across Main Street, we found a very, very long line of people waiting for the impending opening of the building warehousing the thousands of books that would be for sale.  The line actually went to the end of the block and curled around the corner.  One of the crossing guards said that we might as well just stand there and let the line catch up with us, but Will and I decided to just go ahead and get in line...entailing another considerable walk.  When the sale opened and we finally got inside, the place was predictably packed with book fiends (I wonder what the fire code's maximum limit of people was).  It was almost impossible to get anywhere because of the density of customers, but eventually I was able to make my way to the areas I was the most interested in.  I found a couple of 50-cent mystery novels and three foreign language Bibles: a 10-cent Spanish version, a $1 French version, and, best of all, a $1.50 Chinese/English dual translation version.  And I was able to find a book on the history of Christianity that I hope will help Melissa in her studies.  Will was also able to find some good books, and we were both satisfied with our purchases, not to mention finally getting out of that overly congested building.

The Friends of the Library sale is held each April and October.  The event's organizers were expecting a crowd yesterday, but according to an article in the local newspaper Gainesville Sun today, the turnout was much, much larger than they had anticipated.  Of course, with a good public library system like we have here in Alachua County,  I can check out books for free and then return them when finished..hoarding piles of cheaply bought books can be a bit troublesome in the long run. So I'm not quite as much of fan of the FOL sale as others...but that Chinese/English Bible was a special find...

Just Finished Reading Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels

A few days ago, I finished reading Jonathan Swift's classic novel, titled Gulliver's Travels.  Because it came out in 1725, nearly 300 years ago, I feared that the language might be a little too antiquated...but it turns out that Swift's writing is easy to follow.  Most people who haven't read Gulliver's Travels are aware that Gulliver is a sea-goer who gets himself shipwrecked on a strange island...and wakes up to find himself bound and surrounded by minuscule people: the Lilliputians.  But that's just the first part of his odysseys into fanciful lands populated, not just by the diminutive Lilliputians, but also by the ultra-giant Brobdingnags, the Laputans with their floating capital, the Balnirabi with their ridiculous, pointless science projects, the Luggnaggs with their shunned and pitied immortals, the Glubbdubdribs with their ability to drum up ghosts...any ghost you'd want to converse with, and finally, the Houyhnhnms, horses who within their domain replace humans (which they call "Yahoos") as the intelligent, reasoning species.  Because of the funny-sounding names Swift imagined for these "peoples", reading aloud can contribute greatly to the effect of his writing...and it can lead to uncontrollable fits of laughter, especially when Lemeul Gulliver (a physician by profession) goes off in a laudatory rant about the esteemed and superior Houyhnhnms.

I have read that there is a lot of satire in Gulliver's Travels, and I'm sure that Swift had different groups in mind when he wrote about various societies that his hero encountered.  But there is a punch line to his satire: after Gulliver discovers and reveals the various down-sides to these very disparate cultures, he tries to convince the Houyhnhnms how reasonable his own English culture is and that they should be regarded as equals.  Only one problem: as Gulliver goes on describing his own society, he finds himself continually criticizing it and exposing its many injustices and flaws.  Finally, he sees that his own native world is just as bad as the strange ones he had encountered previously.  Upon returning to England at the end, he can't adjust to even being in the presence of his fellow humans, much less interacting with them...

I was pleasantly surprised with Gulliver's Travels.  Not only did it crack me up with its humor, but its sobering description of Swift's contemporary English society still holds up nearly three centuries later with ours of today.  I don't think you'd regret it if you found a copy of this book and read it...

Car Accident and Annual Medical Checkup

It's been a few days since I wrote an article on this blog, but I've been a little preoccupied.  On Monday afternoon, I was driving to work and, while I was stopped at a traffic light, another (larger) car plowed into the back of my car, crumpling up the back of it like an aluminum can.  Fortunately, I had my foot solidly on the brake pedal and my car remained stationary throughout...so I avoided hitting the car in front of me.  And, oh yeah, I also had on my seat belt, a real life saver.  People around me seemed surprised that I was walking around afterwards without a scratch.  Two days later, I'm still not feeling as if I sustained any kind of injury.  I suspect that the driver (also apparently uninjured) who hit me was distracted, because the impact was pretty severe...not like someone who was slowing down for the light but whose brakes couldn't completely stop their car...

Yesterday I spent the whole day at Shands Hospital getting my annual checkup for a chronic condition that was discovered in early 2012 and which, as it turns out,  I had from birth.  The condition hasn't worsened in the three years since that diagnosis, and as such I've been "cleared" again for another year.  I was a little surprised (and dismayed), though, to discover that my weight had creeped up to an unacceptable level.  This in spite of all the running I've been doing.  But then again, of late I have been eating too much, and especially too much of the wrong foods.  It looks as if a "dietary reset" is due for me...

Southeastern Storm Squall Line Finally Hits Gainesville

A massive storm system, full of lightning, hail, high winds, heavy rain...and, yes, tornadoes, has slammed into the southeastern part of the United States and has just begun to pass over Gainesville...hopefully as briefly as possible.  The squall line just hit, and if we're fortunate we'll just get soaked, along with a few tree branches blown down.  The above photo tries to capture a little of the enveloping storm...

Just Finished Reading John Irving's Last Night in Twisted River

Many years ago, I once saw an episode on the 1980s sitcom Newhart, in which Bob Newhart's lead character, an author living in Vermont, had just published a novel.  Curiously, every character in his story was almost exactly like a "real"-life friend or family member...and the laughs began as each of the people discovered themselves in the book and reacted to their portrayal.  It was a pretty funny episode, as I remember it.  And that memory has returned after reading John Irving's novel Last Night in Twisted River. 

In Last Night in Twisted River, published in 2009 and which I've just finished reading, John Irving explores the craft of writing through the character Daniel Baciagalupo, a cook's son who spends his childhood years at a logging camp in New Hampshire.  As the result of a horrible accident at the camp, Dominic, the father and his son are forced to flee elsewhere, with the aid of Dominic's close friend, Ketchum, as they try to avoid the wrath of the sadistic and vengeful Constable Carl.  Starting in 1954, the story flashes back to 1942 and then jumps ahead in spurts, to 1967, 1975, 1983, 2000, 2001...and, finally, 2005.  But even with that abrupt progression, the story isn't told in a linear chronological order...in 1983, for example, events from earlier years are told in flashbacks, a frequent device of Irving in this novel. As for my earlier allusion to Newhart, Daniel as a novelist keeps churning out book after book whose characters are eerily close to the people in his past and present...to the point where his father discovers details of his son's life that otherwise would have been too intimate and controversial to discuss openly. Parallel to this, Irving himself seems to be revealing his own life through this author, who has renamed himself with "Danny Angel" as his pen name.   For example, Danny goes to an Iowa writers workshop where he meets and befriends the great author Kurt Vonnegut...it was actually Irving himself who did this in real life.  And the New Hampshire setting along with Daniel's attendance at Exeter Academy closely dovetails with Irving's personal experiences...along with the fact that both Daniel and John were able to avoid being sent off to Vietnam during that war because they were fathers of young children. In all of this, Irving seems to be telling his readers that in order to write effectively, you must put all of yourself into it and avoid self-restraint...and that will most likely result in your own personal experiences, along with the people you come to know and the events you encounter, in one form or another, becoming a part of your stories...consciously or unconsciously. In other words, each of us has to write from where we are, not from the point of view of some hypothetical "objective" person: they don't exist, anyway...

I was frustrated at the often foolish decisions made by Danny, Dominic, and Ketchum in the story, but now, looking back on it, I respect Irving for having made these characters seem so real through their imperfections.  On the other hand, the author unrealistically had Danny, in his forties, going out on casual 6-to-7-mile country runs, in which he could collect his thoughts and come up with new writing material...all the while running at a 6-to-7 minutes-per-mile pace.  Casually. A little too fast for my tastes, I would think...

As a couple of side notes, if you're inclined toward the culinary arts, you'd enjoy the many sections in the book that Irving devoted to different types of food and how they are prepared.  And for the politics junkies among you, there's plenty of that, too, with Irving expressing, through his characters, what he thinks about George W. Bush and his policies.  Although I wasn't too keen on the political potshots, I did appreciate that the author had people well into their elder years, several even well into their eighties, who were active, lucid, and deeply involved in the high drama of the story.  In this it reminded me of Stephen King's earlier novel Insomnia, one of my favorites of his...

NBA Playoffs Begin This Saturday

The National Basketball Association "second season" of the playoffs begins this weekend as sixteen teams vie in eight best-of-seven series in the first round.  The pairings, based on the seeding according to regular season win-loss records in each conference, are thus:

East
Atlanta vs. Brooklyn
Toronto vs. Washington

Cleveland vs. Boston
Chicago vs. Milwaukee

West
Golden State vs. New Orleans
Portland vs. Memphis

Houston vs. Dallas
Los Angeles Clippers vs. San Antonio

The playoffs are constructed in a bracket format, similar to the NCAA tournament.  So regardless of the relative seeding of the winners of the first round, the next opponents will be within the groupings that I have set off...hence, suppose Atlanta and Washington win their opening series, then they'd face each other the next round...and so on.  Then, the two remaining teams from each conference will play for the conference titles...and then those two winners will play for the league championship, to end some time in early June.

I'm rooting for Atlanta, Washington, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, Memphis, Dallas, and San Antonio in the opening round, but I suspect that Cleveland and Golden State will easily win theirs.  As for the eventual NBA championship series, I'd like to see Chicago playing San Antonio, with the latter winning the title...but I suspect it will be more like Cleveland playing Golden State, with Lebron James of the Cavaliers adding another championship to his resume...

Read Robert Jordan's Crossroads of Twilight a While Ago

Usually when I have just finished reading a book, I'll review it (without spoiling the ending) within a week at the latest.  However, I was going over my reviews of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series, a fantasy venture in which the author seemed to have lost his way over the years in the process of writing it.  Crossroads of Twilight is the tenth volume of this fourteen-part series.  Jordan would write one more before dying...and writer Brandon Sanderson (who wrote the excellent Mistborn fantasy series) would finish the final three volumes.  But this last book I read (from March 17 to the 27th) was so inconsequential and left so little an impression on me that I forgot all about it very soon after I finished...and thus never got around to writing a review.  Eventually, since the beginning of the Wheel of Time series, we've been told that main protagonist Rand al'Thor, also known as "The Dragon Reborn", will unite the forces of good behind him and defeat the evil Dark One in a monumentally cataclysmic final showdown battle.  This battle, after ten books, seems to be even further away than it was at the start, and Rand seems to be failing miserably in his quest to bring people together behind him: other than his closest, inner circle of loyalists, they are obsessed with petty bickering and backbiting.  Minor characters abound, and I wonder what ultimate purpose the author had in bringing their subplots to the foreground of the narrative...

Well, I reviewed the story line in Crossroads of Twilight, which as I can see it has one important development...right at the very end.  I'm prepared to embark on Jordan's eleventh and final (for him) book  and then see what Sanderson was able to do to salvage the series.  I could just walk away from it right now, seeing all of the other books I could be reading instead...but I've already invested too much of my time into it.  To the bitter end!

Yesterday's City Commission Runoff Election, Deplorable Turnout

In yesterday's Gainesville City Commission runoff elections, Harvey Budd and Charles Goston squeaked out very narrow victories over their respective opponents Jay Curtis and Yvonne Hinson Rawls.  The turnout was an abysmal 11.8% of registered voters.  Goston won his election by only 69 votes.

I keep hearing how we're supposed to honor our brave young men and women in the armed forces who defend our liberties with their service and have done so over the course of our country's history.  And I do honor and respect them.  One way that I do this is to take seriously the hard-won liberty of being able to choose our own leaders and representatives through the democratic voting process.  Apparently though, 88.2% of Gainesville's registered voters don't agree with me about the value of their collective and individual sacrifices for our freedoms...freedoms which too many take for granted...

Today is Election Day in Gainesville...Why Not Vote?

Today is election day here in Gainesville, Florida.  In last month's two city commission races, there was only a 12% turnout.  Based on the early vote attendance in the last few days, today's runoff vote will have an even smaller turnout.  Needless to say, I went down to my local precinct, which was crowded (it's a senior recreational center) and voted, being the only voter there...and probably had been for quite a while.

The two races are for District One, in which I don't live, and for an at-large seat comprising the entire city.  Therefore,  I only voted in the runoff election between Harvey Budd, who seems to be supported by the more left-leaning faction of the Democratic Party, and Jay Curtis, who seems to be represent reasonable growth and lower utility rates.  In the District One race, Yvonne Hinson-Rawls is running against Charles Goston.  Budd and Curtis each got about 33% of the vote in the initial election: I think Budd will win it, though...although I had a more favorable opinion of Curtis.  I'm not sure about the other two, although Hinson-Rawls seems to be garnering more support from the political establishment here.

So if you're a resident of Gainesville and are a registered voter, why not refamiliarize yourself with your local precinct and have a voting experience today?  Then you can go around the rest of the day and lord over others the fact that you voted and they didn't...

Hillary Declares Candidacy for President

Hillary Clinton has now declared herself to be a candidate for the Presidency in 2016, joining Jeb Bush and the minor league field of Republican hopefuls.  The Democrats no doubt would love to see someone like Ted Cruz or Rand Paul get the GOP nomination as it would be little of a contest, regardless how you might feel about these candidates.  Marco Rubio has also stated that he is running, and his candidacy should be seen as a bit more problematic.  He is just as ideologically on the extreme right as Cruz or Paul, but he is a soft-spoken and skillful speaker who presents himself as a reasonable leader...much in the same way that Barack Obama did in 2007 when he launched his improbably successful presidential bid.  H-m-m, I don't plan to vote for Rubio, but he is, at least at this stage, a big threat to Bush in the upcoming primary campaign season.  And about Wisconsin's governor Scott Walker, I don't see him getting very far in the campaign other than maybe being selected as a vice-presidential running mate...but that might just be due to the fact that of all candidates so far (although I'm not sure he's officially declared himself yet), he repels me the most...

I won't equivocate...I'm a Democrat and I plan to vote for Clinton for President.  But should Jeb Bush manage to get himself elected in 2016, I won't grieve too much...he was quite an able governor of Florida during his two terms from 1999 to 2007 and is well superior to the rest of the Republican field.  But to each his or her own, I suppose, and it is not for me to tell you or anyone else which candidate or party to support...

Game of Thrones and Hobbit Shows on HBO Tonight, Diverge From Books

Although my current cable television service has on it many, many channels, I don't subscribe to HBO.  Every now and then, however, they offer a short period of time in which HBO is shown for free.  It just so happens that this weekend is one of those times, and I'm taking advantage of it by watching old Game of Thrones reruns, as well as the new season's opener for the series, which will air at 9 PM.  Then, at 10, I plan to watch (on a different HBO channel): The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, which is the second part of the movie trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien's relatively short book The Hobbit.  These two shows bring to the forefront a major gripe I have with screen adaptations of literary works...

The HBO TV series Game of Thrones is based on George R.R. Martin's ongoing fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, of which he has published five volumes and still has two in the works.  Yet the TV adaptation has taken some major liberties with Martin's story, virtually ignoring some characters (which the author may intend to later play a more significant role) and at times creating brand new story lines.  I was watching one of season #4's reruns earlier this afternoon and it had Bran Stark and his entourage kidnapped and imprisoned by a character that he never encountered in the book.  And Bran's mother...at a point in the series, they began to ignore her while the book continued to show her as a meaningful part of the story.  But Game of Thrones is just one example of this problem (or least it's my problem): the movie adaptation of The Hobbit goes even further in diverging from Tolkien's book, both by invoking an ultra-somber mood and by injecting completely foreign story lines with subplots to which the author would probably strenuously object were he still alive.  Then, to top it all, the makers of The Hobbit movies decided that they could capitalize on the success of the Lord of the Ring movie trilogy by placing some of its characters in it (and who weren't in the book)...supposedly as a draw for those many Ring fans...

Still, in spite of my criticisms, I do enjoy seeing how the works of Martin and Tolkien have been realized on the screen, especially in regard to the special effects and the generally good acting and direction.  But I am glad that I read the books beforehand, at least the ones that have already come out...

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...