Just Finished Reading Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island

Published in 1874, The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne, fulfills the qualifications for what constitutes true science fiction perhaps better than any story in that genre that I've read.  It obviously is fiction, no doubt about that.  But there is so much science (and engineering) in it that I would recommend this book for a general middle school science class.  Unfortunately, the often excessively detailed attention that the author devotes to explaining how different things were devised and constructed slowed down my reading to the point where it took me much longer than I had expected to complete this 500-page novel.  That having been noted, I still thought it was a good tale...

The setting for the opening of The Mysterious Island is the besieged Confederate capital city of Richmond, Virginia in February of 1865, just two months before the end of the U.S. Civil War and the ensuing assassination of President Lincoln.  Engineer and Union Army Captain Cyrus Harding is a prisoner of war there, but is allowed to freely roam through Richmond without being allowed to leave. He is joined by his servant Neb, a freed slave who has been employed by Harding as a servant on his Massachusetts farm for much of his life.  They meet up with a New York reporter named Gileon Spilen, a sailor named Pencroft, and a young teen-age boy accompanying Pencroft named Herbert.  Pencroft points out to Harding that the Confederates had constructed a large hot-air balloon to break the siege and were planning soon to use it.  Instead, with the aid of a fortuitous strong storm, the five of them sneak aboard the craft and take off.  The storm, much stronger than they had expected, puts them on a perilous flight for thousands of miles into the open South Pacific Ocean.  There, with some adventure, they manage to land on an uncharted island and, using their individual talents, create shelter, agriculture, and industry using the raw materials available.  But there is a mystery here on Lincoln Island, as they named it.  Some anonymous person or force, at different times of crisis, keeps intervening to save them...just enough so that they cannot trace the source of their benefactor.  Without wanting to give away the assorted adventures that our "heroes" encounter throughout the book, let me just say that the mystery does get eventually resolved...and it points to a hilarious time contradiction that Verne must have known about but still allowed to stand...

It isn't apparent for most of The Mysterious Island, but this novel is indirectly related to an earlier Jules Verne work...the name of which I'll let you, the adventuresome reader, to discover for yourself.  The problem with time here is that both novels are set in the same time period, yet The Mysterious Island is supposed to take place many years after the conclusion of that earlier novel!  I think that the author had wanted to tie in two different historical events: the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the end of the Civil War in 1865...and couldn't integrate the two dates without creating a troublesome overlap. Oh well, that's the author's prerogative...I'll just roll with it (but it's still funny)...

With most stories I read, the characters have all sorts of conflicts with each other...this is usually one of the desired effects that the authors are trying to produce.  Not with The Mysterious Island, though.  The "five", although truly distinct individuals with their own personalities and bents, all continually work together with a common spirit, camaraderie, and commitment .  I was very impressed with their high level of cooperation...maybe The Mysterious Island should be taught in social studies classes, too!

Major League Baseball: Following Florida and West Coast Teams

Although they've just lost a couple of games in a row, baseball's American League East Division-leading Tampa Bay Rays have come a long way from last year.  Currently, they are 40-32, while after 66 games in 2014 they were a dismal 24-42.  With proven success Joe Madden leaving the team after last season to manage the Chicago Cubs (which he has predictably turned around into a contender), many weren't giving the Rays much of a chance this year, especially in such a competitive division.  But Kevin Cash has stepped in and done a great job so far.  Still, the East has four of the five teams bunched up close together at the top, while even cellar-dwelling Boston could well be a factor in the second half of the season should they put things together...

The same good news cannot be said for the Miami Marlins in the National League East, currently mired in fourth place at 30-41.  The good news is that this team is in the same situation as the aforementioned Red Sox, i.e. should they catch fire and go on some winning streaks in the second half of the season they might be able to contend for a playoff spot at the end.  Still, when I consider some of their additions this year, like Dee Gordon, Michael Morse, and Ichiro Suzuki, along with the productivity of slugger Giancarlo Stanton, I'm more then a little dismayed by this team's failures so far...they should be at the top of the standings with the Nationals and Mets...

Although I tend to follow the two Florida teams in baseball, my work schedule, which has me getting home a little before 12:30 AM, has given me the opportunity to watch the conclusions of games played out west...so I'm becoming more familiar with Seattle, both Los Angeles teams, Arizona, San Francisco, San Diego, and Oakland...and I tend to root for the Mariners (who aren't playing up to expectations so far) and the Giants (who are matching, if not exceeding expectations)...

Some 1965-66 Nova Elementary Memories, Part 2

This is a continuation of the article I wrote on June 13...

There were a lot of different things going on at Nova Blanche Forman Elementary School (in Davie, Florida) during the 1965-66 school year, when I was in the Fourth Grade, assigned to its "Suite C".  But there were also events taking place in the news as well.  The War in Vietnam was escalating throughout this time as more and more troops were sent over there, out into the jungles and enemy-occupied lands to basically "draw fire" and locate them for aerial attacks.  This cynical strategy of my country's military planners to sacrifice the precious lives of our young soldiers (many of them draftees, not volunteers) as bait wasn't to be revealed for decades.  Instead there was a great patriotic fervor about how brave the soldiers were and they were out there preserving our freedoms back home.  In my school, we would often have assemblies within our classrooms when we would do nothing but sing American fight songs and anthems.  Mr. Johnston (the Room 11 teacher) and the librarian (whose name I have forgotten) held a mini-course about American patriotism, complete with a nifty textbook.  We would meet in small groups in one of the library's conference rooms and discuss topics like patriotism...and, of course, being willing to lay down one's own life in a war like Vietnam.  I remember the librarian mentioning that her own son was over there...which in retrospect was probably why Johnston had enlisted her help in teaching this course.  I believe it was at that time that I mentally began to calculate the number of years before I would be old enough to have to go over there and dutifully sacrifice my own life...not something very appropriate for a nine-year old to have to be considering.  Anyway, Mr. Johnston, who must have been a soldier of sorts in his own youth, possessed a sizable collection of military insignia and mementos, which he displayed in his home room.  One day, though, someone must have stolen some of his items, for the entire Suite C was told to sit there quietly in their rooms for upwards to an hour while the teachers went around haranguing everyone about the theft and that the thief was making everyone else suffer for their misdeed.  How "professional" of my teachers to do that to us...

Aside from Vietnam, during my Fourth Grade at Nova they would send up the orbital Gemini space flights, which preceded the Apollo Moon missions and were designed to prepare the astronauts for space walks and docking and releasing the modules in space.  Whenever such a flight was going on during the school day, I remember the TV being on, with endless coverage of the event, complete with tedious, unchanging "simulations" interspersed with Tang commercials...

More on my 1965-66 Nova Elementary School memories to come...

Just Finished Reading Voltaire's Candide

French philosopher Voltaire wrote in 1759, during the Enlightenment and before the French Revolution, the satirical short novel Candide...which is also the name of its protagonist, a young man who plays the common literary/cinematic role of the "noble innocent"  (like Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot, or, in our own era, Forrest Gump).  Candide is a German from Westphalia, placed in a castle and then thrown out of it by the distantly related Baron when he becomes infatuated with his daughter, the beautiful Cunegonde, and is caught kissing her.  The eviction leads Candide to join the Bulgar army, after which he discovers that the same army has ravaged the land around his former home and butchered the very people he lived with...including Cunegonde herself and his teacher, an unreasonably optimistic fellow named Pangloss, who sees everything that occurs, no matter how negative on the surface, as "all being for the best".  Subsequently, Candide finds himself travelling from one land to another...to Portugal, then Argentina, then Paraguay, then Suriname, back to Europe in the Netherlands and off the coast of England, then in Venice...finally culminating in the Turkish Ottoman Empire.  Early during these journeys he discovers that Cunegonde has survived the earlier attack.  While in South America, he and his servant Cacambo accidentally discover the hidden realm of El Dorado, whose inhabitants amaze him with their wisdom, grace, and untold riches...reminding me a bit of the horse-like Houyhnhnms in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.  Along the journeys, Pangloss has resurfaced alive, only to be hung as a heretic by the Inquisition in Portugal following a severe earthquake...and then resurfacing alive later.  While in South America, Candide encounters the pessimistic counterpart to Pangloss in Martin, a man of Manichaean belief whose cynical views continually contradict the unwarranted optimism that Candide has learned to exhibit from Pangloss.

Much of Candide's travels are motivated by his search for his love Cunegonde, with whom he had been reunited for a little while but had been again separated from when a powerful Buenos Aires nobleman decided to take her as his mistress.  Will they ever see each other again?  Well, you can read Candide for yourself to find out, if you're interested.  To be perfectly honest, though, I began to lose interest in what happened to the novel's various characters when I realized what Voltaire was trying to do here, which I believe is twofold...

First, Candide is a concentrated piece of satire, heavily dripping with sarcasm directed at the society of his time.  Voltaire rips apart the notion of war being fought by "international rules" while innocent people are being tortured and killed and their land and possessions either destroyed or stolen.  The idea that nobility is an absolute quality that someone can possess is also ridiculed (Cunegonde's noble line counts back to 72 generations, just a little too many for Candide to "qualify" as a husband).  And the various nations of the time, not to mention religious institutions, receive their share of abuse at the author's pen.

Aside from satire, though, Voltaire has an important, serious philosophical point to make with Candide.  The various characters go through the story looking for the key to happiness and freedom from suffering...and only at the end, through a happenstance encounter with a modest Turkish farmer, does Candide realize the "magic formula": work at cultivating your own garden and be devoted to it.  As the farmer put it, by focusing on purposeful, hard work you will be engaged and not in danger of falling to the three great evils of boredom, vice, and poverty.  Cultivate your own garden...this is an "internal" approach for one to take instead of  "externally" seeking out the answers from wealth, adventure, pleasure, politics, religion, or any other "solution" the world has to offer.  I think that's pretty profound, if I might say so...

Record Heat and Ichetucknee Springs Logjam

The temperatures in north-central Florida, where I live, are off the charts and have been almost unbearable for about a week.  Today the forecast high, as I viewed it on my television screen, was to be a "near-record" 95 degrees.  I looked at this prediction at the same time they were showing the current temperature: 98!  Just stepping out of the door is like stepping into a furnace, it is so hot.  This morning, Melissa and I drove out past Fort White (a few miles northwest of Gainesville) to Ichetucknee Springs, where on the Ichetucknee River, largely shaded, visitors traditionally ride tubes down the slow current.  We were going, however, to attend some river baptisms that our church was holding there.  As we drove through Fort White on our way to the park, we passed, on the right side of the road, business after business renting out the huge inner tubes used at Ichetucknee...and the visiting vehicles were being loaded up.  But when we got to the park's entrance, there was a backup of 70+ vehicles.  As it turned out, Ichetucknee Springs was packed to the hilt and each car had to wait for one to leave in order to enter...an excruciatingly slow process.  Seeing the pointlessness of hanging around, I turned the car around and headed back.  On the way, we passed into High Springs and I stopped at a place, alternately called "The Corner" and "The Talented Cookie" which serves coffee, tea, desserts, sells some antiques, and rents out boating and water sports equipment.  Melissa and I enjoyed our respective tea and coffee along with our sweets.  A nice place to stop by, if you happen to be going in that direction (it's on the left side of US-27 going northwest, just before the US-41 intersection).  Afterward, we continued on home.  I felt sorry for all those people who had gone to all the trouble to rent out those tubes and had expected to soon be enjoying themselves in that river...only to be hopelessly in an endless line just to get into the park to find a parking space.  Some other time, though, I'd like to go there with Melissa and tube down the river...but not on a weekend, especially one when there are baptisms taking place...

In spite of the weather, I had an impulsive urge this afternoon to spring into action and mow the front yard, which was beginning to look like a wheat field.  That being done, I washed up and am now at my favorite Starbucks (at least as I write this) working on iced coffee and iced water...I think a refill is in order.  The main thing, though, is that I'm on the air-conditioned side of the window!

Just Finished Reading Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door

A Wind in the Door, by Madeleine L'Engle, and which I just finished reading a few days ago,  is the second book in her TIme Quintet science fiction series aimed at young adults and teens.  Like its predecessor, A Wrinkle in Time, the Murray children of Meg and Charles Wallace, along with their friend Calvin O'Keefe, are involved in another adventure to save the world from evil forces threatening it.  But unlike the first book in this series,  the focus here is on microbiology, with the Murray kids' mother, a microbiologist, being the science expert instead of their father, a physicist and whose adventures were featured in the previous story, which involved planet-hopping through a device called the "tesseract".

The crisis in A Wind in the Door focuses on the human mitochondria, found in each cell and which are indispensable to life.  A disease that infects them has spread among the population, and young Charles Wallace catches it, his life in peril.  In the meantime, Meg has discovered that her hated former school principal, Mr. Jenkins, has tripled in number, all three identical on the surface.  But two of the Mr. Jenkins are Echthroi, which go about destroying things by "un-naming" and emptying them (also called "X"-ing). Meg is tasked with the problem of naming which of the three is the real Mr. Jenkins, and she discovers that love for this thoroughly unlikable person is the key in accomplishing this.  Then, with the help of a dragon-like cherubim, the real Mr. Jenkins, and a visiting human-like Mr. Blajeny to teach them, Meg and Calvin (along with the cherubim and Jenkins) shrink way down in scale, recalling to me the movie Fantastic Voyage (but much, much smaller), and enter the mitochondria of Charles Wallace to determine what is causing the sickness.  There they encounter a rebellion of young "farandolae" (one of them, named "Sporos", is also a pupil of Blajeny), which according to the author's imagination are in symbiosis with the mitochondria and are needed for their healthy function.  And who is stirring up the trouble among these mouse-like creatures?  None other than those troublesome Echthroi...and it's up to Meg to quell the rebellion, defeat the Echthroi, and save the life of her little brother...

There's a lot of science in A Wind in the Door...much of it speculative.  I can see how Madeleine L'Engle's stories can spur young readers to take a greater interest in areas like biology, physics, and astronomy.  But the main emphasis is more about ethics and philosophy...and how love is the driving force in life and creation...

FIFA Women's World Cup in Soccer Finishes Group Stage

The 2015 FIFA Women's World Cup in soccer yesterday completed its group stage of play, with two exciting games within Group E determining the final lineup, heading into the "knockout" round of sixteen.  Originally, I had erroneously reported that each team within a group played the others twice...but, alas, there are only three total games in group stage.  That's good, though, for the United States, which had been for some reason thrown into a group with two 2011 group qualifiers, Australia and Sweden (and the latter had made it all the way to the semifinals) and had managed to be first in that group after playing everyone once.  By contrast, Canada, which is hosting the World Cup this year, had no opponents within their group that had advanced last time, giving them an easier run at it.  The field of teams in 2015 was increased from 16 to 24, and instead of eight coming out of the group stage into the quarterfinal round, this year we have 16 qualifying for the new knockout round, which will be played in various locations across Canada June 20-22.  All eight teams making it out of group stage in 2011 are still in the running (defending champion Japan, runner-up USA, Sweden, France, Germany, England, Brazil, and Australia).  Canada plays against Switzerland on June 21st, while the United States plays against Colombia, a powerhouse in men's international soccer but a fledgling team in the women's sport, on the 22nd.  The tournament will proceed until the final championship game, which will take place on July 5th.

I'm finding the level of play within women's international soccer to be very high, and the games carry a lot of excitement with them.  One thing I noticed, which maybe some of my readers have also, is that there is an enormous amount of yelling back and forth between the players.  Then again, I experience the same phenomenon when watching other women's sports like basketball, lacrosse, volleyball, and softball.  I'm sure that the men playing these sports also yell from time to time, but not anywhere to the same extent that the women do.  I wonder what this discrepancy between the genders means.  Any ideas?

My Favorite Songs of 2015 So Far

The first half of 2015, as far as my own personal musical preferences are concerned, has been dominated by two sources: alternative indie/rock music on two different radio stations (WHHZ/100.5/Gainesville and WXXJ/102.9/Jacksonville) and the release of Sufjan Stevens' beautiful new album, titled Carrie and Lowell (largely a tribute to his deceased parents).  As a matter of fact, I prefer his album over Beck's Morning Phase of last year (which I also liked)...a work that garnered him a Grammy for Best Album.  Sufjan (pronounced "soof-yan") should at least get a nomination for his work...

I'm still working through the tracks on Carrie and Lowell.  Sometimes it takes a while for a song to "reach" me, and sometimes I "get it" from the first listen.  I have a feeling that this album features both kinds of songs.  In Carrie and Lowell, Sufjan has abandoned the annoying "bells and whistles" of his electronic musical laboratory and returned to a more acoustic-like sound (well, generally so...he tactfully does use some electronic background arrangements as well on some tracks). For those who tend to be turned off by ear-splitting, screaming rock songs, this album will be easy to digest with its subdued mood...

As for the alternative music I'm hearing of late, there's a lot of good stuff out there. Last year, one of the more minor songs I liked that didn't make my "Top Ten" list was Sail by a group called AWOLNATION (always written with capital letters...no, I don't know why, either).  This year "my" stations are playing another of their songs, Hollow Moon (with the alternate title Bad Wolf).  This is a rather complex song, compared to others getting radio play.  It's fast-paced, with widely divergent musical themes alternating but somehow seamlessly fitting together.  It's danceable...yet there's a bit of the Nirvana sound as well, especially toward the end.  A pretty interesting piece, I'll say...which, besides the important fact that it is just plain fun to listen to, is why at this point of time it's my favorite song of 2015.  Next, at number two, is a song by Bear Hands titled Agora...it actually was released in 2014 but has such a following that it gets regular air time even now.  Other songs I like to listen to are Mess is Mine by Vance Joy, Cigarette Daydreams by Cage the Elephant, Renegades by X Ambassadors, and Saint Motel's My Type, a curious song that sounds like a cross between K.C. and the Sunshine Band and Franz Ferdinand.  Here's my list of favorite songs so far in 2015:

1 HOLLOW MOON (BAD WOLF)...AWOLNATION
2 Agora...Bear Hands
3 Death With Dignity...Sufjan Stevens
4 Mess is Mine...Vance Joy
5 Cigarette Daydreams...Cage the Elephant
6 Should Have Known Better...Sufjan Stevens
7 Blue Bucket of Gold...Sufjan Stevens
8 Renegades...X Ambassadors
9 My Type...Saint Motel
10 Fourth of July...Sufjan Stevens

So, as Casey Kasem used to say on his weekly Billboard Top 40 radio show, there you have it. But don't expect this list to remain static throughout 2015...it's bound to change quite a lot before the year is through...

At Starbucks Waiting for Auto Repair

Here I am, at this writing (at  9:30 AM, although it will be posted later in the day), sitting in my favorite spot at my most frequented Starbucks in Magnolia Parke on 39th Avenue.  I'm here, and not at home rousing myself out of bed, because one of our cars has some air conditioning issues and is getting a look-over at the auto shop on the other end of the complex.  I have a number of little routines that I try to get in on a daily basis; I'm knocking off a few of these while waiting for the verdict on the car...

First, I like to practice temporarily memorizing sentences in certain foreign languages...Chinese, German, Spanish, and Russian...that I use various books for and whose meanings I make sure I understand...and then write each one down on paper from memory.  Daily I do this with ten Chinese sentences and four each for German, Spanish, and Russian.  It obviously isn't the same as being immersed in a foreign language environment, but it does keep me thinking in each language, albeit to a limited degree...

I am currently engaged in another daily routine: writing an article for this blog of mine!  Sometimes it's hard to come up with a topic, and sometimes it's easy...this morning's circumstances automatically furnished me with one...

After finishing this entry, I will embark on another routine, which is daily reading.  Currently, I am nearing the end of Jules Verne's adventure story The Mysterious Island and just finished the second book in Madeleine L'Engle's Time quintet, titled A Wind in the Door.  And I'm about to start on Voltaire's short novel Candide (translated into English, of course).  For now,  I'll read some of Jules Verne's tale...

Hopefully, this auto repair today won't take too long and I'll get back home in time to perform another daily routine of mine...running!

WUFT-FM To Add Classical Music Station on 92.1

On June 11, WUFT-FM, which broadcasts a talk/news format on 89.1 mHz, announced that, pending expected FCC approval, they will soon be starting a new station on 92.1 that will feature classical music, the 89.1 station's original format years before they changed their programming (to my chagrin).  This station already exists as an HD-radio option for those equipped with such receivers, but I don't have one and am looking forward to the resumption of good classical music over the open airwaves here in Gainesville.  I have three questions about the new station, though.  One, when is the new station going to begin its broadcasts?  Two, how powerful will the signal be...will it be as strong as the 89.1 signal, or will it be a hard-to-pick-up low-power signal like the station on 94.7?.  And, three, will it actually be broadcasting classical music 24/7, or will it have that late night/early morning jazz programming from before, which used to annoy me to no end?

All questions aside, I welcome the new station and look forward to listening to it...

Just Finished Reading Robert Jordan's Knife of Dreams

After reading the tenth book in fantasy writer Robert Jordan's expansive The Wheel of Time series, I began to wonder whether or not the author was truly interested in reaching a final resolution, as he kept introducing new minor characters to the epic and obscuring the main story line with numerous subplots.  But with this, his eleventh book, titled Knife of Dreams, I can start to see some light at the end of this tortuously long and convoluted reading experience.  The main protagonist, a young man named Rand al'Thor, is the reincarnation of an ancient hero who had defeated and imprisoned the supremely evil Dark One...now Rand has the title of Dragon Reborn, and the prophecies strongly point to his fateful rematch with his nefarious adversary in the Last Battle...we've known about this fact since very early in the series.  In the meantime, though, Rand has been crisscrossing the land, alternately making alliances and war, much as have done his friends Mat, Perrin, and associated supporting characters like Egwene, Nynaeve, Elayne, Min, and Loial, to name a few of the most important.  There are all these various kingdoms and movements around, most of them at complete odds with one another, and Rand seems to be saddled with a thoroughly hopeless cause trying to unite them together under his leadership.  But some of the main story threads have attained some resolution in Knife of Dreams, especially regarding the main characters.  This gives me hope for the future books in this series!  Only one problem, though...

Robert Jordan died after the publication of Knife of Dreams.  In order to continue and ultimately complete the Wheel of Time series, his extensive notes outlining what he wanted to do for the final book(s) were collected and examined, and esteemed fellow fantasy fiction writer Brandon Sanderson was hired to complete the series.  This he did in three books, making the final The Wheel of Time series a rather unwieldy fourteen volumes.  It will be very interesting to see how Sanderson manages to tie so many divergent tales together...I sincerely hope he doesn't introduce many more insignificant characters or irrelevant side stories as did the original author...

Some 1965-66 Nova Elementary Memories, Part 1

How old are you?  I'll be 59 in October and sometimes, looking back on my life, have vivid memories of certain circumstances along with big, gaping holes of time, my recall of which seems elusive.  One of those "vivid" times was entering the Nova educational system in 1965, when I was starting the fourth grade. Eventually, I would graduate in 1974 from Nova High School.  But that first year at Nova Blanche Forman Elementary School, which was also the very first year of its own existence, still evokes strong memories...

The previous three years, I had been attending Boulevard Heights Elementary School, which was about a block and a half from my home in West Hollywood, Florida (before it all was annexed into Hollywood in 1965).  To get to Nova, though, I needed to ride a school bus to cover the five mile distance north into Davie.  So from the very beginning I got to know a circle of kids at my bus stop like Martin, the two brother combos of Jim/Greg and Mike/Scott, along with pipsqueaks Harold and Kenny (who got us into trouble at our bus stop with his uncontrollable shrieking)...and also Glen, the "senior" among us.  Yes, for some random reason at the beginning my bus stop was all boys...and this eventually may have been one reason why we tended to get into trouble.  But I digress...

Nova Elementary School, when I went through it, comprised grades one through six, the concept of "middle school" still yet to be implemented in the public school system.  My school was divided into four "suites", as they called them: A,B,C, and D.  I was assigned to Suite C, which had all of the fourth-graders and half of the school's fifth graders.  How the folks in charge of all this decided which fifth-graders were to be assigned with us fourth-graders and which were assigned with the sixth graders in Suite B (renamed Suite D the following year) is beyond my understanding...but there we were.  I was in Miss Kidder's home base Room 7 (initially it was Room 8, but for another unknown reason we were all switched around a few weeks after the school year began).  Let's see if I can remember the other teachers in Suite C: Mrs. Hernandez (who replaced a different teacher whose name I forgot) in Room 8, Mrs. Jenkins in 9, Mr. Drew in 10, and Mr. Johnston in 11.  Normally, a suite would have six classrooms, but where Room 12 would have been was the Practical Arts room, where Mr. Mielock held fort. Across from our suite, looking westward, on the far left, was the Multi-Purpose Room, aka the cafeteria (why couldn't they have just called it that), then the Science Room, complete with a botanical section and a top-level lab equipped with hard tops and gas jets for bunsen burners...Mrs. Bethune was in charge here.  Then, continuing to the right, there was/were one or two little conference rooms, a hallway (containing the audio-visual equipment room) going back to the back of the building (where the supplies store and Suite B were) and then the library to the right (I have a mental block about the librarian's name).  At the far right, from the perspective of Suite C, was administration, which for the main purposes of the students, was where the principal (then it was Mrs. LaBelle) and nurse's station was located. Across the hallway from the library, and next to our suite was one of the first-through-third graders' suites.  Our outside-directed windows faced the bus-loading area (my bus number was at first #79, changing later in the year to #75...they were both rickety, old buses)...

I'm taking up a lot of blog article space writing about this topic, so I think I'll continue writing about it in a couple (or more) days.  Part of all this is expository, to give a picture of my experiences back then to those (almost all of you) who weren't there.  And part of this is just for my own sake of putting my memories on the record, as trivial as some of them may seem...

Just Finished Reading Sue Grafton's J and K Novels

As I continue to make my way through the alphabet, Sue Grafton-style with her series of Kinsey Millhone mystery novels, each title based on a letter, I've just finished reading two more: "J" is for Judgment and "K" is for Killer...having skipped "I" is for Innocent, which I just read this past January.  With each of "J" and "K", I thought I might be reading them for the first time, but as it turned out, both are books I've already gone through.  Here is the link to my January article about "I" is for Innocent...

With "J" is for Judgment, Kinsey is hired to search for Wendell Jaffe, who had disappeared on his boat five years earlier and was assumed to have committed suicide in the face of insurmountable debts.  But did he fake his death instead?  Someone has seen a man who strongly resembles Jaffe in Mexico, and Kinsey goes down there to investigate.  During the course of the story, she also discovers cousins, aunts, uncles, and her own grandmother who all had been living nearby her home city of Santa Teresa, California, but had never felt the necessity before to contact her, an orphan from early childhood after an auto accident had claimed her parents.  Needless to say, Kinsey has very mixed feelings about these people...

"K" is for Killer introduces organized crime, the way you might imagine it practiced in The Godfather. But those criminals are not the problem here...although they may well end up being the solution.  A young woman has recently died in her rented cabin and her mother hires Kinsey to investigate her death.  Grafton introduces a plethora of potential suspects in this classic whodunnit story...

The most remarkable elements of these last two novels I've read of Sue Grafton are their memorable endings...one with Kinsey putting pieces of the mystery together long after everything had already apparently been settled, and the other with her realizing that the criminal justice system is often woefully inadequate when it comes to seeking and catching suspected killers...and maybe she has to skirt the system for real justice to occur, a very touchy matter indeed...

Personal Favorites Lists

During the last couple of years on this blog, I've generally steered away from putting out lists of my personal favorites, which in preceding years I'd been in the habit of doing...usually in areas like music, television, movies, and reading.  But I still do have my own favorites, and have of late felt that writing down a few lists might be interesting.  In past articles, I've often headed an entry featuring such lists with the designation "List Madness"....maybe I'll leave that introduction off future lists...

Needless to say, like most everyone else, my favorites in different areas change over time.  What I listed, say, as my top 25 favorite songs back in 2007 is obviously going to be a bit different now...so I think updating that list of all-time favorite songs is in order.  Maybe I'll designate a certain day of the week to publish a "favorites" list in different categories.  Should be interesting (at least for me)...

Soccer Focusing on National Teams as Spring Passes Into Summer

Now that the soccer leagues other than America's Major League Soccer have finished their seasons, the summertime soccer focus has switched to national teams.  In men's soccer, there are many exhibition games, for some reason called "Friendlies", going on between national teams.  Today, for example, the USA team plays against Germany in such a contest (which can be seen on TV).  There are World Cup tournaments going on this summer as well: the U20 World Cup featuring players under the age of 20 and the Women's World Cup.  The U20 play is currently in the quarterfinal stage, while the Women's competition has just begun its group stage...

In the Women's World Cup there are six groups, each with four teams that will play the teams within each group twice, one "at home" and one "away"...actually, the games are all being played at various locations within Canada.  The top two finishers in each group will advance to the "sixteen" stage, along with the four third place finishers with the best records.  The United States is in the same group as Sweden, Nigeria, and Australia.  They defeated Australia 3-1 in their first match.  Both the Women's World Cup and the U20 World Cup are being shown at various times on TV...check your listings if you're interested.  There is also a U17 World Cup, but I haven't seen any TV broadcasts of their games...

And, of course, there is still MLS, which plays its games (generally) over the weekend...

NBA Finals a Good Show So Far

Like a few of my readers, I have been casually following the National Basketball Association playoff finals between Cleveland and Golden State...which I predicted would take place (against my own preferences) a few weeks ago on this blog.  The series has gone through two games, both home games for Golden State (at Oakland, California) with both going into overtime...each team winning once.  I had pegged Cleveland, with the trio of stars Lebron James, Kyrie Irving, and Kevin Love, to overcome the high-flying offense of the Warriors, led by their MVP guard Stephen Curry.  But the Cavaliers have suffered some serious misfortune of late, with both Irving and Love out with injuries for the rest of the playoffs.  So now it's all up to Lebron and his entourage...incredibly, Cleveland handled Golden State Sunday by a combination of a career performance by James and Cleveland's tenacious defense of Curry, limiting his ability to get off any good shots.  And by winning a game in Oakland, a very difficult task for visiting teams, the Cavs are unexpectedly in a good position to build a good lead in these finals with their upcoming home games.  But I suspect that Curry and the Warriors are going to adjust to Cleveland's strategy and Lebron James, even with a good performance, will not be able to carry his team on his shoulders to two consecutive home wins.  The main thing for me, as a basketball fan who doesn't have any particular preference in this series, is that the games continue to be close and that the series will go all the way to the seventh and deciding game...

Just Finished Reading The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells

Seeing that I am in the prolonged (for reasons which I will reveal in the future) process of reading a rather lengthy novel (The Mysterious Island) by renown science fiction writer Jules Verne, I decided to tackle something shorter by another famous author within this genre.  So I picked H.G. Wells, probably more famous for his stories The Time Machine and War of the Worlds, and read his 1897 short novel The Invisible Man.  The title is the same as a sci-fi thriller movie in which the villain is a complete terror...or at least that's how I remember it from childhood.  But that isn't how Wells portrays, at least initially, his protagonist, a brilliant young physicist named Griffin who, by dint of changing the refraction of light in his own body's living cells, has made himself invisible.  Almost at once, he realizes that he hasn't prepared for the many bad things that can result by walking around without others noticing him...most immediately that traipsing around naked outside in England during cold times would have most assuredly give him a bad cold...which it does, burdening him with the embarrassment of continually giving away his presence to others with his sneezing.  But more than that, Griffin keeps almost comically going from one predicament to another...and his angry rage grows.  What he wants now, more than anything else, is to figure out how to restore his visibility...but  the circumstances in the culturally provincial small towns in southern England where he struggles confound him time and time again. These nosy people just won't respect his privacy (he has tried representing himself, completely clothed and bandaged, as someone recovering from wounds), and the growing suspicions among the people that he is responsible for a local burglary (which he is) increases the unwelcome scrutiny on him.  He becomes more and more emotionally unstable and resorts to physical violence against others, in particular against a vagrant named Tom Marvel with whom he has entrusted the task of carrying his crucial scientific notebooks and money.  Marvel flees with the goods, and the invisible man is now in a state of murderous rage after him. The story's violence escalates, and the protagonist "looks" more and more like the evil figure portrayed in the movie.  As a reader, I naturally try to empathize with the main character...which I was able to do to an extent at the first with this hapless invisible man.  But Griffin's personality is so self-centered as he rationalizes away his abhorrent behavior toward others that I quickly began to root against him...a troublesome predicament for a reader like me who is accustomed to pulling for the story's "hero".

As usual, I left out the ending to this novel so that you might pick it up and read it for yourself some day.  It gives a good picture of small-town England and its people at the end of the nineteenth century.  But more than that, The Invisible Man carries an unspoken warning about scientific ventures undertaken without considering all of the possible negative consequences...

Plenty of Sports to Watch on TV Today

There is plenty of interesting sports action to follow on TV today...although I'm not really interested in golf, tennis (women's final today in the French Open), NASCAR, or college baseball.  And the NBA finals between Cleveland and Golden State won't continue until tomorrow evening...still, I'm surprised, even for a Saturday, how much is going on...

First and foremost, horse racing's Triple Crown culminates today in New York's very long Belmont Stakes, which will be shown on NBC with the pre-race hoopla starting at 4:30.  American Pharoah, winner of the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, has a very good shot at horse racing immortality if it manages to beat out the other seven horses in this endurance race.  Last year it was California Chrome, also victorious in the first two races, trying for a sweep.  But Tonality, which was entered only for the Belmont, prevailed...prompting the California Chrome owner to go off on a ridiculously bitter rant about the circumstances of his horse's loss.  Funny thing is that I had a feeling about Tonality before the race...this year there is another similarly named entrant, Materiality, going up against American Pharoah.  H-m-m...

The UEFA Champions League in soccer, a season-long European tournament of the previous year's top professional league soccer teams, will hold its finale starting at 2:45 PM (EDT) with the game, featuring Spain's Barcelona against Italy's Juventus, to be played in Berlin, Germany.  Barcelona, the heavy favorite, features three of the all-time best soccer players in Argentina's Lionel Messi, Brazil's Neymar, and Uruguay's Luis Suarez.  If you watched the World Cup last year, you'd know what I'm talking about regarding these highly talented players...and they're all on the same team!  Good luck with that, Juventus!

In hockey, Tampa Bay tries to even the Stanley Cup finals tonight against the Chicago Blackhawks in their second game, starting around seven.  This game will be shown on NBC. At the same time, FoxSports1 will show a FIFA Women's World Cup soccer match between China and Canada...

And, of course, there's plenty of Major League Baseball to watch today, with my Florida teams going unexpectedly in different directions this year.  The Tampa Bay Rays, expected to do poorly with a rebuilding year, are at or near the top of their division, while the Miami Marlins, expected to be contenders, are underachieving and are well below .500...and have already undergone a managerial change.  Still, I can see that this team has a lot of spirit and drive.  I expect them to make a big comeback later on this summer...

So, there's a lot going on today! Not that I intend to spend the whole day watching sports on TV...I plan to do a little running of my own...

RFK Murdered on This Date in History

In Davie, Florida, on the morning of June 5, 1968, I found myself in Room 18 of Suite D in the grand, exalted Nova Elementary School "educational experiment" as a Sixth Grader.  I was, for whatever reason...it was not the ordinary routine...sitting in the southwestern part of the room (closest, through the walls, to the basketball court), which was old man Bartfay's home base (you had to have been an original "Nova Titan", based in the elementary school experience, to know what I'm talking about).  It was there and then that I was informed by one of my fellow students (or, more accurately, my fellow inmates), that New York Senator Robert Kennedy had been murdered in California following his victory speech after that state's Democratic Party primary had given him all of its delegates in the fight for the presidential nomination.  The horrible act had occurred several hours earlier, but since in my own highly dysfunctional childhood family back then none of us ever gave a hoot about what was going on in the world during the early morning hours besides our own self-pitying circumstances, we all had woken up in the morning that sad day and each of us had gone off on our merry (check that, miserable) ways, completely oblivious to the terrible tragedy that had already taken place some three thousand miles west.  But there I was...and I can't remember who I was with...with another assassination on my hands to deal with, after Martin Luther King's a couple of months earlier...

When I think of Robert Francis Kennedy, I naturally hearken back to his brother John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose middle name was my mother's maiden.  I also think of the very talented comedian John Byner and how he, on the Steve Allen television show in 1968, would perform his hilarious rendition of Bobby Kennedy by means of his character "Kenny Bobbity", which forever established firmly within me RFK's unmistakable voice (although you can still hear it by listening to Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal). I do remember watching Bobby Kennedy debating Gene McCarthy on television just before that fateful California Primary...and noticing that his opponent thoroughly creamed him in it.  But Kennedy narrowly won the primary anyway...although historians seem to forget that Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who had forgone campaigning in California, had already collected enough delegates to win him the party's nomination in the first round.  I know this with confidence, because I actually went to the library (at the University of Florida) and examined day-to-day newspaper records of the ongoing events.  It was only years after the fact that some revisionists began to claim that RFK would have gotten the '68 Democratic nomination had he not been assassinated.  That claim is completely false...

My parents were very skeptical about Robert Kennedy, claiming that he was a political chameleon who changed his colors with the times, going from fervent anti-communist witch-hunter in the fifties...to his brother JFK's right-hand man in the early sixties...to Gandhi-like peace advocate later that decade.  I tend to agree with their opinions, but nevertheless the man was done a terrible injustice with his shooting that terrible night 47 years ago...

Soccer's Joseph "Sepp" Blatter: Controversy and Accomplishment

I've been following professional soccer in earnest ever since the Men's World Cup games last summer.  I discovered in the process that the globe is covered with leagues upon leagues...just about every place has at least one pro soccer league.  And the countries all seem to be represented by national teams as well.  After seeing how incredibly popular soccer is in England and how more popular it is becoming here in the United States, it is clear to me, without knowing who is in charge, that they must be doing quite a few things right.  The organization FIFA has authority over the professional sport of soccer and, since the late 1990s has had as its president a Swiss watchmaker named Joseph "Sepp" Blatter.  Blatter, it is reported, along with his predecessor, have often been accused of bias against the more industrialized countries of the West in favor of third world soccer development.  And he does seem to have enormous support among the myriad countries comprising Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Oceania.  That support enabled him to withstand a formidable challenge to a fifth term as president during the election held just last week...amid a severe scandal involving many high-ranking FIFA officers, accused of seeking and accepting massive bribes by countries wanting to be picked as World Cup hosts...most particularly Qatar, which won the honor for 2022 over its chief competitor, the United States...

Blatter was able to defeat his opponent, a Jordanian prince, by mustering up enough third world support to get a 133-73 majority on the first ballot.  Before the second ballot (candidates must get a two thirds majority to win on the first ballot), the opponent withdrew, handing Sepp, as he is commonly called, the election and a fifth term.  He immediately began by walking up to the podium and giving a condescending and arrogant victory speech, even once saying, "I am now the president of everybody".  Even though I had never heard of the man before this election last week, he irked me a lot and I felt defensive about the U.S. and England, which he seemed to have issues with.  And then, to everyone's surprise, just a couple of days ago Sepp Blatter held a press conference in which he announced his resignation...of course he has his own hand-picked successor (election pending), just as he himself was "picked" years before...I assume,  to continue his agenda...

I don't know how deeply, if at all, Joseph Blatter is involved in the FIFA scandal, which the FBI is now investigating.  Who knows at this point...I reserve judgement...except that he doesn't sound as if he thinks it is that important. It is that callousness that I object to, but after looking back on things, I have to reconsider (at least a little) my earlier objections to Blatter.  Sure, he's obviously an egomaniac, full of himself and his position.  He treats other people representing the various countries like little children, and it doesn't help that some of them grovel at his feet.  My personal dislike of the man having been said, however, I have to note that soccer has exploded in popularity under his tenure, not just worldwide but also here in America, where we have a well-established tier of professional leagues.  And also under Sepp Blatter's presidency, women's soccer has taken off as well: this summer we'll be able to watch as the favored U.S. women's soccer team goes for another FIFA World Cup championship.  But finally, it is I as an individual who discovered how much fun it really is to watch soccer, at least as it is played with a high level of skill in the premier leagues.  And since he's been the dude in charge of things, in some way Blatter deserves credit for all this...

Just Finished Reading Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time

Published in 1962, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time is a children's science-fiction novel, the first of the Time Quintet.  It involves the struggle between good and evil, championed by the "kids combo" of social misfit Meg Murray, her precocious younger brother Charles Wallace, and their new friend, Calvin O'Keefe...neglected by his own family.  With the help and direction of the mysterious and angelic trio of Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which, they travel to different worlds by means of the "tesseract", which wrinkles space and allows them to cross great distances quickly (sounds like an episode of Wormhole).  Meg and Charles Wallace are determined to find their missing father, a physicist who had traveled into space on a secret government mission.  They ultimately land on a planet called Camazotz, where they find their father and struggle against the evil leader of the controlling darkness, called "IT".  How does this all end?  Hey...I have to leave you some motivation to read the book for yourself!

In A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle makes clear her Christian orientation, but also pays respect to other cultures and philosophers seen as fighting against the "darkness".  But the evil that she presents here seems to be rather thinly-veiled communism...all together with the totalitarian brainwashing, severe restriction of individuality, and strict, forced egalitarianism that many in the West have stereotyped it as encompassing.  It is clear to me that this story (and as I suspect, the subsequent ones in this series) is, at least in part, the author's attempt to indoctrinate the young with her own religious and political viewpoints...which, as far as I'm concerned, she has every right to do.  However, that being noted, I found parts of it a bit annoying...

What I liked the most about A Wrinkle in Time wasn't the religion, politics, the sometimes very intriguing science, or even language (Mrs. Who continually dishes out great quotes in assorted foreign tongues), but rather its characters and their backgrounds and personalities.  I felt a great deal of empathy toward both Meg and Charles Wallace (that is, until the latter seemed to assume a kind of superhuman psychic ability).  Both are misfits at school and for different reasons...but both from which I suffered throughout my own school years.  Another thing I liked about this book was less tangible...it just seemed to have a sweetness to it...

I'll be continuing this pleasant (so far) series through to its end...just because it's aimed at a younger readership doesn't mean that a budding old codger like me can't enjoy it, too...

NSA Surveillance Reauthorization Advancing In Senate

The reauthorization for the NSA surveillance that has come under such scrutiny and controversy of late is advancing in the United States Senate (the House of Representatives has already passed it) with a cloture vote, which was just held at this writing.  The 60 votes minimum to advance the bill was assured: only 14 senators opposed it.  The champion of this small minority is Kentucky Republican Rand Paul, who, like his father in the U.S. House, Ron Paul, is an strong advocate of personal liberties and privacy from government snooping.  Recently, as I recounted in an earlier article, he went on the Senate floor and blasted the Patriot Act, which included the NSA surveillance provision.  This provision was to expire last Sunday, and Paul was able, by maneuvering through arcane Senate rules, to delay matters until it had already expired.  And now the Senate is hastily trying to put it back into law...

I'm for the NSA protecting American citizens from an obvious and dire threat, which is the infiltration of terrorists from abroad into this country as well as their recruitment of American citizens to perform their nefarious deeds from within.  My only problem with this is that, as Senator Paul mentioned during his ten-hour "filibuster" speech last week, the government can use data gathered from the collection of phone numbers and contacts to construct probability scenarios for various Americans who they think are likely to be involved in some sort of non-terrorist-related criminal activity...in other words, change the whole point of the law allowing this mass data collection in the first place.  It's been done before: the government was using anti-racketeering laws, originally aimed at organized crime, to restrict anti-abortion protests.  It took twenty years of legal fighting until the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 2006 that those laws were being misused against the protesters.  I sadly see a similar potential for misuse with this mass data collection, all denials by the senators supporting reauthorization notwithstanding...

My May 2015 Running Report

May saw me limiting my running due to a leg strain, the pain from which seems to come and go.  Before it, though, I managed to accumulated a decent amount of mileage, giving me a monthly total of 122 miles, run over 19 days...mostly in the first part of the month.  My longest single run was for 4.1 miles.

I'm probably going to be limited with my running for a while as I recover.  I still would like to eventually train up to marathon level...albeit at a slower pace.  But since we're entering the hottest part of the year here in Florida, I think limiting the miles for a while is a reasonable idea, injury or not...

Just Finished Reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

The 1931 novel Brave New World, by English author Aldous Huxley, is one of those books I've heard about for years, a kind of predecessor of all of these dystopian stories that have since proliferated onto the literary scene.  Sometimes you might wonder whether some of the presumptions of some of these tales have become obsolete over the years...with Brave New World, which I finally just got around to reading, this may be partially the case...but only partially...

In Brave New World, projected to take place in the 2500s, the "civilized" parts of the planet have been reorganized into a tightly controlled society with its people manufactured in genetic factories and then conditioned from infancy to parrot the society's maxims.  People are either alphas, betas, gammas, or deltas...with the latter two groups deliberately deprived in gestation of necessary nutrients in order to produce imbecilic humans who are destined to perform the menial functions of society. Concepts like "mother", "family", and "privacy" have been relegated to the status of the obscene, and people are conditioned to never have to experience extremes of emotion caused by deprivation or pain...and if things do get out of hand with an individual, they are administered soma, a drug that puts them off into a "dream holiday".  Sex is promoted as a collective, social activity without any associated emotional value like love or jealousy.  The old is condemned for the sake of the new, and a throw-away culture of consumption predominates throughout.  It is no accident, then, that Henry Ford, the originator of industrial mass-production, is the great hero of society...even to the point where the calendar year has been changed to "Before or After Ford".  Another barb that Huxley threw was aimed at British socialist George Bernard Shaw, one of the very few "old" figures still highly esteemed in this cradle-to-grave society of government control...

With Brave New World's characters, the focus changes from the beginning when the Director reveals the system of growing embryos and then educating infants into their role in society through a modified form of hypnosis.  Then, as the story progresses, social misfit Bernard and thoroughly conditioned Lenina carry on a curious courtship based on one misunderstanding after another.  They visit a "savage reservation" in the North American southwest where the native people are still allowed to follow traditional culture, including natural childbirth and family relationships.  There they find John, a misfit in his own right, whose light European skin paints him as an outcast to others within that society.  His sickly mother Linda pines away for a return to London, and John, who has developed his own world view and language from a book of Shakespeare that she game him, quotes Miranda, in eager (and mistaken) anticipation from The Tempest, "Oh, brave new world!" when he discovers that Bernard and Lenina would be taking them back with them. John finds himself attracted to Lenina, but their gulf of cultural disparity is even much larger than was that between her and Bernard...a foreboding of tragedy.  The end of the book largely concerns itself, besides their troubles, with a conversation between the World Controller Mustapha, Bernard, a talented friend of Bernard named "Helmholtz", and John (now commonly referred to as "The Savage"). Each argues his own opinion on how society should be structured, and Mustapha, to my amazement, presents an entirely reasonable point of view defending the totalitarian world that he has authority over...

As I look on it, ever since 9/11, the population at-large has gone heavily on the side of personal security in the face of violent religious extremism...and as a result, the state has been given a stronger role in our lives.  Also, Huxley's consumer-based culture of disposability has become the norm in our society...without the need for anyone in government to dictate that trend.  The idea that intellectuals and strong passions are both responsible for the calamities that befall us in the forms of war and terrorism was a motive in Brave New World for the state to strictly control people's education and emotions, with any deviations carefully noted and dealt with.  Let's hope that our real future doesn't ever come down to that level...

Mexican Soccer Championship a Done Deal Even With Final Game Left

Even with the final match looming on Sunday, it should be pretty clear to anyone that Santos Laguna is the new Mexican Premier League MX champion for the Clausura split-season this year.  This is because the northern Mexico team thoroughly annihilated their finals opponent Queretaro  5-0 in their opener for the two-game series.  Last night's game was at Santos Laguna while the Sunday contest takes place at Queretaro. The series winner is determined by adding the goals of each team for each game.  It's going to take a miracle of sorts for Queretaro to come back from five goals down...

Santos Laguna is one of those teams that peak just at the right time of the year...barely making the playoffs as an eighth seed and then plowing through opponent after opponent.  In this, they remind me of last year's two World Series baseball teams, Kansas City and San Francisco, who both sneaked into their finals as wild-card teams while others were given more attention over the course of the year.  However, if I had my way, the World Series would have been between the top-two regular season teams in each league and the Liga MX championship would have simply been the aggregate best team over that league's regular season as a whole, without the gimmicks of split seasons and playoffs.  By this, then, the Tigres of UANL (a Monterrey team) would have won the Liga MX championship outright and the Los Angeles Angels would have faced the Washington Nationals instead in the World Series.  Of course, had "my" system been in place, I'm sure that the various teams and their management would have made many different decisions and would consequently have caused the results to be different as well...

Just Finished Reading Sue Grafton's "G" and "H" Kinsey Millhone Stories

As I continue (happily) plodding through the "alphabet mysteries" of Sue Grafton, featuring Californian private eye Kinsey Millhone, I've just knocked off two more books: "G" is for Gumshoe and "H" is for Homicide.  The former is one that I already read (and liked a lot), and the latter is a first-time read (and I liked it even more).  As a matter of fact, I was so impressed by "H", that at this point in time I consider it to be my favorite Kinsey Millhone novel.

In "G" is for Gumshoe, Kinsey is hired by a woman to find her elderly mother, while at the same time she discovers that a thug she helped to catch in the past has placed her on his hit list...and others on that list are getting knocked off.  She hires a bodyguard, who is another detective...and they develop a more personal relationship in the process.  This book has an interesting ending, one in which the two biggest "bad guys" (for entirely different reasons) inadvertently cross paths...

In "H" is for Homicide, Kinsey goes undercover to expose an auto insurance fraud racket that is based in Los Angeles, as well as try to solve the murder of an employee of the insurance company that she is loosely associated with.  There is a lot of interaction between several unsavory characters here, and this is a story that takes our detective away from her home town of Santa Teresa.  The affliction known as Tourette's Syndrome is examined as the main villain prominently exhibits it.  And the curious mixture of family-like intimacy/ informality with the violent cutthroat culture prevalent in gangs and organized crime is also a prominent feature of this tale...

Next up: "I" is for Innocent, a Grafton book that I believe I've already read before...

Just Finished Reading (Again) F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

Forty-two years is a considerable span of time between two readings of the same book...but since I've only read the overwhelming majority of books in my lifetime just one time, that still says something.  I first read The Great Gatsby, a 1925 novel by F.Scott Fitzgerald, in the fall of 1972 in my high school eleventh-grade English class...and then proceeded to write a research paper about it, a rush job that regrettably garnered me a poor grade and didn't reflect the fact that I had liked the book.  But I shouldn't hold that against either Fitzgerald or that English teacher, although the latter in retrospect did a lousy job of teaching (as, sad to say, did most of my high school teachers).  This novel, set in the early 1920s in New York's Long Island during the early years of the Prohibition Era (which lasted from 1919 to 1933), painted a time picture of an America that was struggling with its identity following a trying world war and the promise of prosperity with the advent of mass production.  Organized crime, both in regard to gambling (the fixing of the 1919 World Series in baseball is mentioned) and alcohol smuggling and distribution was on the rapid rise.  There also was a cultural clash of sorts between the nouveau riche, those people who made their wealth rapidly (legitimately or not) from the middle and lower classes and those from the traditionally upper classes with their own sense of inherited entitlement and superiority...

The Great Gatsby is told in the first person by the character Nick Carraway, a young bonds trader who has just moved east to Long Island and, in his relatively modest home, finds himself living next door to a mansion in which a mysterious young man, Jay Gatsby, resides.  Gatsby is continually throwing parties at his house, and eventually Carraway is invited to attend one...at which he meets his host in person and strikes up a friendship.  In the meantime, Nick has met back up with a distant cousin named Daisy, who is married to a brutish, bigoted, and snobbish dude named Tom Buchanan (as you might guess, a thoroughly unlikable character).  When Gatsby hears of Daisy, the circle is closed, for as it turns out, they had been lovers just before he was to sent off as a soldier in World War I...but their respective disparity of social standing kept them from marrying each other.  Daisy instead, brought up in money, married Tom, another "well-to-do", while Gatsby, following the war, got rich quick...with the implication that he was involved with organized crime on some level.  So, as readers, we find ourselves dealing with this triangle of Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom...plus Tom's mistress Myrtle and her estranged husband George.  And now it's up to the author to mix circumstances together in such an improbable manner as to brew up an ending which bothered me.

Don't get me wrong, I still liked the story, Jay Gatsby's constant and thoroughly annoying use of the saying "Old Sport" notwithstanding. But the novel's outcome does depend on an incredibly unlikely chain of events...it would have been better had things gone down in a more believable manner.  Still, F. Scott Fitzgerald gave us an incisive look at America in the early 1920s as the growing decadence of its culture combined with its economic optimism and growing mass consumerism...and the accompanying tendency to dispose of anything, including people, that might interfere with one's lifestyle or plans...

Futoshiki: Another Numerical Logic Puzzle

Adding to the group of numerically based logic puzzles like Sudoku, Kakuro, Ken-Ken, and Hidato, which I already regularly play, Futoshiki recently came to my attention.  It is a puzzle based on inequalities between the squares, with "greater than" and "lesser than" symbols separating them, either vertically or horizontally.  The occasional absence between squares of such a symbol means that the relationship between the two adjacent numbers is not revealed...not exactly an aid in solving the puzzle.  Otherwise, Futoshiki operates in similar fashion to Sudoku in that each row or column contains unique numbers covering those available...e.g., in a five-digit game, 1,2,3,4, and 5 each appear once in each row and column...in different orders, of course, based on the inequality signs that direct the flow of the game.

Right now, I'm focusing on the "easy" Futoshiki puzzles as I develop my own strategies for solving them.  On different websites that provide these puzzles, they often provide a section revealing strategies for filling them in.  That would, for me, take away much of the pleasure I derive from this pastime, since developing my own techniques is a major part of the activity...

Just Finished Reading Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters

Robert Heinlein, one of the most renown science fiction writers of the twentieth century, in 1951 published his novel The Puppet Masters.  It examines how an alien invasion of Earth might take place with the parasitic conquerors surreptitiously taking over the minds and bodies of unsuspecting humans.  If this sounds a bit like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers or that Conspiracy episode from Star Trek: The Next Generation, then it's because this novel forms the original basis for those types of "conquer from within" stories.  Heinlein, himself a staunch anti-communist who saw a "fifth column" threat from the Soviet Union and China within the United States through traitors and spies in our government, schools, and media, may have used The Puppet Masters as an analogous way to express his angst of the times.  This is definitely a "period piece", and it is set hard in the context of the politics of its time...in that part of the Cold War when China and the USSR were allies and the latter had just attained the ability to detonate the hydrogen bomb.  And America, along with the nominal United Nations forces, was embroiled in a "hot" war in Korea against the communists.  Heinlein seems to have taken the tension of his time and projected it ahead onto our early twenty-first century...

That having all been said, Heinlein spins an interesting, suspenseful story with sympathetic characters (the secret agents Sam, Mary, and the "Old Man"), along with their own personal tales.  How they combat the "slugs" who take over people by attaching themselves to their shoulders (and then hiding their presence under clothing), and how successful they ultimately are, pose questions that led me to keep plugging away at the book to its finish.  I felt that the ending works, as Heinlein seems to have put a lot of thought into the ramifications of such an alien invasion...

One other observation about The Puppet Masters: it exhibits a couple of commonly held assumptions by mid-twentieth century sci-fi writers about the "near future" as it pertained to themselves (which corresponds to our "present" and "near past").  First, in their "prophetic" narratives there usually is a World War III that occurred toward the end of the twentieth century and which involves nuclear attacks and bombed out cities (in The Puppet Masters, Manhattan is a "crater").  Second, space travel is on a much more advanced level than we have yet attained...Mars and Venus have already been explored in Heinlein's novel (of course, he didn't know then about Venus's ultra-hot, acid-saturated atmosphere).  Although I'm disappointed about our relative lack of progress with manned space efforts during the last few decades, I'll accept the lack, as of yet, of a devastating Third World War as a reasonable trade-off for this deficiency...

Let's see...so far I've read four novels of Robert Heinlein: Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, and, now, The Puppet Masters...not to mention a few of his earlier short stories.  He is one of my favorite writers, so I'm going to have to seek out some of his other books...

Rand Paul Speech Suckers Me In With Its Arguments and Oratory

I'm a sucker for really good, persuasive oratory.  That's why, during the week in the late mornings and early afternoon you'll often find my television tuned in to C-Span2 (Gainesville's Cox Channel 81), which broadcasts live the United States Senate floor proceedings.  Although, as a governing body, the Senate is generally painfully slow at getting anything done, the senators often provide very illuminating information about their sides of the various issues about which they are debating.  Take the upcoming vote on the renewal of the Patriot Act...

On Wednesday afternoon, I happened to have the Senate on my TV and the floor was given to Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul to speak...and he spoke...and he spoke...and he spoke...his topic was the Patriot Act and his opposition to what he sees as its violations of our U.S. Constitution, especially of the Fourth and Ninth Amendments.  His arguments were legitimate and persuasive.  I had to stop watching after about one hour of his speech because I had to go on to work, but I was interested in how the conservative and liberal evening opinion shows would cover it. As it turned out, Paul's speech, which I was astounded to discover, went on for more than ten hours, and was an opening topic for both FoxNews's right wing Hannity show and  MSNBC's left wing The Last Word, hosted by Laurence O'Donnell.  And both parties actually were very respectful of Senator Paul and his arguments.   Today, on C-Span2, I watched as Florida Democratic Senator Bill Nelson, nowhere nearly as elegant an orator as is Rand Paul, nevertheless presented a convincing counterargument  to the Kentucky senator's position.   I came away from the experience as I often do with these types of debates, with the conviction that I have a tendency to be swayed by good oratory, even when it contradicts common sense that I hold dear to me.  Do you, my faithful reader, want to hear my views about privacy and the Patriot Act?  That's easy enough, just let me know...I'm on Facebook, after all...

Correction about Mexican Liga MX Playoffs

Due to my misreading of a Wikipedia article, I have been under the misconception, while following Mexican Premier League ("Liga MX") soccer, that the winners of each of the split seasons (Apertura and Clausura) would then afterward play each other to determine the overall champion for that year as a whole.  While maintaining that notion, I was surprised that Club America, which won the Apertura title but was eliminated in the current Clausura playoffs, fired their manager...so why sack their leader when they stand to win it all?  After all, wouldn't Club America still be in the "finals" for 2014-15?  As it turns out, the answer is "no"!  There are no playoffs between the Apertura and Clausura winners, after I recently (and lamentably) discovered.  So where did I get that notion that there were?

The answer lies in the next lower league, called "Ascenso MX".  As I had originally read in their article (from Wikipedia, naturally, where else), in Ascenso, they also have Apertura and Clausura seasons, for which they have championship playoffs.  But they need an overall champion to determine which team gets promoted to the Premier League the next year...so the Apertura and Clausura winners have a final playoff for the overall champ...but not the Premier Liga MX. I had mistakenly transferred in my mind the Ascenco playoff structure to that of the Premier Liga MX...

Time Off from Running Due to Leg Strain

Unfortunately, for the past couple of weeks I've been suffering from a left leg strain that has kept me from running or bicycle riding.  I suspect that I had gone into the cycling a bit too hard instead of following the advice I always give others to start a new training regime slow and easy.  Instead, I pushed myself too hard at the outset and didn't include days off for my  body to recover.  So I'm off the exercise routine for a few weeks...as long as it takes for recovery...instead I think I'll focus on getting my eating habits back to a healthy level and work on getting my weight down.  In that regard, I could probably stand to lose about 25-30 lbs...

What's Happening in Professional League Soccer

The various professional league soccer seasons are winding down in this month of May (except in the United States and Canada with their March-to-December Major League Soccer).  In England, London's Chelsea has far outpaced the other 19 teams in the Premier League, winning the championship (they have no playoffs).  Manchester City, (2012 and 2014 champion), Manchester United (2013 champion), and perennial contender Arsenal (another London team) round out the top four...it is this group that will contend next year in the European Champions League against other leagues' top finishers.   In Germany's Bundesliga, Bayern Munich won easily while Spain's La Liga has Barcelona ahead of its arch rival Real Madrid with the season nearing an end.  Other countries...well, just about every one, for that matter...have their own leagues, but there's no way I can follow them all.  Besides, the only pro soccer leagues available right now for me to watch on TV are America's MSL, the English Premier League, and Mexico's Liga MX...

Speaking of Liga MX, their second split-season of 2014-15, called the Clausura, has ended and they are now thick in the middle of the championship playoffs.  Favorites America (a Mexico City team) and UANL (from Monterrey) were both eliminated yesterday...although, since America had won the Apertura split season playoffs in December, they are already in the final championship round to face the winner of these playoffs (actually, as I later found out, the Apertura and Clausura winners don't meet, after all).  This evening, Guadalajara faces Atlas to see who advances from that city and Queretaro and Vera Cruz square off in a series between two improbable playoff teams.  Since the team I was originally rooting for, the Tigres of UANL, is no longer in the playoffs, I'm now rooting for Pachuca (who beat America).

After this month, the only premier league soccer left until August will be Major League Soccer.  Now they have a Florida representative with the expansion team Orlando City, but although I pull for them whenever they have a game on TV, I also enjoy getting into any game that's being broadcast, regardless who's playing. I think it's hilarious, though, how American teams imitate their European counterparts with names like "Real" Salt Lake, "Sporting" Kansas City, Orlando "City", D.C. "United", and Houston "Dynamo", along with the often ridiculously ornate coats-of-arms they display for themselves, as if they embody old traditions instead of being around as a league only since 1995...

106-Year Old Man Throws Out First Pitch

I was watching the MLB (Major League Baseball) Channel last night after work to catch up on the day's baseball action.  Aside from my teams generally losing (so what's new), they had a short segment about someone ceremonially throwing out a game's first pitch, this one taking place, I believe, in St. Louis.  Nothing unusual there...except that the individual performing the honor (from a little bit closer to the home plate than the pitcher's mound), a man named Arnold Vouga, is 106 years old!

Let's see...if you're 106 years old, that means you were either born in 1908 or 1909.  You were a young adult when the stock market crashed in 1929 and were already well into your thirties when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.  At 58, I consider myself to be on the verge of being counted as one of the elderly, but you'd already have been where I'm currently at around 1967, when the Beatles were still together and producing their best music, LBJ was still the Prez, and Martin Luther King, Jr. was still alive and speaking out against the quagmire known as the Vietnam War...and Michigan Governor George Romney was leading a dude named Richard Nixon in the Gallup polls for the Republican presidential nomination the following year...

So here I am at my age...do I really think I'm going to last as long as Arnold Vouga, much less be as active and engaged as him at his advanced age?  Shoot...I doubt that Mr. Vouga himself could have predicted he'd still be around in 2015 in his present condition.  Better for me to just live each day as it comes and simply be grateful for any blessings of longevity and health should they become a part of my life in the future...

Miami Dolphins Stuck in Same Division With Habitual Cheaters

In England, the National Football League's pointless promotional efforts notwithstanding, the predominant "football" game is what we know as soccer.  The wildly popular Barclay's Premier League, which corresponds there in importance to our NFL, consists of 20 teams each season...with the lowest three finishers each year relegated to the next lower league and that league's top three promoted to the top league.  That, along with the fact that the regular season top finisher automatically wins the championship without the need for all the playoff games we see in the NFL, establishes to me the superiority of English league football to the way things are done over here.  But it's also the fact that the teams are all grouped together instead of being pigeonholed permanently in divisions that gives their system more appeal to me...

I am a Miami Dolphins fan and have been since 1968, their third year in existence.  They are in the American Conference East Division, perpetually lumped together with the Buffalo Bills, New York Jets, and New England Patriots.  I understand the reasoning of league organizers who believe that having the same teams in these small divisions year after year will foster interesting rivalries.  But it's one thing to play these teams two times a year, each and every year...and another to have to twice play a team like the New England Patriots, a franchise that seems intent on winning at all costs, including searching for ways to skirt the rules.

Whether it's surreptitiously spiriting away footballs to a bathroom in order to quickly deflate them to the cheating quarterback's preferences or video-taping the other team on the sidelines in order to steal their signals and discover which plays they are running, this team goes way over the top in its unsportsmanlike conduct.  And my Dolphins are forced to contend with this low-life arrogance twice each season...many teams don't even have to play them once...

I believe these divisional rivalries are overblown, anyway.  I have an idea: instead of a draft that favors the worst performing teams and encourages those starting with poor seasons to give up halfway through, why not instead have a kind of random lottery/drawing after each season that sets up the eight four-team divisions for the next year.  After all, isn't that how the groups in the overwhelmingly popular World Cup in soccer are filled?  For example, you might end up with, say, a division with St.Louis, Miami, Denver, and Washington...randomly constructed and limited to one season, after which another random realignment takes place.  I think that would be very interesting...and much more fair to the different teams as well.  As for the New England "Cheatriots", well, someone has to play in their division, I suppose...

Just Finished Reading Sue Grafton's D, E, and F Novels

Mystery writer Sue Grafton, as I have written on this blog a number of times, is in the process of traveling through the alphabet with a novel based on each letter.  The detective is always Kinsey Millhone and the stories are written in the first person from her point of view.  She is based in the mythical California coastal city of Santa Teresa (supposedly patterned after Santa Barbara), and from there deals with the often eccentric and disturbed people who seem attracted to her as clients and suspects.  I began reading this series many years ago, hopping around in no particular order, and now can't figure out which books I've read so far.  So I started anew from "A"...and have just quickly gone through "D" is for Deadbeat, "E" is for Evidence, and "F" is for Fugitive.  Each of these last three, in some ways, seems familiar to me, and I may have read the last two through to the end before.  But I know that with "D" is for Deadbeat, the ending was a surprise...

With "D" is for Deadbeat, Kinsey is hired by a man who wants her to personally deliver a $25,000 cashier's check to another party...but his check for her detective fee bounces and he disappears from the scene, leaving her to try to find both him and the party he is trying to reach with the money. This story is about the terrible mistakes people can make in their lives, their attempts to make amends with the victims, and how those victims can struggle with the conflicting ideas of forgiveness and vengeance.

"E" is for Evidence is how an engineering firm, run by one of five contentious siblings, gets struck by a fire and files a claim with the insurance company working with Kinsey.  When she investigates the incident, she finds herself framed for insurance fraud along with the company's head.  Evidence has been tampered with, and Kinsey races against time to discover, largely by determining the inner dynamics of the relationships between those five siblings, who is behind the frame-up.

In "F" is for Fugitive, an aging and ailing father hires Kinsey to exonerate and free his son, who has recently been recaptured after being a fugitive prison escapee for seventeen years after being convicted for a murder for which he claims innocence.  Kinsey goes to a sleepy coastal town with her investigation and seems to uncover one murder suspect after another with every turn.

In each of these books, there are murders to solve, and the killer, presented as a character early in the story, is invariably a surprise at the end.  Knowing this, it then becomes easier to sift out which characters the author is inserting as red herrings and which ones may well be revealed as the villains at the end.

The next book, "G" is for Gumshoe, is one that I definitely remember reading...but I'm still going to read it again anyway.  I like Grafton's writing and like to keep up with her protagonist Kinsey as her personal life gradually changes from "letter to letter"...

Keeping Perspective with Calamities

From time to time I watch science TV series like Wormhole, Cosmos, or the The Universe.  Inevitably, the topic of cataclysmic catastrophes will come up, something that I tend to be interested in. You may already know about the asteroid collision with Earth that is generally believed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago.   Or even lesser known, the much more devastating Permian extinction  250 million years ago when almost all life on Earth was nearly snuffed out from a chain of disasters originating from a massive, drawn-out super-volcano eruption in what is now Siberia.  But the scale of a disaster can be much smaller, and yet in our world today seem almost incomprehensible in its toll on lives and property...take a look at Nepal and what has recently happened there with those two massive earthquakes.  And if you happened to be in the middle of it, yesterday's horrible passenger train derailment in Philadelphia most likely seemed cosmic in its devastation.  But a  cataclysm can be very personal as well.  A few years ago I lost a friend of mine, a co-worker, to an auto accident not of his own fault on the Interstate when traffic slowed to a stop and a truck obliviously plowed in behind him, causing the fatal collision.  Two other friends have recently been diagnosed with cancer and have had their lives turned upside-down with it. Given our own personal fragile existence on this Earth, it then becomes preposterous to watch those same science shows and hear supposedly learned people express concern that our sun, in a few more billion years, will die out...but before doing so, will devour Earth as it greatly expands in size.  Oh yeah, right, I want to start worrying about that...

Where Are the Planets in the Nighttime Sky?

A few days ago, I was pointing out some planets in the night sky to some co-workers, only to later realize, to my embarrassment, that I had gotten it wrong.  I had correctly pointed out ultra-bright Venus in the low western sky, but then I got Sirius (the brightest night star), then in the southwest, mixed up with Jupiter, which was still relatively high in the sky.  Well, since then the Earth's orbital position around the Sun has changed, as well as that of Venus and Jupiter (and, of course, the rest of the planets).  Now, Venus is a little higher in the evening sky and Jupiter is lower...and the two, at least visually from Earth, are getting closer and closer to each other.  This summer will be a visual treat for sky-gazers as they get much closer.  Jupiter is in the constellation Cancer, Venus in the adjacent (to the west) constellation Gemini, and Mars can no longer be seen as the Sun's position is too close to it.  Mercury may be seen close to the horizon right after sunset.  Saturn is visible in the A.M. night sky, so if you want to see it, you'll have to wait until the constellation Scorpius rises in the southeast, where you'll find the "original" ringed planet...

Just Finished Reading Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

A while back, I read a series of books by British author Jonathan Stroud titled The Bartimaeus Trilogy, which was generally considered to be in the "junior readers" category of fiction. In it, an alternative history of the world was presented, one in which magicians steered the course of events with their magic.  Susanna Clarke seems to have picked up this theme with her 2003 novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell...did she mean to pay a tribute to Stroud with that first name?  In Clarke's book, an alternative  history is also in place with magic playing a predominant role...but there are some notable differences.   Set in the early nineteenth century in the middle of England's long war against Napoleon's France, magic has all but disappeared from England as the only magicians left are either illusionists, con artists, or "theoretical" magicians who only analyze the history of the magic that had been lost to them.  To these theoretical magicians, the idea of a "practical" magician who purports to practice the art elicits derision as they believe any such claimant to be a con artist.  In northern England, where magic is supposed to have been the strongest, even to the point where a magician king ruled the that part of the country for centuries, there is, in Yorkshire, a club of theoretical magicians who find themselves in a confrontation with a practical magician, a Mr. Norrell.  After soundly proving the worth of his magic in a wager...and forcing the York magicians to stop their claim to be magicians in the process...Norrell moves to London where he lobbies to resurrect the role of real magic and help England in its ongoing war against France's Napoleon.  Down the line, another magician, Jonathan Strange, emerges and the two go through a tortuous love/hate friendship/enmity throughout the remainder of the story.  But Mr. Norrell has kept a dark secret from Strange: he has reintroduced a magical fairy into England, and that sinister entity is causing all sorts of trouble behind the scenes.

Susanna Clarke's story in this novel is quite interesting enough, but the characters she introduces make it memorable.  Besides Strange, Norrell, and the obnoxious fairy, there is Norrell's wise and able assistant Childermass, his cynical London promoters Drawlight and Lascelles, the sad, trapped Lady Pole, the noble butler Stephen Black, Strange's spunky and compelling wife Arabelle, and the mysterious street magician Vinculus.  And there are plenty more characters besides these, including some historical ones...in particular the Duke of Wellington, for whom Strange works magic against Napoleon.  But Clarke never lets the number of characters get to the point where they weigh down the story.  One thing about this book, though, that did bug me a little was her extensive use of footnotes in order to establish the history of magic in England.  I felt that I had to read these, which interrupted the flow of the narrative, just to make sure I wouldn't miss out on anything.  That was a bit annoying.  But everything else in the tale, especially the clash of personalities between the open and courageous Jonathan Strange and the magically-miserly Mr. Norrell, was a big hit.  No wonder that this novel was a best-seller and award-winner...

I understand that BBC will air on its TV channel (Cox channel 228 in Gainesville) this summer a seven-part series adaptation of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.  I'm looking forward to seeing it, but I urge others to read the book first...

Soccer: Mexico's Liga MX Regular Season Over, Playoffs to Come

Mexico's premier professional soccer league, the Bancomer Liga MX, has just completed its Clausura part of the 2014-15 split season, and eight teams out of the league's eighteen have qualified for the Clausura playoffs, which they call the Liguilla.  The first round begins with games on May 13th and 14th.  The league's two best teams (which met in the opening Apertura Liguilla championship round last December) are the UANL Tigres (meaning "tigers"), based in Monterrey, and Club America, based in Mexico City.  America won the Apertura playoffs, meaning that they are automatically in the final 2014-15 championship round against whichever team wins the upcoming Clausura Liguilla.  Should they win that one, too, they are automatic champions (no, I was mistaken...the Apertura and Clausura champions won't face each other to determine an overall champion).  But I'm pulling for the Tigres and Atlas (from Guadalajara) as my favorites in these springtime playoffs...

Each year, the poorest perfoming team, based on a comparative three-year measure of their records, gets relegated (demoted) to the next lower league (called "Ascenso") while the Ascenso champion gets promoted to Liga MX the next year.  This year the big loser was the Universidad de Guadalajara Leones Negros (meaning "black lions") who had only been promoted into the premier league the previous year.  I felt that they got a bum deal out of this, for they were quite competitive...and the league's worst team this year, Morelia, was far behind UDG in the standings and only avoided relegation because they had a good season back in 2012-13.  But those are the rules, and I can only wish the Leones Negros a good season next year in the Ascenso league...

I'm not a big fan of having playoffs determine championships when the regular season has already demonstrated which team is the best.  In European soccer, the regular season champion IS the final champion, but for some reason in North America, no matter which sport it is, there seems to be a kind of compulsion to hold intricate, drawn-out playoffs that often elevate lesser teams to championship status, just because they get "hot" at the propitious moment.  If Liga MX had done their league's championship the way that England's Premier League, Germany's Bundesliga, or Spain's La Liga does it, the UANL Tigres would be league champion tonight since they have the best aggregate regular season record if you combine the Apertura and Clausura split seasons.  But I suppose, with the Liguilla playoffs ahead, I'll still have some exciting Mexican soccer to look forward to watching...

Just Finished Reading Dostoevsky's The Idiot

Fyodor Dostoevsky, already my favorite Russian author, can add another book to the list of my favorites with his novel The Idiot, which came out in 1869.  The "idiot" in the title is a Russian prince, a young man named Lev Nikolayevitch Myshkin, more commonly known as Myshkin, or the Prince.  He is far from being the idiot that others portray him as...his affliction is epilepsy, and in the story's opening passage he is returning to Russia from a Swiss clinic in which he has spent much of his youth under treatment.  His aim, which he eventually succeeds at, is to look up some distant relations in order to get help adjusting to living independently. On the railway trip there, he meets up with and befriends Rogozhin, a sinister character obsessed with a woman named Nastassya Filippovna.  Myshkin himself in time becomes enamored with her, but explains his affections as being of pity.  These two characters, Rogozhin and Nastassya Filippovana, keep resurfacing throughout the book.  As the story develops, it becomes clear  that the Prince, always willing to forgive and put others in the best possible light, displays in his behavior a kind of naivete that predisposes others to manipulate him instead of respecting his good intentions toward them.  At the beginning of The Idiot, I was certain that the term was an abject, unfair misnomer, as Myshkin is quite intelligent and lucid with his deeply held thoughts.   But as the story progressed, and especially toward the end, I began to have second thoughts about this.  It is one thing to have an abstract intellectual intelligence, as well as being smart enough to be able to clearly communicate to others one's thoughts.  But there is something called "social intelligence" as well that allows one to learn, through experience, how to deal effectively in the context of social relationships. In this, Prince Myshkin is sorely deficient, and his incapacity to adapt to his social situation puts him in one ridiculous, if not dangerous, circumstance after another.  Not one to give away the book's ending, I'll just say that, after having the reader teetering on the edge of despair about poor Myshkin, Dostoevsky works a little miracle of justice and mercy on this sympathetic character.

In any good work of fiction, the author puts a lot of himself or herself into the story...and also elicits a sense of empathy from the readers, a recognition within themselves of truths that are being expressed.  The Idiot, I believe, is a masterpiece at fulfilling both of these conditions.  In Myshkin's perplexity about the confounding behavior of his circle of friends and acquaintances toward him, I am totally in sympathy, as I have endured this sort of thing to various degrees for a lifetime.  But unlike with Myshkin, I feel that, at least to a modest degree, I have learned a little from my experiences...

After Car Accident, All is Restored

After my car accident on April the 20th, in which I suffered a rear-end collision while waiting at a red light with the car being totaled in the process, Melissa and I have been shuffling the use of one car between us.  But yesterday we were able to purchase a good, quality used car from another party, and as a result, will not suffer any financial setback from a circumstance that I was not at fault with in the first place.  As for me personally, after nearly three weeks I never did feel any physical pain or injury from the accident.  So we've been blessed throughout all this, and appreciate the concerns of our friends...

2015 Atlantic Hurricane Season Predicted to be Light

After last month's forecasts by various meteorological organizations of a very subdued Atlantic hurricane season for 2015, it is interesting that, more than three weeks before the official beginning of that season, we may have our first named storm.  For the last few days, there has been a tropical disturbance, starting in the Bahamas and affecting South Florida, and then drifting northward in the Atlantic just east of the Florida peninsula.  It looks as if it may well strengthen,  not to mention finally hit the mainland, most likely long the coast of South or North Carolina.  If its sustained winds reach 39 mph, it will be named "Ana".

Besides Ana, the first named Atlantic tropical storms in 2015 will be Bill, Claudette, Danny, and Erika. The experts don't expect the number to get far beyond that, though, since the Atlantic Ocean temperatures have been much cooler than usual and, as a result, work as a retardant to the development of tropical storms.  But even with that in mind, it only takes one hurricane hitting a vulnerable area point blank for a disaster scenario to occur.  So the storm hovering out in the western Atlantic right now can serve as a wake-up call for those us who live in the coastal eastern states....