Tuesday's List: I Rank the Harry Potter Books

With all the times they keep showing Harry Potter movies on TV these days, it might be easy to forget that in years past, Harry Potter was first and foremost a great adventure in reading, widely lauded for encouraging children with this activity.  One day in 2000 I went to my local Books-a-Million for my usual daily flavored coffee, planning to browse around the store.  Instead the place was packed with kids and employees dressed and made up like characters in J.K. Rowling's popular series about the young English wizard.  Why all this hullaballoo? Book Number Four, titled Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, had just been released and the store was holding a big celebration as fans came in to pick up their preordered books.  I did manage to find a seat in the café and, looking around me, decided I'd better get on the Harry Potter reading train.  So that year I caught up on the first four books...and waited for the next one to come out.  Meanwhile, the first Harry Potter movie hit the theaters and I wondered...as I am wondering now about George R.R. Martin's delay in publishing the next volume in his A Song of Fire and Ice "Game of Thrones" series after it was adapted to an HBO series...if the movies weren't holding up the release of Rowling's next book.  Finally, it came out and I kept up with the written series, even going to the final two book parties at Books-a-Million.  And I watched all the movies as well...

I strongly recommend the books over the movies, although the latter did a generally good job at holding to the story lines and portrayed the characters well.  The books had a great amount of background story material that the movies omitted...you miss a lot if you skip them, so I'm glad I first read the books before starting in on the movies.  There were seven in all, and I have my own preferences that I will list below...with a little commentary, of course.  Each book's title begins with the words "Harry Potter and", which I left out of the list.  Oh, by the way, I liked ALL of the books, even my least favorite one...

1 THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN (Book 3)
   One of the best time-travel stories I've read, and the Marauder's Map was a brilliant gift for young Potter, a compulsive snoop.  And the mystery of the four animagus Hogwarts students Moony, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs...

2 THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE (Book 6)
   Severus Snape's role as the series' wild-card character, the flashbacks to Voldemort as Hogwarts student Tom Riddle, the mysterious potions book, and the introduction of Professor Slughorn, collector of students...

3 THE GOBLET OF FIRE (Book 4)
   Probably the most convoluted of all the Potter tales, the book reveals much, much more than the movie.  Harry, Ron, and Hermione are shown entering adolescence, with their change in personalities and interests.  The Quidditch World Cup and the Triwizard Tournament,  features only of this book, dominate the story...

4 THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS (Book 2)
   Students, a cat...and even a ghost...are found in catatonic states at Hogwarts, and the trail seems to lead back to Harry, who always seems to be at the scene of the crime and has the very suspicious ability to converse with snakes.  The very seedy and sinister Knockturn Alley, right next to the more reputable Diagon Alley, captured my imagination...

5 THE SORCERER'S STONE (Book 1)
   Originally called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, it introduces Harry Potter and the secret world of magic, full of wizards and magical creatures and places, that exists parallel to our own and has its own school for young wizards: Hogwarts.  I didn't quite get the ending, though...

6 THE DEATHLY HALLOWS (Book 7)
   All final books in a long series can be a little bit long on explanation and resolution and short on new, innovative material...Rowling made this book a delightful exception to that rule with the three Deathly Hallows.  The resolution of the conflict at the end differs in detail with the movie version, though...

7 THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX (Book 5)
   There is a plausible explanation given later as to why Harry Potter is always angrily yelling at everyone in this book...but it began to get under my skin after a while.  Also, the whole premise of Voldemort's plot made absolutely no sense whatsoever to me...what difference does knowing the special prophecy's message make in the struggle between the Dark Lord and the good guys?

Loyal to Own State's College Football Teams

The other day I wrote about how I was rooting for Florida State and Miami to win their football games while my hometown school, the University of Florida, had a much-needed bye week in anticipation of playing against long-time rival Georgia next Saturday.  When I grew up in Hollywood...just a few miles north of Miami...the idea of supporting all Floridian teams whenever they weren't playing each other was very common.  But since I moved to Gainesville, I noticed that the prevailing sentiment seems to hate the other two major college teams for all it's worth.  I was disappointed in FSU's last-minute loss to Louisville, even though I'll be fervently pulling for the Gators when they face off later this year.  And I was equally elated when the "Cardiac 'Canes" pulled out another win, this one against Syracuse.  But my allegiance to my home state in no way transfers to that for the other teams in the Southeastern and Atlantic Coast Conferences...

Outside of Florida, there are few teams that I consistently support...and a couple that I vehemently oppose, both in Florida's own SEC: Alabama and Georgia.  The Crimson Tide I dislike only because I dislike their coach, who deserted my Miami Dolphins in mid-contract after the 2006 season to coach his "dream team".  With the Bulldogs, I don't dislike them per se...they just seem to be Florida's natural rival with a long history of bitter losses and glorious victories in their regular season games at Jacksonville...

There are other teams besides the "big three" in Florida: South Florida, Central Florida, Florida A&M, Bethune Cookman, Florida Atlantic, and Florida International.  Of these, USF and UCF are enjoying particularly good seasons in 2017: I'll have to keep an eye on them...

 

Just Finished Rereading Stephen King's Book On Writing

In the months immediately before and after a distracted van driver struck Stephen King while he was walking on the shoulder of a rural Maine road and nearly killed him in June, 1999, the famed author took a detour of his own from writing fiction and instead composed On Writing, which is part autobiography and part helpful hints for the aspiring writer.  It's a small book by his standards, but packed with interesting and sometimes very helpful information.  Stephen King believes that his advice, properly implemented, cannot make a great writer out of a good one, nor can it make a competent writer out of a poor one...but it can make a good writer out of a competent one.  Well, I see myself as being in the general category of "competent", so I thought that checking out the recommendations of one of the most successful writers of our age couldn't hurt...

First of all, Stephen King's own personal story paints the picture of someone who was into writing and storytelling from a very early age, and his mother strongly encouraged him.  Having support from those close to you has got to be a big plus, but sometimes this is beyond one's control.  Still, King distilled some lessons he learned from his early writings and the many rejections he received from publishers.  One is that the story reigns supreme...you want to develop your characters, descriptive language, and dialogue, but don't let them get in the way of the story.  Two is that it is a very good idea to establish a regular time and place to write...a setting removed from distractions from others, television...even open windows to the outside can present a problem.  The rationale is that, if you train yourself this way, then the creative thoughts will more easily come to you.  Three is that story is not the same as plot, which there is no need to even consider when writing a story.  Thinking in terms of advancing the plot creates awkward writing and implies that the ending has already been mapped out in advance, something that King is usually opposed to doing...this is the one piece of his advice that I am uncertain about.  Four, in the first draft of a story, write, write, write freely to your heart's content...then when you're finished, put it aside for a few weeks.  Then return to it and read what you've written, making technical corrections...and then have a trusted "ideal" reader go over it and give you needed feedback.  And five, there's something in editorial circles called the "10 %" rule, meaning that generally the amount of words in a story can and should be reduced by that amount in order to curtail redundancy and make the text more readable.  There are a few other gems of advice that King dispenses...this is a pretty handy book...

Above everything Stephen King stresses that if anyone wants to be a serious writer, there are two things they have to spend a lot of time doing: reading and writing.  For most of us, the writing part seems obvious, but a lot of reading can help to indicate what works in a good story and what doesn't...and also what's already been done before.  Not that you should read for those reasons alone...no, read for the enjoyment!  After all, that's how you'll want anyone reading your own stories to approach them...

Saturday Afternoon with Starbucks and Football

I'm sitting outside for a few minutes on this late Saturday afternoon at the brand-new Starbucks off NW 43rd Street in far northern Gainesville, the closest one to my house.  As a matter of fact, I am looking out across the street at one of the running routes I would regularly take a few years ago when I was training for the marathon and put in several 15-plus-mile runs.  I'm not in shape now for any runs that long, but would like to get back up to that level.  I do know that if I were in good enough condition for it, this weather would be perfect: overcast skies, a nice little breeze, and moderate temperatures.  Finally it looks as if we are going to start getting autumn weather conditions: temperatures will be dipping into the 40s next week and peaking in the 60s...now that's the way u-huh u-huh I like it...

Speaking of late Saturday autumn afternoons, it's the middle of football season and my Florida Gators have a bye week before they head off to Jacksonville to try and upset Georgia.  I wish them well without my hopes getting too high.  UF isn't the only Florida school with football issues this season: Florida State, initially ranked number three in the country, fell today to 2-4 after losing a heartbreaker to Louisville 31-28, after it looked as if the Seminoles were in position to close out the game with an easy field goal...but their talented freshman quarterback James Blackman fumbled the ball away and the Cardinals went downfield to win it.  The University of Miami is still holding on to a 13-6 lead over Syracuse...I root for all my in-state teams as long as they aren't playing against Florida.  With the Hurricanes, though, it feels a little awkward after all the years of pulling against current UM coach Mark Richt when he was in charge of Georgia.  In the pros, the Miami Dolphins seem to have finally woken up and are playing some pretty good football of late...especially on the defensive side.  Their next game will be a rematch with the New York Jets, which they lost to miserably the first time around 20-6...

Well, I think I'll get up, go down to Publix and pick up some groceries, and then head on home...

Quote of the Week...from Al Franken

The biases the media has are much bigger than conservative or liberal.  They're about getting ratings, about making money, about doing stories that are easy to cover.          --Al Franken

Not that there isn't plenty of partisan and ideological bias in the media today, but Senator Franken is correct: the reporting and discussions we experience...especially on television...have been greatly simplified, personalized, and delivered for their emotional impact and ability to attract viewers (who then watch the commercials), not as a means to inform and educate.  The fact that our president can tie up so much news time with his absurd Twitter posts is symptomatic of this dereliction of mass journalism in the early twenty-first century.  I can easily spot...and most probably you can, too...whenever someone is leaning too far over to one political side over the other.  But it is much more insidious when it comes to choosing WHAT to cover...FoxNews can discuss an issue and claim that they are balanced because they have a conservative and a liberal debating it, but if the topic is always about Hillary's emails then the bias is already embedded.  The bottom line is that when media can choose between devoting coverage to issues facing us and the personalities involved in the debate, they usually lean toward the personalities...

I never did think Al Franken was funny on Saturday Night Live, but I hadn't realized that he was more of a behind-the-scenes figure in this series, writing much of the comedic material.  Since then, he's gone into politics, first as an opinion-maker with some bestselling books and then as one of Minnesota's senators since 2009.  He is a staunch progressive Democrat who I feel looks out strongly for the interests of people at large and in particular for those he represents in Minnesota...including groups not a part of his political base and not just the wealthy, vested interests that control so much of what happens on Capitol Hill.  Sometimes I think Franken is a bit too blunt and undiplomatic in his approach, but compared to the current occupant of the White House he's pretty tame and easy-going.  I just finished reading his current release, titled Giant of the Senate, and which relates his upbringing, the years with SNL and his relationships with his colleagues there...and then the turn to politics, finally discussing his first term in the United States Senate.  I found the book very educational and entertaining, although I'd already read a lot of the earlier stuff about him.  It was his Senate chapters that interested me the most, especially the parts where he discussed different issues in greater detail than the media is willing to cover...

I just heard that Al Franken and Attorney General Jeff Sessions were in a heated exchange the other day in a Senate hearing...sounds like business as usual.  But although he is partisan in his politics, the Minnesota senator and former comic is developing a reputation in his current post as someone who is very personable and willing to work across the aisle with Republicans on issues of mutual benefit.  And Bill O'Reilly despises him...yet another feather in his cap...

10/15 Sermon on David, Pt. 5

The sermon series here at The Family Church in Gainesville, Florida about David, king of Israel, his relationship with God...and how we in our present time can learn from it...continued with a message focusing on the story of David and Bathsheba.  The text of focus was the narrative presented in 2 Samuel 11:1-5...you can read it through the following link to Bible Gateway: [link].  Philip Griffin, our senior pastor, used this story and other scattered Bible passages to delineate the difference between two roads we can take: the one to compromise or the one to integrity...

David chose the road to compromising his principles when he made several decisions that ultimately led him to seduce Bathsheba and betray her husband Uriah, who was one of his most loyal and courageous soldiers.  As Pastor Philip put in the form of a word equation: Wrong Place + Wrong Time + Wrong Focus = Wrong Action...David made all these mistakes and had to live with their consequences.  After repenting, he chose the road to integrity.  How can we go down that road? Philip listed four components: make my first commitment to God, maintain proper boundaries, monitor my own heart, and manage my mind.  In other words, with God being the top priority, I need to be in a constant state of spiritual self-examination as to whether I am walking according to his plan for my life...or whether I am slipping into that Wrong Place, Time, and Focus trap that leads to compromise and Wrong Action...

You can see this message for yourself, which I recommend since what you're reading in this article is just a summary and Pastor Philip is an excellent communicator.  Just click on the following YouTube video link to watch it: [link].  The Family Church is at 2022 SW 122nd Street and holds its Sunday services, replete with the weekly message, worship music, prayer, and fellowship, at 9:30 and 11.  I imagine that next week we'll be hearing more about King David...

Wednesday's Short Story: Crouch End by Stephen King

Although Stephen King is primarily known for his novels, he is also an excellent short story writer, coming out every few years with a new collection.  One of these, 1993's Nightmares and Dreamscapes, contains several good pieces, but by far my favorite (as well as one of my all-time favorite Stephen King stories) is Crouch End.  Named for a London suburb, the setting of the story, it concerns itself with alternate worlds and the "thin places" on Earth through which passage is sometimes possible...

The story is told through a flashback at the local police station as young American tourist Doris Freeman is relating her harrowing ordeal to the officers on duty there.  Doris, her husband Lonnie, and their two children are on vacation, first to England and later Barcelona.  While in London Lonnie decides to visit a business contact living in Crouch End, and Doris is going with him in a cab, the kids having remained at the hotel with a sitter.  It is getting late in the day as they arrive, and Lonnie has foolishly lost his friend's address.  The cab parks near a phone booth and he goes there to make a call, and Doris soon follows after him.  Lonnie gets his address, but as they both look back at the cab, it is gone...and then they notice that the scenery around them has changed as well.  During the next few hours...well, this is where I get off the storytelling bus and you'll just have to get on yourself to see what happens...

Crouch End reminds me of times in my otherwise ordinary, mundane life in which I discern that things around me aren't quite "right"...that something undecipherable has changed and it's not necessarily for the better.  Wanting to believe that I am a sensible person, I attribute these feelings to my own imagination and propensity for the dramatic...after all, I do like to read Stephen King's books.  So no, I'm not talking about entering a parallel universe or crossing over into another dimension...although there are some areas around Gainesville that are frankly hair-raising in their creepiness, one of them being near my workplace and marked by a prevalence of strange people and an overriding sense of wrongness.   I have also heard of haunted house stories from people whom I otherwise would regard as completely rational and grounded in reality.  When I used to work the graveyard shift at my job, I would listen to a late-night radio talk show that catered to these kinds of thoughts...we humans do tend toward the melodramatic, don't we...

Crouch End is a tribute to the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, and King references much of his material in this short tale.  The two police officers, the seasoned Vetter and the novice Farnham, play an important role in how the story ends.  Whether or not there is any true basis for the kind of scenario presented here is one thing: what I'm sure of is that there are many, many such places scattered all over the world that the locals regard in much the same, wary manner as those in Crouch End, even if everything is ultimately explainable in terms of our own reality...

Well, that's my "spooky" Halloween article, even if it is a couple of weeks early...

Tueday's List: I Rank My Favorite Elvis Presley Songs

The great, late American rock and roll icon Elvis Presley began his explosive rise in fame two years before I was born, in 1954...it wouldn't be until 1963-64, when I began to earnestly listen to the radio, that I would begin to hear many of his biggest hits, played as "golden oldies" on Miami's WQAM/560 "Tiger Radio".  Since that time, Presley continued to come out with new material, usually without the resounding success of his earlier songs.  However, because I was there, living through these later releases, they carried greater personal meaning for me: hence songs like Kentucky Rain, In the Ghetto, and Viva Las Vegas having places at the top of my favorites list... 

And here's that list of my top thirty favorite Elvis Presley tunes.  As usual, I put the song titles in blue capitals followed by their year of release.  What are your favorites of the King?

1 KENTUCKY RAIN [70]
2 CAN'T HELP FALLING IN LOVE [61]
3 IN THE GHETTO [69]
4 (MARIE'S THE NAME) HIS LATEST FLAME [61]
5 VIVA LAS VEGAS [64]
6 DON'T BE CRUEL [56]
7 JAILHOUSE ROCK [57]
8 HOUND DOG [56]
9 (LET ME BE YOUR) TEDDY BEAR [57]
10 RETURN TO SENDER [62]
11 THAT'S ALL RIGHT [54]
12 LITTLE SISTER [61]
13 MYSTERY TRAIN [55]
14 I'M LEAVING [71]
15 SUSPICIOUS MINDS [69]
16 BOSSA NOVA BABY [63]
17 HEARTBREAK HOTEL [55]
18 BLUE MOON [56]
19 ALL SHOOK UP [57]
20 GOOD LUCK CHARM [62]
21 BLUE SUEDE SHOES [56]
22 LOVE ME TENDER [56]
23 IT'S NOW OR NEVER [60]
24 BURNING LOVE [72]
25 CRYING IN THE CHAPEL [65]
26 ARE YOU LONESOME TONIGHT? [60]
27 KISSIN' COUSINS [64]
28 I WANT YOU, I NEED YOU, I LOVE YOU [56]
29 (YOU'RE) THE DEVIL IN DISGUISE [63]
30 HARD HEADED WOMAN [58]

Just Finished Reading The Vanishing Year by Kate Moretti

The Vanishing Year, by Kate Moretti, is one of those books I read after choosing it almost at random from my public library's shelves.  It's a mystery on different levels: a young woman, Zoe Whittaker, has had a rough past, being abandoned by her mother soon after birth and brought up by her adoptive mother in poverty after the adoptive father was killed in an accident.  She went through a period a few years before when she consumed and peddled drugs, and got in trouble both with the law and with her suppliers, having testified against them.  Now, with a new identity provided by the authorities, she is affluent and married to a wealthy young Manhattan businessman, Henry Whittaker.  But Henry, alternately very affectionate and then cold and controlling, has his own secrets that he is keeping from Zoe.  Who was Zoe's birth mother, who was Tara, Henry's mysterious first wife who he said had died in a traffic accident?  And what about the two thugs she put in prison...have they discovered where she now is?  These and more questions keeping coming up in the story until the reader isn't quite sure what is real and who is who...

It's fun to read this kind of fiction.  The book isn't very long and not part of a long series, so the time investment isn't great.  I liked Zoe, a realistic character with her own admitted shortcomings...no superhero here, thankfully.  And I enjoyed all the unraveling mysteries, plot twists, and misdirection until it all gets clearly laid out in the final pages.  After finishing the book, I thought yes, that explains why Henry married Zoe and treated her in such a peculiar way.  It's apparent to me that Moretti had outlined her book from start to finish before starting on it...there's no way she could have just begun to write it and then let the story develop on its own.  Some authors, like Stephen King, don't believe in outlining their stories while others, like Isaac Asimov, were methodical about preparing in advance what they were going to write.  I can see the advantages of both approaches, but with King's method it's a bit harder to predict the ending.  In any event, The Vanishing Year...which came out just last year...was a good read, and I can see it successfully being adapted to the screen...

Yet Another Disappointing Offensive Season for Gator Football

I'm a football fan of sorts and follow certain teams, professional and college, over the years.  Predictably, my favorites tend to be my hometown teams...first the Miami Dolphins from my childhood in south Florida, and then the University of Florida in my adopted Gainesville.  We Gators, frustrated over the years at never having been able to win a Southeastern Conference Championship...the situation aggravated by the 1984 team's title being forfeited because of rules violations...finally not only won repeated conference titles under legendary coach Steve Spurrier with his trademark exciting razzle-dazzle offense, but even the national championship after the 1996 season.  When Spurrier left in 2002 to try his hand at coaching in the National Football League, Ron Zook was hired and, while moderately successful, was vilified by the fans as simply not good enough...he got the axe after just three years and then monumentally successful (and very ambitious) Utah coach Urban Meyer came on to replace him.  All he did was win two national championships during his second and fourth of six seasons at Florida.  And then, beginning with Meyer's final season in 2010, the Gators passing offense disappeared...

From 2011 through 2014 defensive-minded Will Muschamp coached Florida through one impressive year (2012) and one disastrous year (2013), sandwiched between two yawners before he was canned and our present leader, Jim McElwain, was hired.  McElwain is now in his third season and inherited his predecessor's recruits...meaning a great defense and a stagnant offense.  Will Grier was the starting quarterback early in the 2015 season and was effective while improving in his position, until he was suspended for having taken performance-enhancing drugs.  After Grier was gone (he's now playing for West Virginia), the Gators faded but still managed somehow to win their conference's East Division.  In 2016, Luke Del Rio, unpolished but intelligent, looked as if he could be a quarterback to lead the team to success throughout the season...but he was injured in midseason and that was it for the Gators, although once again they defied the odds and took home another division title.  This year, though, everything was going to be different.  We not only had Del Rio coming back healthy, but there was a new freshman, Feleipe Franks, who was supposed to have done great things in high school and could end up as a superstar.  Only he didn't develop as well as hoped after recruitment and, although initially named starter and even responsible for a game-saving last-second 63-yard bomb to beat rival Tennessee, was finally benched in favor of Del Rio.  But once again, Del Rio was injured for the year and Florida has had once again to struggle with a horribly inconsistent offense.  Add to that the fact that several Gators were suspended at the start of the season for credit card fraud and it seems that Coach McElwain is always finding himself shorthanded...either from injury, violations, or the lack of his players' improvement...

Looking back, I think that Ron Zook should have been given at least a couple more years to see whether his own recruits could bring glory back to Florida.  When a new coach is hired he is more or less at the mercy of how well his predecessor's recruits do, although there is a lot more to how well a team does than just the sheer individual talent of its component players.  Jim McElwain might be regarded on one hand as extremely unlucky...or he may on the other be too undisciplined and disorganized.  When he was hired he was to bring high-powered passing back to the Gators, but we're now in season number three and it doesn't look any better than it did when Muschamp was struggling.  And the defense is nowhere as good as it used to be...

I doubt that Florida will be able to win their division again this year...they're only 3-3 and next play a special Georgia team that could well compete for the national championship this year.  I think that Jim McElwain should get at least two more seasons to turn this team around, but he has to develop his players' skills, be more involved in their personal conduct...and, frankly, do a better job with recruitment, both on offense and defense...

As far as I'm concerned, I don't need for Florida to win the national championship every year, as some unrealistic fans seem to feel.  But I do want them to be competitive, interesting and at least be contenders as the season approaches its culmination in December.  Injuries happen to every team: it's a part of the game, but while some coaches seem able to compensate for them, with others...well there's always excuses and "wait'll next year"...

Just Finished Rereading The Dead Zone by Stephen King

I first read Stephen King's 1979 novel The Dead Zone several years ago and, when a co-worker mentioned it as one of his favorites, I realized that I had forgotten a lot of what happened in it...only that I had also liked it.  So, as I have recently done with other King novels like 11/22/63, Salem's Lot, Insomnia, and Needful Things, I reread it...it really was pretty doggone good...

Johnny Smith is a young man...residing in Stephen King's home state of Maine, naturally...who had a childhood accident that occasionally gives him precognitive powers.  Employed as a high school teacher, he takes his date, Sarah...also a teacher at the same school...to the carnival where he freaks everyone out by repeatedly hitting the right numbers at a gambling stand. The circumstances during that night culminate in Johnny being critically injured while riding a taxi home...and he doesn't come out of his coma until five years later.  Meanwhile, Sarah has married and had a child...and history has marched on as well...

The Dead Zone follows another character, the antagonist Greg Stillson, as he "progresses" from a dog-killing Bible salesman to a heavy-handed small town mayor in New Hampshire.  Stillson has big plans for himself and decides to run for U.S. Representative in his district.  While this is going on, Johnny comes out of his coma...with much stronger abilities...to see into others' lives, even their futures...simply by touching them.  When he encounters Greg Stillson at a campaign rally, he sees a terribly ominous future for the country and the world...

As was the case in Firestarter...written by Stephen King at about the same general time...the protagonist cannot hide his paranormal abilities from others and as a result suffers persecution.  But Johnny cannot help wanting to warn others of impending doom...some heed his words, some don't, but almost all come away with the feeling that he is one very scary guy, to be avoided.  What I liked the most about this story was how the author developed the characters and put people like Sarah, Johnny's father, and his neurologist Sam Weizak into his life who genuinely cared and supported him...it wasn't just Johnny vs. the world...

I never saw the movie version of The Dead Zone, which came out in 1983 and starred Christopher Walken as Johnny Smith and Martin Sheen as Greg Stillson.  I do know that the ending was changed around a bit, though...but that doesn't surprise me.  I also read that the television version of this story is markedly different from the book.  Although a couple of people I know who saw the movie said they liked it, I'd still recommend that you read the book first.  Oh, by the way...that term "dead zone" referred to a part of Johnny's brain that had been damaged during his accidents and which caused certain lapses in his memory...

Quote of the Week...from Derek Jeter

There may be people who have more talent than you, but there's no excuse for anyone to work harder than you do - and I believe that.                                ---Derek Jeter

One of the big reasons that I still root for the New York Yankees is that Derek Jeter played out his major league career there...he was my favorite baseball player during his tenure from 1995 through 2014.  Now he is part-owner and CEO of the Miami Marlins, determined to make that franchise a winner...good luck with that, Derek! And about those Yankees, "my" team in this years Major League Baseball playoffs...congratulations for defeating favored Cleveland after being behind two games to none...

As for Derek's quote, I agree that he believes what he says and has played his baseball career with fervor and integrity.  Hard work often more than makes up for a lack of talent...at least until you get to the elite level in an endeavor: sorry, but concert pianists, singers, and professional athletes need that giftedness as well...Derek Jeter was also a gifted player.  Still, his quote has broad applications to our everyday lives.  I know people around me who are serious about working hard, and I greatly respect them for that.  There are some reactions, though, that I'd like to bring up about this topic...

Part of "working hard", in my opinion, is prayerful reflection on my priorities and exactly where I should be directing my efforts.  In the workplace this is a no-brainer: I should always work hard at my job...end of that discussion. But it's also important to make a personal assessment of my own interests and goals...and not let myself get distracted with expending too much time and attention on extraneous or trivial matters.  Also, working hard does not always match up with results: if I always evaluate my progress in an area by the instant feedback I receive, I'm bound to be disappointed and discouraged...instead just work hard and let the results take care of themselves.  And whenever I do get a reputation as a hard-worker, in a funny sort of way that seems to open me up for criticism by others, some of whom are jealous, others who don't want to be shown up for their own lack of motivation...and still others who want to assure me that my efforts are misplaced and I should be working in a "higher" venue elsewhere doing something different.  And then there's the fact that past accomplishments breed future expectations: if you don't want people paying too much critical attention to you or expecting more good things from you, then don't work hard at anything!  But what kind of life is that? 
   

10/8 Sermon on David, Part 4

At The Family Church here in Gainesville, senior pastor Philip Griffin continued his study of the important Old Testament figure of David, king of Israel.  Sunday's message was titled Desiring God's Presence and inferred from David's attitude and experiences how we in our present age can desire and experience God's presence as well.  The scripture of focus was 2 Samuel Chapter 6...you can read it in the New International Version through the following link to Bible Gateway: [link]...

The passage in the scripture refers to the returning of the Ark of the Covenant, from which God would speak to his people, to Jerusalem after David has become king of Israel.  Pastor Philip noted that God's own instructions for handling and transporting the Ark, clearly laid out in scripture, were violated as non-Levites moved it on an oxcart...in the same way that the unbelieving Philistines did.  One of the men transporting it reached out to prevent it from touching the ground...and was instantly smitten with death.  Some have issues with this passage, implying that God is cruel and vindictive...but is he that way, or instead, like the lion Aslan in C.S. Lewis's Narnia series, good but dangerous.  Philip pointed this out and then read on as to how David, seeing the error of what he had done, repented and had the Ark carried in the proper manner into Jerusalem.  And he openly rejoiced and danced, unashamed before all about his love for God...

In discussing the presence of God and how one desiring that presence can achieve it, Pastor Philip emphasized that while God is omnipresent, being in a covenant relationship with him requires his grace...and overcoming the problem of sin, which separates us from God.  Through Christ and our repentance God can work his grace in our lives and make his presence known to us...and we may rejoice as well...

This sermon can be viewed through the church's YouTube video website...here's a link to it: [link].  The Family Church holds its Sunday morning services...with the weekly message, praise music, prayer, and fellowship...at 9:30 and 11.  There is also a hospitality room next to the lobby where coffee is available...

Wednesday's Short Story: The Man Upstairs by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury was a peculiar soul, as well as a brilliant writer.  I remember sitting in the hospital with Melissa, just after Will was born in April of 1990, and the television there was on some obscure channel showing an interview with Bradbury.  The noted author made an incredible claim: he had a perfect photographic memory...he even remembered being born!  Whether he was just joking or not, I'll never know...but I wonder what life would be like for someone like that.  In any event, I've read a lot of his works, notably Something Wicked This Way Comes, Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and a plethora of short stories.  One of them, The Man Upstairs, from 1947, appeared in the 1955 collection titled The October Country (Ballantine Books).  In it, the reader is once again drawn to Bradbury's familiar Midwestern small town setting in the late 1920s with the protagonist being a little boy...

The story's title refers to a mysterious, exacting, and sullen man who arrives to rent out a room at the boarding house run by young Douglas's grandparents.  The boy takes an instant disliking to this new interloper in his life and goes out of his way to antagonize him as much as possible.  Douglas never was squeamish by any stretch of the imagination, so he was delighted to watch his grandmother work on preparing a chicken for roasting, first by reaching in and removing its internal organs, and then putting in the bread stuffing.  Now what does a mysterious new resident in town have to do with the innards of a chicken?  Leave it to Ray Bradbury to provide the pretty disturbing answer...

There were two main reactions I got from this story: one was that each of us is at a particular spot on the "squeamishness" scale, on one end impervious to any kind of gore or exposure to biological waste or decay...and on the other end prone to nausea just thinking or reading about these types of things.  I'm a little on the side of being too sensitive...and even writing or speaking about this subject makes me a bit uneasy.  On the other hand, Ray Bradbury and Stephen King seem to have no problem at all with it, easily conjuring up all sorts of distasteful images in their stories.  My second reaction to The Man Upstairs is how easy it is to feel alienation and unacceptance within one's society...both in a general sense as well as in various specific situations.  When you're the odd man out, as was the antagonist in this story...well, you're "strange", like in that old Doors hit single.  It seems that one of the needs of social groups is to have a convenient outcast at hand, someone to berate and ostracize for being "different", serving in a perverse way to bond the others within the group closer...it makes it all the easier if the scapegoat has no interest in being accepted by anyone else...

The Man Upstairs is available for you to read...just click on the following link: [link]

Tuesday's List: My Top Thirty Favorite Rolling Stones Songs

The Rolling Stones seem like a permanent fixture in our world, enduring when other bands have come and gone with a sort of uneasy-but-stable, ongoing peace between leaders Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.  I remember back after their Voodoo Lounge tour was announced following that album's release 23 years ago...it was derisively referred to as the "one-foot-in-the-grave tour"...yet the band plays on and I don't hear anybody joking anymore.  I was seven years old when they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show on the heels of the Beatles' appearance in early 1964...some of their songs from that era remain as favorites of mine.  Although the Stones were never my favorite band, and I haven't heard much of their material from the numerous albums they've made over the years...yet at their best they were tops in their field, and quite often extremely hilarious.  May they keep on pluggin' away...I hear they're planning on a new album...

So here's my list of my thirty favorite Rolling Stones songs, with the titles in blue capitals and the year of release (in America) following them.  Note that nowhere in this list are some of their biggest hits like Satisfaction, Brown Sugar, It's Only Rock n' Roll, and Start Me Up...I never could figure out why these were so popular...

1  IT'S ALL OVER NOW [64] 
2  STREET FIGHTING MAN [68]
3  PRODIGAL SON [68]
4  TIME IS ON MY SIDE [64]
5  JUMPIN' JACK FLASH [68]
6  SHATTERED [78]
7  UNDERCOVER OF THE NIGHT [83]
8  MOTHER'S LITTLE HELPER [66]
9  RUBY TUESDAY [66]
10 NOT FADE AWAY [64]
11 WHEN THE WHIP COMES DOWN [78]
12 SHE'S A RAINBOW [67]
13 WAITING ON A FRIEND [81]
14 YOU GOT ME ROCKING [94]
15 ALMOST HEAR YOU SIGH [89]
16 AS TEARS GO BY [65]
17 GIMME SHELTER [69]
18 BITCH [71]
19 HAVE YOU SEEN YOUR MOTHER, BABY, STANDING IN THE SHADOW [67]
20 PAINT IT BLACK [66]
21 LITTLE RED ROOSTER [64]
22 UNDER MY THUMB [66]
23 COME ON [64]
24 HAPPY [72]
25 SHE'S SO COLD [80]
26 MISS YOU [78]
27 YOU CAN'T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT [69]
28 ANGIE [73]
29 EMOTIONAL RESCUE [80]
30 I'M FREE [65]

Major League Baseball Playoffs So Far

Let's see...it's 2017 and the two 2016 World Series contenders, the Cleveland Indians and the Chicago Cubs, are still strongly in the running for a rematch.  Will Joe Madden's Cubs repeat as champs?  Well, in spite of their comeback in the second half of the regular season to win their division, the National League team that people are talking about isn't them but rather the Los Angeles Dodgers, who won 104 games, at one time going on a 43-7 run.  L.A. has a 2-0 divisional playoff lead over wild card winner Arizona...and the games haven't been close.  Action goes back to Arizona today to see if the Diamondbacks can't pick up at least one victory in this best-of-five series.  In the other NL series, Washington and Chicago are knotted up at 1-1 with the Cubs hosting today's game.  In the American League, the New York Yankees, a traditional favorite of mine, squeaked out a 1-0 win over the Indians to stay alive in their series, but they're still 2-1 behind Cleveland.  And Boston turned the tables on Houston yesterday to stay alive as well, also now trailing 2-1.  All series feature games today:

Houston at Boston, 1 pm, on Fox Sports 1
Washington at Chicago, 4 pm, on TBS
Cleveland at New York, 7 pm, on Fox Sports 1
Los Angeles at Arizona, 10 pm, on TBS

In Gainesville, Cox Cable has Fox Sports 1 and TBS on channels 62 and 67, respectively.  Unfortunately, I'll be at work and will miss this day-long extravaganza of championship-level baseball (but work's a good thing, too).  Three of the four series just might be decided today...I'm rooting for the Yankees and Nationals to make it to the World Series, which I recognize as being highly unlikely.  My "backup" favorites are the Red Sox in the American League and Arizona in the National...even less likely to happen.  Should Cleveland and Los Angeles play in the World Series...the most probable matchup... I'll go for the Indians...

Rock and Roll Elitism

I remember as a kid during the 1960s when the Grammy Awards would be shown on TV...and acts like Frank Sinatra, Barbara Streisand, and Henry Mancini would walk away with the awards while the wildly popular rock and roll musicians of the time would be uniformly snubbed...it wasn't until 1967 when the Beatles were finally honored for their song Michelle and the Sgt. Pepper album the following year's ceremony.  But in subsequent years a funny sort of reversal would happen...corresponding to the rise in rock-oriented criticism in magazines like Rolling Stone...in which elitism stemming from music critics would invade this genre itself.  So while progressive groups like the Moody Blues, King Crimson, Yes, and Rush would be making history with their groundbreaking music and other acts like Journey, the Doobie Brothers, the Cars, and Bon Jovi were capturing the allegiance of masses of Americans, they have been largely shunned from admission to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame...

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, located in Cleveland, Ohio, was founded in 1983 and began inducting members two years later.  It appropriately took very little time for the musical innovators from the 1950s and earlier like Chuck Berry and Little Richard to gain admittance as well as supergroups like the Beatles and Rolling Stones.  Over the years the membership list has swelled in number...yet several of the inductees do not enjoy anything approaching general popularity and many of those refused entrance were important and extremely popular during their time.  Of the bands I mentioned before, only Rush, Journey, and Yes were inducted...and only just recently, almost as afterthoughts.  True, the Moody Blues are on the list of next year's nominees put out just four days ago, a list also including Radiohead, Rage Against the Machine, the Cars, Bon Jovi, Kate Bush, J. Geils Band, Depeche Mode...among others.  The final inductees will be announced in a couple of months, but should I even care whether the Moody Blues, one of my all-time favorite bands, is selected?  And what about the Doobie Brothers, not even nominated...I just don't get this elitism...

To me, the essence of what rock and roll is all about is young folks listening to the records of their music idols and copying out and practicing the songs on their guitars and other instruments until they can completely cover them...and then coming up with their own original music...that's how the Beatles and the Stones got started and it has absolutely nothing to do with professional critics and music historians, noses upturned, sitting on their high and mighty thrones pronouncing their judgments on what is influential and artistic and what isn't.  Rock and roll is the people's music, belonging to the masses, not to an exclusive club of insiders who think and act like they know better than everyone else...

Just Finished Reading Mischling by Affinity Konar

When I went to my local public library and checked out Affinity Konar's novel Mischling, which I later discovered was based in part on a true story, as usual I read a preview of what it was about...and so knew well in advance that I was in for a story about terrible suffering: after all, anything about Auschwitz is going to be very, very serious and somber.  So I braced myself and proceeded, knowing that no matter how many accounts I hear or read about this horrible chapter in human history I will never be able to fully understand and feel what these people had to go through...

During World War II, within the German Nazi concentration death camp Auschwitz in southern Poland operated one of the most infamous "physicians" the world has ever known: Josef Mengele, who routinely mutilated, poisoned, and in other ways tortured and killed countless victims...all for the purported "advancement" of science.  One of his chief areas of interest was twins ("Zwillinge"), and he sought them out among the population, mostly Jewish, sent against their will to this hell on Earth.  And so arrive Paula and Stasha, identical twin girls with distinctly different personalities, accompanied by their mother and grandfather and then separated from them soon after they disembark from their train.  Mengele interviews them...wondering aloud whether they are "Mischling" (of "mixed" race) and they join a large group of other children, twins and triplets...some of them are horribly disfigured and others are ominously missing their counterparts.  It is the year 1944, when the extermination camps are going full throttle carrying out Hitler's "Final Solution" in murdering the Jewish population of Europe (along with other groups like the Romany) in a mass genocide...at first, it appears that being twins has saved them from this fate.  But as the story progresses, with alternating chapters expressing first Stasha's point of view and then Paula's, they discover that their futures may be eventually much worse and Mengele is in truth anything but the kindly "Uncle Doctor" that he insists they call him...

Two reactions: something that has always fascinated me is the way some brave people, while appearing on the surface to work "for" the bad guys, are really working for those suffering oppression.  In Mischling, one of Mengele's assistant doctors fills this role and ends up saving the lives of many...but later on she is still scorned as being a collaborator by one of the former girl prisoners.  The other reaction is the fascination I feel about the anarchy at the close of the conflict: the Nazis are in retreat ahead of the advancing Soviet army, and the protagonists, as wandering refugees, find themselves in a social no-man's land as they alternately encounter pockets of German soldiers, Russian soldiers, the Jewish resistance, collaborators with the Nazis, other concentration camp refugees...and just people at large struggling to simply survive, the need to make any sense of this insanity long vanished from their priorities...

No, I'll never fully be able to emphasize with the torments and struggles of the German death camp prisoners under the Nazi regime. With Mischling, Affinity Konar has put my own so-called problems in perspective: in stark contrast with the experiences of Paula and Stasha, my trials are trivial...

Quote of the Week...from Tom Petty

And I'll keep this world from draggin' me down...Gonna stand my ground and I won't back down.
                                                                  ---Tom Petty

The above lines are from Tom Petty's hit song I Won't Back Down a part of his blockbuster 1989 Full Moon Fever album.  Although the song was co-written by him and Electric Light Orchestra front man Jeff Lynne, I have to believe that the sentiments in its lyrics were fully Tom's.  As most of us already know by now, he passed away this past Monday at the way-too-early age of 66, on the heels of that infamous Las Vegas terrorist attack the night before...October 2nd was really one majorly sorry-ass day...

I Won't Back Down is my all-time favorite Tom Petty song, both musically and lyrically.  It's important to know where I am and just how far I will go in compromising my principles and best interests in order to match up with what I perceive the world expects from me...somewhere and sometime I have to draw the line and "stand my ground" in spite of the negative consequences: now seems as good a time as any.  On the other hand, it's all too easy to develop a cynical attitude about how I'm treated by this "world" and walk around with a mountain of a chip on my shoulder...better to pick my battles and fight them steadfastly and let the numerous, far less important things go...

I would say that I'll miss Tom Petty, and in a way it's true although I never met him...but he's pretty much immortalized himself in his music and the friendships he made with others, even though he admitted to having difficulty in making new friends (I kind of find that hard to believe).  I'll always have that music, and no, I'm not going to live forever any more than Tom did: we all have that crossing to make some day...although extremely advanced, lucid old age gets my vote for the best time...

10/1 Sermon on David, Part 3

For last Sunday's sermon at The Family Church here in Gainesville, we had as speaker Kevin Sides, a member in our church who has been active over the years with Athletes in Action...and is a gifted orator.  He continued the ongoing series about David of the Old Testament...and focused on Psalms as he titled his message Growing in Times of Trials...

Kevin drew upon three Psalms as he presented his talk: Psalms 142, 57, and 34 in that order...just click on the Psalm's number to read it in the New International Version on Bible Gateway.  He revealed to have recently experienced trials of his own and studied the life of David and how he, as a man of God, got through his difficult times.  Kevin identified three parts to the process of growing through our troubles: bring them to God, receive God's perspective on them, and respond to God's instructions in them.  He pointed out that early on in trials we tend to be consumed with ourselves and our circumstances but as we turn to God the tone changes as we seek his mercy, rescue, and guidance.  It is then that we are in a position to receive God's true perspective on trials and our true role within them. Besides these important points, Kevin made some great statements like "The wilderness is just part of God's plan", "God knows our difficulties better than we know ourselves", "We grow and develop as human beings through difficulties and hardship more than through comfort and ease", and "We all experience trials: either we're in the wilderness, just coming out, or about to go in".  Through Christ we can present ourselves to God in all of our messiness and ask him to clean it all up.  In other words, trials are a part of God's plan for us...sure, we often play a part in bringing them on through our own willfulness and transgression...but the way to respond is to seek God, not blame him...and realize that trials are a natural symptom of a vibrant, growing life...

I wasn't able to personally attend this past service, but I was able to hear Kevin's message in its entirety through the church's YouTube video website, which you can also access through the following link: [link].  The Family Church, located at 2022 SW 122nd Street in far-western Gainesville, has its weekly Sunday services as 9:30 and 11...with the sermon message, worship music, prayer, and fellowship.  Looking forward to being there next time...

Weekly Short Story: Presposterous by Fredric Brown

Preposterous is a 1954 short story...a short, short story...by Frederic Brown, whom I've previously reviewed for his short story The Weapon.  It doesn't quite fill up a page...but it doesn't have to, for the message here doesn't take very many words to express.  A father is berating the mother for having tolerated their son's reading of trashy pulp science fiction magazines.  Why, this material just puts crazy, impossible ideas in children's minds and then what are they good for?  After finishing his brief tirade, dad leaves for work...and the piercing irony of his complaints sets in...

Humanity has the quality of being very adaptable: people tend to quickly adjust themselves to whatever circumstances they find themselves in.  On one end, poverty and suffering becomes normal...but on the other so does great wealth...just look at the reality TV shows full of folks surrounded by riches...but who are utterly unappreciative of their material blessings and constantly bicker with each other.  And with innovations that improve the quality of our lives, such as smartphones, the Internet, and drastically improved medical knowledge and procedures, it takes very little time for them to be treated as simply the status quo and not things to be marveled at. For example, by the time that Apollo 13, the moonshot that was aborted in transit due to an explosion in the Service Module, was launched, the population was already so jaded with this third moon venture only nine months after the first one that television networks wouldn't even cover it in prime time...

You might think that with all of the tools we have been given to improve our lives that our attitudes toward each other would also respond in kind...but I see the same old entrenched arrogance, grievances, and prejudice coming out of people's mouths and on social media...another innovation also widely taken for granted.  But what does this have to do with Frederic Brown's story Preposterous?  Its final short...but packed...paragraph lays out a different future human scenario...but with the same old type of complacent, unimaginative, and unappreciative (but adaptable) people the world is loaded with today...

I own the book From These Ashes, which is a collection of all of Frederic Brown's short science fiction (he also wrote in the mystery genre)...some stories like Preposterous and The Weapon have profound messages, some are primarily escapist entertainment...and some are just plain silly.  You might find this story on the Internet, but I'm not sure whether the copyright is still in effect and if any such websites are on the up and up...

Tuesday's List: The Chapter Headings of Neil deGrasse Tyson's Latest Book

In my mind, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is currently the greatest popularizer of science in the world today, a worthy successor of past giants like Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan.  He has written a number of books over the years, but it wasn't until his latest, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, that I got around to reading one.  This one I purchased on Kindle, so I can take it with me wherever I go and read it...and reread it...at my pleasure on my cellphone.  Tyson's book should be adapted to a twelve-part television series, although there is a great amount of overlap with Cosmos, which Sagan was responsible for the first time around and Tyson for its remaking...

The chapter headings are in blue and capitals, along with some commentary from me about each.  Hope you enjoy it and get around to reading this remarkable book.  I know I'm going to look at some of Neil deGrasse Tyson's earlier works...

1  THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD
    Perhaps the most amazing thing about the beginning of the universe is the exactitude with which events can be measured by the "one ten-million-trillion-trillion-trillionth of a second" after the instant of the Big Bang and lengths by "one hundred billion trillionths of a meter" with precise times given for when the different fundamental forces of the cosmos each became distinct...yet nothing is known of what happened before the Big Bang...
2  ON EARTH AS IN THE HEAVENS
    Newton and Einstein established the universality of physical laws...not just on Earth, which isn't intuitively obvious...
3  LET THERE BE LIGHT
    There was no light in the universe until after 380,000 years when it had cooled enough for electrons to combine with nuclei to form atoms...freeing photons to travel unimpeded from collisions with them throughout the cosmos...
4  BETWEEN THE GALAXIES
    Who would have thought it: the so-called "space" between the galaxies is full of things like "dwarf galaxies, runaway stars, runaway stars that explode, million-degree X-ray-emitting gas, dark matter, faint blue galaxies, ubiquitous gas clouds, super-duper high-energy charged particles, and the mysterious quantum vacuum energy"...I don't know about you, but that last one kind of creeps me out...    
5  DARK MATTER
    Since dark matter does not interact with light or chemically with other matter, it's virtually impossible to pin down...yet there is a big discrepancy between the observed motions of galaxies with their known masses and the theories that predict those motions, which can only be reconciled by the presence of such a type of mass...
6  DARK ENERGY
    The ever-accelerating expansion of the universe can only be accounted for by inserting the concept of dark energy which, like dark matter, has never been observed or measured...its existence was accidentally predicted through Einstein's "blooper" of his "cosmological constant lambda"...
7  THE COSMOS ON THE TABLE
    A element-by-element romp through the Periodic Table, and their respective origins in the cosmos...
8  ON BEING ROUND
    Spheres are the natural shape of objects in the universe...but only when gravity exceeds the chemical and physical bonds between the matter within the objects.  At a certain mass threshold, celestial objects form spheres...hence smaller, irregular-shaped moons like Mars' Phobos and Deimos...and spheres like our Moon and the larger moons of the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune...
9  INVISIBLE LIGHT
    In the early 1800s, the light spectrum was expanded to include invisible infrared and ultraviolet...as we now know, the visible light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is relatively small, with the waves, in order from shortest to longest, being the gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared light, radio waves, and microwaves...although this list is far from comprehensive.  So with instruments detecting non-visible sources of radiation we can learn much more about the universe...
10 BETWEEN THE PLANETS
    Asteroids, comets, gravitational and magnetic field effects from other planets, the solar wind (high-energy charged particles ejected by the sun), dust...and of course all those moons...are a few of the "goodies" to be encountered in the supposedly empty space between the planets in our solar system...
11 EXOPLANET EARTH
    Many planets...called "exoplanets" for being outside our solar system...have been discovered in other star systems of late.  How would intelligent, scientifically and technologically adept beings in a distant star system be able to detect Earth's presence as an exoplanet from their perspective...and what scientific means that are now available to us would reveal to them the nature of our home planet, whether it supports life...and even possibly intelligent life?
12 REFLECTIONS ON THE COSMIC PERSPECTIVE
     The author expresses his deep concerns for the ongoing problems here on Earth, but also stresses that much of the trouble and turmoil around us could be ameliorated if more and more people took on a cosmic perspective, which he lays out as a kind of manifesto...

I finished chapter 12 at page 208, so this is a pretty short book.  Tyson introduces the many concepts without snowing the reader under in overly technical explanations...but in the final analysis, he is true to his opening words: "The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you."  That having been said, Neil deGrasse Tyson made a whole lotta sense to me...

Last Night's Las Vegas Concert Massacre

A little before one late last night (Gainesville time) I turned off the TV and went to bed...a short time before the breaking news story that is dominating the airwaves today: a lone gunman massacred at least 58 people and injured more than 500 during the last day of an open-air country music concert in Las Vegas.  The alleged perpetrator, who stationed himself in a 32nd floor suite at the Mandalay Bay hotel overlooking the event and then shot himself dead as the police approached his room, is identified as Stephen Paddock, a 64-year old resident of Mesquite on the outskirts of Las Vegas.  As of this writing, no motives have yet been determined.  It looks as if Paddock, who had rented out his hotel room since Thursday, gradually smuggled in one automatic weapon after another until he finally had a considerable arsenal...and then knocked out two different windows as he began shooting while country music star Jason Aldean was performing.  At first, many of the reported 23,000 there thought the gun sounds were fireworks...but as the carnage became apparent and Aldean and his entourage fled the stage, a general panic ensued as the endangered spectators tried to escape the fire...

My heart and prayers go out to all those directly affected by this tragedy, as well as their families and friends.  It looks once again as if the first responders...especially the police and firemen...were heroes as they bravely exposed themselves to hostile fire and put their own lives on the line to help people find shelter from the deadly barrage...

Just Finished Reading Stephen King's Firestarter

Several years ago I saw the movie version of Stephen King's 1980 novel Firestarter, starring Drew Barrymore, David Keith, Martin Sheen, and George C. Scott.  After seeing it, I felt no need to read the book, but lately after noting how divergent some of King's film adaptations were from the original stories, I though I'd go ahead and read it anyway.  As it turned out, there were some minor differences...but the movie by and large "stuck to the script".  The only real problem I had with it was the casting of George C. Scott as the homicidal psychopathic native American John Rainbird...reading the book gave me a completely different picture of this character...

Firestarter is one of those stories common to the era in which it was written...the government has very sinister, secret, and ruthless factions within it where the law and protection of life and liberty are meaningless: in this particular story the offending agency is called the Shop.  As the result of one of their experiments, Andy McGee and his future wife Vicky are induced through a hallucinogen into having psychic abilities...which change their DNA and are passed on to their daughter Charlie.  Charlie has the talent of pyrokinesis, which means she can start fires with her mind.  The bad guys in government want to control this innocent family for their own nefarious ends, all supposedly in the name of national security.  Firestarter is how Andy, Charlie, and to a lesser degree Vicky deal with their persecution...you'll have to read it yourself (or watch the movie) to find out what happens...

Firestarter hits upon a belief that I've always subscribed to: if you find that you have a special paranormal ability, then the last thing on Earth you want to do is let it become common knowledge.  For you will then become a target and your so-called rights will good for nothing anymore when, if you had been able to keep it to yourself, then you could have cautiously and sparingly used your gift for your own benefit.  The problem with Firestarter was that the Shop was deliberately looking for signs of paranormal ability among its test subjects, who themselves were uninformed of this.  So when Andy McGee innocently called out one of the "volunteers" by name when it hadn't been revealed, it quickly became too late to back out...

I've read better Stephen King novels than Firestarter, but I tend to suspect that there are clandestine agencies within our government, which by dint of their secrecy and security clearance can and do trample on the rights of the very people they are supposed to serve.  To me, that's a lot scarier than the dubious ability of someone to mentally make fires.  Somebody in the story once hysterically called Charlie a monster for her paranormal capabilities, but the Shop was full of the worst kind of monsters as they rationalized the murders and kidnappings of their fellow human beings with their insulated, bureaucratic self-righteousness...

My September 2017 Running Report

In September I had to contend with some soreness in my right foot, as well as some back strain issues...limiting my ability to train.  I missed seven days of running because of this, but managed somehow to run a total of 47 miles during the month.  My longest single run was for just 3.5 miles...it's been a while since I've run anything on the order of middle distance, much less the long distances that I prefer...

So with the weather supposedly cooling a bit this coming month, I should hopefully be able to get back to increasing my mileage.  It sounds like a broken record, for my running so far in 2017 has not been anywhere near what I want it to be.  Yet I think I may have solved that foot problem by going back to the protective shoes I used to wear...ever since I switched back, my feet seem fine.  In any event, I will need to drastically get back my endurance over longer distances if I'm to run upcoming races this fall and winter.  And I'd better hurry up: the Tom Walker Memorial Half-Marathon SE of Gaineville will be held November 11, just six weeks from now.  And then there's the 10K Turkey Trot on the Tacachale campus in NE Gainesville on Thanksgiving.  Next year will spotlight the Ocala Half-Marathon and the 15K Newnan's Lake Run, both in January, and the Five Points of Light Half-Marathon here in Gainesville in February.  A grand total of five middle-to-long distance races in our immediate area.  If I can remain healthy, I should be able to swing this...

Quote of the Week...from Senator Bill Nelson

One of the great privileges of being a part of the Senate, it being the greatest deliberative body in the world, is out of the discussions of ideas, hopefully truth can ultimately be achieved.
                                              ---Bill Nelson.

Bill Nelson is one of the two United States senators from my home state of Florida.  Originally a Democratic congressman who once flew on the Space Shuttle back in the 1980s, he is a staunch advocate for our space program and for Florida's future role in it.  He also is very strong on national defense, the environment, the rights of seniors...and above everything, the interests of the state he represents.  Although Nelson's speech mannerisms can be at times a little irritating, their content is almost always spot on, making him one of the few politicians on Capitol Hill that I consistently agree with.  He's up for reelection next year, and most Floridians are anticipating that Republican lame duck governor Rick Scott will run against him, making the contest a most difficult one to win.  The above quote, reflective of Nelson's three terms of service in the United States Senate, is once again totally true...and you can test its validity out as C-Span 2 shows its floor proceedings live...

If you're like me and sick and tired of the talking media heads spinning the issues out of control...both from the "left" and "right"...then maybe you'd appreciate a more dispassionate setting where those same issues can be discussed and debated in a civil manner, and without the participants interrupting each other and flying off the handle.  In the Senate there is a deliberate atmosphere of comity, and the senators are constantly referring within their speeches to the opposition party as "our friends across the aisle".  That doesn't mean that they aren't fully committed to promoting their own viewpoints and criticizing the others': it means that within this setting, at least, personalities are deemphasized while the issues at hand, with their various ramifications, get the deserved center stage...

I have been following the Senate on C-Span 2 since 2001...one of my first experiences was of an eloquent and persuasive speech by Senator Jeff Sessions, now our attorney general.  Over the last sixteen years there has been a lot of turnover in this body, but I have made it a point to know all of the senators by name, state, and appearance...and a little about each one's politics and speaking styles.  I was a little distressed by the recent Republican primary loss in Alabama by Luther Strange to Judge Roy Moore...I got to like "Big Luther"...as the president accurately depicts him...for his gentle politeness as well as when he would preside over the Senate.  So in a way, the personalities are still there...but on the floor the talk is all about the issues, which is the way I wish the media in general covered politics.  Notice that in this article I've praised both Democratic and Republican senators...that's because, my political leanings notwithstanding, I've come to greatly respect...and even like...these people.  I'm a firm believer that gentle, reasonable persuasion can change hearts much better than can smears and hyperbole...although the last presidential election didn't exactly bear that out, did it...

9/24 Sermon on David, Part 2

Last Sunday at The Family Church here in Gainesville, senior pastor Philip Griffin continued his series on David, king of Israel.  This message's title was Life's Battlefields and focused on the Old Testament book of 1 Samuel, particularly chapter 17, verses 26-50...you can read it in the New International Version (or a different translation if you prefer) via the following link to Bible Gateway: [link].  The setting is the confrontation between the Israelites, led by King Saul, and the Philistines, championed by the arrogant giant Goliath...who is challenging anyone to face him: no one wants to.  David steps up, however...much to the consternation of his brothers...and tells Saul that it was God who rescued him from the bear and lion when he was herding his sheep, and that same God will protect him from the Philistine... 

Pastor Philip drew four important principles from this passage: listen to the right voice, use what God has already given me, focus on the size of God and not the size of the problem, and rely on God's power and not my own.  The setting in 1 Samuel was literally a battleground, but our lives have times in which we must either take a stand...or retreat.  Sometimes prudence is called for, especially when it involves discerning the significance of the "battle", e.g. someone out in traffic is overcome with road rage against me...discerning God's wisdom through the Holy Spirit will lead me away from any conflict of that sort.  But other times God will direct and empower me to stand up and face the adversary, be it human or situational...with the emphasis, of course, on God being the one in charge.   He will not ask of me anything that he hasn't already equipped me for: David was equipped with his life experience of fighting predators while shepherding, his sling, and stones....and more than anything, his faith in God...

You can watch the video for this message by clicking on the following link to the church's YouTube video website: [link]. The Family Church, located at 2022 SW 122nd Street, holds its Sunday morning services at 9:30 and 11 and invites you to attend.  There's the weekly sermon, inspiring praise music, friendly folks all around, and prayer and discipleship opportunities...and, of course, that delicious complimentary coffee...

Wednesday's Short Story: The Big Front Yard by Clifford Simak

Back in May I discussed another of the great twentieth century science fiction writer Clifford Simak's short stories: Huddling Place, from 1944.  But one of the first sci-fi stories I ever read was his 1958 The Big Front Yard, which I found while thumbing through one of my father's old paperback anthologies.  It also appears in Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories 20 (1958), published by DAW Books in 1990.  Unlike many other stories I have read over the years, it has strongly stuck with me to this day...and for good reason...

Hiram Taine is a solitary handyman living on the edge of the woods outside a New England village with his dog Towser.  The folks from the village like and respect him, and bring in their broken down televisions and other contraptions for him to repair.  One day he notices that Towser is acting as if he is smelling a rat or woodchuck...and it seems to be coming from the basement.  Later he discovers that the ceiling of the basement has been replaced by an impermeable smooth glassy barrier.  Not freaking out as I (and most people) would have done, Taine with his "Yankee sensibility" continues to go about his own business in town and returns home to find his house's front closed in on itself, completely impassable.  Going in from the back, he sees that the front windows and door open out to a very sunny desert scene...while it's still nighttime and New England in the back!  Whatever "rats" had built the basement ceiling had also transformed his house into a gateway to another planet.  Taine knows they came from outer space because Towser had picked up their buried spaceship's scent.  And the story continues from there...

When I first read The Big Front Yard as a kid, the idea of just walking through a door and instantly traversing enormous distances greatly intrigued me...even now I often joke about wanting to be able to step into a closet and come out at some distant destination, saving me the time, expense, and hassle of going through all that tedious travel.  But when I reread it the other day, I picked up on something else: there is a character named Beasly, a man whose features you might recognize in a few others you know in your own life.  He does odd jobs around town to earn his frugal lifestyle and is generally regarded as somewhat slow-witted, consequently commonly being jeered at by some of the town's kids and shown disrespect by those he works for...except for Taine, who treats him as an equal.  But as it turns out, Beasly has a special talent that has gone undiscovered for his entire life, a talent that is crucial to the story's successful outcome.  I wonder how many of us regard ourselves as superior to others whose mental faculties we deem to make them not quite "complete", when the truth is that each and every one of us are complete in our own right and deserve an opportunity for a dignified life within our society...

Tuesday's List: Fundamental Units of Physics and Derived Formulas

A few decades ago I was studying basic college physics when I tired of having to remember all of the formulas in mechanics and electricity...and decided to develop numerical strings for each type of quantity that, for me at least, were easier to retain.  Now in physics there are seven fundamental units, of which everything else can be derived (back then I only used four):

1 mass.......................kilogram (kg)  
2 length.....................meter (m)
3 electric current........ampere (A)
4 time........................second (s)    
5 thermodynamic temperature...degree Kelvin scale, or kelvin (K)
6 amount of substance...mole (mol)
7 luminous intensity.....candela (cd)

For the purposes of this article, I'll leave off the last three units, although you might find it interesting that thermodynamic temperature does not figure into the formula for energy...heat energy or otherwise.  What I did was to write out four-number strings, each number representing the exponential powers for the units or combinations thereof.  So...

mass:          1  0  0  0  kg
length:        0  1  0  0  m
current:      0  0  1  0  A
time:           0  0  0  1  s

From this we can derive more strings:

area             0  2  0  0   length-squared
volume        0  3  0  0   length-cubed
velocity       0  1  0 -1   length per time
acceleration 0  1  0 -2  length per time-squared
density         1 -3 0   0  mass per length-cubed
force            1  1  0 -2   mass multiplied by length per time-squared
energy         1  2  0 -2   mass mult. by length-squared per time-squared
power          1  2  0 -3   mass mult. by length-squared per time-cubed
pressure       1 -1 0 -2   mass per length per time-squared
charge          0  0  1  1  current mult. by time
voltage         1  2 -1 -3  mass mult. by length-squared per current per time-cubed

Each number of the string represents the exponential power of that fundamental unit within the formula...and you multiply across the string.  A unit represented by "0" simply isn't present within that formula.  I found this numerical mnemonic system, once learned, to be easier to remember...

And it's also easier to see relationships between the different formulas, for example:

We're taught that force=mass x acceleration...or:

      1   0   0   0    mass
      0   1   0  -2    acceleration
      1   1   0  -2   force     (note that when multiplying exponents you add the powers)

If you're interested, you can go through the whole physics textbook like this and the formula derivations can get to be almost a matter of second nature after a while...

The Ongoing NFL Kneeling-at-the-National Anthem Controversy

I wrote early on in the 2016 National Football League season that I strongly disagreed with the tactics taken by then-San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick as he remained seated during the pregame playing of the National Anthem as a protest against how he perceived blacks and other minorities were being treated in this country.  Several players on his team and others joined him in this silent but ostentatious action, and at the time I stated that since the league was not going to take any disciplinary action against them then I would boycott the season.  And I did, until I noticed that that same league was making sure that the police and our brave soldiers were being honored during different halftime shows and decided that in an imperfect world, they were probably doing the best they thought they could.  Still, I objected to the protests...and multimillionaire Kaepernick, a sympathizer of brutal communist totalitarian dictator Fidel Castro, should have been the last person to emulate or be called "courageous" for taking his stand...or should I say "seat".   But it seemed that the furor over all this had finally died down until it looked as if all of the teams were blacklisting Kaepernick, a capable pro quarterback who was an available free agent but not being considered...and believe me, some teams desperately need a quarterback who doesn't totally suck.  As this 2017 season has begun and progressed, more and more players were seen kneeling during the anthem, and the league offices once again averted their eyes.  Then President Trump went off on one of his spontaneous rants the other day at a rally aimed at his whopping 35% base of supporters and angrily urged fans to walk out of stadiums and for the teams to fire players who refuse to honor our national symbols.  I thought it was interesting that during the Charlottesville incident when white supremacist racists demonstrated against the removal of a Confederate statue, his off-the-cuff reaction was that they had a legal permit to do so and then equated their actions with the counter-demonstrators.  But with these NFL protestors Trump decided to make a "moral statement" instead and come down harshly against them.  So let me see...when it's white racists protesting, our prez says there are some very good people among them and takes great pains to emphasize that it's their legal right...when it's blacks protesting against white racism, he says "Fire them!"  H-m-m, I think I'm beginning to understand where Mr. Trump stands on race...

In spite of disliking the protests at the playing of the National Anthem, I do respect and agree to a great extent with the reasons for them...blacks and other minorities really don't get a fair shake in this society, especially with regard to their treatment by police and how the justice system more severely prosecutes them.  But I'm standing back and watching how it's all being spun on TV and I have to wonder whether I'm the only one who discerns that the issue is being twisted around a bit.  To disrupt an assembly through protest is in of itself a deliberate act of disunity...to stand together at the playing of the anthem would have been the act of unity.  Instead, different teams are all pretending to be "united" by holding arms and doing other sorts of symbolic acts...but the unity is among themselves only, not with the fans or the people at large.  And Trump is consequently being portrayed as a "divider"...which I agree he most assuredly is, but not for the reason they're all giving over the air...and it's a shame, because I find myself at times agreeing with the president's positions on different issues: if he only didn't act as a wrecking ball in promoting his viewpoint.  The protesters most certainly are ALSO dividers, not unifiers, and it might be argued that their divisiveness is for a good cause...you're not going to hear me disagree on that one.  But I think that all of this symbolic stuff going on isn't going to make anyone's life better...if anything it will just entrench those whose mindsets need the most change.  In any event, our bumbling, blustering president has turned the protests from a social statement into a political one: if you're against Trump, then kneel, if you support him, stand...never mind how you feel about the honor and privilege of being an American anymore...

Just Finished Rereading Stephen King's 11/22/63

Back in April of 2012 I read for the first time Stephen King's time travel novel 11/22/63...here is a link to my article about it: [link].  Since I'd be simply repeating from I wrote about this outstanding piece of speculative science fiction, I thought I'd go off in a (very) slightly different direction today...

Time travel has always been a popular theme in fiction and its prospects appeal to a wide swath of the population...at least to that part that is capable of reflection and isn't constantly surrendering itself to pleasure-seeking and ego gratification.  I think I might have an answer as to why the idea of venturing into the past or future appeals to a lot of us: time is the dimension of space-time in which we can't travel other than the steady, second-by-second pace with which we live it out.  I can imagine what the beach is like and I can also physically go there.  And I can imagine the past or future...but my brain and body are trapped in the now.  What time travel fiction accomplishes is to make the now a totally personal and portable concept, with the travelers toting it around with them "whenever" they go.  And once you can separate now from the notion that we're all locked into the present, where we dwell with our earlier life...and even earlier nonexistence...trailing back on one side, and our future life...and death and beyond...projected ahead on the other...then immortality sounds a bit more achievable, even if this is only felt unconsciously.  But even if time travel were possible, we still live within our own physical bodies, subject to wear and tear by aging and vulnerable to injury and disease.  But it does seem exciting to some people to be able to escape the confines of our own lifespans and experience other times...as if they were getting away with something much more meaningful and transcendent than traveling cross-country or abroad...

In the 2012 article I wrote about 11/22/63, I alluded to the movie Groundhog Day, which was a different kind of time travel story...one with impenetrable temporal walls confining Bill Murray's character to a single, repeating day.  There's another time-themed story, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, that has as its protagonist Billy Pilgrim, who has become "unstuck" in time and goes back and forth through different points within his lifespan and experiences.  His time travel, like that in Groundhog Day, while in many ways different, is also based on subjective, experiential reality and not on scientifically provable objective reality.  I imagine that if there is truly anything to time travel, it will be as a subjective and not an objectively demonstrable experience...

The Gustav Mahler Test

No, this isn't an examination about the late 19th/early 20th-century Austrian composer Gustav Mahler...not that the works of this important link between romantic and modern classical music aren't worth examining.  Instead, this is more like a litmus test than an academic one...and it indirectly concerns my driving...

I am one of those people who can't keep their hands off the radio dial when on the road...don't worry, I'm looking where I'm going.  My favorite stations are few in number: WUFT/Classical on 102.7, WUFT/NPR News-Talk on 89.1, WHHZ on 100.5 (alternative rock)...and occasionally WIND on 92.5 (classic rock)...I've pretty much given up on WSKY/97.3 with its extremely biased right-wing political talk format. Sometimes I find myself riveted to one station...more often, I'm surfing around on the dial for something interesting.  But for the last couple of weeks, I have been listening to a CD that my friend Rob from work gave me a while back: Mahler's Ninth Symphony in D-Minor, which he composed shortly before his death and was consequently never performed in his lifetime.  But it is widely considered to be one of his best symphonies, and the symphony is the form that he excelled in.  Although Mahler's Ninth is difficult to get my arms around...it seems much less structured to my untrained classical music ears than a symphony by Mozart or Beethoven...I have come to sense more and more that its mood matches mine, almost as if a kind of synchronicity is going on.  As a result, this CD has become a test of sorts regarding whatever is on the radio.  When I'm on the radio the question comes up: does any of this stand up to Mahler's Ninth?  Usually it doesn't and I switch over to the CD, which picks up on the symphony at the point when I left off the previous time.  But lately, I haven't even bothered to listen to the radio and just keep the Ninth playing in the background as I drive...