Some More About Recent Savannah Visit

When Melissa and I enjoyed our brief visit to Savannah, Georgia last month, we naturally took a few photos...let me discuss the above six.  At the top is a nighttime shot of the "Waving Girl" statue of Florence Martus, who for decades greeted every ship passing by on its way to Savannah Harbor. We were walking along the river, watching the different ferries as well as other people...there was a big formal dance party about to board one boat and a mass of very formally-dressed and made-up young couples were assembled, very charming.  Then again, most everyone else there seemed to be tourists like us, traipsing around to find something interesting.  The Waving Girl is on the east side overlooking the Savannah River.  The second picture is of Melissa standing on the outer stairs of one of the many beautiful old buildings in the Historic District...she noticed the cherry blossoms and we set up a shot.  The third photo is of the Mercer Williams House, which is the main setting of the famous John Berendt 1994 nonfiction novel Midnight in the House of Good and Evil.  We went inside and enjoyed a tour of the place, including the room where the infamous shooting depicted in the story occurred.  The next picture is of Union General William Sherman's headquarters while his troops peacefully occupied Savannah following the March to the Sea through Georgia in 1864 during the Civil War...another beautiful old mansion.  Picture number five is of one of the more than twenty squares interspersed throughout the old part of town...almost all of them mini-parks with walkways, horticulture, benches, and fountains or statues.  It's one of the prettiest features of Savannah.  And as for the last picture...

Today happens to officially be Casimir Pulaski Day, at least if you happen to live in Illinois where it is an official state holiday with a large ethnically Polish population.  Pulaski, regarded as the father of the American cavalry, was originally a Polish officer fighting for independence against Russia.  He was recruited by Benjamin Franklin and Lafayette to join Washington's army and later died during the siege of Savannah, to where the British had retreated from Charleston in 1779.  The picture is of a monument to Casimir Pulaski, and his remains are believed to be buried beneath it.  It stands in Monterey Square, which is adjacent to the Mercer Williams House and also featured in Berendt's book...

There is a lot of history concentrated within easy walking distance among a few blocks in Savannah.  John Wesley once delivered sermons at a church here, and writer Conrad Aiken, musician/composer Johnny Mercer, and Girl Scout founder Juliette Gordon Low grew up within blocks of each other, although in different times.  I'm looking forward to a return visit...



Being Gracious and Polite is No Longer Politically Correct

The other day our previous vice-president...and possible 2020 presidential candidate...Joe Biden happened to mention the current VP, Mike Pence.  Biden, in the noble tradition of speaking kindly of another political leader from the opposing party, graciously stated that he thought Pence was a decent man.  That's all.  And you would have thought ol' Joe had said "Heil Hitler" from the reaction he got from his own party.  You see, it's not politically correct anymore to state your own beliefs and respectfully point out how another's differing perspective might be mistaken and worthy of correction.  No, nowadays in order to get in good with your own crowd, you have to personally denigrate the other's character and completely reject them as either insane, stupid, crooked, treasonous, bigoted...or a combination thereof.  After receiving a firestorm of criticism for his respectful depiction of a figure who is worthy of that deference if for no other reason than that he occupies such a significant place in our elected government, Biden backed down and tempered his remark to limit it to his assessment of Pence in the context of foreign policy.  In my opinion, Biden shouldn't have done that...he had been correct and proper in the first place for being courteous toward Pence. The particular special interest group that is so hatefully opposed to our vice-president and which called out Biden for his "decent" characterization of him is a victim of its own self-victimizing narrative, having distorted and misrepresented some of Pence's recent statements and positions regarding them.  I lost a bit of respect for Joseph Biden because of his hasty retreat from civility and wonder from this incident whether he could truly be a strong and effective president should he somehow manage to find himself elected to that office next year...he's starting to sound awfully weak to me...

New Reading Project: Homer's The Odyssey & James Joyce's Ulysses

Once at my local public library I ran across a copy of Irish writer James Joyce's enigmatic 1939 book Finnegans Wake...intrigued enough, I checked it out and tried to figure out exactly what the dude was trying to say with stream-of-thought language totally overrunning any semblance of a narrative.  It was quickly clear to me that in order to understand any of it I would have to be well-acquainted, if not fluent, in a number of European languages as well as have a deep background in the continent's culture and history, especially that of Ireland and Britain.  Plus, Finnegans Wake was supposedly based on a real funeral dirge and its lyrics.  Some day I'd like to come back and tackle Joyce's problematic book, but first I thought I'd prepare by reading his much more widely acclaimed novel Ulysses, which came out in 1922.  Like Finnegans Wake, Ulysses is very loosely based on another work: the ancient Greek epic poem The Odyssey, traditionally attributed to Homer and whose protagonist is also named Ulysses, the Roman designation for Odysseus.  Seeing how I would in all probability otherwise miss out on what Joyce's Ulysses had to convey, I decided to take on Homer's work first...which I've just started, reading of course an English translation from the ancient Greek.  It all should be a very interesting, as well as I'm sure confounding and often frustrating, experience...I'm a little more than halfway through The Odyssey...

Quote of the Week...from James Joyce

Shut your eyes and see.                                ---James Joyce

The first reaction I had upon reading the renowned early twentieth century Irish author's above quote was that it's probably not a very good idea to do that if you're driving!  But I think James Joyce was using the word "see" in a more expansive way, meaning "perceive", "reflect" and "receive enlightenment".  As for myself, I am very sensitive visually to my current environment, especially in social settings...just sitting there watching everything and everyone around me doesn't make very much sense and can actually be a bit distressful.  I am a perceiver of patterns and tend to unconsciously connect them together to form principles and trends, as was, I suspect, Joyce: once you "see" how things are, then why keeping looking?  Not that I am endorsing his life, reportedly fraught with personal difficulties including perhaps mental illness.  But he was also a great writer and is responsible for Ulysses, a novel that I will soon embark upon reading and which many regard as the apex of English language literature.  I liked this quote of his...not knowing its exact context or when he made it...because of its brevity and that I often find myself closing my eyes in order to sort through thoughts while cutting out the distractions of the world around me.  Again, this is NOT something to do while driving...

Also, "Shut your eyes and see" can mean that sight isn't the only one of my senses that matter...hearing, in particular, is often made secondary to seeing, but can be an important source of information beyond the visual.  Between television and radio, the former has a tendency to rivet my mind in a semi-trance as I sit before it, demanding my complete attention...but the latter accords me the mental freedom to pick and choose the degree to which I pay attention while I go about my other tasks in life...or maybe just choose to shut my eyes for a little while...

My February 2019 Running Report

In February my running mileage increased, largely due to me feeling better and not having the back issue that nagged me in January: 107 total miles.  I ran each day, and managed a 9.3-mile semi-jog designed to just cover the distance without regard to speed.  On the 9nd I ran the local weekly Saturday morning Depot Parkrun 5K race...I'd like to make this a monthly tradition, realizing that entering it every week probably isn't feasible.  As for other future races, until the fall I'd like to restrict the distance to 10K (6.2 miles). There is a such a race, called Run the Good Race, scheduled for April 27th and to take place around the North Florida Regional office park area across Newberry Road from the Oaks Mall. A couple of trail races are set in the Gainesville vicinity for March, but I'd rather stick to the road instead of getting stuck in the mud.  Sadly, what I had hoped to become an annual tradition, the Run for Haven 10K/5K race in mid-March with a St. Patrick's Day theme in Tioga (a few miles west of Gainesville) is no more...2017 seems to have been its last year.  I don't know why the race ended as it was extremely popular and had many participants.  Well, I think instead I'll just stick to my daily training runs during the next few weeks and occasionally go to Depot Park on Saturday morning...

Weekly Short Stories: 1943 Science Fiction, Part 3

The next three science fiction short stories I read from the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 5 (1943) are by familiar authors: Frederic Brown, C.L. (Catherine) Moore, and A.E. van Vogt.  I have been a fan of Brown and Moore for decades while van Vogt had a penchant for writing extremely convoluted plots...some worked and some didn't.  During 1943 all were writing at the peaks of their respective careers, and these three tales reflect this...

DAYMARE by Fredric Brown
Many years in the future humanity has explored and settled into our solar system, including Venus, Mars, and some of the gas giants' moons.  On Jupiter's Castillo the settlements are divided into sectors: in Sector Three an unspeakable event has occurred: a murder, never having happened there before.  But the victim, an eccentric inventor suspected of dallying in forbidden subversive and technical literature, appears to have died of a different cause by each person who sees his corpse...a major mystery! Frederic Brown weaves into this tale of conspiracy and deception a future society that is so frightened of war and unrest that it has gone to extraordinary measures to censor anything from the past that the authorities regard as dangerous...

DOORWAY INTO TIME by C.L. Moore
An alien, in self-imposed isolation, has constructed for himself his own museum of prizes he has stolen, often at great peril to himself, from other worlds...including some of their inhabitants.  He considers himself a hunter and is addicted to the thrill of the chase and its accompanying danger, although he knows that he ultimately always has the upper hand.  After walking his halls he becomes bored and ventures through his "doorway into time" to take for his collection a young woman from Earth...but the man accompanying her has different ideas.  This story, to me, seemed to be a not-so-subtle slap at trophy hunters who, with all the odds on their side, go to wilderness areas and slaughter wild animals just because they can...and then stuff and mount their carcasses as if they actually accomplished something worthwhile...

THE STORM by A.E. van Vogt
In the distant future we're dealing with human expansion into the galaxy.  Biological android robots...sounds like a contradiction, doesn't it...are hiding and in conflict with the rest of humanity, which considers them as subhuman.  Now their home planet looks to be occupied by the enemy and they hatch a plan: draw the advance ship into a very concentrated, invisible and lethal cosmic ray storm to destroy it.  The Storm is, to me, an allegory about prejudice in general...something I appreciate from a writer back in 1943...and its final resolution I really appreciate...

I'll conclude my look back at 1943 short science fiction next week...

Just Finished Reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

The city of Savannah, Georgia during the 1980s is the focus of John Berendt's 1994 primarily nonfiction novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, later made into a movie starring John Cusack and the lately-disgraced Kevin Spacey.  In it Berendt, as narrator, plays the role of a New York journalist who travels to the southeastern Georgia town at the start of that decade, being introduced along the way to its very interesting history, landmarks, famous buildings...and ultimately some very quirky, eccentric people with their own special stories.  I read it because I was going there on a weekend recently with Melissa and wanted to find some places to explore while better understanding the city.  For this purpose the novel was an unqualified success as we toured the Mercer Williams House, prominently featured in the book, as well as walking up and down the streets of the Historic District and the riverfront area...not to mention visiting Forsyth Park and Bonaventure Cemetery, the latter serving as a setting for a couple of the story's scenes.  Berendt, after his book came out, noticed that tourism to Savannah had dramatically increased, and during our stay we were surrounded by droves of other sightseers.  Berendt's associations in Savannah revolve around Jim Williams, a wealthy antiques entrepreneur who was a driving force in the renovation of downtown Savannah, as well as the owner of the majestic (then) Mercer House.  Also, other characters emerge, like the irresponsible, continually partying attorney Joe Odom, the mentally disturbed inventor Luther Driggers, the troubled street hustler Danny Hansford, the voodoo charmer Minerva, and the drag queen Chablis.  The plot of the story, which is interspersed by these and other characters and descriptions of Savannah's history and social structure, is driven by the murder trial of Williams after he shoots to death an employee in his office at Mercer House.  Well, I think that's about as far as I want to go in with the storyline...I don't want to spoil things in case you want to read it for yourself...

Although the sights and history of Savannah were things from the book I could explore during my visit, Berendt's ability to meet and get to know on a relatively intimate level some of its inhabitants wasn't something I felt like emulating...like most other visitors, I wanted to explore and enjoy the food and ambiance there.  I appreciate books like this that give a stronger sense of context for a place I'm either visiting or plan to visit...Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch did much the same for Manhattan.  I heartily recommend Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, although if you're a little skittish about explicit passages you might want to take a pass. As for the Clint Eastwood-directed film adaptation, I have no plans to see it, although I understand that it was filmed largely on location and in places I just visited...including Jim Williams' office where the alleged murder happened...

Alliance of American Football Doomed to Obscure TV Coverage

Back in the 1960s during the years of the American Football League, then a new pro league in direct competition with the NFL, their Sunday games were broadcast live on NBC and were thus readily available for viewing across the country, developing as a result a wide following.  Now in 2019 a new league, the Alliance of American Football, with its eight teams and regular season starting immediately following the NFL's Super Bowl, is struggling to even meet its payroll.  There is no pretense as to the AAF being on the same skill level as the NFL; they are simply providing a little more pro football for diehard fans of the sport.  I watched some of the opening week game between Orlando and Atlanta and thought the level of play was relatively good and entertaining...I even wrote an article on the 10th (here's the link) praising the league and its prospects for survival.  But that game I saw was broadcast on the regular CBS network channel...every single subsequent game in the AAF regular season this year has been relegated to "bottom-feeder" channels like B/R Live, CBS-Sports, and the NFL Channel.  I happen to get none of these channels on my cable lineup and for those who do get CBS-Sports and the NFL Channel with Cox Cable in Gainesville, they are buried deep on the selection dial at channels 269 and 250, respectively.  So I ask: is this any way to promote a new league and familiarize it to the masses of American football fans?

Although I initially held high hopes for the AAF as an emerging football tradition, now that I am completely cut off from its games and know that very few others will be watching any of them, I sadly now feel that its days are numbered...good luck on even making it to the end of this season!  It's almost as if CBS and the NFL got the broadcasting rights just so that they could sink the league by placing the games on channels nobody watches...I can understanding why a competing league like the NFL would do this, but why CBS, especially after that Orlando-Atlanta game drew such high ratings?

2020 Presidential Race Starting Far Too Early

With all of these Democratic candidates for president in the 2020 election already officially in the race, and with President Trump already a declaring himself a candidate for reelection immediately after he took office in 2017,  it looks as if we're in store for a flood of really bad, bad ideas for our country's future...as well as uninformed, knee-jerk reactions by the candidates whenever a provocative news story breaks, such as the faceoff between the Kentucky students and the Indian drummer in D.C. or the faked hate crime mugging in Chicago.  Now that our president has everyone conditioned to this foolish reactive behavior, all the candidates now feel as if they have to weigh in on everything...and the lazy media just gobbles it all up and regurgitates it on the air...

Since nobody gets to vote until next year, it's apparent that generating money and name recognition are the two motivators spurring these candidates onward so prematurely.  That they feel the need to constantly stay in the news means that we're going to have one ridiculous proposal after another to put up with...I'm already sick of looking at most of these attention grabbers.  Yet in the end somebody will be elected, not this November, but in the November following.  It's still only February 2019 and I'm already tired of the 2020 race...

Just Finished Reading Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Mark Twain's famed novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn came out in 1884, eight years after The Adventures of Tom Sawyer introduced the title character, who narrates the story in his very regional, uneducated idiosyncratic way...one of the charming aspects to this book.  The setting is rural Missouri along the Mississippi River some fifty years earlier when it was still a slave state and the "n" word was a regular part of people's vernacular, without the taboo overtly racist overtones it carries today.  But from our own convenient, semi-enlightened vantage point we can see that racism runs rampant in Huck's time as human beings are subject to being owned and controlled by others simply for their skin color and African origin.  Huck's alcoholic and abusive father, thought to have died, returns and wants his son's money from the treasure he and Tom won in the previous book, but the judge overseeing the funds won't release them.  Huck's adventures take off when he escapes his father's clutches by faking his own death and taking a raft down the river.  Jim, a runaway slave, runs into him and the two begin their odyssey together along the Mississippi.  I'll leave you, the potential reader, to discover the details and how the story resolves itself...

Twain presents The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of an "innocent", that is a character who is relatively ignorant of the ways of society and sees things in a more straightforward manner...I believe that Dustin Hoffman's protagonist in Little Big Man and Tom Hanks' in Forrest Gump are derived from this literary tradition.  In doing so, the author is able to subtly deliver social commentary and criticism without getting into the reader's face to make his point...pretty crafty, I say.  Mark Twain was a foe of slavery and did not shy away from taking on the subject head-on and honestly, although some...once again conveniently using hindsight from the present perspective...could criticize the speech of Jim and other black characters as being intended for comedic relief.  I dare say that a Mark Twain living in 2019 would treat these characters differently as well...

The only part of Huckleberry Finn I have a real beef with is the ending, where due to a highly improbable state of circumstances the title character hooks up again with his old buddy Tom Sawyer and then fades into the background as Tom takes over the story...Twain was probably hedging his bets when he did this, wanting the book to capitalize on its predecessor's success.  But it had the effect of stopping the narrative in its tracks, very frustrating to me...

So now that I've recently read three Mark Twain books in relatively rapid succession, I'm ready for another.  But which one will it be?  Stay tuned to find out...

Quote of the Week...from Albert Einstein

A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.               ---Albert Einstein

Yes, it's okay to make mistakes, and learning from them is indispensable to becoming better at what you're trying to accomplish...no disagreement from me with the distinguished, groundbreaking physicist.  Of course, it's better to learn from others' mistakes, especially the kind where the consequences can be serious...even fatal, like crossing over the median into an oncoming vehicle's path from inattentiveness or getting hooked on a drug, for example.  And then there is the tendency for some, when caught having deliberately committed a crime or a serious ethical lapse, to refer to their misdeeds simply as "mistakes"...no, dude, you knew that what you were doing was wrong and did it anyway.  But that's about how the word "mistake" is used (or misused) and what Einstein was trying to stress is that folks shouldn't avoid trying out new things for fear of looking foolish when they almost inevitably flop at the start.  I'm thinking of getting more involved in chess, but I can confidently state that there's no way I'll ever improve my currently atrocious game without first having to go through several humbling experiences.  But to improve means I also need to develop a knack for discerning my mistakes and incorporating their lessons into how I play the next game, and this in itself may be the trickiest part of it all, requiring a fair amount of insight and wisdom...

Visited Forsyth Park and Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah

During last weekend's brief stay in Savannah, Georgia, Melissa and I pretty much confined ourselves to the historic area north of Gaston Street, with a couple of notable exceptions: Forsyth Park and Bonaventure Cemetery. Bordering Gaston and stretching southward like a green rectangular slab on the map, Forsyth Park is perhaps the best city park I've experienced with its numerous walking trails, open fields, courts, playgrounds replete with swing-sets and the like, bathroom facilities, a bandshell for performances, statues, fountains, and even a Marine Corps monument at its Gaston Street entrance.  It's what I had wished Central Park in New York or the Mall in Washington, D.C. to be...Forsyth isn't broken up like that but is continuous, no streets running through it.  If I lived in Savannah I imagine I'd be spending a lot of time there...the only thing I see lacking is a public swimming pool, but maybe I just missed it.  As for Bonaventure Cemetery, it is humungous, occupying a large area to the city's east and bordering the Wilmington River.  We went there because of the reference in John Berendt's book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil where the author is taken there by a local woman to a bench facing the gravestones of the renowned American poet and short story writer Conrad Aiken's parents.  As they sit sipping their martinis she explains the tragic story of their deaths.  He asks her where Conrad was buried...she answers that they were sitting on it: he had his own gravestone fashioned into a bench to invite visitors to sit there and watch the river.  The little plot reserved for the Aikens is very unpretentious...some of the surrounding gravestones and monuments are pretty grandiose by contrast.  By the way, I remember Conrad Aiken as the author of the short story Silent Snow, Secret Snow, which was made in 1966 into a short film narrated unabridged by Orson Welles and shown in its entirety, uninterrupted, as a Night Gallery episode...by far the high moment of that series.  That story made a deep impression on me...you should check it out when you have the chance, and the film adaptation was extraordinary.  The famed musician and composer Johnny Mercer, a longtime resident of Savannah and probably best known for his song Moon River, is also buried at Bonaventure...

The first four photos above are of Forsyth Park...in the third the Marine Corps monument is in the fore with the famous Armstrong House in the background on the other side of Gaston Street. And of course the last picture is in Bonaventure Cemetery...

Weeky Short Stories: 1943 Science Fiction, Part 2

I continued going back through the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 5 (1943), covering three more stories.  As I did I realized that of the twelve featured in this book, five of them were either by the married writing team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore or by one of them individually...this may have been their "peak" year, at least as far as their short fiction was concerned.  Now, here is my reaction to this week's stories...

Q.U.R. by Anthony Boucher
The first...and very revealing...thing about this story is its title, once you know what it stands for: Quinby's Userform Robots.  It's some time off in the future and robots are everywhere serving humanity...in android form.  The only problem is that they're failing and breaking down on a mass scale. What's going on? A brilliant inventor, Russ Quinby, realizes that it's in their design: robots should be specifically tailored to their assigned tasks and not all made to resemble humans...hence the coinage "userform".  But robots are made by a legally-entrenched monopoly, so how do the narrator and Quinby, with their new spinoff company Q.U.R., get around this and introduce their specialty robots?  That's for you, the reader, to discover...this story stuck with me because although for years science fiction writers typically saw robots as being android in appearance, Boucher foresaw their actual development as highly specialized thinking machines, which we see all around us today...

CLASH BY NIGHT by Lawrence O'Donnell
This is another tale by Kuttner and Moore written under a pseudonym...it's widely thought that Kuttner wrote this one alone, hence my 2016 review with him listed as the author: read it through this link: [Clash by Night].  There's not much I can add, except to note that when it comes to predicting the future, sci-fi writers can either be completely off the mark or mysteriously on target.  Kuttner saw Venus as full of life...albeit very hostile life...with its planetwide oceans and jungles.  Well, that's obviously not true as we now know.  But he turned around and, two years before the atomic bomb was successfully (and very secretly) developed, chillingly predicted the ramifications of a world-wide nuclear holocaust...

EXILE by Edmund Hamilton
Exile, one of the shorter stories in the anthology, is an exercise in solipsism, which entertains the notion that the universe is a creation by oneself...always fun to encounter these tales.  Along with that is the suggestion that, since all of our memories are presently embedded within our brains, then perhaps there is no such thing as the past...I may "remember" going to high school in 1973 but the memories I access are here in 2019.  Exile is a good story about four science fiction writers who regularly meet and chat about their lives and chosen profession...

More science fiction stories from 1943 (if it really existed) next week...

Back From Savannah

Well, we got back from Savannah yesterday, both Melissa and I enjoying the experience.  I'll probably write a little bit about it on this blog from time to time.  Today it's back to work...I'm glancing outside and at least right now the weather looks as dreary as it did through our stay in Georgia...albeit a bit warmer. News-wise it doesn't look as if I missed much...Trump's throwing the work "treason" around again to accuse some of those in the Justice Department and the FBI and lawsuits are abounding against his national emergency declaration on border security. Some actor in one of those melodramatic, self-important TV series appears to have set up his own hate crime, hiring two men to attack him so that he could blame it on homophobes and Trump supporters...now that ain't cool.  In the meantime, my phone seems to be kaput and I have to do something about it...

Visiting Savannah with Melissa This Weekend

This weekend...and into President's Day...Melissa and I will be staying in Savannah, Georgia and getting to know the city, its culture, and history.  Should be a fun experience...Melissa's physician had suggested she read John Berendt's acclaimed 1994 nonfiction "novel" Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which deals with personalities and events from this interesting city.  I checked it out and got a big dose of Savannah's history in the first few chapters, as well as information about some of its landmarks and famous people associated with it and its downtown renovation project in the 1950s.  This should make our visit more meaningful...but mainly we plan to relax and enjoy the ambiance there.  Melissa's been there before but this will be my first visit. A pleasant three-day weekend well spent...

Quote of the Week...from Shelley Moore Capito

Being a good listener is more than just being quiet.  It's reflecting back on what you're hearing.  It's processing the information to formulate a question, a comment or a speech.
                                                                         Shelley Moore Capito

When Shelley Moore Capito, then a Republican representative from West Virginia, won her U.S. Senate race in that state following the retirement of Jay Rockefeller, it marked the first time since 1942 that her party had won a Senate seat in that state...as a matter of fact Rockefeller, originally a Republican in line with the rest of his political family, had switched to the Democratic Party because it was so dominant there.  Well, times have changed and West Virginia's voters have tended to vote for Republicans of late.  Capito was on the 17-member committee to work out a compromise border security funding bill just recently that kept the federal government from again shutting down.  She is known in the Senate as a likeable colleague who, although true to her conservative principles, works well with members of both parties and is known to try to see things from others' points of view.  On the Senate floor she is one of the more eloquent, informed speakers: Capito's oratory is meant to educate and persuade, not demean and divide.   You might infer from all this that I happen to admire her, and you would be right.  I think she would make an excellent Republican president...

The above quote is simply an explanation of Shelley Moore Capito's own pragmatic philosophy...listening doesn't mean you are weak or are in agreement with who's speaking, but rather that you want to learn as much about an issue from all of its angles and arguments.  When there is agreement, capitalize on it and when there isn't, then either stick to your guns if it is a high priority or find a trade-off somewhere where both sides can come away with something.  It is people like her that make things work in our elected government, not the brash attention-grabbing grandstanders with their obstruction, taunting accusations, insults, and weaponized political correctness...

Happy Birthday, Melissa!

On this Valentine's Day I want to wish my wonderful, beautiful wife Melissa a very happy birthday as well!  You are such a blessing to me, Sweetheart!

Weekly Short Stories: 1943 Science Fiction, Part 1

As I continue along with my look at the best in short science fiction, I have begun with the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 5 (1943) and the first three stories in the book. So without further ado...

THE CAVE by P. Schuyer Miller
The setting is Mars enough years in the future for humanity to have settled there while still battling the hostile environment...both its climate and the native inhabitants.  A grek, the intelligent humanoid life form there, has sought refuge in a cave from one of the extremely fatal storms afflicting this planet.  Once inside he finds several other native creatures huddling for safety there...including a zek, one of their carnivorous beasts.  Yet within the cave predator and prey maintain a state of peace among themselves as long as the storm rages outside.  Meanwhile, Harrigan, a young man caught in the storm, discovers the cave and goes within, only to find said Martians.  His encounter with them will determine his fate in this story.  The Cave is the first of two stories in this anthology dealing with the notion of a collective alliance within an ecosystem when faced by outside dangers.  The grek wonders whether the human in the cave is a part of that ecosystem...or a part of the outside danger.  He gets his answer by how Harrigan behaves at the end...

THE HALFLING by Leigh Brackett
I have never understood the appeal of freak shows, be they in circuses or in Ripley's Believe It Or Not shows and museums.  The Halfling deals with a future circus showing "halflings", in this story meaning native intelligent life in humanoid form from other worlds in our solar system.  This premise is obviously preposterous as Venusians, Martians, and the life forms from various moons of Jupiter are wandering around the set, all a part of the traveling show.  There is a vicious cat-man from Callisto and a Martian dancer...but John "Jade" Greene, who runs the circus, hires a new dancer...a beautiful young woman...to headline the show.  And then they find the old dancer murdered, traceable back to the cat-man.  And so on goes the story.  I didn't like this tale because one...like I said...I don't like freak shows, two, its premise was impossible and silly, and three, it didn't give me any insights about anything to carry off from it after it was over...

MIMSY WERE THE BOROGOVES by Lewis Padgett
As I indicated when I reviewed The Twonky recently, Lewis Padgett was a pen name for the husband and wife writing team of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore.  They have three entries in this 1943 anthology, but Mimsy Were the Borogoves is by far the best of them...and in my opinion, one of the best short science fiction of all time: it's certainly my favorite.  The title is from a poem by English author Lewis Carroll within his book Through the Looking Glass...Carroll actually makes a brief appearance in this tale toward the end.  A little boy, playing hooky from school on the shores of a river, finds a strange box.  After some difficulty he opens it and finds several strange toys, with which he begins to play...and his thinking begins to change, along with that of his two-year-old sister, also enamored with the little gadgets.  But their parents can't see anything logical about these toys...everything seems random about them and nothing makes sense.  Mimsy Were the Borogoves points out the fundamental difference between how children...especially young children...and adults think, and how our conditioning may fundamentally bias us regarding the true nature of reality.  Unlike the previous story in the book, this one leaves a lot of things to consider...

Next week I'll delve further into what anthology editors Asimov and Greenberg deemed the best science fiction short stories of 1943...

Not So Keen on the State of Television Nowadays

It's been clear to me for some time that I'm a bit out of touch with contemporary popular culture, at least in terms of what's being presented on television.  When I get home from work...usually around 10:30 at night...the only viable options for me are choices between live sports, satiric cartoon shows like Family Guy or South Park (if they are actually showing one of the few episodes I like), old movies, C-Span talk/documentaries, old-time TV on channels specializing therein...and the Music Choice channels appended to my Cox Cable service.  None of the ongoing television series have any appeal for me...I know this because on my breaks at work some of them are shown on the break-room TV.  It seems like whether it's comedy, drama, or comedy-drama as the format, they all seem to be highly pretentious, as if they're bucking for an Emmy with every episode.  As for the late-night talk shows like Colbert, Kimmel, and Meyers, they seem to have substituted what could have been an opening comedic monologue showcase of their talents with hyper-political Trump-bashing...that doesn't take any special skill to do!  I used to watch old Johnny Carson Tonight shows when one of the "retro" channels showed them at 11:30 and got a kick out of the opening monologues...he'd sometimes joke about whoever the current president was, but always in fun and without regard to whichever party was in power.  And he joked about other topics as well...sometimes the gags went flat, which also was funny as ol' Johnny would react to the lack of audience appreciation.  But now they've switched the showtime to 10 pm, too early for me to watch.  And what about these horrid reality and talent shows infecting the programming?  I could do without any of them, thank you...

An article like this wouldn't be complete without looking at the state of popular music today.  I just watched the Grammys and had a hard time recognizing many of the names, all of whom it was assumed were extremely important superstars in their genres. For those I did know, like Katy Perry, Lady Ga-Ga, or Miley Cyrus, I could count the number of songs of theirs I'm familiar with all on one hand.  And the year's "best" music performances were awful to my ears...there wasn't a song on the show that I could stand, not even when the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a band that I actually knew and liked a bit, got onstage with one of their tunes.   I don't think that just standing there showing off one's vocal range qualifies their music as outstanding, and I also have never been able to figure out the appeal of hip-hop...but if you do then the more power to you, there's no shortage of it around...

Well, I guess that's enough of me going negative on TV for a while...

Just Finished Reading Two More Oz Books by L. Frank Baum

Although the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz...along with the soulful version called The Wiz from 1978...are what most people think of when the Wizard of Oz comes to mind, original creator and author L. Frank Baum actually wrote a long series of books based on this imaginary land of wonder and magic.  I just read the third and fourth books, titled Ozma of Oz and Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz respectively, written in the years 1907-08.  That latter title probably confused a few people due to its similarity with the more well-known original story.  In Ozma of Oz, Dorothy is on a ship with her Uncle Harry to visit Australia where some of his relatives live, but the visit is more intended to improve his flagging health than anything.  One turbulent night she goes up on deck fearing her father had gone there and was in danger...only to get thrown overboard herself.  A chicken crate also meets the same fate, and fortunately for Dorothy she finds it suitable as a raft...and there is a surviving hen as well to accompany her to their shared destination as they float on the open sea.  Then the hen begins to speak, indicating that they had entered a area where magic prevails.  They wash up on a shore where she uncovers a mechanical man called Tic-Toc.  They are now in the land of Ev...and it turns out to be just across the desert from Oz, now ruled by the girl queen Ozma.  Subsequently, Dorothy, Billina...as she names the hen...and Tic-Toc embark on an adventure to rescue the rightful rulers of Ev from the Gnome King, with all sorts of sidetracks and strange creatures along the way.  In the next book, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, you can correctly assume that our heroine survived her previous perils and is now in a new adventure.  This time, she and Uncle Henry have just returned to the States and are staying a bit in California.  While being driven in a coach with her cat Eureka by a boy named Zeb and pulled by Jim, the horse, a severe earthquake opens up the ground beneath them and they plunge into the depths below.  By the time they are near the Earth's center they have slowed down and soft-land in a strange place where all life is plant-based. Not much later a familiar figure lands there, too: the Wizard of Oz, now working in a circus as a balloonist and also caught up in the quake.  Before long they all realize they'd better escape for their lives...the novel jumps from one underground setting to another, each with its own special "people"...some benevolent and some extremely dangerous.   And yes, there is a connection in all this with the kingdom of Oz, which the book reveals toward the end.  And, naturally, the moment they descend from the earthquake low enough to be in "magical" space, the cat Eureka and horse Jim begin to speak and reveal their own individual, quirky personalities...

These Oz tales are very whimsical, funny, and cute...they remind me of C.S. Lewis with his Chronicles of Narnia series, but without the religious analogies.  I wonder if Lewis got some of his inspiration for it from Baum, who wrote his series some thirty-to-fifty years earlier.  I plan to continue reading the books in the series all the way through the fourteenth and final one...

Alliance of American Football Begins Inaugural Season

Every decade of two in American professional football, a new league will form to challenge the monopolistic domination of the National Football League.  The NFL dealt with the All-American Football Conference of the late 1940s by incorporating its most successful franchises and the American Football League of the 1960s by merging with it...and with the later World Football League and United States Football League by competitively crushing them.  Recently we've had Arena Football and the United Football League, both now defunct.  It's interesting that with all of the talent coming from college that there hasn't developed with American football the multi-tiered league system prevalent in countries where soccer is the dominant form of "football".  Now we have a new league, the Alliance of American Football, and we'll just have to see how long it can last.  Last night's CBS-televised game between the Orlando Apollos, coached by Steve Spurrier, and the Atlanta Legends...two of the league's eight teams divided into two divisions...was pretty well-played, all things considered.  In the AAF there are no extra point kicks after touchdowns: only two-point conversions.  And no kickoffs as well...the receiving offense starts from the 25-yard line.  Other rules are designed to further streamline and shorten the game and keep fan interest.  The fact that they waited until the weekend following the NFL's Super Bowl to start the season is probably the best idea: the AAF isn't directly competing with the NFL for TV time and attention, but instead slyly capitalizing on the end of the previous college and pro seasons to extend football for a couple more months.  The AAF regular season consists of ten games with the two top finishers in each division making the playoffs, the championship game to be played later in April.  And you won't be seeing oligarchic and often obnoxious owners like Robert Kraft or Jerry Jones in the stands...all teams are league-owned.  How this arrangement plays itself out should be one of the more interesting things about this new league.  I hope it succeeds...American football is clearly the most popular spectator sport in the United States and there is plenty of talent available to field quality teams, even if it isn't on the "premier league" level of the NFL.  If the AAF can do well with its eight teams and establish a sense of stability from year to year, they just might be able to establish themselves as a more permanent fixture in the American professional sports landscape.  And they should succeed as long as they get their games shown on broadcast television by major networks and/or cable channels like ESPN...

Ran Another Depot Park Parkrun 5K This Morning

Back on January 5th, after having signed up online, I ran in my first Depot Park Parkrun here in Gainesville.  The Parkrun is a network of non-profit races held...without entry fees...at various locations throughout the world: Florida now has three, in Gainesville, Clermont, and Pensacola.  My original intention last month was to make a regular weekly habit of running in it, interspersed with times that Melissa would go with me to walk together the 5K (3.1 miles) course that involves four laps on a very interesting winding and sloping trail around the park.  Last month I enjoyed the run, although near the end I had a short bout of hacking coughs...today was worse as I struggled with this for most of the run.  Although I was primarily running against my last month's time of 30:00, I did finish 13th out of 46 participating, also being the oldest male runner. My finishing time at 30:36 was a bit slower...here's a link to the race's results page: [results].  Still, even with my struggles and slowness it was a triumph of sorts as I had been suffering from some lower back pain recently that kept me from running and had reduced my walking to a hobble.  The weather at 7:30 race time was pleasant enough...about 57 degrees with 42% humidity.  But the wind was strong from the north and was a bit irritating when I faced it...

On a different note, although I wasn't planning to run the Five Points of Life half-marathon here in Gainesville this month as I have five times in years past, I had already mentioned that they had drastically changed their running course, which traditionally had run through the heart of Gainesville, going up and down the challenging hills of NW 16th Avenue, passing through downtown, and then through the University of Florida campus and even in and out of the football stadium...a great running experience!  Now, though, for whatever reason the course runs southwest of the city west of I-75, much of it up and down Archer Road.  The marathon course is ridiculous: I looks as if about 17.3 miles of the 26.2-mile distance involves running down Archer Road and back...sounds like a very boring course to me!  Will I run the Five Points half-marathon in the future?  I don't know, but this new course isn't helping me to decide in the positive...

Quote of the Week...from Stephen Hawking

Keeping an active mind has been vital to my survival, as has been maintaining a sense of humor.
                                                                            ---Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking, the renowned astrophysicist and decades-long survivor of the debilitating and usually quickly fatal disease ALS who finally passed away last year at age 76, has many good quotes...I even discussed the same one in two different blog articles.  The above quote is spot on for me, as I try both to keep my mind active and find things in life to laugh at.  But to me, being continually engaged in learning new things and finding and relishing the humor in my life has always been an integral part of who I am and isn't just some survival strategy.  When I see others who are utterly devoid of humor or are so close-minded that they refuse to try to see things from the viewpoint of someone with a different perspective, I don't react by thinking that they will soon perish, but rather perceive that they are lacking elements in their lives that would otherwise give them fulfillment and contentment.  Besides, in a way everyone has an "active" mind, but do they engage in thinking that enhances their skill levels and understanding of the world and other people, or do they absorb themselves in fruitless mental tape-playing reinforcing their own vanity, grudges, delusions and regrets?  I submit that you cannot be a compassionate person without the ability to laugh, especially at yourself.  I look at some of these "new wave" politicians, some of them running for president, and see neither humor nor compassion in their hearts.  I think a lot of people in today's runaway world of political correctness...and PC sees no humor in anything...are experiencing their careers and futures being ruined by past gaffes that they originally intended to be funny, even going back decades in the process.  But I digress...

I think I'm going to carefully look at the current and upcoming field of presidential candidates on the Democratic side and pick one to support over the others.  Two prerequisites: they have to be thinkers on both sides of the issues, being able to explain the other guy's side as well as their own.  And they must have a sense of humor...and a little grace wouldn't hurt, either.  As for my own thinking, I don't believe I have a career in astrophysics on my "event horizon", but that doesn't mean I can't study on my own level black holes and other areas of cosmology in which the great Stephen Hawking excelled...

Just Finished Reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

After reading Mark Twain's 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, I thought I'd go back and read some of his other famous works...I just finished reading his 1876 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a book I had begun reading before but never got around to completing.  I vaguely remember watching one of the movie adaptations when I was a kid and knew that the climax has something to do with a cave, but couldn't recall anything else other than the famous con job Tom did on his friends at the beginning to get them to whitewash the fence for him.  Orphaned with his little tattletale brother Sid, Aunt Polly has the task of caring for him...and quite a task it is as Tom is virtually uncontrollable, constantly getting himself in all sorts of trouble.  Read for yourself all the adventures he has with his friends Joe Harper, Huckleberry Finn, and Becky Thatcher, and get a sense of what life was like in early-to-mid-nineteenth century Missouri, then still a slave state with plenty of racial prejudice.  Twain used that "n" word from time to time here in the boys' dialogs...but I believe he was faithfully describing how people spoke back then, not promoting any agenda of his own.  Instead I'd like to touch upon an observation I made while reading this story...

I don't know where the expressions "finders keepers" and "possession is nine tenths of the law" come from, but it is clear in Tom Sawyer that the people in his society were respectful of the notion of property, much more than in today's world.  An example: Tom's church gives out tickets for Bible verse memorization...collect enough of them and they hand you a brand-new Bible.  Now Tom never studied his verses and knows next-to-nothing about the goings-on in the Bible, but he still has his mind set on winning one for his own.  So he goes around to all his friends and trades things for their tickets...one day in church he stands up and turns in enough tickets to get a Bible, to the congregation's astonishment.  Standing in front of everyone, Tom proudly receives his new Bible and is asked to tell them who Jesus's first disciples were.  Hesitating for a moment, he blurts out "David and Goliath!"  Tom's fraud in procuring the tickets having been exposed didn't matter...he possessed them and got the Bible, property rights respected.  Another incident happens at the story's end that affirms this strongly held respect for people's rights of possession, but you can discover that for yourself if you choose to read the book.  The sad, sad twist to all this is that the exaltation of property rights extended even to that of possessing other people...

Well, that's the second book I've read from Mark Twain in the last week or so...think I'm finished?  Not a chance!  I'm about to embark on what's generally considered his masterpiece: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn...

Weekly Short Stories: 1942 Science Fiction, Part 4

I'm concluding a look back at the best in short science fiction in 1942, at least from the viewpoint of the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 4 (1942).  This is one of my favorite volumes from the series, which spans the years 1939-1963.  Here are the final stories...

THE TWONKY by Lewis Padgett
Lots of writers use pseudonyms for an assortment of reasons...Lewis Padgett was special because "he" was actually the wife and husband writing team of Catherine Moore and Henry Kuttner, who collaborated on many stories during this era.   The Twonky, in my opinion, was an inferior precursor to their following year's masterpiece Mimsy Were the Borogroves, which I hold high as my all-time favorite science fiction short story.  In The Twonky a "person" from a technologically advanced time accidentally slips through time-space-dimensional barriers and finds himself in a radio factory (TV hadn't taken off yet in 1942). Told to go to work by a foreman who thinks he is an employee, he uses what skills he has and constructs what looks on the outside like an ordinary radio console but after delivery to the eager customer turns out to be something pretty scary...

QRM-INTERPLANETARY by George O. Smith
The term "QRM" is used in amateur radio to ask the question "Do you have interference?"  And interference is the focus of this story as an ignorant supervisor takes charge of a very complex communications relay station positioned in the orbit of Venus.  This guy comes in with all his authority but very little knowledge...his arrogance and micromanagement remind me of...well, never mind.  This is a story that teaches quite a bit about science, both in terms of radio propagation and astronomy.  And it's also clearly a lesson about misplaced authority and the folly of misapplying business models to science and technology.  Nowadays I'd say the same about insurance folks...also elevating the financial bottom line over anything else...and who act as if they know more about medical care than the physicians...

THE WEAPONS SHOP  by A.E. van Vogt
I have a problem with the premise of this story, which if I reveal it might involve spoiling it for the reader...maybe you should stop here if you plan to read it!  Well, let's just say that during one of those common sci-fi scenarios of a dictatorial and corrupt future empire, a small town wakes up to find a "Weapons Shop" suddenly standing there in an empty lot...ready for business.  Only problem is that the door won't open for anyone with harmful intentions.  But Fara, a local repairman who blindly follows the empress, gets through although he is suspicious of this place of defiance, which promotes freedom through the possession of very advanced arms...sounds like the NRA's pitch in today's world, doesn't it?  The problem I had with the premise is that although by buying and "appropriately" using one or more of these weapons one can assert their freedom and independence, this all hinges on the behind-the-scenes support of a very powerful, secret organization much more technologically advanced than the oppressive government being resisted...and that's the contradiction I see here.  The Weapons Shop is a sequel to last year's story See-Saw and was expanded into a series by van Vogt.  As a story it is well-written, but I much prefer his Asylum, also from 1942...

MIMIC by Donald A. Wollheim
Although many of my favorite stories from this anthology were pretty lengthy, Wollheim proved with this five-page tale that you don't have stretch out a story to come up with a quality product.  Mimic is about the concepts of mimicry and camouflage as different species have evolved to use them to escape predators...but what about today's world when humanity itself stands as the biggest predator of all?  One of the greatest endings I've ever read...Wollheim, by the way, was the publisher of this anthology series...

Next week I begin the book on short science fiction from 1943...

State of the Union Address Tonight at Nine

Tonight at nine President Trump will deliver his one-week-delayed annual State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress, with the U.S. Supreme Court justices also expected to attend.  It will take place in the House of Representatives chamber in the U.S. Capitol building...Vice-President Pence will be visible behind the president to his left and House Speaker Pelosi to the right. I thought last year's speech was one of the high moments of Trump's presidency so far, as he accentuated unity, national security, and economic prosperity in it.  Unfortunately, the gracious tone with which he spoke quickly withered away afterwards and the next morning he was back to his same old Twitter antics...this morning on the Senate floor Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer alluded to this and remarked that whatever kind unifying and reconciling message Trump purveys this evening will be meaningless without him consistently following up on it afterwards.  Although I was impressed with last year's address, I was dismayed a few days later when, at one of his strange campaign rallies with the usual lot of grinning and nodding adoring sycophants appearing behind him, he suggested that the Democrats in the House chamber who hadn't risen up and applauded his speech were guilty of treason...yeah, that, I sadly suppose, is the real Donald Trump, regardless what he says tonight from his prewritten script.  Still, I plan to listen, once again on the radio at work...

My Reactions to Yesterday's Super Bowl

Interested in how people reacted to yesterday evening's Super Bowl between the Los Angeles Rams and the New England Patriots to determine the 2018 National Football League season champion, I watched a little TV today and surfed a little Web ...the prevailing view seems to be that the game wasn't all that great but the halftime show was pretty good...even spectacular to some.  I beg to differ...

I don't know where it came to be that low-scoring games...in whatever sport one's discussing...are somehow of a lower quality that those where the scores shoot through the roof.  I found the tenacious defense in yesterday's Super Bowl, as practiced by both teams, to be absolutely extraordinary!  In play after play not only was the pass rush strong enough to harass the quarterback, be it Jared Goff or Tom Brady, to throw hurried passes, but the coverage was amazing as defenders repeatedly reached in at the last second to bat down passes or knock them from the receivers' arms.  The low score, 13-3 with the Patriots finally prevailing, was indicative of this defensive domination...I'm glad that Brian Flores, the winners' defensive playcaller, will become my Miami Dolphins head coach starting next year.  The one thing I didn't understand was how little the Rams used their franchise running back Todd Gurley.  When he did run, he usually did quite well...but he spent most of the time on the sidelines while his offense was on the field.  Gurley had been recovering from a knee injury but the team kept repeating that he was healthy to go...so what gives?  His presence most likely would have been a major game-changer...

As for the halftime show, I have become totally numbed by all the light shows and pyrotechnics in concerts nowadays...so I wasn't at all impressed by the excess I saw in this regard.  The headlining act, Maroon 5, sounded all right but I didn't get the semi-strip-tease performance of their lead singer, who seems to regard himself as irresistible to women, at least onstage.  I'm not into the rap/hip-hop scene musically, but the performers who shared the stage with Maroon 5 were more entertaining...although I couldn't understand a word they were saying (probably for the best, anyway). Maybe the best feature of the show was the televised overlaying of an old SpongeBob SquarePants episode where Squidward leads the band to the Super Bowl: that was funny.  I think my main problem with the show was that it was seemed too frantic and rushed, but maybe that's because (1) they had a lot to fit into a short time and (2) a lot of folks nowadays seem devoid of anything resembling an attention span...

I'm not happy with the Super Bowl's outcome, with New England winning its sixth Super Bowl title. But they deserved it, and it was a very good game, others' assessments to the contrary notwithstanding...

Virginia Governor Northam's Strange, Offensive Yearbook Picture

It's been a couple of days since Virginia Governor Ralph Northam's 1984 medical yearbook profile page showed a picture of somebody wearing "blackface" standing next to another in KKK attire, both holding drinks.  Underneath the regrettable photo was a supposed quote of his, attesting that since there are more old drunks in the world than old doctors, then bring me another beer.  I get it, other students with personal pages in that yearbook probably had gag pictures and quotes on them as well...all in fun, right? But, dude, you had to know that this would not be a good picture to promote and identify with, didn't you?  DIDN'T YOU?

Northam's initial reaction to the revelation was to put out a written apology acknowledging his poor judgement with wearing blackface...but since then has denied doing so, claiming that he wasn't even in the picture.  In the meantime, almost the entire Democratic Party, led of course by those grandstanders running for president, are calling for him to resign as governor, which he has been serving as for a little more than a year.  Before that Northam was Virginia's lieutenant governor for four years.  And yet all this time, with all the high-paid opposition research supposedly done on candidates in these very competitive political times, no one had come up with this amazingly offensive photo...and in one of the places you might think researchers would have gone to at first...what incompetence!  And about the racial aspect to this all? It's apparent to me that Northam...and most likely the white classmates he buddied around with...were a bit flippant, insensitive, and careless about race and tried to joke around about a topic that has been the source of great suffering, indignity, and persecution in the past.  But that's what happens when people surround themselves with the same little clique of friends, each feeding off the others' words until they begin to mistake the perspectives (and warped sense of humor) of their limited social circle as being those of society at large...I strongly suspect this is what happened in medical student Northam's case.  Oh well, if he hasn't resigned yet I think he probably will before too long...

Just Finished Reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Back in the primitive days of computerdom it was considered a great innovation to have a CD slot on one's PC to play music, and the educational CD-ROM came into existence as well...a lot of information can be stored on these discs.  I soon became the owner of a set of three CD-ROMS, each claiming to be the complete fictional works of a famous author: William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain.  Yet I rarely used this format...now I'm wondering whether I want to dig them out and examine them.  For Mark Twain's 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which I just finished reading, is no doubt included...

There is a lot of narrative to this novel...it is initially in the first-person by the author himself but switches to that of a New England native, Hank Morgan, who after suffering a head blow during a fight finds himself back in the times of Camelot when King Arthur supposedly reigned over England...in the sixth century.  Hank brings his Yankee independence and technological knowhow to this situation, cloaking his abilities as being that of a magician, one superior to the envious Merlin...and King Arthur buys it!  Along the course of the story he sees firsthand the injustices caused by what he deems the outright fraud of nobility, but also notes that the masses of oppressed people themselves willingly submit to their domination, something continually very consternating to him. Hank has his own ideas about how to change this society, and he uses America's late-nineteenth-century model of freedom, science, and self-reliance to implement it...including the development of electricity and mass communications.  And we know that Hank made it back to our time (i.e., 1889) because M.T.,the original narrator, had met and interviewed him.  Other than that I think I'd better leave the finer points of characters and plot to you should you want to read it someday.  Instead some side thoughts...

First of all, the dialog between Hank and the people of King Arthur's era is uproariously funny and reminds me of the hilarious repartee between Groucho Marx and others when the moustached comedian would continuously follow one zinger with another...now I wonder whether Groucho derived some of his act in part from Twain's writings.  For that alone I'd recommend this book, but there's more.  Hank's narrative, which really reflects the thoughts of Twain, is very incisive as he observes what's going on around him and it carries much application to the world today.  For one, I never did understand why folks in America are so interested in and endeared to English royalty...didn't we have a revolution to get away from that sort of thing?  And for another, I look at the political landscape today and marvel at how some of the poorest groups of people regularly support political leaders and parties whose very actions go directly against their own best interests...you can read this from either side of the political spectrum if you wish.  No, "our" politicians aren't technically "nobility" although that great Don Henley line speaks to me: "We're beating plowshares into swords for this tired old man that we elected King" (referring to President Reagan).  Yes, we in America have substituted other forms of royalty for that which we abandoned in 1776. And Twain, through his protagonist, had a lot to say about a Church that so monopolized religion and its expression that it had become a corrupt political institution in itself and a rival to the nobles in subjugating the vast majority of the people...

There have been a number of film adaptations to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, including one in 1931 starring Will Rogers and another in 1949 with Bing Crosby...this one was a musical...a musical of all things!  I can't imagine how anyone could read this book and come away with a musical...well, now I'm intrigued, so I guess I'll have to watch it sometime.  But I'm already confident that, regardless which movie adaptation you see, you'll still be missing a lot of what the book has to offer...and maybe the most important parts...

Quote of the Week...from Mark Twain

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
                                                                                  ---Mark Twain

I just finished reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by the great American author Mark Twain (real name Samuel Clemens).  Twain wrote in the late 1800s and early 1900s...he was a philosopher and humorist, but even more so a blunt appraiser of what it is to be an American.  I'll go further about that novel in tomorrow's posting, but for now I want to examine the above quote of his, which rings so true to me and on more than one level...

It seems to be a permanent fixture on the news channels: whatever is being reported, be it issues or politicians, somebody's got to come out with a poll showing how the American people feel about them.  And majority rules here: whichever side "wins" the poll, the moderators tend to treat it as the final, ultimate confirmation or rebuke of what or whom they're asking about.  Lately in the news they've been polling a lot on two issues: Trump's wall and the Mueller investigation.  Right now, Trump is down and Mueller is up, if you go by the public opinion polls.  But what do the masses of questioned Americans really know about either issue?  Most of them probably don't pay much attention to the news or the issues, and even for those who do, their knowledge falls far short of the experts and involved players...so it all comes down to a political popularity contest in the end...

In my younger elementary and high school years I formed my own opinion about being on the "side of the majority".  In the social life back them bullies were preponderant and the prevailing attitude of the "majority" was not to ostracize them like mean ol' Scut Farkas was in the movie A Christmas Story, but rather to suck up to them, befriend them, and even participate in shunning and belittling their chosen victims...even teachers in that time sided with bullies, placing all of the responsibility on the victims having to stand up for themselves.  That kind of majority rule soured me very early on to this concept, and I've subsequently never enjoyed social settings where a leader will whip up mass enthusiasm within a crowd...even less when it is sprinkled with derision expressed at adversaries, real or imagined...sometimes I wonder whether many who have psychologically bonded with Donald Trump did so because he brought back nostalgic feelings of youth when they themselves were bullies, toadies, or suckups…

No, I'm not so keen on the idea that if most of the people in a particular setting agree on something, then that automatically means that they're right.  For many folks are fodder for manipulation, especially for the type that pits them in an adversarial relationship with others...when this happens, reason and common sense...as well as compassion, grace, and mercy...tend to fly out the window...

My January 2019 Running Report

As the new year began I had high hopes of possibly running both a half-marathon and a 15K race in January...unfortunately about a week into the month I came down with some lower back pain that put an end to my high ambitions.  Still, on the 5th I ran in a 5K race: Gainesville's Depot Park Run, which takes place every Saturday morning and is free...donations and volunteer work are always welcome, though.  I enjoyed that run and thought it would be a good idea to make a weekly habit of it, either running the course or walking it with Melissa whenever she wanted to go.  But that hasn't happened yet, although this Saturday I'm looking into returning.  I don't think I'll be running this city's Five Points Half-Marathon in February either...I'm not in shape for it and the fools completely changed what had been a fantastic course: instead Melissa and I are visiting Savannah that weekend...

Despite missing 9 days of running due to that backache, I still managed to run a total of 65 miles in January, with 5.2 miles being my longest single run.  I'm still looking forward to running longer distances, but maybe I've reached the point where 10K and 15K races should be the distance limit.  But "official" racing isn't why I run anyway: I like the activity for its own sake...

Weekly Short Stories: 1942 Science Fiction, Part 3

This week as I continue through the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 4 (1942), I have run across two rather long short stories...novellas might be a more appropriate designation.  They are Nerves by Lester del Rey and Barrier by Anthony Boucher...the titles may sound familiar if you'd read this blog over the last couple of years: I've reviewed them both previously.  One of the problems with a really long "short" story is that the author sometimes doesn't seem to know exactly what to do with it...with Nerves del Rey wrote a full-length novel adaption a few years later.  But I had hoped that he would have pruned out some of the excess narrative and made it shorter...I guess that was hoping for too much, though.  Well, let's see if I can't throw in a couple more thoughts about these stories...

NERVES by Lester del Rey
Nerves lays out...way back in 1942...a foreboding picture of what a nuclear reactor meltdown would look like, both in its danger to the surrounding community and environment and in terms of the horrible effects of radiation and burns on human casualties.  The story focuses on two physicians thrown into this disaster shorthanded, an elderly doctor experienced with established medicine and a young, unexperienced doctor who understands much about atomic physics and the effects of radiation.  How these two interact may be the best part of Nerves, although I still can't get over the author seeing this 3 years before the first atomic bomb was exploded, 13 years before the first nuclear reactor was built, and 37 and 44 years before the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl meltdowns, respectively.  Here's a link to my 2017 review of Nerves: [link]…

BARRIER by Anthony Boucher
A young man with no particular specialized knowledge or skills is hired by the inventor to be the guinea pig in a time machine going from our "present" time (i.e. the early 1940s) some five hundred years into the future.  He quickly discovers to his horror that he is now in a totalitarian, stagnant society, the Stasis, that forbids any kind of scientific or artistic innovation...people can even be arrested for not conforming to dictated rules of grammar.  A time barrier has been built to prevent anyone from the future with notions of how better to run things from infiltrating their time and wrecking the Stasis...our time traveler finds himself both pursued by the "Stappers", that is, the enforcers of the Stasis, and temporally imprisoned, unable to return to our present century.  He befriends some members of the resistance movement and then the time travel paradoxes begin to present themselves.  As a matter of fact, if you're looking for the story to end all stories about the paradoxes involved in traveling through time, then this one is for you.  And here's a link to my 2017 review of Barrier: [link]…

Next week I should be able to conclude my look back at the best in short science fiction from 1942...

Optimizing Unconscious Competence at Work

I've mentioned before about how I admire the work ethic of NFL quarterback Tom Brady, bemoaning in the process that he plays for "my" Miami Dolphins' chief rival, the Patriots.  Brady is known to stand facing a wall and endlessly repeat his stances and throwing motions in order to perfect them and reinforce these actions to the point where they become unconscious, freeing him to think about more pressing issues during a game...like his receivers' sometimes errant pass routes or that linebacker who's unexpectedly coming up at him on a blitz. Brady's philosophy of work is similar to mine in that first you master every aspect of your assignment that you can turn into unconscious routines, and that involves looking on a micro-level at the precise ways that you arrange things and the order in which you perform your functions.  I believe...and it has been borne out over the course of my work life...that if you can commit as much of your job to unconscious competence, then that will allow you to focus your intelligence and volition on the inevitable glitches and exceptions that arise from all sources.  I've recently begun a new job assignment at my workplace and I've still working hard on getting everything in order...the basics are simple enough but it's also easy to get tripped up over details if I'm not careful.  But I've found that while I still have a ways to go before I've made those parts of this assignment fully unconscious routines, I am still better able to effectively react when things don't go as expected.  But I also realize that I work as part of a team and that there are aspects to my work that involve me respecting how those with whom I directly work do things.  So if one day I walk into a room and the setup I am used to arranging has been done a little differently by someone else, then I flow with it...I think a lot of us sometimes forget that in our jobs...especially those that involve processing material commodities or providing services to the consumer public...we're also charged with treating our fellow employees in a constructive and respectful manner.  And, bringing it all back to the beginning, I suspect that this area is also one where Tom Brady excels...why, oh why does he have to play for New England?

Just Finished Reading The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum

A few months ago I had decided to read L. Frank Baum's lengthy series of short novels about the mythical land of Oz after noticing the complete set on my sister's bookshelf when we visited her and her family back in 2017, but never got around to following up on the first book, naturally called The Wonderful Wizard of Oz...from 1900.  The written story turned out quite a bit different from the 1939 blockbuster musical movie version starring Judy Garland, but I enjoyed Baum's writing style and it was pretty funny.  Then, while recently reading Robert Heinlein's sci-fi novel Podkayne of Mars, I noticed that its protagonist Poddy, a girl in her late teens, was a big Oz fan and made numerous references to different characters in the series.  This turned my attention back to Baum and I just finished reading book number two, titled The Marvelous Land of Oz, which he had published in 1904...

In this story there is no sign either of Dorothy or the Wizard of Oz, although at least they were mentioned in passing: no reference at all was made to the Cowardly Lion.  Oz is benevolently ruled by Scarecrow while his best friend the Tin Woodman reigns over the land of the Winkies.  The story is centered around a boy named Tip who has been placed in the custody of a sinister old sorceress named Mombi.  One day, while harvesting pumpkins, he decides to play a prank on her by cutting out a face on a pumpkin and setting it up, complete with a wooden body and arms and legs, to surprise her.  Surprised Mombi is, and she decides to prank Tip in return by sprinkling life-enabling magic powder on it.  Jack Pumpkinhead, as Tip calls him, is a genial but rather stupid sort...but the sorceress threatens to turn Tip into a statue and use Jack instead to perform her chores.  So Tip sneaks out with Jack and escapes, taking with him Mombi's stash of life-powder.  They go out in search of the Emerald City where they hope the King, who is Scarecrow, will help him with his situation.  Meanwhile, there is an insurrection in Oz as the girls, led by General Jinjur and armed with knitting needles, take over and make the men do all the domestic work.  Scarecrow and company escape and seek help from the Tin Woodsman.  Meanwhile, Tip has brought a sawhorse to life with the pilfered powder...he ingeniously calls him "Sawhorse"...

No, I'm not going to tell the rest of the story.  But with this one I may have found my favorite character: a "woggle-bug"...more specifically H.M. Woggle-Bug, T.E....who after having absorbed the lessons from a school teacher after hiding out in his school, is caught one day and magnified on a screen to the students.  A distraction occurs and the enlarged bug wanders off, hence the initials H.M. (highly magnified) and T.E. (thoroughly educated).  He reminds me strongly of Milne's Owl character in the Winnie the Pooh series: very pompous and arrogant about his educational level.  But the funniest moment may have been when Jack Pumpkinhead first meets Scarecrow and agree in their amiable discussion to get an interpreter...even though they already understand each other!  Yes, there's a lot of funny stuff in this book, and unlike with the first one, I wasn't getting myself sidetracked comparing it to the movie...

Since the Oz series is now public domain, you shouldn't have trouble getting it on the Internet.  YouTube has available public domain audiobooks...that's what I used this time around...

Today's Miserable Weather, Meaningless Football Game

Today has to be one of the most miserable days of the year, at least as far as the weather is concern.  It has been raining here nonstop in the Gainesville area with no relief in sight...plus, as the day has worn on, the temperature has plummeted.  Yuck!  And on this Sunday afternoon with me off from work, it might have been a good time to watch some football on TV...except that the only game is the meaningless National Football League Pro Bowl, their version of the all-star game.  Of course, no one wants to get injured in these contests, so the defense plays super-light, everyone who gets the ball races to the sideline, and the officials are continually quick-whistling plays over before tackles can be made.  So how is this a real game?...it's a joke, that's what it is.  I was watching it for a while but finally gave up.  Besides, if your team's star player gets injured today and it affects your season next year...well, better for him to skip this game in the first place, I say.  I read that players on today's winning side will received $67,000 and the losers $39,000, while the game's MVP is to win a new car.  Well, that's good for them, I suppose, although it does nothing to whet my interest in this nonsense...

Days like this were meant to be spent at work...that is, if your job is indoors.  On the other hand, there's nothing like this sort of weather (and lousy television) to put on some hot coffee or chocolate and grab a good book to read...

A Little More Political Reflection

If a Republican other than Donald Trump...say one of the leading primary also-rans like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio...had been elected president in 2016, I wonder how vastly different the media reaction and coverage would have been in terms of its negativity.  Trump, if anything, has made the Democratic-leaning opposition lazy in that he serves up outrageous statements and actions almost on a daily basis, insulting people left and right and making all sorts of false claims.  I have no doubt that if Cruz or Rubio were in there, we would have neither this governing-through Twitter nonsense nor the regular pandering to the political base with the campaign rallies.  Instead, their messages would have been to the American people as a whole and that, although their policies may have been just as ideologically on the right as the current president's, they would have been more persuasive and less denunciatory in nature...in other words, more presidential.  Not that the late night talk show hosts wouldn't have all sorts of nasty things to lead their shows off with against a Cruz or Rubio presidency...they'd just have to work a bit harder at it, that's all.  And I say all this acknowledging that I, myself, am a Democrat.  But look at what just happened recently in Washington...

At their annual March For Life rally in the nation's capital...one of the relatively rare protest demonstrations conducted by political conservatives...there was outrage expressed at an infamous photo and an accompanying short video of teenage boys, wearing those dumb "Make America Great Again" red hats that signify support for Donald Trump, appearing to be taunting a poor old, innocent American Indian who was just there beating a drum.  How racist those kids are, the social media reaction virally went, they should be punished...and their Catholic school in Kentucky was actually considering suspending or expelling them when the situation's true context was revealed.  The boys were just gathered there waiting for the bus to drive them back home when a different group of protesters approached and began to taunt them.  Then the Indians came, with that drummer being the one to confront the boy, not the reverse.  The young man just smiled back at the Indian, the photo was clicked, and the smear campaign began with opinion-makers taking off with the story and running with it...

It's this sort of thing that gives me pause during this time of torrential criticism of the current president and the Republicans.  True, Donald Trump with his bullying, deriding nature has assuredly set much of the tone for the backlash from the left, but I feel that with even someone else in charge it would be much the same.  I didn't vote for this president, but he is my president and I want him to succeed in the areas that he has the Constitutionally-mandated responsibility for.  And one of the most supremely important areas is our national defense, which includes protecting our borders.  I've said it before and I'll say it again: Trump was the one elected, like it or not, and Congress should be deferential to him in his role of Commander-in Chief...he, not they, should be in charge of border policy.  Trump's mistake, however, was using an issue (the border wall) to hold the federal government...and eventually, the nation...hostage with a financial shutdown.  Now any future president from either party will be able to point back to this precedent and do the same with their own pet issues...thanks a lot, Donald...

Now about this "national emergency" notion that has some screaming "dictator" and "martial law": declaring national emergencies has become commonplace during the past few administrations, regardless which party has been in power...it isn't that big of a deal, except to the ignorant.  The only possible legal glitch for Trump declaring a national emergency at the border so that he can build his wall is that he might need to demonstrate a viable way to fund it...if he declares such an emergency it will certainly go to the courts, who lately seem to be the ones deciding on our border and immigration policies.  I'd rather see everyone, from both parties, just get together, with recognized experts on the subject, and work out the best possible policy that optimizes expense with border protection.  But that involves folks in D.C. being reasonable for a change, so good luck with that...

No, this border wall issue is not what disturbs me about this president.  My biggest concern is that he has been somehow compromised by the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin and is doing his bidding, however subtlety.  It's already been established that the Russians didn't influence the 2016 election by hacking and manipulating voting machines, but they did infiltrate social media with intentions to sway the election against Clinton and for Trump.  But I imagine every country in the world (including the U.S.) with interests in other countries are always trying to influence their elections...that is, when the countries they want to affect actually hold free elections.  I don't hold Trump and his cronies responsible for collusion or conspiracy...I instead hold those American voters responsible who bought this crap and let it influence their decisions.  So is Trump somehow beholden to Putin?...that's the only thing I wonder about now.  And if Mueller can't answer that in his investigation, it doesn't do me any good in terms of resolving this whole sordid affair...

Quote of the Week...from Ernest Hemingway

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men.  True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.                                                 ---Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway, of course, was one the greatest American authors of the twentieth century...I've read his novels The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls...that last one is my favorite of his.  Most successful people, like Hemingway, are often esteemed for having risen above the masses with their chosen craft and they deserve commendation for this...I myself have a grudging admiration of standout NFL quarterback Tom Brady, despite the fact that he plays for a team I always root against.   And wanting to be better than everyone else is indeed a good goal...but only up to a point.  If that's all that is motivating us to succeed, I believe we probably will be very disappointed in the end and possibly just give up, "playing second fiddle", "backup", or "also-ran" not elements of our personal vocabulary.  I think that was the problem with another NFL player, Tim Tebow, who was more concerned about being seen as the "best" over others than working hard to improve himself into being the best player God had gifted him to be...so he left the sport.  Hemingway showed his wisdom and indicated to me by the above quote that even had he not achieved such acclaim for his writing, he still would have continued pursuing it as a personal commitment...a noble commitment.  What are the things we are committed to improving on...even without any assurance of tangible recognition from others?  I agree with Mr. Hemingway and suggest that here is where real nobility can be found...           

Just Finished Reading Podkayne of Mars by Robert Heinlein

One of Robert Heinlein's lesser known works is his 1963 science fiction novel Podkayne of Mars. In it Podkayne...or "Poddy"...lives on Mars with her parents, precocious 11-year old little brother Clark, and the infant triplets that have diverted her parents' attention and cancelled a long-desired family trip to Earth.  Yes, by all this you can assume that it's some time off in the future and humanity has colonized Mars...plus Venus as well, its extremely overheated and poisonous atmosphere still unknown at the story's writing.  And yes, there are native intelligent life forms on both planets...Heinlein mixes this "soft" science fiction with "hard" passages describing space travel in detail that makes such a scenario nearly seem plausible.  Well, the Mars senator, who just happens to be Podkayne's uncle, hears of the trip's cancellation and invites her and Clark to accompany him on a trip to Earth...with a stopover in Venus.  At this point I won't go any further revealing the plot and instead will focus on two areas: super-intelligent Clark and the story's original and altered endings...

There is a mythos in our modern society about the incredibly smart little know-it-all kid who almost magically knows advanced science, math, and technology...like Stewie in Family Guy with his time machine or Artemis Fowl with his criminal shenanigans in Eoin Colfer's children novel series. Look at young Sheldon on TV...the kid just "knows" so much more than the dumb adults around him.  Clark in Heinlein's story is another example of a child whose intellectual level is vastly beyond what one would reasonably expect from even a genius at his age.  And why is it that these brilliant kids seem to tend toward manipulation and villainy?  I don't know about you, but I'm getting sick and tired of this recurring super-smartass-scheming-brat caricature I see in books and on the screen...

Robert Heinlein wrote an ending to Podkayne of Mars that did not sit well with his publisher, who insisted that he change it...which he reluctantly did: I read the revised version.  Yet, the original is also still out there and I understand that some editions feature both endings.  Talk about a schizophrenic novel.  In any case, I don't have to read the original ending to know what's different about it...all in all I enjoyed this short book, but it's not anywhere near the quality level of the author's Stranger in a Strange Land or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress...