Quote of the Week...from Stephen Covey

I am not a product of my circumstances.  I am a product of my decisions.   ---Stephen Covey

Stephen Covey is the author best known for his bestseller Seven Habits of Highly Effective People a few years ago.  He is a major advocate of people being proactive and not reactive with their lives.  In truth, the way I see it, we are products of both our circumstances and our decisions.  Albert Einstein once wrote, "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." In other words, genius begins with one's reasonable recognition of their own abilities and limitations...that's not being negative, for making such an assessment can point to the areas where their genius and talents can instead be fully realized.  Also, folks tend to get into the habit of living their lives according to narratives of self-victimization, that is they either dwell on mistakes others made in their upbringing or identify closely with a demographic group that has been (or still is) maltreated in society and, well, why bother trying when the system is rigged against you? My response is while discrimination has always been a problem and sadly will probably continue to be one, and just about all of us can find some negative things in our own personal pasts to blame someone else for, sometimes it's better to lay that aside and focus our thoughts and efforts on our own behavior.  For when I look back on trials and setbacks in my own life, my memory tends to focus more on how I reacted to them than the events and situations themselves...including those who may have perpetrated some wrong against me.  But that involves me, for the sake of effective living, ridding myself of the notion that my circumstances define me and instead orienting myself around my own decision-making, which in the long run by far determines who I really am and where I will go in life...

Just Finished Reading Ulysses by James Joyce

Back in the late 1970s, when I attended the University of Florida here in Gainesville as a student, I would go to the Reitz Student Union to relax...it's been rebuilt two or three times since.  But then on the first floor, on the west end of the building, was a student lounge area where we could sit back in big comfy cushioned swivel chairs and watch TV.  On the opposite wall was a painting that looked as if anyone at random had just taken their brush and thrown up different colors...an abstract work, but one that "experts" in the field no doubt thought possessed a high degree of aesthetic value.  That's kind of how I felt after reading Irish writer James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses: it's widely considered by many in the literary field to be one of the greatest works in English language literature...but it often left me scratching my head in confusion...and a little anger.  The main characters are compelling enough: Leopold Bloom, a Jewish Dubliner in his middle ages, is portrayed going through "a day in the life".  He knows about  his wife Molly's infidelity and hides from her suspected lover whenever their paths cross.  The secondary protagonist is Stephen Dedalus, who is frustrated with his manipulative roommate and struggles to make a name for himself as a writer and a scholar of Shakespeare.  Joyce presents these characters and others they meet by revealing their streams of thought...which usually meander in all kinds of directions, causing at least with me a sense of drift and uncertainty as to who is doing the thinking and often wondering what happened to the general story line.  Many times while reading Ulysses I had to stop and ask myself whether the narrative was the real progression of the plot or an imagining of one of the characters: Joyce seemed not to care how he presented his story, and I suspect he probably deliberately obfuscated it to encourage a sense of mystery and intrigue to provoke readers and scholars to analyze it more deeply.  Also, I was not in Joyce's Dublin at the time and do not know the different references to contemporary personalities nor the political and religious divisions and issues of the time, other than that Ireland had been seeking independence from the United Kingdom after an armed insurrection and was negotiating an agreement.  The language in dialogue is often steeped in dialect and as such difficult to comprehend. Much is made of Bloom's Judaism and his place in an Irish society with Catholicism being the dominant religious presence. Joyce named his novel after Homer's The Odyssey and the characters Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus supposedly correspond to Homer's Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus, respectively...and the book's chapter titles reference sections from the ancient Greek epic.  I had read The Odyssey beforehand, thinking that it would help me better understand Ulysses: didn't work...

All that having been said, I felt that there was a lot of humor in Ulysses, and I concentrated on following the sections of narrative in bite-sized chunks instead of trying to integrate everything I encountered into the larger story.  This book was initially declared obscene in the United States due to its often explicit sexual references, and although it was first published as a complete novel in 1922, it wasn't until the mid-1930s that it became available for general reading in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.  Well, if you're going to write with the view of recording people's real thoughts, then I guess you're probably going to throw in a bit of sexuality as well, humans being wired as we are...I had no problem with the sexual content, but then again I'm looking at it from the vantage point of 2019 and our society's values, not 1922 and theirs.  Ulysses is a difficult book to read, for sure...I'm glad I read it but am also glad that the other books I have read were mostly written with more consideration for me as their reader...

An afterthought: I mentioned before that Ulysses was about "a day in the life" of Leopold Bloom.  I wonder whether the late Beatles great John Lennon had been influenced by Joyce and his defining work, since he also had a tendency to play around with words, both in his own literature and his song lyrics...including, of course, A Day in the Life...

Weekly Short Stories: 1948 Science Fiction, Part 2

I continued my review of selected science fiction short stories from the year 1948 as they appear in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 10 (1948) with an interesting observation: the length of these stories tends to be quite shorter than those from earlier anthologies which at times were more novellas than short stories.  There are six listed below, all relatively brief...but that doesn't make them any less significant or worthy.  Here they are...

MARS IS HEAVEN by Ray Bradbury
The first ever manned expedition to Mars lands with its crew of seventeen...on a lawn of green grass.  Why, outside the ship it looks like one of the quaint small towns that Bradbury was always writing about, and furthermore, people are coming out of the houses to greet the long distance voyagers: their own deceased relatives and old friends, now looking quite alive and well.  The shock of experiencing this has its effect on the crew which is overcome with joy and abandon, and only Captain John Black begins to suspect something's amiss here.  While reading it I wondered to myself how clueless this crew must be and then I thought, that's the whole point...how many dubious things do we incorporate unquestioningly into our own personal narratives because they "fit" them and resonate with us on an irrational, emotional level?

THANG by Martin Gardner
For such a short, short, story (one page long) this is an exercise in imagining scale on an extremely large level. The title character is an entity who feeds on star systems...but that's not the end to it.  In my view, I get what the author was trying to express but sometimes a story can, well, just be TOO short...

BROOKLYN PROJECT by William Tenn
It's sometime in the future and, like so many science fiction scenarios, society has become more totalitarian with the State pretty much running everything, including science.  The big project at hand is to employ a time machine that can take pictures of its surroundings at intervals of millions of years...starting with the Earth's beginning.  A dissident group of scientists had warned of the consequences of meddling with the past like this, but of course they are all "silenced" in one way or another.  The time machine is activated and the observers note the pictures coming back from the past through each interval.  Only something isn't quite right...although none of them can detect it.  But it's pretty clear to the reader, which is what makes this story memorable...

RING AROUND THE REDHEAD by John D. MacDonald
This story delves into another common science fiction theme, that of entering into other dimensions of reality.  A tinkerer/inventor is on trial for murdering his next door neighbor, whose only remains seem to be small fragments of brain tissue in the shrubbery between their houses.  Our hero, convinced of his own innocence, knows everything that happened and insists on taking the stand, to the consternation of his own lawyer.  It seems there is a ring-shaped device that he came upon when a room in another dimension opened up suddenly, and through it he can explore other dimensions and extract things...and people (including a beautiful redheaded woman) through them.  Where does the neighbor fit into all this and what happens?  Guess you'll have to read it to find out...

PERIOD PIECE by J.J. Coupling
A man with memories of a past hundreds of years gone by is carted around from one social gathering to another off in the distant future and relates to his listeners what it was like "back then", as he is deemed a time traveler. Along the way he begins to entertain doubts as to why he is being handled in this way...and ultimately about his own identity.  I've wondered myself whether we can be truly certain that there ever was a past since we're all imprisoned in the present moment and our very memories of a supposed past are accessed in the "now" as well...

DORMANT by A.E. Van Vogt
It is the present...that is, it's 1948...and a U.S. Naval destroyer goes to a remote small Pacific island where they believe the Japanese had stored supplies for the war that just recently ended.  On it they discover a massive rocklike formation...and it seems to be moving up the island's mountain!  It's actually an alien creation that feeds on radioactivity...and wouldn't you know it, they've been testing atomic bombs in the Pacific.  And now this ominous thing is beginning to wake up from its dormancy of millions of years and resume its mission...and you really don't want to know what that is...

That's it for this week...next week I conclude my look at short science fiction from 1948...

Congratutations to St. Louis Blues and Toronto Raptors

Being a vicarious sports fan...meaning that I follow all these sports I never participate in myself...I have to congratulate a couple of teams for winning their respective leagues' championships a few days ago: the National Hockey League's St. Louis Blues and the National Basketball Association's Toronto Raptors, neither of them expected to go the distance.  The Blues struggled in their series against both the Dallas Stars (I thought Dallas was the better team in that one) and San Jose Sharks and were clear underdogs facing the Boston Bruins in the Stanley Cup finals...but came out on top in an exciting seven-match series.  As for the Raptors, most of the NBA's Eastern Conference attention was on Philadelphia and Milwaukee, yet under the leadership of Kahwi Leonard, along with a great supporting cast including the underrated Kyle Lowry, Pascal Siakam, Marc Gasol, Danny Green, Serge Ibaka...the list goes on...they overcame the 76ers winning the final deciding game of the series as Leonard broke a tie with time running out, shooting a three-pointer that bounced four times off the rim before settling in the basket.  Against the Bucks, the Raptors were even more impressive, earning the right to face twice-defending champion Golden State in the final series.  The Warriors, sadly, were hobbled throughout the finals: their star Kevin Duran was recovering from injury for the first four games and was out...in game five he played one quarter and blew out his achilles tendon and is now expected to miss the next season.  DeMarcus Cousins rejoined the squad for the series after his own injury and was effective in helping them to stay in it.  But what sealed the coffin for Golden State in their quest to win a third straight NBA championship was Clay Thompson's two injuries in the series, the last one leaving only Stephen Curry as the team's truly effective outside shooter and he could not overcome the Raptors' defensive pressure as Toronto won the sixth and final game 114-110 to secure the championship.  Both Toronto and St. Louis, although each franchise has a long record of regular season success, count this year's championships as their first ever...I'm looking forward to seeing how they do next year.  With the Raptors, their success may come down to whether Kawhi Leonard stays in town or moves elsewhere to play...

Some States' New Electoral Vote and Ballot Laws Seriously Misguided

When I heard of the movement of some Democratic-controlled state legislatures to enact laws giving their presidential electoral votes to the candidate receiving the highest popular vote total nationwide I initially thought that it was relatively meaningless, considering that all states passing these laws had clearly gone for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election anyway...it would only have teeth if swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan would go for it or if the states with more Republican leanings would go against their political instincts.  In other words, I initially concluded that giving one's own state's electoral votes to the popular winner needs most of the country to go along with it to be truly effective, something that simply is not going to happen.  However, a more recent development has been going on in some states as they have passed laws barring any presidential candidate from their ballots if they won't release their income tax returns.  The U.S. Supreme Court in the past has struck down such restrictive laws and I expect (hopefully) that they will again.  But in the meantime, an ugly scenario is being created by the mix of these two different laws.  Let me explain...

Take a look at California, by far the most populous state in the country, and which has both the law giving its massive amounts of electoral votes to the popular winner and that banning a candidate from its ballot who refuses to reveal his or her tax returns.  Then even though voters will be able to write in that candidate's name on their ballot, the effect will be to artificially drastically diminish his or her vote total...not just within California but also for the entire nation's popular vote tally.  And all these other states are by their own laws depending on the viability of that popular vote figure to determine their own electoral votes.  If the tax/ballot restriction movement isn't quashed by the courts, then I fear that Republican-controlled state legislatures would pass their own retaliatory laws having the effect of banning top Democratic candidates, using their own criteria in doing this. These two different laws simply do not mix...frankly, I wish neither of them had ever been considered in the first place...

Enjoyed Watching the U.S. Open Golf Tournament This Weekend

I hadn't planned on watching any golf on TV this weekend...I hadn't done so in years.  But I was captivated by the beautiful Pacific Ocean, harbor, and beach background to the Pebble Beach golf course on the mid-Californian coast...where the annual PGA United States Open is held, one of the major golf tournaments.  The leader at the close of Saturday was Gary Woodland, who had only a one-stroke lead over Justin Rose and at age 35 was still looking for his first ever majors victory.  Brooks Koepka, who had won the U.S. Open the previous two years, was also in contention.  By the time the leaders reached the final holes today, Rose had faded while Koepka had surged to second place, finishing his round two strokes behind Woodland.  But Woodland, who was previously 0 for 7 when defending a tournament lead going into the final day, showed exceptional poise and consistency, getting a long birdie at his turn on the 18th to finish with a three-stroke win over Koepka...

I've never played any "regular" golf although I've always been pretty good at miniature golf...at 62 I'm probably not going to go buy a set of clubs at this point.  But it was fun to follow the sport, something I used to do when I was much younger and stars like Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Gary Player, and Tom Watson were consistently on the leader board.  And for some reason, as I watched golfer after golfer drive the ball off into the rough yesterday and today, I thought of the scene in that old James Bond movie Goldfinger when 007 plays a major prank on the title villain while playing against him.  Like horse racing or next month's Tour de France bicycle races, some sports I follow only during major events...maybe I'll be checking out golf like this, too.  Let's see...the next major tournament will be the British Open on July 18-21, to take place at Dunluce Course in Northern Ireland.  Now that I recognize some of the players it should be fun to follow...although I'm expecting the scenery to not be as good as Pebble Beach...

USA Women's Soccer Antics Remind Me of South Park Episode

I've watched the cartoon satirical series South Park over the years...most of the episodes, especially recently, have been off the mark but a few are ingeniously brutal in their lampooning of our society's various foibles.  The 2006 episode Stanley's Cup is a case in point: nine-year-old Stan Marsh needs his bicycle to earn money with his paper route, but one day it is towed away.  He goes to the bureaucrat-in-charge to plead it back, but is told he'll have to do the favor of coaching the local Pee Wee hockey team first.  So Stan tries to coach a group of very young children who can barely balance on their skates or even nudge the puck in the general direction of the goal.  At the end of this convoluted tale, they find themselves playing the final period of an NHL game against the Detroit Red Wings after the scheduled team, the Colorado Avalanche, put them in instead.  Detroit essentially massacres the helpless little Pee Wee players en route to a 32-2 rout...and with each goal the Red Wing players whoop it up with grandstanding celebrations, as if they were actually accomplishing anything worthwhile.  That's the kind of reaction that I and most other observers had when our United States women's national soccer team won their first World Cup group stage match against Thailand 13-0, scoring several goals in the closing minutes to run up the score and acting like "Cartoon Detroit" with their boisterous post-goal jumping, screaming, and hugging.  I'm not against them winning 13-0 since the first tiebreaker in the group stage is the three-match aggregate goal differential...I don't think Team America will need to worry about that anymore.  But there is a point when excessive celebration in the middle of a rout becomes poor sportsmanship.  No, the Thailand team wasn't at all like South Park's Pee Wee hockey...it was still a competitive contest in the first half and they clearly had their own skilled players.  One of the U.S. players stated that the Thailand players wouldn't have a problem with their behavior...I think it's a mistake to presume graciousness on the part of someone whom you may have offended, though.  I'm still rooting for the good ol' USA, but a little more decorum and maturity...and grace...would help them more in their public relations efforts to promote this sport that grossly underpays them for their outstanding talent...

Quote of the Week...from Maya Lin

Math...it's a puzzle to me.  I love figuring out puzzles.                 ---Maya Lin

Maya Lin is the architect and artist responsible for the design of the Vietnam Memorial wall in Washington, D.C., which was initially considered controversial but is now widely esteemed as one of the greatest memorials anywhere...Melissa and I were very impressed when we visited it last October. Lin's above quote resonates with me as I have always thought that mathematics was taught in schools incorrectly.  If the puzzle-like nature of this field were emphasized in school instead of making it all a solemn judgment of the poor student's abilities and work ethic, than I believe we'd see a lot fewer people...including those with a high intellect...suffering mental blocks over the subject.  As for me, whenever I do pick up one of my several Shaum's Outline Series books on mathematics...and this series covers just about every course imaginable...I regard their "problems" as fun puzzles to work out, and the answers are provided along with explanations as to how to solve them.  And since I'm not going to school, there's no verdict coming down on me being a dumbass because I got a wrong answer.  So many people nowadays like to do puzzles such as Jumble, Sudoku, Kakuro (my favorite), Hidato, Crosswords, and others... I'm also a fan of jigsaw puzzles.  But believe it or not, picking up a Schaum's book about a particular field in math and going through it can be its own kind of fun puzzle experience...and who knows, you may discover that you're not as mathematically-challenged as you thought.  But keep it secret if you do this, otherwise folks will be asking you what you're going to do with your new mathematical learning while if you stick with the more "standard" kinds of puzzles they won't bug you over it...

Rainy June

June has seen a huge upward spike in rainfall for the Gainesville, Florida area, especially after the pretty dry conditions we experienced the previous month.  I'm not quite as averse as other people to walking out in it for a few minutes without an umbrella, but I do have an issue with oversaturation of the ground, along with puddles and slippery roads...and the associated proliferation of potholes.  I tend to avoid running outdoors when it's raining or has been recently because road surfaces...sometimes mixed with oil from parked vehicles...can seriously interfere with traction and vision.  Another problem is the presence at times of lighting, which was in the news recently when a young Floridian man riding a motorcycle on the interstate was directly struck by a lightning bolt and killed.  A few years ago I was running along Daytona Beach when a sudden, severe thunderstorm swept through and it was a race for me to get back to my hotel with lightning crashing around...a scary experience I don't want to repeat.  So while I acknowledge that in my northern Florida area the ground conditions had been getting dry enough for folks to begin sounding alarms about potential forest fires and the recent rains have "dampened" those concerns, I'm still looking forward for some drier weather...although that's not going to come anytime soon if the prognosticators are right...

Weekly Short Stories: 1948 Science Fiction, Part 1

I continued on with my look back at excellent short science fiction from the past as I moved to the year 1948, using the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 10 (1948).  Here are my reactions to the first six tales from that book...

DON'T LOOK NOW by Henry Kuttner
"Don't look now" is the frequent comment made by what appears to be a very paranoid and delusional man to a reporter in a bar.  He is convinced that Martians have invaded and infiltrated Earth and are all around us...third eye and all, just like that old Twilight Zone episode made a few years later.  He uses the kind of fervent, detailed language paranoids use that often gets listeners hooked on their narrative, which can be pretty farfetched.  How it all ends...this story is pretty brief...I leave it for you to possibly read...

HE WALKED AROUND THE HORSES by H. Beam Piper
This is a story about an alternative history.  In 1809 Prussia a British diplomat traveling to Vienna in the midst of conflict with France's Napoleon walks around the horses at a stable...and disappears.  That causes enough consternation for the people around him, but from the perspective of the new, parallel world he has entered that has no Emperor Napoleon in it, the people there are just as confounded by his sudden unexplained appearance and historically absurd rantings.  It's a good history lesson if you're unfamiliar with this era and even delves back into our own Revolutionary War...

THE STRANGE CASE OF JOHN KINGMAN by Murray Leinster
One of those psychiatrists of the time who was into the trend of applying electroshock therapy to their patients has his eyes set on John Kingman, diagnosed as a delusional paranoid who has been a patient at a mental institution as far as anyone can remember.  The doctor goes back into the records and discovers he was first admitted in the late 1700s! And what about those six fingers on each hand and his tendency to sketch highly technical drawings that illustrate science and engineering principles yet undiscovered?  The story draws a line between true science and "pop" science and suggests that not knowing the difference can bring some regretful consequences...

THAT ONLY A MOTHER by Judith Merril
This is a somber apocalyptic tale about a young woman carrying and giving birth to her baby daughter in an post-nuclear war environment where a large percentage of the newborn have serious birth defects and infanticide runs rampant as a result.  The most disturbing story by far in this group...

THE MONSTER by A.E. Van Vogt
Earth has been decimated by war, wiping out all life.  Aliens bent on conquering the planet for their own can resurrect life from the ashes.  Looking for the causes of the catastrophe they keep trying to bring back people from the past, but none of them can provide any answer.  Finally they resurrect one of the most recent humans...and he instantly vanishes!  And then the fun starts...this is the only story I know of that paints an optimistic picture of humanity after its complete self-annihilation...

DREAMS ARE SACRED by Peter Phillips
The third story of the six about an paranoiac, an institutionalized famed fantasy writer has slipped into his own fantasy dream...unwakeable...and the attending doctor enlists the aid of his pragmatic friend to enter that dream and bring the writer back to reality.  Uh...does this possibly remind you of the movie Inception, which is based on people entering and messing with others' dreams?  Seemed like a great original idea when I first saw it, but Peter Phillips had already laid it all out back in 1948...

That's it for this week.  More sci-fi short stories from 1948 next week...

2019 Women's World Cup in Soccer Underway

The 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup in soccer has begun its group stage, with 24 nations divided into six alphabetized groups of four...the USA is in Group F along with Thailand, Chile, and Sweden.  Chile and Sweden begin this group's play today while the United States will face Thailand.  All matches in the World Cup will be held at various locales throughout France.  Sixteen teams will quality from the group stage to enter the knockout rounds, culminating in the finale to be held on July 7th in Lyon.  The American team features Megan Rapinoe, Carli Lloyd, and Alex Morgan and are defending champions.  I'm looking forward to following the matches and hope you are, too...

This morning on the United States Senate floor, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer decried the disparity in pay between the American men's and women's national soccer teams.  He pointed out that the men's team was rewarded with a $5.1 million bonus for getting into the Round of Sixteen in their last World Cup...not the one most recently held in Russia since they didn't even qualify for it, while the women's team was given a paltry $1.7 million after they WON the World Cup in 2015...one third of the men's take.  Furthermore, women have already won three World Cups. The men, by contrast, have never even come close to winning a World Cup.  And you see a similar discrepancy in pay for men and women's league soccer.  But then again, this relegation of women's sports as secondary to men's isn't just in soccer...in the recent French Open in tennis the women's semifinals were exiled to secondary courts in order to focus the primary ones on the men.  It's too bad we live in a world like this...I think we'll be hearing more about this gender-based inequity in the days to come as the Women's World Cup coverage intensifies...

Later: USA beat Thailand 13-0 with Alex Morgan scoring 5 goals.  I originally got the match's date wrong...imagine my surprise when I finally got off from an extended work day only to see it being replayed on FS1...

Just Finished Reading A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul G. Tremblay

I follow Stephen King on Twitter, and he uses it a lot to express himself on different issues...more often than not to bash Trump.  Another thing he does a lot on it is recommend books to read: Paul G. Tremblay's 2015 horror novel A Head Full of Ghosts is one he has promoted...so I checked it out and just finished reading it.  My reactions...

If you want to create a scenario of true horror, then combining different scenarios horrible in their own right...like demon-possession, exorcism, paranoid ranting, and reality television...makes for a pretty explosive formula.  Yet as revolting as much of Tremblay's tale was, he deftly crafted it into an unexpectedly rational narrative whose ending made a kind of terrible sense...although it was very, very, disturbing and upsetting.  On the surface the story features a "typical" American family, with the father, mother, older sister (Marjorie) and younger sister (Merry) going through their typical American middle-class lives...until, that is, Marjorie starts to display disturbing behavior, which she claims is coming from voices speaking to her within her head.  The parents are at a loss and completely at odds with each other on how to deal with Marjorie's worsening apparent psychosis: the father, immersing himself into an offshoot sect of Christianity, seeks exorcism, convincing himself she is possessed while the mother, who rejects organized religion, wants secular medical treatment. The father wins out and then a reality TV show is set up to film the family through their ordeals, providing them with money to help with their burgeoning expenses.  The story, told from a future time by an adult Merry to a writer she is entrusting with her experiences, is centered around little Merry's place in the family and as Marjorie's main confidant and friend...as well as the chief witness to some of her scariest acts.  Their family crisis was difficult enough to read through, but having to put up with cameramen, directors, and producers traipsing though their house and rooms...along with the angry protesters lined up outside...lent the story a creepiness that verged on the obscene.  This is a tale of severe psychological warfare and I definitely do NOT recommend it to anyone with insomnia, nightmare issues, or weak constitutions.  Still, as I said before, the author crafted the whole thing very well: after all, this is a horror story. Read it at your own risk...if you read Stephen King's Thinner and were upset with how that one turned out, then you probably don't want to pick up A Head Full of Ghosts.  As for me, I think I'll be a little more circumspect about Mr. King's literary endorsements in the future...

Yesterday's Belmont and NHL, NBA Playoffs

Although I knew that the Belmont Stakes, thoroughbred  horseracing's third jewel in the Triple Crown, was taking place yesterday, I put the event to the back of my mind for a couple of reasons.  One was that I was driving down to Orlando and back to pick up Melissa from the airport and didn't think we'd be back in time for me to watch it.  The other was that very few horses from the earlier two races were competing...I was only interested in Tacitus and the Preakness winner War of Will.  As it turned out, I happened to be in the takeout section of my nearby Piesano's restaurant back in Gainesville when I tuned in to the race on my cellphone around 6:40 pm. It was pretty exciting to watch and very close...the eventual winner, Sir Winston, was at 10-1 and its rider skillfully rode past much of the field around the final turn, hugging the rails. And when he was blocked at the end he maneuvered to the outside and took the lead.  Had the race been a few feet longer I think favored Tacitus, who was closing in fast, would have overtaken him.  Although it was fun to watch, I doubt many people will remember this race...I only wrote about it here because I had written about the Kentucky Derby and Preakness and didn't want to leave the last one out...

We're nearing the closing of two pro sports league seasons for 2019, the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association.  Both are in their final playoff series for the championship and the underdogs are in a position to close them out.  Tonight the St. Louis Blues will try to win their first ever NHL Stanley Cup championship as they play the favored Boston Bruins at home with a 3-2 series lead.  And tomorrow the Toronto Raptors, with a 3-1 series lead over two-time defending champion Golden State, will host the injury-plagued Warriors on Monday.  Will Kevin Durant return to the court after his left knee injury rendered him absent for the end of the Clippers series, all of the Trail Blazers series, and the Raptors series to date?  I'd like to see his return, but only if he's capable of playing at the high level that he needs to be at to keep his team in the series...

So that's it for sports...I also watch baseball games when they're on, which is good since we're running out of other major sports to watch...

Just Finished Reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Gilead, a 2004 novel by Marilynne Robinson that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year, came to my attention after Melissa was assigned to read it for her current class.  The title refers to the fictional small Iowa town of Gilead where John Ames, a third-generation Congregationalist pastor, is in his late seventies and, realizing that his remaining time on Earth is running out due to a recently-diagnosed heart ailment, is writing the narrative as a letter to his seven-year-old son.  In it he reminisces about both his father and grandfather, vastly different personalities with diverging views on what it means to be a Christian.  Grandfather Ames is a fiery warrior who takes up arms supporting abolitionist John Brown in Kansas before the Civil War and then serves the Union cause during that conflict, losing one of his eyes in the process.  John's father, on the other hand, has a serious falling out with the grandfather and turns into a staunchly anti-war pastor during World War I, even tempted once to deliver a sermon describing the raging and deadly flu epidemic of the time that was killing so many young men as a blessing from God that would prevent them from going overseas and committing murder as soldiers.  The author also described how life was in this part of the country during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  His older brother Edward, whom he has always looked up to, becomes an atheist and their relationship tests both his own faith as well as that of his father...John Ames is continually examining his own beliefs as to their veracity instead of blindly adhering to a doctrine etched in stone. The narrative continues as John describes his own tragic first marriage when his wife Louisa dies giving birth to his daughter Rachel...who also dies soon thereafter.  Many years later he remarries, to Lila who is much younger than him and who bears their son in 1949...this narrative letter is set in the year 1956.  That's the general background for the story, but the ultimate focus is his relationship with the "black sheep" prodigal son figure of John "Jack" Ames Boughton, son of his longtime friend and Gilead's Presbyterian pastor who had honored him by giving his newborn son his name.  He is suspicious of Jack's motives for hanging around his family and befriending his son and wife...both men know of Jack's past waywardness on many levels and John feels very uncomfortable and defensive around him.  The relationship takes a turn for the worse when Jack begins to intensely question the pastor's Calvinist theology, especially with regard to the concept of predestination...he can come up with no satisfactory response.  I think, with all the text's postulating on different concepts, that it helps the reader to better understand Gilead if he or she has studied theology, been brought up in a religious family, or served in a pastoral capacity in a church...I struggled a lot with it.  But the historical references, along with the issues of conscience, belief, sacrificial love, and grace emphasized in the story made it worthwhile and it merits my recommendation to others.  Still, that theology stuff...do they really have to make it that complicated?

Quote of the Week...from Donald Trump

Listen to those incredible people back there.  These people are so amazing, and what they don't realize is that, I'm holding them up because of this interview. But that's because it's you.
                                                                       ---Donald Trump.

You need to know the above quote's context to understand its meaning.  President Trump was in France yesterday to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Allies' D-Day invasion of France during World War II to liberate it from Hitler's Nazi regime.  He was at the site of the ceremony, where hundreds of veterans were attending, and while awaiting the arrival of French president Macron by helicopter was giving a TV interview to FoxNews' Laura Ingraham.  It was to her that he made his comment, and she felt the need to stress at the airing of the taped interview that he hadn't caused any delay and that their cue to end the interview was the sound of Macron's approaching helicopter...I'm referring to an article by Justin Baragona for The Beast, reprinted on the MSN newsfeed, for this information.  As it was, the French president was late enough to give them the time to finish their interview, and Trump was there waiting for him when he arrived.  I'm making the point about this quote because it so clearly exemplifies Donald Trump's penchant for making up things and spewing them out as he goes along, without weighing their truth value or the effects his careless words might have on others or himself.  His 2016 late-campaign rhetoric praising WikiLeaks for publishing stolen Democratic Party e-mails, as well as his off-the-cuff comments at different times to interviewer Lester Holt and the Russian ambassador regarding why he fired FBI director James Comey...all matters increasing suspicion that he was colluding with the Russians...fit this foolish behavioral pattern of his, in my opinion.  All Trump cares about, when he goes running his mouth off like this, is to make an impact on the listeners and get more publicity and he does not try to think ahead to the consequences of his words.  Between him and the cringe-worthy campaign speeches being delivered by current Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden, this is going to be one very long, tedious campaign season...

Can PopVox Improve Constituent Engagement?

I tuned in to C-Span2 this morning with the forlorn hope of watching the United States Senate in the act of actually doing something.  But no, they had already decided last night to adjourn all the way to next Monday afternoon...last one out off the lights!  Instead, the channel that faithfully broadcasts their proceedings...when there are proceedings...was showing a House committee hearing on improving constituent engagement.  I wasn't quite sure of this idea, since although senators and representatives have their town hall meetings and can already be reached by e-mail and social media, they tend to vote in lock-step with whatever their glorious leader...be it McConnell, Schumer, Pelosi, or McCarthy...dictates to them, regardless what their constituents back home are saying.  Still, I found it intriguing enough that when PopVox co-founder Marci Harris, who spoke at the hearing, said that her site was determined to consolidate people's federal, state, and local elected officials on one dashboard and expedite communications with them, I decided to sign up myself and see what it was about.  I soon discovered that PopVox is a work in progress...they only had my two Florida senators (Rubio & Scott) and House representative (Yoho) on it.  On the right side of the screen, every single legislative active these three were directly involved in was listed, the latest listed first...I found that instructive.   But since I was disappointed that they didn't show my state senator, state representative, and local county and city commissioners, I wrote them an e-mail.  The response, by Ms. Harris, was that they are testing a more vertical federal-state-local site in six locations this year and plan to implement it nationwide in 2020...that's cool, I'm willing to wait a little...

I like to be able to better know what my elected representatives are really up to on their jobs besides their often deceptive spoken rhetoric.  As for giving them my opinions as one of their constituents, I think that what usually happens is that a senator or representative will claim to be attentive to our concerns but will then cherry-pick and use only those comments that dovetail nicely with their  already-decided direction.  So whereas I welcome more information from them coming to me on a site like this, I'm a bit skeptical about my elected leaders caring a whit about my information going out to them...

By the way, just going by the title, what exactly did you think this article was going to be about?

Weekly Short Stories: 1947 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I conclude my look back at the year 1947 in short science fiction literature with my reactions to the final six stories from the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 9 (1947).  Here they are...

WITH FOLDED HANDS... by Jack Williamson
At some time in the future humanity has already explored and settled other star systems and robotics (or "mechanicals" as named here) are a big part of the economy.  One day, out of the blue, a new "humanoids" store is standing, ready to sell their uniform models to each and every person...and they're all tied in to the central intelligence form the home planet, adhering to the principle that no harm befalls any human being. This is one of those stories that gets me reflecting in different directions on its messages. On one level, there is an ominous level of prophecy at our increasing dependency on artificial intelligence as device after device makes assumptions as to our liking or well-being, whether we happen to agree or not.  Another is that even before AI began to make its presence felt, our society has been involved in efforts to restrict people's freedoms based on them avoiding activities and consumption deemed harmful to them. A pretty profound tale, especially coming from 1947. Then again, Prohibition was the law of the land from 1919 to 1933 and the "war on drugs" began almost immediately thereafter...

THE FIRES WITHIN by Arthur C. Clarke
This very short story reminds me of Hal Clement's Proof from back in 1942.  In both the author puts forth the proposition that there may be other forms of intelligent life going on undetected for the only reason that its physical and chemical structure and location are so vastly different from our own that we're not looking for it.  A scientist hits upon a device that uses sonar technology to examine to several miles underground to determine what the composition of inner Earth is like...and makes an astounding discovery.  But some things...as the end reveals...are better left covered and hidden...

ZERO HOUR by Ray Bradbury
Little children all around, to the amusement of their parents and other grownups, have invented a new game they call "Invasion", and they claim that Drill, an alien from another dimension who has befriended them, is trapped here and needs to be freed.  You can quickly tell where this story is going...I wanted to scream at the adults to stop acting like a collective bunch of dumbasses...

HOBBYIST by Eric Frank Russell
A stranded spaceman...along with his talking macaw partner, explores the world he thinks he'll almost certainly be spending the rest of his life on: little to no hope of rescue.  He discovers numerous plant and animal life forms...but they are all singular in nature.  And what about that golden column of light, filled with what looks like stars, that roams the area at night?  This is a story whose implications dramatically expand from a simple tale of survival to speculation about the ultimate nature of our existence...

EXIT THE PROFESSOR by Lewis Padgett
This story reminded me a little of the old  1960s Beverly Hillbillies TV series where the "sophisticates" in the Big City continually underestimate the strengths and talents of a family from the backwoods.  Exit the Professor is like Beverly Hillbillies on steroids...very, very funny...

THUNDER AND ROSES by Theodore Sturgeon
The anthology closes with this, perhaps the most somber of all the post-nuclear war apocalypse stories ever written...and that's saying something considering the inherently somber nature of the topic.  There has been a nuclear exchange between us and the "other" side, but we didn't fire our bombs in response...it's the only thing that's kept Earth from being completely sterilized of life from radiation.  A famous singer visits an military base to put on a last show and plead for life and not hate.  Very touching...and once again, here's a story about nuclear war written when the United States still had a monopoly on the atomic bomb...

Next week I'll begin my look at excellence in science fiction short stories from the year 1948...

Just Finished Reading Bullet Point by Peter Abrahams

Bullet Point is a 2010 standalone novel by Peter Abrahams, an American writer of books in the young adult genre, most of them being in series. It's about a teenage boy Wyatt who lives in an economically-depressed small town in a western state.  How economically depressed? Due to layoffs and the consequential drop in property taxes funding the local high school, they decide to drop baseball as a sports option...just when Wyatt, an enthusiastic and talented player, was about to join up.  He's also in an antagonistic relationship with his stepfather...his own biological father whom he never met, Sonny, is away in prison for murder.  With little in his hometown, other than his mother and little half-sister, to keep him there, he secures a transfer...effected by his school's former baseball coach...to a school down the road, one that has a baseball program.  Unfortunately, due to a technicality in the rules he must wait out a year residing there before he can qualify to play.  Wyatt is disappointed, but goes to his classes at his new school, doing the best he can.  He meets a young woman, Greer, with whom he quickly jumps into a very physical relationship...much to the consternation of just about everyone around him.  Greer's father is at the same prison as Wyatt's, which incidentally is on the outskirts of his new hometown.  Through Greer and her father Sonny contacts Wyatt by phone and the two begin to talk for the first time ever.  Greer thinks Sonny may be innocent and helps Wyatt investigate the original crime and trial...you're welcome to take over from here as a reader since I don't want to give away the story...

After reading Bullet Point, I checked out the Goodreads website to see what others thought about it.  The reactions were generally consistent: they liked the general flow of the story and the characters...until the ending that is, which was almost universally panned for its content and brevity.  I, on the other hand, thought that Abrahams was ingenious with this story's resolution, while I had trouble identifying with the character of Wyatt, who seemed to me to be something of an oversized crybaby with chips on both shoulders about his lot in life. Still, I recommend it although many of the topics are more adult in nature than you'd find in a typical "teen", "junior", or "young adult" genre novel.  One other thing: the author inserted references to Shakespeare's tragic play Hamlet throughout the story as a theme, making me wonder whether I might take a tour of that famed English bard's collection of works sometime in the future...

2019 Atlantic Hurricane System Underway

The 2019 Atlantic hurricane season officially began the day before yesterday, and it behooves those living in vulnerable coastal areas to start taking steps early on to prepare for potential power outages, closed roads and stores, and problems pertinent to their homes and locations.  Last year Hurricanes Florence (category 4) and Michael (category 5) slammed through the Carolinas and the Florida panhandle respectively, each causing more than 50 deaths and around $25 billion in damage.  Although there were 15 named tropical storms in 2018 and most of them flourished and floundered in the open Atlantic waters, all it takes is one to thoroughly mess up your life.  As for 2019, AccuWeather's official forecast is for 12-14 named storms and 5-7 hurricanes, with 2-4 of them being major.  The El Niño effect, which tends to create wind shear that limits tropical storm development, should be present through the main hurricane months of August, September, and October...but they're not completely sure on this. And on their map of more likely landfalls, the Florida peninsula is highlighted in red...here's a link to that AccuWeather forecast: [AccuWeather]...

In 2019 so far, Andrea briefly formed last month near Bermuda in the western Atlantic as a subtropical storm, becoming the first named storm of the year.  Here are the names for 2019:

Andrea, Barry, Chantal, Dorian, Erin, Fernand, Gabrielle, Humberto, Imelda, Jerry, Karen, Lorenzo, Melissa, Nestor, Olga, Pablo, Rebekah, Tanya, Van, Wendy

May none of these names gain infamy for representing storms causing loss of life or catastrophic damage.  But we haven't been so fortunate the last couple of years with Atlantic tropical systems...best to keep up with what's going down in the area...

Trump, Meghan, Nasty, and Royalty

This is starting to sound like a broken record: I'm no fan of President Trump, but...

In advance of President Donald Trump's visit to Great Britain next week, he was interviewed by some Brit journalist and asked about Meghan Markle, the American actress who married Prince Harry and last month gave birth to their first child.  Markle, it was revealed to Trump, had made some disparaging comments about him as a candidate during the 2016 campaign and the interviewer wanted the President's reaction.  Trump replied, repeatedly expressing his goodwill and support for the new Duchess of Sussex and that he hadn't heard anything about earlier criticism from her.  At the end he used the word "nasty" to describe the comments that he only just heard of secondhand from the interviewer.  And now you would have thought he was insulting the entire British royalty by his comment, which I thought he was provoked into making...

Whatever negative things you might want to say about Donald Trump, he has always made himself available for interviews and has been willing to address questions head-on without evasion.  The journalist in this interview kept prying at him for some kind of interesting reaction about Meghan Markle, and Trump wouldn't oblige...the "nasty" remark was blown way out of proportion, just to make him look bad.  Although I think he has a low moral compass and seems think the universe revolves around himself, as an American I am sick and tired of folks on the other side of the Atlantic acting as if we're somehow obligated to kiss up to their royalty and all the rituals and rules associated with it...didn't we fight a war of independence to break away from that nonsense?  So go ahead, Britain, and deride our president with your asisine big orange balloon and keep showing that clip of him actually standing in front of the queen at one point...I'll say it right now: I couldn't care less about British or any other brand of royalty...to me there is much more nobility and dignity in the masses of people...be they in America, Great Britain, or elsewhere...who have to get out of bed each morning to go to work in order to take care of themselves and their families than a small group of folks born with silver spoons in their mouths who expect the rest of their society to enrich and practically worship them.  So Brits, thanks a lot for actually making me have to stoop to the level of defending Donald Trump...

My May 2019 Running Report

In May I ran a total of 130 miles, missing three days...the longest single run was 8.1 miles.  I ran the May Day Glow Run 5K on the 4th (in the evening) in Jonesville, a few miles west of Gainesville off Newberry Road.  As the year progresses into the summer months, the temperatures are rising...we've seen them spike into the 100s this past week.  So when I do go outside to run around my neighborhood I am careful to take short walking breaks throughout my runs as well as carry a low-sugar sports drink with me for rehydration as I go along.  Healthwise I don't see anything impeding me from continuing along with my running, and I would like to increase my endurance by the fall season to half-marathon level again.  In June there are no public races here other than the weekly Depot Park 5K Parkrun, held each Saturday morning at 7:30 at that east Gainesville park.  It's free but you need to preregister at their website to obtain the barcodes necessary to record and post your finishes.  Here's a link to that site: [Parkrun].  I've run it twice so far this year...it's just tough for me, more an afternoon/evening person...to get up that early on a Saturday morning to run a race.  My main running emphasis in June, though, will be to get out and run some of my own personally-designed courses at a more subdued pace...and pile up the mileage while being careful about the heat.  In years gone by, I used to report for work later in the afternoon, according me more time for longer runs...my reporting time now is 1:30 pm, so I've often had to curtail my runs just to get to work on time.  Looks like I'll just have to start getting up and out earlier if I want to increase my mileage...

Quote of the Week...from Mitch McConnell

The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice.    
                                                                          ---Mitch McConnell

The United States Senate's majority party has been Republican for the last two years of the Obama presidency and for all of Trump's so far.  Kentucky's Mitch McConnell has been majority leader the entire period and has ruled his caucus with a tight rein, demanding strict party loyalty on the vast majority of votes.  And "his" senators have by-and-large meekly complied like sheep with his whims, basically turning the Senate into a one-man legislative body.  In February of 2016, United States Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, a strong conservative, unexpectedly passed away, leaving a vacancy.  Within three hours of the announcement, before President Obama could even talk with him about it, McConnell issued a press release stating that he would not consider any Obama appointment to fill the seat and that it would be filled by the winner of the coming November election after he or she took office.  The above quote was made during this period...Barack Obama, who actually WAS the American people's duly-elected president at the time, still submitted federal judge Merrick Garland as his nominee.  But McConnell snubbed Garland's attempts to meet with him and Charles Grassley, the Senate Judiciary chairman, refused to hold confirmation hearings.  The rest is history: Republican Donald Trump won the election, the Republicans retained control over the Senate, and Neil Gorsuch filled Scalia's seat instead of Garland.  Now fast forward to today in 2019 with the 2020 campaign and election looming ahead.  I've previously suggested on this blog that should another vacancy occur on the Supreme Court during 2020, Mitch McConnell would weasel out of his so-called "principled" rationale for blocking Obama's 2016 nominee and instead push through a Trump replacement nominee.  So when he was questioned about this last week in Paducah, Kentucky, he confirmed my suspicions by stating precisely that...

I know that many, many people keep political score on the United States Supreme Court composition and how the tally of conservatives vs. liberals will tilt the balance regarding strongly divisive issues, some of which carry enormous weight with different people and their associated interest groups  My problem is that on some things I'm on the conservative side and on others I'm more to the left.  I don't have any phobia about an "unbalanced" Court wrecking our country and our rights, but I do believe that when the political leaders responsible for processing its nominees are only interested in playing that numbers game for their own "side" and switch from principle to expediency whenever it suits them, then the system becomes corrupted and everybody eventually loses out when they lose respect for the process...and consequently the Court rulings when they are issued.  I never did like McConnell because of his naked hypocrisy on this and other issues...can't the Republicans come up with anyone better to lead them?  I can think of several in the Senate who would do a better job. As far as I can tell, conservatives and liberals alike despise him...Rush Limbaugh even derisively refers to him as "the Turtle"....

Weekly Short Stories: 1947 Science Fiction, Part 2

I continued my examination of some of the best in short science fiction from 1947, using the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 9 (1947).  The four stories I've reviewed below deal respectively with extraterrestrial contact, a secret invention, sense of identity, and the atom bomb...themes that are common in science fiction short stories.  Here are those stories...

TINY AND THE MONSTER by Theodore Sturgeon
Most alien visitation stories don't begin in the sunny Caribbean, but this one does.  In the Virgin Islands a dog...Great Dane by breed...disappears from its owner Alec for a few hours and then returns subtly changed, if you can call being able to read subtle.  Events seem to mysteriously conspire leading Tiny to be sent to Miss Alistair Forsythe, a metallurgical scientist by profession who lives a little upstate from New York City off the Hudson.  Tiny seems to be the manipulator of events, and what does he have in mind for Alistair...no, I am not going to spoil the story.  Tiny and the Monster, like just about all Theodore Sturgeon stories, are character-intensive and care as much about their relationships as they do the often quirky sci-fi themes that would arise in his fertile imagination...

E FOR EFFORT by T. L. Sherred
Ed, a frustrated small-time, shady entrepreneur stumbles across a small theater run by Miguel, or Mike as it is anglicized.  The movie he sees there is historical, about the encounter between Cortez and Montezuma, with remarkable detail in spite of the low-budget film it is using.  It comes out early on in the story that Mike has invented a machine through which one can view anything that has ever happened anywhere.  So what do Ed and Mike stupidly do with it? They make and distribute blockbuster historical movies, which work out fine for them...especially with the gobs of money they earn...until they make films about the U.S. Civil War and the two World Wars (and their causes).  This is an example of something I've harped upon before: if you have an ability or special access to something that gives you a unique advantage over the rest of the world, then the last thing you should want to do is go about publicizing it...especially when by doing so you are telling people that they can hold no secrets from you.  I gave up on Ed and Mike's foolishness early in the story, but it's a worthwhile examination about the limitations of our so-called "free" society...

LETTER TO ELLEN by Chan Davis
A young biological engineer/scientist is working on a special project with his friend and colleague to create special forms of life while their supervisor keeps the specifics of their ultimate goal secret from them.  One day the colleague sneaks around and discovers the answer, turning their project upside-down and causing a lot of introspection about their own identities.  This relatively brief story is presented in the form of a letter the young man is writing to Ellen, his love interest...

THE FIGURE by Edward Grendon
Only five pages long, The Figure fits with that type of short story that builds up to the climactic and paradigm-shifting final knockout sentence.  Three scientists are teamed up to invent a special form of time machine that can extract something from the future and bring it back.  Suddenly it's revealed by the narrator, one of the three, that the other two decided to "go fishing" and probably won't come back.  Why did they leave?  One clue: the narrator touches upon the sudden population explosion of roaches and other bugs following nuclear detonations, especially with the ones in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  I don't know whether this really happened or not, but the author certainly made it seem real...

More about short science fiction from 1947 next week...

Freckles, 2005-2019

Our precious mixed-breed rescue dog, Freckles, passed away today from organ failure at the age of 14...we're all in a state of grief over her departure, but also remember with great fondness the span of her long life and time with us.  This has to have been one of the sweetest dogs in history, and how fortunate for us that she entered our lives in the summer of 2005.  Here is a reprint from an article I wrote on this blog about her eleven years ago...

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Freckles, Cuddles, and Taffy

Two summers ago, we adopted Freckles (above), a mixed-breed puppy, for my daughter as a advance-birthday present that year. Gainesville has a non-profit organization called Puppy Hill Farms that takes in abandoned animals, cares for them, and puts them up for adoption. Freckles was already spayed when we got her from them. We weren't too sure how big she would grow, but she finally slowed her growth down to where she is about 55 pounds. Freckles is a very high-spirited, lively dog who loves to play with tennis balls or sticks, as well as having her belly rubbed. At the beginning, we took her to obedience classes, where she learned a few commands. Freckles apparently had some traumas before Puppy Hills Farms took her in, because she becomes petrified at the sight of any truck or the sound of any running machinery. Freckles has an older "sister" in Cuddles, another mixed-breed dog that we've had since 1997 (as my son's dog). While Freckles seems to have some greyhound and Aussie shepherd in her, Cuddles is more like a dachshund/basset hound combo and is stocky and close to the ground (but very fast when she wants to be). We adore our dogs. A year ago, Taffy, our miniature poodle, passed on after nineteen happy years with us. I love dogs, and I am not particular about breeds, either. If you live in a place that allows pets, I recommend adopting a mixed breed dog from one of the adoption agencies. Our lives have been enormously enriched by ours! Last month, our veterinarian picked Freckles as the pet of the month (entitling her to a free bath and nail-clipping)! Here are pictures of Cuddles (left) and a very young Taffy (with me, right):

Congress Taking Yet Another Whole Week Off from Work

For many of us we enjoyed the Memorial Day weekend off from work while honoring those who fell in war to protect our freedoms.  Many worked as well...but we're all anticipating returning to our normal work schedules today, the day after Memorial Day...right? Wrong!  Our elected national Congress has scheduled the entire week of Memorial Day off...after all, I guess they think they work so hard on our behalf that they need the extra time...not! I find it more than a little disconcerting that the Senate Majority Leader keeps complaining about the Democrats holding up Trump's nominations and bills, yet the Senate takes off 17-18 full weeks per calendar year...and that doesn't include the weekends.  The House of Representatives takes even more days off,  missing many Mondays and Fridays.  I suppose the rationale for this is that members need to return to their respective states and districts to keep in touch with the people they represent...if this were only so.  Instead, I see party leaders tightly holding their caucuses together in lock-step votes on most issues presented on the floor instead of the members themselves voting according to their own individual consciences and convictions.  I'm sure that when the Senate finally gets around to reconvening on Monday afternoon of June 3rd, Senator McConnell will return to bemoaning how far behind the Senate is with its work...well, dude, if you're so concerned about getting things done then why don't you show up for work like the masses of people you claim to represent? I'm going to work this afternoon, but politicians apparently believe they need a whole week to recover from a holiday...I guess they're just better people than us ordinary folk...

Recently Read Article About Repelling Mosquitos

Since I cancelled my subscription some time back to my local newspaper and have little patience with my local or national TV news, I've come to rely more...for better or for worse...on my MSN newsfeed that pops up on my computer screen upon activation.  Sometimes they have helpful articles about different topics they picked up off other sites: the one I just read about ways to repel mosquitos is good example.  It was a Prevention magazine piece written by Korin Miller and Markham Heid and listed a few ideas that might be of use.  In Gainesville we're bordered on the south by a vast wetlands area called Payne's Prairie...it's the size of our fair city and is a prime breeding zone for those horrible, obnoxious insects that really begin to plague us around this time of the year.  Right now, it would be more appropriate to rename this area Lake Alachua, which it used to be called a century ago before the waters receded considerably.  When the wind is blowing in from the south...a common occurrence this time of year, it blows all those nasty little buggers breeding there over to the city, regardless how careful folks here are to avoid any sources of standing water around themselves (this was one of the article's suggestions).  So like it or not, mosquitos are a fact of life that we folks in Gainesville have to deal with.  Miller and Heid emphasized that with the advent of the dangerous mosquito-borne West Nile and Zika viruses, repelling them is advised for everyone.  Some ideas from the article:

Try to stay out in breezes (or use electric fans to stir up the air).

Avoid the outdoors during dusk and dawn when mosquitos are the most active.

Use DEET (rub on the skin, not spray).  This is the active agent common to many effective mosquito repellents sold in stores, with the concentration affecting the time span of its effectiveness.

Stay cool and avoid sweating...mosquitos are attracted to the hormones within perspiration.

Wear tight or lightly-colored clothes.

Avoid things like exercise, alcohol, or spicy foods that tend to increase metabolic rate and consequently carbon dioxide production...mosquitos go for CO2 in a big way.

Get plants like citronella, lavender, lemongrass, marigolds, and basil that repel mosquitos.

Get your yard sprayed for mosquitos.

Avoid scented products.

I appreciate all the above suggestions by Korin Miller and Markham Heid, although to me exercise is often a major component of going outside, and twilight running is preferable to running in the heat of the day...especially one like today when the temperature is topping 100. Of course, the act of running itself automatically sets up a breeze around me, so that's good...as long as I remain in motion, that is.  But if I'm going to just sit out there in the shade...or maybe do a little evening stargazing...I definitely plan to start slapping on some of that repellent...

NBA, NHL, Soccer Seasons Winding Down for 2019

I just witnessed the Toronto Raptors come from a two-to-nothing deficit to win four straight games over the favored Milwaukee Bucks, claiming their first ever National Basketball Association Eastern Conference title...they'll be starting their league championship series against the Golden State Warriors this Thursday evening, the 30th of May.  I've come to enjoy watching this team play, not only because of their superstar Kawhi Leonard but also for their unselfish team play...my favorite player is Kyle Lowry, who's gone through a lot with this team over the years and is finally getting his due recognition.  For the Raptors/Warriors series, I don't especially care who wins, just that the games are close and the series lasts a while...

In hockey, the NHL playoffs have also reached the stage of the final series to determine their Stanley Cup champion.  The survivors to this point are Boston...my favorite in the playoffs after Tampa Bay dismally failed in their opening series...and St. Louis, who surprised a few by coming back and knocking out San Jose in their last series.  The Blues have never won the Stanley Cup and the Bruins would like to add another...should be fun to watch when I have the opportunity...

The various pro team soccer leagues from different countries have mostly finished their seasons.  In England Manchester City won their second straight Premier League title by a single point over Liverpool, while in Germany's Bundesliga Bayern Munich survived a scare from Borussia Dortmund to claim yet another championship...in England and Germany (as well as most other leagues) there are no postseason playoffs: the regular season champ IS the champ.  Mexico's top league, however, not only has a playoff system they call the Liguilla, but they do it twice a year...as I write this the very final match is on to determine the 2019 Clausura Liguilla champion.  UANL Tigres, which I've consistently followed and supported over the last five years, is looking to gain its fourth Liguilla title against Leon, which finished this regular season with the league's best record.  Meanwhile, Major League Soccer, a spring-to-fall league composed of American and Canadian teams, is in the middle of its season: there's plenty more soccer throughout the summer!

And once basketball and hockey are finished with their playoffs, I'll basically be left with Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer to follow through the summer months.  I haven't been paying much attention to baseball...may that will change once the other sports are through with their seasons...

One other thing: in team professional soccer, the vaunted Champion's League for Europe will stage its championship match next Saturday, June 1 to determine the continent's best team for the year.  It will be an all-England finale pitting London's Tottenham against Liverpool: the site will be Madrid, Spain...should be exciting to watch...

Space Program is Each President's Political Toy

I find it pretty frustrating that with each new administration in Washington our space program gets turned topsy-turvy as the incoming president almost always has a different emphasis and ideas as to where he wants to go with it.  With the last four presidents, Bill Clinton cared little about getting humans out of near-Earth orbit while George W. Bush set into motion plans for a more powerful rocket to take us back to the moon...this time for a permanent base...while retiring the Space Shuttle.  Barack Obama then abruptly ended that, breaking a campaign promise he had made to Floridians just before the 2008 election, and changed the emphasis to outsourcing rocket-building and the manned space programs to private firms like Space X and focusing instead on going to Mars and the Asteroids much further into the future.  And now Donald Trump has steered the program back to the moon, with the idea of establishing businesses there as well as a platform to eventually make trips to the Red Planet.  Although I am totally on board with our current president's program...and each president does have undue influence over our space efforts since NASA is an agency within the Executive Branch...I also am skeptical that it will stay in place beyond his tenure in office.  Whoever succeeds him, I'm sure, will want to put their own personal stamp on the space program...something I find extremely counterproductive as it causes massive changes of our goals every few years.  No wonder we've been stuck having to depend on the Russians to launch our own astronauts into space for so long!  We desperately need to be able to make our space program not such a political toy for each president to play with...and wreck in the process.  In this I am referring primarily to manned exploration and settlement of other worlds, efforts that need a continuity of bipartisan political support spanning many years for them to bear any fruit.  Naturally, I'm hearing next-to-nothing about this problem in the already-overheated, much-too-early presidential race from the other candidates.  Here's an issue on which that I can stand with Trump...unfortunately, his program may be doomed if he loses the 2020 election just because he himself pushed it...if he loses, his successor will doubtless turn around and change everything once again.  Sigh...

Quote of the Week...from Yogi Berra

Make a game plan and stick to it.  Unless it's not working.                      ---Yogi Berra

Yogi Berra was a Hall of Fame catcher and fantastic hitter for the New York Yankees during my early childhood when they were tearing up the baseball world as a fixture in the World Series from year to year, winning several of them along the way.  Later on he tried his hand at managing with mixed results.  What many remember him the most for, however...besides his many Yoo-Hoo TV commercials...was his sense of humor and ability to twist the English language like a pretzel, creating ludicrous contradictions in many of his sayings, like "Ninety percent of the lies they're telling about me aren't true" or "I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous".  Sometimes, though, he would come up with something that for most sounded ridiculous, but upon thinking about it a little would actually contain some profound wisdom...like the above quote, for example...

Yogi was a baseball man and it's natural that he would term advance strategizing as "a game plan", and in sports as will as other endeavors it only makes common sense to know up front what you're going to do before commencing with it.  There will almost always be a few bumps at the start...but if your strategy is well thought out it's probably in your best interests to stick with it.  But in competitive environments the opponent not only has his own game plan, but is also adjusting to yours in order to render it ineffective.  Still, even without an adversary to throw a monkey wrench into all your well-laid plans, the pervasive nature of chaos as it can overtake any undertaking (ooh, that's sounds like something Yogi might say) demands that tactics and priorities must change along with the often-confusing changes going on around.  Besides, in a game or a project, you only have so much information to start with...the flood of input soon into it can be daunting and it's probably a good idea to stick to your guns until you can adequately process it all.  But if it's become clear that your strategy is a complete exercise in futility, why not then ditch it and try something new?  Yogi, you never let me down with your wisdom...

Just Finished Reading A Separate Peace by John Knowles

When I recently bought John Knowles' novel A Separate Peace (for 25 cents) at a local used book sale, I didn't recall that I had actually read it before. But as I went through it, the text seemed more and more familiar...making me conclude that it was probably one of those high school English class reading assignments that I had stashed away in the deep, dark recesses of my memory.  It's a story about two boys attending a private prep school in New Hampshire in 1942 as World War II raged in the news and shortages and restrictions made themselves more and more felt around them, and with military service looming ahead of them upon graduation.  Gene, the first-person narrator, is the more introverted and cautious while "Finny" (from Phineas) is extroverted and impulsive.  The story quickly evolves as an examination of their friendship and its nature: Gene finds himself a follower of Finny's exploits, eventually feeling resentment at the latter's apparent view of him as being little more than just an extension of his own dominating personality.  The rift between the two is kept hidden and unexpressed until...well, here's where I let you, the potential reader of this novel, find out for yourself what happens...

It is that determination that some have to dominate and submerge others in their relationships...and the other party's unhappy and irrational acquiescence to such an inequitable and demeaning arrangement, that impressed me the most with A Separate Peace.  All throughout my life I have experienced people who, like Finny, seem to think that there's only one narrative to display interest in: their own, and that it is supposedly up to me to simply lay down my own sense of identity, interests, and values and follow them in everything they say and do.  To which I say: screw that!  If you haven't read this 1959 book by John Knowles, I recommend it to you. But why not save the quarter I spent on it and just check it out for free from the library?  One warning, though: although it is a short novel, it is also pretty disturbing...

Weekly Short Stories: 1947 Science Fiction, Part 1

This week I moved forward one year in my reviews of past science fiction short stories to 1947...far bygone, to be sure, but still close enough that many alive then are still around now (including Stephen King, born in that year).  The book I drew upon is Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 9 (1947)...this series spans the years 1939-63 in short sci-fi.  Here are my reactions to the first four stories in this "year's best" anthology...

LITTLE LOST ROBOT by Isaac Asimov
To fully grasp this story you need to understand a little about Isaac Asimov's created fictional universe, especially with regard to robots.  In the not-so-distant future, robots, positronically-powered, are all android in nature and have achieved a great level of sophistication.  There has been popular backlash against them, and partially as a response all robots are programmed to adhere to the Three Laws of Robotics...the first and foremost being that a robot can never cause harm to a human, either by direct action or through neglect.  In a remote hyperatomic-driven space base, robotics psychologist Susan Calvin is brought in the solve a mystery, that of a missing robot that had part of its First Law amended to allow it to work in high-radiation zones with humans.  The missing robot has concealed itself among 52 other normal, unaltered robots.  Dr. Calvin's task is to figure a way to discover which one of the 53 is the hidden robot...all will need to be destroyed should she fail in her mission.  This is as much a detective mystery story as it is science fiction, and Asimov proudly admitted as much...

TOMORROW'S CHILDREN by Poul Anderson
A bleak tale of the worldwide apocalypse on many levels following a planetary nuclear war two years earlier.  Hugh Drummond, the protagonist, is an American military officer sent on a mission to discover the extent of the postwar damage, and he returns to the de facto President in Taylor, Oregon...the new national capital "city"...to deliver the somber news.  It isn't just the immediate death and destruction caused by the explosions or the massive social upheavals...the radiation has permeated everything on Earth, forever changing the future of humanity in the most fundamental ways.  This story came out while the United States had monopoly control over the nuclear bomb, two years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  But just two years later the Soviet Union would explode their first atomic weapon and Anderson's foreboding tale would take on a greater sense of meaning and urgency...

CHILD'S PLAY by William Tenn
One of the grosser short science fiction stories I've read and reminiscent of some earlier works by Lewis Padgett, Child's Play has no connection with the horror movie series starring the evil little doll Chucky.  Instead, an ordinary, insecure lawyer in a firm gets a mystery gift delivered to his door in the form of a large box.  Inside are instructions and ingredients for a child's educational toy: Build-a-Body.  He learns, through reading the instructional booklet, all there is about constructing other life forms, including humans.  Discovering that he can make twins of people, he decides to "copy" the gorgeous secretary who just threw him over for a colleague.  But there's a tall, menacing-looking man trying to find him...our lawyer hero knows his "present" came from the future and this dude is out to retrieve it: he'd better hurry with his plans.  I figured out the ending for this story too early...but the premise was interesting although quite a bit disturbing...

TIME AND TIME AGAIN by H. Beam Piper
A dying military officer on the battlefield in World War III...year 1975...gets a special injection that sends him back to his 13-year-old body and New Hampshire home in 1945, but complete with all his memories from the intervening years.  Knowing what's to come, he has to come clean with his father about his situation...his intent is to alter history over the next few years so that the war never materializes.  Time and Time Again is clearly about time travel, but toward the end goes more into a speculative conversation about the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the "now" as it passes through the chronology of years.  Interesting ideas, although the story didn't adequately explain itself, in my opinion...

More from 1947 in the world of excellent science fiction short stories next week...

Game of Thrones and Avengers: Endgame: To Spoil or Not to Spoil

There are two series, one on television and the other on the big screen, that have closed out just recently with their final episodes: Games of Thrones and Avengers.  I haven't followed either...I only saw Iron Man, featuring Robert Downey, Jr. as the eventual Avengers superhero, and managed to see part of one of the Thrones episodes when I happened to get a free sneak preview of HBO, the series that carries it, on my cable service.  But I have read author George R.R. Martin's The Song of Ice and Fire, on which Game of Thrones is based, all the way through the latest and fifth book and have for several years awaited the next installment.  Incredibly, Martin assented to allow the HBO series to continue all the way to the conclusion, with different characters dying out and others rising to the ascendancy...none of which he has yet revealed in his book series. Now I'm determined to boycott any more books by this author, series-related or not: that's NOT how to treat your loyal reading base, dude!

Since I'm washing my hands of Martin's fantasy series, I don't suppose then that it should matter how the television Games of Thrones ends, but I still find it pretty disconcerting to be exposed to all the plot spoilers that have spontaneously appeared on social media and even from sources that should know better than to reveal things which others are waiting to discover for themselves.  Contrast this with the Avengers final movie Endgame, for which there seemed to be a near-universal agreement among fans not to divulge how it ended.  Yet with Game of Thrones I hear...without asking for it...how many parents had named their daughters Daenerys and now are going to have to live with that decision.  Or how Taylor Swift, judged by an popular magazine to be one of the "100 most influential people in the world", has been greatly influenced by Arya Stark.  Here is where fiction gets a little muddy...which is more surreal: Taylor Swift being influential on any level or fictional character Arya Stark's reality to her? In any event, fans of this series are getting themselves all knotted up over the different characters and that final episode...to them I say: get a life, or at least some semblance thereof, until you can get yourselves hooked on the next fad HBO series.  And by the way, believe it or not, not everyone on Earth is necessarily following the same crap you're so engrossed in...

Disappointed With Current Alternative Music "Hits"

I've expressed before on this blog that my popular music tastes tend to focus on alternative/indie rock, which in the past has produced many memorable songs and brought my attention to several talented, inspired acts.  Of late, however, I have noticed that the most popular alternative hits are insipid songs that musically display little creativity.  Instead, the performers seem like they are competing on those TV reality talent shows I avoid like the plague and which are so popular in this era.  It hasn't always been like this...as a matter of fact, I didn't notice the change within the genre until around three years ago.  The other day I was listening to Google Play's Alternative Hotlist, which plays the current rotation of chart-toppers in alternative music...and after an hour of wincing and grimacing finally gave up and switched to one of their artist-oriented channels.  You see, if you want to hear music of the general type of a particular act you like, you just enter the act's name and their algorithm will create a station around it.  I chose Radiohead, and found myself sighing with relief as one song after another was played that resonated with me.  Unfortunately, almost all of them were songs from the past...is anybody coming out with anything interesting these days?  I have to search high and low for a current song that doesn't bore me to tears...