Let's see, it's Monday once again, so I think I'll lay out the next ten songs on my all-time top 500 list, along with the customary commentary. Man, do I ever like these songs...
370 NIAGARA FALLS...Sufjan Stevens
This is one of the songs on my list that was neither a standard album track nor a singles release (or B-side). Niagara Falls can be found on Stevens' 2003 Michigan album, but only on the vinyl edition's second disc. I discovered Sufjan Stevens in 2009 and quickly came to like much of his earlier music, including this brief and sweet, nostalgic song of childhood when he could see Niagara Falls from way off in the distance. In today's Internet-world, Niagara Falls is pretty easy to find: the singer's mellow voice and his trademark banjo highlight it...
369 POSITIVELY FOURTH STREET...Bob Dylan
Possibly the greatest putdown song of all time, the closing line was beyond hilarious: "Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes, you'd know what a drag it is to see you". I never did care all that much for Dylan's 1965 blockbuster hit Like a Rolling Stone, but when this song came out I had to stop and take notice. He's got some more entries on my favorites list in weeks to come...
368 THE BITCH IS BACK...Elton John
The summer and fall of 1974 in my life was a time that I look back on as being positive and optimistic...this song captures a lot of that feeling with the singer asserting his dogged determination to succeed and those standing in the way could just step back or get bowled over. It's one of those "I'm gonna succeed and if you don't like it, too bad" anthems along the lines of Tom Petty's I Won't Back Down. I wish Elton had recorded more of these strong rockers...
367 GET BACK...the Beatles
The Beatles' monster hit single Get Back...sung by Paul McCartney with guest Billy Preston working wonders on the keyboard...came out in 1969, the year before their final album Let It Be was released. Get Back was a track on that album but they cut off the great ending and ruined it...listen to it from another source than Let It Be. Back during '69 I remember strongly disliking both of the band's Abbey Road hits Something and Come Together...it wouldn't be for another couple of years before I listened to the whole album and discovered some masterpiece tracks on it. Get Back was more of an old-style Beatles song, very fun to listen to...
366 THE PORPOISE SONG...the Monkees
In 1968 when the Monkees recorded Head, their sixth studio album in only two years, during which time they acted in 107 Monkees TV series episodes and went on numerous publicity and concert tours and interviews, the critics panned them claiming that they were a manufactured band. But how many award-winning, lauded musical acts since then don't write their own music or play their own instruments...the hypocrisy here is outrageous, in my opinion. Head's The Porpoise Song is a collaborative singing effort of Davy Jones and Mickey Dolenz, with a dreamy-sounding accompaniment backing them...the album was recorded after the TV series was canceled and was the soundtrack for the same-named movie starring the band. The Porpoise Song was featured in the movie Vanilla Sky...
365 WILL IT GO ROUND IN CIRCLES...Billy Preston
I enjoyed the summer of 1973, and this song was a big hit then...hence the positive associations with going to the beach. It's also the second song on today's list Preston was involved in...look back a couple of songs. He reminded me a bit of Stevie Wonder on this song, a great compliment to be sure. And Will It Go Round in Circles contains one of my all-time favorite lines: "I've got a story ain't got no moral, let the bad guy win every once in a while". This comes in handy from time to time, like when I'm watching the Alabama Crimson Tide or New England Patriots play or receiving the disappointing news on election night...
364 WONDERIN'...Neil Young
In the early 1980s, much to his recording company's chagrin and who later sued him for it, Neil Young made a string of narrowly-themed and just-as-narrowly-appreciated albums...one of these, from which Wonderin' came, was a tribute to old-time fifties rock n' roll. But Wonderin' is Neil Young through and through, and the official music video to it is one of the funniest I've seen...and which to me is the forerunner to Peter Gabriel's artistically-styled Sledgehammer video that came out three years later...
363 WELCOME TO THE BLACK PARADE...My Chemical Romance
This song...as well as its entire 2006 concept album The Black Parade...by this indie/alternative rock band, deals with the unsettling and often taboo subject of death, especially in the accompanying official video. It's hard to imagine, with the vivid and disturbing imagery of that video, that this piece would be a source of comfort and impart a sweet spirit as a moving tribute to someone recently deceased, but that's the impression I got from it. One of the reasons I think death is often taboo in our society for discussion and artistic expression is the absolutist way in which religions treat the subject...all of them have their own ideas on exactly what happens and if someone comes out with a creative and imaginative treatment of it, there's not only a possibility but rather a certainly that it will garner criticism. I thought the song stood well on its own without the video, but that video...
362 BABY LET ME TAKE YOU HOME...the Animals
Back in 1964 when as a seven-year-old brat I thought of the Animals...not the Beatles...as my favorite rock band, this great song was released in the USA following their big hit House of the Rising Sun. I always looked forward to watching the Ed Sullivan Show when they were scheduled and on one of those evenings came to despise President Lyndon Johnson when the show...and their appearance...was preempted because of his televised nationwide address about some far-off place called Vietnam. I still think of Eric Burdon as the greatest singer in the genre's history...it's too bad the band couldn't write their own songs the way the Beatles or Rolling Stones did...
361 SAW LIGHTNING...Beck
Saw Lightning is easily my favorite song of this year, by the accomplished LA-based alternative rock artist Beck. The funny thing about it is that after it came out my wife Melissa and I were walking down Daytona Beach early one evening when the whole western sky erupted into lightning...kinda scary, although some dumbbell beachgoers just stood there out in the ocean staring at it all and others thought it would be just peachy recording it all on their smartphones: the two of us hauled ass back to the hotel. Later I heard of someone out on Ormond Beach getting struck by lightning and killed...I wonder if it happened when we were out walking. This song, with a strong blues and religious flavor, is heavy on percussion and awesome riffs...
That's it for this week...next week I'll cover songs #360-351...
Monday, November 25, 2019
Sunday, November 24, 2019
Madame Engadine's Elegant Parisian Party
I'll leave you to stew a minute in speculation about the meaning of this article's title...let me just say that my recurring "presence" in that place is due in large part to the abysmally low level of quality in late night television programming when I get home from work during the week. Other than an occasional live sports event...usually on the west coast...or a very rare South Park episode I like, I have the cable news channels with their perennial, wearisome war of words between the two main political parties...it continues in the opening segments of the popular late-night talk shows, who have substituted angry and vicious political tripe for humor, along with guest "stars" I've never heard of. So what's left for me? Short of switching to the ambient music station...which usually sends me into a deep sleep...I head off to YouTube to watch what is probably my favorite series of all time, and more likely than not, my favorite episode of that series from the late 1960s. It is about a British secret agent, played by the late Patrick McGoohan, who angrily resigns, get knocked out, and awakens to find himself in a prison that is in the form of a fancy resort: the Village...location unknown. I'm speaking of course about The Prisoner, and the fantastic episode is A., B. and C. So what does this have to do with Madame Engadine's fancy party?
In The Prisoner, the kidnapped agent is told he is now Number Six...all residents there are assigned numbers, both the inmates and wardens. Running the Village is Number Two, presumably with the mysterious, unknown Number One on top of the ruling hierarchy. The entire series involves attempt after attempt to lure Number Six into explaining why he resigned...but the agent refuses to break. In A., B., and C. they come up with a scheme...through the invention of a technique that broadcasts Number Six's dreams on a television screen...to make their target dream of a popular French party he used to frequent and then have him meet in succession there three different contacts, dubbed "A.", "B.", and "C.", one of whom Number Two thinks will solve the mystery of his resignation. It is this party, hosted by the warm and sophisticated Paris socialite Madame Engadine, that has ultimately become what I now hold to be the impossible standard of what any decent party should be. Impossible because, after all, the good Madame obviously had a mansion and a lot of money to spend for it and most parties are on a much more modest scale. Still, I liked hers because the guests were personally greeted and welcomed and then accorded freedom of movement and association without being corralled into overly-organized events such as the idiotic games that plague (and to me, ruin) many parties and social events. I definitely think that Number Six liked her parties, too. Check out the episode...you may end up watching the whole seventeen-part series. And dig that party...
In The Prisoner, the kidnapped agent is told he is now Number Six...all residents there are assigned numbers, both the inmates and wardens. Running the Village is Number Two, presumably with the mysterious, unknown Number One on top of the ruling hierarchy. The entire series involves attempt after attempt to lure Number Six into explaining why he resigned...but the agent refuses to break. In A., B., and C. they come up with a scheme...through the invention of a technique that broadcasts Number Six's dreams on a television screen...to make their target dream of a popular French party he used to frequent and then have him meet in succession there three different contacts, dubbed "A.", "B.", and "C.", one of whom Number Two thinks will solve the mystery of his resignation. It is this party, hosted by the warm and sophisticated Paris socialite Madame Engadine, that has ultimately become what I now hold to be the impossible standard of what any decent party should be. Impossible because, after all, the good Madame obviously had a mansion and a lot of money to spend for it and most parties are on a much more modest scale. Still, I liked hers because the guests were personally greeted and welcomed and then accorded freedom of movement and association without being corralled into overly-organized events such as the idiotic games that plague (and to me, ruin) many parties and social events. I definitely think that Number Six liked her parties, too. Check out the episode...you may end up watching the whole seventeen-part series. And dig that party...
Saturday, November 23, 2019
Just Finished Reading The Glass Ocean by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White
The Glass Ocean is a 2018 historical fiction novel written by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White. Its focus is the May, 1915 doomed voyage of the passenger ship Lusitania, which was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-Boat off the coast of Ireland in the thick of World War I. The narrative is divided between three protagonists and two times: writer Sarah Blake, with the burden of caring for her early-onset-Alzheimer's mother, is running out of money in 2013 as the proceeds of her book from five years earlier are drying up and she needs a new source of writing inspiration. Opening up an old chest her mother was storing, Sarah discovers that her great-grandfather was employed as a steward on the Lusitania and died with it...and he left behind some papers that send her on a trail to England to unravel the mysteries surrounding that ship's last trip and demise. The narrative shifts to 1915 and alternately...with occasional returns to 2013 and Sarah...describes the experiences of Lusitania passengers Caroline, a wealthy American industrialist's wife with a talent for the piano, and Tess, the daughter of a traveling con man who is now teaming up with her sister to commit a great forgery on the ship. The story has the name Langford to unite both eras: Robert in 1915, the dashing love interest of both women then, and his descendant John in 2013, whom Sarah has persuaded to help her with her investigation. The authors inserted into their tale the notion that there was some significant wartime espionage going on during the ill-fated Atlantic crossing, with suspicion and fear abounding. As with all historical fiction, I found myself wondering where the truth ended and the fiction began, finally deciding that my knowledge of the true events of the Lusitania sinking wouldn't be greatly enhanced by this tale and to simply treat this book as a good piece of adventure, mystery and romance fiction...which it was. It's not a very long book, and I think you'd enjoy it, too...
Friday, November 22, 2019
Quote of the Week...from Amy Klobuchar
I'm not going to go for things just because they sound good on a bumper sticker and then throw in a free car. We have an obligation to have people's backs, be honest about what we can pay for, and be smart about how we do it. Amy Klobuchar.
Amy Klobuchar is the senior senator from Minnesota and a Democratic candidate for president in 2020. The above quote she made at Wednesday night's Democratic presidential debate I picked up on a retweet from Utah's independent conservative Republican Evan McMullin, who "liked" her statement. If you're ever wondering why Senator Klobuchar is my first choice among the candidates for president, what she said pretty much exemplifies my respect for her reasonability. Not that I agree with all of her opinions...like most of the rest of the Democratic field Klobuchar tends to treat Trump like he's the most despicable creature on Earth: I'm not a personal fan of him either, but my dislike isn't to the extent of the "resisters" and I find myself agreeing with some of his positions on issues, especially those relating to national defense and border security...but then again I recognize that this election is essentially a referendum on Donald Trump and the opposition sees its own unity in terms of going after him. The Minnesota senator has always been wildly popular in her home state, her constituents recognizing her attention to their concerns by rewarding her with repeat landslide election victories there. Klobuchar is one of those senators who tend to steer away from "horizontal" tit-for-tat partisan politics in her role there and instead works within her caucus and with the Republicans to try and come up with bills that advance issues she deems important...which I think most Americans want our elected officials to be doing instead of whining and shoving at each other like petulant little babies. When I'm watching C-Span2, the channel that covers live the U.S. Senate proceedings...and Senator Klobuchar takes the floor to speak, I know that I'm about to be briefed well on an important issue, with the speaker rationally presenting its pros and cons without impugning the integrity of the opposition, expressing her conclusion while encouraging others...usually on the other side of the aisle...to join her effort. I think she would make a fantastic president and is only far back in the pack of Democratic candidates because the vast majority of her party's potential supporters are placing their current hopes in Joe Biden, who quite frankly has disappointed me so far this campaign season. It's still a long way off from March's Florida Primary...if I had to vote right now it would be for Amy Klobuchar, although as she is such a reasonable person I don't think she'll stay in the campaign too long after Iowa and New Hampshire if her candidacy doesn't eventually catch on...
Amy Klobuchar is the senior senator from Minnesota and a Democratic candidate for president in 2020. The above quote she made at Wednesday night's Democratic presidential debate I picked up on a retweet from Utah's independent conservative Republican Evan McMullin, who "liked" her statement. If you're ever wondering why Senator Klobuchar is my first choice among the candidates for president, what she said pretty much exemplifies my respect for her reasonability. Not that I agree with all of her opinions...like most of the rest of the Democratic field Klobuchar tends to treat Trump like he's the most despicable creature on Earth: I'm not a personal fan of him either, but my dislike isn't to the extent of the "resisters" and I find myself agreeing with some of his positions on issues, especially those relating to national defense and border security...but then again I recognize that this election is essentially a referendum on Donald Trump and the opposition sees its own unity in terms of going after him. The Minnesota senator has always been wildly popular in her home state, her constituents recognizing her attention to their concerns by rewarding her with repeat landslide election victories there. Klobuchar is one of those senators who tend to steer away from "horizontal" tit-for-tat partisan politics in her role there and instead works within her caucus and with the Republicans to try and come up with bills that advance issues she deems important...which I think most Americans want our elected officials to be doing instead of whining and shoving at each other like petulant little babies. When I'm watching C-Span2, the channel that covers live the U.S. Senate proceedings...and Senator Klobuchar takes the floor to speak, I know that I'm about to be briefed well on an important issue, with the speaker rationally presenting its pros and cons without impugning the integrity of the opposition, expressing her conclusion while encouraging others...usually on the other side of the aisle...to join her effort. I think she would make a fantastic president and is only far back in the pack of Democratic candidates because the vast majority of her party's potential supporters are placing their current hopes in Joe Biden, who quite frankly has disappointed me so far this campaign season. It's still a long way off from March's Florida Primary...if I had to vote right now it would be for Amy Klobuchar, although as she is such a reasonable person I don't think she'll stay in the campaign too long after Iowa and New Hampshire if her candidacy doesn't eventually catch on...
Thursday, November 21, 2019
Checking Out What's Going On in "My" Pro Soccer Leagues
For this 2019-20 professional soccer season my interest in the sport has abruptly waned...I'm not quite sure why this is so, but there it is. It's been quite some time since I tuned in to a Mexican Premier League (Liga MX) or Major League Soccer match...and I haven't watched a single English Premier League match all season. This in spite of me having following all three leagues, many of their games available on my cable service...Mexico's is on Univision, MLS games were shown (their season's now over) on ESPN and English soccer on NBC-Sports. Out of curiosity I checked the respective standings of these three leagues I follow...I usually ignore the rest of the world's many pro soccer leagues (although I used to lightly follow Germany's Bundesliga) to see who's doing well, who isn't, and how "my" teams are doing...
In Major League Soccer (covering the USA and Canada), whose seasons lie completely within the calendar year and thus don't need hyphenation, the 2019 season is over and the Seattle Sounders defeated Toronto in the championship playoff match on November 10. For the regular season, Los Angeles FC had the best record and so earned this year's Supporter's Shield award. I generally support the Portland and Orlando franchises in MLS: the former managed to squeak into the playoffs while the latter once again missed the postseason, finishing a dismal next-to-last in their division. In Mexico's Liga MX there's only one week left in the Apertura split season for 2019-20 and then the top eight finishers (out of this season's 19 teams) will be eligible for the Liguilla championship playoffs. My team, the UANL Tigres, has won at least one Liguilla championship in each of the previous four seasons and is again qualified for the postseason...they're fighting for a higher seed which would give them an marked advantage in the playoffs. In the English Premier League Liverpool is undefeated so far and running away in first place from the others. Surprisingly, "my" Leicester City is hanging on to second place...defending champs Manchester City have already suffered three losses this season and may find themselves too far behind to make up the difference in 2019-20...
I'd like to watch Tigres play in the upcoming Liguilla, but the match would need to be on the weekend and one that is actually televised. As for English soccer, their premier league to me is the best in the world for being played at such a high level of skill, combined with a more competitive distribution of teams than is the case in other countries like Spain, Germany, France, and Italy. If I'm going to revitalize my interest in soccer, my best bet is to make some time on Saturday to watch one of the English matches...
In Major League Soccer (covering the USA and Canada), whose seasons lie completely within the calendar year and thus don't need hyphenation, the 2019 season is over and the Seattle Sounders defeated Toronto in the championship playoff match on November 10. For the regular season, Los Angeles FC had the best record and so earned this year's Supporter's Shield award. I generally support the Portland and Orlando franchises in MLS: the former managed to squeak into the playoffs while the latter once again missed the postseason, finishing a dismal next-to-last in their division. In Mexico's Liga MX there's only one week left in the Apertura split season for 2019-20 and then the top eight finishers (out of this season's 19 teams) will be eligible for the Liguilla championship playoffs. My team, the UANL Tigres, has won at least one Liguilla championship in each of the previous four seasons and is again qualified for the postseason...they're fighting for a higher seed which would give them an marked advantage in the playoffs. In the English Premier League Liverpool is undefeated so far and running away in first place from the others. Surprisingly, "my" Leicester City is hanging on to second place...defending champs Manchester City have already suffered three losses this season and may find themselves too far behind to make up the difference in 2019-20...
I'd like to watch Tigres play in the upcoming Liguilla, but the match would need to be on the weekend and one that is actually televised. As for English soccer, their premier league to me is the best in the world for being played at such a high level of skill, combined with a more competitive distribution of teams than is the case in other countries like Spain, Germany, France, and Italy. If I'm going to revitalize my interest in soccer, my best bet is to make some time on Saturday to watch one of the English matches...
Wednesday, November 20, 2019
Weekly Short Stories: 1953 Science Fiction, Part 4
Today I finish my look back at science fiction short stories from the year 1953, as selected by the editors in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 15 (1953). Two of them I've already reviewed on this blog and the last one you might already be familiar with if you're a "classic" television fan...
TIME IS THE TRAITOR by Alfred Bester
I discussed this story earlier on this blog...here's a link to that article: [link]. An uncannily accurate professional decision-maker travels the galaxy while imposing his quirky personality on everyone...including murdering any man with the name "Kruger". His staff hire a genial ex-boxer to befriend him and root out the cause of his rage...the bribes and hush money are seriously cutting into the company's profits. One important thing I recently picked up while rereading it (for the umpteenth time): when remembering events and people from years gone by, how we ourselves have changed during that intervening span will alter those memories...something that I've been emphasizing of late in some articles...
THE WALL AROUND THE WORLD by Theodore Cogswell
Another of my favorite sci-fi tales that I've previously discussed: click on the following link: [link]. A boy living in a society based on magic that is enclosed by a vertical thousand-foot wall shows an aptitude for technology and machines, severely frowned upon by the authorities in his "world". He wants to scale the wall, whose smooth surface precludes any climbing...and the best broomsticks will only reach a certain height. It's the ending of this story that to me made it worth reading and brought it all together...a real paradigm-shifter...
THE MODEL OF A JUDGE by William Morrison
On a minor satellite of Saturn there lives a race of savage humanoid beings who would even attack and devour people...one of them, captured, trained, and operated on to restrain his carnivorous instincts and now deemed as a trustworthy member of human society, is picked to be the judge in a baking contest among the settlers' wives. You can almost see how this one's gonna end once you get all the needed info about the protagonist...it all hinges on a metaphor somebody inadvertently blurts out...
HALL OF MIRRORS by Fredric Brown
A cyclic time-travel story with a special twist, I was impressed with both the logic and resigned decision-making of the protagonist...who incidentally turns out to be the only character. I also felt that although the story itself gave a couple of examples of time travel into the past, its main thrust...that of time-travel into the future, might well be manageable at some time in the "future". Given what happened to the time traveler, what decision would you make...and how certain would you be that you would "always" make it? Check out the story to decipher all these cryptic remarks of mine...
IT'S A GOOD LIFE by Jerome Bixby
This story was adapted into a famous Twilight Zone episode starring the later series Lost in Space's Billy Mumy as a little boy in a rural midwestern American town...complete with surrounding cornfields...who is born with god-like abilities of mind-reading, telekinesis, and the ability to transmute matter. The point, I think, of this tale was that it can sometimes be a good thing that babies and little children are relatively helpless because of their utter lack of social understanding and inability to see the consequences of their actions. The written version, which I read first before seeing it on TV, is more sympathetic to little Anthony as he prefers reading the simple minds of the little animals around him and likes to construct places they enjoy going to...the Twilight Zone kid is just simply a little monster with hardly any redeeming qualities...
Next week I'll begin looking at science fiction short stories from 1954...
TIME IS THE TRAITOR by Alfred Bester
I discussed this story earlier on this blog...here's a link to that article: [link]. An uncannily accurate professional decision-maker travels the galaxy while imposing his quirky personality on everyone...including murdering any man with the name "Kruger". His staff hire a genial ex-boxer to befriend him and root out the cause of his rage...the bribes and hush money are seriously cutting into the company's profits. One important thing I recently picked up while rereading it (for the umpteenth time): when remembering events and people from years gone by, how we ourselves have changed during that intervening span will alter those memories...something that I've been emphasizing of late in some articles...
THE WALL AROUND THE WORLD by Theodore Cogswell
Another of my favorite sci-fi tales that I've previously discussed: click on the following link: [link]. A boy living in a society based on magic that is enclosed by a vertical thousand-foot wall shows an aptitude for technology and machines, severely frowned upon by the authorities in his "world". He wants to scale the wall, whose smooth surface precludes any climbing...and the best broomsticks will only reach a certain height. It's the ending of this story that to me made it worth reading and brought it all together...a real paradigm-shifter...
THE MODEL OF A JUDGE by William Morrison
On a minor satellite of Saturn there lives a race of savage humanoid beings who would even attack and devour people...one of them, captured, trained, and operated on to restrain his carnivorous instincts and now deemed as a trustworthy member of human society, is picked to be the judge in a baking contest among the settlers' wives. You can almost see how this one's gonna end once you get all the needed info about the protagonist...it all hinges on a metaphor somebody inadvertently blurts out...
HALL OF MIRRORS by Fredric Brown
A cyclic time-travel story with a special twist, I was impressed with both the logic and resigned decision-making of the protagonist...who incidentally turns out to be the only character. I also felt that although the story itself gave a couple of examples of time travel into the past, its main thrust...that of time-travel into the future, might well be manageable at some time in the "future". Given what happened to the time traveler, what decision would you make...and how certain would you be that you would "always" make it? Check out the story to decipher all these cryptic remarks of mine...
IT'S A GOOD LIFE by Jerome Bixby
This story was adapted into a famous Twilight Zone episode starring the later series Lost in Space's Billy Mumy as a little boy in a rural midwestern American town...complete with surrounding cornfields...who is born with god-like abilities of mind-reading, telekinesis, and the ability to transmute matter. The point, I think, of this tale was that it can sometimes be a good thing that babies and little children are relatively helpless because of their utter lack of social understanding and inability to see the consequences of their actions. The written version, which I read first before seeing it on TV, is more sympathetic to little Anthony as he prefers reading the simple minds of the little animals around him and likes to construct places they enjoy going to...the Twilight Zone kid is just simply a little monster with hardly any redeeming qualities...
Next week I'll begin looking at science fiction short stories from 1954...
Tuesday, November 19, 2019
Just Finished Reading Poland by James A. Michener
Poland, by James A. Michener, is the third novel I've read by this late prolific author of forty. A reflective historical look at this important eastern European country's past from the vantage point of three fictional families sharply divided by class, it was published in 1983, a little more than a year after that Eastern Bloc nation declared martial law and severely curtailed its people's freedoms. By decade's end, though, communist rule would be overthrown and, following free elections in 1989, a capitalism system was instituted. Michener's story goes up to and hints at the coup d'état in December, 1981 that put an abrupt end to liberalization in that society without covering it...since he would live on to 1997, I wonder what he thought about the subsequent fall of communism and the Soviet Union. The novel itself spans nearly 800 years as it describes a stagnant social system in Poland of powerful landowning nobles called "magnates", lesser landowners called "gentry", and the peasants, comprising the vast majority of Poles and who for all practical purposes were the property and slaves of the magnates and gentry. This grossly inequitable system would last into the last century when two cataclysmic world wars would forever uproot and transform their society...
If there are two important themes winding through this generally chronologically-presented novel, they are that (1) Poland was a land, without the benefit of natural barriers, that was constantly either under the threat of attack and occupation by outside forces or in the state of occupation by them, and (2) the magnates...and to a lesser degree the gentry...fiercely held onto their stranglehold on Polish society while always believing themselves to be enlightened, free, and democratic. In the early centuries, as Michener laid it out, these ruling families demonstrated great patriotism and courage in the defense of their homeland from invaders. But when Poland began to be partitioned...and ultimately eliminated from the map for more than a century...in the late 1700s by Prussia, Austria, and Russia, these same magnate families enthusiastically adopted the banners of their new national rulers in the interests of preserving their own properties and status. Part of the problem that made Polish governments weak was that their ruling king was always elected by the magnate-controlled legislature and that usually weak kings were selected from abroad in order to ensure that none of them would become too powerful. The other part of the problem was the so-called "Golden Freedom" in which just one member of the elected legislature could raise an objection and cause that entire session's work to be nullified...this caused a usually broken national government which kept the magnates strong and in ultimate control...
I'm not going into any detail describing the fictional families, characters, and locales...the author did a great job with developing and presenting them, though. As with the previous James Michener novels I've read, Space and Centennial, I had to struggle a bit trying to figure out what was real history and what was a product of his vivid imagination. The Tatar and Teutonic Knight invasions from the 1200s and 1400s respectively, the union with Lithuania, the partition period, and the many and often desperate struggles of the last century were well-presented...especially with regard to the horrors of Nazi occupation during World War II. You'll get to know a lot about Polish history, culture (especially paintings and classical music), geography and its society...at least up to the year 1981...if you read this worthwhile book. Well, I guess it's about time for me to look up another James A. Michener novel to start on....
If there are two important themes winding through this generally chronologically-presented novel, they are that (1) Poland was a land, without the benefit of natural barriers, that was constantly either under the threat of attack and occupation by outside forces or in the state of occupation by them, and (2) the magnates...and to a lesser degree the gentry...fiercely held onto their stranglehold on Polish society while always believing themselves to be enlightened, free, and democratic. In the early centuries, as Michener laid it out, these ruling families demonstrated great patriotism and courage in the defense of their homeland from invaders. But when Poland began to be partitioned...and ultimately eliminated from the map for more than a century...in the late 1700s by Prussia, Austria, and Russia, these same magnate families enthusiastically adopted the banners of their new national rulers in the interests of preserving their own properties and status. Part of the problem that made Polish governments weak was that their ruling king was always elected by the magnate-controlled legislature and that usually weak kings were selected from abroad in order to ensure that none of them would become too powerful. The other part of the problem was the so-called "Golden Freedom" in which just one member of the elected legislature could raise an objection and cause that entire session's work to be nullified...this caused a usually broken national government which kept the magnates strong and in ultimate control...
I'm not going into any detail describing the fictional families, characters, and locales...the author did a great job with developing and presenting them, though. As with the previous James Michener novels I've read, Space and Centennial, I had to struggle a bit trying to figure out what was real history and what was a product of his vivid imagination. The Tatar and Teutonic Knight invasions from the 1200s and 1400s respectively, the union with Lithuania, the partition period, and the many and often desperate struggles of the last century were well-presented...especially with regard to the horrors of Nazi occupation during World War II. You'll get to know a lot about Polish history, culture (especially paintings and classical music), geography and its society...at least up to the year 1981...if you read this worthwhile book. Well, I guess it's about time for me to look up another James A. Michener novel to start on....
Monday, November 18, 2019
My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: 380-371
Most of the songs on this week's list are distinguished not only for the great music in them, but also for their lyrics, some of which I've indicated. Here's the next ten selections and my reactions...
380 TURN IT ON AGAIN...Genesis
The first Genesis song I ever liked, Turn It On Again first came out in 1980 but I only first heard it two years later when Gainesville's Rock-104 played it a lot. A great collaborative effort between Phil Collins doing lead singing and drums, Mike Rutherford as guitarist/lyricist, and Tony Banks doing his magic on the keyboards. I loved the instrumental buildup at the song's beginning...
379 INSTANT KARMA...John Lennon
In early 1970 when it was a hit, I didn't like this clashing, angry song by John Lennon but in subsequent years grew to greatly appreciate it...Instant Karma, looking back on it, might just well be the musical ancestor of the Grunge movement in later years. Paul McCartney reportedly was very impressed with it as well...here's one of my favorite lines: "Instant Karma's gonna get you, gonna look you right in the face, better get yourself together darlin', join the human race"...
378 DREAMER...Supertramp
Dreamer was originally a 1974 British singles hit that became popular years later in the U.S. following the band's wildly successful Breakfast in America album...I recall it getting a lot of radio play in 1980. Supertramp was a quality collaborative musical act...sadly one of many...that eventually broke up because its lead singer came to believe that he was bigger than the rest of the band. Too bad, I thought their work was top-notch when they were all together: you'll be seeing them again on this list...
377 APPLE SCRUFFS...George Harrison
In 1971 I bought the George Harrison single What is Life, one of my favorite songs from that year. The flip side is Apple Scruffs, a paean for the fans who hung around the Beatles when they were at their Apple recording studios...the harmonica reigns supreme in this underappreciated, sweet song. Sometimes the B-side on those old singles turns out to be as good as the more promoted song on the other...
376 CECELIA...Simon and Garfunkel
In the spring of 1970 while my personal life as an angst-ridden thirteen-year-old was in turmoil, this singular track from the duo's final album Bridge Over Troubled Waters was released as a single. It has very strange beat and what seemed to me a Caribbean flavor combined with some racy lyrics to present a standout, unforgettable tune...I was crazy about it back in '70...
375 MARTHA MY DEAR...the Beatles
This was one of Paul McCartney's songs off the band's White Album with extensive background arrangement by producer George Martin. I first heard it in 1972...four years after the album's initial release. It's one of this double album's best tracks in spite of the fact that the "Martha" old Paul seemed to be singing so romantically about turned out to be his own pet sheepdog...
374 THE RUNNER...Manfred Mann's Earth Band
With all the songs on this list that I associate with running, it's ironic that Manfred Mann's Earth Band's early 1980s song The Runner didn't appeal to me for that reason...I wasn't running then and hadn't been for years. No, the lyrics had a broader meaning to me of striving hard for any worthwhile, challenging goal no matter what obstacles or opposition from others may arise...pretty inspiring...
373 NEW FRONTIER...Donald Fagen
This song should have been a monster hit in 1982...such a classy mix of nostalgic lyrics and jazzy rock. Fagen's Steely Dan had split for a while back then and the band's lead singer scored big with this single...and the video is hilarious and romantic, one of the best I've seen. The setting is the early years of the Kennedy administration in the early '60s when nuclear Armageddon at the height of the Cold War between America and the USSR hung menacingly over everyone but people still went about their lives without freaking out over the threat. Still, a lot of folks had built family bomb shelters out back...
372 STUPIFY...Disturbed
This 2000 hard rock song is a mood piece, expressing the singer's abject frustration at every turn of his situation until the point where he's "stupefied". It's marked by a sharp, regular barking out of words, some of them unprintable. My favorite part is the solemnity of the music and singer David Draiman slowly chanting in a Middle Eastern-style break toward the song's end the Hebrew "tefached", meaning "you will be afraid". I also loved his spoken introductory words: "Yeah, bringing you another disturbing creation from the mind of one sick animal who can't tell the difference and gets stupefied"...
371 MOVIN' OUT (ANTHONY'S SONG)...Billy Joel
I've written before about a couple of songs that put down the rat race, claiming that spending that much time and energy for marginal material gain just isn't worth it...Movin' Out is the undisputed king of such songs. Joel bluntly and sardonically lays it out on the line about a policeman moonlighting as a bartender: "Yeah, and he's tradin' in his Chevy for a Cadillac, you oughta know by now, and if he can't drive with a broken back, at least he can polish the fenders". This was the opening track in Billy Joel's stupendous The Stranger album from 1977...the pinnacle of his creative output, in my opinion. I'm totally in sync with his message on Movin' Out, although in real life Joel himself seemed totally immersed in the rat race...
Next week: #370-361...
380 TURN IT ON AGAIN...Genesis
The first Genesis song I ever liked, Turn It On Again first came out in 1980 but I only first heard it two years later when Gainesville's Rock-104 played it a lot. A great collaborative effort between Phil Collins doing lead singing and drums, Mike Rutherford as guitarist/lyricist, and Tony Banks doing his magic on the keyboards. I loved the instrumental buildup at the song's beginning...
379 INSTANT KARMA...John Lennon
In early 1970 when it was a hit, I didn't like this clashing, angry song by John Lennon but in subsequent years grew to greatly appreciate it...Instant Karma, looking back on it, might just well be the musical ancestor of the Grunge movement in later years. Paul McCartney reportedly was very impressed with it as well...here's one of my favorite lines: "Instant Karma's gonna get you, gonna look you right in the face, better get yourself together darlin', join the human race"...
378 DREAMER...Supertramp
Dreamer was originally a 1974 British singles hit that became popular years later in the U.S. following the band's wildly successful Breakfast in America album...I recall it getting a lot of radio play in 1980. Supertramp was a quality collaborative musical act...sadly one of many...that eventually broke up because its lead singer came to believe that he was bigger than the rest of the band. Too bad, I thought their work was top-notch when they were all together: you'll be seeing them again on this list...
377 APPLE SCRUFFS...George Harrison
In 1971 I bought the George Harrison single What is Life, one of my favorite songs from that year. The flip side is Apple Scruffs, a paean for the fans who hung around the Beatles when they were at their Apple recording studios...the harmonica reigns supreme in this underappreciated, sweet song. Sometimes the B-side on those old singles turns out to be as good as the more promoted song on the other...
376 CECELIA...Simon and Garfunkel
In the spring of 1970 while my personal life as an angst-ridden thirteen-year-old was in turmoil, this singular track from the duo's final album Bridge Over Troubled Waters was released as a single. It has very strange beat and what seemed to me a Caribbean flavor combined with some racy lyrics to present a standout, unforgettable tune...I was crazy about it back in '70...
375 MARTHA MY DEAR...the Beatles
This was one of Paul McCartney's songs off the band's White Album with extensive background arrangement by producer George Martin. I first heard it in 1972...four years after the album's initial release. It's one of this double album's best tracks in spite of the fact that the "Martha" old Paul seemed to be singing so romantically about turned out to be his own pet sheepdog...
374 THE RUNNER...Manfred Mann's Earth Band
With all the songs on this list that I associate with running, it's ironic that Manfred Mann's Earth Band's early 1980s song The Runner didn't appeal to me for that reason...I wasn't running then and hadn't been for years. No, the lyrics had a broader meaning to me of striving hard for any worthwhile, challenging goal no matter what obstacles or opposition from others may arise...pretty inspiring...
373 NEW FRONTIER...Donald Fagen
This song should have been a monster hit in 1982...such a classy mix of nostalgic lyrics and jazzy rock. Fagen's Steely Dan had split for a while back then and the band's lead singer scored big with this single...and the video is hilarious and romantic, one of the best I've seen. The setting is the early years of the Kennedy administration in the early '60s when nuclear Armageddon at the height of the Cold War between America and the USSR hung menacingly over everyone but people still went about their lives without freaking out over the threat. Still, a lot of folks had built family bomb shelters out back...
372 STUPIFY...Disturbed
This 2000 hard rock song is a mood piece, expressing the singer's abject frustration at every turn of his situation until the point where he's "stupefied". It's marked by a sharp, regular barking out of words, some of them unprintable. My favorite part is the solemnity of the music and singer David Draiman slowly chanting in a Middle Eastern-style break toward the song's end the Hebrew "tefached", meaning "you will be afraid". I also loved his spoken introductory words: "Yeah, bringing you another disturbing creation from the mind of one sick animal who can't tell the difference and gets stupefied"...
371 MOVIN' OUT (ANTHONY'S SONG)...Billy Joel
I've written before about a couple of songs that put down the rat race, claiming that spending that much time and energy for marginal material gain just isn't worth it...Movin' Out is the undisputed king of such songs. Joel bluntly and sardonically lays it out on the line about a policeman moonlighting as a bartender: "Yeah, and he's tradin' in his Chevy for a Cadillac, you oughta know by now, and if he can't drive with a broken back, at least he can polish the fenders". This was the opening track in Billy Joel's stupendous The Stranger album from 1977...the pinnacle of his creative output, in my opinion. I'm totally in sync with his message on Movin' Out, although in real life Joel himself seemed totally immersed in the rat race...
Next week: #370-361...
Sunday, November 17, 2019
Election Season Getting Uglier By the Day
Normally I don't relate my experiences at work in a direct way, and this article...while veering a bit in that direction...is still in the end faithful to this "rule". The other day while there I went on my first break, in mid-afternoon, and as usual went to the main break room where there are plenty of seats, a television, and several vending machines. The TV, sadly, was loudly showing the ongoing impeachment hearings and there was only one other individual in the room with me, somebody I didn't know. At one of the vending machines he began to loudly talk to me about how the hearings were just going to hurt the Democrats and then followed me to where I sat...with my paperback sci-fi book...opened...while continuing his one-sided rant. I clearly did not want to continue this fruitless conversation, partially because dammit this was my break and I wasn't going to let someone else run it, and partially because when folks get as emotionally stirred up about politics as this dude was it's a waste of time to try to respectfully share my own opinions on the subject. Finally I flat-out told him that I didn't care about any of it and he angrily trudged off, repeating to himself..."doesn't care about any of it". The fact is that I do care about politics and if circumstances were different and had I decided to share my opinion I would have told him that I had been following politics and elections ever since the 1968 presidential primary campaign and election and don't need some brainwashed fool repeating what he just heard some spin doctor say on his favorite TV or radio show. I know the main candidates and why they won or lost in the 1968, 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential primaries and general elections, as well as the various times that the Senate and House of Representatives changed their majority parties. With the current campaign I've already been weighing the different candidates according to factors like character, positions on the issues I care most about, and their general philosophies on government...and will then cast my single vote at the set time, first for the Florida Primary on March 17th and then for the 2010 general election on November 3rd. In every single one of those years I just listed, I formulated my decisions early on about whom I supported during the primaries and then, once the eventual nominees became clear, whom I would support in November...1968 and 1972 happened before I was of voting age, though, with 1980 being the only election since then I missed out on voting in...
In light of that individual trying to harangue me at work with his unsolicited political comments, I expect the tone of political discourse to deteriorate to new lows as this already much-too-long campaign progresses. I am a faithful and consistent voter and will from time to time make my personal opinions known on this blog...but I am not a campaigner, which is just as well because of the Hatch Act that prohibits partisan campaigning by employees where I work. I WILL NOT allow myself to get caught up in all the negativity and vitriol surrounding current politics...I can't even stand watching late-night TV talk shows because most of the hosts seem to think it's a legitimate part of their show...especially that opening so-called "comedy" monologue...to insult and offend the other political side and its leader as much as possible. I already know what my voting choices are and, if my past history is any guide, am not at all likely to change my choice other than with "my" candidate dropping out of the race before the election. So if you're one of those political zombies who get off on regurgitating their favorite media ideologue's talking points in other people's faces, you're wasting your breath going after me...
In light of that individual trying to harangue me at work with his unsolicited political comments, I expect the tone of political discourse to deteriorate to new lows as this already much-too-long campaign progresses. I am a faithful and consistent voter and will from time to time make my personal opinions known on this blog...but I am not a campaigner, which is just as well because of the Hatch Act that prohibits partisan campaigning by employees where I work. I WILL NOT allow myself to get caught up in all the negativity and vitriol surrounding current politics...I can't even stand watching late-night TV talk shows because most of the hosts seem to think it's a legitimate part of their show...especially that opening so-called "comedy" monologue...to insult and offend the other political side and its leader as much as possible. I already know what my voting choices are and, if my past history is any guide, am not at all likely to change my choice other than with "my" candidate dropping out of the race before the election. So if you're one of those political zombies who get off on regurgitating their favorite media ideologue's talking points in other people's faces, you're wasting your breath going after me...
Saturday, November 16, 2019
Just Finished Reading Full Throttle by Joe Hill
Joe Hill is the pen name of Joseph King, one of renowned horror fiction writer Stephen King's sons. Hill has his own successful writing career, and this 2019 book Full Throttle is a collection of short stories that he wrote over the years, two of them in collaboration with his father. Some of the stories, and the author acknowledged this, seem derivative. But each of them is in essence its own original story with its own message...or moral, if you will. I liked the stories but admit that they could be very troublesome for squeamish and overly sensitive readers, belonging as most of them do to the horror fiction genre. By the way, I also enjoyed the introduction, in which Hill discussed himself, his famous dad as well as his personal take on the craft of writing...
Here's a listing of the individual stories...with some commentary following each one that I included to aid me in better remembering them sometime off in the future.
1 THROTTLE (with Stephen King)...similar to movie Duel, "victims" are motorcycle gang
2 DARK CAROUSEL...youths rob carousel operator, flee its "animals"
3 WOLVERTON STATION...coffee magnate slips into werewolf England
4 BY THE SILVER WATER OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN...children with awful parents find dead lake monster
5 FAUN...jerk in Maine finds portal to fantasy world, uses it to hunt its creatures
6 LATE RETURNS...dude gets a library bookmobile job, dead people visit him
7 ALL I CARE ABOUT IS YOU...teenage girl in a dystopian future with present-day angst, add robot to mix
8 THUMBPRINT...military woman comes home from scandal-ridden Iraqi detention center, what goes around...
9 THE DEVIL ON THE STAIRCASE...in Italy of the past, a red door on a long staircase leads to hell....
10 TWITTERING FROM THE CIRCUS OF THE DEAD...teenage girl tweets family visit to isolated gross-out circus...
11 MUMS...McVeigh-like separatist dad fights mom for son, story heavily involves plants...
12 IN THE TALL GRASS (with Stephen King)...out west, a couple walk into the tall roadside grass to rescue crying boy, big mistake...
13 YOU ARE RELEASED...on a jet plane to Boston the passengers are progressively notified of an international crisis...
All the stories were good, but also pretty disturbing, which is what you usually get with this type of fiction...so you've been warned...
Here's a listing of the individual stories...with some commentary following each one that I included to aid me in better remembering them sometime off in the future.
1 THROTTLE (with Stephen King)...similar to movie Duel, "victims" are motorcycle gang
2 DARK CAROUSEL...youths rob carousel operator, flee its "animals"
3 WOLVERTON STATION...coffee magnate slips into werewolf England
4 BY THE SILVER WATER OF LAKE CHAMPLAIN...children with awful parents find dead lake monster
5 FAUN...jerk in Maine finds portal to fantasy world, uses it to hunt its creatures
6 LATE RETURNS...dude gets a library bookmobile job, dead people visit him
7 ALL I CARE ABOUT IS YOU...teenage girl in a dystopian future with present-day angst, add robot to mix
8 THUMBPRINT...military woman comes home from scandal-ridden Iraqi detention center, what goes around...
9 THE DEVIL ON THE STAIRCASE...in Italy of the past, a red door on a long staircase leads to hell....
10 TWITTERING FROM THE CIRCUS OF THE DEAD...teenage girl tweets family visit to isolated gross-out circus...
11 MUMS...McVeigh-like separatist dad fights mom for son, story heavily involves plants...
12 IN THE TALL GRASS (with Stephen King)...out west, a couple walk into the tall roadside grass to rescue crying boy, big mistake...
13 YOU ARE RELEASED...on a jet plane to Boston the passengers are progressively notified of an international crisis...
All the stories were good, but also pretty disturbing, which is what you usually get with this type of fiction...so you've been warned...
Friday, November 15, 2019
Quote of the Week...from Elizabeth Loftus
Just because someone thinks they remember something in detail, with confidence and with emotion, does not mean that it actually happened, ..False memories have these characteristics, too.
---Elizabeth Loftus
Elizabeth Lofton is a respected cognitive psychologist specializing in the study of memory. She is especially knowledgeable in the area regarding eyewitness testimony and how various factors can distort someone's memory of past events while they themselves fully believe in their recollections. With this "Me Too" movement arising recently with people...mostly women...recalling...sometimes from decades earlier...their experiences of sexual abuse at the hands of usually affluent and famous men, this is an important field to examine. Of course, anyone who had been paying attention to the news last year knows of the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing, when she claimed he tried to sexually assault her upstairs at a party some 35 years earlier. I'm not here to suggest that hers or any specific allegations from others are true or false...come on, how would I know anyway...but rather I want to steer the topic of false memory to my own experiences, for which I do claim some authority...
A year before she passed away, someone close and dear to me in my family made certain statements that I knew were absolutely untrue about the way things were at a past time during which I was 5-6 years old...just to be sure it wasn't me who was imagining things I consulted with another family member who confirmed my memory. The only reason I can fathom for her misrepresenting our past is that her new "memories" fit in better with the narrative that she had adopted about her own life...a week ago on this blog I discussed this idea recently of folks believing falsities for the sake of preserving their own cherished worldviews. I also had more than one unsettling experience with an old friend going way back to elementary school when I would bring up something random that I remember him being involved with and he would flatly deny any memory of it...very disturbing. I think that these two dear people weren't the only ones who unconsciously either manufactured false memories of their own pasts or simply denied to themselves parts of it...I think this cuts across our society, and Dr. Loftus would probably concur. The question I have to pose myself is how pervasive are false memories among people in general and have they infected my own recollections of my past?
Elizabeth Loftus has been a critic of what has been called the "recovered memory movement", which involved adults...sometimes under hypnotism...coming up with "memories" of being abused as children. The hysteria in the early 1990s about childhood satanic ritual abuse that destroyed the lives of some of the accused parents was a symptom of this...I'm glad somebody rose up to denounce this biased and agenda-driven process. Nobody should be subject to automatically having their life ruined by another who, out of the blue, starts pointing their finger at them and falsely accusing them...even with all sincerity...of some horrible outrage from years gone by. Still, narrative-driven individuals, without the assistance of anybody else, can come up with their own false memories and wreak all sorts of havoc...after all, they're obviously not lying, right? That was the problem with Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh: our system of law depends on and respects eyewitness testimony...but how do we distinguish between a real account of events and an honestly-held false memory? I initially held that Kavanaugh's confirmation vote should have been delayed until a full-blown FBI investigation was held, but the witness's lack of recall of the event's specific time and place...as opposed to her detailed description of the alleged attack...most likely meant that such an inquiry would have been fruitless. I'm not saying that the accuser in this case wasn't ultimately correct with her recall, but rather given the lack of corroboration how should society properly react to the charges and protect the accused who, as an old friend from high school pointed out to me in a comment, is supposed to be held innocent until proven guilty?
One important guard against false memory is the simple acknowledgement that it can sometimes happen, and that sometimes it comes about...albeit unconsciously...as a positive response to an agenda or narrative...
---Elizabeth Loftus
Elizabeth Lofton is a respected cognitive psychologist specializing in the study of memory. She is especially knowledgeable in the area regarding eyewitness testimony and how various factors can distort someone's memory of past events while they themselves fully believe in their recollections. With this "Me Too" movement arising recently with people...mostly women...recalling...sometimes from decades earlier...their experiences of sexual abuse at the hands of usually affluent and famous men, this is an important field to examine. Of course, anyone who had been paying attention to the news last year knows of the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing, when she claimed he tried to sexually assault her upstairs at a party some 35 years earlier. I'm not here to suggest that hers or any specific allegations from others are true or false...come on, how would I know anyway...but rather I want to steer the topic of false memory to my own experiences, for which I do claim some authority...
A year before she passed away, someone close and dear to me in my family made certain statements that I knew were absolutely untrue about the way things were at a past time during which I was 5-6 years old...just to be sure it wasn't me who was imagining things I consulted with another family member who confirmed my memory. The only reason I can fathom for her misrepresenting our past is that her new "memories" fit in better with the narrative that she had adopted about her own life...a week ago on this blog I discussed this idea recently of folks believing falsities for the sake of preserving their own cherished worldviews. I also had more than one unsettling experience with an old friend going way back to elementary school when I would bring up something random that I remember him being involved with and he would flatly deny any memory of it...very disturbing. I think that these two dear people weren't the only ones who unconsciously either manufactured false memories of their own pasts or simply denied to themselves parts of it...I think this cuts across our society, and Dr. Loftus would probably concur. The question I have to pose myself is how pervasive are false memories among people in general and have they infected my own recollections of my past?
Elizabeth Loftus has been a critic of what has been called the "recovered memory movement", which involved adults...sometimes under hypnotism...coming up with "memories" of being abused as children. The hysteria in the early 1990s about childhood satanic ritual abuse that destroyed the lives of some of the accused parents was a symptom of this...I'm glad somebody rose up to denounce this biased and agenda-driven process. Nobody should be subject to automatically having their life ruined by another who, out of the blue, starts pointing their finger at them and falsely accusing them...even with all sincerity...of some horrible outrage from years gone by. Still, narrative-driven individuals, without the assistance of anybody else, can come up with their own false memories and wreak all sorts of havoc...after all, they're obviously not lying, right? That was the problem with Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh: our system of law depends on and respects eyewitness testimony...but how do we distinguish between a real account of events and an honestly-held false memory? I initially held that Kavanaugh's confirmation vote should have been delayed until a full-blown FBI investigation was held, but the witness's lack of recall of the event's specific time and place...as opposed to her detailed description of the alleged attack...most likely meant that such an inquiry would have been fruitless. I'm not saying that the accuser in this case wasn't ultimately correct with her recall, but rather given the lack of corroboration how should society properly react to the charges and protect the accused who, as an old friend from high school pointed out to me in a comment, is supposed to be held innocent until proven guilty?
One important guard against false memory is the simple acknowledgement that it can sometimes happen, and that sometimes it comes about...albeit unconsciously...as a positive response to an agenda or narrative...
Thursday, November 14, 2019
Needless Obsession over College Football Playoff Rankings
As if they didn't have better things to talk about, I am tired of hearing on the sports radio and television programs how this major college football team should be in the top four playoff-eligible positions for the 2019 championship and that team shouldn't. Undefeated LSU, Ohio State, and defending champion Clemson are usually agreed upon for the top three slots as things stand right now...it's the final one that's causing so much needless (in my opinion) commotion. Alabama lost 46-41 to LSU this past Saturday for their only defeat of the year and the Crimson Tide are almost always taken for granted to be in the playoff picture every year. But Georgia, with one loss as well, has crept above them to take the number four position, with Nick Saban's team sliding to number five, temporarily out of the playoffs. But look, behind them are the Pac-12 Conference's Oregon and Utah, each with one loss, and the Big Ten's Minnesota, which has run the table so far. And poor Baylor, leading the Big-12 Conference with a 9-0 overall record, is wondering why they're not getting any respect. As far as I'm concerned, it's too early to start grumbling about who's in and who's out of the playoffs: we still have another couple of weeks left in the regular season and then the conference playoffs to sort things out. In the SEC LSU will face Georgia in the championship game...whether the Tigers win or lose that game they'll probably still go to the playoffs while the Bulldogs will advance if they win it...but only if they get past Auburn in their game this weekend, not a done deal by any stretch. Ohio State will face Minnesota for the Big Ten championship...the winner's "in" the playoffs while the loser's "out". And Clemson shouldn't have any trouble mowing over any remaining opposition in their relatively weak Atlantic Coast Conference this year. So we're left...assuming that the involved teams win their upcoming games in which they're strong favorites...with either three or four of the playoff positions filled: LSU, Clemson, Big-Ten-winner, and Georgia-or-another-school. If LSU beats Georgia, that leaves an opening for either Alabama or the Pac-12 champion to sneak into that fourth spot. And if Baylor stays undefeated to the end...they're playing one-loss Oklahoma (with their own argument for playoff consideration) this Saturday... they certainly have a major claim to that final spot as well. At this juncture, though, it's just all speculation, and those critical of Georgia being ahead of Alabama right now don't seem to understand that today's rankings mean little in light of what's to come in the four weeks ahead of us: besides, the Crimson Tide have to play Auburn two weeks after Georgia deals with them...
Wednesday, November 13, 2019
Weekly Short Stories: 1953 Science Fiction, Part 3
Here are my reactions to the next four science fiction short stories featured in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 15 (1953). I like them all, but Imposter was brilliant and introduced me to the fantastic fiction of Philip K. Dick...
IMPOSTER by Philip K. Dick
This story was adapted to film a few years ago but I never watched it...what would be the point since I already know how it ends and believe that they couldn't possibly improve on the original written story. In the middle of an interstellar war between Earth and an alien force from Alpha Centauri, an engineer working on a weapon that might turn the war's fortunes in favor of our home planet one day suddenly finds himself accused of being an enemy robot designed to exactly replace his original human self and that it would be programmed to think of itself as being that man (and not the robot "imposter"). It all throws into question whether we're really the people we think we are...Philip K. Dick liked to play around with his readers' minds like this...
THE WORLD WELL LOST by Theodore Sturgeon
I saw a movie titled Giant a few years ago...it featured Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean, starting out about a romance triangle set in oil-drilling Texas. But the movie's direction ended up abruptly changing to an entirely different theme, one that involved civil rights and bigoty. The World Well Lost is similar in that it begins with a two-man crew in an interstellar craft returning two captive fugitives to their home world but its theme and ultimate message drastically shift to commentary about a different kind of prejudice that still strongly persists today but was almost taboo to discuss back when Sturgeon wrote about it, and in a very sensitive and sympathetic manner. Read it and find out what it is...
A BAD DAY FOR SALES by Fritz Leiber
It is sometime in the near future and Robie the talking robot entertains the Time Square, New York crowd while hawking and selling candy, soda, booze, and other goodies on behalf of the corporate interests that built and employs "him"...just place the coins in the proper slot to get your stuff. It all seems to be going well until Armageddon arrives in the form of a nuclear bomb exploding over the city...see how stalwart public hero Robie responds in this incredibly cynical story...
COMMON TIME by James Blish
On a faster-than-light spaceship going to Alpha Centauri and back, the third attempt after the first two mysteriously disappeared, Garrard, the mission's solo astronaut, suddenly awakes to time frozen still...or at least moving very, very slowly. Knowing that this wasn't a predicted possible phenomenon, he has to think quickly to save his own life...and continues to have extraordinary experiences with time. As for what he finally encounters at Alpha Centauri, read it yourself to find out. Oh, do you know of the late Carl Sagan's novel Contact, which came out in 1985 and was made into the movie starring Jodie Foster? What happened to Foster's character in the "great beyond" bears a marked similarity to Garrard's experiences. I wonder whether Sagan unconsciously picked up on this James Blish story when writing his own...I guess we'll never know...
Next week I conclude my look back at short science fiction from 1953...
IMPOSTER by Philip K. Dick
This story was adapted to film a few years ago but I never watched it...what would be the point since I already know how it ends and believe that they couldn't possibly improve on the original written story. In the middle of an interstellar war between Earth and an alien force from Alpha Centauri, an engineer working on a weapon that might turn the war's fortunes in favor of our home planet one day suddenly finds himself accused of being an enemy robot designed to exactly replace his original human self and that it would be programmed to think of itself as being that man (and not the robot "imposter"). It all throws into question whether we're really the people we think we are...Philip K. Dick liked to play around with his readers' minds like this...
THE WORLD WELL LOST by Theodore Sturgeon
I saw a movie titled Giant a few years ago...it featured Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean, starting out about a romance triangle set in oil-drilling Texas. But the movie's direction ended up abruptly changing to an entirely different theme, one that involved civil rights and bigoty. The World Well Lost is similar in that it begins with a two-man crew in an interstellar craft returning two captive fugitives to their home world but its theme and ultimate message drastically shift to commentary about a different kind of prejudice that still strongly persists today but was almost taboo to discuss back when Sturgeon wrote about it, and in a very sensitive and sympathetic manner. Read it and find out what it is...
A BAD DAY FOR SALES by Fritz Leiber
It is sometime in the near future and Robie the talking robot entertains the Time Square, New York crowd while hawking and selling candy, soda, booze, and other goodies on behalf of the corporate interests that built and employs "him"...just place the coins in the proper slot to get your stuff. It all seems to be going well until Armageddon arrives in the form of a nuclear bomb exploding over the city...see how stalwart public hero Robie responds in this incredibly cynical story...
COMMON TIME by James Blish
On a faster-than-light spaceship going to Alpha Centauri and back, the third attempt after the first two mysteriously disappeared, Garrard, the mission's solo astronaut, suddenly awakes to time frozen still...or at least moving very, very slowly. Knowing that this wasn't a predicted possible phenomenon, he has to think quickly to save his own life...and continues to have extraordinary experiences with time. As for what he finally encounters at Alpha Centauri, read it yourself to find out. Oh, do you know of the late Carl Sagan's novel Contact, which came out in 1985 and was made into the movie starring Jodie Foster? What happened to Foster's character in the "great beyond" bears a marked similarity to Garrard's experiences. I wonder whether Sagan unconsciously picked up on this James Blish story when writing his own...I guess we'll never know...
Next week I conclude my look back at short science fiction from 1953...
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
Cool Weather, Distance Running, and the 72 Dolphins Break Out the Champagne
While I'm seeing reports about some severe winter weather going on up north, in Gainesville it's become downright pleasant with much cooler temperatures...and it looks to remain so at least through this coming weekend, with some rain today and then later on in the week. Wednesday's predicted high, at this writing, is only 60 degrees, and the highs on Saturday and Sunday won't pass 70 if the current forecasts hold. And the lows are to be in the 40s...love it!
I'm sitting here right now in this Starbucks looking to my right, out the front window, to the electricity station across NW 43rd Street with all its transformers and wiring...and the asphalt walking path in front of it. I plan to be running down it in a couple of weeks or so, as part of an experiment I'm undertaking as to whether it is feasible for me to run and finish a 26.2-mile marathon in the near future. This weekend, with this great cool and pleasant weather descending on us in northern Florida, I'm going to try for a 16.5 mile run, extending my existing course by 3.2 miles by going up and down NW 37th Street and through one of its subdivisions. Then we'll see where I'm at, and if all things are still "go" then I'll extend my course further in later weeks by going north down that path on 43rd...
Last night while enjoying Veteran's Day off from work...God bless our veterans for all they've done and sacrificed for us...I thoroughly enjoyed watching the Monday Night Football game on ESPN between then-undefeated San Francisco and Seattle, "my" team for a number of years in the National Conference. I'm totally sold on Pete Carroll as a great coach and love seeing him so animated on the sidelines...I wasn't disappointed with this game, which went back and forth with spectacular plays from both teams on both offense and defense. It went to overtime and the Seahawks won it with a field goal, 27-24...ending the 49ers' unbeaten record and ensuring for another year that no NFL team other than the 1972 Miami Dolphins would run the table throughout the regular season and playoffs. Now I know that the Dolphins from that year annually uncork the champagne and drink to the preservation of their unique status in football history after the last undefeated team finally loses...I'll pretend this iced coffee I'm drinking is champagne and raise my cup...cheers!
I'm sitting here right now in this Starbucks looking to my right, out the front window, to the electricity station across NW 43rd Street with all its transformers and wiring...and the asphalt walking path in front of it. I plan to be running down it in a couple of weeks or so, as part of an experiment I'm undertaking as to whether it is feasible for me to run and finish a 26.2-mile marathon in the near future. This weekend, with this great cool and pleasant weather descending on us in northern Florida, I'm going to try for a 16.5 mile run, extending my existing course by 3.2 miles by going up and down NW 37th Street and through one of its subdivisions. Then we'll see where I'm at, and if all things are still "go" then I'll extend my course further in later weeks by going north down that path on 43rd...
Last night while enjoying Veteran's Day off from work...God bless our veterans for all they've done and sacrificed for us...I thoroughly enjoyed watching the Monday Night Football game on ESPN between then-undefeated San Francisco and Seattle, "my" team for a number of years in the National Conference. I'm totally sold on Pete Carroll as a great coach and love seeing him so animated on the sidelines...I wasn't disappointed with this game, which went back and forth with spectacular plays from both teams on both offense and defense. It went to overtime and the Seahawks won it with a field goal, 27-24...ending the 49ers' unbeaten record and ensuring for another year that no NFL team other than the 1972 Miami Dolphins would run the table throughout the regular season and playoffs. Now I know that the Dolphins from that year annually uncork the champagne and drink to the preservation of their unique status in football history after the last undefeated team finally loses...I'll pretend this iced coffee I'm drinking is champagne and raise my cup...cheers!
Monday, November 11, 2019
My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #390-381
Here are the next ten entries in the list of my 500 all-time favorite songs. Don't get sidetracked by the big numbers: I love these songs...
390 FOREVER IN BLUE JEANS...Neil Diamond
This early 1979 song wasn't one of Diamond's biggest hits, but in my opinion it's the most romantic one. And that's saying an awful lot considering some of the songs he had produced previously. It also brings up various associations regarding my own life at the time of its popularity...music can be a great memory aid in this regard...
389 THINGS WE SAID TODAY...the Beatles
When I was a kid during the 1964-66 Beatlemania years my parents, also Beatles fans, would buy each succeeding album as they came out. In mid '64 when the movie A Hard Days Night hit the screens, United Artists issued the same-titled album while Capitol released Something New, containing an overlap of songs with the other album. We ended up with the United Artists version, meaning I missed out on Things We Said Today, a Paul McCartney composition and what I might call a "pensive" love song. Wish we'd got that album instead...
388 WORDS...Missing Persons
In the fall of 1982 when this song was played on the radio, the New Wave music movement was in full bloom, one of its Los Angeles success stories being the band Missing Persons, featuring Dale Bozzio as the vocalist with a Betty Boop singing style and a top-notch guitar/synthesizer/drum band to back her. Words has several great lines such as "You look at me as if you're in a daze, it's like the feeling at the end of the page when you realize you don't know what you just read"...
387 NOVACANE...Beck
An example of a song I discovered many years after its initial release, Novacane is one of Beck's hilarious nonsense pieces...this one's from his acclaimed 1996 Odelay album. But it was its hard-driving, relentless nature along with the sharp guitar breaks that won me over to it when I first heard it just a few years ago...a good tune to take along with my training runs. Its ending, though, you may want to cut off since it deteriorates into ear-splitting noise. Here's one of those classic Beck lines..."Mission incredible undercover convoy, full-tilt chromosome cowboy, X-ray search and destroy, smoke stack black top Novocaine boy"...
386 DANSE WITH ME GEORGE...Ambrosia
Ambrosia was one of those obnoxious late-1970s love ballad groups that fared well on the pop charts...but not with me. But then comes this bizarre track...a tribute to the Polish classical composer and pianist Chopin...off one of their albums. It's about 7:20 long and is good listening throughout (and very different from other Ambrosia songs) but the really interesting "plunge down the rabbit hole" begins at 4:14. By the way, the "George" in this song refers to Chopin's long-time love interest, the novelist Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, better known as George Sand. There's some pretty dazzling piano playing going on here...I'm sure the band hired out for it. It's one of the strangest pieces I've heard: give it a listen and see if you don't agree...
385 TOUCH AND GO...the Cars
The unsettling beat, which as a music theory dunce I looked up as being polymeter, stands out in this minor 1980 singles hit for this great old Boston-based band...sad to know that both singer Ric Ocasek and bassist Benjamin Orr have passed on. And the keyboards in this underrated piece are simply haunting...this might be a good song to spring on people on Halloween. This is another example...like #390...of a singles release that should have been a major hit but only resonating to a lesser degree with the general public...
384 LODI...Creedence Clearwater Revival
If I ever get around to learning guitar the way I want to, this is one of the first songs I want to learn to play. And while I'm at it, I want to sing it just the way John Fogerty belts it out. Lodi, like Johnny Mathis' I'm Coming Home earlier on this list, is about the singer lamenting of his disillusionment at trying to make it big and only wants to go back to his old home town...I bet a lot of people have gone through this kind of experience: the rat race isn't for everyone and it sure as 'ell isn't for me...
383 DON'T CROSS THE RIVER...America
Still another minor, highly underrated hit from a major band, Don't Cross the River was getting its brief radio airplay back in March of 1973. I invariably associate it with my struggles at that time (on my high school track team) to transform my body into that of a long-distance runner...something that I eventually abandoned in 1976 but resumed in 2009 and am continuing to this day. But this kind of struggle is fun and this song has an inspiring feel to it, making me want to keep on running and not stopping no matter what my sore legs, feet, aches all over my body, and fatigue are telling my brain...
382 DARE...Gorillaz
Speaking of running, back in 2011 I collected all of the British alternative act Gorillaz's albums and transformed them to my MP3 player, listening to them on shuffle mode while doing my neighborhood training runs that year...Dare, from their 2005 album Demon Days, is one of their best tracks and suggests a sense of vertigo you might get from one of those up-and-down, revolving thrill rides in a theme park. What I also like about Dare...as well as many of the other Gorillaz songs...is that it's pretty funny without necessarily meaning to be so. You never can be too sure what you're going to get when you first listen to one of their songs. More from Gorillaz to come...
381 TALK TALK...Music Machine
Talk Talk, the group Music Machine's one big hit, came out in late 1966 and got a lot of radio play in the beginning of the following year. To me it's the rallying anthem for anyone who ever felt they were despised outcasts in their everyday existence. Have you ever undergone such an experience when, without any good reason, you seem to have derision heaped upon you from all around and even those who you thought were friends turned on you? Dig these words from the song: "My social life's a dud, my name is really mud, I'm up to here in lies, guess I'm down to size". I didn't fully appreciate this song when it came out...only years later when I finally carefully listened to the lyrics and said to myself, this bro's speaking some truth!
Next week: #380-371...
390 FOREVER IN BLUE JEANS...Neil Diamond
This early 1979 song wasn't one of Diamond's biggest hits, but in my opinion it's the most romantic one. And that's saying an awful lot considering some of the songs he had produced previously. It also brings up various associations regarding my own life at the time of its popularity...music can be a great memory aid in this regard...
389 THINGS WE SAID TODAY...the Beatles
When I was a kid during the 1964-66 Beatlemania years my parents, also Beatles fans, would buy each succeeding album as they came out. In mid '64 when the movie A Hard Days Night hit the screens, United Artists issued the same-titled album while Capitol released Something New, containing an overlap of songs with the other album. We ended up with the United Artists version, meaning I missed out on Things We Said Today, a Paul McCartney composition and what I might call a "pensive" love song. Wish we'd got that album instead...
388 WORDS...Missing Persons
In the fall of 1982 when this song was played on the radio, the New Wave music movement was in full bloom, one of its Los Angeles success stories being the band Missing Persons, featuring Dale Bozzio as the vocalist with a Betty Boop singing style and a top-notch guitar/synthesizer/drum band to back her. Words has several great lines such as "You look at me as if you're in a daze, it's like the feeling at the end of the page when you realize you don't know what you just read"...
387 NOVACANE...Beck
An example of a song I discovered many years after its initial release, Novacane is one of Beck's hilarious nonsense pieces...this one's from his acclaimed 1996 Odelay album. But it was its hard-driving, relentless nature along with the sharp guitar breaks that won me over to it when I first heard it just a few years ago...a good tune to take along with my training runs. Its ending, though, you may want to cut off since it deteriorates into ear-splitting noise. Here's one of those classic Beck lines..."Mission incredible undercover convoy, full-tilt chromosome cowboy, X-ray search and destroy, smoke stack black top Novocaine boy"...
386 DANSE WITH ME GEORGE...Ambrosia
Ambrosia was one of those obnoxious late-1970s love ballad groups that fared well on the pop charts...but not with me. But then comes this bizarre track...a tribute to the Polish classical composer and pianist Chopin...off one of their albums. It's about 7:20 long and is good listening throughout (and very different from other Ambrosia songs) but the really interesting "plunge down the rabbit hole" begins at 4:14. By the way, the "George" in this song refers to Chopin's long-time love interest, the novelist Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, better known as George Sand. There's some pretty dazzling piano playing going on here...I'm sure the band hired out for it. It's one of the strangest pieces I've heard: give it a listen and see if you don't agree...
385 TOUCH AND GO...the Cars
The unsettling beat, which as a music theory dunce I looked up as being polymeter, stands out in this minor 1980 singles hit for this great old Boston-based band...sad to know that both singer Ric Ocasek and bassist Benjamin Orr have passed on. And the keyboards in this underrated piece are simply haunting...this might be a good song to spring on people on Halloween. This is another example...like #390...of a singles release that should have been a major hit but only resonating to a lesser degree with the general public...
384 LODI...Creedence Clearwater Revival
If I ever get around to learning guitar the way I want to, this is one of the first songs I want to learn to play. And while I'm at it, I want to sing it just the way John Fogerty belts it out. Lodi, like Johnny Mathis' I'm Coming Home earlier on this list, is about the singer lamenting of his disillusionment at trying to make it big and only wants to go back to his old home town...I bet a lot of people have gone through this kind of experience: the rat race isn't for everyone and it sure as 'ell isn't for me...
383 DON'T CROSS THE RIVER...America
Still another minor, highly underrated hit from a major band, Don't Cross the River was getting its brief radio airplay back in March of 1973. I invariably associate it with my struggles at that time (on my high school track team) to transform my body into that of a long-distance runner...something that I eventually abandoned in 1976 but resumed in 2009 and am continuing to this day. But this kind of struggle is fun and this song has an inspiring feel to it, making me want to keep on running and not stopping no matter what my sore legs, feet, aches all over my body, and fatigue are telling my brain...
382 DARE...Gorillaz
Speaking of running, back in 2011 I collected all of the British alternative act Gorillaz's albums and transformed them to my MP3 player, listening to them on shuffle mode while doing my neighborhood training runs that year...Dare, from their 2005 album Demon Days, is one of their best tracks and suggests a sense of vertigo you might get from one of those up-and-down, revolving thrill rides in a theme park. What I also like about Dare...as well as many of the other Gorillaz songs...is that it's pretty funny without necessarily meaning to be so. You never can be too sure what you're going to get when you first listen to one of their songs. More from Gorillaz to come...
381 TALK TALK...Music Machine
Talk Talk, the group Music Machine's one big hit, came out in late 1966 and got a lot of radio play in the beginning of the following year. To me it's the rallying anthem for anyone who ever felt they were despised outcasts in their everyday existence. Have you ever undergone such an experience when, without any good reason, you seem to have derision heaped upon you from all around and even those who you thought were friends turned on you? Dig these words from the song: "My social life's a dud, my name is really mud, I'm up to here in lies, guess I'm down to size". I didn't fully appreciate this song when it came out...only years later when I finally carefully listened to the lyrics and said to myself, this bro's speaking some truth!
Next week: #380-371...
Sunday, November 10, 2019
Ran the 2019 Tom Walker Memorial Half-Marathon This Morning
I got there early this morning in order to register...I'm not a fan of paying in advance for races when I can avoid it. The temperature was a perfect 46 degrees, a little chilly at the race's start but warming up to the 60s by the end, with relatively low humidity. In recent years the event's organizers added a 5K race to coincide with the half-marathon...much of the crowd was there for this shorter race. Upon reaching the trail before the start at 8:00, I made my way to the back of the racing throng, knowing in advance that I wouldn't be setting any speed records today. My strategy was clear: go out slow, run slow, keep running slow, and finish slow...with the main word in this sentence being "finish". As a matter of fact, at the race's start I was running so slow that I was going barely faster than a gentleman clearly several years older than me who was walking the race. I also was prepared to take periodic walking breaks as I do during my training runs, but although I noticed many other participants employing this run/walk method to get through the race I felt comfortable just running it on through from beginning to end. My finishing time was 2 hours 35 minutes and 20 seconds...easily the slowest finishing time of the twelve half-marathons I've run since 2010. But I hadn't run one since February of 2018 and that race was marked by severe leg cramps near its end while in 2017's half marathon I suffered deep coughing attacks...neither of these happened today. And unlike my 13.3 mile training run three weeks ago, I never ran into a "wall" and kept a high energy level throughout it all. So no, I didn't run a very fast race, but finishing it well gives me hope at age 63 for future races...and a possible venture into longer distances...
Here's a link to the race results: [Start 2 Finish Race Management]...
Saturday, November 9, 2019
Comparing Access in Russia and China to Social Media and Blogsites
Before Facebook came along and provincialized and insulated social media, the blogosphere was a worldwide, developing phenomenon that promised to bring millions of people of diverse backgrounds, countries, and perspectives together. I set up my own personal blog in 2007, using the Google Blogger free blogging site...and I have been regularly writing articles ever since, totaling now over 4,100 (and you can read every one of them if you wish). Before Facebook I had a more cosmopolitan reading audience but ever since that site took over the world's social media the formerly-explosive development of personal blogging receded in favor of this convenient, albeit much more insulated and restrictive, form of Internet communication. I finally saw the writing on the wall in early 2013 and began to post links on my Facebook page to my daily blog articles while still hoping that international readers...or others at-large from the good old U.S.A....would hit upon it as well, not just my Facebook friends and family. Then I realized that other countries, to varying degrees and for different reasons, were blocking access to social media and blogging sites...the biggest reason I imagined being to stem the flow of any dissident material against their respective regimes. Since Russia and China are often mentioned in the same sentence as being nations highly restrictive of the free flow of communications, I thought I'd compare how they deal with the most popular Western social media and blogging sites...
Right up front, pure and simple, China totally blocks Google, YouTube, GoogleMaps, Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok (although it is a Chinese company's product), Twitter, and Wikipedia. WordPress.com-hosted blogs are also blocked there, but WordPress.org-generated blogs are not. LinkedIn technically isn't blocked, but the Chinese version reportedly carries greater restrictions. In Russia, among the above sites only LinkedIn is blocked, and that is reportedly because it violates a Russian law prohibiting individual Russians' user information being stored outside the country. And some Wikipedia articles have been blacklisted in Russia. Yet I have read ongoing Twitter live on-the-spot reports by a Russian journalist during recent Moscow protests...no problem picking it up along with commentary and video. And he would agree with me that although Russia isn't as free and open a society as America with our dearly-held First Amendment, it is still a much freer place for its people regarding the Internet than is mainland China. Russian folks can read my blog...Chinese cannot, and that about expresses it as far as I'm concerned. Now it's true that the Russian authorities over the years have placed restrictions on certain matters of content...particularly with YouTube...but bloggers and social media users still really do have a good amount of freedom between the U.S. and Russia. China? Forget it...
Right up front, pure and simple, China totally blocks Google, YouTube, GoogleMaps, Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok (although it is a Chinese company's product), Twitter, and Wikipedia. WordPress.com-hosted blogs are also blocked there, but WordPress.org-generated blogs are not. LinkedIn technically isn't blocked, but the Chinese version reportedly carries greater restrictions. In Russia, among the above sites only LinkedIn is blocked, and that is reportedly because it violates a Russian law prohibiting individual Russians' user information being stored outside the country. And some Wikipedia articles have been blacklisted in Russia. Yet I have read ongoing Twitter live on-the-spot reports by a Russian journalist during recent Moscow protests...no problem picking it up along with commentary and video. And he would agree with me that although Russia isn't as free and open a society as America with our dearly-held First Amendment, it is still a much freer place for its people regarding the Internet than is mainland China. Russian folks can read my blog...Chinese cannot, and that about expresses it as far as I'm concerned. Now it's true that the Russian authorities over the years have placed restrictions on certain matters of content...particularly with YouTube...but bloggers and social media users still really do have a good amount of freedom between the U.S. and Russia. China? Forget it...
Friday, November 8, 2019
Quote of the Week...from Billy Joel
Though we choose between reality and madness it's either sadness or euphoria. ---Billy Joel
The above quote is a line from Billy Joel's 1976 Summer, Highland Falls, a track from his 1976 Turnstiles album. This song's lyrics are a cognitive reverie in philosophy...I encourage you to listen it, which I just posted this past Monday as #393 on my all-time favorites list. Before I go into what this quote meant for me, let me share that once in my eleventh-grade English class back in late 1972 we had a guest speaker, a poet of renown, to sit in on the class and discuss his craft. I remember him stating that oftentimes he would get feedback from people who credited him with all sorts of revelations in his poems that enlightened them...but that he himself hadn't been thinking at all along those lines when composing them. And then he said that the work stands on its own once it's out there and that even unintended interpretations are legitimate, as far as he was concerned. So with that in mind I acknowledge that I may or may not be in total sync with Billy Joel's intended message here, but I'll give my own "feedback" anyway, for what it's worth...
If there's one word that I believe adequately describes these times we live in and the social attitudes epitomizing it, it is "narrative". Art Linkletter may have said that "kids say the darndest things", but people in general believe the darndest things as long as they fit within their own personal adopted narratives about the nature of the world around them and their own perceived lives. These narratives, which include past personal history, religion, politics, socioeconomic class, identity categories, economic status, consumption patterns (including that of drugs), and entertainment preferences, tend to reinforce themselves in their holders' minds through supporting input...be it true or false...while they tend to reject any contradictory information regardless of its truth value...to believe something patently false just because it fits your narrative to me is a feature of madness. And behind each person's personally and tenaciously held narrative...each with its peculiar mixture of reality and fantasy...is the unrecognized cause for it: the narrative makes them feel better...
One thing that social media like Facebook and Twitter do very well is to reveal and encourage people's personally held narratives. These forums feed into narrative bias by giving users access to just about any opinion source that supplies catchy slogans or "news" items propping them up. I believe folks in general want to have a sense of order about their lives and what's going on around them, and since it comforts them more they will be willing to throw away any objective, respectful and skeptical treatment of the news or the diversity of viewpoints about a particular point and instead boil it all down to the good guys (who possess all of the truth) versus the bad guys (born liars, all of them). It's frustrating for me to see this in others, along with their tendency to only reference the news sources that resonate with their narratives, yet in all honesty as a human being here along with the rest of us I'm also plodding along through my own life with my own tightly-held, cherished narrative...after all, it's either sadness or euphoria. But I've noticed one thing ever since I began this blog more than twelve years ago: when I write about a particular subject I often finding myself taking on both its pros and cons and on a number of occasions end up with a message that I hadn't previously intended...and I watch and read all kinds of perspectives on what's going around us. Why don't you start your own writing blog and share your views with the world as well? I'd be interested in reading it, plus it may benefit you as it has done me by helping you to sort out your own narratives. Wordpress or Google's Blogger (which I use) are good places to start...
The above quote is a line from Billy Joel's 1976 Summer, Highland Falls, a track from his 1976 Turnstiles album. This song's lyrics are a cognitive reverie in philosophy...I encourage you to listen it, which I just posted this past Monday as #393 on my all-time favorites list. Before I go into what this quote meant for me, let me share that once in my eleventh-grade English class back in late 1972 we had a guest speaker, a poet of renown, to sit in on the class and discuss his craft. I remember him stating that oftentimes he would get feedback from people who credited him with all sorts of revelations in his poems that enlightened them...but that he himself hadn't been thinking at all along those lines when composing them. And then he said that the work stands on its own once it's out there and that even unintended interpretations are legitimate, as far as he was concerned. So with that in mind I acknowledge that I may or may not be in total sync with Billy Joel's intended message here, but I'll give my own "feedback" anyway, for what it's worth...
If there's one word that I believe adequately describes these times we live in and the social attitudes epitomizing it, it is "narrative". Art Linkletter may have said that "kids say the darndest things", but people in general believe the darndest things as long as they fit within their own personal adopted narratives about the nature of the world around them and their own perceived lives. These narratives, which include past personal history, religion, politics, socioeconomic class, identity categories, economic status, consumption patterns (including that of drugs), and entertainment preferences, tend to reinforce themselves in their holders' minds through supporting input...be it true or false...while they tend to reject any contradictory information regardless of its truth value...to believe something patently false just because it fits your narrative to me is a feature of madness. And behind each person's personally and tenaciously held narrative...each with its peculiar mixture of reality and fantasy...is the unrecognized cause for it: the narrative makes them feel better...
One thing that social media like Facebook and Twitter do very well is to reveal and encourage people's personally held narratives. These forums feed into narrative bias by giving users access to just about any opinion source that supplies catchy slogans or "news" items propping them up. I believe folks in general want to have a sense of order about their lives and what's going on around them, and since it comforts them more they will be willing to throw away any objective, respectful and skeptical treatment of the news or the diversity of viewpoints about a particular point and instead boil it all down to the good guys (who possess all of the truth) versus the bad guys (born liars, all of them). It's frustrating for me to see this in others, along with their tendency to only reference the news sources that resonate with their narratives, yet in all honesty as a human being here along with the rest of us I'm also plodding along through my own life with my own tightly-held, cherished narrative...after all, it's either sadness or euphoria. But I've noticed one thing ever since I began this blog more than twelve years ago: when I write about a particular subject I often finding myself taking on both its pros and cons and on a number of occasions end up with a message that I hadn't previously intended...and I watch and read all kinds of perspectives on what's going around us. Why don't you start your own writing blog and share your views with the world as well? I'd be interested in reading it, plus it may benefit you as it has done me by helping you to sort out your own narratives. Wordpress or Google's Blogger (which I use) are good places to start...
Thursday, November 7, 2019
Just Finished Reading The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel
Yann Martel is best known for his 2001 novel of Life of Pi...here is a link to my earlier review of it on this blog: [Life of Pi]. His 2016 work the The High Mountains of Portugal conveys a very different mood while continuing with the themes of animals, religion, cross-cultural encounters, mortality and grief...all present in that earlier work. It is divided into three separate tales, set in 1904, 1939, and 1981 with unifying elements of family, religious symbolism, and a small village in "mountainous" east Portugal (where the author points out that there are no true mountains). This book was much more difficult for me to get through than Life of Pi, especially that very confusing second story...but this is how Martel wrote it and I accept it, without necessarily liking it...
The first tale concerns grief-stricken young Tomás, whose beloved wife and their young son had recently died of illness, reacting by only walking backwards while becoming engrossed in a 17th century diary of an obscure Portuguese priest assigned to Angola and Sao Tome in Africa. Tomás embarks on a quest to find that priest's special, mysterious crucifix, hidden somewhere in an unknown rural eastern Portugal church. The second story involves a Portuguese pathologist, his wife, and a visit from an elderly woman in grief. And the third is about a burned-out Canadian politician who abandons his office to return to his ancestral roots in Portugal...with a very special companion...
It's often difficult for me to write a review without giving away too much...let me just say in the case of The High Mountains of Portugal that I've read some of the reactions to it on the Goodreads website and discovered that readers usually either loved it or despised it. That stands to reason as this novel of Yann Martel is in places difficult to follow as a literal, reality-based narrative and is full of all sorts of symbolism and allegory...seems like the kind of book that high school English teachers like to assign to their hapless students. I also think a lot of readers were hoping for another story along the lines of Life of Pi and were put off by the descent into weirdness in the 1939 story, but as I had previously noted, the two works do have several overlapping themes. I'm glad I read it, but I much, much preferred Life of Pi...
The first tale concerns grief-stricken young Tomás, whose beloved wife and their young son had recently died of illness, reacting by only walking backwards while becoming engrossed in a 17th century diary of an obscure Portuguese priest assigned to Angola and Sao Tome in Africa. Tomás embarks on a quest to find that priest's special, mysterious crucifix, hidden somewhere in an unknown rural eastern Portugal church. The second story involves a Portuguese pathologist, his wife, and a visit from an elderly woman in grief. And the third is about a burned-out Canadian politician who abandons his office to return to his ancestral roots in Portugal...with a very special companion...
It's often difficult for me to write a review without giving away too much...let me just say in the case of The High Mountains of Portugal that I've read some of the reactions to it on the Goodreads website and discovered that readers usually either loved it or despised it. That stands to reason as this novel of Yann Martel is in places difficult to follow as a literal, reality-based narrative and is full of all sorts of symbolism and allegory...seems like the kind of book that high school English teachers like to assign to their hapless students. I also think a lot of readers were hoping for another story along the lines of Life of Pi and were put off by the descent into weirdness in the 1939 story, but as I had previously noted, the two works do have several overlapping themes. I'm glad I read it, but I much, much preferred Life of Pi...
Wednesday, November 6, 2019
Weekly Short Stories: 1953 Science Fiction, Part 2
I continue my look back at 1953 science fiction, reviewing more selections from the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 15 (1953). Here are the next five from the book...
SAUCER OF LONELINESS by Theodore Sturgeon
On their 1979 Regatta de Blanc album, the Police have a very popular track titled Message in a Bottle...its culminating line resonates strongly with the message in this story of a woman, who while taking a walk through Central Park one day, gets hit in the head by a small flying saucer with its own message to convey. She discovers that loneliness and being alone are two entirely separate things as she is harassed and subjected to interrogations and universal notoriety and scrutiny as a result of her experience...
THE LIBERATION OF EARTH by William Tenn
I reviewed this story in an earlier article...click on the following link to read it: [Link]. This is a tale that has almost universal allegorical application: Earth is just minding its own business when one day a far-more technologically advanced alien race lands and informs "us" that they are embroiled in a serious galactic war with another race of beings...and that they are "liberating" Earth from its influence (which was never felt in the first place). The battles between the warring parties ensue with our dear home world further damaged and its population decimated with each succeeding encounter. To apply the allegory, think of all the situations on different levels when people just want to be left alone to mind their own business and some other more dominant party decides, according to its own values and self-interests, to interfere and ultimately subjugate and harm them while at the same time claiming that it is working to help or "liberate" them...
LOT by Ward Moore
Another story that has allegorical value, Los Angeles has just been struck in a nuclear exchange and the city is in a near-panicked state of mass evacuation. Mr. Jimmons has foreseen this development and has already meticulously planned his escape plans, including his destination, escape route and strategy, and what to take and what to leave behind...unlike his wife and three children, each with their own shortsightedness, petty concerns and unwillingness to see the changed reality in their situation for what it is. The narrative describes their journey along the highway and the revealing ongoing conversation in the car between them, as well as Jimmons' unspoken thoughts that explain and justify his actions. And the title Lot is in itself an analogy...from the Old Testament of the Bible...
THE NINE BILLION NAMES OF GOD by Arthur C. Clarke
According to this story, there is a sect of monks off across the Himalayas believing that when God's nine billion names are compiled, his task in the universe will be complete...whatever that's supposed to mean. The monks hire a western tech company to send them a computer, along with two technicians, to print out all reasonable combinations of letters that would eventually encompass those nine billion names. This is one of those typically brief short stories of Clarke that has a knockout, memorable final line. As for the computer, remember that this story was written in 1953!
WARM by Robert Sheckley
This story depends on the notion that what we perceive as humans is conceptualized by trying to form "wholes", or Gestalts, out of those perceptions. Sheckley, through his protagonist who is about to leave his apartment to pick up his date to a party, describes in progressive fashion what would happen if one abandoned his humanity and began to perceive reality on its own terms and not through our own evolved filters of conceptualizing. This is a pretty doggone deep story and kind of makes you wonder about it all...
Next week: more sci-fi short stories from 1953...
SAUCER OF LONELINESS by Theodore Sturgeon
On their 1979 Regatta de Blanc album, the Police have a very popular track titled Message in a Bottle...its culminating line resonates strongly with the message in this story of a woman, who while taking a walk through Central Park one day, gets hit in the head by a small flying saucer with its own message to convey. She discovers that loneliness and being alone are two entirely separate things as she is harassed and subjected to interrogations and universal notoriety and scrutiny as a result of her experience...
THE LIBERATION OF EARTH by William Tenn
I reviewed this story in an earlier article...click on the following link to read it: [Link]. This is a tale that has almost universal allegorical application: Earth is just minding its own business when one day a far-more technologically advanced alien race lands and informs "us" that they are embroiled in a serious galactic war with another race of beings...and that they are "liberating" Earth from its influence (which was never felt in the first place). The battles between the warring parties ensue with our dear home world further damaged and its population decimated with each succeeding encounter. To apply the allegory, think of all the situations on different levels when people just want to be left alone to mind their own business and some other more dominant party decides, according to its own values and self-interests, to interfere and ultimately subjugate and harm them while at the same time claiming that it is working to help or "liberate" them...
LOT by Ward Moore
Another story that has allegorical value, Los Angeles has just been struck in a nuclear exchange and the city is in a near-panicked state of mass evacuation. Mr. Jimmons has foreseen this development and has already meticulously planned his escape plans, including his destination, escape route and strategy, and what to take and what to leave behind...unlike his wife and three children, each with their own shortsightedness, petty concerns and unwillingness to see the changed reality in their situation for what it is. The narrative describes their journey along the highway and the revealing ongoing conversation in the car between them, as well as Jimmons' unspoken thoughts that explain and justify his actions. And the title Lot is in itself an analogy...from the Old Testament of the Bible...
THE NINE BILLION NAMES OF GOD by Arthur C. Clarke
According to this story, there is a sect of monks off across the Himalayas believing that when God's nine billion names are compiled, his task in the universe will be complete...whatever that's supposed to mean. The monks hire a western tech company to send them a computer, along with two technicians, to print out all reasonable combinations of letters that would eventually encompass those nine billion names. This is one of those typically brief short stories of Clarke that has a knockout, memorable final line. As for the computer, remember that this story was written in 1953!
WARM by Robert Sheckley
This story depends on the notion that what we perceive as humans is conceptualized by trying to form "wholes", or Gestalts, out of those perceptions. Sheckley, through his protagonist who is about to leave his apartment to pick up his date to a party, describes in progressive fashion what would happen if one abandoned his humanity and began to perceive reality on its own terms and not through our own evolved filters of conceptualizing. This is a pretty doggone deep story and kind of makes you wonder about it all...
Next week: more sci-fi short stories from 1953...
Tuesday, November 5, 2019
Giving Miami Dolphins a "Mulligan" After Beating Jets
Usually in professional sports a franchise's management won't deliberately come out before the season even begins and make it clear that they plan to "tank" their team by (1) finishing poorly in order to garner top draft picks and (2) trading away any current players of any value for future draft picks. When done this way, like with the baseball Miami Marlins in 2018 or the football Dolphins this year, the effect is like team management giving the finger to its fans while expecting them to continue shelling out the big bucks for tickets, TV subscriptions and merchandise. At first it looked as if the Dolphins were going to deliberately let themselves be humiliated in their quest to be absolutely the worst NFL team ever to hit the field. But over the past few weeks, although they continued to lose, Miami under their first year head coach Brian Flores showed a lot of spunk in games against Washington, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh, nearly winning the first and leading late in the other two. In spite of their management's tactics the coaches and players WANT to win. And last Sunday at home they beat the New York Jets, a team that had hired for its head coach Adam Gase, whom the Dolphins had fired last year and despite its initial high hopes for the 2019 season now find themselves sharing a 1-7 record with Miami...and in last place in the division for having lost to them. But if I were Dolphins management I wouldn't start panicking yet...there are at least three top quarterback prospects that will be entering the upcoming draft, enough to spread among the very worst teams in the league. What they don't seem to get, though, is that along with raw talent it is very crucial that a franchise establish a tradition and reputation for a disciplined, tough, and winning approach to the game...that's worth a couple of places in the draft hierarchy, in my opinion. So, using a term from the sport of golf whereby a player gets a free swing after "muffing" one, I'm giving the Miami Dolphins a Mulligan...may they use it well as I continue to root for them. Meanwhile, it looks like we'll be seeing other teams like the Jets and the Cincinnati Bengals joining Miami's management...but not its players and coaches...in the tanking strategy now that their seasons have been torn to tatters. By the way, the Cleveland Browns, a recent repeat tank act, were supposedly going to set their division on fire this year with their top pick at quarterback and other acquisitions...they're now at 2-6 with only one more win than Miami: how's that strategy worked for them?
One other thing: the Baltimore Ravens, which humiliated Miami 59-10 in the season's opening game, knocked the New England Patriots...43-0 winners over the Dolphins in the second week...out of the undefeated ranks by beating them 37-20 Sunday evening. That leaves the San Francisco 49ers as the last remaining undefeated team in the NFL this year. May the Seattle Seahawks perform the needed task of defeating them next week so that the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only team that went through an entire season and playoffs with a perfect record, once again will be able to celebrate their unique status in pro football history and break out that champagne...
One other thing: the Baltimore Ravens, which humiliated Miami 59-10 in the season's opening game, knocked the New England Patriots...43-0 winners over the Dolphins in the second week...out of the undefeated ranks by beating them 37-20 Sunday evening. That leaves the San Francisco 49ers as the last remaining undefeated team in the NFL this year. May the Seattle Seahawks perform the needed task of defeating them next week so that the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only team that went through an entire season and playoffs with a perfect record, once again will be able to celebrate their unique status in pro football history and break out that champagne...
Monday, November 4, 2019
My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #400-391
Today I start on the next hundred in my weekly countdown of my own 500 all-time favorite songs...so without any more intervening jabbering, here are the next ten and my comments...
400 TWILIGHT OMENS...Franz Ferdinand
Franz Ferdinand is a Scottish alternative/indie rock band that came out with a couple of hit singles in 2004: Take Me Out and This Fire. On the their 2009 Tonight album is the deep track Twilight Omens, pretty short at 2:29 but it has a very riveting introductory (and recurring) musical theme...I listened to it a few times and the song continued playing itself in my mind, almost spellbinding...
399 SCOFF...Nirvana
Off Nirvana's 1989 Bleach album is Scoff, another of composer/singer/lead guitarist Kurt Cobain's tributes to teenage angst as he takes on the role of someone facing adult authority and judgment, rejecting that authority and judgment...well, that's what I got out of it. Oh, and he wants them to give him back his alcohol...repeatedly. The lyrics are deranged and defiant and the music is loud, stomping, and in your face...another one of those cathartic tracks telling listeners that they're not alone: they have fellow travelers in their anguish...
398 JUST LIKE ROMEO AND JULIET...the Reflections
When I hear such a spot-on, well-produced song like this one from the Reflections in 1964, I wonder to myself why this group didn't come out with a string of great hits...there are lots of artists over the years I feel this way about. Still, I'm grateful for this exuberant song with a very catchy beat and wonderful harmonizing and vocal range, another tune I liked hearing off the radio even back when I was but seven years old...
397 CASTLES IN THE AIR...Don McLean
Don McLean, best known for his cryptic anthem American Pie in 1971, ten years later released the single Castles in the Air...demonstrating that he still had the "magic". Only one problem with that conclusion: McLean had written this song back in 1970 and released it as a single before American Pie...the 1981 version he modified and rerecorded. It's a bittersweet song Glen Campbell could have successfully recorded back in his Galveston and Wichita Lineman years as it expresses the singer's longing for the country life (and a country wife)...
396 TOO MANY PEOPLE...Paul McCartney
In 1971 I enthusiastically bought Paul McCartney's second solo album, Ram, and played it over and over. Ever since that time I thought the opening track Too Many People was one of the few standouts on it...I've often thought there were "too many people" and that they seemed determined to make a misery out of my unassuming little life. But McCartney, I think, who at the time was in the midst of a nasty lawsuit against his former bandmates from the Beatles and their manager Allen Klein, was directing his invective...in a backhanded manner...at them, not people in general. What I grew to like most about this song was McCartney's lengthy instrumental jam session at the end...
395 I TURN MY CAMERA ON...Spoon
Speaking of songs with catchy beats, this alternative hit from 2005 pretty much introduced this Austin, Texas-based act to the rest of the world. Gritty-voiced singer Britt Daniel is also one of the main creative forces with Spoon and pretty much produced I Turn My Camera On himself...his take on the lyrics is that it described someone who hid behind his camera from the reality he was shooting...interesting, and a song that definitely makes you want to snap your fingers as Daniel goes into falsetto mode...
394 SUKIYAKI...Kyu Sakamoto
Sukiyaki is a nonsense title given to Japanese artist Kyu Sakamoto's 1961 hit, originally titled Ue o Muite Arukou…I can see why they changed it to something more memorable: after all, the song is completely in Japanese. By the way, that earlier title, which is also the opening line, means "I look up as I walk". Why after this monster hit we didn't hear anything else by Sakamoto, a very expressive singer, is beyond me...I'm sure he produced a lot of good music for his Japanese fans...
393 SUMMER, HIGHLAND FALLS...Billy Joel
This track from Billy Joel's 1976 Turnstiles album should have been titled "Sadness or Euphoria" for those recurring words as he combines philosophical introspection with poetic lyrics and piano virtuosity. There's not an unquotable line in the song...maybe I should examine some of these lyrics sometime in my Friday "Quote of the Week" focus on this blog. The essence of this song as I see it is that people tend to complicate things in life when they're really making simple choices as they go along. And no, I have no idea what "Summer, Highland Falls" has to do with any of this...
392 THE WAY...Fastball
The subject matter for this 1998 song, which sounds like the group was emulating the style of the Beatles back in '64-66, is pretty dark as it describes a couple who one day decide to suddenly abandon all their responsibilities...including their own children...and run away to a new life abroad. I think this might be based on a real news story of such a couple being discovered and arrested for child neglect. I say hey, if your life isn't going the way you wanted, go ahead and change it to something better but please don't victimize or betray others in the process. Having said that, I loved this song 21 years ago and once again can't understand why this group didn't produce any more hit records afterwards...
391 THAT GIRL COULD SING...Jackson Browne
It was in the fall-winter of 1980 when this song was popular on the radio...I associate it with cold weather, apparently that was a cold winter in Gainesville. I taped it off the radio and played it over and over again back then...it's my second favorite song by Browne. This very talented artist, however, tended to go overboard with promoting whatever left-wing political causes were in vogue at the time...and this bugged me, not that some of those causes weren't just, but rather that he seemed so patronizing about how "right" he was about it all. That Girl Could Sing is a love song of sorts...but the singer has to come to grips with the fact that his love, as he sang it, "could have turned out to be almost anyone...almost anyone...with the possible exception of who I wanted her to be"...
Next Monday: #390-381...
400 TWILIGHT OMENS...Franz Ferdinand
Franz Ferdinand is a Scottish alternative/indie rock band that came out with a couple of hit singles in 2004: Take Me Out and This Fire. On the their 2009 Tonight album is the deep track Twilight Omens, pretty short at 2:29 but it has a very riveting introductory (and recurring) musical theme...I listened to it a few times and the song continued playing itself in my mind, almost spellbinding...
399 SCOFF...Nirvana
Off Nirvana's 1989 Bleach album is Scoff, another of composer/singer/lead guitarist Kurt Cobain's tributes to teenage angst as he takes on the role of someone facing adult authority and judgment, rejecting that authority and judgment...well, that's what I got out of it. Oh, and he wants them to give him back his alcohol...repeatedly. The lyrics are deranged and defiant and the music is loud, stomping, and in your face...another one of those cathartic tracks telling listeners that they're not alone: they have fellow travelers in their anguish...
398 JUST LIKE ROMEO AND JULIET...the Reflections
When I hear such a spot-on, well-produced song like this one from the Reflections in 1964, I wonder to myself why this group didn't come out with a string of great hits...there are lots of artists over the years I feel this way about. Still, I'm grateful for this exuberant song with a very catchy beat and wonderful harmonizing and vocal range, another tune I liked hearing off the radio even back when I was but seven years old...
397 CASTLES IN THE AIR...Don McLean
Don McLean, best known for his cryptic anthem American Pie in 1971, ten years later released the single Castles in the Air...demonstrating that he still had the "magic". Only one problem with that conclusion: McLean had written this song back in 1970 and released it as a single before American Pie...the 1981 version he modified and rerecorded. It's a bittersweet song Glen Campbell could have successfully recorded back in his Galveston and Wichita Lineman years as it expresses the singer's longing for the country life (and a country wife)...
396 TOO MANY PEOPLE...Paul McCartney
In 1971 I enthusiastically bought Paul McCartney's second solo album, Ram, and played it over and over. Ever since that time I thought the opening track Too Many People was one of the few standouts on it...I've often thought there were "too many people" and that they seemed determined to make a misery out of my unassuming little life. But McCartney, I think, who at the time was in the midst of a nasty lawsuit against his former bandmates from the Beatles and their manager Allen Klein, was directing his invective...in a backhanded manner...at them, not people in general. What I grew to like most about this song was McCartney's lengthy instrumental jam session at the end...
395 I TURN MY CAMERA ON...Spoon
Speaking of songs with catchy beats, this alternative hit from 2005 pretty much introduced this Austin, Texas-based act to the rest of the world. Gritty-voiced singer Britt Daniel is also one of the main creative forces with Spoon and pretty much produced I Turn My Camera On himself...his take on the lyrics is that it described someone who hid behind his camera from the reality he was shooting...interesting, and a song that definitely makes you want to snap your fingers as Daniel goes into falsetto mode...
394 SUKIYAKI...Kyu Sakamoto
Sukiyaki is a nonsense title given to Japanese artist Kyu Sakamoto's 1961 hit, originally titled Ue o Muite Arukou…I can see why they changed it to something more memorable: after all, the song is completely in Japanese. By the way, that earlier title, which is also the opening line, means "I look up as I walk". Why after this monster hit we didn't hear anything else by Sakamoto, a very expressive singer, is beyond me...I'm sure he produced a lot of good music for his Japanese fans...
393 SUMMER, HIGHLAND FALLS...Billy Joel
This track from Billy Joel's 1976 Turnstiles album should have been titled "Sadness or Euphoria" for those recurring words as he combines philosophical introspection with poetic lyrics and piano virtuosity. There's not an unquotable line in the song...maybe I should examine some of these lyrics sometime in my Friday "Quote of the Week" focus on this blog. The essence of this song as I see it is that people tend to complicate things in life when they're really making simple choices as they go along. And no, I have no idea what "Summer, Highland Falls" has to do with any of this...
392 THE WAY...Fastball
The subject matter for this 1998 song, which sounds like the group was emulating the style of the Beatles back in '64-66, is pretty dark as it describes a couple who one day decide to suddenly abandon all their responsibilities...including their own children...and run away to a new life abroad. I think this might be based on a real news story of such a couple being discovered and arrested for child neglect. I say hey, if your life isn't going the way you wanted, go ahead and change it to something better but please don't victimize or betray others in the process. Having said that, I loved this song 21 years ago and once again can't understand why this group didn't produce any more hit records afterwards...
391 THAT GIRL COULD SING...Jackson Browne
It was in the fall-winter of 1980 when this song was popular on the radio...I associate it with cold weather, apparently that was a cold winter in Gainesville. I taped it off the radio and played it over and over again back then...it's my second favorite song by Browne. This very talented artist, however, tended to go overboard with promoting whatever left-wing political causes were in vogue at the time...and this bugged me, not that some of those causes weren't just, but rather that he seemed so patronizing about how "right" he was about it all. That Girl Could Sing is a love song of sorts...but the singer has to come to grips with the fact that his love, as he sang it, "could have turned out to be almost anyone...almost anyone...with the possible exception of who I wanted her to be"...
Next Monday: #390-381...
Sunday, November 3, 2019
Just Finished Reading Slade House by David Mitchell
Slade House, a 2015 novel by David Mitchell which I just finished reading, is my third from this author, the first two being Cloud Atlas (which I was intrigued into reading from its movie promos) and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet...you can read my past reviews of them by clicking on their titles. In Slade House I encounter once again the concept of "psychic vampire", which Stephen King wrote about in his novel Doctor Sleep and which one of the sci-fi Scanners movies also delved into. It's always been interesting to me that, once the author has introduced paranormal or supernatural powers into his or her story, then it becomes necessary to impose special limiting rules on those powers...like, for example, the existence within the Superman series of kryptonite as a counter to his otherwise unlimited powers. In Slade House, the "vampires" have to replenish their power at a specific place in London (hence the book's title) every nine years by drawing to them unsuspecting victims who they know possess the psychic component they must feed upon. This way the novel divides itself into essentially separate short stories, jumping from 1979 to 1988 to 1997 to 2006 and finally 2015...
The theme of reincarnation, which was evident in the earlier Cloud Atlas, is here as well in Slade House. But then I discovered that this book has a predecessor, The Bone Clocks, which I should have read first since some of those "rules" I referred to were first laid out in it while one of its characters makes an important appearance at the end of Slade House. It seems that David Mitchell is like other authors such as Isaac Asimov and Stephen King, creating his own fictional universe with recurring characters and paradigms that crop up from time to time within his supposedly "independent" novels...it would have been more accurate to describe them as all being a part of the same series. In 2006 Mitchell reportedly wrote a book, titled From Me Flows What You Call Time, that he has put off its release until the year 2114: I can hardly wait, let's see, I'll be turning 158 that year...
Slade House was a good story in the gothic horror tradition. My only problem with it was that the author didn't make it a complete story in itself but tried to integrate it with his earlier works...I've read Stephen King's novels Hearts in Atlantis and Insomnia and had the same problem with these two works' tie-ins with his Dark Tower series: if you haven't read it then you're lost to some extent with these two books. But David Mitchell's writing is what it is and I plan to read his other novels, including The Bone Clocks...
The theme of reincarnation, which was evident in the earlier Cloud Atlas, is here as well in Slade House. But then I discovered that this book has a predecessor, The Bone Clocks, which I should have read first since some of those "rules" I referred to were first laid out in it while one of its characters makes an important appearance at the end of Slade House. It seems that David Mitchell is like other authors such as Isaac Asimov and Stephen King, creating his own fictional universe with recurring characters and paradigms that crop up from time to time within his supposedly "independent" novels...it would have been more accurate to describe them as all being a part of the same series. In 2006 Mitchell reportedly wrote a book, titled From Me Flows What You Call Time, that he has put off its release until the year 2114: I can hardly wait, let's see, I'll be turning 158 that year...
Slade House was a good story in the gothic horror tradition. My only problem with it was that the author didn't make it a complete story in itself but tried to integrate it with his earlier works...I've read Stephen King's novels Hearts in Atlantis and Insomnia and had the same problem with these two works' tie-ins with his Dark Tower series: if you haven't read it then you're lost to some extent with these two books. But David Mitchell's writing is what it is and I plan to read his other novels, including The Bone Clocks...
Saturday, November 2, 2019
Thinking of Teaching Self a Musical Instrument (or Two)
My father was an excellent country-style guitar player and also played clarinet earlier in his life...his singing sounded a lot like that of Hank Williams. My mother was also adept at guitar to the point of mastering the basic chords necessary to accompany folk songs that as children me and my sister Anita, a very good singer, would sing along with her while she played. My son Will became a very good piano player and my daughter Rebecca has a talent for hearing tunes and readily transferring them to instrument as well as for her beautiful singing voice. And my wife Melissa played flute in her high school band. Me? I'm very good at listening to music and not much more. I took some private piano lessons a few years ago but didn't progress very far, although I managed to survive a recital playing a short classical piece. Musical ability for most of us is something that works best when we start it very early in life...a lot of classical composers started out learning music and playing instruments as toddlers and Mozart wrote most of his officially-credited symphonies by the age at which I graduated from high school. So in stating that I'd be interested in my later years taking on learning a musical instrument may sound like a lost cause...but I think I'll try it anyway, focusing on teaching myself basic guitar and reviewing and surpassing my previous instruction level on the keyboard. There are even apps that help with this sort of thing and I plan to make full use of them. Should be interesting, everybody plug your ears...
Friday, November 1, 2019
Quote of the Week...from Jeff Galloway
Being an athlete is a state of mind not bound by age, performance or place in the running pack.
---Jeff Galloway
One thing that you probably noticed upon reading the above quote by Jeff Galloway, himself a longtime runner who has achieved personal success in marathon races and who encourages and teaches others from the general population who want to complete a 26.2 mile race for themselves, is that his definition of "athlete" is confined to the sport of competitive running. I'm sure, though, that Galloway, many of whose precepts about running I follow and who seems like a thoughtful, reasonable sort, would normally expand "athlete" to encompass the world of sport in general...although when ESPN shows poker games I draw a sharp line there. Some people who otherwise could physically and medically participate in athletic sports are prevented from running...sometimes they have issues with their knees or feet, or example. These can transfer Galloway's statement to another activity, be it swimming, biking, or maybe something more team-oriented. Although I do not enter running races with the primary goal of beating others, even my finishing time is increasingly secondary to actually covering the distance successfully. And maybe it's ironic that I'm like that, since in the last two races I finished this past spring I won awards for best finisher in my male/age category...then again I was the ONLY finisher in the category for each race! I consider myself to be an athlete, not only with running but also with walking. That's also good, since as I age (I'm 63 now), barring medical developments to the contrary, I intend to continue running and walking as long as I can do so. On November 10th I plan to run the Tom Walker Memorial Half-Marathon to be held at 8 AM at Boulware Springs Park in southeastern Gainesville...
As long as I'm writing about running and this is the first day of November, here is my running report for the previous month. In October I ran for a total of 139 miles, with 13.3 miles being my longest single run. I missed running for two days in the month, and during that time I was walking considerably, including a hike along a Georgia mountain trail with Melissa. All considered, a pretty good month for my running/walking. Looking forward to see what happens this coming month...
---Jeff Galloway
One thing that you probably noticed upon reading the above quote by Jeff Galloway, himself a longtime runner who has achieved personal success in marathon races and who encourages and teaches others from the general population who want to complete a 26.2 mile race for themselves, is that his definition of "athlete" is confined to the sport of competitive running. I'm sure, though, that Galloway, many of whose precepts about running I follow and who seems like a thoughtful, reasonable sort, would normally expand "athlete" to encompass the world of sport in general...although when ESPN shows poker games I draw a sharp line there. Some people who otherwise could physically and medically participate in athletic sports are prevented from running...sometimes they have issues with their knees or feet, or example. These can transfer Galloway's statement to another activity, be it swimming, biking, or maybe something more team-oriented. Although I do not enter running races with the primary goal of beating others, even my finishing time is increasingly secondary to actually covering the distance successfully. And maybe it's ironic that I'm like that, since in the last two races I finished this past spring I won awards for best finisher in my male/age category...then again I was the ONLY finisher in the category for each race! I consider myself to be an athlete, not only with running but also with walking. That's also good, since as I age (I'm 63 now), barring medical developments to the contrary, I intend to continue running and walking as long as I can do so. On November 10th I plan to run the Tom Walker Memorial Half-Marathon to be held at 8 AM at Boulware Springs Park in southeastern Gainesville...
As long as I'm writing about running and this is the first day of November, here is my running report for the previous month. In October I ran for a total of 139 miles, with 13.3 miles being my longest single run. I missed running for two days in the month, and during that time I was walking considerably, including a hike along a Georgia mountain trail with Melissa. All considered, a pretty good month for my running/walking. Looking forward to see what happens this coming month...
Thursday, October 31, 2019
Just Finished Reading Centennial by James A. Michener
In the summer of 1976 I had signed up to take a summer college course in general American history...the young instructor in his opening lecture told the students that he wasn't that concerned about facts per se, but rather that we picked up on the trends being taught in the course. I promptly dropped the class and switched to the same course but by a different instructor, a crotchety old man who taught from a scrapbook of different newspaper and magazine clippings he had assembled over the years. And he covered facts, boy did he ever...as well as laying out his own admittedly biased worldview. But I liked Mr. Theriault's way of teaching anyway...if you're not solidly based in historical facts then you're susceptible to any cockamamie idea floating around...and there are quite a few a these nowadays. I say all this because James A. Michener's 1974 historical novel Centennial, set in a fictional Colorado county on the Wyoming border north of Denver, mixes the two approaches in a disconcerting way. After reading it I feel I understand the trends and eras leading up to the present (the author's 1974, that is) while at the same time I became very uncomfortable with all of the "facts": the characters, locales, and events, while very similar to real historical people, locations, and events, are nonetheless fictional. So now I have this very-well researched and described fictional mental picture that is in all likelihood a very faithful representation of what the area around Centennial, a made-up town along the real Platte River, was really like. But that's the way it is with historical fiction, and I have to admit to greatly admiring Michener's attention to detail as well as his compassion and discernment in presenting all sides, good and bad, of his characters and the way societies and movements developed and declined there over the years...
Centennial is in essence a fictional history researcher's account of his commissioned area in northern Colorado, and he goes all the way back to the Earth's formation and the area's geological origins...then on to presenting life from the viewpoints of different animals populating the same region, including the dinosaur diplodocus, an early horse, a bison named "Rufus", a mother beaver, and a battle between a rattlesnake and eagle. How this fictional researcher came across these experiences strikes me as being a bit dubious, but he presents them all as fact...as well as the stories of a Clovis spear-maker from nearly 10,000 BC and Lame Beaver, an Arapaho Indian warrior. Don't get me wrong: I loved all of these little stories...and the book itself is by and large a collection of short stories bound in chronological order by the narrative connecting them all to the same geography. I already greatly admired Michener's writing after reading his 1982 novel Space, which I recently reviewed. I intend to embark on another Michener book in the near future, but I don't know which of his 40 novels it will be. So if you're interested in getting a good sense of what it was like in the American west...more specifically northern Colorado just east of the Rockies, you'll get a lot of input from Centennial about geology, dinosaurs, mammoths, horses, beavers, rattlesnakes, eagles, Arapaho-Shoshone-Pawnee-Cheyenne-Comanche Indians, French traders, the Army out west, outlaws and the gun culture, the gold and silver rushes, white prejudice against Indians and Mexicans, German, Russian, and Japanese settlers, the Mexicans and their revolution, cattle drives, ranching, religious attitudes of the time, the tactics of land acquisition and control, farming beets and then wheat, the Dust Bowl, and the effects of urban development on the environment...just to name a few items...then I say go for it!
Centennial is in essence a fictional history researcher's account of his commissioned area in northern Colorado, and he goes all the way back to the Earth's formation and the area's geological origins...then on to presenting life from the viewpoints of different animals populating the same region, including the dinosaur diplodocus, an early horse, a bison named "Rufus", a mother beaver, and a battle between a rattlesnake and eagle. How this fictional researcher came across these experiences strikes me as being a bit dubious, but he presents them all as fact...as well as the stories of a Clovis spear-maker from nearly 10,000 BC and Lame Beaver, an Arapaho Indian warrior. Don't get me wrong: I loved all of these little stories...and the book itself is by and large a collection of short stories bound in chronological order by the narrative connecting them all to the same geography. I already greatly admired Michener's writing after reading his 1982 novel Space, which I recently reviewed. I intend to embark on another Michener book in the near future, but I don't know which of his 40 novels it will be. So if you're interested in getting a good sense of what it was like in the American west...more specifically northern Colorado just east of the Rockies, you'll get a lot of input from Centennial about geology, dinosaurs, mammoths, horses, beavers, rattlesnakes, eagles, Arapaho-Shoshone-Pawnee-Cheyenne-Comanche Indians, French traders, the Army out west, outlaws and the gun culture, the gold and silver rushes, white prejudice against Indians and Mexicans, German, Russian, and Japanese settlers, the Mexicans and their revolution, cattle drives, ranching, religious attitudes of the time, the tactics of land acquisition and control, farming beets and then wheat, the Dust Bowl, and the effects of urban development on the environment...just to name a few items...then I say go for it!
Wednesday, October 30, 2019
Weekly Short Stories: 1953 Science Fiction, Part 1
When I recently picked up my own copy of Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 15 (1953), it struck me that I've owned that particular book in the series longer than most of the others, having read several of its stories a number of times. Today I'm covering the first three of the selected science fiction short stories from 1953: all three are set off in the future on other planets, the first two of which happen to be Mars...
THE BIG HOLIDAY by Fritz Leiber
This story reads like something that Ray Bradbury would have written about the good ol' days growing up in a small midwestern town, but the people here are living on a future terraformed Mars...and seem to have gotten their priorities straight, celebrating the "Big Holiday" by laying down their work and engaging in good-natured community games, feasts and parties...along with the rest of the now-enlightened collective population of Earth and Mars. It's a story of hope, that somewhere along the line the things that should really matter to us will finally become the determining priorities for humanity's future instead of destructive warfare, fear, and hate...
CRUCIFIXUS ETIAM by William M. Miller, Jr.
A young man from Peru, enticed by the good pay for laboring on Mars, signs up for a five-year stint there. He is fully aware that eventually he will probably lose his ability to breathe on his own and become permanently dependent on oxygen directly supplied by a machine to his bloodstream, but he struggles in vain against what increasingly seems inevitable. And why are all of them working so hard anyway to dig up the strange substance from deep under the planet's surface? Another Mars tale with an ultimately optimistic ending...but in this case to get to heaven you must first go through hell...
FOUR IN ONE by Damon Knight
One of my all-time favorite sci-fi stories, Four In One takes place far into a future when the entire human-settled galaxy is locked in the throes of a civil war between two implacable factions. On a hasty project to claim an previously unexplored-but-strategic planet for one side in the conflict, a biologist and three others in his team accidently fall into a mass of strange protoplasm...which proceeds to digest their bodies, leaving only their brains, eyes, and nervous systems intact within the mottled mass. How protagonist George Meister assesses and adapts to his unique situation and how he deals with the others sharing his predicament form the flow of this fascinating and singular tale. And the ending definitely provides food for thought...
Next week: more reviews of good 1953 sci-fi short stories...
THE BIG HOLIDAY by Fritz Leiber
This story reads like something that Ray Bradbury would have written about the good ol' days growing up in a small midwestern town, but the people here are living on a future terraformed Mars...and seem to have gotten their priorities straight, celebrating the "Big Holiday" by laying down their work and engaging in good-natured community games, feasts and parties...along with the rest of the now-enlightened collective population of Earth and Mars. It's a story of hope, that somewhere along the line the things that should really matter to us will finally become the determining priorities for humanity's future instead of destructive warfare, fear, and hate...
CRUCIFIXUS ETIAM by William M. Miller, Jr.
A young man from Peru, enticed by the good pay for laboring on Mars, signs up for a five-year stint there. He is fully aware that eventually he will probably lose his ability to breathe on his own and become permanently dependent on oxygen directly supplied by a machine to his bloodstream, but he struggles in vain against what increasingly seems inevitable. And why are all of them working so hard anyway to dig up the strange substance from deep under the planet's surface? Another Mars tale with an ultimately optimistic ending...but in this case to get to heaven you must first go through hell...
FOUR IN ONE by Damon Knight
One of my all-time favorite sci-fi stories, Four In One takes place far into a future when the entire human-settled galaxy is locked in the throes of a civil war between two implacable factions. On a hasty project to claim an previously unexplored-but-strategic planet for one side in the conflict, a biologist and three others in his team accidently fall into a mass of strange protoplasm...which proceeds to digest their bodies, leaving only their brains, eyes, and nervous systems intact within the mottled mass. How protagonist George Meister assesses and adapts to his unique situation and how he deals with the others sharing his predicament form the flow of this fascinating and singular tale. And the ending definitely provides food for thought...
Next week: more reviews of good 1953 sci-fi short stories...
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
A Little Rant About Introverts and Extroverts
I have more than once heard it stated that people more oriented to introverted personalities are fundamentally different from their extroverted counterparts in one very significant way: while an extrovert will feel emotionally and spiritually energized from social interactions and deliberately seek them out...the more people and the louder the better...it is precisely this type of situation that drains introverts, who relish solitude to replenish themselves. Being such an introvert, I really don't need around me any extroverts who think it is part of their mission in life to change me into a more "social" creature and impose their view of social interaction on me: I've seen extroverts in action and oftentimes it isn't very pretty, what with all of the backbiting, gossip, grandstanding, verbal aggression and manipulation I hear...
Speaking from my own experience...and not necessarily yours...it is complicated enough for my feeble mind to figure out where someone else is coming from in simple one-on-one conversations, much less to sit at a table or in a room where most of the people there are simultaneously assessing and judging each other while in conversation and spewing out stuff about others who are not present. I remember even back to the first grade when the teacher would simply walk out of the classroom for a couple of minutes and the entire class would erupt into spontaneous, loud chatter...I would just sit there overcome and immobilized by it all. But school is where extroverts get the automatic upper hand over introverts and the latter are often psychologically beaten down over the years to the point where...well, it all seems pointless. Introverts are not incomplete or insecure people who need to be brought out of their "shells"...Lord knows, I've encountered some extroverts who have to rank among the most insulated and insecure I've experienced...
Most of us are mixes of introverted and extroverted personalities, seeking a kind of balance whenever we're either too isolated or too crowded. Although without a doubt pretty far down the introverted scale, I still enjoy my family and associating with others, as well as being interested in what goes on around me...I just don't want to be swept off into oblivion by the masses...or even a small group...
Speaking from my own experience...and not necessarily yours...it is complicated enough for my feeble mind to figure out where someone else is coming from in simple one-on-one conversations, much less to sit at a table or in a room where most of the people there are simultaneously assessing and judging each other while in conversation and spewing out stuff about others who are not present. I remember even back to the first grade when the teacher would simply walk out of the classroom for a couple of minutes and the entire class would erupt into spontaneous, loud chatter...I would just sit there overcome and immobilized by it all. But school is where extroverts get the automatic upper hand over introverts and the latter are often psychologically beaten down over the years to the point where...well, it all seems pointless. Introverts are not incomplete or insecure people who need to be brought out of their "shells"...Lord knows, I've encountered some extroverts who have to rank among the most insulated and insecure I've experienced...
Most of us are mixes of introverted and extroverted personalities, seeking a kind of balance whenever we're either too isolated or too crowded. Although without a doubt pretty far down the introverted scale, I still enjoy my family and associating with others, as well as being interested in what goes on around me...I just don't want to be swept off into oblivion by the masses...or even a small group...
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