Weekly Short Stories: 1962 Science Fiction, Part 2

Allegory is the common thread of these four 1962 science fiction stories from the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 24 (1962).  But that's commonly the case with this genre, which offers a politically safer forum to discuss pressing and sensitive social issues that would invite blowback and retaliation were the author's ideas expressed more directly and literally.  Here are my reactions to them...

HANG HEAD, VANDAL! by Mark Clifton
A procedure has been developed to derived unlimited energy through fission with ordinary elements...but since there's no way of stopping the process once started then Earth is off-limits to apply the process.  But with Mars...since it's presumed to already be a dead, uninhabited world far away from us...who would miss its demise in the name of progress? The key word here is presumed.  An allegorical story, written years before Earth Day and the advent of the environmental movement, about the unintended consequences of our sometimes blind march ahead with technology and "progress"...

THE WEATHER MAN by Theodore Thomas
The most intriguing story of the four to me, this tale creates the future scenario of Earth's weather being micromanaged...by specially constructed spaceships that navigate the sun's surface and selectively direct its energy toward Earth to provide the wanted effects.  Because of this ability, worldwide political power has been concentrated in the weather control bureaucracy with three divisions that mimic our own present society's institutions: the political Weather Congress, the scientific Weather Advisors, and the implementing Weather Bureau.  An ambitious politician high up in the Congress comes up with what seems an impossible project, and the Advisors and Bureau are challenged to see it through...

EARTHLINGS GO HOME! by Mack Reynolds
An ostensibly tongue-in-cheek story from the viewpoint of a future jaded Earthling who, bored with what his home planet can provide in the area of stimulation and interest, travels to Mars to live it up.  The then-notion of the "ugly American" going abroad with an attitude of entitlement is treated allegorically here, with the native Martians having to adapt to the Earth people's presence...but not liking it one bit...

THE STREETS OF ASHKELON by Harry Harrison
An atheist trader on a world heretofore untainted by humanity has befriended the native intelligent amphibian life and is gradually imparting a sense of the universe to them when a Christian missionary is forced upon him and his world, creating a direct conflict as to the direction of those native beings. As with time travel stories, I am weary (and wary) of science fiction tales that stereotype Christians the way this one does...I think the author, clearly on the side of the atheist and presenting the religious debate in overly simplistic terms, could have easily used greater subtlety to get his point across and his story probably would have had a stronger effect on the reader.  My least favorite of today's four...

Next week I conclude my look back at science fiction short stories from 1962...

Primary Election Day Today in Florida

Today is primary election day for the state of Florida if you're planning on on-site, in-person precinct voting...Melissa and I mailed in our ballots several days ago and, thanks to Alachua County's online ballot-tracking feature, we are confident that the elections office received them and everything is in proper order to process them tonight in the count.  I've noticed that my county provides Business Reply postpaid ballots for voters while others...neighboring Gilchrist County, for example...don't and have the voters put a stamp on their ballots.  And I wonder whether this simple convenience (or lack) will influence relative voter turnout, we'll see.  If you applied for and received an absentee ballot, I recommend that you drop it off at the local elections office (in Gainesville it's at 515 North Main Street) instead of using the mail if you still want to vote that way...the one here will be open for drop-off until 7 pm.  If you have your absentee ballot but haven't sent it yet and want to instead vote in person, take it to your local precinct polling place and surrender it for a new one and vote there...or simply show up if you never applied for a mail-in ballot.  This election is just a primary yet will essentially decide who will be our Alachua County sheriff along with two school board seats and a state representative race.  And since the U.S. House of Representatives District 3 seat always goes Republican due to the demographics of our area, whoever wins that party's crowded and increasingly mud-slinging contest will almost surely be the next representative here.  No president, governor, state cabinet or United States senatorial races are on the ballot so it's not as "sexy" as the one we're facing on November 3rd...even then, Florida isn't holding gubernatorial or U.S. Senate races in 2020.  Since I applied for absentee ballots for the upcoming general election I'm probably going to continue to vote by mail during this pandemic...

I'm hearing all this hullabaloo about the postal service being attacked by Trump as if it's something new...not only has he been railing against my employer for years but the Republican Party has been trying to privatize it for decades.  They pushed through an onerous bill that President Bush signed into law in 2006 compelling the USPS to prefund all of its employees' retirement for the next 75 YEARS..a deliberately backbreaking measure that no American business had ever been forced to operate under.  Yet just three years later we had a Democratic president, Senate, and House and for the two years they controlled the federal government from 2009 through 2010 they did NOTHING to help us out.  And now the same people are clamoring about the how the good old post office is under attack...but I think the main reason they're concerned is because they see it as a threat to the plan for universal mail-in voting that they are promoting, something that is currently being practiced in only nine states and which in all likelihood will not expand nationwide this year, pandemic notwithstanding.  I have my own opinions about the subject of universal voting and voting in general that I plan to share in a future article...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #45-41

And here we've arrived once again at Monday, meaning it's time for me to list the next five higher-ranked songs on my list of 500 all-time favorites.  One's relatively new...if you count seventeen year-old songs...and the others are buried deeply in the past.  Let me excavate them and bring them to your attention...

45 FATHER AND SON...Cat Stevens
From 1970, I didn't hear this poignant song by Stevens until '72 when it was played, of all places, during my eleventh grade English class...I've loved it ever since.  In it, the singer alternates the verses between a father and his son, deep-voiced for the former and higher for the latter.  Dad is full of time-tested, wise advice emphasizing patience while his restless son cries out for his individuality and freedom to determine his own destiny...an eternal generational struggle that as a teenager and young man I only understood too well for myself.  It's definitely a major tearjerker of a song...

44 CALCULATION (THEME)...Metric
There is a clear, literal interpretation to the cryptic lyrics in this unique, singular song by the Canadian band that I like to refer to as the "Blondie of our century"...I'll leave you to figure it out for yourself should you decide to give it a listen: I'll just say that this may be the ultimate science fiction pop song.  Instead what appealed to me so much in this 2003 track from the band's Old World Underground album that I first heard off the Internet six years later is the sweet singing of Emily Haines and the generally mystical mood of the song.  And the ending lines are pretty awesome, some of the best parting shots in a piece I've ever heard...

43 WHAT'S GOING ON...Marvin Gaye
From Marvin Gaye's groundbreaking 1971 What's Going On album with its themes of social consciousness, racial justice, the environment and opposition to the Vietnam War is the title track, released as a single into a monster hit during the springtime that year...I was fourteen at the time, finishing up a dismal ninth grade school year.  It's not just Marvin's message but also the brilliant backing vocals and instrumentation that make this one of my favorites...I also loved his Mercy Mercy Me and Inner City Blues from the same album, a masterpiece for the ages: "Right on, brother, right on"...

42 SCARBOROUGH FAIR...Simon and Garfunkel
One of the most incredibly beautiful harmonic pieces ever released, Scarborough Fair...referring to a locality in England...is a dreamy collage of lyrical images with a renaissance fair sensibility to it. It was originally an English folk song with Simon and Garfunkel recording it for their 1966 Parsely, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme album (the title a part of the lyrics) but became more known as a singles release in '68 to accompany the soundtrack for the move The Graduate (which we saw as a family that year at a local drive-in).  There's an extended version of this song: normally I'd recommend it but I think the single does quite well...

41 HUMMINGBIRD...Seals and Crofts
From the duo's debut Summer Breeze album, Hummingbird was a minor early 1973 hit, but to me it was by far my favorite song of the year...I thought of it for quite some time as my all-time favorite song.  I don't exactly know what Seals and Crofts meant by the lyrics, but I always viewed it as an inspiring exhortation to never give up on your dreams (the "hummingbird") in the face of adversity...I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for these two rather quirky, offbeat musicians and this sweet, encouraging song that has an epic feel to it...still think it's fantastic...

Next week: #40-36...

Enjoyed Watching Horse Races with No Prior Knowledge of Entrants

Yesterday afternoon I was surfing the different channels for live sports and came across one showing a race from the Saratoga Race Course in upstate New York...the race was the Saratoga Derby Invitational Stakes, for what that was worth.  All I know is that when I tuned in the horses were just being loaded up for the race's start and soon thereafter it was on...I didn't know anything about the horses or their odds other than what the screen was showing as they took off.  I quickly saw that the three favorites in this race, #2,4, and 6, had similar odds and kept my eye out for them.  The race was very close and exciting, and it ended with a photo finish...couldn't have wished for a more exciting couple of minutes watching televised sports.  Yet I knew nothing beforehand about the horses entered, nor had I even been aware of that particular race until I happened to click on it happenstance.  Today I watched a couple more races at Saratoga...FoxSports1 was covering their race day...and although I had to wait a little longer for the races to start I once again was entertained with highly interesting, gripping experiences.  This is a stark contrast to how, during the Triple Crown races like the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont, they'll go on for hours on end with boring background stories about the horses, trainers, owners and the respective tracks...just give me the race, please: I've tried to get enthusiastic about the pre-race hype but it doesn't work for me...

As for Saratoga, they have a no-spectator policy in place because of the coronavirus pandemic, and this past June's Belmont Stakes, also in New York state, was held without live fans on hand.  But the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs, postponed from May until September 5th, is at this writing going to take place before live spectators...I wonder how that's going to play out.  As for my view of the sport in general, I've known people who are crazy about horses and some who clearly have a weakness for gambling...sorry, but I've never been partial to either: I think the last time I gambled on sports was in a football pool in 1973 during high school.  No, I just like to watch races during the couple of minutes they take out of my day and then go on to other things...others can keep their money and horse lore...

Constellation of the Month: Sagittarius (the Archer)

Sagittarius, representing an archer (one of two constellations depicting half-horse, half-man centaurs), is prominent in the southern sky during the month of August in the evening. Although there are no first magnitude stars in it, there are plenty of second and third magnitude...but its main feature is that the Milky Way runs strong through it and there are many Messier objects...mainly nebula and star clusters...interspersed throughout.  I picked it as my constellation of the month over a couple of others because of the striking presence of the planets Jupiter and Saturn in its northeastern corner right now.  By the way, three of the names of Sagittarius's more prominent stars, Kaus Borealis, Kaus Media and Kaus Australis, are derived from two different languages...Arabic and Latin: "kaus" is "bow" and "borealis", "media" and "australis" translate to northern, middle and southern, respectively.  Sagittarius is the last of the brighter zodiac constellations that march across the sky...at least for a few months: its followers...Capricornus, Aquarius, and Pisces...are pretty faint as the autumn evening sky has few bright stars of note.  The above picture I drew just shows the brighter stars along with Jupiter, Saturn and the positions of some of the Messier objects...Sagittarius contains many more stars visible to the naked eye and encompasses a much wider area in the celestial sky than what I've shown...

Quote of the Week...from Thurgood Marshall

Each of you, as an individual, must pick your own goals.  Listen to others, but do not become a blind follower.                                                         ---Thurgood Marshall

I don't know where the above quote came from, but it sounds like a school's commencement speech, doesn't it?  Thurgood Marshall, a champion for civil rights in the twentieth century, is best known for his tenure as a U.S. Supreme Court justice from 1967 to 1991 as well as the attorney successfully arguing for the plaintiff in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case that the same court ruled to outlaw segregation and overturn the earlier 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson "separate but equal" ruling.  But before that 1954 case Marshall repeatedly risked life and limb in the segregated Jim Crow south defending blacks against unjust charges, having to contend with lynchings, white-instigated race riots, police mistreatment of prisoners, and a general atmosphere of hostility toward his presence there as a black northern lawyer...of course he had to abide by the discriminatory segregation rules as he went about his business there as well.  I'm learning all this as I am currently reading Gilbert King's excellent historical account of a 1949 central Florida case he was involved in, titled The Devil in the Grove...very, very disturbing.  As for Marshall's quote, I picked it because it is so universal in application.  I'm afraid that more and more people these days are wasting their God-given ability to think for themselves and instead place all their beliefs in the hands of media gurus, celebrities, and politicians who seem to have a queer hold on them.  Also, in deciding how to behave during this pandemic I'm afraid that too many of us are like animals in a herd, knowing the right, publicly responsible thing to do but holding off on doing it for fear of rejection by the rest of the "herd" we interact with...in particular the alpha dog leaders who often espouse questionable tenets.  For me, no longer concerned about herds or alpha dogs, Marshall's quote had a deeper meaning to me.  I will be turning 64 in less than two months, and when it comes around to forming goals...especially those requiring a substantial investment of my time...this more advanced age may imply to some that my doors are closed in some areas.  But I'm not a blind follower of other peoples' dictates or views and instead hold to the notion that no matter where I am in this journey called life, I have the present moment to make my choices in...what the future holds for anyone is always going to be a mystery...

Biden's Pick of Kamala Harris as Running Mate

After months of speculation, presumed Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden has selected California senator and former presidential candidate Kamala Harris to be his vice-presidential running mate.  The choice wasn't unexpected; Harris was generally considered the frontrunner.  I wasn't too thrilled over the way she ambushed Biden in the first debate, but it's clear to me that when her campaign began to stall not very long thereafter she realized her mistake and was one of the first candidates to withdraw from the race.  Since his campaign's dramatic recovery in March she has been vocal in her support of Biden and because...unlike our current president...he has a forgiving, live-and-let-live gracious aspect to his personality, he buried their "spat from the past".  It brought to my mind the bitterly-fought 1980 Republican primary campaign between Ronald Reagan and George (H.W.) Bush.  Reagan was the clear odds-on favorite, but Bush came on strong early and openly challenged him, calling him an advocate of "voodoo economics".  I was living near the University of Florida campus at the time and, just before the Florida Primary that year, walked a couple of blocks over to Norman Hall to hear Bush's son Neil give a speech for his father in which he derided Reagan's opinions.  Yet in the convention later that year Reagan picked Bush for his VP and the rest is history...

The Republican Party and the Russian government supporting Trump had plenty of time to conduct extensive opposition research on whomever Biden would ultimately pick as running mate.  Kamala Harris would not have been my first choice as I preferred Georgia's Stacey Abrams or Florida's Val Demings...and I'm glad he didn't pick Susan Rice who, while very knowledgeable and intellectual, I feared might seem a little too distant to a lot of Americans.  But had Biden picked Abrams or Demings or Rice or one of the other leading contenders, you can rest assured that, like yesterday and today's immediate attacks against Harris, they would also have their supposed faults quickly exposed.  For this reason and others expect Biden to drop in the public opinion polls, tightening the race...that's no reflection on Harris but rather that Biden, whether you personally like him or not, was already going to be the generally more liked figure on the ticket regardless of his pick.  Also, expect people to criticize Harris for being aggressive and ruthless...just as Hillary Clinton was pilloried for her assertiveness and articulation in 2016.  To me that's sexism since male candidates generally get lauded for exhibiting the same traits...let's see, Trump's already wasted no time in calling Harris "nasty".  Should be interesting to see how the campaign progresses...

Weekly Short Stories: 1962 Science Fiction, Part 1

When the retrospective anthology I'm referring to here with my review of science fiction short stories from 1962 was first published in January 1992, co-editor Isaac Asimov was already seriously ill with kidney failure...he would die from it three months later.  So only Martin Greenberg is present in this volume...along with the final one covering 1963...with his commentary alone preceding each entry...so sad.  As for my own life in 1962, I was five going on six...which meant that I began the first grade in September of that year at Boulevard Heights Elementary School in West Hollywood, Florida.  Only a month later they marched us into the inner hallway and had the class line up and kneel down against the wall, our hands tucked over our lowered heads: it was a civil defense drill during the scary Cuban Missile Crisis...but I was unaware of this at the time and just thought of it as a weird fire drill...

THE INSANE ONES by J.G. Ballard
It's a crazy future scenario here with psychiatry as a profession banned world-wide to accommodate a sweeping political movement to remove insanity as a possible criminal defense.  One psychiatrist, recently released from his own three-year imprisonment for such an illegal practice, finds himself pressured to treat an obviously disturbed young man who is determined to commit a dangerously violent act.  This story puts forth the suggestion that what is ultimately a sane or insane act is largely determined by the context in which it takes place...sometimes it's the surrounding society that has lost its sensibilities...

CHRISTMAS TREASON by James White
A network of psychically-connected, precocious little children across the world are concerned about whether Santa Claus will be able to deliver his toys this season...they project themselves out in a search for his headquarters, settling on what turns out to be a nuclear missile installation.  High jinks abound as military guards keep encountering little kids in pajamas...a funny, seasonal tale with a hopeful ending...

SEVEN-DAY TERROR by R.A. Lafferty
Another tale about precocious children, as a little boy in a small town has built a "disappearer" out of spare parts he's found lying around and tries out his invention on the neighborhood...and its occupants...with disastrous results.  His big sister knows what's going on and offers her solution to the problem.  The final sentence thoroughly cracked me up in this short, short story...

KINGS WHO DIE by Poul Anderson
This is a story examining the possibilities of the human body becoming fused with high technology with a space war between the two Earthly superpowers providing the setting.  Here are warriors with bombs surgically planted in their bodies while the other side has discovered that the human mind can be fused with computers to provide a very effective operating system.  Anderson showed quite a bit of prescience here while at the same time writing a Cold War story with the antagonists extending their respective opposing ideologies far into the future...in his scenario the war on ground level is still "cold" while what was proxy warfare in 1962 among smaller nations on Earth has now been transformed into space battles.  I wonder if that's where we're heading with our respective "space forces"...

THE MAN WHO MADE FRIENDS WITH ELECTRICITY by Fritz Leiber
A man deliberately moves to a home with a noisy, crackling high-tension electrical tower nearby.  He claims to be able to hear the electricity speaking to him, and it can apparently understand his words as well.  And, it seems, the network of electricity that now spans the globe has come to its own conclusions regarding the way things should be.  A forerunner of the genre of science fiction that would give us movie series like Matrix and Terminator...

Next I continue my look back at science fiction short stories from the year 1962 as they appeared in Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 24 (1962)...

Just Finished Reading The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis

Lindsey Davis wrote a lengthy series of detective mystery novels...twenty in all...from 1989 to 2010.  What makes them special is the time and setting: imperial Rome during the reign of Emperor Vespasian and the detective, officially called an "informer", is an ex-soldier named Marcus Didius Falco.  In the first book, titled The Silver Pigs and which I just finished reading, Falco lives in a dingy, cramped apartment high in a Rome complex, harassed for rent by his crooked landlord's goons and almost as harassed by his overbearing mother living nearby, who periodically invades his apartment to drive out any of Falco's women guests she finds staying there.  He encounters a young woman who eventually leads him into a case of corruption, theft and smuggling of valuable metals (the "silver pigs"), and political assassination.  Along the way Falco goes back to his former, bitterly remembered battleground of Britain to investigate the case's trail and come up with suspects.  An intriguing romance forms as well, and the dialog is both cheeky and funny...the author has basically taken characters interacting like pulp fiction characters and placed them in an ancient, exotic culture with its own rules and customs...including, sadly, slavery as well as rigid social class distinctions.  She did an excellent job developing the characters, and after getting through story's climax and ending I'm looking forward to tackling the next book in her series.  Right now, though, I have two other reading projects ahead of me: John Steinbeck's East of Eden and Gilbert King's The Devil in the Grove...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #50-46

Now I begin my final top 50 all-time favorite songs from my original list of 500.  Four of the five go way back into the past...and the other reminded me of it.  They're all superb in their own ways...you should give them each a listen...

50 TIME IN A BOTTLE...Jim Croce
In early 1974 this single by Jim Croce, who had died the previous summer in an airplane crash, was popular on the radio...I always liked it a lot and found it a good meditative song.  I also remember at the time...just a seventeen-year old high school senior...feeling that I was old and that so much of life had passed me by.  There's an old song by Bob Dylan with the words "but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now".  He got that right, and Croce I believe had the makings of a long, Dylanesque career himself had his own life not been so tragically cut short...

49 TIMEBOMB...Beck
Timebomb was a 2007 alternative rock singles release by this multiple-Grammy winning Los Angeles artist, not a part of his original Modern Guilt album (which I also recommend) also released that year.  It has a bubble-gum sing-song nature to it that Beck somehow makes work...and it brings a strange association to my mind: back in 1969 during the last half of my seventh grade experience at Nova High in Davie, Florida we had a bomb scare that lasted several hours, with students forced out into the surrounding field for hours without any relief under the hot, beating sun.  I don't think they ever found a bomb, but the experience just standing out there like that with no end in sight was unsettling (and memorable) enough...

48 EAST OF GINGER TREES...Seals and Crofts
A very beautiful, mystical track from the pop duo's famous 1972 Summer Breeze debut album, it evokes some pretty exotic and vivid imagery...and the background instrumentation is fantastic with its oriental overtones.  Because I liked their early '73 single Hummingbird so much I later bought the album, otherwise I might never have heard this wonderful piece that should be near the top of anyone's listening list.  Seals and Crofts made a string of singles hits for the next few years...I think my high school graduating class's theme song was their We May Never Pass This Way Again...

47 UP THE LADDER TO THE ROOF...the Supremes
Although Diana Ross had left the group by early 1970 when this song came out, the lead vocal sounds like her...ironically, although I thought (and still think) that she was/is great, Up the Ladder to the Roof is my favorite Supremes song. It was Jean Terrell, brought on to replace Ross, who sang lead on this optimistic, wistful song that was popular and a source of soothing during a turbulent period in my early teen-age years.  In 1983 I thought that Prince had ripped off the chorus melody to it with his Little Red Corvette...I seem, however, to be the only one who felt that way...

46 EYES OF A CHILD/FLOATING...the Moody Blues
From the Moody Blues' 1969 concept album To Our Children's Children's Children is this three-part piece, the John Lodge-composed and sung Eyes of a Child sandwiching the core song Floating, another Ray Thomas composition.  It's Floating that I like a lot here, but to get the full impact of it all I recommend you listening to it all together.  The first part of Eyes of Child sounds a bit like the band's hit Nights in White Satin while its closing part reminds me of their Just a Singer in a Rock n' Roll Band.  Floating is a tribute a child's vivid, powerful imagination...very sweet yet with a peculiar psychedelic bent to it...

Next week: #45-41...

Voted Today (Mail-In) in Florida's Primary Election

In Florida the 2020 primary election (not the presidential primary, which we had back in March) will be held August 18th with early voting going on now.  Melissa and I applied for mail-in ballots, which we just filled out and will put in the mail tomorrow.  Florida holds its governor and state cabinet elections in off-years, and neither U.S. Senate seat is up for election in 2020. The only race on my ballot with national ramifications, Florida's 3rd Congressional District with incumbent Ted Yoho retiring after four terms, is up for grabs...at least for Republicans, that is, since although Gainesville is primarily Democratic the surrounding population for this district is overwhelmingly Republican.  So whoever wins the Republican primary race this month is almost certain to win in November: as our president recently said on a different topic, "It is what it is".  There was one race for state representative I got to vote on, and the rest were local in scope: two county commission seats, two school board seats, property appraiser, party leadership committee posts, and sheriff.  The sheriff's race bothered me since essentially only registered Democrats will decide who our next sheriff will be after Republican and Independent voters were shut out by a loophole in the election law because somebody with virtually no chance of victory earlier filed as a write-in candidate...that just doesn't seem right to me.  I still haven't decided whether to try and vote in person for the general election or not, but I'm keeping my mail-in balloting options open.  If you're in Florida and are registered to vote, this particular primary election may or may not be important for you...but I'm pretty sure that the general election in November will be...

Just Finished Reading The Second Sleep by Robert Harris

The Second Sleep, at first glance a novel set in the Dark Ages more than five hundred years ago, turns out instead to be eight hundred years into the future when our science and technology-based society has been abandoned for a church-run theocracy reminiscent of that earlier era.  A young priest serving the powerful bishop based in Exeter, England is assigned to look into the death of the priest stationed in a relatively isolated village in the country's southwestern section.  After arriving for what he thought would be a very brief stay, he finds himself first mysteriously delayed from returning with a suspicious treefall blocking his road and then discovering that the deceased priest had been investigating the fall of our contemporary hi-tech civilization following the calamity that occurred in our year 2025.  He gets introduced to different characters, each with their own distinct personalities and pasts...and the story intertwines his developing relationships with them with the clues leading to the climactic discovery at the end.  And the ending...well, in a word, I can only say that it's rude.  Two words? Very rude...

The term "second sleep" refers to the second part of the night, with that latter half of the sleep cycle supposedly different in nature than the first.  Allegorically, it refers here to the sleep that civilization is going through after the disaster that the author forecast just six years from this book's publication in 2019.  It was chilling that one component of the catastrophe that ripped apart society was a worldwide plague...now that's too close for comfort.  Civil unrest and the unraveling of our economy...including the endangerment of our food supply...are also covered here: Robert Harris seemed to figure it all out just months before the proverbial pile hit the fan: incredible.  The Second Sleep isn't a long novel by any stretch and reads well.  I've read a couple of science fiction short stories with theocratic themes like this, set either on a future Earth or another planet.  It's not my favorite subject, but you may think otherwise...

Quote of the Week...from Albert Einstein

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?   
                                                                 ---Albert Einstein

Not being a research scientist myself, this is one of those articles in which my relative ignorance of the field is bound to shine through...so please bear with me.  But in today's world of massive public denial of science in the contexts of the ongoing pandemic, climate change, pop medicine...to mention just three areas...I feel it's important to note that the idea of "pure" science out there somewhere with only the motive of laying out the "truth" for us is not in itself "purely true".   Anyone with an eye on history knows of the Manhattan Project during World War II in which leading physicists and other physical scientists collaborated with engineers and the military to develop the fist workable atomic bomb...in other words, highly focused, agenda-driven research.  Although I still have in my mind the picture of the altruistic scientist driven only by his or her desire to learn the deep truths about the reality we live in, I have over the years learned that this is mostly a fantasy while the overwhelming number of scientists engaged in research are doing so at the behest of agenda-driven organizations, be they the military, businesses, non-profits...each group with its own goals that it wants the scientists working for it to advance. Even at a public university, scientists need to go outside their offices and laboratories and continually beseech monied interests to fund their research projects...this naturally in turn directs exactly what will be their research projects and how far their research will go.  The problem with all this is that although research for specific areas that have direct military, business or social applications can be very useful and important, it still is determined not by science itself but rather by the society's institutions.  So when people hear in the news that scientists support this or that take on an issue, those who would disagree with their conclusions often question the motives of those scientists...and sometimes this complaint, in my opinion, is legitimate.  The scientific method and pure science research are ideals that should be promoted...but the ones with the money to sustain that research have their own ideas about what kind of research it should be.  Back to Einstein's quote, having a definite, clear result in mind when doing research in itself implies that the researcher has already reached a conclusion before even beginning.  This may help to solve specific problems and publicly promote agendas but I don't see it going far to expand our fundamental understanding of the universe.  But I get it: research costs money, and if I had money why should I give it to somebody who plans to study an area that doesn't coincide with my own interests?  My only response to this question is that our government should be more generous with its own research funding with the grants not necessarily directed at areas with its own interests in mind...

Having Sports to Watch Again a Welcome Relief

For the couch potato TV sports junkie that I am, even though the coronavirus pandemic is showing no signs of letting up around me I am at least mollified by the now overwhelming preponderance of major professional sports on television.  Live basketball, baseball, hockey and soccer games are now readily available and the lack of live spectators present doesn't seem to affect the athletes' performances or my enjoyment of them...sometimes I get a kick out of the various ways they present "spectators", be it though life-sized photo props in the stands, piped-in fake crowd noise or screens showing fans watching through their computers.  Hopefully, the COVID-19 outbreaks occurring in baseball, the only one of the currently ongoing sports not using the "bubble" strategy, will clear up: the Marlins seem to be okay now, with their games resuming this week.  In all the sports I tend to naturally root for the Florida teams, and am gratified (and very surprised) to see Orlando City...a franchise that had never before made it to the playoffs...as one of the semifinalists in Major League Soccer.  As for the non-Florida teams I prefer, in the NBA it's the Los Angeles Clippers, San Antonio Spurs. Portland Trail Blazers and Toronto Raptors: my favorite coaches are Doc Rivers with the Clippers and the Spurs' Gregg Popovich...player-wise I like Jimmy Butler (Miami), Kyle Lowry (Toronto), and C.J. McCollum (Portland).  With Major League Baseball it's the Yankees, Angels, Nationals and Giants for me...after the Rays and Marlins, of course.  As for hockey, I'm still at the stage of just trying to keep up with what's going on during a game...

Yes, having some sports to watch has been a distinct pleasure for me recently...for the most part they've been pretty careful about the pandemic.  I just hope football doesn't come along and flub everything up...

Weekly Short Stories: 1961 Science Fiction, Part 4

Here are my reactions to the final four stories in the retrospective anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 23 (1961).  The first story I thought was a great classic, but I wasn't so hot on the final three...I guess it's all a matter of personal taste...

A PLANET NAMED SHAYOL by Cordwainer Smith
Cordwainer Smith was to me the most imaginative sci fi writer when it came to envisioning future space travel and settlement, and his depiction of life on a remote prison planet in A Planet Named Shayol is so vividly bizarre that it steps over the line into the horror genre...but you'll have to read for yourself this remarkable tale of a convict sentenced to serve the remainder of his life there.  The imagery is like one of those nightmares that you just want to wake up from...but can't.  Cordwainer Smith was the pseudonym for Paul Linebarger (1913-66), a college English professor who preferred a quiet life behind his literary anonymity: his 1955 story The Game of Rat and Dragon is one of my all-time favorites...

RAINBIRD by R.A. Lafferty
Another (groan) time travel story that once again presents the concept of paradox and all the interesting effects that traveling backward in time can have on future events.  In this story, it is 1779 and a young man, destined to be a moderately successful tinkerer and inventor of assorted small items, sets out and turns into the world's premier inventor, producing technology far ahead of its time.  But when he is old, he decides that he could have taken wiser paths in his younger years that would have advanced his inventions much further...and thus steps into the "retrogressor" (time machine) he has also invented, to counsel his young self into the direction he so clearly sees now. And that's what I managed to get of this tale: no one is completely satisfied with their pasts and many of us, from the advantage of hindsight, see certain pivotal times in our lives that would have changed for the better had we acted differently.  But I didn't need another time travel story to tell me what I already knew...

WALL OF CRYSTAL, EYE OF NIGHT by Algis Budrys
In the future, the communications industry is being dominated by advanced subliminal products that detect the viewers' predilections and then manufacture a "reality" that they can experience which meets their expectations.  A tycoon finds himself in a desperate race against his main rival to find the ultimate subliminal technology...and goes to Mars where the Martians reputedly have developed one such machine.  What's real and what's not get all fuzzy in this story, not one of my favorites...although the anthology's editors had all kinds of wonderful things to say about it.  It did give me a creepy feeling, seeing the direction our Internet and social media of today are going with detecting our own interests and then producing content to reflect them...

REMEMBER THE ALAMO! by T.R Fehrenbach
A short alternate-reality story about that famous event, but with the principal players substantially altered.  And wouldn't you know it: another dang-blasted time travel story!  Still, the author has a lot of fun recasting the roles of William Travis, Jim Bowie, Davey Crockett and Santa Anna as a British "traveler" from the future gets a severe lesson in alternate history at the besieged Alamo...

Next week I start my look at the year 1962 in short science fiction...

Just Finished Reading Light in August by William Faulkner

A few years ago Oprah Winfrey selected three of early twentieth century American writer William Faulkner's novels for her book club: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August.  The first, the most famous of the three, I have yet to read...and the second I read back in 2014.  A couple of years ago I read his 1948 novel Intruder in the Dust...I thought it was a good time to delve into another of his works, so I read Light in August.  As with other stories of his, the locale is Faulkner's fictional Jefferson County in Mississippi during the time he wrote in, the 1920s and 30s.  A young woman, Lena Grove, has largely walked here from her home in Alabama...she is looking for the father of the child she is pregnant with, who came here to find work and had promised to marry her: Lucas Burch, who is now going under the name Joe Brown.  He gets a job at the local mill where he meets with two other of the story's main characters, Byron Bunch and  Joe Christmas.  Bunch is upright and wants to do the good thing for Lena, with whom he has become smitten, while Christmas has led a life believing that since...at least in his own mind...he is partially black, then he consequently belongs to neither of the severely racially segregated communities in the South in this era.  Bunch also confides regularly with a disgraced former minister, Gail Hightower, who has his own story to tell as well.  And the story of Joanna Burden, descended from abolitionists who moved into the area following the Civil War and who now lives in reclusion, adds a further tragic dimension to the story.  The language used by the novel's characters reflects that of the sharply segregated and discriminatory Deep South of the Jim Crow era...it's pretty racist, to say the least, so if you're into retroactive political correctness you might want to avoid the many "n" words sprinkled throughout.  Faulkner bluntly lays out the prejudice against blacks of his white characters and their society at large...this story is definitely not a presentation of America living up to its stated ideals.  He also very intensively goes into the life histories of his characters, meticulously analyzing their distinctively individual personalities and the experiences they had which shaped them.  I felt uncomfortable reading Light in August, and for good reason: I had difficulty bonding with any of the characters the way most fiction presents a clear, central protagonist to focus on.  Hightower and Bunch did present a sense of reason, Christmas' childhood past drew some sympathy from me, Lena's predicament with her situation did as well in its own way, and Joanna Burden's story was compelling...but that Lucas Burch had no redeeming qualities that I could see.  The author did such a good job with his characterizations that I'm tempted to look around me and see this or that bit of a character's personality in different people...including myself.  One other thing: Light in August wildly jumps around in time with multitudes of flashbacks...that, combined with no clear central protagonist, might make this a difficult reading choice.  But I still recommend it for being a cultural snapshot of a time in our history as well as a sobering look at people not at their best moments...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #55-51

We're getting close to the final top 50 songs on my list of 500 all-time favorites...each of the below songs are classics to me and, although each one has its unique sound they are all very serious pieces with some pretty rough elements in either their musical presentation, lyrics, or both.  Only two of them I've heard before on the radio, so there's a high probability you're new to most of them...try them out!

55 SUNNY CAME HOME...Shawn Colvin
This was a big radio hit in 1997, as well as the only one by Colvin...should have been more as she is quite a good singer, and if this song is an example a good songwriter as well.  The topic is severe as a woman takes matters into her own hands with fire...not something I would recommend.  So you have this very sweet-sounding, sad song with its haunting mandolin accompaniment and lyrics and before long it gets under your skin as it did with me.  Sunny Came Home won the Grammy Award as the song of the year...

54 NEON BIBLE...Arcade Fire
The title track to Arcade Fire's outstanding 2007 Neon Bible album, it only lasts two minutes...and is a slow-moving song for such a short duration.  The band's lead singer Win Butler reportedly wrote it to mix together some of his thoughts about religion and culture...but it's the kind of song that releases the listener to derive their own meanings from it.  The chorus features Butler's wife Régine Chassagne with a childlike sing-song melody...the lyrics seem to be directed at "every boy and every girl".  The crackling sound of a neon light flickering off and on adds a interesting effect to the song as well.  The Neon Bible album, the band's best in my opinion, contains many excellent tracks...

53 AGAIN...Alice in Chains
For such a rough, menacing song combining grunge, the blues, and heavy metal, Again's lyrics are surprisingly sensitive as the singer laments repeated betrayal by someone he had trusted and befriended.  Released in 1995, I listened to it a lot the following year on Gainesville's Rock 104 radio and later crowned it my "song of the year" for 1996.  Lead vocalist Lane Staley had his share of drug problems, which contributed to his early death a few years later...Staley and Soundgarden's Chris Cornell to me were the great, soulful singers of the grunge era in rock...

52 THE GOOD'S GONE...The Who
I had never heard of this brilliant old song by the old British rock group The Who until I bought, at a steal, their first four vinyl studio albums at Hyde and Zeke Records nearby the University of Florida campus some time in 1994.  From their 1966 album The Who Sing My Generation, The Good's Gone is a relatively lengthy track, driven and relentless, with Roger Daltrey singing his gruff best and the electric guitar dominating...especially the long mid-song instrumental break. Jimmy Page once claimed to had contributed guitar work on some of The Who and Kinks' old recordings...it sounds like him here...

51 FIERY CRASH...Andrew Bird
Not a song ever to played on a plane or at an airport, Fiery Crash, from Andrew Bird's 2007 Armchair Apocrypha album, is nonetheless something you should experience...in a safe, secure place, that is.  Bird is known as a multi-instrumentalist...his trademark "instruments" are the violin and his own whistling virtuosity, both of which he exhibits on this song.  Chances are you've never heard of this talented Chicago-based musician, but he's put out several albums and his music always pushes the frontiers of creativity.  My favorite part of Fiery Crash is the break in the middle when it eerily resembles the Beach Boys' classic hit Help Me Rhonda.  Then again, this song in its entirety is pretty eerie...

Next week: #50-46...

Historic American Space Launch Astronauts Returning This Afternoon

After two months at the International Space Station, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the first two American astronauts to launch from U.S. territory in nine years, are returning to Earth this afternoon, reentry in the atmosphere to commence at 1:51 and splashdown at 2:48, somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida panhandle coast around Pensacola and Panama City.  They successfully launched from Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral on May 31 and will be in the same Crew Dragon capsule when they return...a joint team from SpaceX corporation and NASA will pick them up from the ocean...the rescue process should take about an hour and then they'll be flown to Houston.  I'm about to watch the TV coverage of it all...I was going to mow the lawn but one of the northern bands of Tropical Storm Isaias, which is creeping up the Florida east coast (and which caused the proposed splashdown site to switch to the Gulf from the Atlantic), just swept through us with rainfall...think I'll just stay indoors and watch the tube.  C-Span is covering it all live although I imagine the other cable news channels will break from their typical news stories to temporarily feature it as well.  I was happy two months ago with the successful launch, but a mission isn't truly a success until the astronauts are back at home, safe and sound...well, I might have to qualify that in this pandemic era...

My July 2020 Running Report

For July I amassed a total of 162 miles run, with my longest single run being 8 miles...I ran on every day of the month.  No races of course, nor naturally any in the foreseeable future due to this awful coronavirus pandemic.  That having been said, I felt pretty good with my running in July and look forward to possibly pushing the upper end of my distances in August when I go out on my weekend long runs around my home neighborhoods.  This coming weekend should be interesting with now-Hurricane Isaias predicted to pass by the eastern coast of Florida...if the rainfall is low I might be able to squeeze in a run.  No, it doesn't look right now as if we'll be staging any running races for the remainder of 2020...the big question now is whether the Five Points of Life Marathon/Half-Marathon race, scheduled here in Gainesville during February next year, will still go on as planned.  If so, I'd like to take a crack at it since they have returned to their traditional course through the heart of the city and the University of Florida.  Guess I'll just have to wait and see.  I did go to my gym once and ran on the treadmill, something I might do more of in the future later on in the evening after work when it isn't quite as busy...assuming it stays open, that is...
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Quote of the Week...from Harry Callahan

A man's got to know his limitations.                  
                                                          ---Harry "Dirty Harry" Callahan, as portrayed by Clint Eastwood.

Not exactly the most likeable character in the history of film...yet adored by millions...the gruff, no-nonsense San Francisco homicide inspector Harry Callahan, played by Clint Eastwood in his "Dirty Harry" series,  has said a few famous one-liners: the above quote, taken from Magnum Force, is my favorite.  It's also the final line spoken in it, in one of the most satisfying closing moments in my moviegoing experience.  Whether you're in the police, athletics, the arts...or just engaging in some work around the home...it's crucial to be aware of what you can and cannot do.  It doesn't mean you are incapable of learning new things, but if you're confronted with a task or challenge you're not up to, then you're better off letting it go or finding someone else to help you with it.  Also, just because somebody's real good in one area or the "alpha dog" leader in a group, formally or informally, that doesn't automatically make them an all-encompassing, wise guru on everything that comes up, and it irritates me to no end whenever a star athlete or entertainer gets full of their own importance and expects me to agree with their opinions outside the scope of their expertise simply on the strength of their fame or popularity: sure, I'll hear what they have to say but their star value means nothing as to their arguments' merits...

In a time when we are being bombarded by messages about how we can do anything with our lives, it's important to recognize that we also are ultimately limited in our choices if what we are seeking is fame and recognition from others.  Better to pick areas that we enjoy and find rewarding for their own sake...and let what comes from others' reactions be their business and not be concerned about it.  Sometimes those goals of fame and fortune can be limiting...how many celebrities, once they get to where they've been struggling for so long and so hard, then turn about-face on it all and try to shut out the world?  Go figure.  And we all know people, going back throughout our years even into childhood, who had special talents and accomplishments (as well as special training and teaching that we weren't provided) that may have caused us to feel diminished about our own lives in comparison.  The solution: don't compare yourself to others like this, and instead rejoice in their success...that's maturity, something a lot of us never get around to attaining, but which is also something that shouldn't be beyond anyone's limitations...

Tropical Storm Isaias Headed Our Way This Weekend

Tropical Storm Isaias (pronounced ee-sa-EE-yas) is headed our way this weekend...if you happen to be living on the Florida peninsula, that is.  Not expected at the current time to strengthen to hurricane intensity, it is speeding along at a fast clip (20 mph), at this writing on Thursday morning about to cross the mountainous region of the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles from the Caribbean Sea and then through the Bahamas.  The projected tracks have its center passing just to the east of Florida and ending up somewhere along the Georgia/Carolinas coastline. Isaias is asymmetrical with the bulk of its stormy areas lying to its east...as it passes on into the open Atlantic this area will be largely unaffected by the Hispaniola crossing.  The models have it passing just east of Miami by Saturday afternoon and then past northern Florida on Sunday, its maximum sustained winds projected by then to be at 70 mph, just beneath hurricane strength.  The ultimate course of Isaias will depend on a trough in the U.S.: how strong it remains and where it goes will steer the tropical storm as it advances.  Not too serious looking right now, but I'd definitely keep my eyes on Isaias if I lived anywhere near its path (which I happen to do), especially along the eastern coastline...just a little shift to the west and more strengthening than expected could affect us in Florida more severely...

Weekly Short Stories: 1961 Science Fiction, Part 3

Here are my reviews of three more science fiction short stories from 1961, as they appeared in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 23 (1961).  They were all pretty thought-provoking, although I wasn't too keen on the first one below.  But I still think even that one is pretty good reading...I'd welcome your reaction should you decide to tackle it...

DEATH AND THE SENATOR by Arthur C. Clarke
I remember reading this story fifteen years ago while with my son Will, waiting at the Orlando International Airport for the return of Melissa and my daughter Rebecca from her school trip to Washington, DC...after a second run-through I still disagree with the author's conclusions.  A powerful politician has neglected his family over the years in favor of ambition, but now discovers he has a terminal heart condition.  But relief is offered from a source he had campaigned as a senator to cut from funding: an orbiting zero-gravity station shown to be therapeutic and run by the Soviets.  The ending, to which I strongly objected, implied that one's patterns of behavior are so strong in their lives that it would be preferable to just go ahead and die, since it would be fruitless to actually try to change...

THE QUAKER CANNON by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth
In a war implicitly between the West and the Russians (called "yutes") taking place way off into the future, in the 1980s that is, an American officer, who had been earlier captured, subjected to torture and interrogation...and subsequently talked, is given another chance as the personal aide to the general responsible for the upcoming major attack against the enemy.  He is informed of a major ruse in their strategy: like Patton's phony army in World War II, another fake force is being assembled to make the yutes mobilize against them instead of the true invasion group.  How this story ends is pretty brilliant...

THE MOON MOTH by Jack Vance
Vance posits the argument that when a society becomes self-sufficient and comfortable, then it will retreat into an intricate system of rituals and rules, stratifying everyone's role within it while being sharply opposed to anything innovative or different.  As a consular representative of the "federation" to such a world, the protagonist finds himself caught up in a web of "musts" and taboos, having to wear a mask...not any mask, but the exact, appropriate one...while speaking to others in a completely roundabout manner to the accompaniment of any of a number of specifically-applicable native musical instruments.  He is suddenly given an assignment to catch a dangerous assassin who had just landed there...and tries to plow through the entrenched, extremely individualistic social system to stop his foe.  A very satisfactory ending with all the story's pieces falling together nicely. By the way, I'm starting to notice our own masks of today's coronavirus world becoming more stylized to reflect their wearers' sense of identity: watch out...

Next week I conclude my look back at the year 1961 in short science fiction...

COVID-19 Outbreak with Marlins Calls into Question Baseball's Strategy

I'm not sure how this is all going to eventually "play" out, but after reading my computer's newsfeed yesterday morning on which it was revealed that after only three games fourteen Miami Marlins players and staff had tested positive for COVID-19...later revised to thirteen...it looks as if Major League Baseball is in for a rough couple of weeks ahead as games are being postponed and the league's non-bubble strategy of playing at home ball parks...with players and staff able to be with their families...is being placed under increasing scrutiny.  By contrast, Major League Soccer has played according to the isolated bubble format...no problems at all so far with any coronavirus contamination, and they've already played their three-match group stage and are now in the midst of the sixteen-team knockout round.  The soccer format not only isolates the players and staff but also limits the total amount of games, with the number of participants set to halve with each proceeding round.  Likewise, with the National Basketball Association pursuing a similar bubble strategy as they try to close out the 2019-20 season and resume play in a couple of days, they should be better prepared than baseball to avoid mass infections.  But the upcoming National Football League and college seasons are now clearly in jeopardy...not so much because of the in-game contact between players but rather because of the players' greater exposure to the outside world between games.  It's not working for baseball, which plans to play a sixty-game regular season...should be interesting to see where they go from here and if the threat can still be reasonably contained to continue on with play: I still remember the NBA season being abruptly stopped after just ONE player tested positive...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #60-56

The five songs on this segment of my list of 500 all-time favorite songs are all pretty old, the most recent one from 28 years ago.  Four of them you probably have heard before, the other being the first one listed below.  After thinking about each of them, it occurred to me that they're all pretty introspective, thoughtful pieces with memorable melodies and compelling instrumental arrangements: I think you'll like them, too...

60 LAZY DAY...the Moody Blues
One of my all-time favorite album sides...when they used to exist before the advent of the compact disc...is Side Two of the Moody Blues' 1969 On the Threshold of a Dream.  Lazy Day is the second track, but all the songs are wonderful...and they smoothly transition one into the next.  There is something very "English" about this song, and something subtly sinister about it as well, although the lyrics seem perfectly innocent describing life in a small town.  It was one of the many great compositions and performances I love by bandmember Ray Thomas...he's got a couple of higher-ranked songs on this list of mine...

59 NOT ENOUGH TIME...INXS
Not Enough Time, from 1992, to me was the final great song from the wildly talented and creative Australian band INXS.  It is one of their slower pieces, with the lyrics very romantic and passionate and the music dreamy.  I thought INXS would be around for a long time, but their popularity and music began to decline as the 1990s wore on, and then the tragic death of singer Michael Hutchence was devastating.  But I still have their backlog of great works to listen to...

58 LONELY PEOPLE...America
This is a real inspirational, uplifting song designed to help anyone listening who is suffering from discouragement and despondency.  It came out in early 1975, during a time in which I was having a lot of conflicting thoughts about society and my future place in it.  Great lyrics..."This is for all the lonely people thinking that life has passed them by, don't give up until you drink from the silver cup and ride that highway in the sky".  During their popularity in the seventies I had something of a love-hate relationship with this band: most of their stuff I could do without but then they'd come up with a song like this treasure...

57 BLACKBIRD...the Beatles
Originally I didn't even know the Beatles had written and originally recorded Blackbird...my first exposure to this song was through a cover version from a Latin band with a female lead singer...I think it was Bossa Rio.  But Paul McCartney's recording is easily superior and I've always considered it to be one of the best songs from their 1968 self-titled "White Album".  It's a great acoustic guitar piece...with a lot of little chirpy bird sounds: I'll have to compile a list someday of songs with birds and other animals in the background...

56 CHANGES...David Bowie
Changes was initially a popular singles hit in the U.S. in 1971...in South Florida where I was a 15-year old at the time, though, only WSRF/1580 in Fort Lauderdale would play it.  Fast forward four years to March of '75...now WQAM/560 for some reason had it in their regular rotation and I associate it with that time as well, including a 14.5 mile run I did one afternoon while humming this song to myself.  But regardless when it was popular or what I associate it with, Changes stands well on its own and contains some good, poetic wisdom about life and the passage from one generation to the next...

Next week: #55-51...

2020 Drags On With All Its Problems, As a Patriot Passes On

Late this morning I watched on TV as the horse-drawn caisson carrying John Lewis' flag-wrapped casket crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama for his last crossing at the place where in March, 1965, he suffered a fractured skull at the hands of state troopers attacking the peaceful demonstration march for civil rights as they were making their way to Montgomery, the state capital.  Only this past March, Lewis, a longtime U.S. representative for Atlanta, had walked over the bridge with several congressional colleagues...he seemed strong and fit although he knew then he was suffering from pancreatic cancer.  That was less than five months ago...wow, it seems like this year time has come to almost a grinding halt.  I remember "long, long ago" on February 16 stepping off our Caribbean cruise ship with Melissa at Port Everglades, with the coronavirus a concern for the U.S. west coast...who would have guessed how it would explode in scope, first in Europe and then New York and the rest of the country, during the ensuing weeks.  And the murder of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis, preceded a few days by the killing of Ahmaud Armery in Brunswick while out jogging, and followed by weeks of nationwide protests that have yet to subside, seems to have happened so very long ago.  I liked John Lewis and am saddened at his passing...he was a brave, principled man and a patriot in the highest sense of the word.  But those protest marches he undertook with others like Martin Luther King, Jr. during those bygone years were deliberately and steadfastly peaceful...the violence which happened was perpetrated on them, not by them.  Sadly, I'm now seeing what generally started out as a peaceful, legitimate protest movement against police abuse degenerating into street violence, vandalism of public and private property, and an Orwellian type of attitude pushed about political correctness...not a good direction to go.  Unfortunately, I also see no light at the end of the tunnel for any of this...I guess I should at least be happy that live pro sports is finally coming back (at least for the time being)...

Fauci, Nicknames, and Washington

I was at work Thursday evening when, just before the 2020 Major League Baseball televised debut game between the New York Yankees and the Nationals in Washington, DC, pandemic guru Dr. Anthony Fauci threw out the ceremonial first pitch.  I did hear the funny reactions on sports talk radio, prompting me to later check it out.  The good doctor strode up confidently to the mound...and then proceeded to hurl a zinger about 10-15 feet to the left of the waiting catcher.  Not as bad as the radio jocks sounded...I was impressed that Fauci could even throw that far, to be perfectly honest.  Once I had a much worse throw...I was standing nearby a softball game one afternoon while in the sixth grade at Nova Elementary and a stray ball came rolling my way. I scooped it up and then helpfully heaved it back with all my might...only the ball didn't go back, but rather at a 90 degree angle to the left, straight at the school building: it was a very embarrassing run for me to retrieve it, sigh...

Speaking of Washington and sports, the report is out now that the city's National Football League franchise, after finally dumping its moniker "Redskins" following years of harsh criticism, will be moving forward this season as "The Washington Football Team".  And why not, since in soccer you already have teams like "Los Angeles Football Club" and "New York City Football Club".  Personally, I searched myself to come up with appropriate nickname replacements, producing results like "Big Fat Buildings", "Mall", "Museums", "Metro", "Bureaucrats", "Tourists", "Lobbyists"...you see, I visited there a couple of years ago.  But after giving it all due thought, my final suggestion has to be the Washington Jelly Beans, in honor of our late former president Ronald Reagan's penchant for the candy...that should help to soothe all the conservatives miffed at the dumping of "Redskins".  And besides, everybody likes jelly beans, right?  Okay I get it, never gonna happen...

Quote of the Week...from Isaac Asimov

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.                                                        ---Isaac Asimov

I'm not sure when Isaac Asimov penned the above quote, but I do know that he died in 1992...28 years ago.  And yet today, with science denial running rampant in our society on a number of fronts, it couldn't ring truer.  We have so much information now at our nearly instant disposal, and it's portable: you can carry and access it on your smartphone anywhere you go...yet I don't think that people are any more knowledgeable about the issues that affect them and our country this election season than they were when there was no such thing as the Internet.  With this very recent innovation connecting the world over, are people kinder and more gracious and empathetic toward one another than before?  Doesn't seem so to me, looks like many of us are stubbornly digging ourselves deeply in our preconceived mindsets and closing up to anything that might challenge them...no, our "wisdom" is definitely not keeping up with the science.  I wonder what Asimov, were he alive today (he'd be 100), would think about the nonsense going on around us and the way people rationalize their own behavior in the face of facts to the contrary.  I'm guessing that he wouldn't be surprised, not one little bit...

Sports Talk Radio and Television Continue to Ignore Actual Sports

It's been fun the last few days to once again being able to watch live, American major league sports games that matter...I'm referring, of course to Major League Soccer and its group stage of matches in this improvised 2020 pandemic season.  Of course, were you listening to sports talk radio or TV you may not even be aware of the fact of soccer's resumption since they tend to obsess about football and basketball...with just a pinch of baseball thrown in.  And the media sports blabbers aren't really into these sports per se, but rather analyzing with an often overbearing attitude of political correctness what various players, owners and members of management are Tweeting or saying and focusing on their respective conflicts and offenses.  The complete repudiation of professional soccer as a topic of discussion is most likely based on the various announcers' ignorance and lack of interest in it, but you would think that a network like ESPN, which is actually broadcasting MLS matches live, would encourage its own people to bring it up on theirs shows...if only briefly.  Today Major League Baseball will open its own curtailed season and I still expect, in the midst of it all, my local sports radio talk stations to continue their obsession with besieged National Football League Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder, as if this were the only "sports" topic worth discussing besides what messages different players will be "sporting" on their jerseys.  In a few days basketball and hockey will resume as well...forget about the latter ever getting any sort of mention.  At least they're actually going to be showing the soccer, hockey and baseball, regardless of the amount of attention they will be receiving from the so-called sports talk "professionals" who are supposed to be knowledgeable about them and who, one might think, would have a vested interest in promoting public enthusiasm about these sports...

Weekly Short Stories: 1961 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here are my review of the next four tales appearing in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 23 (1961). One's a mystery, one's a satire, one's a "short-short", and one's a love story of sorts: nice mix...

HIDING PLACE by Poul Anderson
In interstellar space, a spaceship owned and staffed by an eccentric wealthy entrepreneur is racing to avoid being nabbed by brutal space pirates.  They hone in on an alien ship and occupy it, only to find that all the life forms...including the intelligent beings who run that ship...are in cages as it seems to be a zoo of sorts.  The human occupiers desperately need those beings' cooperation to be able to run this ship and escape the pursuing pirates, but how can they distinguish them from the other life forms they are hiding among?  It's a mystery worthy of a Sherlock Holmes tale, and Anderson adds color to the story with the characters' salty language and behavior...nothing like mixing metaphors...

WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED LOVE? by Isaac Asimov
The story behind this humor piece is that back in '61 Playboy ran an article deriding modern science fiction as being a lot of campy, lurid tales unworthy of readership.  Asimov turned the tables on the popular men's magazine with a story involving aliens abducting to their spaceship an unrelated couple standing in the New York subway, trying to coax them into mating...only the aliens are really clueless as to what actually constitutes mating among animals from Earth.  Surprisingly, I thought the story was funny, too...

A PRIZE FOR EDIE by J.F. Bone
This was a very short story about someone named "C. Edie" being awarded the Noble Prize after being credited as the responsible party for discovering the cure for cancer.  But who is C. Edie...the answer made me groan with dismay, but then I realized that this story came out before all those subsequent others from shows like Twilight Zone, Star Trek and The Prisoner with episodes treating the same subject.  Nowadays you read A Prize for Edie and say to yourself "So what?"...

THE SHIP WHO SANG by Anne McCaffrey
This provocative story is a forum on how to treat the severely disabled from birth and offers a science fiction solution: from infancy have them adapted to pilot and run spaceships...from the inside, with their neural networks tied into the ships' systems.  Helva was one such child, now grown...deformed beyond any ability to function independently and now only with memories of her altered, destined role.  She selects her partner for their ship: a young man who shares her love of music...and the adventures ensue.  The dilemma here is that humans like Helva are altered and adapted long before they are of an age to consent or dissent, but waiting that long in her life would be impossible. In today's world of robotics and advanced prosthetics, I wonder whether anyone could have written this story.  McCaffrey would expand it into a full novel with the same title, published in 1969...

Next week I continue with this anthology of selected science fiction short stories from 1961...

Managed to See Comet NEOWISE Sunday Evening

Sunday at twilight I dragged a folding chair across my backyard, bringing with me a cup of coffee, and then sat there as the blueness gradually receded and the darkness began to reveal one star after another.  My purpose in this venture was to catch a glimpse of Comet NEOWISE, only discovered less than four months ago, and which is visible to the naked eye...if you're at the correct latitude, that is, and clouds aren't obscuring the sky.  Sunday it was wonderfully clear and I first noticed the star Arcturus high in the sky, followed by Vega in the east, the north star Polaris, and the stars of the Big Dipper, a popular asterism within the constellation Ursa Major...in which Comet NEOWISE was to be located on its western side.  As the sky darkened and more stars became visible, I was frustrated at not being able to make out the comet.  Melissa then came outside and joined me in looking for it...she found it first and eventually so did I, around 9:30 pm.  The Big Dipper was turned on its side in the northwestern sky with the pan in the bottom and the handle on top.  I went down from the Dipper about halfway to the horizon, and a little to the left...and there it was, a faint smudge in the sky trailing off to the upper right: I could see it better if I looked a little to the side, not directly at it.  Okay, good, I saw it in person...and frankly, noting how the summer skies here in northern Florida tend to get overcast lately in early evening and that I'm going to be indoors at work this time of the day until next Saturday, this may have been my final opportunity to view it...glad I did.  I first heard of this comet on a Tweet by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, whom I follow, and then kept up with it through some posts by Julie, a Facebook friend.  A few days ago it was in the constellation Auriga, then drifted eastward to Lynx and is now in that far western section of Ursa Major: its position among the starry background changes due to the comet's own motion as well as the Earth's revolution around the Sun.   By the way, the reason the name is in all capital letters is that the discovery came about under a project (NEOWISE) using the space telescope WISE, which stands for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer...at least that's what Wikipedia said...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #65-61

Here are my reactions to the next five songs on my 500 all-time favorites list.  You probably know two of them very well and never heard of the other three...why not give them all a listen, you never know: one or two of them might eventually find their way onto your own "list"...

65 STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN by Led Zeppelin
Stairway to Heaven, which was released in November, 1971 along with the rest of the band's untitled fourth album, was being heavily played on my favorite Miami rock station in October, 1973 when I underwent my only open surgery to date at age 17...a hernia correction.  I remember a lot about that Hollywood Memorial Hospital experience: maybe too much, and it did little to improve my opinion of human nature...I think I might write about that some other time.  But I was able to listen to the radio during my stay and loved hearing this fantastic song.  My favorite part, aside from the instrumental acoustic guitar/flute opening fanfare, is singer Robert Plant's line "There's a feeling I get when I turn to the west and my spirit is crying for leaving"...

64 RED BARCHETTA by Rush
Back in 1993 we in Gainesville were blessed with a great alternative rock station on 97.7...late Saturday nights they had a show called "Saturday Night Six-Pack" on which they'd play six complete CDs one-by-one, on into the early morning hours.  This is how I was introduced to the Canadian band Rush's 1981 masterpiece Moving Pictures, on which Red Barchetta is the second track.  Great guitar riffs by Alex Lifeson accompany drummer Neil Peart's compelling lyrics...sung by Geddy Lee...about his youth experience driving his uncle's antique Italian sports car in the countryside at breathtaking speed. Peart, both a terrific drummer and songwriter, sadly passed away this past January, I'll miss him...

63 UNDER PRESSURE by Queen with David Bowie
Also sadly, neither David Bowie nor Queen front man Freddie Mercury are with us any longer, but this collaboration from 1981 was special...the video contained classic silent screen film clips.  And the background bass beat was shamelessly exploited by dubious rapper Vanilla Ice, which more than anything probably made the original more popular.  Under Pressure's lyrics are great...such as "Turned away from it all like a blind man, sat on a fence but it don't work, keep coming up with love but it's so slashed and torn".  Yeah, that pretty much expressed how I felt about it all.  This was a song that I ignored when it first came out but which grew on me over the decades...

62 IN LIMBO by Radiohead
One of the most mind-blowing pieces produced by a band already widely acknowledged for its creativity and innovation in the studio, In Limbo is from Radiohead's terrific 2000 album Kid A...with another track from it ranked even higher up on my list of all-time favorites.  It's a drifting, very dreamy and sometimes jazzy mood piece that bears little comparison to anything else I've heard.  And the lyrics are a haunting jump down the rabbit hole: "I'm on your side, nowhere to hide, trap doors that open...I spiral down".  Beats anything I ever heard from the sixties' psychedelic era.  Sometimes In Limbo is played together with its preceding track, Optimistic, another great song...

61 TREAT by Kasabian
The British alternative rock group Kasabian's 2015 album 48:13...named after its duration...was generally a disappointment to me, especially in comparison to their first four albums.  But one track, the 8-minute Treat, stood out and would became my 2015 "song of the year".  I still like it a lot...it has that old Beatles kick to it with a little Led Zeppelin/Jimmy Page kind of guitar riff thrown in for good measure.  And on top of that, it sounds pretty danceable...if you're into that type of thing, which I'm not. Unfortunately, I recently discovered that the band just fired their lead singer Tom Meighan, who got into hot water over a domestic assault against his fiancée.  I felt a bit betrayed by Meighan upon hearing that because I'd become a big fan of his singing and the band as a whole.  But Treat is still great...

Next week: #60-56...

Just Finished Reading The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

Marcus Zusak's 2005 novel The Book Thief is one title I found myself repeatedly coming across as I recently surveyed the Internet for recommended fictional books...so I naturally checked it out from my library and read it.  It's set during the Hitler era during the late 1930s and early 1940s as Liesel
Meminger is a little girl who grows up in the midst of all the turmoil, persecution and tragedy under that heinous regime.  Death himself narrates the story and does a pretty good job...here he doesn't cause death but always promptly arrives to gently gather up the souls of the newly deceased, reminding me somewhat of how J.K. Rowling portrayed him in the book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which came out in '07.  Liesel's father, a communist, has disappeared, presumably snatched and killed by the Nazis, while her mother plans to take her to friends to foster-care her and her little brother as she expects to soon be arrested as well...but little brother dies on the train and little Liesel is left alone, presented to Hans and Rosa Hubermann in a modest home in a Munich suburb.  Her new "parents" are loving, each in their own way, and Liesel gradually adapts to life in her new home.  Starting with that ill-fated train ride, she has begun to snatch books...usually at random...from various sources even though at the start she is unable to read.  But Hans, and later others, will teach her and she becomes quite a reader.  I'm a little hesitant about going any further in describing the plot and characters because I'd like you to read The Book Thief for yourself and provide some feedback on it.  It's a very sobering look at how Jews were persecuted and killed under Hitler's brief (but still much too long) reign, as well as how the German people in different ways responded to the pressures and sacrifices placed upon them.  I became quite attached to the various characters...Zusak was excellent in developing them, making the book seem very real.  I'm not surprised by this novel's popularity...oh, it was made into a movie in 2013, although I'm not sure I want to see it: sometimes the visual images from the big screen displace what my own imagination conjured up while reading a story, and that's a loss...

On the Day of John Lewis' Passing, Georgia Governor and Mayors Need to Negotiate

On this day in which the great civil rights advocate and long-time Atlanta congressman John Lewis died after a seven-month struggle against pancreatic cancer, his home state of Georgia...where I was born...is in the thick of a legal and political struggle concerning how the COVID-19 pandemic is handled there.  The governor, Brian Kemp, has proclaimed a statewide mandate that opens businesses and encourages (but doesn't require) masks in public settings...the recent sharp resurgence in cases has caused several local mayors to enact public face covering mandates in violation of Kemp's rule.  And now he is suing the mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms, to rescind that locality's law.  The Georgia governor has been thoroughly trashed in the media for this policy of his in the middle of a public health emergency, but I think he has a point that most media pundits have conveniently chosen to overlook.  You see, these cities that are mandating masks are also considering shutting down their businesses again, like what happened earlier this spring across the country.  Kemp is making it clear in his speeches that he is determined to keep Georgia's economy running and feels that the mayors choosing to defy his policy about masks will...if not checked...then proceed to once again close their city's businesses.  This is what totally frustrates me about this political wrangling: many people at-large automatically associate mask wearing with economic shutdown while in actual policy the former, if universally practiced, will enable businesses to flourish at close to maximal capacity.  Governor Kemp wants Georgians to wear masks but he does not want his state to go into an economic depression with mass-ordered shutdowns...it seems that there should be room for negotiation here: grant the mayors and counties the right to impose and enforce mask mandates while they agree that they will not close down businesses.  Georgia businesses staying open and everybody wearing masks isn't going to make a lot of people happy but it's the obvious solution to this standoff...

Quote of the Week...from Pelé

Success is no accident.  It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.                       ---Pelé

Pelé, from Brazil, is one of the greatest...and most beloved...soccer players in history.  His above quote not only accurately describes his own approach to the game he excelled in, but goes beyond it to apply to me in any challenging area of my life for which I want to achieve success.  The truth is that it's easy to get excited and motivated when starting new projects, and equally easy to coast on successful outcomes.  But when the going is rough, when I am discouraged, anxious or distracted and cannot enjoy or even envision my direction and progress properly, this is precisely when it is important to work, persevere, and sacrifice...to get through those hard times and back on the positive side.  Most people give up in those dark times, but the ones who ultimately succeed and become skillful and accomplished in their chosen areas are the ones who are always working to take things to a higher level, with an ultimate prize envisioned ahead of them.  Above everything, though, as the great Pelé concluded, it is crucial to love what I'm doing or learning to do...beyond what society may say about my current level of competency.  I think a lot of people are hesitant to try anything new for fear of failing before others...it's important that one's interest in an area surmounts that resistance.  As the Desiderata stated, "If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself".  It's always been my experience, no matter what I do and how hard I work at it, that somebody will inevitably come along who exceeds my skill and accomplishment, often taking great pains to inform me of this.  So you gotta love what you're doing for its own sake and don't get hung up by the noise coming from others...

Tuberville Defeats Sessions in Alabama: Should Conservatives Rejoice?

Tommy Tuberville defeated Jeff Sessions in this past Tuesday's Alabama primary for the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate seat currently occupied by Democrat Doug Jones.  It marked the final nail in the political coffin of Sessions, a long-time popular conservative senator for that state before he avidly supported Donald Trump in their 2016 presidential primary and was later rewarded with the post of Attorney General in the new administration.  Because Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, Trump never forgave him and often publicly berated this crucial campaign supporter before he was finally pushed out of office.  Seeking his old Senate seat, which Jones had won in a 2017 special election upset in this strongly red state, Sessions was thwarted by Trump's hearty endorsement of former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville, who has consistently led in the polls over both Sessions and Jones.  So in all likelihood, next January we'll see that seat return to the Republican side...but if you're a conservative you shouldn't be rejoicing...

Jeff Sessions to me was the great, articulate spokesman in the United States Senate for the conservative positions on the various issues coming before it.  Ever since C-Span2 began live floor coverage of this body nearly twenty years ago, I enjoyed watching him get on the floor with his polite, soft-spoken demeaner and then proceed to thoroughly thrash in the most civilized way the other side's arguments, and he was a powerful voice on the Judiciary Committee...conservatives should mourn that he won't get a chance to return.  Instead we have a good ol' boy political neophyte who is totally in the pocket of the current president and won't express a single independent thought that doesn't have the White House's seal of approval stamped on it preapproved.  The only problem with this is that as things now stand, Trump's probably going down in November and we'll have a Democrat as president two weeks after Tuberville gets sworn in.  And poor old Tommy will be standing there all alone without anybody besides the typical radio and TV hacks to tell him what to say...that's what I mean when I said conservatives shouldn't be rejoicing: Jeff Sessions would surely know what to say and how to say it.  I was sadly shocked in '16 to seem him so whole-heartedly supporting and campaigning for Trump in Alabama when that primary campaign was still up in the air and Ted Cruz, a true, consistently conservative standard-bearer, had performed so well on the trail.  Cruz was Sessions' natural choice but he instead made a political mistake that later came to haunt him, and he's paying for it now...maybe FoxNews will hire him on as a political analyst, though.  I often disagreed with Jeff Sessions' opinions as a senator and some of his actions as Attorney General, but felt that he was treated very disrespectfully during the Senate hearing for his confirmation as well as by Trump when the President decided he was no longer useful to him and openly turned against him, a pattern that this individual has repeated with many, many others...

Weekly Short Stories: 1961 Science Fiction, Part 1

I begin my look at science fiction short stories from the year 1961 with the opening two tales from the retrospective anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 23 (1961).  Just two stories here because they're both pretty long and each one gets a high recommendation from me to read.  In 1961 my family spent its first full year at our new home in the brand-new Boulevard Heights subdivision in West Hollywood, Florida.  I was four going on five...my sister Anita, four years older than me, went to Boulevard Heights Elementary School, which was a couple of blocks from our house.  I had my neighborhood friends Danny and Stevie and Jimmy I hung out with back then.  But enough of the personal stuff: here are my reactions to those stories...

THE HIGHEST TREASON by Randall Garrett
I was impressed by this story the first time I read it a few years ago, and still am after going through it again.  Set in a future interstellar space war between Earth, its colonies and outposts, and an alien humanoid militaristic society, an Earth military officer decides to desert his decadent, weak and complacent homeland to join the Kerothi as they are steadily and consistently winning the war.  His motivations at first seem despicable...but as the story goes on and especially at the end, the plan is entirely different.  Let's just say that some alternate histories of Judas and Jesus paint the former, almost always portrayed as the worst of all traitors, in a more sympathetic light.  The meaning of personal sacrifice in the pursuit of the greater good is the overriding theme here...

HOTHOUSE by Brian Aldiss
Aldiss meticulously created a scenario far off into Earth's future, billions of years from now, when the Sun is dying and the Earth always keeps one face to it while the moon is fixed sharing Earth's orbit.  Plants have taken over the biosphere and only five species of animals remain: humans and four insect forms.  The story takes place in a banyan forest (one giant banyan tree on the planet remains) as the various carnivorous plants prey on the small tribe of remaining humans, who struggle to survive until the next generation against the heavy odds stacked against them.  This story you probably want to take slowly and sit back from time to time, close your eyes, and visualize the environment and strange creatures the author imagined.  At first glance, Hothouse is a bleak look into the future, but upon reflection I have to admit that for a species such as our own which has only been around for less than a half million years, projecting its survival for another two billion years is actually a pretty doggone optimistic assessment.  The ending is fantastic...begging for a sequel...and uses cosmic radiation, plus the fact that it was early plant life on Earth that originally permeated its atmosphere with oxygen...

Next week: more science fiction short stories from 1961...

Constellation of the Month: Scorpius (the Scorpion)

If you happen to be a follower of that nonscientific field of soothsaying known as astrology, you already know that Scorpio is a sign of the Zodiac, representing people born October 23-November 21...guess what, I think horoscopes are a lot of hooey.  Astronomically speaking, I learned about the celestial Zodiac constellation Scorpius early in life at the age of seven...I remember that late spring night 56 years ago when I got permission to stay up late enough to watch it rise in the southeastern sky, leading with the scorpion's claws (three stars) followed by its highlight, the bright red giant star Antares.  In the United States Scorpius passes low in the southern sky during summer evenings and actually does resemble a scorpion when you connect together the dots (its stars, that is).  It also lies on the elliptic, meaning that our sun, moon, and the planets are seen from our vantage point on Earth to travel through it (and the other 11 Zodiac constellations).  Now to call Scorpius a "July" constellation only means that round 9-10 pm in the evening of that month it crosses the meridian (the imaginary line in the sky that divides east from west).  I could technically call just about any of the 88 official constellations as belonging to July since they all likewise cross that meridian line, most of them at other times of the day or night, however.  So for convention's sake I do as others do and take a mental snapshot of the sky at mid-evening during a particular month...

Although Scorpius is traditionally represented by that scorpion pattern from its brightest visible stars, the constellation is actually a sector of space projected outward from Earth to the farthest regions of the universe, comprising untold numbers of galaxies.  There are four Messier "objects" with Scorpius, all star clusters.  Scorpius lies the furthest south of all the Zodiac constellations, passing low in continental American skies.  It's usually a lot easier to notice the three prominent "claw" stars at the constellation's western end, followed by spectacular Antares.  The upper two claw stars are Graffius and Dschubba, respectively.  Other notable stars in Scorpius are Sargas in its tail and Shaula at the tip where the "stinger" is...

I have a memory from childhood of being with my family at the Golden Glades Drive-In theatre in northern Dade County, between Opa-Locka and Carol City near the Palmetto Expressway.  We were walking outside and I happened to look up toward the south and saw Scorpius in its completeness...it's one of the more spectacular constellations in the sky, definitely the highlight of the summer season...