Just Finished Reading Matilda by Roald Dahl

Ever since that Jeopardy! episode a few weeks ago that devoted an entire category to British children's books author Roald Dahl, I've been exploring his collected works, believing then that I was unfamiliar with anything he had done.  Sure, he wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, from which the early 70s movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was made, and I'd heard of his James and the Giant Peach.  But I'd never seen a movie or read a book of his...until the other night when I got out my own DVD of the 1967 James Bond thriller You Only Live Twice and discovered that Dahl had written the screenplay!  Well, I felt it was time for me to read another of his books, so I picked his 1988 novel Matilda...I wasn't disappointed.  Once again we have a Dahl story in which a child...Matilda, of course...is the heroic protagonist and a mixture of adults, some of whom are sweet and compassionate and some of whom are beyond nasty in their meanness. Matilda is a four-year old girl, a genius who has taught herself to read as well as a great deal of math.  She befriends the local librarian, who has introduced her to great books in literature and has already read many.  But her negligent parents belittle her and refuse to recognize her talents...when she finally starts out in school she discovers friends, a compassionate teacher...and a thoroughly abusive principal.  What distinguishes Matilda in this tale is her spunk and refusal to take any abuse lying down...here is someone who knows how to even the score!  It was all very entertaining...sadly, Dahl passed away back in 1990.  To me, he and Neil Gaiman are my two top favorite British contemporary authors...I plan to read all of their works.  In 1996 the film version of Matilda came out, but I haven't seen it or nor do I plan to...I don't want my own visualizations of Dahl's story and characters to become supplanted by an altered version...

My #7 All-Time Favorite Song: Building a Mystery by Sarah McLachlan

Number 7 on my list of all-time favorite songs is BUILDING A MYSTERY by Sarah McLachlan.  A singles hit in 1997, I grew to love it while listening in early 1998 to my local Gainesville alternative rock station, then on 97.7, and which played the song in its regular rotation back then.  Besides McLachlan's extraordinarily beautiful singing, this slow-moving song speaks of a woman's love interest whose fanatical sense of independence and wonder entrances her as well...while she bluntly acknowledges his glaring faults.  And aren't we all in the end deeply flawed individuals with our own special stories to tell?  Aside from the universal wisdom embedded within the lyrics...with a little unnecessary profanity thrown in for good measure...I got deeply within the "mystery" angle to it as the singer's boyfriend explores the frontiers of reality and beyond.  Sarah's singing to him...but she's singing to each of us as well.  It's a great love song, but not of a blind, possessive love but rather a more discerning, mature kind in which both share in their mutual affection and attraction while respecting the sometimes stark differences between them.  Sarah McLachlan has a couple of other songs that I liked a lot: Sweet Surrender which, like Building a Mystery, is from her excellent 1997 album Surfacing, and Fallen, from her 2003 Afterglow album.  I probably should explore this wonderfully talented artist's collected works at some time in the near future...

Just Finished Reading The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a prequel novel by Suzanne Collins, released earlier this year, to her wildly popular The Hunger Games series.  It focuses on the life of that series' chief antagonist, Panem president Coriolanus Snow, who duels with heroine Katniss Everdeen throughout the three novels.  I read these books earlier and was greatly impressed by Collins' writing...the adaptation to film with Jennifer Lawrence playing Katniss and Donald Sutherland as President Snow was excellent, perfectly cast and expertly directed.  So much so, it would seem, that while reading this prequel novel I was continually finding myself picturing Snow as a young Sutherland when he appeared as surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in the original 1970 M.A.S.H. movie.  As prequels go, one must have a special motivation to read them (or watch them, as was the case with the three Stars Wars prequel movies) since you pretty much know how they're going to end: with the beginning of the "first" book (or movie).  Having attached myself to the characters and Collins' writing style, it was easy for me to take the plunge...

Reading prequels is similar to rereading a novel in that you pretty much know how it's going to end and which characters will make it that far.  Also, certain themes prevalent in the series are more deeply examined in prequels, for example Snow's fascination with roses, the origin of the mockingjay, and how the Games began following the Rebellion. Following young Coriolanus Snow as he makes his life choices along the way, some demonstrating his courage and intelligence and others his ambition and treacherous self-centeredness, it's easy to see developing within him the later ruthless, cunning President Snow of the Hunger Games books and movies.  Still, I didn't like it nearly as much as the original three novels...if you're a completist and a big Hunger Games fan, you probably will enjoy it more than I did...for that matter, I never did go that much for any of the extra Harry Potter spinoffs, either...

Deliberately Avoided Election Results As Long As Possible

I related to Melissa a few days ago that I was going to see how long I could go without knowing the 2020 election results, be they the presidential race, the numerous US Senate races, or any of the other races or referenda.  Tuesday evening I was at work and I heard nobody speak of any results, and I carefully avoided the TV in the breakroom as well as my smartphone's newsfeed and social media.  After work at home, Melissa...who kept up with the results herself...made it easy for me to sidestep the news channels on TV and held off on discussing the election.  Wednesday morning I posted a link to that day's blog article on Facebook and Twitter using my desktop computer...I brought out a piece of cardboard to shield the screen from my eyes, avoiding the news-infected Microsoft Edge home screen and then anything that two social media sites might reveal.  Then I went on my local public library's website to put some items on hold.  I then embarked on my regular routines for the day as usual, first stopping at my nearby Dunkin' Donuts for an iced coffee...listening to loud classical music on my earphones to avoid anyone around talking about it...and then headed off to my afternoon/evening work shift.  There I was again careful to avoid that breakroom, which doubtless would have somebody on the television talking about the election. I knew that eventually I'd want to end my information "fast" if only because of Melissa, but I did string it out through most of Wednesday, with her bringing me up to date on the counting...everything was still up in the air, although I was confirmed in my prediction that the election would be a lot closer than the opinion polls indicated.  After that I tried to avoid the news but not like before...you can go nuts listening to that stuff nonstop.  And here we are today, five days later...I don't know about you, but I have absolutely no control on what's going on now with the election and where it will lead, so I'm instead going to attend myself to matters that I can actually affect...

I'd tried this kind of game before of delaying knowing what happened in a big news story, but always with major sporting events like the January, 1984 Super Bowl between the Los Angeles Raiders and Washington Redskins and the 2008 national championship college football game between Florida and Oklahoma.   I think what got me to do it this time were the repeated warnings from the media that it would possibly take days following the election before a winner for the presidential contest could be determined...so why should I get myself all flustered over this drawn-out drama?  After all, we've still got the same leaders until January, whether they won or lost.  I remember back in 2000, weeks after that year's election between George W. Bush and Al Gore brought on a protracted struggle and recount in Florida.  I was in the Checkers drive-thru on Archer Road and the attendant, a friend from church, interested in my take on Bush vs. Gore asked me through the window, "So who's the President?".  Without missing a beat I replied, "Why, Bill Clinton, of course!" Twenty years later, I feel I've given myself some peace of mind by escaping all the political hullabaloo, if only for a short period.  And I've got to get that Microsoft news feed off my computer's home screen...as a matter of fact, I'm thinking of permanently restricting my national news intake to the traditional early evening news on one of the alphabet networks... 

Quote of the Week...from Bob Newhart

The only way to survive is to have a sense of humor.                        Bob Newhart

Bob Newhart, the great television comedian known for his two popular sit-coms The Bob Newhart Show (1972-78) and Newhart (1982-90), is definitely a survivor...he's 91 and still pluggin' along.  However, if you put his name into a search engine you're bound to come up with death reports...he supposedly just died either on September 21st or October 30th, depending on the website.  From what I can tell, this is a hoax and the soft-spoken humorist is still alive and well...which brings me to the above quote.  I suppose you really are a survivor if you outlive your own death notices!  My favorite Bob Newhart Show episode...and there were many I liked as I regularly watched it back in the 70s on Saturday evenings following Mary Tyler Moore...was the Thanksgiving episode from 1975 in which Emily leaves on a trip and Bob is left spending the holiday with others, including his highly neurotic patient Carlin, in his apartment as the turkey gets burnt in the oven and Bob orders Chinese while everyone ends up getting inebriated.  One element of his series that I loved was how a simple joke or turn of phrase from early on would come back later on and get amplified and humorously twisted...this particular episode was a great example, with knock-knock jokes taken to their funniest.  Let's all hope that Mr. Newhart got a good laugh at his "demise" and will continue enjoying his life to the fullest.  By the way, there's something on the internet called WikiObits that produces makeshift obituaries of famous people even if they're still alive.  They did one for Newhart and I tested it out by doing a search on Beyoncé...their false obit of her stated that she died possibly of a fireworks accident.  This all illustrates something I've hit upon before: if you Google something, it will respond by providing you what it "thinks" you want, not necessarily what is true...

Some Interesting Newspaper Articles from October, 1956

Here are four articles that caught my attention as I was skimming through the archives of The Miami News, a mainline, established newspaper, covering the dates October 4th through 6th, 1956...64 years ago.  It's interesting to see how people saw the future back then, as well as being treated to many assumptions they made about the ways society should be structured.  With each article I first wrote the main point of interest to me, followed by my own commentary.  Yes, these were real articles...

ENSLAVEMENT OF MEN AS ROBOTS PREDICTED...JUST PLUG 'EM IN (10/4/56)

In the article: Curtiss R. Schafer, project engineer for the Norden-Ketay Corp., of Milford Conn., said research in the science of "biocontrol" has shown that the conversion of human beings into electronically-controlled robots is possible.

Yes, I believe Schafer's revelation that "whole nations might be enslaved by tiny radios implanted into the brains of infants to prevent them from thinking as individuals" is feasible: I saw, with my own eyes, the archvillain Plankton do this sort of thing in the first SpongeBob SquarePants movie!  But seriously, aren't a lot of people in our own day and age voluntarily allowing themselves to be enslaved by their own smartphones and social media? This was a United Press article...

RADICAL CARS STILL FAR IN FUTURE...STEERING LEVERS AND ATOMIC ENGINES COMING (10/4/56)

In the article: According to F. C. Reith, vice-president of the Ford Motor Co. and general manager of the Mercury division, "Gas turbine engines are 5 to 10 years away, while atom-powered cars are at least 15 to 20 years in the future."

Although gas turbine technology has been extensively used with other forms of transportation, it hasn't yet taken a strong hold with passenger cars...although lately research and development is going on concerning its use with hybrid electric cars.  As for atomic cars...ha, ha, ha...this shows the overly rosy assessment folks were giving this energy source at the time: after all, the first running nuclear reactor began operations just the previous year.  Mike Davis, Miami News staff, wrote the article...

DUMB GUYS HELD BETTER AS DRIVERS (10/5/56)

In the article: Quoting Arthur L. Berlin, chairman of the driver education program in San Leandro's (California) schools: "The man who drives while thinking of his business is a poor driver, while the man with low mental ability won't be thinking about much of anything."

This is the kind of silly article I would have expected from a rag like the National Enquirer, not a reputable, serious newspaper like the Miami News...yet it was released under the auspices of the Associated Press. The article's premise is asinine: just because someone's thought processes function at a "lower" level than another's doesn't mean that they can't be just as distracted by their own less-significant thoughts while driving...

STOP THE SHOUTS FOR EQUAL RIGHTS...A WOMAN'S VOICE (10/6/56)

In the article: From Dorothy Roe's syndicated women's advice column, agreeing with Florence Anderson, a Chicago mechanical design engineer: For instance, if you want a raise...don't start complaining about how you can't afford a new pair of nylons, have to go without lunches and haven't had your hair done in three weeks...Instead tell [the boss] how fortunate you are to have such a brilliant and understanding employer, who understands the necessity of keeping up appearances in the business world. Tell him how you'd hate to work for an old fogy who didn't appreciate the importance of such things as hairdos and nylons.  

From today's more enlightened vantage point about equal rights for women, this article seems overly patriarchal and patronizing.  But it was serious advice when it was written and would have been uncontroversial within the accepted norms of the time.  I expect to see more articles like this one from the old newspapers... 

Well, I guess it's time for me to go back to the archives for some more treasures...

Weekly Short Stories: 1965 Science Fiction, Part 1

Today I begin reviewing science fiction short stories from the year 1965 as they appear in the anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1966, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr and presenting their selections from the previous year.  For me, still living in the Boulevard Heights subdivision of West Hollywood, Florida...which that year would be annexed into the city of Hollywood...1965 marked my transition from the third grade at Boulevard Heights Elementary School (two easy blocks from my home) to the fourth at Nova Blanche Forman Elementary, five miles away and requiring daily bus trips...this brought a group of unforgettable kids into my life like Martin, Mike, Jim and Greg.  In 1965 President Johnson would often interrupt regular TV prime time shows to give nationwide addresses, usually beginning with "My fellow Americans" in his thick Texan drawl while discussing various issues, among them his decision to escalate fighting in Vietnam, and I was totally into listening to the pop/rock music being played, via my trusty little transistor radio, on 560/WQAM "Tiger Radio".  My favorite TV show by far this year was The Man from U.N.C.L.E....I had each episode's title memorized.  Pet-wise, Tiger the cat reigned supreme at our home.  But enough of the memories, here are my reactions to the book's first four tales...

SUNJAMMER by Arthur C. Clarke

Imagine a yachting regatta with majestic boats out on the open sea racing for bragging rights and the prize purse...now picture it in space and the boats are ships with wide, ultra-thin metallic sails to capture the radiation emitted from the sun (aka solar wind) to power them onward and you have the premise for this thoughtful story about one such event.  Seven ships, each designed differently and from a different country, vie to be the first to pass the moon as they leave Earth's orbit. This story's a great lesson in science as Clarke teaches the reader a lot about what goes on inside the sun and how its radiation bursts can pose a threat to space travelers, as well as how physics would dictate the motions of such "sailing" ships in space...

CALLING DR. CLOCKWORK by Ron Goulart

This story is a brutal indictment of socialized medicine as society in the future is divided between private health and that provided for "free"...the Urban Free Hospitals are dilapidated, neglected and use run-down robots as physicians.  Arnold Vesper, his own medical care supposedly assured with private insurance, is visiting an ailing friend of his father's in one of those "hospitals" and gets himself inextricably sucked into the system.  It's all exaggerated satire that makes the author's point much too vividly, although I strongly believe that providing affordable health care to all is an integral part of what any civilized society should strive for...

BECALMED IN HELL by Larry Niven

Howard...this story's narrator...and Eric are the two crewman on a scientific mission with their spaceship deep into hot, poisonous Venus' atmosphere...the extremely dangerous conditions leave little room on their mission for technical problems, but of course one is detected...and the two have difficulty finding the source of the breakdown as time is running out on them.  Not only was the unique working relationship between the two intriguing to me, but this might be the earliest science fiction I've read about Venus that described our "sister" planet in realistic terms instead of as the commonly-depicted fantasy world with treacherous oceans and steamy jungles teeming with lots of scary creatures...

APARTNESS by Vernor Vinge

In Vinge's post-apocalyptic depiction of future Earth following a nuclear holocaust that virtually wiped out life in the Northern Hemisphere, it is left to the remaining southern nations to pick up the pieces and go on.  An Australian anthropologist is on an Argentine ship...Buenos Aires is now the great world power...as it explores a section off the Antarctic coastland in search of a lost floating island that the Argentine ruler's astrologers predict will bring great joy and wealth to the regime.  Knowing that this is all nonsense, the anthropologist has his own agenda, revealed with the discovery of a heretofore unknown settlement of humans on Antarctica.  What follows bears out the story's title and steers it into an ingeniously different direction: brilliant and ahead of its time...

Next week: more sci-fi short fiction from 1965 reviewed...

On This 2020 Presidential Election Day

So here we find ourselves again, four years later as Donald Trump goes into Election Day as an underdog against his Democratic opponent for president.  I'm inclined to agree with progressive activist Michael Moore that Trump voters are underreported in the public opinion polls, this year as they were four years ago, and that this election between him and Joe Biden will be closer than most polls currently indicate.  If that's so, then once again...for the sixth straight presidential election...it will all come down to the uninformed, pain-in-the-neck undecided voters who will...as they have since 2000...allow late-hour "news" stories and phony campaign ads to sway their votes in one direction or the other and decide our collective fate for the next four years.  My vote was cast weeks ago and I had wanted to steer mostly clear of the no-holds-barred political warfare going on in the media, but the sad truth is that no matter which channel I watched on TV I was barraged with those horrendously annoying and often patently cynical campaign ads.  Tonight and beyond they'll be tabulating and releasing the results: my sincere, deepest hope is that no matter which candidate you supported, you haven't invested so much emotionally into the campaign and the candidates that the results devastate you if they don't go your way.  For me, I have fulfilled my responsibility as an individual American citizen by informing myself and casting my single vote...on this runaway train where the most easily manipulated voters routinely end up electing our national leaders, I can only brace myself for what's to come, for better or for worse: I suggest you do likewise. Regardless who wins, I suspect it's gonna get "pretty ugly" out there for the next eleven weeks until Inauguration Day, 2021...I want no part of it...

My #8 All-Time Favorite Song: For My Lady by the Moody Blues

My #8 favorite song, from my recently compiled list of 500 all-time personal favorites, is FOR MY LADY by the Moody Blues.  It comes off their 1972 album Seventh Sojourn, which features singles hits Isn't Life Strange (#422 on my list) and Just a Singer (in a Rock n' Roll Band).  For My Lady, which is the album's contribution by my favorite "Moody"...flutist Ray Thomas...was a common staple at the time on album rock radio, where it first captured my attention.  It has a seafaring, romantic theme to it and to me is one of the all-time greatest love songs...if not the greatest.  Thomas' flute contributes to the song's mystical, dreamy atmosphere as he sings "My boat sails stormy seas, battles oceans filled with tears.  At last my port's in view, now that I've discovered you."  From the first time I heard it I liked this piece and over the years have always placed it high among my all-time favorites.  Back in early 1972 I was in a generally introspective, philosophical frame of mind and this great song often played around in my head as I mused about this thing or that.  This list of my 500 all-time favorite songs has its share of Ray Thomas songs, with his Legend of a Mind (#26), Flying (#46) and Lazy Day (#60)...he also collaborated with bandmate John Lodge on Are You Sitting Comfortably (#105).  He is also responsible for the beautiful, haunting flute solo on the Moody Blues' famous song Nights in White Satin (#122)...I guess you can surmise that I'm a big fan of this band! Ray Thomas sadly passed away at age 76 on January 4th, 2018...he was a largely unrecognized giant in the music industry and his works should endure for a long, long time...

Just Finished Reading House of Salt and Sorrows by Erin A. Craig

House of Salt and Sorrows is a 2019 young adult fantasy/horror/romance novel by Erin A. Craig...if the combination of those three genres within a single story sounds strange, please keep in mind that many of our famous old fairy tales do the same thing.  And this novel is a fairy tale in its own right as a family of twelve sisters finds itself in a nightmare as they begin to die through mishaps or illness, until when the narrative begins they are only left with eight, ranging from late teens to little girls.  Annaleigh, the second oldest survivor, is the story's protagonist as she tries to unravel the mystery of the most recent death of one of her sisters.  The family, headed by a widowed wealthy shipping magnate who has remarried, lives on an island within a chain of islands on a fantasy world where humanity is in pretty much the same technological state as in other fantasy works like Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings.  The impression I got when I started it was that it was a mystery novel of sorts and that although in a fantasy setting the real world's parameters generally prevailed.  But as I read on, it became more and more clear that the author was prolifically adding magic, the paranormal...and ultimately supernatural mythological characters...into the mix.  To me as a reader I felt a little cheated as I was first presented with a situation and then the explanations at the end weren't remotely available to me until Craig decided to throw them into the story.  It also played with my sense of what was real and what wasn't...the reader needs to be able to have at least some anchor of reality to help navigate them through the book: it's a problem I also had with celebrated writer Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House.  But keep in mind that my subjective criticisms may not be the same as your own reactions, and you might really like this novel which seems to have met with widespread approval and enthusiasm.  In any event, I always appreciate a writer's efforts and I understand that Erin A. Craig is coming out with another book in 2021, which I intend to read...

My October 2020 Running Report

In October I ran for a total of 161 miles, putting in time on every day of the month.  My longest single run was for just 5 miles as I employed the strategy of shorter runs and multiple activities within the day.  I also walked quite a bit, something I plan to intentionally increase in emphasis.  Because of COVID-19 I see no races for myself anytime in the future...I knew some other places downstate were apparently hosting races but I didn't realize until today that my own Gainesville will be holding something on November 20th called the Cupcake Race, with 5K, 10K, and half-marathon events all to begin at 8 am.  It uses the Hawthorne Trail as a course and starts and ends from Boulware Springs Park on SE 15th Street. I'm trying to wrap my head around the logistics involved in bringing all these people together in one spot at the same time and then starting the race and with them all breathing heavily in each others' faces...sadly sounds like a super-spreader event tailor-made for pandemic deniers and herd immunity proponents.  No, if I run a half-marathon anytime in the next few months I think I'll just do it by myself and save the money and exposure danger. The other day the weather turned pleasantly cooler and drier...maybe if it lasts I'll see if I can't notch up the distances with my neighborhood runs.  In October I ran slowly and often...for November I see no reason to change...

Quote of the Week...from John Dewey

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.  

                                                                         --John Dewey

The above quote from educator/philosopher John Dewey, which I picked up watching one of my Music Choice TV channels, brings into question what actually constitutes our own sense of identity.  I'm sure the dude has written a lot to back up his above quote, and you're welcome to delve into his rationales...I have my own reactions...

Back on September 15th I reviewed Dr. Ski Chilton's book The ReWired Brain, in which he claimed that simply thinking physically changes the neural pathways within our own brains and and thus alters ourselves, and repeating the same thoughts reinforces those changes.  Thinking is as much of a choice as "doing", and as such fits Dewey's criteria of choice of action. And since we are constantly thinking and doing, this naturally constantly changes us. One of my favorite Star Trek; the Next Generation episodes, titled Tapestry, has Captain Picard lamenting his earlier rowdy years in Star Fleet and a specific incident in which he jumped into a fight that caused him to lose his heart (it was replaced, naturally).  His regret prompted the alien character Q to intervene and give him a chance to go back in time and change the fight's outcome...the result showed that both good and bad experiences interweave within us to form our own individual tapestries: you can't go back and take something out without unraveling it all.  So yes, our minds and bodies do change as do our perceptions of our own selves. Still, I believe that there is within me a continual, unchanged core "self" around which all of these changes take place as my personality and character develop through my experiences and thoughts.  For example, when I am dreaming much of that "tapestry", and well as my ability to discern reality and critically reason things out, is fast asleep.  Yet I'm still there within that unconscious state, a core of me that is, my continuous "self", along with other residual elements of my personality.  I am an big advocate for people trying to improve themselves, but my interpretation is that in doing so they are creating more knowledge, character, abilities, and stronger and healthier bodies as the most immediate environment around that core being...

Unintentionally Funny '56 Newspaper Column about Henry Wallace, "The Prophet"

When I was a kid growing up in South Florida our daily newspaper was the Miami News, since my father worked down in Dade County (we lived in southern Broward) and felt more connected there.  Unfortunately, I would have preferred our own city paper, the Hollywood Sun-Tattler...but little kids often get no say in what they want.  Now I have this feature whereby I can read old newspapers off my computer screen...and since the Sun-Tattler isn't available I decided to make my father's preferred brand my own.  I went back to the day of my birth...October 3rd, 1956...to see what was going on in the world and in people's minds back then, as reflected on the pages of the Miami News Main Edition.  The World Series had just begun between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees, the Cold War was going on strong, and Dwight Eisenhower was in a heated electoral campaign against Democrat Adlai Stevenson for a second term.  In the News' opinion section for that day I read a column by Ralph McGill that led off calling former Franklin Roosevelt's vice-president and 1948 independent presidential candidate Henry Wallace "The Prophet".  Why, it seems that the American economy, which dominated the world in that era, was flying high in early fall of '56 with record employment and only brighter prospects to come.  McGill then made a point of agreeing with Wallace's prediction of a four-day work week in the (then) near future, citing the fact that even Vice-President Nixon was on board with it...and then emphasized that one of the crucial tasks for the future was to educate the people as to how best spend all the oodles of leisure time they were going to be getting.  At this I just laughed and laughed and laughed some more...

There's a lot of irony here, some of it personal.  For one, I remember that in my early childhood my dad had a six-day work week as a letter carrier, not five as the 1956 McGill article claimed for the ongoing national standard.  Secondly, a few years ago my own employer posted jobs involving a four-day work week...but the shifts were ten hours long with the cumulative weekly total still at 40 hours.  I've heard over the years that in Europe conditions have generally improved for workers and that in many countries they have a lot more leisure time than us here in the USA.  Nowadays though, instead of one spouse being able to support the family on a single forty-hour, five-days-a-week job as used to be the case for middle class households, for many both spouses are not only working full time to keep things afloat but also often have extended hours, either through overtime or working at home.  Ralph McGill claimed back then that the wheel of time had turned, but oftentimes people get so stuck in their present situation that they cannot reasonably envision a future that departs in significant ways from it.  But it all makes interesting...and unintentionally funny...reading for me.  Now on to the next hilarious article from the past...

Weekly Short Stories: 1964 Science Fiction, Part 5

Here are my reactions to the final three stories in the anthology Robert Silverberg Presents The Great SF Stories (1964).  Of them, the second below was by far my favorite and, hey, turns out it's written by the guy who presented the book!  Starting next week I'll be switching to a different sci-fi short stories year's best anthology series that covers the years 1965-89...I'll deal with 1990-onward when I get there... 

THE LIFE HATER by Fred Saberhagen

Back on September 2nd I reviewed the 1963 Saberhagen short story Fortress Ship, which dealt with a fleet of automated warships from an unknown, probably extinct alien civilization from eons before that humans must combat to save their own planets and even Earth.  This particular story is another one with this theme as Carr, solo piloting his own ship and painfully suffering from terminal cancer, encounters one such ship and decides that dialogue with its AI controls is the only way to save himself.  A clever story leading the reader in one direction, until the final conversation takes place...

NEIGHBOR by Robert Silverberg

On a distant sparsely-settled planet far off in the future with human life extended to hundreds of years, a domineering man living with his family on their great land holdings fumes with hatred at his neighbor whose ugly home base is visible from his window.  The enmity between the two is mutual and has been going on for untold years and they have their own defenses, weapons and robot surrogates facing off against each other...only the planet's other residents have collectively kept open conflict from breaking out.  One day the neighbor asks for a truce and a meeting between the two...and the real reason for the vehement hatred then makes itself known.  A story with a clear allegorical meaning for us in the present real world on Earth...

FOUR BRANDS OF IMPOSSIBLE by Norman Kagan

Set a little into the future, a young mathematician/student continues his studies and discovers a movement to explore how to break through logical contradictions in that field.  The story rambles a bit too much for me as the institute pushing Project Round Square has its ultimate goal: sensory enervation, the opposite of sensory deprivation and designed to inject massive computer-generated input into the minds of volunteers.  The abject irrelevancy of huge sections of mathematics has always been a sticking point for me...this story goes into all that but I had a bit of trouble trying to make sense of both the protagonist and the author's trains of thought...I think the story was meant to be funny or satirical in some way...

Next I begin my look at science fiction short stories from the year 1965...

A Great Information Chasm Cuts Right Through My Life

At age 64 I belong to the historically unique group of people who have one foot of their lives squarely within the digital era and one foot squarely outside it...right now there are a lot of us, but like the almost extinct group of folks who experienced World War II, there will be a time when we're all gone and everyone alive will have the span of their chronological lives covered by computer technology and the Internet.  How does my life in this respect differ from my younger friends and the generations preceding me?  Let me explain about this great information chasm...

A few days ago I subscribed to an online service displaying old newspapers from years gone by, as they appeared in print.  Among these papers was the local Ft. Lauderdale rag, and it covered the years I went to school there and a few thereafter.  Just browsing through them I would occasionally see a picture or article with a familiar name from school...one who made repeat appearances was Jim, whom I knew very well for 11 years from the 2nd through 12th grades as we were in the same year in school and grew up living close to each other.  I already knew he had tragically passed away from complications relating to cancer in 1998 and that he had developed a penchant and talent for poetry in his adult life.  On the tribute website for him was mention of a book containing some of his poems.  I went to Amazon and Google and there is not a trace of its title and very little if anything about this remarkable man.  Yet he only left this Earth 22 years ago, but it might as well have been 220 since his work was largely done before mass digitalization revolutionized communications.  Contrast that with this blog of mine, a daily journal of general interests begun in 2007: you can easily find it on a Google search, but only because it's on this side of the great digital divide.  And that's what I'm discovering with my perusals of the old newspapers: these people I went to school with and closely knew...some in friendship and regrettably some in enmity...seemed to have suddenly just fallen off the planet.  The advent of Facebook did perform a service in that several "resurfaced" from the anonymity that assimilation into the masses and the march of the years had placed them under, and I respectfully recognize that probably many people wish to remain there.  Ol' Jimbo, I'm confident, would have loved the opportunities that social media gives us today to reconnect...but the information chasm has now left his significant voice largely and sadly on the other side...

People in my generation, like me, can develop an ongoing digital history of ourselves but it only naturally extends to the edges of the advent of digitalization...to go beyond further back in time requires special efforts such as digitalization of old pictures and, in my case, taking advantage of old newspapers online and blogging while recounting old memories.  Life is now openly being reported and recorded on a daily basis...and it all remains in the great digital cloud...while life before this era, as it retreats further and further into the past, becomes exponentially more of a mystery shrouded in uncertainty with its evidence stored away in boxes in dusty rooms.  I wonder whether at some point, probably later this century, people will look back at the transformation of the 20th into the 21st century as a kind of cliff beyond which information drastically drops off.  Maybe today is the time to try to salvage some of it while some of us who were there can remember it.  I like the successful efforts to digitalize old music recorded before CDs, but with literature we're way, way behind on reaching the same level of progress.  I wonder if anyone knows where I can get a copy of Arrival: One or Only?...

My #9 All-Time Favorite Song: Landslide by Fleetwood Mac

 MY #9 ALL-TIME FAVORITE SONG: LANDSLIDE by Fleetwood Mac

Fleetwood Mac's enormously creative and talented Stevie Nicks is so closely identified with their song Landslide...from their self-titled 1975 blockbuster album and recorded right after she joined that band...that I nearly typed in her name instead of the group's.  There are different versions of this enduring piece out there, but the original track, with Lindsey Buckingham providing a brilliant guitar accompaniment, is by far my favorite.  It's one of those songs that escaped my attention when it first came out...only in the last twenty-odd years has it become one of my all-time favorites.  It's also a song that, should I ever get around to becoming proficient enough with the guitar or piano, I would put at the top of my performance repertoire list.  The lyrics are sad and philosophical about growing older and leaving behind the dependency embedded within some relationships...but the listener can fashion whatever deeper mean he or she derives from Stevie's words.  Life goes on, even if the landslide wipes out a great portion of it...you have to just get up and do the best you can with the time given to you, to paraphrase a fictional wizard's famous words.  Landslide belongs squarely on my short list of songs that have brought tears to my eyes...repeatedly, as if on cue each time I hear it...

Next week: my #8 song from my list of 500 all-time favorites...

Our Excursion to Ormond Beach

 This past week Melissa and I enjoyed one of our traditional destinations: Ormond Beach, Florida, which is a relatively close and inexpensive way to enjoy the beach for people like us who are Florida "inlanders".  The weather was sometimes rainy and stormy (but without lightning), the skies sometimes clear and cloudy...a good mix with temperatures on the warm (but not sizzling) side.  We enjoyed our hotel's balcony and pool and went on frequent long walks on the beach. The Orionid meteor shower was peaking earlier in the week and I was able to spot a couple of meteors a few minutes past midnight early Wednesday from the hotel balcony.  As we were leaving Walgreens Thursday afternoon I noticed that the local newspaper's front page warned that those pesky truckers were planning to swamp Daytona Beach (right next to Ormond) this weekend...but apparently it fizzled out: good, I had enough of them on Labor Day!  Our Saturday visit to Tomoka State Park (the last two photos) was our first ever. It is north of Ormond Beach, on the mainland side of the Intracoastal Waterway.  They have boating, fishing, hiking, picnicking...it's also the site of an old Indian village.  On the beach during our stay I observed several species of sea birds...other than the pelicans they tended to flock together on the shore.  I'd like to learn each of their names...there were also a lot of grackles and pigeons there.  Wednesday morning Melissa and I went on a long beach walk just at the peak of the King Tide, which has caused elevated high tides up and down the Florida coast...Hurricane Epsilon in the deep Atlantic may have been a contributing factor as we slogged through the sandy mud and waves along the nearly nonexistent beach: that was a unique experience!  Mostly though, we took it easy and enjoyed the ambiance...still, I am very happy to be back home now...

Just Finished Reading Ubik by Philip K. Dick

Back in 2009-10 I got into reading famous American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick's novels...I went through ten of them, and then drifted away.  The other day, though, I picked up his 1969 novel Ubik, which received a lot of recognition back then as one of his best works.  It deals with alternate reality and the slippery philosophical concept of solipsism and is in places pretty danged confusing. The setting is 1992, 23 years into the future as society is run by rampant consumerism while corporations hire telepaths and precogs (predicters of the future) to spy on each other and engage in sabotage.  To thwart them a consultation company provides "inertials" who detect and dampen the telepaths' presence...whoa, I see a direct, prescient analogy to today's computer hackers and viruses, and those who combat them.  Joe Chip, the protagonist, works for such a company and is sent to the moon to clean a company based there of telepathic subversion...and there the story explodes into deep mystery as to what is real and what isn't.  Chip's boss is widowed, but his wife is only "half-dead", her body deep in "cold pack" and it is possible for him to still communicate with her still-active mind...this idea of partial death is central to the story's progression and resolution.  If you've seen The Matrix you might find yourself treated to a similar confusion as to what is real and what is only illusion.  So, what exactly is Ubik?  Ah...guess you'll have to read it yourself to find out.  As for my reaction to the story, I recognize that once an author inserts paranormal abilities and time travel into his or her narrative, then it's easy to come up with all sorts of speculative mysteries and paradoxes.  Ubik is full of them, but after it was all over I couldn't help but feel that this all was an allegorical exercise in philosophical solipsism...I'd be interested in reading your own reactions.  One humorous aside: Philip K. Dick, apparently harassed by coin-operated toilets and the like in his own life, decided to include and expand the feature in his future world to coin-operated doors, with the story's hero often finding himself stuck in his own room...

Here are links to reviews I've written about other Philip K. Dick novels.  When reading them it will become clear that Dick didn't just write science fiction but also delved into more general fiction with society and relationships often his chief focus...

Voices from the Street (1952)

The Cosmic Puppets (1953)

The World Jones Made (1954)

Puttering About in a Small Land (1957)

Time Out of Joint (1958)

In Milton Lumky Territory (1958)

Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (1960)

The Man in the High Castle (1961)

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964)

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974)

Quote of the Week...from E.T. Bell

 'Obvious' is the most dangerous word in mathematics.                E.T. Bell

I'm not sure what mathematician E.T. Bell exactly meant here by the word "obvious", but when I read this quote earlier this week on the BrainyQuote website it brought to my mind a pet peeve regarding how this field is often taught in schools.  It's more annoying than dangerous when a teacher is rambling through an obtuse presentation at the front of a class and decides to pepper his or her lesson with "of course this" and "obviously that"...if it were all so obvious, we poor students wouldn't need you up front to explain it to us!  Here's another "mathematics" quote I read from the same site, by the late economist Paul Samuelson: "My belief is that nothing can be expressed by mathematics that cannot be expressed by careful use of literary terms".  This quote seems to fly in the face of how we're accustomed to perceive mathematical concepts, in a more two-or-higher-dimensional presentation instead of with ordinary language.  Have you ever heard or read a purely verbal, literary exposition of a mathematical course or even lesson?  I haven't, but I wonder whether the capacity to accurately verbalize mathematical concepts shouldn't be a valuable, sought-after skill for mathematicians as well as mathematics teachers.  Wouldn't it be great, instead of tuning in on the radio to political hacks like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage or Mark Levin, you had a station with a talk show whose host spoke Math...has it even ever been done before?  What if society educated people to be able to speak out detailed principles in mathematics and technology in ordinary conversational language with one another...I might find the listening experience akin to discerning meaning from a foreign language I only have rudimentary knowledge of, but I also know that many of us process our thoughts out verbally and such an added component to our communications would doubtless raise the educational and reasoning levels of our general population, knowing such abilities existed and were attainable.  Maybe if some of us achieved a verbal proficiency in math we also could cockily ramble on like everything in it was "obvious", although the opposite effect may instead be the result.  I think Bell may have meant his quote to stress that every step in a mathematical progression of reasoning has to be rigorously attended to and that carelessly glossing over a point as being "obvious" could well unravel the entire solution or theory being examined.  So the upshot of all this is that when anyone is engaged in the sometimes torturous endeavor of mathematical discussion it would be better to just preemptively omit that pesky word from their vocabulary...

Enjoying Putting Together Jigsaw Puzzles Lately

The last few days I've been doing some jigsaw puzzles that Melissa, Will and Rebecca have recently given me...always a fun little diversion that I can rationalize because it keeps my aging mind sharper.  The above-pictured ones are the last few I did...I call the puzzle with the space theme the End of Everything (after the excellent recent cosmology book I read by Katie Mack)  because such a scene in reality would be pretty apocalyptic, wouldn't you agree?  Jigsaw puzzles...the ones not done online, that is...are a good way to get away from all the digital gadgetry around me and tone down the technology a few notches.  Still, I couldn't resist showing them on my blog...

Weekly Short Stories: 1964 Science Fiction, Part 4

Here are my reactions to three more science fiction short stories from the anthology Robert Silverberg Presents The Great SF Stories (1964).  These three are the kinds of tales that motivate me to read more in this genre, all of a reasonable length with each one written in a different style and expressing a different mood.  And the authors are all pretty well known as well.  With the first story below, references I find online to it refer to it as The Dowry of the Angyar, but Silverberg's anthology omits the second "the"... 

THE DOWRY OF ANGYAR by Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin, who passed away two years ago, was best known for her Earthsea fantasy children's books...this story is an early sci-fi effort that she incorporated into a novel two years later.  On a distant planet whose humanoid life forms have developed into three distinct species, a noblewoman of one of them goes on a journey to recover the valuable lost necklace she had inherited in order to bestow upon her husband a dowry.  The quest draws her into contact with the planet's other human types as well as the mysterious Strangers.  For a brief story this was full of action, emotion and mystery: very well done... 

WHEN THE CHANGE-WINDS BLOW by Fritz Leiber

A visitor to Mars following a devastating nuclear war on Earth that killed his fiancée is traveling in his hovering craft over the desert when he encounters a famous cathedral he recognizes from Earth, in splendid minute detail.  Thinking that the native insect-like intelligent Martians are manipulating his thoughts, he nonetheless lands, disembarks, and explores his finding.  This tale is a mood-piece of grief and regret as the protagonist struggles with a past forever gone...

THE FIEND by Frederik Pohl

This is one of those clever stories that drastically change the reader's perspective with the revealing final paragraph.  A spaceship transporting 700 colonists in suspended animation across the vast gulfs of space is piloted by one individual who has decided...for his own nefarious purposes...to resuscitate one young female passenger and observe her reactions.  It all sounds pretty fiendish, doesn't it...hence the story's title.  The narrative is presented from the deviant pilot's perspective, giving it a sinister mood as well.  The "punch line" at the end turns out scarier than what's happening on the ship... 

Next week I finish my look at short science fiction from the year 1964...

With NewsNation WGN TV Provides Viable Alternative to Cable News Channels

If you're into watching TV during the prime time hours sometimes you'll find yourself wanting to check in to see what the news is...traditionally when I grew up in the 1960's and 70's we got all that in a half-hour span on one of the three network news shows, nowadays usually airing at 6:30 pm: my parents preferred Cronkite on CBS.  Now, if you wait a little later to 8:00 then you can tune in to WGN/Chicago which, in my hometown of Gainesville, Cox Cable provides on Channel 14.  At that time they present a great three-hour-long news show called NewsNation that covers the news straight and much more comprehensively with a wider variety of stories than do CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC...and it's on seven days a week.  From 11 to 2 they repeat the earlier evening show, which is great for someone like me who gets off from work at 10 pm.  I am so utterly fed up with the out-of-control spin and manipulation on those aforementioned three channels that I'd rather forego the news than spend any appreciable amount of time watching them.  But now we have NewsNation, which only began its run just a month and a half ago.  Try it out and see if you agree with me that here is a more reliable news source.  I also recommend the more obscure Newsy channel, which in Gainesville is Channel 276 on Cox Cable.  That station presents news around-the-clock and genuinely tries to present the facts without drowning the viewer in the announcers' own opinions.  Newsy and WGN's NewsNation: two welcome alternatives to the mind-numbing, slanted crap we're getting elsewhere.  Of course, in our very polarized, emotionally-extreme electoral season simply watching the news...especially with regard to politics...might pose a mental health hazard to viewers, even without the spin...  

My #10 All-Time Favorite Song: Living for the City by Stevie Wonder

MY #10 ALL-TIME FAVORITE SONG: LIVING FOR THE CITY...Stevie Wonder

Back in the early 1970s I used to listen a bit to album rock radio...in South Florida my radio station of choice was 103.5/WSHE.  In late 1973, after I had just turned 17, they kept playing a lengthy epic about a young black man's nightmare experiences with racial discrimination, first in Mississippi where he grew up and then on the streets of New York City and the unfair justice system...the narrative was gripping, the music top-notch, and the singer...Stevie Wonder?  I didn't recall anything by Wonder...or other soul stars for that matter...getting air time on album rock radio: for me it was long overdue.  I strongly encourage you to hear out the song for yourself...not the cut-down singles version but the complete 7:25 album track: you have to hear it for yourself to get the full impact.  The album it's on is Innervisions, which is widely critically considered to be one of the greatest albums ever made and which also contains the hits Higher Ground and Don't You Worry 'bout a Thing.  Stevie Wonder, blessed with a beautiful, versatile singing voice, is perhaps unmatched in this performance as he switches character roles and at one point holds a single note for what seems like forever.  As the doomed protagonist steps off the bus in New York, the song breaks into an eerie scene of city sounds as his fate becomes sealed by prejudice and injustice before Wonder breaks back in with a much rougher voice.  I believe that Living for the City is a song of transformation...anyone with a semblance of a conscience cannot help having their eyes open and their perspective permanently altered by this significant piece of art, truly Stevie Wonder's greatest single work in my opinion...

Next week: my #9 all-time favorite song from my list of 500...

About COVID, Coffee Shop, and Gator Coach Mullen

At this writing I'm sitting midday at the nearest Starbucks...outside, because they are now operating at full capacity seating and a lot more customers than I'm comfortable with are seated inside although they're mostly wearing masks.  Blessed with the tempting but generally useless gift of hindsight, I'm becoming more of the opinion that it's a shame that back in February they couldn't have drastically stepped up emergency production and distribution of masks and pushed much harder on universal compliance instead of completely shutting down businesses and schools the following month and mandating people to stay at home: I believe those draconian measures contributed a lot to people irrationally rebelling against mask use and social distancing later on.  But here we are and, despite the coronavirus pandemic showing no sign of retreat, more and more people are acting as if they're so fed up with it all that they want to pretend it's no longer there.  After the University of Florida's 41-38 loss to Texas A&M at College Station, Gator head coach Dan Mullen commented that he wanted to see Florida's home stadium packed with fans for the following week's game against LSU.  That statement caused a firestorm of criticism against him and deservedly so, but the University's president reiterated that the stadium would only be operating at 25% capacity.  Mullen seemed to blame his team's loss to the Aggies for what he perceived to be a noisy crowd there, but I think he needs to get his head on straight on two counts: (1) the Gators defense this year is mediocre at best with the team giving up 100 points in their first three games and (2) football is a game played for entertainment and people's lives are at stake with this pandemic: he needs to seriously sort out his priorities.  A few days later, as it was revealed that some 21 players plus staff on his team had tested positive for COVID-19 and that the LSU game was postponed until December 12th, Mullen claimed that he never meant for the stadium to be full of fans...but that's not what he said the previous Saturday afternoon.  And yesterday he announced that he himself has tested positive.  I have mixed feelings about leaders who trivialize this disease that has killed around 220,000 Americans during the past seven months and then come down with it themselves...they deserve some rebuke but my hopes and prayers are for their full recovery...

Bean Counting Motivates Everything in Washington

Bean counting is what politics in Washington is all about, whether we're talking about amassing enough Electoral College votes to swing a presidential election, manipulating the U.S. Supreme Court nomination and confirmation process to gain or enhance a like-minded majority, passing legislation to address either emergencies or the ideological interests of one's own party, or getting enough senators or representatives elected on one's own side in Congress to assure their party's control of the Senate or House, respectively.  I have been watching snippets of Amy Coney Barrett's Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing as she aspires to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a justice on the high court, just as I've observed similar proceedings with the nominations of current justices Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito and Roberts in recent years.  It's obvious that the underlying motivation, both in the nomination process from the view of the President as well as those of the Republicans and Democratic senators considering them in through advice and consent, is primarily a matter of selecting someone whose expressed ideology and judicial record will help to tip or maintain the Court's voting numbers in their party's favor on key political issues.  In our current world it's issues like the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide, gun regulation laws, LGBT rights, environmental legislation, voting rights and the limits and extent of allowable presidential and congressional authority that motivate the bean counters as they look at the new nominee.  But during the hearing all we've basically seen is Barrett sitting there batting back question after question as if she were in some kind of verbal tennis match, with the objective of avoiding transmitting the least bit of information as possible about her judicial temperament or philosophy, much less anything about specific issues...in a similar way that the four previous nominees performed.  Maybe the hearings serve an educational and political purpose for the voting public by allowing the different senators on the committee a forum to express their own opinions, but as far as enlightening anyone as to what kind of Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett will be, I think we'd be better informed by a journalist or announcer just sitting there reading verbatim the nominee's previous statements from earlier times.  Of course, this hearing is a charade: the Republicans have enough votes to confirm and will do so in plenty of time for Barrett to sit in on next month's case as the deciding "bean" on Obamacare's fate.  And since it is clear that Republican Senate Majority Leader McConnell's actions are only designed to enhance his own party's power through partisan bean counting, the Democrats had better regain control of the Senate if Biden gets elected, otherwise few if any of his cabinet, judicial, or other nominations will ever see the light of day... 

Quote of the Week...from a Local Hazardous Waste Center Employee

When in doubt, bring it out!                     --Alachua County Hazardous Waste Center Employee

Having accumulated assorted old bottles of cleaning agents, paint cans, other caustic agents...as well as a couple of useless old push lawn mowers, I decided to unload them and discovered that here in Alachua County we have an excellent one-stop center for doing just that.  Called the Alachua County Hazardous Waste Center, its at 5125 NE 63rd Avenue, which you get to going north on Waldo Road a little past the NE 53rd Avenue light and turning right just past the green roadside sign advertising the site.  Then go down a little and follow the sign on the right and you're there.  Earlier this week I somehow managed to cram the two cruddy old mowers into my two-door Honda Civic and drove down there and then to the drop-off spot the helpful gentleman working at the site directed for me.  After that I mentioned some other items I might bring on another day and he bestowed the above perfect quote on me.  I recognize that this waste center is a bit of a drive for many, but it has the convenience of being available when you want to use it (weekdays and Saturdays), instead of having to wait for specified times of the year for drop-off.  Here's their webpage, which lists the various items that they will receive: [Waste Center].  Hopefully, if you live in a different area, your own community provides a similarly convenient service...

Constellation of the Month: Pegasus (the Winged Horse)

 

For the month of October I've selected Pegasus as my Constellation of the Month, a feature I've been doing on this blog since June.  The other night it was finally clear and dry and the stars shone bright, even in my semi-urban sky of far northern Gainesville.  Pegasus, representing the winged horse in the Perseus mythological family of autumn constellations, was practically overhead around 10:30 EDT, with its trademark "square" just east of the zenith.  In a season when the evening skies are marked by fainter constellations, at least Pegasus has its share of clearly visible second and third magnitude stars.  To discern the rough semblance of a horse you need to invert the above drawing I made...the star Enif, whose meaning from Arabic (all the brighter stars have Arabic names) is "nose", should set you right.  My main beef about Pegasus is how its hind legs are actually the constellation Andromeda, and Alpheratz, one of the "square" stars, is actually a part of that separate constellation...I tend to see Andromeda instead as part of the Great Horse.  Monday evening I showed Pegasus to Melissa and then pointed down from it eastward to a stupendously bright star...except that it wasn't a star but rather the planet Mars, considerably brighter because it is currently much, much closer than usual to Earth in the two planets' orbital cycles while in a position to reflect the Sun more fully to us.  Way back in 1964 we went through what seemed weeks of overcast evening skies in south Florida during the fall. Since that was the first year ever that I was observing stars and constellations in the night sky, as a kid just turning eight, the long delay seemed to go on forever...I wasn't all that impressed with the fall sky when I finally did get around to viewing it.  Pegasus is one of two standout October constellations, in my opinion...a year from now we'll see about the other one.  Now although the general region of the sky where Pegasus resides doesn't have bright stars, you can still look to the west where the Summer Triangle asterism of first-magnitude stars Vega, Deneb and Altair dominates that section of the sky.  And, at least now in 2020, Jupiter and Saturn are still bright in the low southwestern sky at my latitude during the early evening hours...

Weekly Short Stories: 1964 Science Fiction, Part 3

Here are my reviews of three more stories deemed by editors Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg to be among the best from 1964, as they appeared in their anthology Robert Silverberg Presents The Great SF Stories (1964).  Of them I was the most impressed with the relatively short first story below, demonstrating that filling a lot of pages with writing doesn't necessarily mean that the story's better...although in the end the writer probably got paid more.  I thought that Silverberg and Greenberg put too many novellas into this book, but technically its title doesn't really say "short stories only"...

THE LAST LONELY MAN by John Brunner

It's off in the future and a "great" discovery has been made: Contact, whereby people can arrange with others...usually close family and friends...to have their mental patterns imprinted upon themselves so that upon someone's death, their minds and identity will immediate flee their own deceased bodies and then inhabit the bodies of whom they have made "Contact" agreements.  In the narrative, a man with a lousy personality and no friends and family...hence no Contacts...desperately seeks out the protagonist for one connection to save him after he dies.  The whole thing seems like a very scary concept to me...and then I look at how people nowadays appraise themselves and others based on their relative popularity on social media...

SOLDIER, ASK NOT by Gordon R. Dickson

Sometimes an author can get so involved with his or her own fictional "universe", with its various societies, rules and history, that an individual story can suffer without the context of the other stories propping it up. Such is the case, I fear, with this novella that examines how, as humanity explores and settles the cosmos, it might be advisable for the different groups to separate and develop specialization ...and then later work to reintegrate themselves back together.  A news reporter is on a distant world where an armed conflict is going on between such groups.  Instead of seeing the bigger picture that others see...including the warring sides themselves...he lets his emotions and desire for revenge cloud his judgment.  I vaguely felt here that Dickson's idea of manipulating the march of history as a kind of philosophy was a bit derivative of Isaac Asimov's science of psychohistory that was a crucial element of his Foundation series of novels...

A MAN OF THE RENAISSANCE by Wyman Guin

On yet another waterlogged planet with a human population (see The Kragen from a couple of weeks ago), the title character...truly a "man of the renaissance" with his Da Vinci-like talents for art, architecture, invention and understanding of science and history...struggles within the intrigues of a low-tech system of royal principalities as he seeks through a revolt to tie three small islands together to form a more viable political and economic entity.  Although the author goes into the protagonist's mind as he works on various scientific and technical problems facing him and explains the nature of the islands in terms of volcanic activity, the genre to me was much more like the fantasy fiction of Robert Jordan or Brandon Sanderson than science fiction.  Since I'm currently rereading George R.R. Martin's fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire I could almost imagine this tale, with its very similar sociopolitical structure, on the other side of the planet from Martin's Westeros, a side covered with sea and floating islands.  This novella should have been in a "year's best" fantasy fiction anthology instead...

Next week I discuss more science fiction short stories from the year 1964...

Just Finished Reading Danny, the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl

Danny, the Champion of the World is a short 1975 children's novel by Roald Dahl, which I just finished reading and which is my fourth Dahl story, following Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and The BFG.  As with these other stories, the setting is England and once again a poor child is the protagonist...in this one it's nine-year-old Danny who lives with his widowed father behind their filling station in a Gypsy caravan (also called a varno).  His father is a great mechanic as well as an amateur naturalist and storyteller...the bond between father and son is very strong.  One night Danny awakens to find his father is gone...turns out he was poaching wild pheasants on a wealthy landowner's property a few miles away.  It also turns out that poaching the pheasants was a family tradition...not only did dad's ancestors do it, but also Danny's mother.  The landowner is painted as being arrogant with his wealth and treats practically everyone in the village with contempt...especially Danny and his father.  The plot progresses around the poaching and the two's adventures...and misadventures.  And then the rest of  the town weighs in on what's going on, and eventually I realized that the author had written a story about unjust class divisions, with the "people" in a continual struggle against the "elite" and the rules that unfairly favor the latter.  I enjoyed this novel, in which Dahl presented a reasonable, positive philosophy of living...although I wouldn't recommend poaching to anyone.  I'm still trying to create a mental picture of that stroller scene at the end...must have been an awfully big stroller, that's all I have to say.  At this point in my personal tour of Roald Dahl's writings, Danny, the Champion of the World is my favorite...but I'm still reading on.  I think the story has been adapted to the screen although I don't plan to check it out: you'd probably be better served to read it before watching a TV version...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #13-11

All three of the songs listed below are pretty recognizable...and the British acts who wrote and performed them are even more so...you can't get much more famous than the Beatles and Led Zeppelin when it comes to classic rock.  And they are all from a condensed time period when a lot of great music came out: the late 60s and early 70s...

13 GOLDEN SLUMBERS/CARRY THAT WEIGHT/THE END...the Beatles

Although this medley appeared at the close of the Beatles' Abbey Road album and was released in 1969 I didn't hear it in its entirety until two years later...it was a favorite of mine early in 1971.  Every part is special: Paul McCartney's sweet, sad lullaby at the start, the eerie Carry That Weight chorus in the middle, and then the classic drum solo/guitar jam toward the end.  During the Beatles' early years I generally kept up with their music as it was being released in America, but with their last five studio albums I didn't get into the deeper tracks until after the band had broken up in 1970.  Too bad they couldn't reconcile themselves to be primarily four solo acts who got together every two or three years to churn out a quick collaborative album and then afterwards go merrily off on their respective ways until the next meeting, with producer George Martin always around to piece everything together as he did with this entry on my favorites list...

12 #9 DREAM...John Lennon

It was the fall of 1974 when I kept hearing this song on album rock radio.  That was a great year in music with many good songs like Jim Croce's Time in a Bottle, BTO's You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, George McCrae's Rock Your Baby, and John Denver's Sunshine on My Shoulders.  But this mystical, dreamy piece by Lennon ended up surpassing them as as my "song of the year" and has always been one of my all-time favorites ever since.  It sounds like Lennon's old production partner Phil Spector was back at the helm in the studio with this song, what with the wall of sound so characteristic of his work...but, no, it was the former Beatle himself who put it all together.  It's from his Walls and Bridges album of the same year, which also contains Lennon's collaboration with Elton John Whatever Gets You Thru the Night...  

11 MISTY MOUNTAIN HOP...Led Zeppelin 

During the 70s and 80s I would hear this song from time to time on album rock radio and thought the lyrics were funny: "Crowds of people sittin' on the grass with flowers in their headsets"...only it turned out to be "flowers in their hair said": I thought my version beat Robert Plant's to hell and back for sarcasm and social commentary.  Still, I moderately liked it until Led Zeppelin's box set came out in late 1990 and I listened more intently and seriously...ever since it's been one of my favorites.  It has a strange beat and arrangement with a menacing lead guitar, and the cycling lyrical crescendo, one syllable at a time, is quite unique.  And Plant's reference to Tolkien's Middle Earth from his Lord of the Rings/Hobbit books capped it all for me.  Misty Mountain Hop is on Led Zeppelin's fourth "Untitled" album from 1971, one of the supremely great rock n' roll works of all time...and I'm not yet finished with it on my all-time favorite songs list...

Next week: my #10 all-time favorite song...

Just Finished Reading The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

The Haunting of Hill House is a gothic horror novel by American writer Shirley Jackson (1916-65) from 1959, the first of her novels I've read although I went through a collection of short stories by her a few years ago...her most famous one is probably The Lottery.  As you might suspect from the book's title, it is about an alleged haunted house, this one off in the woods at an undisclosed location, as a paranormal investigator recruits another man and two women to reside a few days there with him and experience and note the house themselves.  Along with Dr. Montague is Luke, who stands to eventually inherit the property, Theodora, a more or less free-spirited artist, and Eleanor, an introverted woman easily intimidated by others.  The story is generally presented from Eleanor's viewpoint, although it's made clear from the beginning that Montague has selected his fellow guests partially because of paranormal phenomena they experienced earlier in their lives...Eleanor seemed to have encountered a poltergeist event back in her childhood.  Now as a reader, the good doctor's intentions immediately seemed suspect to me: if he were investigating something basic to the nature of the house itself, wouldn't he instead want entirely rational people wedded to scientific reality to team up with instead of people who would be looking for anything to call "haunted"?  My reservations seemed to be affirmed as the story progressed, for things...even pretty frightful...do happen at this forsaken place but it's not clear as to what or who is causing them, the house or the people visiting there.  But that's Shirley Jackson for you...from where does evil arise, outside sources or within people's own hearts?  And that's the disturbing question that will plague the reader after finishing this most disturbing story...

Although I personally wasn't too thrilled with the book, Stephen King considers The Haunting of Hill House as a great inspiration to his own writing career, and there is a spinoff television series going on...although after reading the written novel I wonder how much it would have to diverge from Jackson's original narrative.  In spite of the story's doom and gloom, there is actually room for humor here...especially with regard to the cantankerous, stubborn old couple taking care of the property and Montague's hilarious, contrarian spiritualist wife, who enters the story later on.  I guess a one-line reaction I could make from this reading experience is "while looking for the darkness without, one finds the darkness within"...

Surprised by Florida Pro Teams' Success in This Pandemic Year

Nearly two weeks ago the National Hockey League's Stanley Cup went to the Tampa Bay Lightning, arguably the best team in the league but with a fresh memory of being shut out in the first round of the playoffs last year by Columbus...this time they handled the Dallas Stars in six games during the final round after a long postponement in the season due to the coronavirus pandemic.  Major League Soccer decided to begin their delayed season with a tournament...Orlando City, which had never even made the playoffs before, found themselves surging and made the final match before bowing to Portland...now in the regular season they're still surging.  In Major League Baseball, the Miami Marlins and Tampa Bay Rays have gone beyond expectations with both making the playoffs and the latter accumulating the best record in the American League during this attenuated 60-game regular season.  Miami even won their first round in the playoffs against the Cubs before falling to the Atlanta Braves...the Rays have gone farther, first knocking out Toronto and then defeating the New York Yankees last night in their series' deciding game on an eight-inning homer. And in the National Basketball Association the Miami Heat, led by Jimmy Butler...one of my favorite players, who has a penchant for turning average teams into contenders...has defied the odds and is playing competitively against the heavily favored Los Angeles Lakers for the league title.  They won a close contest last night and have narrowed their Lebron James-led opponent's lead to three games to two.  I'd like to report that this trend is extending to pro football as well, but alas, the three Florida teams are floundering as usual though the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, with their "new" quarterback Tom Brady, are at least supporting a winning record and are (barely) in front of their division.  But Brady seems out of it and even lost count of the down he was on during a decisive late-game possession against Chicago last Sunday.  Still, the other sports seem to be shining on the Sunshine State and there's still time for the Bucs, Jaguars, and Dolphins to straighten out and fly right...

Quote of the Week...from Prince

 Technology is cool, but you've got to use it as opposed to letting it use you.          ---Prince

A few weeks ago I wrote that I was about to embark on a project whereby I would listen to each and every one of Prince's 39 studio albums he released from 1978 to his tragic, untimely death in 2016...so far I've covered 16 and can confidently state that there's not a bad album among them.  Now as with every other musical act I like, some tracks are better than others, and a few I'd just as soon avoid in the future.  But once you know where the artist is coming from then it's easier to embrace his music and flow with it.  Prince tended to go for an upbeat sound, danceable and fun...and oftentimes very, very funny: I always leave a Prince album feeling pretty doggone good although the lyrics can be over the top in places. So the dude was clearly inspired and professional with his craft, and I thought checking out some of his quotes was in order: the above one was in sync with my own feelings on the subject, so I chose it...

I believe that Prince's meaning with his quote centered around how recording can be enhanced and made easier in the studio with the ever burgeoning digital technology that enables just about any kind of sound to become available and minutely edited, but since I'm not a musical recording artist like he was I see it more in terms of my own experiences.  Take cell phones, for example.  It's clear that having a phone with me when I leave my house...especially while driving...adds a big element of security as I can call for help should anything go wrong.  The problem is the corresponding feeling of insecurity when I'm separated from it, yet I've lived most of my life with telephones hardwired to the wall at home.  The same goes for the incredible braking and warning technology embedded with newer models of cars: drivers have these added features of security but when they find themselves behind the wheels of an earlier model then will they feel like it's much more dangerous...and even possibly forget that the car they're driving won't compensate for their dependence on the later models' protection systems?  And I've written a bit recently about the dangers of letting social media get the best of its users...I certainly use it myself but I don't live there.  Companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, and Microsoft want us to derive so much meaning from their products that we become dependent on them and feel incomplete when we go for any substantial length of time without accessing them.  I used to go running with my smartphone in my hand while listening to music from it...lately, though, I've found it personally liberating to just get out there on the road and leave the phone and even my MP3 player at home.  Maybe it would be a good idea for each of us to schedule time away from our little gadgets and reacquaint ourselves with the world as it really is.  I like the new technology and appreciate its uses the more because I vividly remember a time when it wasn't available...that to me is an advantage I have over younger people who have always had it and may not be as adaptable when it's absent...

Online Newspaper Archives a Source of Interesting Material

In Stephen King's fantastic 2011 time travel novel 11/22/63 protagonist Jake Epping repeatedly finds himself investigating newspaper archives on the Internet...I'm familiar with that because I used to do the same at the University of Florida Library West microfilm room back in the 1980s, years before it became possible to access old newspapers online.  A couple of weeks ago I subscribed to such a service being provided by a genealogy company and have been exploring them once again...guess I don't need to go back to UF anytime soon after all.  With archived newspapers you get a great glimpse at the ongoing news and sports stories...as well as the opinions and assumptions that people entertained back then.  Often it's the editorial page and the regular columns that provide the greatest insight, but sometimes you can get a lot by simply reading advertisements and comics.  And speaking of comics, delving back into the past is a definite trip down memory lane for me as I reexperience the old strips like L'il Abner, Nancy, Calvin & Hobbes, Herman, Henry, Pogo, Miss Peach, They'll Do It Every Time, Zippy, The Far Side, Bloom County, Cathy, and so on.  And it's also very easy to clip and print various puzzles I see, to do later and elsewhere at my own convenience. Unfortunately, the particular service I'm using isn't up to date with my local Gainesville Sun, although it does feature several papers...including my favorite Miami Herald going back to 1911...and Ft. Lauderdale is covered by its own paper throughout my school years in south Florida.  As for the Gainesville Sun, Google has its own free archive service providing coverage from 1981 to 2007. From time to time on this blog I may be discussing some finds I make as I browse through the past.  Seeing how we are approaching yet another presidential election, I'm thinking of looking back at some from the past and how the papers with their editorial pages assessed them just before they took place...

Weekly Short Stories: 1964 Science Fiction, Part 2

 Here are my reactions to three more science fiction short stories from the anthology Robert Silverberg Presents The Great SF Stories (1964).  For some reason I found the writing style in each of them a little cumbersome to read...maybe it's because I've recently been reading some of Kurt Vonnegut's works and he deliberately writes in a plain, clear manner.  Still, I plowed through the below stories of Smith, Zelazny and Brackett and have nothing but high respect for each of these wonderful writers...

THE CRIME AND THE GLORY OF COMMANDER SUZDAL by Cordwainer Smith

Commander Suzdal is alone on his spaceship exploring the deep regions of the galaxy when he encounters a distress signal from an unknown group, the Arachosians.  He learns of their history just as they are about to take over the ship. This group of humans who left Earth many generations before had encountered disaster on their chosen world and had changed, and now see themselves as humanity's enemy: how can he stop them?  The remarkable ending, the Arachosians' story, and Suzdal's ultimate fate are mysteries for the reader to discover.  It's a little hard for me to describe my objection to this story directly because I'd be spoiling the story for you if I did...let's just say that the author overdid it a bit with his aversion to exactly how the Arachosians had changed...

THE GRAVEYARD HEART by Roger Zelazny

Set primarily in our own times and the immediate future decades, Moore, a young engineer, finds himself falling for a pretty woman (Leota) who is a member of the Set, an exclusive, select society of people who jump through time by sleeping in frozen states for years and then reviving for short stretches, during which they attend extravagant parties and see how the world has changed.  Moore has a rival for Leota's affections, the cynical poet Unger, and the story gravitates about how these three interact and how they come to experience and understand the strange subculture and effects of the Set.  Zelazny wrote in a very ornate style that was a little challenging for me to follow...some readers (including a few literary critics) dig that way of writing, but it seemed to interfere with the story as far I was concerned...

PURPLE PRIESTESS OF THE MAD MOON by Leigh Brackett

Reminding me peculiarly of the bizarre video to David Bowie's 2016 song Blackstar, it is Mars in the near future after humanity has begun to settle it and the native Martians have their own culture and history.  Seldon, who has studied Martian history while on Earth, visits the Red Planet to see things firsthand and finds himself suddenly abducted and taken to a hidden site where a secret Martian sect is holding a special ritual.  This very ominous tale...which has overtones of horror à la Stephen King...also brought to my mind one of the scariest tales I have ever read: The Whimper of Whipped Dogs by Harlan Ellison.  In other words, readers prone to nightmares should skip this one.  By the way, Leigh Brackett wrote the screenplay to the Star Wars movie The Empire Strikes Back...

Next week I continue my look at the year 1964 in short science fiction...

Thanks to All for Birthday Wishes

Thank you to everyone wishing me a happy birthday this past weekend on Facebook.  I've been on this social media site going on for some ten years but it was only recently that Melissa checked my settings and made my birthday public...I'm a real klutz with computers in general and Facebook in particular.  Normally on Facebook I just focus on putting links to my daily blog articles for which I use Google's Blogger...and lately I've been putting links to them on Twitter as well.  While with Facebook I get familiar readers whom I know, Twitter expands the scope of readership to the more worldwide scene that I used to get before Facebook came along.  As for wishing others happy birthday on Facebook, I've been inconsistent about it but having such sweetness come my way about mine, I feel more a part of a caring community and think...in spite of some of my recently expressed reservations about social media...that others probably think the same way.  Again, thank you all for your wishes and may your lives be abundant, healthy and happy...