About Procrastination...and Rob Dial's Podcast on the Subject

Recently on his Mindset Mentor podcast, life coach Rob Dial tackled the subject of procrastination...something that has plagued me over most of my life.  His approach is fivefold: first, you admit you're a procrastinator, which involves simply being lazy or proneness to overthinking and "paralysis by analysis".  Second, try taking on what you're putting off in bite-size measures so that it all doesn't seem so overwhelming.  Third, delve into the "why" of the activity in question...sometimes if you probe a little deeply with this you'll find a hidden, but more compelling reason that helps you to address the issue at hand.  Fourth, eliminate distractions to what you're procrastinating...I remember an old SpongeBob episode in which he does everything under the sun other than do his writing assignment homework.  And finally, adopt the Pomodoro Method of time management (he's covered this before) in which you work assiduously and highly focused for 25 minutes and then completely break from the task for 5...and then return to it for another 25 if need be.  I look back at my life on my tendency to procrastinate and came up with two observations: one, isolating myself in the face of something I need to do often extends the delay as I am a master at coming up with my own excuses and distractions...better to increase my exposure to public life, which in turn increases my sense of responsibility.  Two, I see a lot of life as threads through time, usually dormant but sometimes actively vibrating, calling my attention to them.  My various health issues, teeth/gums, car maintenance, insurance/retirement/bills...to mention just a few things, work like this, and my goal in dealing with each of them is to calm down the thread in question through attentive action and return it to its state of dormancy.  Responsible living requires making some sort of effort in dealing with things as they crop up: I've said this about voting but it applies to just about every area in my life.  Dial's podcast was helpful to me, especially since I'd been putting off some needed action in different areas of late...

Just Finished Reading Dracula by Bram Stoker

The mythos of the vampire monster may have been part of Eastern European folklore for centuries, but when English writer Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in 1897 it forever placed the topic in the setting of a remote Transylvanian castle in Romania, with the Count being an urbane but ultimately predatory and evil bloodsucker, converting his victims into fellow vampires.  A solicitor, Jonathan Harker, is sent to his castle from London to finalize arrangements for Dracula's purchase of a house in the city's outskirts...before long he is deep in danger as three vampire women set their sights (and very sharp teeth) on him...saved from their clutches at first by Dracula and later abandoned to them, the story takes a turn in its setting to the English coastal town of Whitby,  where Harker's friends and associates...along with suitors of a friend of his fiancée's...begin to encounter a strange and unwelcome presence among them.  As the story progresses, a Belgian professor, Abraham Van Helsing, recognizes the signs of vampire activity and joins them in combating Dracula...naturally I left out gobs of plot because I don't want to give away the story.  Let's just say that many of the "rules" governing what vampires can and cannot do are laid out here, as well as how one can finally "kill" them...although in a manner of speaking they are already dead.  The much more recent Stephanie Meyer Twilight series pretty much adopts all of this while making "her" vampires equivalent to humanity in their ability to choose between good and evil: Stoker's Dracula and his ilk, on the other hand, are completely evil and separated from God.  Dracula's narrative is unconventional, consisting of a succession of journal entries and letters written by the various characters involved...beginning with Harker's accounts.  I enjoyed the book, marveling that at my relatively late age I hadn't yet learned the fate of Count Dracula and those involved in the literary story.  In childhood I saw him on the drive-in theater screen in the movies Horror of Dracula (from 1959) and Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966): Christopher Lee played the Count in them, with Peter Cushing as Van Helsing.  Now I'm on to another great old monster classic: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley... 

My Picks and Preferences of Rest of NFL Playoffs

With the 2021 National Football Season playoffs, held in 2022 to confuse future sports historians looking back on it all, now past the wildcard games, we have four contests to look at this weekend.  Of the eight remaining teams, here are my preferences: 

1 Tampa Bay Buccaneers

2 Kansas City Chiefs

3 Green Bay Packers

4 Cincinnati Bengals

5 Los Angeles Rams

6 San Francisco 49ers

7 Tennessee Titans

8 Buffalo Bills

And here are the teams ranked, in my humble opinion, according to how good they are:

1 Buffalo Bills

2 Kansas City Chiefs

3 Tennessee Titans

4 Green Bay Packers

5 Tampa Bay Buccaneers

6 Los Angeles Rams

7 San Francisco 49ers

8 Cincinnati Bengals

The above second list is to me a bit deceiving since I believe these eight teams are such that on any given day any of them could beat their opponent...who knows which ones will prevail this weekend and ultimately get to the Super Bowl.  Today Cincinatti is at Tennessee (4:30) and San Francisco at Green Bay (8:15).  Tomorrow it will be Los Angeles at Tampa Bay (3:00) and Buffalo at Kansas City (6:30).  I'll be at work today and miss the first two, but plan to enjoy (or suffer through) Sunday's games.  As for my preferences, I want Tampa Bay to win a lot more than any of the other teams, and with nearly the same intensity want Buffalo to lose.  By the way, it's nice to not see teams like New England and Dallas at this stage of the playoff picture...

Quote of the Week...from Mitch McConnell

The concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.                      ---Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell 

Amid the very partisan struggle over voting rights and election reform, with the latest chapter being the refusal of the U.S. Senate to suspend the filibuster in order to pass the Democrats' bill, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell spoke about concerns that blacks were unfairly targeted with voter suppression measures recently taken in several different states.  His above quote was meant to address and refute them...I don't know whether his facts are right or not.  But it became controversial when his opponents interpreted him to mean that he thought African Americans weren't real Americans...although I dislike McConnell and think he has brought on much of the political turmoil and division we're now experiencing with his obstruction tactics over the years, his intention is clear if you only take a moment to try to understand it.  As with a lot of people who are out there speaking off the cuff, they tend to get sloppy at times with their wording...McConnell could have been more precise by replacing "Americans" with "America at-large" or "the average for Americans [or America]".  Yet even had he done this I think there would be some trying to pin him down as being racist...

When I went to school we had a highly dysfunctional bus stop, where bullies prevailed and threatened and mocked other kids lower on their perceived pecking order.  If somebody not of their liking said something...anything...they would twist their words around to put them down even further, often only referring to their target by an insulting nickname.  I believe we're seeing the same mental process at work here with McConnell...folks, get a grip on yourselves, you're much better than this...

How About Digitally Switching James Bond Actors in Old Films?

Over the years I've been a big viewing fan of the James Bond film series, which at this point with last year's No Time to Die totals some 26 movies (including 1983's Never Say Never Again and excluding the '67 farce Casino Royale).  There have been six different actors playing Bond: Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig...each with his own distinctive appearance, personality, and mannerisms.  I've often wondered how a certain movie might look had a different actor appeared in it...I can't see anyone but Connery starring in Goldfinger and Thunderball.  But I have a sneaking suspicion that for most if not all of the rest of the flicks, the other actors would fit the bill appropriately although the movie's tone might change a bit.  Now, with the computer technology available to change people's appearance and insert them into places they've not been, wouldn't it be cool to go down a menu of James Bond movies and watch, say The Spy Who Loved Me and pick Daniel Craig as the Bond for it, or see how Roger Moore looks in Die Another Day?  The main movie I'm interested in is 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which originally starred George Lazenby...his portrayal of Bond, although probably truer to James Bond creator and author Ian Fleming in his books, was a bit different than the larger-than-life near-supermen of the others...let's see how Pierce Brosnan would have done in his shoes.  The idea of digitally substituting actors in old movies sounds extremely fun and worth pursuing, although copyrights, licensing, contracts and other legal entanglements will probably keep it from fruition, whether the technology to perform this feat is as yet possible or not.  On the other hand, our reality is already being severely tested in the media with the manipulation of images...brave new world!

Weekly Short Stories: 1981 Science Fiction, Part 1

Here are my reactions to the opening three 1981 science fiction short stories as they appeared in the anthology The 1982 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and presenting his selections for the best from the preceding year.  1981 saw me kicking some bad personal habits and settling into some positive routines, among them daily study of Chinese through the incredible John DeFrancis textbook series (published by Yale University) each day after work.  Historically, old man Reagan was inaugurated as our 40th president and shot soon thereafter by a lone armed lunatic...sigh, not much has changed since then with our culture of gun violence, has it?  Anyway, here are my takes on the first three stories... 

BLIND SPOT by Jayge Carr

A surgeon seeks to preserve the sight of an artist belonging to an underclass humanoid species from a distant world, but fails.  When she asks to return to her home planet, he insists on accompanying her and discovers the social disparity between the "superior" treetop dwellers and the "inferior" trogs to which his patient belongs.  One day she disappears, presumed dead on the forest floor that is densely populated by predators.  Overcome by grief, he leaves but later discovers his lost patient's true place on her home world as well as the trogs and upper-dwellers.  A story about interdependency among disparate groups that speaks to our current understanding of society as well as ecology... 

HIGHLINER by C.J. Cherryh

In a future world where massive cities have grown with their skyscrapers fused together into a massive superstructure reaching upward toward space itself, a team of "highliners", that is construction workers in the outside heights, finds itself caught up in corporate corruption as they are warned to go along with sabotage of a certain building project.  Wow, you could make a great series...book, movie, or television, out of this premise, and the visuals would be stunning...

THE PUSHER by John Varley

A middle-age man calling himself a pusher, who hangs out at children's playgrounds to find himself a "suitable" girl to isolate, isn't as horribly sinister as John Varley intimates, but the author goes out of his way in the beginning to make the story's protagonist look like a predatory pervert.  As the story progresses, however, we learn about the relativistic effects of space travel at very high velocities, with the traveler aging much more slowly than the planet-bound people he left behind.  In this story, the spaceman has hardly aged after returning to Earth where everyone else has grown 40 years older.  Now try to tie these two seemingly completely incongruous threads together to come up with a much more innocent ending...

Next week I continue looking at science fiction short stories from 1981...

Where I Stand on Voting Rights and Election Reform

In both 2018 and 2020 we had national elections, the latter including a presidential race.  In each election occurred what I see as big problems regarding the integrity of the vote and outcome.  In 2018...in California...ballot harvesting, illegal over most of the country, was in full swing and tipped a number of close congressional elections from Republican to Democratic.  In ballot harvesting, party operatives canvas neighborhoods before the election is over to selectively visit voters in their own party with absentee ballots.  If the voter hasn't mailed theirs in yet, the operatives will let them fill it out and promise to deliver it themselves.  The result is batches of large amounts of ballots dumped into the mix at the end to be counted...I find this highly unethical, rendering election results dependent on the efficiency of political party machines instead of the will of the voter.  In 2020 the notion of automatically sending absentee ballots in certain states to each and every eligible voter likewise gave me pause...I believe that voting at least on some level should require an effort on the part of the voter: the more passive the process is, the more likely abuse will occur.  The worst effect of 2020, though, was Donald Trump's Sore Loser philosophy, transformed from a morally-bankrupt individual's hangup to his entire party, as the Republicans tried to undo the free and fair election results that had elected Joe Biden to be the next president.  Then, in 2021 a number of Republican-controlled state governments enacted laws that tightened their election and voter laws...most of them I'm fine with, but sadly they also codified Trump's Sore Loser creed by enabling the partisan politicians to overthrow any elections that go the "wrong" way...this in my opinion is pure authoritarian fascism...

Now the Democrats in the U.S. Senate are trying to get two recalcitrant senators from their own party, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, to join them in a partisan voting bloc to temporarily suspend that body's filibuster for their voting rights bill.  Although Manchin and Sinema have expressed support for the submitted legislation, they are balking at the notion of suspending the filibuster...I kind of agree with them.  The bill's provisions set Federal standards for voting across the country and supersede state and local laws...that's the problem that Republicans have with it.  I don't know of anything in the proposed 800-page law that prohibits states from engaging in "Sore-Loserism" and overturning elections because of baseless fraud claims, and it allows for universal ballot harvesting...if you have further information on these two points I'd appreciate you letting me know...

In my view, the single most important determiner of election results is voter turnout, and it's interesting to note that the Democratic (my) Party is the one that tends to suffer the most from off-year voter apathy, with state legislatures and governorships...even in so-called "blue" states...going consistently to Republican control, largely because so many Democratic voters simply sit on their hands and won't vote unless it's for president.  The previous two Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton in 1994 and Barack Obama in 2010 saw their congressional majorities drastically swing to Republican control just two years into their respective administrations, hampering their ability to effectively govern...and it was largely due to their supporters refusing to vote in those elections, not because they were being persecuted in some way.  I see the same thing happening in 2022, only instead of decrying voter apathy and irresponsibility I predict the media talking heads will say it was all because of voter suppression....

Rob Dial's Take on Fear and How to Deal With It

For the past few Mondays I've been devoting this blog space to discussing a certain podcast I have recently been following: motivational speaker Rob Dial's The Mindset Mentor...except that Dial doesn't like being called a motivational speaker.  Dude, that's what you do, you're good at it, own it!  The other day he had a show about fear and brought up a few good points.  He said that infants are afraid of basically two things: loud noises and falling...every other fear is something we've picked up later in life.  Fear is a survival mechanism that is supposed to tell us when we're in danger of being killed, but people mostly are afraid of things posing no such danger but rather possible social rejection or humiliation.  Dial says that nevertheless fear in these circumstances is a good thing because it signals that we're out of our comfort zone and are ready for growth.  He also gives three pointers for dealing with fear: (1) change our mindset and determine a course of action in dealing with what's making us afraid, (2) do things in bite-size portions, incrementally, and (3) "dance" with the fear by not avoiding it but rather recognizing it and confronting it (easier said than done).  If these suggestions seem a little obvious, then I wonder why many of us (including myself) tend to succumb to silly fears instead of dealing with them in a constructive manner.  Everybody suffers fear...if you don't, you're in trouble! My own kids, when they were growing up, gave me a lesson in fear whenever we visited a nearby theme park that had several scary looking roller coasters and thrill rides.  They faced their fears and enjoyed the rides. One day I was fed up with my own fear-induced reluctance and decided to take them out there and ride ALL the terrifying rides with them: it was fun as hell and I remember the date: March 22, 2003...I was hooked on theme parks for years afterwards.  Looking back on Rob Dial's three pointers about fear, I guess I skipped past (2) with the coasters...

Watching the Australian Open Tennis Tournament Starting Tonight

The 2022 edition of the Australian Open, the first of four Grand Slam professional tennis tournaments held throughout the calendar year, begins in earnest today with the opening "Round of 128"...coverage begins this evening at 7 on ESPN-2 (Gainesville Cox Channel 27).  I'm not sure whether the matches to be shown are live or tape-delayed since Australia's time is half a day out of sync with ours here in the eastern United States.  I got into watching tennis last August and September while recovering at home from surgery...the U.S. Open was exciting, with Daniil Medvedev winning the men's title and Emma Raducanu the women's.  I was looking forward to seeing men's number one-ranked Novak Djokovic, who lost to Medvedev in that tourney's finale, defend his 2021 Australian Open championship...but Covid vaccination concerns ultimately led to him not being allowed to stay in Australia for the tournament.  I still plan to watch it all, though.  A funny thing happened while I was searching the Internet for the channel carrying it: I picked up that in a different country, either Britain or Canada, only Discovery Plus, a premium subscription channel, would be showing it and thought that was applicable to me here in America.  We took Discovery Plus up on their 7-day free trial period and while browsing their programming lineup I was delighted to see that they carried old seasons of the Morgan Freeman-hosted science series Through the Wormhole, which I had watched when we had the Science Channel on our cable lineup.  But this afternoon I tuned in to watch an episode and found out they had cut the series from their menu.  Couple this disappointment with the fact that I discovered my earlier mistake and that ESPN and/or ESPN2 would be showing the tournament instead on "regular" TV, and it's "Goodbye, Discovery Plus"!  The Australian Open will be on through January 30th...

Later...Melissa showed me that the Wormhole series (some of the seasons) are actually still on Discovery Plus, but they're buried in the search engine.  I watched a couple of the second season (first season unavailable on this channel) last night...

Constellation of the Month: Auriga (the Charioteer)

 

Auriga is a prominent winter evening constellation to the north of zodiac constellation Taurus, which in turn is just north of dazzling Orion...but its own relatively bright stars, highlighted by Capella...make it nearly as recognizable.  The main part of the constellation is an irregular pentagon and other fainter stars give it...if you see it as the Charioteer's head, that is, a pointed hat and his nose (just southwest of Capella).  The bottom star, El Nath, is technically part of Taurus representing the tip of one of the bull's horns, but it also belongs to Auriga...if unofficially.  Capella is one of the northernmost first-magnitude stars and as such, is usually visible in the evening not only in the winter but also the springtime (in the northwest sky) and the fall (in the northeast)...Vega, a summer evening bright star, is similar on the other side of the sky.  Auriga contains three Messier objects, M36, M37, and M38...all of them open star clusters.  With Capella being the sixth-brightest star in the night sky, Auriga is hard to miss and is an integral part of the winter evening "starscape".  Next month I'll pick a constellation to feature for the February evening sky...

Quote of the Week...from Martin Luther King, Jr.

If you can't fly, run; if you can't run, walk; if you can't walk, crawl; but by all means keep moving.

                                                                         ---Martin Luther King, Jr.

Four years ago I featured a quote by noted ultramarathon runner Dean Karnazes that's very close to the above one made many years earlier by the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.  Karnazes made his application very literal, about his gritty perseverance under the often brutal conditions on the running trail.  King's quote has a broader meaning to how one should approach life.  For me, both literal and figurative interpretations apply.  I intend to return soon to running long-distance races of the 15K and half-marathon variety...for me the overriding goal is to simply cover the distances, hopefully through running but also walking some if that's necessary to finish them.  With life in general, progress isn't usually linear but instead full of snags and setbacks...often I have to press the reset button and start anew when things go awry.  Giving up isn't an option, but changing my mind as to what I will emphasize and how I will attain it is...even it involves "crawling" for a season.  Life by its nature is growth and motion...I never want to forget that. I also won't forget the example Martin Luther King, Jr set for his compassion, courage and wisdom as he sought justice for the oppressed and disadvantaged and inspired so many to follow in his footsteps of "creative altruism" as he called it...

Stunned and Dismayed by Dolphins' Firing of Head Coach Brian Flores

The other day I was browsing through the Microsoft news feed on my computer...admittedly not always the best way to get unbiased or accurate news...and came across an article listing the most likely new head coaching prospects to fill in a vacancy from an unsuccessful National Football team this year.  I expected this kind of article immediately after the regular season and 18 of the league's 32 franchises didn't make the playoffs, although they all set their sights on them.  Among the list of available possibilities was Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores...that can't be right, he's only just completed his third year.  But no, Flores was fired the day after his team defeated their rival New England for the second time in a season and finished with a winning record of 9-8...that's significant because with 2020's 10-6 season it marks the first time since 2003 that the Dolphins have enjoyed two consecutive winning seasons!  This after Flores' first season in which the team's management decided to divest themselves of their core, star players including quarterback Ryan Tannehill and planned to tank at 0-16 in order to garner high draft picks.  Perhaps this was the time in which Brian Flores began to incur the wrath of Miami Dolphins management with their owner Stephen Ross and general manager Chris Grier because the newly hired coach scrapped and struggled with this inferior team throughout his 2019 debut season and actually pulled off 5 unexpected victories.  And to turn it completely around the next year and win 10 was incredible!  Flores, formerly the Patriots' defensive linebackers coach, has the much-needed talent of making his players believe in themselves and work hard to win games as a cohesive unit...yet Dolphins management just dumped him!  For me, I'd have liked them to make the playoffs, which they just barely missed the last two years.  But to see them in 2021 undergo their 7-game winning streak, coming back from an early injury-marred 1-7 start, made me feel that with Brian Flores the Miami Dolphins had finally found a true leader that could sustain them over the years.  Second-year quarterback Tua Tagovailoa had suffered an early injury this season, but by its end was transforming into a very competent NFL quarterback. There seemed to be some sort of disagreement about his future with the team as owner Ross was the prime mover behind Tua's being drafted in the first place and Flores wanted to obtain a quarterback he felt could win more games for them.  Well, the Dolphins blew it when they sacked Brian Flores....expect him to go on an become a Super Bowl-winning legend for ANOTHER franchise and expect the Miami Dolphins to return to their losing ways. Let's see if they can't go 0-17 this time around...I'm sure that would thrill owner Ross...

Weekly Short Stories: 1980 Science Fiction, Part 4

Today I conclude my look back at the year 1980 in short science fiction, using the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1981 Annual World's Best SF, featuring Wollheim's selections from the previous year. Although it sometimes appeared that year that the world was "going to hell in a handbasket", for my own actual life I was self-sufficient and healthy, with only a predilection for drinking a little too much beer two or three times a week (usually Miller Lite or an occasional Michelob) being probably my single worst habit...other than being at the time incurably antisocial and insulated. '80 was a good year for music...Funky Town and Another One Bites the Dust stand out in my memory.  But this article is about the stories from that year, and here are my reactions to the book's final three... 

WINDOW by Bob Leman

A truly scary tale worthy of Stephen King, Window addresses the problem inherent in being able to enter a portal into an alternate reality...sometimes that might mean someone on the "other side" can then enter into ours.  At a secret installation, American scientists have created such an entranceway to possibly another dimension or universe, as they watch in amazement a seemingly normal house with what appears to be a normal, happy nuclear family residing there.  Once a day there is a five-second period allowing objects to pass from our reality into theirs...all hell breaks loose when an overeager young scientist suddenly rushes across the barrier onto the house's lawn during one such interval...

THE SUMMER SWEET, THE WINTER WILD by Michael G. Coney

This story, uniquely told from the collective perspective of a migrating wild caribou herd, examines how some of what we might think of as virtuous and compassionate behavior like empathy toward other species and nonviolence can ultimately cause more death and suffering than a more selfish, cutthroat mode of existing that has typified the evolution of life over the eons.  Pretty thought-provoking, how the author makes a subtle connection between wolves and humans as the collective consciousness envelopes all sentient life in the area...

ACHRONOS by Lee Killiugh

Reminding me a little of the Restaurant at the End of the Universe in Douglas Adams' hilarious series A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a motorist one day finds himself having inadvertently driven to the end of a dead-end road at a beach.  Getting out of his car, he stoops down and picks up a living trilobite, which evidently had just washed up onto the shore although they had gone extinct hundreds of million years before.  Then he discovers people from the distant future there...eventually the mystery is explained: this place is "achronos", or not belong to any time, and is accessible from different time periods.  But why won't the future people he has encountered try to return to their own era...and what does it mean to be alive in a place where time doesn't advance?  Pretty provocative...

Next week I move on to 1981 and that wonderful year's best sci-fi short stories...

Just Finished Reading The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

The Bluest Eye, from 1970, is the first novel from award-winner author Toni Morrison...after reading Tar Baby I thought I'd check out some of her other works.  Morrison is masterful with her intense and intricate characterizations...it seems that no one in her stories escapes scrutiny, much of it condemnatory yet at the same time exculpatory as she unravels the reasons why many people do bad...really bad...things to other people.  The industrial belt city of Lorain, Ohio...close to Cleveland...is the setting in which the lives of two black girls, one from a strict-but-loving family and the other from a terribly broken one, are spotlighted.  Claudia and her sister Frieda live in a tightly-knit nuclear family with both parents...Claudia sees everything and everyone through skeptical and often cynical eyes, sensitive to both the racism and sexism around her.  Her friend Pecola, on the other hand, lives in a broken home with parents who physically abuse each other...the father has little-to-no moral compass in his life.  She has a brother, Sammy, who repeatedly runs away...not at all the kind of material you might see in an old '80s' TV sit-com.  Pecola believes the dogma that her own mother and the world around her has pounded into her psyche: that she is ugly, very ugly...and that those with lighter skin and blue eyes are better-looking...and generally better people than her.  If only she had blue eyes, she grows to believe, her life would be so much better!  Of course, Claudia is revolted by Pecola's perspective but loves her as a friend and tries to help her.  Through the course of the story, Morrison goes back and forth in time to explore the origins of the various cast of characters, including both girls' parents and an itinerant pseudo-preacher with his own peculiar moral hang-ups.  And moral hang-ups are something that the grownups here have in no short supply.  It all supposedly takes place in twentieth century post-Depression America, and even though Lorain is nowhere near the Jim Crow Deep South, blacks and whites are still segregated and divided, with much antagonism and distrust between the two groups.  The Bluest Eye is difficult to read, not because of the language or writing style but rather because it exposes the often sordid private lives and thoughts of people.  In this sense it steps out of an ethnocentric story about a specific demographic group and becomes universal, and although I appreciate learning about diverse people's attitudes and experiences I also look for that universal application to humanity.  We humans are indeed a pretty pathetic lot, hiding our dirty linen often in plain view of those around us while entertaining delusional self-images that greatly diverge from who we really are...and who we should be striving to become.  This book is very disturbing, but it's also very honest and intimate with its characters...looks like I'll be reading another Toni Morrison novel soon...

Three Ways to Learn and Read Faster, According to Rob Dial

On a recent The Mind Mentor podcast, motivational guru Rob Dial listed and discussed three ways he believes folks can learn and read faster.  The first I already do...kind of.  He recommends Kindle for reading and then purchasing the Audible version option when obtaining books...still cheaper in his opinion than buying the paper hardcopy, and then the reader can simultaneously employ their eyes and ears (through Whispersync), helping them to better retain the material they cover.  He also advocates using the Highlighter function that enables readers to filter out the most significant areas of the books they read. Along with this he points out that public libraries offer the Overdrive (or Libby) app that enables one to check out, for free, audiobooks to listen to on their computers or smartphones.  Dial's second tip for learning and reading is to employ the Pomodoro technique of time management whereby one engages in intense, focused activity for 25 minutes and then fully rests from it for 5...and then returning to the cycle: he maintains that this resonates better with people's peaking during prolonged directed learning activity: I usually do something like this without the formality of the 25:5 time ratio.  And finally, the Mindset Mentor suggests that whenever we learn something we immediately turn around and teach it to someone else...this is an old Stephen Covey point that runs counterintuitive to a lot of us.  After all, knowledge and skill are often regarded as commodities that set us competitively above others and give us an edge over them...but sharing what we learned will greatly reinforce and strengthen it within us, making us even more knowledgeable and skillful.  At the end of the podcast, Dial touts the use of YouTube as a great source of teaching...I know what he's talking about as you can learn just about anything on it.  This was a good podcast, although I still see some use in good old-fashioned paper books even in this age of Kindle and Audible, especially since many of them are older and not yet offered in those formats...

More About the Beatles' Get Back Sessions and Their Walk Through 1969

I've been continuing my slow watch of the Beatles' Get Back documentary on Disney Plus, a few sometimes painful minutes at a time.  It's still just a few days into the project in early January, 1969 at their London Twickenham Studios site.  It's been interesting hear Paul McCartney playing out fragments of songs that would later appear on the Abbey Road album (Golden Slumbers, Carry That Weight) and as a solo artist two years later after the Beatles breakup (Another Day).  George Harrison came into the studio with his own material as well...I Me Mine, The Inner Light and For You Blue were standouts.  But John Lennon didn't seem to have any new songs to throw into the mix besides Gimme Some Truth (his Across the Universe was a holdover from the '68 White Album sessions) and Paul openly confronted him on this...John often appeared disheveled and out of it.  At one session they sat around and speculated about the site of the project's closing concert, including a strange remote ancient stadium in northern Africa...only Paul seemed enthusiastic about even putting on a show. As for Ringo Starr, the Beatles' drummer, although rarely partaking in the band's musical creative process, he was consistently present and agreeable.  If you didn't know anything about the Beatles' history you might think from what's been shown so far that it was Paul and George leading the creative process with Ringo and John providing the support.  I know the outline of events that would transpire after this project in 1969...the Beatles would hire Allen Klein in February as their manager over the objection of Paul, who wanted his own soon-to-be own father-in-law for the job.  Paul and John would respectively marry Linda Eastman and Yoko Ono in March and at the same time George would be arrested for pot possession with his wife Patti.  The band recorded the Abbey Road album from February through August, it was released in September, and in the same month they signed a new long-term recording contract...soon after which John announced to the others his departure from the Beatles.  That fall the hoax that Paul McCartney was dead from a 1966 car accident and was replaced by an imposter took hold in the popular culture...Paul's isolation with Linda at their rural estate compounded the mystery.  The public at large would still believe that the Beatles were still together until McCartney's announcement with the release of his first solo album in the spring of 1970 that the band was finished. Ironically, a few weeks later the Let It Be album, based on the very Get Back sessions I've been watching, was released, boasting on its jacket that it was a "new phase" Beatles album.  Living through 1969 as a 12-13 year old, I just remember what a cool, kick-ass song Get Back was...

About the NFL Final Regular Season Weekend

Today and tomorrow mark the final weekend in the 2022 National Football League regular season.  The number of games each team plays has increased this year from 16 to 17...unless you've experienced a tie game (like Pittsburgh) there will be no more 8-8 seasons: either you're a winner or a loser.  And that's how the roller-coaster Miami Dolphins stand, at 8-8 with a home game against New England Sunday afternoon.  After beating the Patriots in the season opener, Miami then proceeded to lose 7 straight games...and then abruptly turned around and won 7 straight, putting them at 8-7 and right in the middle of playoff contention.  Then last week they went to Tennessee and completely folded against the Titans, 34-3...eliminating them from playoff contention.  So their contest against the Pats will be to salvage a winning season, which I think they're very capable of accomplishing as long as they decide to show up for the game.  Most of the rest of the games this weekend figure into the playoff scenario, with the AFC wild card slots up for grabs among several teams while the NFC has San Francisco and Philadelphia vying for the final spot.  Although I'm working this afternoon and evening and will miss the Kansas City-Denver and Dallas-Philadelphia games, I plan on enjoying the league's final Sunday of regular season play... 

Quote of the Week...from Melody Beattie

The new year stands before us, like a chapter in a book, waiting to be written.  We can help write that story by setting goals.                                                            ---Melody Beattie

Melody Beattie is the author of several self-help books, largely about overcoming and preventing codependent relationships.  Although I've never read anything of hers, I think her above quote is very appropriate for this beginning of 2022.  Each of us is the author of our own book of life, and for me setting and working to fulfill goals I have created is essential to making this year one of success and happiness.  That's important, because goals...written down...can serve to keep me focused on what is important to me throughout all the many times that obstacles and distractions inevitably arise to curb my self-improvement in this often complicated existence. Goals provide structure and meaning to the days of my life...because of this, it's a good idea to think them out realistically. Where am I at right now with the areas I want to work on, what are my ultimate goals with them...and what steps can I be taking right now toward those ends?  Changing bad habits into good ones is a part of this goal-setting...ultimately my goals should lead to me living out my daily life in a more healthful, fulfilling way...  

About the January 6th Insurrection, One Year Later

Today the major media outlets are commemorating the violent attack on our nation's capital and democracy a year ago on January 6th, focusing on the mass assault and occupation on the Capitol building, fomented and praised by sitting-and-defeated president Donald Trump.  Unfortunately, that attack on our cherished freedoms to peacefully and duly elect our leaders didn't end there, though.  After the attack and Congress reassembled to officially count the electoral votes, two thirds of the Republicans in the House of Representatives and seven in the Senate voted to overturn the people's will in the election...for the first time ever in our country's history: pure authoritarian fascism.  Sadly, one of my own state's senators, Rick Scott, and my own representative, Cat Cammack, joined in this travesty...I will always regard them both as fascists, along with the others including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and, of course, the instigator of it all: Donald Trump.  In 2016 I was disappointed in Trump's election but noted...on this blog...that he won it fair and square.  His opponent Hillary Clinton promptly acknowledged her defeat and Trump's win, and sitting president Obama the next day invited the victor to visit him at the White House in order to plan a speedy transition.  There was no sense of return to this graciousness on Trump's part in 2020 as he launched more than 60 frivolous lawsuits against various states that went for his opponent Joe Biden, and even tried to get the Georgia Secretary of State to manufacture more than 11,000 votes for himself...this action alone should have him in prison right now.  Yet Americans by the millions within the Republican Party cannot disengage themselves from this strongman fantasy they're attached to about this dictator-wannabe, and their leaders for the most part are too frightened to speak up against him.  The 2022 elections to me won't be as much a referendum about Biden and his presidency as it will be about whether our country is capable of sustaining its own highly cherished status as a democratically elected republic... 

Weekly Short Stories: 1980 Science Fiction, Part 3

Below are my reactions to two more 1980 science fiction short stories appearing in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1981 Annual World's Best SF, showcasing the editor's picks from the previous year...you may recognize the first author, whose featured work is actually more of a novella than a short story.  Back in '80 I was living a reclusive, frugal existence in Gainesville, making the move from a shared apartment with three roommates (ugh) in May to a single apartment in then-quiet and uncrowded southwest Gainesville within easy walking distance to my workplace (hooray)...that was fortuitous, since it would be at this residence some five years later where I ended up meeting Melissa, the love of my life, who has been my wife now for 35 years.  But back to those stories...

NIGHTFLYERS by George R.R. Martin

On an interstellar quest to find and learn about a mysterious race of space-traveling beings called the volcryn, the captain of the hired ship knows he must keep himself apart from the passengers.  The mystery of Royd Eris' circumstances, the burgeoning fears of his assorted passengers about his intentions, and an unsettling string of grisly shipboard murders set the stage as the ship plods on through space toward its rendezvous with the volcryn.  There's a lot in this story for the reader, drawing both from the ancients' deification of barely sentient animals and different sci-fi themes, most notably the predicament in which astronauts Dave and Frank find themselves in Arthur C. Clarke's classic 2001: A Space Odyssey...

A SPACESHIP BUILT OF STONE by Lisa Tuttle

On Earth it's been established that survival strategies by different species can be very similar...why not stretch the application to settlers from other worlds who seek that same survival?  This is an intriguing story that uses the common fictional device of dreams that not only reflect the truth but are also present among a number of people.  Being skeptical myself, largely because of my own sorry-ass dreams, I still thought the premise was original, with the story's ending top-notch and unexpected...

Next I finish looking at sci-fi short stories from 1980...

How About an "Automatic Passenger" for My Car

 

They say that children grow up imitating their parents, either deliberately or unconsciously.  I do know that with driving, both my mother and father have had their influence on me.  For example, I tend to think out my itinerary in advance, getting myself strategically in the correct lane sometimes miles down the road...that's my mother speaking to me.  My father, although a careful driver, had one particular less praiseworthy influence on me.  Picture Ralphie's "old man" in the TV holiday staple movie A Christmas Story, down in the basement cursing endlessly at the furnace...transfer that setting to the road and you have someone reacting to every provocation he perceives from others.  And I picked up on it and carry that habit with me...but when I get a passenger in my car I tend to go more into "Uber driver" mode and generally keep my verbal reactions down.  Now I can pretend that I'm driving an imaginary passenger in order to work on dampening my verbal reactions to the nincompoops I encounter on the road...but why not instead get an Automatic Passenger, much like the above-pictured Automatic Pilot from the classic 1980 comedy film Airplane! It can be situated in the middle of the back seat, and I can press a button up front which will inflate it into the shape of a comical person much like our friend from the movie...with its presence clearly visible through my rear-view mirror. On the other hand, I could get a poster-sized representation of a passenger and prop it up back there.  Or just tape the words "Automatic Passenger" or "Uber Driver" on the dashboard as an instant reminder to behave myself.  In case you're wondering about this silly article, I wrote it while making "dignified driving" a personal goal for the next hundred days...no, most likely I'll settle for just pretending I have a passenger with me...

Eight Things to Leave Behind for 2022, According to Podcaster Rob Dial

One of motivational coach/speaker Rob Dial's latest shows on his Mindset Mentor podcast had him listing and describing eight things to leave behind as I move into 2022: toxic relationships, negative self-talk, not following through on tasks and projects, reacting in the moment instead of taking time to breathe, people-pleasing, guilt about my past, doing things because I "should", and never asking for help with anything.  As with his other shows, I find his presentation loaded with good advice, but often with some important caveats.  As I had written in an earlier article, sure, I want to avoid those who always seem to be in a negative, critical, or manipulative frame of mind...but also recognize that perhaps me being around them could help them in their own lives as a counter-influence. It's true that I tend to take a cynical view of a lot around me, but I also tend to undersell my own abilities as well with what I tell myself.  Not finishing what I started has been a big sticking point...Dial's "hundred days" project whereby I list a small number of changes in my life that I prioritize for that period of consecutive days (click here my 12-20-21 article) is a good tool for dealing with this.  I could also work on not instantly reacting to various provocations I see around me...our "mentor" suggests setting a few moments aside when this happens and take a few deep breaths while doing a mental re-set. As for people-pleasing, since I'm already very sensitive to when others are trying to manipulate me, I tend to avoid trouble in this area.  With the irrational burden of past guilt, Dial quoted someone as follows: "The mountains you're carrying you were only meant to climb", meaning that mistakes are intended as a means to ultimately become a better person, not for self-condemnation.  I'm also somewhat immune to the guilt-mongering involved in "should" behavior: Dial puts it poignantly by saying we should stop "shoulding" all over ourselves.  And finally, that part about not asking for help is sadly a deeply ingrained part of my personality, going back as far as I can remember...even into early childhood.  So sometimes I have to pick and choose different Mindset Mentor podcasts, just as you probably have to go through some throwaway articles of mine to find something useful...hey, even my famous bands like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin have album tracks I regularly skip over.  But I respect Rob Dial's talent in verbal expression and his wisdom is usually spot-on.  I'll check in on another of his podcasts next week...

Just Finished Reading Calculating the Cosmos by Ian Stewart

Ian Stewart is a prolific popular science writer...he's a British mathematician and has also dabbled in science fiction writing.  I just finished reading his 2016 book Calculating the Cosmos, in which he goes through selected interesting topics concerning our solar system, galaxy, the universe...and their respective origins, laying out the different historical viewpoints as well as the current scientific perspective, including ongoing disputes.  Like the other popular science book I just read, David Sumpter's The Ten Equations That Rule the World, Calculating the Cosmos...while generally easy to follow...does dip into some rather technical jargon that loses me for a bit until I can regain my footing.  More than about math, though, this book is an excellent introduction to the fields of astronomy, astrophysics and cosmology, discussing interesting (to me) topics such as how Earth got its Moon, the various planets and their satellites, the Kuiper Belt, Oort Cloud, the nature of black holes, the big bang theory, the cosmic radiation background, dark matter and dark energy.  Along the way Stewart surprised me by claiming that some of these concepts aren't necessarily established truths and that his colleagues are coming up with alternative theories to explain observations without involving them, especially dark matter and dark energy...I found that pretty provocative.  And, as was the case with Sumpter's book, I intend to reread Calculating the Cosmos...nonfiction that has a lot of technical content has to be approached differently than with regular fiction.  I'm also interested in checking out some of Stewart's other works...

My December 2021 Running and Walking Report

In December 2021 I ran a total of 148 miles, running on every day of the month with 14.4 miles being my longest single run...albeit accomplished very slowly.  I managed to enter and finish my first race since my July heart surgery: Gainesville's weekly Depot Parkrun 5K on the 4th.  With walking I didn't need to be as intentional as with running...my job automatically involves much of it, and I finished the month with 142 miles.  As for January, I'd like to continue with this level of running and walking while participating in two races: another Depot Parkrun early in the month and the Newnan's Lake 15K in far eastern Gainesville on the 29th...I've run both multiple times before.  This, of course, hinges on the new Omicron upsurge in Covid-19 and whether or not the event organizers follow through with holding them or decide to cancel out.  Regardless, I want to continue with my running and walking even if they are more or less solitary endeavors...

Quote of the Week...from Henny Youngman

I told my doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places.           

                                                                                           ---Henny Youngman

Henny Youngman...who died at the age of 91 in 1998, was king of the one-liners in the stand-up comedy trade...his trademark line was "Take my wife...please!" Only Rodney Dangerfield with his "I don't get no respect" theme compares in stature.  I picked Henny's above one-liner because, well, this past year I've seen plenty of doctors...including yesterday's regular visit to my primary physician.  One of the problems many of us experience nowadays is that it's difficult to communicate one-to-one with your doctor and that appointments can sometimes take weeks if not months.  I do have the benefit of an online portal through which I can ask questions to one of my now-several physicians, usually getting a prompt response from a designated physician's assistant or nurse practitioner.  Still, when discussing some subtleties of a test or possible upcoming procedure there is nothing like direct give-and-take dialogue between patient and doctor, something I was able to accomplish yesterday. Otherwise it's like the Henny Youngman joke, with the two parties talking at cross-purposes.  Ironically, although his joke was funny, it also contains an element of truth...whatever you were doing when you broke your leg, stop doing it!  I checked up on a list of Henny's more famous short jokes and quickly found myself chuckling...

My Favorite Songs of 2021 As I Lived Through It

Below is my top ten list of favorite songs from 2021 as I have lived through it.  Each entry lists the song's title, artist, and year of release.  It shouldn't take long to notice that nine of them are from earlier years...I just don't listen to broadcast radio with their present-day song rotations except for Gainesville's alternative rock station WHHZ/100.5 (which accounts for #6).  Five of the ten songs on the list I heard listening to the Music Choice Soundscapes channel on my Cox Cable TV service...they're all instrumental pieces, including the piano masterpiece standing at #1.  As for The New Pornographers, I wish they'd named themselves differently...it's tough telling folks that this is one of my favorite bands.  Regarding Twenty One Pilots, I think The Outside is my current favorite song and predict it will feature prominently on my list of 2022's favorites.  But for 2021, Lady's Grace is a spectacular piano piece with an enchanting flute accompaniment.  Whiteout Conditions is a brilliant description of someone struggling daily with depression...I've experienced it as well.  Palomatronics is an Eastern, Indian-sounding mood piece that reminded me both of some of George Harrison's sitar-based Beatles works and the eerie beginning and conclusion to the Doors' monumentally disturbing-but-beautiful 1967 song The End.  You can hear all these songs on YouTube...why not give them a listen?  As I usually do when suggesting this, I recommend you listen to the original studio recordings and not concert renditions....

1 LADY'S GRACE...Kerani (2015)

2 WHITEOUT CONDITIONS...The New Pornographers (2017)

3 PALOMATRONICS...Green Isac (2014)

4 PLAY MONEY...The New Pornographers (2017)

5 LADY LABYRINTH...Ludovico Einaudi (2009)

6 THE OUTSIDE...Twenty One Pilots (2021)

7 PILLS...St. Vincent (2017)

8 NIGHT...Ludovico Einaudi (2015)

9 SVANIRE...Angèle Dubeau (2015)

10 ILLEGAL FIREWORKS AND HIDING BOTTLES IN THE SAND...Jeff Rosenstock (2020)

Weekly Short Stories: 1980 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here are my reviews of three more 1980 science fiction short stories as they appear in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1981 Annual World's Best SF, featuring the editor's picks from the preceding year.  1980 was a rough time for our country, with the Iranian hostage drama dragging throughout the year, relations with the USSR turning icy cold, and the economy tanking at year's end. But saddest of all, in the evening of December 8th, just as I was rejoicing at the Miami Dolphins beating the New England Patriots with a closing field goal, I received the news that John Lennon had been shot and killed at his Dakota Apartments residence in Manhattan...the murderer was a deranged stalker whose name does not merit mention.  Lennon was enjoying accolades from his recently released Double Fantasy comeback album, on which he split the tracks evenly with his wife Yoko Ono...Watching the Wheels was my favorite track from it.  But back to the stories... 

ELBOW ROOM by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Set off in the future at the entrance (or exit, depending on your point of view) of a vortex...corresponding to our notion of a wormhole...a very introverted young woman is stationed there as a manual backup to the automated computer system processing spaceships going through it to and from distant points.  Isolated from her crew, she begins to wonder if they're really there at all or rather just computer projections.  I can relate to her introversion, but not to her sense of reality unraveling with such an extended period of isolation. I think I would come out of it all just fine, thank you...

THE UGLY CHICKENS by Howard Waldrop

This is a "what if" tale about the extinction of the dodo bird, native to Mauritius and neighboring Indian Ocean islands but soon killed off by colonizing Dutch and French by the mid-1700s.  The narrator has discovered a trail leading to a rural northern Mississippi farm...could there have been real dodos there, and if so what happened to them?  The scene at the end depicting the dodos' fate is one of the more vivid, unforgettable ones in my own reading history, but probably not all that far removed from what happened to other extinct species, notably the passenger pigeon...

PRIME TIME by Norman Spinrad

This is a disturbing story about virtual living.  People can buy their own personal movies and experience them first-hand, going through adventures, parties, history, even orgies if so desired...the real world has become a throwaway, trivial existence.  A married couple is mired in this vicarious lifestyle, but the husband has reached the breaking point, his efforts to reach his complacent wife in vain.  Sad, but I fear we're miring ourselves more and more in fake life as we depend more and more on social and mass media for our reference points and less and less on what and who are actually all around us.  Unlike the couple in this future dystopia, though, we can still step outside our artificial constructions and experience the world as it truly is...go ahead, finish reading this article, and then turn off that smartphone or computer! 

Next week: more about science fiction short stories from 1980...

Paul McCartney's Erroneous Assumptions in the Get Back Movie

As I continue to watch...a few minutes at a time...the Beatles' Get Back movie that Peter Jackson coproduced and is airing on the Disney Plus streaming channel, I've reached a scene in which the four are sitting in a rough circle in their makeshift studio along with various staff.  They're just throwing out thoughts to one another, but it's clear that Paul McCartney has taken center stage as he prattles on about how, since manager Brian Epstein's death in 1967, the band has been leaderless and without discipline.  McCartney here seems to think his bandmates are unmotivated and wants to whip them back into shape...but openly disclaims the role of leader in doing so. Finally, one of the staffers suggests the band go back to playing their music, which is why they came here in the first place.  So they work on the later Abbey Road track Maxwell's Silver Hammer, not exactly one of my favorite Beatles songs..I think I would have preferred they continue talking instead...

The notion that the Beatles...and presumably other acts of this time in the late 1960s...felt that they were under constant pressure to record a new album at least twice a year stands out to me in 2021 when my current favorite recording artist, Regina Spektor, hasn't come out with a studio album for six years and running and others in our era space out their releases similarly. McCartney was also railing that in the previous year, '68, the Beatles weren't as coherent a band as before, with the different members essentially writing and recording their own songs apart from the others...using their bandmates strictly as accompaniment without collaborative feedback and bringing in outside musicians.  Hindsight is very convenient, I recognize, but looking back on their emerging domestic lives and distractions at that time, the very things that McCartney was criticizing in this discussion...if implemented regularly...might have kept the band together for much longer instead of their dissolution just a few months later.  John, Paul, George...and even Ringo...could have put out their own solo albums at their own convenience while at the same time coming up with material that could be used for upcoming Beatles albums...which would be recorded every two or three years using the 1968 so-called White Album as a model without the bandmates getting on each others' nerves too much.  Everybody'd be happy with the band remaining intact, especially the fans although a few would be miffed...like me about Regina Spektor's few-and-far-between albums. And if Paul, George or Ringo wanted to go on tour while John didn't, then those three could still do so while promoting their solo albums...which is what happened anyway but with the Beatles split up. Ain't hindsight wonderful?

Rob Dial's Five Keys to Have More Energy Podcast

Rob Dial is a young entrepreneur and motivational coach who has a regular free 20-minute podcast called The Mindset Mentor, in which he lays out different ways the listener can change his or her life to the better...as you might have guessed, mindset is everything.  His show three weeks ago centered around what he considers five important areas in which your energy level can be enhanced (or hindered if you ignore them): the music you listen to, the people you surround yourself with, the information sources you use, the food you consume, and whether (or not) you "force motion", i.e. deliberately maintain a state of physical activity.  Now with music, most of us have our different individual tastes...Dial stresses that we should focus on music with uplifting moods and lyrics.  With people, he divides the human race into "batteries" (energy enhancers) and "black holes" (energy drainers)...like with music, people who emit positives vibes are the ones to hang with.  As for information, once again Dial stresses sources that give empowering news...he doesn't like to tune in to the standard newscasts since they're usually so negative.  With food, it's clear that unhealthful diets loaded with sugar, salt and fat will keep the fatigue level high, as will excessive dependence on mind-altering chemicals such as alcohol.  And his idea of "forced motion" promotes not only regular exercise but also a state of mind that emphasizes activity...walking and standing over sitting whenever the choice is available, for example.  As for my reactions to these five areas Rob Dial emphasizes, I'm in general agreement while differing on some specific points.  With music, I love beautiful hymns, instrumental classical music, and light ambient pieces...but I also like some pretty heavy, harsh-sounding hard rock stuff as well, and the lyrics can sometimes be a bit brutal.  With people I agree that it's important to have positive, supportive folks around while also recognizing that for some other souls who may be missing out on that positive mindset, I may be in a position to play a supportive role in their lives...in other words, spread the faith. With information, I don't think I should just sit there for hours ingesting bad news off the cable news channels, but on the other hand I'd be deliberately delusional if I only cherry-picked news sources that omitted true-but-unpleasant important information.  I don't exactly know of Rob Dial's dietary practices, but I can't think of anything I disagree with what he says about ingesting good vs. harmful substances...except that for some reason he's a big advocate of nicotine (the chemical, not tobacco).  But I'm completely on board with his notion of "forced motion" and have practiced that principle long before I ever tuned in to this podcast.  So in summary I'm generally in agreement with Dial's five principles of energy, with a few caveats.  Oh, at the end of his presentation he mentioned that as a sixth energy source he sometimes likes to immerse himself in 45-degree (Fahrenheit) water...no thanks, dude...

New Omicron Covid-19 Outbreak

Amid reports that COVID-19 cases are spiking, both in seasonal terms and due to the rise of the highly contagious Omicron variant, I'm getting two diametrically opposed narratives from the media.  One is that hospitals are filling up and we're entering another period of sickness and death through mass infection, with the voluntarily unvaccinated suffering the worst effects of the disease...just as it happened this past summer with the Delta variant.  The other narrative states that we're over Covid and are returning to our pre-pandemic lifestyles.  And then there is the third narrative: yes, here comes a new sweep of the virus through our population, both vaccinated and unvaccinated...but that this will bring about the "herd immunity" that had been the distant dream of just about everyone.  Not being an expert in the field, I have to react to all this noise by staying current on my Covid-19 vaccines (the first two Pfizer shots and the later booster) and avoid mass assemblies.  My mask usage had gone down, but with this flu season and the Covid resurgence I intend to go back to earlier adherence.  The reason is not to protect myself...I have the flu shot as well...but to protect those around me who for whatever rational or irrational reason have refused the Covid-19 vaccination, in spite of the fact that it's free, safe, effective, and convenient.  I wonder whether we'll start seeing shutdowns and event cancellations if the Omicron outbreak is as strong early in 2022 as some suggest.  I suppose the most bizarre thing I take from the media is how pandemic denial and the anti-vaccination movement has become a conservative political cause, with former president Trump even being criticized by his own fans for supporting vaccination...are you kidding me?

Merry Christmas to All

I'd like to take this opportunity to wish all of you a very Merry Christmas and a joyous holiday season in this month that also features Chanukah and Kwanzaa.  Besides celebrating the birth of Jesus, Christmas also marks the close to another calendar year. It seems that too much serious and somber stuff has happened to me, my colleagues, and loved ones in 2021...more than perhaps any single year I can remember, even including 2020.  I think I could stand a more light-hearted, fun year for 2022, how about you?  Season's greetings...

Quote of the Week...from John Lennon

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.                  ---John Lennon

Unforeseen circumstances are commonplace, even after the most elaborate plans have been made...the Beatles great John Lennon tersely and accurately spelled it out.  That doesn't mean that life shouldn't have a structure to it since things don't turn out as anticipated...when that happens you either go back to the plan or use the new information to set up new ones.  There is a continual dance in our lives between chaos and order...the former must be recognized while the latter is emphasized, a kind of duality, one element of which describes the world in general and the other our subjective being and proactive role in it.  Seeing in advance how overly-specific plans can fall apart, I've tended of late to make my plans based on my own behavior and routines...with options to participate in certain future events instead of hinging everything on that participation.  For example, I like to run and train a number of miles daily.  There are certain local races I want to run in, including a half-marathon planned for February 2022.  I "plan" to enter it, but I also recognize the current fidgety social climate about the ongoing Covid-19 resurgence with the Omicron variant and how different parties are reacting to it, some canceling or postponing their public events.  That's "life happening", but it doesn't affect my more primary plan of daily running with occasional long runs...race or no race.  Besides, even if it goes as planned I could still have a sore foot or feel under the weather on race day...or it could be stormy outside: that's life, and it tends to be chaotic.  Still, plans are good guides and worthwhile to make and execute...    

Just Finished Reading The Ten Equations That Rule the World by David Sumpter

David Sumpter is a professor of mathematics at a Sweden's Uppsala University, born and raised in Great Britain. His The Ten Equations That Rule the World, from 2020, is about the secret society of TEN, a loose group over the course of modern history comprised of mathematicians and those who have capitalized on ten fundamental formulas that describe aspects of our world and social organization. Sumpter goes chapter by chapter in laying out each equation, its history, and applications while inevitably slipping into rather technical mathematics. Still, he always returns to straightforward nontechnical prose illustrating principles that even those not inclined toward mathematics can understand and use to analyze the world around themselves and draw some benefit. If you're not well-versed in mathematics...and I certainly fit the bill here...you may feel a little lost in some parts of this book. But I'm confident that you'll come away from the reading experience with a greater respect for how things work and how to assess one's situation in diverse settings more reasonably and accurately. I wrote out the ten equations in the above picture...below are their corresponding names... 

1 JUDGMENT EQUATION (Baye's Rule)

2 BETTING EQUATION (Logistic Regression)

3 CONFIDENCE EQUATION (Confidence Intervals)

4 SKILL EQUATION (Markov Assumption)

5 INFLUENCER EQUATION (Stationary Distribution)

6 MARKET EQUATION (Stochastic Differential Equations)

7 ADVERTISING EQUATION (Correlations)

8 REWARD EQUATION

9 LEARNING EQUATION

10 UNIVERSAL EQUATION

Weekly Short Stories: 1980 Science Fiction, Part 1

Today I begin my look at science fiction short stories from 1980, as presented in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1981 Annual World's Best SF, featuring the editor's picks from the previous year.  1980 was marked by two major ongoing news stories: the 1980 presidential election and the Iranian hostage crisis.  I remember living at La Mancha Apartments back then, about three blocks from the University of Florida campus. Just before the contentious Florida Primary between Ronald Reagan and then-surging George Bush, Bush's son Neil gave a speech for his father at nearby Norman Hall.  Putting down "Voodoo Economics" and the former California governor's politics in general, Neil did a pretty good job...but his dad lost the pivotal primary anyway and Reagan rode a surge of disaffection about the hostages and slumping economy to an easy November victory while picking his former primary opponent as his running mate.  But back to those stories...here are my reactions to the first two...

VARIATION ON A THEME FROM BEETHOVEN by Sharon Webb

Humanity, through its advances in medical science in a future era, has conquered disease and aging, giving people their cherished dream of immortality.  One catch, though: without the pressure of eventual death, the arts have suffered.  The remedy is to take a tiny portion of the population from birth and take away the immortality treatments, allowing those few chosen to excel in their chosen field.  A boy is selected and taken to a rural location where he can grow in music, with the company of others selected for their talents.  They are given the option, though, at a certain time of deciding to return to immortality if they so with...the boy decides against what I would do, given the recent number of people I know who have died recently...

BEATNIK BAYOU by John Varley

Humanity has been exiled from Earth after an alien invasion...for generations the small remnant live within the moon, and their science has advanced tremendously, allowing for people to change their own sexes on whims...as well as their biological age...while living very long life spans.  In this setting a young teenage boy receives his education through teachers who live alongside him, chronologically much older but whose bodies have been regressed to his level.  This story plays a lot with your mind and what it means to be an individual with a specific identity.  H-m-m, maybe life under the aliens wouldn't be so bad after I read about the moon society's capital punishment for what we would consider as minor crimes...

Next week: more about 1980 science fiction short stories...

Just Finished Reading Tar Baby by Toni Morrison

Tar Baby is a 1981 novel by Toni Morrison. Set first on a small Caribbean island before it moves to the U.S. mainland in places like rural impoverished Florida and bustling Manhattan, the story examines the relationships and self-identification of several people, black and white, male and female, educated and unschooled, rich and poor, and young and old as they work, love, and fight together (and apart).  Jadine is a young successful model whose adoptive aunt and uncle have raised her following her mother's death.  They work as cook and servant to a wealthy white retired Philadelphia businessman, Valerian Street, and his wife on that Caribbean island at their estate.  Valerian has sponsored Jadine's education and budding career, and she in turn feels a sense of loyalty and obligation to him.  Jadine's family is black, and throughout the story you can read how race pops in and out of the narrative and exchanges between the various parties as they work out among themselves their often divergent takes on reality and their relationships.  A young black man who goes by the name Son has jumped ship and escaped to the island, where he has secretly stayed at the Street's home until discovered one day.  Instead of throwing him out or having him arrested, though, Valerian treats Son as an honored guest...Jadine, her aunt, uncle, and Valerian's wife on the other hand see him in more of a negative light.  Eventually Son and Jadine become romantically involved, and while the working and spousal relationships at the Street estate undergo some serious testing, the two young lovers leave for America to rediscover Son's home roots in a small poor northern Florida town and start a new life together in New York...where they undergo some serious testing of their own...

I love stories written to probe into the various characters' thought processes and choices as they struggle to relate with one another.  Racial division is spotlighted here as well as conflicting notions of what it means for a black man or woman...with a history of persecution and discrimination over centuries...to engage fully in the present-day opportunities society now offers them.  To Son this participation is a sellout while Jadine accepts it as a mature reckoning with the reality of the world and the need to be responsible for herself and her loved ones as she pursues her career while prodding Son, in vain, to capitalize on his own talents.  Toni Morrison was brilliant here in her use of dialogue to draw out the essence of her characters...pretty amazing. Sadly, she passed away two years ago at age 88 from pneumonia. Tar Baby was her fourth novel...the next one I'm reading was her first, titled The Bluest Eye...

The 100 Days, As Seen by Rob Dial

On his podcast show The Mindset Mentor, Rob Dial presents various ways to look at self-motivation and success.  Some of his angles work for me and some I have a little difficulty with.  I liked one idea he presented on his December 10th show in which he proposed that I decide what it is I want to take action on and do it for 100 consecutive days...no excuses.  This transforms whatever action goal I have into an established habit that I have internalized...I've heard that it takes fewer days to accomplish this, however. The point of making a big deal about "100 days" is that, sometime down the line, I'm going to be tempted to forego the designated activity because of my feelings or time constraints.  But having that rule already in plan will help me keep true to whatever I had made a commitment.  Dial says that success comes from consistency and failure from giving up...a lot of his presentation comes from notions that we all generally already know and accept, but he repackages and expresses them in a way that can be inspiring.  So step number one is to reflect on and write down what it is I want to incorporate into my life, and then with step number two set out on those 100 days.  Obviously it has to be something already within the scope of my ability to accomplish, at least at a basic level from the beginning: traveling to a new country or running a marathon each day wouldn't cut it!  It's also an invitation to be a little creative about myself: a reinvention of sorts...

Constellation of the Month: Eridanus (the River)

 

Eridanus is a large constellation in the southern evening December sky, starting at its northeastern end with its "beta" star Cursa near the star Rigel of the prominent constellation Orion and winding around, ending up much further south with the first-magnitude "alpha" star Achernar.  In spite of its size, Eridanus is rather devoid of bright stars besides Achernar, the rest being of third magnitude or dimmer.  Achernar, some 7 times the mass of our sun, is about 140 light-years away. Although technically it should be visible just above the southern horizon here in Gainesville when it crosses the meridian, in reality I cannot see it from this latitude because of trees and buildings almost inevitably blocking my view.  But growing up in south Florida...Hollywood to be exact...I was about 4 degrees further south and could see Achernar back then.  I don't recall having ever experienced a clear enough night when city lights or the moon didn't render Eridanus difficult to observe, but its occupation of a relatively large swath of the celestial sky qualifies it as my constellation of the month for December. The above drawing should make it clear why it represents a river...

Quarreling Among the Beatles in Get Back Movie

I'm about halfway through watching the first of three parts of the Peter Jackson-produced Beatles documentary Get Back, now airing on the Disney Plus channel.  In early January, 1969, they're a few days into rehearsing material at their makeshift studio for a new album (eventually becoming Let It Be) and a planned concert, place and time undetermined.  After Paul and George have a brief, rough-but-polite exchange, the four meet up the next morning...except John is late.  In the meantime, Paul, with George and Ringo backing him up, concocts the core elements of the future blockbuster hit song Get Back.  Later on John shows up, gamely trying to participate on a positive level with the band but appearing confused and out of it...something was definitely going on with him.  After some jamming, they sit around facing each other...along with the assistants...and Paul starts off on a lecture of sorts about how he doesn't want to be the leader of the band but seems to be forced into that role.  In both this scene and in the previous day's exchange with George, I felt that Paul was acting a bit like a drama queen and treating others with a patronizing attitude...and why not: every reality show...and this one certainly qualifies for that designation...seems to have someone who acts out on the others like this.  I just expected that John would have been the prima donna here...if Paul had just guarded his tongue and simply stuck with the incredible music he was producing, I think things would have gone a lot smoother in these sessions, as well most likely in the months to follow that culminated in John quitting the Beatles in September.  The documentary is already very, very long, but still had to selectively edit the Beatle's weeks-long sessions, each of which lasted all day for days on end each week: very, very grueling as I have said before.  I felt that George came into the studio with a great amount of enthusiasm and songs of his own to contribute, gradually becoming disillusioned about how he was being treated by both Paul and John.  Just a couple of days later he would walk out of the band with the other three trying to coax him back into rejoining during the ensuing two weeks.  As for the eventual final product, that Let It Be album, which was finally released in the summer of 1970 after McCartney had announced the Beatles' breakup, contained some very good songs like Get Back, The Two of Us, For You Blue, Across the Universe, The Long and Winding Road, and I've Got a Feeling (I never did care for the title song Let It Be)...pretty impressive coming from what I've seen and heard so far on this documentary movie.  So the Beatles quarreled among themselves...but this had probably been going on throughout their existence.  The idea of filming and recording their conflicts in January of 1969 may be informative and entertaining for us today in looking back on it all, but the rolling cameras themselves were active participants in shaping the individual bandmates' attitudes and behavior toward one another... 

Quote of the Week...from Noel Coward

Work is much more fun than fun.                             ---Noel Coward

The late playwright Noel Coward had it right, although he was probably a lot more fanatical about his work than I am about mine.  Although I enjoy unwinding and relaxing, what apparently many people think of as fun....social gatherings like parties, concerts and get-togethers...don't do anything for me. If anything, they cause me a lot of anxiety and I would rather be in a structured work setting...even one where the tasks are relatively menial and repetitive.  I like my personal projects like running, reading, studying, and writing this blog, all of which can be seen in more of a "work" perspective than "fun".  I know folks who are into gardening, cooking, knitting/crocheting, home improvement, musical performance, auto mechanics, charitable service and other pastimes that don't fit into the category of "fun" that you might see on beer commercials where the men and women are soaking in the enjoyment of their social throngs. I like to sit back and watch TV and listen to music, but it's more fun to be working on something, whether it's at my job for pay or rather as an activity I have consciously adopted for myself to pursue. One type of work I could do without, though...but know that I will need to do more and more in the future as I age: medical/dental appointments.  And I have one this afternoon, sad to say...

Miami Dolphins Still in Running for Playoff Spot

I tend to follow the National Football League...sometimes I wonder why with some of the controversy surrounding the sport in recent years.  But it's been a solid tradition for me since 1968, when I began rooting for my then-hometown team, the Miami Dolphins, in their third season of existence.  Since then I've ridden the roller-coaster of great-to-awful seasons this franchise has produced including their undefeated 1972 season and that awful year in 2007 when they went 1-15.  Currently, under third-year head coach Brian Flores after a near-playoff surprise 10-6 season in 2020, this year they got off to a horrible start at 1-7, culminating in a humiliating loss to lowly Jacksonville in a game played in London, England.  No, I don't know either why the NFL keeps staging games in a country where virtually nobody plays the game, much less demonstrating any degree of interest in watching it.  That said, the Dolphins under this inspiring coach never said die and has now won five games in a row to bring their regular season record to 6-7...and back into the playoff discussion.  This Sunday they play at home against their divisional rival New York and should beat the last-place Jets.  If they accomplish this they will have already merited special mention for coming back from so far to a .500 record.  Now I'm more keenly interested in how teams in the AFC with slightly better records in the Dolphins fare, creating the unusual situation where I'm pulling for hated New England to beat the Indianapolis Colts in their upcoming contest Sunday night...the Patriots are already too far ahead of Miami in the standings with just four games to go in the new 17-game regular season and the Colts sport a 7-6 record, making them one of the teams the Dolphins will need to hurdle over to get to the playoffs.  Of course, should Miami fail against the Jets then, oh well, that's how it goes sometimes.  But I've been impressed with this team coming together both on defense and offense, the latter highlighted by the marked improvement of their second-year quarterback Tua Tagovailoa.  I'm not one of those sports fans who expect their team to win the championship every year or it's all a disaster...just get me to this point in the season and if they're still in the hunt, that's all I ask for.  Go Dolphins!

Weekly Short Stories: 1979 Science Fiction, Part 4

Today I've reached the end of the science fiction anthology The 1980 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and featuring his selections from 1979. That was the year that the fledgling Tampa Bay Buccaneers of the NFL, after losing their first 26 games as a franchise in 1976-77, made it to their conference's championship game, bowing out to the L.A. Rams 9-0.  The Pittsburgh Pirates, with their theme of "Family" after Sister Sledge's ongoing hit We are Family, came from behind in that year's world series against the favored Baltimore Orioles for the second time in eight years.  President Jimmy Carter decided to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics after the U.S.S.R. invaded Afghanistan.  And the Florida Gators football team, under first-year coach Charley Pell, went 0-9-1.  That's sports...here are my reactions to those final three stories...

OUT THERE WHERE THE BIG SHIPS GO by Richard Cowper

The notion of humanity going out and conquering the galaxy gets a rude awakening here as an exploratory mission encounters an advanced alien culture already entrenched throughout it...and their unifying thread is in a special board game played throughout the stars.  Back on Earth at a Caribbean resort a boy notices the returning astronaut who has introduced the game to his home planet, where it has become the premier cultural attraction. Using games as devices for peaceful interaction and education among disparate societies reminded me of the ideals behind the resurrection of the Olympic Games in 1896...before they became nationalist propaganda tools and then completely professionalized...

CAN THESE BONES LIVE? by Ted Reynolds

A young woman on a future Earth when humanity has become extinct owes her own resurrection to an alien race that returns one specimen on from intelligent species on each planet to life, allowing them to plead the case for their own species' revival.  The woman struggles to justify why mankind should be given another chance...and then she discovers the answer.  And that alien race itself gets taught a lesson in humility and perspective...

THE EXTRAORDINARY VOYAGES OF AMÉLIE BERTRAND by Joanna Russ

The idea of a portal in reality that leads to other places and times isn't new.  Recently Stephen King has used this device in novels like 11/22/63 and The Talisman (with Peter Straub), Philip Pullman with the His Dark Materials series, and of course J.K. Rowling's Platform 9¾ from Harry Potter.  In this tale a traveler in France encounters such a portal at a train station, and the woman there who rescues him from accidentally falling through it tells her strange story about her exciting and exotic adventures.  This story was meant as a tribute to the great French science fiction writer Jules Verne...

Next week I begin looking at the year 1980 in short science fiction...