Ideas for Breaking Through Mental Barriers, As Related by Rob Dial

On a recent Mindset Mentor podcast hosted by Rob Dial, he laid out three ways to break through mental barriers...and he used for an example an area with which I am only too familiar: long-distance running.  According to Dial, a noted ultra-marathon runner is asked by someone to help his friend get over his running block: he can't surpass five miles for a single run without losing his energy and needing to stop.  The "ultra" man accepts the challenge to help him out but insists that he commit himself to three things: (1) repeat to yourself "I will never quit", (2) don't give your pain a voice, and (3) continually think of things in your life that you are grateful for.  The story goes like this: on their very first run together, the friend not only breaks his five-mile barrier but runs for 100 miles!  With the repeated mantra of never quitting, Dial explains that your body responds to the voice inside your head...another example is the placebo effect in which healing occurs seemingly because the mind is convinced that the ingested "medicine" is effective for the body.  With not giving pain a voice, the point is to not to focus on things you don't want, but instead to switch to emphasizing that which you desire.  And thoughts of gratitude cause the brain to release chemicals that benefit action and reduce anxiety and discouragement.  As for me, I employed these three principles during the half-marathon yesterday...and they worked, although had I not heard this episode of Rob Dial's podcast I think I still would have done all right.  Who knows, maybe I was already practicing these suggestions, albeit in a different form...

Ran Gainesville's Five Points Half-Marathon This Morning

 

This morning I ran Gainesville's Five Points of Life Half-Marathon, the sixth time I've run this event (2010, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018) and my overall thirteenth half-marathon.  Last year's race was cancelled due to Covid, and the 2022 edition features a modified course that winds through the city but in a different direction...although the NW 16th Avenue stretch of hills and the stadium run remain on the course.  I woke up at 5 and managed to get out there in plenty of time, parking in front of the Thomas Center and walking the few blocks to Bo Diddley Plaza in the heart of downtown where the race was to begin and end.  It was cold, in the upper thirties with high humidity, but once we started running the weather wasn't any bother.  The Five Points Half-Marathon uses pacers who run the race just to finish at a specified final finishing time: the one I selected, who incidentally is an ultramarathon runner, held the sign for 2 hours 40 minutes, five minutes slower than my previous half-marathon time in 2019.  She told us up front that she would alternate two-minute runs with thirty-second walks...that was fine with me since I like those brief walking breaks.  After the race began a few delayed minutes past 7, we headed east on University Avenue, turned south on East 7th Street and made our way to Depot Road, which we took to the trail that passes over US 441 just south of the University of Florida campus.  Then we passed through the area of the various UF medical buildings, crossing busy Archer Road and beginning the hilly part of the course.  Eventually we passed Lake Alice, made it back to University Avenue and then ran through the Florida football stadium before running through the heart of the campus.  After that we went north to NW 8th Avenue, cut through to 16th and ran east to 441 before turning right.  After that it was more or less a matter of going back to the downtown area where the finish line stood near the Hippodrome Theater.  I liked our pacer's run/walk strategy until we began to encounter some substantial hills...then I found it tiring since she'd often run up a hill and walk down another.  By the time we reached 16th...home of the really "bad ass hills" as legendary seniors marathoner John Wallace has termed them...I had decided to abandon following a pacer and employed my own strategy of tackling the hills: it worked and my finishing chip time was 2:33:51, more than six minutes faster than the pace I followed for the race's first half.  My feet got sore early on, and by the end I was essentially focused on putting one leg in front of the other until it was all over.  The police (who regulated the surrounding traffic) and volunteers were all very friendly and encouraging...for the last three miles of the run people on the side would keep yelling at me that I was "almost there": that kind of got tiring.  But the end was sweet, and Melissa and Will congratulated me on getting through it...I even got a photo op with Albert, the Florida Gator mascot!  And now it's time for my poor sore, crampy body to recover from the ordeal before I get ready for the next one.  Click HERE to view the race results...

The Burden of Relevancy in Academic Conversation

I have a daydream fantasy, one that I believe few others have.  It goes like this: along with all the inane radio talk shows hosted by political extremists, self-proclaimed experts on money or the law, paranormal promoters, and sports know-it-alls there is one program in which the host, a master of informed questioning, has as guests people who are knowledgeable and competent in diverse academic fields, ranging from medicine to physics to language to mathematics to agriculture to mechanics to economics...or anything else. In each interview they spend the allotted time exploring the actual content of the field for discussion, not necessarily its applications or implications to society or the guest's life history. Now I know this is just cognitive reverie on my part, but what if I were to become like that host and ask those around me about their own fields of expertise?  My guess is that they would mostly be reticent about sharing many details of their specialized knowledge, trying to steer the conversation toward their own life narrative or what career achievements they have won...and question my own rationale in asking them in the first place.  And simple curiosity and a desire to learn new things just don't sound like good enough reasons...there has to be demonstrated relevancy to push the topic forward.  On the other hand, since I haven't tried this how do I know that would happen? I do know that there is an increasing gulf in society between those "in the know" about science and technology and the bulk of the population, which at best takes it all for granted and at worst outright rejects science and advanced learning in favor of nonsensical notions...

Quote of the Week...from Clint Eastwood

Maybe I'm getting to the age when I'm starting to be senile or nostalgic or both, but people are so angry now.  You used to be able to disagree with people and still be friends.  Now you hear these talk shows, and everyone who believes differently from you is a moron and an idiot.           ---Clint Eastwood

I'm a fan of Clint Eastwood's movies...especially the early westerns...and have noted his political leanings over the years as well. A pragmatic conservative who supports minority rights as well as avoiding overseas military conflicts, he is usually in the general center of the political spectrum.  And I've noticed that this position can bring out a lot of antagonism from folks mired in ideology and partisanship...although not from me.  That's why he disappointed me at the 2012 Republican Convention that nominated Mitt Romney for president when he ranted on for ten minutes at an empty chair onstage, pretending that President Obama was sitting in it and putting vulgar expressions in the absent president's mouth...to the ecstatic cheers and laughter of the attendees. It drew out my scorn for Eastwood...and most likely unintentionally helped contribute to Obama's reelection that year as it did NOT play well on TV.  The irony was that his objection to the president was rooted in the increased military focus on Afghanistan, something that many conservatives supported: politics can get pretty convoluted!  Anyway, fast forward eight years and we find Eastwood opposing Trump and endorsing centrist candidate Michael Bloomberg in the Democratic primaries...so his political leanings are by no means bound to one party.  I've forgiven the dude for that earlier diatribe and see his above quote as a marker for our times.  As for me, I tend to politically divide the people around me not so much by whether they lean Republican or Democratic as by how vocal and adamant they are about openly pushing their opinions on me and others.  Look, I watch the news and can read...I don't need someone regurgitating almost verbatim something they picked up on some talk radio or TV show, usually with an insulting jab aimed at the "other side".  I do know that the hosts of many of these shows specialize in demonizing the opposition, and if you're a regular listener then you're liable to fall under their sway and begin to emulate their contemptuous attitudes.  I used to listen to both conservative and liberal opinion shows but can no longer handle the vitriol that is disguised as public discourse. If that's your cup of tea then good luck with it... just keep it off my wave, as the late Chris Cornell of Soundgarden once sang ...

Constellation of the Month: Canis Major (the Great Dog)

 

If you think dogs are great and that's why the southern February evening constellation Canis Major is translated as "great dog", then you're missing the point that it is so named as to distinguish it from the nearby constellation Canis Minor...the "lesser dog".  Portrayed in the night sky as hunter Orion's dog forever pursuing the adjacent star group Lepus (the hare), Canis Major's greatest feature is Sirius, easily the brightest star in the night sky at -1.46 magnitude, only some 8.6 light years distant making it a celestial neighbor of ours.  Sirius is a binary star, the much dimmer companion a very dense white dwarf star, "the Pup", almost the exact size of Earth but much, much more massive.  The rest of Canis Major contains a number of readily visible stars, making it easy to find in the evening sky, just to the southeast of Orion with that constellation's three-star "belt" roughly pointing in Sirius' direction.  It also contains a Messier object, M41...an open cluster visible to the naked eye at 4.5 magnitude.  It shouldn't be too hard to find this constellation on a clear twilight during February...just look to the southeast (from continental U.S. latitudes) as the sun sets and Sirius should stand out as the first star to become visible as the blue background darkens...

Next month I will examine another constellation...

Weekly Short Stories: 1982 Science Fiction, Part 1

This week I begin my reactions to 1982 science fiction short stories as they appeared in the anthology The 1983 Annual World's Best SF, featuring editor Donald A. Wollheim's picks from the year before.  In 1982 I was single, living in an apartment in the southwest corner of town, across from a big, empty field which in just a handful of years would be converted into shopping center ringed by shops and restaurants...I had originally moved out there because it was quieter.  Now it's by far the most congested part of Gainesville!  Here are my reviews of the first three stories in the anthology...

THE SCOURGE by James White

A human couple has been sent to a remote planet to see if its intelligent inhabitants qualify for admission into the Galactic Federation.  This world is plagued by incessant meteorites showering down on the land, caused by the breakup of one of its moons over a thousand years before...the cause of that breakup is important. Martin lands on the planet's surface and soon meets Teldin, a high-ranking slave who reveals the regimented master-slave social structure there.  How can Martin communicate the Federation's agenda if they won't speak with him directly, since as a subordinate in his own job he is regarded as a "slave"?  Interesting scenario and story, with some lessons for us today in our real world... 

A LETTER FROM THE CLEARYS by Connie Willis

After a nuclear apocalypse a family in rural Colorado struggles to make ends meet while watching out for dangerous survivors roaming the area.  The daughter goes out to the post office to pick up the mail and discovers a letter from a family back east that was to visit them just before everything went down.  Her family's reactions when she reads it aloud reveal the whole dismal situation.  For such a brief story, the author did a fantastic job of gradually unraveling their plight to its greatest effect. This story reminded me of the 1980s TV movie The Day After...

FARMER ON THE DOLE by Frederick Pohl

On a depopulated Earth, due probably to the worsening environment, robots comprise the vast majority of the remaining "population" with humans disguised among them...but with clear social and legal advantages.  But a movement is growing, that of "robot rights", and robot Zeb, abruptly displaced from his farmer role and reprogrammed as a mugger (of other robots) is caught up in the middle of it. I think Pohl was definitely striking up an analogy to today's world with its underclasses and ruling elites...lots of satire here...

Next week I continue my look at the year 1982 in short science fiction...

Podcaster Rob Dial's Strategy to Manifest Whatever You Want

Podcaster Rob Dial, whose specialty is life coaching and strategies, recently had a show on his Mindset Mentor series in which he explored what he called the "Law of Attraction".  Dial maintains that you can manifest whatever you want by implementing its three basic elements: envision, strategize and execute.  With the first, it's important to not only spend time and effort visualizing whatever it is you want to accomplish as if it has already been attained...but to do so to such an extent that success in that area seems normal.  With strategizing, he suggests an investment of time, writing down the steps you need to take, both in the long run and the short.  And then focus on those more immediate things you need to do.  As for execution, it's all a matter of "getting off your butt", as he puts it, and getting serious: Ready, Fire, and Aim is his motto as he reverses the last two steps...emphasizing that it's important to get out there doing things even if you think you're not ready yet, with adjustments to be made afterwards.  All of this sounds reasonable to me, especially the "envision" part...I think too many of us get started with stuff without thinking it through to what we really want from it...and why.  And with strategizing, it's too easy to get hung up worrying or getting discouraged about long term goals not being fulfilled instead of concentrating on the now.  Which kind of brings up a contradiction: you work in the present to change your habits in the direction you want while visualizing the future as if it's already happened...if I got what Dial said right.  Well, since I haven't employed these principles in the more meticulous way he laid them out, who am I to say it won't work?  Better to test it out by picking one area I want to achieve and applying his Law of Attraction...

Happy Birthday, My Dear Sweet Melissa

Well, Melissa, it's that time of year again...Happy Birthday!  It's also that time of year for me to reflect on how grateful I am to have been so blessed with such a wonderful, beautiful woman as you.  May the days, weeks, months and years ahead be full of joy, love and health for us and those around us...

Just Finished Reading Murder in the Manor by Fiona Grace

It seems that Fiona Grace is a prolific English author of numerous cozy mystery book series.  With the one I'm starting, the Lacey Doyle Cozy Mysteries, she has already published a prodigious 9 novels in just the past three years...but that's nothing: her aggregate total, the way I've figured it, is 33 books from 2019 to now!  You might think that this would interfere with the quality of her writing, but from what I gather after just finishing reading her first Lacey Doyle novel, Murder in the Manor, her writing quality is just fine, thank you. I was curious, though, about how other readers reacted to this story and checked out Goodreads...my eyes were opened.  Review after review dismally panned the book, and there was a consensus that there is no Fiona Grace. Her apparent prolificity is explained by there being a multitude of anonymous writers penning the many books bearing that name.  Makes sense to me, although in the final analysis it doesn't really matter, only the story itself.  Lacey is a 39-year old American woman whose dirtbag husband just pulled a no-fault divorce on her because she hasn't born him any children...and then has the gall to demand for spousal support from her.  She's an antiques dealer working for a New York company...to get a break from her domestic drama she travels to England, to a small quaint village she once stayed at as a child with her family.  There she quickly opens her own antique shop, gets to know various characters...both good and bad, and then a murder happens (she is initially the top suspect).  The narrative progresses to the crime's solution...naturally, Lacey figures it all out.  As stories go, I liked it...especially considering that the book's series title advertises it as a cozy mystery...no pretense here.  If you're going for a literary classic instead of pleasure reading, you probably won't give it raving reviews on Goodreads, either.  Armed with the knowledge that "Fiona Grace" probably isn't writing these stories, I'm still open to exploring other books attributed to her...including other series...

Just Finished Running Gainesville's Depot Parkrun 5K

I had been putting it off for the previous three weeks due to excessively cold weather and my wimpy Florida sensibilities.  But this morning I had no excuses as the temperature was a reasonable 49 with humidity around 95...so I got up early and headed across town to Depot Park for their weekly free Saturday morning 5K (3.1 mile) race.  I've run it five or six times in the past, beginning in early 2019 right after they established it.  Although not so long before (while in my fifties) I had run faster races...dipping down to times in the mid-twenties...my Deport Parkrun personal record is only 30:00.  Back in December I ran a tad slower than 33 minutes, but this morning I was a lot faster, getting my finishing time down to 31:28.  I'm writing this about two hours after finishing the race and feel like my body's making a smooth recovery...that's good since I'm going to work on my day off a little later.  I am always impressed by the beauty of Depot Park, which is just east of Main Street in Gainesville and just south of Depot Road, on the south side of the city's downtown area.  And birds seem to love it here...I heard all sorts of bird songs, including red-winged blackbirds which seem to thrive around the park.  Next weekend will be the Five Points of Life Half-Marathon and I'm still entertaining hopes of running it...we'll see what happens between now and then.  As for the Depot Parkrun results for today, click HERE to see them...

Quote of the Week...from Tony Dungy

As big a deal as the Super Bowl is, it's not the most important thing going on in the planet.

                                                                                 ---Tony Dungy

I've always respected and admired Tony Dungy, the National Football League Hall of Fame coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Indianapolis Colts.  Focusing on revamping the Bucs' sagging defense in the late 1990s, he built them up into the talented and cohesive unit that won the 2002 championship under his successor Jon Gruden and then went on to bring a Super Bowl title to the Colts after the 2006 season.  His style has always been one of soft-spoken dignity while still demanding quality from his players...proof that you don't have to be a jerk to coach a football team.  I obviously picked his above quote since this coming Sunday will be the next installment of the annual Super Bowl spectacle, this time pitting the Los Angeles Rams against the Cincinnati Bengals.  It doesn't matter to me who wins, but just for the sake of having a side to root for I am going with LA because (1) I have always believed that their quarterback Matthew Stafford was very underrated because he played for so long with an unsupportive franchise (Detroit) and (2) I always liked the Rams' cool helmets with the horns...it was the first NFL team I rooted for in a game, back in 1967 when they played the 49ers during that regular season.  Much ballyhoo has been made about the Bengals' second-year quarterback Joe Burrow as if he's going to be the next Tom Brady...maybe he will, but do I really care?  And then there is the overhyped halftime show and the numerous expensive commercials, some of which are so contrived that not only do I often not understand them but also fail to even see what product they're selling.  I don't necessarily think that Tony Dungy wants us to sit around, instead of watching the Super Bowl, dwelling and worrying about Covid, politics, the environment, social change, Russia, or other running news stories...but they are more important than some dumbass football game.  Also, knowing what an introspective man of character and honor Dungy is, I imagine he was also referring to the fact that although spending a little time on Sunday watching a game is okay, fun entertainment, each of us has our own personal lives and relationships that dwarf it in significance.  Anyway, the day after this game the focus will be on next year and the champion will be something receding into the past to merge with the lengthening (and increasingly forgotten) list of earlier winners: it never ends...

Russia, Authoritarianism and the Populist Rabble

If you're wondering why I haven't been writing about the Russian military buildup along their border with Ukraine and the imminent possibility of a full-scale invasion, there's a reason for that. I am figuratively holding my breath to see which direction my own country, America, takes during the next two major election cycles.  Will we return to our often fractious and quarrelsome, but ultimately peaceful political debate that acknowledges and respects election results or will we move toward a fascist, authoritarian system typified by an increasing number of regimes in the world where the leader panders to a certain element of his constituency?  This element is found in large numbers just about anywhere...composed of people, whom I term as the "rabble", who are essentially xenophobic and imperialistic as they believe that the only true leader is an aggressive strongman and that his political opponents are by definition traitors who should be punished accordingly.  Before the 2020 U.S. presidential election and its immediate aftermath, a lot of us here thought that the United States was immune to this sort of thing...but events since then have proved otherwise.  In our nation's past history it was manifested in populist movements that came and went, but in some other countries the rabble component of the population is much larger than ours, setting up a kind of ironic political situation: authoritarian regimes that won't allow free and fair elections that would most probably reflect the general approval of their population.  Until corrected with evidence to the contrary, that's where I believe countries like Russia, China, Turkey, the Philippines and Venezuela...among many...stand today.  It's not just secret police or restrictive laws propping up their governments...a huge bloc of their own people stands solidly behind them as well.  As does a substantial bloc of our own people behind efforts to transform our democratically represented republic into one in name only.  I hope nothing violent comes out of the Russian troop buildup, but I think that in spite of that country's leadership making it out as an external matter between them and the West, it's most likely rooted in inner political struggles that have been submerged by that great nation's abandonment of free and fair elections in favor of authoritarianism...

Weekly Short Stories: 1981 Science Fiction, Part 4

Today concludes my examination of some of the choice 1981 science fiction short stories as they appeared in editor Donald A. Wollheim's anthology The 1982 Annual World's Best SF, featuring his selections from the preceding year.  One of these days I'm going to need to make up a list of my all-time favorite short stories...most of them I think will be either from Wollheim's series, which covered the years 1964-89, or that of Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg, which featured tales from 1939 through 1963.  Well, here are my reactions to the final two '81 stories from the book...

THROUGH ALL YOUR HOUSES WANDERING by Ted Reynolds

This novella consists of a man's succession of telepathic communion with other species across vast expanses of space as his consciousness enters their bodies and experiences how they live their respective lives...each time for two hours before briefly returning to his laboratory.  His colleagues are skeptical of his recollections, some thinking that he has gone insane.  But at the end he puts it all together, and with an unexpected twist on astrology.  Funny, but this story reminded me of an old SpongeBob SquarePants episode where the title character invades the dreams of his fellow ocean-bottomers...

THE LAST DAY OF CHRISTMAS by David J. Lake

An interesting story written by an Australian, centered around that country.  A mysterious young Australian man has developed a special perfume that brings out sexual urges from anyone smelling it...the resulting complete transformation of human society horrifies him and he works to remedy his mistake.  But who is this guy really and what is his agenda?  The ending reminded me of Agent Smith's conversation with Morpheus in the Matrix movie...

Next week I begin my look at science fiction short stories from the year 1982...

Gainesville Bookstores of the Past

I'm sitting here reminiscing on Gainesville bookstores from years gone by...there have been a lot of them and some were outstanding.  Funny, though, although with audio media, phonograph records went through a number of digitilizations, first with compact discs and then to MP3 and now streaming, printed material is taking a while being synchronized with our computer era.  Sure, Kindle is prospering and it's easy getting books on it...that is, if they are still in print.  Unfortunately, most of the ones out of print are unavailable in the digital era and you have to get the hard copy to read them.  Amazon has largely supplanted local used bookstores as a source of these old books, but as one who likes to browse shelves and pick up books and leaf through them, it falls short in that respect. In Gainesville, we still have some bookstores, but I remember times when there were some awfully good ones, like...

Book Gallery---This store, the "original" Book Gallery until it spun off into Book Gallery West on NW 16th Blvd (that one still stands), was in the Publix shopping center on N. Main St. between 10th and 16th Avenues.  In the late 80's we'd go there as our number one source of used books...the used book collection was vast.

Goering's---Situated on the NW corner of University Avenue and 13th Street, it was loaded with all sorts of books and magazines, one of my favorite browsing spots.  Before the building was torn down for construction, they had opened a second store further west on University past 34th Street but both closed down.

Gainesville Book Company---Located in the industrial park on NW 97th Blvd off 39th Avenue, this small shop was loaded with ultra-cheap used books...I especially liked the science fiction collection and bought many of the Stephen King books I would read through this period during the 2000's decade.  They were open every other weekend.

Borders---A huge store with new books now occupied by the equally-excellent DSW shoe store on Newberry Road near I-75, I loved browsing through it and found some excellent puzzle books...and got hooked on the Magicians series by Lev Grossman.  They also had a great CD and DVD collection as well as a big coffee shop/sitting area.

Media Play---Across from K-Mart off Newberry Road just west of the Interstate, this store...like Borders...featured books, CDs and DVDs.

Barnes and Nobles---On Archer Road right near the also-now-defunct Atlanta Bread Company...where I used to hang out for their excellent coffee and sitting area, I spent a good amount of time here.  B&N has their own "Kindle", which they call "Nook".  My take on the two is that until out-of-print books are available on them, then they are going to continue to be secondary to hard copy books.

The Florida Bookstore---Right across from the University of Florida campus on University Avenue, it was a primary supplier of textbooks, class material and school supplies.  Of course, other companies have sprung up in the area to replace it, but I wish this one was still there.  Once it briefly had a second outlet on SW 34th Street, but now there's a Sherwin Williams paint store at that spot.

The "First" Books-a-Million---Replacing the Skeeters restaurant on NW 13th Street, Books-a-Million was my primary stopping place before my graveyard shift job in the 1990s...I'd always get the flavored coffee of the day and then browse around.  I read the first four Harry Potter books sitting in there, a few pages at the time, as well as some others.  It's been replaced by the used bookstore 2nd and Charles and still has an outlet on Newberry Road near the Oaks mall.

Walden and B.Dalton at the Oaks Mall...I usually didn't go to these unless I happened to be walking through the mall on other business, but they were always fun to stop at and browse.

Archer Square bookstore...I don't remember this business's name, but it was in the Archer Square shopping center on Archer Road just west of 34th Street that featured a Winn-Dixie and Tony and Pat's Pizza, along with a kiddie's place called Fun Factory.  It was in the 1980s and I would walk across the field from my nearby apartment and browse around...it was here that I bought my first Isaac Asimov sci-fi anthology paperbacks.

Westgate Plaza used bookstore...I don't remember this one's name either, but they had a great selection of books...I bought Frank Herbert's entire Dune series here.  Now the whole plaza, along SW 34th Street just south of University Avenue, has been demolished and is being rebuilt, but the bookstore left a while ago.

I'm sure I'll think of more, but it's kind of sad to see these fine establishments come and go...they deserved better...

   

Rob Dial's Podcast Discusses Overthinking

The other day on the Mindset Mentor podcast I listen to regularly, host Rob Dial discussed how folks tend to overthink, and he suggested a constructive way of looking at it: we are not our thoughts.  That tends to conflict with the commonly held view that people's learning, experiences and accomplishments define them.  For me, I've long had this notion of separating the "I" as a separate identity from how I mentally process my ideas and experiences...unfortunately, whenever I bring this up in conversation with others I get nowhere.  I even wrote about it many years ago on this blog and got an angry response from an old high school buddy of mind who got the idea somehow that because he was good in mathematics then that made him an expert in everything else...that's like some I know who are under the impression that, because they have money and/or worldly status, this makes them somehow more spiritual than me.  Both cases are examples of people who confuse who they are with external manifestations of their lives...and that includes their thoughts.  Dial encourages us to do what I believe is called "mindfulness" at various points of our day: whatever we're doing, wherever we are, stop and get notice of what is around us, even to the point of noticing things we'd discard as irrelevant to our functioning.  This, he maintains, will help to turn our often-wayward thinking back to our control instead of it controlling us as it often does.  The particular show I listened to also brought to mind how I can often over-analyze situations and scenarios to the point where I'm too discouraged to even engage in them...enough is enough with that...

Just Finished Reading Maui Murder by Jasmine Webb

A couple of days ago Maui Murder, Jasmine Webb's second installment in her Charlotte Gibson mystery book series, became available to me through my library and I wasting no time checking it out and reading it.  I like the earthy, irreverent 30-year old protagonist "Charlie", who has fled back to her home island in Hawai'i after shooting a gangland robber of a Seattle bank where she was employed.  Now she works at an ice cream shop...when not taking on murder mysteries, that is.  In this story Jo, a young woman, has been killed and found in the ocean...her bereaved father, hearing of Charlie's success at solving the last murder, is offering her $100,000 to go after Jo's killer.  Without going into plot details, she enlists the aid of familiar characters like her best friend Zoe and septuagenarian women Dot and Rosie while crossing paths with the cops and having to deal with her loving, but sometime overbearing mother.  My only problem with Jasmine Webb's writing as Charlie interviews Jo's coworkers at her software development company or encounters her ex-boyfriend is that men tend to be treated as stupid, sexist creeps while the women are smarter and much more socially enlightened.  I noticed this some in her first book, but now it's forming an unpleasant pattern...still, I plan to continue reading this entertaining series when the next book is available as Charlotte Gibson will no doubt encounter a fresh set of male idiots...

Ongoing Beijing Olympics to Me a Big Yawn

I'm guessing that if you grew up in the north (or far south of the Equator) you may be much more acquainted with the various sports comprising the Winter Olympics...you may even have participated in some of them.  For me, I grew up in the Miami vicinity of southern Florida, far away from ice and snow and mountain slopes.  I have never skied, ice skated, snowboarded, ridden on a bobsled or luge, played ice hockey or curling...or any of the other peculiar areas spotlighted every four years, often in a country loaded with its own controversies.  In 2022 the Winter Olympics are being held in Beijing, China...causing objections from others concerned about what they consider to be human rights violations in that nation.  The network presenting them, NBC this time around, usually focuses on the Americans there with the greatest chances of winning medals, I guess they expect me to root for them...after I figure out what the heck they're supposed to be trying to do!  Since I usually don't watch NBC very much anyway...or CBS, ABC and FOX for that matter...I won't be missing preempted shows I normally would have been watching.  At least last summer during the Tokyo Olympics they had sports I could relate to, several of them from personal experience.  Oh well, the Winter version will be over before I know it and I am supremely confident that I will carry with me few, if any, substantial memories of it...

Quote of the Week...from Brian Flores

God has gifted me with a special talent to coach the game of football, but the need for change is bigger than my personal goals.                                             ---Brian Flores

As I wrote a few days ago, I was greatly dismayed at the announcement that three-year Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores was being fired following his second straight winning season...the first time that's happened with this franchise since 2003...and winning five games in 2019, a year the team was widely expected to go winless after it had deliberately divested itself of its star players. And it was that 2019 season that soured Dolphins owner Stephen Ross, an incredibly wealthy New York real estate magnate (~$70 billion), to prematurely end Flores' tenure.  You see, Ross, who apparently holds no appreciation for the sanctity and dignity of the game and doesn't care about Dolphins ticket holders who shell out their money and attend games expecting a reasonable effort from their team, WANTED Miami to tank that year in order to pick up star quarterback Joe Burrow in the next year's draft. Earlier this week Flores announced he is suing the National Football League, the Miami Dolphins and two other NFL franchises for racial discrimination as well as what he alleges Ross offered him in 2019: $100,000 for each game he lost...Flores did NOT give in to this affront to the game's integrity and instead inspired his players to play beyond their talent level.  The lawsuit is designed to be class-action, apparently intended for others to come forward with their own stories about racial bias and abuse with coaching in this league. One ex-coach, Hue Jackson, has already stepped forward, claiming that while coaching the Cleveland Browns that club's owner paid him the same hundred grand for losing games. Also, after Flores was fired, he applied for an open head coaching job for the New York Giants...they scheduled an interview but before that happened, he discovered that the team had already decided on another candidate and that HIS interview was only a cynical formality to comply with the 2003 Rooney Rule that mandated teams have at least one minority candidate interview for vacant coaching positions.  Brian Flores alleges discrimination in NFL coaching hiring...the figures confirm his stance since the number of black head coaches in this 32-team league has dwindled in 18 years from 3 to just 1 while the vast majority of players in the league are African American.  But noting disturbing trends and relating an unprovable conversation may not be enough to convince a civil court of one's allegations, however compelling they might be.  Still, for my part I believe Brian Flores is a man of integrity...and Stephen Ross is quite the opposite.  May the good guy win this time around...and that Flores will continue to be able to exercise his obvious coaching gifts in the future.  But I don't think I'll ever again be willing to follow the Miami Dolphins while this amoral and manipulative owner is running things...

Just Finished Reading Aloha Alibi by Jasmine Webb

Before checking out the short novel Aloha Alibi by Jasmine Webb from my library I had never heard the term "cozy mystery" before, but now that I've read it I'm pretty sure about what this subgenre of mystery fiction is all about...and I like it.  Aloha Alibi, published just this past year, is billed as the first book in the Charlotte Gibson Mysteries series...but this author is really churning out the books, with the fourth one already coming out this year! Charlotte "Charlie" Gibson is a young adult millennial, an intelligent underachiever in school who works at a jewelry store in Seattle when it is robbed one day, the criminal being a hood from an area crime family.  Forced to shoot dead the man who is about to kill her, she has to flee to her childhood home on Maui, Hawaii after his brothers swear vengeance.  There she lives with her doting mother (who is always trying to get her to sleep with men to produce grandchildren), gets a job at an ice cream store, is reacquainted with her old school friend Zoe (now a doctor) and of course gets embroiled in a murder mystery.  Along with two eccentric, but highly capable and shrewd elderly ladies who are vying with her for the reward money, Charlotte dives into the case...since this is "Book One" in the series you can surmise that she survives it all.  Aside from the mystery itself, I was charmed by the social interplay between the characters, giving the story a very warm and funny aura that attracted me to the characters...I could especially relate to Charlotte's early adult struggles with economic independence.  When the next Charlotte Gibson mystery is available from my library for me to read (I just put it on hold), I'll continue with this series, which I recommend as fun, "cozy" reading....

Weekly Short Stories: 1981 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I look at three more science fiction short stories from 1981 as they appeared in editor Donald A. Wollheim's anthology The 1982 Annual World's Best SF with his picks from the previous year.  My song of the year in '81 was the huge Kim Carnes summer hit Bette Davis Eyes.  To me, Hall and Oates hit their peak this year with three songs: Kiss on My List, Private Eyes, and I Can't Go for That.  Rush's masterpiece album Moving Pictures also came out in 1981 (with the songs Tom Sawyer, Red Barchetta, Limelight and Vital Signs) as well as the Moody Blues' comeback LP Long Distance Voyager with its superb track Gemini Dream.  I could go on and on about the great music back then, but I'd better get back to reviewing these stories... 

OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE by James Tiptree, Jr.

This novella gets a little creepy as an incorporeal alien being, while fleeing an equally incorporeal alien predator, descends on Earth and splits its consciousness among three people: a business leader father, his baby daughter and his secretary.  The three, although still ostensibly "themselves", nevertheless seem to make their respective life decisions in a strange kind of harmony that ultimately leads to the story's climax surrounding a massive block of ice in the ocean.  I didn't dig the notion of possession by another entity, but maybe some whose religious beliefs entertain this idea might go for it. On a more general level, though, it does give food for thought: are my opinions and hunches my own, or am I being manipulated through the media and news according to someone else's agenda? 

SLAC// by Michael P. Kube-McDowell

A human exploratory party is on a distant planet to establish communications and relations with a humanoid species there...but their language in places is difficult to translate, eventually putting the party in peril.  The story's title is actually their name for the flying predator/enemy they must contend with...only what is the true nature of "Slac//"?  An examination of our tendency to ascribe intelligence to other species based on their similarities to our own instead of more objective factors...

THE CYPHERTONE by S.C. Sykes

If you had never read the wonderful-but-disturbing 1943 Lewis Padgett story Mimsy Were the Borogoves before reading Sykes' much-too-similar tale, I think you'd like this story of a boy who becomes addicted to a computer game...it certainly captures the way a video game can take hold of someone to the point where they can't stop playing.  The father detects something wrong...his son's personality and outlook is drastically changing...and he knows it's this game he's playing making it happen.  My suggestion: read Mimsy Were the Borogoves first...it's a lot better and more profound, and The Cyphertone strikes me as a major ripoff...

Next week I finish my look at 1981 in short science fiction...

My January 2022 Running and Walking Report

In January, 2022 I ran a total of 150 miles, missing but two days running out of the month with 10 miles being my longest single run.  With walking I covered 130 miles in the same time span, most of it coming from walking back and forth over the course of my normal work day.  I had planned to enter and run a couple of races in January, but very cold mornings on race day during the past three weeks presented a most unattractive picture to me and I demurred, waiting for a more auspicious, warmer time in the future (maybe this Saturday).  I feel pretty good about my running progress so far and look forward to continuing at about the same intensity as I have for the past two months.  Aside from the free, weekly Depot Park 5K held every Saturday morning here in Gainesville, I am seriously considering running the Five Points Half-Marathon on Sunday, February 20th...if the weather cooperates, that is...

About Responsibility for Other People's Experiences

If we're fair to those we love, we will take our own past experiences into account before passing judgment on what they say and do.  These experiences overwhelmingly affect our beliefs, morals, and personal philosophy and those of others are bound to be different from ours.  So spoke Rob Dial in a recent of his Mindset Mentor podcasts...beyond being true to ourselves and behaving in a charitable and decent manner, we are indeed NOT responsible for what others think of us since they are doing so by filtering us through their own experiences.  It gets more convoluted, though.  Dial quotes American socialist Charles Cooley, "I am not who I think I am, I am not who you think I am...I am who I think you think I am".  As social herd creatures we tend to act (or not act) according to how we perceive others reacting to what we do.  But there is no way we can do (or not do) anything without some people objecting and criticizing us.  Better to go back and just be true to our own values and goals and let the chips fall where they may.  It's been my experience that most folks will adapt themselves to accommodate others' quirks and differing beliefs...conformity for its own sake is a death trap spiral.  And deliberately hiding our own talents in the presence of others just to "fit it" is a symptom of this destructive belief pattern.  Time to redefine who "I am" by filtering out our perceived impressions, real or imagined, of how others might define us according to factors in their own experiences of which even they might be unaware... 

Just Finished Reading Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

English author Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein ushered in an era of horror/science fiction writing that still continues today.  In it an ambitious young scientist relates to an English explorer, who has rescued him in the frigid far north, his tragic story of creating a brand new human being...then abandoning him in horror and leaving him to fend for himself, ostracized as a terrifying-looking monster by those encountering him.  Victor Frankenstein's creation isn't far off visually from his depiction in the movies, but unlike the film versions, the Frankenstein monster in Shelley's original account has two years to learn English quite well and has developed a sophisticated worldview, albeit one steeped in offense and desire for revenge.  The Mel Brooks comedy Young Frankenstein is a takeoff of the old Boris Karloff movie and not of the book, which spends little time in the laboratory...and there's no "Igor" here.  Shelley seems to have used this story to illustrate how people are unfairly categorized and stigmatized and not given an equal chance to pursue their own lives of happiness and prosperity, a more general social commentary than shown on the big screen.  Dr. Frankenstein creates his human as a science project but never acknowledges that humanity...he is the story's true villain as the "monster", never shown any level of love or acceptance in his brief life, cannily turns rejection into murderous vengeance against his creator.  A sad story, but one very well written and eye-opening...I wish they had made a movie truer to this excellent book, which I have to admit that I liked a lot more than Bram Stoker's Dracula, which I also recently read...

Not a Cold Weather Runner

Watching the Weather Channel this morning makes me feel like a wimpy Floridian complaining about this weekend's frigid temperatures where I live in Gainesville...low 30s this morning with winds of 20-30 mph (22 degrees wind chill) and expectations of a dip into the mid-20s Sunday morning.  Of course, that's a lot warmer than in the northeastern U.S. with its temperatures in the teens and everything essentially snowbound.  That being said, keep in mind that I grew up in south Florida where a dip into the upper 40s is a major winter event.  This all relates to my running as I try to engage this basically solitary activity in a more social setting by entering local races.  For the past three weeks the temperatures have spiked downward on Saturday into the 30s...and I've had it with shivering to death outside early in the morning under these conditions waiting for the race to begin.  Both my first half-marathon (in 2010) and my only marathon (2011) took place with the temperatures in the mid-20s...why, oh why do they always insist on holding these races during the absolutely coldest conditions in the dead of winter?  A few years ago a 10K race was held in March in the nearby town of Tioga...what I loved about it was its time: Saturday afternoon at 4!  I am more of a moderate-to-warm weather runner...my longest training run (26.6 miles) was accomplished with temperatures in the sixties and I've run more than ten miles on a number of occasions when it was in the upper 80s and even the low 90s...although truth be told in recent years I've tried to avoid the extreme heat as well.  My only caveat with running under warmer conditions is that I try to avoid high humidity...which usually dissipates as the morning advances and the sun rises.  I had planned to run a 5K race a couple of weeks ago and the Newnan's Lake 15K this morning and was confident of doing well in them, but the weather had a different idea.  Next month I'd like to try Gainesville's Five Points Half-Marathon race on the 20th, but if it dips down to this level of coldness then I'll be passing on it as well...enough is enough.  Well, there's a "backup" half-marathon on the Hawthorne Trail that's set to take place in April and I might just go for it...

Quote of the Week...from Nelson Mandela

We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right. 

                                                             ---Nelson Mandela

I came across this quote on the Internet while seeking if there wasn't an appropriate one about the passage of time.  You see, I was comparing how time passed so slowly last September while I was following the progress of the U.S. Open tennis tournament to now, just four months later, with that of the Australian Open.  Back then I was at home full-time, recovering from my surgery with few other daily concerns.  Now, though, I am much more active and have returned to work long ago, rendering my days broken up into little segments many of which either demand my undivided attention or draw me physically away from the TV set where all the great tennis is happening.  The result is that while back then I was able to follow the tournament from the early rounds and get to know several players, this time around I suddenly find myself here today with the final matchups already set in place: Ashleigh Barty against Danielle Collins tomorrow for the women's title and Rafael Nadal vs. Daniil Medvedev (US Open champion) for the men.  Last night after work I did get to see much of the semifinal match between Nadal and Matteo Berrettini, which was entertaining.  As for Nelson Mandela, he languished for much of his adult life in a South African prison for being one the leaders fighting racist Apartheid in that country but later became not only its president but also a champion in his own right for peaceful social progress and reconciliation along the model of Gandhi and King.  The passage of time can play tricks on the mind and give one the false impression that it's all too late now...I remember thinking this lie even as far back as the fifth grade in 1967 when I was only ten!  But now I know better: as long as I am alive and breathing, I will always have time in the "now" to decide whether to do the right thing...this is a privilege as well as an enormous responsibility... 

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer to Retire This Year

United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, appointed in 1994 by Bill Clinton and at age 83 serving on the bench going on 28 years, just announced his retirement following the conclusion of the court's 2022 term...which ends in October.  This sets President Biden up for his first...and possibly last...Supreme Court nomination...which, as he has promised, is almost certainly going to be an African American woman.  I liked Breyer, but as I see it his spirit of compromise just doesn't work in a Supreme Court that has been unfairly manipulated by Republicans into a 6-3 conservative majority.  Now that Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has altered the Senate rules to eliminate the 60-vote threshold to end debate on Supreme Court nominees, the candidate no longer needs crossover support to win confirmation although some are concerned that Democratic Senators Manchin and Sinema, who thwarted recent important legislation placed forth by their own party, might balk at a nominee they regard as extremist.  Nevertheless, Biden should pick someone with a history of strong, capable and passionate articulation of her beliefs that will carry on into her tenure as the next justice...the time for consensus-building in this highest judicial body of the country that Breyer stood for is over for now: time to take off the gloves and get to work laying the foundations for a future majority...   

Weekly Short Stories: 1981 Science Fiction, Part 2

As I continue my look back at 1981's science fiction short stories as presented in the anthology The 1982 Annual World's Best SF (edited by Donald A. Wollheim with stories from the previous year), I remember the sports scene at the time.  Charlie Pell was the Florida Gators football coach, in his third season with them going a mediocre 7-5 including a convincing bowl loss to West Virginia.  In major league baseball, the players went on strike in the middle of the summer and they ended up making an awkward split season out of it all...the Cincinnati Reds, sporting the best overall record in baseball with their ace pitcher Tom Seaver going 14-1, didn't even make the playoffs!  The Miami Dolphins, with the alternating quarterback duo of Woodley and Strock, got back into the playoffs but lost an incredibly exciting opening round playoff game against Dan Fouts and his San Diego Chargers at year's end...I think the 49ers with Joe Montana ended up winning their first Super Bowl of many that season.  But back to those sci-fi stories... 

POLYPHEMUS by Michael Shea

An exploratory mission to a mostly desert distant world finds the crew in a life-or death struggle in one of its lakes as a behemoth of an aquatic creature, much worse than Moby Dick or Jaws with its neural network of tethered shark-and-squid-like "components", takes apart and consumes the trapped crew one by one.  In their midst is a classic he-man hero type, Nemo Jones, and of course he has to take center stage in their final desperate act to escape the monster's clutches.  The novella's premise was fun and exciting...the author's tendency to overly describe the creature's biology in painful detail wasn't and made the story drag...

ABSENT THEE FROM FELICITY AWHILE... by Somtow Sucharitkul

Reminiscent of the Bill Murray Groundhog Day movie that came out twelve years later, humanity on Earth one evening is beset by an advanced alien elementary school class that freezes everyone into repeating the same day...going on millions of years according to their own time scale as they are practically immortal.  Everyone is aware of the situation they are in and many try to change their actions to effect different outcomes, discussing their tactics during the two-hour daily "free time" the aliens allow them.  What a quirky little tale that made me wonder whether the creator of that movie didn't get his or her ideas from here...

Next week I continue reviewing science fiction short stories from 1981...

Football and Tennis Dominate My TV Watching

I split my TV watching this past weekend...at least the part of it that I wasn't working...between the National Football League divisional playoffs and the Australian Open tennis tournament.  True, I could have been watching the Beatles inch painfully and inexorably toward their rooftop concert in the January 1969 rehearsal and recording sessions as presented in the Get Back documentary on Disney Plus...oh, I'll "get back" there in good time.  And on the Pluto channel they're showing the three great old Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.  Then there are the old Through the Wormhole episodes that Discovery Plus is carrying. But right now my focus is sports, and tennis and football are running through my veins...

With pro football, I can't recall in the 54 years I've followed the sport a playoff weekend in which all the games were nailbiters...of the four contests, three were decided by field goals with time running out and the fourth was sent into overtime...with time running out...by yet another field goal. Sunday's games were incredible...Tampa Bay with their 24-point comeback against Los Angeles seemed to have sent the game into overtime with their game-tying score, leaving the Rams only 42 seconds in regulation. But Matthew Stafford, one of my favorite quarterbacks even when he played those many years for perennial loser Detroit, got a bomb completed to standout receiver Cooper Kupp, setting up an easy game-ending field goal.  And Buffalo seemed to have sealed up a victory against Kansas City by scoring a TD with only 13 seconds remaining...but no, Patrick Mahomes engineered a brilliant time-efficient drive that set up a successful 48-yard field goal and sent the game into OT, which the Chiefs won by "defeating" the Bills in the coin toss. Although I was disappointed that the Bucs lost to the Rams, I will be pulling for LA to beat the 49ers next week, as well as for KC to handle Cincinnati...

As for the Australian Open, I've been catching bits and pieces of matches on ESPN-2...it's much different for me than with last year's U.S. Open because then I was always at home, recuperating from my heart surgery.  Still, I've enjoyed the tennis I've been able to see and plan to watch more when I get off from work at night. Not that I plan to spend all my free time watching TV...I have this blog to write, after all...

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...