Music and Math, the Beatles and John Nash...and "Community"

I'm currently in the middle of two different projects, both concerning highly talented and competent people and their working relationships within their respective crafts.  One you already know about if you've been reading this blog: I'm watching the film version of the Beatles and their January 1969 "Let It Be" sessions that Peter Jackson has re-edited and renamed Get Back: it's being shown on the Disney Plus channel, to which I subscribe.  The other is the 1998 Sylvia Nasar biography of American mathematician John Nash, titled A Beautiful Mind and adapted as an Oscar-winning Ron Howard movie four years later.  In both works we get a glimpse into the interpersonal dynamics of those at the top of their respective professions and how the love of what they do often gets greatly distorted by their egos, jealousies, intrigues, suspicion and vendettas.  I don't think this sort of social dysfunction is just a trait of the highly adept and accomplished...I remember in high school how, within certain circles, the same situations arose between students.  And to be perfectly honest...in other social settings I've in which I've found myself as an adult...I've seen the same destructive kind of behavior.  Yet I'm continually being encouraged to seek "community" in relationships with others, something that not only I instinctively resist as a bona fide lifelong introvert but have also bitterly learned tends to be more harmful to me than keeping mostly to myself.  They say the mark of insanity is to keep repeating the same thing and expect different outcomes...I've seen enough in my life over the decades to be distrustful of "community". When I was in school and was found to excel in a subject or course, inevitably the faculty would take me out of my preferred setting where I was better than my fellow students and lump me in with the other "high achievers", immediately thereby canceling out the good feeling I had developed before from working so hard.  Likewise, I imagine that's how some of the musicians and mathematicians felt when in the immediate company of the standouts in their respective fields.  Unfortunately, although it seemed that those portrayed in the film and book seemed to love their work for its own sake, their primary motivation was to be seen as the "top dog" and universally acknowledged to be superior to their colleagues. I'm like this myself, but only to a point...I mainly just want to be considered as a legitimate player.  But it can get to be a little spiritually deflating to be in a field in which, by almost anyone else's standards I am very competent with even a history of achievements but not even recognized as an equal by others within my circle of interests...George Harrison would have understood this only too well as this accomplished and very creative musical artist sat for years, almost as an extra, across from John Lennon and Paul McCartney.  Also, in watching the Beatles film and reading the Nash book I noticed that these people's lives and their choices of projects seemed very chaotic...almost random, as if they were going about their business and relationships like pinballs in a machine, bouncing off one experience into another.  I wonder whether this was really what happened, or was an effect created by the stories' authors and editors.  After all, with both the Beatles and John Nash we have two different versions shaped and presented by third parties according to their own agendas...their real lives were most likely quite different.  Yet one truth did come out: the almost nauseating tendency of people to obsess about establishing hierarchical pecking orders among themselves whenever they meet and engage in "community"...

Weekly Short Stories: 1982 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I finish examining some 1982 science fiction short stories as they appeared in the anthology The 1983 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and featuring his choices from the preceding year.  I remember 1982 as the first year I really paid deep attention to Major League Baseball by watching it on TV: the Atlanta Braves were featured on Ted Turner's Superstation WTBS and I followed their Cinderella season with manager Joe Torre, finally rising from obscurity in the National League West with stars like Dale Murphy, Bob Horner and Phil Niekro to win that division by a game over Tommy Lasorda's Los Angeles Dodgers...a terrible late-season slump by the Braves had made it much closer than it might have been.  Well, here are my reactions to those final three tales in the book...

SOULS by Joanna Russ

Many hundreds of years ago a European abbey is besieged by a group of barbaric, conquering Normans, but the abbess in charge attempts to save her own people by offering the invaders a special deal, promising riches that they couldn't imagine as long as they refrain from violence.  Over the course of the narrative, it becomes clear that she is something quite beyond who she is pretending to be, in this world but not of it.  This novella reportedly was only a part of a larger work, but editor Wollheim included it in his anthology...to me it was only marginally science fiction...

SWARM by Bruce Sterling

In the future what is left of humanity is divided in a life and death struggle between the Mechanists who control the asteroids and the Reshaped, who dwell out by Saturn's rings. An agent of the latter is on a mission to a special star system populated by a swarm of highly interconnected organisms...he wants to take their genetics and generate a force of slave labor for his own people.  The unexpected ending is profound and sadly timely, reflecting on mankind's self-destructive nature through war. When this came out, the Cold War was ramping up again...and now with the invasion of Ukraine, here we go again...

PEG-MAN by Rudy Rucker

Reading like a couple of South Park episodes I know, a woman's husband has become something of a video game addict where he works as an arcade mechanic.  Only he claims there is more to his favorite game, "Peg-Man", than it seems. One day she and her old calculus professor pay him a visit at his workplace...like I said, it's like South Park (especially that fifth-season episode with Towelie and the Crab People)...

Next week I'll begin looking at 1983 science fiction short stories...

My February 2022 Running and Walking Report

In February I ran on all the days of the month, totaling 154 miles with the 13.1 mile Five Points of Life half-marathon (in Gainesville) on the 20th being my longest single run.  In the same span I walked a total of 105 miles.  With races, along with that half-marathon I ran a Depot Parkrun 5K (3.1 miles) race on the 12th.  My times for the half-marathon and 5K race were 2:33:51 and 31:28, respectively.  I feel that this past month has been very encouraging with my running, and in March I intend to enter a couple more races, one being for 5K and the other 10 miles.  Besides that, I'm wondering whether or not to speed-walk one Depot Parkrun 5K per month...they hold these races weekly and they're free. I'm also considering possibly adding swimming to my exercise routine...I'll need to first work things out with the gym of which I am a member... 

Podcast Presents 7 Ideas for Increasing Focus on Tasks

On his Mindset Mentor podcast, Rob Dial recently gave a talk on some of the ways he thinks will help anyone focus more on whatever tasks they deem necessary...he has seven.  The first is to stay away from your phone, an incredibly distracting device: I wonder if some folks are capable of that, as addicted they are to it.  Two, "prepare the brain"...the mind is resistant to a change in focus. Dial suggests some breathing exercises as well as a brief, light transitional activity leading into the task.  Three, eliminate distractions from others by communicating with them (if possible) the need for you to be alone for a little while, and physically isolate yourself by going into another room and closing the door.  Four, Rob Dial opposes multitasking as a general principle because it dilutes the effectiveness and focus of the involved activities and produces less progress and more slipshod results.  Five, keep a notepad with you at all times in order to quickly jot down any significant ideas that come into your head that may be unrelated to what you're trying to accomplish right now...otherwise they tend to play around in your mind, offering distraction.  Six, Dial recommends putting on headphones and playing long tracks of instrumental music to blot out incidental noises that might interfere with concentration.  Finally, he advocates the Pomodoro Technique, in which one works with focus on something for 25 minutes and then takes 5 minutes completely off-task...and then returns to work for another 25 minutes as the cycle continues: this is supposed to be more effective than simply working straight though a task.  As for me, I agree with Rob Dial on most of his principles but have a disagreement of sorts with his exhortation to avoid multi-tasking.  From my experiences his advice is only sound when applied to two similar activities: listening to a lecture while composing a letter produces a conflict but listening to a Mindset Mentor podcast while exercising poses no problem and makes efficient use of time.  As for "preparing the brain" and using headphones more, these are probably the two suggestions I need to focus on the most...what techniques do you use to be able to concentrate better on the task at hand?

Speed Golf: A Viable Alternative to the Original Sport?

I was watching yet another PGA tournament this Sunday afternoon...with yet another group of completely different golfers vying for the title...when it occurred to me what was missing from the sport: timing, which would add more of an athletic dimension to it.  I had all the rules for this new sport worked out in my head, a kind of golf that used the same course, clubs and balls but was much faster and more action based.  And then, just before I set out to write my article on this great invention of mine, I decided to do an online search using the words "speed golf"...sure enough, it's already been invented with professional tournaments going on for ten years already.  According to "their" rules, in an 18-hole round each golfer gets the usual score of total shots, to which is added the total minutes taken to run the course...giving the final composite score.  I don't know if they time the interval between holes...I wouldn't, timing only between the tee and hole.  Also, according to "my" version, I would completely discount how many shots are taken and only go by the time taken to accomplish it...and I'd have the golfers on a particular hole all tee off and play simultaneously...no tedious breaks with players analyzing and lining up shots!  I think that adding the element of timing would make golf more similar to tennis in that the tournaments would tend to go more consistently to the sport's stars instead of being spread out so much among so many.  And, of course, I think it would be a lot more exciting to watch.  Will speed golf ever catch on as a major sport?  I don't know, but reportedly its major tournaments are shown on CBS and ESPN...next time they show one I'd like to see how they do it...

Just Finished Reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

A few weeks ago I was listening to a Rob Dial podcast in which he referenced a book titled The Power of Now but failed to mention its author.  He is Eckhart Tolle, a German metaphysical philosopher and teacher now living in Canada who published the book, full title The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, in 1997.  Reviewing it presents a sort of quandary, in that Tolle maintains that people in general place too much store in their thinking, and that what endures within ourselves is what he says is the "observer", rooted in the here and now.  One's thoughts, he believes, are just so much noise that tends to obscure our true nature. So in reviewing this book of his, I'm giving in to my thinking "self"...forgive me, dude!  The book's format is very readable, in question-and-answer dialog form as the author covers the main concerns about his philosophy, which seems to bear some resemblance to Buddhism although he claims that the kernels of all religions proclaim essential truths...you just have to know where to look for them.  That's the only part of the book I had a problem with: Tolle tends to give his own interpretation of various religions' scriptures...of course, all the references and quotes he uses conveniently fit his thesis.  Lately the notion of "mindfulness", where one pauses during his or her daily routines and worldly endeavors and focuses on what is immediately around them in the present moment, gets star billing here.   Tolle maintains that true enlightenment can only come by shedding the notions of past and future and embracing the here and now where dwells our eternal nature. There is a lot to cover for a book that forswears too much thinking, but Eckhart Tolle isn't against thinking per se...just doing so excessively to the point where one confuses their thoughts with their own true essence.  A very interesting and thoughtful book, one worth going back to but with some accompanying discernment.  A thinking person's book that eschews thinking: sounds Zen, doesn't it...

Quote of the Week...from Leslie Nielsen in the Movie Airplane!

I just want to tell you both good luck.  We're all counting on you.        ---Leslie Nielsen, Airplane!

One of my favorite movie comedies is the 1980 farce Airplane!, a satire of the preceding decade's airplane disaster flicks.  Toward the movie's end, Leslie Nielson's "And don't call me Shirley" character Dr. Rumack is trying to encourage low-confidence stand-in pilot Ted Striker (played by Robert Hays) as he and his co-pilot, flight attendant Elaine Dickenson (Julie Hagerty) try to land the stricken passenger plane safely.  He starts out with the above quote...then keeps repeating it until the plane is on the ground...and then says it again!  To me that was one of the high points of an already side-splitting movie...and the race I just ran this past Sunday reminded me of how preposterous it was.  I was running a half-marathon and had just cleared the hilliest part, with just about three miles to go as my body was aching all over and starting to run out of steam.  And that's when it started, Airplane-style, with people standing on the side of the course repeating the same mantra: "You're almost there!"  Over and over and over and over again, each of them apparently unaware that I still had quite some distance to go while repeating the same tired old line up and down the road.  Finally, just when I turned left on NW 1st Street for my final stretch run, a young woman volunteer yelled out, "You're almost there! I'm telling you the truth!"...apparently, she somehow knew that this had been going on for miles on the course.  I half-expected somebody to repeat it after I had finally crossed the finish line as Leslie Nielson did in the movie...oh well, we can't have everything!  Have you ever experienced this sort of thing, where you keep hearing the same often well-intentioned line over and over again to the point where you're just about ready to slug somebody? 

Fascist Putin, Praised by Trump, Invades Ukraine

Fascist Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, as expected for weeks, today launched his country's invasion of neighboring Ukraine as tanks are rolling in and bombs dropping across this besieged nation.  Putin's biggest American buddy, fellow fascist Donald Trump...who tried to overthrow our dearly cherished free and fair presidential election a year ago...has been full of nothing but praise for Putin, calling his Ukraine strategy of aggression "genius".  And other right-wingers, most notable among them FoxNews' Tucker Carlson, have made no secret of their unbridled support for Putin...what has my country come to?  It's true that under Vladimir Putin and his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, Russia shed its previous aggressive communist ideology in favor of social conservatism...lining themselves up nicely with the political right on several ongoing issues in America.  But don't these people see what carnage, damage and disruption this military takeover of another sovereign nation is going to cause?  This isn't like some football game with folks choosing, say, the Rams or the Bengals...this is life and death, and some of my compatriots need to get their heads screwed on right and their hearts drastically changed.  As for my own heart, it goes out to the Ukrainian people in this time of crisis and suffering...

Weekly Short Stories: 1982 Science Fiction, Part 2

Today I continue my look at some of 1982's standout science fiction short stories as they appeared in Donald A. Wollheim's anthology The 1983 Annual World's Best SF, featuring his selections from the year before.  The prevailing national mood back then was a bit somber and gloomy, what with a deep recession going on, perceived loss of American industry to Japanese exports, and a scary return to the Cold War between Reagan and Brezhnev's successor Andropov...not to mention an explosive situation developing with Lebanon's civil war in the Middle East.  But here we still are, forty years later, with me reviewing four more sci-fi short stories...

PLAYING THE GAME by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann

Jimmy Daniels is a little boy living in a small town...whenever he wakes up from sleep, he discovers he is in a different alternative reality with a different home and parents who, ostensibly the same, have different personalities, states of health, and jobs.  He seeks out the town's cemetery as one of the few places that seem the same regardless which "universe" he finds himself in.  No one around him seems to think anything is amiss, and Jimmy is careful not to let on about his different realities...one of the best really short stories I've read recently and a great ending... 

PAWN'S GAMBIT by Timothy Zahn

An advanced alien civilization, fearful of other intelligent life in their area of space developing into an aggressive threat to them, selectively abducts representative individuals from various worlds and subjects them to board games while analyzing their tactics and ways of thinking to determine their species' threat level.  An Earthman gets kidnapped as well and devises a unique strategy of saving himself as well as his fearsome opponent from another system.  I thought the author hit the mark, revealing humanity's great strength of being able to forge alliances in times of external threat...

THE COMEDIAN by Timothy Robert Sullivan

A very brief tale with a very abrupt ending, it appears that a sick serial child abductor is on the loose with seven kids already disappeared...and it increasingly looks like the man responsible is out to add to the total.  Yet from his viewpoint he is doing good and is doing the bidding of a strange shape-shifting entity who likes to impersonate famous comedians.  It all seems very sinister and dark...turns out that it IS very sinister and dark, but not at all the way the author builds it up...

WRITTEN IN WATER by Tanith Lee 

After a planet-wide plague wipes out almost every human on Earth, the only survivor is an embittered hermit of a middle-aged woman who lives her solitary daily existence as if nothing has changed.  Then one night a star falls from the sky onto the black field adjoining her home...but it is no star, but rather a young alien man.  She helps him recuperate from his shock of landing and although he does not understand her speech the two reach a state of rudimentary mutual understanding.  How the story culminates was pretty disturbing to me, and demonstrates how rigidly people can adhere to their old habitual thought patterns even in the face of cataclysmic change...  

Next week I conclude my look at science fiction short stories from 1982...

TikTok as Forum for Diverse Ideas & Opinions

I have had the short looping video app TikTok on my smartphone for a few months now, never putting out anything on my own but rather just scrolling through the randomly appearing posts of others.  My use of it reflects how I used Twitter: to get people's brief reactions to what is going on around us as well as their general philosophies of life.  Before, when I used Twitter...and social media in general...what I saw was pretty much set in advance by my choice of people I followed and was thereby inherently slanted. When I flick through video after TikTok video (I don't follow anyone or participate in their interactive options of reactions to posts), I'm getting more of a cross-section of viewpoints about most anything, but weighted heavily in favor of current events and issues.  And since the people putting out these videos are for the most part neither celebrities nor anyone I personally know, I am not having to deal with inner conflicts about those individuals whenever I happen to disagree with a posting (and that happens a lot)...I can focus on the message, not the messenger.  Some of the videos out there do stretch the standards of modesty and propriety a bit, but I suppose in a free speech environment it's better to err in that direction than in that of censorship.  Speaking of censorship, just about every mainstream social media platform practices some sort of content regulation and TikTok has its own issues as well...seems that criticism of some autocrats has been suppressed in the past and there was a recent scandal in which a site urged students to vandalize their schools.  I also know that Trump hated TikTok and wanted it banned in the United States...had it not been for him I probably wouldn't have even considered it: thanks, Donald, in a backhanded sort of way.  Is this app perfect? No way...not by far...but it is always interesting.  TikTok as I see it presented is a crazy, chaotic kind of digital bulletin board, a welcome, more grassroots kind of entertainment to check in on whenever I get tired of the contrived and narrative-driven mass media news programs I see on TV.  I'm not necessarily recommending it for you, but I've seen it as a good source for independent opinions and information...although as with everything else it's crucial to be discerning in filtering it all through and not automatically accept everything I read or hear...

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!