On this 11/22, Fifty-Nine Years Later

As I mentioned in Saturday's article, I've just finished reading Stephen King's epic time travel classic 11/22/63...for the sixth time.  Although I'm a fan of King's I typically don't reread his stuff like that...what is the case with this particular novel?  I did like his chief protagonist Jake Epping, whose first-person narration is perhaps the best in any story I've ever read.  And the character of Al Templeton...the man who has discovered a time portal that transports anyone entering it back to a specific moment in September, 1958..is remarkable, especially with regard to how he interprets his discovery and applies it.  But after giving it some thought, I think the main thing I took from the book is something that needs no magic pathway into the past.  It's all, after all, a simple thought experiment.  Although Epping and Templeton did their time traveling as 2011 adults transplanted into a mid-twentieth century environment, my experiment has me, with my present so-called wisdom and knowledge, conveniently entering my own distant past at what I now consider pivotal times of my youth...and then acting differently from what I actually did.  So, for example, maybe instead of my poor study habits back then I set up a regular homework routine and religiously adhered to it.  The resulting good grades and improved relationships with my teachers would also lead to different social relationships with my peers...and differing expectations and new challenges.  But would I be well-equipped for all the changes going on around me including possible adversity from my own parents (people tend to be resistant to change in others, even for the better)...after all, the further I progress in my "new' past life the more novel experiences I will have and no way of determining their positive or negative (and possibly tragic) outcomes.  In a way, this is what Epping discovered in 11/22/63...so let's go further on with that thought experiment.  Suppose I take that regret about my past...poor study habits or something else that comes to mind...and since I don't have a time portal to "remedy" things, instead I simply apply the changed behavior to my present moments, here in good old 2022?  And it's here, I think, where I feel the attraction for Stephen King's best novel, in my opinion.  Templeton sets the goal of preventing the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and Epping is left to complete the task.  I was in the second grade, just having come back to the classroom after lunch, when the terrible event was announced to us.  At home my parents left the TV on with its nonstop coverage of the aftermath...I think that affected me more than the actual initial news.  After all, I was only barely seven and wasn't exactly filled in on what was going on politically...

Podcaster Emphasizes Gradual Improvement and "Becoming" Over Time

Rob Dial's Mindset Mentor podcast of late has featured some pretty spot-on topics...the last two installments have focused on gradual improvement over time as small, good personal habits accrue and build upon one another.  He emphasizes the importance of envisioning who I want to become, taking pains to write it down in as much detail as possible.  And becoming...as author James Clear has emphasized in his book Atomic Habits...is clearly the preferred path.  On Dial's show this morning he suggests a 1% improvement from day to day...sounds reasonable to me although I'm not sure exactly how to enumerate "becoming": a lot of that habit-changing behavior doesn't always translate well into tangible measurement.  Still, as much as feasible, I get what he's saying: it's important to monitor how I'm doing...and make some record of it, even if it is an imperfect process. It's all an imperfect process, anyway!  He also makes a good point: sometimes we set goals for ourselves, projecting into the future our present capacity for fulfilling them.  But we may be selling ourselves short with our planning in that "becoming" someone with abilities and habits can enable us to tackle more ambitious projects and live on a level that would not be possible today.  Food for thought...but don't think too long before acting...

My #4 All-Time Favorite Album: Illinois by Sufjan Stevens

The 2005 album ILLINOIS, by Sufjan Stevens, is my all-time #4 favorite album...I doubt whether most of you have ever heard of it, though, or even of Stevens himself.  It was the fifth album of this versatile and highly creative, multi-instrumental artist with a subdued-but-expressive singing voice.  His previous album, Michigan, contained tracks relating to different parts of that state and his experiences as a resident there...this has continued to Illinois as well as he gives a rigorous history and geography lesson of the Prairie State with autobiographical and Christian themes woven into the lyrics.  One might well say that this is a Christian work that will never be played on any of the so-called "Christian" radio stations that depend on fundamentalist churches to render judgment on what is "appropriate".  Stevens took up 74 out of the allotted 80-minute space on a compact disc, and still had a lot of material left over...much of which he used for his follow-up album The Avalanche (also excellent).  I first heard of Sufjan Stevens and this album while randomly listening one day in 2009 to what was then AOL Radio, on their alternative music channel, when they played Chicago, one of its more known tracks...that was an experience!  I quickly explored further into his music and found that my local public library carried most of his CDs, which I checked out and listened to.  My "song of the year" for 2009 was another Illinois track: Casimir Pulaski Day.  Sufjan Stevens has produced a wide variety of albums, many instrumental in nature, a few Christmas-themed, others more Christian-oriented and for those containing lyrics, nearly all with an introspective, autobiographical slant.  He's quite a singular artist...it's hard to find another with whom to compare him.  Stevens is a Christian who honestly writes about his real, personal experiences and struggles with his faith...so as I've said before, you'll never hear him on whitewashed, sanitized Christian radio.  On Illinois, the songs tend to have overly long titles (and alternative titles as well), which I've whittled down.  Also, he split the brief instrumental endings of a few into separate tracks, which frustrated me when listening to the album in shuffle mode on my MP3 player.  Oh well, nobody's perfect.  Illinois, or Sufjan Stevens for that matter, may or may not resonate with you, but I highly recommend you check it out to see for yourself...YouTube carries it, I believe.  My favorite songs from it are, in order of preference, Casimir Pulaski Day, Jacksonville, Come On Feel the Illinoise, Decatur and Chicago. Below are listed the basic tracks of Illinois as they appear on the album...

CONCERNING THE UFO SIGHTING NEAR HIGHLAND, ILLINOIS

THE BLACK HAWK WAR

COME ON! FEEL THE ILLINOISE!

JOHN WAYNE GACY, JR.

JACKSONVILLE

DECATUR

CHICAGO

CASIMIR PULASKI DAY

TO THE WORKERS OF THE ROCK RIVER VALLEY REGION

THE MAN OF METROPOLIS STEALS OUR HEARTS

PRAIRIE FIRE THAT WANDERS ABOUT

THEY ARE NIGHT ZOMBIES!

THE SEER'S TOWER

THE TALLEST MAN, THE BROADEST SHOULDERS

OUT OF EGYPT, INTO THE GREAT LAUGH OF MANKIND

Next week: my #3 all-time favorite album...from the turn of the century...

Enjoying My Weekend Off from Work

I've been enjoying my weekend off from work, now on Saturday evening approaching the midpoint of it all...Smokey and the Bandit is playing right now on CMT channel.  Earlier I witnessed a couple of concurrent college football games, one...TCU vs. Baylor...ending spectacularly with a literally last-second Horned Frogs victory (keeping them undefeated and in the college football playoff picture), and the other a dismal letdown of a performance by my hometown University of Florida against Vanderbilt, bowing to the Commodores in yet another chapter to the Gators' horribly inconsistent season.  Now I'm toggling back and forth between Reynolds, Field, Reed & Company and the Tennessee/South Carolina game...looks as if relaxation is the word for today.  I had been strongly considering running in tomorrow morning's Cupcake Run (yes, they actually had the nerve to call it that) in Hawthorne southeast of Gainesville...they offered a half-marathon option among their scheduled races.  But the forecast has been for rain, and I've recently (and foolishly) run a half-marathon while ignoring the weather.  That's all right...early in December there will be a 15K race to check out...if the weather is halfway decent, that is.  On the reading front, I just finished reading Stephen King's epic time travel masterpiece 11/22/63, for the sixth time: guess there's something special to that book!  And now I'm tackling (again) another jewel: his psychological horror novel It.  No, I've been studiously avoiding the movie and/or television adaptations of these two great books...King's writing and my imagination have an excellent ongoing working relationship as it is, thank you.  Well, I see Jackie Gleason's making his appearance, so I'd better be going...

Quote of the Week...from Barbara Streisand

People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.    ---Barbara Streisand

Although renowned singer/actress Barbara Streisand sang these words from the sixties' hit Funny Girl musical's song People, it was Bob Merrill who wrote these lyrics.  On the surface, it's all a kind of feel-good statement...yeah, it's good to have a positive opinion of people, I guess.  And I strongly appreciate the presence of certain, specific people in my life...that is irrefutable.  But to sashay around in life relishing being around folks in general not only isn't a need of mine, but the experiences are usually frustrating if not outright distasteful.  All these social gatherings apparently designed with the lucky "people-needers" in mind, to me are just assembling individuals with their own walls and sometimes aggressive agendas toward others.  We just got a little puppy dog a few months ago and it sees us as its pack, with training largely having to do with making it feel secure in its assigned place (at the pack's bottom, of course).  But those people...of which I admit to being one...have the same kind of continually ongoing struggles about who is dominant and who is supposed to be submissive.  This intrigue for status in imaginary hierarchies plagues interpersonal relationships and ruins the social experience for me.  Sometimes I think people want to get together in concerts or mass rallies or similar settings...or even just sit in a coffee shop...just to be around others without the immediate necessity to work out this pecking order crap.  And yet, as we've seen with Covid-19 recently, the desire to just be in crowds isn't always such a hot idea, either.  Besides, when you're in one of them...these running races I occasionally enter come to mind...the people aren't really "together": they're all divided into their little subgroups, engaging in clannish behavior while regarding the strangers around them with guarded formality. When I see other people, I feel a strong sense of empathy toward them as fellow travelers through life, with many of them going through experiences similar to my own. Plus, we all need each other in that we provide important goods and services in our economy and society...my medical issues last year certainly bear that out.  And our close interpersonal relationships like family and close friends are likewise very meaningful.  But the notion that solitude is bad and it's important to seek immersion around others for its own sake has never caught on with me. No, there's got to be a good reason for me to hang out with others...guess I'm just unlucky that way...

Constellation of the Month: Andromeda

 

Andromeda is a prominent constellation in the autumn evening sky, passing overhead for many of us in the northern hemisphere during the month of November.  Attached to Pegasus (Alpheratz is usually seen as common to both constellations), it is probably best known for the Andromeda Galaxy, also called M31 in the Messier catalog of deep space objects.  This galaxy is visible to the acute naked eye in places unencumbered by outdoor lights, but you can still easily view it with a good pair of binoculars. There seems to be a scientific consensus that the Andromeda Galaxy and our own Milky Way will collide sometime in the distant future, eventually combining to form a new, non-spiral galaxy.  Near M31 are two "companion" galaxies, M32 and M110...better use a telescope for those.  Andromeda represents the chained maiden in the ancient Greek Perseus myth, as the hero arrives on the winged horse Pegasus to rescue her from the sea monster.  All three are "in the sky" as constellations, along with Andromeda's mother Queen Cassiopeia and father King Cepheus.  Personally, I think all the old myths are kind of lame...they should reconfigure the night sky with figures from Stephen King stories, and throw in a few from Tolkien and some other more modern writers as well...

Next month: another constellation...

Weekly Short Stories: 1987 Science Fiction, Part 7

Today concludes my examination of 1987 sci-fi short stories as they appeared in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Fifth Annual Collection.  For me in '87, I changed jobs three times and moved twice, radical behavior for someone as tied to routine as myself.  But I will always cherish that brief time we lived in Leesburg...I felt good vibes about that place and the surrounding area with their five big lakes and moderate-size towns like Eustis, Taveres and Mount Dora, all connected by good old US-441.  And it was but a short drive to the beach or big city Orlando...as well as to Gainesville, for that matter.  But let's get back to the final stories in the book...

ALL THE HUES OF HELL by Gene Wolfe

Kyle is on the crew of a space mission in a peculiar system, with their ship seeming to orbit empty space when it is really an invisible, "shadow" world hosting a sentient alien life form they are assigned to capture and study.  One of the crew, Skip, becomes unhinged, thinking himself dead. And a woman on board is pregnant, somehow a significant part of the narrative.  But as the story grinds on, Kyle's cyborg nature starts to become the standout issue.  I'd be less than honest in claiming I understood this story or what the author was trying to say: maybe he was trying to say too much in too little space...

HALLEY'S PASSING by Michael McDowell

A truly impressive horror story ranking up there with Stephen King's best, as a mysterious man transforms like a chameleon, stealthily traveling from one place to another as he continually changes his outward identity while adhering to an obscure personal formula for decision making.  Along the way he randomly murders people.  Yes, I said that...didn't I say this was horror?  

FOR THUS DO I REMEMBER CARTHAGE by Michael Bishop

As this story progresses the reader can pick up on what the author is doing here.  He is writing an alternative history of the world while resourcing and renaming important scientific discoveries and technological innovations.  East meets West as a Chinese astronomer, knowledgeable about his own colleagues' advanced knowledge, encounters the story's protagonist Augustine in a besieged city whose walls are threatened by invading barbarians...

MOTHER GODDESS OF THE WORLD by Kim Stanley Robinson

If you are a mountain climber and knowledgeable or interested in the detailed topography of Mount Everest, this story is for you as two different climbing teams race against an opportunistic publicist to the site on the world's tallest mountain where two famous earlier climbers met their demise in the 1920s.  More a novella than a short story, it's a funny tale and probably one for which you might consider slowing down your reading in order to more fully appreciate.  Like Moby Dick with 19th century whaling, there are lots and lots of little details here about how to scale mountains as well as the various sides of Everest, also called Chomolunga, "Mother Goddess of the World".  There's also a lot about the native people in this amazing part of the world, especially the Tibetan Sherpas...and Buddhism.  Good read...

Next week I begin looking at science fiction short stories from 1988...

Podcaster Talks About the Need to Mess Things Up

On his Mindset Mentor podcast (20 minutes each, four days a week), personal development coach Rob Dial tends to repeat the same principles, often packaging them slightly differently.  One recurring theme he consistently stresses is the crucial importance of letting oneself mess things up.  And it's not just because too many of us (myself included) are too hesitant to start something new because we fear we'll make fools of ourselves.  It's important to get past that fallacy, to be sure, but there's another factor to consider as well.  By making mistakes, "cocking it up" as James Bond's boss likes to warn him against, this focuses the brain on the problem with epinephrine supplied by the body to help with the necessary learning. Messing up, or "f##king up" as Dial so eloquently puts it, is an integral part of education.  Which made me consider once again how "ass-backwards" my own school experiences were, with teachers awarding perfection with high grades and deducting grades for mistakes.  One Russian professor in college even told my class that we could say anything in Russian to him, but only if it was mistake-free!  And my experiences while working decades ago with Vietnamese refugees in the kitchen of a local Chinese restaurant supported Dial's conjecture: those who put their pride aside and tried to communicate as much as possible in English...no matter how clumsily...quickly learned it fluently while others fearful of not saying things "right" were much, much slower in their learning. Sometimes Rob Dial says stuff that is affirming, and, in a way, this podcast was as well.  But it's more affirming with what I see in others rather than in what I myself am doing, sad to say...I have a lot of work ahead of me in this area...

Miscellaneous Musings with Daisy This Morning

While Daisy the Wonder Dog stalwartly guards our home from squirrels, crows, other big birds...and FedEx trucks...I'm sitting here ruminating over a random assortment of stuff.  First of all, the 2022 general election came and went, yet six days later we still haven't confirmed that the Republicans will narrowly take control of the House of Representatives and several close elections are slow in determining the winners because of mail-in balloting.  Aside from this, Alaska and Georgia have runoff election provisions whenever no candidate achieves a majority in the general election...and that's just what happened there.  Yet the Democrats will remain in control of the Senate, helping President Biden with his various nominations for the next two years and offering a counterweight to whatever the House Republicans dish out on the other side of the Capitol building.  Our local area elections and referenda served up typically mixed results...I haven't gotten around to checking them all out yet.  As of this writing I haven't heard of anyone trying to overturn election results...I kind of have a feeling that this type of mischief is mainly a Donald Trump thing, and interest in doing it drops off precipitously when he isn't bullying people around for his own ambitions...we'll see what the future brings.  Yesterday, as a couch potato, I was treated to two great, close football games, Minnesota somehow managing to beat Buffalo in overtime (jettisoning the Dolphins into first place) and Green Bay socking it once again to Dallas in a nailbiter...the fact that I was rooting for both eventual winners didn't hurt, either.  As for my wavering running race plans for this upcoming Sunday morning, the long-range weather forecast doesn't bode well, with rain predicted for race time.  I'll wait a couple more days, but if it doesn't change, I think I'll just pass up on it...

My #5 All-Time Favorite Album: Superunknown by Soundgarden

In the early 1990s the debate was on about which band was the best in the grunge subgenre of hard rock...was it Nirvana or Pearl Jam? By 1995 the answer was clear to me: neither, it was another Seattle-area band: SOUNDGARDEN, featuring one of the greatest singers ever in rock, Chris Cornell, along with lead guitarist Kim Thayil, drummer Matt Cameron and bassist Ben Shepherd.  In 1994 they released their hallmark SUPERUNKNOWN, now my all-time #5 favorite album. I didn't know it at the time, though, being gradually treated to radio and video releases from it like Spoonman, My Wave, Fell on Black Days and Black Hole Sun.  Spoonman may have been the coolest video ever, My Wave was my "song of the year" for 1995 with its defiant message to meddlers everywhere, and Black Hole Sun...curiously played on radio as an adult contemporary song although it was probably the darkest on the album with a very scary accompanying video...contained the catchy (to me) line "Hang my head, drown my fear, till you all just disappear".  But I was still unaware of the album itself until visiting my sister Anita in 1994 and noting that my musically inclined nephew Greg owned a copy.  But even then, I wouldn't have heard it except for a quirky twist of fate: a couple of years later, while listening to one of Gainesville's more obscure AM radio stations (on 1390 kHz) play a succession of Doors albums in their entirety, suddenly they started playing Superunknown instead.  Buying the album, I took to it quickly...especially the first eight tracks...and have never looked back.  Superunknown is definitely Soundgarden's best work, combining a generally connected musical thread of their instrumental and singing styles along with some really complex arrangements to form something that they could never hope to match again.  But that's all right: the band came through with this one!  Along with the others are two deep tracks that resonated with me: Mailman and Fresh Tendrils...definitely NOT adult contemporary material.  The original album contained fifteen tracks...some later editions added another song, She Likes Surprises, at the end although I don't think it fit the album.  Superunknown bluntly discusses topics like death, depression, drug abuse and social disaffection, so it may seem a little over the top or disturbing to you...make your own choices, I say. Below are my rankings of Superunknown's original tracks according to my liking...

1 MY WAVE

2 MAILMAN

3 FRESH TENDRILS

4 SUPERUNKNOWN

5 HEAD DOWN

6 LET ME DROWN

7 BLACK HOLE SUN

8 SPOONMAN

9 FELL ON BLACK DAYS

10 THE DAY I TRIED TO LIVE

11 KICKSTAND

12 4TH OF JULY

13 HALF

14 LIKE SUICIDE

15 LIMO WRECK

Next week: a completely different-sounding album as my #4 all-time favorite...

Ran Gainesville's Depot Parkrun 5K Race This Morning

This morning I ran Gainesville, Florida's free timed-and-posted 5K (3.1 miles) race: the Depot Parkrun, held Saturday mornings, appropriately, in pretty Depot Park just south of downtown.  It's the eighth time I've run in this event, which has been held 152 times so far, and my first there since March earlier this year.  The course is a winding loop, slightly hilly in some places, through the nature scenery.  It takes four laps to cover the distance, and you sign up in advance online and get a printable barcode that they scan along with the little plastic card they hand you at the finish line giving your time.  Then, about an hour later you can see the results online...click HERE for today's.  This morning the temperature was a foggy and unseasonably warm 66 degrees with, naturally, 100% humidity.  Still, it was better than last Sunday's conditions on the Hawthorne Trail when I struggled through the Tom Walker Memorial Half-Marathon...I entered today's race to build my confidence back up and employ a better running strategy, which I did.  Not even remotely trying to set any personal records, I simply ran a comfortable, sustainable pace under the conditions and finished with a time of 31:38.  Out of the 99 runners and walkers finishing the race, I crossed the finish line 43rd and was the 7th oldest...I thoroughly dig seeing my fellow senior citizens out there!  I still haven't decided what to do about next Sunday's half-marathon being held from Hawthorne, a few miles southeast of Gainesville.  First, I think I'll check out the long-range forecast for that morning and, if the temperatures and conditions look substantially better than they were at the Tom Walker Race (meaning much cooler), I'll probably enter it...

Quote of the Week...from Neil deGrasse Tyson

Democracy...of the people, by the people, and for the people...is so fragile that you can vote it out of existence.  Just select candidates who will only accept the election results if they win.

                                                           ---Neil deGrasse Tyson

It's now coming up on three days since the midterm elections that were supposed to determine which parties control the Senate and House of Representatives...and it still is inconclusive, although in all likelihood the Republicans will regain control of the House after just four years of being in the minority.  Supposedly, the tedious time-consuming mail-in ballot counting is continuing across the country, with Nevada and Arizona standing out among the close Senate races and numerous House races still undetermined.  As for me, throughout my adult lifetime I've seen swings between the two major parties and easily accept how voters can run on emotion and ignorance when casting their ballots...I've been known to regret some of my own votes as well.  But implicit in all this cyclic give-and-take of partisan political power is the confidence we have that the losers of elections will accept the results and allow for the peaceful transfer of power.  Ever since the Bush-Gore election debacle in 2000 I've seen an increased amount of election denial on the part of both politicians and people at large, and this is unhealthful for a representative democratic republic as we have.  It reached a head in 2020 when an actual sitting president refused to accept his electoral defeat...and now within one of our parties a large number only accept elections if they win.  So, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, the narrator of the great Cosmos series...and someone I follow on Twitter...is absolutely right in his assessment, which he made just before the election.  By the way, in fledgling democracies elsewhere in the world, the same thing has happened and is happening...the people elect someone as leader who uses the system once he is in power to change the laws to ensure that he will remain in power: not cool at all here in the good old U.S.A....

Tropical Storm Nicole Passing by Gainesville Today with Wind and Rain

Nicole, hopefully the final tropical storm to affect us in northern Florida, is currently passing through the central part of the state's peninsula on its way to the Gulf of Mexico where, at some point, it is predicted to make a turn toward the north and Georgia and the western Carolinas.  In the meantime, Gainesville is being subjected all day and night today to strong winds and tropical storm force gusts along with continual, strong and slanted rain.  I've been tuned in to The Weather Channel, which has been emphasizing Florida beaches...especially those sections like Vero Beach where the minimal hurricane, now a tropical storm, came ashore and places like Daytona Beach Shores which suffered much damage during Hurricane Ian a few weeks ago.  Still, other than the rain and annoying wind, Nicole should pass through our area without too much trouble...although I'm crossing my fingers about the power staying on in our area.  It developed a few days ago east of the Bahama and began drifting westward through Florida, sending Weather Channel meteorologists up and down the eastern Florida coast.  Melissa and I have stayed a number of times at Daytona Beach Shores and seeing the combination previous damage from Ian with the new storm's surge made a big impression on us.  Locally, Santa Fe College and the University of Florida are closed today and, of course, tomorrow is Veteran's Day.  Nicole is not a very strong storm as hurricanes go, certainly nowhere near in impact as Ian, but it does encompass a very large area and will take a while to pass on through...  

Weekly Short Stories: 1987 Science Fiction, Part 6

Today I continue discussing short stories from the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best SF, Fifth Annual Collection.  1987 was an interesting year for me in sports.  In baseball, the World Series, between the St. Louis Cardinals and the improbable Minnesota Twins went seven games: that's nothing new.  But it was the only time that the home team won every game in the Series, leading all of them into the ninth inning.  In pro football, the NFL experienced its second players' strike in five years...this one in mid-season...and the owners decided to use replacement non-union players (scabs in union parlance) to fill in the missing games.  So, in the American Conference East, Baltimore went 3-0 during this period while my Dolphins, without Dan Marino, went 1-2...and missed the playoffs by one game: what a rip-off.  The only redeeming factor in the season was former Tampa Bay quarterback Doug Williams, now for Washington, thoroughly kicking Denver in the Super Bowl...but that happened in early 1988.  Okay, enough about sports, how about those stories...

EVER AFTER by Susan Palwick

This is dark fantasy, not science fiction.  In a medieval culture, this story reads more like Cinderella with Caitlyn subbing for her, and her "fairy godmother" is an earthly woman of a distinctively familiar, scary persuasion...maybe I should term this tale "gothic fairy tale horror" instead... 

THE FOREST OF TIME by Michael Flynn

An alternative reality in which the United States is broken up into warring sections, the "country" of Pennsylvania is visited, accidently, by a scientist from "our" Earth who has researched interdimensional travel and has lost his way back home.  Different individuals in the military interrogate him in captivity after his rescue in the wilds. It's these interactions that make the story work for me as the reader sees different motivating factors at work... 

THE MILLION-DOLLAR WOUND by Dean Whitlock

My favorite story of today's bunch, it takes the state's exploitation of its soldiers in wartime to its logical conclusion as Billy thinks he got his "million-dollar wound" that will take him out of the brutal ongoing Bolivian war and save him...but he instead is "saved" by advanced medicine and returned to combat duty.  He and his buddies soon see that their loophole of surviving this conflict through injury is being thwarted at every step, as modern medical technology and procedures seem to have the answer to every eventuality.  You might think a story like this is promising, but it's really kinda scary...

THE MOON OF POPPING TREES by R. Garcia y Robertson

The 1890 massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee and its leading causes, including the Ghost Dance, form the focus of this tale, told from the vantage point of a young Indian woman caring for an elderly shamanic Indian man.  Their dreams are entangled with modern physics of the relativity sort, recognized by a white Quaker at the local school.  He helps them as they embark on a vision quest into the forbidden Black Hills.  And then there is the Tachyon, which really sends this story deeply into the science fiction realm...

DINER by Neal Barrett, Jr.

Where are the birds and why are there so many annoying bugs? This question and others are eventually answered as a man in a near-future western Gulf coast fishing town lives his daily existence in poverty along with the other townsfolk...the food, drink...even cigarettes...are all substandard, but they get by.  And then there are the Chinese functionaries and soldiers who exercise authority over them.  Implied is a future conflict between the Soviet Union and the U.S.A. that's leaves the Chinese in control to pick up the pieces and reorganize the world as they envision it...

Next week I conclude my look at short science fiction from the year 1987...

Podcaster Gives Suggestions for Better Communication

On a recent Mindset Mentor podcast, personal development coach Rob Dial approached the subject of effective communications, which incidentally turned out to be the title of an English class I took in my senior year of high school.  Except that back then the teacher...as was overwhelmingly the case during that time...didn't really teach anything.  Dial, on the other hand, has broken the subject down to interpersonal interaction...usually on a conversational level...with three key elements to his presentation.  They form the acronym L-U-V, coined by psychologist Karol Kumpfer: listen, understand, validate.  This in itself wouldn't be of much help to me, but Dial expands upon them.  With "listen", he decries the way most exchanges go, with silence beyond a brief pause something awkward and to be avoided, and the two sides often thinking more about what they're going to say next than actually picking up what the other is saying.  Instead, Dial suggests that the listener give the speaker his or her undivided attention and, whenever a pause happens, count "one Mississippi" to three before speaking.  This gives the other a chance to continue, often going into a deeper and more meaningful mode of expression. Listen without judgments, and with empathy toward the speaker...for we all have different life experiences leading to where we are today.  With "understand", the idea is to convey that through one's expressions, head nodding, "uh-huh" type cues, and so on, that the speaker is understood (I'm already pretty good with this).  And "validate" is to let the speaker know that you are not there to "fix" them and render judgment, but instead that you are interested in their viewpoint, asking follow-up questions to express that interest and their worthiness as a speaker.  Dial noted that many families have this problem where parents tend to listen to their children with the aim of "fixing" any perceived problems...leading to the kids clamming up and becoming secretive (that was the case with me when I was growing up).  I think all these suggestions are valuable as long as I am focused on communicating in a proactive way...but that's only half of the formula as I see it.  I think all of what Rob Dial presented would be self-evident if I myself, as a speaker, had over the course of my formative years regularly experienced conversations in which the other attentively listened without judgment or interruption and affirmed the worth of my opinion or narrative, not seeing my message as a problem that they were supposed to fix or a challenge that they needed to put down.  The spiritual saying "Do unto others as you would have them to unto you" is the proactive path, but most folks actually learn to "Do unto others as they do unto you"...

Ran the Tom Walker Memorial Half-Marathon Yesterday Morning

Yesterday morning I ran my fourth Tom Walker Half-Marathon race here in Gainesville, and weatherwise it was easily the worst by far.  There's a reason that long-distance races just aren't offered across Florida during the late-spring-to-early-fall months: the heat combines with the high humidity to produce a very difficult running environment as it tends to interfere with the body's capacity to perspire effectively, commonly resulting in overheating.  Although I signed up to run this event during the last week in October, it wasn't until a few days later that I found out the temperature and humidity would be the worst, in the 70s and 90s respectively...ugh, this just isn't supposed to happen in November!  To further aggravate the situation, the clock was moved back an hour Sunday morning, meaning that the sun would be that much further above the horizon at the 8:00 race time. Still, I gamely got up early yesterday morning and made my way down to Boulware Springs Park, in southeastern Gainesville, where it hooks up with the racecourse, the Hawthorne Trail.  I pre-hydrated and carb-loaded on Saturday but knew this run of 13.1 miles over a lot of sloping trail would be a challenge.  The Florida Track Club, which organized this race, provided pacers, with the slowest one going at a 2-hour 20 minutes finishing time; I thought that was a little too fast for where I was at, but for the first six miles I kept up with the pacer.  Then I had to have a conversation with myself about how I would continue, with the heat/humidity really starting to take a toll on me.  I decided to go Galloway Method for a few miles, running for one or two minutes and then walking for one.  This I did up to about the ten-mile mark, when I decided to simply walk at a brisk pace...this is how I finished the race, in my easily slowest finishing time by far, 3:05:29...yet I won my gender/age group (because I was the only finisher in my gender/age group).  Still, I covered the distance...this was my 14th half-marathon since I began running them in 2010.  In retrospect, I probably should have run from the start at a much slower pace instead of trying to keep up with that pacer...maybe I wouldn't have had to walk as much at the end.  After the race was over, the good people at FTC who were managing the finish line let me sit for a few minutes on one of their chairs...thank you!  It's Sunday afternoon as I write this to be posted early Monday morning, and I feel a lot better but still predictably tired and sore.  I'm going to need to look at how I tackle this distance in any future races...I had actually skipped running the Tom Walker Memorial Half-Marathon in an earlier year just because it was too hot and muggy...which proves that growing older doesn't automatically translate into growing wiser!  Still, am I glad I ran this race under such conditions? Hell yes!  Would I run it the same way again? Hell no! You can read the 2022 results by clicking HERE...

My #6 All-Time Favorite Album: Automatic for the People by R.E.M.

For the Georgia-based alternative rock group R.E.M., AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE...my #6 all-time favorite album...was the 1992 follow-up to Out of Time (#21 for me) and the immediate predecessor to Monster (#16), at the apex of that great band's long run.  My first exposure to it, appropriately, was its first track, Drive, played on my local station Rock/104.  Later on, Man on the Moon came out and blew me away...they're both all-time favorite songs of mine, as is the album's closer Find the River.  In all, Automatic for the People is comprised of twelve tracks that, for the most part, present a mood of melancholia and a coming to terms with aging and death in their different manifestations.  So, it's not exactly a rocker, and former Led Zeppelin keyboardist/bassist John Paul Jones even contributed string arrangements for several of the tracks (including Drive).  I was surprised reading how lead guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry worked out and recorded much of the tracks' instrumental sections and then presented them to singer/lyricist Michael Stipe to bring out the lyrics, surprised especially when his words seamlessly fit with the music.  Below are listed the album's tracks in order, along with a little commentary from yours truly...

DRIVE--Whatever Stipe's intentions when writing this, I keep thinking of a rebellious kid down the street from me when I was growing up who thought he was so cool because of his impulsiveness and surly demeanor.

TRY NOT TO BREATHE--One of several songs at least on the surface dealing with impending death (or drastic change).

THE SIDEWINDER SLEEPS TONIGHT--To me this is about a cute little baby/toddler and the wonder of childhood...

EVERYBODY HURTS--A strong anti-suicide song, to urge those in desperate straits to form a broader perspective about their plight...

NEW ORLEANS INSTRUMENTAL NO. 1--Pretty, no words obviously, I though Endgame from Out of Time much better.

SWEETNESS FOLLOWS--Very gently sung, about overcoming adversity. 

MONTY GOT A RAW DEAL--Very somber tribute to actor Montgomery Cliff, disfigured in an auto accident at the height of his career and victim of persecution for his homosexuality.

IGNORELAND--Strongly political, anti-Republican it seems, Stipe didn't care for the then-recent and ongoing Reagan/Bush administrations and was clearly pissed off here.

STAR ME KITTEN--"Star" in the title is a euphemism for "F###", which appears in the song lyrics: lush and sensual.

MAN ON THE MOON--A combination tribute to the late comedian Andy Kaufman and celebration of rational humanism, not so much about the moon after all.

NIGHTSWIMMING--A wistful reminiscence about youthful, innocent skinny-dipping.

FIND THE RIVER--The video emphasizes death, but the lyrics can mean any impending, profound passage, be it within this life or beyond. 

Next week: Album #5... 

Just Finished Reading Assassin's Quest by Robin Hobb

The other day I finished reading Assassin's Quest, Robin Hobb's concluding book in her Farseer Trilogy after going through the first two, Assassin's Apprentice and Royal Assassin...click on their titles to read my reviews, which I recommend before you continue this article.  As in tightly chronologically ordered series like this where what happens in the first two volumes directly leads into the beginning of the third, there is little of specifics about which I can discuss without ruining the story for anyone who hasn't begun reading this series yet.  I can cut to the chase with generalities, though...here we go.  Assassin's Quest succeeds in tying up the lingering mysteries from the first two books as readers normally expect from the author...bravo!  I mentioned in one of my reviews the absence of mythical creatures in this series...I'm afraid the ending backloaded a crucial factor in this regard, which almost made it seem like a deux ex machina tactic on the part of Hobb that made the ending much less satisfying to me.  I also felt that telepathic communication over distances between the different characters, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not, took up too much of the narrative and drove the story's resolution to too high a degree instead of real-life action and character interaction.  Well, for what it's worth, I'm glad to get that off my chest.  There is no shortage of fantasy fiction out there to read, but unfortunately too much of it involves privileged "nobles"...in essence authoritarian dictators...presented as the "good guys" while commonfolk are often depicted as overly ignorant and superstitious.  If you dig these stereotypes, then you shouldn't have too much trouble with this genre...but it bugs me.  Maybe down the line I'll try a new fantasy series, but for now it's on to a different type of fiction...

Quote of the Week...from José Altuve

 I feel proud to be able to play every day.  That's what makes me really happy.      ---José Altuve

José Altuve is perhaps the most talented and accomplished hitter in baseball today when it comes to pure batting.  He has played for his major league career on the Houston Astros, a team that has won the Amercian League pennant four out of the past six seasons and the World Series in 2017.  It was in that year of 2017, however, that the franchise...and players like Altuve...have received much negative attention for its team scandal in which, during home games in their stadium, opposing teams' catchers' signals to their pitchers were secretly filmed and conveyed to Astro batters to give them an unfair advantage, a clear violation of the rules that has tainted them in subsequent years...even up to today as Houston plays Philadelphia in this year's Series.  This sort of cheating scandal isn't new to sports, and instead of going more deeply into it I'd like to discuss what it does to players like Altuve who get stuck in it.  José Altuve is the last player who needs an unfair advantage to prop up his already spectacular batting, and he reportedly was angry whenever the others tried to give him stolen signals.  But whenever there is a conspiracy within an organized group to transgress the rules or law, be it a sports team, the police, a political group, family, just about any workplace, or even an informal social clique, the "Code" comes into play which compels the members to silence in the face of the violations...this doesn't just happen in The Godfather and Goodfellas.  The result is such members find themselves as victims of a no-win situation that they had little-to-no influence in creating.  Either they come clean and report the violations outside the group and be shunned as violating the Code, or they stay true to the Code and get vilified by the outside...such is the situation Altuve and other Astros players like pitching ace Justin Verlander find themselves in.  I am personally very much aware of this disgusting aspect of human social interaction and have many memories going back all the way to my childhood of this type of group abuse of individuals.  It's gotten to the point where I have a strong sense of when something untoward is going on around me, causing me to instinctively withdraw as much as possible from contact with those I believe are centrally involved.  And I can tell among a group that certain of them are up to no good...even when I am not privy to any specific information.  People-lovers will say I'm paranoid...no, I'm just experienced and wary.  As for Mr. Altuve, I say don't worry, my friend, be happy and play...

More Jigsaw Puzzles

 

At the Alachua County Friends of the Library book sale recently I bought a couple of 300-piece jigsaw puzzles...there they are above, I just finished them.  I enjoy the process of putting together these pictures, with each piece a challenge as to color shade and shapes that interact with each other to form the composite scene.  Three prerequisites to me doing a jigsaw puzzle: (1) no large sections...such as a clear sky...in which there are little to no variations on the picture from piece to piece, (2) the pieces cannot be so similar in shape that the wrong piece fits in the wrong place, and (3) the puzzle has to be a simple picture: no special gimmicks such as a puzzle within a puzzle.  The best ones are the 300–500-piece puzzles I can lay out on the tabletop and assemble in an hour or two, like the above.  Now that I'm through, I'm thinking that maybe I should have hung around that sale longer and bought some more puzzles...

Weekly Short Stories: 1987 Science Fiction, Part 5

Here are my reactions to four more 1987 short stories as they appeared in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Fifth Annual Collection. 1987 may well be the last year I faithfully and regularly listened to Top Forty radio, actually noting with interest which songs rose to the top of the charts.  There was a lot of good music this year, with Susanne Vega's haunting ode about child abuse, Luka, being my favorite song of that year...right behind it on my "list" was T'Pau's one hit: the rousing Heart and Soul. I remember this was the time when U2 punched through into superband status with their Joshua Tree album, highlighted by the tracks With or Without You and I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For. Music videos were still imaginative and creative, and I could have the radio on and every record they played was actual music, even if I didn't like it...not like today.  But enough of music: let's get back to those stories...

SHADES by Lucius Shepard

This novella is a ghost story, set in post-war Vietnam as a returning soldier encounters the departed spirit of his own fighting comrade, a disliked superior named Stoner who died in a village from an explosion.  And as in other tales, Stoner's spirit is trapped in Vietnam, seeking release...and so flows this very descriptive story that reads as if it were written by someone who had experienced that terrible conflict in the most personal terms.  Very gripping...

THE FAITHFUL COMPANION AT FORTY by Karen Joy Fowler

This is a brief, thoroughly muddled tale mixing the Lone Ranger and Tonto characters with Eastern philosophy, social theories and a general treatment of someone who seems fated to play second-fiddle to the more charismatic character.  Maybe it's me, but I just don't get this story...

CANDLE IN A COSMIC WIND by Joseph Manzione

Sometimes stories are hard to pick up at the start...this one was, with a Soviet observer at a US nuclear missile base caught in a sudden nuclear superpower war and conflagration.  But then there are these tall, ducklike friendly aliens walking around later in the middle of what she interprets as the nuclear winter...what is Avdotya Nazarovna to make of this as she blames the Americans for starting the war?  Quite a brilliant story, when all is said and done...

THE EMIR'S CLOCK by Ian Watson

This short tale covers a lot of stuff. The young prince of a small Middle Eastern emirate, soon to ascend to his country's leadership in the face of terrorism threats, is attending college in the USA, where he platonically befriends a young American woman.  The prince is forming his own theories about the creation of humanity, and the woman discovers they go contrary to his Muslim faith.  And...she wonders...what is his rationale behind his sometimes casual, hedonistic behavior?  The prince one day shows her a cryptic message hidden alongside an old church clock...and then she wonders if terrorism might be a viable option after all.  The story, though, isn't plausible to me since it assumes time travel into the past...

Next week: more from 1987...

I Voted, Let the Election Take Its Course

Melissa and I have both filled out, signed and mailed our ballots for the November general election this year.  But those political ads continue on TV, annoying in their negativity and dishonesty...wish I could somehow get some sort of exemption from having to see them...wait a minute, how about just muting them and looking away!  Although progressive documentary filmmaker Michael Moore has predicted the Democrats will do very well in this election, most other people...including myself...think that the Republicans will take over control of the House of Representatives and possibly even achieve a Senate majority, while continuing their control of most state legislatures and governorships.  Why?  One reason as I see it: Democratic-leaning voters reverting to their old habit of sitting on their hands during off-year elections whenever "their" president is in power, as if they expect him to wave a magic wand and decree everything they want.  Folks, that ain't how things work here in America!  You have to be a consistently active, interested voter on the local, state and national level in every election presented to you.  If one party's constituents statistically pass over elections that don't "excite" them, then the other has a built-in advantage that regularly results in unpopular politicians elected and unpopular legislation enacted (upheld by unpopular judges).  Getting out on the streets and protesting the actions of people you could have voted against is NOT "democracy in action" as one deluded senator had earlier claimed.  In spite of all the rhetoric about voter suppression going on in various states, the sad truth is that the drop-off in voting during off-year elections is primarily due to too many registered voters WILLFULLY REFUSING to exercise their civic duty as Americans.  Not that I plan to let this election get under my skin...I performed my voting responsibility as a citizen and can't control what others choose to do (or not do).  Along with our mail-in ballots we received a notice that we will have to reapply to receive them for future elections.  I myself would much rather vote in person on Election Day and only went absentee because of Covid...

My October 2022 Running and Walking Report

In October my running stats were pretty much commensurate with those of the previous few months...just plodding along, exercising every day.  The major difference was that, with the onset of the fall running race season here in northern Florida, I was able to enter a couple of middle-distance races here in Gainesville, both 10K (6.2 miles): the Tom Walker Preview on 10/15 and the Run the Good Race on 10/22.  Both were held on Saturday mornings, the first out on the Hawthorne Trail and the other in the office park and residential area around North Florida Regional Medical Center.  I ran both seeking to establish a reasonable.pace for my age, finishing with times of 1:04:55 and 1:03:20, respectively.  My legs were sore in the immediate hours and days following each race...my training has been on soft, level surfaces, and the hard, hilly asphalt surfaces in these races were a bit uncomfortable.  I thought maybe I should train more under these conditions for future events and then concluded that I don't want to overtrain and overstress the soft connective tissue...a problem plaguing athletes in today's "only winning matters" sports world.  In November, there will be two half-marathons (13.1 miles) offered, both along that same Hawthorne Trail...I've already signed up for the first on Sunday the 6th and if all goes well, might try out the second one two weeks later.   As for my walking, since I naturally rack up the mileage due to my generally active lifestyle, I haven't been measuring it for months, although I easily average several miles a day.  Oh, with regard to that upcoming half-marathon on November 6th, the Florida Track Club is organizing it and they have included pacer runners based on different finishing times...the slowest is running at a 2 hours 20 minutes pace.  My plan is to run just behind that pacer...it should alleviate a lot of the pacing problems I had when I ran the preview race earlier this month.  Hopefully, the weather will hold up for that morning...

My #7 All-Time Favorite Album: The White Album by the Beatles

The 1968 double album THE BEATLES, more commonly referred to as "THE WHITE ALBUM" due to its packaging, is my all-time #7 favorite album.  The Fab Four composed much of the music here while on an Indian retreat and, while the recording reflected a much more individualist approach to the Beatles' music-making then their previous, more team-oriented efforts, the overall effect...and this may have had a lot to do with their incredibly talented producer George Martin...was a surprisingly cohesive work, especially considering its length and number of tracks.  I wouldn't hear the entirety of this album until four years later in the fall of 1972 when a buddy of mine lent me his copy...I bought one for myself soon thereafter.  For an album with such a name, The White Album was easily the band's darkest work and should have been named "The Black Album"...it dovetailed perfectly with the personal period of prolonged adolescent depression I was undergoing at the time (especially the contributions from George Harrison and John Lennon).  The album also was loaded with "clues" about the "Paul McCartney is dead" conspiracy theory floating around at the time, and I would listen intently to the most suspicious track, Revolution 9, for hidden messages buried beneath the wall of noise in it.  That was the longest "song" on the album although it was more an abstract audio collage created together by John and his newfound love Yoko Ono.  Some of the tracks I knew from the late '60s like Blackbird (covered by the Brazilian group Bossa Rio) and Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, a Beatle-ized reggae tribute. And I much preferred the "fast" Revolution that was the flip side to Hey Jude to the album's slower Revolution 1.  Good Night, written by John for his son Julian, was sung by Ringo Starr, his greatest ever vocal performance in my opinion.  Below are my own personal rankings of the thirty tracks...in their own ways they were all good...

1 BLACKBIRD

2 GOOD NIGHT

3 OB-LA-DI, OB-LA-DA

4 MARTHA MY DEAR

5 EVERYBODY'S GOT SOMETHING TO HIDE EXCEPT FOR ME AND MY MONKEY

6 WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY WEEPS

7 REVOLUTION 9

8 GLASS ONION

9 CRY BABY CRY

10 BACK IN THE U.S.S.R.

11 SAVOY TRUFFLE

12 SEXY SADIE

13 MOTHER NATURE'S SON

14 HONEY PIE

15 REVOLUTION 1

16 BIRTHDAY

17 I WILL

18 HELTER SKELTER

19 THE CONTINUING STORY OF BUNGALOW BILL

20 WHY DON'T WE DO IT IN THE ROAD?

21 DEAR PRUDENCE

22 YER BLUES

23 DON'T PASS ME BY

24 I'M SO TIRED

25 LONG LONG LONG

26 ROCKY RACCOON

27 HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN

28 JULIA

29 PIGGIES

30 WILD HONEY PIE

Next week I discuss my #6 all-time favorite album...

Mass Rallies Creep Me Out

Back in the fall of 2020, when COVID-19 was going full blast, then-Florida Gator football coach Dan Mullen praised the over-full College Station, Texas stadium of his rival Texas A&M following a close loss to them, stating that UF needed to "pack the Swamp [their stadium]" as well.  Soon thereafter the next game against Missouri was moved back because of several positive COVID test results among the team.  Now, although this scourge is still raging unabated, there are no crowd restrictions, and the expectation is full stadiums in every football game out there...at least the college ones.  Just a few months earlier in '20, news outlets like CNN were meticulously filming...often using zoom lenses to distort the effect...beaches that were beginning to draw crowds following their reopening, trying to create the impression that assemblages were still improper.  Then, suddenly, mass protests started after the police killing of George Floyd and, just like the snap of a finger, the emphasis on avoiding crowds changed to embracing them...for the protest demonstrations across the nation, that is.  And so have mass rallies, protests and sporting events been used to manipulate public opinion even to the point of brainwashing people along a certain narrative.  I like to watch sporting events, but the tens of thousands of yelling fans creep me out almost as much as do those Trump rallies with all the head-bobbing grinning zombies pictured together behind the Orange Man as he blathers on.  I have attended a church in which a pastor got up in front of the congregation and acted as if we had all been doing something wrong by previously staying at home and watching online services in 2020, and then pronouncing it all over (even though it wasn't).  Packed churches, rallies, demonstrations, stadiums, concerts, whatever...getting a bunch of people together in a concentrated, noisy mass to parrot whatever happens to be the organizers' intended narrative...is the opposite of democracy, where people can individually calmly, quietly, and anonymously select their own leaders and vote on referenda.  I remember in 2016 immediately following Trump's election (which I recognized although I didn't vote for him), demonstrations against him were organized with the ongoing mantra "NOT MY PRESIDENT!".  I thought that was a bit over the top, but four years later it paled in contrast to Trump's refusal to concede the 2020 election and his call to Washington for militant groups like the Proud Boys to swarm the Washington Mall in protest of the Electoral Vote official certification by Congress, resulting in the violent storming of the US Capitol building.  If you derive a sense of legitimacy about anything by seeing masses of assembled people agreeing with you, then I believe you are a part of a serious problem that is only growing in this country.  Sure, I get it at sporting events...it's fun for everybody to get together and root for their team.  On the other hand, I was watching the baseball playoffs the other day and the home crowd, whenever their pitcher was on the mound, would loudly boo whenever the umpire called a ball on a pitch that was clearly far outside the strike zone...there's a difference between being passionate for your cause and being a dishonest, sore loser...did you get that, all you Trumpies?  I didn't think so..

Quote of the Week...from Elon Musk

 the bird is freed                                                      ---Elon Musk

I thought I'd keep the language sloppiness to this Twitter submission by the richest man in the world, who just bought Twitter and made it his own private company to do with as he pleases.  As is the case with business innovators and tycoons, I have a degree of admiration for Elon Musk and his vision for the future.  This is especially true with his SpaceX plans to travel to and eventually settle the planet Mars, and his Falcon 9 rockets kick major ass, to put it crudely.  One problem that seems to infect people of this stature, though, is that because they have shown themselves to excel in a few things, then that means they are geniuses in everything...which clearly isn't the case.  Musk says he wants Twitter to return to the old days during the Trump presidency when anyone could put out any disinformation on this social media platform with no accountability other than that of dissenting comments.  The only problem I see in this is that it's already been established that foreign governments hostile to the U.S. have used venues such as Twitter and Facebook to plant false narratives under fake identities in order to unduly shape public opinion and influence elections in favor of candidates more to their liking...I've heard no acknowledgement of this problem from Musk, though.  Well, although I tend to avoid making "tweets", I've been on Twitter before Trump, and stayed there during what I regard as a fascist demagogue's reign as our 45th president. I will continue to be there as well after Elon Musk's takeover, but I wish the dude would focus his attention more on his companies' wonderful accomplishments and plans in future technology and not be so full of himself...which I recognize is probably a complete waste of my wishing efforts... 

2022 World Series is a Rematch of Classic 1980 NLCS

In 1980 I enjoyed watching the resurgent Atlanta Braves under rookie manager Joe Torre rise from their divisional cellar to achieve a winning regular season record, although they were still a couple of years from making the playoffs.  Instead, the playoffs for the National League championship pitted the Philadelphia Phillies under manager Dallas Green against Bill Virdon's Houston Astros in a best-of-five series.  Both teams had their retinue of great players, the Phillies with Pete Rose, Mike Schmidt, Tug McGraw and Steve Carlton and the Astros with Joe Morgan and Nolan Ryan...just to name a few.  This series, which I initially cared little about, turned into what I still consider to be the most exciting league championship series ever played, with the two opponents playing series brinksmanship on a level I haven't seen since...at least, that is, until the Boston Red Sox turned the tables on the New York Yankees in 2004 after trailing their best-of-seven series three games to none.  I remember that last game with the series tied two-two and the Astros had built up a 5-2 lead after seven innings...with ace Nolan Ryan pitching for them.  Yet the Phillies miraculously came back for a squeaker 8-7 win in ten innings...unforgettable!  Since then, of course, Houston jumped over to the American League and has been dominant there for the past five years or so...they won the pennant last year as well but bowed to Atlanta in the World Series.  Critics of the changed playoff system this year point to 100+ win teams like the Braves, Mets and Dodgers losing to upstart teams like the Phillies and the San Diego Padres, but over on the American League side the best regular season teams prevailed in their playoffs.  Houston is heavily favored over Philadelphia, but just like back in '80 I'll be rooting for the spunky, never-say-die Phillies.  Game One is tomorrow evening in Houston...

Weekly Short Stories: 1987 Science Fiction, Part 4

Below are my reactions to four more short stories as they appeared in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Fifth Annual Collection.  It was in 1987 that I taught myself rudimentary computer programming skills...all to create a training program, using BASIC language, on an old Atari game console that my brother-in-law left with us, that simulated the city scheme computer training I was undergoing for my impending job as a postal letter sorting machine clerk.  My program, consisting of timed random numerical iterations passing by on the screen, fully prepared me to pass the modules that more than 90% of the rest of newly hired trainees were failing.  Switching over to working at the post office was a curious type of culture shock for me considering the social climate there that was vastly different from anything I had experienced in the work force before.  Well, maybe I'll tactfully elaborate on some of that after I eventually retire...for now, let's discuss those stories...

BUFFALO GALS, WON'T YOU COME OUT TONIGHT by Ursula K. Le Guin

A little girl being flown over the SW US desert falls out of a crashing plane and somehow survives, being rescued and cared for by a coyote...or is it a woman?  She soon realizes that there are two types of humanity and her newly adopted community consists of the first, with the residents living dual existences as people and the native animals.  This sounded to me like a speculative adventure as to "what if" American Indian myths were literally true...

GLASS CLOUD by James Patrick Kelly

The extremely intricate and advanced march forward with technology is contrasted in this novella with the often-crass inanity motivating humans...and even supposedly more advanced aliens...in their decision-making progress.  Architect Phillip Wing's vision of a Glass Cloud has been accepted as one of the future Modern Wonders of the World, but his personal life has entered a time of turmoil and all signs of the cause seem to point to an ostensibly benevolent, but shallow, alien named Ndavu whose race is subtlety ruling the Earth from the background and which is promoting the notion of immortality through machines.  The nature of immortality and whether it is even desirable get treatment here, as well as the often-banal reasons for major undertakings...

THE EVENING AND THE MORNING AND THE NIGHT by Octavia E. Butler

The best story of the today's four by far, in my opinion, it's also pure, hard science fiction...and has an ominous bearing on what's going on in the world today.  The cure for cancer has been found in a special vaccine shot.  Only one problem: it drastically alters the genetic makeup of the recipient to the point that they eventually tear at and eat their own flesh...before beginning on that of others.  A young woman is the offspring of two such parents...both of them have succumbed to the brand-new disease and she carries the fatal gene.  In a future of no hope, she visits, with another so afflicted, his mother who was in the advanced throes but has been stabilized at a new, special retreat.  There they learn their respective fates... 

NIGHT OF THE COOTERS by Howard Waldrop

Reminiscent of the old fifties film version of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, but with a vastly different (and much funnier) outcome.  The invading Martians have picked two Earth sites to stage their invasion: London, England and some hole-in-the-ground rural town in Texas: they should have stayed away from the latter.  The local citizenry mobilizes with their weaponry, and they sock it to the thoroughly disgusting aliens before anyone else in the country can get there to help. Ha-ha-ha-ha... 

Next week: more about 1987 short science fiction from the Dozois anthology...

Dramatic vs. Incremental Personal Transformation

As you probably already know if you've been regularly reading this blog, I listen to a podcast titled Mindset Mentor.  On it, host Rob Dial, a 36-year-old self-help coach and entrepreneur, puts out each week four twenty-minute monologues on different topics in this field.  His premise is that success in life in general and in one's specific endeavors depend heavily on whatever mindset is brought into it...and that we all can become the people we want to be...within the reasonable parameters of physics, chemistry and biology, that is.  He sometimes, as would one who covers any field in a comprehensive manner over time, sounds as if he is contradicting himself...the other day's topic is a good example.  Dial is a big advocate of change over time, with little habit changes snowballing over long spans into life-altering transformations.  He consistently stresses that folks write down what they want to accomplish in the future in the most specific terms possible...one of Dial's explanations for people failing is that they really don't know what they're after.  I agree that substantial betterment can be achieved this way...gradually over a reasonable time span.  But on a podcast last week he suggested that his audience dramatically "disappear" for six months, work very, very hard on their written goals, and avoid everything else in their lives...besides the bare basics of providing for dependents.  This sounds a bit over-the-top to me and doesn't resonate with other broadcasts of his...as well as sources such as James Clear's book Atomic Habits, which stresses deliberate, small-but-significant incremental directed life changes.  Well, as I've written before, I don't always agree with the person I listen to, even if I derive a substantial benefit from them.  I think Rob Dial was concerned about those of a younger age than myself with really bad habits or addictions, or maybe whose jobs were going nowhere and whose lives had become stagnant...I guess some "emergency" action might be called for here!  But for me at least, dropping out and disappearing for six months, other than for potential future medical reasons I don't presently foresee, just isn't on the plate...maybe it would work for others according to their own circumstances, though...

Time Off at Book Sale and Starbucks, Election Comments

Today is, for all practical purposes, the first day of my two-week vacation although, technically, it began Saturday at midnight, the "official" start of my work week. I took advantage of the free time this afternoon by going over to the Friends of the (Alachua County) Library book sale that had been going on since Saturday...it lasts through Wednesday, located in the 400 block on the east side of North Main Street here in Gainesville.  There I browsed a little and bought two math exercise books and two jigsaw puzzles, shelling out just $5.50 for the lot.  The mask and social distancing rules from earlier sales were gone, but I wore a mask anyway out of respect to others.  Now I'm sitting at my favorite Starbucks off 39th Avenue writing this.  Earlier, while walking from my parked car to the book sale site, I crossed past the elections office where they had begun early voting for the November general election.  It reminded me that I need to fill out my mail-in ballot and get it out...I wasn't sure about some of so-called "nonpartisan" races.  I had previously stopped off at my local library and on the way out picked up a copy of Gainesville's left-leaning news rag The Iguana to see who they were endorsing for the five cryptic Soil and Water Conservation Group seats.  After noting their endorsements, I then received in the mail a "conservative" piece listing all of their (presumably) Republican endorsements.  I was surprised to see some overlap between their picks and the "other" side's. Nevertheless, because of this party's deep infiltration by fascist anti-democratic elements and their general refusal to take the Covid-19 pandemic seriously, I vowed to avoid voting for ANY candidates that I believe to be Republicans.  Sorry, bros, maybe next time around I'll consider you...but only if you dump Trump, come to your senses, and get your act together...I'm actually on the conservatives' side with some issues! Well, I guess I've spent enough time here...time to swing around to Publix to pick up a couple of items...

My #8 All-Time Favorite Album: Houses of the Holy by Led Zeppelin

HOUSES OF THE HOLY, the fifth studio album of the British hard rock group Led Zeppelin, is my #8 all-time album.  It came out in 1973, largely overshadowed on the radio by their monster hit from the previous album, Stairway to Heaven.  Yet Houses of the Holy is loaded with a high quality and diversity of musical types within its eight tracks.  D'yer Mak'er, later revealed to be pronounced as "Jamaica", became a U.S. singles hit later that year.  Many of the other songs received extensive play on album rock radio stations, including my local one in South Florida at the time, WSHE/103.5.  Still, it wouldn't be until I began working in the post office as a letter-sorting machine clerk in the late 1980's that I began to more fully appreciate this album along with the band that produced it.  You see, much of my job then involved sitting at a console with modified keys while letters, one by one, whizzed by me as I keyed in the code for their next destination.  We were allowed to listen to radios with earphones while doing this, and one song stood out as I regularly tuned in to Gainesville's Rock 104: Over the Hills and Far Away, from this album. Then, in late 1990, their box set was released, and Rock 104 played it in its entirety: I was blown away by the depth of their music and suddenly became a big fan of Led Zeppelin although I had known of them since 1970. In the ensuing couple of years, I collected their music, always regarding Houses of the Holy as one of their greatest works.  Here are the album's tracks, along with some brief commentary: 

The Song Remains the Same---Primarily a vehicle to demonstrate Jimmy Page's amazing guitar virtuosity, it's mostly instrumental with front man Robert Plant providing curiously weak singing...

The Rain Song---Pretty lengthy and very slow to the point of being languid, with an orchestral-sounding Mellotron background.  The melody is beautiful...

Over the Hills and Far Away---Two very different songs in one, a slow section sandwiches the central, rousing philosophical ventures of Plant with Page providing the guitar excitement.  I think what won it over to me, though, was Page's acoustic guitar introduction and the keyboard closing, likely by John Paul Jones...

The Crunge---One of my favorite Zeppelin songs, it's a humorous tribute to James Brown...yes, the King of Soul really sounded like this.  I loved the song's crazy beat as well...

Dancing Days---Another personal favorite, its generally dark mood belies the deceptive title.  Page's defining guitar riff along with Jones' haunting interspersed keyboards are unforgettable...

D'yer Mak'er---Ostensibly the band's half-hearted, jesting stab at reggae music, by the time Page put his guitar work into it this commercially successful singles hit sounded like something completely different.  The radio played it a lot around December 1973...

No Quarter---A thoroughly brilliant exercise in utter despair, it may be the most artistically pure piece that the band ever produced.  But the depths of that despair expressed here may be difficult for some listeners...

The Ocean---The title refers to Led Zeppelin's loyal base of fans and the song is pretty upbeat...that's good, considering the previous track!  The song abruptly switches gears from a slow-paced, heavy grinder to a spirited, happy ending...

I didn't mention one of Led Zeppelin's indispensable members: their incredible drummer John Bonham.  His death in 1980 ended the band, pure and simple.  Maybe their disbanding after that tragedy saved them from the fate of others who continued on for decades while producing substandard work...

Next week: my #7 all-time favorite album...

Ran the "Run the Good Race" 10K This Morning

Running In the USA is a good website that has a detailed running race calendar for just about anywhere in the country...I regularly consult it, which is how I first found out about today's race.  Back in 2019 I ran one local race here in Gainesville, titled "Run the Good Race" and which features a 5K (3.1 miles) or 10K (6.2 miles) option, the course being in the North Florida Regional Medical Center office park and the hilly residential area behind it.  Back then it was held in April...click HERE to read about my experiences...but after the Covid-19 cancellations it was revived last year, moved to October.  Since at that time I was still recovering from my July open heart surgery, I didn't participate.  Early this morning, though, I was able to and managed to pull my sorry old body out of bed and get down there.  There were some similarities and contrasts with last week's 10K on the Hawthorne Trail...let me discuss the differences first.  I mentioned last Saturday that there were too many "Galloway runners" in that race, runners who would go through a repeated cycle of walking for a set time and then running for a set time: I didn't encounter any of these today.  Neither did I experience the annoyance of bicycles buzzing by me at high speed as happened last week.  There were not only indoor bathroom accommodations at today's race, but participants could also huddle indoors from the cool early morning temperatures before race time.  Also, last week's race was runner-centered, organized by the Florida Track Club.  Today's event was Christian-themed and had as a goal to raise money to fight the trafficking of women, a very noble cause.  And, of course, this race didn't take place way the heck in the middle of nowhere as did the other!  As for similarities between the two, the biggest standout was the hilliness of the course in both of them and how I have not trained for hill running...I need to insert something for that in my future routine.  For today's Run the Good Race 10K I passed the finish line as the timer read 1:03:20...for the complete race results, click HERE...

Quote of the Week...from Ursula K. Le Guin

The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp.  The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.                                                      ---Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin is a renowned science fiction writer who passed away in 2018...today she would have turned 93.  I've read her Earthsea fantasy series as well as her acclaimed novel The Left Hand of Darkness...not to mention a number of short stories.  Le Guin's above quote reminded me of the time in my eleventh grade English class when a poet paid a visit.  He said that although he may have been thinking along a certain thread when writing a poem, it's always what the reader or listener gets from it that makes it all legitimate.  I think that goes for music and lyrics as well...once the creator releases his or her product for others to share, it becomes a property of the world to interact with.  Her opening words "The unread story is not a story" bother me: how many books are out of print and have never been digitalized...or ever will be available for others to read?  Yet with music I can get digitalized copies of some of the most obscure, out-of-print recordings...why are books lagging so far behind in this?  It's true that we do have the mega-corporation Amazon and some other sites to dig up hard copies of some long-gone novels and collections, but their prices are often inflated if they are available at all...

If you've read this blog for any length of time, you know that I like to read.  I go at it with Ursula K. Le Guin's philosophy that my reaction and take from a story is just as essential as the writer's original intent was.  I also write this blog with the presumption that whoever reads it will naturally apply their own background and interpretation to it... that's what makes it all interesting and worthwhile, after all... 

I Want Condensed Baseball, Please

The Major League Baseball playoffs for 2022 have finally reached the League Championship Series, when the top two teams from each league play a best-of-seven series to determine who will be playing in this year's World Series.  Last year's champion, the Atlanta Braves, won their division but were eliminated in the playoffs by wild card Philadelphia.  In the Amercian League Houston, who lost to the Braves in the '21 Series, is playing the New York Yankees.  Meanwhile, on the National side the Phillies face the upstart San Diego Padres for that league's pennant.  I like to watch baseball, although for nearly all of the time a game is going on, nothing is really happening.  Much of the time I'm okay with this as I can easily walk away from the TV and do other things.  But since there are already built-in breaks after each half inning, I'd like to have the option of watching a game with the action condensed to eliminate any time in which the ball isn't in play or there's no action on the bases.  I'm guessing that most games could be reduced to about 20-25 minutes this way.  Of course, while a game is going on live this couldn't be done, but why not have an option...make it late at night if that's convenient...where the game is presented super-condensed, eliminating the boring commentary and dugout bubblegum-blowing and spitting? This especially makes sense to me when I have another commitment, such as work, and can't get myself in front of a TV to watch a live game....I sure don't want to invest more than two hours to watch a repeat broadcast!  Will my suggestion ever be adopted? Probably not, since it's probably all about advertising, anyway...

Weekly Short Stories: 1987 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today as I review more science fiction short stories from 1987, I switch over to the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Fifth Annual Collection, featuring the editor's picks.  In covering these stories as they appear in the book, I'm skipping over the ones I've already discussed that were in the other anthology presented by Donald A. Wollheim.  Now, without further ado, here are my reactions to the first five stories appearing only in the Dozois anthology... 

DREAM BABY by Bruce McAllister

A great story in its own right, there are still telling similarities in concept with the Twilight Zone episode The Purple Testament as well as the Stephen King novel Firestarter.  A nurse serving in the Vietnam War dreams of the soldiers who will be flown in and die under her care.  She encounters one, though, with a different paranormal ability...unwittingly attracting the attention of a government black-ops agent...

FLOWERS OF EDO by Bruce Sterling

Not exactly science fiction, but an enlightening revelation about what it must have been like in the years following the forced exposure to the West and its society and technology imposed upon imperial Japan following Matthew Perry's naval expedition in 1853.  An embittered former samurai tries to relate to the new Japan as it adopts foreign Western concepts...funny in places but ultimately shown to be a horror tale...

AT THE CROSS-TIME JAUNTERS' BALL by Alexander Jablokov

Demigod-like humans have the ability to create new realities, entirely different worlds with notable similarities at times to one another.  Some "ordinary" humans serve specialized functions for them, including the protagonist, whose job is to be critic to their "artistic" creations.  But he finds that someone is trying to kill him as he journeys from world to world while trying to keep his marriage together.  One of those stories that show that vanity and arrogance are universal with people, even those with extraordinary abilities and power...

THE TEMPORARY KING by Paul J. McAuley

On a future Earth when humanity has settled the cosmos, there are protected pockets of more traditional, pretechnological cultures...the Lemue family live in one not far from advanced, bustling San Francisco.  But a strange man with high tech gizmos has suddenly appeared, and his presence has the locals practically deifying him.  A teenage girl, one of the Lumues, sees a different side of him...

PERPETUITY BLUES by Neal Barrett, Jr.

The saga of little Maggie from her seventh birthday through her teens is revealed in this humorous tale of strange disappearances, a dubious crash-landed-but-kindly alien, abusive relatives, truckers, gangsters, and on it goes.  Maggie deals with her situations and plights with blunt optimism...she's pretty cool!  Very funny...and very Maggie...

Next week: more short sci-from '87...