People and Happiness: Not Synonymous

A few weeks ago, I discussed a "Goth Kid" quote from the cartoon series South Park.  The Goth Kids embrace that alternative culture complete with black clothes and idiosyncratically gloomy music while smoking, drinking coffee and talking about bad everything is.  Well, I had to check myself to see how Goth I was...at least from the South Park writers' perspective: "yes" on black clothes, gloomy music and coffee, "no" on smoking and "sometimes" on running down what's going on around me and in the world. I think a lot of so-called "self-help" gurus out there, religious preachy-types and unapologetic extroverts tend to confuse being down on people and society with being down on life. But you can be highly critical and even cynical about people and society while at the same time thoroughly enjoying life: those Goth Kids seem to dig their own scene! I am tired of those who think I'm unwillingly in some kind of shell that they need to crack in order to expose me to the company of all the annoying, problematic people that they feel will bring me real happiness.  But truth be told, I'm already pretty happy, thank you, and for the most part hanging around a lot of folks tends to drain me mentally and emotionally while elevating my anxiety. On the other hand, I've always enjoyed good one-on-one conversations, so go figure. People and happiness, for me, are neither synonyms nor antonyms...they're completely different concepts and if the former piss me off from time to time I'm gonna call it like it is, whether I'm "Goth" or not...

Weekly Short Stories: 1994 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here are my reactions to three more science fiction short stories as they appeared in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twelfth Annual Collection.  1994 was the year of the incredibly dumb Major League Baseball strike that ended the year in the middle of the regular season, no postseason or World Series...it should have bothered me, but it didn't.  About the time that was going on, my family and I made a summer road trip to visit my sister Anita and her family in Plano, Texas and later a friend of Melissa's in Murfreesboro, Tennessee: it was a lot of fun and memorable.  We even retraced the Kennedy assassination route in Dallas: it was a lot more closed-in than I expected, making me wonder whether some of the extra shots that witnesses say they heard weren't reverberations off buildings.  But back to those stories...

MARGIN OF ERROR by Nancy Kress

This is a story about revenge as two sisters meet up again after five years.  Paula has bullied and manipulated Karen their whole lives.  Her intellectual theft of Karen's own work at a genetic research company was the final straw.  Karen's revenge? I'm not telling, but I will say that it's interesting that the perpetrators of vengeful acts often seem to think it's necessary to let their victims know what's going on...even when it sets themselves up for payback...

 

CILIA-OF-GOLD by Stephen Baxter

This is a great old-style sci-fi tale set on Mercury, told from the viewpoint of both its own indigenous life under the surface and of the human explorers based there.  It also presents the twists questioning what truly indigenous life is and what is advanced and intelligent.  The explanation for the multiple mysteries is given through conjecture, but you just know it's true...

GOING AFTER OLD MAN ALABAMA

In generally our present time (c. 1994, that is) it's rural Oklahoma and Native Americans there are practitioners of their own traditional magic, with medicine men and witches and their own special talents and proclivities...move over, Harry Potter.  One sinister old man among them is Old Man Alabama, and a couple of medicine men think he's up to something really bad...and they follow him to a destination that reveals both his great knowledge...and great ignorance.  A very funny ending... 

Next week: more sci-fi reviews from 1994...

NYC Marathon Open to Slow Finishers, Unlike Gainesville-Area Marathons

The New York City Marathon took place the Sunday before last, and I enjoyed watching ongoing television coverage.  Although there was a channel devoted to showing the top elite competition at the front, there were also several YouTube live feeds at different parts of the running course, depicting what was going on from the sidelines.  The most compelling of these, which I watched in the early evening toward the event's end, showed 59th Street in Midtown Manhattan on the southern rim of Central Park, just one mile from the 26.2-mile race's finish line.  There, exhausted and sometimes limping entrants mostly walked past the exhorting, shouting dude behind the camera as their impending finishing times crept higher and higher toward the seven-hour mark.  This scenario...at least the part allowing the race's stragglers to finish without closing the course because of an imposed time deadline...made the NYC Marathon an open race.  We used to have a couple of those in the marathon distance here in north central Florida, but sadly, no more.  Let me explain...

My only "official" marathon...although I had run a practice one the week before in four hours and twenty-three minutes...was the Ocala Marathon of January 23, 2011.  Regrettably, I sustained an IT band injury which hobbled me in the second half of the race, forcing me to walk slowly for its final seven miles. My time?  Six hours and four minutes.  I had also intended back then to run the next month's scheduled Gainesville Five Points of Life Marathon, but my need to recover cancelled that and I then resolved to stick to half-marathons as my longest racing distance.  But lately I've been thinking it would be nice to have another go, if only for just one time, at a marathon-distance event.  But both the Ocala and Five Points of Life marathons are no more, and the only other races of this distance in my area have very restrictive time limits.  The biggest of these, the Florida Track Club's Mary Andrews Marathon next January, sets just five hours as its limit...even with good training and without any injuries, at my age (67) I would be hard-pressed to get a sub-five hour finishing time. So, although I sympathize with the race organizers who don't want to hang around waiting for someone to finally get to the finish line after seven or eight hours, I do think that since they are charging a hefty fee to enter the race in the first place then they should be more flexible with the allotted time and at least extend the limit to a more reasonable six hours.  That is, if they're really interested in popularizing and growing the sport and not just stuck-up elitists.  I think all public races, even the two extinct ones I extolled, have limits on finishing times. But since they're public, they should take that public in mind and avoid oppressively short limits on finishing times.  Sadly, at least in my area, the opposite is happening...

Enjoying the Change of Weather, If Only Briefly

The weather here in Gainesville has turned interesting, with yesterday marked by overcast skies and cool mist condensing out of the air with temperatures staying in the sixties.  At this writing today it's continuing like this, although I expect the sun to start peeking through sooner or later.  Rainy days are on the menu for this week at least, at least according to the sometimes-flawed weather forecast I got off the news yesterday.  I'd like to see this somehow finally leading to more seasonal, cooler weather with clear skies...I miss those good old crisp autumn days.  In any event we're enjoying a respite from the extended summer that looks to finally be packing up for 2023. As I was expecting warmer weather yesterday during my race, I'm relieved for the change.  I've always kind of liked dreary, cool, overcast weather as long as it doesn't rain, although I'm realistic enough to expect some showers if not outright downpours. That's okay, too: I'm a Floridian, after all...

Ran the Tom Walker Half-Marathon This Morning

This morning I got up early and once again headed out to Boulware Springs Park off 15th Street in southeast Gainesville to run in yet another Hawthorne Trail race...this one the Tom Walker Memorial Half-Marathon, hosted by the Florida Track Club, of which I am a member.  It's my fifth Tom Walker Race...I ran it in 2010, 2011, 2019, and 2022.  Last year's race took place under unusually warm and humid conditions...I didn't properly prepare myself for that and had to walk the final three miles (yet still won my age group).  Today the weather was much more conducive to running, being 61-62 degrees although the humidity was still high...and the cloud cover made things better as well. This time around I employed the Jeff Galloway run-walk strategy, with me running five minutes and then fast-walking one minute, repeating the cycle throughout the race.  It worked better than I could have imagined, and I had no shortage of energy as I finished strong at 2:18:06 chip time, once again winning my age division.  It was also my fastest half-marathon since 2015...I didn't expect that to happen!   Recovery after the race seems to be going well, and I appreciate all the encouragement and support from my loved ones, especially Melissa.  You can view the race results by clicking the link HERE...

Volunteered at Gainesville's Depot Parkrun This Morning

Although the nice middle-age English lady who pretty much manages Gainesville's free weekly Saturday morning 5K (3.1 mile) run/walk suggests that participants do approximately a 4:1 ratio of runs to volunteering at the event, I think most of them don't even remotely meet this request.  And then there are a few who see volunteering as their primary fulfillment.  I say good for all of them, but to me volunteering is sheer drudgery, involving me to be stuck around people I frankly dislike (although there are some really sweet, charming ones as well) and who I feel marginalize me and are obsessed with where they stand on the social pecking order.  Well, I got through it, having volunteered this time around because "my" race is tomorrow morning's Tom Walker Half Marathon.  It's hosted by the Florida Track Club and is held every November (except for pandemics and nuclear holocausts) on the Hawthorne Trail, starting and ending at Boulware Springs Park in southeast Gainesville.  This will be my fifth time running this event...the first two took place with temperatures in the shivering thirties while last year's, a debacle in which I had to walk the final three miles, was in unseasonably sweltering heat and humidity. Tomorrow it will be a little bit cooler, but still unpleasant.  During the race I'm planning to alternate five-minute runs with minute-long fast walks, to be repeated throughout the race...should be interesting to see how it goes.  In any event, I'm looking forward to it...and NOT forward to volunteering again: will I ever learn...

Quote of the Week...from Neil Gaiman

The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you.  Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.          Neil Gaiman

I've read quite a few of Neil Gaiman's novels in past years, although recently I've gotten a little bit away from his fantasy-based genre of fiction writing.  Today is his birthday and I thought I'd drop in on a thought of his that appealed to me...so here's the above quote.  It sounds on the surface self-contradictory to say that we're all the same in that each of us is unique, but there you are: it's true!  Yet with the explosive advent of artificial intelligence permeating so many aspects of our being...impelled by the development of quantum computing...I'm beginning to wonder in fact whether a virtual "myself" couldn't just as easily be created, if not now, then in the not-so-distant future.  But now is now, and in my daily walk through life I want to act out that unique nature of mine, be grateful for it, and appreciate the differences and similarities I see in others. And maybe it's time for me to dig back into some more of ol' Neil's works... 

Podcaster Discusses How to Make Oneself Miserable

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you already know that I am a regular listener to personal development coach Rob Dial's podcast, which can be found on number of sites, including YouTube...it's called Mindset Mentor.  Usually if I write about a specific podcast, I'll have waited a few days beforehand.  But today he presented four mindsets people have which make themselves miserable in life.  The first is trying to control that which I cannot control, be it situations on the other side of the world or the people around me.  To a certain extent I can do my part to make things better by expressing opinions or voting on election day.  And speaking truth in a compassionate way to others is also something I could do more.  But sitting there letting the negativity stew around in my mind helps no one, especially myself.  The second of Dial's points is comparing myself to others, bemoaning the supposed advantages others enjoy that enable them to have or experience a more interesting and bountiful life.  To that he recommends intentionally setting aside time to focus on things that I can be grateful for in my life...and there is definitely a lot to consider here.  That doesn't imply that I shouldn't strive to improve myself and my circumstances, but once again I shouldn't just sit there fuming inside about how unfair life is.  Number Three on Rob Dial's list of things making folks miserable is focusing on the past.  We all live in the present and the past is gone...in spite of all the science fiction stories I've read or watched using the literary gimmick of time travel.  Moping around about past regrets can mess up my present, yet I don't think I should ignore the past either...it's how I learn to better live in the present!  Finally, our host presents the fourth pathway to misery: worrying about the future.  To be sure, that's where we're all heading...but most of the disasters predicted ahead don't materialize.  I am rooted to the present, and only in the now can I act to do my part to bring about a better world.  But once again, I present a caveat: of course, I need to notice danger and problems on the horizon and, if possible, try to effectively deal with them.  But static worry accomplishes nothing to alleviate anything.  If you think I'm getting a little preachy here, rest assured: I wrote this down primarily as a way to reinforce to myself the show's message...which today seemed quite profound...

Weekly Short Stories: 1994 Science Fiction, Part 1

Today I begin a new year in retrospect as I examine some select sci-fi short stories from 1994 as they appeared in the Gardner Dozois-edited anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twelfth Annual Collection.  This was the year of the gimmicky mid-term elections in our country, where the party opposing the previously elected president comes up with some dumbass slogan to rally their own forces, along with the easily media-manipulated.part of the electorate, to retake Congress. In this election the president was Bill Clinton, and the insurgents were Republicans with Newt Gingrich leading the charge with his "Contract with America"...transformed by opponents into "Contract on America".  The switch in congressional power, sustained in two subsequent elections, would lead to Clinton's eventual politically motivated impeachment in 1999.  But back to those stories from '94...

FORGIVENESS DAY by Ursula K. le Guin

In le Guin's science fiction "universe"...several writers, like Isaac Asimov and Cordwainer Smith, created their own future scenarios in rather great detail. A female envoy from the Ekumens, this story's version of Star Trek's Federation of Planets, is assigned an outlying world that seeks admission to their body.  Only problem is that they have a highly stratified social order, with slavery a prominent element.  The envoy is very annoyed with the standoffish officer provided for her protection...but then all hell breaks loose and it's a case of who is double-crossing who.  It's actually a novella and, as such, tended to drag a bit...but I liked the outcome...

THE REMORAS by Robert Reed

This is a brilliant tale that leads to an anticipated conclusion but then veers off to something entirely different...yet had I been more attentive to the beginning I wouldn't have been so surprised.  On a humungous, planet-sized ship in the distant future, people have attained immortality through genetic manipulation.  One such woman lives in luxury with her recent husband...but then a representative of a very deformed subclass of human one day visits her home to demand her husband pay off a debt.  Sympathetic to the visitor although taken aback at his appearance, she goes to the ship's hull where he and others of his kind work on the exterior in space.  One important lesson from this story is that you can't always go by appearances...

NEKROPOLIS by Maureen F. McHugh

In a future society where biologically induced voluntary servitude based on personal bonding, called "jessing", is prevalent, one such servant is having second thoughts about her choice after she is paired up with a young, "manufactured" human male whom she initially regards as no more than an abominable machine.  Soon she discovers he has more human feeling and compassion that the so-called "real" people she works for and around.  A depressing look at a potential future?  I hope not but you can never tell...

Next week I continue reviewing science fiction from 1994...

Just Finished Reading 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson

I just finished reading, on audiobook, Jordan Peterson's 2018 book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.  Peterson is a Canadian psychologist who has a podcast which features long shows usually involving interviews.  The tone in this book is very moralistic and on audio his adamancy for his opinions can get to the point of coming across a bit shrill and plaintive...at least that's how he sounds to me. In spite of that, I was a bit blown away by the depth of thought and insight underlying his enunciated principles and felt alternately convicted and affirmed by many of his conclusions about society and how individuals can and should function within it.  It's a tough-love kind of message here, and I believe that not everyone would receive it as well as myself.  I'm planning to go for a reread of this remarkable work in the near future...

 

Here are the rules:

1 Stand up straight with your shoulders back.

2 Treat yourself like someone you're responsible for helping.

3 Make friends with people who want the best for you.

4 Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.

5 Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.

6 Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.

7 Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).

8 Tell the truth...or at least, don't lie.

9 Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't.

10 Be precise in your speech.

11 Do not bother children while they are skateboarding.

12 Pet a cat when you encounter one in the street.

Some of the above...especially the final two...are a bit tongue-in-cheek while others have much more expansive interpretations, which the author is quite willing to reveal in each chapter.  This is an idea-packed work, and I don't automatically subscribe to everything Peterson has laid out here...but he did a masterful job of presenting his own thoughtful views about life and how to live it...

Some Comments After the NYC Marathon

I watched some of the day's events at the New York City Marathon yesterday...most of it was through live feeds on YouTube with cameras strategically placed at various points in the race.  I enjoyed the coverage of the leaders...Tamirat Tola of Ethiopia and Hellen Obiri of Kenya won the men's and women's events respectively.  I also dug seeing runners of different degrees of training and speed at places like south Brooklyn (Bay Ridge), north Brooklyn (Williamsburg), and one spot on the southern edge of Central Park on 59th Street, just a mile from the finishing line.  That last viewing I saw of the runners taking three times as long (or more) than the race's winners...they were pooped and most of them were walking.  The guy behind the camera kept yelling out for them to "bring it on home", "you did all the work" and "get your medal"...I wonder how long he was standing there doing that over and over again.  As for me, I'm happy to witness the madness from afar, content as of now with more sedate (and shorter) racing experiences with fewer accompanying hassles.  Tola and Obiri are obviously top-notch athletes...for most of those in this marathon, that clearly wasn't true.  Yet being an athlete per se is more a state of mind than an objective truth...I consider myself to be one, in fact.  There are people who never would run in any public race and only run for their own personal self-fulfillment or exercise to maintain health.  Although these are good motives and I run for those reasons as well, I feel that there's a little more to it all in my case.  I'm looking forward to what the future brings and congratulate those runners and walkers who tackled that difficult course in the Big Apple yesterday...

NYC Marathon Taking Place Today

Of all the marathons that I have NOT run...and the now-extinct Ocala Marathon is the only one I have...it's the New York City Marathon, held on the first weekend in November, that captures my imagination the most.  On YouTube I've been able to get a runner's-eye-view of the race on three very different videos: one from 2019 features a Chinese-speaking entrant who is relatively fast and the other two are from last year, one filmed by Alex, who has made numerous other race videos in the area and ran an average (for me) race and the other by a novice who ended up walking much of the distance.  In all three I got a great sense of the geography of the city's five boroughs, in this order of the race: Staten Island (at the beginning), Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, Bronx, and then Manhattan again at the end.  If these three videos showed all there was to running the NYC Marathon, I'd say "Sign me up and stick me on a plane."  But after viewing other videos of the event, it seems most of the effort goes not into actually running it, but rather first getting approved to enter it over all the other aspirants through either their February lottery or by joining with a charity and generating a lot of money.  Also, since we're talking more than 50,000 runners clogging the streets of New York, every time anything is considered, be it making hotel or restaurant reservations, picking up bibs at the required exposition at the Jacob Javits Center, checking in a post-race bag in Central Park, just getting to the starting line (no subway access to Staten Island) and going through the security check there after which there are hours of standing around before the race actually starts, we're talking endless lines and waits...ugh!  Yet those who speak of this event think it's a great thing and keep wanting to return next year.  I think that if I could escape somehow all that extraneous tedious b.s. and just start it like in all those racing videos, I'd think it worthwhile as well.  But if someday I do run a big-city marathon or, more likely, a half-marathon, then it will probably be in another place.  I wrote about it this morning because right now that same New York City Marathon is ongoing, to last throughout the day as they have staggered the massive number of runners into five waves and subdivided them further. It's a bit cooler there and windier than last year's race...a lot of the runners also seem to underestimate the fluctuations in altitude throughout this not-so-flat city: NYC does have some badass hills as well as a lot of extended upward and downward sloping!  I think a TV channel is covering the event, but most likely it will focus on the top finishers.  Funny that for someone as enthusiastic about running as myself that I am so clueless about the top athletes in this sport...

Ran Gainesville's Depot Parkrun This Morning

Today's Depot Parkrun 5K would be more appropriately named the "Darkrun" since, after all, this is the Saturday just before the clocks go back an hour from Daylight Savings Time to good old Standard Time. It was slightly chilly before the race at 58°, with just 69% humidity.  There didn't seem as many folks here at Depot Park, a few blocks south of Gainesville, as last week...suits me fine!  As usual, I ran the 5K as an exercise in establishing a comfortable but brisk pace.  I went slow the first lap but finished strong, at 30:14...you can view the results by clicking HERE.  After I finished, I waited about ten minutes, then did an extra run, involving both the park and the adjacent Hawthorne Trail, for 2.4 miles, with this one alternating five-minute runs with a minute of fast walking.  Next week I'll once again run in the Florida Track Club's Tom Walker Memorial Half-Marathon, to take place on the same Hawthorne Trail, but further south and east from where I ran today, beginning and ending at Boulware Springs Park.  Because that race happens on Sunday the 12th, I can still participate in next Saturday morning's Depot Parkrun, either (or both) as a runner/walker or volunteer...I'll have to see how I feel in a day or two.  After leaving the park I noticed the local traffic was unusually heavy for a Saturday morning. Of course, I should have known: there's a Gator home football game starting at noon...

Quote of the Week...from Mark Twain

It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.     ---Mark Twain

For me the king of monologues has to be the late Jean Shepherd, author and narrator of the famous television movie A Christmas Story and a legend on New York's talk radio station WOR for his show that lasted for decades in the last century.  From 1974 to 1976 I would avidly listen to rebroadcasts on my local Miami station WKAT/1360 and marvel at Jean's ability to maintain an ongoing monologue for around a half hour.  Of course, even back then (I was 18-20 years old) I knew that he would most probably enter the studio with at least a rough outline as to what he would sit there and discuss (with himself) for any set program.  But it's also obvious that he was speaking very conversationally and was spontaneous, not reading something straight from a prompt as so many politicians and media jocks do today.  Being someone interested in beginning a podcast, I'd like to emulate Jean Shepherd's style...and that's where Mark Twain's above quote kicks in.  I don't know whether the famed author was referring to writing a detailed outline or a script to be memorized, but it seems that regardless, it seems that some kind of preparation is in order before a final podcast monologue can be recorded.  Right now, I'm just practicing (without recording) listening to myself (try to) tackle various preset topics verbally in my car to establish the skill of maintaining a smooth, viable narrative.  But after seeing on YouTube how much podcasters edit their product, a lot of that smoothness you hear and see is often artificially produced in hindsight, after the initial recording.  Well, recording artists remix and mess with their music as well, and few complain about the final polished product.  I imagine my own final product, which I want to sound impromptu, will also...as with Twain...demand some foresight and organization requiring extra time and effort... 

My Progress So Far on Budding Podcasting Efforts

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about considering starting my own podcast, with the same basic goal as my writing except that it would be speaking instead.  Again, I want to instill a regular, disciplined habit of publicly available expression, this time making it verbal.  I mentioned that preliminary to starting an actual podcast I would make unrecorded monologues about preset topics during my drives to and from work.  Well, that was an eye opener for me, with me stumbling about tongue-tied for the most part, more a stream of disconnected consciousness coming from my mouth than a coherent narrative...is that really how I think? I do think I've improved a bit, and I've decided to alter the strategy with my "carcasts", as I call them, to do a "rough draft monologue" on the drive to work, let the results simmer in my mind for a few hours, and then on the drive home revisit the topic, hopefully in a more structured and comprehendible (to others) way.  I get that most of your regular podcasters develop outlines, some detailed, beforehand of what they will discuss om a podcast.  I'm not yet at that point, preferring right now to make the experience more extemporaneous.  Yesterday, for example, I set out to discuss the University of Florida campus as I remember it and as it is today.  During the first monologue I felt I was awkwardly groping about to find something to say while in the second, I felt more organized and with more knowledge at quick recall.  Now let's see what my carcast topic for today will be... 

Weekly Short Stories: 1993 Science Fiction, Part 8

Today's the final installment of my review of 1993 "short" science fiction from the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Eleventh Annual Collection.  In all fairness, Dozois doesn't use the word "short" in his series title, and for good reason: some of the stories are novellas and, in, say, books of decades past could have passed for full-blown novels.  Such is the case with this book...and its final story, discussed below.  So why don't we close out this year with the last two tales...

WHISPERS by Maureen F. McHugh and David B. Kisor

A plague has beset the world, and an American woman, while not technically a "doctor", is essentially performing the same duties in rural Shandong, China, treating disease victims.  One patient is a young man who seems to be withering away and dying...but this is a new strain of the plague, and he seems to be defying all expectations by returning to general health...although he still looks withered.  To make it all creepier (remember this was published in 1993), the story takes place in 2018. I've always thought that evolutionarily speaking, it wasn't an enduring strategy for a disease to kill its hosts...eventually it would need to evolve to keep them alive and in a state of equilibrium together: that's the case here, although the author ends up making this particular plague into something that makes me wonder about the nature of identity as it applies to microorganisms, especially those causing pandemics... 

WALL, STONE, CRAFT by Walter Jon Williams

The only "science fiction" in this alternative history novella is that it is an alternative history.  With Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein in "our" time, as the chief protagonist...with her eventual husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and sister Claire, she is still single for most of the story, retaining her maiden name Wollstonecraft (hence this story's title).  The three of them are traveling through France immediately following Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, a British victory largely engineered by Lord George Byron, in "our" world a famed poet while in theirs a cavalry leader.  The often-antagonistic exchanges between populist Mary and aristocratic George mark this story as they together cross France and then meet up again in Switzerland...roughly retracing their travels in both real and alternative worlds.  In our world Percy and George are good friends...in theirs it's more distant but still amicable.  I did learn a bit about these famous writers, but as is the case with alternative histories, sometimes it's difficult to filter out truth from the author's creativity.  Frankenstein, which I read not too long ago, did come up at the story's end, but since this is alternative history, you might correctly infer that it wasn't spared from a little alteration as well...

Next week I begin my look at the year 1994 in short science fiction...

My October 2023 Running and Walking Report

In October '23 I ran a total of 306 recorded miles...I don't keep track of the walking mileage although this may change in the future.  I also ran on every day of the month, with my general state of fitness seeming reasonably good.  As far as public races (or "runs", as one event likes to call them), I did three: the Florida Track Club's Tom Walker Preview 10K along the Hawthorne Trail on the 14th and two Depot Parkrun 5Ks, on the 21st and 28th, all Gainesville events taking place on Saturday morning: you can read about them by scrolling back to the specified date on this blog. I missed racing on the weekend of the 7th since Melissa and I had a higher mission: relaxing on the beach!  I have been hitting my local gym (Gainesville Health and Fitness, if you must know) after work usually once or twice a week, and always used their treadmills.  They have a feature you can choose while running called Virtual Active.  It presents continuous videos, each one about five minutes long, showing virtual runs in various scenic parts of the world: it's helped me a lot with my training there! I also run in my house and in my grassy backyard...not too much neighborhood road running these days.  In November they are holding two races I'm interested in: on Sunday the 12th will be another addition of the Tom Walker Memorial Half-Marathon on that Hawthorne Trail, originating from Boulware Springs Park in the SE part of town.  Then, on Thanksgiving Day the 23rd Lloyd Clarke Sports is hosting a 5K/10K Turkey Trot race being held at Critter Creek Farm Sanctuary north of Gainesville off County Road 231.  Of course, the Saturday morning Depot Parkruns will continue...I just attained one of their milestones of 25 finishes: going for 50 now! I also began this month what I hope to be a new tradition, running a little bit further after races are completed. Oh, there is also a strange event called the Cupcake Run held at a section of the Hawthorne Trail on the 19th (10K, half-marathon and full marathon offered), originating from Hawthorne near their high school.  But that's a longshot dark horse, as far as my own participation is concerned...seems they can't properly post their race results online...

Does AI Pose a Future Threat to Us?

In a 1950s futuristic series of novels and short stories, science fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote that robots were specifically designed with the imprinted program to never intentionally harm humans or to passively allow such harm to befall them.  In spite of this, in his version of our future, society became suspicious of them and eventually banned them from fear of being dominated by what we now would call artificial intelligence, or AI.  In subsequent decades, though, as computer systems...as opposed to individual units called robots...were more quickly and highly developed in the real world, science fiction turned its attention to supercomputers and the imagined threats they might pose to humanity.  In particular, with regard to my own television viewing experiences as a kid, the original Star Trek series episode The Ultimate Computer, in which a sophisticated computer imprinted with a human personality is installed and independently steers the Enterprise into war, was an early exposure to real fears developing about digital technology running amuck.  Then there was the 1970 TV movie Colossus: The Forbin Project...based on a 1966 novel by D.F. Jones...in which an American supercomputer, designed to defend the country and prevent nuclear war, itself takes over the world and uses the arsenals to establish its power.  Several other movies would ensue, to me the most notables being The Terminator and The Matrix, presenting nightmare scenarios as human beings fight for their very right to exist in the face of uncontrolled AI dominating the planet.  Returning to reality in 2023, it seems to me that only within the last few months have we seen an exponential development of artificial intelligence, and the internet connects it all together.  Major software and internet corporations like Google and Facebook liberally use AI to run their algorithms...I believe one of these erroneously booted a recent compliant post of mine off the latter as no real person would have made such a decision.  I recently checked out YouTube and there are a number of folks raising the alarm about AI being out of control, with a bleak future ahead for us all.  I just checked out a book on my library's Libby app by one of those voices, Mo Gawdat...I'll share some of my insights after I've read it.  Is all this negativity about artificial intelligence like the unfounded public fears expressed in Asimov's earlier novels, or do we have a much more ominous future in store that reflects scenarios like Colossus, Terminator or Matrix?  I don't know yet...maybe I never will...but my gut feeling tells me that the answer lies somewhere in the middle...

Just Finished Reading Make It Stick by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel

Make It Stick...a 2014 book I just read by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel, has as its co-title The Science of Successful Learning.  I heard about it from a podcast of Steve Kaufmann, a polyglot who had also just read it and endorsed many of its points.  The premise of the book is that learning is more effective when approaching it in some ways that our traditional educational system tends to avoid.  Instead of learning material in blocks and regurgitating it on tests, the authors emphasize techniques such as expanding on the material as it is presented...sometimes even before the teacher lays it out in class.  Interleaving the material with other assignments also accomplishes the goal of spacing it more, with the result that, although it seems to be counterintuitive to memory retention and permanent learning, the opposite in fact happens, with the subject matter better learned.  Although I was interested in the book's topic and sympathetic to the authors' viewpoints, it was still...albeit probably necessary...rather bathed in academic language and something of a slog to get through.  One thing brought up struck me personally: the notion that if you pick certain specific settings to consistently do your learning, then recalling those same settings can be a great aid in recalling what was learned.  It's the first time I have heard anyone affirm this truth that I have known for decades.  There's plenty to digest in Make It Stick...I probably should have assiduously followed its own suggestions in reading it...

Ran Gainesville's Depot Park 5K This Morning

Once again, I managed to drag my sleepy body out of bed on a Saturday morning around six and got myself ready to drive down to Gainesville's pretty Depot Park, where the international, England-based non-profit organization Parkrun has been holding its free weekly, volunteer-run event at 7:30 since late 2018.  I began the Depot Parkrun in January 2019 and, today, managed to finish my 25th run...they don't like to call them races, although they do post the finishes online with participants' names and times.  I did speed-walk one race (I at least call them races) this past spring but haven't done one since, in spite of my intentions.  This morning I ran the course again, finishing the 5K (3.1 mile) distance in 30:38: you can view the overall posted results by clicking HERE.  Parkrun, which is now held in 1,913 different locations worldwide, has a system of rewarding regular participants with Milestone recognition at 25, 50, 100, and 250 cumulative runs.  Since I just got to 25, I was able to order a t-shirt recognizing that accomplishment.  I have to say that this event has been a blessing in my life, adding an element of discipline to my running and a healthy pressure to regularly run in a more social environment.  I didn't feel quite as up to the run this morning as last week...as Winnie the Pooh would say, I had a "rumbly in my tumbly"...and the humidity was an unpleasant 92% although it was a nice 64 degrees at race time.  I had planned afterward to go explore the Hawthorne Trail a little further, but there seemed to me a large number of walkers clogging the pathway and, as I said, I was probably physically better off going on home anyway.  Later on in the day I ran another 4.2 miles...slowly...so it was a good day in that regard.  Oh, one other thing...some of the people there were dressed up for Halloween in role-playing costumes: that was cute...

Quote of the Week...from Jimmy Buffett

Go fast enough to get there, but slow enough to see.            ---Jimmy Buffett

Although Jimmy Buffett, who sadly passed away two months ago, is known for his style of rock that emphasized tropical, southern living, my first exposure to his wonderful music came during the summer of 1974 when he sang of wanting to leave Los Angeles and return to the mountains of Montana in the song Come Monday.  Four years later I heard Cheeseburger in Paradise which pretty much said everything essential about this American delicacy...those are my two favorite songs of his.  Buffett's above quote also stirred me and reminded me of the time a few years ago when Melissa and I visited Kanapaha Botanical Gardens southwest of Gainesville during their Moonlight Walk.  The two of us took our time slowly strolling down the pathway looking at the plants, while for the entire walk people would be speedily passing us saying stuff like "excuse me, sorry, excuse us" in their great rush to get through the experience.  I thought that was kind of weird, and maybe you do, too.  Yet consider that with anything we do, short-term or long, there is a goal or destination, which to attain we need to undergo a time-consuming process.  You want to get there in a reasonably timely manner...yet that which involves the endeavor is also worthwhile, and sometimes it dwarfs the outcome.  That's the way I see running races...not so much the finishing and aftermath, but the race itself with the variables involving distance, location, course terrain, weather, my body's state, people, and other factors I'm dealing with that mix together into an experiential stew.  But I could also say that about a drive to work, reading a book, buying groceries, mowing my lawn, cleaning out my garage, traveling to anywhere, even going to the dentist!  Somebody once said to stop and smell the roses, but if you're not into that stuff then there's plenty else to enjoy, and who says you have to stop...

Constellation of the Month: Aquarius (the Water-Carrier)

Aquarius is one of the twelve Zodiac constellations, marking the pathway along our Solar System's plane where you can see the Sun, Moon and planets in their celestial wanderings...with a corresponding astrological sign for those born between January 20th and February 18th.  It's also the name of my "song of the year" from 1969, by the Fifth Dimension, which signaled the advent of a new astrological age...but I digress: back to astronomy and reality.  Aquarius is a constellation a stargazer would see crossing the meridian (the imaginary line running across the sky from the northern horizon to the southern) during mid-evening during the month of October...hence it's my chosen constellation of this month.  Brighter than Pisces, the Zodiac constellation to its east, and dimmer than Capricornus, to its west (and south), the fact remains that all three aren't exactly easy to spot in the sky, especially if you're hindered by city lights as I am here in Gainesville.  I first encountered Aquarius at age seven looking at a star map in the Herbert S. Zim Golden Guide to the Stars handbook, but it was drawn completely omitting the constellation's western half, including its brightest stars.  Aquarius has been drawn a number of ways...I kind of freelanced the above version.  If you're new to reading star maps, take note that Greek letters are used to designate stars and, generally speaking with a number of exceptions, their relative brightness diminishes as you go down the alphabet. There are three deep-sky Messier objects in its western half: M2, M72 and M73, all globular star clusters.  The best way I know to locate Aquarius in the night sky is to find the first magnitude star Fomalhaut in Piscis Austrinus, which lies south of Aquarius, and go north a bit (upward in latitudes north of the Equator), but not so far as much more prominent Pegasus.  Good luck with that...Aquarius is hard to spot under my conditions, but at least it's not one of those dinky, insignificant constellations I've referred to recently in this monthly feature.  I guess I'll keep doing it until I run out of constellations, possibly combining some of the tinier ones...

Weekly Short Stories: 1993 Science Fiction, Part 7

Not quite finished with the year 1993 in sci-fi short stories...but approaching it...I continue today with some more from Garder Dozois' anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Eleventh Annual Collection.  As with a long span during this era, I was involved with making long lists of things and memorizing them, later reviewing and expanding upon them.  The fact that I had an on-the-surface tedious job in which I could go for long stretches of time in personal reflection made this feasible...I think this exercise strengthened me in later years.  But as I like to say, back to those stories... 

LIESERL by Stephen Baxter

This story starts from the end and then presents the narrative leading up to it as a young woman finds herself comfortably deep beneath the sun's surface, genetically modified to withstand the extreme conditions.  Sounds impossible, but the author somehow makes you believe it anyway...today's scientific advances in this area may not end up so accomplished, but they're getting to the point of being scary...

FLASHBACK by Dan Simmons

I'm currently reading Stephen King's 2011 novel 11/22/63 for the umpteenth time, and this novella from eighteen years earlier, set in a dystopian 2018 America quite different from the way it turned out, presents a dual-interesting perspective on looking back in the time, and also trying to project the future.  In Flashback, flashbacks are addictive, digitally directed drugs that send the user to a specific moment in the past for a set...usually brief...period of time, and then back again.  One elederly man keeps reliving up close the final minutes as a Secret Service agent before the John F. Kennedy assassination 55 years earlier, trying in vain to change the outcome as time ironically, repeatedly, keeps running out on him.  Similar dramas with flashback are going on with his daughter and her teenage son.  What kind of digital drugs are we addicted to in our time? A worthwhile reading...I've read Simmons before, and he's one of the better writers of our time...

A CHILD'S CHRISTMAS IN FLORIDA by William Browning Spencer

A brief tale of how a dysfunctional, native rural Floridian family spends their Christmas time with their own traditions, straight out of the Stephen King playbook.  A retired elderly couple from the colder north like the Florida warmth but miss the holiday ambiance associated with their former harsher winters.  The wife misreads a nearby family's celebration of Christmas, imputing innocent good will to very sinister goings-on.  Sad, and in a way, funny, too...

Next week I conclude my look at 1993 in "short" science fiction with two stories, one of them a rather lengthy novella...

Podcaster Says to Stop Doing These Nine Things

In yesterday's article I was critical of Daniel Amen using his professional title as a doctor of psychiatry to present a comprehensive bible of life and how to live it, noting that were he only to present himself as a fellow traveler through life without all the self-aggrandizing hoopla, I would have been more receptive to his message.  In a similar vein, I tend more to relate to podcaster Rob Dial on his Mindset Mentor show.  Dial to me has just as much insight into "life"...however you might frame it...as "doctor" Amen, but he doesn't hide behind professional titles in giving his views.  Even so, sometimes I agree with Dial and sometimes I don't...that, I'm sure, would suit him quite well as he is no stickler for perfection (read numbers 4 and 6 below).  The other day he listed nine things that he insists each of us stop...nip it in the bud, as Barney Fife would say.  Here they are...

STOP

1) making excuses...rarely does anyone regret not having made them

2) playing the victim...takes control of life away from self, better to take responsibility

3) complaining...use "1-3-1" method: identify 1 problem, come up with 3 solutions, pick 1 to start with

4) being afraid of failure...failure is the best teacher, you want to fail soon and often

5) procrastinating...too much planning, instead "ready, fire, aim", aka take action and then adjust

6) being so hard on yourself...you're doing the best you can, let it go-especially past regrets

7) trying to control everything...we're all pretty insignificant in the grand scheme of things

8) giving up on yourself...follow up, go through with what you've started

9) settling for just an "OK" life...we have the capacity for an incredible life, which we get one shot at

To all the above the "Goth" part of me would like to add "easier said than done".  But then again, life is a journey, not a destination...let's just take things one micro-habit at a time...

Just Finished Reading You, Happier by Daniel G. Amen

Daniel Gregory Amen is an American psychiatrist who has become popular with his notion of brain types, as revealed by what he calls SPECT (single-photon emission computed tomography), that is, brain scans, that he liberally uses at his clinics to determine his clients' brain types and then offer treatment and programs that purportedly match the determined type.  And he has identified 16 types: 5 primary and 11 secondary, which are derived from the primary.  Since this book of his I just finished reading, You, Happier, bases a lot of his advice on which particular brain type I supposedly have, I decided to take his online survey that he claims to approximate the correct brain type.  The primary types are (1) Balanced, (2) Spontaneous, (3) Persistent, (4) Sensitive, and (5) Cautious.  Balanced is what it claims to be, a measured combination of 2,3 and 4.  After I took the "test", they gave me my type: Number (8), which curiously ALSO claims to be a combination of brain types 2,3, and 4!  Only, I guess, with me the combination isn't so balanced...or maybe they don't know what the hell they're doing, always a possibility.  With books like this by pop physicians who use a hook or gimmick to lure in the reader (and prospective customer of their inevitable product line), Amen expanded You, Happier to become a bible of living, smoothly stepping out of his area of medical expertise to give dietary advice, labeling some foods and drink (like pizza, ice cream, hamburgers and coffee, you know, the stuff I like) as "sad" and others (green vegetables, nuts, fruits...all organic, of course) as "happy".  If it sounds as if I am being unduly critical of the good doctor, then it's only because I feel that he is trading off his medical credentials in order to build a lucrative business and loyal following while making dubious connections between the study of the human brain and popular psychology.  Had he written his suggestions and advice from the perspective of a fellow traveler through life such as myself, I would have had no doubt a more positive reaction. Also, these brain scans Daniel Amen bases his theories on dosing the brain with radiation for those scans, and he's been criticized for this as well.  In closing, I have to admit to cringing a bit whenever my local public television station is undergoing a fund drive, and they have people like Amen or Steven Gundry on the air lecturing the gullible, nodding audience on their particular quirky notions about what is good and what isn't.  But why stop with this review...why not simply check out You, Happier and see (or hear if you do the audio version) for yourself?  I thought there was some good stuff in it, but I had to filter it out from the author's personal biases...

Looking (and Laughing) at Ridiculous Trends of the Past...and the Present

Sometimes people post old pictures of themselves and their buddies on my high school nostalgia website.  Everyone...especially the boys...has long, long hair that's screaming for professional style haircuts.  And those sad omnipresent bell-bottom jeans: give me a break! I don't know of anyone back then in the early seventies who deliberately preferred, on their own initiative, this style of clothing.  No, it was something that the fashion industry imposed on the population and one day, that's all people had to choose from...at least that's the way I remember it.  In any event, I think everyone looks kind of dopey in those old pics, and it's largely because they were following the herd mentality in trying to fit in and look like everyone else.  Don't think that I'm letting our present time off the hook.  Nowadays the "in" public appearance revolves around carrying one's cell smartphone in the hand, spending inordinate time looking down at it instead of paying attention to their ongoing surroundings and situations.  I know this because I regularly drive to work here in Gainesville down US-441 past the University of Florida, midday when the students are flooding the sidewalks with their presence.  Students who walking in couples or groups don't stare at the phones, but a large percentage of the "singletons" just go walking down the sidewalks...even crossing busy streets...with their eyes glued to their object, even when the sun is glaring down on them making actually seeing anything at least theoretically impossible.  I couldn't do that simply because I'm afraid I'd trip on something and fall on my ass...these kids must have an inner gyroscope guiding their motions!  I'm speaking from 1973 to 2023 here, but what will be it like fifty more years in the future, in 2073, when these very students are old fogies like me and are themselves observers of the passing scene: how will the inevitable changes manifest themselves?  I don't see this smartphone culture as static in the least.  Cyber technology will become more internalized and private, to the point I think that folks from the future will be laughing at images of these people stuck on their phones today.  In that sense I'm already way ahead of my own time.  On the other hand, those 2073 folks may be laughing at stuff they see from 2023 that I think is perfectly normal...  

Ran Today's Depot Parkrun 5K...and a Little Beyond

For a while I had been considering driving all the way down to Ocala, about 37-38 miles away from my home, and trying one of the bi-monthly racing events being staged in Baseline Trailhead Park, on the eastern side of town off 58th Avenue.  But instead of shelling out the fee for their race this morning...I'll probably do it some day in the future anyway...I once again ran my hometown's free, volunteer-run regular event, the Depot Parkrun 5K (3.1 miles)...and for the 24th time since 2019.  The weather was pleasant at the 7:30 race time, in the mid-sixties and a little over 90% humidity.  I felt energetic and my running reflected it as I got myself into a brisk pacing groove early on and finished strong with one of my better times for this event at 30:19. You can see the results by clicking HERE.  After last week's 10K race on the Hawthorne Trail held by the Florida Track Club, I waited a few minutes after finishing it and then ran an additional 1.5 miles on a part of the Trail I hadn't covered before.  So why not do the same here?  I waited about ten minutes after finishing my 5K and then set out to get back on the Hawthorne Trail...it's connected to Depot Park. I went south on it until I reached Williston Road and then turned back, covering an extra 1.9 miles. That stretch of the Hawthorne Trail has some of the prettiest scenery I've experienced along it so far, with a bridge going over a creek that looked like something from northern Georgia. I like this "going the extra distance" strategy following races and plan to implement it in future events, although I think I might take a pass whenever a half-marathon rolls by...

Quote of the Week...from Jordan B. Peterson

If you are not willing to be a fool, you can't become a master.       Jordan B. Peterson

On a recent podcast of his personal development coach Rob Dial paraphrased the above quote by Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson, a podcaster in his own right.  It was used to illustrate how people need to immerse themselves within an area in which they want to attain expertise, with mistakes and failures integral parts of the learning process.  Dial didn't mention Peterson by name, which to me seemed unusual.  Jordan B. Peterson wrote a book, among others, titled The Twelve Rules of Life, which I checked out on Libby and am currently reading.  He takes a strong position on people taking personal responsibility for their own lives and has gotten some negative press scrutiny over his general objection to identity politics, although on a number of issues he is clearly on the liberal side.  I won't get into the dude's political leanings but rather into the substance of the above quote.  As little children, we usually are given much leeway with our mistakes, but once we "grow up" those same mistakes can make us the target of ridicule...or at least that's the way our fears can manipulate us into believing.  I know that I will never speak a language I am studying unless I first just get out there with native speakers and stumble around, playing the fool, so to speak.  The same thing goes for any other area I'm engaged in.  Of course, if I'm learning to fly a plane or drive and park a long tractor trailer, there is naturally going to be less tolerance on being a fool and making mistakes as the negative consequences would be too high.  But speaking a new language?  Somebody throw me a jester's hat!

A Good YouTube Video of Recent Staten Island Half Marathon

Over the past year I have become a pretty avid viewer of YouTube, a video platform run by Google (the same company that backs this blog).  Among the many kinds of videos I like to watch are the virtual runs...the YouTube channel Runners Digest contains some of the best, with Treadmill Trainer also providing good material.  These videos tend to be designed with treadmill running in mind, with the user pretending to be in an actual race while training at home or the gym.  For me, I watch the videos at home while jogging around the house...no treadmill necessary.  On this past October 8th, Staten Island, one of the five boroughs of New York City (and the starting point for the NYC Marathon), held a half marathon there.  One of the entrants has a history of filming these types of races in the New York area from the perspective of a runner, and this video, posted on the Runners Digest channel, shows how much he has progressed in developing his video-making skills.  Along with the usual screen of how a developing race looks to a runner in it, he also put at the top a sort of virtual "rear view mirror" showing how it appears looking back.  And there are ongoing stats presented in the corner of the screen.  Although on these sorts of race videos I prefer to just hear the actual sounds of the event, this one...like many others I've experienced...has pretty background music to accompany it instead: I can handle that, though.  My only "experience" of Staten Island is with the NYC Marathon videos I've seen of it: in these there's just a large "herding" area for the tens of thousands of runners and then they're suddenly on a steep, long bridge out of there, leading to Brooklyn where much of the event takes place.  In this race I just saw, though, you get to see a lot more of this interesting part of New York...click HERE to view it like I did... 

Weekly Short Stories: 1993 Science Fiction, Part 6

Once again, it’s time to look at three more short stories from the year 1993, as they appeared in the anthology The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Eleventh Annual Collection and edited by the late Gardner Dozois.  I remember around this time being exposed to horrific news stories about fighting and massacres going on in what was formerly Yugoslavia, once a nation applauded for its unity of diverse nationalities (Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, Kosovan, Bosnian, Macedonian) and religions (Roman Catholic, Muslim and Orthodox), which had escaped the Soviet domination after World War II that afflicted other countries in this area…only to fall into this tragic, belligerent and divisive chaos.  It would go on there throughout the 1990s, sad to say.  But, as I usually say at this juncture, back to those stories…

THERE AND THEN by Steven Utley

In yet another time travel story, it’s the Silurian period during the Paleozoic era and humans are there studying it all while, true to their nature, hatching schemes to exploit what they find to bring it back home to the (story’s) present.  During this the protagonist, along with the other crew members and some begrudgingly welcomed visitors from “back home”, behave like characters in a dumb reality TV show in spite of their incredibly exotic surroundings.  Yep, that sounds like the human nature I’ve come to know…                                                                                                                                                              

THE NIGHT WE BURIED ROAD DOG by Jack Cady

A brilliant, unforgettable tale about like in the 1960s in the rural, mountainous American northwest when and where well-built, souped-up legendary cars speed dangerously down the treacherous highways and one man decides to begin a graveyard for them, complete with headstones.  Only there’s something Jesse isn’t sharing with others, including the narrator: there’s somebody who looks just like him prowling the roads while leaving behind cryptic messages: the Road Dog.  And here’s where the story heats up.  As good or better than anything Stephen King has produced, and that’s saying a lot…

FEEDBACK by Joe Haldeman

This story deals with a future when people can temporarily blend their identities through technology.  Of course, human nature being what it is (see previous story), it becomes big business as an artistic painter hires himself out to blend identities with a sinister, wealthy man to paint the portrait of a nude model.  And with this kind of story being what it is, the artist gets more than he bargained for…

Next week: more from ’93…

Just Finished Reading Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

I returned to murder mystery novels recently by picking one I hadn't read before, but which has been immortalized on the silver screen: Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile, first published in 1937.  Having never seen the movie adaptations, I enjoyed how the author introduced the characters...including the story's victim(s) and suspects...and developed the plot as series regular, soft-spoken but discerning Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, sleuths his way through a confounding murder mystery taking place on a pleasure cruise down the Egyptian Nile River.  The principles in the story constitute the cruise's passengers and crew...even including Poirot, who is there on vacation.  A young, glamorous wealthy English heiress is there with her groom, whom she essentially stole from her best friend.  And now that aggrieved woman is there as well, stalking the newly married couple and laying down all sorts of threats against them.  There is an assortment of other characters of varied backgrounds, convictions and morals (or lack thereof) that Christie has inserted to present a tableau of other potential suspects when the inevitable killing begins.  No, this is not a review that spoils the ending, which I incidentally found to be quite satisfying...except for an action Poirot takes that, frankly, seemed a bit unethical and out of character for him, for me a cringeworthy moment.  But I'll leave this objection as yet another mystery for you, a potential reader of this fine novel, to discover.  If you do, give me some feedback...you know where to reach me.  Now on to another book!

Truly Pleasant Fall Weather Day Here in Gainesville

This morning I walked out in the back yard and marveled about the coolness...so pleasant, for a change!  I checked my phone weather app, and it said here in Gainesville it was 58 degrees with a humidity of 77%...this a little past 10:30. I think we may now be entering a "Goldilocks" zone with the weather in northern Florida...not too hot and not too cold, with rain at most presenting occasional umbrella opportunities.  On the other hand, I would probably like it even more if today's "high" were 58, with the nighttime lows dipping into the upper 30s...yes, that's my Goldilocks zone.  Still, I'll take any break from the unbearably hot and humid year we've been experiencing.  Hopefully, the cool weather break will extend into a properly autumn seasonal trend and stay with us for a while without reverting to the months-long stagnation plaguing us this year...

About This Blog and a Potential Podcast

This blog, begun in April of 2007, now has more than 5,540 posts and I'm not even remotely considering ending it...for me it's been a successful disciplined exercise and outlet for my writing.  Although I have intentionally striven to avoid excessively personal and dramatic articles, at times my passions regarding a particular subject can come out on the page...that's good since this never was to be a dry, technical manual.  This is a personal journal, designed to have one foot objectively planted in the world around me and the other in my own inner world over which subjectivity reigns supreme. It's the intersection of these two worlds that defines reality for me.  Personal opinions and sometimes emotional reactions to what I experience, either in my daily walk or from being exposed to media news sources, are things that I naturally expect to often differ from those of other people.  The problem I see nowadays is that the expected bedrock of factual information, where that first foot is supposed to securely stand, also differs vastly from one individual to another. People have deliberately chosen to believe alternate realities and, with the choices that they have with their information sources, can now completely surround themselves with only that which affirms their prejudices and biases and either condemns or ignores differing and possibly challenging conclusions that could be drawn from a more realistic presentation of the news.  So, this is the world I live in in the year 2023, and I don't see things improving on this front anytime in the near future.  As for my personal expression, I am thinking of establishing my own brief podcast, in the same vein as this blog to serve as a consistent periodic disciplined exercise, not in writing though, but rather in speaking.  Since my speaking ability has always lagged far behind that of my writing, this should pose a bit of a challenge to my fear of rejection.  As a precursor to me starting out on this venture, I have decided to "schedule" my daily solo drives to work and back as "carcasts" in which I verbally speak out on a predetermined topic (with myself as the entire audience), much in the same way I write.  I figure if I do this enough times to place myself in a kind of habitual speaking "groove", then some of the awkwardness involved in improvised speaking specifically for effective podcasting can be exercised away and I can grow into this new activity.  I also need to find a suitable outlet for podcasts...since Google has served me nicely with this blog, I think I'll start there. Do you have a podcast or blog, and have you ever considered doing one?   

Ran the Florida Track Club's Tom Walker Preview 10K This Morning

Every November...unless there's a pandemic or something else dire going down...the Florida Track Club holds a half-marathon south and east along the Hawthorne Trail, titled the Tom Walker Memorial and named for a former FTC president who passed away far too young at age 38 in 1989.  The last couple of years they have also been holding an October 5K/10K race along the same trail called the Tom Walker Preview: I ran it last year and repeated this morning.  This time the race time temperature, while around 71 degrees, was accompanied by a pleasantly low humidity at 39%, according to my phone app.  Add to these factors the presence of mostly overcast skies and the conditions were very conducive to a pleasant run.  My strategy was simply to alternate five minutes of running at a steady pace with a minute of brisk walking...repeated until the run's end...oh by the way, I opted for the 10K (6.2 mile) distance.  It all went quite well, and for the last 17 minutes I had enough energy left over to just flat-out run the rest of the race, finishing with a "gun" time of 1:05:05 (chip-timed at 1:04:51)...better than planned.  Click HERE to see the "official" results posted by the Florida Track Club through Second Wind Timing. The difference between the "gun" time and "chip" time is the number of seconds it takes for the runner, often stuck back in a crowded pack, to finally reach the starting line when the race begins, so the chip time actually more accurately reflects my run from start to finish. They awarded me another coffee mug for finishing third in my age/gender category, to go with the identical one I won last month.  This race, as well as the half-marathon scheduled for November 12th, originates and ends at Boulware Springs Park off SE 15th Street, accessible via Hawthorne Road.  I was also hoping that the Tyler's Hope 15K, held at the same location in the past in early December, would already be on the racing calendar but perhaps they're not holding it this year...that would be sad.  A few minutes after this morning's run I decided to run north along the trail to SE 22nd Avenue and back...an additional 1.5 miles.  It's been a good running day for me so far...I think I'll rest a bit for the remainder and watch sports on TV...

Quote of the Week...from Katrina Mayer

 Books were my friends when no friends were around.                ---Katrina Mayer

On my Facebook page often appear certain sites that were provided for my viewing without me directly requesting them...I always assumed that the AI running the show over at FB thought I'd like them.  One of these is "Goodwill Librarian", which is spot-on in nailing my affection for books and reading.  Wednesday morning, they posted the above quote by Katrina Mayer, an author who conducts "positivity" workshops.  Checking out her website, she immediately won me over by this other quote: "I'm an avid fan of solitude, peaceful surroundings and simplicity." I am a big fan of books and reading, almost always in the middle of two or three at a time, both in fiction and nonfiction as well as novels and short story collections.  During some of the most negative periods of my youth, reading provided a solace and a sense of rational foundation that no doubt saved me from treading down more pernicious and self-destructive paths. I was blessed to have parents and an older sister who were avid readers, and I often secretly raided their storehouse of books.  My dad was particularly keen on science fiction, and through him I was introduced to old-time science fiction greats like Frederic Brown and Clifford Simak.  I was also partial to the inexpensive books I could buy after saving up my meager allowance, especially the Herbert S. Zim Golden Guides to science and nature...the one about stars has to be my all-time favorite.  The ironic thing about my reading is that, with a small number of notable exceptions, most of my reading assignments in high school were negative experiences...I'm convinced that my teachers and the educational system they worked under...at least back then...were clueless and that they saw me an annoyance they had to get past to get through their days, not as a valuable individual with future potential.  But back to the books: when I could choose them, I loved them...and still do.  Now, though, I'm putting more and more of them on my Kindle as well as reading a ton of audiobooks...but they're still books and they are friends...

Dentist, Storms, Feistiness

At this writing I just left the dentist after a surprisingly pleasant visit...and headed over to my nearby doughnut shop to get my customary iced coffee...my current favorite flavoring is mocha.  I do have to be careful about coffee spilling out of my mouth, since my left side is thoroughly numb...ha, ha.  It's been an unusually stormy morning here in Gainesville. It began last night and is expected to last the day, spreading all over the northern part of Florida and reportedly spawning tornadoes.  The Weather Channel called it "feisty", while they depicted an Iowan storm system as "boisterous"...sounds like an undergraduate English major was writing their script.  Speaking of those two terms, they naturally have usually been applied to people, not inanimate processes.  Yet in today's so-called "enlightened" society where perceived anger is regarded as a threat, typically feisty individuals can be demonized for simply being themselves. If you're in an office as a client and complain about their billing process, as I did recently, there's a possibility that the party you're addressing may deflect your complaint against you, claiming that you are in a state of anger...as if that by itself constituted some form of illegitimate, antisocial behavior.  I think that's a form of manipulation...people by their very natures are cranky at times and will react in like fashion if somebody pushes their wrong buttons.  It's okay to express frustration when you perceive you're being taken advantage of or ripped off, and that isn't your fault...

Weekly Short Stories: 1993 Science Fiction, Part 5

Below are my reactions to three more short stories as they appeared in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Eleventh Annual Collection, covering material published in 1993. That year...going back to me first starting to work at the Gainesville post office and afterward through most of 1995...I often rode my ramshackle bicycle the nearly eight miles from my home to my graveyard shift at work and back, usually on the way there stopping off for a book & coffee break at the Books-a-Million (now 2nd and Charles) on NW 13th Street and then cutting across the University of Florida campus before hitting Archer Road...good times, good times. I'm also having a good time reading this book edited by Dozois...

GEORGIA ON MY MIND by Charles Sheffield

Sheffield was a theoretical physicist who worked with the U.S. space program...he injects much of his science and engineering knowledge into his stories.  Here he presents a primer on the early history of computers as an anomalous discover has been made in a remote New Zealand country house that puts into question not only what we believed about our past, but also the notion that humans are the only indigenous life forms on Earth at our level of intelligence and technology.  Very intriguing...

CUSH by Neal Barrett, Jr.

A poor rural black woman's niece has a little boy, Cush, who seems to supernaturally bless everyone he encounters while drawing illness, injury and deformity upon his own body.  When word of his gift leaks out, Andrea must encounter and confront the outsiders invading their personal lives at their suddenly prospering Alabama farm.  Taking on the world's pain and suffering to make it undeservingly better is a common theme in religion, especially Christianity.  This tale seems to be a kind of analogy...

ON THE COLLECTION OF HUMANS by Mark Rich

Sometimes a story can be so short, like this one, that it lacks an integral structure.  This is more or less a manual for advanced alien scientists on how to abduct humans for research purposes.  Obviously meant to be funny, I gave it a couple of chuckles and then moved on, in doing so casting a suspicious look at the sky behind me...

Next week I will continue my look at 1993 as I go through some more of Garder Dozois' selections from that year in science fiction...

Back from Extended Weekend Off

Well, after being off from work for four days, it's back to the grind...although truth be told, I don't have any problem with that.  Acknowledging the many blessings in my life has become a worthwhile personal habit, and my gratitude furthers enhances my daily walk. It's a terrible shame that people, being what they are, just can't seem to get along in the world...or in many areas within my own country, for that matter.  By most standards, you could call me a misanthrope, and yet I don't attach negative emotions to that label, only recognizing fallen human nature for what it is and refusing to adopt a Pollyannish worldview that would only continually crash down on me from letdown and betrayal.  I love my family and close friends, but beyond that I'm a little like those European immigrants to this great land featured in the Godfather movies who, while engaging and interacting with others, at the same time entertained a healthy skepticism about their character and motives.  Be nice to folks, sure, and don't always go around complaining about things, either.  But at the same time, I'm hip to the ways of the world and it ain't always rosy, just in case you haven't been watching the news lately...

Some Comments on TV, News and Facebook

This morning I used my TV the way I usually do: in Roku mode. I listened to a couple of podcasts (while exercise-running up and down the hall and rooms) and several foreign language newscasts...followed by some YouTube videos alternating two different foreign languages: my preferred ones are Mandarin Chinese/Vietnamese, French/Spanish, and Russian/German. If I do go to the mainline channels, I tend to go to The Weather Channel and avoid both the cable news and opinion channels and the cozy "good morning" magazine-type shows.  That's because I'm focused on my own agenda and want to avoid the distraction, manipulation and, frankly, the fear and outrage those other shows tend to provoke, whether deliberately or not.  I also tend to steer from Facebook when I can, only checking the notifications section to see if someone has something on it pertaining to me.  I am only active on it because, with a break for a few months in 2021, I have since 2013 been putting links to this blog's usually daily entries on my Facebook page for others to more easily access.  But I am not fan of Facebook per se: it seems more of a popularity site for head-nodders than something that resonates with me on a higher level.  It's also an outlet for propaganda, conspiracy theories, and serves as a magnet for aggressive people who have nothing better to do with their lives than to troll others for simply having differing opinions on provocative subjects.  In 2021 after the Trump-worshipping fascists tried to overthrow the United States government following a free and fair election that turned him out of power, I pretty much left the news...and Facebook as well, only resuming the latter after a small number of my blog readers commented that me linking articles to that site made reading it a lot more convenient for them.  But I like Facebook even less than ever, and it's making posting these articles to it more and more arduous: were it not for this blog, I would rarely go there.  As for the news and the events transpiring now with the wars and presidential election campaigns heating up, I don't need constant, draining exposure to it all in order to know where I stand regarding issues and candidates and make my own responsible civic duty choices when election time comes.  Maybe you're different...well, if that's so, then you should be a happy camper with all this crap out there to fill up your mind and waking moments with...

Just Started Reading Rob Dial's New Book Titled Level Up

As you may already know if you've been reading this blog regularly, I've been a regular listener to personal development coach Rob Dial's podcast The Mindset Mentor for some time.  He's just come out with his first book, titled Level Up, and which I am grateful to have received as a birthday gift...I just started reading it.  It's not the kind of book I would normally read through and then immediately review here on this blog as I do others.  No, each chapter has its own special theme with the last page listing cues for journaling, an activity that Dial strongly recommends.  The subtitle to this book is How to Get Focused, Stop Procrastinating, and Upgrade Your Life.  It contains much of what I have already heard from him on his show, and I am serious about implementing some of his suggestions...always, though, with a discerning filter that doesn't automatically swallow everything I read.  He has a very plain and simple, readable writing style that, well, frankly reminds me a little of my own: make it simple and sweet, I always say!  Although I don't plan on a book review for this one, I'm pretty sure that from time to time I'll discuss a topic I come across from it that interests me.  He also has been doing the same lately on his podcast, picking out different chapters to discuss...

Enjoying Beach Outing This Weekend

This weekend Melissa and I have been at the beach, Ormond to be specific.  It's been fun and a good change of scenery and pace.  We're returning home tomorrow...hope all is well with you!  I really enjoyed getting out in a decent pool and getting to swim a bit...maybe I'll finally get around to trying laps at my local gym's indoor pool after getting off from work at night.  In any event, it's a blessing to thoroughly enjoy outings like this while, at the same time, looking forward to getting back...

New Running Strategy is a Return to My Old Running Strategy

As the temperatures grudgingly begin to fall while the fall season progresses, I am considering my running and walking strategy for the weeks and months ahead.  I've decided to go back to a method touted by running guru and marathoner Jeff Galloway that alternates running with walking, and which I used to great success in my training for years.  My plan now is to simply, whatever the distance, run at an appropriately brisk pace for five minutes, followed by a fast one-minute walk, and then going back to the steady run for five more...and then back to walking, alternating between the two for however long my distance is for that day.  This will be for training as well as for races, although when I'm just jogging around inside the house, I don't see the need for it.  Melissa and I will be going to the beach this weekend...I definitely will be doing the run/walk plan then on any runs from our hotel to the Daytona Beach Pier and back.  I distinctly remember back in 2010 feeling that with this way of training, if I wanted, I could run indefinitely for whatever distance I chose without stopping...

Weekly Short Stories: 1993 Science Fiction, Part 4

Here are my reactions to three more sci-fi short stories as they appeared in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Eleventh Annual Collection, edited by the late Gardner Dozois, a respected writer of this genre in his own right.  In 1993, although there was plenty of good new music out there...at least with alternative and hard rock (R.E.M's Automatic for the People and Coverdale/Page's self-titled album stand out)...I was more focused on albums and acts from years earlier, especially the progressive rock group Yes and their six album-side-length tracks from the 1970s.  One of these, Close to the Edge, became my "song of the year" for 1993 although it was twenty years old at the time.  But now it's time to get back to those stories... 

GUEST OF HONOR by Robert Reed

In his introduction, Gardner makes reference to "the decadent world of ultrarich immortals" that he tongue-and-cheek recommended you avoid if you encounter it...I'm already freaked out by the cruelty and corruption rampant in the real decadent world of mortals!  He's right: this is a haunting, unforgettable story that in a sense reminded me of the old 70's sci-fi flick Logan's Run as to how they try to snow people into thinking that being killed is only a transformation to the next level...

LOVE TOYS OF THE GODS by Pat Cadigan

Obviously meant to be funny, this not-quite-so-funny short tale pokes fun both at the then (and now) ongoing narrative of alien abductions and at rural American culture, making everybody out to be ignorant dumb-ass rubes...guess there are some folks out there you can trash and ridicule without being canceled...

CHAFF by Greg Egan

Of the three stories I read this week, this one has the greatest chance of becoming true, and frankly that scares the hell out of me.  An artificially biologically engineered area in the northern South America jungle is growing...and producing mind-altering drugs of a sort never before humanly experienced.  A "black ops" operative is sent down there in a clandestine mission...like in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness or the movie Apocalypse Now...to find and capture (or terminate) a leading scientist believed to be largely responsible for the crisis. What this ruthless agent discovers at the end of his quest to me is entirely feasible...and bone-chilling...

Next week: more sci-fi from 1993...

My Current Approaches to Foreign Language Study

Although I do like Steve Kaufmann's LingQ language learning website, which enables the subscriber to keep track of their new words learned in various foreign languages, I have found myself using other venues more recently.  YouTube has an unbelievable amount of educational material on it, and the Kendra and Eko series each are very useful as they match up two languages, phrase by phrase...it enables me to build up vocabulary and familiarity without always having to use my native English as a translation reference.  The Tunein Radio app enables me to listen to radio and podcasts in different languages as they are normally spoken, trying to pick up meaning when I can and letting the rest "wash over me", as Kaufmann likes to put it.  And Wikipedia is fantastic with its different topics and languages...as with the Tunein audio material, I find myself reading different articles and just trying to pick up meaning as I go without trying to get everything right.  So, while I'm not always using Steve Kaufmann's LingQ in my language study, I have adopted his approach to learning, which seems to make it all more fun as well as effective...

Mixed Feelings about High School and College Football

I was watching some of the college football games on TV this past Saturday and understand why so many of us are mesmerized by the sport.  It's all a kind of adventure story with action, interspersed with breaks to analyze what's going on and what will (or should) happen next, depending on which team you're rooting for.  Unfortunately, football is also very violent, taking a punishing toll on the body.  I remember in the eleventh grade in high school as one of my social studies teachers one day went on an anti-football rant, decrying its violence and effects on young people's bodies, often limiting and hobbling them later in life as well as posing a significant danger of brain damage.  The kids in the class, most of them ardent football fans if not players themselves, took this lecture all in stride seeing that this dude was widely regarded as one of the "cool" teachers.  At the time I was on the track team and the football team was doing spring "conditioning" for the next fall in the track's interior...I put that word in quotes because all they seemed to be doing was hitting each other as hard as they could, further weakening their bodies for future injury.  And that indeed happened, with many key players later sidelined for the season as the varsity football team in my senior year went 0-9-1.  That fall, while "my" team was losing game after game, I went to Hollywood Memorial Hospital for a scheduled hernia repair operation...which would turn out to be the only general anesthesia surgery I would undergo until 2021 when I had open heart surgery to replace a defective heart valve and repair an aortic aneurism.  I shared my recovery room with two other teenage boys, both suffering leg injuries from playing football, each kid a couple of years younger than me.  Their buddies would traipse in and out of the room treating them like war heroes.  Saturday night's South Carolina at Tennessee game reminded me of that time as the crazy-ass fans in the stands would wildly cheer whenever their team put an extremely hard hit on the other while they would be respectfully silent when someone went down and couldn't get back up, having to be carted off the field.  I think the Suzanne Collins Hunger Games series may have at least unconsciously derived from this duplicity from fans of wanting violence in a controlled setting and then acting like it's a shame when someone gets hurt (or, in the Hunger Games, killed).  So yes, I like a good story, and football can provide some good ones.  Still, I like to think I'm not quite as bloodthirsty about it as some of my fellow fans are...

The Misanthropic Volunteer?

Today's piece is more or less a continuation of yesterday's entry about my running and walking...with a marked misanthropic slant, if you can handle that.  I mentioned that yesterday I volunteered at my local Gainesville Depot Parkrun event, sorting the plastic finishing tokens that are scanned along with the runners' own printed barcodes...I don't expect you to know what I'm talking about.  But being where I was, I could observe the proceedings from a different perspective and, quite frankly, came to the conclusion that the vast majority of people around me were miserably unhappy.  There was one lady there...there always seems to be someone like this in most public social situations I find myself in... who made a point of having me walk across the park to ask a park employee whether a sheltered pavilion there was available to us in case it started raining.  She could have gone and done that herself, but I sensed a need in her to assert hierarchy and power, no matter how petty.  I was fine with the task but filed away her behavior...that alone would convince me to never volunteer here again.  But with the others, in spite of all the stuff I hear about how people want to be sociable and make friends, none of them seemed the least bit interested in doing so, with me or anyone else, for that matter.  Everyone, frankly, seemed terribly reserved and formal...yeah, like I want to hang out with them!  Not that I am necessarily passing judgment on anyone...I'm sure they could come up with some zingers to say about me as well.  But I do think that it is a fraud, a big lie, to claim to be extraverted...or that there is something wrong with me that I am introverted...when the vast majority of folks out there are either put out, uncomfortable...or even frightened when in social settings, especially among strangers.  Does any of this prove that I hate people?  I don't think so, otherwise I wouldn't have been willing to pay attention in such a discerning way to those around me.  Instead, I believe that people in general are much, much more misanthropic than they like to let others believe. And if it's not a sweeping dislike of humanity with them, at the very least they are tribal, with all of their efforts at sociability confined to their insulated little bubble of family and close friends.  Oh heck, I'll probably volunteer here again, I'm such a glutton for punishment...