Disappointed in 2024 Presidential Campaign Offerings

 I was watching a little bit of the Republican presidential campaign debate on TV last night.  There were four candidates on the stage: former Lousiana and New Jersey governors Nikki Haley and Chris Christie, respectively, current Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and some dude named Vivek Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy is an "almost billionaire" who founded a pharmaceutical company a few years ago and has been very politically active on the far right.  He's also critical of American support for Ukraine in their conflict against invading Russia...sounds like somebody Trump, aka "Putin's Puppet", might like for a VP pick.   Christie, a vehement critic of Donald Trump...who is vastly leading in the polls in the Republican race...bashed his debate opponents for refusing to likewise criticize the former president. I didn't care for anyone's performance in the debate...and I sure don't like Trump. I suppose that of the five, Nikki Haley stands out to me as the most presidential...yes, I think we would at least survive as a nation with her in charge and she isn't as dirt-dog-mean as the others in her party who are running. It's a shame we don't have better choices for president in 2024 than what we have been provided so for by either major party.  And if you're think of vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s independent campaign, then think again. Joe Biden has recently said that he probably wouldn't be running for reelection were it not for Trump running again. Whatever happens, I guess I'll just exercise my right to cast my votes next year in the primary and then the general campaign and do my best to positively adapt to whatever the rest of my country decides.  But sometimes I feel like I'm on a runaway train when it comes down to politics...     

Weekly Short Stories: 1994 Science Fiction, Part 5

Here are my reactions to three more 1994 stories from the Garder Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twelfth Annual Collection. Living in Gainesville, I was caught up that year in University of Florida head football coach Steve Spurrier's ultimately unsuccessful quest to win a national championship for the Gators. But a close heartbreaking home stadium loss to Auburn, along with an infamous four-touchdown blown lead to tie Florida State...along with a Sugar Bowl loss to the 'Noles in a rematch... delayed the title until another year. Still, Florida won the SEC championship. But enough of that, how about those stories...

NONE SO BLIND by Joe Haldeman

A young man, very smart, nerdy and awkward with girls, falls in love with an equally nerdy young blind woman...she returns his affections.  But although he claims to be interested in restoring her sight through a new surgical procedure, he's really interested in using it to vastly enhance her intelligence.  Here's a story that makes me wonder whether the author knows something that the scientific community is keeping secret, or maybe he's just engaging in some good old-fashioned science fiction speculation... 

COCOON by Greg Egan

A research company working on a project to help pregnant women from suffering complications by employing a special filter to prevent noxious substances from transferring to the embryo/fetus is the target of a bomb...a detective who happens to be gay becomes the lead investigator.  His homosexuality, it turns out, is relevant to the developing story as it becomes more and more apparent to him that diseases and poisons are not the only things this project was aiming to filter out from reaching the unborn.  Provocative, like the previous tale, but as with None So Blind, I'm left wondering how much is fact and how much is speculation...

SEVEN VIEWS OF OLDUVAI GORGE by Mike Resnick

It is in the far distant future and thousands of years after humanity, the hyper-aggressive Terran intelligent life form, had conquered the galaxy...and ultimately became extinct.  A research team of various talented entities from various systems are at Africa's Olduvai Gorge, to research artifacts there in order to determine more about humans, their nature and demise.  One of them can actually melt over an artifact and tell its story to the others...hence the "seven views" in the title.  Here is another novella that Dozois likes to stick in his book, so it's a bit lengthy.  But the surprise ending was perfect, and yes, it figures...

Next week: more SF from '94... 

Just Finished Reading The Silver Arrow by Lev Grossman

Lev Grossman is the dude who wrote the very excellent fantasy series The Magicians...one of my all-time favorites in that genre but which sadly was hopelessly mangled in the adapted television series bearing the same title.  In 2020 he had published The Silver Arrow, a fantasy series aimed at children...having just discovered it I checked it out and just finished reading it.  Kate gets a special present for her 11th birthday from her eccentric billionaire Uncle Herbert: a train, and a full-size, functioning one at that...move over, Polar Express! With her brother Tom, they start it up and go off on their own fantastic adventure, picking up along the way various talking animals who have their own special destinations.  There is some kind of murky antagonist alluded to, but the story ultimately points the finger of blame straight back at humanity, for mistreating and endangering the wild animals of the world.  So yes, this is a story with a Lorax-like moralistic, preachy theme to it...I'm okay with it, though, since this one happens to be tragically true.  I wonder what the rest of the books in this series are like...guess I'll have to read the next one to find out...

About This Year's College Football Playoffs Selections

Being a Floridian for almost my entire life, I have been a supporter of Florida college football teams since I began to follow the sport in 1968 when I was 11 going on 12 years old.  Then I liked Miami, Florida and Florida State and over the years continued to root for them...whenever they weren't playing against each other, that is. Since I moved in '77 to Gainesville, home of the University of Florida, I naturally became primarily a Gators fan but still supported the other two...unlike many of my fellow Gators.  So, when the college football playoff selection committee earlier today snubbed 13-0 Florida State, winner of the major Atlantic Coast Conference championship, from the four-team championship series in favor of two one-loss schools Texas and Alabama, I was disappointed.  FSU's star quarterback Jordan Travis had broken his leg in their next-to-last regular season game, and head coach Mike Norvell had toned down the high-flying explosive offense in favor of ball-control running and a strong defense for the last two contests.  The committee evidently saw Travis as an indispensable part of Florida State and thought his absence diminished them, thus opening the way ultimately for Alabama with Texas already "in" since they defeated the Crimson Tide at the season's start.  Alabama, for their part, defeated #1 ranked Georgia in their Southeastern Conference championship game, enabling them to claim a legitimate spot in the playoffs.  So, the seedings are now 1-Michigan, 2-Washington, 3-Texas, and 4-Alabama.  The semifinals will take place on New Year's Day with Michigan playing Alabama in the Rose Bowl and Washington against Texas in the Sugar Bowl.  Unhappy FSU is in the Orange Bowl on December 30th against equally unhappy Georgia.  I just wish that Oregon had hung on against Washington in their conference championship game...then I think Florida State would have made the playoffs.  Of the four teams that made it, I'm partial to Alabama, don't care much who wins between Washington and Texas, and will root against Michigan regardless.  Personally, I think Alabama's a better team than Michigan and will be surprised if they don't "upset" them...

Just Finished Reading Scary Smart by Mo Gawdat

Scary Smart, long title Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World is a 2021 book by Mo Gawdat, a former Google X business executive at that AI-development section of Google with a background in engineering.  When I think of artificial intelligence combined with the word "scary", I recall movies like The Terminator, The Matrix and the old 1970 TV movie Colossus: The Forbin Project, all depicting a future nightmare scenario where super-intelligent computers have concluded that humanity at best is inferior and extraneous...and at worse an evil affliction on the planet that must be controlled or eradicated.  I believe that these stories greatly contribute to the public's increasing concerns about the meteoric rise of this technology in today's real world, and about what direction it will take in the near future, good or bad.  In our dog-eat-dog cutthroat competitive capitalist business environment, the clear message is that you'd better jump into AI as quickly and deeply as possible, else you will be left in the dust and perish.  Gawdat recognizes all this, and hence I felt while I was reading his book that he and I had at least a good deal of common ground in spite of our highly divergent personal and academic backgrounds.  He considers humanity's investment in artificial intelligence too far gone to reverse.  It is here to stay and, with the recent development of quantum computing, increasing its power and development more than exponentially, its intelligence will soon far, far exceed that of humans.  Gawdat believes the world will be irreversibly transformed in the next thirty years or so, so much that he posits a word picture projected ahead that far: he and the reader are out in some isolated natural scenario camping...are we rejoicing at the great new world AI has created for us or are we desperately in retreat, hiding from it?  His thesis in Scary Smart is that now is the time that people can affect the future benevolent (or malevolent) nature of artificial intelligence by instilling in it a more positive representation of what humanity is instead of the more negative, hypercompetitive, bellicose and cruel image we've engendered of ourselves over our history and how we have been using AI so far.  Gawdat is pushing a new creed of happiness, politeness, grace and generosity in dealing with artificial intelligence, which learns with every single interaction.  Even though he feels that we're destined for some future difficult times with artificial intelligence, which he likens to a sentient life force, a change in our attitudes toward ourselves where mutual happiness is the higher aim can steer it away from the nightmare science fiction scenario featured in old movies and toward the fulfillment of the many hopes for us that it brings.  I sympathize with Mo Gawdat's views but given my own experience with human nature over the course of my 67-year existence on Earth, I tend to think that his suggestions are probably just as impractical as reversing AI.  Still, I liked and recommend his book: check it out and get back to me..

Ran Gainesville's Depot Parkrun 5K This Morning

Unlike with last week's cooler weather, this morning it was 68 degrees with 89% humidity, pretty uncomfortable weather for a 5K (3.1 miles) run, but nevertheless I got myself up and out for my 28th Depot Parkrun 5K, taking place at that park which is just south of downtown Gainesville.  I got there early, at 7:05, but the parking lot was already packed, and I had to drive around to the "extra" parking lot a little further away.  Apparently, there was another group of runners that had picked the same spot and morning to go on their outing and they took up most of the parking...that's okay, I kind of prefer the other lot anyway after thinking about it.  Anyway, for the race I decided to forego any thoughts of a "personal best" time and stick with my Galloway method of alternating five minutes of steady running with a minute of fast walking...worked like a dream once again! My final time, although not a personal best for a Parkrun, was a respectable (for me) 30:39, and I didn't feel depleted or too hot at the end.  Next Saturday I'll be skipping the Depot Parkrun in favor of the Season of Hope 15K, which takes on the Hawthorne Trail, starting and finishing at Boulware Park off SE 15th Street.  I hope the weather then is better than today's, although I think that with my system I'll do fine in any event.  Click HERE for the results of today's Deport Parkrun...

Quote of the Week...from Trinity in The Matrix

Get up, Trinity. Just get up.  GET UP!!!         ---the character Trinity in the movie The Matrix

Carrie-Anne Moss is the actress who brilliantly portrayed the computer hacking genius Trinity in the Matrix movies.  The above quote happened at the opening sequence in the first film, when Trinity...trapped in the Matrix...is desperately struggling to escape death at the hands of the ruthless and powerful Agents, having impossibly leaped through a building's high window, landing on her back after rolling down brutally rough stairs.  She is momentarily frozen with tension and fear, as she looks back up in anticipation of her enemies.  And then she listens to herself and does get up to fight another day.  Why did I pick this quote?  Many times, over the course of my life I've suffered setbacks, humiliations, and what seemed at the time to be personal disasters.  But lately during such experiences, although for a brief spell I am tempted to say to hell with it all and just stop trying, I have been punching back at life with defiance...nobody with bad intentions is going to stop me from what I need or want to accomplish.  Get up, Billy.  Just get up.  GET UP!!!

My November 2023 Running/Walking Report

In November I ran a total of 363 miles, and on every day of the month. My runs were spread throughout each day more or less, and I made much use of my local gym, which is Gainesville Health and Fitness.  Maybe it's counterintuitive, but when I get off from work in the evening I'm often tense and tired...yet getting on the treadmill for a brisk run relaxes me and takes the edge off the day.  I also ran a couple of Depot Parkrun 5Ks in the month...but my biggest race was the Tom Walker Half-Marathon, organized by "my" Florida Track Club and held on the 14th on the Hawthorne Trail.  There I surpassed my personal expectations when I employed the Jeff Galloway method of alternating running a set number of minutes (for me, 5) with a set number of walking minutes (1).  The result was the best finish I had at the distance since 2015.  I even applied it to the much shorter 3.1-mile Parkrun distance and finish with a personal best out of 27 Parkruns.  In December I plan to continue doing the Depot Parkrun 5K, but on the 9th I intend to run another Hawthorne Trail race: Season of Hope 15K (proceeds to go for the fight against dystonia) for my third time, and the first since 2019.  As for walking, I may walk one of those upcoming Parkruns...speed-walking rocks, too...

Weekly Short Stories: 1994 Science Fiction, Part 4

Today it's time to once again check out some of the 1994 short stories appearing in Gardner Dozois' anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction Twelfth Annual Collection.  In April of that year, sadly, grunge rock star Kurt Cobain killed himself at the peak of his band Nirvana's popularity.  I was and still am a fan of this genre, and Cobain's death deeply saddened me.  Later that summer, the Atlanta-based alternative group R.E.M. (I'm also a fan) released their studio album Monster, one of my favorites of theirs.  It features a deep track titled Let Me In.  Band frontman Michael Stipe, who would befriend Cobain's widow Courtney Love, wrote the lyrics in tribute of the fallen star.  But enough sadness...back to the stories...

THE HOLE IN THE HOLE by Terry Bisson

This is one of my favorite types of sci-fi stories, where there is a special, hidden passageway linking our world to another, be it in space or time.  Here a modest lawyer in a big city needs a special part to repair his car and runs across such a portal behind a ramshackle junkyard.  The place it leads to it is literally out of this world.  There's an interesting character in his story, the lawyer's academic friend Wilson Wu, who it seems is almost as mysterious as the portal itself with his deep knowledge and expertise in so many diverse fields.  A very funny tale...

PARIS IN JUNE by Pat Cadigan

A "man"...at least the story seems to start out that way, is an itinerant, homeless hustler who collects experiences in Paris (and June, of course) and transfers them to the Creators, apparently some alien race that from time-to-time whisks down in the sky to sweep up his thoughts.  Since he's telling the story, it's a bit cryptic as to what is really going on.  But he does come across a "woman" who he recognizes as another creation like himself, only that she has asserted her own independence.  Frankly, I didn't get this story...

FLOWERING MANDRAKE by George Turner

Capella is a first-magnitude star in the northern constellation Auriga.  In this story it is the system of two different intelligent life forms on two planets, constantly in bitter warfare against one another: the Greens and the Reds.  One of the Greens is the sole survivor of his blasted spaceship and drifts for centuries in his escape pod until he encounters Earth sometime in our not-so-distant future when we've begun to mine the asteroids.  When he is gradually introduced to life on Earth through images projected inside his pod and sees a picture of a human, the truth about the nature of the Greens and Reds becomes clear.  This was a brilliant story that expanded the baseness of human nature to include so-called "intelligent" life elsewhere in the cosmos...

Next week: more from 1994...

Just Finished Reading Exercised by Daniel Lieberman

Daniel Lieberman's academic title is "paleoanthropologist", a mouthful that I'm confident he's gotten quite well at enunciating...I, though, have some catching up to do.  I first saw him in a YouTube interview on the excellent channel Diary of a CEO and was impressed enough to check out his book Exercised from my public library.  Its premise resounds like Lieberman's interview: humankind evolved not to engage in exercise, but to avoid it. He posits his theory based on his academic research living among different ongoing hunter-gatherer cultures in various parts of the world.  There the people's lives are doubtless physically strenuous, but only when their necessities, such as hunting, demand it.  Otherwise, they seem quite lazy, sitting around and definitely not jogging or weightlifting.  Lieberman says that this is why people in more "advanced" technology-based cultures (such as presumably yours and mine) need to intentionally move our bodies even when labor-saving devices can do most of the physical work for us.  He believes that the advancement of the species through evolution is focused on getting the individual successfully past reproductive age, beyond which their survival into old age becomes more extraneous to the process.  But by assigning special social roles to the elderly that benefit the group's survival, they, too, can achieve long and healthy life spans.  Daniel Lieberman is a big advocate for both resistance and aerobic fitness training, and he himself is a long-distance runner. He also has something to say about the very passive way of sitting for long stretches of time in "advanced" cultures as opposed to the more squatting, fidgety way he observed in his field work of the more "primitive" peoples...our ways lower longevity. I liked both this book of his and his online interview.  Check it out if you have the time or inclination...

My Favorite Songs for 2023 So Far

 I know it's been a while since I wrote about my favorite ongoing popular music.  Truth be told, for most of 2023 I had been largely listening to a playlist of favorites from last year.  Up until October I had considered the curiously-titled song A Hairdryer by The Smile to be my "song of the year" but since then I've explored some album releases from some of my favorite alternative music acts and now have quite a playlist just from them. I purchased Sufjan Stevens' latest album Javelin and have been listening on YouTube to 2023 releases from Depeche Mode (Memento Mori), Gorillaz (Cracker Island), Metric (Formentera II) and the New Pornographers (Continue as a Guest).  So right now here's my current "top ten" list of favorites for 2023, naturally subject to revision by year's end...

1 OIL by Gorillaz

2 SHIT TALK by Sufjan Stevens

3 MY COSMOS IS MINE by Depeche Mode

4 WHO WOULD YOU BE FOR ME by Metric

5 PEOPLE ARE GOOD by Depeche Mode

6 NEW GOLD by Gorillaz

7 PONTIUS PILATE'S HOME MOVIES by New Pornographers

8 BOTTLE EPISODES by New Pornographers

9 A HAIRDRYER by The Smile

10 MY FAVORITE STRANGER by Depeche Mode

Enjoyed Watching College Football Rivalry Games on TV Yesterday

Yesterday I enjoyed watching college football as the regular season wound down to its very end with rivalry matchups dominating the schedule.  The three games I followed were Michigan-Ohio State, Alabama-Auburn and Florida-Florida State.  All three turned out to be close-fought, exciting games...although of the three, easily the best was the late afternoon Alabama "state championship" Iron Bowl contest played at Auburn University's Jordan Hare Stadium. It was nip-and-tuck all of the way until it looked as if the Crimson Tide, behind 24-20 late in the game, weren't going to beat Auburn after they punted deep into the Tigers' territory.  But the receiver fumbled the punt and Bama recovered with a golden opportunity to go ahead...they needed a touchdown.  But on the subsequent series of downs, they made mistake after mistake, moving backwards from a first-and-goal at the Auburn 7 to a fourth-and-goal on the 30, with less than 40 seconds to go in the game and little to no hope of winning.  But Tide QB Jalen Milroe, with his stellar offensive line providing plenty of time for him to sort out the field, threw a long pass into the corner of Auburn's end zone, hitting his receiver for the highly improbable winning score. Until last season I had been rooting against Alabama, but then switched my allegiances.  This year I'm pulling for them to beat Georgia in the SEC championship game and sneak into the college playoffs, alongside Florida State, who came from a 12-0 deficit to beat my hometown Gators in Gainesville in the evening contest, 24-15.  As for that first game, I "kind of" pulled for Ohio State to win it, but to no avail: Michigan remains undefeated but will still need to beat Iowa to win the Big Ten championship and advance to the playoffs.  It should be fun to watch the upcoming conference championship games...including the game between Washington and Oregon.  As for Florida, their season is now over at 5-7, although in yesterday's game they showed some promise for the future...

Ran Gainesville's Depot Parkrun 5K This Morning

After my half-marathon on November 12th, in which I had my best final time since 2015 by employing the Jeff Galloway strategy of inserting regular short intervals of walking over the course of the race, I decided to see how this would work on a shorter, 5K race.  Although in earlier years my final times of this distance had gotten down to 23-24 minutes, since 2019 for the span of my previous 26 Depot Parkruns here in Gainesville (a free weekly Saturday morning run/walk run by volunteers) I never ran faster than my 30:00 finish in that first Parkrun.  Until today, that is.  This time I ran the first 6 minutes, then speed-walked 40 seconds...then ran again until my timer hit 12 minutes, then speed-walked 40 more seconds, alternating like this until I crossed the finish line at 29:47, finally breaking that frustrating 30-minute barrier.  I already knew I could do it anyway because in another relatively recent local 5K race I had run it even faster, but this time it seemed more satisfying since it pointed the way to how I intend to run any future race, regardless of the distance.  The race time (7:30 am) temperature was 50 degrees with 93% humidity...lots of folks lined up bundled up: I dressed as usual, tee-shirt and shorts.  Running this Galloway method is more than getting faster finishing times...I actually feel that I could continue on for an indefinitely longer distance.  So now I'm wondering whether I really should set half-marathons as my longest race in the future.  You can view today's results by clicking HERE...

Quote of the Week...from Steve Kaufmann

I study on my own when I feel like it.  When I'm tired of whatever I'm doing, I move on to something else.                                   ---Steve Kaufmann

In his latest podcast, polyglot Steve Kaufmann, who has at different times in his 77-year-old existence mastered some 20 different languages, describes himself as a "lazy language learner".  He is the creator of LingQ (pronounced "link"), a language-learning website app, as well as a weekly podcaster I regularly listen to.  On one of Steve's latest shows, he gave the above quote after claiming that he is a lazy language learner.  That may be true now, but I happen to know that in his early adult years he underwent intensive language training in Chinese and Japanese while he served there in his country's (Canada) foreign service.  So, Steve Kaufmann knows on a deep level how to successfully tackle languages, and that can partially be attributed to life experiences that wouldn't be applicable to most of us, me included.  But I understand the gist of his argument, which is that repeated exposure to the target language, both listening and reading, can activate the mind's natural language learning abilities without subjecting oneself to graded classes with exams or memorizing long word lists and intricate grammar rules.  Yet in my own past I did memorize and repeatedly reviewed long word lists...including 1,700 Chinese characters...and this I feel has greatly helped me to understand what I am hearing and reading today.  I think each of us has our own special set of experiences, proclivities and skills that we bring to the table of language learning and that it's okay to use them to our advantage...no one formula fits everyone.  What I call "lazy" language learning greatly overlaps Steve's version while differing in some respects.  I just need to get easier access to instant translation of unknown words I come across in order to make my learning more meaningful... 

Happy Thanksgiving, Everybody

I'd like to take a moment to wish all of you a happy Thanksgiving Day.  It's a time to reflect on all the wonderful things in my life to be thankful for, especially my loved ones.  I hope you can also find the time to do the same with yours...

Weekly Short Story: 1994 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I deliberately made the number singular on this weekly blog feature of mine.  Usually, I'll read a few entries from an anthology and then briefly review each story.  But this week as I was reading through Gardner Dozois' sci-fi anthology series, specifically The Year's Best Science Fiction, Twelfth Annual Collection, I ran across a pretty lengthy novella.  Dozois has always had a penchant for inserting long stories like this one, not quite at novel-size, into his series.  So, here's my reaction to that novella...

MELODIES OF THE HEART by Michael F. Flynn

As Gardner Dozois intimated in his intro to this story, it's a time-travel piece, but in a special sense.  A physician has been assigned duty caring for elderly people at a facility while his little daughter is suffering from progeria, which causes her to rapidly age to a premature death.  He treats what he has been told is a 100-year-old woman who has been complaining of old songs loudly playing in her head.  Her cantankerous demeanor ruffles him...he's already developed a cynical view of the elderly, most likely in light of what is happening to his little girl.  The story develops as the woman's songs recede decade by decade into her past until the good doctor begins to question how old she truly is...and he begins to connect her plight with that of his daughter.  There is a subplot about his distant, obsessive-compulsive wife and the nurse hired to care for their stricken daughter.  It's a very sad story, but one I'd recommend if you have the time to spend on it...if only for the wealth of old songs with their time of popularity pinpointed as well as some lyrics that were changed over the years: political correctness isn't just a recent phenomenon...

So, there you have it for this week's feature.  Maybe I'll come up with some actual "short" stories next time around from 1994...

Sixty Years Ago, Tomorrow

Tomorrow marks the sixtieth anniversary of one of the most traumatic single events this country has ever experienced: the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald.  The President was visiting Texas, riding in a motorcade in an open car with his wife Jackie and Texas governor John Connally when Oswald shot him twice with his rifle from the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository building.  I was just a kid of seven in the second grade of my West Hollywood, Florida elementary school when we heard the news of the shooting just after lunch on Friday.  Numerous conspiracy theories sprang up in the ensuing years, but like Stephen King, who authored the fantastic 2011 time-travel novel 11/22/63, I always felt that Oswald was the lone wolf behind the assassination.  As I mentioned in an earlier article, my family and I visited Dallas in 1994 and retraced the motorcade route...I wonder how many others have done the same.  I am praying that in this upcoming tumultuous presidential campaign of 2024, all the candidates are safe and more tragic bloodshed is avoided... 

Just Finished Reading Level Up by Rob Dial

Very recently Rob Dial, known for his Mindset Mentor personal development-themed podcast that often offers topics for my blog articles, had published his first book: Level Up, long title Level Up: How to Get Focused, Stop Procrastinating, and Upgrade Your Life.  This pretty much describes the book, which incorporates the gist of Dial's podcast messages and presents it in more whole fashion.  Level Up is divided into three sections: why you're not taking action, how to take action, and creating habits and making them stick.  In each of them are subtopics that logically contribute to the main message. At the chapters' close are personal journaling questions...Dial believes strongly in introspection and writing down on paper one's inner thoughts and feelings.  In that sense this is an interactive book...not in the adopted cyberworld sense but in that the reader is invited to participate, step by step, with the program as it is laid out.  I haven't sat down and begun this interaction...no, I've procrastinated, dang it!  But there's no better time than now...actually, there's no time other than now.  I think you'll find this book helpful regardless where you happen to be in your own personal walk through life...there's none of that mystical nonsense that I've encountered in other works of this sort.  Hopefully, the public library web service Libby will begin to offer it for checkout before long...

Computer Problems Cause Gap in Blog

I've been experiencing some technical difficulties with this blog and my computer in general...I'll be back before too long.

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...