My Jigsaw Puzzle of the Golden Gate Bridge

 

Here's the final of the seven jigsaw puzzles I put together from the box depicting different notable American scenes I got last year...actually, it's the first one of the bunch I did.  The Golden Gate Bridge connecting San Francisco with Sausalito and northern California is another of those symbols of American engineering prowess.  I've never been there, but that climactic scene in the James Bond thriller A View to a Kill was impressive to watch.  This was the biggest of the puzzles at 1000 pieces, and that undifferentiated sky took up way too many puzzle pieces to be enjoyable.  Guess it's time to go get some more puzzles...

Ran Gainesville's Depot Parkrun 5K This Muggy Morning

This morning I drove out to Gainesville's Depot Park, just south of downtown, to participate in yet another of their Saturday morning free 5K Parkruns.  Sometimes I speed-walk the four laps around the pretty park there, but I usually run it like a race...that's what I did today.  It was 65 degrees and a stifling 97% humidity at 7:30 race time, though, and as is usually the case, I gave myself permission to just cover the distance if the muggy heat started to mess with me.  But all went well, weather-wise, and although the conditions were admittedly uncomfortable I found myself well-prepared to keep a reasonable pace going throughout, finishing at 27: 32.  There were a lot of people there this morning, including some little kids for whom this event was brand new and unfamiliar.  I wish them the best with their running futures, including figuring out that you don't sprint past other runners and then come to a grinding, sudden halt immediately in front of them, forcing folks like myself to take evasive action to avoid a collision.  That was a bit annoying, at least at the beginning, but in Parkruns you get quite a cross-section of the human population on the course, and even some canines...sometimes evasive action is necessary with these as well.  I'm glad I went there...click HERE to view today's results (when they're finally posted).  You can join in on the Parkrun experience by Googling their website and signing up (as said, for free).  They'll provide you barcodes that you can print out and take with you to the race for them to scan so that your finishing time can be posted with all the others. Parkrun began in England and has spread worldwide, growing here in the USA...

Happy Birthday, My Sweet Melissa

Today marks the fortieth time I get to spend with my dear wife Melissa on her birthday...1986 was the first, shortly after we met.  Yes, for most of us today marks the annual celebration of love known as Valentine's Day...we're into that as well.  Melissa, what a blessing you have been and are to me...let's keep it going with these birthday celebrations for several more decades!  I love you so much...

Recently Assembled Jigsaw Puzzle of Mount Rushmore

 

Mount Rushmore, near Rapid City, South Dakota, is one of the places I'd like to visit some day.  Situated in the state's Black Hills, the huge faces carved in granite depict four historically-significant US presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.  This National Memorial was sculpted, after US government authorization, by Gutzon Borglum, but the use of federal lands whose ownership is disputed by Indians has made the project, starting in 1927 and completed 14 years later, somewhat controversial.  My experiences with Mount Rushmore are tightly connected to the climactic scene in the great 1959 Alfred Hitchcock movie thriller North by Northwest, in which hero Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint flee there to escape the murderous bad guys, led by James Mason and Martin Landau.  The irony of it all is that the actual "Mount Rushmore" footage was done on models created for filming in Southern California!  Yes, I'd dig going over to South Dakota to check it out, as well as the nearby memorial to Crazy Horse that has been under construction since 1948 and still is far from completion.  Anyway, Mount Rushmore was the setting shown in one of my seven Americana jigsaw puzzles, pictured above...

Weekly Short Stories: 1999 Science Fiction, Part 3

This past week I only managed to read one short story in editor Gardner Dozois' anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection, and which features his picks published in the year 1999.  Back then I was working at the Gainesville postal processing facility, sorting out mail on their flat-sorting machine while doing the graveyard shift.  That meant I was awake all night and could listen to late-night talk radio, most notably Art Bell's kooky, quirky Coast-to-Coast AM show that explored the paranormal, UFOs and conspiracy theories, to name a few topic categories.  But back to the Dozois anthology... 

GALACTIC NORTH by Alastair Reynolds

This is a tale of three people, very much in the future when humanity has not only spread out and settled the cosmos but has also mastered biology and medical science to the point that heads can be severed...and preserved, to be later reattached to the body.  Yes, it's pretty scary and gross, but the real horror to this true horror/science fiction story is the unintended consequence of the development of terraforming technology that is unleashed into the wild reaches of space, to develop on its own beyond anyone's control.  A woman is committed to protecting the thousands of "sleepers" on board her ship, but must land it on an asteroid as a ferocious, sadistic pirate seeks her cargo and forces her partner to betray her.  The rest of the story relates her very-long quest for revenge against both of them, and against the backdrop of a nameless doom destroying all known life in the galaxy.  Pretty heady stuff...normally I'd say that stories like this leave me cold, but somehow this time it all clicked together...

Next week: more from 1999...

Melissa and I Attend Our Second Candlelight Concert

Last December 17th Melissa and I went to downtown Gainesville to attend a Candlelight Concert at the Hippodrome Theater...click HERE to read the article I later wrote about our experiences then.  This evening we went back down there to the same place for yet another concert, this one a tribute to the Beatles.  The featured string quartet performed their renditions of several Beatles hits and is based in Jacksonville...I recognized most of the players from before.  I was seven years old when I heard my first Beatles song, I Want to Hold Your Hand, which the Fab Four, as the Beatles were often dubbed, performed on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964...our Candlelight Concert musicians performed this one as well.  They also went through several years and albums, doing Help!, Michelle, Eleanor Rigby, Here There and Everywhere, I Get By With a Little Help from My Friends, All You Need is Love, Penny Lane, Hey Jude, Lady Madonna, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Blackbird, Come Together and Here Comes the Sun. The audience was very enthusiastic and appreciative of this show, as were Melissa and me.  They are quite the talented and inspired musicians, these four, and we look forward to another visit with a different theme.  The only drawback I saw was the tight, restricted parking available downtown...even the quartet commented on that...

About Yesterday's Super Bowl Contest

A few weeks ago at the start of the National Football League 2024 season playoffs, I listed the participating teams in the order of my liking.  For the American Conference I had Kansas City as my favorite and with the National it was my home state's Tampa Bay...with Philadelphia in second place.  So yesterday's Super Bowl matchup between the Chiefs and Eagles was pretty good as far I was concerned.  Yet although back then I liked KC more than Philly, something happened during the course of events that reversed that.  Former Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll is someone with an admittedly flawed past (see his tenure coaching USC), yet I was captured by his style and enthusiasm while coaching in the pros.  And he has just been hired as the new head coach of the Raiders, a team that I had grown to root against over the course of the decades.  Formerly based in Oakland, and for a few years in Los Angeles, they are now in Las Vegas and are big division rivals of Kansas City.  Beyond my geographical support for Florida teams, I tend to gravitate toward teams whose players and/or coaches earn my respect and admiration.  Already a fan of Pete's, that kind of diminished the Chiefs for me by comparison and elevated the Eagles.  So when Philadelphia pretty much demolished Kansas City in yesterday's Super Bowl held in New Orleans, that was quite all right with me.  I don't know how the Raiders will do next year...it'll be interesting to see how fast Carroll can turn them around from their dismal last-place season in '24.  As for the "who's who" celebrities attending the game, who cares: I'm guessing that most of them were there just to be seen and talked about, including He Who Must Not Be Named...

Just Finished Reading The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle

The Talent Code is a 2009 book by Daniel Coyle that seeks to derive truths about how people successfully develop talent.  Coyle works from the notion that talent, although often considered innate, must undergo a process in order to achieve mastery in any particular area.  He divides the elements of talent development into three parts: deep practice, ignition and master coaching, in the process supplying numerous (maybe too numerous) examples to make his points.   Coyle insists that the growth of myelin in our brains is specific to the things we learn to do, and deep practice contributes to that growth for the specific area.  One breaks a learning project down to chunks, or sections, assimilating each one through repeated failing to proficiency.  Ignition is the spark of motivation exploding into a passion.  And deep coaching involves imparting the appropriate information to the client/student's talent formation at the right time.  Throughout his presentation Coyle refers to special places that seem to produce an inordinate amount of overachievers, and seeks to explain why this is so.  After finishing the book, I had to ask myself what new information he had imparted to me.  Sadly, there wasn't much here...maybe you would get more from it, I don't know.  But with his idea of breaking things down to sustainable chunks, I definitely see that as an affirmation of what I already knew.  And yes, with that deep practice and ignition, I have experienced what some have termed the "flow" state when my progress in an area, suddenly takes off and seems almost effortless.  Do I recommend The Talent Code? Well, it can't hurt and I was able to check it out from my public library, so it didn't cost me anything either.  Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but sometimes a rereading can provide me a different angle to it all...  

Ran Florida Track Club's Micanopy Ten-Miler Race This Morning

I had long planned to run the 2025 version of the Florida Track Club's February event, the Micanopy 5/10 Miler...I picked the ten miles option, of course.  The day began a little roughly as I experienced a rare bout of insomnia last night and finally just decided to stay up after only about three-four hours sleep.  Then, when I was driving the fifteen miles south through Gainesville and on to Micanopy, I had to contend with some of the thickest fog I have ever experienced.  Still, thanks in part to my Waze app, I got there in plenty of time and handled my pre-race business in time.  The temperature at 8:00 race time was 58 with the pea-soup fog providing 100% humidity...it heated up a bit during the run.  There were 128 people in the race, a little over half doing my ten miles.  I decided beforehand that I would go nice and steady, running with my only walking breaks happening on steep hills.  And there were a few of those that I speed-walked up.  I noticed that the extra five-mile loop that we ten-mile racers went down was configured in the opposite direction from last year's race...later I found out they switched the direction every year.  I liked this year's direction (clockwise) more.  It seems like everything went according to plan, except that I had more energy left at the end and finished second in my age group with a time of 1 hour 36 minutes 50 seconds, more than two minutes faster than my previous personal best (last year) at this distance.  They handed out post-race, as awards, a cool-looking cap with the Florida Track Club logo on it...Melissa suggested I wear it on next week's Depot Parkrun.  And so ends, for the foreseeable future, my running/walking races longer than 5K.  You see, I'm having surgery early in March and it may be a few months before I feel I'll be ready to tackle runs like today's.  That's okay, I just feel grateful for the opportunity for that surgery.  And besides, you and I both know that during the spring and summer here in northern Florida you usually don't see many opportunities for long distance races.  You can view today's race results by clicking HERE...

Quote of the Week...from Bob Dylan

What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.                                  ---Bob Dylan

I quote Bob Dylan here with a little hesitation because I lifted it off Facebook...maybe he really said it or maybe not, but I don't think it reflects unfairly on him if he didn't.  I like it, but with one caveat.  You might say to yourself, sure, Bob, you have all that money, so it's easy for you to downplay its importance.  But I would disagree.  Dylan's gone through both lack and wealth and as such can make a better assessment of money's worth.  My possible difference with his above quote stems from his "wants to do" conclusion.  If what you want to do is avoid discomfort and just live life on an exclusively hedonistic level without regard to your health or the welfare of others, I'd hardly call that being a success.  But if you know what you stand for and incorporate some personal responsibility and social accountability into that "wants to do" in a balanced way, then sure, I'm all on board, Dylan: sign me up...

My Jigsaw Puzzle of Hoover Dam

 

In the box of assorted jigsaw puzzles of Americana that I got a few weeks ago is one of Hoover Dam, the giant engineering project during the Great Depression years in the early-to-mid 1930's connecting the Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt administrations.  Bordering Nevada and Arizona, it takes the Colorado River and functions as flood control, irrigation and a source of hydroelectric power.  Many lives were lost during its construction, but it stands as a "can do" symbol of American know-how and potential.  I've never been to Hoover Dam...have you?  I'm guessing that most visitors have other places on their travel agenda as well, the Grand Canyon probably one of them.  Thanks to Wikipedia for the information about this dam...

Weekly Short Stories: 1999 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here's my second week of looking through the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection, presenting the editor's picks of the best short sci-fi to come out in the year 1999.  When 1999 began, the country was in the throes of a presidential impeachment as the Republican Party decided to score political points against the current Democratic president, Bill Clinton, after he was discovered to be lying about a consensual affair while in office.  In light of the current occupant of the White House and his own much more serious shenanigans, it's amazing how the level of partisan political divide in this country, as well as the standards of behavior expected of our leaders, has deteriorated.  But I'm reviewing stories, right?  Here's what I thought about the next two appearing in the book...

1016 TO 1 by James Patrick Kelly

Read "10 to the 16th to 1", this story has a distinct Stephen King feel to it...awesome! It's October 1962 and a boy has to come to grips way too early in his life with the politics of impending nuclear Armageddon after he encounters a strange man named "Counts", who seems to know all about the future.  What does this individual want, and which direction will history go if he fulfills his new-found "friend's" modest request regarding then-President Kennedy's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis?  The story's ending should be sobering for all of us here in 2025...

WINEMASTER by Robert Reed

Many years ago the 1960's hit science fiction series The Outer Limits has an episode starring Robert Culp titled Demon with a Glass Hand.  The premise with Reed's tale here is similar, as in a rather dystopian future a whole segment of humanity has been miniaturized...and the authorities, after criminalizing their existence, are out to get them.  One individual, named Winemaster, is trying to protect them from the pursuing agent Blaine...it becomes a suspenseful battle of wits...

Next week: more from "party like it's" 1999... 

My Preferences with NFL Teams Over the Years

A few minutes ago I was watching the Fox Weather Channel, and the two announcers were taking a brief break from their meteorological meanderings to shoot the breeze, so to speak, about their loyalties to different NFL teams.  With them, there was that early support for a team that they grew up around.  But as adults living in other places and following certain players and coaches, their preferences over the years changed with their new situations.  That's me, too.  I grew up in the South Florida area, just a few miles north of Miami, and as such was a big Dolphins fan. Their early seventies' Super Bowl appearances (3) and wins (2)...not to mention that still-unmatched season of 1972...more than likely extended that loyalty for many decades beyond, even long after I had grown up and moved away from the area.  I still like to see them succeed, but feel they blew a golden opportunity for greatness a few years ago when they let go head coach Brian Flores.  And their current "star" quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, although admittedly talented, had established himself as an injury-prone, "fragile" athlete even back when he was taking hikes at the University of Alabama.  But the Fins coach Mike McDaniel...unlike Flores...has insisted on sticking with Tagovailoa, and, frankly, it's been painful watching Miami play, either with Tua in there or on the sidelines while his backup struggles.  No, of late I've tended to be more of a Tampa Bay Bucs fan if geography figures into the equation, although I've just never gotten myself attached to Jacksonville, which is much closer to Gainesville.  But I also now tend to root for certain players and coaches regardless of where they work.  One of these is Pete Carroll, who piloted his Seattle Seahawks to two Super Bowl appearances and one victory...he has an infectious, positive, exuberant sidelines attitude, totally into the game and his players' welfare.  Pete has just been hired as the Las Vegas Raiders new head coach...I guess now I'm a Raiders fan! Oh, and regarding the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles, I think they're both pretty cool, too...

My Jigsaw Puzzle of Stature of Liberty with Manhattan Background

The above image is yet another jigsaw puzzle I've recently assembled, this one a view of the Statue of Liberty in the Hudson River with Lower Manhattan...highlighted by the New World Trade Center skyscraper in the background.  I've been to New York City only once, back in 2010 with Melissa and Rebecca, and that time was very special to us.  We focused on Manhattan with our visit, staying at the Marriott Marquis hotel on Times Square, touring the whole area and building wonderful memories of the place.  Of course, back then the World Trade Center site was closed off to the public, with construction of the new building just in its fledgling stages.  If you go back on this blog to April of 2010 you'll find a few articles and photos pertaining to that four-day stay.  Some time in the future I'd like to go back, but then again there are also other places I'm looking forward to seeing in person...

Happy Groundhog Day, If You Can Get Past It

Well, at least according to the media treatment I've seen, it looks like Groundhog Day is rapidly achieving a greater status of recognition as a holiday.  No doubt the Bill Murray comedy with the same name has contributed much of the enthusiasm, but that movie came out way back in 1993...something else must be generating it as well.  We have been experiencing some pretty nutty winter weather as of late...especially down south with all the snow...maybe folks are more interested in the weather patterns.  Then, maybe people have decided to actually believe that animals like groundhogs really can predict the weather...judging from the recent presidential election result, they seem to be more susceptible to all kinds of bullshit, no matter how ridiculous.  For me, the movie, with Murray's Phil Connors character having to live the same day over and over again with no end in sight, carries with it not only the promise of a queer kind of immortality, but also the security of knowing exactly what will happen next in life and being able to learn how to be the best in just about anything.  Well, I'm reasonably confident that when I wake up after going to bed tonight, it will be the next day, February the 3rd...no immortality guaranteed, at least in this fleshy body, but it's still a reset if I let it happen.  Each day a new beginning...that sounds like a good formula to me, good weather or bad...  

Speed-Walked the Depot Parkrun 5K in Gainesville This Morning

In Gainesville this morning, unlike for the previous two weekends, extreme weather was not a factor in my racing.  For today's Depot Parkrun 5K, held at that park a little ways south of downtown, the temperature was a pleasant 57 degrees at 7:30 race time although the humidity was a little bit heavy at 93%.  I decided to speed-walk the 3.1 miles, seeing that it had been a while since the last time and I do like the idea of walking fast instead of running on at least one 5K per month.  There were a lot of runners and walkers this morning...later on at 11 am there was another race in the area that drew several hundred entrants.  I enjoyed pushing myself on this walk, but as before it seems that I've hit a wall when it comes to making a breakthrough with my time.  I want to get my speed-walking best time below 38 minutes for a 5K, but today I crossed the finish line at 39:15.  I wonder whether the slightly slippery asphalt surface...due to earlier showers...had anything to do with slowing me down.  I enjoyed the event, though...click HERE to view the results.  Next week the Florida Track Club is staging their annual Micanopy 10-Mile run, and I've already signed up for it.  I'm hoping the weather remains reasonable for that race as well, but there's no telling what it will be like from week to week...

Quote of the Week...from Albert Einstein

We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies turned into the cosmos.  We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music.                                    ---Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein here sounds a bit like the late Carl Sagan, who once on his Cosmos TV series proclaimed that we were made of "star stuff".  Without referring to dogmatic religious ideology handed down from generation to generation and often enforced through state-sponsored coercion, I like to speculate from time to time on our fundamental natures and the relationship between our perceived subjective identities and the objective reality of the world around us.  I think Einstein pretty much put it down accurately, beyond the quote's poetic quality.  I think that those of us who experience the grief involved in surviving the loss of a loved one...and ultimately that is a fate for each of us who are "survivors"...have to come to grips with the real value and significance of that departed person's life as they lived out their life span.  Each of us has our own "end" as well, but until then may my soul sing songs of gratitude and love through my own biochemical garments...

My January 2025 Running, Walking and Swimming Report

On this next-to-last day of the month, I thought it was close enough to the end to discuss January regarding my running, walking and swimming.  Let's eliminate swimming up front: it didn't happen in January, primarily because of colder-than-usual weather.  With walking...at least speed-walking...I still practiced it at home but didn't do it in any of my races.  I'm considering speed-walking the Depot Parkrun 5K this coming Saturday morning, but that's in a new month.  Now with running, there's a lot to report.  On New Year's Day I ran my first officially timed mile since college in the fall of 1974 (I did a passable 5:25 then at age 18).  It was the Frank Shorter Mile, organized by the Florida Track Club, and I enjoyed the experience although I was much slower than decades ago at 8:25.  In mid-January the same group held the Mary Andrews Half-Marathon, which I completed under adversely cold weather conditions after it was delayed a day because of thunderstorms.  A week later I did the Newnan's Lake 15K in similarly freezing conditions.  The rest of January saw me finish four Depot Parkrun 5Ks, three of them all-out runs and one a walk with Melissa through the course.  At home I practiced running daily, and added some resistance training, regularly and incrementally doing push-ups and dead hangs.  In January my date for prostate removal surgery was set in early March, and I've been cleared to continue with my running and other athletic activities.  I already signed up to run the Micanopy Ten-Miler race on the 8th...it will be my third time with this event.  Otherwise, I plan to go to Depot Park and run or walk their Saturday morning 5K race.   I feel completely well and energetic, which as I've written before doesn't exactly mesh with my recent prostate cancer diagnosis.  Oh well, looking forward to new adventures, athletic or medical...a little travel at some point would be cool, too...

Weekly Short Stories: 1999 Science Fiction, Part 1

Today I begin reviewing stories from the year 1999 as they appeared in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Seventeenth Annual Collection.  I remember that year...besides Prince's 1983 anthem heralding its coming...as being full of uncertainty about the coming Y2K, that is the year 2000, and the feared shutdown of computer-based society that was supposed to descend on us after the calendar changed at midnight.  Of course, nothing came of that...I wonder, though, about this acceleration in the development and implementation of Artificial Intelligence and ask myself whether maybe folks weren't worrying about the wrong thing.  In any event, below is my discussion of the one story I've being reading for the past week. Once again, it's a novella: Dozois sure loved "long" short stories...

THE WEDDING ALBUM by David Marusek

The anthology's editor, in his preface to this tale, referred back to an earlier story by Marusek titled We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy.  Both of them take place in the not-too-distant future, when biological and digital advances have brought into question the meaning of what it means to be alive and possess identity.  Told from the shifting perspectives of "sims", that is animated, life-size copies of real people that can freely be altered or even deleted at the "real" owners' discretion, the author seems to be forwarding the notion that artificially-constructed intelligence deserves some recognition for its own rights and interests.  In a world being overtaken in the 2020's by rapidly accelerating advances in AI, this to me portends something likewise that may be on our horizon.  That said, the story was hard for me to follow as the narrative had a tendency to confuse what is real with what isn't...

Next week I'm forging ahead with more stories from 1999 (hope they're easier to follow)...

My Songs of the Month for January 2025

Since I now have on my Amazon account unfettered access to music, I've decided to make more of an effort to keep up with the current songs out there.  Not any kind of music though: I'm partial to indie/alternative rock.  They have a channel called Indie-Rock, so in the past few days I've checked out what's coming out.  Back in the early 1970's, when I was in my mid-to-late teens, I used to decide my own personal "song of the month" according to my likes...I'm thinking of resuming that.  Let's see, what are my top songs of January 2025?

1 Everyone Out...by DIIV (pronounced "dive")

2 The Narcissist...by Blur

3 Starburster...by Fontaines DC

4 Zero Sum...by the Smile

All of the above are in the indie-alternative-rock genre of popular music...you can listen to them/watch their videos on YouTube, too.  There's another song I've heard from time to time that I like, but don't know how to find out who did it or its title...maybe it'll resurface sometime...

Recent NFL Playoffs, Tennis and Golf

This past weekend saw me following three different sports, and each of their time circumstances made a difference.  The Australian Open tennis tournament, one of the year's four Grand Slam events, takes place on the other side of the world, so it wasn't surprising that the men's final match between Jannik Sinner and Alexander Zverev took place live at 3:30 AM Eastern Time.  Wanting to watch it later without knowing in advance who won, I went on YouTube to see if they had a prerecording of the championship match. But the finale's result was all over the site and I didn't stand a chance of not knowing that Sinner had won.  Oh well...

There was a PGA golf tournament this weekend as well, the Farmers Insurance Open out on the California coast.  The four rounds were each moved ahead a day in order for the final round to take place on Saturday and not compete for network TV coverage with the NFL conference championships games on Sunday.  I enjoyed the close finish of the Farmers as Harris English calmly parred hole after hole to win it by a single stroke...

The National Football League conference championships, held on Sunday, both went the way I wanted as Philadelphia convincingly beat Washington 55-23 and Kansas City barely squeaked by Buffalo 32-29. Controversy seems destined to follow the Chiefs, who have been accused on social media of being unfairly favored by questionable officiating.  A couple of the calls by Sunday's officiating crew were crucial to the game's outcome: an apparent fourth down conversion late in the game by the Bills was called to be short and a Chief receiver's called reception on a deep pass was shown on replay to touch the ground.  I thought Buffalo played well enough to win, but so did Kansas City.  Now it's on to the Super Bowl a couple of weeks from now as KC and Philly meet in the Big Game for the second time in three years...

My Cloud Gate, Chicago Jigsaw Puzzle

 

Cloud Gate, or as it is commonly known, the "Bean", is situated at the northern end of Chicago's Millennium Park.  Made from stainless steel to resemble mercury, it was designed by sculptor Anish Kapoor and completed in 2006.  Melissa, Will and I visited it in 2019...click HERE for a link to that article on this blog.  I recently enjoyed putting together this jigsaw puzzle, not only for the beautiful work of art it shows as well as the background of Chicago, but also for the personal memories of being together with our son as we enjoyed the sights of the Windy City... 

Ran This Morning's Newnan's Lake 15K East of Gainesville

Anticipating sub-thirty temperatures this morning as I set out to run, for the fourth time, the Newnan's Lake 15K...just a short distance east of Gainesville off Hawthorne Road...I planned in advance for the event with two layers of wicking long-sleeved shirts and full-length running pants.  Melissa lent me her gloves to fend off the cold on my sensitive hands, and I was good to go.  The last time I ran Newnan's Lake was 2018: there were noticeably fewer entrants this time around, and I had no trouble finding a parking spot.  No need for porta-potties, either: the fishing ramp park from which this race is staged has its own restroom facilities.  When the race began at 8:30, it was around 28 degrees, no wind to speak of, and around 80% humidity.  The race course went a bit down the side of Hawthorne Road westward until it turned right at Lake Shore Drive.  Then we ran for a while down that road, with marshy Newnan's Lake on our right.  The road eventually transformed into East University Avenue, which we went down with some small detours as we turned around after 4.65 miles, going back the way we came.  The first part of the run seemed for me to be mostly upwardly sloped, so returning down it the other way was a bit of a relief.  I had to unzip my outer shirt/jacket as the day (and my body) heated up, along with shedding those gloves that were so helpful early on.  Lately on these longer-distance races I've tended to exceed my intended pace...happened again!  But although I felt sore and part of me wanted to take a walking break, I kept general pace with the runners in front of me and finished with a time of 1 hour 25 minutes 22 seconds, which turns out to be my third highest 15K finish ever (of nine).  You can view today's results by clicking HERE.  My recovery from today's race is going fine...

Quote of the Week...from W.C. Fields

It ain't a fit night out for man nor beast.                          W.C. Fields

Early twentieth century comedy legend W.C. Fields wrote and starred in a short film in 1933 titled The Fatal Glass of Beer.  His character, Pa Snavely, lives in a cabin in the frigid Yukon cold.  Without getting into the story's plot, the one thing that stuck with me so many years later was Fields opening up the cabin's door, loudly proclaiming the above quote, and then receiving a blast of fake snow in his face...this happened a number of times, each one hilarious.  I've grown to use Fields' quote whenever the weather is sub-par, especially if it's stormy or cold.  Lately I've been signing up for distance running races that would fit that description, the last one being the off-and-then-on half-marathon I ran this past Monday morning.  That one started out being too stormy to stage, and then ended up exceeding cold (for my admittedly wimpy Florida standards) after being delayed one day.  Tomorrow morning is going to be another one of those "ain't a fit night out" instances as the temperature has been forecast to bottom out at 26 degrees.  Remember, I'm a Floridian and a lifelong one at that: 26 degrees ain't fit for much of anything...

Physical Therapy, 15K Race Slated for Next Two Days

In this clearly bizarre period in my life, tomorrow I have an appointment at the UF Medical Plaza with a physical therapist who will almost certainly introduce me to the Kegel exercises for my lower pelvic floor muscles that are supposed to help me recover the appropriate bodily functions following scheduled surgery in early March to remove my cancerous prostate.  Then, Saturday morning I'm signed up to run a 9.3 mile race, the Newnan's Lake 15K, which I've done three times before although the last time was in 2018.  I'm physically feeling fine and even athletic, yet medically I'm in a rough state...my physicians, however, have been encouraging to me about my continued physical activity. Following the operation, of course, that's going to change drastically in intensity as my body's healing takes priority.  In a life where uncertainty is an elemental feature, I'm at a state of peace about all this.  Still, not having to deal with the medical issues would have been much more welcome...

Weekly Short Stories: 1998 Science Fiction, Part 13

Today I finally reach the end of my look at the year 1998 in the genre of short science fiction, presented in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Sixteenth Annual Collection.  I say "short", although several of this series' stories are actually of novella length, including the one I'm reviewing below...

THE SUMMER ISLES by Ian R. MacLeod

Here is an alternate history tale, set in England, an England that lost World War I instead of Germany, enduring the sanctions, international humiliation and rise of fascism in its politics.  Set in 1940, it looks as if England's fascist (called "Modernist" here) prime minister John Arthur is about to go to war against his old European rivals, a mirror of what Hitler in Germany did in "our" reality.  The story's narrator is an Oxford professor, Griffin Brooke, who knows all about Arthur and his mysterious past. The fascist movement in Britain is also bent on scapegoating groups like Jews and homosexuals.  With the former, whole families are secretly swept away, to supposedly live out their lives away from everyone else on the Summer Isles north of Scotland...but what's really happening? And with the homosexuals...count Griffin Brooke among their number...the ones without Brooke's social standing are sent to the Isle of Man for conversion treatment.  This novella hops back and forth in time, and paints a bleak picture of how a fascist movement gains momentum through populism and scapegoating other groups for the people's problems.  It also suggests that fascist governments can vary to the degree that their brutality and oppression are exercised, depending on the already existing social institutions.  I am concerned about the future of my country in the face of a rising populist fascist movement...it's almost as if I'm living out a highly improbable alternate history with this current regime being happily voted into power by a plurality of the electorate with all the information they had, doing so with eyes wide open...

Next week I'll be starting on a new book featuring science fiction stories from the year 1999...

Wilmot Botanical Gardens...and Will

 

Our dearly beloved son Will tragically left us for heaven last July...we miss him so much.  He was employed by the University of Florida and worked with their IT section.  In honor of him, they placed a brick bearing his name, alongside others honoring departed UF employees, on the walkway of their beautiful Wilmot Botanical Gardens.  This place, under the management of UF Medicine, is situated just north of their Medical Plaza off Archer Road.  I have been there a bit recently with radiology and physician consults, and Melissa and I gladly took advantage of these visits to stroll and sit here.  It was kind and thoughtful of those at the University of Florida to accord this honor to my son.  Wilmot Botanical Gardens has a number of different-themed gardens within it...Will's memorial brick is accessible through the Japanese Maple Tree Garden...

Ran the Florida Track Club Mary Andrews Half-Marathon This Morning

Named in honor of local distance runner Mary Andrews, who passed away a few years ago from cancer, the Florida Track Club has been holding an annual combination marathon/half-marathon event on the eastern end of the Hawthorne Trail here in Alachua County some 15-20 miles southeast of Gainesville.  I've run their half-marathon the previous two years there, and covered the exact same course (doubled over) for the full marathon last November with a different organizing group.  I had considered signing up for the marathon this year, but decided with my ongoing medical issues to play it more conservatively and settle for a 13.1 mile run.  Only one problem, though: right after I signed up for the race, severe weather forecasts began to abound about race day morning: it was going to be a very wet, rainy affair unless thunderstorms canceled it outright.  The Florida Track Club organizers began to e-mail us updates concerning Sunday morning, when the race was scheduled, and about what they would do about the bad weather.  I woke up that morning intending to just skip it all and let it go for another year when I received their e-mail stating that they had moved everything to this morning instead.  I was happy about that, and headed down there to run my half-marathon, starting at 8 am with the rain and thunder long gone, replaced by painfully (for me) cold conditions: 35 degrees, 75% humidity.  I somehow managed to get everything in place for the race's start, and my strategy was simple: I wouldn't try to set any personal best, but rather just run through it all and try to follow just behind the slowest pacer they provided, which was stated in their guide at 2 hours 20 minutes.  At the start I was near the back of the pack and searched ahead for my pacer...never found him/her for the simple reason that they didn't have any pacers.  By the time I realized that, I found myself running a much faster pace than planned, stumbling my way at the end to a chip time of 2:05:13...some two-and-a-half minutes faster than last year's finishing time and my fastest half-marathon since February 2015.   You can view the results by clicking HERE. Because the race had been delayed a day, there were fewer participants and, as a result, I was eligible to get a very attractive lavender running jacket with the Mary Andrews logo, along with a similarly-decorated coffee mug and some electrolyte-infused coffee.  So this extended weekend saw me running two races, a 5K on Saturday and a half-marathon today.  I doubt I'll be doing that again, and with my upcoming surgery in March it doesn't look like another half-marathon is within the immediate future for me either.  I'm glad I ran today's race...I didn't experience any leg cramps like I did after last November's marathon.  Then again, I went heavy on electrolytes before the race...

Recent Done Jigsaw Puzzle of Washington Monument

Here's another recent jigsaw puzzle I've put together...this one depicts the Washington Monument off in the distance in our nation's capital, from the vantage point of the Lincoln Memorial looking over the pool at the west end of the Mall. Melissa and I visited there back in October, 2018.  We saw a couple of Smithsonian museums, the Capitol (sitting in both the Senate and House chambers), Library of Congress, Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King Memorial, Vietnam Memorial and Arlington Cemetery.  It was a memorable visit, and I put this puzzle out on my blog since not only is tomorrow Martin Luther King, Jr, Day, but it's also the day that our next presidential inauguration takes place.  Because of the frigid cold weather, this ceremony has been moved indoors, to the Capitol Rotunda. But I'm only going to be celebrating the legacy of our late civil rights leader, not the return to power of the convicted felon...

Ran Gainesville's Depot Parkrun 5K This Morning

Right after I signed up for a half-marathon race that's supposed to happen tomorrow morning in Hawthorne, I began to see weather alerts pointing to severe storms from a strong winter front that is to span much of the weekend, beginning Saturday (today) evening and dropping extensive rain on our area into Sunday afternoon.  That sucks...probably wouldn't have signed up had I known that.  But it is what it is...didn't Donald Trump once say that...and here I am with a soaking-sucking weekend ahead of me.  I'm skeptical that I'll show up in Hawthorne early tomorrow morning, but I'll leave that decision up to the "me" that experiences that time when it comes around.  Instead, I got up early this morning...after a rare bout with insomnia...and hauled myself out to Depot Park, a few blocks south of downtown Gainesville, to see what I could salvage today before the buckets start pouring down.  For today's Depot Parkrun 5K, it was still dry (although humid at 87%) with a bearable 53 degrees at 7:30 race time.  I felt a little stiff and out of sorts from lack of sleep, but I went out on the run pushing myself, despite feeling that this race was going to be a slow one.  It turned out, though, that while I felt I was struggling a bit, I had a better-than-expected final time at 27:45...not my personal best for a Parkrun, but still better than last Saturday's: click HERE to view today's race results.  As for tomorrow's race, the organizers e-mailed me an update yesterday stating that they were considering delaying the 8 am start if the rain was falling too hard.  But I'd rather know that was going to happen before I go down there and find myself stuck, waiting around in the rain: tell me your decision sometime today, please, if you're gonna do that.  I don't mind getting a little wet, but I'm guessing that the grounds are going to be thoroughly saturated, with a lot of puddles to run through on the paved course.  So at least I got in a nice little run this morning, even if I end up (as I'm currently inclined) skipping tomorrow's event...

Quote of the Week...from Jim Carrey

I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.                                          ---Jim Carrey

I've always thought that comedic actor Jim Carrey was very talented, although truth be told I sometimes felt that he had a tendency to ham it up just a little too much in his movies.  But his characters in the 90's comedy series In Living Color were hilarious.  Carrey has turned out later in his life to be quite a philosopher, a thoughtful individual.  His above quote appealed to me not because I think there's anything wrong in being rich and famous and doing everything I ever dreamed of, but because I think that too many of us stumble through life believing in those goals and feeling that anything less than their fulfillment is the sign of a failed life.  I like material well-being without necessarily being rich.  I like recognition from others for achievements I've attained without me attaining those achievements in order to receive recognition.  I like to fulfill some of my dreams as well.  But I also believe that there is such a thing as "enough", and once I've reached a level in some area then I'm (hopefully) content enough to explore other areas as well.  I think Carrey was hinting that community and the helping of others as part of a deeper, more spiritual outlook should also be a part of the "answer". As for me, let me take this day and just see what I can do with it.  Then, when and if tomorrow comes, I'll take that day on its own terms, and so on.  And if along the way there are some things I'd like to have and some things I'd like to do, then that's cool, too...

Jigsaw Puzzle of St. Louis' Gateway Arch

I've never been to St. Louis, but I always liked its Gateway Arch.  A few weeks ago Melissa and I went to Daytona Beach and while there visited their Marshalls store off A1A.  There I got a box loaded with jigsaw puzzles depicting various famous American scenes.  I think that from time to time I'll show one of them that I've put together...

Weekly Short Stories: 1998 Science Fiction, Part 12

I'm getting closer to the end of the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Sixteenth Annual Collection, which covers the editor's picks of short stories and novellas from the year 1998. I've been doing this more-or less weekly sci-fi review Wednesday series for a few years, starting with stories first published in 1939...I'm planning to eventually bring it all up to the present.  But first a couple more from '98...

FREE IN ASVEROTH by Jim Grimsley

On a distant world, the narrator recounts her experience of breaking out of captivity one day with two of her kind, and their struggle against the "two legs" to stay free as they are relentlessly pursued.  It's no mystery who those pursuers are, either: human settlers...well, invaders...who have brutally fought the indigenous intelligent life, demeaning them as savages and destroying their society and freedom.  No doubt this is a direct analogy to all those times in our "two leg" history when one conquering group regarding itself as "superior" did the same upon encountering another more "primitive" group, such as the American Indians or Australian aborigines.  I sincerely hope our flawed humanity will have outgrown this tendency before we settle the cosmos, should that ever occur...

THE DANCING FLOOR by Cherry Wilder

An asteroid has been terraformed and transformed into a paradise, only to be evacuated and abandoned due to mismanagement and overreaction to some life support malfunctions.  There are some hangers-on hiding on this tiny artificial world constructed by a wealthy, eccentric magnate, though, and they resist contact and interaction with the "outsiders", which is pretty much everyone else.  And they especially despise the androids sent to their world.  The "Dancing Floor" in the story's title is the main reason one of the visiting team's members is there: it seems of alien construction, although its function is a mystery. Here's a tale that leads the reader in one direction with secondary characters inserted in the plot, only to find those secondary characters at the end to be of primary significance. My only problem with this short story was trying to keep up with the many named characters the author introduced: finally I just wrote each new name down as they appeared... 

Next week I'll hopefully get around to reviewing the final tale in this anthology, once again appearing to be one of those long, drawn-out novellas of which Dozois was so fond... 

Five Stages in Personal Change, According to Podcaster

On one of his recent Mindset Mentor podcasts, personal development coach Rob Dial repeated a show I've heard before, but have felt to be one of his more significant and applicable topics: what makes people quit their goals.  I guess at this time a little more than a week after many people have started out with their New Year's resolutions, a large portion of them are having second thoughts about them...if not giving up altogether.  Citing Don Kelly and Daryl Connor, who first presented their Emotional Cycle of Change in 1979, Dial lays out the five stages in goal development:

1 Uninformed Optimism-great enthusiasm and misplaced confidence

2 Informed Pessimism-dawning awareness of the goal's difficulties

3 The Valley of Despair-discouragement and a feeling of futility  

  (Connor and Kelly have the 3rd stage as "Hopeful Realism"-also a bottoming out but with more optimism)

4 Informed Optimism-understanding that the goal is attainable with the means to attain it

5 Completion-the lack of ability has been replaced by incorporation into habit, becoming part of identity

I can look back into my past and see how I encountered the above different stages for various projects I've pursued. And since I've set about to structure some of my retirement with new projects, I know I will have to meet each stage as it comes.  Rob Dial suggests that, at that beginning stage, I spend some time and effort to ascertain exactly what it is that I want to achieve and why...this can be of supreme importance in not giving up when stages two and three come into play.  Dial's "Valley of Despair" makes more sense to me than Kelly and Connor's "Hopeful Realism"... then again you could just add the latter to the former and make it six stages instead of five. For me, personal projects are like adventures leading to other adventures...a lot of fun but also a lot of hard work, with failures along the way to be seen as outcomes I can learn from...

Medical Procedures Clarified, Optimistic about Future

This morning Melissa went with me to a long awaited appointment with my specialist regarding my health: an action plan for dealing with my prostate cancer, recently diagnosed.  It's medically classified as localized, and I chose surgery...that will happen in early March.  I am grateful to finally have a clear treatment course laid out before me, and as I had stated in an earlier article, I am at peace with the whole process and confident of a successful outcome, with a full, active lifestyle to follow recovery. And beforehand as well: I just signed up to run the Mary Andrews half-marathon in Hawthorne on this Sunday, January 19th...it's organized by the Florida Track Club and will be my third straight year running it.  Before this prostate issue arose, I had considered doing the full marathon, but decided for now to stick with the shorter distance, deferring any future marathon races until after I recover from surgery. In the meantime, life is good...

NFL First Round Games This Weekend

Yesterday the National Football League playoffs began with the wild card round.  For much of the end of the regular season, several teams struggled week-by-week to make the postseason playoffs and the few who squeaked in at the end I'm sure feel successful.  But then reality hits and they have to play much better teams once the playoffs begin.  Yesterday I saw two good opening round games in the American Conference: the Los Angeles Chargers at the Houston Texans and the Pittsburgh Steelers at the Baltimore Ravens.  Being from the Miami area, I tend to root for whichever...if any...Florida teams make the playoffs: this year only Tampa Bay qualified.  Beyond them, I have others I tend to support.  With Saturday's contests my traditional favorite has been Baltimore, and I was glad to see them prevail.  As for the other game, I've come to like Houston for their head coach DeMeco Ryans and their excellent young quarterback C.J. Stroud...the Texans unexpectedly turned some big plays into a decisive win as well.  Today it's Denver at Buffalo, Green Bay at Philadelphia, and Washington at "my" Tampa Bay.  Monday night has Minnesota "at" the Los Angeles Rams, that game moved to Glendale, Arizona because of the LA-area wildfires.  Detroit and Kansas City received byes this week due to them having the best regular season records in their respective conferences.  At this juncture I like to think about possible intriguing Super Bowl matchups.  Let's see, of the 12 remaining teams, we have Detroit, Minnesota, Houston and Buffalo never having won a Super Bowl, and among them Detroit and Houston have yet to even get to play in one.  So any games involving the assurance of a "first" Super Bowl win is very interesting...I see the most likely scenario here being Buffalo vs. Detroit or Minnesota.  Then we have old title game rematch possibilities: Green Bay vs. Denver, Tampa Bay vs. Kansas City, Philadelphia vs. Kansas City, Buffalo vs. Washington, Minnesota vs. Kansas City, Green Bay vs. Kansas City...quite a few.  Let's see, where do the remaining teams rank according to my liking and to their likelihood of winning it all (two very different lists)?

MY LIKING:

1 Tampa Bay

2 Kansas City

3 Houston

4 Baltimore

5 Philadelphia

6 Los Angeles Rams 

7 Minnesota

8 Green Bay

9 Washington

10 Detroit

11 Denver

12 Buffalo

THEIR LIKELIHOOD

1 Buffalo

2 Detroit

3 Kansas City

4 Minnesota

5 Baltimore

6 Philadelphia

7 Houston

8 Green Bay

9 Los Angeles Rams

10 Tampa Bay

11 Washington

12 Denver

Ran Today's Cold and Windy Depot Parkrun 5K

This morning the southern tip of a strong continental winter storm (The Weather Channel names it "Cora") swept through northern Florida, leaving the weekly Depot Parkrun 5K here in Gainesville under chilly conditions with overcast skies and gusty northerly winds.  It had also rained a bit over the previous few hours, so when Melissa and I showed up it was no surprise to see the volunteers huddled under the roofed pavilion instead of the usual site, an open area near the starting line.  According to my weather app, the temperature at race time was 55 with 99% humidity...it only got colder as time went on.  The paved pathway around the park (we do four laps) was also damp enough to cause me concern about possible slips, so that in itself impeded any plans for me to run a fast race.  Still, unlike many other bundled-up participants, I showed up "like a Canadian" in a simple tee-shirt and shorts.  Melissa walked the course as well, and after I finished I joined up with her to walk the last couple of laps.  Our Alachua County today celebrates its bicentennial, apparently established only some six years after Florida was acquired by the United States from Spain in 1819 and twenty years before being admitted as a state.  While we were in our race, they were starting to set up the park for that observance...hope they enjoyed it all: we got out of there as soon as we finished.  I timed my finishing time at 28:16, but once again they screwed up the results page, this time giving me the time of the runner finishing just ahead of me: 27:51.  Well, I rolled with it a few weeks ago when it went against me, so I guess I'll continue likewise when I'm favored...click HERE to see those results.  Now I'm hunkering down, in a heated house and bundled up like a true Floridian, insulated against the brutal 47 degrees outside...

Weekly Short Stories: 1998 Science Fiction, Part 11

Wednesday has once again rolled around, telling me to write another article about the short stories I've been reading, at this point looking at the output from the year 1998.  Unfortunately, due to the fact that I chose a science fiction retrospective anthology series whose editor harbors a deep fondness for novellas in his selections, I've often found myself slowly slogging through material. This has been one of those weeks, although the novella I'm discussing today (second of the two below) has thankfully been more readable than last week's novella.  I'm using Gardner Dozois' anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Sixteenth Annual Collection...

LA CENERENTOLA by Gwyneth Jones

This is a chilling tale discussing where we may be heading with our advancing know-how regarding the control of our own reproduction...and what kind of offspring we will be producing.  Cloning, prevalent here in the tale of a young couple traveling in Europe with their daughter as they encounter a mother and her two obviously cloned, stunningly beautiful daughters, seems to be the topic for discussion here.  Except when the narrator sees the daughters fade and vanish into thin air!  Then the story advances to beyond cloning, and into a world that maybe we don't know what we're really getting into.  The title is the nickname of another, less-favored daughter of the woman with the "cloned" daughters', and who seems to hold the key to the mysteries in the story...

DOWN IN THE DARK by William Barton

This novella examines a topic commonly covered in sci-fi tales: the end of the world.  It's not so far off into the future (2057), and humanity had already begun to explore and even settle different feasible worlds within our solar system, including the Moon, Mars, and some of the outer moons in the solar system like Saturn's Titan, where the narrator is based.  The Earth and all life on it has been recently vanquished, due to an asteroid crashing into it along with misguided, backfiring efforts to break it up in space before the strike...the planet itself is now uninhabitable.  Now only about two thousand humans are left, scattered on a few different worlds in the solar system, with their machines, food and ability to replace depleting stocks running down toward an eventual extinction.  In contrast to what happened so abruptly to the billions of Earth-dwellers, their plight is an agonizingly slow one, and with this comes the opportunity to observe how people might react to their apparently hopeless situation.  Hence this tale, which in the end is very heavy on psychology and how people deal differently both with grief and with their oncoming deaths.  But there is something else happening on Titan...is it another form of life?  I'm not telling...read on, reader: there's more to this story than the oppressing doom and gloom...

And that's it for this week: let's see what happens next Wednesday...

Country Deserves Incoming CCC-in-Chief

The incoming CCC-in Chief (Convict, Conman, Clown) is up to his old tricks, deliberately saying anything he can to steal the media spotlight from other people and events, in this case the solemn observance honoring former president Jimmy Carter, who recently passed away at the age of 100.  CCC is working mass and social media up into a frenzy, making hints of annexing Greenland, the Panama Canal...even Canada,,,along with renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America".  The latter gesture, I'm guessing, was aimed at the hard-core voters who supported him from the start and thought twenty years ago that the old "change" from French fries to "Freedom" fries was a good idea.  When I went to school many decades ago, we had a bus stop bully who practiced the same kind of manipulation, threatening and deriding others he felt he could intimidate and always talking loudly about random subjects with outrageous statements abounding...just to keep attention on himself.  Now this dude, at an advanced age, is plaguing my high school reunion website...probably the same old narcissist he always was...sound familiar?  So, returning to our current collective problem, my country knew all about CCC yet elected him, even giving the degenerate a popular vote victory.  So this coming presidential term is on America, a country that has abandoned its sense of reason and decency in favor of self-brainwashing and fascism.  If you want to frequent Facebook (which has just abandoned its fact-checking policy after pressure from you-know-who) or those obnoxious cable news and opinion channels to get your news input, be my guest...all we're going to get in the next four years is more of the same constant, deliberately outrageous crap.  And my country deserves it for what they did on Election Day.  Enjoy...

Three Movies Recently Watched

During the last few weeks I did something I've rarely done in recent memory: watch three full-length currently-running feature-length movies.  They were, in order of viewing: Red One, Wicked and Carry-On.  Red One is a largely tongue-in-cheek comedy...with a mushy subplot...about Santa Claus being kidnapped and two unlikely allies, portrayed by Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans, teaming up to solve the mystery and rescue good ol' St. Nick.  It's loaded with computer-generated imagery, as I'm afraid movies these days tend to be.  The action is in your face and abrupt...but that's also the case with the other two films I saw.  Wicked is a revisionist prequel to L. Frank Baum's classic Wizard of Oz...it tells the story of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, and reframes her image as being a thoughtful, compelling young woman, as opposed to the shallow and narcissistic "Good Witch" Glinda.  That movie, based on the Broadway run adapted from Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel, hit me like a spoof of South Park's spoof of High School Musical: a little too heavy on the song-and-dance, thank you.  It's also just Part One, so another Wicked is on its merry way.  And the last movie I saw...all of them with Melissa and the middle one with Rebecca...was Carry-On, an edge-of-your-seat action flick about a TSA checker at the LA airport who is blackmailed at his post during the Christmas season to allow a sinister piece of luggage to pass through unchecked.  It was well-made and suspenseful, but I couldn't help but see its premise as a blatant ripoff of the 2002 thriller Phone Booth.  I managed to get through all three movies intact, but felt that each of them was guilty of sensory overload...I couldn't help feeling somehow manipulated, even with the cutesy Red One.  But I guess that's how movies are made today...

Ran Today's Cold (for Me) Depot Parkrun 5K

 I was attentive to the weather forecast for this morning, as they were predicting temperatures here in the Gainesville area to dip into the upper thirties by 7:30 race time for the weekly (free) Depot Parkrun 5K, held at that park just a few clocks south of downtown.  As it was, my phone app had it at 40 degrees with 56% humidity. The last couple of times I recently went out for a race when the temperature had dipped like this I didn't wear gloves...didn't make that mistake again.  No, I wore full-length pants and a jacket, the latter which I shed halfway through...no point in needless suffering, especially standing around shivering before the race.  Speaking of "before the race", during the announcements they asked if there were any out-of-town Parkrunners present, and wouldn't you know it, several from England and Canada raised their hands...all were dressed in short-sleeves and shorts like it was a warm spring morning instead of "freezing-ass cold" as I like to describe it.  I had been watching YouTube and saw a video advising runners to keep their cadence at around 170-180 steps/minute...I was experimenting around with this at the start of the run, only to later realize that when I am actually running at my usual faster clip toward the end I'm naturally maintaining that suggested cadence.  I started slow and finished fast, final time at 27:43...click HERE to view the results.  From here onward my participation in organized races is a bit uncertain as I have a medical video-conference Tuesday morning to discuss my diagnosis and future options after the prostate biopsy last month.  I intend to follow medical advice regarding my running and walking (and other activities), but if I'm still able to continue like I've been doing, then that's what I'll do...until they say otherwise... 

Quote of the Week...from Paul McCartney

One of my biggest thrills for me still is sitting down with a guitar or piano and just out of nowhere trying to make a good song happen.                                ---Paul McCartney

I don't know when Paul McCartney...now 82...made the above quote.  That exemplifies the tremendous stability of the personality and beliefs of this remarkable individual, an outstanding musical artist with whom we've been blessed to live during the same years.  From time to time I've flirted with the notion of learning to play musical instruments...some time in the past in my early fifties I took some private piano lessons.  But unlike Bill Murray's Groundhog Day character Phil Connors, who had a seemingly endless progression of the same day ahead of him as he went through his own piano lessons, I experienced back then the progression of brand new, very different days and their accompanying demands and distractions.  So although I picked up some slight keyboard skills and actually somehow got through a piano recital performing an excerpt from a Beethoven composition, I ended up abandoning the piano project. But in the back of my mind I've always wanted to be able to pick out any tune and transfer either its main melody or accompaniment to the keyboard...or guitar, for that matter.  Will and Rebecca studied piano and applied themselves better to learning it than did I.  I understand that when the Beatles were starting out, none of them could read music, but rather developed and honed their musical skills by endlessly practicing their instruments, and their songwriting was a matter of dreaming stuff up and quickly transferring it to guitar, piano, drum and voice, with each other serving as critics and contributors. Melissa recently gave me a nice electronic keyboard for Christmas, and I have a different strategy for playing it than before, one that I think the Beatles great with his above quote would heartily approve of. But my aims are a bit more modest than those of Sir Paul McCartney:  I just want to play the music that I already know and love...and he wrote his share of it...

Planets on Full Display in Winter Night Sky

On New Year's Eve Melissa and I were invited to our friends' rural farm home to celebrate with them and others the changing of the year with food and good conversation.  We had never been there before and gratefully availed ourselves of the Waze app to know where to turn on the zigzagging way, with dirt roads presenting their own challenges as we approached our destination.  Once there, we enjoyed ourselves while soaking in the ambiance of being way out in the countryside of Gilchrist County.  The sky was cloudless and the stars shone brilliantly...as well as the planets: there were three of them (or four if you looked down and counted the Earth): Saturn, Jupiter and Mars.  I could easily make out red Mars, which was the easternmost, just below the zodiac constellation Gemini (technically it's in Cancer, but no one can make out that faint constellation).  I had to look up later which of the other two was Jupiter and which was Saturn.  Jupiter is in Taurus and Saturn, in the west part of the sky, is in Aquarius...just south of Pegasus.  I liked the fact that I could look all the way down to any horizon and see stars without noticeable interference from city lights.  Of course, out here as well as where I live, there are plenty of trees to block the view.  We enjoyed our visit, which I wouldn't have been able to be a part of had I not retired.  One door closes and many more open.  Speaking of more opportunities, I'm looking forward to seeing more of my local planetarium once its January schedule resumes after the holiday break.  It's the Kika Silva Pla Planetarium at Santa Fe College, directed by James Albury...

Weekly Short Stories: 1998 Science Fiction, Part 10

Here's yet another installment in my Wednesday feature, with me reading and reacting to stories appearing in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Sixteenth Annual Collection, and featuring his picks from the year 1998.  Today it's just one tale, a long novella...

GRIST by Tony Daniel

Sometimes an author has several different provocative ideas that he or she would like to put into a story, and that's one of the things I like about science fiction.  But if those provocative ideas all get thrown into one tale, then a problem arises...at least with me as a reader...pointing to a general lack of a stable point of reference that I can anchor myself to.  It's immediately clear to me what my problem with this novella is: there is no clear-cut notion of what constitutes individual identity, as almost all the characters...including the protagonist...are composite amalgamations of multiple brains and artificial intelligence.  It's so murky that not only do I not care about the hero's assignment to help avert a cataclysmic war, but I'm also not interested in "his" history of relationships with the other characters.  I suspect a lot of readers think that it's kind of cool to go deep down the rabbit hole of speculative fiction, but seriously, stories like this one just make me want to throw my hands up in frustration and walk away.  But the late Gardner evidently loved these disorienting stories, and the longer they are the better.  I'll tell you what: see if you can't find Grist and read it yourself...and tell me what you think about it, along with any suggestions on how I can better approach it...

Next week I'll see if I can't come up with some more reactions (hopefully positive) from Gardner Dozois' anthology...

My New Year's Day Walking and Running Events

This first day of 2025 saw two special holiday events for walkers and runners take place in Gainesville.  Early on, with temperatures in the low 50s at the 7:30 am start, the Depot Parkrun held its traditional New Year's Day 5K.  The organizers promoted the event by encouraging us all to wear pajamas to it, and Melissa and I complied...along with several others.  I'm proud of Melissa taking this positive step of doing her first 5K walk since last May before her breast cancer surgery, and I look forward to her walking in more events as the year progresses.  Later at noon, the Florida Track Club held its own event, the Frank Shorter Mile run, with the course primarily being a repeated loop on the east end of Westside (Albert Massey) Park, going through a quiet residential neighborhood.  I signed up for it because the last time I was timed in a public one-mile race was in the fall of 1974, during my conditioning physical education class at Broward Community College...back then I enjoyed my fastest mile (5:25) of a middling running career.  I knew today I'd be much slower, but then again I'm 50 years older!  The race was very well staged with a lot of positive vibes going around, and I started out running hard.  So hard, in fact, that early on I began to wonder if maybe I was running too hard, but no, I was able to maintain my pace and even increase it at the end, finishing with a time of 8:25.  The noontime temperature had only risen to 58, so all in all, the running (and walking) conditions today were optimal for me and Melissa.  Click HERE to view today's Depot Park run 5K results and HERE to see the Frank Shorter Mile results...  

My December 2024 Running, Walking and Swimming Report

It's sometimes difficult, when outside events are imposed on me, to maintain my own set of standards and routines of running, walking...and especially swimming: December 2024 was a case in point. On the 18th I underwent a prostate biopsy, recovery from which involved a temporary withdrawal from at least the running and swimming...at this final date of the month (and year) I have yet to resume the latter.  But for December as a whole, I'm pretty satisfied with my state of progress in the three areas.  I participated in four  races, running in the Season of Hope 15K, and doing the Depot Parkrun 5K three times, speed-walking it once.  This was my first full month of retirement, yet although you might think this would enhance my training, I actually had more control over my activity with my work structure, counter-intuitive as it may seem. Now I need to set up and assert my own routines: it's a process, both for me and for my loved ones.  This self-discipline regarding running, walking and swimming is something that I need to develop and take personal responsibility for...with expected medical procedures in the near future, though, I'll still need to be reasonable about it all.  In January, apart from the weekly Parkrun 5Ks, there will be a marathon/half-marathon event on Sunday the 19th and a 15K on Saturday the 27th.  The degree to which I participate...and train, for that matter, will come down to those factors of self-discipline and my ongoing medical situation.  I'm realistically optimistic about the long-term picture, although circumstances may be limiting in the short-term.  I'm continuing to see walking and swimming take more significant roles in my life, and my recent switch to the nearby YMCA with its much more accessible swimming pool bodes well for the future...

My Favorite Songs of 2024

Back in July this year I noticed that I hadn't been keeping up with this year's new music, much less listen to the "hits" as they had their "rotations" of radio play.  So I listened to some albums, the best of them being The Smile's Wall of Eyes and Green Day's Savior. They're both very good, but as far as standout tracks are concerned, only three made a deep impression on me...that was in July: click HERE to read the article I wrote about it on July 9th.  I never did go deeper into current album releases, what with tragedy and medical crisis permeating my life for the remainder of 2024.  But those three songs remained strong and meaningful for me, and now that I can instantly call them up to play with my Amazon Music account, I have listened to them many, many times over the past few months.  So there won't be any long list of my top favorite songs of 2024: just three.  At #3, it's Read the Room by The Smile.  As I wrote back in July, this is a British alternative rock band composed of Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, along with drummer Tom Skinner.  Wall of Eyes is their second album...and they must all dig their little group because they just released a third studio album.  Read the Room has cryptic lyrics...that's all right since many of my favorites over the years were pretty difficult to understand as well.  It's the musical counterpoint going on here that drew me to it, especially during the complex instrumental ending.  At #2, it's impossible not to understand the words to Green Day's lyricist and vocalist Billie Joe Armstrong's powerful The American Dream is Killing Me, which pretty much sums up my own thoughts as to the course of our society as it has largely degenerated over recent years.  Finally, my favorite song from 2024 is also from The Smile: I Quit.  I quickly found myself attached to it not only for its incredibly blunt and pertinent lyrics about making a permanent transition and taking a new path, but also for its haunting and very complex music.  Below are some of the  words...  

Wild ghosts

Wild feelings

Leaning windmills

A dead drop

This is the end of the trip

A new path

Out of the madness

To wherever it goes

To wherever it goes

And wherever it goes

And wherever it goes

And wherever it lies

And wherever it lies 

I liked this song before learning of my son's passing and not long thereafter deciding to retire.  It reminded me of the ending to Lord of the Rings, when aging Bilbo Baggins utters the following line as he is about to board the boat to take him on to the Grey Havens: "I think I am quite ready for a another adventure!"  May your own new adventures bless you...sometimes, though, they come whether you're ready for them or not...

Looking Back on 2024 in My Life

As 2024 draws to a close, I look back in my life on both the good and the bad, the miraculous and the tragic.  In May, Melissa had her breast cancer diagnosis and quick surgery to remove the malignant lump...this followed by chemotherapy (her body suffered a bad reaction to it) and then radiation therapy, ending this fall.  By all measures, the cancer has been removed from her body, thank God.  But after pulling up into our driveway on July 18th following the second round of that chemo, the police were there to notify us that our beloved 34 year old son Will had died.  This would overshadow all of the good that 2024 had produced for us, and we're left with a big hole in our lives.  He was (is) such a compassionate and responsible young man...what a terrible loss for us and the world he graced with his presence for too short a time span.  Rebecca, my 29-year old daughter, lives in town and makes me proud with her commitment to her job as well as her close relationships with us and her partner. My own health seems to be going in opposite directions: in one direction I am gradually becoming fitter and more athletic while in the other I have just been diagnosed with localized prostate cancer, the treatment for which looms ahead of me in early 2025.  I do feel blessed to be in such an environment where it can be effectively treated and I am confident of the successful outcome.  And when I clocked out at 10 pm on Friday, November 29th, my retirement began after working for 37 years at the Gainesville Post Office.  I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to work there and have many good memories of my colleagues as well as the work itself...I am no disgruntled postal worker!  And I have enjoyed not having to deal with the traffic while driving to and from work since then.  For 2024, Will's passing dwarfs everything else, but in life sometimes you have to take the bad with the good, and that can be difficult...

Ran Gainesville's Depot Parkrun 5K This Morning

This last Saturday morning in December was unusually warm and muggy (64 degrees, 100% humidity) at the 7:30 beginning of the weekly, free (sign up online) Depot Parkrun 5K, just one of hundreds of similar events taking place across the USA and several other countries.  On such a day as this, when I'm going to run it (instead of speed-walking like I did last week), I know up front that I will be simply working to sustain a strong regular pace without attempting to set any personal best records.  So that's exactly what unfolded, with me settling into a slightly uncomfortable pace and enjoying the presence of some runners ahead of me who kept me honest with that pace.  At the end I had a time of 27:32...click HERE to view the results.  There weren't as many participants in today's race as usual, and that may be due to the fact that (1) the University of Florida is closed for the holiday season (2) many may be out of town who normally would be there or (3) folks are waiting for the special New Year's Day edition of the Depot Parkrun, to take place this coming Wednesday morning.  The organizers say to wear the pajamas you slept in the night before: dare I?...

Quote of the Week...from Mahandas Gandhi

Be the change you wish to see in the world.                          ---Mahandas Gandhi

Mahandas (or "Mahatma") Gandhi was the great twentieth-century lawyer who, with his pacifist creed of passive resistance, was instrumental in India's independence and had a lot of things to say about how best to live one's own life.  That in itself doesn't qualify him for my "quote of the week" feature, but the above quote...Rob Dial recently referred to it on a podcast...resonates with me.  In the first place, I can't exactly dictate to the world how I want it to be...well, maybe I can but I would be delusional if I thought it cared one bit.  But seeing how much of human behavior is imitative, I do have the power and authority to demonstrate by my own actions what I would like to see from others.  I believe that many of us are seekers, looking for examples in others to emulate and guide them through their daily existence.  Why not be one of the examples?  No, I'm no Gandhi, nor would I want to be, and I have a lot of stuff to work out in my own life and am far, far from any semblance of a perfect model.  But I'm alive, here and now, and that gives me enough to change with...

Wishing All the Best, Taking Blog Break

I hope that you and yours have been enjoying your holiday season this year.  Melissa and I have spent quite some time with our daughter Rebecca as well as with Melissa's family side residing here in Gainesville.  I found it probably the best thing to take a little break...for a few days...with this blog.  Maybe toward the end of 2024 or, starting next year, I'll get it going again...

Blessings and Hopes for this Christmas Holiday Season

On this Christmas Eve "Eve", I wish you all a happy holiday season and that you experience peace in the present and hope for the future.  Melissa and I both are still deeply in grief over the loss of our wonderful son Will, who tragically passed away this past July.  The holiday season simply isn't the same without his loving presence in our lives...we are grateful for our dearly beloved daughter Rebecca to be living near us to celebrate Christmas.  God Bless you all...

First Round Major College Football Playoffs: Boring Mismatches

The brand-new major college football playoff format, with a whopping twelve schools now vying for the national championship, began this weekend with four largely boring, lopsided contests...not exactly what the organizers were hoping for, I'm sure.  Notre Dame, Texas, Ohio State and Penn State stuffed Indiana, Clemson, Tennessee and SMU, respectively.  I was only surprised at the Vols-Buckeyes score, thinking that Tennessee had more in them than that.  On the other hand, unlike the NCAA major college basketball championship tournament that tries to stage its games at more neutral sites, this round took place at the higher-seeded schools' home stadiums, a huge advantage for them, to say the least.  The second round will all be traditionally-named bowl games: Boise State plays Penn State New Year's Eve in the Fiesta Bowl, then on January 1st its Arizona State/Texas in the Peach Bowl, Oregon/Ohio State in the Rose Bowl and Georgia/Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl.  I'm not all that interested in who wins, but I usually pick out a team before each game I watch to root for anyway. I guess Georgia...until they lose...will be "my" team since I was born there.  I just hope the next games will be more competitive...

Walked Gainesville's Depot Parkrun 5K This Chilly Morning

After a cold front passed through our area in northern Florida yesterday, the temperature plummeted to 38 degrees (76% humidity) on this Winter Solstice Saturday morning here in Gainesville.  I was ready for the weekly Depot Parkrun 5K, starting at 7:30, regardless.  You see, I had a recent prostate biopsy done and felt that doing an intense run might be a little bit too much too soon thereafter, so I instead stayed dressed up...complete with jacket...to do a speed-walk there.  Other than feeling that I should have worn gloves to protect my painfully cold hands during the race, I enjoyed it and...while not walking my fastest 5K...still managed to finish under 40 minutes again.  I didn't walk today trying to set a personal 5K walking record since, as mentioned before, I was recovering from that medical procedure.  But it would be nice if sometime in 2025 I could get my speed-walking pace down to a twelve-minute mile: it's possible but I'll need to work at it.  I'm glad to be inserting walking into my races: it's also more conducive than running to just immersing myself in the immediate surroundings, noticing many more sights and sounds than I would normally perceive were I only running instead. Not that I've given that up, though...just not today.  For today's results, click HERE...