Eleven Twenty-Two

Today marks one of those sadly-increasing dates, like 4/4, 9/11, 12/7, and 12/8, that represent tragic events. Of course, today is the 48th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Texas. Many people think of this as a pivotal moment in our history: too many important things happened differently under the subsequent Johnson administration, some good and some very, very bad. The worst of the bad was the massive military escalation in Vietnam even after intelligence reports clearly indicated that this strategy wouldn't work. I can't imagine Kennedy making the same stubborn, bone-headed and callous decisions that LBJ did: it just wasn't a part of his character. Also, I wonder whether we would have abandoned our Apollo/Moon landing program prematurely had JFK stayed in office for two whole terms, as he was clearly headed for an easy reelection in 1964. With no Vietnam to burden a second term, the political resurrection of Richard Nixon in 1968 becomes a major question as well. And although Johnson was lukewarm to Apollo, Nixon was outright hostile to it, being the one who was instrumental in curtailing the missions and leaving us in low-Earth-orbit ever since (actually, we've now regressed so badly that we can't even do that anymore).

On the bright side (if you can imagine a bright side to a horrible act of cruel violence like an assassination), Lyndon Johnson, with his experience twisting arms as Senate Majority Leader, was able to get a torrent of progressive legislation quickly passed upon entering office. This included landmark bills like the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and Medicare. Had Kennedy been able to stay in as president, this legislation probably would have dragged on for years, being impeded in large part by boll-weevil southern conservative Democrats sitting on the bills while sitting as committee chairmen. On the other hand, perhaps the racial unrest that rose up under Johnson wouldn't have materialized under Kennedy; at least JFK may have been able to handle it better, who knows...

The feeling that history turned in a big way on Kennedy's murder has inspired Stephen King to write a novel about it, soon to be released. I may not be able to wait for the library this time to check it out: to the bookstore I say!

Goodkind Driving Me Nuts With Boring Novel

I wonder how many people picked up the first of Terry Goodkind's 12-volume Sword of Truth fantasy series with the firm determination to read through the entire series, only to become so frustrated in the first few chapters that they put it down, never to pick it up again. I know that's how I am feeling right now, about halfway through the first book, titled Wizard's First Rule.

One of my major gripes about Christopher Paolini and his Eragon fantasy series, besides the suspicion that he ripped off just about every major (and minor) idea of his from other writers, is that he tediously goes on for page after page exploring the innermost thoughts of his characters. Maybe you're the kind of reader who digs this, but I find it to be a literary cop-out, a short-cut around using the unraveling story as a way to better get to know the characters and their personalities. But at least I thought that, well, at least here Paolini is writing with some originality (very boring originality, that is). Ooops, maybe he wasn't after all...

No, I don't know whether Paolini read Goodkind or not. But I would be surprised if he hadn't at least begun to read the first book even if he, like me, later laid it down in frustration. Because Goodkind, who began writing his Sword of Truth series several years before Paolini, is eerily similar to the latter with his endless excursions into the thoughts, sub-thoughts, and micro-sub-thoughts of his characters. No wonder that this series is so damned long! Ironically, though, Goodkind has (at least so far) spared the suffering reader with this torture regarding the antagonist, Darken Raul (doesn't that sound a lot like Star Wars?). With Raul, Goodkind lets his actions speak for what kind of person he is. And although those actions are dastardly and nasty, at least I know when I come across a chapter featuring the "bad guy", I will enjoy a kind of reprieve from the mental tedium pervading the "good guy" narrative. The result is that I am unwittingly beginning to root for the antagonist to vanquish those god-awful-boring heroes!

So I don't think I'm going to make it through the first book, much less the whole series. But that may be just as well: I saw Stephen King give a speech and Q & A on C-Span and he is soon coming out with two very interesting stories.

Now what will I ever do if THE KING retires from writing??!!

Gainesville Sun Ignores Local Running Races

Last week's Tom Walker Memorial Half-Marathon race in Gainesville represented a major sporting event in this community of mine. Promoted in advance in the local papers, nevertheless NO coverage was provided of this event's results. No, not even a flimsy article anywhere indicating the very top finishers. Yet, especially in the Gainesville Sun, we get an endless stream of yawn-inducing drivel about various aspects of the Gators football team. Reality check, Gainesville Sun: there's more to sports than your precious NCAA football and the grossly underachieving and overindulged Florida Gators!

It could well be just that the sports editor has some kind of grudge against the sport of running. Maybe he was a nonathletic or out-of-shape little kid and the other kids laughed at his meager attempts to run back then. Yeah, I bet he hated that aspect of physical education class. Maybe at least with football, he was good at just standing there on the line and blocking. Or maybe he WAS a good runner once and was slighted at some time in the past, holding onto a grudge all these years. Or maybe he just can't get along with the Florida Track Club, the organizer and promoter of this event. No, that can't be it: the Gainesville Sun is an equal-opportunity ignorer of all local running races (unless they are officially affiliated with colleges or high schools).

Then again, it might not be the sports editor at all.

Maybe it's just that my hometown Gainesville Sun sucks, pure and simple. But no, that can't be it either: sometimes they do come out with some interesting articles. So then what is it they have against running?

Running is very popular here in Gainesville, with many people engaging in the activity on many levels. It's a shame that those "running" my local newspaper, which does have some positive features, seem to think that this sport isn't important enough to report...

Florida Eases Into a Bowl It Doesn't Deserve

The University of Florida football team has a good thing going for themselves in spite of this year's mediocre edition. They are currently 5-5 and will probably lose next week's regular season finale against a superior Florida State team. And why do I emphasize the words "regular season"? Because, in spite of their difficulties and probable humbling 6-6 finish, they will still be eligible to play in a post-season bowl game, full of its pomp and glory (and financial reward). This is due to a rule allowing schools with non-losing records to participate in bowls and likewise prohibiting the "losers" from "disgracing" these games with their presence. But Florida?

The Gators aren't the only major college school that pads their schedule with easy opponents, but they may well be the worst offender. They opened their season against two pushover small colleges, giving the world (and sadly even themselves) in doing so the false impression that they were a much better team than they actually were. Add to this the fact that their next two conference opponents were having dismal seasons and you had a 4-0 team pushing to be included in the Top Ten. Then, the bottom fell out of their season as they played against several highly ranked teams and went 1-5 (and barely pulling out their one victory during this stretch). So UF is 5-5 with the Seminoles to play next week. So how do they get to go to a bowl?

For some reason I cannot fathom, a few years ago the bigshots who set the rules for college football decreed an extra game in the regular season, making it twelve games. Florida reacted by scheduling a powder-puff pushover college late in each season. This year they are playing Furman, a team that hasn't exactly sparkled, even against other schools in their level of play. That game, which the Gators could win blindfolded, is going to begin here in Gainesville less than two hours from now. This "victory", hollow as it will be, will nevertheless be the one that gives them a pass into a bowl game, one that I think they don't deserve at all.

What's really sad about this Furman game today will be the feigned excitement expressed by the play-by-play radio announcers whenever Florida pulls off a successful play against their grossly (and deliberately) outmatched opponent.

Bicycling in My Life

When I was a kid, I hardly ever rode a bicycle. In fact, it wasn't until I was sixteen that I even owned one. The only reason that I instantly could ride it from the time I set it out in the parking lot was that, many years before when I was about eight, there was an old beat-up bicycle in our storage room at home that I would repeatedly get up on and try to balance myself in our backyard. But once I actually began riding one on the street in 1973, I fell in love with this activity. Yet I never did fall for the trappings and expense of "serious" bicycling. To me, that would have detracted from the utter simplicity and freedom of being so mobile with a vehicle that ran on no fuel, could be parked just about anywhere, had very cheap maintenance, and cost me only about a hundred bucks.

I continued my fervent bicycling for about 22 years, finally cooling off in late 1995 when I changed my work schedule to a shift when bicycling conflicted too much with the local traffic. You see, although I lived about eight miles from my workplace, I would often ride my bicycle to work and back. This also meant riding up some pretty steep (for Florida) hills. So I kept myself in pretty good shape with this activity.

Since that time, my bicycling tapered off considerably. Along with that went my physical fitness as well, and at times I got quite overweight. A few years ago I began to exercise at my YMCA's workout room. Then, a local Starbucks manager, Marty Bower, told me that with his suggestion Gainesville had started to hold an annual marathon/half-marathon in February (put on by LifeSouth). I told him that I wanted to run in it, but tarried in getting back to running. Finally, in 2007 I began to run in earnest, first on the treadmill, then in the vicinity of Gainesville's Westside Park, and finally settling down to designing and running lengthy courses up and down my neighborhood roads. So my fitness level improved again with the running, but I never did get back to bicycling very much. And I did manage to run and complete the 2010 LifeSouth Half-Marathon, but unfortunately Marty had left Starbucks by then and I couldn't brag to him about it.

During my "heyday" of bicycling, I felt relatively safe on the road. Sadly, I can no longer confidently state that. Motorists today seem very impatient and are too easily distracted with their assorted "toys", the worst being their cellphones. They tend to drift off the road too much into the bike lines that are reserved for me, not them. No, I have to admit it: I'm a little bit scared to undertake bicycle riding again to any appreciable degree.

Not that, from time to time, I won't just get on my bicycle and ride around for a little bit. My days of "extreme" bicycling are probably over, but I'll always cherish the memories of my journeys in the now-receding past...

Atlas of Middle Earth and Its Appeal

Every now and then I get into a whimsical mood and check out a peculiar spin-off book from my local library: The Atlas of Middle Earth by Karen Wynn Fonstad. It is based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, known best for The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. This book goes into meticulous detail about the various stages of change in Middle Earth, a thoroughly fictional place, through the different "ages" as Tolkien laid out in his often cumbersome tales.

Fonstad is herself a geographer with cartographic experience. It shows in this excellent book, although as I study its pages I get the disturbing feeling that my time would be better served looking over maps of real places. And yet, because I have enjoyed an affinity with maps since early childhood and feel quite comfortable around them, I keep coming back to this book.

As for the Third Age, the era in which The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings transpires, I am pretty familiar with the geography of this completely non-existent world. As for the earlier ages, there were a lot of cataclysmic upheavals that occurred with Middle Earth, raising and sinking islands and parts of continents, making one place move to another realm, and even changing the shape of Middle Earth itself. Definitely pure fantasy, not science fiction!

Since Atlas of Middle Earth is based on stories and illustrates where events took place involving those stories' characters, how about a personal "Atlas of Real Earth" compiled in a comparable manner? Let's say, for example, that I want such an atlas for my family and friends. The maps would feature migration routes as we moved from southern Georgia in my infancy to Alexandria, Virginia, and then to Opa-Locka and later Hollywood in southeastern Florida. Then in my adulthood to Gainesville, Leesburg for a seven-month respite, and then back to Gainesville. There would be a special page showing the various places in Gainesville I've lived as well. Not to mention the vacation excursions and other travel I've undergone. And of course, friends and other members of my family would have their own tales and "trails" featured on the maps.

I think that would be a pretty cool idea for a business: make and sell a highly stylized atlas, patterned after Tolkien's maps, depicting your own life's events and journeys just as if you were the one living out some fantasy adventure!

Unseasonably Hot and Humid Weather

I am beside myself at the sorry weather we're experiencing here in the middle of November in north-central Florida. After the cold morning (32 degrees) on Saturday when I suffered at the beginning of my half-marathon race, the temperatures rapidly surged upward until we are now left with lows in the 60's and highs in the 80's. And the humidity? Earlier today around 11 am, the humidity, normally dissipated by that time of the morning, still stood at an oppressive 87%. So instead of running outdoors, I felt the need to run inside on the treadmill. And tonight while driving home, I marveled at the combination of the warmth and a very, very thick fog.

I don't see any relief in sight from this horrible weather. I guess the only way it's going to get cold again is for me to sign up for another running race...

Anthropology and Race

Former University of Florida Anthropology Department chairman and professor emeritus John Hartwell Moore has written an important opinion piece in last Sunday's Gainesville Sun concerning the need to emphasize the field of anthropology in our university curriculum, our extreme right-wing governor Rick Scott's loudly-expressed opinions on the matter to the contrary.

Moore's main argument is compelling: before the advent of modern anthropology during just the last century, academic discussion about diversity among humanity was based on an orthodoxy dividing people into distinct "races", each one with its own particular traits of intelligence and personality. Even though this racial eugenics-based theory was used to justify slavery and discrimination in America and persecution of Jews in Europe, encyclopedias and texts continued to display articles about the three main "races" in the world and how other groups were "mixes" of these "races".

Professor Moore named a group called "Southern Physicians" who used racist theory as "science" to try to justify racial segregation. Modern anthropology, on the other hand, does not recognize "race" as a legitimate scientific concept with an applicable meaning.

As a child, I remember looking in my home encyclopedia at pictures of different racial types throughout the world, classified under the banners of "Caucasoid", "Negroid", or "Mongoloid". This implied that there was such a thing as "racial purity", a very dangerous concept as history has tragically borne out. Children born of parents of differing "races" were deemed as "mixed race". We still (regrettably) generally adhere to these notions today, modern anthropology notwithstanding.

Since there is no such thing as "race" there is also no such thing as "mixed race". Race is a matter of subjective perception, not objective reality. On those annoying questionnaires I get from time to time, I am just as entitled to bubble in next to "black" or "African American" for my racial/ethnic affiliation as I am to fill in for "white" or "European". But I actually just see myself an almost universally human "brown", thank you. Funny that they never offer THAT choice on a questionnaire of this type...

I agree with John H. Moore's conclusions: anthropology needs to be emphasized more in schools, not less. After all, in a world full of misinformation, widely-believed conspiracy theories of all sorts, the closet-racist "birther" movement about President Obama, and denial of solidly established facts like the Jewish Holocaust and evolution, the last thing we need is to retreat from science and reason in our educational system. If anthropology fades, then something more insidious and false will surely replace it as a model of humanity's diversity. And then I'm afraid we'd be in for more trouble...

Too Many Presidential Debates

I am wondering whether anyone else is picking up on the same thing: aren't there way too many Republican presidential debates? I'm not saying this because I am anti-Republican: I thought the same about the Democratic campaign against Bush in 2003-2004. To me, all these debates seem to accomplish is give the other party (this time it's the Democrats) ammunition to use in the general election whenever a candidate commits a gaffe (which sometimes happens several times in a single debate). Also, if the Republicans are really serious about regaining the White House in the 2012 election, then these debates are also counterproductive in that they force the candidates to play up to the more extreme conservative elements in the party. Instead, the candidates should be demonstrating to the nation that they are reasonable leaders with the country's greater interests at heart, not just towing some narrow ideological line that has little broad appeal to the electorate.

Perhaps the reason we are currently experiencing so many debates is something that I have alluded to in some previous articles: Americans seem to have some serious issues with their attention spans and memories. Or at least enough of them do to potentially effect the outcome of close elections. Maybe the GOP organizers see this, too, and feel that only with these continuing debates can they keep the campaign (and their candidates) in the public eye before that public quickly forgets about them!

My Half-Marathon Race Earlier Today

Earlier this morning, I ran the Tom Walker Memorial Half-Marathon as planned. And as has usually been the case with me, the temperatures spiked severely downward. It was 32 degrees at the race's start (about 8:10) with 100% humidity. Not fun at all for me. I spent most of the pre-race waiting in the car with the heater going. But eventually I shivered my way somehow to the starting line, once again deliberately behind as many entrants as I could get.

This race is basically along a single paved trail (with a slight divergence at the beginning), with the second half of the race a retracing of the path back to the beginning (or close thereto). One thing that I noticed this time around above 2010's run was that the first three miles (and the last three) of the race had a lot of hills and valleys. It was more difficult for me this year since I have only been either training around my immediate, very flat neighborhood or on the treadmill. Last year I incorporated a path that had some small hills into my training, so the race course's hills weren't such a big deal then.

In spite of the hills, I felt pretty strong throughout the run and once again decided to run the race through from beginning to end without walking breaks. Still, I was certain that my time would be much slower than last year. Imagine my surprise when I came to the finish line with a new personal half-marathon record, turning in a time of 1:59:38.

After the race, my legs were sore. But that was pretty much it for the recovery, which has gone quite well. I am very encouraged by my successful run today. After all, I hadn't covered a half-marathon distance in a run since this past January 23's Ocala Marathon. My training strategy instead consisted of alternating long runs with short ones on successive days, with the long runs varying from 7 to 10 miles. Apparently, this is the way to go for me with half-marathon training. After all, it is hard for me to argue with the results!

My Half-Marathon Tomorrow Morning

Tomorrow morning I will be running in Gainesville's Tom Walker Memorial Half Marathon for the second consecutive year. Last year I ran without employing my customary run-walk method, going nonstop for the 13.1 mile distance. I was also training for a marathon race then, so this race was a "way-stop" for me, so to speak. Now, it's a little bit different. For one, the half-marathon is my chosen full-length race for the present and future. For another, I fully plan to do my usual "run six minutes, walk one minute" routine throughout the run. But like last year, I am going about it will little concern for my time and finish. My practice pace is my race pace, pure and simple.

In training for it, for more than the past two weeks I have been alternating my days between long runs and very short ones. Today, though, I deliberately broke my string of 16-straight running days to rest my body for tomorrow.

It looks as if the weather will be dipping down to almost unbearable cold, just for my race. This is the fourth straight race of half-marathon length or more that it has done this for (or to) me. So far the prognosticators have the temperature dropping to around 37. Let's see how low it really goes.

Well, I had better post this, sign off, and review the location of the park where the race begins and ends. I haven't been there since the last one..

Penn State Students Borderline Psycho Over Paterno

And I thought it was bad enough here in Gainesville during the Urban Meyer/Tim Tebow era, with any criticism of the two local football demigod/heroes met with angry rebuffs. But we're quite reasonable here in comparison to the lunacy currently transpiring at Penn State University, which last night fired its long-time head football coach Joe Paterno.

You see, in 2002 Paterno received direct information from an eyewitness who saw his former assistant defensive coach Jerry Sandusky RAPING a little boy in an athletic-area shower on campus. All Paterno did was to perfunctorily refer the matter to his "superior", athletic director Tim Curley. Curley essentially sat on his hands and not only covered up this atrocity without contacting the police, but also continued to allow Sandusky on campus, although he was under "university" orders not to bring any of "his boys" with him (that rule in itself was incredibly bizarre: the suspected serial rapist can appear on campus, but his victims can't). I have no doubt that Paterno must have encountered his old colleague on numerous occasions during that time, but he apparently decided that the welfare of little children was trivial in comparison to his good-old-boy relationships, even if one of the good-old-boys happened to be a sexual predator. In response to Paterno's apathy and inaction, the board at Penn State in charge of firing people did just that last night: they fired Paterno. So what was the reaction around Penn State?

I'd like to think that people around campus felt a little shame and a lot of letdown that their revered authority figures allowed something this horrible to go on for so long (the 40-count indictment against Sandusky spans 15 years, from 1994 to 2009). Unfortunately, this isn't the case. Instead, students are taking to the streets and angrily demonstrating, not for the young victims, but rather for Paterno, who helped to enable this to continue by conveniently looking the other way. And I heard snippets of the press conference there last night when the firing was announced. The local reporters there were just as irrational as the students, angrily telling the college official there that Paterno was being treated unfairly (once again without expressing any concern for the little boys who suffered these crimes).

When I think of the shame that supposedly responsible people at this once highly respected university have brought down upon it, I then look at its student body and local media. Don't they see that they are magnifying their disgrace to the world?

Penn State? No, how about Psycho State!!!

GOP Needs to Wise Up About Cain, Romney

Look, I'll admit it: at this time in my life, I tend to vote more in line with Democrats than Republicans. And I think that many of President Obama's difficulties so far are due in large part to the absolute and even hateful opposition of the Republicans as a bloc in Congress. When Ronald Reagan was president, he was able to engage in some give and take with enough Democrats to get a modified version of his agenda passed, and in a timely manner. But with Obama, the Senate minority Republicans, under reactionary leader Mitch McConnell, have openly expressed that their primary objective is to make our president a failure, with the nation's interests lagging behind in their priorities.

Having said that, just so you know where I'm coming from, I have to admit to some disappointment with the motley group of GOP presidential candidates so far, above and beyond my ideological differences. The latest letdown has been with current frontrunner Herbert Cain, who is suffering allegations that he sexually harassed women a few years ago. About these allegations, I suspend judgement. No, what bothers me about Cain is his extreme arrogance with the press, ordering them in fact to only address topics that he wants to discuss. The way he argues in such a nasty, mean manner with reporters even scares me a bit. Do you want someone like that leading our country?

The only candidate I see showing any hint of presidential stature is Mitt Romney. Not that I intend to support him should the Republican Party finally wise up and nominate the one candidate in the field with a real chance to beat Obama. It is just that the others in the field (well-meaning-but-incompetent-campaigner Jon Huntsman excepted) seem to be climbing over each other to spread messages of intolerance, if not bigotry, while collectively bending over backwards to promote a class warfare situation benefiting the very rich over the rest of us.

Video Games Unworthy of My Fanaticism...Yet

I have to admit it: I never could get into the video game phenomenon. Although there are individual exceptions, I think that becoming a video game fanatic (or not) is largely a generational matter. And I may have just missed the "cut". I know that my children sure were (and still are) big video game players. I keep telling them, in reference to my relative lack of interest in the "activity", that I am waiting for virtual reality technology to take hold. But in spite of the fact that Walt Disney World's Carousel of Progress show's vision for the near future features Grandma sitting in the living room engaged in playing a virtual reality space battle game, nothing of the sort has yet "materialized" in the "real" world of the marketplace. Instead, we just keep getting more realistic looking flatscreen games.

Maybe we need a Steve Jobs in the gaming industry to come out with a vision that pushes the technology and software designers into the virtual world that I myself would clamor for. But then again, maybe that's the point: virtual reality could possibly be made so alluring that its participants might just decide to spend their waking hours completely within its fantasy lands, and that wouldn't exactly be a good thing for society in general, would it? Come to think of it, that's just what happened in a Star Trek: the Next Generation episode: one of the crew went overboard with his holodeck (virtual reality room) sessions to the exclusion of his duties, even losing touch with reality itself (which was actually complete fiction, but in the context of the show it was reality).

After all, it is clear to me that this is already happening to an extent with flatscreen games. There is even a company called GameFlight that allows video game fans to be able to afford to spend just about every waking moment of their lives completely immersed in them. I've seen the commercials: the "satisfied customers" kind of creep me out with their fanaticism, I have to say. Have you seen any of these ads?

Maybe the current generation(s) of video gamers will eventually reach the point where the two-dimensional game image becomes a bore and they collectively begin to demand high-quality and readily available virtual reality. If that happens and the industry responds with some good reality-emulating products (and not those cheap, inadequate 3-D simulations), expect yours truly to join the ranks of creepy video game fanatics...

Chekov and the Nuclear Wessels

This may represent the height (or depth) of triviality, but something's been gnawing at me for years (perhaps illustrating the triviality of my mindset). During the movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the original Enterprise crew has gone back in time to late twentieth-century America in search of some humpback whales. The plan is to transport them back to their own 23rd century just in "time" to save the Earth from a destructive extraterrestrial probe. Yes, this is obviously some heavy fiction: who really thinks we'll even MAKE it to the 23rd century? But still, I'm in on the fantasy elements of Star Trek and I like their stories and characters. And Star Trek IV may well have been their best feature-length movie, at least until the latest Star Trek flick came out and pushed the time travel paradox beyond the breaking point (but with a great story and compelling acting). One thing bothered me about one of the characters, though: Pavel Chekov.

Admittedly the character Chekov, a bridge officer on the Enterprise, although Russian in his upbringing, is played by a non-Russian actor named Walter Koenig. According to William Shatner, Koenig was originally picked for the TV series because he looked a lot like the Monkees' Davy Jones and they wanted some teeny-bopper bounce in the ratings (it apparently didn't work, though). Still, Koenig was able to make Chekov into a distinct, popular character on the series and in the movies. One thing he did that brought many smiles to the faces of viewers (including mine) was his thick Russian accent and difficulty pronouncing certain English words. And now we come to what is gnawing at me...

During a scene in Star Trek IV, Chekov and Uhura are walking the streets of San Francisco in "our" time. Knowing that it is a navy harbor, they are looking for a ship with a nuclear reactor. Chekov walks up to a cop doing his beat and point-blank asks him where the nuclear "wessels" are. The cop looks at him puzzled. Chekov repeats himself, carefully enunciating the words: nu-cle-ar wes-sels. Finally, after some moments of this confusion they do get some information (I believe from someone else). Trust me, everything eventually turns out all right. But "wessels"?

Chekov's difficulty in pronouncing the "v" sound implies that it is nonexistent in Russian. But that isn't so: it is actually very common. Ironically, it is the "w" sound that Chekov keeps saying in its place that is relatively rare in Russian. But still, if you didn't know anything about Russian you wouldn't have any reason to suspect this. Walter Koenig pulled a fast one on us, I think, and got away with it.

But then again, maybe I'm missing something here. If so, will someone qualified with a Russian background explain a native speaker's tendency to substitute a sound rare in his own language for one that is common?

More Sports Stuff, Spectator and Personal

A lot of sports stuff has been going on lately, both personal and in the spectator "zone". So please forgive my continual focus on this area. But facts are facts: some pretty cool things have been happening (depending on whom you're rooting for, I suppose)...

Spectator-wise, the main thing is that my Miami Dolphins finally pulled off their first victory this year, thoroughly blowing away Kansas City on the road today 31-3. Phew, I thought for a while that they were just going to write off the rest of the season. Now they're worth following again...

Also, LSU defeated Alabama yesterday in college football, just as I had wanted. Not that I care one bit for the victors: I just enjoyed seeing Alabama get their comeuppance.

And oh yes, baseball's World Series is finally over and we have a champion for 2011. Now if I can just remember who was playing...

On a personal level, I have decided, after successful runs of 8.5, 10, 7.18, and 7.18 miles this past week, to enter this coming Saturday's Tom Walker Memorial Half-Marathon here in Gainesville. Yes, it's been a while since I ran 13.1 miles. But in each of the aforementioned runs, I felt strong toward the end and am confident that, while running the few extra miles needed to complete a half-marathon may be a challenge, it is still very attainable. Anyway, I've done it before many, many times...

LSU My Preference Over 'Bama in Today's Big Game

At the risk of this starting to look like just a sports blog, here comes another article about...sports! Namely, the sport of football. More specifically, the season-defining college football game between the two top-ranked schools in the country: LSU and Alabama, to take place later today in Tuscaloosa.

At first glance, it might not seem to be important to me as to which team I want to root for in this game: after all, both of them are rivals of my hometown Florida Gators and beat up on them pretty badly last month. So I don't particularly like either team. But against each other? Well, I didn't have to give it much thought: I want LSU to beat Alabama, no doubt about it. And there's one dominant reason for this: Alabama's head coach is Nick Saban.

You see, although I follow college football and want the University of Florida to win, there is one team that I have fervently pulled for since childhood: pro football's Miami Dolphins. In 2005, Nick Saban, after coaching LSU to a national championship, went to try to rebuild a struggling Miami team. I thought he was a great coach and, like so many other Dolphins fans, was willing to give him several seasons to turn the team around. He was a hard worker who insisted on a great amount of control over the team. But at the close of the 2006 season, after angrily denying that he would leave Miami to coach for Alabama, Saban suddenly changed his mind and left anyway, leaving my team in shambles, to go 1-15 the next year.

Now LSU fans don't like Saban because he took on a job as the coach of their big divisional rival. But there are three points to consider here with Saban's treatment of LSU: One, he didn't leave directly to coach at Alabama; he initially left LSU to coach in the NFL. Two, unlike the case with Miami, Saban didn't leave LSU until he had rebuilt their program, even leading them to a national championship. And three, after he left, LSU had a strong enough program to win another national championship with his successor. But Saban left the Dolphins in worse shape than when he found them. Sure, I suppose that, had Nick Saban left Miami to coach for a divisional rival like the Bills or Jets instead of the University of Alabama, it would have irked me more. But the dude, after talking so much about how important character and commitments are, decided that talking is one thing and "walking" is another.

So I doubt that I will ever again support any team with which Nick Saban is affiliated. Not that he cares at all about what I think (or apparently what anyone else thinks, either)...

Muschamp Downplays Rivalries Too Much

As a follow-up to yesterday's article about the Florida-Georgia college football rivalry, I feel the need to discuss the Gators' current head coach Will Muschamp and his puzzling posture concerning school rivalries.

Muschamp has continually and vigorously downplayed the rivals that Florida has faced this year, be they Tennessee, Alabama, LSU, or Georgia. He says that his players train the same way each week and that he simply wants them to carry out their assignments well. If that happens, according to the UF coach, then he will be satisfied and the game will take care of itself, rivalry or not. Muschamp seems to picture himself as somehow above college football rivalries, as if it were something too dirty to involve himself with.

I wonder, though, whether Will Muschamp displays this attitude because he played for Georgia in college and was once an assistant under current Alabama coach Nick Saban when he was LSU. On the other hand, Urban Meyer, Muschamp's immediate predecessor, coming out of Utah in the far west and with his coaching roots far away from the Southeastern Conference, fervently stoked rivalries. I think Meyer was on the right track: there is a lot more to winning football games than simple mechanics. Players need to feel a sense of urgency about an upcoming game against an opponent, and emphasizing that they are playing a rival enhances that feeling. Psychology is essential to good performance on the field. Urban Meyer was also a stickler for mechanical competence with his players, but he understood the need to get them emotionally involved in collectively working to defeat their rival. Will Muschamp needs to get over his professional history and his smugness about the absolute supremacy of mechanics and assimilate this lesson from Meyer, who won two national championships in six years as Florida's head coach.

Florida-Georgia Rivalry, Politics

In the realm of college football, rivalries abound. Some of them get pretty intense, with fighting often breaking out around the stadium among fans of opposing schools. With the Florida-Georgia rivalry, this is partially explained by the fact that they play their games each year at a neutral site: Jacksonville, with each side getting an allotted number of tickets, essentially resulting in neither team having a home-field advantage from year to year. So the unfortunate spin-off of this is that there are more incidents of scuffles between immature and usually drunken fans, supporting opposing teams and acting easily offended at the others' taunts. But there is a larger picture to see regarding this unique arrangement between two proud, perpetually dueling football institutions.

First of all, in college football, having a home game gives a team an enormous advantage over the visitor. Often this results in a weaker team defeating a stronger one, sometimes ruining the better team's title hopes for that year. With Florida-Georgia, though, the stronger team, be it Georgia or Florida, usually wins the game since it doesn't play under the handicap of being an "away" game. So this system favors both schools in the long run as the record has shown: both Florida and Georgia have enjoyed their share of conference and national championships while almost miraculously avoiding stepping on each other, rivals that they are. This year was an example of this: had weak Florida played stronger Georgia at home in Gainesville, they might well have beaten them, damaging the Bulldogs' chances at winning the conference division race.

In a larger context, politicians from the two major parties could learn a lesson from this arrangement. Democrats and Republicans are obviously major rivals, but there are times when they need to sit down at the table and agree to their own arrangements, which are necessary to an effective system of government. Right now, though, compromise and reason seem to be dirty words to those "principled" ideologically-driven politicians who are currently wrecking our political process and damaging our national interests. Too many of them are only concerned about the next scheduled election and what the mass media talking heads are saying about them instead of tending to the people's business.

My Ten Mile Run Today

Anticipating my possible entry in a local half-marathon (13.1 miles) race ten days from now, I decided to step up my running distance today. Well, not initially...my calf muscles felt a little sore from the 8.5 mile treadmill run Monday and I thought that just covering 7 miles would be a good result. But as my run today progressed, I did not feel as if 7 would be enough! So, I kept running until I reached 10 miles and then called it a day. My running time was 1 hr 31 m 46 s, typical of my usual pace.

The weather was crucial in allowing me to finally get back up to 10 miles after several months. Temperatures ranged from 64 degrees at the start to 72 at the end. Likewise, the humidity went from 64% to 57%. As long as it stays like this, I won't have any need to use the treadmill.

As I am writing and publishing this, I have just finished my run a little less than an hour ago. Ultimately, I will judge the success of this run not only by how I did during it, but also how my recovery went. So it will be interesting to see how it goes for the next few hours. Tomorrow I plan to run, but for a mile or so...