Going to the Beach Today

It's a beautiful, warm and sunny day today, and Melissa and I are heading out to the beach...Daytona Beach, that is.  Specifically, to Daytona Beach Shores and the hotel we stayed at back in early March. With my back feeling much better than the last time we went, I'm looking forward to swimming some and running on the beach.  Plus, just relaxing around and enjoying the ocean and sand...

Also, there's something special about going out on the beach at night, with the stars overheard and the dark surf crashing ashore on one side.  During the last few years, it has been more pleasant with the hotel lights dimmed in order to help out the sea turtle population, which apparently needs darkness at night.  Good, I never did like all of those blinding lights anyway...

When I was a kid, the big attraction for me at the beach was to venture out into the ocean and go up and down with the waves, occasionally doing battle with them as they broke just before reaching me.  As a father, I'd also go out there...with my own kids, who had the same sense of adventure.  But quite honestly, given the choice, nowadays I'd just as soon confine my oceanic forays to wading in the water at about ankle-level!

Just Finished Reading Patricia Cornwell's Novel: At Risk

Two or three years ago I bought a cheap used paperback copy of one of novelist Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta's novels (and I can't for the life of me remember its title).  Scarpetta is a forensic pathologist/investigator who is featured in a long-running series of Cornwell.  I'm not sure why I didn't finish it, other than that I got tired of the open antagonism expressed between its characters.  It gets a little tedious after a while reading that, almost as if the people themselves were surrounding me arguing.  Well, I decided to give Cornwell another try and got a copy of her short novel At Risk.  Dr. Scarpetta is nowhere to be found here; the protagonist is a young man named Win Garano, who is an investigator and whose mixed-race status sadly seems to rattle some people, even in the supposedly more enlightened 2006 setting of the story.  Win is working for a Massachusetts district attorney named Monique Lamont and has been sent to Tennessee to further his crime-stopping education.  He also is trying to solve a cold case murder in Knoxville more than twenty years old.  A new company that Monique is touting is providing cutting-edge DNA technology that can help to solve such mysteries, and Win, with his assistant, work to employ it to solve the case.  Meanwhile, Monique is attacked in her apartment and raped...what is the tie-in between this and what Win is doing...and that company in question?  Don't worry: in stories like this, nothing takes place by happenstance and everything ties in together...all to be resolved at the end.  And it is resolved.

But although I managed to get through this novel of Patricia Cornwell, and the characters were different this time around, they were just as argumentative and negative around each other as in the Kay Scarpetta book I had put down years earlier.  "Snippy", a term made famous by Al Gore when he briefly argued on the phone with George W. Bush on election night in 2000, would be an appropriate designation to describe the conversations these folks typically have: with At Risk, just imagine such a conversation between Gore and Bush that lasts about four hours....ouch, my ears!

Hiding Businesses from the Street, Following Instructions

The other day I was in the crowded Hunter's Crossing Shopping Center parking lot, back in the corner during a heavy rush hour period in the late weekday afternoon.  This place, which features a Publix, Piesano's Pizza,  Ace Hardware, and a Starbucks among other businesses, has three entry/exit points.  Depending on the traffic and where I'm coming from, I choose which one to use that will save me the most time and hassle.  But across the street from here (across NW 43rd Street) is another shopping center: Hunter's Walk.  Hunter's Walk is an example of that annoying type of shopping center...almost invisible from the street, hidden by trees and bushes with no store signs advertising their presence there.  Only a Walgreens, which was built almost up to the street, is visible from the road.  This place contains, among other businesses, a Cedar River seafood restaurant and a Little Caesar's.  The only access, in or out, is an intersection with a traffic light on 43rd.  The only indication that there is a shopping center here is an unobtrusive, low sign right there at the entrance...by the time you see and notice it you've probably already passed it! Why am I saying all this? Well,...

As I was saying, I was in that crowded parking lot late one busy afternoon.  I had returned to my car and was about to pull out when I heard a horn tooting behind me.  I looked back and saw a middle-aged man gesturing to me from his car.  It seemed he was driving around, fruitlessly looking for that Cedar River restaurant...could I please tell him how to get to it?  No wonder, I thought, that he couldn't find it with it hidden like that.  I then told him that he was in the wrong shopping plaza and for him to go back around and go to the nearby traffic light...and then go straight ahead, directly across it.  After that, I said, he would be able to turn into the shopping center with Cedar River.  And, oh, I said, it's at the end of the building closest to Walgreens.  He thanked me and went on and I congratulated myself on having been such a good Samaritan.  I pulled out of my parking space and drove up to the light into the left-turn lane (you see, I wasn't going to Cedar River, but rather home). As I approached, I saw the car with the driver I had talked to in the correct lane...to go straight across.   Then I saw him turn his head to the left, where he could see the Walgreens store.   Immediately he cut over in front of me into the left turn lane, apparently thinking he could get into the place from that direction.  No, no, no, I thought...dude, why couldn't you just follow my instructions? I almost put my car into "park" and got out to tell him of his mistake, but held back, realizing that some people just think they know better and have to learn things the hard way.  When the light changed, I saw him turn and then look for another entrance...which he never found.  I drove on home, wondering whether he had enough sense to go back to my explicit instructions and enter the shopping center where I had told him to.

One of my pet peeves in life is this tendency for some communities to put on a highbrow pretense and force incoming businesses to hide themselves from the public behind rows of hedges and trees while restricting their use of signs...as if their existence were somehow a blight on the aesthetics of the area.  Melissa and I were driving down I-75 near Tampa a while back and saw a sign on it advertising a Red Lobster at the next exit.  We got off the Interstate there and searched high and low for it.  Even with a GPS in the car, we kept approaching the spot it was supposed to be at and then would suddenly be leaving it behind.  Finally, after a few frustrating trials, we found it.  The restaurant was actually very close to the highway, but was hidden by bushes with no signs advertising its existence.  And to get to it you had to turn down a road off the highway and wind your way back around.  That's ridiculous, but, sadly, all too common!

Just Finished Reading Not Cool! by Greg Gutfeld

Well, I just resisted the temptation of titling this article "Greg Gutfeld's Not Cool!", but I had to throw in the line anyway.  Gutfeld is a Fox News Channel commentator, host of his own show Red Eye, and a regular panelist on the late afternoon show The Five.  He is funny, feisty and very opinionated, but doesn't automatically subscribe to the Republican Party's talking points as others on this channel do.  Instead he takes a generally libertarian view of the issues (like being in favor of the legalization of marijuana and gay marriage)  while siding with the general Party leadership on issues like business and bank deregulation, gun rights, national security, and empowering police to fight crime.  But in Not Cool!, his latest book, while a making partisan conservative spin on some things (e.g. he profusely lauds John Bolton, one of Fox's "contributors" who consistently spins Obama's ongoing foreign policy efforts into the ground and then stomps on them), is more about how a certain segment of our society, which he terms as "the hipster elite", continually screws up things by making heroes out of terrorists and other criminals, making crime victims out as being guilty, trashing important life-saving scientific and technological advances like genetic modification of foods, effective insecticides like DDT, and vaccinations, refusing to recognize the Islamic element in so many of today's terrorist attacks and wars,  the propensity to call anyone in disagreement with them as "haters",  the refusal to support the domestic exploration, extraction, and transportation of our own energy natural resources like coal, oil, and natural gas, attacking the traditional American family and glorifying "alternative lifestyles", demonizing our military and national defense efforts and seeing all overseas problems as somehow being America's fault, the irrational embracing of foreign despots (but only if they're on the left politically), the stereotyping and ridicule of the South and its traditions, the elevation in stature of irresponsibility and shallowness in youth culture, jumping on the-pro-gay-bandwagon-and-anyone-who-isn't-on-it-is-retroactively-a-hater, stigmatization of openly conservative entertainers, and using news stories of shootings to attack people's legal rights to own guns.  Whew!, that's a lot of ground for Gutfeld to have covered, and in a relatively short book at that.  Plus, he goes off into other subjects as well (including a section in the end where he recommends a number of musical artists that I've never heard of).

I don't agree with all that Greg Gutfeld has presented here, but we're on the same wavelength on many of the issues.  I salute him for expressing his views, and look forward to seeing him on TV..it's obvious to me that he speaks his mind and isn't just trying to tow some party line or please his employer.  Plus, I like his flowing, conversational writing style, which I also try to use here in this blog...albeit without Gutfeld's sprinkling of profanity.  I recommend Not Cool!, although, if you're one of those "hipster elitists" you may want to ditch it after a couple of pages....

Gainesville Radio: 100.5 "The Buzz" Switches Back to Indie/Alternative Rock Format

My radio listening time of late has been pretty much confined to when I'm driving.  Due to the lack of interesting musical programming, I have been generally listening to sports talk shows, on the AM band: Gainesville's 850/WRUF and 1230/WGGG.  The political talk shows on the other stations usually leave me cold, be they on the left or right side of the viewpoint spectrum, since they typically feature commentators determined to spin the news and manipulate opinions primarily for the advantage of one political party over the other.  And the music stations...what a disaster.  Rock 104 (WRUF-FM) switched over to a country and western format a few years ago and now the light jazz station is simultaneously playing the exact same electronic dance music as another (100.9 and 99.5).  I don't understand how the owners of these stations see any profit in that, but this broadcast radio industry IS peculiar.  And the local Public Radio station, also a few years ago, decided to dump its great classical music format in favor of excruciatingly boring news/talk.  But the biggest disappointment I experienced was when 100.5/WHHZ "The Buzz" abandoned its fantastic indie/alternative rock format in 2008 to be a (then) Rock 104 clone.  Ugh.  Still, after the latter switched to country, I occasionally surfed it on the radio to see if any good songs were on.  But gone were acts I enjoyed like Arcade Fire, Spoon, Gorillaz, Franz Ferdinand, The Vines, Metric, The Hives, Death Cub for Cutie, MGMT, Muse, and Kasabian.  It was this abandonment by them of my favorite music that led me to abandon broadcast radio and embrace the Internet for my musical interests.  By surfing around musical sites there, I discovered talents like Sufjan Stevens, Regina Spektor, and Andrew Bird.  So in a roundabout way The Buzz did me a favor when they switched their programming.  Still, I wished I had at least one local station that played my kind of music...

A few months ago I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the Jacksonville station on 102.9 had switched to a format that included alternative rock.  But that was nothing like a few days ago when, driving in my car, I tuned in to The Buzz on 100.5 and heard them playing the indie/alternative act MGMT doing their old 2008 hit Kids.  Immediately, I knew that they had switched back to their old, sweet format of independent/alternative rock.  And I was confirmed in this by subsequent songs.

So now, when I start fiddling around with my radio dial, the first place I go is 100.5 to see what they are playing...and only after that do I check out the sports stuff on AM.  Whoopee, happy days are here again on the radio!  Now if the good folks who own 99.5 and 100.9 would please just switch one of those stations to a hard rock format to serve the many local fans of THAT genre...

Just Finished Rereading The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis

I just finished reading the seventh and final book in the Chronicles of Narnia fantasy series by C.S. Lewis, appropriately titled The Last Battle.  When I had first read this book a few years ago, I was naturally expecting Lewis to wrap things up so that the series could be presented as a whole collective work, from beginning to end.  The degree to which he "wrapped things up", though, was a bit of a jolt!  When surprise endings in stories are first encountered, there can be that kind of shock.  But since I already knew what was going down (or up, depending on how you look at it), this time around I was just in it for the ride.  The Last Battle takes place at the end of the Narnian age, when the final king there has a crisis after a wayward ape presents a disguised donkey (in old lionskin) as Aslan the Lion Lord of Narnia and himself as his prophet.  This ape, named Shift, then proceeds to turn the kingdom of Narnia upside down with his false claims, in the process unwittingly inviting the barbarian kingdom of Calormen to invade them.  The Calormenes don't follow Aslan, who in essence is an allegory of Christ; instead they worship his opposite, the brutal entity called Tash.  In order to fool the native Narnian talking animals about Tash, Shift makes the claim that Tash and Aslan are one and the same, and that by worshiping one you are in fact worshiping the other as well.  This results in a "new" god in Narnia: the composite creation "Tashlan", whom the native Narnians are duped into following, but whom the invading Calormenes reject, knowing the separate nature of their Tash.  In order to convince the Narnians that Aslan has returned, Shift parades the donkey, Puzzle, out of a stable each night for a few minutes...and then back in.  Later, after Puzzle leaves the charade, this stable becomes the focus of the story...and different things happen to different folks who enter through its doors. 

The humans from Earth who were in featured in the six previous Narnia stories make their appearance in The Last Battle...except Susan (this is explained).  Eustace and Polly from The Silver Chair return early on to free King Tirian and help the Narnians see through the deception and to fight the Calormenes in the "last battle".  Aslan makes his indispensable appearance at the right time, but this time he has company: the rest of the Earthling cast from the other stories.  Whoa, I'd better leave something for you, the reader, to discover for yourself!  And what I'm leaving for you...well, it surprised me when I first read it.

There are two subplots in The Last Battle.  One involves the intransigent refusal of the dwarfs to believe in Aslan or the world he created, even when it is right in front of their eyes to see. This sounds to me like Lewis is pointing out the spiritual blindness of skeptics...although I may be mistaken about his intentions here. The other is the Calormene soldier who practiced a virtuous and honest life, but in the name of the false god Tash.  Aslan, though, while emphasizing that he and Tash are distinctly different, still credits that soldier's good behavior as having been in his own name.  I thought this was very interesting of Lewis to put in this story, especially in light of the way many evangelicals tend to view this sort of thing, regarding people brought up in other religious settings as automatically being lost...

The Chronicles of Narnia is fun reading, and each book is pretty short and as such isn't very much of a time commitment.  There have so far been high-budget movies made for three of the stories, although I don't know whether they'll get around to covering the entire series on film if the box office receipts don't keep up with the expenses.  Regardless, I think people should take the time to read the stories before they watch the movies: they'll get a lot more out of them if they do... 

Yesterday's Treadmill Run Encouraging

Yesterday evening, for the first time since February 25th this year, I went to my local gym (Gainesville Health & Fitness Center) and ran on the treadmill.  It was part of my project to step up my running and regain the level of endurance I had achieved from back in 2010 to early 2013.  I wasn't sure how well I would do, but I set out running at my usual pace and would just take it one mile at a time.  After covering 3.7 miles, I stepped off...not because I couldn't go further, but rather because I understand the value of recovery and of not overdoing it, especially since I hadn't been on the treadmill in a while.  This was an encouraging run for me, and I plan to use the treadmill more often this spring and summer.  I had been breaking up my runs into smaller distances, but decided that there is a benefit to covering the same distance in a single run.  So with that in mind, I have been consciously going about running longer distances during the last few days. Neither lower back pain, which was bothering me the last couple of months (especially in March) nor foot pain (which temporarily sidelined me from running last spring) were factors in my treadmill run yesterday.  Hopefully, this trend will continue and I can gradually step up the mileage per run, both on the treadmill and on the road.  The payoff for this will be a planned string of half-marathon races for me to run in this coming fall and winter...

Just Finished Reading Phantom by Terry Goodkind

I just finished reading Phantom, which is the tenth book in Terry Goodkind's eleven-part fantasy series The Sword of Truth.  The book's title refers to the character of Kahlan, who is the chief protagonist Richard's wife.  A spell called "Chainfire" has been placed on her, hence the title of the previous book.   This spell, placed by some really evil women called "dark sisters", is designed to remove the memory of her existence from everyone in the world.  It also makes Kahlan forget her own past and who she is.  Only Richard, who was touching his magic sword when the spell was cast, knows about Kahlan.  So in a way, Kahlan is a "phantom" of sorts.  The term also applies to Richard's D'haran army as he changes their strategy against the enemy Imperial Order by having them abandon their defensive strategy of trying to hold on to D'hara and instead go on the offense as "phantoms", engaging in widespread brutal guerrilla warfare on the Imperial Order's home territory in the Old World.  There are many, many plot twists and turns, so convoluted that I honestly don't know how Goodkind is going to be able to resolve it all in the next (and final) book in the series.  On top of this, in Phantom the magically advanced Nicci and Zedd discover all sorts of obscure, complicated rules of magic that imperil not just Richard and Kahlan, but the future of all existence.  Make one false move and "poof", it's all over.  This frustrated me reading it all, because by the end of Phantom I really don't know what's going on, at least as far as the "rules of magic" that Goodkind invented for this series are concerned.

Richard in Phantom has finally convinced his friends of the existence of Kahlan, although they still have no memory of her.  Other subplots are the interference of a witch-woman from the south called Six, the boxes of Orden and their implications, the taint on magic caused by the Chimes, a beast from the underworld that Jagang (the ruler of the Imperial Order) has unleashed on Richard, and a troublesome character named Samuel who is wreaking havoc with Richard's magical sword of truth.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's not surprising if you are unfamiliar with the series. I've read it and much of it doesn't make sense to me.

Phantom is the middle book in a trilogy embedded within the larger series.  As such, its ending is very, very incomplete with very little to mark the end of a book, except that the book ended.  So I got hold of the final book, Confessor, and began on it...

Soundgarden: One of the Greatest Rock Bands in Its Heyday

One of the greatest rock acts of all time, in my opinion, is the Seattle-based grunge group Soundgarden.  Fronted by gifted vocalist and songwriter Chris Cornell, Soundgarden had three incredible albums in the early-to-mid-1990s: Badmotorfinger, Superunknown, and Down on the Upside.  Of these Superunknown is, in my opinion, one of the very superior albums ever produced in this genre.  I remember how, after purchasing it in 1995, I would listen to it over and over (and over) again...never tiring of it.  A real masterpiece (if you're one who likes very hard driving, intense, irreverent, and raucous music, that is).  Well, after the release of Down on the Upside, at the apex of their popularity and name recognition, Soundgarden went on a very frustrating (for themselves) concert tour, after which they broke up for whatever reasons.  Cornell then put out his own solo album, which was much softer and subdued than what he did while he was with Soundgarden.  It was a pretty piece of work, but I think his followers (including me) were expecting something a little more hard-edged from him, and it didn't do as well as he might have wanted.  Later he was able to hook up with remnants of another successful-but-defunct 90s band, Rage Against the Machine, to form Audioslave. That act was more successful for Cornell (although not with me).  Now Soundgarden is back together and they even released another album a few years ago...but I never heard anything from it.  Maybe I should give it a try... maybe it's the best ever work of theirs, but I doubt it.  Rather I suspect that the band members, seeing the cash cow in their old successful brand name, resurrected it in order to resurrect their own flagging careers.  But that's O.K. with me...because I still have those other three great albums of theirs, on my MP3 no less.  My favorite Soundgarden songs are My Wave, Face Pollution, Mailman, Mind Riot, Somewhere, Fresh Tendrils, Dusty, Boot Camp, and Switch Opens...

Just Finished Reading Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch

The Goldfinch drew my attention a few months ago when, week after week, it was at the top of the New York Times book list.  Now it's won for author Donna Tartt a Pulitzer Prize...and I can see why.  It is meticulously written, well researched, brings to life vivid, memorable characters, and pushes the plot along without getting involved in assorted subplots, a pitfall of some other novels I have read recently.  Its protagonist is Theo Decker, a young man who as a teenager endures a traumatic terrorist bomb attack that kills his mother.  The (fictional) fact that it occurs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is crucial to the story, since there hangs the famous painting by seventeenth century artist Carel Fabritius titled The Goldfinch (an actual, existing work portraying, quite reasonably, a goldfinch).  That this work of art is physically relatively small is significant, because after talking with a dying elderly man nicknamed Welty (who just moments before was standing with an intriguing little girl who caught Theo's interest) right after the explosion, Theo accepts the man's ring that he offers him and takes The Goldfinch painting off the wall and out of the museum.  He later finds that his mother, from whom he had been separated in the museum just prior to the bomb attack, had died in it. He is put in the care of the family of a school friend, and later moves out west to Nevada along with his father (who had left his mother and him before the bombing) and his father's girlfriend.  Out there he forms a friendship with another "half-orphan" named Boris...all along taking with himself the spirited-away masterpiece.  Later he moves back to New York to stay with and work for Welty's longtime business partner, an expert antique restorer named James Hobart (or "Hobie").  But the plot and all of its twists and turns (and numerous details), along with the culmination of this story (which naturally focuses on the painting The Goldfinch), I leave to you, the reader.  I'd like to examine something else here.

Theo Decker is someone who, even before the disaster that changed his life forever, always acted on impulse, in direct response to his feelings.  And then he'd sit around and muse on what he'd done.  This set into motion more feelings in reaction, leading directly to consequential behavior.  Since he generally feels pretty crappy throughout the story, you might surmise (and you'd be correct) that his behavior isn't generally very constructive or healthy.  It isn't until he decides to turn the equation around and let his thoughts dictate his actions...letting the feelings follow those actions...that he is able to overcome his extreme despair.  But in spite of that, it is clear that despair or not, Theo Decker is constitutionally a pretty melancholy sort of human being. 

The novel seems to make the claim that each of us has to define reality for ourselves and be true to it, even if it involves antisocial and self-destructive behavior.  I don't buy into that: even I, as reclusive as I can be, recognize that while we all have our own individual natures, we also exist as social creatures and as such need to recognize as part of ourselves an appropriate sense of "good" and "bad" regarding what is acceptable behavior in that context.  While Tartt, speaking through Theo as he relates the story in the first person, does at least elevate the concept of honesty in business dealings as a social virtue, it seems that pretty much everything else should be up to individuals to decide for themselves.  One thing that I do stand with the author about, though, is that, like Theo, there are people out there who just have generally pessimistic...if not cynical...demeanors, and it's a waste of time to try to change them.

The Goldfinch, like any good story, opens up a world about which many readers may not be familiar.  It examines with a great amount of detail the antiques and art "industry" that is entrenched in New York and other cities, as well as the more seedy side of it as it relates to the criminal underworld along with its thefts and forgeries.  Having visited Manhattan in 2010, it was fun "walking" through some of the places along with Theo... 

My Personal Running Report for April

Today is the last day of the month, and as such I will discuss how my running went.  In April I managed to barely exceed my monthly goal of total 100 miles, coming in at 101.  I managed to run at least a little on every day of the month, although for some of the days it was just a very small, token amount (due to sickness, among other reasons).  I don't know exactly how long my longest run of the month was since I tended to break up my runs over the course of the day into smaller runs and then add up the total.  This isn't the direction I want to be headed in, but for April it had to suffice and was better than simply abandoning running.  I do intend to get back into longer runs in May, even if it entails taking more days off in between for recovery...

Two Aspects to the Donald Sterling Controversy

The controversy surrounding the racist comments of the National Basketball Association's Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling has dominated the sports (and news) headlines during the last few days.  New NBA commissioner Adam Silver yesterday banned him from the league for life, as well as fining him $2.5 million and setting into motion the process that would eventually lead to him selling his team.  Sterling's comments were atrocious...there is no argument about that.  He had to go because the brand name of the NBA and its reputation was at stake.  Apparently, this guy had a low opinion of blacks and of associating socially with them: so why did he buy an NBA team?  Probably, I'm guessing, to make a big profit (which he did) and to look like a bigshot in the media (which he also did).  After Silver's announcement, there was a long procession of people reacting with praise for his strong actions against Sterling.  And I understand how Silver needed to protect the league.  But there's one important element largely missing from this discussion, an element that I only heard brought up on Fox News Channel (on Megyn Kelly, not Bill O'Reilly)...

The comments attributed to Donald Sterling that got him into so much hot water were all part of a PRIVATE phone conversation he had with his girlfriend, who very well may have illegally recorded it (violation of California state law) without his permission and then released it.  Sterling had neither said nor written anything of the kind for public consumption: this wasn't one of those gaffes you hear about from time to time coming out of the ignorant mouths of public figures.  No, this was an INVASION OF PRIVACY!  A commentator on CNN today said that the girlfriend claimed that Sterling had given her permission to make the recording...and that may well have happened...but in the absence of any tangible proof supporting that claim or of Sterling's own confirmation thereof, the burden is on her to prove her claim.  After all, anyone can violate someone else's privacy and then claim the other's spoken permission...

Think about it: are any of us immune to saying things about others that don't reflect well on us?  Don't we believe that we should be protected from having our private discussions made public without our permission?  Sterling is reputed to have $2 billion to his credit and isn't likely to be financially ruined...not by a longshot.  But for the rest of us, having personal, private information illegally leaked to the public could well cause financial ruin for ourselves as well as make it difficult to recover after the public scrutiny and humiliation. I'm thinking of all of the celebrities who lined up to condemn Sterling and laud Silver's harsh judgment and wonder how many of them, if not all, have said things in private that, were they publicized, would have ruined them as well.  Think about it, and then ask yourself why the invasion of Donald Sterling's privacy is receiving such a relative lack of media attention...

Premature Summertime Weather Here

Well, it's starting to look as if the typically long Floridian summer has begun.  No, I know summer doesn't officially start until late June, but where I live here in Gainesville, temperatures are skyrocketing.  It's in the low 90s right now; last night around ten, when I left to go to work, it was a stifling 78 degrees!  I think that's what bothers me the most about the summertime weather here...I can take scorching hot temperatures in the middle of the afternoon, but I can't get any relief in the nighttime. At least the humidity hasn't been too bad so far, but I expect suffocating heaviness in the nighttime air to couple with the heat during the next few weeks.  And don't get me going about how bad the mosquito nuisance can get.  Not a very pleasant place to hang out, the outdoors at night in northern Florida.  I think I may just stay cocooned for as long as possible in a cooled, insulated indoor environment. Hooray for air conditioning!

Players and Pieces

In George R.R. Martin's fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, the first book is titled A Game of Thrones.  Game of Thrones is also the title of the HBO television series that is the on-screen adaptation, largely (but not exclusively) for those not wanting to be unduly hampered with the possibly arduous task of actually reading something.  The title in itself suggests a way of looking at life...a worldview, so to speak.  In the struggles for power among hereditary houses of nobility on the make-believe continent of Westerlos, individuals seeking that power engage in a mishmash of schemes, conflicts, and alliances to defeat enemies and elevate themselves.  Some, like Queen Cersei and Petyr Baelish, wholeheartedly participate in this "game of thrones".  They also tend to recognize what they are doing and show respect to those like-minded, whom they appropriately designate as "players".  And what do they call anyone who isn't in on the "game"?  The pejorative term "piece".  You're just a "piece" (applied to doomed Lord Eddard Stark in the series) to be used and disposed of at the convenience of the players. And it's apparently the fault of those "pieces" who refuse to play the game...because they're in it whether they want to be or not.

Martin's fantasy world has its own limitations regarding its applicability to our real world, but the player-or-piece choice is present in our lives, whether we want to admit it or not.  Let's say you don't want to be a player in politics and stay home from the polls on election day, as does most of the electorate on a consistent basis.  Then by refusing to "play the game", you are then empowering a small number of very powerful people to unduly influence elections with heavy campaign spending targeted at getting their own voters motivated to go to the polls.  These "players" depend on you staying out of the process; by your absence you become a useful "piece" in their designs. Also, as a adult you are likely to be at least nominally involved in a number of groups, be they professional, religious, educational, charity, and so on.  It is the rule, rather than the exception, for people to jockey for power within even the most benignly reputed groups...and this can make someone like me want to just avoid them altogether.  For which, I'm sure, many within them regard me as a useful "piece"...although I doubt that they'd put it exactly that way. Still, I would be no more a "player" were I to become more actively involved...because there are two sets of rules: the outwardly expressed charter of beliefs and missions of an organization...and the inwardly unspoken rules of the "game of thrones", which tend to rule the day.  No, I don't want to play the "game of thrones"...and I don't want to end up like Eddard Stark either, not even figuratively...  

Two Blown Baseball Games

I was sitting through two different major league baseball games last night, both involving Florida teams playing on the road.  That they were "away" games is important, because this figures into what happened in the bottom of the ninth inning, when the home teams were up at bat. The Miami Marlins overcame a deficit they had endured for almost the entire game and scored a couple of late runs to take a 3-2 lead over the New York Mets, going into the bottom of the ninth.  For New York's last chance, the Marlins had as their regular closer Steve Cishek, who I understand hadn't blown a save opportunity since June of last year.  Which is saying a lot, since Miami wasn't very good last year!  Unfortunately, for this game Cishek just didn't have his usual stuff and the Mets batters hit him hard, culminating in a walk-off hit that won the game for them 4-3.  I was disappointed that Miami had lost, but I understand that sometimes your ace reliever is just having a bad night.  And sometimes the other team is having a good one!  And then, there was the Rays game...

The Tampa Bay Rays were in Chicago playing the White Sox (by the way, I'm following both the White Sox and Mets and root for them whenever they are NOT playing a Florida team).  The game, which the Rays had threatened to blow wide open in the second inning, was locked 4-4 before Evan Longoria put them ahead late with a two-run homer.  Then, it was the bottom of the ninth and manager Joe Maddon brought in his own closer, Grant Balfour.  Balfour, who had been picked up by the Rays to be their closing relief this year, has not been very effective for them.  I remember another game in which he was trying to protect a slim lead and it looked for a long time as if he wasn't capable of throwing a strike.  Well, if anything, he was worse last night and walked batter after batter.  The lead had been whittled down to 6-5 and the bases were loaded with two out.  Balfour pitched to Jose Abreu and did manage to find the strike zone on one of his pitches.  Which the Chicago batter then proceeded to hit for a game winning grand slam home run.  Final score: Chicago 9, Tampa Bay 6.  The Rays closer managed to pitch only two thirds of an inning while giving up FIVE runs!!  My problem isn't just with Balfour, though.  Why didn't Maddon intervene when anyone could see what was going down and bring in someone else?  There's only one reason I see for him sitting on his hands: maybe he's letting this sorry performance be Balfour's swan song as a closer and he'll switch to someone else.  Otherwise I don't know whether I even want to watch the end of a close Rays game if they're going to bring him in again.  I understand and appreciate that Balfour is trying his hardest to be a good pitcher and help his team out, but, unlike with Cishek, he has not inspired any degree of confidence with his appearances this year.  I say keep him on as a middle reliever and let someone else get a shot at closing. Who knows, maybe he'd use the time in middle relief to get his effectiveness and confidence back...

Just Finished Reading The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan

The Great Hunt is the second book in Robert Jordan's lengthy The Wheel of Time fantasy series. I'm determined to go ahead and try this series out: so far, so good.  Two books down, twelve to go...

The objects of the "great hunt" are two items: the Horn of Valere, a device when blown would call into service an army of the dead from eons past (sound familiar, all you Tolkien fans?).  The other is an enchanted (with evil) dagger that one of the protagonists, Mat, is bound to and must possess in order to avoid death.  Rand, the main hero in this epic, is more interested in recovering for his friend the dagger, which along with the horn has been taken by Padan Fain, a powerful servant of the dark lord (and Rand's arch-nemesis) Ba'alzaman.  The quest takes Rand and his party to a land recently conquered by a cruel society invading from across the ocean.  It is here that the struggle to recover the missing items reaches its climax, culminating in another big confrontation between Rand and Ba'alzamon (I'm beginning to suspect that this will be the case at the end of each book).  A subplot within the story is the ordeal of the women Egwene, Nynaeve, Elayne, and Min as they are betrayed into slavery to the conquering Seanchan by an Aes Sedai named Liandrin and struggle on their own to escape.  There are several other characters who figure into the story, including some from the first book Eye of the World and a few newly introduced here.

If there is a theme to be examined here in The Great Hunt, and in the Wheel of Time series as a whole, it is the struggle between the notions of free will and predestined fate for an individual.  Rand, like so many other protagonists in other series (Richard Raul, Frodo, Harry Potter, Neo, etc.) is deemed "The One", upon whom everyone else depends to deliver them from the clutches of the evil one.  And like the others I've mentioned, he rebels against his seeming helplessness to resist the various forces that relentlessly drive him toward accepting the role of savior that he so strongly wants to deny.  With the Wheel of Time alluded to by the series title, time itself is circular and reincarnation the rule: Rand is forced into confrontation after confrontation with his evil counterpart through life after life...it reminds me of an old Star Trek episode in which two men from different universes are forced into eternal battle in a kind of "middle" zone, between one who wants to cross a boundary and cause complete annihilation of everything, and the other who sacrifices himself to prevent this and save all of creation.  I expect more of the same in future books.  I like this series so far, but I also see so many subplots going on with so many characters (with a lot more to come, I'm confident) that it's starting to resemble the chaotic world in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series.  I'm beginning to see how, in the end, it might well take up to fourteen volumes in order to just tie up all the loose ends...

Delving Back Into Old Science Fiction Short Stories

I have a large collection of old science fiction short story anthologies.  Back in the 1980s Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg undertook a project to assemble what they considered to be the best sci-fi short stories published each year from 1939 through 1963, a span of time that they termed "The Golden Age of Science Fiction".  I tend to agree with that appellation: these stories tend to tower above others within this genre. I know this because I bought every volume in the series!  Each book is titled The Great SF Stories, followed by a number.  "1" represents 1939, "2" is 1940...and so on to "25" (1963).  After this series ended, Donald A. Wollheim began his own series, titled The [year] Annual World's Best SF Stories, covering material originally published from 1964 through 1990.  I own those as well. Since then, Gardner Dozois has been engaged to this day editing his own popular annual science-fiction short story anthologies. And there have been other "year's best science fiction" series as well.  But my favorite series is the older Asimov/Greenberg one.

In recent years I've gone more for full-length novels than short stories, and those old anthologies have fallen into storage instead of use.  But I'm thinking of pulling them back out and reading them.  This would be a lot easier if I could digitalize them and put them on my Kindle...  

Just Finished Rereading C.S. Lewis' The Silver Chair

I just finished rereading another book in the Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis.  This one, titled The Silver Chair, is the next-to-last book in this series, at least as the narrative unravels chronologically...although I believe that Lewis wrote it before a couple of others.  It is one of only two novels that completely exclude any of the Pevensie children (Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy) who are the series' main characters (besides Aslan, that is).  However, there are other visitors from our world as Eustace (from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) returns from Earth to the fantasy world of Narnia, this time along with a girl named Jill as they go there to escape bullying from their "experimental" school (reminds me where I went to school).  Although Eustace and Jill believe that they made their choice to get to Narnia by their own free will, their encounters with the Narnian lion lord Aslan indicate that it was he who put the idea into their heads...and that he has an important mission for them.  They are to seek out and free from bondage Rilian, the imprisoned son of now-very-old King Caspian (of two previous books). The Prince just happens to be in the Underworld under a spell cast by a witch queen very reminiscent of the enemy in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  But first Aslan gives Jill specific instructions about what to do at specific times...instructions that both Jill and Eustace (when he hears of them) generally fail to implement.  But Aslan is faithful to his own plan for Rilian's deliverance and engineers events to aid the children in their quest in spite of their mistakes.  One crucial element is the addition of a peculiar man-like Narnian named Puddleglum, a "marshwiggle" with a comically morose and spindly appearance and demeanor...who entertains a completely erroneous notion of how others see him.  Puddleglum tends to take over the story with his antics and turns out to be a great hero in the effort to release Rilian.  I can see that Lewis had a lot of fun developing this character!

The "silver chair" in the story's title is an enchanted silver chair that the evil witch queen binds Rilian to whenever her enchantments on him, which cause him to forget who he is and place him under her domination, begin to wear off.  This chair to me symbolizes the spiritual bondage that Christians suffer at times in their walk through life.  That makes sense, because after all, the entire Chronicles of Narnia series is an allegory of Christianity, with the lion Aslan representing the Christ of mercy, justice, redemption, and divine power.

Ultimately, as in all of the other Narnia tales, Aslan must intervene in order to set the wrongs to right and mete out justice and mercy in his own measure.  Specifically how it all ends...I'll leave that to you, the reader, to find out for yourself.  The Silver Chair, although not one of my favorite Narnia books, is worth reading if for no other reason than for its depiction of that Puddleglum, a depiction that somehow reminds me of gloomy and hilarious Stan Laurel of Laurel and Hardy fame. Who knows, maybe Lewis, a contemporary of Laurel, used him as a model...

Seasonal Change and My Running

With it currently being in the middle of spring, my home region of north central Florida is kicking in to the warm, and eventually hot, weather.  Along with this comes an unofficial end to the competitive running season in this area, at least as far as the longer distances are concerned.  I did manage to get in one half-marathon race a couple of months ago, but for various reasons never got around to another. With the exception of the Lake Minneola half-marathon down in Lake County this coming weekend, I don't see anything offered in Florida besides those sadistic-sounding trail races near Miami, held once a month during the worst of the summertime. There are, to be sure, still those local fundraising 5K events that appear on the racing calendar: there's one this Saturday on the University of Florida campus and one several miles west, in the town of Bell.  And on Saturday, May 10, an interesting early evening 5K is set for Tioga, just west of Gainesville.  Maybe I'll enter one of these, but regardless I think it's time I begin to seriously consider getting myself into better condition for the longer races in the fall.  And this  doesn't just involve running longer and harder in practice: I've gained quite a bit of weight over the past year or so and have to deal with that extra load each time I plant my foot on the ground and push ahead on each run.  Time to be more rational with my eating...

I just underwent an annual medical exam that cleared me for another year regarding a condition that I have been afflicted with since birth but didn't find out about until a little less than three years ago.  Did the tests I just underwent show any worsening? No, if anything, things seem to be better, so I am happy to feel empowered and medically cleared to go back to my running...although those days of training for full-length marathons may be a past memory.  I'm also going to have to figure out a way to handle this problem of my seasonal respiratory allergies, with all of this pollen in the air...   

Discussing Languages As I Plod Along

I'm currently about 70% through reading The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.  In it the protagonist, a young man named Theo, has as a dubious friend someone named "Boris", with whom he went to high school for a spell.  Boris speaks several languages fluently, including Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian..all of which he picked up from early childhood and from living in countries that spoke them. Theo, who speaks only English, tries to learn more Russian by taking classes...his progress is naturally slow.  When he meets back up with his old friend after a few years' absence, Boris quickly dismisses the worth of all of Theo's linguistic endeavors, claiming that all he needed to speak Russian was to spend a month in Moscow.  Or, I might add, to either have been born there or to have had parents who spoke it to him from early childhood.  I think that's how a lot of people see learning languages as well...that it's a waste of time to study it on your own away from where the targeted language is spoken seems to be the consensus opinion. I never run across others like me who enjoy gradually getting to know different languages by self-study.  No, either they speak whatever language it is as a first language or they picked it up by living abroad.  I know a couple of people who underwent intense language training in the military and used their abilities in intelligence work.  But none can relate to me about language in the way that I see it. Even if I go somewhere, even to Moscow as fictional Boris suggests to fictional Theo, and learn to speak Russian...and there's nothing wrong with that, maybe it's a good idea...I'm still left with the other languages I like to study as well.  What am I supposed to do, become a travel junkie?

Once I was taking a class in Polish at the University of Florida.  At the time, in the late 1970s, UF had a student exchange arrangement with a college in Poznan, Poland...hence the existence of this class, largely to train students planning to go there.  I took the class because I wanted to know more about Polish.  One of my classmates, who wasn't going on the study abroad trip to Poland but had learned Russian by dint of having been in military intelligence, was also taking the class. One day before class we were speaking casually and I happened to bring up to this individual something specific to how some nouns in Polish were declined (Polish is linguistically, like Latin, a very synthetic language in which declensions and conjugations abound). This dude suddenly broke in on me and curtly told me in no uncertain terms that he did not go for discussing grammar like that: that wasn't how "he" looked at languages.  End of conversation...that put a serious damper on my ability to communicate with this talented but self-centered and rude individual. His irrational abruptness at my having brought up an aspect of Polish grammar, in a Polish language class no less, may seem to be an extreme case, but it is an example of the irony of people who refuse to discuss aspects of the languages they speak.  It reminds me of those scenes in the The Matrix when Trinity suddenly finds herself in need of knowing how to fly a helicopter, or when Neo wants to learn martial arts.  They both simply have the knowledge and ability downloaded by computer straight into their brains in a matter of minutes. There's no way they could discuss with anyone how they learned what they learned; such conversations would be meaningless to them.  I think that people in general nowadays see language learning that way: if it doesn't come quickly and effortlessly, then you're a fool for trying it. And don't dare ever to try discussing Polish grammar with a linguistic diva...