My Running During the Past Few Months

The past few months have seen me both increase my overall running mileage and participate more in middle-to-long distance races.  Here are the races I've run during the last four months (three of the four in Gainesville):

11/27.....10K Turkey Trot...Time 56:56

12/21.....Starlight Half-Marathon (in Palm Coast)...Time 2:03:30

1/31.....Newnan's Lake 15K...Time 1:18:21

2/15.....Five Points Half-Marathon...Time 1:58:48

Now that I have unwittingly set a pattern of one race per month, I now feel compelled to continue it.  The obvious choice for March is a 10K Saturday afternoon race to be held on the 14th in Tioga, a small community a few miles west of Gainesville.  As for any more half-marathons, I'll have to think about a possible late March or April race that would be held within a reasonable driving perimeter. Let's see...there's a combination marathon, half-marathon, and 5K race March 29 in Ormond Beach and also a combo half-marathon, 12K, and 5K race in Clermont on April 25.  Well, I'll have to see how things stand as these dates approach, I suppose...

Looking back on the four races I've done recently, I have to state that they all tended to be rather frustrating efforts, at least at the start of each event.  This is because of the problem of "runner congestion", when I repeatedly found myself boxed in due to slow runners around me who also would make no effort to offer any opening for me to get around them.  In the last half-marathon, I was nearly halfway through it before the path finally opened up for me! As for how I physically felt during these races, I seemed to hold up well, although I experienced some aches and cramps at various moments...the most serious being the leg cramps near the end of the Five Points race.  Perhaps better electrolytes/hydration (i.e. more Gatorade) will alleviate this problem in the future.

After April, the prospects for long-distance races in the northern Florida area disappear with only the 3.1-mile 5K event available from time to time. If I continue running monthly races from May through September, I'll have to stick with this shorter distance...unless I begin to travel to places further north and/or west where the longer races are held that time of year...

Reading Sue Grafton's Series from "A" to "Z"

As I had mentioned in a blog entry a few weeks ago, I have begun reading mystery writer Sue Grafton's "Alphabet Mystery" novels...this time in alphabetical order.  I've been hopping around the "letters" indiscriminately, beginning several years ago with the book "L" is for Lawless.  Since each book's story is complete in itself, jumping around the series out of order isn't in itself such a bad thing, although its main protagonist, Santa Teresa, California private detective Kinsey Millhone, does undergo changes in her personal life and relationships progressively with each successive book.  The main drawback with what I've been doing is that I have lost track as to which books I've already read and which ones I haven't.  And since I truly love Grafton's writing in this series and like the Kinsey Millhone character a lot, I decided to just go back to the beginning, to "A" is for Alibi, and read on through "W" is for Whatever (I don't know the title offhand), her latest book.  Grafton plans to end the series with "Z" is for Zero.

As it turns out, I had already read "A" is for Alibi a while back and knew who the main culprit is (there is more than one guilty party in this story).  So although I knew roughly how it would turn out as I reread it, it was interesting to see how the author introduced the villain early into the story and how she laid down hints of his culpability at various points while at the same point inserting other suspicious characters into the narrative.  All in all, I enjoyed the second time around as much as the first!  Oh, and I counted in it four different times that Kinsey went out jogging, something I particularly identify with...

Now it's one to the next book, titled "B" is for Burglar...

MercyMe Concert at Yesterday's Florida Strawberry Festival in Plant City

Yesterday, Melissa and I drove down a few miles west of Tampa to Plant City, where they have been holding their Florida Strawberry Festival.  Naturally, strawberries are a big focus of the event, but as is the case with county fairs elsewhere, there's a lot going on.  Rides, stands selling food of any kind you can imagine, and crafts exhibits dominate the landscape.  Also, there's a stadium there where they hold concerts.  That's convenient, because at 3:30 yesterday afternoon the Christian contemporary band MercyMe held a concert there that we attended.  I've heard them before, especially that big hit of theirs If I Could Only Imagine from a few years back, but I didn't realize what good musicians they truly are.  The selection of songs they performed during the slightly more than one hour they were up there went across the spectrum of musical styles...I was impressed!  I'm going to have to get hold of some of their material to listen to on my MP3 player...

Yesterday morning before we set off, I checked out the Weather Channel website on my computer and it had for the Plant City forecast a 25% chance of "showers" and a high of 72.  I looked at the radar map for central and northern Florida and saw a small band of clouds around the Tampa area, a very big clump of clouds heading for Gainesville...and a wide swath of clear skies in between.  Instead, though...in the real world...it rained all the way from Gainesville to Plant City...and throughout almost the entire MercyMe concert.  But speaking of "mercy", it did let up afterwards and Melissa and I spent the next hour or two walking around the fairgrounds...and of course we had to try out some strawberry shortcake!  Also, there was a stand selling fresh-popped kettle popcorn...you can see above a picture of me holding my "prize catch".

Almost from the moment we got back into the car to drive back home, it had resumed raining...all the way back to Gainesville with only minor periods of respite.  Well, the rain was tough, but the fair, and especially the company, was great!

My February 2015 Personal Running Report

In February 2015 I managed to run through a series of upper respiratory colds, somehow getting my total mileage for the month to 314 miles, despite physically feeling crappy much of the time.  I ran on every day of the month, and my longest single run at one time was during the Five Points Half-Marathon (here in Gainesville) on the 15th, when I covered 13.1 miles with a time of 1:58:48.  That was good enough in my Men's 55-59 age group for 5th place out of 23.  I felt pretty good about that, especially when, close to the end of the race, I was wondering whether I'd even be able to finish it due to leg cramps.  For an entire day, though (on the 21st), I managed once to cover 32 miles by spacing apart several smaller runs.

Starting the second week in March, my work schedule will change from the "graveyard" late night/early morning shift to a late afternoon/evening shift.  This should greatly aid with my sleeping patterns, and might help me to better withstand these viral cold attacks I've been suffering lately.  As a matter of fact, if my unscientific memory serves me correctly, I've generally been more healthy and less often sick when I used to work the hours that I'll soon be returning to.  Time will tell if that works for me again...

Just Finished Reading Tad Williams' Shadowheart

I just finished reading the book Shadowheart by Tad Williams, which is the concluding volume to the four-part Shadowmarch fantasy series.  This was a rather difficult series for me to get through because, although I normally expect fantasy series to contain a reasonable portion of magic and the supernatural (hence the name "fantasy"), Shadowmarch is overwhelmingly loaded with it.  As such, it was difficult to read it while keeping at least one foot set in reality.  Other writers like George R.R. Martin, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Daniel Abraham seem to realize this need to primarily base the story line in some semblance of reality in order to make the occasional "magic" seem more special.  But when it's all out of the ordinary, at least for me, the reader's mind gets numbed to it after a while.  Nevertheless, in Shadowheart, Mr. Williams does manage to tie up all of the threads he had loosened earlier in the series, and the ending is quite satisfactory with the bad guys getting their comeuppances and the heroes and heroines largely receiving happy endings...if they weren't killed off earlier, that is.  Naturally, I'm not telling what happened since I want you to try this series out for yourself...and for you to give your own feedback to it...

I will give Tad Williams the credit for having the self-discipline, apparently lacking in Robert Jordan in his The Wheel of Time series and George R.R. Martin in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, to limit the scope of his characters and story.  I think there must be a temptation in fantasy fiction writing to want to keeping on creating and creating within your own devised "world"...but for readers this can get to get very cumbersome to keep up with.  With the Shadowmarch series, the core characters remain the same throughout...with the greatest focus given to the two preeminent ones: Princess Brienny and her twin brother Prince Barrick.  I'd also like to give Williams kudos for his well-done character development.  It's obvious to me that he put a lot of himself into writing this series, which can put the reader into a kind of funk in some of the tediously depressing sections but still represents a very interesting story with compelling protagonists (and very nasty villains)...

Unnecessary Homeland Security Bill Senate Filibuster

The Republican-controlled US House of Representatives has passed a  Department of Homeland Security authorization and funding bill to keep the crucial department fully funded through the end of the year.  However, included in the bill is a repudiation of President Obama's executive action giving partial amnesty to illegal aliens (or "undocumented immigrants", if you want to tip-toe through political correctness land).  This bill has now been brought up before the Senate, where Democrats are filibustering it to keep it from being submitted to the floor for debate, amendments, cloture, and a final vote.  As was the case tith the recently passed Keystone XL Pipeline bill, it has no chance of being signed into law by the President, and there is no hope of overriding a presidential veto.  So I ask myself, regardless of anyone's opinion about the propriety of the Republicans' actions attaching the anti-exucutive action part to the bill, why can't it be brought up to the Senate floor for debate as the Keystone Pipeine bill was?  I'm not a Senate insider here, with my own connections and news sources.  But I have a sneaking suspicion...

Back in January when the Keystone bill was openly debated, amended, and voted on, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid was absent due to an accident that he was being treated for.  I his place, Minority Whip Dick Durbin stood in and ran his party...and allowed the bill to pass through the normal legislative process.  But the minute that Reid came back, though, presto!...here comes the filibustering...

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell  has proposed splitting up the Homeland Security reauthorization bill into two parts, one being a "clean" bill that funds the department without reference to Obama's recent immigration executive action, and the other a section on whether that action should be accepted or rejected.  That sounds quite reasonable to me, but I have my doubts about even that great concession on the part of the majority Senate leadership being accepted by morose and spiteful Senator Reid, sad to say.  Still, there is hope now for this important bill to be passed and the needed funding to continue.  The next day or two will tell what happens...

Oh, by the way, after I had posted this article and looked back up on its title "Unnecessary Homeland Security Bill Senate Filibuster", I realized that it could be taken two different ways.  No, the Homeland Security bill is necessary, but the filibuster against it isn't...

MLS Brings Premier-Level Pro Soccer to Orlando

One of the interesting things about how international professional soccer is set up is that it is now a year-round sport.  Most of the leagues around the world play from August through May, while in North America the established premier league, Major League Soccer, has their season starting in March and going on to year's end.  So as the English Premier League and Mexican Liga MX wind down their respective seasons, pro soccer in the United States and Canada is just getting underway.  This year, MLS will be eliminating one team and expanding with two.  The bygone franchise is L.A. Chivas while the two new ones are another New York City team (there's already the New York Red Bulls) and Orlando (as the Lions).  The fact that, right when I'm getting interested in following soccer, a big time team gets established within reasonable driving distance is pretty cool.  If the ticket prices are reasonable, I'd like to go down there and see them play in person. Major League Soccer's season will kick off on March 6, so I'll be alternating then (at least for two or three months) between three leagues...

Soccer on TV Highlights Day of Recovery

While recovering from sickness on my day off, I spent much of yesterday resting, reading...and watching television.  I've discovered that, on Saturdays this time of the year, if you don't have much else to do at the time, you can spend much of the day watching soccer on TV if that's the sport you like to follow.  And since that was the case with me yesterday, I ended up watching five different matches...

The first two were from the English Premier League.  League-leading Chelsea was expected to run up the score on floundering Burnley, which is fighting to avoid relegation (demotion) to the next lower league next year.  Chelsea, after getting an early 1-0 lead, couldn't build on it and Burnley managed to score a late goal to tie it, to the surprise of everyone.  The second game featured defending champion Manchester City plastering their opponent Newcastle 5-0 with excellent passing and shooting.

The final three games were from the Mexican Liga MX, their premier soccer league.  The first of these was a classic confrontation between Cruz Azul, based in Mexico City, and Guadalajara Chivas.  The former was undefeated so far in this second half "Clausura" of the split 2014-15 season and expected to continue against Chivas, which was also fighting to avoid relegation to the next lower league.  Cruz Azul took a 1-0 lead and held it almost to the end, but Guadalajara jolted them with two lightning-quick goals in rapid succession around the 80-minute mark and upset them.  What a great game that was!  Then, disappointing Monterrey still managed to pull out a 2-1 win over Queretero, followed by the Monterrey-based Tigres "Tigers" bowing to the Chiapas Jaguares "Jaguars" 1-0.  That finale was a little disappointing to me since I was expecting Tigres, which nearly won the first split season "Apertura" championship this year, to be stronger than they have been of late...

Well, today I don't expect to be camped out in front of the TV set, and I have other things to do anyway.  Still, I need to rest a little more before I go back to work this evening, and if a soccer match happens to be on...

Repeated Colds a Burden This Winter

For some reason, this winter I have been repeatedly afflicted with colds...one of which I am suffering right now.  Ugh. Usually, I manage to avoid them since I practice a good deal of care with hand washing and avoiding contact with other sick people.  But this time around, I don't know if it is because my body is somehow weaker or because there are just more germs floating around than usual...they keep coming back at me.  I think this has also diminished my ability to run effectively in my races, although almost miraculously all three of them have come between episodes.  Nonetheless, now here I am again with headaches and congestion..fortunately, I have the weekend off from work to stay at home and recover some.  That's not so bad, but out of respect for others, when I am sick like this I try to minimize being out in public and as a result miss out on healthy social interaction.  But since I tend to have a reclusive nature anyway, it probably doesn't affect me as much as it would others...

Just Finished Reading Robert Jordan's The Path of Daggers

The Path of Daggers is the late Robert Jordan's eighth book in his extensive, fourteen-volume The Wheel of Time fantasy series (Brandon Sanderson wrote the final three books after Jordan's death).  I just finished reading it, and, sad to say, my two most positive reactions from it are (1) it is the shortest book in the series and (2) I am now past the halfway-point, one book closer to the end.  Besides this, it's pretty much the same fare as before, with the protagonists crisscrossing Jordan's fantasy continent from one kingdom to another in various states of peril and freedom/captivity.  The main hero, Rand al'Thor, is just as unlikeable to me as ever.  His hometown friend, Mat Cauthon, who along with Perrin Aybara are the only two characters I care for in the series, wasn't even in this book...despite the fact the previous one,  A Crown of Swords, ended with him left behind in a newly conquered city (by enemy forces) with his future in doubt and suspense.  So I suppose I'll just have to wait until the ninth book in this interminable series to find out what happens to him...which I suppose is that he'll experience some kind of tribulation in that occupied city, get out somehow, and then go on some trek to who-knows-where else, like all of the other characters. What really gets me is Jordan's device of having a group of villains, called "The Forsaken", who have the ability to pop in and out of thin air anywhere and anytime they want to stir up trouble.  This lack of order in the ongoing narrative, to me, serves to destroy its integrity when certain characters can behave without limitations.  But maybe, just maybe, the author is going somewhere with all this...who knows.  Another major problem I have with this series is that Jordan keeps introducing scores of new characters and spends a large section of the text discussing them.  There is way too much to have to keep up with here...

I'm still going to trudge along with this frustrating series to the bitter end.  At least I have THAT going in my favor: it definitely will end!

Running: Race Recovery and Near-Future Prospects

My recovery from last Sunday morning's half-marathon race has left me with sore, tight calf muscles...but otherwise I'm doing fine.  On March 1st, Tavares, Florida (a few miles north of Orlando) will once again be holding its Orange Blossom Half-Marathon, which unlike the recent Gainesville Five Points race, is essentially flat and lacking in hills.  I ran it in 2013 and recorded my fastest personal half-marathon time.  I'm wondering whether I might just try it one more time,  although the travel from Gainesville to the race site tends to be bothersome...unless I stay overnight at a hotel (which is what we did last time).  Melissa and I enjoyed the 2013 event, as she walked the concurrent 5K race while I ran the 13.1 miles.  Only then, the weather was freakishly cold and windy, something neither of us anticipated with a central Florida March race, although we knew conditions would be colder than usual...

Then again, these races do cost money to enter and I can opt instead to continue my running at home.  I've run in three races this winter: the Starlight Half-Marathon in Palm Coast in the evening of December 21st, the Newnans' Lake 15K east of Gainesville on January 31st, and the Five Points Half-Marathon on February 15th.  So each calendar month I have run in a a race, making the upcoming Tavares run a possibility in my mind.  But there is an alternative choice for me: on March 14th there will be a more reasonably-priced 10K run in Tioga, just a few miles west of Gainesville.  It will be held on a Saturday late afternoon and there will be a post-race outdoor party with live music and refreshments.  Plus, there's a 5K run/walk for Melissa...

Two Interesting European Soccer Matches on TV Right Now

I enjoy following league soccer play, as opposed to the national teams that people are accustomed to seeing during the World Cup.  The only problem with this is that, outside of America's MLS league, the English Premier League, and Mexico's Liga MX, I don't have access to league games and as a result miss out on some of the greatest teams in the world.  Teams like Spain's Barcelona and Real Madrid, Germany's Bayern-Munich, and France's Paris Saint-Germain, for example.  However, interspersed throughout the regular season of the individual European soccer leagues is an ongoing interleague tournament, titled the UEFA Champions League.  Today they're showing on TV two live games: Fox Sports 1 (Gainesville Cox Cable channel 62) is showing the contest between England's Chelsea and Paris Saint-Germain while Fox Sports 2 (channel 267) is showing Ukraine's Shakhtar Donetsk against Bayern-Munich.  The Donetsk team, by the way, is playing its home games this year away from its home town, which is the midst of the rebel strife going on in that country.

Not that I plan to stay glued to the TV the whole time, but it's going to be fun seeing how they play...

Just Finished Reading Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities

In a departure from the fantasy fiction I've been reading, I decided to try a contemporary American general fiction writer.  Why not Tom Wolfe?  So I read his 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, an excruciatingly satirical look at the entanglement of politics, avarice, ethnic and social class divisions...and vanity, as they remove any vestige of "justice" in a big city's criminal justice system... in this case, that of New York City in the 1980s.  In a nutshell, without giving away the story to prospective future readers, a wealthy bonds trader named Sherman McCoy, while picking up a woman (with whom he is having an affair) from the airport, gets himself lost in traffic and the two find themselves in a run-down South Bronx neighborhood and encounter two young black men in an obstructed highway entrance ramp.  What ensues there drives the story for the rest of the book, from the investigations of the incident by the press (by English journalist Peter Fallow) and district attorney's office (by assistant D.A. Larry Kramer) to the Al-Sharpton-like agitation and protests by Reverend Reginald Bacon.  Each player in the story has their own personal agenda they are pursuing, and none of these really has anything to do with justice.  Ultimately, McCoy becomes the politically-convenient WASP symbol of wealth that (1) the D.A., trying for reelection in his heavily minority-populated Bronx, (2) Fallow, looking to advance his journalism career, and (3) Bacon, trying to advance his own persona as a civil rights  leader, can all use for themselves.  Never mind the facts, it all becomes a farce of justice.  As a matter of fact, the developing farcical nature of The Bonfire of the Vanities, to me at least, resembles the absurdity of the wartime military that Joseph Heller so aptly conveyed in his book Catch-22, published a quarter of a century earlier.

Each character in Bonfire is very consciously aware, to the point of obsession, of his or her own status regarding ethnicity, wealth, and social status and seems to be in a constant struggle to enhance that status.  I wonder whether that's really what it's like in New York City with people in general, or even in other places (such as my own Gainesville).  Or is Wolfe just exaggerating his characters' "vanities" to makes his own points?  I tend to see his characterizations in much the same way that Heller made his, which was to point out the foibles (and humor) of people's perceptions about themselves and their often ridiculous efforts to improve their perceived "positions".

I recommend Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities.  It also has an interesting kind of ending, expressed in its epilogue (I tend to be a "collector" of interesting story endings...like that in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, for example).  I also discovered that a not-very-successful movie had been made for the book starring Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Bruce Willis.  I think I'll just steer clear of that one, thank you...

Ran Gainesville's Five Points Half-Marathon This Morning

This morning I ran the Five Points Half-Marathon here in Gainesville.  This is a great race, not only because it's held in my home town.  The course runs right through the city itself, including the University of Florida (passing through the football stadium along the way).  The terrain is moderately challenging with several Florida-level hills to climb.  But most of all, I like the way it was planned, from not having to worry at all about sharing the road with motorized traffic to the excellent facilities and water/Gatorade stations...and the very convenient parking.  I also like that they had pacers: I found the pair of runners going at a 2-hour pace and stuck with them for about 9 miles, after which I took off ahead of them.  The next 2 miles of the race (going down SW 2nd Avenue and running through the UF campus) saw me generally gaining on and passing other runners.  But after I had run about 11.5 miles, while passing through the University's Fraternity Row, my lower legs began cramping up on me...especially my left calf.  For the remainder of the race it was down to a struggle to finish in spite of the cramping: thankfully it never got to the point that Lebron James reached during the NBA playoffs a few years ago when he was rolling around on the floor in apparently mortal agony.  Curiously, once I passed the finished line, my cramps subsided: I was then just plain tired.  My final finishing time was 1 hour, 58 minutes, 48 seconds...good for 211th overall.  I'm not sure exactly how well I did in my 55-59 age group, which in Gainesville is extremely competitive, but I was able to see from preliminary results that I finished out of the "running" for an award.   My recovery from the race seems to be going quite well.  This is the third time I've run this event, the others being in 2010 and 2014.  My final time, although not my best by a long shot in the half-marathon (personal record: 1:50:53), still was my fastest for the Five Points races I've run...

The weather, for a change, was more to my liking with this race.  The temperature at the 7:00 AM start was about 47 degrees, so there was no need to wear anything more wintery than the usual tee-shirt and shorts.  Still, I was amazed to see people crowding around the starting line looking like they were going out in a blizzard with jackets, long pants, insulating caps, and gloves.  Needless to say, there was a whole lot of partial disrobing going on soon after the race began for these folks...

Football Talent and the Florida Gators

I don't claim to be an expert at football, and what all constitutes "talent" in the sport.  To me, since it is played at different levels depending on whether it's high school, college, or professional, that "talent" designation seems to be relative to how well a player can fit and thrive in the environment he finds himself in.  It's hard to isolate a player from his team and judge his skill level without taking into account how well he plays with others...and how well others play with him. We've just had the recruiting process for college football, and schools have been ranked on how well they signed up the top "talent" in high school players.  The University of Florida usually does well with this recruiting, typically ranking among the top in the country.  After their recent head coaching change had left them behind with the recruiting this go around, they quickly recovered through the efforts of their new coaching staff and reportedly now have a lot of  new incoming "talent" to work with.  As for the players leaving the team after playing for them a number of years, Florida also has many, in comparison to other colleges, whom the National Football League has considered to be talented enough to invite to try out for that league.  H-m-m, so the players are "top talent" coming in to UF and they're "top talent" going out...so why is it that, during the actual Gator football seasons in the last few years, all I've heard was that this team was having to make do with less talent than those around them?  It seems to imply to me that the coaching staff wasn't doing a very good job of developing that top talent that they recruited and that, only after the very best manage to leave Florida, do they finally see the opportunity to achieve their full potential under more competent direction.

I have a feeling that this discrepancy with the Florida football talent has a lot to do with the recently departed staff.  I have to grimace a little whenever I hear in the media that a particular team's head coach is so beloved by his players that he is commonly referred to as a "players coach".  That usually means that the team is lacking in consistency and discipline, and that the players aren't challenged enough in practice to better themselves...in other words, to develop the talents that they already demonstrated in high school and which had made them such promising recruits in the first place.  The new coach, Jim McElwain, seems more interested in molding together a winning team and developing his players' talents to the next higher level than the previous one, who seemed more interested in making them like him than anything else...  

John Batchelor Radio Show a Winner

On Sunday nights, on my local radio station WSKY "The Sky"/97.3, is the nationally broadcast John Bachelor Show.  This is not your typical right-wing rant-and-rave talk radio show, so if you are someone who likes to be spoon-fed your conservative Republican talking points, ready-made to spit back out at others, you're probably better off sticking to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or Mark Levin.  Instead, Batchelor, himself a conservative, hearkens back to the better days of this genre, having on a great diversity of guests who share their research and expertise in various areas of history and the physical and social sciences...with the emphasis on history.  For example, the other night he had on as a guest someone who had written a book on the Malmedy massacre late during World World II (during the Battle of the Bulge).  Another topic was New York City's "Year of Anarchy"...1914...when the newly-elected reformist mayor, the Rockefellers, anarchists and the backdrop of World War I combined to cook up a recipe for disaster.  Later on, another guest on the show delved into the Russian crime organization that is behind much of the explosive growth in Internet identity theft hacking scams that have increasingly plagued society during the last ten years.  In each interview, the host demonstrates that he himself is not only interested in the guest's topic, but has also researched the subject material to the point where he asks pertinent and meaningful questions.  What a refreshing change from the usual drivel I hear on talk radio...

The John Batchelor Show broadcasts every Sunday night from 9 to 1.  The last part of his show coincides with my work schedule, and that's when I usually can pick up on what's going on.  If you find yourself tiring of the same old television fare on Sunday nights, why not just flick off that boob tube and tune in to this quality show on the radio.  Who knows, you just might learn something...

Watching International Internet TV for Foreign Language Practice

Today I resolved to give myself a little needed exposure to some of the languages I had been studying by watching Internet TV on my laptop using the site wwiTV.  On it, you can select whichever country you want to watch TV from, and then choose from one of the stations available.  It's all free, and it gives you the opportunity not only to practice your language listening skills (mine are sorely lacking) but also get a glimpse into life in other parts of the world.  For myself, I watched French, Russian, and Chinese TV in their languages...although with the latter two I presumed an inherent bias in their programming.  Of course, when you're watching a culinary show demonstrating the various ways to make dishes with duck, the opportunity for propaganda isn't very high...although seeing some of those scrumptious-looking meals made me want to reach into the computer screen and pluck them out...

I had been searching for some sites in other countries that broadcast their own soccer league games with the play-by-play in the native tongue, but I didn't find any.  I'm sure those stations are out there, but they probably come with an extra subscription fee, and that's a no-go for me. So, for soccer, I guess I'll just stick with my own cable TV service here in Gainesville and follow the English Premier League and the Mexican Liga MX, whose games ARE shown...

Just Finished Reading Daniel Abraham's The King's Blood

This weekend I found myself a bit under the weather with a bad, contagious cold, so as happens in situations like this, I stayed at home and watched TV (soccer and the History Channel series I mentioned yesterday)...and read a lot.  I managed to read the rest of Daniel Abraham's book The King's Blood, the second in his ongoing fantasy series The Dagger and the Coin.  Connected with famous author George R.R. Martin through collaboration and the latter's ringing endorsement on his books, Abraham also has written this series in much the same way that Martin has been doing with his A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) series.  The ongoing story, spread out over this series' fantasy continent, features alternating passages presented from the views and experiences of various characters, mainly Cithrin, a young precocious teenage girl banker, Marcus, a soldier with a heroic and tragic past, Geder, a minor nobleman, very sensitive to slights, suddenly catapulted into power without any training or preparation, Dawson, a hard-edged nobleman,  and his wife Clara.  The main developing story line in this book seems to be the infiltration through various countries by a mysterious religious sect with its priests containing living spiders in their blood, and who can distinguish truth from lies as well as persuade people to believe what they say.  One of them, Kit, has left this group and recognizes its sinister nature, wanting to bring it down.  Meanwhile, Geder has visited this order and ridden into power over the kingdom of Antea on the backs of the priests' ability to distinguish loyalist from traitor by their speech.  Unfortunately, he has not yet recognized the fact that these priests, while able to tell whether someone is telling the truth or not, themselves have no qualms about lying if it suits their own agenda.  Not wanting to give away the story, I'll just say that Abraham successfully keeps the number of subplots at a manageable level and has done a magnificent job of bringing out each character's personality.  I feel that I somehow know these people...a great accomplishment on the part of the author.  In spite of the fact that I am tiring somewhat of the fantasy genre of fiction and don't plan to start reading any new series anytime soon, I definitely intend to keep up with this ongoing work.  I've already begun reading the next book in this series, titled The Tyrant's Law...

The History Channel Showing Excellent Series Right Now

I was channel surfing early this afternoon and, lo and behold, when I hit upon The History Channel, they were actually showing something about history, for a change.  As a matter of fact, the series they are presenting (and will be until 7 tonight) is a twelve-part blockbuster titled Mankind: The Story of All of Us.  I happened to tune in during episode #8, which covers the period from the 15th through 17th centuries.  It's quite an amazing series, and it ties the world together through the various trends, events, and personalities of each era.  I probably won't watch it continually until 7 (after which the usual non-historical, dull programming resumes on The History Channel), but then again, it's such an intriguing, well-written and produced series that I won't be surprised if I do...

Give Runners Choice During Race Between Half-Marathon and Marathon

My running training is rarely a matter of me establishing a set amount of miles beforehand and then running them.  Instead, I will run as circumstances dictate, both those external and internal.  For example, I may be operating one day under time constraints that limit the amount of running time I can spend.  Or I might be feeling under the weather or have a slight injury to nurse.  But when I have the flexibility of time and I'm physically feeling good enough, then my mileage on any particular run becomes open-ended...and it's always seemed to be that way, ever since I resumed the activity in 2007 after essentially ignoring it for thirty years (exception: a short three months running period in early 1998).  Sometimes this way I will go on and on with a run, racking up huge mileages...and sometimes I'll stop at a lower level.  Which brings me to a proposal about some of the long-distance races I've entered before...

As I see it, there are two types of half-marathon races out there: the races that only feature that one length of the course and those which combine the 13.1-mile half-marathon course with a 26.2-mile full marathon course.  One of the latter is coming up on February 15: Gainesville's FivePoints Marathon/Half Marathon, the two races being run concurrently.  That's important with regard to my proposal...

In the FivePoints races, both events run the same course for the first 13 miles.  Then, just as the half-marathon event is almost finished, all of the runners encounter an intersection with directing signs.  The arrow pointing to the right is for the half-marathoners to follow and finish up their almost-completed race, while the left-pointing arrow directs the marathon entrants to continue their race another 13-plus miles.  Of course, the way things stand now, there's no choice involved here: the runners have either signed up for the half-marathon or the marathon and they can only finish in that event for which they are already registered.  But suppose, just suppose...

Suppose that there is a third option for runners that gives them the opportunity to choose to go either left or right at that intersection!  That would be awfully intriguing for someone like me who usually keeps on running in my training when I'm feeling strong.  It would be a tantalizing decision to make, indeed.  It reminds me a little of the Matrix movie scene when Morpheus presents Neo with the choice of choosing the blue pill (end the adventure now and go back to life as you want to believe it) or the red pill (and see how far down the "rabbit hole" goes)...