Major League Soccer's Orlando City Plays First Ever Regular Season Game

I just finished watching, on TV (ESPN2) the very first regular-season game for both of Major League Soccer's expansion teams this year, Orlando City and New York City, as they faced off in Orlando's Citrus Bowl to more than 62,000 spectators.  It was an exciting contest with the level of play better than I had expected.  Of course, I was rooting for the Iron Lions, the nickname that Orlando goes by. Their star player is a Brazilian with one of those funny stylized singular names, Kaká, who plays midfield and is whom they consider as their "striker".  Orlando looked dominant in the first half, but couldn't manage a score due to the New York City goalkeeper's several excellent saves.  In the second half, NYC managed a goal to take the lead, and when Aurélian Collin, one of Orlando's defenders,was ejected with a red card and the team was reduced on the field to ten players, it looked dismal for them.  But just past the 90-minute mark, they were awarded a free kick near the goal and Kaká was able to punch it through for the score, with the ball deflecting in transit off a New York defender.  So the game ended as a 1-1 tie.  I was impressed with both the fan support and the team's play, and hope they both continue strong through what promises to be a challenging first season.  I definitely want to get down there and watch a game or two...

Just Finished Reading Daniel Abraham's The Tyrant's Law

Reading Daniel Abraham's The Dagger and the Coin fantasy series is, in some ways, the antithesis of that of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time.  The former keeps the characters and story lines limited in number and easy to follow, while the latter is overly encumbered with minor characters often dominating the text for long passages.  I definitely prefer Abraham's work, and just finished the third volume, titled The Tyrant's Law...and have already gone a few chapters into the next one, The Widow's House...

I read up a little on Daniel Abraham on the Internet, and if what I uncovered is to be believed (and I don't have any persuasive reason to think otherwise), he is primarily a science-fiction writer who decided to try out writing a fantasy series like his friend, writer George R.R. Martin.  He reportedly got together with Martin and some other writers to get down the essence of this genre...and subsequently laid down an outline for this five-part series.  Now that's something I doubt that Robert Jordan ever did.  There are a lot of derived themes in The Dagger and the Coin, such as a distant past with dragons once dominating the picture, but also there are two innovations as I see them.  One is the diversity of humanity in the form of thirteen distinct races...and they are much more different from each other than the so-called human "races" we think of in our real world and over which have created such a fuss throughout history (and even now, sadly).  The other is the corruption of a segment of humanity with little spiders running through their veins, the effect on them being that they can distinguish truth from lie as well as giving them Jedi-like powers of persuasion.  Well, maybe that last feature WAS derived, wasn't it?  This conspiratorial group drives the story line in the series as they try to take over Abraham's imaginary world...

As in other fantasy series, the main characters of Cithrin (a young female banker), Geder (the "tyrant", besotted with Cithrin), Clara (widow to a nobleman who unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Geder), Marcus (war hero from bygone years who goes on various adventures), and Kit (an apostate from the spider-people group who is on his own quest to destroy them) spend the book crisscrossing the lands and seas in their various narratives.  Even with the welcome limitation of characters, it can get to be a little bit tedious trying to keep up with all these wanderings, but I am holding out the hope that the author will stick with his plan to conclusively tie it all up in that yet-to-be-published fifth book...

Changed Shift Times at My Workplace

This morning, when I finished my work shift at six and walked out of the building, it ended a two-year long stint working the late-night/early morning "graveyard shift".  Since the post office needs to process the mail passing through it in a prompt and efficient way in order to assure timely delivery, many of its workers in the mail processing section have these shifts.  It's what I started out doing in 1987 when I began my employment there and I worked these difficult hours for fifteen of my first sixteen years.  However, I never did get used to it and had much difficulty getting enough sleep.  Also, I believe it made me more susceptible to illness.  From 2003 to 2013, I was able to switch to an afternoon/evening shift and my sleeping patterns normalized, with my general health improving.  But due to my organization's sweeping consolidation decisions in the past few years,  my position with this preferred schedule was abolished...and I chose the best available post for me back on the late night shift.  Only this time, I was determined to stabilize my sleep by going straight to bed soon after I got home from work in the morning.  Still, on my days off I would revert back to sleeping like most of the world during those late night hours.  Although I handled this better than in the early years, I still felt that I was getting sick way too often.  So when the opportunity recently presented itself for me to switch back to an afternoon/evening shift, I jumped at it and got the position.  After a couple of days off, I will begin it this coming Monday afternoon...

Just Finished Reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad is one of those classic writers whose works inevitably find their way into high school and college English class reading assignments.  It happened to me in the tenth grade when I was instructed to buy a paperback copy of his novel Lord Jim at the school bookstore, read it, and then summarize it.  I neither bought nor read it...although my summary paper garnered me a "B" grade (talk about winging it).  Since then, 43 years have passed and I finally got around to reading some Conrad, this one his short novel Heart of Darkness.

The 1902 story Heart of Darkness, on which Francis Ford Coppola based his epic 1979 movie Apocalypse Now, differs from the latter in that Conrad's setting is the deep recesses of the Belgian Congo as his hero Marlowe travels up river to encounter the enigmatic ivory trading agent Kurtz (whom I constantly envisioned as looking like Marlon Brando as I read it).  Yes, the quest is similar to the film adaptation's Cambodia-based quest for Colonel Kurtz, there an American renegade soldier...although Coppola was obviously going for a heavy political statement about the American war effort in Vietnam.  In Heart of Darkness, Marlowe is a seaman who wants adventure in his life...and plunging into the depths of Africa's "heart of darkness" to find the ailing Kurtz is irresistible to him.  Along the way he discovers the reprehensible way that the native blacks are treated by the colonialists, with disease, near-starvation, and gross overworking just the most glaring symptoms of their exploitation.  In this sense, this novel was an important eye-opener into how native populations were being abused by occupying colonial powers...in this case the late nineteenth-century Belgium Congo, as run by their King Leopold, being one of the most extreme abusers...

Eventually, as in the movie, Marlowe (or the cinematic character played by Martin Sheen with a different name) meets up with Kurtz and discovers him to be a fascinating combination of idealism, charisma, and utter disregard for others' lives.  The local people living under his rule, also as in the movie, adore him and fear losing him as the traveling party (through Marlowe) convinces him, as he is dying, to go back down river with them.  There is a curious character in the book, a Russian, who, like a similar hippie-like character in the movie, who has lived with Kurtz in his strange, reclusive new society and regards him as a great genius with a flare for poetry, teaching...and instilling terror. Despite knowing what a murderer Kurtz is, Marlowe can't help admiring him and comparing him favorably to the other, more petty-minded traders around him. It is this strange approval of such a sinister character that gave me pause, considering the villains of similar ilk that have victimized the world during the century following the publication of this story... figures like Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Che Guevara, Charles Manson, Jim Jones, and others...who entranced those around them with their presence but who ultimately were agents of destruction and darkness.  Hence, the double meaning of the title "Heart of Darkness".  In one sense, it refers to going to an extremely remote, isolated place, in the middle of an area unfamiliar to most of civilized society.  In another sense, it can mean how one's own heart can be made full of darkness. Perhaps one lesson, intended or not, that can be taken from it all is that trying to effect great changes, no matter the idealism or good intentions behind them, by isolating oneself from the "corrupt" world, also removes the good from that very same world and gives evil and darkness an opening to work its own aims within one's soul...

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...