Just Finished Reading Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time

Published in 1962, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time is a children's science-fiction novel, the first of the Time Quintet.  It involves the struggle between good and evil, championed by the "kids combo" of social misfit Meg Murray, her precocious younger brother Charles Wallace, and their new friend, Calvin O'Keefe...neglected by his own family.  With the help and direction of the mysterious and angelic trio of Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which, they travel to different worlds by means of the "tesseract", which wrinkles space and allows them to cross great distances quickly (sounds like an episode of Wormhole).  Meg and Charles Wallace are determined to find their missing father, a physicist who had traveled into space on a secret government mission.  They ultimately land on a planet called Camazotz, where they find their father and struggle against the evil leader of the controlling darkness, called "IT".  How does this all end?  Hey...I have to leave you some motivation to read the book for yourself!

In A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle makes clear her Christian orientation, but also pays respect to other cultures and philosophers seen as fighting against the "darkness".  But the evil that she presents here seems to be rather thinly-veiled communism...all together with the totalitarian brainwashing, severe restriction of individuality, and strict, forced egalitarianism that many in the West have stereotyped it as encompassing.  It is clear to me that this story (and as I suspect, the subsequent ones in this series) is, at least in part, the author's attempt to indoctrinate the young with her own religious and political viewpoints...which, as far as I'm concerned, she has every right to do.  However, that being noted, I found parts of it a bit annoying...

What I liked the most about A Wrinkle in Time wasn't the religion, politics, the sometimes very intriguing science, or even language (Mrs. Who continually dishes out great quotes in assorted foreign tongues), but rather its characters and their backgrounds and personalities.  I felt a great deal of empathy toward both Meg and Charles Wallace (that is, until the latter seemed to assume a kind of superhuman psychic ability).  Both are misfits at school and for different reasons...but both from which I suffered throughout my own school years.  Another thing I liked about this book was less tangible...it just seemed to have a sweetness to it...

I'll be continuing this pleasant (so far) series through to its end...just because it's aimed at a younger readership doesn't mean that a budding old codger like me can't enjoy it, too...

NSA Surveillance Reauthorization Advancing In Senate

The reauthorization for the NSA surveillance that has come under such scrutiny and controversy of late is advancing in the United States Senate (the House of Representatives has already passed it) with a cloture vote, which was just held at this writing.  The 60 votes minimum to advance the bill was assured: only 14 senators opposed it.  The champion of this small minority is Kentucky Republican Rand Paul, who, like his father in the U.S. House, Ron Paul, is an strong advocate of personal liberties and privacy from government snooping.  Recently, as I recounted in an earlier article, he went on the Senate floor and blasted the Patriot Act, which included the NSA surveillance provision.  This provision was to expire last Sunday, and Paul was able, by maneuvering through arcane Senate rules, to delay matters until it had already expired.  And now the Senate is hastily trying to put it back into law...

I'm for the NSA protecting American citizens from an obvious and dire threat, which is the infiltration of terrorists from abroad into this country as well as their recruitment of American citizens to perform their nefarious deeds from within.  My only problem with this is that, as Senator Paul mentioned during his ten-hour "filibuster" speech last week, the government can use data gathered from the collection of phone numbers and contacts to construct probability scenarios for various Americans who they think are likely to be involved in some sort of non-terrorist-related criminal activity...in other words, change the whole point of the law allowing this mass data collection in the first place.  It's been done before: the government was using anti-racketeering laws, originally aimed at organized crime, to restrict anti-abortion protests.  It took twenty years of legal fighting until the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 2006 that those laws were being misused against the protesters.  I sadly see a similar potential for misuse with this mass data collection, all denials by the senators supporting reauthorization notwithstanding...

My May 2015 Running Report

May saw me limiting my running due to a leg strain, the pain from which seems to come and go.  Before it, though, I managed to accumulated a decent amount of mileage, giving me a monthly total of 122 miles, run over 19 days...mostly in the first part of the month.  My longest single run was for 4.1 miles.

I'm probably going to be limited with my running for a while as I recover.  I still would like to eventually train up to marathon level...albeit at a slower pace.  But since we're entering the hottest part of the year here in Florida, I think limiting the miles for a while is a reasonable idea, injury or not...

Just Finished Reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

The 1931 novel Brave New World, by English author Aldous Huxley, is one of those books I've heard about for years, a kind of predecessor of all of these dystopian stories that have since proliferated onto the literary scene.  Sometimes you might wonder whether some of the presumptions of some of these tales have become obsolete over the years...with Brave New World, which I finally just got around to reading, this may be partially the case...but only partially...

In Brave New World, projected to take place in the 2500s, the "civilized" parts of the planet have been reorganized into a tightly controlled society with its people manufactured in genetic factories and then conditioned from infancy to parrot the society's maxims.  People are either alphas, betas, gammas, or deltas...with the latter two groups deliberately deprived in gestation of necessary nutrients in order to produce imbecilic humans who are destined to perform the menial functions of society. Concepts like "mother", "family", and "privacy" have been relegated to the status of the obscene, and people are conditioned to never have to experience extremes of emotion caused by deprivation or pain...and if things do get out of hand with an individual, they are administered soma, a drug that puts them off into a "dream holiday".  Sex is promoted as a collective, social activity without any associated emotional value like love or jealousy.  The old is condemned for the sake of the new, and a throw-away culture of consumption predominates throughout.  It is no accident, then, that Henry Ford, the originator of industrial mass-production, is the great hero of society...even to the point where the calendar year has been changed to "Before or After Ford".  Another barb that Huxley threw was aimed at British socialist George Bernard Shaw, one of the very few "old" figures still highly esteemed in this cradle-to-grave society of government control...

With Brave New World's characters, the focus changes from the beginning when the Director reveals the system of growing embryos and then educating infants into their role in society through a modified form of hypnosis.  Then, as the story progresses, social misfit Bernard and thoroughly conditioned Lenina carry on a curious courtship based on one misunderstanding after another.  They visit a "savage reservation" in the North American southwest where the native people are still allowed to follow traditional culture, including natural childbirth and family relationships.  There they find John, a misfit in his own right, whose light European skin paints him as an outcast to others within that society.  His sickly mother Linda pines away for a return to London, and John, who has developed his own world view and language from a book of Shakespeare that she game him, quotes Miranda, in eager (and mistaken) anticipation from The Tempest, "Oh, brave new world!" when he discovers that Bernard and Lenina would be taking them back with them. John finds himself attracted to Lenina, but their gulf of cultural disparity is even much larger than was that between her and Bernard...a foreboding of tragedy.  The end of the book largely concerns itself, besides their troubles, with a conversation between the World Controller Mustapha, Bernard, a talented friend of Bernard named "Helmholtz", and John (now commonly referred to as "The Savage"). Each argues his own opinion on how society should be structured, and Mustapha, to my amazement, presents an entirely reasonable point of view defending the totalitarian world that he has authority over...

As I look on it, ever since 9/11, the population at-large has gone heavily on the side of personal security in the face of violent religious extremism...and as a result, the state has been given a stronger role in our lives.  Also, Huxley's consumer-based culture of disposability has become the norm in our society...without the need for anyone in government to dictate that trend.  The idea that intellectuals and strong passions are both responsible for the calamities that befall us in the forms of war and terrorism was a motive in Brave New World for the state to strictly control people's education and emotions, with any deviations carefully noted and dealt with.  Let's hope that our real future doesn't ever come down to that level...

Mexican Soccer Championship a Done Deal Even With Final Game Left

Even with the final match looming on Sunday, it should be pretty clear to anyone that Santos Laguna is the new Mexican Premier League MX champion for the Clausura split-season this year.  This is because the northern Mexico team thoroughly annihilated their finals opponent Queretaro  5-0 in their opener for the two-game series.  Last night's game was at Santos Laguna while the Sunday contest takes place at Queretaro. The series winner is determined by adding the goals of each team for each game.  It's going to take a miracle of sorts for Queretaro to come back from five goals down...

Santos Laguna is one of those teams that peak just at the right time of the year...barely making the playoffs as an eighth seed and then plowing through opponent after opponent.  In this, they remind me of last year's two World Series baseball teams, Kansas City and San Francisco, who both sneaked into their finals as wild-card teams while others were given more attention over the course of the year.  However, if I had my way, the World Series would have been between the top-two regular season teams in each league and the Liga MX championship would have simply been the aggregate best team over that league's regular season as a whole, without the gimmicks of split seasons and playoffs.  By this, then, the Tigres of UANL (a Monterrey team) would have won the Liga MX championship outright and the Los Angeles Angels would have faced the Washington Nationals instead in the World Series.  Of course, had "my" system been in place, I'm sure that the various teams and their management would have made many different decisions and would consequently have caused the results to be different as well...

Just Finished Reading Sue Grafton's "G" and "H" Kinsey Millhone Stories

As I continue (happily) plodding through the "alphabet mysteries" of Sue Grafton, featuring Californian private eye Kinsey Millhone, I've just knocked off two more books: "G" is for Gumshoe and "H" is for Homicide.  The former is one that I already read (and liked a lot), and the latter is a first-time read (and I liked it even more).  As a matter of fact, I was so impressed by "H", that at this point in time I consider it to be my favorite Kinsey Millhone novel.

In "G" is for Gumshoe, Kinsey is hired by a woman to find her elderly mother, while at the same time she discovers that a thug she helped to catch in the past has placed her on his hit list...and others on that list are getting knocked off.  She hires a bodyguard, who is another detective...and they develop a more personal relationship in the process.  This book has an interesting ending, one in which the two biggest "bad guys" (for entirely different reasons) inadvertently cross paths...

In "H" is for Homicide, Kinsey goes undercover to expose an auto insurance fraud racket that is based in Los Angeles, as well as try to solve the murder of an employee of the insurance company that she is loosely associated with.  There is a lot of interaction between several unsavory characters here, and this is a story that takes our detective away from her home town of Santa Teresa.  The affliction known as Tourette's Syndrome is examined as the main villain prominently exhibits it.  And the curious mixture of family-like intimacy/ informality with the violent cutthroat culture prevalent in gangs and organized crime is also a prominent feature of this tale...

Next up: "I" is for Innocent, a Grafton book that I believe I've already read before...

Just Finished Reading (Again) F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

Forty-two years is a considerable span of time between two readings of the same book...but since I've only read the overwhelming majority of books in my lifetime just one time, that still says something.  I first read The Great Gatsby, a 1925 novel by F.Scott Fitzgerald, in the fall of 1972 in my high school eleventh-grade English class...and then proceeded to write a research paper about it, a rush job that regrettably garnered me a poor grade and didn't reflect the fact that I had liked the book.  But I shouldn't hold that against either Fitzgerald or that English teacher, although the latter in retrospect did a lousy job of teaching (as, sad to say, did most of my high school teachers).  This novel, set in the early 1920s in New York's Long Island during the early years of the Prohibition Era (which lasted from 1919 to 1933), painted a time picture of an America that was struggling with its identity following a trying world war and the promise of prosperity with the advent of mass production.  Organized crime, both in regard to gambling (the fixing of the 1919 World Series in baseball is mentioned) and alcohol smuggling and distribution was on the rapid rise.  There also was a cultural clash of sorts between the nouveau riche, those people who made their wealth rapidly (legitimately or not) from the middle and lower classes and those from the traditionally upper classes with their own sense of inherited entitlement and superiority...

The Great Gatsby is told in the first person by the character Nick Carraway, a young bonds trader who has just moved east to Long Island and, in his relatively modest home, finds himself living next door to a mansion in which a mysterious young man, Jay Gatsby, resides.  Gatsby is continually throwing parties at his house, and eventually Carraway is invited to attend one...at which he meets his host in person and strikes up a friendship.  In the meantime, Nick has met back up with a distant cousin named Daisy, who is married to a brutish, bigoted, and snobbish dude named Tom Buchanan (as you might guess, a thoroughly unlikable character).  When Gatsby hears of Daisy, the circle is closed, for as it turns out, they had been lovers just before he was to sent off as a soldier in World War I...but their respective disparity of social standing kept them from marrying each other.  Daisy instead, brought up in money, married Tom, another "well-to-do", while Gatsby, following the war, got rich quick...with the implication that he was involved with organized crime on some level.  So, as readers, we find ourselves dealing with this triangle of Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom...plus Tom's mistress Myrtle and her estranged husband George.  And now it's up to the author to mix circumstances together in such an improbable manner as to brew up an ending which bothered me.

Don't get me wrong, I still liked the story, Jay Gatsby's constant and thoroughly annoying use of the saying "Old Sport" notwithstanding. But the novel's outcome does depend on an incredibly unlikely chain of events...it would have been better had things gone down in a more believable manner.  Still, F. Scott Fitzgerald gave us an incisive look at America in the early 1920s as the growing decadence of its culture combined with its economic optimism and growing mass consumerism...and the accompanying tendency to dispose of anything, including people, that might interfere with one's lifestyle or plans...

Futoshiki: Another Numerical Logic Puzzle

Adding to the group of numerically based logic puzzles like Sudoku, Kakuro, Ken-Ken, and Hidato, which I already regularly play, Futoshiki recently came to my attention.  It is a puzzle based on inequalities between the squares, with "greater than" and "lesser than" symbols separating them, either vertically or horizontally.  The occasional absence between squares of such a symbol means that the relationship between the two adjacent numbers is not revealed...not exactly an aid in solving the puzzle.  Otherwise, Futoshiki operates in similar fashion to Sudoku in that each row or column contains unique numbers covering those available...e.g., in a five-digit game, 1,2,3,4, and 5 each appear once in each row and column...in different orders, of course, based on the inequality signs that direct the flow of the game.

Right now, I'm focusing on the "easy" Futoshiki puzzles as I develop my own strategies for solving them.  On different websites that provide these puzzles, they often provide a section revealing strategies for filling them in.  That would, for me, take away much of the pleasure I derive from this pastime, since developing my own techniques is a major part of the activity...

Just Finished Reading Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters

Robert Heinlein, one of the most renown science fiction writers of the twentieth century, in 1951 published his novel The Puppet Masters.  It examines how an alien invasion of Earth might take place with the parasitic conquerors surreptitiously taking over the minds and bodies of unsuspecting humans.  If this sounds a bit like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers or that Conspiracy episode from Star Trek: The Next Generation, then it's because this novel forms the original basis for those types of "conquer from within" stories.  Heinlein, himself a staunch anti-communist who saw a "fifth column" threat from the Soviet Union and China within the United States through traitors and spies in our government, schools, and media, may have used The Puppet Masters as an analogous way to express his angst of the times.  This is definitely a "period piece", and it is set hard in the context of the politics of its time...in that part of the Cold War when China and the USSR were allies and the latter had just attained the ability to detonate the hydrogen bomb.  And America, along with the nominal United Nations forces, was embroiled in a "hot" war in Korea against the communists.  Heinlein seems to have taken the tension of his time and projected it ahead onto our early twenty-first century...

That having all been said, Heinlein spins an interesting, suspenseful story with sympathetic characters (the secret agents Sam, Mary, and the "Old Man"), along with their own personal tales.  How they combat the "slugs" who take over people by attaching themselves to their shoulders (and then hiding their presence under clothing), and how successful they ultimately are, pose questions that led me to keep plugging away at the book to its finish.  I felt that the ending works, as Heinlein seems to have put a lot of thought into the ramifications of such an alien invasion...

One other observation about The Puppet Masters: it exhibits a couple of commonly held assumptions by mid-twentieth century sci-fi writers about the "near future" as it pertained to themselves (which corresponds to our "present" and "near past").  First, in their "prophetic" narratives there usually is a World War III that occurred toward the end of the twentieth century and which involves nuclear attacks and bombed out cities (in The Puppet Masters, Manhattan is a "crater").  Second, space travel is on a much more advanced level than we have yet attained...Mars and Venus have already been explored in Heinlein's novel (of course, he didn't know then about Venus's ultra-hot, acid-saturated atmosphere).  Although I'm disappointed about our relative lack of progress with manned space efforts during the last few decades, I'll accept the lack, as of yet, of a devastating Third World War as a reasonable trade-off for this deficiency...

Let's see...so far I've read four novels of Robert Heinlein: Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, and, now, The Puppet Masters...not to mention a few of his earlier short stories.  He is one of my favorite writers, so I'm going to have to seek out some of his other books...

Rand Paul Speech Suckers Me In With Its Arguments and Oratory

I'm a sucker for really good, persuasive oratory.  That's why, during the week in the late mornings and early afternoon you'll often find my television tuned in to C-Span2 (Gainesville's Cox Channel 81), which broadcasts live the United States Senate floor proceedings.  Although, as a governing body, the Senate is generally painfully slow at getting anything done, the senators often provide very illuminating information about their sides of the various issues about which they are debating.  Take the upcoming vote on the renewal of the Patriot Act...

On Wednesday afternoon, I happened to have the Senate on my TV and the floor was given to Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul to speak...and he spoke...and he spoke...and he spoke...his topic was the Patriot Act and his opposition to what he sees as its violations of our U.S. Constitution, especially of the Fourth and Ninth Amendments.  His arguments were legitimate and persuasive.  I had to stop watching after about one hour of his speech because I had to go on to work, but I was interested in how the conservative and liberal evening opinion shows would cover it. As it turned out, Paul's speech, which I was astounded to discover, went on for more than ten hours, and was an opening topic for both FoxNews's right wing Hannity show and  MSNBC's left wing The Last Word, hosted by Laurence O'Donnell.  And both parties actually were very respectful of Senator Paul and his arguments.   Today, on C-Span2, I watched as Florida Democratic Senator Bill Nelson, nowhere nearly as elegant an orator as is Rand Paul, nevertheless presented a convincing counterargument  to the Kentucky senator's position.   I came away from the experience as I often do with these types of debates, with the conviction that I have a tendency to be swayed by good oratory, even when it contradicts common sense that I hold dear to me.  Do you, my faithful reader, want to hear my views about privacy and the Patriot Act?  That's easy enough, just let me know...I'm on Facebook, after all...

Correction about Mexican Liga MX Playoffs

Due to my misreading of a Wikipedia article, I have been under the misconception, while following Mexican Premier League ("Liga MX") soccer, that the winners of each of the split seasons (Apertura and Clausura) would then afterward play each other to determine the overall champion for that year as a whole.  While maintaining that notion, I was surprised that Club America, which won the Apertura title but was eliminated in the current Clausura playoffs, fired their manager...so why sack their leader when they stand to win it all?  After all, wouldn't Club America still be in the "finals" for 2014-15?  As it turns out, the answer is "no"!  There are no playoffs between the Apertura and Clausura winners, after I recently (and lamentably) discovered.  So where did I get that notion that there were?

The answer lies in the next lower league, called "Ascenso MX".  As I had originally read in their article (from Wikipedia, naturally, where else), in Ascenso, they also have Apertura and Clausura seasons, for which they have championship playoffs.  But they need an overall champion to determine which team gets promoted to the Premier League the next year...so the Apertura and Clausura winners have a final playoff for the overall champ...but not the Premier Liga MX. I had mistakenly transferred in my mind the Ascenco playoff structure to that of the Premier Liga MX...

Time Off from Running Due to Leg Strain

Unfortunately, for the past couple of weeks I've been suffering from a left leg strain that has kept me from running or bicycle riding.  I suspect that I had gone into the cycling a bit too hard instead of following the advice I always give others to start a new training regime slow and easy.  Instead, I pushed myself too hard at the outset and didn't include days off for my  body to recover.  So I'm off the exercise routine for a few weeks...as long as it takes for recovery...instead I think I'll focus on getting my eating habits back to a healthy level and work on getting my weight down.  In that regard, I could probably stand to lose about 25-30 lbs...

What's Happening in Professional League Soccer

The various professional league soccer seasons are winding down in this month of May (except in the United States and Canada with their March-to-December Major League Soccer).  In England, London's Chelsea has far outpaced the other 19 teams in the Premier League, winning the championship (they have no playoffs).  Manchester City, (2012 and 2014 champion), Manchester United (2013 champion), and perennial contender Arsenal (another London team) round out the top four...it is this group that will contend next year in the European Champions League against other leagues' top finishers.   In Germany's Bundesliga, Bayern Munich won easily while Spain's La Liga has Barcelona ahead of its arch rival Real Madrid with the season nearing an end.  Other countries...well, just about every one, for that matter...have their own leagues, but there's no way I can follow them all.  Besides, the only pro soccer leagues available right now for me to watch on TV are America's MSL, the English Premier League, and Mexico's Liga MX...

Speaking of Liga MX, their second split-season of 2014-15, called the Clausura, has ended and they are now thick in the middle of the championship playoffs.  Favorites America (a Mexico City team) and UANL (from Monterrey) were both eliminated yesterday...although, since America had won the Apertura split season playoffs in December, they are already in the final championship round to face the winner of these playoffs (actually, as I later found out, the Apertura and Clausura winners don't meet, after all).  This evening, Guadalajara faces Atlas to see who advances from that city and Queretaro and Vera Cruz square off in a series between two improbable playoff teams.  Since the team I was originally rooting for, the Tigres of UANL, is no longer in the playoffs, I'm now rooting for Pachuca (who beat America).

After this month, the only premier league soccer left until August will be Major League Soccer.  Now they have a Florida representative with the expansion team Orlando City, but although I pull for them whenever they have a game on TV, I also enjoy getting into any game that's being broadcast, regardless who's playing. I think it's hilarious, though, how American teams imitate their European counterparts with names like "Real" Salt Lake, "Sporting" Kansas City, Orlando "City", D.C. "United", and Houston "Dynamo", along with the often ridiculously ornate coats-of-arms they display for themselves, as if they embody old traditions instead of being around as a league only since 1995...

106-Year Old Man Throws Out First Pitch

I was watching the MLB (Major League Baseball) Channel last night after work to catch up on the day's baseball action.  Aside from my teams generally losing (so what's new), they had a short segment about someone ceremonially throwing out a game's first pitch, this one taking place, I believe, in St. Louis.  Nothing unusual there...except that the individual performing the honor (from a little bit closer to the home plate than the pitcher's mound), a man named Arnold Vouga, is 106 years old!

Let's see...if you're 106 years old, that means you were either born in 1908 or 1909.  You were a young adult when the stock market crashed in 1929 and were already well into your thirties when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.  At 58, I consider myself to be on the verge of being counted as one of the elderly, but you'd already have been where I'm currently at around 1967, when the Beatles were still together and producing their best music, LBJ was still the Prez, and Martin Luther King, Jr. was still alive and speaking out against the quagmire known as the Vietnam War...and Michigan Governor George Romney was leading a dude named Richard Nixon in the Gallup polls for the Republican presidential nomination the following year...

So here I am at my age...do I really think I'm going to last as long as Arnold Vouga, much less be as active and engaged as him at his advanced age?  Shoot...I doubt that Mr. Vouga himself could have predicted he'd still be around in 2015 in his present condition.  Better for me to just live each day as it comes and simply be grateful for any blessings of longevity and health should they become a part of my life in the future...

Miami Dolphins Stuck in Same Division With Habitual Cheaters

In England, the National Football League's pointless promotional efforts notwithstanding, the predominant "football" game is what we know as soccer.  The wildly popular Barclay's Premier League, which corresponds there in importance to our NFL, consists of 20 teams each season...with the lowest three finishers each year relegated to the next lower league and that league's top three promoted to the top league.  That, along with the fact that the regular season top finisher automatically wins the championship without the need for all the playoff games we see in the NFL, establishes to me the superiority of English league football to the way things are done over here.  But it's also the fact that the teams are all grouped together instead of being pigeonholed permanently in divisions that gives their system more appeal to me...

I am a Miami Dolphins fan and have been since 1968, their third year in existence.  They are in the American Conference East Division, perpetually lumped together with the Buffalo Bills, New York Jets, and New England Patriots.  I understand the reasoning of league organizers who believe that having the same teams in these small divisions year after year will foster interesting rivalries.  But it's one thing to play these teams two times a year, each and every year...and another to have to twice play a team like the New England Patriots, a franchise that seems intent on winning at all costs, including searching for ways to skirt the rules.

Whether it's surreptitiously spiriting away footballs to a bathroom in order to quickly deflate them to the cheating quarterback's preferences or video-taping the other team on the sidelines in order to steal their signals and discover which plays they are running, this team goes way over the top in its unsportsmanlike conduct.  And my Dolphins are forced to contend with this low-life arrogance twice each season...many teams don't even have to play them once...

I believe these divisional rivalries are overblown, anyway.  I have an idea: instead of a draft that favors the worst performing teams and encourages those starting with poor seasons to give up halfway through, why not instead have a kind of random lottery/drawing after each season that sets up the eight four-team divisions for the next year.  After all, isn't that how the groups in the overwhelmingly popular World Cup in soccer are filled?  For example, you might end up with, say, a division with St.Louis, Miami, Denver, and Washington...randomly constructed and limited to one season, after which another random realignment takes place.  I think that would be very interesting...and much more fair to the different teams as well.  As for the New England "Cheatriots", well, someone has to play in their division, I suppose...

Just Finished Reading Sue Grafton's D, E, and F Novels

Mystery writer Sue Grafton, as I have written on this blog a number of times, is in the process of traveling through the alphabet with a novel based on each letter.  The detective is always Kinsey Millhone and the stories are written in the first person from her point of view.  She is based in the mythical California coastal city of Santa Teresa (supposedly patterned after Santa Barbara), and from there deals with the often eccentric and disturbed people who seem attracted to her as clients and suspects.  I began reading this series many years ago, hopping around in no particular order, and now can't figure out which books I've read so far.  So I started anew from "A"...and have just quickly gone through "D" is for Deadbeat, "E" is for Evidence, and "F" is for Fugitive.  Each of these last three, in some ways, seems familiar to me, and I may have read the last two through to the end before.  But I know that with "D" is for Deadbeat, the ending was a surprise...

With "D" is for Deadbeat, Kinsey is hired by a man who wants her to personally deliver a $25,000 cashier's check to another party...but his check for her detective fee bounces and he disappears from the scene, leaving her to try to find both him and the party he is trying to reach with the money. This story is about the terrible mistakes people can make in their lives, their attempts to make amends with the victims, and how those victims can struggle with the conflicting ideas of forgiveness and vengeance.

"E" is for Evidence is how an engineering firm, run by one of five contentious siblings, gets struck by a fire and files a claim with the insurance company working with Kinsey.  When she investigates the incident, she finds herself framed for insurance fraud along with the company's head.  Evidence has been tampered with, and Kinsey races against time to discover, largely by determining the inner dynamics of the relationships between those five siblings, who is behind the frame-up.

In "F" is for Fugitive, an aging and ailing father hires Kinsey to exonerate and free his son, who has recently been recaptured after being a fugitive prison escapee for seventeen years after being convicted for a murder for which he claims innocence.  Kinsey goes to a sleepy coastal town with her investigation and seems to uncover one murder suspect after another with every turn.

In each of these books, there are murders to solve, and the killer, presented as a character early in the story, is invariably a surprise at the end.  Knowing this, it then becomes easier to sift out which characters the author is inserting as red herrings and which ones may well be revealed as the villains at the end.

The next book, "G" is for Gumshoe, is one that I definitely remember reading...but I'm still going to read it again anyway.  I like Grafton's writing and like to keep up with her protagonist Kinsey as her personal life gradually changes from "letter to letter"...

Keeping Perspective with Calamities

From time to time I watch science TV series like Wormhole, Cosmos, or the The Universe.  Inevitably, the topic of cataclysmic catastrophes will come up, something that I tend to be interested in. You may already know about the asteroid collision with Earth that is generally believed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago.   Or even lesser known, the much more devastating Permian extinction  250 million years ago when almost all life on Earth was nearly snuffed out from a chain of disasters originating from a massive, drawn-out super-volcano eruption in what is now Siberia.  But the scale of a disaster can be much smaller, and yet in our world today seem almost incomprehensible in its toll on lives and property...take a look at Nepal and what has recently happened there with those two massive earthquakes.  And if you happened to be in the middle of it, yesterday's horrible passenger train derailment in Philadelphia most likely seemed cosmic in its devastation.  But a  cataclysm can be very personal as well.  A few years ago I lost a friend of mine, a co-worker, to an auto accident not of his own fault on the Interstate when traffic slowed to a stop and a truck obliviously plowed in behind him, causing the fatal collision.  Two other friends have recently been diagnosed with cancer and have had their lives turned upside-down with it. Given our own personal fragile existence on this Earth, it then becomes preposterous to watch those same science shows and hear supposedly learned people express concern that our sun, in a few more billion years, will die out...but before doing so, will devour Earth as it greatly expands in size.  Oh yeah, right, I want to start worrying about that...

Where Are the Planets in the Nighttime Sky?

A few days ago, I was pointing out some planets in the night sky to some co-workers, only to later realize, to my embarrassment, that I had gotten it wrong.  I had correctly pointed out ultra-bright Venus in the low western sky, but then I got Sirius (the brightest night star), then in the southwest, mixed up with Jupiter, which was still relatively high in the sky.  Well, since then the Earth's orbital position around the Sun has changed, as well as that of Venus and Jupiter (and, of course, the rest of the planets).  Now, Venus is a little higher in the evening sky and Jupiter is lower...and the two, at least visually from Earth, are getting closer and closer to each other.  This summer will be a visual treat for sky-gazers as they get much closer.  Jupiter is in the constellation Cancer, Venus in the adjacent (to the west) constellation Gemini, and Mars can no longer be seen as the Sun's position is too close to it.  Mercury may be seen close to the horizon right after sunset.  Saturn is visible in the A.M. night sky, so if you want to see it, you'll have to wait until the constellation Scorpius rises in the southeast, where you'll find the "original" ringed planet...

Just Finished Reading Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

A while back, I read a series of books by British author Jonathan Stroud titled The Bartimaeus Trilogy, which was generally considered to be in the "junior readers" category of fiction. In it, an alternative history of the world was presented, one in which magicians steered the course of events with their magic.  Susanna Clarke seems to have picked up this theme with her 2003 novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell...did she mean to pay a tribute to Stroud with that first name?  In Clarke's book, an alternative  history is also in place with magic playing a predominant role...but there are some notable differences.   Set in the early nineteenth century in the middle of England's long war against Napoleon's France, magic has all but disappeared from England as the only magicians left are either illusionists, con artists, or "theoretical" magicians who only analyze the history of the magic that had been lost to them.  To these theoretical magicians, the idea of a "practical" magician who purports to practice the art elicits derision as they believe any such claimant to be a con artist.  In northern England, where magic is supposed to have been the strongest, even to the point where a magician king ruled the that part of the country for centuries, there is, in Yorkshire, a club of theoretical magicians who find themselves in a confrontation with a practical magician, a Mr. Norrell.  After soundly proving the worth of his magic in a wager...and forcing the York magicians to stop their claim to be magicians in the process...Norrell moves to London where he lobbies to resurrect the role of real magic and help England in its ongoing war against France's Napoleon.  Down the line, another magician, Jonathan Strange, emerges and the two go through a tortuous love/hate friendship/enmity throughout the remainder of the story.  But Mr. Norrell has kept a dark secret from Strange: he has reintroduced a magical fairy into England, and that sinister entity is causing all sorts of trouble behind the scenes.

Susanna Clarke's story in this novel is quite interesting enough, but the characters she introduces make it memorable.  Besides Strange, Norrell, and the obnoxious fairy, there is Norrell's wise and able assistant Childermass, his cynical London promoters Drawlight and Lascelles, the sad, trapped Lady Pole, the noble butler Stephen Black, Strange's spunky and compelling wife Arabelle, and the mysterious street magician Vinculus.  And there are plenty more characters besides these, including some historical ones...in particular the Duke of Wellington, for whom Strange works magic against Napoleon.  But Clarke never lets the number of characters get to the point where they weigh down the story.  One thing about this book, though, that did bug me a little was her extensive use of footnotes in order to establish the history of magic in England.  I felt that I had to read these, which interrupted the flow of the narrative, just to make sure I wouldn't miss out on anything.  That was a bit annoying.  But everything else in the tale, especially the clash of personalities between the open and courageous Jonathan Strange and the magically-miserly Mr. Norrell, was a big hit.  No wonder that this novel was a best-seller and award-winner...

I understand that BBC will air on its TV channel (Cox channel 228 in Gainesville) this summer a seven-part series adaptation of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.  I'm looking forward to seeing it, but I urge others to read the book first...

Soccer: Mexico's Liga MX Regular Season Over, Playoffs to Come

Mexico's premier professional soccer league, the Bancomer Liga MX, has just completed its Clausura part of the 2014-15 split season, and eight teams out of the league's eighteen have qualified for the Clausura playoffs, which they call the Liguilla.  The first round begins with games on May 13th and 14th.  The league's two best teams (which met in the opening Apertura Liguilla championship round last December) are the UANL Tigres (meaning "tigers"), based in Monterrey, and Club America, based in Mexico City.  America won the Apertura playoffs, meaning that they are automatically in the final 2014-15 championship round against whichever team wins the upcoming Clausura Liguilla.  Should they win that one, too, they are automatic champions (no, I was mistaken...the Apertura and Clausura champions won't face each other to determine an overall champion).  But I'm pulling for the Tigres and Atlas (from Guadalajara) as my favorites in these springtime playoffs...

Each year, the poorest perfoming team, based on a comparative three-year measure of their records, gets relegated (demoted) to the next lower league (called "Ascenso") while the Ascenso champion gets promoted to Liga MX the next year.  This year the big loser was the Universidad de Guadalajara Leones Negros (meaning "black lions") who had only been promoted into the premier league the previous year.  I felt that they got a bum deal out of this, for they were quite competitive...and the league's worst team this year, Morelia, was far behind UDG in the standings and only avoided relegation because they had a good season back in 2012-13.  But those are the rules, and I can only wish the Leones Negros a good season next year in the Ascenso league...

I'm not a big fan of having playoffs determine championships when the regular season has already demonstrated which team is the best.  In European soccer, the regular season champion IS the final champion, but for some reason in North America, no matter which sport it is, there seems to be a kind of compulsion to hold intricate, drawn-out playoffs that often elevate lesser teams to championship status, just because they get "hot" at the propitious moment.  If Liga MX had done their league's championship the way that England's Premier League, Germany's Bundesliga, or Spain's La Liga does it, the UANL Tigres would be league champion tonight since they have the best aggregate regular season record if you combine the Apertura and Clausura split seasons.  But I suppose, with the Liguilla playoffs ahead, I'll still have some exciting Mexican soccer to look forward to watching...