The Tricolor Good Neighbor Sign

The above photo is of a sign I've been seeing quite a lot of lately...one of tolerance, wouldn't you say?  By the way, thanks to National Public Radio's website, here's the pertinent article: [link].  There's one of these signs...and I love the green/blue/orange color scheme...posted by a resident two houses down from me, and it seems there is a preponderance of them on the roadside in front of various churches in town...a church seems to be the origin of these signs (read NPR's article).  But what are they trying to convey...and why?

The overt message is simple and positive: we're not prejudiced about where you're from...if you're our neighbor, then we accept and welcome you.  Sounds good, to me...how about you?  The problem I see is that by making the sign into Spanish, English, and Arabic translations, a not-so-subtle political dart is being thrown at the Trump administration...after all, does anyone honestly think that these signs would have come out had Hillary Clinton (whom I supported) been elected as president?  Donald Trump had campaigned on protecting our borders from both illegal immigration from the predominantly Spanish-speaking south and from radical Islamists from predominantly Arabic-speaking countries...I think the measures he's taken so far as president are a little over the top but well-intentioned.  After all, he is duty-bound to protect us and uphold the laws and I believe he's doing the best he can under the circumstances...I don't have a problem with our president on this particular issue other than the confrontational, stumblebum manner with which he has addressed it...

When President Obama gave his farewell speech just before leaving office, he repeated the oft-said "lesson" about how we are a nation of immigrants, after all.  To whom I, as a Democrat who twice voted for him, respond that I'm all for liberal, legal immigration policies...but what about folks just flooding over the border or overstaying their visa provisions?  I think that our immigration laws should be enforced...and if people think the laws are wrong, then they can change them through the democratic process!  I don't need this condescending, politically correct preaching that typecasts people concerned about terrorism and illegal immigration as intolerant bigots. I'm glad of my neighbors, regardless of their origins...but they should follow the law in becoming my neighbors...

On the other hand, I love it whenever I have a "Rosetta Stone" experience and can see translations of three great languages like Spanish, English, and Arabic.  This green, blue, and orange sign that is springing up in so many places has a good basic message which I accept...I just suspect some ulterior political motives behind it all...

Weekly Short Story Review: The Mile-Long Spaceship by Kate Wilhelm

The Mile-Long Spaceship was Kate Wilhelm's first published story, and it made the list of the top science fiction short stories of 1957, according to Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg.  These two compiled and edited the successful Isaac Asimov Presents: The Great SF Stories, spanning the period of short fiction in this genre from 1939 through 1963.  Kate Wilhelm's story was one of the first I read from this series...I now have all 25 volumes...

In The Mile-Long Spaceship...only about twelve pages long, the time is in the not-to-distant future and a young man is recovering from brain surgery caused by a near-fatal traffic accident.  While recovering in the hospital, he has recurring dreams of outer space...and of visiting a huge spaceship.  Its crew seems benign to him and he wonders what their mission is.  As it turns out, they are not at all benign and the future of humanity may be at stake.  And this story, as are many short stories, has a surprise ending that turns everything on its head...

Kate Wilhelm went on to become a successful science fiction and mystery writer, preferring the less-financially lucrative short stories and novellas to novels.  She is still alive...around age 88 or 89...I wish her the best. The book that contains her story, now out of print, is Isaac Asimov Presents: The Great SF Stories #19 (1957).  It contains several other noteworthy tales, some of which I may discuss in future articles...

Reconsidering Twitter

The social media website known as Twitter has of late been closely identified with politics...particularly those of our current president as he has made much use of it during his campaign and even now.  But unlike Facebook, which people in general use to see what's going on with each other, Twitter seems to have been relegated to "following" celebrities, news, and politics.  I have my own Twitter account and never post on it...although a couple of years ago I tried linking my mostly daily blog articles on it.  But since nobody's going to reach my blog that way unless they already "follow" me, Twitter just didn't seem like a viable way to publicize my blog.  And I'm pretty dissatisfied with the "news feed" I'm getting on it right now.  So I'm reconsidering how to use this free Internet communications site to my best advantage...both in expressing myself and receiving information on it from others.  I may have to be a bit creative as I try to figure out ways to get around some of the obstacles I see from Twitter...

I heard a few weeks ago to my surprise that Twitter, unlike other social media companies, was losing money bigtime and faced bankruptcy.  I'd hate to see that happen, but then again Twitter needs to make itself somehow easier and more attractive for people in general to use and network with each other...not just as a publicity tool for the rich and powerful...

Just Finished Reading The 12th of Never by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro

There are two kinds of fiction book series: the ones in which just about everything at the start of a volume depends entirely on what happened at the end of the previous one...you absolutely have to begin at book #1 and proceed in numerical order.   With the other type, though, each book is self-contained with its own complete story...and there are what I call "continuity" characters along with the guest characters.  These relatively continuous characters within the series include the main protagonist, but also others whose lives and relationships develop from book to book. It is this aspect of picking up a book in a series like this "out of order" that can cause a little disorientation with the reader.  The Women's Murder Club series, for most of its volumes a writing collaboration between James Patterson and Maxine Paetro, belongs to this second type of series.  So there are two different threads of narrative happening here: the crime mysteries that San Francisco homicide investigator Lindsay Boxer solves with her cohorts and friends...and these characters' continually changing personal lives.  As for the latter thread of their personal lives, I will make no comment here in my review out of respect for you, a potential reader of this series...just in case you might want to start reading it.  But the mysteries are another matter...

In The 12th of Never, which I just finished reading, there are a number of mysteries.  A middle-age professor goes to the police station with the claim that he is vividly dreaming of future murders...and they seem to be coming true!  In another case, a sleazy lawyer is on trial for murdering his wife and their young daughter and seems well on the road to conviction...that is, until an extremely complicating factor gets thrown in at the very last minute.  A star 49ers football player is under suspicion for killing the model he is engaged to marry, and then her body mysteriously disappears from the morgue.  And a convicted serial killer from an earlier story comes out of his coma and claims to have changed, now wanting to reveal the identity and location of his numerous victims.  Quite a lot of material, especially when you add all of the personal stuff that Lindsay and her "murder club" friends Claire, Yuki, and Cindy are going through in their respective personal and professional lives.  Yet Patterson and Paetro did a masterful job of weaving it all together with this, in my not-so-humble opinion, their best book so far in this series.  Good job, you two...

Enjoying NHL Playoffs and Mexican Soccer Right Now

This evening I have been enjoying the National Hockey League Stanley Cup playoffs as well as Mexican premier league pro soccer.  Earlier Ottawa had won an exciting overtime game against Boston...now I'm going back and forth between Washington vs. Toronto (NBCSports Channel) and Nashville vs. Chicago (NBC).  Later they'll be showing the Anaheim-Calgary game on NBCSports.  And from time to time I check in on Univision to see how Mexican soccer's UANL Tigres are doing against the UNAM Pumas...looks like "my" Tigres are going to win this one.  All of the hockey games have been close and exciting...well, maybe underdog Nashville is starting to pull away from the Blackhawks right now.  I finally think I have a solid grasp on the rules concerning offside and icing...some of what I see on the rink now makes a lot more sense...

Later this evening Univision will be showing the soccer match between Club America and Queretaro.  I'm sure I'll be switching back and forth between that one and the NHL game between the Mighty Ducks and Flames...

Notice that I've written nothing about Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association playoffs, which just started .  Well, right now hockey and soccer just happen to be more interesting to me that those two sports...I'll get around to watching some of them, too...eventually...but not tonight!

Quote of the Week...from Stephen Hawking

Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.                   ---Stephen Hawking

If there were ever someone who might have felt justified at simply curling up onto himself and turning his back on the world around him, it just might be Stephen Hawking who, while an up-and-coming young physicist in 1963, was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease...a crippling affliction that is usually fatal within years.  Hawking, though, has endured with it over the decades...although he must depend not only on others and technology for his mobility and life support, but even to able to speak his thoughts.  Yet with all of this adversity he has only intensified his curiosity and wonder at the universe and our place within it.  I definitely credit the loving devotion of others around him and our advances in digital and medical technology with Hawking's longevity...not to mention that his ALS was slower in its process, but I also think that by maintaining his attentions outward and deliberately nurturing his curiosity, he has become in some ways a stronger person than many of us who have been blessed with relatively good health.  For myself, I have always had a natural curiosity at what is going on around me, and this has built up within me a reservoir of knowledge and understanding about many areas...although there are quite a few about which I'm admittedly ignorant.  The downside to this catering to curiosity is that I haven't been able to put other things out of my mind in such a deliberate, concentrated, prolonged, and disciplined way as to achieve a deeply specialized skill in an area that would have been more socially prestigious and financially rewarding...but Stephen Hawking, with all of his physical problems, managed this feat as well while still maintaining his "look up".  What an inspiration to all of us!

4/9 Palm Sunday Sermon

This past Sunday was Palm Sunday, marking the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem.  The guest speaker, Kevin Sides, presented the message by referring to the pertinent passage from Mark 11:1-11, shown here in the New International Version courtesy of Bible Gateway:

11 As they approached Jerusalem and came to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two of his disciples, ² saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and just as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. ³ If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ say, ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here shortly.’”
⁴ They went and found a colt outside in the street, tied at a doorway. As they untied it, ⁵ some people standing there asked, “What are you doing, untying that colt?” ⁶ They answered as Jesus had told them to, and the people let them go. ⁷ When they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks over it, he sat on it. ⁸ Many people spread their cloaks on the road, while others spread branches they had cut in the fields. ⁹ Those who went ahead and those who followed shouted,

“Hosanna!”

“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

¹⁰ “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David!”

“Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

¹¹ Jesus entered Jerusalem and went into the temple courts. He looked around at everything, but since it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the Twelve.

 

Kevin placed great emphasis on the discrepancy between the people's expectations of Jesus as he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and those of Jesus himself: they expected an Earthly king to free them from the heavy Roman yoke on Judea, while Jesus was instead doing the work of his heavenly father, work that had much more far-reaching consequences.  It is this contrast between what we sometimes expect from God and what Kevin terms his "perfect will" that can often get us into trouble, not only in how we interpret our experiences, but also in how we act upon them.  On the other hand, as a Christian I do have expectations of God based on his love for me, and I believe that as long as I understand that although his ways and will are at times beyond my comprehension, he listens to me and wants my greater interests realized and protected.  The conflict is when what I think are my greater interests diverge from God's perspective...

 

A couple of points I'd like to bring up regarding this message. First, on the surface it may seem like riding the colt of a donkey, instead of a more prestigious horse, might be a signal of humility on the part of Jesus...but this was done specifically to fulfill the prophecy of the messiah's coming laid out in the Old Testament book of Zechariah, which would have been widely known at that time among the Jewish population there.  Second, there is no indication that the "crowd" was disillusioned with Jesus when, after seeing that it was already late at the temple, he left to be with his disciples...this seems to be reading something into the text that isn't there.  Furthermore, there's no evidence from what I can see that the "crowd" that greeted Jesus on his triumphal entry was the same "crowd" that later angrily shouted "crucify him!".  To take a more modern example, there were crowds at Trump campaign rallies and then, after he was elected, crowds protesting him...would anyone automatically argue that these "crowds" were composed of the same people?  Nevertheless, I understand and appreciate this message, for it is crucial that we temper our expectations of God with the wisdom that he already knows what is best for us according to his perfect will...

 

You can watch this and other sermons on the Family Church YouTube video website, available through this link: [link].  The Family Church will be holding its Easter services this Sunday morning at 7 (outdoors sunrise service), 9:30, and 11.  It is located at 2022 SW 122nd Street...

The Little Black Bag, a Short Story by Cyril Kornbluth

This blog already has the weekly feature of Friday's quote of the week.  To this I am adding another, for Wednesdays: reviews of short stories that made an impact on me.  For much of my life I was primarily a short story reader, generally eschewing the longer format of novels (and series of novels) until the last fifteen years or so.  I built up a substantial collection of short stories, primarily in the science fiction genre, and still haven't read most of them.  Well, it's time to "hit the books" and explore this treasure of good fiction!  Today's story is from a popular (back then) mid-twentieth century science fiction writer named Cyril Kornbluth.  Kornbluth sadly lived a short life, plagued and eventually ended at the age of 34 by a heart condition and his refusal to abide by prescribed treatments...he suffered his fatal heart attack on a winter morning in 1958 after rigorously shoveling snow from his walkway and then running fast to the railway station.  He was a collaborator with other sci-fi writers on novels and wrote many short stories that were published in the pulp science fiction magazines of his day.  In 1950 one such tale, The Little Black Bag, came out in Astounding magazine and would make it to that year's list of top short stories...

The Little Black Bag paints the picture of a future society in which humanity is blessed with great advances in technology and still keeps the structures of democracy and economic freedom.  Sounds too good to be true, right?  And of course the answer is a resounding YES!  For the overwhelming majority of people in "this" distant future have regressed in their intellectual capacities and are unknowingly completely dependent on a very small subclass of people with advanced abilities who provide all the needed supertechnology, maintain the structure of society, monitor the mentally-challenged majority...and stay discretely hidden and disguised as menial workers.  A "physician" in this world one day carelessly loses his "little black bag" in a time machine and it makes its way back to "our" time...and into the hands of a much smarter, but ruined and alcoholic doctor.  When he begins to use the instruments contained within the bag on patients, he discovers that they work autonomously and to a precision that he could never possess...in other probably politically incorrect words, they are idiot-proof.  I'll let you, the potential reader of this truly "short" story, read what happens for yourself.  Instead I'd like to further examine its premise and what the author was trying to say about our present world...

I'm living in 2017 and I see it all around me, but for Cyril Kornbluth to notice and report in 1950 on the general decline in standards and levels of education and knowledge among the population as the seeming magic of technological development made communications, transportation, and "creature comforts" much more readily available demonstrated to me this author's ability to forecast the future...albeit in a pretty sarcastic fashion.  The consumer would make use of all the new "stuff" coming out, "stuff" that a smaller group of other folks who had much more extensive and specialized training had developed.  Nowadays what do most people know about how smartphones function other than the settings they can select on them?  I look around me in public and almost always note a substantial portion of the people are dumbly staring at their little gadgets.  I've even been watching sporting events where the camera pans the spectators after an exciting play...only to find many of them also preoccupied with their little miracles of technology instead of what just happened on the field or court.   And what about social media and the Internet...are they making people smarter and more discerning...or the opposite?  I imagine that if my pal Cyril were here today, he'd have a few choice comments to say about that.  Have you ever watched Jesse Watters on Fox walk around out in public and randomly ask people very simple questions about history and general knowledge?  The level of ignorance and apathy among the general population is incredible, regardless whether or not you happen to agree with Watters' conservative politics.  But we also have a smaller number of very engaged, knowledgeable people in our present world who...surprise, surprise...seem to operate "behind the scenes".  Which makes me wonder what our society is going to look like in about a hundred years...or even further down the line.  Will it resemble Cyril Kornbluth's cynical prediction?  I sure hope he's dead wrong (no pun intended)...

The Little Black Bag is just one story of many from the book His Share of Glory: the Complete Short Story Science Fiction of Cyril Kornbluth.  The publishers are NESFA (New England Science Fiction Association) and it came out in 1997.  I found that some of Kornbluth's stories in this book were "hits", but a few were "misses"...and with others, to this day, I still don't know what he was talking about...

Florida Governor Declares State Emergency with Wildfires

For the most part, I have been enjoying the relatively dry, warm spring we've had here in northern Florida...I qualify that remark because I've been suffering from seasonal respiratory allergies as well as a sensitive throat resulting from an earlier viral infection.  But I'm taking on these issues aggressively and feel that recovery is on the advance.  Although the weather is pleasant...especially with regard to the low humidity...there is a down-side to it all: increased probability of wildfires in this area...

Perhaps you've been watching the news lately and saw the pieces about forest fires in Seminole County, just north of Orlando.  In truth there are more than 100 wildfires going on now in Florida, covering around 120,000 acres...prompting our governor, Rick Scott, to declare a state of emergency.   From around Lake Okeechobee northward, the currents fires are spread throughout the state...there is one at Hidden Lake in my Alachua County now consuming about 140 acres and another in northeastern Marion County just to the south taking up 700 acres. The outlook right now for more fires seems ominous...especially seeing how our local 2017 rainfall level so far is about half that of the previous year.  Conditions are dry, little rainfall is in sight, and we may be headed for some rough times ahead.  So far it's enjoyable being outside, but should another fire break out in the vicinity...or even as far as a hundred miles away...and the wind happens to be blowing our way, then the air may turn into something noxious with the smoke and haze.  I'm hoping that won't be the case this year, but we'd better start seeing some more precipitation if we're going to avoid that unpleasant scenario...

Just Finished Reading Ally Condie's Atlantia

From time to time I like to read "young adult" fiction, although I believe that designation is a misnomer...it's more aimed at teen-agers than adults and used to be called "junior" fiction.  I wonder if some twisted form of political correctness is at work here, with some folks apparently obsessed with the names things are called...even when the new form makes little sense. In any event...call it "junior" or "young adult" fiction as you like...I just finished reading one such book: Ally Condie's 2014 dystopian futurist novel Atlantia...

Atlantia is told in the first person by the protagonist, an orphaned teen-age girl named Rio, who lives with her twin sister Bay in the insulated, underwater city of Atlantia...in the distant future following a world-wide catastrophe (most likely nuclear).  For many years humanity's hopes of survival depended on living deep under the sea, with people periodically sent to the surface in order to supply the needed food and materials to sustain it.  Although going to the Above means sacrificing one's longevity due to the contaminated air, those who choose to do so are held in high regard by those below.  Rio wants to leave Atlantia and live on the surface...and has told this to Bay, who strongly objects.   The obvious reason is that the two would be permanently split apart, since the law dictates that, one, those who go above cannot return and, two, a family member has to be left behind in Atlantia...and Bay is the only one left.  But does Rio's devoted sister have a secret reason for Rio not to leave Atlantia...and what happens when the opportunity comes again for people to choose life on the surface?  Well, there's a lot to Atlantia, and I'd be cheating you out of a good story if I told you much more about what happens.  I will say this much: there is a "wild-card" character in Atlantia: Rio's aunt Maire, whom she suspects of having killed her own mother, who was Atlantia's leader.  But Maire has her own explosive secrets that threaten to tear the social fabric of Atlantia apart...and which increasingly center on Rio herself...

This was a very compelling story, and I loved the different characters.  It may seem a little silly for someone like me at 60 to read this kind of literature, but I don't care...I like stuff of this level like Divergence, The Hunger Games, Twilight, Harry Potter, Series of Unfortunate Events, InnerWorld and Coraline (by Neil Gaiman), Time Quintet, Earthsea, and so on.  There is something about this genre that appeals to me...I guess the inner child is always there with us throughout our lives...

NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs to Begin on Wednesday

The 2016-17 National Hockey League regular season ends tonight, but the lineup of the sixteen Stanley Cup championship playoff series teams has already been set.  Once again, the Washington Capitals finished with the league's overall best record...will they once again choke in the playoffs?  The Pittsburgh Penguins, last year's Stanley Cup winner, are back in the playoffs again as are the San Jose Sharks, the team that lost to Pitt in the finals.  Sadly, neither the Tampa Bay Lightning nor the Miami-based Florida Panthers were good enough to make the playoffs this year...it's also unusual that the Detroit Red Wings and Los Angeles Kings missed them, too.  Instead, we have five Canadian teams in this year's playoffs...last year there were none.  But to be perfectly truthful about it all, I'm not all that interested in rooting for any particular team...other than perhaps the Chicago Blackhawks, that is...I just enjoy watching and trying to make sense out of this fast-paced, interesting, and often confusing sport...

Seeing how on weeknights I'm working during the time when the games are going on, I'm going to have to wait for the weekend to be able to see any...although I'm hoping that they'll be showing replays on one of the channels after midnight.   I should get to watch several of the games...after all, these playoffs will go on into June...

This Blog Ten Years Old Today

Today marks the tenth anniversary of this blog of mine, with the number of articles contained within it now totaling 3,161...all of them still accessible.  It's been a long-term exercise for me with this writing discipline...not only to attempt (sometimes unsuccessfully) to get something out there on a daily basis, but also to maintain a sense of decorum and reasonableness with my writing while showing a personal side to it without my personality being the main topic.  Naturally, I've written about subjects I've been interested in (like running, star-gazing, music, soccer, books I've read, etc.) while consistently ignoring those areas that I like to ignore (like gardening, reality television, and most arts and crafts).  Some days I get a little philosophical and others a little political...but I try to keep interpersonal relationships out of the picture when I'm writing.  And if I'm sitting down to write and can only draw a blank, there's always the weather to discuss!

Blogger (run by Google) is the site I've used for this blog of mine, and I laud them for their consistency and simplicity of use over the years.  When I am looking at my blog on my laptop computer, Blogger has an option at the top of the page called "Next Blog" that I can click on and view a random blog from someone else.  Usually the blog is relatively current, but sometimes they show one in which the last entry was years ago.  Which leads me to wonder at the myriad of abandoned blogs...many from well over a decade ago...that are "floating" around in cyberspace, forgotten but still accessible if you happen to know their titles or URLs.  Some of this detached material...not just old blogs but deserted websites in general...contains information that might be useful to someone, but how do you get to it?  Sounds like a job for a new field: cyberarchaelogy, a term which I just coined, although I have to acknowledge that someone else may have already, coincidentally, beaten me to it...

In any event, I'm happy with this blog and plan to keep it going as long as I have the ability and resources to do so.  And, I suppose, as long as Google doesn't ever change their policies that allow me easy use of Blogger without cost.  Hope you enjoy reading it...

Quote of the Week...from James R. Newman

The most painful thing about mathematics is how far away you are from being able to use it after you have learned it.                                              James R. Newman

I found the above quote and decided to use it, although I hadn't heard of James R. Newman before.  He was a mathematician as well as a popularizer of the field, writing a number of books.  What attracted it to me was how strongly I have agreed with its message over the course of my lifetime...well, at least that lifetime after my mathematics education in school passed from arithmetic to geometry, algebra, theorems, and proofs.  Seeing how my life veered in a direction from a career that directly used mathematics...careers like engineering, physics...and of course, teaching mathematics...I've found no occasion whatsoever to employ anything I've learned beyond simple arithmetic...not even basic algebra...and at college I've taken courses in calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, and mathematical statistics.  This has to be the one subject in school for which the grand majority of graduates will find little or no application in life...beyond that basic grammar school arithmetic competency.  Yet I find the subject intriguing and from time to time delve into it...

In a way, mathematics is an area that anyone can do...even one untrained in it.  If you're not trying to get something extraneous from it, such as a passing grade in school or math-related job, then you don't have to worry about impressing others or being as fast or accurate as them.  Ultimately, removing the competition and time pressure angles from studying mathematics can make this field more attractive for life-long learning.  Of course, it also helps to have a good amount of free time at your disposal!  Still, YouTube is loaded with free math courses on just about any level, and the Internet provides many resources that in former eras would have been more difficult and expensive to amass...

I've decided to go "back in time" and approach mathematics as something to embrace instead of fearing...in the process hoping that I will better grasp some of the principles contained within it than when I was "under the gun" in school...

4/2 Sermon on Prodigals, Part 3

Last Sunday at The Family Church here in Gainesville, Pastor Philip Griffin finished his three-part series titled Prodigals, based on Jesus's story in Luke Chapter 15 of the prodigal son.  But as Pastor Philip pointed out, there were two prodigal sons in this tale: the young brother rebelled and ultimately repented and was welcomed back into his father's family...but the older brother, full of his sense of righteousness and entitlement based on the work he had done while remaining behind, ultimately rejected his father and the grace shown to his returning brother.  Pastor Philip listed four aspects of the older brother's attitude that characterized him as a prodigal of self-righteousness and pride: one, he felt that his father owed him for his work and obedience, characterizing his life as slavery.  Two, not only did he insist on independence from his father, but he only wanted to be around people who were like himself.  Three, he believed he was better than others, building his own list of rules through which he could judge them...while ignoring his own pridefulness.  And four, the older brother and the younger brother both needed to repent, the younger from his wrongdoing, and the older from his self-righteousness...only one did, though...

There is a clear analogy between this story of the prodigal sons and our relationship to God.  One cannot "earn" God's rewards through work and "slaving"...they come only as gifts from the heavenly father.  The father in the story celebrated repentance over works, and that...as our pastor pointed out...should be our goal in the church.  Also, I think folks in general like to focus on putting down certain sins they see in others for which they themselves are not guilty...while ignoring their own pride and self-righteousness...

You can watch Pastor Philip's message on The Family Church YouTube video website.  The Family Church holds its Sunday morning services at 9:30 and 11.  The Easter service the Sunday after next will also feature an early service at 7...

Just Finished Reading Janet Evanovich's One For the Money

Janet Evanovich is a mystery writer whose books I have been running across on library and bookstore shelves for many years but until just now never got around to reading any.  She is best-known for her Stephanie Plum series, which numbers twenty-three books so far and, like James Patterson's Women's Murder Club series, contains each book's number in the series within its title.  I decided to start with the first book and just finished reading One For the Money, originally published in 1994...

In One For the Money, Stephanie Plum is introduced as a young Trenton, New Jersey woman who finds herself unemployed and quickly running out of money...her car has just been repossessed.  Her mother, whom she visits for meals from time to time, is hilarious as is Grandma Mazur...the dialogue is classic "Jersey thing".  The name of Stephanie's slimy uncle Vinnie is brought up: he is a bail bondsman and apparently there is an office worker position open.  Against her better instincts, Stephanie gives in to her mother's prodding and goes there, only to find the job already filled.  But while there she discovers that she can make big money fast by bringing in bail dodgers...so with some slimy arm-twisting of her own, she convinces her skeptical uncle to let her try out some cases.  As it turns out, the one case that she becomes obsessed with involves a former one-time lover of hers, Joe Morelli, a policeman who has jumped bail after being charged with the murder of an unarmed man.  And here is where I leave off, just in case you're in the same boat as myself and feel like finally picking up a Janet Evanovich book and reading it...

Janet Evanovich adds an interesting twist to the mystery genre with Stephanie Plum's bounty hunter vocation...contrast this with the private detectives and homicide investigators in other series.  And she starts out her new career in complete ignorance, having to learn the hard way: through her many and often comical mistakes.  Fortunately there is Ranger, another bounty hunter working for Vinnie, who helps her out with various aspects...some of them legally suspect...of the trade.  I liked One For the Money because the characters were realistic and sympathetic and...I have to admit I like this in a book...it was relatively short.  But what I liked the most was when Stephanie would visit her parents and Grandma Mazur for dinner, and all that terrific Jersey conversation would ensue...

Gorsuch Supreme Court Confirmation Enters Final Week

All day yesterday the Senate Judiciary Committee held its final session for the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court.  Each of the committee members gave their speeches pro or con about this nominee, set to replace the late Antonin Scalia as an associate justice. Afterwards, the full committee voted and sent his nomination to the Senate floor for debate and final vote.  I watched much of the proceedings on C-Span2 and gained some insight into the various viewpoints on Gorsuch.  For example, I heard a couple of Democratic senators criticize the federal judge for excessive writings of concurrent opinions in various cases, opinions that in their opinion expressed an ideological purpose in altering the law and its interpretation...Judge Gorsuch was even known on a number of occasions to write concurring opinions to the majority opinions that he himself wrote.  One of these senators, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, contrasted this tendency of Gorsuch to try to broaden rulings to another federal appeals judge, Merrick Garland...nominated by President Obama in 2016 to fill the same seat for which Gorsuch is now being considered.  Garland is a minimalist, in the tradition of former Supreme Court Justice Byron White (for whom Gorsuch clerked), in that he seeks the narrowest application of law to a judgment and is thereby much less likely to make a politically-charged, judicially activist ruling.  But both Gorsuch and Garland are well-known on their courts as consensus builders with other judges...

I think it's a done deal, in spite of the Democrats staging a filibuster against Neil Gorsuch this week on the Senate floor, that this nominee will be confirmed by floor vote on Friday, when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will have the rules changed to be able to end debate and invoke cloture by a simple majority vote.  I have my own concerns about Neil Gorsuch, especially how in some cases he has had a tendency to play around with the definitions of words in order to reach the conclusion he felt most comfortable with.  But he has sat on some 2,700 cases on his 10th Circuit Court of Appeals since 2006: 97% of the decisions there he voted unanimously with the other judges on that court and 99% of them he was on the majority side.   And I don't necessarily believe that you can rate a judge by how many times he rules on the side of the "little guy" versus how often he supports big money and corporations...judges are supposed to apply the law accurately and sometimes the compelling argument weighs on the side of the latter.  Although Neil Gorsuch is regarded as conservative and was nominated by a conservative Republican president, I think the real reason for the Democratic filibuster against him is the way Merrick Garland was summarily rejected out of hand last year by the Republican Senate leadership and not even accorded a hearing, much less a floor debate and vote.  For the Republican senators to express outrage at the Democrats' filibuster attempt is about as hypocritical as it can get.  Yet I don't favor a filibuster, either...getting a supermajority of votes (60) in order to close out debate and advance the Supreme Court confirmation process to a final floor vote has only become a significant factor in the process during the last few years...else why wouldn't the Democrats in 1991 have filibustered Clarence Thomas when he barely ended up confirmed by a vote of 52-48?  No, Neil Gorsuch will be our next Supreme Court justice, for better or for worse.  I'm a bit skeptical of him right now, but we'll just have to wait and see how well (or badly) he does...

Some Sports Talk

I like to watch sports on TV, team sports that is...you can keep your golf, tennis, swimming, running, boxing, UFC, and so on.  No, what I prefer as a spectator are sports like soccer, basketball, baseball, football...and lately, ice hockey.  It just so happens that four of these have a lot going on right now.  In women's college basketball, the Division I championship finale yesterday pitted two SEC schools: Mississippi State, which just came off a huge upset of Connecticut in the semifinals, and South Carolina.  I think that the Bulldogs must have been spent after that win, because South Carolina built up an early lead and stopped Mississippi State from scoring beyond the three-point line...eventually winning the national championship going away.  In the men's NCAA Division I championship game...to begin tonight a little past nine...my remaining favorite, North Carolina...with its incredible rebounding ability...will play Gonzaga, a team that has lost only once all year.  But I'll be at work during this game, regrettably missing out on it...

The playoffs are set to begin in the National Hockey League soon, and I honestly don't have a favorite team right now.   The other night I watched a game between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and, for the first time, felt that I understood the game and was able to follow it...wow, that makes a big difference!  Not that I'm going to be a hockey fanatic any time soon, but from time to time during the Stanley Cup playoffs I'm certain to watch some televised games...

There is one sport I haven't mentioned because it has a combination team/individual duality to it: bicycle racing.  This July the Tour de France will take place, and I have a tendency to stay glued to the television watching the excitement...as well as the beautiful, often breathtaking scenery as the competitors pedal their way through towns, the country, and steep mountain roads...

Major League Baseball began its 2017 regular season this past weekend...and I'm already bored.  This despite one of "my" teams, Tampa Bay, taking it to the Yankees 7-3.  I wrote earlier that I preferred to watch team sports, but maybe baseball...already very slow-moving without the even more complicating factor of instant replay review...may turn out to be a sport I tend to avoid.  Then again, sometimes I enjoy sitting back and watching a game...especially when there isn't anything else on the boob tube...

In soccer, I'm following the English Premier League, Mexico's Liga MX, Germany's Bundesliga, and the North American top pro league, Major League Soccer. Of these four, I clearly prefer English league soccer...the combination of its high standard of play with league parity makes their matches a joy to watch.  Contrast this with MLS, where the players seem to often have difficulty connecting on simple passes.  Still, come summertime MLS will be the only league left in season...

Just Finished Reading Endymion by Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons is beginning to become one of my favorite writers.  I read his standalone novel Drood, which is a historical drama featuring Charles Dickens, and have now just finished the third book in his four-part science fiction Hyperion Cantos series, titled Endymion.  This series was published back in the 1990s...it pains me a little to say "back in" to refer to that decade, which part of me still somehow sees as lying in the future (I was born in 1956).  But I digress...

It wasn't always so, but in recent years if one wants to be seen as a serious, competent science fiction writer, he or she had better display a pretty serious competency in science and technology...and in detail.  Alas, the days of Ray Bradbury and others successfully bluffing their way through stories pretending knowledge that they did not have are over, but at least with Dan Simmons, there is no cause for concern: this guy, if he is bluffing about his scientific prowess, then he sure as heck fooled me.  As a matter of fact, there has been so much futuristic science and technology info injected into this series...especially the first two books...that at times I felt like screaming at the author "OK, you win...now can we please just go forward with the story?"...but then again, these are the times we live in: had Simmons done as I wished, the veteran sci-fi readers out there probably would have crucified him for it.  In any case, book number three, titled Endymion, finally got down to a reasonable narrative with a stable cast of characters I could follow...I guess by that time Simmons felt he had already proven what a hotshot scientific dude he was...

As is the case with other series, Dan Simmons has created his own future universe with humanity branching off into two groups: the Ousters...the first wave to settle space and which adapted themselves to their new homes, and the Hegemonists...people who transplanted their own cultures to different worlds and terraformed them to their own tastes.  These two groups were at war with one another, and the Hegemonists were heavily dependent on highly advanced artificial intelligence with its own consciousness...an idea later adopted in the Matrix movie series...which provided them with "farcasters": portals through which people could instantaneously travel from one world to another.  The first two books dealt with the fate of the Hegemonists, the Technocore...as that artificial intelligence was collectively called...and those farcasters.  Endymion begins nearly three hundred years after the end of the previous book...but once again we're back on the "outback" planet of Hyperion, featured in books one and two, but with a new force of humanity to reckon with: the Pax...

The problem with describing the setting and situation of the third book of a series that is cumulative in nature...i.e. everything depends directly on what happened in the preceding two volumes...is that just about any effort I make in that regard is bound to spoil the stories revealed in those early books...so I'll refrain from doing so.  After all, I think this is a very good, modern science fiction series and would recommend anyone interested in this genre to invest some time reading it.  I was especially gratified by the compelling, diverse, and memorable characters...from the pilgrims to Hyperion to the Hegemony CEO to the Keats cybrids to Endymion's Raul, Aenea, Bettik, and Father de Soya.  Brilliant character development, but that's what I've grown to expect from great writers...as a matter of fact, it's not their expertise within whatever genre they are writing in but how they make the people in them seem real and invite an empathetic response from the reader that gives them that greatness.  Besides the characters and the plot in Hyperion Cantos, there is also a good amount of deep philosophical discussion going on...as well as some pretty intense poetry!  I guess by all this you can see that Dan Simmons has won me over...that's good, because he's written quite a few other books by now for me to read.  But for the time being, I'm starting on the final book of this series, titled Rise of Endymion...

My March 2017 Running Report

In March I went through different stages with my running.  At the beginning I was recovering from the eventful Five Points of Life half-marathon I ran on February 26; feeling some aching in my left knee, I lightened up and took a couple of days off from the activity.  Then I ran the 10K (6.2 miles) Run for Haven race on Saturday afternoon, March 11, in (and west of ) the town of Tioga...I pushed myself to maintain a good pace with that run and was satisfied with the result.  Then, as March wound down I considered running a 10K trail race in Paynes Prairie but decided to bow out due to upper respiratory seasonal allergy issues...I'm now aggressively working to alleviate those symptoms.  Then, a few days ago that knee ache began ever-so-slightly...but not wanting to take any chances, I rested from running a couple more days...

For the month, I ran a total of 98 miles, that 6.2 Run for Haven distance being my longest single run.  I ran on 27 of March's 31 days, filling in the rest days with some bicycling.  I'm beginning to wonder whether I'm wearing the right type of running shoes and that perhaps a lighter pair might be more suitable.  In April, the main race I see ahead of me is the Run the Good Race 10K/5K run/walk here in Gainesville, proceeds from which are to benefit Iraqi and Syrian refugees through World Help.  A good cause to support...and the only 10K event in April, at least in my home county of Alachua.  There are plenty of 5K races available this month as well, but after that 10K I plan to enter, I may just wait until May for the next one and instead focus on training smartly...

Quote of the Week...from Stephen King

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.      ---Stephen King.

I've read more Stephen King books over the years that those of any other author...he's by far my favorite writer of this era.  One of his books that impressed me...it was one of his few nonfiction works...was On Writing, a semi-autobiographical book that went into what it takes to write successfully.  King was frank: you have to have the knack for it...like many other fields, innate talent does play an important role.  But one can have all the talent in the world for any area, and if they don't arduously apply it by working hard to develop that talent, then they're not going to go anywhere with it.  With writing, King stresses spending about an equal amount of time...at least four hours a day each...between reading others' works and actually engaging in writing.  And writing talent won't develop on its own...one has to write, write, write...and then write some more...

Seeing that I work full-time at my job and can't realistically see myself putting in eight daily hours of reading and writing...at least not until retirement day eventually comes around...I'm going to need to fudge a bit on Stephen King's minimum standard for developing whatever writing talent I have.  Although it may seem to a reader of this blog that I read a lot...and I do compared to most folks...it's still less than I would like.  And my writing?  Other than this blog, the articles for which I usually whip up in 30-40 minutes while sipping my iced coffee at Starbucks (where I'm at now) or McDonald's, I haven't been writing...so between the two King-recommended regimens of reading and writing, my great, glaring need is to write more.  And to begin to write fiction.  Fortunately for me, I've been at work on this blog coming up on ten years in about a week, and I've consciously, deliberately made it available worldwide...and in the past four years have linked it to Facebook so that people who know me could read it, too.  So I shouldn't feel too self-conscious about publishing my first fictional stories.  Except that, right now, I do.  Well, the only remedy I see for that is to shift into turbo with my writing...