Looking with Concern at Swelling UF Student Presence in Gainesville

I live in far northern Gainesville, and my workplace is on the far southern side.  I drive there usually on W 34th or 43rd Streets, but occasionally I'll stop by the Dunkin' Donuts store nearby my home and continue along W 13th Street (US 441)...which runs by the University of Florida main campus...to work.  During the past few months the traffic going this way has been relatively light, but as I approached the University a couple of days ago I realized that the students are coming back in droves...just as they are at colleges across the country.  I've been watching the news of late and listening to sports talk radio as well.  Here are some of the things I've taken from them:

--Many students are careful about masks and distancing but there are also many who completely disregard the coronavirus pandemic and its risks, not only to themselves but to those they come in contact with once infected...I'm hearing report after report of off-campus parties that are causing outbreaks among the student population.  Some colleges are either delaying their classes or deciding to hold the entire semester online.  At UF here in Gainesville it's going to be interesting as many are coming up from COVID hotspot South Florida...in-person classes are set to begin on August 31...

--The University of North Carolina is one of the institutions cancelling in-person classes and going back to an online format, yet they are still going to field a football team this season.  Other schools, though, are still planning to go ahead with regular classes but have cancelled their fall sports...doesn't seem to be a coherent policy here: some colleges even plan to allow thousands of live spectators at their home football games.  The Gators are still plowing full steam ahead with football...seems to me the athletes are probably better off in a more controlled environment playing the sport than they would be mixing more with the general student population.  But it all sounds like a big mess to me...

--I'm suspecting that Alachua County where I live will begin to see an upsurge in the COVID-19 infection rate as the University of Florida campus swells with its students...after all, they won't be functioning within any kind of bubble there: a coronavirus outbreak there means an outbreak for the community at large...

Although I have rarely visited the University of Florida campus during the years after I studied there and graduated, the fact that this damnable disease has forced it off-limits for me has caused me to reflect on how I, in the future after it has been contained, can use this nearby and valuable learning resource.  For one, I'd like to be able to use their library system and investigate how I could check out books from it.  As a UF alumnus I haven't really taken advantage of my status...joining their alumni group may be a good idea as well.  In the meantime I'm looking with some concern at the swelling Gainesville population this month with students flooding back in...some from COVID hotspot areas...and possible future repercussions for my community in light of other college towns' experiences...

Weekly Short Stories: 1962 Science Fiction, Part 2

Allegory is the common thread of these four 1962 science fiction stories from the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 24 (1962).  But that's commonly the case with this genre, which offers a politically safer forum to discuss pressing and sensitive social issues that would invite blowback and retaliation were the author's ideas expressed more directly and literally.  Here are my reactions to them...

HANG HEAD, VANDAL! by Mark Clifton
A procedure has been developed to derived unlimited energy through fission with ordinary elements...but since there's no way of stopping the process once started then Earth is off-limits to apply the process.  But with Mars...since it's presumed to already be a dead, uninhabited world far away from us...who would miss its demise in the name of progress? The key word here is presumed.  An allegorical story, written years before Earth Day and the advent of the environmental movement, about the unintended consequences of our sometimes blind march ahead with technology and "progress"...

THE WEATHER MAN by Theodore Thomas
The most intriguing story of the four to me, this tale creates the future scenario of Earth's weather being micromanaged...by specially constructed spaceships that navigate the sun's surface and selectively direct its energy toward Earth to provide the wanted effects.  Because of this ability, worldwide political power has been concentrated in the weather control bureaucracy with three divisions that mimic our own present society's institutions: the political Weather Congress, the scientific Weather Advisors, and the implementing Weather Bureau.  An ambitious politician high up in the Congress comes up with what seems an impossible project, and the Advisors and Bureau are challenged to see it through...

EARTHLINGS GO HOME! by Mack Reynolds
An ostensibly tongue-in-cheek story from the viewpoint of a future jaded Earthling who, bored with what his home planet can provide in the area of stimulation and interest, travels to Mars to live it up.  The then-notion of the "ugly American" going abroad with an attitude of entitlement is treated allegorically here, with the native Martians having to adapt to the Earth people's presence...but not liking it one bit...

THE STREETS OF ASHKELON by Harry Harrison
An atheist trader on a world heretofore untainted by humanity has befriended the native intelligent amphibian life and is gradually imparting a sense of the universe to them when a Christian missionary is forced upon him and his world, creating a direct conflict as to the direction of those native beings. As with time travel stories, I am weary (and wary) of science fiction tales that stereotype Christians the way this one does...I think the author, clearly on the side of the atheist and presenting the religious debate in overly simplistic terms, could have easily used greater subtlety to get his point across and his story probably would have had a stronger effect on the reader.  My least favorite of today's four...

Next week I conclude my look back at science fiction short stories from 1962...

Primary Election Day Today in Florida

Today is primary election day for the state of Florida if you're planning on on-site, in-person precinct voting...Melissa and I mailed in our ballots several days ago and, thanks to Alachua County's online ballot-tracking feature, we are confident that the elections office received them and everything is in proper order to process them tonight in the count.  I've noticed that my county provides Business Reply postpaid ballots for voters while others...neighboring Gilchrist County, for example...don't and have the voters put a stamp on their ballots.  And I wonder whether this simple convenience (or lack) will influence relative voter turnout, we'll see.  If you applied for and received an absentee ballot, I recommend that you drop it off at the local elections office (in Gainesville it's at 515 North Main Street) instead of using the mail if you still want to vote that way...the one here will be open for drop-off until 7 pm.  If you have your absentee ballot but haven't sent it yet and want to instead vote in person, take it to your local precinct polling place and surrender it for a new one and vote there...or simply show up if you never applied for a mail-in ballot.  This election is just a primary yet will essentially decide who will be our Alachua County sheriff along with two school board seats and a state representative race.  And since the U.S. House of Representatives District 3 seat always goes Republican due to the demographics of our area, whoever wins that party's crowded and increasingly mud-slinging contest will almost surely be the next representative here.  No president, governor, state cabinet or United States senatorial races are on the ballot so it's not as "sexy" as the one we're facing on November 3rd...even then, Florida isn't holding gubernatorial or U.S. Senate races in 2020.  Since I applied for absentee ballots for the upcoming general election I'm probably going to continue to vote by mail during this pandemic...

I'm hearing all this hullabaloo about the postal service being attacked by Trump as if it's something new...not only has he been railing against my employer for years but the Republican Party has been trying to privatize it for decades.  They pushed through an onerous bill that President Bush signed into law in 2006 compelling the USPS to prefund all of its employees' retirement for the next 75 YEARS..a deliberately backbreaking measure that no American business had ever been forced to operate under.  Yet just three years later we had a Democratic president, Senate, and House and for the two years they controlled the federal government from 2009 through 2010 they did NOTHING to help us out.  And now the same people are clamoring about the how the good old post office is under attack...but I think the main reason they're concerned is because they see it as a threat to the plan for universal mail-in voting that they are promoting, something that is currently being practiced in only nine states and which in all likelihood will not expand nationwide this year, pandemic notwithstanding.  I have my own opinions about the subject of universal voting and voting in general that I plan to share in a future article...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #45-41

And here we've arrived once again at Monday, meaning it's time for me to list the next five higher-ranked songs on my list of 500 all-time favorites.  One's relatively new...if you count seventeen year-old songs...and the others are buried deeply in the past.  Let me excavate them and bring them to your attention...

45 FATHER AND SON...Cat Stevens
From 1970, I didn't hear this poignant song by Stevens until '72 when it was played, of all places, during my eleventh grade English class...I've loved it ever since.  In it, the singer alternates the verses between a father and his son, deep-voiced for the former and higher for the latter.  Dad is full of time-tested, wise advice emphasizing patience while his restless son cries out for his individuality and freedom to determine his own destiny...an eternal generational struggle that as a teenager and young man I only understood too well for myself.  It's definitely a major tearjerker of a song...

44 CALCULATION (THEME)...Metric
There is a clear, literal interpretation to the cryptic lyrics in this unique, singular song by the Canadian band that I like to refer to as the "Blondie of our century"...I'll leave you to figure it out for yourself should you decide to give it a listen: I'll just say that this may be the ultimate science fiction pop song.  Instead what appealed to me so much in this 2003 track from the band's Old World Underground album that I first heard off the Internet six years later is the sweet singing of Emily Haines and the generally mystical mood of the song.  And the ending lines are pretty awesome, some of the best parting shots in a piece I've ever heard...

43 WHAT'S GOING ON...Marvin Gaye
From Marvin Gaye's groundbreaking 1971 What's Going On album with its themes of social consciousness, racial justice, the environment and opposition to the Vietnam War is the title track, released as a single into a monster hit during the springtime that year...I was fourteen at the time, finishing up a dismal ninth grade school year.  It's not just Marvin's message but also the brilliant backing vocals and instrumentation that make this one of my favorites...I also loved his Mercy Mercy Me and Inner City Blues from the same album, a masterpiece for the ages: "Right on, brother, right on"...

42 SCARBOROUGH FAIR...Simon and Garfunkel
One of the most incredibly beautiful harmonic pieces ever released, Scarborough Fair...referring to a locality in England...is a dreamy collage of lyrical images with a renaissance fair sensibility to it. It was originally an English folk song with Simon and Garfunkel recording it for their 1966 Parsely, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme album (the title a part of the lyrics) but became more known as a singles release in '68 to accompany the soundtrack for the move The Graduate (which we saw as a family that year at a local drive-in).  There's an extended version of this song: normally I'd recommend it but I think the single does quite well...

41 HUMMINGBIRD...Seals and Crofts
From the duo's debut Summer Breeze album, Hummingbird was a minor early 1973 hit, but to me it was by far my favorite song of the year...I thought of it for quite some time as my all-time favorite song.  I don't exactly know what Seals and Crofts meant by the lyrics, but I always viewed it as an inspiring exhortation to never give up on your dreams (the "hummingbird") in the face of adversity...I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for these two rather quirky, offbeat musicians and this sweet, encouraging song that has an epic feel to it...still think it's fantastic...

Next week: #40-36...

Enjoyed Watching Horse Races with No Prior Knowledge of Entrants

Yesterday afternoon I was surfing the different channels for live sports and came across one showing a race from the Saratoga Race Course in upstate New York...the race was the Saratoga Derby Invitational Stakes, for what that was worth.  All I know is that when I tuned in the horses were just being loaded up for the race's start and soon thereafter it was on...I didn't know anything about the horses or their odds other than what the screen was showing as they took off.  I quickly saw that the three favorites in this race, #2,4, and 6, had similar odds and kept my eye out for them.  The race was very close and exciting, and it ended with a photo finish...couldn't have wished for a more exciting couple of minutes watching televised sports.  Yet I knew nothing beforehand about the horses entered, nor had I even been aware of that particular race until I happened to click on it happenstance.  Today I watched a couple more races at Saratoga...FoxSports1 was covering their race day...and although I had to wait a little longer for the races to start I once again was entertained with highly interesting, gripping experiences.  This is a stark contrast to how, during the Triple Crown races like the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont, they'll go on for hours on end with boring background stories about the horses, trainers, owners and the respective tracks...just give me the race, please: I've tried to get enthusiastic about the pre-race hype but it doesn't work for me...

As for Saratoga, they have a no-spectator policy in place because of the coronavirus pandemic, and this past June's Belmont Stakes, also in New York state, was held without live fans on hand.  But the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs, postponed from May until September 5th, is at this writing going to take place before live spectators...I wonder how that's going to play out.  As for my view of the sport in general, I've known people who are crazy about horses and some who clearly have a weakness for gambling...sorry, but I've never been partial to either: I think the last time I gambled on sports was in a football pool in 1973 during high school.  No, I just like to watch races during the couple of minutes they take out of my day and then go on to other things...others can keep their money and horse lore...

Constellation of the Month: Sagittarius (the Archer)

Sagittarius, representing an archer (one of two constellations depicting half-horse, half-man centaurs), is prominent in the southern sky during the month of August in the evening. Although there are no first magnitude stars in it, there are plenty of second and third magnitude...but its main feature is that the Milky Way runs strong through it and there are many Messier objects...mainly nebula and star clusters...interspersed throughout.  I picked it as my constellation of the month over a couple of others because of the striking presence of the planets Jupiter and Saturn in its northeastern corner right now.  By the way, three of the names of Sagittarius's more prominent stars, Kaus Borealis, Kaus Media and Kaus Australis, are derived from two different languages...Arabic and Latin: "kaus" is "bow" and "borealis", "media" and "australis" translate to northern, middle and southern, respectively.  Sagittarius is the last of the brighter zodiac constellations that march across the sky...at least for a few months: its followers...Capricornus, Aquarius, and Pisces...are pretty faint as the autumn evening sky has few bright stars of note.  The above picture I drew just shows the brighter stars along with Jupiter, Saturn and the positions of some of the Messier objects...Sagittarius contains many more stars visible to the naked eye and encompasses a much wider area in the celestial sky than what I've shown...

Quote of the Week...from Thurgood Marshall

Each of you, as an individual, must pick your own goals.  Listen to others, but do not become a blind follower.                                                         ---Thurgood Marshall

I don't know where the above quote came from, but it sounds like a school's commencement speech, doesn't it?  Thurgood Marshall, a champion for civil rights in the twentieth century, is best known for his tenure as a U.S. Supreme Court justice from 1967 to 1991 as well as the attorney successfully arguing for the plaintiff in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case that the same court ruled to outlaw segregation and overturn the earlier 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson "separate but equal" ruling.  But before that 1954 case Marshall repeatedly risked life and limb in the segregated Jim Crow south defending blacks against unjust charges, having to contend with lynchings, white-instigated race riots, police mistreatment of prisoners, and a general atmosphere of hostility toward his presence there as a black northern lawyer...of course he had to abide by the discriminatory segregation rules as he went about his business there as well.  I'm learning all this as I am currently reading Gilbert King's excellent historical account of a 1949 central Florida case he was involved in, titled The Devil in the Grove...very, very disturbing.  As for Marshall's quote, I picked it because it is so universal in application.  I'm afraid that more and more people these days are wasting their God-given ability to think for themselves and instead place all their beliefs in the hands of media gurus, celebrities, and politicians who seem to have a queer hold on them.  Also, in deciding how to behave during this pandemic I'm afraid that too many of us are like animals in a herd, knowing the right, publicly responsible thing to do but holding off on doing it for fear of rejection by the rest of the "herd" we interact with...in particular the alpha dog leaders who often espouse questionable tenets.  For me, no longer concerned about herds or alpha dogs, Marshall's quote had a deeper meaning to me.  I will be turning 64 in less than two months, and when it comes around to forming goals...especially those requiring a substantial investment of my time...this more advanced age may imply to some that my doors are closed in some areas.  But I'm not a blind follower of other peoples' dictates or views and instead hold to the notion that no matter where I am in this journey called life, I have the present moment to make my choices in...what the future holds for anyone is always going to be a mystery...

Biden's Pick of Kamala Harris as Running Mate

After months of speculation, presumed Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden has selected California senator and former presidential candidate Kamala Harris to be his vice-presidential running mate.  The choice wasn't unexpected; Harris was generally considered the frontrunner.  I wasn't too thrilled over the way she ambushed Biden in the first debate, but it's clear to me that when her campaign began to stall not very long thereafter she realized her mistake and was one of the first candidates to withdraw from the race.  Since his campaign's dramatic recovery in March she has been vocal in her support of Biden and because...unlike our current president...he has a forgiving, live-and-let-live gracious aspect to his personality, he buried their "spat from the past".  It brought to my mind the bitterly-fought 1980 Republican primary campaign between Ronald Reagan and George (H.W.) Bush.  Reagan was the clear odds-on favorite, but Bush came on strong early and openly challenged him, calling him an advocate of "voodoo economics".  I was living near the University of Florida campus at the time and, just before the Florida Primary that year, walked a couple of blocks over to Norman Hall to hear Bush's son Neil give a speech for his father in which he derided Reagan's opinions.  Yet in the convention later that year Reagan picked Bush for his VP and the rest is history...

The Republican Party and the Russian government supporting Trump had plenty of time to conduct extensive opposition research on whomever Biden would ultimately pick as running mate.  Kamala Harris would not have been my first choice as I preferred Georgia's Stacey Abrams or Florida's Val Demings...and I'm glad he didn't pick Susan Rice who, while very knowledgeable and intellectual, I feared might seem a little too distant to a lot of Americans.  But had Biden picked Abrams or Demings or Rice or one of the other leading contenders, you can rest assured that, like yesterday and today's immediate attacks against Harris, they would also have their supposed faults quickly exposed.  For this reason and others expect Biden to drop in the public opinion polls, tightening the race...that's no reflection on Harris but rather that Biden, whether you personally like him or not, was already going to be the generally more liked figure on the ticket regardless of his pick.  Also, expect people to criticize Harris for being aggressive and ruthless...just as Hillary Clinton was pilloried for her assertiveness and articulation in 2016.  To me that's sexism since male candidates generally get lauded for exhibiting the same traits...let's see, Trump's already wasted no time in calling Harris "nasty".  Should be interesting to see how the campaign progresses...

Weekly Short Stories: 1962 Science Fiction, Part 1

When the retrospective anthology I'm referring to here with my review of science fiction short stories from 1962 was first published in January 1992, co-editor Isaac Asimov was already seriously ill with kidney failure...he would die from it three months later.  So only Martin Greenberg is present in this volume...along with the final one covering 1963...with his commentary alone preceding each entry...so sad.  As for my own life in 1962, I was five going on six...which meant that I began the first grade in September of that year at Boulevard Heights Elementary School in West Hollywood, Florida.  Only a month later they marched us into the inner hallway and had the class line up and kneel down against the wall, our hands tucked over our lowered heads: it was a civil defense drill during the scary Cuban Missile Crisis...but I was unaware of this at the time and just thought of it as a weird fire drill...

THE INSANE ONES by J.G. Ballard
It's a crazy future scenario here with psychiatry as a profession banned world-wide to accommodate a sweeping political movement to remove insanity as a possible criminal defense.  One psychiatrist, recently released from his own three-year imprisonment for such an illegal practice, finds himself pressured to treat an obviously disturbed young man who is determined to commit a dangerously violent act.  This story puts forth the suggestion that what is ultimately a sane or insane act is largely determined by the context in which it takes place...sometimes it's the surrounding society that has lost its sensibilities...

CHRISTMAS TREASON by James White
A network of psychically-connected, precocious little children across the world are concerned about whether Santa Claus will be able to deliver his toys this season...they project themselves out in a search for his headquarters, settling on what turns out to be a nuclear missile installation.  High jinks abound as military guards keep encountering little kids in pajamas...a funny, seasonal tale with a hopeful ending...

SEVEN-DAY TERROR by R.A. Lafferty
Another tale about precocious children, as a little boy in a small town has built a "disappearer" out of spare parts he's found lying around and tries out his invention on the neighborhood...and its occupants...with disastrous results.  His big sister knows what's going on and offers her solution to the problem.  The final sentence thoroughly cracked me up in this short, short story...

KINGS WHO DIE by Poul Anderson
This is a story examining the possibilities of the human body becoming fused with high technology with a space war between the two Earthly superpowers providing the setting.  Here are warriors with bombs surgically planted in their bodies while the other side has discovered that the human mind can be fused with computers to provide a very effective operating system.  Anderson showed quite a bit of prescience here while at the same time writing a Cold War story with the antagonists extending their respective opposing ideologies far into the future...in his scenario the war on ground level is still "cold" while what was proxy warfare in 1962 among smaller nations on Earth has now been transformed into space battles.  I wonder if that's where we're heading with our respective "space forces"...

THE MAN WHO MADE FRIENDS WITH ELECTRICITY by Fritz Leiber
A man deliberately moves to a home with a noisy, crackling high-tension electrical tower nearby.  He claims to be able to hear the electricity speaking to him, and it can apparently understand his words as well.  And, it seems, the network of electricity that now spans the globe has come to its own conclusions regarding the way things should be.  A forerunner of the genre of science fiction that would give us movie series like Matrix and Terminator...

Next I continue my look back at science fiction short stories from the year 1962 as they appeared in Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 24 (1962)...

Just Finished Reading The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis

Lindsey Davis wrote a lengthy series of detective mystery novels...twenty in all...from 1989 to 2010.  What makes them special is the time and setting: imperial Rome during the reign of Emperor Vespasian and the detective, officially called an "informer", is an ex-soldier named Marcus Didius Falco.  In the first book, titled The Silver Pigs and which I just finished reading, Falco lives in a dingy, cramped apartment high in a Rome complex, harassed for rent by his crooked landlord's goons and almost as harassed by his overbearing mother living nearby, who periodically invades his apartment to drive out any of Falco's women guests she finds staying there.  He encounters a young woman who eventually leads him into a case of corruption, theft and smuggling of valuable metals (the "silver pigs"), and political assassination.  Along the way Falco goes back to his former, bitterly remembered battleground of Britain to investigate the case's trail and come up with suspects.  An intriguing romance forms as well, and the dialog is both cheeky and funny...the author has basically taken characters interacting like pulp fiction characters and placed them in an ancient, exotic culture with its own rules and customs...including, sadly, slavery as well as rigid social class distinctions.  She did an excellent job developing the characters, and after getting through story's climax and ending I'm looking forward to tackling the next book in her series.  Right now, though, I have two other reading projects ahead of me: John Steinbeck's East of Eden and Gilbert King's The Devil in the Grove...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #50-46

Now I begin my final top 50 all-time favorite songs from my original list of 500.  Four of the five go way back into the past...and the other reminded me of it.  They're all superb in their own ways...you should give them each a listen...

50 TIME IN A BOTTLE...Jim Croce
In early 1974 this single by Jim Croce, who had died the previous summer in an airplane crash, was popular on the radio...I always liked it a lot and found it a good meditative song.  I also remember at the time...just a seventeen-year old high school senior...feeling that I was old and that so much of life had passed me by.  There's an old song by Bob Dylan with the words "but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now".  He got that right, and Croce I believe had the makings of a long, Dylanesque career himself had his own life not been so tragically cut short...

49 TIMEBOMB...Beck
Timebomb was a 2007 alternative rock singles release by this multiple-Grammy winning Los Angeles artist, not a part of his original Modern Guilt album (which I also recommend) also released that year.  It has a bubble-gum sing-song nature to it that Beck somehow makes work...and it brings a strange association to my mind: back in 1969 during the last half of my seventh grade experience at Nova High in Davie, Florida we had a bomb scare that lasted several hours, with students forced out into the surrounding field for hours without any relief under the hot, beating sun.  I don't think they ever found a bomb, but the experience just standing out there like that with no end in sight was unsettling (and memorable) enough...

48 EAST OF GINGER TREES...Seals and Crofts
A very beautiful, mystical track from the pop duo's famous 1972 Summer Breeze debut album, it evokes some pretty exotic and vivid imagery...and the background instrumentation is fantastic with its oriental overtones.  Because I liked their early '73 single Hummingbird so much I later bought the album, otherwise I might never have heard this wonderful piece that should be near the top of anyone's listening list.  Seals and Crofts made a string of singles hits for the next few years...I think my high school graduating class's theme song was their We May Never Pass This Way Again...

47 UP THE LADDER TO THE ROOF...the Supremes
Although Diana Ross had left the group by early 1970 when this song came out, the lead vocal sounds like her...ironically, although I thought (and still think) that she was/is great, Up the Ladder to the Roof is my favorite Supremes song. It was Jean Terrell, brought on to replace Ross, who sang lead on this optimistic, wistful song that was popular and a source of soothing during a turbulent period in my early teen-age years.  In 1983 I thought that Prince had ripped off the chorus melody to it with his Little Red Corvette...I seem, however, to be the only one who felt that way...

46 EYES OF A CHILD/FLOATING...the Moody Blues
From the Moody Blues' 1969 concept album To Our Children's Children's Children is this three-part piece, the John Lodge-composed and sung Eyes of a Child sandwiching the core song Floating, another Ray Thomas composition.  It's Floating that I like a lot here, but to get the full impact of it all I recommend you listening to it all together.  The first part of Eyes of Child sounds a bit like the band's hit Nights in White Satin while its closing part reminds me of their Just a Singer in a Rock n' Roll Band.  Floating is a tribute a child's vivid, powerful imagination...very sweet yet with a peculiar psychedelic bent to it...

Next week: #45-41...

Voted Today (Mail-In) in Florida's Primary Election

In Florida the 2020 primary election (not the presidential primary, which we had back in March) will be held August 18th with early voting going on now.  Melissa and I applied for mail-in ballots, which we just filled out and will put in the mail tomorrow.  Florida holds its governor and state cabinet elections in off-years, and neither U.S. Senate seat is up for election in 2020. The only race on my ballot with national ramifications, Florida's 3rd Congressional District with incumbent Ted Yoho retiring after four terms, is up for grabs...at least for Republicans, that is, since although Gainesville is primarily Democratic the surrounding population for this district is overwhelmingly Republican.  So whoever wins the Republican primary race this month is almost certain to win in November: as our president recently said on a different topic, "It is what it is".  There was one race for state representative I got to vote on, and the rest were local in scope: two county commission seats, two school board seats, property appraiser, party leadership committee posts, and sheriff.  The sheriff's race bothered me since essentially only registered Democrats will decide who our next sheriff will be after Republican and Independent voters were shut out by a loophole in the election law because somebody with virtually no chance of victory earlier filed as a write-in candidate...that just doesn't seem right to me.  I still haven't decided whether to try and vote in person for the general election or not, but I'm keeping my mail-in balloting options open.  If you're in Florida and are registered to vote, this particular primary election may or may not be important for you...but I'm pretty sure that the general election in November will be...

Just Finished Reading The Second Sleep by Robert Harris

The Second Sleep, at first glance a novel set in the Dark Ages more than five hundred years ago, turns out instead to be eight hundred years into the future when our science and technology-based society has been abandoned for a church-run theocracy reminiscent of that earlier era.  A young priest serving the powerful bishop based in Exeter, England is assigned to look into the death of the priest stationed in a relatively isolated village in the country's southwestern section.  After arriving for what he thought would be a very brief stay, he finds himself first mysteriously delayed from returning with a suspicious treefall blocking his road and then discovering that the deceased priest had been investigating the fall of our contemporary hi-tech civilization following the calamity that occurred in our year 2025.  He gets introduced to different characters, each with their own distinct personalities and pasts...and the story intertwines his developing relationships with them with the clues leading to the climactic discovery at the end.  And the ending...well, in a word, I can only say that it's rude.  Two words? Very rude...

The term "second sleep" refers to the second part of the night, with that latter half of the sleep cycle supposedly different in nature than the first.  Allegorically, it refers here to the sleep that civilization is going through after the disaster that the author forecast just six years from this book's publication in 2019.  It was chilling that one component of the catastrophe that ripped apart society was a worldwide plague...now that's too close for comfort.  Civil unrest and the unraveling of our economy...including the endangerment of our food supply...are also covered here: Robert Harris seemed to figure it all out just months before the proverbial pile hit the fan: incredible.  The Second Sleep isn't a long novel by any stretch and reads well.  I've read a couple of science fiction short stories with theocratic themes like this, set either on a future Earth or another planet.  It's not my favorite subject, but you may think otherwise...

Quote of the Week...from Albert Einstein

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?   
                                                                 ---Albert Einstein

Not being a research scientist myself, this is one of those articles in which my relative ignorance of the field is bound to shine through...so please bear with me.  But in today's world of massive public denial of science in the contexts of the ongoing pandemic, climate change, pop medicine...to mention just three areas...I feel it's important to note that the idea of "pure" science out there somewhere with only the motive of laying out the "truth" for us is not in itself "purely true".   Anyone with an eye on history knows of the Manhattan Project during World War II in which leading physicists and other physical scientists collaborated with engineers and the military to develop the fist workable atomic bomb...in other words, highly focused, agenda-driven research.  Although I still have in my mind the picture of the altruistic scientist driven only by his or her desire to learn the deep truths about the reality we live in, I have over the years learned that this is mostly a fantasy while the overwhelming number of scientists engaged in research are doing so at the behest of agenda-driven organizations, be they the military, businesses, non-profits...each group with its own goals that it wants the scientists working for it to advance. Even at a public university, scientists need to go outside their offices and laboratories and continually beseech monied interests to fund their research projects...this naturally in turn directs exactly what will be their research projects and how far their research will go.  The problem with all this is that although research for specific areas that have direct military, business or social applications can be very useful and important, it still is determined not by science itself but rather by the society's institutions.  So when people hear in the news that scientists support this or that take on an issue, those who would disagree with their conclusions often question the motives of those scientists...and sometimes this complaint, in my opinion, is legitimate.  The scientific method and pure science research are ideals that should be promoted...but the ones with the money to sustain that research have their own ideas about what kind of research it should be.  Back to Einstein's quote, having a definite, clear result in mind when doing research in itself implies that the researcher has already reached a conclusion before even beginning.  This may help to solve specific problems and publicly promote agendas but I don't see it going far to expand our fundamental understanding of the universe.  But I get it: research costs money, and if I had money why should I give it to somebody who plans to study an area that doesn't coincide with my own interests?  My only response to this question is that our government should be more generous with its own research funding with the grants not necessarily directed at areas with its own interests in mind...

Having Sports to Watch Again a Welcome Relief

For the couch potato TV sports junkie that I am, even though the coronavirus pandemic is showing no signs of letting up around me I am at least mollified by the now overwhelming preponderance of major professional sports on television.  Live basketball, baseball, hockey and soccer games are now readily available and the lack of live spectators present doesn't seem to affect the athletes' performances or my enjoyment of them...sometimes I get a kick out of the various ways they present "spectators", be it though life-sized photo props in the stands, piped-in fake crowd noise or screens showing fans watching through their computers.  Hopefully, the COVID-19 outbreaks occurring in baseball, the only one of the currently ongoing sports not using the "bubble" strategy, will clear up: the Marlins seem to be okay now, with their games resuming this week.  In all the sports I tend to naturally root for the Florida teams, and am gratified (and very surprised) to see Orlando City...a franchise that had never before made it to the playoffs...as one of the semifinalists in Major League Soccer.  As for the non-Florida teams I prefer, in the NBA it's the Los Angeles Clippers, San Antonio Spurs. Portland Trail Blazers and Toronto Raptors: my favorite coaches are Doc Rivers with the Clippers and the Spurs' Gregg Popovich...player-wise I like Jimmy Butler (Miami), Kyle Lowry (Toronto), and C.J. McCollum (Portland).  With Major League Baseball it's the Yankees, Angels, Nationals and Giants for me...after the Rays and Marlins, of course.  As for hockey, I'm still at the stage of just trying to keep up with what's going on during a game...

Yes, having some sports to watch has been a distinct pleasure for me recently...for the most part they've been pretty careful about the pandemic.  I just hope football doesn't come along and flub everything up...

Weekly Short Stories: 1961 Science Fiction, Part 4

Here are my reactions to the final four stories in the retrospective anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 23 (1961).  The first story I thought was a great classic, but I wasn't so hot on the final three...I guess it's all a matter of personal taste...

A PLANET NAMED SHAYOL by Cordwainer Smith
Cordwainer Smith was to me the most imaginative sci fi writer when it came to envisioning future space travel and settlement, and his depiction of life on a remote prison planet in A Planet Named Shayol is so vividly bizarre that it steps over the line into the horror genre...but you'll have to read for yourself this remarkable tale of a convict sentenced to serve the remainder of his life there.  The imagery is like one of those nightmares that you just want to wake up from...but can't.  Cordwainer Smith was the pseudonym for Paul Linebarger (1913-66), a college English professor who preferred a quiet life behind his literary anonymity: his 1955 story The Game of Rat and Dragon is one of my all-time favorites...

RAINBIRD by R.A. Lafferty
Another (groan) time travel story that once again presents the concept of paradox and all the interesting effects that traveling backward in time can have on future events.  In this story, it is 1779 and a young man, destined to be a moderately successful tinkerer and inventor of assorted small items, sets out and turns into the world's premier inventor, producing technology far ahead of its time.  But when he is old, he decides that he could have taken wiser paths in his younger years that would have advanced his inventions much further...and thus steps into the "retrogressor" (time machine) he has also invented, to counsel his young self into the direction he so clearly sees now. And that's what I managed to get of this tale: no one is completely satisfied with their pasts and many of us, from the advantage of hindsight, see certain pivotal times in our lives that would have changed for the better had we acted differently.  But I didn't need another time travel story to tell me what I already knew...

WALL OF CRYSTAL, EYE OF NIGHT by Algis Budrys
In the future, the communications industry is being dominated by advanced subliminal products that detect the viewers' predilections and then manufacture a "reality" that they can experience which meets their expectations.  A tycoon finds himself in a desperate race against his main rival to find the ultimate subliminal technology...and goes to Mars where the Martians reputedly have developed one such machine.  What's real and what's not get all fuzzy in this story, not one of my favorites...although the anthology's editors had all kinds of wonderful things to say about it.  It did give me a creepy feeling, seeing the direction our Internet and social media of today are going with detecting our own interests and then producing content to reflect them...

REMEMBER THE ALAMO! by T.R Fehrenbach
A short alternate-reality story about that famous event, but with the principal players substantially altered.  And wouldn't you know it: another dang-blasted time travel story!  Still, the author has a lot of fun recasting the roles of William Travis, Jim Bowie, Davey Crockett and Santa Anna as a British "traveler" from the future gets a severe lesson in alternate history at the besieged Alamo...

Next week I start my look at the year 1962 in short science fiction...

Just Finished Reading Light in August by William Faulkner

A few years ago Oprah Winfrey selected three of early twentieth century American writer William Faulkner's novels for her book club: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August.  The first, the most famous of the three, I have yet to read...and the second I read back in 2014.  A couple of years ago I read his 1948 novel Intruder in the Dust...I thought it was a good time to delve into another of his works, so I read Light in August.  As with other stories of his, the locale is Faulkner's fictional Jefferson County in Mississippi during the time he wrote in, the 1920s and 30s.  A young woman, Lena Grove, has largely walked here from her home in Alabama...she is looking for the father of the child she is pregnant with, who came here to find work and had promised to marry her: Lucas Burch, who is now going under the name Joe Brown.  He gets a job at the local mill where he meets with two other of the story's main characters, Byron Bunch and  Joe Christmas.  Bunch is upright and wants to do the good thing for Lena, with whom he has become smitten, while Christmas has led a life believing that since...at least in his own mind...he is partially black, then he consequently belongs to neither of the severely racially segregated communities in the South in this era.  Bunch also confides regularly with a disgraced former minister, Gail Hightower, who has his own story to tell as well.  And the story of Joanna Burden, descended from abolitionists who moved into the area following the Civil War and who now lives in reclusion, adds a further tragic dimension to the story.  The language used by the novel's characters reflects that of the sharply segregated and discriminatory Deep South of the Jim Crow era...it's pretty racist, to say the least, so if you're into retroactive political correctness you might want to avoid the many "n" words sprinkled throughout.  Faulkner bluntly lays out the prejudice against blacks of his white characters and their society at large...this story is definitely not a presentation of America living up to its stated ideals.  He also very intensively goes into the life histories of his characters, meticulously analyzing their distinctively individual personalities and the experiences they had which shaped them.  I felt uncomfortable reading Light in August, and for good reason: I had difficulty bonding with any of the characters the way most fiction presents a clear, central protagonist to focus on.  Hightower and Bunch did present a sense of reason, Christmas' childhood past drew some sympathy from me, Lena's predicament with her situation did as well in its own way, and Joanna Burden's story was compelling...but that Lucas Burch had no redeeming qualities that I could see.  The author did such a good job with his characterizations that I'm tempted to look around me and see this or that bit of a character's personality in different people...including myself.  One other thing: Light in August wildly jumps around in time with multitudes of flashbacks...that, combined with no clear central protagonist, might make this a difficult reading choice.  But I still recommend it for being a cultural snapshot of a time in our history as well as a sobering look at people not at their best moments...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #55-51

We're getting close to the final top 50 songs on my list of 500 all-time favorites...each of the below songs are classics to me and, although each one has its unique sound they are all very serious pieces with some pretty rough elements in either their musical presentation, lyrics, or both.  Only two of them I've heard before on the radio, so there's a high probability you're new to most of them...try them out!

55 SUNNY CAME HOME...Shawn Colvin
This was a big radio hit in 1997, as well as the only one by Colvin...should have been more as she is quite a good singer, and if this song is an example a good songwriter as well.  The topic is severe as a woman takes matters into her own hands with fire...not something I would recommend.  So you have this very sweet-sounding, sad song with its haunting mandolin accompaniment and lyrics and before long it gets under your skin as it did with me.  Sunny Came Home won the Grammy Award as the song of the year...

54 NEON BIBLE...Arcade Fire
The title track to Arcade Fire's outstanding 2007 Neon Bible album, it only lasts two minutes...and is a slow-moving song for such a short duration.  The band's lead singer Win Butler reportedly wrote it to mix together some of his thoughts about religion and culture...but it's the kind of song that releases the listener to derive their own meanings from it.  The chorus features Butler's wife Régine Chassagne with a childlike sing-song melody...the lyrics seem to be directed at "every boy and every girl".  The crackling sound of a neon light flickering off and on adds a interesting effect to the song as well.  The Neon Bible album, the band's best in my opinion, contains many excellent tracks...

53 AGAIN...Alice in Chains
For such a rough, menacing song combining grunge, the blues, and heavy metal, Again's lyrics are surprisingly sensitive as the singer laments repeated betrayal by someone he had trusted and befriended.  Released in 1995, I listened to it a lot the following year on Gainesville's Rock 104 radio and later crowned it my "song of the year" for 1996.  Lead vocalist Lane Staley had his share of drug problems, which contributed to his early death a few years later...Staley and Soundgarden's Chris Cornell to me were the great, soulful singers of the grunge era in rock...

52 THE GOOD'S GONE...The Who
I had never heard of this brilliant old song by the old British rock group The Who until I bought, at a steal, their first four vinyl studio albums at Hyde and Zeke Records nearby the University of Florida campus some time in 1994.  From their 1966 album The Who Sing My Generation, The Good's Gone is a relatively lengthy track, driven and relentless, with Roger Daltrey singing his gruff best and the electric guitar dominating...especially the long mid-song instrumental break. Jimmy Page once claimed to had contributed guitar work on some of The Who and Kinks' old recordings...it sounds like him here...

51 FIERY CRASH...Andrew Bird
Not a song ever to played on a plane or at an airport, Fiery Crash, from Andrew Bird's 2007 Armchair Apocrypha album, is nonetheless something you should experience...in a safe, secure place, that is.  Bird is known as a multi-instrumentalist...his trademark "instruments" are the violin and his own whistling virtuosity, both of which he exhibits on this song.  Chances are you've never heard of this talented Chicago-based musician, but he's put out several albums and his music always pushes the frontiers of creativity.  My favorite part of Fiery Crash is the break in the middle when it eerily resembles the Beach Boys' classic hit Help Me Rhonda.  Then again, this song in its entirety is pretty eerie...

Next week: #50-46...

Historic American Space Launch Astronauts Returning This Afternoon

After two months at the International Space Station, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the first two American astronauts to launch from U.S. territory in nine years, are returning to Earth this afternoon, reentry in the atmosphere to commence at 1:51 and splashdown at 2:48, somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida panhandle coast around Pensacola and Panama City.  They successfully launched from Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral on May 31 and will be in the same Crew Dragon capsule when they return...a joint team from SpaceX corporation and NASA will pick them up from the ocean...the rescue process should take about an hour and then they'll be flown to Houston.  I'm about to watch the TV coverage of it all...I was going to mow the lawn but one of the northern bands of Tropical Storm Isaias, which is creeping up the Florida east coast (and which caused the proposed splashdown site to switch to the Gulf from the Atlantic), just swept through us with rainfall...think I'll just stay indoors and watch the tube.  C-Span is covering it all live although I imagine the other cable news channels will break from their typical news stories to temporarily feature it as well.  I was happy two months ago with the successful launch, but a mission isn't truly a success until the astronauts are back at home, safe and sound...well, I might have to qualify that in this pandemic era...

My July 2020 Running Report

For July I amassed a total of 162 miles run, with my longest single run being 8 miles...I ran on every day of the month.  No races of course, nor naturally any in the foreseeable future due to this awful coronavirus pandemic.  That having been said, I felt pretty good with my running in July and look forward to possibly pushing the upper end of my distances in August when I go out on my weekend long runs around my home neighborhoods.  This coming weekend should be interesting with now-Hurricane Isaias predicted to pass by the eastern coast of Florida...if the rainfall is low I might be able to squeeze in a run.  No, it doesn't look right now as if we'll be staging any running races for the remainder of 2020...the big question now is whether the Five Points of Life Marathon/Half-Marathon race, scheduled here in Gainesville during February next year, will still go on as planned.  If so, I'd like to take a crack at it since they have returned to their traditional course through the heart of the city and the University of Florida.  Guess I'll just have to wait and see.  I did go to my gym once and ran on the treadmill, something I might do more of in the future later on in the evening after work when it isn't quite as busy...assuming it stays open, that is...
'