Our Weekend Trip to Daytona

For Melissa and me this year's Labor Day weekend coincided with our wedding anniversary...going on 34 fantastic years now.  We decided to book a room in Daytona Beach at the Hampton Inn we liked...only our preferred hotel was already full and we just barely got a room at the one further south in Daytona Beach Shores.  But that's a good hotel, too, and Saturday afternoon we drove into Ormond Beach on State Road 40, looking forward to getting settled in at our place down the road.  While going down Granada Boulevard I noticed many motorcyclists riding as a group, all donning special shirts identifying them as veterans...cool...but then I wondered whether we might have stumbled into this area in the middle of a special bike week celebration.  But when we all got to A1A the bikers turned left and we went right toward our hotel destination.  The traffic seemed a little heavier than expected, but hey, it was Labor Day weekend after all and we knew it would be busy.  But a little later we found ourselves stuck in a massive traffic jam...loaded to the hilt with pickup trucks, the kind their owners like to raise up high over their wheels for some peculiar reason known only to themselves.  Everywhere.  It was then that we discovered that a trucking rally, postponed from a few months earlier due to the coronavirus, was now taking place...oh joy.  We did eventually make it to our hotel, and from our 8th floor balcony we could look down on the beach and a long procession of raised pickup trucks passing by, first in one direction and then in the other.  I get it, this is an "identity" kind of thing where you see yourself in terms of your interest and congregate...just driving back and forth like that, though, seemed silly.  Apparently, the focus of the rally was the Daytona Speedway...glad we didn't go anywhere near there...

You've maybe seen the same scenes on TV that I have of people on different beaches violating distancing rules, but generally here on Daytona Beach Shores they seemed to be doing a reasonable job...with the pointed exception of the truckers and their mostly young adult passengers, many times crammed together in the pickup trucks' backs and nobody ever wearing a mask.  In our own hotel most patrons and all of the staff complied with mask rules...but then again there were a few guests who didn't.  But we didn't let the lack of common civility among some of the people around us wreck our enjoyment of the weekend and we had a great time...love the beach...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #30-26

It's Monday, and thus time for some more songs on my countdown of my 500 all-time favorite songs.  I'm getting closer to the end...and the very best of the lot, so starting next week I'll whittle down the weekly number of songs covered from five to three.  Ultimately, I'll give each of my top ten songs a complete article...

30 LUKA...Suzanne Vega
The summer of 1987 had an extraordinarily good selection of popular hits that I liked a lot...this one by folk artist Suzanne Vega about the very serious and sad subject of child abuse was the best of them, so much that I crowned it then as my Song of the Year.  I associate it with the brief time that year when I lived in Leesburg, Florida...very memorable.  Vega is one of those artists who should have been a big hitmaker like Elton John or Carole King...the only other song she did that was a hit was her Diner. The guitar strumming on Luka is among the among the best I've heard on a record...

29 DIALOGUE (PARTS 1 & 2)...Chicago
I remember first hearing this 1972 song by the horn-dominated rock band one morning in the spring of 1973, during my high school's televised announcements show, and immediately liked it. Singers Terry Cath and Peter Cetera take turns in a dialogue, with the former making a call to conscience and face the different serious ongoing problems in society, while the latter takes on the role of complacency and self-interested denial...gee, that sounds like what's going on today! The song's second part is an instrumental jam of horns, guitar and percussion that exemplified this band's great musical talent and innovation during their early years of success, before they began to churn out a series of tame, boring ballads...

28 DESTINATION UNKNOWN...Missing Persons
For me the quintessential New Wave song, Destination Unknown was a minor radio hit in 1982 for the Los Angeles synthesizer band as lead singer Dale Bozzio performs with her "Betty Boop" style. Destination Unknown was their follow-up singles release to Words, also a personal favorite.  The lyrics are a bit deceptively deep, like "When will my time come? Has it all been said and done? I know I'll leave when it's my time to go, 'til then I'll carry on with what I know".  I think its greatest appeal to me was in the atmosphere of mystery it imparted. Missing Persons, disbanded in 1986, was another group that I thought should have been more popular, as they were very talented and creative...

27 REASON IS TREASON...Kasabian

Reason is Treason was initially released as a single by the British alternative rock bank in 2004, but I didn't hear of it until a couple of years later when my local alternative radio station, 100.5/WHHZ/"The Buzz" began to play it in their regular rotation.  It's a hard-driving, relentless piece that's good to run along with...I always used to get an extra energy spurt and picked up the pace during my later training runs when it would play in shuffle mode on my MP3 player.  Kasabian is a band that tends to "miss" more than "hit" with their songs, at least to me, but the ones that are on target, like Reason is Treason, more than make up for the rest.  Too bad they recently had to let their lead singer go due to a domestic abuse charge...

26 LEGEND OF A MIND...the Moody Blues
Back in the late sixties when this British band was in their psychedelic, Eastern mysticism phase, Ray Thomas wrote, sang and played the flute in this classic album rock radio piece...you'd probably better recognize it by the recurring line "Timothy Leary's dead".  There isn't a weak moment in this track from their 1968 In Search of the Lost Chord album...it's sandwiched in the middle of House of Four Doors but stands as well on its own.  My favorite section is during the mid-song instrumental break when Thomas' incredible improvised flute playing segues into Mike Pinder's Mellatron imitating deep orchestral strings: you can't beat the dramatic buildup here.  Always a "legend in my mind", although the lyrics are admittedly a bit spacey and dated, not to mention seeming to promote LSD, for which Leary had been a major advocate back then...

Next week: #25-23...

Happy Anniversary, Sweet Melissa

It's now been 34 years since my dear wife Melissa and I have been married.  Besides her beauty and compassion, she has been a unending source of encouragement and has inspired me to be more of what I am capable of being. What a wonderful, caring woman...Happy Anniversary, Sweetheart!!!

Just Finished Reading 11/22/63 by Stephen King (for the 4th Time)

For a book that came out less than nine years ago, Stephen King's time travel novel 11/22/63 has to be one of my all-time favorites...I just finished reading it, and for the fourth time at that.  This time around I checked it out from my public library's Libby site and listened to its lengthy duration at 2X speed...that comes in pretty handy at times.  Sometimes I wonder why a particular book will get a hold on me and with this one, I have to admit that it's very good in a number of areas.  But I am always intrigued by the notion of the "rabbit hole" or secret entranceway to another place or time.  What King pulled off here with his story is nothing less than genius: the special door from 2011 to 1958 has already been discovered, and Al Templeton has thought it all out pretty much as many of us would have: first explore around, then take advantage of what going back and forth in time can do for you...and then begin to think of more serious uses.  I don't expect any special, secret porthole to another dimension or era in my own material life, but I can expand what Stephen King presented into a workable allegory...

Paradigm shifting isn't as vividly dramatic as stepping through an invisible opening to another time, but you're still stepping through...albeit mentally...into another way of seeing things.  What I am talking about here is both intellectual and emotional empathy, whereby you deliberately shed your well-designed clothing of stances on issues and people and instead see things from the vantage point of another with a different take.  I actually do this a lot in my life, and furthermore I have come to the strong belief that there is a sizeable number of fellow travelers through life...and quite a few on social media...who are cognitively incapable of empathy, dividing everything they see only in starkly stratified terms: black or white, good or evil, worthy of idolization or worth of contempt.  And if we're talking politics, I'm seeing this inability or unwillingness to see things from the other guys' perspective on both sides of the ongoing debate.  You idolize Trump and scorn Biden?  Try criticizing the former and genuinely praising the latter.  You like Biden (I doubt many idolize him...to his credit) and despise Trump? Likewise criticize Joe and find something nice to say about our president.  And with the issues that people are so rapt up in, why not take a little time and see things from the other side's viewpoint...in their words, not just those of their critics...starting with the issues you feel the most passionately about.  I look at the different people in politics and the issues around me and I know that there are legitimate reasons to take the sides people take...but what I don't accept is the notion that those who disagree with me are evil or stupid dupes.  What I do accept is that people tend to become comfortable with their own narratives, which they sometimes wrap around themselves so tightly that they tend to confuse them with reality itself.  Why not take a break...if you're capable of it, that is...and step through the invisible passageway out of your own narrative and into a refreshingly different environment? Unlike with Stephen King's novel, it's really possible and no secret...

Just Finished Reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

A couple of Saturday evenings ago I was sitting there as I usually do watching Jeopardy!, easily my favorite game show.  One of the categories stumped me: it just said "Roald Dahl".  I would quickly discover that this late Welsh novelist wrote a number of famous children's books, most notably James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  Since I'd read none of his works nor seen any movie adaptions, I thought I'd take a little time and check them out.  My first Dahl book was his 1964 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory...my first, immediate impression from it was that J.K. Rowling must have been inspired by Dahl's wit when she first set out to write her Harry Potter series, especially the parts showcasing the Dursley family that young Potter was forced to grow up with.  The setting is a small English town with an enormous chocolate factory...owned and operated by Willy Wonka, of course.  The Bucket family, comprised of young Charlie, his parents, and his four grandparents...the latter spending all their hours on a huge bed inside one of the small house's two rooms, are in dire financial straits after Charlie's dad lost his job screwing tops onto toothpaste tubes...starvation sadly seems to be in the works for them.  Meanwhile Willy Wonka, who had earlier fired all his workers for fear of industrial espionage and shut down his factory for a while, has reopened it and is once again producing the world's best chocolate...but apparently with no hired help.  And then he makes a startling announcement.  He has hidden golden tickets inside five of his chocolate bars...five children, along with their caretakers, will be allowed inside for a one-day tour of his plant and then get plenty of chocolate delivered to them for the rest of their days.  Since you already know the story's title, you can infer that Charlie gets to go...and my favorite character of the book, Grandpa Joe, accompanies him.  The other children are monumental brats, very much on the level of Rowling's Dudley Dursley character with comparable parents...let's see how clever Willy handles them...

I was pleasantly surprised by this very funny tale and look forward to seeing how the two movies will probably twist its tone and message completely out of shape.  I'd like to start out with the version starring Gene Wilder from 1972...Sammy Davis, Jr.'s hit song at that time Candyman, which I liked a lot, is part of the soundtrack.  The more recent version starring Johnny Depp as the enigmatic Wonka should be interesting as well...I wonder which movie will be more faithful to the book.  Now on to the next Roald Dahl book...at least after I've finished reading Stephen King's masterpiece novel 11/22/63 for the fourth time...

Quote of the Week...from Katie Mack

I've been trying to wrap my head around what it means to live in a universe where space and time are not fundamental.                                                         Astrophysicist Katie Mack.

Yesterday I reviewed astrophysicist...and investigator of the origin and ultimate demise of the cosmos...Katie Mack's new book The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking).  In it she presented potential scenarios for the destruction of the universe while giving a brilliant introduction to cosmology and astrophysics in the process.  This is a very dynamic scientific field in which all sorts of interesting theories are arising about the nature of reality...her above quote from the book alludes to the work of one of her contemporaries.  This seems to be a popular quote on Twitter, and in another Tweet a fan wrote that she "is really good at messing with your mind"...to which Katie Mack replied, "It's not me, it's physics".  As someone untrained in the deep mathematics and scientific method necessary to more fully comprehend the material she is discussing I can only sit back in wonder at what is being undertaken in this area. Personally, I'm not all that concerned at how our universe will end...astrophysically speaking, of course...but I do very much appreciate Mack's well-written exposition on many different areas of current research and what we know at this point concerning the cosmos.  I'm looking forward to reading more from her in future books...

Just Finished Reading The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack

Katie Mack is an astrophysicist/cosmologist who also is one of those treasured scientists who strive to popularize their respective fields and increase awareness and understanding among the general population...I love people like that...Neil deGrasse Tyson and the late Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov also come to mind.  I read Tyson's book Astrophysics For People in a Hurry three years ago and loved it: here's a link to my earlier article about it: [Tyson].  Mack's just recently published book The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) picks up where Tyson left off and is an intriguing adventure into the origins, fundamental nature...and possible endings...of our universe as today's astrophysicists, including the author, are on the cutting edge of discovery.  She is a bit more detailed on the scientific side with her narrative than was Tyson in his book, but I recognize that it's got to be tough translating what is essentially highly technical material bathed in complex mathematics into common language that laypeople can understand.  You get treated to a great variety of topics: stages in the universe's development, quantum theory, the different fundamental forces, general relativity, entropy, the cosmic microwave background, inflation, gravity fields, subatomic physics...this plus much more. Since the book's title referred to the end of everything, Mack's presentation culminates in a listing and description of five potential scenarios:

The Big Crunch...the amount of matter in the universe ultimately causes an end to its expansion and causes it to draw back upon itself and contract.

The Heat Death...with dark energy now a recognized element in the cosmos and causing an accelerating...no slowing...expansion, this scenario has the cosmos reaching a point of complete cooling where entropy has reached its limit and time itself ceases.

The Big Rip...another dark energy-caused scenario whereby the very fabric of existence is torn apart suddenly and without warning.

Vacuum Decay...what we nowadays consider as an absolute vacuum is actually permeated with a gravity field...should that field alter into a higher vacuum state anywhere in the universe the result could be the Bubble of Death expanding to end and replace our own reality.

Multiverse Collison...in a setting comprised of multiple universes, another one colliding with us could conceivably cause our destruction...assuming of course that there are actually other universes.

When I refer to "our" destruction, I'm referring to our cosmos as a whole and not specifically our own Earth and its life, doomed to disappear in a few billion years anyway as the dying sun expands as a red giant and encompasses our orbit.  I noticed something interesting about Katie Mack's presentation: the doomsday scenarios...particularly that one about vacuum decay...seem to exist as logical extensions of ongoing theories, theories that are subject to revision with incoming new information.  As for the universe's actual, ultimate demise, this sounds like a topic that's a little bigger than me.  It's clear to me that Katie Mack loves her job...I liked her book so much that I bought it!

Weekly Short Stories: 1963 Science Fiction, Part 1

Today I begin discussing science fiction short stories from the year 1963, as published in the retroactive anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 25 (1963).  This book is the final volume in a project that editors Asimov...who passed away just before it was published in 1992...and Martin Greenberg deemed the "Golden Age of Science Fiction": 1939-63.  But the stories won't end after this book: I also have "year's best" anthologies, edited by Donald Wollheim, that cover the years 1964-89.  1963 for me spans the second half of my first grade at West Hollywood's Boulevard Heights Elementary School, the first half there of my second grade, and a nice, long summer vacation sandwiched in between. One Friday afternoon after coming back to our classroom from lunch in late November a kid from the class across the hall came in to tell our teacher something...we soon found out that President Kennedy had been shot...

FORTRESS SHIP by Fred Saberhagen
A series of warships in deep space are presenting a problem for human space travelers...from a civilization far away and long gone, these monstrosities are unmanned and automatic, destroying whole fleets and even planets they happen to encounter along their way.  Three little Earth ships must coordinate and attack one before it destroys a nearby world...I think one of the old Star Trek episodes was based on this story...

NOT IN THE LITERATURE by Christopher Anvil
I used to watch an old late 70's public television series called Connections that revealed the development of technology over the ages and how different smaller discoveries and inventions were crucial to later innovations.  This story presents a scenario in which a society is advancing toward rocketry...but it's missing a particular element of "discovery" in its own scientific/technological history that is causing one failed launch after another.  Somebody comes up, however, with the answer (obvious to us)...but he is laughed off by the so-called "experts"...makes me wonder whether we're missing something fundamental in our own approach to things...

THE TOTALLY RICH by John Brunner
Very similar in format to the 1962 Theodore Sturgeon short story When You Care, When You Love that I reviewed just last week, one of the world's very few super-rich, a middle-aged woman, finds a scientist/engineer who has discovered and developed a procedure that could bring back a deceased person...or at least a duplicate, given enough information about his or her immediate environment.  It's another trip of speculation as to how the most wealthy on Earth may be essentially invisible to the rest of us and how they choose to live their lives...

NO TRUCE WITH KINGS by Poul Anderson
Some three hundred years after a planetary nuclear war (the "Hellbomb"), Earth is divided into smaller, warring political units...the focus in this story is the former American Pacific west as two sides vie for control.  But there is another element here: an alien group has infiltrated Earth and is taking sides in the conflict, hoping to steer humanity's course toward a more civilized, less violent society that will enable it to be admitted to the interstellar community as a participating member.  Whew, talk about violating Star Trek's Prime Directive!

Next week: more on science fiction short stories from 1963...

My August 2020 Running Report

August 2020 was not one of my better running months...a combination of horrifically hot and humid weather here in northern Florida and some days suffering from general inflammation resulted in me taking 8 days off from running and limiting my mileage on the others. I ran a total of 74 miles for the month...much lower than my figures for the previous several months...with 5 miles being my longest single run.  For this month of September, I plan to do my running on a day-by-day basis, keeping the mileage low and making sure I always have plenty of hydration and rest. I'm looking forward to my general health returning to a high enough level to resume longer runs, but that will also depend in part on the weather improving. Exercise matters, and if running seems too strenuous for me during this time I'll see what I can do with walking instead...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #35-31

Here are five more entries to my list of 500 all-time favorite songs.  They are all a bit on the "down" side, but that's just the way I like it sometimes.  And four of the five are deeply buried in the past as well, the one exception being a twenty-year old song I first heard ten years ago...

35 FUNERAL FOR A FRIEND/LOVE LIES BLEEDING...Elton John
Although this lengthy track from Elton John's 1973 Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album had been out for a while, my local album rock radio station began to seriously play it in early 1975...and it quickly became one of my favorites: I picked it as my "song of the year".  The "funeral" opening section is brooding, stormy, sad, and completely instrumental.  Elton eventually breaks in to singing as the tempo and mood both pick up...I regard this as his supreme masterpiece...

34 MORNING BELL...Radiohead
I'll always associate this sobering song from the British alternative band with long distance training runs in late 2010 and early 2011, and the areas I ran in west of my home neighborhood while listening to a shuffle mix of Radiohead songs on my MP3 player.  From Radiohead's 2000 Kid A album, their greatest in my opinion, its lyrics seem to be about divorce and the heavy toll it takes, especially in those cases involving children.  There's an alternate version of Morning Bell on their next album, Amnesiac...but I prefer the original...

33 LOVE IS LIKE OXYGEN...Sweet
Another "song of the year" on today's list, this one was from 1978 and represents one of those curious examples of a piece of music that stands very apart from the artists' other works.  I've never been much of a Sweet fan but in early '78 the album rock stations began playing this incredible song of theirs that does all sorts of interesting things with melody...and the lyrics resonated with me strongly at the time: "I walk the streets at night, to be hidden by the city lights"...back then I did probably more walking...day and night...then I have ever done before or since...

32 SCENTLESS APPRENTICE...Nirvana
This is a prime example of a song that the listener will either strongly love or strongly hate.  I get the rage embedded within it, the guitar work is phenomenally menacing and heavy metal, and I bet there will never be another artist with the guts to scream his heart out in the demented way that Kurt Cobain does it here.  It's from the Aberdeen, Washington band's 1993 final studio album In Utero, a work that I generally didn't care for all that much.  The lyrics are brilliant and very disturbing with a nihilistic bent...maybe you should skip this one if you're squeamish or prone to nightmares...

31 FOR NO ONE...the Beatles
This is a brief track from what I see as the Beatles' greatest album, Revolver, from 1966.  It's a "Paul" song with McCartney singing solo chiefly to the accompaniment of a piano...that is, until the mid-song break, highlighted by a French horn arrangement improvised and played by Alan Civil,  bringing to mind a similar contribution to the band's Penny Lane by trumpeter David Mason the following year.  For No One is a melancholic, pensive piece that has always matched up well with my general disposition...

Next week: #30-26...

Just Finished Reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck

I've been reading through some of American writer John Steinbeck's more famous novels lately...five years after reading his Of Mice and Men, I went through three last month: The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, and The Pearl.  The last one was a reread: I had it back in '71 as a high school English class reading assignment.  And now I just finished reading my fifth book of his: the 1952 semi-autographical multigenerational family epic East of Eden.  Like his Grapes of Wrath, this novel was quickly turned into a successful film, one of James Dean's three celebrated starring cinematic appearances before his tragic accidental death in 1956.  Like most of the stories of his I've read so far, the setting is primarily in California...more specifically the agriculturally rich Salinas Valley where the author grew up.  According to the narrative he traces his ancestry back to the Hamilton family which, along with the Trasks form the focus of the story as it delves into three generations...with two generations of intense sibling rivalry within the latter family drawing forth the novel's title as an allegory on the Cain and Abel story from the Biblical book of Genesis.  So what we're seeing here is a mixture of the fictional with nonfiction...not that far removed from James Michener's long list of historical fiction novels, when you think about it...

East of Eden is very character-intense, with Steinbeck deeply exploring the personalities, history and beliefs of the various characters.  There is the Hamilton family with Irish immigrant Samuel and his hardy, blunt, and morally impeccable wife Liza and their many offspring...the Hamiltons settled into the Salinas area with little money and have always lived on near-subsistence level at their farm, this in spite of Samuel, a naturally good-natured, upbeat man, being an inventor/tinkerer and generally lauded in the area as an expert repairman.  The Trask family starts in Connecticut, where the widowed father of two boys has built a false aura of military expertise around himself, fooling the government into hiring him for consultation.  He favors his son Adam and neglects Charles...the latter resents the favoritism and takes it out on his brother.  Yet Adam, forced into the army by his father, grows to disdain him and...well, I can see I'm going to take up several pages describing the developing relationships.  Let me just say that Adam eventually moves to his own farm in Salinas with his psychopathic, pregnant wife Cathy...they have fraternal twin sons Caleb and Aaron.  The rest of the book takes off from there as the Hamiltons and Trasks go through their various life changes and crises...connected together conceptually through the philosophical and spiritual discernment of Lee, the Trask home's caretaker/cook who is a descendant of Chinese immigrants.  It is Lee who interestingly takes up a deep study of Hebrew scriptures and with the deciphering of the Hebrew word "timshel" learns the true meaning of the story of Cain and Abel, "east" of Eden...

East of Eden to me was an overly ambitious attempt to accomplish a lot of different things in one story, and because of this overarching reach it seems to sometimes lose a sense of coherency.  On the positive side, I took away from this reading experience the notion that we all have choices to make in our lives as long as we can still breath in the air. Our pasts, especially those things burdening us with guilt or resentment, will necessarily often weigh in on our present state, but we still always have that "timshel" that is divinely provided for us to be able to change.  And that's no small deal...

Just Finished Reading Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King

I just finished reading Gilbert King's historical work Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America.  Published in 2012, it won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction the following year.  It's an account, earlier in Marshall's career before his tenure on the United States Supreme Court, of when he was an NAACP lawyer defending blacks across the country, and of a case in Jim Crow-segregated central Florida in the late 1940s and early 1950s where four young black man were framed in a white supremist justice system for a rape that probably never happened.  Called the Groveland Four case after the southern Lake County town at the epicenter, King examines the deeply entrenched racism of the white community there at that time, with an extremely corrupt, racist sheriff and deputy who would stoop to any level to see to it that Charles Greenlee, Earnest Thomas, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin would be executed for their alleged crimes.  If Marshall represented the virtuous, rescuing hero of this story then Sheriff Willis McCall would be the archvillain, closely tied in with the Ku Klux Klan and illegal gambling operations in the area.  On one evening outside Groveland, a poor rural white married couple, the Padgetts, got their car stuck in the mud...Shepherd and Irvin were together driving by, and stopped to help them get their car free.  Unsuccessful, the husband, Willie, got angry at them and after insulting them got on the short end of a fist fight with Shepherd.  That was the incident that later was turned into a gang rape allegation...the other two eventual defendants were nowhere near at the time and were sucked into the case by McCall.  Thomas, hearing that he was being accused of this capital offense, fled to the north Florida woods while the other three, while in detention, were beaten and whipped into forced confessions by deputy Yates and his partner...with McCall looking on.  I'll save relating the fates of these four innocent black men, two of them brave, returning World War II veterans, in case you decide to read or research the case for yourself.  Instead I'll discuss how the author chose to present it...

Gilbert King split his analysis of the Groveland Four case into sections whereby he described Thurmond Marshall's philosophy of defense and his different partners and associates within the NAACP, as well as his communications and relationships with the FBI, Florida governors, and the judges and prosecution.  The endemic racism of the South...and of Lake County, Florida in particular...of that time was emphasized as King related incidences of previous horrific lynchings of blacks.  This was crucial to the story as it showed the defense strategy Marshall would employ in trying to save his clients from the electric chair.  The citrus growers would use cheap black prison labor in their groves...Sheriff McCall would see to it that he provided the necessary bodies. The author also presented the corruption and ties to the KKK of the local law enforcement as well as the inherent racism of the local justice system at the time through the principals involved.  And of course, the sequence of events that first led up to the arrests and what followed to the end was revealed through the course of the book.  This is not one of your "whitewashed" Yankee Doodle Dandy American history texts that paint our past in generally idealized terms, but rather is an important testament to the underlying reasons for the racial divisions still plaguing our society in this Black Lives Matter era...I recommend it although its content is very disturbing and pulls no punches about the extreme violence that happened: if you're white and grew up in Lake County back then you most definitely enjoyed a much different experience than if your skin had been of a darker hue...

Quote of the Week...from Michael Jordan

Always turn a negative situation into a positive situation.                 ---Michael Jordan

Of course, Michael Jordan is the all-time basketball great, the star of six NBA championship Chicago Bulls seasons as well as a NCAA championship season at North Carolina...many regard him as the greatest basketball player ever.  When in high school he was turned down for the team, but in reaction decided to put all he had into improving his game...and the rest is history.  Turning a negative situation into a positive one isn't just the option for famous, enormously talented individuals like Jordan; we can all benefit from his sage advice.  Unfortunately, for me I've often been in the habit of confronting negative scenarios by either avoiding them or just giving up...please don't tell this to Michael.  Going through personal storms with dignity and a purpose to make things better at the end is a major way to strengthen oneself and provide deeper meaning to life.  And sometimes if I'm not careful I can fall into the trap of perceiving a situation as being negative when it really isn't...holding off on reacting in an unproductive manner can help to turn things around in a hurry: in other words, sometimes it pays to just keep my mouth shut...

As a National Basketball Association team owner, former player, and a black man, Michael Jordan has recently served as an intermediary between the striking players and the rest of the owners on resuming the season in light of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, unarmed but shot in the back seven times, now paralyzed.  This is about as negative as it gets...to turn it into a positive situation will require a change of heart across our society...

Mail-In Voting

I happen to be a United States Postal Service employee and have been since 1987...I'm in the clerk craft section of operations and have always been involved in mail processing .  I don't intend with this article to get into its recent policies under the direction of new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, but I realize that with the current heated debates going on nationwide about expanded mail-in voting due to the COVID-19 epidemic screwing around with all our lives, I may have to refer to the USPS a little in passing...but it's not the gist of what I want to write about today.  No, I want instead to address the different perspectives that people on different political sides have about the process of voting and how this has influenced their views on today's questions...

Regrettably, in the United States...especially in the Jim Crow Deep South states...there is a history of voter suppression of different demographic groups, especially of blacks, intended to keep them out political power and in an underclass state.  After the Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965, the measures taken to disenfranchise certain prospective voters...such as poll taxes and literacy tests...have been outlawed...but there is still a sense nowadays that one side of the political equation wants to reduce the presence of blacks, who tend to overwhelmingly vote Democratic, at the voting booth.  So you see the accusations flying whenever Republican state legislators and governors sign into law new voter identification bills that reputedly are designed to protect the electoral process from voter fraud but are seen by the other side as discriminatory and an end-around to the Voting Rights Act.  Also, Trump's objections to the universal mail-in voting proposed in light of the coronavirus pandemic have been portrayed as voter suppression as well...he alleges there would be mass fraud with ballots flooding the mail system, many unasked for.  The President has stated that voting is an act that should involve an effort on the part of the voter...and in this I am in agreement with him.  To me, the more passive a voter is come election day the more able his or her vote can be manipulated by outside parties, thereby distorting the will of the people.  An example is this notion of ballot harvesting, illegal in most states but not in California.  In the 2018 congressional election held in that state there were a number of House seats that looked to be close Republican victories but after the "harvested" votes...overwhelming Democratic...were counted, they went to the other side.  Democratic Party operatives basically canvassed neighborhoods, avoiding registered Republican homes and going to those supporting their own party and collecting and delivering mail-in ballots to the elections offices.  Now the parties have always had their election day voting drives whereby they encourage voters and sometimes even drive them to the polling place and back...but you see, this still entails some sort of active effort on the part of the voter...

So in this discussion we're left with two seemingly conflicting philosophical approaches.  One side says voting should be as easily, effortlessly accessible as possible and the other says that it is an act of responsibility that necessarily involves initiative on the part of the voter.  As in most things there should be a reasonable middle ground...I think too passive of a voting electorate can tempt a destructive manipulation of the system while the rules for voting should be made careful to avoid making them too difficult for citizens in diverse groups to attain.  I like my Florida system of mail-in absentee voting whereby I take the active step and request a ballot either online or by phone or mail.  In California, on the other hand, they have flooded their state with ballots while in Texas one has to meet special criteria to vote absentee...even in the midst of this pandemic.  Only nine states currently have universal vote-by-mail, but the Democrats in Washington want to nationalize this process with legislation that is being opposed by Trump and the Republicans...and this is sadly the convenient reason they're making such a big fuss about the Postal Service right now, not because they care all that much about the institution in itself. As I've said before, back in 2009-10 the Democrats had control over the Presidency and both houses of Congress and did nothing to help it with its financial troubles, part of which are caused by the shrinking first class mail volume brought on by the digital revolution and part of which are caused by a burdensome, massive (and unique) 75-year pre-retirement funding mandate passed and signed by the Republicans in 2006...

Weekly Short Stories: 1962 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I conclude my look back at the year 1962 in the realm of short science fiction as revealed in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 24 (1962).  I liked all four of today's stories and there's no doubt that each carries with it a message for our own time although they all came out 58 years ago...

WHEN YOU CARE, WHEN YOU LOVE by Theodore Sturgeon
This is one of those stories that sound very romantic...that is, until the end when not only do you realize the extent to which the extremely wealthy can exert their power but also that your very perception of your own life as being one largely unfettered by the direct manipulation of others comes into question.  This is a story of a young man who, engaging in trespassing for fun, encounters such a powerful person...a young woman...and falls in love with her, arriving at an "ending' bearing a curious resemblance to the Matrix series of sci-fi movies...

THE BALLAD OF LOST C'MELL by Cordwainer Smith
I've already said that Cordwainer Smith was perhaps the most creative and innovative science fiction writer of his age...and I think he must have loved cats as well, since this story, along with my favorite The Game of Rat and Dragon, feature them.  But in this tale it is eons into the future and Earth, now just an interstellar stopping point, has genetically altered the remaining animal forms to resemble humans...as an underclass they take up the menial jobs "pure" humans deem themselves too good for. C'mell, genetically a cat but by all appearances a woman, teams up with a benevolent human leader to help the animal underclass achieve civil rights and social equality.  I hardly need to mention that this story is highly allegorical to our times...and the era in which it was written...

GADGET VS. TREND Christopher Anvil
This brief tale is a sequence of news posts stretched over a period of a few weeks after a new device has been invented that defends privacy and intrusion by setting up a force-field block.  It's bracketed by two pronouncements by a sociologist of that time (way off in the future during the late 1970s), the first passionately in defense of individualism in the face of pressures to conform while the last lambasts selfish individualism and promotes unity and cooperation.  Gee, what happened in between to change his stance?  Guess you'll need to read it to find out...

ROOFS OF SILVER Gordon Dickson
A planet off somewhere in the cosmos is seeded with settlers...with observers secretly dispatched to evaluate their progress toward civilization.  If they're suspected of regressing to animal-like behavior then they are frozen into quarantine and possibly destroyed...one observer, confronted with the information that his planet will face such a fate, objects and takes matters into his own hands.  Toward the story's end he makes a very profound statement while trying in vain to defend his "people" that I think applies to today: "But these people operate according to justice and conscience. It's not just taboo and ritual, not just--".  Who are the people today who operate according to justice and conscience and who are those who operate according to taboo and ritual?

Next week I began my look at the year 1963 in short science fiction...

Hurricanes and Conventions

This week is marked by two named tropical systems invading the Gulf of Mexico and making landfall, along with the Republican National Convention...taking place in a virtually televised format as was the Democratic Convention the previous week.  I studiously avoided the Democratic Convention and will continue in this regard this week with that of the Republicans...I've known for some time how I will vote.  The real question I have is how can anybody planning to vote this November NOT already have made up their minds?  Yet I am supremely confident that, as has been the case in the past five presidential elections, this one in 2020 will be decided by a relative handful of dunderheads who will still be undecided with less than two weeks to go and who will allow some contrived last-minute "news" story to manipulate their vote for one candidate or the other, thus tipping the election.  So already knowing this will happen, why should I waste my time and attention keeping up with the Trump and Biden campaigns, as if my awareness of what is happening will somehow influence anything or anyone?  My answer is that it won't, so I'm not.  If you want to get all bent up out of shape over what's going down and are filling your Facebook page with partisan political rants and posts...some of which were probably planted by Russian intelligence...then you can rest assured that I've already "unfollowed" you until after the election...

Just a few days ago the big story was how two twin hurricanes were going to hit land at the same time...possibly even the same spot...on the Gulf coast, an unprecedented occurrence.  Now, though, the two storms Marco and Laura have diverged a bit, both with their relative strengths and their trajectories.  Marco, at one time on Sunday with minimal hurricane intensity, got severely hit by wind shear and reduced to a manageable tropical storm level.  It only skimmed the Louisiana coast as it diminished to a depression...most of its storms were over southern Alabama and far western Florida.  Laura, which not only has been projected to reach level two hurricane status, is also on a different path than Marco, slated to hit land late Wednesday or Thursday in east Texas/west Louisiana.  Both Marco and Laura thankfully have been speeding along quickly and once Laura dumps its storm surge, wind, and rain on its targeted area, it should rapidly go on its way inland...no doubt unfortunately causing flooding and damage while dissipating.  I'm thankful that Florida is being spared...at least until the next storm comes around...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #40-36

All of the acts on this segment of my 500 all-time favorite songs list are well-known, established artists with maybe only one song being relatively obscure...they should all be famous since they, after all, are in my personal musical hall of fame...

40 I WON'T BACK DOWN...Tom Petty
Gainesville's late home-grown rock star temporarily broke away from his band the Heartbreakers in 1989 to make his solo album Full Moon Fever...that's why you don't see them credited for this track from it although Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell is strongly present.  I Won't Back Down, with lyrics like "No I'll stand my ground, won't be turned around, and I'll keep this world from draggin' me down", is the ultimate song of defiance and individuality in a culture that outwardly celebrates these expressions but actually tends to stigmatize those who do not conform to the "party line" of whichever group seems to dominate the setting, be it a small circle or a nationwide movement...

39 DARKNESS...the Police
From their brilliant 1981 Ghost in the Machine album, Darkness is a powerful mood piece of despair with a strong, blended instrumental component bathing over its entirety.  It's about the futility of trying to create or get anything done...and wouldn't anonymity be preferable? "Instead of worrying about my clothes, I could be someone that nobody knows"...I didn't get to know this song until about 15 years after it came out, but it quickly became one of my favorites of the Police.  But Ghost in the Machine is so good that there's another song from it that I think is even greater: stay tuned to this channel...

38 EVEN FLOW...Pearl Jam
I always liked this strong guitar rock performance by the Seattle band on their 1992 debut Ten album...but there's a different version out there getting radio play that I don't care for as much.  Lyricist Eddie Vedder sings his typically hard-to-understand words about a homeless man while guitarists Stone Gossard (who wrote the song's music) and Mike McCready deliver an epic performance.  A song sure to get your adrenaline going and one on which I automatically turn the volume up to high...

37 PEACE FROG...the Doors
Off their 1970 Morrison Hotel album, Peace Frog is a funky adventure for the Doors as Jim Morrison repeats the mantra "Blood on the streets" while he reminisces about the band's past experiences and recent history and pays homage to his favorite city, "Phantastic" Los Angeles....the break in the song's middle features a spoken poem he wrote years before about an eerie childhood experience he had while his family was stopped on the highway because of a fatal accident that had just occurred: Jim himself represented the "young child's fragile eggshell mind".  A beautiful...yet admittedly a little creepy...piece of art, this song is...

36 STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER...the Beatles
Speaking of weird, artistic ventures in music, Strawberry Fields Forever was written by John Lennon and first recorded twice, each version at a slightly different speed than the other.  Lennon told producer George Martin to combine the two into one track and when Martin protested about the different speeds Lennon reportedly told him to fix it, or something of the like.  The result was a recording that at times sounds more like Ringo than John...the video shown on the Ed Sullivan Show in late 1966 (I was ten at the time) was my first exposure to this song: I didn't like it, mainly because everyone was suddenly sporting moustaches.  Of course, now I love Strawberry Fields Forever...

Next week: #35-31...

Books I'm Currently Reading

Sometimes I'm careless with my reading and let myself get stuck reading several books at once: now is a prime example.  I'm plowing...at a snail's pace...through James Michener's very, very long historical fiction work The Source while at the same time reading John Steinbeck's East of Eden and two nonfiction books: The Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New Generation by Gilbert King and The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack.  This is on top of my science fiction short story anthology reading.  Whew, I better watch it with these books and not let them get ahead of me.  I do think they're all very interesting, although with Michener's novels I tend to come away from them not quite sure what really happened and what was merely a product of his fertile imagination.  The Source, which I'm currently about halfway through, is probably going to take longer to finish than the other three, all of which I should be wrapping up (and later discussing) by the end of next week.  Once that happens I may just stick with Michener until his book's finished, maybe adding another author that recently had an entire Jeopardy! show category devoted to himself: children's fiction writer Roald Dahl.  Dahl is responsible for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, among several other works.  Should be fun examining his books, which are a lot shorter and, well, for kids...by the way, I've never seen any of the movies derived from his writings...

Miscellany on My Day Off from Work

Today has been a welcome day for me to be off from work...physically resting at home is exactly what I need.  It's been enjoyable to watch some of the TV sports now available, and I've been observing the progress of tropical storms Laura and Marco as they approach the Gulf of Mexico, where both are expected to intensify to the level of Category One hurricanes...and hit land at about the same spot, in Louisiana if the current models hold. And the House of Representatives was holding a special session to debate and vote on funding the postal service and restricting what some regard as political interference in the organization during this presidential election season...as I've mentioned before, I need to write an article laying out my own more detailed opinions on the subject.  But mainly I've enjoyed watching sports...oh, Melissa introduced me to a series that Amazon Prime is showing about "great races"...the episode we watched featured the Pacific island nation of Fiji as the race site, with contestants on various international teams from across the world biking, hiking, swimming, rafting, climbing...you name it, they had to do it. The funny thing I noticed was that the Fijians observing these supercharged athletes in action seemed to have no problem themselves getting around and seemed fitter than the actual contestants...

Anyway, I've been watching sports today, and that includes Mexican Premier League soccer, the NBA playoffs, baseball, hockey, horse racing at Saratoga...speaking of horses yesterday they announced that the Kentucky Derby, postponed because of the pandemic to September 5th, will not be allowing live spectators after all.  And speaking of soccer, I hadn't realized that our Major League Soccer's recently completed playoffs weren't really for the 2020 championship but rather it was all only a prelude to the "real" regular season that has just begun...wow, that's a letdown. Still, I plan to continue following it as long as they keep showing entertaining matches. As for the title of this article, I don't think I've ever used the word "miscellany" before, either in speech or writing, yet I saw the word many times during my childhood: our family regularly read Life magazine and they had a page toward the back called "Miscellany" in which they would feature random topics.  Well, Miscellany is back, at least on this blog...

Quote of the Week...from Mark Twain

Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.               ---Mark Twain

There is a temptation among some of us to take an ages-old quote and apply it, out of the temporal contest in which it was made, to today's world...the above statement by renowned and beloved American writer Mark Twain (Samuel Clemons) is a case in point.  Twain was said to have made it in jest after a reader with an unusual name asked him to change that of one of his same-named characters. Yet this quote has a much broader meaning as well, a reflection on the times he was living through...but he died in 1910, well over a century ago.  And I think a lot has happened between his time and ours...

Scientific, technological and social progress means that today's possibilities are greater than before...but from the vantagepoint of the future looking back, that same time we're now experiencing will seem limited by contrast.  Serious, debilitating and fatal diseases were running rampant in Twain's time with no immunization or antibiotics available while the era's medical practices, with modern sterilization procedures just beginning to be practiced and a limited ability to control infection after operations, seem barbaric in hindsight...think of all those Civil War amputations.  Communication and transportation were much more limited, and even with the spotlight placed nowadays on racial, ethnic and gender discrepancies in our society, they were much more magnified back then.  People were stratified in their social classes and forced racial segregation was an openly accepted norm of society...even endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court...as voting rights, employment, lending, housing, medical treatment, education and the halls of justice clearly meant entirely different things to people based on their class, race, religion, ethnicity, gender...and of course how much money they had: we're still obviously working on some of this today, but it was much more pronounced back then. Yet Twain could see that his own time...which spanned the latter half of the nineteenth century and the start of the next...represented a marked difference from what it was like before.  And why not? the vast nation was now connected by rail and innovations like the telephone, incandescent light and the electrical grid were radically transforming how people lived, and then here comes the internal combustion engine and cars... 

Everybody thinks the times they are living in are at the pivotal point in history, and to an extent they're right.  The "now" of Mark Twain's time may seem different than the "now" of ours, but everything that ever happens...or ever did happen...depends on the infinitude of "nows" that preceded it.  Maybe that sounds a little simplistic, but wait a decade or two and then see what that "now" brings...