Constellation of the Month: Cygnus (the Swan)

 

The accompanying picture is a drawing I made of Cygnus, a northern summer constellation prominent and high in the sky from northern latitudes.  It is distinguished by its bright first magnitude star Deneb...Arabic for "tail"...and although you might be able to make out a faint resemblance to the swan which it represents, the constellation is also commonly called the Northern Cross because of its core asterism of bright stars.  Like Sagittarius (last month's featured constellation on this blog), Cygnus has the Milky Way prominently in its background. From where I live, it's more visible and impressive because unlike with more southern, low-lying Sagittarius, Cygnus is much higher and removed from the obscuring city lights that confound my star-gazing along the horizon.  Along with Deneb, the stars Vega (from Lyra) and Altair (from Aquila) constitute the Summer Triangle asterism that's visible under even urban skies on clear nights.  If you're into deeper observation of the heavens using a telescope then Cygnus is one of the great sources of interesting objects...the North America, Pelican, and Veil Nebulae are standouts along with M39, an open star cluster.  Deneb, bright as it is from Earth, is a colossal blue giant some 2,600 light years away with an absolute magnitude at higher than -8...that's awfully impressive!

It's been difficult of late for me to get out and look at the stars...even when it isn't raining the sky is usually severely overcast and the overbearing humidity tends to diminish the brightness of the stars even when it is clear.  This summer in northern Florida has to be one of the most miserable I've experienced since moving here in 1977...I'm hoping to get a little relief from it all before too long...

Weekly Short Stories: 1963 Science Fiction, Part 3

Here is another article with me reviewing old science fiction short stories...again from the year 1963...as they appeared in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 25 (1963).  I thought each tale I'm discussing below was important in its own right and they're definitely worth the expenditure of reading time...and a little money if you choose to buy the anthology as I did.  They all left an impression on me, especially the last one...

THE PAIN PEDDLERS by Robert Silverberg
This is a short story with a "you reap what you sow" theme I've often seen in many Twilight Zone episodes, which incidentally was in its third and fourth seasons in 1963.  In this tale we're off in the future a few years and society has turned into an ugly consumer cesspool of vicarious thrills...the latest craze enables "viewers" to temporarily feel the ongoing pain of real injury victims, with media companies even stooping to the level of paying hospital patients to undergo surgery without anesthesia and transmitting their agony to the hungry masses.  I keep thinking of that brilliant 2006 Tool song Vicarious...seems we're well on our way to this disgusting scenario...
                                                                                               

TURN OFF THE SKY by Ray Nelson

On our Earth in the distant future they have a one world government as well as a permissive nanny state that provides for people's needs from birth to death...Abelard Rosenberg is an anarchist who walks around in public nearly naked, passing out his political pamphlets to anyone who'll take them.  He encounters a young woman, Reva, who takes him across the Atlantic on one of the 1000 mph subterranean trains crisscrossing the oceans to England, where there is actually a live music hall featuring artists performing songs with primitive major and minor scales...the music of their own time has expanded to incorporate hundreds of notes in very complex scale patterns.  The story focuses on their relationship and philosophy on life and society...it's very cerebral and worth a read or two...or three...

THEY DON'T MAKE LIFE LIKE THEY USED TO by Alfred Bester

One of my all-time favorite science fiction short stories, a young woman living in a model sailboat house in the middle of New York's Central Park believes she is the last person left alive following a nuclear holocaust...but one day Linda encounters Mayo, a young man who is passing through the empty streets on his way further south.  In the midst of this incredibly gloomy and broken environment the two get along and converse in a light, humorous manner, much like how Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart's characters interacted in their movie African Queen as they faced grave danger.  In time both Linda and Mayo reveal their personal stories of happenstance survival when the bombing hit...after some misunderstandings are resolved they grow to like each other and bond more deeply, hinting that maybe humanity still has a small chance of continuing on.  But there is an undercurrent of something going on around them in the city...including a blue jay's imitation of something metallic and a white, hard gelatinous substance covering a nearby building.  The ending is nothing short of terrifying...Stephen King couldn't have done better than Bester with this one.  By the way, the story's setting is around the year 1980, which gives a clue as to the apocalyptic nature of many people's thinking back in '63...

Next week I finish my look back at science fiction short stories from the year 1963...

Just Finished Reading The ReWired Brain by Ski Chilton

The ReWired Brain is a newly published book by Dr. Ski Chilton, professor of medicine, writer, and entrepreneur...along with Dr. Margaret Rukstalis and A.J. Gregory.  Melissa introduced me to it and I just finished reading it...here are my reactions...

Dr. Chilton in this book lays out the thesis that anyone can "rewire" their own brain and thus transform their life due to recent discoveries in neurological research.  He introduces and explains the concepts of brain plasticity, epigenetics, dual process reasoning (Systems One and Two) and the undifferentiated and differentiated minds.  He challenges, through the presentation of epigenetics, the commonly held notion that one's genetic makeup greatly restricts their capacity to change and that one's mental makeup is pretty much determined in their younger years.  Instead, Chilton explains that our nervous system is designed for change throughout our lives and that what we now choose to think in itself directly causes physical changes that affect our future.  Roughly stated, with dual process reasoning, System One corresponds to the subconscious mind and the lower brain functions while System Two, which defines our humanity in his opinion, rests within the cerebrum...the key is to keep them in balance, and especially work to avoid letting System One rule over what we say and do.  What I appreciate about this book is the personally liberating idea that I can design and change my brain and thinking to whatever I want it to be...the catch is that I not only have to know where I want to go, but also that I need to understand where I'm coming from right now: this is where the concept of differentiation comes into play.  For much of what we take for granted as truth comes from early childhood experiences, some of which may have involved abuse or exposure to destructive belief patterns.  It is important to recognize them in order to "differentiate" our past experience from what we truly are and want to become...

Ski Chilton writes from a personal perspective, drawing upon his own life story and his faith as a Christian.  You do not have to be a fellow believer in order to derive benefit from his writing, though...just realize that he is simply honestly expressing things as he sees them.  He also presents self-exploration questions at the end of chapters designed to get the reader more involved...very useful.  I've grossly simplified the good author's message in this necessarily brief review...let me just say in closing that there's a lot of new stuff here to learn and I'm confident that before long I'll find myself reading it again.  Thumbs up on this book...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #25-23

Two of the three acts featured below as I continue to approach the top of my list of 500 all-time personal favorite songs are well-known while the last one should be...had the trends of popular music tastes remained at the same relatively high level they were during the latter part of the twentieth century.  But that's just my opinion and you're welcome to your boring top forty MTV superstars of the past few years if you're happy with their output: I'm not...

25 FIND THE RIVER...R.E.M.

The Athens, Georgia-based alternative rock band R.E.M.'s greatest album, in my opinion, was Automatic for the People from 1992...Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones reportedly had a big hand in producing it.  My favorite tracks from it are Drive, Man on the Moon, The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight and the closing song Find the River...my favorite from this outstanding musical act.  Find the River's lyricist and singer Michael Stipe admits that he threw a lot of nonsensical words together in it because they sounded good, but he also gets enough in to direct the mood of the song as it portends great change to come...including the inevitability of death itself, as the accompanying video suggests.  But such things are universal, just as the river flows into the sea...an allegory in this song.  Find the River is sad, thought-provoking, and beautiful...

24 STREET FIGHTING MAN...the Rolling Stones

I pretty much ignored this track from the Stones' pivotal 1968 album Beggars Banquet when it first came out...it wouldn't be until the Nineties when I fell in love with the off-sounding beat and guitar and sitar interactions, along with singer Mick Jagger's ironic lament of London's sleepy town status as opposed to Paris, site of many ongoing street riots and protests. Ironic because Jagger was no radical himself, one of those wealthy folk that the anarchists and revolutionaries liked to rail against...yet in the song he calls himself "a poor boy".  Jagger was and still is a master of projecting an image of himself and his band that contributed to their enduring notoriety and success...even as they accumulated their riches and social status.  Street Fighting Man is one of the greatest air guitar songs I know of...yet this band which is still going on strong...more than two and a half decades following their "One Foot in the Grave" concert tour...has another song that is even higher up on my favorites list...

23 OH DETROIT, LIFT UP YOUR WEARY HEAD...Sufjan Stevens

Sufjan Stevens is one of those musical artists for whom you never know exactly what to expect when you play one of his albums for the first time.  In the decade of the 2000s he released two albums themed after the states of Michigan and Illinois...this song about Detroit is obviously from the former as he bemoans the fall that the Motor City had undergone through the years.  It starts out fast-moving and syncopated and winds down to a slow death at the end, mirroring Stevens' feelings about this great old American city.  Eight minutes long, it has always been among my favorites ever since I first heard it in 2009.  Yet I would be astonished if I found out that any of this blog's readers had ever heard this masterpiece before...to me it should have been a nationwide number one singles hit for weeks instead of being deeply buried on an obscure CD.  Stevens has a new album release, The Ascension, due out at the end of this month and I'm looking forward to hearing it...

Next week: #22-20...

Giving George R.R. Martin One Last Chance

I've written on this blog a number of times how I have been disappointed in fantasy fiction writer George R.R. Martin's decade-long delay in finishing his sixth book, The Winds of Winter, in the A Song of Ice and Fire series.  I had ambitiously set out to read the first five volumes of the series, starting with A Game of Thrones, finished up several years ago, and eagerly awaited the next installment...and waited...and waited.  Instead, Martin collaborated with HBO on an eight-season adaptation of the series, even going into yet-to-be published material from the final two books during the last three seasons and completely closing out the series on TV with a very controversial ending.  Meanwhile, Martin has let himself be distracted by other projects, including an unsolicited prequel novel to this series while all his loyal readers have been clamoring for Winds of Winter.  Well, I've reread good fiction before and I don't really know for sure how he plans to end his written version of the series...assuming he gets around to finish writing it, that is.  Still, foolish as I may be, I've decided to reread the first five rather lengthy books in hopes that Martin is true to his word about expecting the next book to be out sometime in 2021.  I'm currently a little more than halfway through A Game of Thrones, listening to it through a speeded up unabridged audio version I checked out from my public library...I plan to go through all the volumes in this manner.  After all, it's more a review for me than ingesting new information, so this strategy is working quite well so far.  Now all George R.R. Martin has to do to finish and publish the promised next book, which he has reportedly said is some 1,500 pages long.  But if the dude passes on before ever delivering the last two long-awaited volumes I reserve the right to create my own ending, screw HBO...

Just Finished Reading James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl

Continuing along with my Jeopardy!-inspired reading of Roald Dahl's children's novels, I just finished his famous James and the Giant Peach from 1961.  Having no idea what to expect from it, I found myself breaking into laughter time and time again with this modern day fairy tale of a little boy's adventures on a magically-enchanted, giant peach along with Centipede, Grasshopper, Miss Spider, Ladybird, Earthworm, Glowworm and Silkworm...all also altered through magic, wiggling beans that a mysterious elderly man one day has given to James.  Another story that might have been an inspiration to J.K. Rowling, James Henry Trotter has been orphaned after his parents are killed by an escaped rhino from a London zoo...his caretakers are now two abusive, mean aunts, Sponge and Spiker, who subject the boy to continual insults, threats, and menial work without any break.  The old man's gift to him was meant for James to ingest, but he stumbles near the home's peach tree and the beans fly out and plant themselves into the soil...creating the aforementioned effects.  Together with his new friends in the peach, James embarks on a series of adventures.  James and the Giant Peach is a modern-day fairy tale in the sense that the reader, originally in 1961, has familiar time references in it while it, as a fairy tale, can be in places more than a little grim and violent...recall some of the more traditional stories from your childhood.  In 1996 James and the Giant Peach was released as movie, no doubt severely altered from the book in the process.  And a few years ago it was made into a musical as well...I think I'll wait a bit before trying the adaptions, though.  If you haven't seen the movie before, I think you'll get a big kick from reading the book...

Quote of the Week...from Prince

Seems that I was busy doing something next to nothing, but different than the day before."
                                                                        ---Prince

Prince, as I hope you already well know, was an extraordinarily talented and driven American popular musician from Minnesota.  He was most famous during the 1980s, especially 1983-84 when he produced first his breakthrough album 1999 and then Purple Rain, the latter paired with a blockbuster movie starring himself.  "Prince" had always been his name...he was named at birth Prince Rogers Nelson.  But in the 1990s during a dispute with his then-record label he shed the "Prince" name in favor of an unpronounceable symbol, for years thereafter referred to as "the Artist Formerly Known as Prince".  By the turn of the century, though, he resumed his Prince moniker, inspiring me to call him "the Artist Formerly Known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince".  That tomfoolery aside, Prince was a remarkably creative songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, accounting for an astounding 39 complete studio albums over 38 years before his untimely, tragic demise in April, 2016.  Many of his songs, especially earlier in his career, had explicitly sexual themes and language...well, I'm finally ready to plow through all of it, cringeworthy lyrics or not: I've decided to explore each and every one of his albums during the next few weeks.  After all, the current music scene as I see it is falling pretty short in my estimation: many of my favorite acts aren't releasing anything new this year, except for Sufjan Stevens'  The Ascension album coming out two weeks from now.  There's only one standout song I've heard this year: EOB's Shangri-La (EOB is Ed O'Brien, Radiohead guitarist).  So if all goes well with my listening, my "top songs of 2020" will likely consist of Shangri-La, a few from The Ascension, and a lot from Prince.  It'll be a bit like in 2016 when I reviewed all 27 of David Bowie's studio albums after his death that year in January, coming up with several treasures in the process.  As for the above Prince quote, it's from my favorite song of his, Raspberry Beret, and ties in a little to my blog article yesterday about making small daily changes in my life.  The irony for Prince, a very self-disciplined, hard worker, is that he never was busy doing something next to nothing...but trying new things was a deeply ingrained habit that he kept throughout his creative life...

Exploring, Experimenting, and Microchanging as Life-Enhancement Strategies

Just going by the mass popularity of self-improvement and motivational literature and programs out there, I'm pretty confident that a lot of us want to do what we can to make our own lives more productive, healthy and fulfilling.  Regardless of my genetic or environmental background, ultimately it's the choices I make that determine the quality of my existence...or at least that's what my own experience has taught me.  And I'm not just talking about momentous, life-changing decisions but also the myriad small choices I make during the course of a day.  As a matter of fact, if done with the oversight of one's better nature without any intention of hurting others or violating ethical standards, the composite effect of many things done a little differently can have an enormous effect on how I enjoy my life.  And regarding those little things, I'm thinking...myself at least...of three strategies: exploring, experimenting, and "microchanging"...

When your daily life is as regular and governed by routine as mine, exploring can be as simple as going down a different street or hallway...or taking a brief moment to look around at the surroundings in greater depth.  Experimenting is doing things a little differently to see the effects, pro and con...say, taking my meals at different times and spacing them differently, for example.  Microchanging, a term that I coined myself, involves taking each day (or cyclic period) and doing a new specific, constructive activity on a small scale ...and then continue onward with that change.  When the next day (or specified time period) arrives I continue to incorporate all the earlier "micro" changes while beginning a new one...creating in the end a mountain of positive change.  I'm doing this starting now...should be a lot of fun, and probably awfully challenging as well...

Weekly Short Stories: 1963 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here are my reactions to three more 1963 science fiction short stories from the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 25 (1963).  I have to admit that I am very partial to the first one below...Clifford Simak may well be my favorite science fiction writer.  Each tale has its own distinctive flavor and presentation...all worthy of reading...

NEW FOLKS' HOME by Clifford Simak

An elderly, retired legal scholar, renowned in his field, has as a close friend a retired astronomer, who is now terminally ill in a hospital.  The two had spent many enjoyable fishing and camping trips together over the years in a special, remote place by a small river several miles from civilization.  One day the lawyer decides to take one last trip there...this time necessarily on his own...and finds to his chagrin that a strange white house is suddenly there, built on a hill overlooking the fishing area that they had become so possessive of.  What he eventually discovers about it leads to another outcome eerily reminiscent of another great old Simak short story, The Big Front Yard...

THE FACES OUTSIDE by Bruce McAllister

A human man and woman are swimming underwater in what is clearly a vast enclosed aquarium with other aquatic life forms like sharks and porpoises...and there are faces on the outside peering in.  The couple, although completely immersed in the water, breathe naturally as if they were in the air.  Devoid of memory of their earlier lives, the two have a telepathic link with one another, and the man has an inner voice coaching him as to how evil those "faces outside" are and to regard them as the enemy.  We find the true context for this uniquely perplexing setting later on as the story takes a sudden downward turn regarding the fate of humanity...and then turns the tables on it all...

HOT PLANET by Hal Clement

Some science fiction aficionados are very particular about reading only "hard" stories, that is the ones that tend to go into great technical detail to present things as strictly in conformance with scientific principles and technology.  I recognize that the writer should try to present the story's science as feasible, but also feel that it's possible to bog everything down with too much detail...but that's just my tastes.  Hot Planet, about an exploratory scientific mission to Mercury from Earth composed of scientific and engineering specialists, is one such "hard" science fiction story. Clement wrote of the impending crisis of a newly-formed volcano on the unexpectedly seismically overactive planet and the crew's attempts to escape destruction.  The beginning was a bit overwhelming to me on the details side, but as it progressed I appreciated that the author had obviously done quite a bit of research on how gravity can affect a planet or moon's seismic nature.  I felt I had learned something after reading it...

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

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...