The Great Conjunction of Planets Jupiter and Saturn Tomorrow Evening

Tomorrow evening...assuming there are clear skies above us...we should be treated to a rare astronomical event as the planets Jupiter and Saturn will appear the closest to each other they ever have from Earth's perspective in nearly 400 years.  This doesn't have anything to do with the two planets' distances from each other, though, and we're fortunate that both have moved eastward on their respective zodiacal paths so that when Monday's conjunction occurs they should be visible just above the southwestern horizon when the sun sets and the sky darkens.  Last night here in Gainesville the skies were overcast and the same is predicted tonight...tomorrow, though, they will be clear: alas, I'll be at work then.  Still, for the past few months I've enjoyed looking at the two largest planets in our solar system close together in the sky, in the constellation Sagittarius (just west of Capricornus, where they are now to be found).  Once you've seen them "hug" each other tomorrow evening in their celestial dance, then swing over to the high eastern sky and behold Mars, still much brighter than it is usually seen.  And, of course, the moon is right there in the middle of it all... 

Prince's Black Album...and Self-Censorship

Several weeks ago I wrote that I was going to explore the collective studio album works of the late, great popular musician Prince...I've heard about half of his 39 albums to date and think well of all of them, although naturally I like a few better than others.  One of these that I instantly took a liking to the first time I heard it...this time from YouTube...is the so-called "Black Album" which I originally thought was recorded and released in 1994.  Like the Beatles' so-called White Album from 1968, the Black Album is actually untitled, released in a black jacket.  Prince recorded it around 1987 and reportedly, with his backup band, took more time and effort to put it together than any other work of his...yet when it was released he suddenly did an about-face on it, proclaiming it "evil" and urging his fans not to buy it.  The release was stopped after just a few sales and the album would eventually be rereleased on CD in a limited edition eight years later.  Apparently, Prince disliked what he perceived as the album's negative bent, although its most negative track by far, Bob George...which had a very similar theme to Jimi Hendrix's rendition of Hey Joe...was something the artist continued to perform in concerts afterwards.  I thought it was an energetic (and often very funny) album with a great mix of musical styles...not my favorite Prince album but right up there with some of his best.  The point here that I'm trying to make is that anyone who creates music, art...or something on social media like Facebook or Twitter...can have times when they produce something they later think was inappropriate and would like to take back even though it's too late to do so.  It's a problem that all serious artists and writers have to face: you want to be true to your feelings and even passions...including the negative ones...but also are concerned about how they will be received by your audience and if there might not be pushback.  The way I handle this sort of thing on my blog...and I'm admittedly no wise guru on the subject...is to stay away from profanity and intentionally avoid singling out individual people for criticism...unless they are public figures like entertainment and media celebrities or politicians...and instead make more general comments about trends I see within society.  But beyond my own standards, employing self-censorship will only produce insipid, insincere, namby-pamby results that aren't worth anyone's attention.  It's a shame that Prince's Black Album was suppressed, but I suppose it was his call to make, not mine...

Quote of the Week...from Ray Bradbury

 You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture.  Just get people to stop reading them.

                                                                     ---Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury, who wrote prolifically and is responsible for many renowned works like Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Martian Chronicles, The Pedestrian...and perhaps his most famous, Fahrenheit 451, was a great lover of reading.  That last book I mentioned is what probably prompted the above quote as its setting was a future dystopia in which books were banned and burned.  I think that reading as a regular discipline or even as an enjoyable hobby has never been something that the majority of any given population...in any era...has taken to.  I also think that in today's world of Amazon, Kindle, and audiobooks, books have never been so available. Yet as I've mentioned before on this blog, those publications that haven't been digitalized and are out of print can be very hard to come by...quite unlike the music industry that has so successfully gone back to the vinyl record era and digitalized most of what has been recorded.  Regarding Bradbury's above quote, I would like to tweak the last sentence a little to read "Just get people to stop reading them critically, with discernment".  This goes especially for nonfiction works that advocate specific positions and ideologies on politics, society, history, lifestyle, dieting and the like. To enhance a culture rather than contribute to its destruction folks shouldn't just read stuff that panders to their preconceived notions and demonizes opposing perspectives and those holding them.  You need to take what's written and process it as to its truth value, as well as try to understand why the author is saying whatever he or she is saying.  Trump worshippers aren't going to expand their horizons by reading the latest Sean Hannity book, and likewise his detractors won't achieve a more broadened perspective taking up the book written by the president's niece, Mary Trump.  I'm not suggesting, either, that the two sides flip and read the "other side's" books...better instead to pick material that is light on the venom and innuendo and heavy on civil discourse.  I saw a Twilight Zone episode once where two aliens come down to Earth to abduct the greatest human in history...turns out the man in question was the world's biggest liar, but the aliens automatically believed everything he said, not possessing the capacity to discern truth from falsehood.  We can do better than that, and we can start by reading stuff that challenges us, not just whatever props up our prejudices... 

A Belated Happy 250th Birthday, Beethoven

On either the 15th or 16th of December, 1770, Ludwig van Beethoven, one of the greatest classical composers of all time, was born.  I listened the other evening on my phone to New York's classical music station WQXR as they were appropriately devoting their programming to his life and legacy during this celebration of his 250th birthday.  Beethoven's gradual loss of hearing, culminating in deafness, has always floored me: how could anyone like this compose something as complex and beautiful as his Ninth Symphony, along with the other late works of his career?  I've always loved that symphony, especially its second movement...which used to be played during the closing credits of the Huntley/Brinkley national news report on NBC during the 1960s when I was growing up.  I love listening to classical music, but at the same time usually feel a bit intimidated: I have no special musical training other then a brief period a few years ago when I took beginning piano.  There's a highly technical side of it all that completely escapes me...what I'm left with as a lay listener is the way the instruments interact during the particular piece's flow to impart feeling. Sometimes it's easy to "get" a classical work, as was the case with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Bach's 140th Cantata, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, and Debussy's Nocturnes...other times it's harder, as has been the case for me with some of the symphonies of Mozart, Haydn, and Mahler...and even some of Beethoven's.  In any event, I usually have my car radio on Gainesville's classical music station on 102.7...if you're in town why not give it a listen?   

Weekly Short Stories: 1966 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I conclude my look back at the year of 1966 in science fiction short stories with the final entries in the retrospective anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1967...edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr.  While these stories were first appearing in various magazines I was nine years old...going on ten...living in Hollywood, Florida with my parents and sister and attending Nova Blanche Forman Elementary School in Davie, going from the fourth grade there into the fifth. In February we were blessed with a spunky little cockapoo puppy, which we named Michelle after the ongoing hit Beatles song...she would be with the family for fifteen wonderful years.  Lyndon Johnson was riding high in the presidency and seemed hellbent on getting the country inextricably drawn into an endless war of attrition in Vietnam with the military draft going on strong, sending non-volunteers into enemy-held territory to draw out their fire: what a cynical strategy. I remember earlier that year a "patriotism" class at Nova in which the idea of how noble it is to die for one's country was promoted...the librarian's son was in 'Nam at the time and she put in her two cents worth for the war. All I could think, at age nine, was is this what's in store for me in my life?  Well, here are my reactions to those four stories from the book...

 

THE WINGS OF A BAT by Paul Ash

Industrial mining meets time travel technology as such a firm finds itself doing just that, back in the Cretaceous Period when dinosaurs roamed and pterodons...winged dinosaurs...flew.  The physician on duty finds himself the nanny of a baby version of such a creature...wing spans up to twenty feet when grown.  It's a bit comical how the doc, who's telling the story, reluctantly puts up with the antics of this creature.  Fiona, she's called, grows up and eventually gets her flying instincts and skills going and flies away, never expected to return to the camp. Yet you know that somehow in the end it's all going to come back as a terrible storm is brewing and our physician hero is caught in the middle of it all.  Although it was (ugh) a time travel story, this one was set completely in the past so they didn't pull out all those annoying paradoxes that they do in other such tales.  Also, I thought it was kind of sweet... 

THE MAN FROM WHEN by Dannie Plachta

Speaking of annoying time travel stories, the only redeeming thing about this one is that it was very, very, short, taking up just a couple of pages.  Out in the country somewhere a man contemplates the scenery while about to mix his favorite drink.  Suddenly, just a few hundred yards away there's a big explosion...and a stranger emerges from the surrounding mist and approaches him: naturally he's from the future, performing a time travel experiment.  What he tells the dude standing there reveals what we sometimes think about doomsday predictions of our future: if they're far off ahead of us then we tend to shrug them off...otherwise...

AMEN AND OUT by Brian Aldiss

In a future Earth when a select few, through special injections, have become immortal and computers and machinery pretty much run people's lives with each person carrying around with them a computer-run shrine to pray to, one indigent outcast has a bold plan to rock the boat as he tries to convince one of the immortals to be the first one ever to leave their place of confinement for centuries.  This story delves into topics like how much people increasingly depend on their machines...and the reference to the shrines made me grin, thinking how much folks nowadays revere the smartphones they absolutely must have in their possession 24/7 and how much meaning they derive from them.  Also, it's a bit philosophical about the implications of immortality and how such people might see things differently from us mortals. The story's final line is a classic...

FOR A BREATH I TARRY by Roger Zelazny

Many thousands of years into the future there is no more human life on Earth, but the machines they built continue "living" on and have created new machines that serve them.  Originally there were two main machines, Solcom as a satellite orbiting Earth, and Divcom, deep underneath the surface, who are now vying for machine supremacy and trying to convert the planet's smaller machines to their respective sides.  On the North Pole dwells the huge, cubical machine Frost who, besides his assigned duties on behalf of Solcom, has an interesting hobby: the study of Man through his relics, books, and movies.  It is this quest to understand what humanity was all about and how they differed from machines that drives the flow of this interesting story.  Frost's fascination with humanity leads him to a wager of sorts with the other machines, leading to a most intriguing ending...

Next week I begin my look at science fiction short stories from 1967...

Just Finished Reading Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane by Suzanne Collins

After thoroughly enjoying reading the Hunger Games young adult science fiction trilogy by Suzanne Collins, I had decided a few weeks ago to go back further in her writing history and tackle her five-part children's fantasy series, titled The Underland Chronicles.  I just finished book two, Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane, from 2004.  Gregor is the name of the series' protagonist, a boy living in poverty in New York City with his family: his mother, father, and two sisters, one of whom, the baby "Boots", has accompanied Gregor in his odysseys far down below ground among the huge talking rats, bats, spiders, cockroaches...and other creatures living there with descendants of the humans who first voyaged there some three centuries earlier.  In this story Gregor is taking Boots out to the park...all he has to do is divert his eyes for a couple of seconds and she's gone...taken underground by giant, protective cockroaches.  You see, they have a scroll, the Prophecy of Bane, which states that the babe's life is in danger from the villainous rats.  Gregor has no choice but to return to the scene of his previous adventure to rescue his beloved little sister...and then is informed that the "Bane" in the prophecy is a huge, evil white rat that he must seek out and destroy on his own.  And the story goes on with some good twists and turns...I liked it and felt that there was a message here regarding using compassion and discernment even in the midst of perilous combat situations.  The ending leaves no doubt that there will be a sequel...which Collins dutifully wrote and published the next year.  I'll soon be reading this next installment, titled Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods...a story which, like the first two, is predicated on a different prophecy of the Underland.  No, I'm not a kid but this series is working for me..,

My #2 All-Time Favorite Song: Switchblade Smiles by Kasabian

SWITCHBLADE SMILES, by the English alternative rock band Kasabian, is my #2 favorite song of all-time.  It's from their 2011 fourth album, titled Velociraptor!, which is also one of the album's tracks...velociraptors, by the way, were a type of speedy, predatory dinosaur during the Cretaceous Period.  Although Kasabian made an interesting, dynamic performance video of Switchblade Smiles, it wasn't released as a single and remains as a deep track on the album, which didn't even chart in the United States (although Velociraptor! reached Number One in the United Kingdom).  Because I was already a Kasabian fan from some of their earlier songs like Reason is Treason, Test Transmission and  L.S.F.,  I soon picked up the album and put it on my MP3 player with all the others...in 2013 I was into listening to a shuffle of Kasabian songs while on my long-distance training runs, and that was how I noticed and grew to appreciate what a great, energetic song Switchblade Smiles was...I made it my "song of the year" seven years ago.  I'm partial to songs like this that fuse together different genres of music and make it all work.  The beginning sounds like it's going to be a techno piece with soft, soothing singing...until the heavy drums cut in and then a killer Led Zeppelin-like guitar rift sends the listener sharply in a different direction.  Add to that elements of punk/rap and eerie interludes sounding Middle Eastern and you have a very singular work.  The lyrics are almost impossible to decipher...even when you read them out, so I have interpreted the general message as one of defiance at all the BS going on around me, to put things as diplomatically as I can..it hits me like Tom Petty's I Won't Back Down in this respect .  It's a passionate song by a band that has sadly tapered off a bit with their last two albums...let's see if they can't pick up the pieces after their front man recently left them and bring back the earlier glory...

Just Finished Reading Solar Lottery by Philip K. Dick

Solar Lottery, a 1955 science fiction novel of Philip K. Dick and the thirteenth book of his I've read so far, creates a future world that I don't want to live in.  Mathematicians in government have devised a strategy of a worldwide society based on a lottery system...how people do depends on their "luck", which they can (and usually do) trade in for the benefit of contracting their labor (and ultimately, freedom) to different powerful employers.  The protagonist, a young engineer named Ted Benteley, one day finds himself out of a job when his employer he is contracted to has to lay off much of their workforce due to a fire.  Benteley wants to climb the ladder of success and seeks the current Quizmaster, i.e. the lottery-winning most-powerful person in the Solar System, to contract himself out to.  Unfortunately, after taking his loyalty oath he finds out that this individual, Verrick, is no longer Quizmaster and he is once again stuck working for a "lesser" employer.  Here the story takes a sharp turn, as the assassination of a Quizmaster is completely legal and Verrick schemes to knock off the new one, a guy named Cartwright.  Since Benteley is in contract to Verrick, he must go along with his new boss's plans...and there the story works it way through to a pretty interesting conclusion.  Throw into the mix that Cartwright is involved with a cult-like movement led by a man named Preston to colonize a yet-undiscovered outer planet, and you pretty much have a sketchy outline of this tale.  Oh, and telepathy plays a role here...causing me to groan a little on the inside since I'm sick and tired of sci-fi stories featuring the phenomenon as an integral element...I don't hanker much to time travel fiction, either (although Stephen King's excellent 11/22/63 is a striking exception).  But I need to consider that the author wrote it in 1955 and it was, according to Wikipedia, his first ever published novel.  As Philip K. Dick novels go, I thought it was one of his better works. From time to time I'll seek out another story of his...he wrote a lot of novels and not all of them were science fiction, although that is the genre for which he is best known... 

Constellation of the Month: Perseus

 

For December I picked as my Constellation of the Month Perseus, prominent for much of the year in northern nighttime skies, and which crosses the meridian around 9 pm this month.  It represents the Greek mythological hero who, riding the winged horse Pegasus, rescues the fair maiden Andromeda from the sea monster Cetus at Queen Cassiopeia's behest...all are represented by nearby constellations. The 1981 movie Clash of the Titans, starring Harry Hamlin as Perseus, presented one version of the story.  Perseus, although possessing no first magnitude stars, is nevertheless loaded with many bright ones, marked by Mirfak and Algol...the latter, "only" 93 light years away from us, is actually a triple star, with its variation in brightness caused by the stars taking turns eclipsing one another.  Mirfak is much further away and bigger.  Perseus is the focus of the annual Perseids, the most spectacular meteor shower of all and which takes place in the wee morning hours around August 11-13 as the Earth rotates into a cloud of dust particles along its orbit around the sun and ignites them within the atmosphere. I can't begin to count the times, though, in which I tried to watch it but for various reasons was thwarted...often from overcast skies, my schedule, or just falling asleep: let's see if I can't catch it in 2021! I've always welcomed seeing Perseus rising up in the northeastern sky (from my Florida latitude) as it presages the coming of the most interesting part of the celestial sky, that of the wintertime.  Next month there can be only one constellation that stands out above all others for January...well, even for the entire year, for that matter: can you guess which one it is?    

Quote of the Week...from Gail Sheehy

Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.                        ---Gail Sheehy

Gail Sheehy was an American journalist and writer who sadly passed away this past August from pneumonia at age 83...regrettably I haven't read any of her works, which deal with numerous ongoing topics in current society including many politically-themed pieces...but her most renowned books are the Passages series focusing on helping more elderly folks (like me) have more fulfilling lives.  I picked her above quote because it is so true, and on more than one level: let me explain...

On a political or national level, I hear a lot of talk these days about how people need to be secure in the areas of their lives that affect them the most...health care reigns prominently in these discussions. But in any industry that wants to grow and increase its quality of goods and services while making them available to the widest possible group of consumers, there is a need for those running the companies to be able to make free choices as to where they place their money and emphasis, based on the needs of those purchasing their products.  In times of emergencies like war or pandemic, successful companies built upon this freedom to grow have then been able to divert their goals to producing much-needed weapons, equipment, and, yes, vaccines: you don't build such organizations from scratch, by governmental decree.  But within all this is the element of the core, basic economic decision, based on scarcity of product and demand and the profit motive...and with it all comes an element of risk.  I'm one of those Americans who feel that health care should be affordable to all and reform of the system is a good thing...but you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater: profit-seeking, risk-taking companies have gotten us here to the point where effective vaccines for this ongoing scourge of this brand-new form of coronavirus have been developed in awe-inspiring, record time...

On a more personal level, I think that growth is both a process of construction and destruction.  Stress, which tears me down physically and mentally, can result in a replacement of body and mind that is stronger and more fulfilling than before if I go about it in an intelligent manner...but it does involve stepping out of that comfort zone and sometimes out on what seems to be a treacherous, narrow ledge up high. Physical exertion through exercise or labor can be seen as a temporary surrender of security as the body is taxed, but after recovery growth has occurred.  Facing down stressful personal storms and getting through them gives me a sense of lack of security when it's all going on, but on the other side I am more equipped to handle future crises.  And sometimes growth in career or relationships can be a little scary as they take me out of my routines and old habits and force me to subject myself to possible failure and rejection. There's nothing more secure, I suppose, than never trying anything new, but it's also stagnating...

Maybe I should try reading something Gail Sheehy has written...I'm sure some of her stuff is in the library...

Local Weather Finally Cools Down

The weather here in northern Florida in the last week or two has finally turned, it seems, toward more wintery, cool conditions...I'm not sure whether to say "thank you" or "oh, no".  Especially in the morning it's the latter choice as I simply do not like the general chill of the area and can't wait to get some hot coffee within me at the first opportunity.  Once the day is firmly underway, though, I tend to enjoy the coolness and dryness.  And with the nighttime, the stars are so much brighter...and then the cycle renews itself the next morning.  When the last cold front passed through, storms hitting my area during the dead of night, my front yard became covered with autumn leaves...guess I'll have to get the rake out before long (let's see if a few more don't come down first).  I'm also happy to see the end of this horrendous 2020 hurricane season...although Louisiana and other areas were hit hard, my own Gainesville vicinity was largely spared although Tropical Storm Eta did sweep through us a few weeks ago, again during the dead of night, knocking down a few branches.  With this colder weather the mosquito presence should subside as well...my workplace is basically situated on the edge of Paynes Prairie, a large wetlands area just south of Gainesville and as big as the city, serving as a vast mosquito incubation zone.  Now excuse me while I go get that crucial first cup of coffee...

Weekly Short Stories: 1966 Science Fiction, Part 2

Below are my reactions to four more short stories originally published in the year 1966 as they appeared in the anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1967 with Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr as editors.  Usually each week when I do this blog feature I can find at least one of the stories I'm examining to be likeable...unfortunately I couldn't this time around, and to make the matter worse the first three were excessively long.  Oh well, you can't win 'em all...

BIRCHER by A.A. Walde

Off sometime in the future when murder is very rare, a regional homicide chief investigator is stumped by an unidentifiable body...clearly the victim of a violent murder...that has been dumped within his district.  Since due to the highly advanced forensics and technology it is virtually impossible in his time to find a corpse without any trail of identifiable features, he finds himself in a situation that threatens his own job should he fail to discover the murderer, much less who the victim was.  It's a traditional whodunnit murder mystery in science fiction garb...nothing wrong with that, but as a reader I felt cheated by the extraneous "facts" the author provided at the end to explain it all...information that I would have no way of knowing since it was safely tucked away within Walde's fertile imagination...

BEHOLD THE MAN by Michael Moorcock

This story took the overdone sci-fi gimmick of time travel and used it to make a statement about religion.  A young amateur psychologist with bigtime neurotic and existential hang-ups finds himself presented with the opportunity to travel back in time by using a crackpot inventor's time machine...he goes back to the Sea of Galilee area around 28 A.D., where he plans to find Jesus and discern some ultimate truths.  The story goes back and forth between his experiences in the Holy Land and the events and discussions with others that led to his forsaking of the present.  If you're into the psychological theories of Carl Jung, you might get more from this story than I did.  I did appreciate that the author demonstrated how certain events can be twisted out of shape and exaggerated over time within popular culture to create myth...the time machine angle was absurd, though, and could only be used one time since any subsequent "trips" would have changed the outcome (although the recent Star Trek movie series seems to have figured a way around that)...

BUMBERBOOM by Avram Davidson

This story, written in a language the author projects far into the future on Earth (and is thus harder to understand), deals with a common theme in science fiction: the regression of humanity from an advanced technological state to a backwards, divided world with more genetically differentiated humanoid groups staking out their own territories and reverting to older social forms and norms.  The chief instigator in this change was something called the "Great Gene Shift" and left unexplained.  The story's protagonist, Mallian, High Man to the Hereditor of Land Qanaras, is a traveling adventurer who seeks his own power and fortune by manipulating those he encounters.  He runs across a huge ancient mobile weapon...perhaps it was a tank...called "Bumberboom" and decides to go about arming it and using it to achieve his ends.  The story resembles Don Quixote in its flow and characters, and Mallian even gets a Sancho Panza-like sidekick toward the end.  It's farcical and hard to decipher...if you can get through the muddled language it's kind of funny and sad at the same time...

DAY MILLION by Fredrik Pohl

This was a very short, snide little piece appearing at the time in the men's magazine Rogue, so its subject was heavily sexual and concerned the relationship between two humans of the future 10,000 years from now (1966, that is).  Pohl does throw in some intriguing ideas about the redesigning of people...on both genetic and cybernetic levels...to achieve longer and more active lives and specialized abilities to adapt to certain environments.  But the general aim of Day Million was to titillate the reader, which apparently worked well enough for anthology editors Wollheim and Carr to select it: I wouldn't have...

Next week I continue looking back at short science fiction from the year 1966...

Just Finished Reading Fall of Giants by Ken Follett

During the last decade Ken Follett wrote a historical fiction trilogy titled Century...Fall of Giants, which dealt with World War I and the years preceding and following it, is the first volume. It features the lives of fictional Welsh, English, German, Russian and American families as they find themselves at the forefront of monumental events in history.  Class divisions and struggles for equal rights vie with the war drums, ignited to actual conflict after Austria-Hungary's Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated by a Serbian nationalist in Bosnia in June of 1914 and the different mutual aid treaties entangling the great European powers drag them all into open hostilities, starting with Austria's invasion of Serbia and then expanding into the German-Russian theater in the east and German's incursion into France through neutral Belgium in the west, leading to a lengthy, disastrous trench warfare stalemate in northeastern France and Belgium between the Allies (first France and Britain and then with the United States entering later) and the Germans.  Before all this the narrative focuses on the Welsh mining family of the Williams, with young Billy entering the mines following in his father's footsteps, with the two adamantly opposed to the owner that Billy's sister Ether works for, a privileged wealthy nobleman named Edward Fitzherbert. Fitz's sister Maude finds herself falling in love with Walter von Ulrich, a visiting German nobleman: not good for them with a war coming on!  Add to the mix the Russian orphaned brothers Lev and Gregori Peshkov and the American official Gus Dewar and you have the book's principal fictional characters, destined to play their own significant roles among real people of the times like Vladimir Lenin, King George V of England, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, Leon Trotsky, Alexander Kerensky, and US President Woodrow Wilson...to name a few of the most important.  From what I already knew about this time and its tumultuous events, I felt that once you filter out the fictional characters, the narrative accurately recounts what really happened.  The only problem I had with it was that I felt the author tended to gloss over the calamitous Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918-19, which actually killed more people worldwide than the war itself. Had Follett written this story in 2020 during this coronavirus pandemic, I wonder whether he might have emphasized that time's horrible pestilence more.  I thought his characters were very compelling and believable, each of them with their own virtues and faults...and also having to deal with the prevailing social and political winds of their own time.  I'm looking forward to beginning the next book in Follett's series, titled Winter of the World... 

My #3 All-Time Favorite Song: Us by Regina Spektor

US, by the Russian-American piano virtuoso (and great singer) Regina Spektor, is from her 2004 third album, titled Soviet Kitsch...and happens to be my #3 favorite song of all time.  As is the case on almost all of her songs, it's basically Regina's voice and her piano...with a beautiful string background...as she delivers an epic performance that touches upon her old Soviet homeland and the many, many statues constructed there of the State's political heroes, as well as the renaming of cities.  The lyrics, unlike any other song I've heard, carry for me two separate meanings, one more literal and the other more applicable to people in general, as their exploits, good or bad, while at one time recognized and even widely lauded, become over the span of time tarnished...or, worse, forgotten: "They'll name a city after us and later say it's all our fault...then they'll give us a talking to, give us a talking to, 'cause they've got years of experience."  The lyrics about statues vividly brings to my mind that Russian statue graveyard scene in the 1995 James Bond movie Goldeneye.  In America of late they've been doing similar things with old statues of presidents and civil war figures, retroactively accused of terrible behavior from the convenient perspective of our enlightened standards of today.  On a broader interpretation, I feel that the trend today is to puncture anything about the past that speaks of greatness through condemnation...I have no problem with reasonable criticism...or simply to forget about it and let it all rust away as Regina alluded to in her song.  I keep thinking of the prolific writer Isaac Asimov, who passed away only 28 years ago and who published more than 500 books in his lifetime, many of them critically successful and popular.  But I wonder how many people, if you asked a random sample of the population, have even heard of him, much less any of his works?  The desire of immortality is often said to be expressed through people's achievements and the effects they have beyond their death...this dream seems to be becoming more and more difficult to realize, especially for those whose life works happened before the digital revolution came to preserve every absurd expressed thought by anybody with an online connection...now we're all being drowned out by each other's voices, and cancel culture reaches out to condemn anyone from the past who might have said or written something back then that offends somebody today.  I first heard Us in 2009 after I was introduced to Regina Spektor on an online alternative music radio channel...it quickly became a favorite of mine.  Can't wait for your next album, Regina!

My Sports Enthusiasm Cooling Down

In case you're wondering why I haven't been peppering this blog recently with sports articles as I have done in the past, this one's for you. I've still been watching sports on TV like usual, right through this pandemic.  I followed the end of the NBA and NHL resumed seasons as well as Major League Baseball's attenuated regular season and expanded playoffs.  I still keep up with professional league soccer, notably the Mexican premier league and Major League Soccer, and regularly watch football, both college and NFL.  But I'm nowhere near where I used to be as far as caring that much who wins or loses...even for my traditional favorites.  Part of the reason is that I've grown to see sports for what it is: entertainment, not something in which I should invest a large part of my emotions, and I never gamble on games.  Since I'm neither a player nor a coach, I have no input into the result of a game I'm watching, so I'm essentially helpless if I do care who wins...other than switch the channel or turn off the TV.  I'm also fed up with the trend on ESPN and other sports media to be full of their own perceived seriousness, as if they were some force in social consciousness with their political correctness and "historical" programming like that annoying series on Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls earlier this year.  I'm tired of sports talk show shock jocks like Stephen A. Smith taunting and deriding certain athletes and coaches they dislike.  But most of all I had an epiphany of sorts when, a few weeks ago following the University of Florida's football loss to Texas A&M, Gator coach Dan Mullen urged for Florida to "pack the Swamp" (their home stadium) in the following week's scheduled game against LSU...Mullen was roundly criticized in the midst of this dangerous COVID pandemic, UF players and staff (including, later, Mullen) tested positive, and the game was postponed. The way I see it, there are too many people in this country who would gladly trade off a few extra deaths in exchange for keeping their supply of sports addiction at the same level that they were used to seeing, flowing freely to them and with full stadiums and arenas...this kind of attitude makes me more inclined to forego even casual sports watching and boycott the entire industry... 

My Architecture Period as a Kid

When my sister Anita, older than me by four years, got hold of a textbook on architecture some time in the mid-to-late 1960s (I'm guessing around 1967-68), she introduced me to the subject and I became fascinated with the different types of buildings...chiefly those of houses...and began to look forward to the weekly Sunday newspaper, not for the comics or sports but rather for the real estate section.  In it were always floor plans of houses that were for sale, and I would imagine myself living in them.  Soon I was drawing up my own floor plans, which...following my sailing ship, world geography, and star map periods, began the next "big thing" for me...in between collecting stamps and trading cards, that is.  At the time, as far as I can remember, I was in the fifth or sixth grade at Nova Blanche Forman Elementary in Davie...Anita's school was across the field at Nova High.   By the way, back then I was fascinated by the pictures of Frank Lloyd Wright's architectural works, and I had always thought that the house at the end of Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 masterpiece thriller North by Northwest was a Wright home.  But after just looking it up, I discovered that instead of being a real building situated behind Mount Rushmore, it was only a movie set creation in California, built to look like something that the famous architect might have designed.  It was my recent subscription to online newspaper archives that brought my architecture period back to the forefront of my memory as I once again scanned through Sunday paper home sections...the above clip is from the June 19, 1966 Miami Herald: check out the prices!  Nowadays I'm more interested in big buildings, impressed by the towering skyscrapers during visits to New York and Chicago (including the Windy City's fantastic Architecture River Tour)...while equally taken aback by those block-long, shorter office monstrosities in Washington, D.C. (shorter due to the city's height restriction for buildings).  As for houses, you might think I'd be a big fan of the Home and Garden channel...but alas, my interest in house designs is no longer what it was more than fifty years ago...

Quote of the Week...from William Arthur Ward

 It is wise to direct your anger at problems, not people...to focus your energies on answers, not excuses.

                                                                             ---William Arthur Ward

I picked up the above quote off my Music Choice Soundscapes channel, provided by my cable TV company and which features positive and philosophical quotes to accompany their ambient music.  William Arthur Ward, whom I've quoted before on this blog, was a twentieth century Christian leader within the Methodist movement whose self-improvement maxims were widely published in newspapers and magazines of the time, most notably Reader's Digest.  I'm discussing it here because I agree with it, but as usual I feel the need to tweak it a little.  For after all, many people nowadays equate their problems with certain people, either in their personal lives or on the national stage in politics or the media. For me, sometimes those politicians in charge are the ones I voted for, sometimes not...that's the way it has always gone in this republic where people vote for their leaders: wait a few years and try it again...maybe "my" guy or gal will win next time if they didn't the last.  On the personal level I think a lot of us...myself included...have fallen into the trap of sitting back and judging those around us without taking into account that our own willful interactions (or non-interactions) with them play a big role in their own attitudes and behavior toward us.  For myself, it's important that with each situation I find myself in that I determine what I'm trying to get out of it and focus on getting my goals accomplished...this helps keep me from that nasty habit of "sideways thinking", i.e. devoting my attention to what others are up to and whether they're being treated better than me or getting away with something they shouldn't.  There's a way to address problems with others...like Ward said, focusing on the problem and not the person while, I would add, communicating during most of any interaction about how much I value that individual. Although it's fair and even recommended to honestly recognize the harm that certain people may have done to me when I was but a child and not to sugarcoat those times...I still have to take responsibility for my own life now. To make excuses or play the blame game when things don't go my way isn't just counterproductive...it also tends to create more problems...

Trying to Obtain Use from Basically Useless Resources

Like squeezing water from a rock, some of the media resources surrounding me offer little hope of positive, constructive use...yet in almost all of them there can be opportunities for enlightenment and application if I just apply myself and face the challenge of plowing through mostly meaningless...and often downright dishonest...drivel.  Take conservative talk radio, for example.  Shows like Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin and Michael Savage depend on listeners plugging their brains into them for two to three hours daily and putting their own independent thinking to sleep as they voluntarily submit themselves to the hosts' brainwashing...but I don't have to go down that path: I can be a discerning listener, noticing when the host is being demagogic or dishonest and when he or she is expressing a reasonable opinion worth considering.  In almost every opinion show on radio or TV, be they from a conservative or liberal perspective, there is something worthwhile...even if it only is to figure out why certain individuals around me are believing the weird things they believe.  Still, with this I wouldn't rely on any of them as my primary source for news. As for other areas, I am regularly receiving company and union periodicals in the mail...I survey each of them and quickly dispose of them: maybe a little more intensive examination might reveal a useful tidbit of information I could use.  As for politicians, it's always a useful intellect and character-building exercise to take the ones I support and look for things to criticize while taking those I oppose and looking for something to praise.  Such an exercise doesn't create uncertainty within me, but rather strengthens my arguments pro and con about the issues and those espousing their positions on them.  In browsing through old newspapers online from years gone by, I have noticed that not only do editorial page columns provide insights into the time period being investigated, but also how regular articles are written, as well as advice columns, advertisements, the classifieds, entertainment section...and even the comic strips.  In a world in which the different political and self-identification factions of the population are bubbling themselves off into insulated spheres of feedback loops, each with their own "alternative facts" and subjective realities, I think it would be healthy for each of us to take at least one day every week or two (or month) and just immerse ourselves...as honestly and empathetically as possible...in the "opposition" bubble.  And also try to find some educational or useful experience in everything we encounter, even if it's generally regarded as junk... 

Weekly Short Stories: 1966 Science Fiction, Part 1

Today I begin looking back at the year 1966 with sci-fi short short stories using the retrospective anthology World's Best Science Fiction: 1967, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr...the title year refers to its time of publication, not the stories contain therein. The first three stories I discuss below contain their own feasible innovations...implanted memories, time-capturing glass, genetically altered human forms to live on other planets...while the final one has a more philosophical (and humorous) bent to it.  Here they are...

WE CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE by Philip K. Dick

The is the Philip K. Dick tale on which the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Total Recall was based...which just a few years ago was remade with a different cast (with much worse reviews). The themes are similar, with a man on Earth doing menial work in the not-so-distant future while dreaming of having an adventurous life on Mars after it has just begun to be explored and settled.  There's a company that creates and implants intricate memories into its clients, and Douglas Quail goes there...with the discovery soon made that he's actually been to Mars.  From here on the written story diverges quite a bit from the movie and, in my opinion, has a more interesting, twisted ending...but you'll have to read it for yourself to discover what it is...

LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS by Bob Shaw

In this story Bob Shaw introduces his innovation of "slow glass", through which light takes years to pass ...and therefore provides a window into the past, capturing ongoing images of wherever it faced the measured number of years before.  An unhappily married, quarreling couple is driving through the countryside, where rows and rows of slow glass are up for sale.  The man stops where the owner is sitting to see about buying some of the glass and happens to see a young woman and her child looking out the nearby home's window without seeming to take any notice of them.  This tale has an amazing ending and puts life's petty squabbles and resentments into perspective...  

THE KEYS TO DECEMBER by Roger Zelazny

In a relatively distant future when humanity has explored and settled deep into the cosmos, biological science has naturally leaped ahead and genetically-designed humanoid varieties, suited for more extreme conditions on specified worlds, are being born to "normal" parents.  Jarry is such a "person", a Catform Coldworlder meant to live on a very cold planet with mining interests, but before he can be sent there its star turns supernova and he is stuck in cold hibernation until another home planet can be found.  Finally another is discovered, but it must be environmentally modified over the course of some thousands of years while Jarry and the other Catforms living there spend most of their time in suspended animation, coming out briefly every 200 years or so to make sure the process is running well.  Only one problem: the native life forms on this world are struggling to varying degrees to adapt to the much colder conditions and Jarry sees that one species is much more intelligent than the prospectors had thought.  I wonder whether this might be one of the more realistic scenarios for future space exploration and settlement...

NINE HUNDRED GRANDMOTHERS by R.A. Lafferty

On the asteroid Proavitus dwell a population claiming never to die.  A trading company, with its employees taking on menacing names like Manbreaker Crag and Blast Berg, lands to transact business there. One of its members, a young man named Ceran who has foresworn the toughguy nicknames of his fellow workers, decides to investigate the source of the native folk's immortality, leading on a quest deeper and deeper under the surface as he peels back generation after generation, talking to the sleepy ancestors.  The ending of this very short story is funny...and hints that the secret to never-ending physical life may be a lot simpler...and less important...than one might think...

Next week I'll be continuing my review of short science fiction from 1966...

My November 2020 Running & Walking Report

In November I ran for a total of 102 miles, missing three days of running and with 6 miles being my longest single run of the month.  I also began to record my walking mileage, amassing a total of 105 miles in November.  I expect the walking-to-running mileage ratio to increase as I get older, and will most likely eventually transition into a primarily walking exercise routine.  This doesn't mean that I am forgoing athletics: speed walking is definitely an option for me and might be something to pursue in shorter races, especially the 5K ones.  But for the immediate future I'm still running and the weather this first week in December has made a strong turn to cooler winter conditions, giving me impetus to go out once again on long weekend runs.  As for races, the coronavirus pandemic surge is precluding my participation, even for any races that are being held in defiance of recommendations.  Hopefully, in the not too distant future the vaccines will turn it all around and I'll be able to enter a few in 2021...we'll see...