Great Old TV Episodes...from The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

 

THE PROJECT STRIGAS AFFAIR...All episode titles in the sixties spy series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. are in "The ___ Affair" format.  The one in this article was from their first season, initially aired in November 1964.  Although at age eight I would become an ardent fan of the series starring Robert Vaughan as agent Napoleon Solo and his Russian sidekick Illya Kuryakin, played by David McCallum, I'm not sure if I saw this specific episode at that time...more likely later in the spring of 1965 as a rerun. In it, sounding more like a Mission: Impossible undertaking, Solo and Kuryakin are assigned to discredit a politically surging warmongering diplomat from a fictional Balkan nation.  Making up an imaginary "Project Strigas" to tempt their adversary's interest, they enlist the aid of a chemical engineer-turned pest exterminator as the phony head of this convoluted plot to lead the ambassador on.  I picked this episode to discuss because of the presence of two very familiar faces, as you can see from the above photo taken from it during a party: Star Trek's William Shatner (playing the exterminator) and Leonard Nimoy (as the Balkan ambassador's assistant) are hobnobbing with Vaughn as Shatner's character has had a little too much to drink.  Star Trek wouldn't begin its three-year run until the late summer of 1966: here's a sneak preview of its stars! Of course, back then I wouldn't have known that...it's fun to go back in these old series (The Twilight Zone is another good source) and notice guest actors who would later star in their own shows and movies, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is loaded with these examples.  For the entire year of 1965 and well into 1966, I was nuts about The Man from U.N.C.L.E.: it was by far my favorite television series of that time.  Unfortunately, after its run...unlike with Star Trek...those possessing its rights refused to release it into syndication for many years.  Still now this series, very popular during its time, is extremely hard to find on TV.  So I decided to buy the entire series on DVD off Amazon at a huge discount using some of my gift card balance...nice!

Just Finished Reading Gregor and the Marks of Secret by Suzanne Collins

Since Suzanne Collins' 2006 children's novel Gregor and the Marks of Secret directly ties in with The Underland Chronicles' previous book, Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods, my review here will necessarily involve some plot spoilers...you may want to stop and catch up reading the series for yourself first.  After the previous book's plague has been resolved, Gregor, a boy who with his mother and baby sister Boots has voyaged deep under the Earth's surface in response to an urgent plea from the human inhabitants there, finds himself the subject of yet another prophecy...this one is held secret from him, though.  Down here the animals are human-size, intelligent, and speak his language...how convenient.  A war is developing between the rats, lead by an albino called the Bane (read book #2), and pretty much everyone else...including spiders, cockroaches, people, bats...and especially the mice, caller "nibblers".  Gregor and his party set out to see about rescuing the persecuted mice and make some grisly discoveries.  The ending segues directly, I'm sure, into the final book of this five-part series.  Not exactly my favorite series in this genre of children's fantasy fiction, but Collins has skillfully built up the suspense and presented the characters to the point where I care about what happens to them at the end of it all...so of course I'm checking out that last volume...

Quote of the Week...from Haruki Murakami

I'll be happy if running and I can grow old together.        ---Haruki Murakami

From an Internet search about running quotes, I got a good article by Norbert Juma listing a few...click here to read it.  One of the listed quotes, many of which were great (and which I might use in the future), is the above one from award-winning Japanese writer Haruki Murakami...guess I'll have to check out a book or two of his now.  I get his drift: it would be great to continue being able to go out on runs as I age and even participate in races when they come up in my area.  Back in January 2011 I ran...and eventually walked the last seven miles due to an IT band injury in my leg...the only marathon I ever officially entered in a race.  Because I was hobbled in the last half of this race, I encountered many slower runners passing me...many of them in advanced years.  The experience, while humbling, made a deep impact on me: I want to be like them and be able to keep on running as long as I live...which hopefully will be for a considerable time in the future.  So I'm not as keen on running fast as I am on covering long distances and maintaining this activity for years to come.  I don't control everything that will happen to me...nobody does...but to the extent that I can I will continue this great activity.  I'd love to be running half-marathons, 15K and 10K races as long as they're still holding them...

Just Finished Rereading Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga Series

Stephenie Meyer wrote and published the core four volumes of her blockbuster vampire/romance series Twilight Saga in the years 2005 to 2010.  I read the books back then but wasn't as attentive to reviewing them on this blog, which I started in 2007.  Having forgotten a lot of the events and characters, I decided to do what I recently did with George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire ("Game of Thrones") series: I checked them out in audio form on my Libby app and listened to them at 2.5X speed...worked again!  Here are my impressions of each book...oh, by the way, plot spoilers abound here so don't read my summaries if you haven't read the series or seen the movies and plan to...

TWILIGHT...Bella Swan moves from Phoenix...where she lived for years with her divorced mother...to rain-plagued, dreary Forks, Washington to stay with her father Charlie and finish high school there.  At school she notices an isolated group of very pale, beautiful-looking students: the story is that they are the Cullen family and they are rich, drive fancy cars and live out of town in a big house.  Bella instantly gets caught up with Edward Cullen, who attends classes with her.  They fall in love as Bella discovers he and his family are "immortals", i.e. vampires...and that all of them are long-lived, but that this family abstains from ever drinking human blood and only maintain themselves through hunting in the woods for animals.  Naturally, from here on Bella has this secret of theirs to keep, but she discovers that there exists outside of town an Indian tribe that knows about the Cullens...one of them, Jake Black, becomes good friends with Bella despite her courtship with Edward.  The story's climax centers on the Cullens' encounter...with Bella present...with three vampires who drink human blood.  Their leader, James, fixates on Bella as a target and tracks her while the Cullens try to protect her...I thought it was suspensefully written, but Bella's subsequent desire to become a vampire alienated me from her perspective...

NEW MOON...After Bella's eighteenth birthday party at the Cullens during which. after a minor accident involving broken glass and Bella spilling some blood, Jasper Cullen freaks out and endangers her, the family...including Edward...decide they are too dangerous to Bella and they move away, leaving her devastated and depressed.  Her father Charlie encourages her to get out and socialize, with little success until she goes out to where the Indians live and becomes close friends with Jake, who sees her as his girlfriend now that his rival is gone.  But the Indians...with a legend about them shapeshifting into wolves...have their own secret to hide, and when Jake comes of age, a trigger event causes him to transform, changing the dynamics of his relationship with Bella.  The Indians apparently have had a peace agreement with the Cullens that the "werewolves" and vampires would not fight under certain stipulations, but now feel liberated with their departure.  But Victoria, the vampire mate of James from the first book, is bent on revenge for his demise at the hands of Edward and is now pursuing Bella...when our heroine dives from a cliff that the Indians use, she sees in the water what she later understands was Victoria's red hair.  But that dive brings another danger...it is misreported that Bella had committed suicide...Edward reacts by going to Italy where the "head" vampires dwell in order to relinquish his existence: the race is on with Bella and Alice (her closest Cullen other than Edward) to stop him before it's too late...

ECLIPSE...The Cullens move back to Forks and the rivalry between Jake and Edward for Bella's affection heats up considerably with Victoria still on the loose and a puzzling series of murders piling up in nearby Seattle.  There is a lot of background story discussed in this book as well as (in my opinion) way too much indulgent dialogue between Jake and Bella and Bella and Edward about their respective relationships...I got how things stood early on and hearing it all repeated over and over again got to be very tedious.  The story's climax happens when it's revealed that Victoria was responsible for the Seattle murders, happening as a byproduct of her creation of "newborn" vampires for her army...and now they're coming to Forks.  Allied with the Jake's pack, the Cullens take on the invaders, but afterwards Jake is devastated and flees when he overhears Edward and Bella discussing their upcoming marriage and her transformation as a vampire...

BREAKING DAWN...Bella graduates from high school, she marries Edward, and the two honeymoon on a special island off the the coast of Brazil.  They find that sex between them...which they had been abstaining from over the course of the series...was possible and enjoyable but that Edward with his prodigious strength had still bruised Bella's body: he resolves to avoid lovemaking until she undergoes the transformation.  But before that can happen, she gets sick and they discover she is pregnant with Edward's child...it progresses at an accelerated pace as they return to Forks.  Jake breaks from the Indians who see the upcoming baby as an abomination to be destroyed...slowly a sort of alliance, if not friendship, develops between Jake and Edward.  The birth happens, the baby is born, and due to the damage to Bella's body her earlier choice to become a vampire is now a matter of survival: Edward injects the venom and she changes.  With newborn Renesmee "Ness" Cullen as a warm-blooded, beating heart human/vampire hybrid, the rest of the Cullens are wary that Bella is not yet conditioned to resist drinking human blood and keep her away until she can demonstrate her self-control, which they are astounded to discover that she has in abundance.  Meanwhile, the ultimate threat is on the horizon: that ruling vampire group from Italy, upon hearing of Renesmee, are coming to Forks en masse to kill her as an abomination...setting up a giant confrontation between the Cullens and their allies and the enemy...

Whew, this should help me a little when my memory of this series begins to cloud again.  I didn't watch the movies, but maybe I'll try out Twilight whenever it's on TV.  Throughout the series I had a big problem with Bella's desire to become a vampire, but hey, this more than everything is a teenage romance series, so love and hormones rule supreme here...

Weekly Short Stories: 1969 Science Fiction, Part 1

If 1968 was a tough year for me growing up, 1969 was even tougher...I was going through all the trauma and turmoil of early adolescence, twelve going on thirteen, and both my peers and the authority figures around me let me down pretty badly...I'll just let that go for now.  In science fiction, though, the short stories were good, and today I'm reviewing the first three from the anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1970, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, and covering the previous year's output. Actually, that third story below is a novella, which accounts for the fact that I'm only reviewing three.  Here they are...

A MAN SPEKITH by Richard Wilson

A moderately successful disc jockey gets hired by a company with space connections and finds himself alone in orbit on a spacecraft with an advanced computer for company when the Earth simply rips itself apart one day, killing everybody...except our hero.  He continues along, putting out an audio journal describing his ongoing feelings and memories of his former life and doomed planet.  Meanwhile the computer has its own narrative going on as it describes some facets of the circumstances unavailable to the isolated DJ, who is unaware of its existence.  The story's resolution is one of the best I've read in a while...  

AFTER THE MYTHS WENT HOME by Robert Silverberg

Around the year 12,240 the highly technologically advanced humans on Earth have discovered ways to call up famous figures from the past, but eventually they get tired of listening to Churchill and Einstein and they devise a way to call up all the old gods.  If the god in question has his or her roots in a real person, then they will cast a certain aura about them...surprisingly all of them do, but the jaded people of our future, full of their own self-sufficiency and luxury, grow bored of them as well and send them all back after only about fifty years.  Not wise, considering what happens next...

DEATH BY ECSTASY by Larry Niven

In this novella Niven saw ahead to the time when organ transplants would be commonplace, extending people's lives and paradoxically causing life to be valued less since people's healthy bodies had become economic commodities...organized crime gets in on the act and people are kidnapped in order for their organs to be harvested.  An investigator, formerly a miner in the Asteroid Belt, finds that one of his old buddies has died on Earth of an apparent suicide due to current addiction.  Knowing that his old friend would never do such a thing, he undercovers a major scam.  Current addiction is something the author brings up in his 1979 novel The Ringworld Engineers, and he imbues the protagonist and his helper with specific psychic abilities, crucial to the story's outcome.  I enjoyed Niven's story here more than his longer works...

Next week I continue my look at short science fiction from 1969...

Game of the Week: Jeopardy!

 

Jeopardy!, my all-time favorite television game show, is still on the air despite the recent tragic passing of its long-time host Alex Trebek from pancreatic cancer.  It's not the host, though...although I liked Trebek...that attracts me to Jeopardy!.  After all, for several years of my childhood from the mid-sixties into the early seventies, I used to enjoy watching it when Art Fleming hosted it.  It's essentially a trivia game between three contestants who have already been prescreened to demonstrate that they're not complete dunces.  Each round...there are two in each game...consists of six categories of topics, each with five answers of increasing monetary value.  The questions read as "answers" to which a contestant must formulate the appropriate question.  For example, an "answer" might be shown as "The most prevalent element in Earth's atmosphere" to which the correct question would be "What is nitrogen?". After the main part of the show is over there is a final Jeopardy answer for which the contestants wager in advance however much they want to from the money they've accumulated so far...the total money winner at the end gets to continue playing in the next episode.  It's fun for me to see how much I know and how I match up with the contestants...there are definitely some categories for which I am pretty ignorant!  For the past few weeks on the show's current run they have been featuring guest hosts, but I usually only have the opportunity to view it Saturday evenings, and at that time they're almost always showing reruns from when Trebek was hosting it.  May Jeopardy! endure for many more years and maintain its present dignified format and tone.  I've written about this show a couple of times in the past on this blog: click on the title to read the article: Jeopardy Wagering Strategies (8/3/14) and Quote of the Week...from Alex Trebek (11/13/20)....

Just Finished Reading The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury, from 1929, is probably the most famous of American writer William Faulkner's novels.  Set as usual in a fictional locale within his home state of Mississippi, the story is presented from four separate viewpoints: Benjy, Quentin, Jason...brothers within the Compson family...and a third-person narration at the end very similar to Faulkner's style in the three other novels of his that I have read so far.  Three of the parts are set within a three-day period of April, 1928 while Quentin's necessarily goes back much further, to 1910 when he was attending college.  Through the "stream of consciousness" lenses of the three brothers...and finally through that of the "impartial" narrator...the reader supposedly can piece together the puzzle of what's really going on in their lives and their family: good luck with that!  Benjy is a severely intellectually-challenged man who sees everything literally, with his emotions springing up spontaneously in reaction.  Quentin is, on the other hand, intellectual and sensitive, spending much of his thoughts reliving past moments of his life and agonizing over them.  Jason is more, I believe, like most of us: rooted in the real moment like Benjy, but putting his own cynical editorial stamp on everything and everyone around him while excusing his own questionable behavior as a matter of habit.  The central character, Caddie...sister to these three brothers...gets no narration but is revealed by the attitudes of her siblings.  Family honor, apparently a big thing within Southern white families of slaveholding lineage, gets a lot of treatment here as Caddie's mother feels scandalized by her daughter first becoming pregnant out of wedlock and then being abandoned by her husband.  Benjy is unaware of any of this and only wants his sister back, Quentin feels extreme guilt and personalizes it all, and Jason scorns and ostracizes his sister while secreting away the support payments she makes for her daughter, also named Quentin.  It's a pretty big mess with a lot of miserable people stuck in their own heads...the mother is a perennial, manipulative hypochondriac and causes much of the family division.  Only Caddie and the Compsons' black employees and family seem to think rationally and act in a socially functional manner.  I was fascinated with how Faulkner used this stream of consciousness approach to divide the population into these three types: the literalist Benjy, the neurotic, fantasizing Quentin, and the cynical, rationalizing Jason.  And then then there is Dilsey, the family's housekeeper and her own family's matriarch, who is the one unrecognized person in the story who keeps both the Compsons and her own together and functioning. In the first two narratives the reader finds himself often instantly transported back and forth in time as the protagonists relive moments from their pasts...Jason's, though, as I earlier said, is rooted in the present real world (of 1928).  The Sound and the Fury is loaded with racism and racist epithets...not from Faulkner's beliefs, but rather from the characters and social climate he tried to realistically depict  from life in rural Mississippi in the early twentieth century.  If you can get past all the "N" words...and it can get overbearing at times...this novel might provide an interesting reading challenge...

Great Old TV Episodes...from Sesame Street

ABOVE IT ALL and GROUCH GROCERY STORE  were my two most favorite segments from the long-running children's series Sesame Street.  These weren't technically "episodes" in the classic sense but were features within the show's often chaotic-seeming sequence as it would progress each day.  Above it All is a short cartoon animated by Sally Cruikshank and first appearing on the show in 1988 (episode 2559).  A bespectacled female lizard/alligator spins the little propeller on her hat and joyfully flies over the land and sea, musically pointing out all the creatures and things below her...until she looks up and discovers she's "below" as well, this time to a friendly bird!   Grouch Grocery Store was in episode 2937 (1992)...Gordon and his son Miles go down into the garbage can with Oscar to see how a Grouch grocery store is run...to side-splitting results.  "This" Gordon, a character played over the years by different actors, puts in a great comedic performance with his exasperation over the Grouch store clerk's antics, including demanding their party take a number...which turns out to be the same one he's handed out to everyone else in the store!  I first saw Above It All in a re-airing in the early 1990s, coinciding in general time with Grouch Grocery Store and my son Will's toddler years.  I never watched Sesame Street until I had kids (I was a teen when it first aired)...I guess that's the way it for folks in general, sharing childlike things with our own children...

The "Shoe on Other Foot" and "What Goes Around" Arguments in Politics

Political nearsightedness is running rampant in our America of recent years, and at no time has it been more on display than in the last few months.  It seems that the overwhelming majority of politicians in Washington speak and act as if their ruling side will be in power forever and that any election or piece of legislation has catastrophic, world-ending consequences if it doesn't completely go their way...and of course the "other side" is run by corrupt extremists.  People-at-large have their own legitimate political orientations, and they usually subscribe to either the conservative, Republican camp or the liberals, with the Democrats as their group.  It would help all of us, regardless of what we want to see done...or not done...in Washington, to realize that the two parties go back and forth between being in power or in opposition every few years or so.  Losing a round of elections isn't the end of the world...unless you're talking about an authoritarian, ultra-narcissistic sore loser like Donald Trump, who has still refused to concede the 2020 election to the winner, Joe Biden.  On January 6th some two thirds of the Republican House representatives rose up in opposition to officially counting the Pennsylvania presidential election results, which Biden won fair and square.  That's far beyond a simple show of protest and portends a future in which possibly a party holding majority power in Congress can undo a national election that the other party's candidate won...and it could happen as soon as 2025 if the Republicans win back the White House in a close contest and the Democrats still run the House and Senate.  It would help if each of us stood back and took the long view on things, considering what it would be like if the shoe instead were on the other foot and it was the Democrats objecting to a free and fair result last November that handed Trump reelection.  Precedent is a very big thing in politics and the Republican grandstanding over the 2020 election is a very bad one.  Other bad precedents that ignore the "shoe on the other foot" and "what goes around comes around" principles have been the removal in the United States Senate of 60-vote thresholds to advance and confirm presidents' nominations, the Democrats starting it in 2014 and the Republicans extending it to Supreme Court nominees in 2017.  Now talk is about for the Democrats to end the legislative filibuster, something that Republican Leader Mitch McConnell resisted doing while Trump was president and his party controlled the Senate.  I say keep things the way they are...what good is it to pass a bunch of controversial bills on 51-vote majorities and then have them automatically reversed when the other party gets into power as soon as 2-4 years later?  Better to work on and achieve compromises on legislation between the two sides that will stand for years, something the Democrats are sadly skirting with this COVID relief bill they are currently forcing through by means of a convoluted legislative process called budget reconciliation, and something that the Republicans tried when they attempted a few years ago to end Obamacare (failed) and pushed a huge tax reform bill (passed).  The notion of packing the Supreme Court by adding four new seats to give the more liberal wing 7-6 majority status is another bad, bad idea doomed to backfire.  Again, what goes around comes around...

Quote of the Week...from Madeleine L'Engle

You have to write the book that wants to be written.  And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.                                       ---Madeleine L'Engle

I got the above quote by Madeleine L'Engle, who wrote A Wrinkle in Time and other children's books, through an online search for quotes about writing.  There are two components to her quote, one of which is that the sensitive writer will discern needs on the part of the readership that point to a new direction, thereby seeming like a book that wants to be written.  The other component pushes forth the notion that writing about difficult subjects does not automatically translate into writing that is difficult to read.  On the contrary...as L'Engle implies, the writer should put forth his or her agenda in a simple and plain manner and if at all possible let it be expressed through the characters and narrative.  And that sometimes books written for children contain the most potent and significant wisdom: I've certainly discovered this for myself, which is why you'll often find me reviewing books of that genre.  So write the book that needs to be written and please go easy on the reader, who has already signaled a personal commitment of their own time (and often expense) by simply picking up your book and opening it...

Filled in Gaps on My Reading List by Rereading Patterson and Grafton Novels

While I was compiling my reading list for the past few years, I came across a couple of obvious gaps with long-running series by authors James Patterson and Sue Grafton.  The first, Patterson's Women's Murder Club series that he co-authored with other writers, progressively goes up the number scale with its titles, while the late Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone mystery series did the same with the letters of the alphabet: I was missing the "4th" and "B" books respectively although I knew I had already read them, so I just finished rereading both and here are my reactions...

In 4th of July, written by Patterson and Maxine Paetro, San Francisco police investigator Lindsay Boxer finds herself confronted with two different series of brutal killings...upon discovering the perpetrators of the first, she and her partner Jacobi are gunned down when they carelessly shoulder their guns while assisting two teenager suspects out of the car they were in on a high-speed pursuit and crash.  Both good guys recover, but Lindsay finds herself on the end of a massive lawsuit from the father of the girl whom Lindsay had to shoot dead in self-defense...this subplot continues throughout the story as she discovers that a earlier cold case seems to be repeating itself in other grisly homicides involving apparently harmless, affluent suburban couples in the area. The story culminates in the resolution of both the lawsuit and that murder case. And I don't know why I never got around to writing a review of it earlier...

The same feeling came to me after rereading Sue Grafton's "B' is for Burglar...no earlier mention of it in my blog archives, but I definitely did read it back then.  Kinsey Millhone is a twice-divorced 32 year old private detective, formerly a cop in Santa Teresa, California where she still lives and works.  An affluent woman commissions her to find her missing sister Elaine in order to obtain a signature releasing inheritance money from a recently deceased relative...seems pretty routine, but Kinsey soon discovers her object has disappeared off the planet, leading her to visit a second home in Boca Raton, Florida while the apartment next to Elaine's back in California, where a burglary-turned-murder had occurred just a few months before, keeps increasing in significance.  With this reading I was brought back to Kinsey's fictional home town with her 80+ year old landlord/baker/crossword puzzle creator Henry Pitts, her assorted routines including her morning three-mile jogs on the beach, Rosie's nearby restaurant where the owner cooks up wild, scary Hungarian dishes, and a budding off-and-on romance with Jonah Robb, a local cop.  Naturally, I had read this book before so the ending wasn't a surprise when I went through it again...but it was fun reading anyway.  Now excuse me while I go back on my blog to last month's cumulative reading list and fill in a couple of gaps: Lindsay and Kinsey in California....

Weekly Short Stories: 1968 Science Fiction, Part 4

This week I finish my look back at 1968 regarding science fiction short stories, reviewing the final four from the anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1969, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr and covering their favorites from the preceding year. As for me, 1968 was a troubling year to live through (I was 11-12 years old) and I don't miss it a bit...but it's still fun looking back and muse over the memories, both good and bad.  That year was also the very first presidential election I followed, and from early in the primary season at that.  President Johnson, anticipating an easy road to the nomination, was stunned early by challenger antiwar senator Eugene McCarthy (my mom's favorite) in the New Hampshire Primary, Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy, and LBJ suddenly decided he wasn't running for president again, opening up the Democratic field.  On the Republican side Richard Nixon, with his secret plan for ending the Vietnam War while emphasizing law and order, was the clear favorite with Nelson Rockefeller challenging him from the party's liberal wing and Ronald Reagan jumping into the race late. Meanwhile, segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace ran a populist third party race, with Nixon squeaking out a close win over eventual Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, on election night.   But enough of that: here are those stories...

TOTAL ENVIRONMENT by Brian W. Aldiss

This is more of a novella than a short story and is one of those peculiar ones set in a future which is now our receding past: the year 2000.  Total Environment is a unique project, located in India, set up ostensibly to study the effects of overpopulated, cramped living conditions and their long-term effects on individuals and societies...but the real reason is to ascertain whether such conditions would develop physic abilities in people.  The protagonist is an investigator sent to live in Total Environment, set in a massive tower housing generations of unbelievably cramped people of multiple generations since 1975.  Aldiss makes some interesting suppositions about humanity and overcrowding here as well as comparing the Eastern mindset with that of the West... 

THE SQUARE ROOT OF BRAIN by Fritz Leiber

Two unnamed individuals, simply referred to as the Modest Young Man and the Undistinguished Old Man, attend a party full of guests espousing their own imagined paranormal and cosmic connections and powers...our two protagonists are polite but aren't buying into it all. At the end they leave the gathering and reveal to the reader who they really are...didn't surprise me.  The author interspersed this story with dubious clips from the Universal American Encyclopedia that provides its own version of misinformation.  It's all about how society fills itself with a lot of false crap masquerading as factual truth...gee, that sounds like today, doesn't it...

STARSONG by Fred Saberhagen

I've reviewed recently three other Saberhagen short stories (Fortress Ship, The Life Hater and Masque of the Red Shift) from his Berserker series of tales involving an ancient fleet of automated warships that prey upon humanity as it reaches out in exploration and settlement throughout the galaxy.  The concept here seems to have be adopted in an original Star Trek episode as well as Star Trek: the Next Generation's Borg invaders.  In Starsong the Berserkers have taken existing human captives and plugged their nervous systems into their own machines...the extent of their grotesque atrocities become revealed when Earth forces taken over one of their key installations.  Here is the tragic story of a young married couple: the wife carelessly exposes herself to capture by the foe...the newlywed husband who pursues her into enemy space is a famous lyricist and singer... 

FEAR HOUND by Katherine MacLean

In a future New York an organization called the Rescue League is dedicated to finding powerful psychic people called Archetypes...capable of unconsciously influencing the masses around them...who are in dire personal trouble.  The city of late seems inexplicably weighed down by fear and anxiety, and Ahmet, the league's best agent, takes on his new partner as the two hunt for who's causing the disturbance.  A pretty cool premise for a story...and for a series, for that matter: it would have translated well on TV.  I enjoyed reading about various sections of Manhattan I traveled through back in 2010...

Next week I begin examining science fiction short stories from the year 1969...

Game of the Week: Flag Football

My exposure to the game of football as a kid...and after that I never played it...was in elementary and high school when we would play it as flag football in physical education class (or "recess" as they called it in the younger years).  Unlike tackle football with players geared up wearing pads and protective helmets designed to shield them from hits and tackles, flag football removes most of that hard contact as each player wears a belt around their waist, with a long, removable plastic strip attached by Velcro on each hip.  During any play in the game, any player holding the ball can then be brought "down" by pulling off one of his or her flags. The only actual instruction I ever received in football at school happened during our opening session at Nova Elementary School in the 4th grade in the late summer of 1965 when our P.E. teacher, Mr. Tilton, gave the assembled boys a brief clinic on how to punt a football.  Nothing about the actual rules of the game, which to me would have helped since I had never played it before...coaches in classes like these tended to show off a kind of phony bravado, acting all military-like and presuming everyone in the class was an athlete already well-versed in whatever activity was on the agenda (and if you were weren't athletically inclined then you were a nobody).  Although I was one of the fastest runners around and NEVER dropped a football when it was passed or kicked to me, I rarely got to be a receiver, instead being repeatedly told to "block" on each offensive play.  So I quickly became a preferred defensive player since that part of the game placed fewer limitations on what I could do with my talents...I tended to be a team leader in "tackles", i.e. pulling off the opponent's flag...often by simply chasing down whoever had the ball...and was known to stand in the way and intercept passes as well.  Since kids tend to cheat and contest calls, I'm glad we played flag football instead of the touch variety, which involved the defensive player having to place a hand on each of the ball carrier's hips to bring him down...enforcing such a rule without an third party referee constantly monitoring the action and calling each play would have required more of a sense of honor than many kids had (and probably still don't as adults).  I looked for photos off the Internet I could include here of flag football, but they seem to mostly be of "official" looking games with stripe-suited officials and uniformed teams on yard-marked fields...I never played any football game on such a level.  The last time I played a flag football game was in September, 1973 in a high school P.E. class...I had caught a pass and was running for a touchdown when the desperate defender pushed me down from behind when he saw he couldn't get to my flag in time. I fell on my hands which miraculously weren't broken, but I never returned to play this game that could have been fun had the players not acted like such jerks...

My February 2021 Running Report

For February I ran a total of 97 miles, missing two days of running in the month with 4.8 miles being my longest single run.  With walking I also covered 97 miles...probably a bit more but that's what I actually measured.  This past month has seen me continue in my holding pattern regarding my running, and it's due to the continuing COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions around us...resulting in the lack of public races that are usually scheduled this time of year.  And that includes Gainesville's big February long-distance running extravaganza: LifeSouth's Five Points of Life marathon, half-marathon and 5K events.  Maybe if things go well they'll hold it once again starting in 2022, but I've found no reference to any such plans while searching the Internet.  In any event I'm hopeful that toward the end of this year we'll see those restrictions ease up along with the danger of the disease.  I'm also looking forward to visiting my local gym...when they reopened last year following the spring lockdown I went a couple of times but was dismayed at the crowding and lack of distancing between cardio machines...and that's not cool.  I'm thinking of once again going out weekends around my neighborhood and the adjacent ones on long, slow runs just to have regular long-distance running experiences...the courses are already laid out for me.  March should be interesting.  Speaking of LifeSouth, the chief nonprofit organization around here for blood collection, yesterday I donated blood...for the first time ever...which accounts for one of my two non-running days of the month (they discourage exercise for 24 hours after a donation).  I'll be getting some feedback in the next few days about my blood type, cholesterol, and whether or not I have antibodies for COVID...still haven't yet had access to a vaccine...

Great Old TV Episodes...from Fawlty Towers

WALDORF SALAD, from 1979, is from the British sitcom Fawlty Towers, a short series that split its twelve total episodes between two seasons in 1975 and '79.   It's about an small town/countryside English inn owned and run by the married couple Basil and Sybil Fawlty, played by Monty Python star John Cleese and Prunella Scales.  Basil is a self-important, arrogant man who acts as if those around him...including the hotel's guests...are beneath his station in life.  Like other great comedic characters (the Honeymooners' Ralph Kramden comes to mind) he is always looking to game the system, usually with disastrous results.  Sybil for her part does little actual work in maintaining the place and is usually seen reading or chatting with others...when she isn't bluntly standing in the way of her husband's chronic foolishness. The rest of the core cast consists of Polly, a competent young waitress and Juan, an all-around worker there from Spain who barely understands English.  The episode I'm discussing today is my favorite of the series.  It's nine at night as the inn's dining section is closing down seating people and Basil, Polly and Juan are frantically running around serving customers while Sybil just stands there talking to a guest.  The orders are late and botched, while Basil makes a show of his general contempt toward both guests and colleagues.  Into the hotel walks a new couple, a tough-talking American and his English wife, and they expect to be fed even though the diner has just closed.  The man slips Basil some money to pay his chef to stay overtime to cook for them, but Basil secretly pockets it and sends his employee home instead.  The rest of the episode is about Basil's subterfuge of pretending the chef's still out in the kitchen while he finds himself clueless about preparing the couple's orders...including their drinks (Screwdrivers) and, of course, a Waldorf salad.  The American, played by Bruce Boa, gets more and more antagonistic with Basil, and their interaction should go down in history as one of the funniest ever in television.  And the episode's ending, with Basil proudly invoking British patriotism against his American adversary, is unforgettable...

Just Finished Reading Flat Stanley by Jeff Brown

One of the things I like about the trivia game show Jeopardy! is that it sometimes gives me reading suggestions...children's book author Roald Dahl was a recent category that sent me in his direction.  But I had no similar expectation with the show preceding it, Wheel of Fortune, until the other night when the solution turned out to be "Flat Stanley"...making me scratch my head in puzzlement, although everyone in the studio seemed to know of this book, also for children.  So I looked it up and yes, Flat Stanley is not only a famous book first published by Jeff Brown in 1964, but years later he turned it into a series of books based on the Lambchop family, headlined of course by Stanley himself.  It starts out one morning when Stanley's brother Arthur goes into his room and discovers a big bulletin board has fallen off the wall and flattened him.  Stanley feels fine, but he's now thin enough to slide under a door, through a drainage grate, into an envelope...or even serve as a pretty awesome kite.  The story's premise is of course ridiculous, but like the more serious story Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, the absurdity of Stanley's condition is dwarfed by that of how the people around him react to it.  I checked it out of my library using the Libby service to download it onto my Kindle...it took just a few minutes to read.  The reading level reminded me of books I'd read around the first or second grade...makes me wonder whether I might have come across it way back when it first came out and just forgot I had read it.  In any event I got a big kick out of it, although I'm not sure I'll read any of its sequels...and that maybe the author ripped off that scene at the end of the Disney movie Pinocchio when Jiminy Cricket mails himself to a prime vacation spot...

Quote of the Week...from Mark Mellman

A future president need only consider whether he has 35 partisan defenders in the Senate to embark on whatever course he or she deems fit, regardless of its democratic propriety.     ---Mark Mellman

The above quote by Mark Mellman, head of the Mellman Group...a business and political consulting organization, appeared in The Hill recently and made it to my computer's MSN newsfeed.  It directly refers to last month's Senate impeachment vote about former president Donald Trump and the fact that 43 of the 50 seated Republicans from his own party voted for acquittal, despite the enormous amount of evidence pointing to conviction and that the senators themselves were directly threatened by the January 6th invasion of the Capitol building...where they were convened to count and confirmed the electoral college votes for the 2020 presidential election...by fascist thugs spurred on by Trump's encouragement.  I think he should have been convicted, but sadly a large swath of the American population seems to be under his spell, having made him into an idol and believing and acting on every lying word coming from his mouth.  And since they have the numbers within the Republican party to "primary" any sitting politician of theirs out of office with a candidate more to their cult leader's liking, senators and representatives...within some remarkable exceptions...are too scared to openly defy Herr Trump in anything.  The situation is so extreme that Republican caucuses of different state legislatures are routinely holding censure votes against national legislators voting against their fascist supreme leader.  So I get what Mellman is saying here.  But as I like to say about politics, what goes around comes around.  And the "flaw" in our system that allows only 34 senators to protect a president who has seriously abused his or her office against our Constitution also protects a sitting, possibly controversial president who has done nothing wrong but has a vengeful opposition party with a majority in Congress.  The Republicans while Obama was president were adept at turning anything hinting of controversy into a scandal requiring extensive hearings and the fascist-leaning talk radio and TV hosts have been there to whip up the loyal extremist sector of the population into pressuring them to take the most punitive actions possible.  So if you're a Democrat and wish impeachment convictions were attainable with only a majority Senate vote instead of the two-thirds as the U.S. Constitution mandates, think again and thank your lucky stars that it is this difficult... 

Just Finished Reading The Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven

When I read Ringworld, the first book in science fiction writer Larry Niven's self-titled series a few days ago, I thought that he had a very innovative idea with a fully habitable, massive constructed ring with familiar surface features like oceans, forests, deserts, mountains, and plains going around a Sol-like star at about the location of Earth's orbit: the possibilities were indeed intriguing.  Add to that his presentation of the interesting main characters Louis Wu, Speaker-to-Animals, Teela...and the most interesting, the bizarre-looking puppeteer creature Nessus, and you had the makings of an unforgettable reading adventure.  But as I wrote in my review of it, Niven allowed himself to get bogged down in the technicalities of his created scenario, making reading through much of the text awfully tedious.  In his 1978 follow-up book, The Ringworld Engineers...which I just finished reading...the author gets even worse in this regard as he tries to rectify "errors" concerning Ringworld's orbital stability from the first book that were brought out by some university geek students with apparently nothing better to do than to nitpick about the "science" in already clearly outlandish fiction.  Besides the overbearing technical mumbo jumbo throughout this second book, the characters were dispersed and less effective: no Teela until the very end, Louis Wu and Chmeee (the cat-like kzin formerly known as Speaker-to-Animals) are split apart for much of the novel, as well as Nessus' replacement puppeteer Hindmost, who had kidnapped Wu and Chmeee to discover for his race what he believed to be the secret of transmutation hidden somewhere on Ringworld.  Wu has a different agenda, which is to prevent the unstable Ringworld from going into its sun...to accomplish this he is on a quest to find the ring's repair center, where its original builders, the Pak Protectors, may have provided the answer of how to replenish its stabilizing rockets (which a later race had cannibalized for their own spaceship parts).  One aspect of the story I did find intriguing was that the Ringworld's designers had imprinted true scale-sized "maps' of various worlds on it, including those of Earth, Mars, and the kzin's home planet.  Overall, though, I was greatly disappointed in this sequel and don't yet know whether I'll ever be ready to go to the next volume in this series...

Weekly Short Stories: 1968 Science Fiction, Part 3

During this problematic year of 1968, during which the following five stories I'm reviewing below from the anthology World's Best Science Fiction 1969 were first published, I developed the hobby of DXing, in which I pulled in distant stations on my cheap Juliette-model table radio.  Listening for hours to frequencies full of static and competing stations were a regular part of my 11-12 year old nights...probably didn't help me the next day at school as I often underslept (and missed homework assignments): oh well, the foolishness of youth.  Now, from my convenient vantage point in 2021 I see the quality of fiction going on in this period and I wish in hindsight that reading would instead have taken a stronger hold on me back then...

THIS GRAND CARCASS by R.A. Lafferty

I've seen this kind of premise for a story before: at the beginning a weary individual unloads what looks like a tremendous bargain to somebody they he may possibly bear a grudge against.  Then as the narrative progresses it becomes clear that the item in question is more of a curse than a blessing.  In This Grand Carcass it's a special machine that thoroughly manages its owner's finances and other machines, and it performs this task so admirably that it looks like he is soon the richest and most powerful man in the solar system.  Only one problem: the owner is getting sick and very weak: what's causing that? The ending points to another type of story...

A VISIT TO CLEVELAND GENERAL by Sydney Van Scyoc

Possibly the most cynical story I've ever read about chaos, corruption and cover-up in the hospital system, a reporter in the future...continually reminded to take his "memory" pills after recovering from a traumatic, near-fatal accident, fills in for the title hospital's regular beat reporter, himself recovering from a health setback.  If you've ever seen the movie Coma, then you pretty much have a sense as to where this story is going.  It's an exposé on how an institution, with the means to effectively cover up its mistakes and excesses, can turn on the very society and people it is meant to serve.  Scary...

THE SELCHEY KIDS by Laurence Yep

Sometime apocalypse scenarios aren't planetwide...sometimes they only hit a locality, as in this tale of the future when western California one day suddenly slides into the Pacific Ocean, taking the family of the protagonist, a young man associated with a marine research organization.  After a period of grief he returns to the area and goes back to work for the marine scientist from his past...along with a pretty telepathic girl and two dolphins: to their boss Professor Selchey they are all the "Selchey Kids".  One day he gets a special assignment: go with his crew to the now-submerged Institute where in a watertight vault lies his late father's papers on important research: what he discovers opens his eyes much more than he would have liked about his own origins...

THE DANCE OF THE CHANGER AND THE THREE by Terry Carr

This story discusses the possibility of intelligent life whose forms are so physically and chemically different from our own that their very values concerning life and communications with others becomes suspect.  Sentient, essentially immortal colorful energy wave forms thrive on a far distant planet much too hostile for human habitation.  But a certain resource is discovered for mining there, and Earth sends a party to establish a mine and relations with this resident life.  The story's title refers to that alien society's tradition going back eons where a "dance" between a "suicidal" entity and its three "friends" takes on a significance incomprehensible to human minds.  And then the values of this society become tragically known to the mining colony... 

SWORD GAME by H.H. Hollis

If you like mathematics, particularly the subject of topology, this brief tale is for you.  A burned out math professor is about to resign in frustration, and then notices a bohemian young female student with whom he starts up a relationship.  They start their own traveling magic sword show, based on a tesseract, a cube with a cube on each face, that plays around with time.  It's a circular story that paradoxically ends at the end of the universe due to the intervention of another topological device, a mobius strip.  Pretty intriguing, but I'm glad the callous professor gets his comeuppance even if he does outlive everybody...and I mean everybody...

Next week I conclude my look back at the year 1968 in short science fiction...

Game of the Week: Hanabi

Although its name is Japanese, meaning "fireworks", Hanabi is the creation of a Frenchman in 2010. It is either a card or tile game, depending on which version you possess, that is themed upon the cooperation among its players, which can number from 2 to 5.  Melissa introduced it to me as during her lunch breaks at work some of her colleagues have played it with her.  The cards (or tiles), each of which depicts a specified number of fireworks from 1 to 5 in one of five different colors, are shuffled and then dealt out with each player holding five of them...but facing outward so that no player can view their own hand.  Then, when it is a player's turn they can either inform one of the others about the nature of their hand or play one of their own cards to build each color of fireworks, starting from those with numbers 1 progressively onward to 5.  The object is, through cooperation and intelligent questioning among the participants, to successfully complete all five colors of fireworks 1-5.  It's a fun game in our household...you should try it for yourself if you're into board or card games.  The above photo is of a tile version of Hanabi in progress with two players, namely Melissa and me...