Just Finished Reading If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

If Beale Street Could Talk is a 1974 novel by James Baldwin, adapted to film three years ago.  It depicts the struggles and family relationships of Tish and Fonny, a young black engaged couple deeply in love with each other as they must deal not only with racism in their everyday life in the heart of New York City but also a justice system with scant sense of justice, as Fonny finds himself jailed on a false charge of rape while the victim, a Puerto Rican woman who identified him in a lineup in which he was the only black man, has returned to her native island and is uncooperative with Fonny's lawyer.  The narrative, presented from Tish's viewpoint, alternates between her childhood, the events leading up to Fonny's arrest by a racist cop with a personal vendetta against Fonny, and the ongoing efforts to free him.  In all of this are the two's respective families, each member vividly presented with their distinctive personality and hang-ups, with tensions brought out by Tish's revelation of her pregnancy with Fonny's baby...I was entranced by the interactions: my favorite character was Tish's assertive-yet-compassionate older sister Ernestine.  The way suspects are arrested and incarcerated on drug charges, how plea bargaining causes suspects to admit "guilt" when they are really innocent, the brutal conditions within jail, the deep flaws of suspect lineups, overly steep imposed bails, and police allowed to run roughshod with their actions and unquestioned words are all covered here in this necessarily difficult story.  Sure, it's fiction, but I have no doubt that the author composed it with a number of real stories in his mind.  As a sidelight, I dug Fonny's dream of being a successful sculptor as he rents out his studio and goes after it.  This was my first James Baldwin book: I don't think it will be my last...

Weekly Short Stories: 1971 Science Fiction, Part 3

With this article I finish my review of the science fiction short stories that appeared in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1972 Annual World's Best SF, which featured what the editors thought to be the best from 1971.  Musically, that year produced some great albums, notably Led Zeppelin IV, Who's Next, and Marvin Gaye's timeless What's Going On...I remember the summer that year being entranced by his track Mercy Mercy Me. I also spent a lot of my free time that year catching up on some of the later Beatles albums that my sister got around to buying. I wouldn't exactly say that '71 was a terrible year in my adolescent life, but it was definitely "blah"...especially regarding school. I will say that in any year new things are learned that help me down the road...this year was very instructive in that regard.  But enough of myself: here are my reactions to those final six stories from the book...

AUNT JENNIE'S TONIC by Leonard Tushnet

Set ten years into the future from the recounted events, a young, ambitious scientist describes the home and folk remedies of a woman from Central Europe, settled in New York City, whom everyone called Aunt Jennie.  Over the years her tonics seemed to perform miracles on the elderly, rejuvenating them and considerably prolonging their lives...her own death at age 108 was from murder, not natural causes.  The narrator works with Aunt Jennie on her products and discovers much of the underlying science, which he presents as his own work in the company he works at.  He also rejects all of the religious and spiritual components she puts into her tonics, thinking only about how wealthy and renowned he will become from them in the future.  After her death he tries some of the tonic on himself, and it all starts to unravel as you might expect from a story of this nature...  

TIMESTORM by Eddy C. Bertin

Off in the future life is pretty easy...a man wakes up on Friday morning, the beginning of his typical four-day weekend.  It's a life of luxury for his times, with his job about as easy as it can get and lots of his services automated and provided by robots.  But unknown to him, it will be a very different morning as something called a "timestorm", caused by the collision of a nova with another star, will send a time shard into his home and send him to another time and reality...and an enormous building with cylinders that can transport him into reliving past time experiences through others' eyes.  There were a lot different angles to this story, and that's the problem: I think the author tried to accomplish too much here.  But he did get an important point across: messing with the past isn't advisable, because even the bad stuff that happened plays an important role in defining our reality and could cause some really bad stuff if they were erased from time...

TRANSIT OF EARTH by Arthur C. Clarke

Marooned on Mars with his four other partners dead and no rescue possible, an astronaut has one final mission: to record the transit of Earth and the Moon across the Sun as he is running out of oxygen.  This story pointed out the precarious position that exploratory missions into space, the Moon or other objects were in (and still are, for that matter), with everything having to go mechanically right with the loom of disaster hanging over everyone if it doesn't.  He has three ways of dying and must choose one, after reliving earlier memories of near-death experiences.  It's a sad, touching story that also elevates the scientific study of astronomy in a way that the author...responsible for the great Space Odyssey series of novels...clearly felt.  Clarke had an optimistic tendency with his science fiction stories to assume humanity would naturally keeping venturing out further into space after the Moon landings: this story is set in 1984...

GEHENNA by Barry Malzberg

Sometimes the shortest stories are the hardest to understand, this one depicting four interwoven human lives: a man, his future wife whom he meets at a Greenwich Village party, her current boyfriend whom she dumps for man #1, and her eventual daughter.  Each story changes as well, presenting slight but significant changes in the setting and progression of events...but they all culminate in tragedy, nonetheless.  I'm not sure what Malzberg was trying to accomplish here other than expressing the notion that life is futile...or maybe he just wanted readers to keep going through the story over and over again while discussing its possible meanings: some writers (James Joyce was a notable example) have been known to deliberately write cryptically to that end...

ONE LIFE, FURNISHED IN EARLY POVERTY by Harlan Ellison

A man entering his middle years has made a resounding material success of his adult life after undergoing a traumatic childhood in relative poverty, clawing and scratching his way through the rat race to put himself far above his childhood peers.  And now he goes back somehow as an adult visiting his young boy self and trying to help him cope with his adverse circumstances.  I've never read a "go back in time and correct the wrongs" kind of story when it didn't fail miserably and make things much worse...Ellison's protagonist here definitely has some issues to work out. This story reminded me of a similarly-themed Twilight Zone episode titled Walking Distance...  

OCCAM'S SCALPEL by Theodore Sturgeon

Roughly stated, occam's razor is the supposition that generally the most plausible explanation for outcomes is the most simple and direct one...conspiracists tend to go in the opposite direction for their convoluted theories (check out today's QAnon, antivaxxer and Stop-the-Steal bozos).  This story brings that up at the very end, after two brothers come up with a strategy to save the world following the death...of advanced old age and natural causes...of a shamelessly polluting tycoon who was by far the most powerful businessman on Earth.  And now the task is to keep his successor, a young man whose penchant for incredible and often effortless success has been the hallmark of his life, from following his former employer's destructive policies.  The change in the title from "razor" to "scalpel" points to what the brothers...one of whom was the tycoon's physician...cook up to accomplish this...

Next week I begin looking at standout science fiction short stories from 1972...

Game of the Week: Bulls and Cleots (Bulls and Cows)

Bulls and Cleots is an obscure pen and pencil game typically played by two people...in my sixth grade at Nova Blanche Forman Elementary around early 1968 it became something of the rage among the geeky, nerdy brain kids, so naturally I was all into it.  Our version of the game was for each player to write down a four-digit number, no repeating digits, and keep it face-down on the side.  Then we take turns speaking out numbers in our progressive goal to guess the others' number before they guess ours.  So, say, I have "3672" as my "secret" number and my opponent calls out "4625".  The "6" is guessed correctly, not only for being within my number but also in the correct place: so that's a "bull".  The other numeral guessed that is present in mine is "2", but it is out of place so it is a "cleot".  My response to "4625" is to say "1 bull, 1 cleot": this process gives clues eventually leading to the correct solution.  We go back and forth until one of us gets the right answer...and then on to the next game.  With the name "bulls and cleots"...which for decades I thought was "bulls and cleods"...the "bull" is obviously short for "bullseye", but I haven't as yet found on the Internet any definition of what the heck a "cleot" is.  The game was later adapted to an electronic version on Mastermind in the mid-1970s, and I think its now available as a phone app called "bulls and cows".  I liked it because, frankly, I was pretty doggone good at reasoning out the solution.  Sadly, I haven't played it since the 1960s, though.  There's no reason I see why the game can't be expanded to more digits than 4...say 5 or 6...but once you approach 10 the nature of the game drastically changes...

Just Finished Reading The Bourne Supremacy by Robert Ludlum

I admit to not being that much into spy novels, which might come as a surprise with some of my readers who know how much a fan of James Bond movies I am, as well as The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Avengers and The Prisoner TV series.  As a spy fiction writer, Robert Ludlum is probably right up there with Ian Fleming as the best in the genre...no complaints from me in that regard.  But after just finishing reading The Bourne Supremacy, the second book in his trilogy about master American secret agent Jason Bourne...a.k.a. David Webb...I'm almost ready to throw in the towel before even beginning the final book, The Bourne Ultimatum.  You see, there is so much double-crossing, manipulation and abuse in this story...and that's just coming from the "good guys" in the U.S. State and intelligence departments...that I began not to care whether hero Bourne successfully accomplished his mission or not.  And that mission, focusing on Hong Kong, Macau and mainland China, has him hunting and capturing a rogue British agent who has been on an assassination trail in the Far East, impersonating Bourne himself in both name and methodology.  As Asian Studies professor at a New England college, David Webb, still gradually recovering his memory from the first novel, The Bourne Identity, is enjoying his new life along with Marie, also from that book and whom he married.  Knowing that he, as the "real" Jason Bourne, was the only man capable of carrying out their proposed mission and that he would turn it down, the bastards good guys have Marie abducted, with the cover story that a Hong Kong crime boss bent on revenge against Bourne is holding her hostage there.  So the adventure begins after Webb/Bourne quickly discovers no one at home will help him after he discovers her missing and the apparent reason.  Not to give away the book, but since there is another Bourne novel after this one it shouldn't be too hard to conclude that the title character survives his ordeal...but how many others do?  The high anxiety and suffering throughout this story without any sort of relief made me halfway wish for everyone to be put out of their misery and all go up in a giant ball of flame.  Yet I continue on...after a reasonable break...to the final book in the series.  And no, I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to tackle the movie version of The Bourne Supremacy after I saw what the film adaptation did to the first book.  Nothing wrong with the writing, like I said, but once you realize what a bunch of jerks are in charge of our national intelligence (at least according to Ludlum) it's very difficult to relate to these characters except to wish for somebody to kick their butts: maybe that's what Bourne will do next...

Great Old TV Episodes...from Family Guy

 

Probably much better known as "Surfin' Bird", the I DREAM OF JESUS Family Guy episode, originally airing in 2008 several years before I began watching the series, is probably my all-time favorite of its entire 19-season run (so far).  In this irreverent episode, Jesus Christ runs a used record store and is tempted through superstardom celebrity fame, but that's really the "second story" to Peter Griffin's rediscovery of his old favorite song Surfin' Bird (by the Trashmen) when a juke box operator at a local diner is about to throw it out and gives it to him.  Never one to do anything halfway, Peter then spends the next days constantly playing the record and acting out this very, very funny, silly song...until the point when talking dog Brian and devious baby Stewie hatch a plan to end their suffering.  In the above picture, Peter's just begun talking about it (once again) and is about to dive into another performance.  I think if you just cut out the later satirical nonsense about Jesus and made a repeating loop of the rest of the episode...and just played it nonstop for a couple of hours, this might be a fantastic remedy for those down in their spirits. A well, don't you know about the bird? Well, everybody knows that the bird is the word!  

About the CDC's Thursday Announcement Concerning the Fully Vaccinated

Thursday the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention came out with a welcome announcement that it was safe for those who have been fully vaccinated for the COVID-19 virus to resume their old lives without masks or social distancing. That does not mean, though, that the restrictions I see around me will suddenly end.  After all, according to the data I'm getting only about 36% of the U.S. population is at yet fully vaccinated although about 47% have received at least one shot. At my workplace the mask rule is still in place as far as I can tell, although nothing is done to enforce it...or ever was, for that matter, even during the heights of the outbreak late last year before the vaccines were ready and so many people were coming down sick. Stores generally still require masks indoors and I still can't sit inside my Starbucks...fortunately I also enjoy sitting outside at the one in Magnolia Parke in northern Gainesville.  So where do we go from here with the restrictions? I have the adult population divided into the following categories:

--Fully vaccinated

--Partially vaccinated

--Not yet vaccinated (but want it)

--Refuse to be vaccinated (but wear masks)

--Refuse to be vaccinated (or ever wear masks)

--Had COVID already and recovered

--Died of COVID 

Unless the government forces people to be vaccinated against COVID...and that's not gonna happen...we'll always have a sizeable number of people among us who may keep wearing those masks or, more likely, never believed the pandemic was real or just didn't care about protecting the welfare of others by either masking up or getting vaccinated.  As for me, I have always tried to abide by the COVID guidelines by masking when requested or mandated and have been fully vaccinated now for more than a month.  I have a great deal of difficulty understanding the reasoning of people who are frightened of getting a vaccine with negligible risk and would rather chance getting a disease that has killed more than 580,000 Americans in only the last 14 months: this irrationality is beyond bizarre.  I'm curious to see about how Starbucks, Publix, Walmart, my local public library, my workplace, church, and other locations adjust to the new recommendations.  Since my governor has forbidden establishments from using vaccination proof as a criterion for business, it will be interesting to see how it all works out.  So many places judge their own success by how tightly they can pack people in, but I've never liked crowds, long before this pandemic ever made itself known.  I expect during the upcoming transition period to get a few dirty looks when I'm not wearing a mask in public from others who may have more difficulty shedding their own.  But these vaccines have been a game changer and it's getting near time to starting living that out: either you believe your vaccine works or you don't...

Quote of the Week...from Mitch McConnell

You'll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think.       ---Mitch McConnell

Republican Senator Mitch McConnell (from Kentucky) made the above quote back in 2013 just before Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Democrat from Nevada) foolishly did away with the 60-vote threshold for confirming non-Supreme Court presidential appointments as a response to perceived Republican obstruction on some of Obama's federal court nominations.  As Majority Leader, McConnell later expanded the "Nuclear Option" in 2017 to encompass Supreme Court nominations as well, in order to allow incoming president Donald Trump's selection, Neil Gorsuch, to be confirmed.  Yet during that presidency, McConnell resisted Trump's pressure and taunts as he refused to eliminate the filibuster for normal legislation...something for which I give him credit amid my many criticisms of his actions as GOP Senate leader.  Now, with Democrat Joe Biden narrowly elected president, the House of Representatives barely holding on to its majority, and the Senate with a 50-50 split and only in the Democrats' control due to there being a Democratic president, many on the political left are pushing to abolish the legislative filibuster with yet another Nuclear Option...are you kidding me?  McConnell's above 2013 quote was true then and it is now.  In the 2014 off-year elections just the following year, the Republicans gained control of the Senate, and only relinquished it early this year...during Trump's single term in office they pushed through Cabinet officers and federal judges by the hundreds...many of them highly controversial...and by dint of McConnell's follow-up action in '17 regarding the SCOTUS, three very, very conservative Supreme Court nominees were confirmed to the high court, none of whom would have ever passed the earlier 60-vote threshold.  Now, on the Democratic side only Senator Joe Manchin (WVA) and possibly Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) stand in the way of abolishing the legislative filibuster.  The way I see it, suppose the Nuclear Option is implemented in the legislative sphere and the Democrats push into law bills that normally wouldn't pass the scrutiny traditionally embedded in Senate consideration: the next time the Republicans are elected into power (and this may be "a lot sooner than you think"), what's then keeping them from going right down the list of Democratic accomplishments and rescinding all of them, after which they pass legislation of their own that runs 180 degrees in the other direction?  Really, is this instability in our elected, representative national government what we want for our future?  The party in power always seems to act as if they think they'll forever be in power.  There's a good chance that the Republicans will retake the House after the 2022 elections...if that happens any subsequent legislation will require the Democrats to work with their counterparts in a highly bipartisan manner and the perceived need to eliminate the Senate's 60-vote minimum will be a moot point.  But if the Republicans can get their act together and reclaim the White House, Senate, and the House after the 2024 elections...something very feasible from my viewpoint...they could find themselves with a big "green light" to jam through anything they want after that, should the legislative filibuster be torpedoed.  Recently McConnell was quoted as saying he was 100% focused on stopping Joe Biden...that open obstructionism will only fuel the push to end the legislative filibuster.  But he had said and done the same when Obama was president, and Harry Reid's response was still very ill-advised...  

My Take on Tim Tebow Trying to Rejoin the NFL

The sports media world is abuzz with the news of Tim Tebow's signing of a one-year contract as a tight end with the Jacksonville Jaguars of the National Football League.  That his former college coach and close mentor Urban Meyer just got the job as that franchise's head coach is the obvious reason. Tebow is the kind of player who is useful, but only in certain roles within certain offensive sets...something Josh McDaniels knew back when he had his Denver Broncos draft him as quarterback in the first round back in 2010 before being fired at the end of that dismal season, thereby immediately putting Tebow's status with the club in limbo when the new incoming owner, John Elway...along with new coach John Fox...didn't share the former coach's enthusiasm for his talents.  In spite of this Tebow performed admirably as the Broncos' starting QB for the final three regular season games in 2010 and then picked up a last-place team the following year and led them to the division title and a dramatic first-round playoff win against hated Pittsburgh.  For this Elway had him traded the next year to the New York Jets, a team that was already committed to its own starting quarterback Mark Sanchez.  Although Tebow acquitted himself well in the very few playing chances he had there, he was let go after the season.  Then the following summer he practiced with Tom Brady and the New England Patriots, who cut him just before the season.  After failing to make the Philadelphia Eagles team, Tebow tried his hand at professional baseball but never made it to the majors.  He's now ten years older from that miraculous 2011 season with Denver, but still seems to be in good shape and of course during the intervening years has not had the cumulative physical wear and tear on his body he otherwise would have if he had been playing football all that time.  As expected, the naysayers in the sports media are outraged at Tebow's signing, some pointing to other players they say should have had another chance before Tebow.  As for my opinion, I rooted for him back in the University of Florida years when he won the Heisman Trophy as well as two national championships with Meyer for the Gators, but always felt that he tended to be idolized too much by his fans while doing nothing to dissuade them.  Still, I wanted him to be successful in the pros and thought that the Broncos and Jets didn't give him a proper chance to succeed.  On the other hand...unlike now...in those years Tim Tebow had stubbornly insisted on only being a starting quarterback and wasn't flexible (or humble) enough to consider other positions like running back or (now) tight end.  I said back then that he would have been tremendously successful both as a runner, in the style of the Dolphins' Hall of Famer Larry Csonka, as well as a player blocking for others.  I wish him well, but I also hope his more vocal supporters will back off and just let him play the game without booing and screaming for him to be put in as quarterback.  Maybe he won't make the cut this year either, but I'm with him going for this opportunity...

Weekly Short Stories: 1971 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here are my reviews of four more science fiction stories from 1971, as they appeared in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1972 Annual World's Best SF, with the editors' selections from the previous year.  As a teenage kid that year, I was into music a lot and tended in the evenings to be a couch potato in front of the boob tube.  All in the Family had its breakthrough debut season in '71 while shows like Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart and Carol Burnett gave CBS dominance...at least in my household. In the summer, Apollo 15 landed on the moon: one of the astronauts was James Irwin...another Irwin, Hale, that November would win his first professional golf tournament of many.  I say this because people who ask my name often seem flummoxed when I say "Irwin", sometimes unable to spell it properly...but I bet no one with their last name ever stood on the moon (or won three U.S Opens).  But you came here to read my reviews, so here they are...

A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE by Poul Anderson

Three despicable human interstellar criminals have hatched a scheme to hijack a peaceful species' primitive spacecraft (while kidnapping one of them to pilot it) in order to sell the technology to barbarian warlords...but the harmless-seeming Witweet has figured out something about the nearby outlying planet Paradox and lures his onboard captors into landing there to salvage abandoned human technology.  But there's something about the prevalence of helium on that planet's breathable atmosphere that gives Witweet an avenue of escape. Anderson was a "hard" science fiction writer who liked to inject science principles into his stories...here is a prime example...

REAL-TIME WORLD by Christopher Priest

This is one of those stories that call into question one's true, real status, both in terms of work assignments and actual physical location.  Way off in the future again...the year 2019 to be exact...a special observatory has been constructed on a distant planet whereby the human scientists can observe its life undetected...through the convenient expedient of being a tiny fraction of a second in the past. The man assigned to collect the reports and communicate back and forth to Earth is the narrator...and he knows that the mission has an entirely separate aspect to it: to study how the crew reacts as each one is separately provided skewed, personally relevant news sheets from Earth.  I happen to watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy regularly when possible...and for some reason my "SmartNews" computer news feed always seems to have something about the latest episodes: pretty creepy, I'll say, and implying that they're sneakily getting some unsolicited feedback from me.  Although way off with the space technology, the story seems spot on with its social analysis for our times...

ALL PIECES OF A RIVER SHORE by R.A. Lafferty

A very wealthy Native American has a hobby he practices to obsession: collecting artifacts from the past.  One day he discovers that there is something called The Longest Picture in the World, a mysterious miles-long representation of a river shore...presumably the Mississippi...that over the years had been cut up and spread out through the years over several states and countries among a multitude of owners.  Leo Nation sets out to collect them all and put them back together in proper order...rolling them all up and spinning them out, creating the visual sensation of a boat ride down the river.  He's successful...that I'll say...but the ramifications of the final product are more than a little chilling...

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE... by Alan Dean Foster

In a future in which Earth has begun to engage in interstellar travel, the dominant alien race of the galaxy punishes our home planet by erecting an impenetrable barrier around it, prohibiting any more space travel, after a war following Earth's refusal to join their federation.  Many generations later that group has been vanquished and a more benevolent and democratic galactic federation faces attack from a different, ruthless foe...and their representatives visit Earth to lift the longstanding barrier and to enlist their help.  Expecting a regressed, backwards society they are astonished to discover something else.  This is one of those "mess with us and you're asking for trouble" kind of stories...

Next week I continue my look at science fiction short stories from 1971...

Game of the Week: Concentration

As a little child in my single-digit years, NBC's Concentration, hosted by Hugh Downs of later 20/20 fame, was easily my favorite game show: I was an avid daily fan, of course with elementary school eventually posing an insurmountable time conflict starting with first grade in the last half of 1962.  Each game is between two contestants, who take turns trying to match overturned blocks on the 5x6 game board.  With each match, the board gradually clears to reveal a rebus message. Rebus, a puzzle I encountered a lot as a kid, combines pictures and strategically-placed letters to reveal a real phrase...whichever contestant solves the rebus wins the game, along with his or her accumulated prizes.  What I liked the most about Concentration is what I like about just any game show, which is to be able to play along with the contestants and try to outguess them, in this case both as to the matching blocks and the rebus puzzle solution.  We also had a card game we called "Concentration"....without the rebus feature...in which the cards would be shuffled and then scattered face down covering the tabletop.  We'd then try to match numbers...whoever ended up with the most matches won.  I think Concentration would be a very popular game show were it resurrected with a dedicated host, much as what happened when Alex Trebek led Jeopardy!'s resurgent popularity after a several-year hiatus...interestingly it was brought back in 1987-91 with Trebek hosting it: they should have kept it going.  But for me, I'd be happy just watching reruns of the old Concentration episodes... 

Political Narratives Becoming Dangerously Homogenous

I was sitting as unobtrusively as possible in the back row of an assembly recently and observed an individual...around my age in his sixties...engaged in friendly conversation with another he had seen sitting in a row ahead of me.  It went a little nervously at first but then I noticed this man suddenly getting very loud as he laughingly proclaimed a very partisan, political statement meant to demean anyone with a different opinion...let me tell you, it was completely inappropriate for that solemn setting.  I'm afraid that this kind of behavior is only becoming more and more prevalent in our society, and depending on where you happen to live or be at any given moment in time, you could change the party labels of those involved and get the same kind of result.  It's all about people stuck in a particular narrative...and there are several narratives in a state of dominance right now...who are operating under the mass delusion that their adopted narrative contains all the truth and that those who disagree with it are themselves deluded, stupid, ignorant, or the enemy.  As an example just look at TV on competing channels and see Don Lemon and Tucker Carlson push their respective conflicting narratives.  This type of thing has been going on throughout our history, but its advent over the past few years...first of multiple specialized cable/satellite television channels, conservative talk radio, and finally, the Internet, political blogging and social media that have made narratives much less individualized and more homogenized within the different camps.  And I fear it's beginning to instill a new form of prejudice...

Usually when you use the word "prejudice" it means "pre-judgment" based on someone's ethnicity, gender, age, or faith.  Now since the mega-narratives of today tend to bundle together a number of different opinions on things, it's tempting to ascribe attributes to people based on little ways they behave.  So a dude walking in Publix without a mask MUST be a Trump-supporting fascist who denies he lost the last election and wants to keep minorities from voting, right?  Or somebody wearing a BLM tee-shirt MUST be "woke" and believe in taking away your guns and suppressing your right to speak your conservative thoughts on social media, right?  In other words, expressing a "piece" of a narrative is increasingly being interpreted as subscribing to that narrative in its entirety, and although our "brave new world" seems to be headed in that direction, I still think that as individuals we're more complex than that, each of us while often latching onto some to the narratives provided us still reserving the right to differ on some of their specifics.  But we are nevertheless going in the wrong direction.  As an exercise I suggest this: examine your own political beliefs and (temporarily) try to see things from the other guy's point of view...or at least try to find something genuinely complimentary to say about those with whom you fundamentally disagree.  You can always spring right back to your own positions, but I think if more folks did this they'd be more civil and respectful to their counterparts while preserving and strengthening their own crucial individual right to disagree on different details of the narratives foisted onto them by others... 

Great Old TV Episodes...from The Beverly Hillbillies

JED BECOMES A BANKER was one of my favorite episodes from the classic comedy series The Beverly Hillbillies.  It was first aired in early 1963 from the first season.  As a little kid I quickly latched onto the exploits of Jed, Granny, Jethro and Elly May as they adjust from their old life in the hills back to their new one in swanky Beverly Hills, California...and everyone else tries to adjust to them.  In this episode the Clampetts' banker, Milburn Drysdale, has an ongoing skeet-shooting rivalry with his fellow bankers...and he's determined to win the contest this time around.  Upon discovering Jed and Jethro shooting flies off their estate's wall with their rifles hundreds of feet away, Drysdale quickly makes Jed his bank's vice-president as only bank employees are permitted to play in the match.  The whole family goes with Jed out to the skeet shooting field and astounds their banker with their sharpshooting skill. Not only does Granny cut the clay pigeons to pieces with little effort (see above picture), but then Elly May pulls out her slingshot and shoots them down as well.  What I liked about this episode was the hilarious performance of Raymond Bailey as Drysdale, who generally played the straight man to the others' more comedic antics.  This one had one of the funniest finishes of the series.  There some other gems from this series as well, almost all of them during the early black & white years of the early 1960s.  Later on Jethro tended to take over the show with his clownish behavior.  At the time the series was running back then, as a kid I though Jethro was my favorite character, but now he kind of embarrasses me with his silliness and misplaced pride, a contrast to his transplanted backwoods family and their  dignified "noble savage" public image.  Nevertheless I recognized that Max Baer, Jr., who portrayed Jethro, is largely responsible for the series' enduring success, even to this day so many years later.  But as far as I'm concerned, Jed's the man now...

Just Finished Reading Tangerine by Catherine Mangan

I just finished reading Catherine Mangan's 2018 psychological thriller novel Tangerine.  Set in the 1950s, it's about the relationship between two young women...Alice Shipley from England and American Lucy Mason...who first meet as roommates at a Vermont women's college, bond closely as inseparable friends, and then abruptly part following a terrible accident there, revealed later in the story.  While the chapters alternate between first person narratives by Alice and Lucy, the time frames also fluctuate between the present time and their college days.  And the present time has Alice, recently married to an Englishman named John, newly arrived with him in Tangier, Morocco.  She is shy and fearful about leaving their apartment but her husband is ebullient about this very beautiful-but-strange locale.  Lucy, desperate to recover their close friendship, seeks out Alice's whereabouts and follows her across the ocean.  What ensues is a psychologically gripping war of will and manipulation between Lucy, Alice, and John...who has incurred Lucy's wrath after she spies him with another woman.  But even more than this, Tangerine is about someone who is a psychopath, who sees hers entire moral world only as it relates to her own self and pride and who is incapable of feeling true love...which is self-sacrificial in nature...and substitutes obsession for it.  And to her credit, Mangan realistically portrays how people are regularly taken in by psychopaths with their apparent emotional honesty concealing their lies, their unwillingness to ever admit defeat, their charm...and their skill at assassinating the character of anyone for whom they bear a grudge: remind any of you of a prominent American political figure during the last five or six years?  I checked out Goodreads after finishing Tangerine to see how other readers reacted to it and their reviews are all over the map, but I noticed that with a few of the negative ones the criticisms seemed misplaced: because Catherine Mangan used the first-person narrative form for her story, that narrative in itself is deliberately inefficient and the characters typically ethnocentric as white, visiting foreigners of the '50s in their view of the Moroccans...don't judge her writing skills or social outlook for that.  Additionally, just about everyone missed the point of what a psychopath is and how one must deal with them completely differently than how they interact with "normal" people who possess a social conscience.  See for yourself and read the book, it's not very long...

Quote of the Week...from Paulo Coelho

Every search begins with beginner's luck, and every search ends with the victors being severely tested.                                                                        ---Paulo Coelho in The Alchemist.

About three quarters of the way through Paulo Coelho's novel The Alchemist, the title character lays the above quote on protagonist Santiago, who is traveling with him across the north African desert to Egypt.  It stood out to me when I first read it and I had it bookmarked to return to later.  He then expands upon this quote with the following explanation:  

Before a dream is realized, the soul of the world tests everything that was learned along the way.  It does this not because it is evil, but so that we can, in addition to realizing our dreams, master the lessons we've learned as we moved toward that dream. That's the point at which most people give up.

It's true that the beginning of a dream or quest often seems to go smoothly, but sometimes I wonder whether the Alchemist had the cart before the horse with his above sayings.  Oftentimes we may not yet have a dream, but successful initial experiences in an area may inspire us to want to go further down that road toward desiring greater realization and success...and then the serious testing begins, especially when the expected social approval begins to wane over time.  After all, we tend in childhood to be rewarded with praise and greater esteem whenever it's discovered we have a special talent or ability with something, and as a child I always wanted to enjoy that kind of respect from others.  What distinguished the Alchemist to me was that while Santiago was wholeheartedly seeking to fulfill his dream of finding his treasure, he allowed himself to grow to appreciate everything around that did not necessarily provide positive personal feedback to his self-esteem...and that the process of the journey was more important in the end than the reward.  Yet without that sought-after reward, Santiago would have just continued with his day-to-day shepherding back in his homeland without ever growing from the inside...

The Alchemist is a pretty small book, but it packs a very big punch philosophically...I just presented a small slice of what it contains.  How about reading it for yourself and letting me know what you thought of it?

Constellation of the Month: Corvus (the Crow)

 

For May I picked Corvus (the Crow) as my constellation of the month, not because it has any bright stars or special deep-space objects of interest (it doesn't), but rather because it has over the years been a dependable sky marker for me during the spring evening hours.  I'm not sure how you get a "crow" out of the above configuration, but the irregular quadrilateral shape of its four brightest stars is unmistakable.  Corvus is located just south of the celestial equator and is between the Zodiac constellation Virgo to the north) and the very lengthy constellation Hydra (to the south).  If you take the top two stars in Corvus, line them up and point to the east (leftward), they point Virgo's bright first-magnitude star Spica.  Corvus is one of those constellations that don't exactly follow the loose protocol of following the Greek alphabet in order of their stars' brightness..."Alpha" isn't even a part of the quadrilateral.  Corvus and I go way back...it's one of the first constellations I remember identifying in the spring evening sky eons ago in 1964 when I was seven years old, so I have a rather soft spot in my heart for it...if one can do so with a sector of the night sky.  Next month I'll feature my second "constellation of the month" for June...in 2020 I picked Boötes for this honor: I have a couple of candidates this time around...

Weekly Short Stories: 1971 Science Fiction, Part 1

Today I move onward with my science fiction short story reviews from 1971, starting with the first four tales appearing in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1972 Annual World's Best SF, which spotlights the editor's selections from the preceding year.  Let's see...the first part of '71 had me finishing up my dismal ninth grade in high school with the fall showing some hope in my tenth, at least academically speaking.  Around late spring all of South Florida stank with the smoke drifting eastward from the burning Everglades as we were in the middle of a horrible weeks-long drought.  Nationally, Nixon was still plugging away as president, Apollo missions continued to land on the moon and return, and the Vietnam War was supposedly being "Vietnamized"...yet Americans, many drafted over there against their will, were still being sent into combat to draw enemy fire and die.  I read The Old Man in the Sea by Hemingway, The Pearl by Steinbeck, and Macbeth by Shakespeare, all in English class with Macbeth performed by all the students in a string of nauseating plays with the same repeating scenes.  But back to those sci-fi stories...

THE FOURTH PROFESSION by Larry Niven

Frazer, a California bartender in the not-so-distant future has as a surprise customer one of the alien hooded Monks, as they call them, a trader group that landed on the moon a couple of years earlier and were thought to only be on Earth around New York.  To pay for his many drinks, the Monk offers him a number a pills, each of which imparts a special knowledge or ability. The alien's visit prompts a visit by an official government intelligence agent, raising Frazer's fears that since he consumed the pills and now possesses special skills and awareness he might become a prisoner of the state.  And the Monk has a more dire proposal: in exchange for more knowledge pills humanity is to design and build a "laser launcher" that will allow his ship to leave the moon and accelerate back to the stars...otherwise, they'll sadly have to explode our sun in order to provide the necessary energy.  It's a quandary for Frazer...I liked how he figured it all out at the end...

GLEEPSITE by Joanna Russ

In a nightmare dystopian future for Earth with an extremely poisonous, overheated atmosphere and male humans for some reason nearly driven to extinction, a bat-like woman visits an high-rise office where two sisters employed on the night cleaning shift are working.  She offers to sell them "daydreams", vividly amplified by a device around her neck...in the process drastically altering the appearance of the office.  She is drawn to the locked panels leading to the lethal outside...and it is here that I completely lost the author's train of narrative, difficult enough for the bulk of this very short story due to her deliberately cryptic writing style.  In researching other readers' reactions to this story, they either didn't get it at all or thought it was a masterpiece...maybe if I wake up at three in the morning with a flash of sudden insight I'll join the latter group, but for now I'm just dumbfounded...

THE BEAR WITH THE KNOT ON HIS TAIL by Stephen Tall

This tale centers around what seems to be an interstellar distress call.  Humanity has developed an extremely fast way to circumvent the speed of light and can now pretty much travel anywhere.  The "bear" in the story is the constellation Ursa Major, and the "knot" is the star system Micor...on the stars is about to nova and the intelligent beings on one of its worlds are transmitting the intermittent, highly musical signals.  A psychic pinpoints the source and the rescue crew sets out.  This is more one of those old-style, feel-good stories about people being basically good, with no apparent limits to human ingenuity and desire to explore and help: kind of like Star Trek, actually...

THE SHARKS OF PENTREATH by Michael G. Coney

Sometimes when a story's protagonist is something of a jerk, reading it can be an irritating experience.  Often though, there is an important point to be made: such is the case here as in a severely overcrowded Earth of the future, humanity has to rotate between Fulltime...like our ordinary existence...and Shelflife...stored away with the mind in a dream state.  The richer people can, while in Shelflife, have their minds projected into robots that can travel just about anywhere.  A little coastal resort has its shops and inns, and the owner of one of them spends his Fulltime with his wife there obsessing with squeezing out money from tourists as he'd like to have enough saved to travel the world himself.  An experience with a couple visiting the place while in the robots, with their bodies in Shelflife, changes his perspective, though, and explains the point of him being the story's "hero": sometimes a life lesson needs to be taught...

Next week I continue with more reviews of science fiction short stories from 1971...

Game of the Week: Baseball

 

Technically, I have never played a single game of baseball, America's supposed "pastime".  When I was a little boy in the early 1960s my father and I both collected baseball cards off the backs of Post cereal boxes...I was very proud of those although I knew little-to-nothing about the game itself.  Like just about every sport I did in school recess/P.E. classes, no teacher ever taught me the rules, and we always played variants of baseball: in my early elementary school years we played kickball, where the "pitcher" rolls the red inflated ball to the "kicker" at home plate...you got an "out" simply by hitting or tagging the baserunner with the ball.  I was pretty good at that game because I was both a good kicker and runner.  Later on we would play softball, but not like how the women in college play it: the pitchers were required to throw the ball slower and with a greater arc to give each batter a shot at hitting it.  By high school it was clear whenever we played softball which of my classmates had played league baseball away from school: their skill levels were way beyond mine.  I never cared for baseball and its variants because almost all the time...unless you're the pitcher or catcher...you're just standing around on the field waiting for the ball to come your way or waiting your turn at bat behind the plate: very, very boring (see above picture from the South Park episode The Losing Edge).  As a spectator, though, I often enjoy sitting down to a televised Major League baseball game, especially if the score's close: doesn't matter that much whether one of "my" Florida teams is playing.  I like the often intricate strategies within an inning, especially after a runner reaches base and the pitcher is exhibiting problems of some sort...then it gets interesting.  Still, even without this pandemic going on I wouldn't want to be stuck for some three hours in a ball park watching a game live.  And I absolutely have no interest whatsoever in either college baseball or softball even though I live here in Gainesville where the University of Florida teams in both sports routinely excel each year.  No, for me baseball is now an exclusively televised Major League spectator sport...I began following the standings earnestly starting in the 1969 season, although "my" first World Series was in 1965, between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Minnesota Twins...

Just Finished Reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Portuguese writer Paulo Coelho is said to have written The Alchemist in the span of two weeks in 1987...yet it's clear that he had already worked out the philosophy of living that he espouses in this short novel.  Santiago is a young man living in Spain with a dream of adventure and treasure...his visit to a nearby fortune teller confirms this and a subsequent encounter with a man calling himself King Melchizedek of Salem (the same who met up with Abraham in Genesis) sets him forward on his quest.  A shepherd by trade, he sells his sheep and ships over into northern Africa and an excruciating crossing of the Sahara Desert to his destination: the Egyptian Pyramids.  Along the way he meets up with the Alchemist of the book's title...as well as romance, a much deeper appreciation of the world around him as it exists in the present, and a whole slew of maxims, one of which is that when you set out to accomplish the dream of your life, the universe will conspire to help you.  Perceiving and heeding omens is another absolute necessity...I think I'll present yet another idea of the Alchemist on this blog's next "quote of the week" article on Friday.  The concept Coelho presents here of someone leaving his home to travel a dangerous path on an adventurous quest for a big prize is very vivid and literal...maybe that's been how you picture fulfilling deeply held dreams of your own, but my dreams aren't quite as easy to present like that.  Still, as the author pointed out through other characters, it is only too easy for one to get so caught up with their routines of everyday existence that they eventually abandon and even forget the dreams that they had earlier held to be important in their lives.  And to this extent the book resonated with me.  The prose is written in beautiful, simple language, the characters are easy to empathize with, and as I said before, the story is brief. I think most anyone would get something positive from reading it as I did, and I thought the ending was perfect...

Great Old TV Episodes...from Columbo

 

When I was a kid in the early 1970s, NBC had a great programming concept: the NBC Mystery Movie, in which over the course of weeks they would show episodes from a multitude of ongoing series including MacMillan & Wife, McCloud, Faraday & Company, Tenafly, Banacek, The Snoop Sisters, Ellery Queen...and perhaps the most beloved, Columbo. Initially I didn't care for this series as I foolishly automatically opposed murder mysteries where the perpetrator is known from the start...but it's the psychological duel between the killer and Peter Falk's enduring character of Lt. Columbo, always in his ratty old raincoat and seriously underestimated by all, that gives it such a great, enduring appeal.  The murder is always conceived to be airtight, but right off the bat Columbo starts poking holes in the scheme and spends most of the episode politely hounding his suspect, tearing bit by bit at their sense of security until it's all completely uncovered at the end.  Such was the case in the Season 2 episode The Most Dangerous Match, first shown in early 1973 and starring Laurence Harvey as Emmett Clayton, an obnoxious, overly proud and arrogant chess master threatened by an old champion from Eastern Europe, played by Jack Kruschen who has come out of retirement for a special, highly-publicized match that just so happens to be taking place in Columbo's home territory.  After being humiliated by his elderly opponent in a private warm-up match (see above picture), Clayton plots his demise in order to escape the public humiliation he sees for himself if the match goes on...but he hasn't foreseen an even more formidable opponent: Lt. Columbo...

I've been writing for the past few weeks about various games, but have so far avoided discussing chess...not to fear, I plan to do so before long.  For some reason, chess causes a lot of folks to get very uptight as if their whole sense of worth is tied up in their performance...Harvey's character in this episode is an extreme example.  But it doesn't have to be chess: it could be any kind of endeavor that can serve as a snare drawing one's fanatical devotion and sometimes creating a bubble of superiority and infallibility that, when popped by another, can be personally devastating. Diversify your interests, I say, even if that means you come up playing "second fiddle" to others from time to time. I remember an excellent old Twilight Zone episode, A Game of Pool, starring Jack Klugman and Jonathan Winters, with a very similar theme but a different game...

My April 2021 Running and Walking Report

In April I ran a total of 107 miles, with 4.8 miles being my longest single run...and I ran on every day of the month.  For walking, I covered 125 miles in the same time, the vast majority of it coming at work...my job involves an awful lot of walking.  I finally got to participate in a public running race after joining the Florida Track Club and entering their April 3rd 5K event at Hogtown Creek Headwaters Park in northern Gainesville...as it turns out, the closest race ever to my home.  I ran it slow and easy, just happy to be back in the mix...although with the ongoing pandemic races are still few and far between.  I'm thinking of running in the Florida Track Club's Friday evening track meet at Cone Park in eastern Gainesville next month on the 7th...they have a number of runs to chose from including 400 meters and 5K: these are the two I'm leaning toward at the moment.  The last time I ran in a track race was in April, 1973. Although I initially thought they were going to emulate the kind of track and field meets from my old high school time, there are no field events like pole vaults, long jumps or shot put.  And even with the purely track events, there are no sprint races like 100 or 200 meters, the shortest event being 400 meters.  When I was a kid, to me running was synonymous with all-out sprinting, going as fast as I could until I pooped out...my forte was the 50-year dash while the 600-yard run they used in high school for physical fitness tests was to me a very long distance.  By the ninth grade they were having us do mile runs, though, and by the time I trained with the track team in early 1973 I was finally beginning to learn the concept of pacing myself: that was crucial because our regimen included intense interval training as well as ten-mile cross-country runs...