Just Finished Reading The Witches by Roald Dahl

The Witches, which I just finished reading and discovered was made into a movie last year starring Anne Hathaway, is my sixth Roald Dahl book (all for children), published in 1983.  A boy stays with his Norwegian grandmother after his parents are both killed in an accident...she wastes little time in enlightening and warning him about the danger of witches in the world.  They all hate children and have as their main goal in life making as many "disappear" as possible, through different applications of their dark magic...often turning them into different animals.  They all go in disguises to blend in with the rest of the population...you can tell witches by their wearing gloves at all times (to cover the claws they have on their fingers), wearing itchy wigs (to cover their baldness), and a slight limp in their walk (none of them have toes), to mention some of the more striking clues.  They can stiff out a child from great distances...the cleaner the kid, the worse they smell to the witches.  After staying with his grandmother, the news arrives that the boy's father had willed that she be his legal custodian...but that he would go back to England where they had lived before the accident and finish his education there.  Well, you just know that the boy will encounter the witches, and the author doesn't disappoint...I'll just leave what happens at that so that I don't spoil the ending.  My reaction to the story is that it can make kids really, really scared of strangers and put into their little minds the notion that people at-large are out to get them: I believe children should be trained to be cautious around strangers but not like this.  But if you're setting out to tell a scary story in this genre, then I guess if you're successful you're going to end up with a lot of frightened children.  And I think of all the over-the-top, gruesome fairy tales I heard and read when I was young.  I thought The Witches was interesting reading, but it probably ticked off a lot of people...especially, I imagine, many in the Pagan movement...

Great Old TV Episodes...from Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown

I was dismayed three years ago when I found out that internationally renowned chef Anthony Bourdain had committed suicide in France while filming a new episode for his acclaimed CNN series Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.  The episode I'm discussing today, PUNJAB, is from the series' third season, originally aired in April, 2014. Bourdain examined the northwest Indian state's cuisine...which he said is what most the West think of when considering "Indian food"...by eating from street-side stands (Bourdain loved these wherever in the world he traveled) as well as restaurant food and "high dining".  He went into geography, politics, history and religion: the area is predominantly of the Sikh faith and borders on Pakistan, which was artificially divided from India in 1947 to reduce mass casualties...which happened anyway when mass migrations of Muslims and Hindus across the new border drawn by a British official produced essentially the civil war that they wanted to avert when Britain granted independence. The border between the two fiercely belligerent neighbors is tight and strict...yet farm-owners on the Indian side are allowed to work their fields on the Pakistani side! After showing the Punjab's capital city of Amritsar, he took a train eastward (and upward) to the base of the Himalayas, ending in the old British colonial outpost of Shimla, where the buildings look more as if they belonged in England than India.  Bourdain also showed that dancing is a very big deal in India...there was plenty of that, too, in this episode. And other than the dinner he ate at Shimla when he tried their mutton and a chicken meal at an Amritsar restaurant, all the food in this episode was vegetarian...Bourdain, more a meat-eater, nevertheless stated that were Western vegetarian menus like that he which experienced in Punjab, he would be much more conducive to it.  Every single episode of this Parts Unknown series was interesting to me, although at times I felt Bourdain got a little too political with his emphasis (as, for example, in the Russia episode).  Still, it was a personal journey, and to each his own, I say.  I'm still sad over Bourdain's death, which apparently was due to long-standing recurring bouts of severe depression... 

Constellation of the Month: Ophiuchus (the Serpent-Bearer)

 

Ophiuchus, representing a serpent-bearer, is a large constellation in the summer evening sky, situated just north of the more prominent Scorpius and south of Hercules.  Although Ophiuchus possesses two second-magnitude stars (Rasalhague and Sabik) and Hercules has none brighter than magnitude three, the latter is easier to identify in the sky due to its more distinctive pattern.  On the western and eastern ends of Ophiuchus are, respectively, the two constellations Serpens Caput and Serpens Cauda, representing the snake/serpent he is holding.  Ophiuchus technically lies in that belt of the sky known as the Zodiac...the sun, moon, and planets pass through it between Scorpius and Sagittarius.  In fact, it is believed that in ancient times it was the thirteenth Zodiac constellation, but that it was kicked out of the "club" when the formerly sacred number "13" was relegated to taboo status with a change in religion.  My take on it is that if you go back thousands of years, you're going to observe a vastly different configuration of stars in the sky, due to their motions relative to Earth over that span...so how could anyone come to that conclusion about a current star pattern?  Anyway, Ophiuchus contains several Messier objects: M9, M10, M12, and M14, M19, M62, and M107...all of them globular clusters.  I have a telescope that I try to take outside to observe the night sky when I'm off from work, but I'm kind of clumsy in getting it properly trained on specific objects smaller than the moon.  And it seems that in recent weeks the night sky here in north-central Florida has been consistently cloudy and I've either been working or tired when at home...but the heavens can wait until my Earthly conditions improve, I suppose...

Next month I highlight another constellation... 

Quote of the Week...from Isaac Asimov

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.                     --Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov (1920-92) was a very prolific writer, not only with his more recognized accomplishments in science fiction, but also with mystery fiction and non-fiction...the latter widely ranging from science to history to the Bible.  He wrote on a fanatical level and was also an accomplished speed typist, something that I am not, my past efforts with the excellent Mavis Beacon program notwithstanding.  As for the above quote, let me first say that it doesn't mean that Asimov wrote down everything he thought...I certainly wouldn't either, for some thoughts are better left guarded.  But the act of writing necessarily demands a direct bond between one's thought processes and what gets presented on the screen (or paper).  And this, I believe, also means that since I tend to think in plain, not overly flowery or literary ornate, terms, my writing will also...like that of Asimov...present itself in that simple, plain language.  He always maintained this style of writing no matter what genre he was producing...makes it a lot easier for the reader to understand and relate, I assure you of that!  As a result I am confident that I can pick up any book by Isaac Asimov...from fiction to Shakespeare to physics...and comprehend just about everything I read, no matter how unfamiliar I am with the subject material.  I also understand that there are certain writers who appeared to deliberately obfuscate their writing and made following it an exercise in decryption more than reading...James Joyce to me is a prime example, but not the only one.  Yet his contemporary, Ernest Hemingway, on the other hand, wrote in plain, terse language...and that style contributed to his stories' effectiveness by strengthening that bond between writer and reader, emulating how people generally think.  While not claiming to be a Hemingway or Asimov, I follow their examples in writing this blog...  

Just Finished Reading Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm

Science fiction writer Kate Wilhelm's 1976  novel Where the Sweet Birds Sang, which I just finished reading, examines the notions of cloning and social division in the context of a post-apocalyptic world where the population has been decimated by pollution and disease...and sterility.  The setting is an isolated part of the Shenandoah Valley and the story takes place over three generations. Facing extinction, David's family...featuring brilliant scientists such as himself...undertake the task, first of cloning livestock that wasn't reproducing normally and then, of humans using himself and other family members as models.  The gambit works in that the clones survive...but since clones of a person seem to have a sort of telepathic link with each other, they develop a completely different worldview than normal humans and even come to see themselves as a separate species.  The clones take over the family estate and condemn individualism, which they see as an abomination.  But with the story's final two main protagonists, clone Molly and her naturally-born son Mark, the author demonstrates that while a sense of social cohesion has its advantages and is even necessary, it is also crucial that each person's individual worth is recognized and valued.  Will the community survive, and what about the rest of the world?  A nightmarish look at a future world that may not be as distantly ahead of us as we would like...

Weekly Short Stories: 1974 Science Fiction, Part 2

Below are four more reviews of short stories as they appeared in Donald A. Wollheim's The 1975 Annual World's Best SF, presenting the editor's selection of his favorites from the year 1974.  This was the year that started off with the Miami Dolphins' second straight Super Bowl championship when they ran roughshod over the Minnesota Vikings...and traumatically ended that December in the next season's playoffs when Ken Stabler of the Oakland Raiders threw an impossible, off-balance fourth-down touchdown pass at the game's close to knock out Miami: I'm still trying to recover from that vicarious sports disaster 46 years later.  But the year in between those two games for me was wonderful, one of my favorites to muse back upon. I spent a great amount of time outdoors then, and in my "earlier" life it represented my peak time of running and biking.  Fond memories...but once again I digress: here are my reactions to those four tales...

A FULL MEMBER OF THE CLUB by Bob Shaw

Seedy entrepreneur Philip Connor is devastated by his girlfriend Angela breaking up with him after she has suddenly inherited millions...upon visiting her new swanky estate he discovers she has several products...among them televisions, coffee, and cigars...that are "perfect" in quality and have on them the trademark label "P" (for perfect).  Wanting these items for himself, he discovers that the party making and distributing them enters into exclusive, discreet agreements with their buyers...now he's become fanatical in finding who they are.  The story demonstrates how wealth goes to people's heads and they feel the need to distance themselves from the rest of us, as if we were somehow "tainted"...reminds me of some folks I knew from my past...

THE SUN'S TEARS by Brian Stableford

A brilliant story with an embedded moral, an rather uninspired spaceman named Colfax finds himself on a quest that many others in his profession succumb to: to go off by himself deep in the cosmos in search of ultimate meaning and fulfillment. Along his complicated path he tries on one planet to win the father's permission to marry a beautiful woman but is faced with one condition: bring back the "sun's tears".  Now Colfax is faced with another task: first he must find out exactly what that is, much less where it is...but he eventually finds out both.  In the process of seeking his quest he experiences an exile for several months...and in the end regrets ever having left it.  Sometimes you can't recognize paradise when it's all around you...  

THE GIFT OF GARIGOLLI by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth

Pohl and Kornbluth had teamed up to write sci-fi before, but this story is special: Kornbluth passed away back in 1958 and Pohl adapted his fragments for a story and finished it. Two concurrent narratives are going on, one by aliens trying to escape Earth and the other by a plastics corporation executive suddenly stuck with a gargantuan debt left by his deadbeat brother-in-law.  Pohl and Kornbluth were both known for their acerbic wit and social satire...this one is right up their alley, very funny...

THE FOUR-HOUR FUGUE by Alfred Bester

In a future world marked by social disintegration and overwhelming pollution...to the point where potable water is so rare that no one ever takes baths...the fragrance industry is booming.  And one company's gifted expert in the field has a creative block...investigations show that he often has late-night four-hour fugues for which he has no memory.  A woman with telepathic skills is hired to trail him...well, it gets a little convoluted from here on.  Still, entertaining reading with a twisted ending...

Next week I conclude my look at science fiction short stories from 1974...

Game of the Week: Minesweeper

 

For years Minesweeper was an embedded game in every desktop or laptop computer, usually along with Solitaire representing the "free" games.  How many of us have gotten sucked into playing this game over and over again when we instead should have been tending to what we were SUPPOSED to do on the computer...or, better, "just say no" and switch off the contraption?  The premise of Minesweeper, which can be played on different-sized game grids with variable difficulty, involves filling up the squares with "steps"...if a number appears, you're safe, but if you just stepped on a mine, then "game over".  Each number indicates exactly how many mines surround it vertically, horizontally or diagnally...so the highest number theoretically would be "8"...if such a "safe" square has no surrounding mines, the game automatically compensates for it so that you are always presented with choices.  There is some strategy and skill to Minesweeper, but luck sometimes is involved whenever no clear safe move is available and you just have to make your best guess.  The program usually keeps account of how quickly you successfully get through a game...I always got a kick out of playing it.  It also makes me feel a bit old in that there is probably an increasing number of people on this planet who have never heard of Minesweeper, much less having experienced playing it since computers nowadays tend not to include it in their packages...

Surgery for Me on Thursday

In three days, on Thursday July 15th, I will be undergoing some pretty involved surgery, centered around replacing a defective heart valve that I was born with and repairing the lifelong damage from that defect.  I am confident that all will go well and I will make a full recovery and be able, before too long, to return to my active lifestyle.  But in the meantime I've been told that following the procedure I will be in intensive care about two days and in the hospital a week...if all goes according to plan.  After that it will be me at home recovering for a few weeks, with physical therapy naturally involved in the process.  For that hospital stay at least I will not be writing anything for this blog. But if you keep checking in during that period, you'll still find articles here: I've written them in advance! Hopefully, once I'm back home I'll be able to resume writing and posting.  It was late 2011 when, after going to an "after-hours" doctor for a sinus infection, he detected a heart murmur and recommended I see my regular physician...whose tests began to uncover the problem. Subsequent tests the following January revealed the scope of the situation, and since then I've had annual exams and consults with my thoracic surgeon over whether to go ahead with the prescribed corrective surgery...this past April he finally came out in favor of it.  So here I go...

Great Old TV Episodes...from The Addams Family

 

LURCH LEARNS TO DANCE was from the first season of the two-year run of the ABC sitcom The Addams Family, first airing in December, 1964.  Lurch, played by Ted Cassidy, is the eccentric family's imposing butler, pictured above on the left of Gomez (John Astin) and Morticia (Carolyn Jones)...in other episodes his one line was "You rang?" after being summoned by the pull of a hangman's rope.  The show's general tone is like the concurrent family sitcom The Munsters, making light of the traditionally morbid and gruesome elements of our history and popular culture...like a TV version of that old funny single The Monster Mash.  Yet with both The Addams Family and The Munsters, they are engaged, loving families...with the latter the Frankenstein-monster-resembling Herman goes off to work while with the former Gomez is apparently independently wealthy, always staying at home like the father in the movie You Can't Take It With You. Each episode usually has someone from the outside encounter them at their house and get utterly freaked out over the surroundings and residents...this particular episode is no exception as Lurch, naturally shy, gets an invitation to the Butlers' Ball and admits to Gomez and Morticia that he doesn't know how to dance.  Concerned, they first arrange for a visiting dancing instructor and, when that doesn't work out, various family members try their hand at helping Lurch...to hilarious results.  Like all the other Addams Family episodes, there is a profound sense of sweetness in this household which otherwise embraces the grotesque...I found that very appealing.  When I was an 8-9-year old kid during the series' run, they actually sold Addams Family trading cards at the U-tote-M convenience store on Taft Street near my home...I collected these at the time along with Beatles and Outer Limits cards.  Besides Lurch, Gomez and Morticia, the family includes the children Pugsley and Wednesday, Uncle Fester, Grandmama, Thing (a disembodied hand that can go anywhere on the property), and later...Cousin Itt.  The unkempt, creepy-looking yard in front of their house has inspired me to engage in the rhythmic finger-snapping of their theme song whenever I'm out walking and pass by a really weedy place that appears abandoned or neglected.  Duh-duh-duh-DUH, snap-snap...

The Moon is a Puzzle

 

Of course this article's title is a play on words: as you can see by the above photo the Moon is literally a puzzle, specifically of the jigsaw variety.  I got it as a gift last year and thought it was a bit challenging, although it was only 500 pieces.  Usually when I'm doing a jigsaw puzzle I start out looking for special standout parts to first assemble...the monochrome Moon, though, is largely an image of different types of black and white shading...but it was fun doing it!  One notable difference between the pictured final product and the real image I see through my telescope is that on the edges it isn't purely curved, but rather you can see the canyons and ridges poking out on the side.  As for the title's figurative meaning, astronomers were puzzled by a relatively small planet as the Earth having as its natural satellite such a massive object, much larger in proportion to the planet it revolves around than with any other...just look at Mars with its small, irregular "rocks" Phobos and Deimos...and same-sized Venus has no satellite at all.  But it has been widely accepted now than billions of years ago, while Earth was still extremely hot and molten on the surface, a dwarf planet collided with it, not directly enough to shatter it but at just the right point to where the two objects violently combined with the particles emitted from the Earth's surface thrown into space, eventually coalescing into what we now know as the Moon.  Such an unlikely accident in space has caused some to speculate that the subsequent development of life on Earth is much rarer elsewhere in the cosmos.  But each situation on each planet, in whichever stellar system you consider, will bring up special unlikely events that determine its present likelihood for life.  In any event, just about every time I look up at our Moon, it bugs me that folks were walking on it during my adolescent years...I'm becoming eligible for Medicare soon and nobody's ever gone back: I firmly believe that future historians will look back on this gap...more than 48 years now and growing...as evidence of the beginning of Western civilization's decline...

Quote of the Week...from Robert Frost

The best way out is always through.                                ---Robert Frost

The renowned American poet Robert Frost is probably best know for the line "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I...I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference" from his poem The Road Not Taken.  With the above quote he emphasizes the need for people to face up to the challenges and problems in their lives and not, I believe, to seek confrontation or trouble.  Everybody has problems, and each of us should recognize our own individual ordeals and shortcomings and deal with them...this requires a bit of courage, though, as well as a recognition that we sometimes cannot surmount our troubles on our own but need to rely on the community around us, starting with our loved ones.  I have entered such a season in my own life when I need to deal with substantive medical issues, and for me the best way out is through some pretty extensive surgery, which is scheduled to take place next week.  But I am looking forward to getting on the other side of all this and resuming my regular life and routines while planning for great things in the future.  In the meantime I wrote out some blog articles in advance, which will be appearing here daily while I'm in the hospital...

Just Finished Reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Back on Sunday June 27th I was watching Fareed Zakharia on CNN and he had on as a guest Malcom Gladwell, a podcaster/author who tends to focus on trends in society and his special take on history.  Intrigued, I checked out his 2000 first book, The Tipping Point, to get a better idea as to what his mindset was/is.  In it he claimed that in society there are movements whose "infection" mimic that of epidemics in that once they pass a certain threshold, i.e. the "tipping point", they explode among the population.  Citing numerous examples of different trends he thinks fit this model, Gladwell then goes on to outline the various parameters of such phenomena.  First he posits three rules: the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.  From the first rule, his belief is that only a relatively small number of people are responsible for exploding a social "epidemic": Connectors (people who know people), Mavens (people who know information), and Salesmen (persuaders with great negotiating abilities).  With his second rule, Stickiness refers to the memorable value of something, that "sticks" with people and keeps the trend in conversation.  And with the third, it is essential that whatever movement or trend is being advanced must be relevant to the time, place and circumstance surrounding it.  The author cuts across many areas with his examples, from the drop of crime in New York City in the 1990s to a syphilis outbreak in Baltimore to Paul Revere's ride to John Wesley's evangelism to Rebecca Wells' bestseller Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood...to mention only some of the more prominent cases.  The Tipping Point is loaded with a sense of scientific and statistical authority to its premises...which automatically sounds off warning bells in my head.  In the end, I regard Malcolm Gladwell's assertations as his own well-informed opinion, and think that in this day and age of QAnon, pandemic and vaccine conspiracy theories and election denial, belief trends also may follow this model he laid out...and clearly not for the better...

Weekly Short Stories: 1974 Science Fiction, Part 1

Today I review the first two short stories...technically these are novella-length...appearing in the anthology The 1975 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim with Arthur Saha and covering their selections of short science fiction from the previous year.  In 1974 the Watergate scandal reached a breaking point in the summertime when the "smoking gun" tape of Nixon trying to cover it all up was released and he resigned the Presidency to avoid a Senate impeachment trial and conviction.  I also graduated from high school that year and began college.  There will be more about '74's history and my personal memories in the weeks to come, but for now here are my reactions to those first two stories, the first of which was written by a very well-known figure...

A SONG FOR LYA by George R.R. Martin

This was one of Game of Thrones creator Martin's early stories, and it deals (as does the next tale) with the theme of immortality.  Two telepaths are sent to a distant planet where humanity is beginning to engage in trade with the indigenous humanoid population which, although predating us with its civilizations by millennia seems in a state of stagnation.  The most disturbing part of their culture, though, is their practices of Joining and Union...voluntary joining with a horrible parasitic creature and then eventually allowing it to uttering consume them in "union".  From their perspective, though, the act brings them into close fellowship with all intelligent beings and guarantees immortality.  The task for our protagonists is to investigate this phenomenon, which has begun to entice humans into their fold.  Here Martin contrasts spiritual immortality with physical immortality in the starkest terms...a very thought-provoking tale... 

DEATHSONG by Sydney J. Van Scyoc

On another world, an exploratory party has discovered both a small number of humanoids, in a generally stuporous state and on the verge of starvation, who engage in a strange nightly practice playing their flutes within an elaborate, specially constructed temple as a living light show surrounds them.  The explorers, upon entering a special room in the temple, are also provided flutes and play them as well...by doing so they discover the very dark side of this planet's history and inhabitants.  As for those emaciated humanoids, a surprise is in store for readers at the story's end. The flutes and lights show deal with immortality, too, but with a completely different...and much more sinister...focus than what the previous story presents.  

Next week I continue looking back at the year 1974 in science fiction short stories...

Game of the Week: Parcheesi

 

Parcheesi is an old board game I used to play often with my family when I was growing up...it's dubbed a "Backgammon game of India".  From two to four players can participate, each one using four pieces...the pictured game has two players.  The pieces all start in the assigned circular "nest" and can only start out on the board's pathway after a dice roll of five.  Players can move their pieces according to their dice rolls, splitting them up according to the numbers...say you roll a "6" and "3"...then you can move one piece 6 spaces and another 3...or choose to move one of your pieces "9".  As in the mythical Jumanji, doubles gets an extra turn.  If you land on a white space occupied by an opponent's piece, you send it back to their "nest" and they must start over with it.  Each piece must make its way all around the board and then go up the red pathway to the center of the board, called "home".  The first player to get all their pieces "home" wins the game.  Part of the strategy of Parcheesi I liked was the "blockade", whereby two of one's pieces placed in the same space can prevent others from passing it...but I noticed that some of my family members back then tended to get angry if a blockade lasted "too long".  At this time I don't own a Parcheesi game, but am considering picking one up.  It's a mix of strategy and luck, so winning means something but only to a limited degree.  I wonder how Trump would react to playing it...I imagine the first time he lost he'd complain that it was all "rigged"...

Just Finished Reading Just Take My Heart by Mary Higgins Clark

Just Take My Heart is a 2009 murder mystery novel by the late Mary Higgins Clark.  There is more than one murder to figure out here, as stage actress Natalie is shot to death upon arriving at her New Jersey home after a brief excursion at Cape Cod, Massachusetts. She is certain she saw there her old friend's boyfriend...whom she only saw in a picture...and who she suspects killed her friend in a feigned New York City mugging a few years earlier. So early on in the story we're confronted with this murder, and as fiction writers go Clark is good at introducing all the principals of the story early in the book...including the real killer. I figured it all out early on while Raines' estranged husband Gregg is charged with the murder and prosecuting attorney, who turns out to be the main protagonist, increasingly has doubts as to his guilt as the trial goes on.  In the meantime a very creepy mass murderer is stalking her from across her own home...did he also kill Natalie?  Throw into the mix that Emily had a heart transplant a few years before...this gives a special meaning to the book's title, doesn't it?  As I said, with some of the other characters the author introduced early on...and I had a lot of names to remember as she mentioned many...I was able to sort through them and nail the culprit, after which reading to the end was simply a test to see if I was correct. Just Take My Heart, like the other Mary Higgins Clark novels I've read so far, is escapist reading and relatively short.  I admire writers like her who stuck to a disciplined routine and churned out book after book, year after year.  Of course, it helps knowing that your publisher is sold on your writing and that your books will be seriously promoted... 

Great Old TV Episodes...from All in the Family

 

ARCHIE AND THE COMPUTER, from the breakthrough 1970s Norman Lear sitcom All in the Family, originally aired in October of 1973.  This episode, which contains one of my all-time favorite comedic lines, is all about how computers had pretty much taken over society and were royally screwing up everything...and that was nearly 48 years ago!  The Bunker family, in case you've been living in a cave all this time and never heard of the series, lives in their suburban house in Queens, New York.  Archie is the breadwinner, working as a foreman on a dock...and is also a raging bigot, with disparaging epithets for just about every group he encounters.  Edith is his loving, loyal, but very honest wife, while their daughter Gloria lives in their home with son-in-law (and staunch liberal) Michael while he's studying in grad school.  In this episode Edith reveals that the quarter for which she had sent a coupon to a prune company came in...and then more and more quarters kept coming: she's now got more than $47 due to this computer error.  Then Michael points out the computer-run electricity grid causing brown-outs and the subway system's malfunctions.  But Archie finally gets his own fill of computers when the Veteran's Administration mistakes him for another veteran who passed away...he's now dead as far as they are concerned and all the concerned businesses around target Edith in light of the "news".  Finally, toward the show's end a real estate agent trying to get Edith to sell their house calls on the phone and Archie grabs the receiver from her, saying "This is Archie Bunker talking to you from the grave...wish you was here!"  When creating this series, Lear wanted to expose prejudice for what it was.  Unfortunately, although All in the Family was a great success, Carroll O'Conner's compelling characterization of Archie gave him appeal to millions...and folks tend to emulate those they like.  Also, the series tended to identify being conservative with ignorance and bigotry...I guarantee that many on the left side of the political spectrum have problems in those two areas as well.  Still, the acting was tremendous and there were several very, very funny episodes, especially in the earlier seasons...

Just Finished Reading Do Over by Jon Acuff

Jon Acuff is a motivational writer and speaker.  I've recently read two of his books, Finish (2017) and Start (2013), each one reflecting in its title advice about approaching projects and personal goals.  In his 2015 book Do Over (long title Do Over: Make Today the First Day of Your New Career), he tackles the subject of career change and the essential elements of success as he sees them.  Acuff structures his presentation around something he calls the Career Savings Account, broken into four areas: Relationships (who you know), Skills (what you do), Character (who you are), and Hustle (how you work).  He goes on with each of these, breaking them down further and tying them all together as they apply to the four different circumstances of career or life change: Voluntary/Positive, Voluntary/Negative, Involuntary/Positive, and Involuntary/Negative.  Along the way in his narrative he adds concepts like Attitude, Expectations, Grit, Chaos, and Flexibility.  He also is a big advocate of folks writing down their introspective insights, especially in regard to their fears and other negative feelings. I thought Jon Acuff did a much better job at organizing and presenting his message in a way that the reader can more easily reference in the future after reading the book...to this extent Do Over is more like his more recent Finish and I recommend them both over his earlier Start.  Personally, I am not contemplating a career change in the strict sense to which the author was referring, but I do plan to retire in a couple of years or so and realize that this will involve a great deal of change...and much of what Acuff was saying in this book was meaningful to me...

Quote of the Week...from Fictional Character John Mallory

Where there's confusion the man who knows what he wants stands a good chance of getting it.    

                                                                            ---John Mallory

The above quote is from the classic 1971 Sergio Leone "spaghetti western" movie A Fistful of Dynamite (alternate title Duck You Sucker), with James Coburn playing the Irish revolutionary explosives expert John Mallory, who made the above comment to his sidekick, Mexican bandit Juan Miranda (played by Rod Steiger).  Today the quote applies to how public opinion can be manipulated through both social and mass media with "alternative facts" and conspiracy theories, and how foreign adversaries like Russia are planting confusion and division within our society in this manner.  After all, if America is at war with itself over the simple notion of what is real, how effectively can it stand up to other countries who choose to challenge it?  It used to be that the political and social differences and disagreements among our population could be discussed between anyone, with a commonly-agreed-to set of facts forming the reality basis for the argument.  Nowadays, this side has its special facts and the other has theirs...I think one of the main problems is that many people have abandoned the traditional sources of information (the newspaper, the evening news) in favor of specialized Internet sites, Facebook and Twitter feeds, clearly agenda-driven "news" channels, and hearsay to get their information.  The sad truth is...and always has been...that those traditional news shows and newspapers have always had embedded bias within them. But one of the reasons we went to school is so that we could discern that bias and filter out the truth value of what others were expressing. Instead of recognizing this fact, though, and continuing to rely on these sources for their primary information, I see an increasing segment of our population abandoning this basic functioning of mature adulthood and instead latching onto media idols, automatically accepting whatever they say, no matter how ridiculous, and demonizing whomever they choose to demonize. I used to think that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter would provide effective forums for people to exchange their views with me on what I have posted on them. Well, I'm older and wiser now...the overwhelming majority of those old classmates...as well as contemporaries...never chose to interact with me on Facebook and I've become pretty intolerant (and correctly so) of those users who voluntarily allow themselves to be deluded by questionable information sources. This voluntary succumbing to disinformation, by the way, isn't just confined to those with conservative leanings.  Many on the political left stubbornly insist on their own narratives about the way things are, selectively including anecdotal events affirming them while rejecting or ignoring anything contradictory.  It's interesting in this time of very effective and...unlike in most of the world...universally-available and free COVID vaccines, both ends of the spectrum are engaged in wacko conspiracy theories that masses are following in refusing to get their vaccines...at least on the left (in general) those choosing against vaccination are still wearing masks to protect themselves... 

A Fistful of Dynamite is one of my all-favorite movies.  Being as self-indulgent as I am on this blog for listing my "favorites" of this and that, I'm working on a new weekly feature in which I review a movie that meant a lot to me...stay tuned...

My June 2021 Running and Walking Report

In June I ran a total of 83 miles and walked a little more than 100.  No super-long runs, and I missed 8 days running.  On June 12th I ran in the weekly Saturday morning 5K Depot Parkrun here in Gainesville under very warm and excessively humid conditions...not enjoyable at all!  This will be my last monthly running and walking report for a while since I am going to be undergoing some rather involved surgery in the near future and recovery will necessarily preempt any sort of athletic activity for a few months.  I do hope that eventually I'll be able to get back to running and walking once I've fully recovered...

Weekly Short Stories: 1973 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I finish my look back at short science fiction from the year 1973 as presented in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1974 Annual World's Best SF, featuring selections from the previous year.  Of the three I review below, the first and last are relatively brief while the middle one may be the lengthiest novella I've discussed in this year-by-year blog feature.  I remember back then watching the Senate Watergate hearings in the springtime at school in my morning Chemistry class...my teacher, a Nixon-hater who wanted to see him go down...constantly showed it during class while commenting profusely: what a character.  I had a revived interest in astronomy that year as well, but it seemed that at different points I was rebuffed in reaching out to others regarding it.  Oh well, that how it goes...here are my reactions to those final three tales...  

MOBY, TOO by Gordon Eklund

A story of apocalypse for both whales and humanity...presented in the first person by a intelligently-mutated whale...goes way off into the "future" to 1986 when he discovers he's alone in the sea and the people seem to be all gone, too.  Or is he all alone?  A strange story of hope and the replacement of hatred with mercy...

DEATH AND DESIGNATION AMONG THE ASADI by Michael Bishop

On an exploratory research mission to a distant world occupied by only one animal form, the intelligent Asadi, the scientist inserts himself right in the midst of their strange, inexplicable society and finds himself both repulsed by it and inexplicably attracted at the same time.  The story is presented in the form of different journal entries by the protagonist, an interesting literary device that I've enjoyed in other stories I've read...still, I thought it was way too long...  

CONSTRUCTION SHACK by Clifford Simak

As humans first start landing on Mars and exploring other worlds, a manned mission to Pluto is sent to follow up on a puzzling find of an earlier probe, showing it with a smooth, undifferentiated surface only distinguished by some dots appearing around its equator.  And the "planet" mysteriously proves to be much, much smaller than previously thought.  When the team gets there, they are astounded at their discoveries, which completely changes what they thought they knew about the origins of everything...

Next week I begin reviewing science fiction short stories from 1974...