Great Old TV Episodes...from The Bob Newhart Show

OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODS, from the sitcom comedy series The Bob Newhart Show, was originally aired in November, 1975.  The series has Newhart portraying a Chicago psychologist married to Emily (Suzanne Pleshette) with the scenes generally split between their high-rise city apartment and Bob's work floor, where  receptionist Carol (Marcia Wallace) and orthodontist Jerry (Peter Bonerz) also work. The Hartleys have a neighbor down the hall, Howard, a passenger jet pilot played by Bill Daily of I Dream of Jeannie renown.  The series lasted from 1972 to 1978 and benefited from its weekly schedule on CBS at 9:30 pm, right between The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Carol Burnett.  I always enjoyed this series, typified by running gags reappearing throughout each episode.  In this particular episode, when Emily is absent traveling one Thanksgiving, lonely Bob decides to share it with friends Howard and Jerry...along with obnoxious patient Carlin (Jack Riley) for an evening turkey dinner...with just a little too much booze thrown in.  It featured a great running gag of a knock-knock joke, which gets ludicrous and twisted toward the end.  And Newhart's "more goo to go" line has never left me to this day.  Like  Mary Tyler Moore and Carol Burnett, this series was moderately funny, but I was caught completely off-guard when I saw this Thanksgiving-themed episode and lost it laughing to the point that I was crying.  I would never see knock-knock jokes in the same light again...

Recovery from Surgery Impacts Blog for Next Few Weeks

I'm still recovering at home from heart surgery, and this will go on for a few more weeks.  As for this blog, for obvious reasons I got out of the habit of writing daily articles...the ones preceding today's were almost all written in advance of the operation.  I had been writing weekly features on it: Sunday was for my favorite TV episodes, Tuesday I discussed specific games, Wednesday was about science fiction short stories I've read, and Friday I presented a meaningful quote from someone.  I may or may not stick to this pattern, and I may also skip some days writing as I recover...

Quote of the Week...from Charles Barkley

Yes, I'm vaccinated. Everybody should be vaccinated.  The only people who are not vaccinated are just [expletive].  Can you imagine if one of these guys that is not vaccinated, if they get one of these players' kids, wives, girlfriends, moms and dads sick and they die over some unnecessary conspiracy bullsh**t?  I think that would be just tragic.                                  ---Charles Barkley

There's not much I can add to the great Phoenix Suns' player and National Basketball Association Hall of Famer...I disagree with him sometimes but not here: he hit the bulls-eye with this comment he recently made during a CNBC interview.  We would not be in this upsurge in Covid-19 right now were it not for those millions upon millions of fellow Americans who have refused to be vaccinated.  The vaccines are free and widespread: no waiting in line or appointments necessary.  The irony is that in much of the rest of the world the population is desperate for vaccines.  The anti-vaxxers here tend to coincide with the anti-maskers: can't these fools realize that wearing masks cuts down on the disease transmission rate and that their refusal to get vaccinated directly leads to new outbreaks and a return to mask mandates?  

Just Finished Reading Mental Immunity by Andy Norman

About three weeks ago I was with Melissa in Books-a-Million browsing around when my eyes fell on Andy Norman's book Mental Immunity in the "self-help" section.  I briefly surveyed the contents and discovered that the author, one of those rare professional philosophers among us, wrote it largely in response to some of the things I was noticing about how people were adopting really, REALLY bad ideas that they were picking up from friends, the Internet, TV and radio.  But how does one reverse the tide of "alternative facts" and confront those who believe in them?  After all, aren't we all entitled to our own opinions?  Norman hones in on this assumption and challenges it, concluding that no, that while legally we may be so entitled our own flawed views...even when the "facts" supporting our positions are false...we are in no way morally entitled to them...even with matters of religious faith.  And, in fact, the idea of NOT challenging those pushing false beliefs is in itself immoral.  Norman doesn't just come up with his notions spontaneously, but bases them on the historical development of philosophy, going back to that of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and progressing up to the century-old dispute about faith between William James and William Kingdon Clifford, the latter of whom promoted a more scientific approach to philosophy...and in particular epistemology, that is the study of knowledge, its truth value and use...and with whose perspective the author essentially agrees.  James, on the the other hand, made one's faith and core belief system a kind of unassailable fortress, basically giving rise to the notion that what people thought was somewhat a sacred right and to confront them was out of line...it was James' approach that won the day, and according to Norman this is causing a great deal of trouble in our time with conspiracy theories and slanted narratives running rampant and people bubbling themselves off with others who share their peculiar beliefs.  It is necessary to dissipate the aura of sacredness regarding one's own beliefs and open them up to the open, public scrutiny that they merit.  As for me, I often find myself standing back from disputing what I hold to be unwarranted assumptions from others around me, falling back on that old James-inspired "everyone's entitled to their own opinion" mantra as a kind of cop-out excuse for avoiding possibly unpleasant and awkward engagement.  Mental Immunity is a very rigorous introduction to philosophy, particularly the branch of epistemology, and there are sections in which I experienced difficulty keeping up with Andy Norman's narrative.  Norman is a philosophy professor, and his evolving teaching approach to the subject reveals part of his strategy for stemming the tide of bad ideas infecting our culture.  After seeing that his lectures weren't getting anywhere with his students, he changed his teaching tactics to include their in-class input...while politely questioning their various assertions as to where they got them from.  The book is an attempted balance between the author trying to justify his views on the state of affairs in our misinformation society of today and explaining in as much detail as he can, with his academic background and knowledge that he uses to back up those views.  It's a tough balancing act, and I respect his efforts.  I'm sure a rereading will help me better understand Norman's approach.  He seems to have rejected the parade of philosophies over the ages, finally setting on a modified version of Socrates' in which the search for truth is marked, not necessarily by rationalization and proof, but rather by inquiry with the notion of commonly-held presumptions playing a major role.  For example, when confronting someone with "bad ideas", politely-leveled questions leading to clarification and giving the source of those ideas helps to keep that party off the defensive, with the dialogue more likely to lead to mutual enlightenment.  At the book's end, Norman has an elaborate strategy laid out for this...I'm gonna have to go back to it...

Weekly Short Stories: 1975 Science Fiction, Part 1

Today I begin reviewing science fiction short stories from the year 1975 as they appeared in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1976 Annual World's Best SF, with the editor's picks from the previous year.  1975 was the year in history that Gerald Ford was president (and shot at a couple of times) and South Vietnam and Cambodia fell to the communists America had been fighting for years.  I was still living in Hollywood and attending college in Davie...more about that in another article. For now, back to the first two stories in the book...

CATCH THAT ZEPPELIN! by Fritz Leiber

A man walking through Midtown Manhattan, circa 1973, walks though a shaded area in front of him on the sidewalk as he is making his way to the Empire State Building and finds his city, country...and himself transformed into an alternate history where World War II and Hitler's Nazis never happened and zeppelins...moored to the tops of skyscrapers...were the dominant form of air transportation.  I thought Leiber did a great job of envisioning things...especially including a much greater economic and cultural influence of Germany over America had not the horrors and shame of Naziism drastically diminished that influence...

THE PEDDLER'S APPRENTICE by Joan D. Vinge and Vernor Vinge

This story is set far off into the future when humans have already explored and settled other star systems and cultures on Earth have come and gone in cycles of growth and self-destruction.  Now it's a worldwide, stagnate society, except for remote pockets such as the Highlands.  Wim Buckry, a rowdy young man leading his gang of crooks, accompanies a strange peddler passing through the area into the more civilized Flatlands and finally the area's capital of Fyffe.  Just who is this peddler who seems to possess and wield great magic and what is the dark secret that the leader of Fyffe is withholding from his strangely passive Flatlands populations?  The moral of this tale seems to be that, sure, growth involves risk and danger...but it's necessary...

Next week I continue looking out sci-fi short stories from 1975...

Game of the Week...Wheel of Fortune

Wheel of Fortune has become a deeply established fixture in American culture, with its co-hosts Pat Sajak and Vanna White going back many decades.  I usually see it on Saturday evenings at 7 on my local Channel 4 station, just preceding the Jeopardy! broadcast.  The game show's premise is for contestants (three of them) to solve the on-screen mystery word puzzle...hinted at by its topic...by alternately guessing letters and spinning the wheel, which usually lands on a dollar amount for each time the letter appears in the solution...but sometimes also landing on "bankrupt" or "lose a turn".  At the end of the show, which halfway through has a puzzle bonus game awarding expenses-paid travel to some exotic location, the player with the most accumulated winnings goes on to the final bonus round, where if they solve the usually very difficult puzzle they win lots more money...or a new car.  Although I prefer Jeopardy! to Wheel of Fortune, I have always enjoyed Sajak's sly wit and the way he has fun, often at his contestants' expense.  Back in 1989-90 he had his own late night TV talk show...which I liked...but apparently few others did and it was soon canceled.  I like the way that contestants who are unlucky with the wheel's spin still have chances to win a lot of money on special challenge games in the show, and that no one leaves with less than $1000 even if they never won a round.  There's a kind of corny, old-fashioned, relaxed and friendly spirit permeating this series, a real feel-good kind of vicarious experience.  And I get a kick out of solving the puzzles before someone else does... 

Recovering from Surgery

On Thursday, July 15th I underwent aortic valve replacement surgery as well as aortic aneurism repair, at the Shands Cardiovascular hospital.  It was necessary to perform open heart surgery that involved splitting my ribs, so recovery has necessarily been a more painful and drawn out process than had I only needed the valve replaced.  After some post-operatic concerns I was finally released this past Saturday and am now at home.  In case you're wondering how I wrote daily blog articles through all this, I didn't, having written about three weeks of articles in advance.  I was first diagnosed with the aneurism and bicuspid valve, the latter a defect that I've unknowingly had my whole life, in early 2012 and had been getting annual examinations as to the aneurism's size and the valve's appearance.  My thoracic surgeon, who I've had through this whole process, this past April decided it was time for the operation, and after some initial hesitancy I agreed.  He had given me his assent to engage in physical activity (such as running) that did not involve lifting heavy weights...while being careful to monitor my reactions.  After I've fully recovered I want to return to running, but for now my goal is to gradually get better while keeping my lungs cleared...    

Great Old TV Episodes...from The Carol Burnett Show

 

SEASON 6 EPISODE 20 of the multiple Emmy Award-winning hour-long comedy variety series The Carol Burnett Show, which ran from 1967 to 1978, stands out in my memory for one sketch that feature Tim Conway playing his revered role as The Oldest Man.  In it Harvey Korman plays a rich man stuck upstairs in his swanky home as the smoke billows around him...Conway finally makes his appearance slowly climbing the ladder outside, and begins to painstakingly break with his axe every pane in the wall-sized window before entering...and then from the inside knocks out the remaining panes. When he did this, I fell apart with laughter...and it continued as Korman gets overcome by the smoke and tells Conway he needs to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation: the veteran comedian, who has already put his colleague into a laughing fit state, ad-libs a couple of lines and sends the skit over the edge.  My favorite Tim Conway role on this show has always been The Oldest Man...I remember an earlier episode when he plays a surgeon who stumbles into the operating room (Korman is the patient on the table, naturally), trips, and does excruciatingly slow somersaults across the floor.  Although it had aired since the late 1960s, I became a stalwart Carol Burnett watcher after CBS switched it to its great Saturday night lineup in 1973, closing it all out at 10. This fire rescue episode, also featuring Valerie Harper with Conway, Korman and Burnett in a blind date skit and one with Burnett spoofing Charro, originally aired in February, 1973...

My July 2021 Walking Report

As I reported a month ago, I am taking a season or so off from running due to surgery and recovery...this does not mean, however, that I stopped walking.  For the first couple of weeks in July I racked up some miles in that regard, mostly at my workplace.  But starting July 15th when I had the operation, my walking mileage naturally nosedived...still, July is a walking month and during it I accumulated about 57 miles.  As recovery progresses in August my walking mileage is sure to increase as well, but I'm looking forward to the day when I resume running and these month-end reports once again include this activity...

Quote of the Week...from Charlie Dent

This CPAC has always been kind of an odd gathering and now it's been taken over by a bunch of radicals, anti-vaxxers.  It's a land of misfit toys, it's a political freak show, it's like the Star Wars bar.  This is just bizarre.                                                            --Charlie Dent

Regarding the much-ballyhooed meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas earlier this month and which was aired extensively over some of the right-wing TV news & opinion channels, former Pennsylvania Republican Representative Charlie Dent had a few choice words describing his reactions to what he saw there.  I love the analogies to Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Star Wars...it puts these people right in their place.  I've stated before on this blog that I have conservative views on some of the pressing issues facing us, but I am revolted and appalled by the bonkers denialism (of climate change, Covid, Biden's 2020 election win), idolatry (of Trump and media figures), conspiracy theories (FBI involvement in 1/6 riot, QAnon, vaccine apocalypse)...and worst of all, the fascism spreading in our country due to Trump's (and his political worshippers') attempts to overthrow the 2020 election results.  Fascist politicians and media people abounded there, including sadly my own senator from Florida, Rick Scott, who was one of the few in the Senate to vote to NOT certify the Pennsylvania state election results.  But the 800-pound gorilla in the room was plainly Donald Trump, even cockier and more unhinged than ever, and feeding off the unquestioning adoration of the groveling people around him: could it get any more disgusting?  There are other real conservative voices out there, besides Charlie Dent, who don't want to be any part of this spectacle: it's high time they emerged from the trees that they're hiding behind...

Just Finished Reading Cosmic Queries by Neil deGrasse Tyson and James Trefil

In 2021 Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist, science popularizer, host of the television series Cosmos and ongoing podcaster with his audio show StarTalk, published a new book that he co-wrote with physicist James Trefil titled Cosmic Queries (subtitled StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going)...I just finished reading it.  It's great popular science reading, exploring the current state of research in just about any area you can imagine: quantum mechanics, the universe's origin, fundamental forces and particles, the nature of life, computer science, basics of astronomy, all about planets, stars, and their births and deaths, the history of scientific inquiry and investigation, the different theories concerning life elsewhere in the cosmos, multiverses, supervolcanoes (there are 20 in the world), mass extinctions and the end of the universe, to mention a few items.  What really got to me was the more detailed exposition of quantum mechanics and its bizarre depiction of fundamental forces in terms of exchange of "virtual" particles, as well as two completely different, well-documented versions of the universe's age...12.5 or 13.8 billion years, each conclusion backed by accurate experimental data: how can this be?  The topics hop around from chapter to chapter in no discernible pattern, but that worked for me: I was happy to just sit back and let the information rain down.  The book is also loaded with many useful illustrations and diagrams to help with understanding the various concepts presented.  Also, interspersed with the text are pithy, witty Tweets from Tyson relating to the ongoing content...in books like this you don't know how much the headline author wrote and how much his collaborator, in this case James Trefil, contributed...but it all fit together seamlessly.  I thought Cosmic Queries was both entertaining and informative, and it introduced me to the StarTalk podcast hosted by Tyson, which I can listen to on my smartphone's TuneIn Radio app.  I don't intend to become a physicist anytime in the near future, and you most likely won't either.  But deliberate and regular exposure to scientific thought processes is one thing we can do to inoculate ourselves from the onrush of really bad ideas currently infecting our society through social and mass media...

Weekly Short Stories: 1974 Science Fiction, Part 4

Today I review the final two stories from the anthology The 1975 Annual World's Best SF, presented by Donald A. Wollheim with his selections for the top science fiction from the previous year.  In the fall of 1974 I began college at Broward Community College, just a few hundred yards from both Nova Blanche Forman Elementary...which I attended from 1965-68 and Nova High School, where I studied from 1968 to 1974: I have my own strong opinions about each of these three educational institutions and their respective approaches to teaching and learning...for now, let me just diplomatically say that I was generally pleasantly surprised at the much more reasonable and professional level of instruction at BCC.  But I stray with the personal memories...here are my reactions to those two final tales... 

THE BLEEDING MAN by Craig Strete

Written by a Native American with a Native American take on life and death, this is a remarkable story about a young orphaned man who has bled from a horrendous gash in his chest his entire life, but only stands there grinning and staring.  The government with its secret research operations has "bought" the uncommunicative individual from his caretaker uncle, and now the physician in charge finds himself in conflict with a cold-hearted, dismissive official over the bleeding man's future.  This story has more of a horror feel to it than science fictions: readers beware...

STRANGER IN PARADISE by Isaac Asimov

I enjoy reading Asimov's writing in the same way I like Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King...all three deliberately write in plain language without cluttering the page with a lot of crap intended to look artistic or trendy.  In this story, it is several centuries after the "Catastrophe"...presumably a nuclear holocaust...and the worldwide society has transformed into a utilitarian kind of "utopia" that stigmatizes close family relationships to the point where two scientists find it awkward and embarrassing to discover that they are brothers with a strong mutual resemblance.  They have a collaborative assigned project: to figure how to operate a research robot on Mercury from Earth using a melding of human thinking with computers.  One of the brothers has saved an autistic man from euthanasia by making him a research subject...this leads to an interesting ending that seemed a little derivative to me nonetheless.  Stranger in Paradise is definitely NOT a part of Asimov's fictional universe tying together most of his science fiction...

Next week I begin looking at science fiction short stories from the year 1975...

Game(s) of the Week: Bombardment and Prisonball

To discuss my old elementary school recess games of bombardment and prison ball, both played on a full-court outdoor asphalt basketball court with those red inflatable bouncy balls and two bowling pins and involving the entire class at once, I read back on this blog and discovered I had already written an article covering it all...so with the author's (my) permission, I have copied that August, 2007 piece and pasted it below:

When I was going to elementary school from the fourth through sixth grades, we had our customary recess/physical education period. And one of the games we used to play was Bombardment. This game used the typical outside, asphalt-surfaced, full basketball court, but instead of using the baskets, a bowling pin was placed underneath each basket on opposite ends of the court. The class was divided into two sides, each side relegated to one half of the court. The object of the game was to knock down the opposing team’s pin using those red, lightweight basketball-sized balls (usually with about four or five used per game) that were commonly used in elementary schools. In the process of the game, if someone got hit by a ball thrown by the other side before it bounced, they’d be out of the game (until the next game started). Unless they caught the ball, in which the opponent who threw it would be out of the game. So, as a game of Bombardment went on, fewer and fewer players would be actively involved, while more and more would be off the court. While “out” of the game, students would often make up their own games, talk with each other, or play on the monkey bars nearby. Apparently, to the faculty involved in overseeing this, that meant too much student freedom and not enough control, so a new game was later devised and called Prisonball. It was exactly the same as Bombardment, except that when you were “out”, instead of leaving the game, you had to stand in a small square inset on the opponent’s end of the court and wait for a ball to come to you (which rarely happened). If you were lucky and got hold of a ball, you then had to hit one of the opposing players with it to be “redeemed” and go back to your end to play. Can you guess what happened? As the game wore on, more and more players became “prisoners” and were cramped together, sometimes resembling “Black Hole of Calcutta” conditions, in the respective “prison” squares (with the more aggressive students jostling with others for positions on the outside). But this misery for the students was joy for the faculty, who once again had the students all under their thumbs. And it got to be that, at the beginning of a game, a teacher would loudly proclaim that it was to be Prisonball, not Bombardment. So one of my favorite games at school quickly turned into my most hated game there. Those responsible for this could control my participation, but they couldn’t control the contempt I felt for them then. It just made me, in the long run, less trusting of any school authority and more likely to go down my own paths, for better or for worse.

More Jigsaw Puzzles I've Done Recently

 

For the few days preceding my admission to the hospital I returned to my old pastime of putting together jigsaw puzzles...from the above pictures you can see that I'm pretty flexible with the pictured images.  The top puzzle shows international postage stamps depicting native bird life, which I got as a family gift.  Next comes "Ralph Breaks the Internet", a Pixar movie that I haven't yet seen: I picked up the tiny-sized 300-piece puzzle at Dollar Tree.  Number Three is an interesting arrangement of fruit...looks like I'll be increasing my consumption of them in the future.  And finally...and the most striking...is a view of Arizona's Glen Canyon National Recreation Center: specifically Horseshoe Bend.  As I recuperate from my surgery I've got a few more ready to open up, lay out on the table, and assemble.  The other day I went to Books-a-Million where I bought the Horseshoe Bend puzzle.  They have some exceptional jigsaw puzzles, even one with 3000 pieces!  For now, though, I have a difficult-looking 1000-piece puzzle showing purple plants (another gift) and a multi-pack (purchased from Wal-Mart around the corner).  Looking forward to doing them...

Great Old TV Episodes...from Seinfeld

 

THE MERV GRIFFIN SHOW is easily my favorite episode of the nineties comedy series Seinfeld...the fact that it's the ONLY one I've seen in its entirety is probably a major contributing factor.  From time to time I tried tuning in to this series that everybody else seemed to be going bonkers over, but the gags and tone just didn't hit me right. Still, I like the New York urban setting and the intertwining subplots involving main characters Jerry Seinfeld, Elaine Baines, Kramer, and George Costanza.  In the Merv Griffin Show episode, originally aired in 1997, Kramer has managed to get the set of the 60s/70s TV talk show into his apartment and has totally submerged himself in Merv's old host role.  Meanwhile, Elaine has a very annoying, dorky coworker who is constantly sneaking up on her and putting her on worse terms with her already-obnoxious boss.  George feels betrayed by the pigeons, who let him run over them ("they broke the deal!"), thereby infuriating his passenger girlfriend.  And Jerry discovers the incredible old toy collection of his new love interest, scheming how to play with them behind her back (she won't let him touch them). The episode mixes all these stories perfectly, and the climactic ending...featuring animal handler Jim Fowler...is side-splitting, a truly classic moment in TV comedy. Several years ago my father was discussing how much he liked the Seinfeld series and I mentioned this particular episode as the only one I saw. "Billy", he said, "You just named probably the funniest one in the series." Should I watch some more Seinfeld to see if there are any other gems?  I could...after all, the reruns are still being shown on the CW channel 10-11pm...

Just Finished Reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

A few days ago I reviewed Malcolm Gladwell's first book, The Tipping Point, which came out in 2000.  Five years later he published his second book, Blink (long title Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking), which I just finished reading.  In it he examines a number of levels for which much of our behavior and notions of what is true are based on snap judgments unconsciously determined by intricate cues in our environment, quickly picked up by our senses and mentally processed without any kind of rational analysis...he calls this "thin-slicing".  Gladwell claims that if done with the appropriate background skill and context, this "thinking without thinking" can produce better results than belabored reasoning and investigation, while when done wrong it can produce negative...even dangerous...results.  He gives many examples over a cross-section of human experience, starting with the purchase of a fraud sculpture by the magnate Getty after extensive analysis to prove its authenticity...while individuals intimately acquainted with the work's genre (that is, those equipped with the skill to place their impressions in the proper context) instantly detected something wrong with it, one of them reacting that it was "fresh" but unable to put his finger on exactly what the problem was.  Another example was a tennis pro who had an uncanny ability to determine when a player was about to double-fault in the next serve...he just knew what would happen but not why.  On the other hand...and this dominated the book's ending...the tendency of police to abandon the cues of person-to-person interaction when confronted with an emergency situation that causes their stress levels to spike has resulted in tragic misjudgments of suspects' behaviors as those instant determinations made them "mind-blind" as to what those actions really meant.  That resonated with me as I have seen video after video over the past few years in which cops seem to go into "combat mode" around what they perceive as dangerous suspects, treating them more like enemy terrorists with their voices rising to terrifying falsetto screams and their words virtually incomprehensible, often signaling that they're about to shoot at the slightest cue.  Blink is an information-heavy book, and it made a bigger impact on me than Gladwell's debut Tipping Point.  He also sheds light on how autistic people see the world, ignoring many of the facial cues and body language that "normal" people are attuned to. I highly recommend Blink...you're bound to find something in it that resonates with you, too, and I plan to frequently return to it in order to refresh myself... 

Quote of the Week...from Neil deGrasse Tyson

Humans aren't as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy.  Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were "reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy."                                                               ---Neil deGrasse Tyson

What kind of world would we have today if empathy were a highly-stressed element of children's upbringing, with parents, teachers and other adult role models consistently exhibiting it in their relationships with them and each other?  Neil deGrasse Tyson hit it right on the head with his above quote...and the fact that he even felt a need to express it says something about the sad state of affairs today regarding this crucial virtue's lacking in society. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you...that's empathy: put yourself in another's place and try to picture the world (and yourself) as they see it (and you) without prejudgment...this is a skill that with our inherently self-centered natures does not come naturally: it does have to be taught! And teaching it comes in two forms: (1) you make it a topic for deliberate instruction as Tyson suggests, and (2) you present yourself as an living example for others to emulate.  That's a powerful combination... 

Just Finished Reading How Music Works by John Powell

John Powell is something of a Renaissance man, with his online bio showing him to be a scientist...in particular a physicist with a "focus" on lasers, an entrepreneur with his laser firm, a musical composer, and of course a writer.  The Englishman's 2010 book How Music Works gives an overview on many different levels about the nature of music, including the science of acoustics as they pertain to pitch and loudness and how different musical instruments accomplish their production of music and differ from one another.  I was surprised to read that musical notes did not actually become universally standardized until the mid-twentieth century.  He also delves into how people perceive pitch (including the notion of "perfect pitch"), and how a heard note's pitch is often simply a recognition of its base note even though higher-octave versions of it are present (and sometimes that base note isn't).  Although these things were all interesting, in my opinion the book took off when Powell began discussing the history of music, especially as it pertained to the development of different types.  Although we in the West are used to the Major and Minor scales, it is the five-note Pentatonic scale that has prevailed over much of the world, in very disparate and diverse cultures over the course of time.  And besides the Major and Minor scales there are others that in centuries past were more commonly used...even recently the Dorian scale was employed in songs like Scarborough Fair and Eleanor Rigby.  Most of all, the author stressed that in all music the composer and performer have as one of their main goals the aim of keeping the audience interested in what is going on...to that end much of the structure of songs (including key changes and note diversions) and classical music has evolved into more or less standardized forms: just to keep folks from zoning out.  Toward the end of the book he discussed the various pros and cons of learning to play different musical instruments: for beginners, guitar and piano are good and violin and trombone, the latter two without specific note settings, are much more difficult to start with.  Yet he also pointed out that violins can play only one note at a time while piano learning can get pretty complex, what with all the chords and the ability to simultaneously hit a number of keys...so down the line it all evens out.  And some composers...at least the good ones...will write their music for different instruments with the recognition that some keys are easier to play on them than others.  Powell went deeply into how music evokes different feelings, such as ascending notes, loudness, and the type of key.  Yet he also disputed the claim that one of the twelve keys within a Major or Minor system is essentially different in imparting emotion than another, a belief that even greats like Beethoven subscribed to.  I've only scratched the surface with this amazing book that does a great job of introducing someone like me to music: I've always loved listening to it, but in the production end of the art such as playing an instrument, singing or composing I've never truly engaged.  John Powell asserts that most of us can learn to play an instrument to basic competency level...it's those extra ten years + natural talent which exceptional musicians require that often intimidate the rest of us into never starting...

Weekly Short Stories: 1974 Science Fiction, Part 3

Here are my reactions to the next two science fiction short stories as they appeared in the anthology The 1975 Annual World's Best SF, covering what editor Donald A. Wollheim deemed to be the greatest tales from 1974.  That was a great year for me with music, with my favorites being Time in a Bottle (Jim Croce), Sunshine on My Shoulders (John Denver), Rock Your Baby (George McCrae), Number Nine Dream (John Lennon), Arabesque No. 1 (Isao Tomita), and You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet (Bachman-Turner Overdrive)...really good stuff.  But enough of that for now...below I discuss those two tales... 

TWIG by Gordon R. Dickson

Twig, like many sci-fi short stories, carries a lot of allegory with it, as on a distant planet the human settlers choose selfish expediency over the respect and preservation of the indigenous life.  

Farmers want to burn the native plants off the fields they want to plant, but their elected representative Hacker has been blocking them...based on the words of an orphaned girl named Twig who, raised in the planet's wilds, knows that there is an intelligent plant-spirit named Plant-Grandfather who unites all native plant life there and converses mentally with her.  Once Hacker's term ends, though, the settlers send out a hit squad to eliminate him and capture Twig, who they hope will reveal Plant-Grandfather's physical location deep under the surface.  This story also examines the nature of life and death...can't get any heavier than that, I guess...

CATHADONIAN ODYSSEY by Michael Bishop

Another allegorical tale about human expediency and short-sightedness on another world.  Here a spaceship stops off at a planet resembling a paradise, with the only visible animal life being armless monkey-like creatures with three legs...so what do the humans do? They massacre every one of them they see for sport, then leave (while conveniently omitting this life form in their reports).  A later three-person craft to this planet will unknowingly pay the price for their brutality...the only survivor of the strange crash landing, a woman, befriends the only one of these creatures she sees.  The story's ending is beyond surprising and makes a big point about the unintended consequences of one's careless or even cruel actions...

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

Game of the Week: Cash Cab

 

Cash Cab is a TV game show, currently shown on Bravo, originally aired on the Discovery Channel.  The host, Ben Bailey, drives his taxi through the streets of New York...usually Manhattan...just like any other cab until the passengers step in and then the lights start flashing above and recognition dawns upon them: the game is on!  Each destination is different, of course, but the rules are the same.  It's a trivia game and the passengers have three strikes (missed answers) before they are ejected from the cab.  Each correctly answered question awards them more cash and if they get to the end still in the game, Ben gives them the chance to go double-or-nothing with a final video quiz.  They can also call someone on their cell for help or do street-side or social media "shout-outs".  Having visited Manhattan in 2010, I enjoy the different routes and street photography showing the throng and surrounding buildings.  I also like the fact that although the contestants tend to be tourists or residents, they don't have to pass auditions to get in on the action as is the case with other game shows.  Cash Cab isn't always filmed in New York, but the overwhelming majority of episodes are.  Ben Bailey is a great host and I admire that fact that he can deftly pilot his taxi through heavy New York traffic without missing a beat with his questions and the guests.  And if you want to see diversity with the contestants on many different levels, you won't do any better than this series...