Quote of the Week...from Neil deGrasse Tyson

Dear Science Deniers (Anti-vaxers, anti-maskers, climate hoaxers, flat-Earthers), You found one another and communicate via stupefyingly advanced technologies that pivot on the discoveries of scientists. Just thought I'd remind you of that fact.  Sincerely, Your Smart Phone.

                                                                       ---Neil deGrasse Tyson

It deeply saddens me when someone I personally know dies from Covid-19 as was the case earlier this week, but it's no longer a matter of being helpless about the subject.  For months we have have FREE, EFFECTIVE vaccines available to ANYONE age 12 or over, and for well over a year have had access to story after story of victims in intensive care units with tubes sticking out of them, many dependent on ventilators to do their own breathing for them.  None of these facts, by the way, require access to a smart phone.  And it was well reported about the current Delta variant of the disease and its devastating effect on the population in India long before it gained supremacy here in the United States.  Delta is much more contagious than the other strains of Covid and that has been hammered home countless times.  Yet people continue to play games about how not wearing a mask in the presence of others without being vaccinated is somehow an assertion of their human rights and dignity.  If you haven't been vaccinated and refuse to wear a mask around others, then you have made a conscious decision to dehumanize yourself into a petri dish for Covid to live on, grow, and become readily transmissible to others.  I repeat: this resurgence of Covid-19 and the tragic deaths resulting from it in the U.S. are completely due to the millions of people that have deliberately degraded their own humanity to the level of a petri dish by neither wearing a mask nor getting vaccinated.  Your bodies are not closed systems: they easily get infected from others and in turn infect still others.  And Covid debilitates and kills.  Or have you completely surrendered your ability to discern reality?  Seems of late that folks are so prideful that instead of recognizing they made a mistake about something, they "double down" on their flawed thinking...

Watching Sports on TV During Recovery

I've been spending a great amount of evening time during my recovery watching sports on TV, first with the Tokyo Summer Olympics and next with Major League Baseball and soccer, particularly the Mexican Premier League.  I was surprised to see "my" Mexican team had a new manager (i.e. head coach), and none other than the fiery, passionate Miguel Herrera, whom I got to know well as Team Mexico's manager during the exciting 2014 World Cup.  So what became of the Tigres' long-term, very successful manager Ricardo Ferretti?  The other night Univision was showing a game between Juárez and Club América and wouldn't you know, old man Ferretti was right there, managing Juárez!  Well I've always liked both Herrera and Ferretti...I guess Juárez, nicknamed the "Bravos"...will now be my second choice behind Tigres.  As for baseball, I am delighted at the continuing success of the Tampa Bay Rays...they seem to be clicking together in all areas.  And I love the way they tend to get stronger in games as they progress into the late innings.  As for the other Florida team, the Miami Marlins, well...better luck next year!

Weekly Short Stories: 1975 Science Fiction, Part 3

Here are my reactions to two more 1975 science fiction stories as they appeared in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1976 Annual World's Best SF, which presented the editor's choices from the year before.  1975 was a year of détente between the U.S. and U.S.S.R., exemplified by the two countries cooperating with the Soyuz-Apollo docking to become the first space station...yet tensions were growing in Africa with newly independent Angola and Mozambique aligning themselves with the communist bloc and Cuba's Castro sending troops to Africa to aid Angola's Marxist government in its civil war.  As for me, I was still living in Hollywood and attending Broward Community College. But let's get back to those two stories, both of which were long enough to be called novellas...

THE STORMS OF WINDHAVEN by Lisa Tuttle and George R.R. Martin

This is a tale about tradition vs. pragmatism as a stagnated society of survivors from an interstellar ship crash on a remote planet have developed a system of inheritance to determine their people's roles in life.  Maris is a young woman who is a "flyer", i.e. she is accorded possession of a set of special wings made from the former ships vast sails which traversed the cosmos with radiation blowing them along.  But now she is being forced to give them up because of her society's rigid rules.  In rebellion, Maris comes up with a new plan for her world...

ALLEGIANCES by Michael Bishop

Set off on a future Earth following a planetwide apocalypse, much of humanity now resides in insulated domed cities interconnected by tunnels.  From time to time they send out people into the outside "wilds" to bring in people with special skills...here Clio accompanies her colleagues Yates and Guest in search of two exiles for their special information about a rival society set up in northern Europe.  The story becomes one about the meeting of two different cultures and which one is considered more advanced or better than the other.  You start out thinking the domed civilization is supreme, then that of the "outsiders"...and finally that even they may be under the thumbs of yet another group.  A little hard to get through at times, I think the notion of cultural supremacy and inferiority gets a very good discussion here...

Next week I continue my look at 1975 and that year's short science fiction...

Game of the Week: Wordscapes

 

Wordscapes is one of a number of puzzle apps users can play on their smartphone...Melissa installed it first on her phone and I followed suit a few weeks later.  As you can see from the picture, for each game they provide either 6 or 7 scrambled letters and it's my task to fill in the accompanying crossword squares to form real words.  It's possible through a number of games to build up credit that I can use to get hints if I get stalled on a puzzle...otherwise I would have to pay them money to get the same hint.  Yes, these games usually have a premium version that eliminates all ads.  Each weekend Wordscapes stages a tournament that the user can play against 99 others...the field gets selected by when the players start playing.  Although I dig the competitive spirit of the tourney, I also just like to pick up my phone and play a few rounds.  If you like Jumble then maybe this one's for you, too...

Constellation of the Month: Aquila (the Eagle)

 

Aquila, representing an Eagle, is one of the more prominent constellations.  Part of this is due to its brightest star Altair (magnitude .76), which is only 16.7 light years away.  And part is due to Aquila resting on the celestial equator, which means that except from extreme northern and southern latitudes this constellation is visible high up in the sky when it crosses the meridian, with much less interference from urban lighting.  Altair is at the southern vertex of the Summer Triangle, an asterism composed of the first-magnitude stars Altair, Vega and Deneb.  The first time I went to the beach with Melissa was during the Memorial Day weekend in 1986, and the two of us stood at the edge of the St. Augustine public pier looking eastward, watching the relentless ocean waves below and waiting for Altair's late night rising, surrounded by people fishing...that was fun.  Aquila also has several deep-space objects, most of the brightest being star clusters.  When I pick a "constellation of the month", the only condition is that it crosses the meridian at 10 pm Daylight Savings Time...so like last year's August pick Sagittarius, Aquila does just that...but it's very visible for most of the year at some time during the nighttime hours from dusk to dawn...

Great Old TV Episodes...from M*A*S*H

THE GENERAL FLIPPED AT DAWN to me was the funniest episode of M*A*S*H, a half-hour CBS comedy series that spanned eleven years...even though its setting, the Korean War, only lasted two. The abbreviated title stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, and the main character is Hawkeye Pierce, a very skilled and clever surgeon played by Alan Alda and who sees the war for what it is.  The particular episode I chose was from Season 3, originally aired in September, 1974.  General Steele visits the medical camp and arbitrarily commands that it all be moved five miles down the road.  His kooky behavior quickly alienates most everyone there, and when Hawkeye sends off a helicopter with an injured soldier and refuses to make it come back for the General's personal transportation, he court-martials Hawkeye.  Harry Morgan, who a year later would come back and portray a completely different character, Colonel Potter, to the series' end, played the bonkers General Steele in this episode.  With its original cast including Wayne Rogers as Captain John McIntyre, McLean Stevenson as Lt. Colonel Henry Blake, and Larry Linville as Major Frank Burns in the early years, I really liked watching M*A*S*H.  But as each of these three departed, the show progressively became more serious and intellectual and I tended to avoid it.  Ironically, it was the final years of the series that garnered most of its awards, critical acclaim and high ratings...

Recovering at Home from Surgery

Just to keep this blog more or less continuous, I'm writing today's article.  It's been two weeks since I was discharged from the hospital following my aortic aneurism/valve replacement surgery and then two weeks in the hospital.  Melissa has been taking good care of me in just about every phase of my slow recovery.  And sometimes the patient himself doesn't see any improvement in his condition...but I've been told I'm doing much better: very encouraging. My physical therapist has been giving me different projects to work on and I have found them helpful.  On the second day after surgery, Shands hospital policy drastically limited to two named people those allowed to visit me...all because of the Delta variant resurgence of Covid-19.  And just as I was being discharged they formulated their policy of postponing elective surgery because of the shortage of ICU beds...had they scheduled my surgery for August as originally planned, I have no doubt that my operation would have been put off.  In any event, I managed to get it in under the wire and am very glad to be at home...

Quote of the Week...from Frank Zappa

Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.                             --Frank Zappa

Frank Zappa (1940-93) was an avant-garde musician and composer, his collected works spanning many styles while often fusing them together in one piece.  He was very satirical with his song's lyrics, and made another quote I discussed in December 2019 on this blog: "The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced." The above quote of his dovetails nicely with the Canadian rock trio Rush's Vital Signs track from their incredible 1981 Moving Pictures album.  And with the population's norm these days for disrespecting science in favor of their precious manipulative, egomaniacal idols, I'm starting to feel like the little boy in the story The Emperor's New Clothes who was "deviant" in simply telling the truth: the emperor is naked!  The great figures of our history were not afraid of standing alone among their surrounding peers.  They often suffered ridicule and insult for simply speaking the truth and many weren't recognized within their own lifetimes for their contributions to humanity.  So, like the little boy in that children's story, I'm going to "deviate".  The current upsurge in the Covid-19 pandemic here in the United States is TOTALLY due to those selfish dupes who refuse to both wear masks in public enclosed places and get the vaccine.  I keep wondering, mystified at how many people have decided to make wearing a measly little thing like a mask the great issue in their lives to take a stand on.  Really?  From what I know about human nature, though, many of the anti-masker/anti-vaxxer folks behave as they do because they see others in their immediate group behaving this way and want to fit in and not be put down by the aggressive ones in that group. Back in early April 2020 I made the decision to wear a mask while at work...even though others (including a supervisor) laughed at me.  I then had my first vaccine in March 2021 and the second in April.  I never entertained the wild conspiracy bullshit (the emperor's new clothes) circulating around me and only stopped wearing a mask when the CDC cleared doing so for those completely vaccinated. But the Delta variant for this already very contagious disease that kills across the age spectrum has prompted those with the proper scientific credentials to go back and urge everyone...even if already vaccinated...to resume wearing masks while in crowds or indoors.  I came too close to having my essential, but elective open heart surgery postponed when the demand at Shands for ICU beds exploded...all because of the jerks who won't mask up or get vaccinated.  I hear a lot of talk from my state's demagogic governor Ron DeSantis banning mask mandates from even private businesses, but I never hear about the need for the people to behave in a responsible manner when each other's health...and even lives...are at stake.  Those who are BOTH anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, like those in the fawning crowd's open adulation of the emperor's new "clothes", have committed themselves to their delusion: they disgust me... 

Communal Jigsaw Puzzles

 

Ever since I've been at home following my surgery and hospital stay, Melissa and I have been doing jigsaw puzzles on our dining room table...the above three so far.  We take turns over the course of the day laying out each successive puzzle and then slowly-but-surely putting it together.  It reminds me of an old 1920s Laurel and Hardy short film involving a chase scene...with an ongoing jigsaw puzzle on a table.  Everyone is running about in madcap fashion...until they catch eye of the puzzle and feel compelled to pause for a minute and work on it.  I call it a "communal" puzzle that anyone's welcome to contribute to, but since we're empty nesters and the visitors we have don't seem that interested in it, it's just the two of us...and the puzzle, of course.  Now it's time to disassemble our latest and break open a new one...

Weekly Short Stories: 1975 Science Fiction, Part 2

Below are my reactions to two more science fiction short stories as they appeared in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1976 Annual World's Best SF, which covered sci-fi published the previous year.  I ran my longest single run until the year 2010, 14.4 miles, in March of 1975, making five loops around the giant block in Davie where I went to elementary school, high school and community college...I wouldn't top it until 2010. Gerald Ford was our president, Cambodia and South Vietnam fell to the communists, and the Miami Dolphins just missed the playoffs...for the first time since Don Shula became head coach.  But enough of memories and history, let's delve into those two tales...

THE BEES OF KNOWLEDGE by Barrington J. Bayley

A space tourist of the future finds himself the only survivor of a ship to a mysterious planet, and soft-crashes on it.  He discovers it is inhabited by something resembling gigantic bees and tries to communicate with them so that he can repair the ship's broken beacon for rescue.  Eventually he discovers that his hosts feed upon knowledge embedded somehow within their own honey.  And upon trying it himself, he goes into a downward spiral: what knowledge is real and what isn't...and who is he, anyway?

THE ENGINEER AND THE EXECUTIONER by Brian M. Stableford

An android robot has been sent to an asteroid in our solar system to destroy it by changing its trajectory into the sun.  Why? An engineer working in its habitable interior has developed a type of virus that drastically alters the life it infects through spores.  The engineer and his adversary robot spar verbally about their fate, and then in desperation talk turns into action...I thought the ending was top-notch...

Next week I review more science fiction short stories from 1975...

Game of the Week: Scrabble

Scrabble is one of the board games in my house...and I also played it way down yonder in Hollywood when I was growing up.  My mother, sister, and I would sit there with our letter tiles, trying to figure words that would optimize the points scored, with strategies such as creating two words at once and/or placing the tiles on special squares on the board that doubles or triples the letter, or squares doubling or tripling the entire word's value.  I believe that I've grown pretty good at Scrabble, but I do have one pet peeve about the game.  My mom had a penchant for coming up with words that neither Anita nor I had ever heard of, and for the most part they were indeed credible words after consulting the dictionary.  I remember back in the 1990s here in Gainesville the Books-a-Million store would hold Scrabble games once a week, with the winners' names published in the Gainesville Sun...but that would involve interfering either with my sleep or working hours, so I never participated.  There is to me an adequate mixture of luck and skill in this game, for players cannot tell in advance which letters they are picking up from the table top...but sometimes making the best of what appears to be an impossible situation is more enjoyable than making a long word...

Watched Tokyo Olympics

When I was in the hospital for two weeks following open heart surgery, I had available a TV to watch, both when I was in the intensive care unit and when I was moved one story below to a more general room.  Once I felt capable enough, I watched a lot of the Tokyo Olympics...which were shown on NBC, NBCSports, USA Network, and CNBC.  I focused on the events for which judges did not play a dominant role in determining scores, opting instead for games and races.  Volleyball, basketball, table tennis, water polo, swimming, badminton, fencing, soccer, bicycle track racing, team handball, field hockey, softball...I enjoyed watching them all, noting that badminton looks pretty brutal when played on a high level.  I somehow missed out on many of the track and field events...in perspective this was most likely due to the fact that they were mostly held after my discharge from the hospital.  But my favorite events, which I enjoyed greatly, were the women and men's marathons...they were among the final events there.  But for the most part I skipped on the diving, gymnastics, artistic swimming, and skateboarding due to the objectivity factor of the judges.  I also thought the rock climbing competition was mesmerizing.  The Tokyo organizers minimized spectator presence due to the pernicious pandemic...understandable. For the same reason they decided not to stage awards with the winning country's national anthem...for me it was refreshing as I had long believed that the Olympics had become way too divisive with the nationalism.  Still, I admit that I would consistently root for the "home" team or contestant.  In just a few months China will be hosting the Winter Olympics...I sincerely hope I won't be back in the Krankenhaus when it takes place...

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...