Eighty Years Ago Today: Pearl Harbor

On the morning of Sunday, December 7th, 1941...eighty years ago...the United States was openly attacked by Japanese bombers at their naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.  The attack was intended to destroy the American fleet in advance of a Japanese strategy to forcibly take over much of the Pacific, but crucial American aircraft carriers and other boats were at sea when it happened and escaped to fight another day.  President Franklin D. Roosevelt promptly had Congress declare war on Japan, which was followed by both Japan and Germany in turn declaring war on the United States: American open participation in World War II combat had begun, more than two years and two months after hostilities began following Hitler's invasion of Poland on September 1st, 1939.  The number of people who remember the Pearl Harbor attack when it happened is dwindling rapidly as are those who served the country during the perilous years to follow, both as soldiers and civilians.  I salute the brave men and women who stood up for freedom and put their lives on the line for future generations...God bless them all!

New Endeavors Can be Slow and Arduous at Start

Rob Dial is a young man who has an ongoing podcast, titled Mindset Mentor, that he puts out several times a week and on which he discusses various topics concerning motivation and self-improvement.  I've been listening to him off and on for the past few weeks...sometimes he seems on-target with his message and sometimes he's a little off, in my opinion.  One of his messages I did resonate with was when he said that starting something new from scratch usually doesn't yield much significant fruit for some time...sometimes a few months will elapse before there are encouraging results.  To that I might add that often at the start of a new self-improvement project...losing weight, for example...there can be a false sense of great progress at the start followed by a more sobering degree of improvement if not stagnation for a while.  Being a runner, after my surgery this past July 15th I wanted to return to that activity, actually running in place a minute or two on August 18th.  Even though in the previous 11 years I had run 12 half-marathons and many more races of middle-to-long distance, starting again from zero has been a slow and arduous process...I wasn't able to simply run around my home neighborhood block (.7 mile) without needing to take walking breaks until October 20th, three months later.  But a little more than a month after that I accomplished a 10-mile slow training run and this past Saturday I finished my first race, a 5K event.  But those initial weeks were slow and often discouraging for me and I still have a long way to go.  I write this not so much about running per se, but about any endeavor that I or you or anyone else might be interested in, with the ultimate aim of achieving competency or even possibly excellence in it.  At the beginning the going can be rough and it might not seem like you're up to the task with any progress being slow and positive feedback in short supply.  But then a day will come when the hard work you have put into it for weeks or even months will result in a breakthrough...there aren't many things in life that beat that.  I have a new endeavor I'm tackling and expect the same slow, humbling initial apparent lack of progress...and also expect that breakthrough down the line in a few weeks.  The trick is in faithfully sticking with it during this challenging time...

An Upcoming Personal Project for 2022

I've been watching the Beatles' Get Back movie on Disney+, which depicts its members going through a series of grueling all-day sessions of song creation, rehearsing and jamming. My initial reaction was to question why anyone would subject themselves to this kind of regimen. Then it occurred to me that for Paul, John, George and Ringo this was their great love, where their skills and interests coincided and they were the most accomplished and recognized: that's why it worked for them (although they still quarreled).  The question I ask is for myself is what in my life is comparable to that which the Beatles experienced back in January, 1969 when they embarked on that project?  And I think I got the answer...

Engaging in cognitive reverie...which is what Russell Crowe's character, mathematician John Nash, often does in the movie A Beautiful Mind...is something I often find myself doing as well.  Sometimes it takes the form of regretful, retroactive daydreaming when I think of times in my distant past and wish that I had adopted different priorities and habits.  One of these areas involves my studying in high school...my attention to homework assignments was atrocious, especially with regard to mathematics.  This is lamentable since every standardized test I ever took showed an exceptional ability in the area...I even scored a perfect 800 in it on my SAT.  Well, they say folks shouldn't bury themselves in their pasts, and I agree...but with an important caveat.  If what I'm regretting can neither be resurrected or made relevant to the present, then I should let it go.  But if there is a way in which I can learn from my past experiences and apply those lessons to the current setting, then this kind of cognitive reverie can be useful and a positive force in my life, here and now.  To this extent I've decided to make the upcoming year 2022 as one themed with intense study of mathematics...I can definitely think of an application or two for the years to come. Much will be simple review and much will be a reexamination in greater depth of what I have earlier covered, but only shallowly.  I have to credit a birthday present I received a few weeks ago: The Great Courses DVD pack of The Joy of Mathematics, authored and presented by Arthur Benjamin...wish I'd had him as a teacher!  Of course, I'll keep all ya'll updated on my progress with my upcoming math adventures...to that end I think it's time to load up my computer with some basic mathematics software...

Ran Gainesville's Depot Parkrun 5K This Morning

When I stepped outside my front door around 6:30 this morning I already knew it would be foggy, but not to the extent that the fog was loud. The moisture was so thick that it was interacting with all the surrounding tree leaves to present the audio illusion of rain, yet I felt no drops falling on me.  Normally at this time of the morning...especially on Saturdays...I am safely tucked away in my bed sound asleep, but today I had somewhere to go.  In Gainesville we are blessed with a free weekly 5K racing opportunity on Saturdays at 7:30 am, the location always being Depot Park just south of downtown.  I had run the Depot Parkrun four times in the past starting in January 2019, the last time being on June 20th this year, four weeks before I underwent open heart surgery to replace a defective valve and repair an aortic aneurism.  Today's adventure was my first race since the operation, but going by my recent running training I was confident that I would be OK...the hardest part of it all was driving back and forth across town in the thick fog.  You couldn't ask for friendlier people among those volunteering to hold this event...if I make it a more regular activity, I'll be volunteering as well.  We were all cautioned just before the race that the fog (humidity 100% at 54 degrees) was causing the pathway to be a bit slick...good advice!  For about two thirds of the race I ran at a reasonably slow pace and then "put the pedal to the metal" the rest of the way, finishing with a time of 33:03, 3 seconds faster than my June race.  Over the years my speed has slowed (I'm 65 now), but I'm taking it all "in stride" and emphasizing covering the distance...hopefully in future years I'll continue to be fully mobile, with my running adventures eventually transforming into walking adventures (actually I'm already having a few of those).  Today's experience was very encouraging...

Quote of the Week...from Albert Camus

The modern mind is in complete disarray.  Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold.  It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.

                                                          ---Albert Camus

Albert Camus, a renowned philosopher, essayist and novelist, passed away in 1960...long before the Internet, talk radio and slanted TV news networks fed into and bolstered people's belief systems based on their own presumptions and prejudices.  But today we've gone beyond formulating our diverse values and priorities according to the facts of the world.  Instead, it's our diverse values and priorities that seem to be formulating our own versions of the facts of the world around us: that is a nihilistic world view, which posits the notion that truth isn't absolute but rather relative to the purposes we have in using it.  Welcome to today's alternative facts, "fake news", bonkers conspiracy theories and knee-jerk accusations of "hoaxes" whenever someone presents a truth that someone else doesn't want to hear.  If the modern mind is a composite of how the masses today think and form their belief systems, then Albert Camus was spot-on in describing it as being in complete disarray...and it is only going to get worse, I suspect.  Well, I can at least take care of my own mental health by staying rooted in reality, which necessarily entails keeping those nihilistic thinkers around me at arm's length, both in person and in the social and mass media.  Go ahead and be conservative or liberal, I dig that...but as John Lennon once sang, "Gimme some truth"...

Following the Beatles' Get Back Documentary on Disney Plus

I have been pleasantly surprised by the Disney+ premium streaming channel since subscribing to it.  Being a stalwart Winnie the Pooh fan, I had missed the old movies as well as the television series The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, which aired in the 1990s and coincided with Will and Rebecca's early childhood...Disney+ carries it all.  The other day we sat down and watched the Broadway production of Hamilton on this channel...what an experience! And now Peter Jackson's project of Get Back, as he has reedited the material used for the 1970 movie Let It Be, has been on it since Thanksgiving...I've been watching just a few minutes at a time because of its intensity.  It's very strange seeing John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, all still alive, young and sitting around together (with Yoko Ono naturally at John's side), joking, eating, jamming, and arguing as if it's all going on right now in the present.  And, knowing the eventual fate of these sessions, filmed and recorded in January 1969, that would ultimately produce their final album release, Let It Be, I find it intriguing as to how the four interacted with one another...I'm starting to form my own opinions. So far I've noticed that it wasn't all doom and gloom in the studio as I had been led to believe: there was a lot of positive musical energy here.  But the brief time I have watched it has also been typified by a frantic, chaotic procession of one song after another with no discernible direction or coherency.  Hopefully, Disney+ will keep Get Back on their lineup at least long enough for me to get through it all as I take in bite-sized portions on more or less a daily basis.  As for this blog, I plan to devote a day each week discussing it, along with other things Beatles: stay tuned...

Weekly Short Stories: 1979 Science Fiction, Part 2

Today I continue my look at science fiction short stories from 1979 as they appeared in the anthology The 1980 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and featuring his selections from the previous year. 1979 represented a special year in my life in which I decided to break away from the drifting college experience I was undergoing to just spend some time on my own supporting myself and living frugally within my means while working at a humble job.  To this purpose I was hired as a cook in a local Chinese restaurant, a position I would continue working at for a while as I sorted things out. In some ways '79 was a very difficult year to live through and in others it was a glorious time of personal growth and independence, depending on how you look at it. But I couldn't imagine how the rest of my life would how turned out if I hadn't lived through it as I did...most of the alternatives were decidedly negative. In the science fiction universe good stories abounded, and here are my comments about two from the book that weren't exactly my favorites...

UNACCOMPANIED SONATA by Orson Scott Card

In a future world claiming itself as a utopia allowing people to play the roles for which they are best suited, a young musical prodigy is selected as a "Maker" and as such subjected to abusive social isolation in order to enhance his senses for picking out music from the surrounding nature...and to avoid the unforgivable sin of derivation.  One day, though, a Listener traveling through hears his music and slips him a recording of Bach...the society's monitors, the Watchers, become aware of it and punish the Maker by removing him from his environment and forbidding him to create any more music.  The story spirals downward from there and I thought this was some hell of a utopia. The ending, which I guess was supposed to be happy, only left me puzzled...

THE STORY WRITER by Richard Wilson

This confusing story portrays a retired successful pulp fiction writer who discovers a second career in writing when he buys a second-hand typewriter at a rural northeastern flea market sale.  He uses it to write stories for the customers stopping by...including a peculiar soul who turns out to be an alien representing his race from another star system and which is planning to settle Earth, albeit primarily in another dimension.  The story gets further muddled when the writer, considered by the aliens to be a prophet whose writings always come true, finds himself in a copied world in the aliens' home dimension (but still on Earth): get lost yet?  The ending made little sense, either...the saving grace in this tale was the insertion of some elementary Polish language greetings and phrases, reminding me of that Polish class I took during the spring of 1978.  Yes, it's all very weird...

Next week: more from the year 1979 in short science fiction...

My November 2021 Running and Walking Report

In November I ran a total of 100 miles, with a slow and easy 10 mile run on the 23rd being my longest single run.  I missed running on 3 days due to feeling under the weather.  With walking, I covered 102 miles for the month, most of my mileage coming from walking back and forth at work. November has been a positive month for me with both running and walking, and my endurance has greatly strengthened.  Still, I recognize that my progress since the July 15th heart operation to replace a defective valve and repair and aneurism has not been linear, but rather an up-and-down curve over the weeks, with the net result being on the upside. With this in mind, my goals...both in terms of increasing my runs and in engaging in public running races...are contingent on where I happen to be on that fluctuating curve at any given time.  I had planned on running in Gainesville's weekly Depot Park 5K race this past Saturday, but when I woke up it was 36 degrees...maybe I'll wait a week or two and see what the weather's like then. The Florida Track Club has scheduled for late January 2022 its Newnan's Lake 15K, which I've enjoyed running a number of times in the past.  And in February we'll see a return in Gainesville of the Five Points of Life half-marathon...although they seem to have cut the full 26.2-mile marathon from this event.  In a perfect, linear world of constant, incremental improvement and fantastic weather I would run a couple of Depot Park races, the Newnan Lake 15K, and top it off with the Five Points half-marathon.  That's how I'm looking at it now at the close of November...let's see how it all materializes, though, in this somewhat less-than-perfect existence... 

Just Finished Reading An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

An Abundance of Katherines, from 2006, is yet another quirky young adult novel by John Green focused on adolescent self-discovery.  This time the protagonist is Colin Singleton, a very intelligent high school student obsessed with that intelligence...as well as the conundrum of why he has been repeatedly dumped by all his girlfriends: they are 19 in total and all named Katherine.  After Katherine the Nineteenth breaks up with him, Colin decides to develop a mathematical formula, based on his own experiences, for predicting how long a relationship will go...of course, this is preposterous.  Known as the nerdy smart geek in his class, he has but one friend, Hassan, who serves as a reality check for him as well as for those of us who tend to see young Muslims in a negative, even fearful, light. One day Colin and Hassan...with Colin's permissive parents' blessings...set off on a road trip from their hometown of Chicago into Tennessee, where they stop at a hole-in-the-wall town called Gutshot.  There they befriend Lindsey...whose boyfriend is also named Colin...and Lindsey's factory-owning mother Hollis, at whose house they stay.  They are hired by Hollis to interview the locals for an oral history of the area she is compiling.  Colin, assured of his prodigal intelligence, is nonetheless concerned that he will never attain the status of "genius", which in his definition involves producing something new, something that matters.  This reminded me of the movie A Beautiful Mind from four years earlier in which mathematical genius John Nash tells his Princeton roommate Charles essentially the same thing.  The story is funny and easy to follow, and I enjoyed the good-natured verbal sparring between the characters, especially Colin and Hassan.  However, I don't know that this story accurately portrayed the state of adolescence, at least as far my own recollection of this period of my life is concerned.  The kids all seem to be level-headed and reasonable, traits that I noticed were generally lacking in many of my classmates (and in retrospect myself as well)...these are all very strong, self-assured personalities.  Maybe Green deliberately wrote them that way to point out a positive direction for all his young insecure, awkward readers. He has done something like this with his other books I've read: Looking for Alaska and Turtles All the Way Down...click on the titles to read my earlier reviews.  I don't think you can go wrong with An Abundance of Katherines, but be prepared to read through some extreme silliness...

Omicron Covid Variant Reported

Surfing around the TV this morning I hit upon CNN...the big news story there is the Omicron Strain...no it's not a Michael Crichton novel or movie, but the latest mutant Covid-19 variant, apparently arising out of South Africa, where the vaccination rate is low because it's not widely available, unlike here where millions upon millions of people willfully perpetuate the virus by refusing it although the vaccine is convenient, free, safe and effective.  Omicron is definitely more contagious then the other Covid strains and has already spread throughout Europe and is expected to hit the U.S. soon.  But as it is newly discovered, not enough is yet known as to whether it is more virulent than its horrid predecessor, the  Delta variant.  Neither is there yet sufficient information about how effective the current vaccinations are against it: the major companies are engaged in testing as I write this and we should know in a couple of weeks.  In any event it's clear to me that Covid-19 is here to stay, both because of the worldwide vaccine production, distribution and inoculation logistics and because so many of us seem to have decided that they kind of like having this scourge around, as perverse as that may sound... 

Our Recent Visit to Asheville, North Carolina

 

Last month Melissa and I went on vacation to the Carolinas, first in Asheville, North Carolina for a few days and then on to Charleston in the South...I've written about the latter in recent articles.  As for Asheville, we stayed at a hotel on the city's east end, near the Billy Graham Training Center which we visited.  It was a pretty, pastoral setting perfect for retreats...I always felt a special respect for Christian evangelist Billy Graham, whose worldwide ministry rejected partisan and Cold War politics in favor of focusing on spreading the Gospel throughout America and the rest of the world.  He always avoided openly siding with one political party over the other, befriending a long succession of both Republican and Democratic presidents, and even sat with atheist authoritarian rulers like the Soviet Union's Nikita Krushchev and North Korea's Kim Il-sung.  Sadly, one of his sons, Franklin, has plunged himself deeply into fractious, divisive political partisanship, first publicly and repeatedly criticizing President Obama even to the extent of questioning his faith and then unquestioningly siding with Trump during his tenure, even going so far as questioning the 2020 election's outcome...very sad indeed.  But as for the retreat center, I loved it and recommend it for visitors, along with the tours they offer.  That visit we did the second day.  On the third we took the train ride on Great Smoky Mountain Railroads, which starts at Bryson City west of Asheville and goes through the surrounding country, stopping off for lunch at a little town called Dillsboro before returning...that was fun.  While in Asheville we ate a couple of times at an excellent locally-owned eatery on Tunnel Road called East Village Grille and did some grocery shopping at a nearby store called Ingles...I wish this chain were in Gainesville, too.  In our previous visit to this area in 2006 we toured the Biltmore estate south of town and also drove through the Smoky Mountain National Park on to Tennessee, stopping off for a few hours at Dollywood in Pigeon Forge before heading back... but not this time around. We did stop off at the Arts and Crafts Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway about a mile from our hotel, though...I got an excellent 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle there (see photo). I liked Asheville, although when walking around I quickly learned to keep a cautious eye on the ground since there were a lot of steep drop-offs everywhere, something that a flat-lander Floridian like myself isn't accustomed to dealing with...

Quote of the Week...from Sheryl Sandberg

Motivation comes from working on things we care about.                 ---Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg is a billionaire business executive, a key player in Facebook's dramatic rise within American society...you can take that as a compliment or criticism depending on your views about this pervasive company (to which I'm posting a link for this blog article that is hosted by Google...another pervasive company for which she also worked).  Sandberg's above statement at first glance seems so obviously self-evident that you might question why I even bothered to post it.  But in our daily lives there are a lot of different things tugging at our attention and most of them concern areas for which we personally hold little interest but still dutifully invest our time and efforts to deal with them.  I can always get around disinterest in a project by framing it in the context of another project: I don't like certain classes in school, but the "bigger" goal is getting good grades...or taking on tedious or stressful aspects of my job: a strong work ethic and consistency through all areas, interesting or not, are pillars of success.  Still, once I'm away from the classroom and workplace I can see Sandberg's point.  On the other hand, my interest in different things tends to fluctuate pretty dramatically over the course of even a single day, much less over longer spans of time.  So I guess the lesson I draw from this quote is that I need to find stuff I care about 24/7 in order to be motivated about it 24/7...

Happy Thanksgiving, Everybody

I wish you all a most happy Thanksgiving.  If you're working today I hope it's because you want to. For the many who traditionally spend it with family, best wishes that everyone shares positive, memorable moments together with lots of good stuff to eat, hopefully not in too much excess.  And if you're one of those who can't wait to go out on shopping sprees later today and tomorrow...well, I'm not quite sure what to say except to stay safe and that I never was into that Black Friday sort of thing.  As for me, my wonderful grown kids are having Thanksgiving dinner at my home with Melissa and me...that's definitely something I am most grateful for, along with the blessings of our health and positive outlook on life...

Weekly Short Stories: 1979 Science Fiction, Part 1

Today I begin looking at science fiction short stories from the year 1979, as they appeared in the anthology The 1980 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and featuring his picks from the previous year.  1979 was a big year in the news as Iran culminated its Islamic revolution early on and later took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran, precipitating an international hostage crisis that lasted until the end of the Jimmy Carter administration.  In the same year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in order to sustain a friendly puppet government there it installed in a coup d'etat the previous year.  Meanwhile, science fiction did well with a number of good stories...here are my reactions to the first three from that book...

THE WAY OF CROSS AND DRAGON by George R.R. Martin

Martin obviously had a hang-up with organized religion, perhaps stemming from his childhood experiences,, for all I know.  In his ongoing fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire he has an intolerant fundamentalist group descend upon the capital city of King's Landing.  Here we have an interstellar group of inquisitors bent on upholding the orthodoxy of the brand of Christianity that has spread throughout the galaxy.  There is a planet that holds to the heresy of Judas being a savior/hero, and the story's inquisitor is assigned to rectify the situation.  He meets a man who revels in being a "Liar", that is he acknowledges the falseness of his Judas preaching as something he entirely made up...yet the revelation places further doubt in the mind of the inquisitor about his own beliefs....

THE THIRTEENTH UTOPIA by Somtow Sucharitcul 

Another (groan) tale about inquisitors and religious intolerance, here we see the enforcer of the orthodox faith with a new assignment regarding his specialty: the sabotage and destruction of societies across the cosmos that have claims to being utopias.  In this one, they seem to have conquered gravity and hold a special reverence toward their sun...the extent of this is revealed at story's end and also shows the author's own possible philosophy...that self-awareness and identity transcend biological life, a very heretical notion in the mind of this story's inquisitor.  But he gets sucked into what they call the "initiation", and is forever changed...

OPTIONS by John Varley 

Off into the future, this time solidly on Earth, gender identities are no longer as solidly differentiated as they were, with a "simple" medical procedure available for the masses that "only" involves creating a near-identical clone body of one's own...albeit in the opposite sex...and then having one's brain and nervous system transplanted into it.  I had to put down the book for a couple of minutes and laugh after reading that! Varley focuses on a married couple with three children and has the wife consider and then undergo a sex-change procedure...he then examines its effect on the husband and family.  A little ahead of its time this story is, although I have a feeling that transplanting brains into cloned bodies isn't going to be in our immediate future. Then again I had no idea a few years ago that people would be walking and standing around everywhere staring at little boxes in their hands...

Next week: more about short science fiction from 1979...

Just Finished Reading Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy

Profiles in Courage is a 1956 history book by John F. Kennedy while he was still a United States senator...it won him the Pulitzer Prize the following year, after which it was revealed that his speechwriter Ted Sorenson wrote the bulk of it.  Regardless who actually put the pen to paper, it was Kennedy who placed his stamp of approval on it, and for the sake of simplicity I'll refer to it as his book.  It is comprised of a set of short biographies of eight men who served over the span of American history as U.S. senators: John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Thomas Hart Benton, Sam Houston, Edmund G. Ross, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, George Norris, and Robert A. Taft.  Kennedy was careful to spotlight members of differing parties and ideologies...his main thrust of argument was that at crucial points in their Senate careers they made principled decisions that went against the passions of their constituents, ending their political careers or at least delaying their fulfillment (Adams would later become president and then a representative in the House while Lamar would make it to the U.S. Supreme Court).  I don't think this book could (or should) have been written today since some of those profiled were on the pro-slavery side in the nineteenth century, even to the extent of owning slaves themselves.  And there were also a number of historical figures around these eight that the author criticized perhaps a bit unfairly.  Still, I think Profiles in Courage makes a couple of significant points applicable to today's political setting and the Senate in particular.  One, our national legislative bodies operate on the premise that we are a representative republic whose leaders are either directly or indirectly elected by the people...this gives them accountability to the population while acknowledging that they are in a better situation than most of us to get the needed information, expertise, and wisdom for the often difficult decisions that go with their positions. And two, the fact that Kennedy felt the need for this book to highlight just eight senators for their political courage demonstrates that in the vast majority of cases senators and other politicians...when push comes to shove...will usually abandon their principles and succumb to popular prejudices and pressure from their colleagues on important, divisive issues.  You don't have to look around very far today to see this going on with too many of our elected national officials, sadly... 

Dan Mullen Fired from Coaching Florida Gators Football

Back in 2018, when Mississippi State head football coach Dan Mullen was sought and hired to replace erratic Jim McElwain at the University of Florida, trumpets were practically sounding that he was a Spurrier/Meyer-caliber coach that would lead the Gators back to their glory days of Southeastern Conference titles and National Championship contention.  The first two seasons, in which Mullen capitalized on players recruited by his predecessor, were great successes and last year's was as well...until the season's end when UF lost three straight games (although in two of them they were playing for the SEC championship (46-52 against Alabama) and in the Cotton Bowl (20-55 against Oklahoma).  This year their roster reflected Mullen's recruiting efforts for Florida, but it became clear early on that the wide-open passing attack and a fast, aggressive defense that defined the Gators in its recent history would be lacking.  Their games in 2021 were marked by inconsistency from week to week, with the offense and defense alternating between good and awful.  For me, I am more supportive of a head coach being given more time to develop his team, and sometimes the season just doesn't go your way.  But with Dan Mullen, although I give him credit for promoting Covid-19 vaccination recently, I can't get it out of my mind that last fall he, in the middle of a deadly upsurge of the virus in the general population...and no vaccines yet available...advocated that Florida "pack the Swamp [its home stadium]" for a game after losing a close road contest at Texas A&M where the home school practiced lax safety protocols for its own stadium.  Until that moment I had been a supporter of Mullen...afterwards I realized that winning was his only yardstick for success.  Well, you win by your yardstick and in turn lose by your yardstick: his team has lost four out of their last five games and in their only victory over that span they gave up a record 42 points in one half (at home) against a small college.  Running and special teams coach Greg Knox will fill the Florida head coaching vacancy against Florida State this week...if the Gators win then they will be bowl-eligible.  I'm not one of those Florida fans who expect them to compete for the National Championship every year, and sometimes you have years like this one and have to shake it off and move on to the next.  Normally I'd say that the coach should be given more time, but after Mullen's tone-death pandemic denial last season my patience with him was gone long before 2021...

Just Finished Rereading The Shining by Stephen King

The Shining is a 1980 horror novel by Stephen King, one of his big early successes in his long, prolific career as a writer of popular fiction.  I first read it about fifteen years ago, a little before this blog began, so I don't have a review of it...until today, that is.  I was prompted to pick it up again after reading King's latest novel Billy Summers, which mentions the earlier novel's central Overlook Hotel and its topiary of shrubs shaped to look like real animals.  Now I've finished reading The Shining...and have a few things to say about it.  It is about a family of three, the Torrances: Jack, the father, is an alcoholic writer/teacher with a short, violent temper that has stood him poorly in recent times, and Wendy, his beautiful wife, tends to see him as a troubled man and a danger to their five-year old son Danny.  Danny has the special gift of "shining", that is to read others' thoughts and see into the future.  Jack is giving winter employment by his old reformed drinking buddy as caretaker of Colorado's Overlook Hotel and he takes his family with him for the bleak, snowed-in months.  Danny is warned by his "imaginary" friend about the hotel's dangers and befriends the chef Dick Halloran, who is psychically sensitive as well and quickly picks up on the boy's talents.  Halloran is leaving for Florida for the winter, but tells Danny he'll come back if called.  Although on the wagon for several months, Jack finds himself craving alcohol...but the hotel is bone-dry, or is it?  The Overlook seems to have a mind of its own and sees in Danny the means to bring itself power and presence...it intends to use Jack and his addiction to that end.  The rest of the story spirals into a mix of ghosts, violence, and soul possession as the three struggle to survive their experience in this clearly-haunted establishment.  Like several of Stephen King's earlier stories, The Shining deals with demonic forces that invade and possess people...in this sense his writing mirrors the attitudes of many religious people who see demons and evil spirits all around themselves while interpreting others' perceived wayward behavior in terms of demonic possession.  Also, as in the case with many of his works around this time, the narrative often slips into stream-of-consciousness mode...I don't notice this literary device used nearly as much in King's more recent novels.  When I first read The Shining, I misinterpreted the book's ending as to what happened to Jack Torrance...this time around I saw it all in a much different light.  As to the Jack Nicholson movie adaptation, what I saw of it diverged too much from the book, with Nicholson as Jack and Shelley Duvall as Wendy, both roles seriously miscast.  Finally, one message I received from this intriguing story is that people have a tendency to think they are in control and masters of their own lives' destinies while in reality they are often pawns manipulated by forces unseen and beyond their control: welcome to the universe of Stephen King.  Doctor Sleep is a 2013 sequel novel to The Shining, with Danny Torrance grown up and suffering from the same weakness to alcohol as did his father...and having to contend with creatures that prey upon psychics...

Recent Visit to Charleston Harbor and Downtown

 

During our brief visit to Charleston, South Carolina last month, Melissa and I decided to explore its famous harbor and downtown.  We went on a tour boat and were treated to various historical and geographic aspects of the area, including Fort Sumter (see bottom picture), the site of the start of the American Civil War on April 12, 1861.  The U.S.S. Yorktown...not the famous aircraft carrier of the Battle of Midway fame (it sank in the Pacific)...but the new ship commissioned to replace it in 1943...is also in Charleston Harbor on the eastern Mount Pleasant side.  Both Ft. Sumter and the Yorktown have tours, but we were pressed for time and let the harbor ride work for us.  Afterwards we walked the streets of downtown Charleston.  The sidewalks around the harbor and immediate surroundings were often blocked by construction and barricades, but once we got further south and west to Market Street, things became easier.  All along Market Street are long brick buildings that provide a flea-market type of people's marketplace (2nd photo from the top).  We turned south at Church Street, on which is located St. Philip's Church...its steeple makes it the tallest in the city, which has prohibited any building from being taller than it.  Down the road on the right side is a special coffee shop, Bitty and Beau's, a chain with 23 stores (one to open soon in Jacksonville) that distinguishes itself by employing those with intellectual and developmental disabilities.  When we got there the store was about to close, but I managed to get a decaffeinated caffè americano to go...click HERE for the company's website.  Eventually we looped around on our downtown walk and made it toward the garage where we were parked...on the way we were passed by horse-drawn carriages, one of which was followed by a car whose business specializes in cleaning the streets of horse poop.  At the end of our walk we cut through the beautiful Gaillard Center to get to our parking garage.  I would have preferred a little more time to explore the area...I was disappointed that the Slave Market Museum had just closed when we passed by.  Still, I'm glad we visited...maybe at a future time we'll get to explore a little more deeply, and maybe even sit a spell at Bitty and Beau's...

Quote of the Week...from Winston Churchill

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

                                                                            ---Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill was perhaps the most famous British prime minister in history, presiding first over the course of World War II and later in the early-to-mid 1950s...let's just assume for the sake of argument that his above derisive quote about the "average voter" was only directed at his own fellow countrymen.  Still, I have issues of my own about American voters...or those from any country where people can freely vote for their leaders, for that matter.  In the election my city of Gainesville just held this past Tuesday, there was a vote turnout of 13%,  meaning that 87% of fully registered voters chose not to participate in the election of one of our city commissioners.  The election, among five candidates, was split evenly enough between the top two finishers so that no one received a majority of votes and the runoff will be held January 25th.  In this digital information age it is only too easy to just speak into the Google search engine and all kinds of sources of candidates' records and viewpoints can be found...but only 13% voted.  And during a time when all I hear is how voting is being suppressed.  I know enough about how people who do vote will make their voting choices according to asinine reasons like how their friends and family voted, the symbols the candidates embrace, innuendos, mudslinging...and the like: anything but how, once elected, the officials will affect their lives and futures by their actions on relevant issues.  Add to this the numerous crank news sources, hack media ideologues and conspiracy theories that too many in our Internet and mass media age have embraced to formulate their political orientation.  Finally, there is always the wishy-washy last-minute undecided voter who will hinge their vote on some sensational news story planted just before the election.  But at least these people are taking the responsible action of casting a ballot...I think I'd modify Churchill's quote to read "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average registered voter"...   

Constellation of the Month: Cetus (the Sea Monster)

 

Cetus is a large autumn evening constellation, nearly all of it lying south of the celestial equator, just south of the faint Zodiac constellation Pisces.  The stars in Cetus tend to be brighter than some of those constellations surrounding it, although that's not saying much.  To me the standout star is Beta Ceti, better known as Deneb Kaitos, situated at Cetus' southwest corner at magnitude 2.04, a clear marker in the night sky, especially in juxtaposition to its dim setting.  Mira is a noted variable star whose magnitude dramatically and periodically changes from easily-visible 3 all the way to 10, only viewable through telescopes.  There's a Messier object, M77, on the constellation's northeastern end...it is a spiral galaxy some 50 million light-years distant.  Cetus represents the sea monster that mythical Greek heroic character Perseus had to battle.  Its nearby constellations in the fall sky are elements of Perseus' story: Pegasus, Perseus himself, Andromeda and Cassiopeia.  Sometimes Cetus is referred to as a whale, and Curious George creator H.A. Rey's redrawn constellations from his children's book Find the Constellations (which I used to check out a lot as a kid) depict it that way.  Next month I'll discuss a constellation from December's evening sky...