Not a Cold Weather Runner

Watching the Weather Channel this morning makes me feel like a wimpy Floridian complaining about this weekend's frigid temperatures where I live in Gainesville...low 30s this morning with winds of 20-30 mph (22 degrees wind chill) and expectations of a dip into the mid-20s Sunday morning.  Of course, that's a lot warmer than in the northeastern U.S. with its temperatures in the teens and everything essentially snowbound.  That being said, keep in mind that I grew up in south Florida where a dip into the upper 40s is a major winter event.  This all relates to my running as I try to engage this basically solitary activity in a more social setting by entering local races.  For the past three weeks the temperatures have spiked downward on Saturday into the 30s...and I've had it with shivering to death outside early in the morning under these conditions waiting for the race to begin.  Both my first half-marathon (in 2010) and my only marathon (2011) took place with the temperatures in the mid-20s...why, oh why do they always insist on holding these races during the absolutely coldest conditions in the dead of winter?  A few years ago a 10K race was held in March in the nearby town of Tioga...what I loved about it was its time: Saturday afternoon at 4!  I am more of a moderate-to-warm weather runner...my longest training run (26.6 miles) was accomplished with temperatures in the sixties and I've run more than ten miles on a number of occasions when it was in the upper 80s and even the low 90s...although truth be told in recent years I've tried to avoid the extreme heat as well.  My only caveat with running under warmer conditions is that I try to avoid high humidity...which usually dissipates as the morning advances and the sun rises.  I had planned to run a 5K race a couple of weeks ago and the Newnan's Lake 15K this morning and was confident of doing well in them, but the weather had a different idea.  Next month I'd like to try Gainesville's Five Points Half-Marathon race on the 20th, but if it dips down to this level of coldness then I'll be passing on it as well...enough is enough.  Well, there's a "backup" half-marathon on the Hawthorne Trail that's set to take place in April and I might just go for it...

Quote of the Week...from Nelson Mandela

We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right. 

                                                             ---Nelson Mandela

I came across this quote on the Internet while seeking if there wasn't an appropriate one about the passage of time.  You see, I was comparing how time passed so slowly last September while I was following the progress of the U.S. Open tennis tournament to now, just four months later, with that of the Australian Open.  Back then I was at home full-time, recovering from my surgery with few other daily concerns.  Now, though, I am much more active and have returned to work long ago, rendering my days broken up into little segments many of which either demand my undivided attention or draw me physically away from the TV set where all the great tennis is happening.  The result is that while back then I was able to follow the tournament from the early rounds and get to know several players, this time around I suddenly find myself here today with the final matchups already set in place: Ashleigh Barty against Danielle Collins tomorrow for the women's title and Rafael Nadal vs. Daniil Medvedev (US Open champion) for the men.  Last night after work I did get to see much of the semifinal match between Nadal and Matteo Berrettini, which was entertaining.  As for Nelson Mandela, he languished for much of his adult life in a South African prison for being one the leaders fighting racist Apartheid in that country but later became not only its president but also a champion in his own right for peaceful social progress and reconciliation along the model of Gandhi and King.  The passage of time can play tricks on the mind and give one the false impression that it's all too late now...I remember thinking this lie even as far back as the fifth grade in 1967 when I was only ten!  But now I know better: as long as I am alive and breathing, I will always have time in the "now" to decide whether to do the right thing...this is a privilege as well as an enormous responsibility... 

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer to Retire This Year

United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, appointed in 1994 by Bill Clinton and at age 83 serving on the bench going on 28 years, just announced his retirement following the conclusion of the court's 2022 term...which ends in October.  This sets President Biden up for his first...and possibly last...Supreme Court nomination...which, as he has promised, is almost certainly going to be an African American woman.  I liked Breyer, but as I see it his spirit of compromise just doesn't work in a Supreme Court that has been unfairly manipulated by Republicans into a 6-3 conservative majority.  Now that Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has altered the Senate rules to eliminate the 60-vote threshold to end debate on Supreme Court nominees, the candidate no longer needs crossover support to win confirmation although some are concerned that Democratic Senators Manchin and Sinema, who thwarted recent important legislation placed forth by their own party, might balk at a nominee they regard as extremist.  Nevertheless, Biden should pick someone with a history of strong, capable and passionate articulation of her beliefs that will carry on into her tenure as the next justice...the time for consensus-building in this highest judicial body of the country that Breyer stood for is over for now: time to take off the gloves and get to work laying the foundations for a future majority...   

Weekly Short Stories: 1981 Science Fiction, Part 2

As I continue my look back at 1981's science fiction short stories as presented in the anthology The 1982 Annual World's Best SF (edited by Donald A. Wollheim with stories from the previous year), I remember the sports scene at the time.  Charlie Pell was the Florida Gators football coach, in his third season with them going a mediocre 7-5 including a convincing bowl loss to West Virginia.  In major league baseball, the players went on strike in the middle of the summer and they ended up making an awkward split season out of it all...the Cincinnati Reds, sporting the best overall record in baseball with their ace pitcher Tom Seaver going 14-1, didn't even make the playoffs!  The Miami Dolphins, with the alternating quarterback duo of Woodley and Strock, got back into the playoffs but lost an incredibly exciting opening round playoff game against Dan Fouts and his San Diego Chargers at year's end...I think the 49ers with Joe Montana ended up winning their first Super Bowl of many that season.  But back to those sci-fi stories... 

POLYPHEMUS by Michael Shea

An exploratory mission to a mostly desert distant world finds the crew in a life-or death struggle in one of its lakes as a behemoth of an aquatic creature, much worse than Moby Dick or Jaws with its neural network of tethered shark-and-squid-like "components", takes apart and consumes the trapped crew one by one.  In their midst is a classic he-man hero type, Nemo Jones, and of course he has to take center stage in their final desperate act to escape the monster's clutches.  The novella's premise was fun and exciting...the author's tendency to overly describe the creature's biology in painful detail wasn't and made the story drag...

ABSENT THEE FROM FELICITY AWHILE... by Somtow Sucharitkul

Reminiscent of the Bill Murray Groundhog Day movie that came out twelve years later, humanity on Earth one evening is beset by an advanced alien elementary school class that freezes everyone into repeating the same day...going on millions of years according to their own time scale as they are practically immortal.  Everyone is aware of the situation they are in and many try to change their actions to effect different outcomes, discussing their tactics during the two-hour daily "free time" the aliens allow them.  What a quirky little tale that made me wonder whether the creator of that movie didn't get his or her ideas from here...

Next week I continue reviewing science fiction short stories from 1981...

Football and Tennis Dominate My TV Watching

I split my TV watching this past weekend...at least the part of it that I wasn't working...between the National Football League divisional playoffs and the Australian Open tennis tournament.  True, I could have been watching the Beatles inch painfully and inexorably toward their rooftop concert in the January 1969 rehearsal and recording sessions as presented in the Get Back documentary on Disney Plus...oh, I'll "get back" there in good time.  And on the Pluto channel they're showing the three great old Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.  Then there are the old Through the Wormhole episodes that Discovery Plus is carrying. But right now my focus is sports, and tennis and football are running through my veins...

With pro football, I can't recall in the 54 years I've followed the sport a playoff weekend in which all the games were nailbiters...of the four contests, three were decided by field goals with time running out and the fourth was sent into overtime...with time running out...by yet another field goal. Sunday's games were incredible...Tampa Bay with their 24-point comeback against Los Angeles seemed to have sent the game into overtime with their game-tying score, leaving the Rams only 42 seconds in regulation. But Matthew Stafford, one of my favorite quarterbacks even when he played those many years for perennial loser Detroit, got a bomb completed to standout receiver Cooper Kupp, setting up an easy game-ending field goal.  And Buffalo seemed to have sealed up a victory against Kansas City by scoring a TD with only 13 seconds remaining...but no, Patrick Mahomes engineered a brilliant time-efficient drive that set up a successful 48-yard field goal and sent the game into OT, which the Chiefs won by "defeating" the Bills in the coin toss. Although I was disappointed that the Bucs lost to the Rams, I will be pulling for LA to beat the 49ers next week, as well as for KC to handle Cincinnati...

As for the Australian Open, I've been catching bits and pieces of matches on ESPN-2...it's much different for me than with last year's U.S. Open because then I was always at home, recuperating from my heart surgery.  Still, I've enjoyed the tennis I've been able to see and plan to watch more when I get off from work at night. Not that I plan to spend all my free time watching TV...I have this blog to write, after all...

About Procrastination...and Rob Dial's Podcast on the Subject

Recently on his Mindset Mentor podcast, life coach Rob Dial tackled the subject of procrastination...something that has plagued me over most of my life.  His approach is fivefold: first, you admit you're a procrastinator, which involves simply being lazy or proneness to overthinking and "paralysis by analysis".  Second, try taking on what you're putting off in bite-size measures so that it all doesn't seem so overwhelming.  Third, delve into the "why" of the activity in question...sometimes if you probe a little deeply with this you'll find a hidden, but more compelling reason that helps you to address the issue at hand.  Fourth, eliminate distractions to what you're procrastinating...I remember an old SpongeBob episode in which he does everything under the sun other than do his writing assignment homework.  And finally, adopt the Pomodoro Method of time management (he's covered this before) in which you work assiduously and highly focused for 25 minutes and then completely break from the task for 5...and then return to it for another 25 if need be.  I look back at my life on my tendency to procrastinate and came up with two observations: one, isolating myself in the face of something I need to do often extends the delay as I am a master at coming up with my own excuses and distractions...better to increase my exposure to public life, which in turn increases my sense of responsibility.  Two, I see a lot of life as threads through time, usually dormant but sometimes actively vibrating, calling my attention to them.  My various health issues, teeth/gums, car maintenance, insurance/retirement/bills...to mention just a few things, work like this, and my goal in dealing with each of them is to calm down the thread in question through attentive action and return it to its state of dormancy.  Responsible living requires making some sort of effort in dealing with things as they crop up: I've said this about voting but it applies to just about every area in my life.  Dial's podcast was helpful to me, especially since I'd been putting off some needed action in different areas of late...

Just Finished Reading Dracula by Bram Stoker

The mythos of the vampire monster may have been part of Eastern European folklore for centuries, but when English writer Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in 1897 it forever placed the topic in the setting of a remote Transylvanian castle in Romania, with the Count being an urbane but ultimately predatory and evil bloodsucker, converting his victims into fellow vampires.  A solicitor, Jonathan Harker, is sent to his castle from London to finalize arrangements for Dracula's purchase of a house in the city's outskirts...before long he is deep in danger as three vampire women set their sights (and very sharp teeth) on him...saved from their clutches at first by Dracula and later abandoned to them, the story takes a turn in its setting to the English coastal town of Whitby,  where Harker's friends and associates...along with suitors of a friend of his fiancée's...begin to encounter a strange and unwelcome presence among them.  As the story progresses, a Belgian professor, Abraham Van Helsing, recognizes the signs of vampire activity and joins them in combating Dracula...naturally I left out gobs of plot because I don't want to give away the story.  Let's just say that many of the "rules" governing what vampires can and cannot do are laid out here, as well as how one can finally "kill" them...although in a manner of speaking they are already dead.  The much more recent Stephanie Meyer Twilight series pretty much adopts all of this while making "her" vampires equivalent to humanity in their ability to choose between good and evil: Stoker's Dracula and his ilk, on the other hand, are completely evil and separated from God.  Dracula's narrative is unconventional, consisting of a succession of journal entries and letters written by the various characters involved...beginning with Harker's accounts.  I enjoyed the book, marveling that at my relatively late age I hadn't yet learned the fate of Count Dracula and those involved in the literary story.  In childhood I saw him on the drive-in theater screen in the movies Horror of Dracula (from 1959) and Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966): Christopher Lee played the Count in them, with Peter Cushing as Van Helsing.  Now I'm on to another great old monster classic: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley... 

My Picks and Preferences of Rest of NFL Playoffs

With the 2021 National Football Season playoffs, held in 2022 to confuse future sports historians looking back on it all, now past the wildcard games, we have four contests to look at this weekend.  Of the eight remaining teams, here are my preferences: 

1 Tampa Bay Buccaneers

2 Kansas City Chiefs

3 Green Bay Packers

4 Cincinnati Bengals

5 Los Angeles Rams

6 San Francisco 49ers

7 Tennessee Titans

8 Buffalo Bills

And here are the teams ranked, in my humble opinion, according to how good they are:

1 Buffalo Bills

2 Kansas City Chiefs

3 Tennessee Titans

4 Green Bay Packers

5 Tampa Bay Buccaneers

6 Los Angeles Rams

7 San Francisco 49ers

8 Cincinnati Bengals

The above second list is to me a bit deceiving since I believe these eight teams are such that on any given day any of them could beat their opponent...who knows which ones will prevail this weekend and ultimately get to the Super Bowl.  Today Cincinatti is at Tennessee (4:30) and San Francisco at Green Bay (8:15).  Tomorrow it will be Los Angeles at Tampa Bay (3:00) and Buffalo at Kansas City (6:30).  I'll be at work today and miss the first two, but plan to enjoy (or suffer through) Sunday's games.  As for my preferences, I want Tampa Bay to win a lot more than any of the other teams, and with nearly the same intensity want Buffalo to lose.  By the way, it's nice to not see teams like New England and Dallas at this stage of the playoff picture...

Quote of the Week...from Mitch McConnell

The concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.                      ---Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell 

Amid the very partisan struggle over voting rights and election reform, with the latest chapter being the refusal of the U.S. Senate to suspend the filibuster in order to pass the Democrats' bill, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell spoke about concerns that blacks were unfairly targeted with voter suppression measures recently taken in several different states.  His above quote was meant to address and refute them...I don't know whether his facts are right or not.  But it became controversial when his opponents interpreted him to mean that he thought African Americans weren't real Americans...although I dislike McConnell and think he has brought on much of the political turmoil and division we're now experiencing with his obstruction tactics over the years, his intention is clear if you only take a moment to try to understand it.  As with a lot of people who are out there speaking off the cuff, they tend to get sloppy at times with their wording...McConnell could have been more precise by replacing "Americans" with "America at-large" or "the average for Americans [or America]".  Yet even had he done this I think there would be some trying to pin him down as being racist...

When I went to school we had a highly dysfunctional bus stop, where bullies prevailed and threatened and mocked other kids lower on their perceived pecking order.  If somebody not of their liking said something...anything...they would twist their words around to put them down even further, often only referring to their target by an insulting nickname.  I believe we're seeing the same mental process at work here with McConnell...folks, get a grip on yourselves, you're much better than this...

How About Digitally Switching James Bond Actors in Old Films?

Over the years I've been a big viewing fan of the James Bond film series, which at this point with last year's No Time to Die totals some 26 movies (including 1983's Never Say Never Again and excluding the '67 farce Casino Royale).  There have been six different actors playing Bond: Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and Daniel Craig...each with his own distinctive appearance, personality, and mannerisms.  I've often wondered how a certain movie might look had a different actor appeared in it...I can't see anyone but Connery starring in Goldfinger and Thunderball.  But I have a sneaking suspicion that for most if not all of the rest of the flicks, the other actors would fit the bill appropriately although the movie's tone might change a bit.  Now, with the computer technology available to change people's appearance and insert them into places they've not been, wouldn't it be cool to go down a menu of James Bond movies and watch, say The Spy Who Loved Me and pick Daniel Craig as the Bond for it, or see how Roger Moore looks in Die Another Day?  The main movie I'm interested in is 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which originally starred George Lazenby...his portrayal of Bond, although probably truer to James Bond creator and author Ian Fleming in his books, was a bit different than the larger-than-life near-supermen of the others...let's see how Pierce Brosnan would have done in his shoes.  The idea of digitally substituting actors in old movies sounds extremely fun and worth pursuing, although copyrights, licensing, contracts and other legal entanglements will probably keep it from fruition, whether the technology to perform this feat is as yet possible or not.  On the other hand, our reality is already being severely tested in the media with the manipulation of images...brave new world!

Weekly Short Stories: 1981 Science Fiction, Part 1

Here are my reactions to the opening three 1981 science fiction short stories as they appeared in the anthology The 1982 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and presenting his selections for the best from the preceding year.  1981 saw me kicking some bad personal habits and settling into some positive routines, among them daily study of Chinese through the incredible John DeFrancis textbook series (published by Yale University) each day after work.  Historically, old man Reagan was inaugurated as our 40th president and shot soon thereafter by a lone armed lunatic...sigh, not much has changed since then with our culture of gun violence, has it?  Anyway, here are my takes on the first three stories... 

BLIND SPOT by Jayge Carr

A surgeon seeks to preserve the sight of an artist belonging to an underclass humanoid species from a distant world, but fails.  When she asks to return to her home planet, he insists on accompanying her and discovers the social disparity between the "superior" treetop dwellers and the "inferior" trogs to which his patient belongs.  One day she disappears, presumed dead on the forest floor that is densely populated by predators.  Overcome by grief, he leaves but later discovers his lost patient's true place on her home world as well as the trogs and upper-dwellers.  A story about interdependency among disparate groups that speaks to our current understanding of society as well as ecology... 

HIGHLINER by C.J. Cherryh

In a future world where massive cities have grown with their skyscrapers fused together into a massive superstructure reaching upward toward space itself, a team of "highliners", that is construction workers in the outside heights, finds itself caught up in corporate corruption as they are warned to go along with sabotage of a certain building project.  Wow, you could make a great series...book, movie, or television, out of this premise, and the visuals would be stunning...

THE PUSHER by John Varley

A middle-age man calling himself a pusher, who hangs out at children's playgrounds to find himself a "suitable" girl to isolate, isn't as horribly sinister as John Varley intimates, but the author goes out of his way in the beginning to make the story's protagonist look like a predatory pervert.  As the story progresses, however, we learn about the relativistic effects of space travel at very high velocities, with the traveler aging much more slowly than the planet-bound people he left behind.  In this story, the spaceman has hardly aged after returning to Earth where everyone else has grown 40 years older.  Now try to tie these two seemingly completely incongruous threads together to come up with a much more innocent ending...

Next week I continue looking at science fiction short stories from 1981...

Where I Stand on Voting Rights and Election Reform

In both 2018 and 2020 we had national elections, the latter including a presidential race.  In each election occurred what I see as big problems regarding the integrity of the vote and outcome.  In 2018...in California...ballot harvesting, illegal over most of the country, was in full swing and tipped a number of close congressional elections from Republican to Democratic.  In ballot harvesting, party operatives canvas neighborhoods before the election is over to selectively visit voters in their own party with absentee ballots.  If the voter hasn't mailed theirs in yet, the operatives will let them fill it out and promise to deliver it themselves.  The result is batches of large amounts of ballots dumped into the mix at the end to be counted...I find this highly unethical, rendering election results dependent on the efficiency of political party machines instead of the will of the voter.  In 2020 the notion of automatically sending absentee ballots in certain states to each and every eligible voter likewise gave me pause...I believe that voting at least on some level should require an effort on the part of the voter: the more passive the process is, the more likely abuse will occur.  The worst effect of 2020, though, was Donald Trump's Sore Loser philosophy, transformed from a morally-bankrupt individual's hangup to his entire party, as the Republicans tried to undo the free and fair election results that had elected Joe Biden to be the next president.  Then, in 2021 a number of Republican-controlled state governments enacted laws that tightened their election and voter laws...most of them I'm fine with, but sadly they also codified Trump's Sore Loser creed by enabling the partisan politicians to overthrow any elections that go the "wrong" way...this in my opinion is pure authoritarian fascism...

Now the Democrats in the U.S. Senate are trying to get two recalcitrant senators from their own party, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, to join them in a partisan voting bloc to temporarily suspend that body's filibuster for their voting rights bill.  Although Manchin and Sinema have expressed support for the submitted legislation, they are balking at the notion of suspending the filibuster...I kind of agree with them.  The bill's provisions set Federal standards for voting across the country and supersede state and local laws...that's the problem that Republicans have with it.  I don't know of anything in the proposed 800-page law that prohibits states from engaging in "Sore-Loserism" and overturning elections because of baseless fraud claims, and it allows for universal ballot harvesting...if you have further information on these two points I'd appreciate you letting me know...

In my view, the single most important determiner of election results is voter turnout, and it's interesting to note that the Democratic (my) Party is the one that tends to suffer the most from off-year voter apathy, with state legislatures and governorships...even in so-called "blue" states...going consistently to Republican control, largely because so many Democratic voters simply sit on their hands and won't vote unless it's for president.  The previous two Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton in 1994 and Barack Obama in 2010 saw their congressional majorities drastically swing to Republican control just two years into their respective administrations, hampering their ability to effectively govern...and it was largely due to their supporters refusing to vote in those elections, not because they were being persecuted in some way.  I see the same thing happening in 2022, only instead of decrying voter apathy and irresponsibility I predict the media talking heads will say it was all because of voter suppression....

Rob Dial's Take on Fear and How to Deal With It

For the past few Mondays I've been devoting this blog space to discussing a certain podcast I have recently been following: motivational speaker Rob Dial's The Mindset Mentor...except that Dial doesn't like being called a motivational speaker.  Dude, that's what you do, you're good at it, own it!  The other day he had a show about fear and brought up a few good points.  He said that infants are afraid of basically two things: loud noises and falling...every other fear is something we've picked up later in life.  Fear is a survival mechanism that is supposed to tell us when we're in danger of being killed, but people mostly are afraid of things posing no such danger but rather possible social rejection or humiliation.  Dial says that nevertheless fear in these circumstances is a good thing because it signals that we're out of our comfort zone and are ready for growth.  He also gives three pointers for dealing with fear: (1) change our mindset and determine a course of action in dealing with what's making us afraid, (2) do things in bite-size portions, incrementally, and (3) "dance" with the fear by not avoiding it but rather recognizing it and confronting it (easier said than done).  If these suggestions seem a little obvious, then I wonder why many of us (including myself) tend to succumb to silly fears instead of dealing with them in a constructive manner.  Everybody suffers fear...if you don't, you're in trouble! My own kids, when they were growing up, gave me a lesson in fear whenever we visited a nearby theme park that had several scary looking roller coasters and thrill rides.  They faced their fears and enjoyed the rides. One day I was fed up with my own fear-induced reluctance and decided to take them out there and ride ALL the terrifying rides with them: it was fun as hell and I remember the date: March 22, 2003...I was hooked on theme parks for years afterwards.  Looking back on Rob Dial's three pointers about fear, I guess I skipped past (2) with the coasters...

Watching the Australian Open Tennis Tournament Starting Tonight

The 2022 edition of the Australian Open, the first of four Grand Slam professional tennis tournaments held throughout the calendar year, begins in earnest today with the opening "Round of 128"...coverage begins this evening at 7 on ESPN-2 (Gainesville Cox Channel 27).  I'm not sure whether the matches to be shown are live or tape-delayed since Australia's time is half a day out of sync with ours here in the eastern United States.  I got into watching tennis last August and September while recovering at home from surgery...the U.S. Open was exciting, with Daniil Medvedev winning the men's title and Emma Raducanu the women's.  I was looking forward to seeing men's number one-ranked Novak Djokovic, who lost to Medvedev in that tourney's finale, defend his 2021 Australian Open championship...but Covid vaccination concerns ultimately led to him not being allowed to stay in Australia for the tournament.  I still plan to watch it all, though.  A funny thing happened while I was searching the Internet for the channel carrying it: I picked up that in a different country, either Britain or Canada, only Discovery Plus, a premium subscription channel, would be showing it and thought that was applicable to me here in America.  We took Discovery Plus up on their 7-day free trial period and while browsing their programming lineup I was delighted to see that they carried old seasons of the Morgan Freeman-hosted science series Through the Wormhole, which I had watched when we had the Science Channel on our cable lineup.  But this afternoon I tuned in to watch an episode and found out they had cut the series from their menu.  Couple this disappointment with the fact that I discovered my earlier mistake and that ESPN and/or ESPN2 would be showing the tournament instead on "regular" TV, and it's "Goodbye, Discovery Plus"!  The Australian Open will be on through January 30th...

Later...Melissa showed me that the Wormhole series (some of the seasons) are actually still on Discovery Plus, but they're buried in the search engine.  I watched a couple of the second season (first season unavailable on this channel) last night...

Constellation of the Month: Auriga (the Charioteer)

 

Auriga is a prominent winter evening constellation to the north of zodiac constellation Taurus, which in turn is just north of dazzling Orion...but its own relatively bright stars, highlighted by Capella...make it nearly as recognizable.  The main part of the constellation is an irregular pentagon and other fainter stars give it...if you see it as the Charioteer's head, that is, a pointed hat and his nose (just southwest of Capella).  The bottom star, El Nath, is technically part of Taurus representing the tip of one of the bull's horns, but it also belongs to Auriga...if unofficially.  Capella is one of the northernmost first-magnitude stars and as such, is usually visible in the evening not only in the winter but also the springtime (in the northwest sky) and the fall (in the northeast)...Vega, a summer evening bright star, is similar on the other side of the sky.  Auriga contains three Messier objects, M36, M37, and M38...all of them open star clusters.  With Capella being the sixth-brightest star in the night sky, Auriga is hard to miss and is an integral part of the winter evening "starscape".  Next month I'll pick a constellation to feature for the February evening sky...

Quote of the Week...from Martin Luther King, Jr.

If you can't fly, run; if you can't run, walk; if you can't walk, crawl; but by all means keep moving.

                                                                         ---Martin Luther King, Jr.

Four years ago I featured a quote by noted ultramarathon runner Dean Karnazes that's very close to the above one made many years earlier by the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.  Karnazes made his application very literal, about his gritty perseverance under the often brutal conditions on the running trail.  King's quote has a broader meaning to how one should approach life.  For me, both literal and figurative interpretations apply.  I intend to return soon to running long-distance races of the 15K and half-marathon variety...for me the overriding goal is to simply cover the distances, hopefully through running but also walking some if that's necessary to finish them.  With life in general, progress isn't usually linear but instead full of snags and setbacks...often I have to press the reset button and start anew when things go awry.  Giving up isn't an option, but changing my mind as to what I will emphasize and how I will attain it is...even it involves "crawling" for a season.  Life by its nature is growth and motion...I never want to forget that. I also won't forget the example Martin Luther King, Jr set for his compassion, courage and wisdom as he sought justice for the oppressed and disadvantaged and inspired so many to follow in his footsteps of "creative altruism" as he called it...

Stunned and Dismayed by Dolphins' Firing of Head Coach Brian Flores

The other day I was browsing through the Microsoft news feed on my computer...admittedly not always the best way to get unbiased or accurate news...and came across an article listing the most likely new head coaching prospects to fill in a vacancy from an unsuccessful National Football team this year.  I expected this kind of article immediately after the regular season and 18 of the league's 32 franchises didn't make the playoffs, although they all set their sights on them.  Among the list of available possibilities was Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores...that can't be right, he's only just completed his third year.  But no, Flores was fired the day after his team defeated their rival New England for the second time in a season and finished with a winning record of 9-8...that's significant because with 2020's 10-6 season it marks the first time since 2003 that the Dolphins have enjoyed two consecutive winning seasons!  This after Flores' first season in which the team's management decided to divest themselves of their core, star players including quarterback Ryan Tannehill and planned to tank at 0-16 in order to garner high draft picks.  Perhaps this was the time in which Brian Flores began to incur the wrath of Miami Dolphins management with their owner Stephen Ross and general manager Chris Grier because the newly hired coach scrapped and struggled with this inferior team throughout his 2019 debut season and actually pulled off 5 unexpected victories.  And to turn it completely around the next year and win 10 was incredible!  Flores, formerly the Patriots' defensive linebackers coach, has the much-needed talent of making his players believe in themselves and work hard to win games as a cohesive unit...yet Dolphins management just dumped him!  For me, I'd have liked them to make the playoffs, which they just barely missed the last two years.  But to see them in 2021 undergo their 7-game winning streak, coming back from an early injury-marred 1-7 start, made me feel that with Brian Flores the Miami Dolphins had finally found a true leader that could sustain them over the years.  Second-year quarterback Tua Tagovailoa had suffered an early injury this season, but by its end was transforming into a very competent NFL quarterback. There seemed to be some sort of disagreement about his future with the team as owner Ross was the prime mover behind Tua's being drafted in the first place and Flores wanted to obtain a quarterback he felt could win more games for them.  Well, the Dolphins blew it when they sacked Brian Flores....expect him to go on an become a Super Bowl-winning legend for ANOTHER franchise and expect the Miami Dolphins to return to their losing ways. Let's see if they can't go 0-17 this time around...I'm sure that would thrill owner Ross...

Weekly Short Stories: 1980 Science Fiction, Part 4

Today I conclude my look back at the year 1980 in short science fiction, using the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents The 1981 Annual World's Best SF, featuring Wollheim's selections from the previous year. Although it sometimes appeared that year that the world was "going to hell in a handbasket", for my own actual life I was self-sufficient and healthy, with only a predilection for drinking a little too much beer two or three times a week (usually Miller Lite or an occasional Michelob) being probably my single worst habit...other than being at the time incurably antisocial and insulated. '80 was a good year for music...Funky Town and Another One Bites the Dust stand out in my memory.  But this article is about the stories from that year, and here are my reactions to the book's final three... 

WINDOW by Bob Leman

A truly scary tale worthy of Stephen King, Window addresses the problem inherent in being able to enter a portal into an alternate reality...sometimes that might mean someone on the "other side" can then enter into ours.  At a secret installation, American scientists have created such an entranceway to possibly another dimension or universe, as they watch in amazement a seemingly normal house with what appears to be a normal, happy nuclear family residing there.  Once a day there is a five-second period allowing objects to pass from our reality into theirs...all hell breaks loose when an overeager young scientist suddenly rushes across the barrier onto the house's lawn during one such interval...

THE SUMMER SWEET, THE WINTER WILD by Michael G. Coney

This story, uniquely told from the collective perspective of a migrating wild caribou herd, examines how some of what we might think of as virtuous and compassionate behavior like empathy toward other species and nonviolence can ultimately cause more death and suffering than a more selfish, cutthroat mode of existing that has typified the evolution of life over the eons.  Pretty thought-provoking, how the author makes a subtle connection between wolves and humans as the collective consciousness envelopes all sentient life in the area...

ACHRONOS by Lee Killiugh

Reminding me a little of the Restaurant at the End of the Universe in Douglas Adams' hilarious series A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a motorist one day finds himself having inadvertently driven to the end of a dead-end road at a beach.  Getting out of his car, he stoops down and picks up a living trilobite, which evidently had just washed up onto the shore although they had gone extinct hundreds of million years before.  Then he discovers people from the distant future there...eventually the mystery is explained: this place is "achronos", or not belong to any time, and is accessible from different time periods.  But why won't the future people he has encountered try to return to their own era...and what does it mean to be alive in a place where time doesn't advance?  Pretty provocative...

Next week I move on to 1981 and that wonderful year's best sci-fi short stories...

Just Finished Reading The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

The Bluest Eye, from 1970, is the first novel from award-winner author Toni Morrison...after reading Tar Baby I thought I'd check out some of her other works.  Morrison is masterful with her intense and intricate characterizations...it seems that no one in her stories escapes scrutiny, much of it condemnatory yet at the same time exculpatory as she unravels the reasons why many people do bad...really bad...things to other people.  The industrial belt city of Lorain, Ohio...close to Cleveland...is the setting in which the lives of two black girls, one from a strict-but-loving family and the other from a terribly broken one, are spotlighted.  Claudia and her sister Frieda live in a tightly-knit nuclear family with both parents...Claudia sees everything and everyone through skeptical and often cynical eyes, sensitive to both the racism and sexism around her.  Her friend Pecola, on the other hand, lives in a broken home with parents who physically abuse each other...the father has little-to-no moral compass in his life.  She has a brother, Sammy, who repeatedly runs away...not at all the kind of material you might see in an old '80s' TV sit-com.  Pecola believes the dogma that her own mother and the world around her has pounded into her psyche: that she is ugly, very ugly...and that those with lighter skin and blue eyes are better-looking...and generally better people than her.  If only she had blue eyes, she grows to believe, her life would be so much better!  Of course, Claudia is revolted by Pecola's perspective but loves her as a friend and tries to help her.  Through the course of the story, Morrison goes back and forth in time to explore the origins of the various cast of characters, including both girls' parents and an itinerant pseudo-preacher with his own peculiar moral hang-ups.  And moral hang-ups are something that the grownups here have in no short supply.  It all supposedly takes place in twentieth century post-Depression America, and even though Lorain is nowhere near the Jim Crow Deep South, blacks and whites are still segregated and divided, with much antagonism and distrust between the two groups.  The Bluest Eye is difficult to read, not because of the language or writing style but rather because it exposes the often sordid private lives and thoughts of people.  In this sense it steps out of an ethnocentric story about a specific demographic group and becomes universal, and although I appreciate learning about diverse people's attitudes and experiences I also look for that universal application to humanity.  We humans are indeed a pretty pathetic lot, hiding our dirty linen often in plain view of those around us while entertaining delusional self-images that greatly diverge from who we really are...and who we should be striving to become.  This book is very disturbing, but it's also very honest and intimate with its characters...looks like I'll be reading another Toni Morrison novel soon...

Three Ways to Learn and Read Faster, According to Rob Dial

On a recent The Mind Mentor podcast, motivational guru Rob Dial listed and discussed three ways he believes folks can learn and read faster.  The first I already do...kind of.  He recommends Kindle for reading and then purchasing the Audible version option when obtaining books...still cheaper in his opinion than buying the paper hardcopy, and then the reader can simultaneously employ their eyes and ears (through Whispersync), helping them to better retain the material they cover.  He also advocates using the Highlighter function that enables readers to filter out the most significant areas of the books they read. Along with this he points out that public libraries offer the Overdrive (or Libby) app that enables one to check out, for free, audiobooks to listen to on their computers or smartphones.  Dial's second tip for learning and reading is to employ the Pomodoro technique of time management whereby one engages in intense, focused activity for 25 minutes and then fully rests from it for 5...and then returning to the cycle: he maintains that this resonates better with people's peaking during prolonged directed learning activity: I usually do something like this without the formality of the 25:5 time ratio.  And finally, the Mindset Mentor suggests that whenever we learn something we immediately turn around and teach it to someone else...this is an old Stephen Covey point that runs counterintuitive to a lot of us.  After all, knowledge and skill are often regarded as commodities that set us competitively above others and give us an edge over them...but sharing what we learned will greatly reinforce and strengthen it within us, making us even more knowledgeable and skillful.  At the end of the podcast, Dial touts the use of YouTube as a great source of teaching...I know what he's talking about as you can learn just about anything on it.  This was a good podcast, although I still see some use in good old-fashioned paper books even in this age of Kindle and Audible, especially since many of them are older and not yet offered in those formats...