Weekly Short Stories: 1981 Science Fiction, Part 4

Today concludes my examination of some of the choice 1981 science fiction short stories as they appeared in editor Donald A. Wollheim's anthology The 1982 Annual World's Best SF, featuring his selections from the preceding year.  One of these days I'm going to need to make up a list of my all-time favorite short stories...most of them I think will be either from Wollheim's series, which covered the years 1964-89, or that of Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg, which featured tales from 1939 through 1963.  Well, here are my reactions to the final two '81 stories from the book...

THROUGH ALL YOUR HOUSES WANDERING by Ted Reynolds

This novella consists of a man's succession of telepathic communion with other species across vast expanses of space as his consciousness enters their bodies and experiences how they live their respective lives...each time for two hours before briefly returning to his laboratory.  His colleagues are skeptical of his recollections, some thinking that he has gone insane.  But at the end he puts it all together, and with an unexpected twist on astrology.  Funny, but this story reminded me of an old SpongeBob SquarePants episode where the title character invades the dreams of his fellow ocean-bottomers...

THE LAST DAY OF CHRISTMAS by David J. Lake

An interesting story written by an Australian, centered around that country.  A mysterious young Australian man has developed a special perfume that brings out sexual urges from anyone smelling it...the resulting complete transformation of human society horrifies him and he works to remedy his mistake.  But who is this guy really and what is his agenda?  The ending reminded me of Agent Smith's conversation with Morpheus in the Matrix movie...

Next week I begin my look at science fiction short stories from the year 1982...

Gainesville Bookstores of the Past

I'm sitting here reminiscing on Gainesville bookstores from years gone by...there have been a lot of them and some were outstanding.  Funny, though, although with audio media, phonograph records went through a number of digitilizations, first with compact discs and then to MP3 and now streaming, printed material is taking a while being synchronized with our computer era.  Sure, Kindle is prospering and it's easy getting books on it...that is, if they are still in print.  Unfortunately, most of the ones out of print are unavailable in the digital era and you have to get the hard copy to read them.  Amazon has largely supplanted local used bookstores as a source of these old books, but as one who likes to browse shelves and pick up books and leaf through them, it falls short in that respect. In Gainesville, we still have some bookstores, but I remember times when there were some awfully good ones, like...

Book Gallery---This store, the "original" Book Gallery until it spun off into Book Gallery West on NW 16th Blvd (that one still stands), was in the Publix shopping center on N. Main St. between 10th and 16th Avenues.  In the late 80's we'd go there as our number one source of used books...the used book collection was vast.

Goering's---Situated on the NW corner of University Avenue and 13th Street, it was loaded with all sorts of books and magazines, one of my favorite browsing spots.  Before the building was torn down for construction, they had opened a second store further west on University past 34th Street but both closed down.

Gainesville Book Company---Located in the industrial park on NW 97th Blvd off 39th Avenue, this small shop was loaded with ultra-cheap used books...I especially liked the science fiction collection and bought many of the Stephen King books I would read through this period during the 2000's decade.  They were open every other weekend.

Borders---A huge store with new books now occupied by the equally-excellent DSW shoe store on Newberry Road near I-75, I loved browsing through it and found some excellent puzzle books...and got hooked on the Magicians series by Lev Grossman.  They also had a great CD and DVD collection as well as a big coffee shop/sitting area.

Media Play---Across from K-Mart off Newberry Road just west of the Interstate, this store...like Borders...featured books, CDs and DVDs.

Barnes and Nobles---On Archer Road right near the also-now-defunct Atlanta Bread Company...where I used to hang out for their excellent coffee and sitting area, I spent a good amount of time here.  B&N has their own "Kindle", which they call "Nook".  My take on the two is that until out-of-print books are available on them, then they are going to continue to be secondary to hard copy books.

The Florida Bookstore---Right across from the University of Florida campus on University Avenue, it was a primary supplier of textbooks, class material and school supplies.  Of course, other companies have sprung up in the area to replace it, but I wish this one was still there.  Once it briefly had a second outlet on SW 34th Street, but now there's a Sherwin Williams paint store at that spot.

The "First" Books-a-Million---Replacing the Skeeters restaurant on NW 13th Street, Books-a-Million was my primary stopping place before my graveyard shift job in the 1990s...I'd always get the flavored coffee of the day and then browse around.  I read the first four Harry Potter books sitting in there, a few pages at the time, as well as some others.  It's been replaced by the used bookstore 2nd and Charles and still has an outlet on Newberry Road near the Oaks mall.

Walden and B.Dalton at the Oaks Mall...I usually didn't go to these unless I happened to be walking through the mall on other business, but they were always fun to stop at and browse.

Archer Square bookstore...I don't remember this business's name, but it was in the Archer Square shopping center on Archer Road just west of 34th Street that featured a Winn-Dixie and Tony and Pat's Pizza, along with a kiddie's place called Fun Factory.  It was in the 1980s and I would walk across the field from my nearby apartment and browse around...it was here that I bought my first Isaac Asimov sci-fi anthology paperbacks.

Westgate Plaza used bookstore...I don't remember this one's name either, but they had a great selection of books...I bought Frank Herbert's entire Dune series here.  Now the whole plaza, along SW 34th Street just south of University Avenue, has been demolished and is being rebuilt, but the bookstore left a while ago.

I'm sure I'll think of more, but it's kind of sad to see these fine establishments come and go...they deserved better...

   

Rob Dial's Podcast Discusses Overthinking

The other day on the Mindset Mentor podcast I listen to regularly, host Rob Dial discussed how folks tend to overthink, and he suggested a constructive way of looking at it: we are not our thoughts.  That tends to conflict with the commonly held view that people's learning, experiences and accomplishments define them.  For me, I've long had this notion of separating the "I" as a separate identity from how I mentally process my ideas and experiences...unfortunately, whenever I bring this up in conversation with others I get nowhere.  I even wrote about it many years ago on this blog and got an angry response from an old high school buddy of mind who got the idea somehow that because he was good in mathematics then that made him an expert in everything else...that's like some I know who are under the impression that, because they have money and/or worldly status, this makes them somehow more spiritual than me.  Both cases are examples of people who confuse who they are with external manifestations of their lives...and that includes their thoughts.  Dial encourages us to do what I believe is called "mindfulness" at various points of our day: whatever we're doing, wherever we are, stop and get notice of what is around us, even to the point of noticing things we'd discard as irrelevant to our functioning.  This, he maintains, will help to turn our often-wayward thinking back to our control instead of it controlling us as it often does.  The particular show I listened to also brought to mind how I can often over-analyze situations and scenarios to the point where I'm too discouraged to even engage in them...enough is enough with that...

Just Finished Reading Maui Murder by Jasmine Webb

A couple of days ago Maui Murder, Jasmine Webb's second installment in her Charlotte Gibson mystery book series, became available to me through my library and I wasting no time checking it out and reading it.  I like the earthy, irreverent 30-year old protagonist "Charlie", who has fled back to her home island in Hawai'i after shooting a gangland robber of a Seattle bank where she was employed.  Now she works at an ice cream shop...when not taking on murder mysteries, that is.  In this story Jo, a young woman, has been killed and found in the ocean...her bereaved father, hearing of Charlie's success at solving the last murder, is offering her $100,000 to go after Jo's killer.  Without going into plot details, she enlists the aid of familiar characters like her best friend Zoe and septuagenarian women Dot and Rosie while crossing paths with the cops and having to deal with her loving, but sometime overbearing mother.  My only problem with Jasmine Webb's writing as Charlie interviews Jo's coworkers at her software development company or encounters her ex-boyfriend is that men tend to be treated as stupid, sexist creeps while the women are smarter and much more socially enlightened.  I noticed this some in her first book, but now it's forming an unpleasant pattern...still, I plan to continue reading this entertaining series when the next book is available as Charlotte Gibson will no doubt encounter a fresh set of male idiots...

Ongoing Beijing Olympics to Me a Big Yawn

I'm guessing that if you grew up in the north (or far south of the Equator) you may be much more acquainted with the various sports comprising the Winter Olympics...you may even have participated in some of them.  For me, I grew up in the Miami vicinity of southern Florida, far away from ice and snow and mountain slopes.  I have never skied, ice skated, snowboarded, ridden on a bobsled or luge, played ice hockey or curling...or any of the other peculiar areas spotlighted every four years, often in a country loaded with its own controversies.  In 2022 the Winter Olympics are being held in Beijing, China...causing objections from others concerned about what they consider to be human rights violations in that nation.  The network presenting them, NBC this time around, usually focuses on the Americans there with the greatest chances of winning medals, I guess they expect me to root for them...after I figure out what the heck they're supposed to be trying to do!  Since I usually don't watch NBC very much anyway...or CBS, ABC and FOX for that matter...I won't be missing preempted shows I normally would have been watching.  At least last summer during the Tokyo Olympics they had sports I could relate to, several of them from personal experience.  Oh well, the Winter version will be over before I know it and I am supremely confident that I will carry with me few, if any, substantial memories of it...

Quote of the Week...from Brian Flores

God has gifted me with a special talent to coach the game of football, but the need for change is bigger than my personal goals.                                             ---Brian Flores

As I wrote a few days ago, I was greatly dismayed at the announcement that three-year Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores was being fired following his second straight winning season...the first time that's happened with this franchise since 2003...and winning five games in 2019, a year the team was widely expected to go winless after it had deliberately divested itself of its star players. And it was that 2019 season that soured Dolphins owner Stephen Ross, an incredibly wealthy New York real estate magnate (~$70 billion), to prematurely end Flores' tenure.  You see, Ross, who apparently holds no appreciation for the sanctity and dignity of the game and doesn't care about Dolphins ticket holders who shell out their money and attend games expecting a reasonable effort from their team, WANTED Miami to tank that year in order to pick up star quarterback Joe Burrow in the next year's draft. Earlier this week Flores announced he is suing the National Football League, the Miami Dolphins and two other NFL franchises for racial discrimination as well as what he alleges Ross offered him in 2019: $100,000 for each game he lost...Flores did NOT give in to this affront to the game's integrity and instead inspired his players to play beyond their talent level.  The lawsuit is designed to be class-action, apparently intended for others to come forward with their own stories about racial bias and abuse with coaching in this league. One ex-coach, Hue Jackson, has already stepped forward, claiming that while coaching the Cleveland Browns that club's owner paid him the same hundred grand for losing games. Also, after Flores was fired, he applied for an open head coaching job for the New York Giants...they scheduled an interview but before that happened, he discovered that the team had already decided on another candidate and that HIS interview was only a cynical formality to comply with the 2003 Rooney Rule that mandated teams have at least one minority candidate interview for vacant coaching positions.  Brian Flores alleges discrimination in NFL coaching hiring...the figures confirm his stance since the number of black head coaches in this 32-team league has dwindled in 18 years from 3 to just 1 while the vast majority of players in the league are African American.  But noting disturbing trends and relating an unprovable conversation may not be enough to convince a civil court of one's allegations, however compelling they might be.  Still, for my part I believe Brian Flores is a man of integrity...and Stephen Ross is quite the opposite.  May the good guy win this time around...and that Flores will continue to be able to exercise his obvious coaching gifts in the future.  But I don't think I'll ever again be willing to follow the Miami Dolphins while this amoral and manipulative owner is running things...

Just Finished Reading Aloha Alibi by Jasmine Webb

Before checking out the short novel Aloha Alibi by Jasmine Webb from my library I had never heard the term "cozy mystery" before, but now that I've read it I'm pretty sure about what this subgenre of mystery fiction is all about...and I like it.  Aloha Alibi, published just this past year, is billed as the first book in the Charlotte Gibson Mysteries series...but this author is really churning out the books, with the fourth one already coming out this year! Charlotte "Charlie" Gibson is a young adult millennial, an intelligent underachiever in school who works at a jewelry store in Seattle when it is robbed one day, the criminal being a hood from an area crime family.  Forced to shoot dead the man who is about to kill her, she has to flee to her childhood home on Maui, Hawaii after his brothers swear vengeance.  There she lives with her doting mother (who is always trying to get her to sleep with men to produce grandchildren), gets a job at an ice cream store, is reacquainted with her old school friend Zoe (now a doctor) and of course gets embroiled in a murder mystery.  Along with two eccentric, but highly capable and shrewd elderly ladies who are vying with her for the reward money, Charlotte dives into the case...since this is "Book One" in the series you can surmise that she survives it all.  Aside from the mystery itself, I was charmed by the social interplay between the characters, giving the story a very warm and funny aura that attracted me to the characters...I could especially relate to Charlotte's early adult struggles with economic independence.  When the next Charlotte Gibson mystery is available from my library for me to read (I just put it on hold), I'll continue with this series, which I recommend as fun, "cozy" reading....

Weekly Short Stories: 1981 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I look at three more science fiction short stories from 1981 as they appeared in editor Donald A. Wollheim's anthology The 1982 Annual World's Best SF with his picks from the previous year.  My song of the year in '81 was the huge Kim Carnes summer hit Bette Davis Eyes.  To me, Hall and Oates hit their peak this year with three songs: Kiss on My List, Private Eyes, and I Can't Go for That.  Rush's masterpiece album Moving Pictures also came out in 1981 (with the songs Tom Sawyer, Red Barchetta, Limelight and Vital Signs) as well as the Moody Blues' comeback LP Long Distance Voyager with its superb track Gemini Dream.  I could go on and on about the great music back then, but I'd better get back to reviewing these stories... 

OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE by James Tiptree, Jr.

This novella gets a little creepy as an incorporeal alien being, while fleeing an equally incorporeal alien predator, descends on Earth and splits its consciousness among three people: a business leader father, his baby daughter and his secretary.  The three, although still ostensibly "themselves", nevertheless seem to make their respective life decisions in a strange kind of harmony that ultimately leads to the story's climax surrounding a massive block of ice in the ocean.  I didn't dig the notion of possession by another entity, but maybe some whose religious beliefs entertain this idea might go for it. On a more general level, though, it does give food for thought: are my opinions and hunches my own, or am I being manipulated through the media and news according to someone else's agenda? 

SLAC// by Michael P. Kube-McDowell

A human exploratory party is on a distant planet to establish communications and relations with a humanoid species there...but their language in places is difficult to translate, eventually putting the party in peril.  The story's title is actually their name for the flying predator/enemy they must contend with...only what is the true nature of "Slac//"?  An examination of our tendency to ascribe intelligence to other species based on their similarities to our own instead of more objective factors...

THE CYPHERTONE by S.C. Sykes

If you had never read the wonderful-but-disturbing 1943 Lewis Padgett story Mimsy Were the Borogoves before reading Sykes' much-too-similar tale, I think you'd like this story of a boy who becomes addicted to a computer game...it certainly captures the way a video game can take hold of someone to the point where they can't stop playing.  The father detects something wrong...his son's personality and outlook is drastically changing...and he knows it's this game he's playing making it happen.  My suggestion: read Mimsy Were the Borogoves first...it's a lot better and more profound, and The Cyphertone strikes me as a major ripoff...

Next week I finish my look at 1981 in short science fiction...

My January 2022 Running and Walking Report

In January, 2022 I ran a total of 150 miles, missing but two days running out of the month with 10 miles being my longest single run.  With walking I covered 130 miles in the same time span, most of it coming from walking back and forth over the course of my normal work day.  I had planned to enter and run a couple of races in January, but very cold mornings on race day during the past three weeks presented a most unattractive picture to me and I demurred, waiting for a more auspicious, warmer time in the future (maybe this Saturday).  I feel pretty good about my running progress so far and look forward to continuing at about the same intensity as I have for the past two months.  Aside from the free, weekly Depot Park 5K held every Saturday morning here in Gainesville, I am seriously considering running the Five Points Half-Marathon on Sunday, February 20th...if the weather cooperates, that is...

About Responsibility for Other People's Experiences

If we're fair to those we love, we will take our own past experiences into account before passing judgment on what they say and do.  These experiences overwhelmingly affect our beliefs, morals, and personal philosophy and those of others are bound to be different from ours.  So spoke Rob Dial in a recent of his Mindset Mentor podcasts...beyond being true to ourselves and behaving in a charitable and decent manner, we are indeed NOT responsible for what others think of us since they are doing so by filtering us through their own experiences.  It gets more convoluted, though.  Dial quotes American socialist Charles Cooley, "I am not who I think I am, I am not who you think I am...I am who I think you think I am".  As social herd creatures we tend to act (or not act) according to how we perceive others reacting to what we do.  But there is no way we can do (or not do) anything without some people objecting and criticizing us.  Better to go back and just be true to our own values and goals and let the chips fall where they may.  It's been my experience that most folks will adapt themselves to accommodate others' quirks and differing beliefs...conformity for its own sake is a death trap spiral.  And deliberately hiding our own talents in the presence of others just to "fit it" is a symptom of this destructive belief pattern.  Time to redefine who "I am" by filtering out our perceived impressions, real or imagined, of how others might define us according to factors in their own experiences of which even they might be unaware... 

Just Finished Reading Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

English author Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein ushered in an era of horror/science fiction writing that still continues today.  In it an ambitious young scientist relates to an English explorer, who has rescued him in the frigid far north, his tragic story of creating a brand new human being...then abandoning him in horror and leaving him to fend for himself, ostracized as a terrifying-looking monster by those encountering him.  Victor Frankenstein's creation isn't far off visually from his depiction in the movies, but unlike the film versions, the Frankenstein monster in Shelley's original account has two years to learn English quite well and has developed a sophisticated worldview, albeit one steeped in offense and desire for revenge.  The Mel Brooks comedy Young Frankenstein is a takeoff of the old Boris Karloff movie and not of the book, which spends little time in the laboratory...and there's no "Igor" here.  Shelley seems to have used this story to illustrate how people are unfairly categorized and stigmatized and not given an equal chance to pursue their own lives of happiness and prosperity, a more general social commentary than shown on the big screen.  Dr. Frankenstein creates his human as a science project but never acknowledges that humanity...he is the story's true villain as the "monster", never shown any level of love or acceptance in his brief life, cannily turns rejection into murderous vengeance against his creator.  A sad story, but one very well written and eye-opening...I wish they had made a movie truer to this excellent book, which I have to admit that I liked a lot more than Bram Stoker's Dracula, which I also recently read...

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...