A Visit to the Dentist...and Starbucks

After my (ugh) teeth-cleaning procedure yesterday morning I thought I'd reward myself for having survived it all by going a few blocks down 13th Street and getting an iced coffee from Starbucks...but no, that outlet is often backed up to the street with its drive-through line, clogging up the parking lot even for those like me who prefer to drink their coffee on-site.  So, I instead went to my familiar Starbucks haunt, a store that's been there since 2000 and never converted to one with a drive-through.  I understand the Starbucks Corporation's policy about rebuilding and moving existing stores to ones with that option for customers...I'd do it, too if I were in their shoes.  But my preference has always been for coffee shops WITHOUT drive-throughs, and I bemoan the loss of several Starbucks that, in the past, I had frequented and spent time studying and enjoying the ambiance.  I miss the ones in Tioga, Hunter's Crossing, Newberry Road (near the Royal Park Cinema), Archer and 34th, and 13th Street and 16th Avenue...these five were great places to visit and were highly popular. I have always enjoyed hanging out in coffee shops and have found their slightly nerve-wracking public surroundings an excellent setting for energizing my mind and focusing my thoughts on creative writing and introspection.  I'm writing this article in that favorite Starbucks in NW Gainesville's Magnolia Parke...may it never close down!  Before Starbucks arrived in my hometown, I often used to go to Krispy Kreme on NW 13th Street and 3rd Avenue, close to the University of Florida campus...I just got a gift card for KK so maybe I should check them out again.  I've also been in the habit of going to fast food places and just ordering a coffee, accomplishing the same thing for less money than at Starbucks.  I've tried this at my public library...it's just not the same.  As for that teeth-cleaning, in the past I had always regarded visiting the dentist's office as a traumatic experience...this time, though, using Eckhart Tolle's principles of think-less/observe-more from his book The Power of Now, I mentally sank into the background and put my old thought reactions on hold during the procedure.  It worked, producing the most pleasant dental visit I've had in quite a while...if you can really properly place the words "pleasant" and "dental visit" together in the same sentence. Also, the experience of open-heart surgery the previous July...along with the following two-week hospital stay and subsequent weeks-long recovery period...puts relatively minor things like a simple teeth-cleaning appointment into sharper perspective...

Weekly Short Stories: 1983 Science Fiction, Part 1

Today I start reviewing science fiction short stories from the year 1983 as they appeared in Donald A. Wollheim's anthology The 1984 Annual World's Best SF, featuring the editor's picks from that genre for the previous year.  In '83 I was living a frugal, single life in Gainesville as a cook in a local Chinese restaurant, studying foreign languages on the side like Chinese, Vietnamese, and Japanese...almost a monastic kind of existence, looking back on it.  This was also the year in which the Nuclear Freeze movement took off in Europe, while a very important TV movie on nuclear war was shown here in the States: The Day After.  More on this special year next week...right now let's a take a look at those stories...

BLOOD MUSIC by Greg Bear

Predating the late Michael Crichton's interesting novel Prey on a similar theme by nineteen years, this story examines a scenario in which nanotechnology merges with microbiological synthesis to produce an unseen world within one's body that works much faster than does evolutionary change in modifying and "improving" it.  An employee at a company researching such stuff foolishly injects himself with some of the microscopic, synthesized protein material and the change begins to happen...what an ending!

POTENTIAL by Isaac Asimov

It seems that supercomputers have the capacity for breaking down the myriad sections within the human genome to find that which predicts telepathic abilities.  The government's top-secret espionage section is naturally interested in this and discovers that an Iowan teenage boy may well be endowed with such talent.  They visit, interview and test him...tough luck, guess they were wrong.  When they leave, he breathes a sigh of relief...then realizes that they had been mistakenly trying to see if he could read other people's minds... 

KNIGHT OF SHALLOWS by Rand B. Lee

This tale is a look at the world worlds of alternate universes, and it seems that there are certain individuals who have the ability (or curse) to travel in and out of them, each universe containing a different version of that person.  The story's protagonist is one of these and his subsequent adventures have him searching through wildly divergent realities for a murderer (an alternate self), who kills other alternate selves...while our hero collaborates with yet another alternate self.  All within a few blocks in Key West, Florida, centered around a bar.  Intriguing...and a little funny, too...

SPENDING A DAY AT THE LOTTERY FAIR by Frederik Pohl

This brief story, similar in theme to Shirley Jackson's famous 1948 short story The Lottery, takes place in a future of overpopulation as each nation on Earth takes its own path in dealing with it.  In America they hold fancy festivals involving lotteries...but a small percentage of the entrants will die while few believe their "number" will come up because of the low odds.  Yet in this story all abortion and birth control have been banned...while killing off little children in the lottery is okay.  Ultimately, this is a tale indicting the ongoing politics about abortion, with the author siding with those complaining how many of the "pro-lifers" lose interest in the lives they want to protect after birth occurs...

Next week I continue looking at the year 1983 as it pertained to short science fiction...

Just Finished Reading A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

A Beautiful Mind, published in 1998, is Sylvia Nasar's biography of American mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. (1928-2015).  It is better known for its 2002 Ron Howard-directed movie adaptation with the same title, starring Russell Crowe as Nash and which won the Academy Award for best picture that year.  Yet the movie diverges in major ways from the book that took me aback.  In both versions we are presented with the life story of a brilliant, accomplished academic whose young adult life was turn upside-down...as well as that of his loved ones...when he became afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia.  The film version, however, takes great liberties with Nasar's account, weaving its own imaginary tale about John Nash suffering from visual hallucinations (which he didn't) and imaginary friends and foes (again, he didn't).  According to the book, in the late 1950s Nash began to have grandiose delusions of his role in the world with conspiracy theories abounding...in today's dumbass world that would have got him elected president but back then it just got him committed...and released...and committed...and released.  Ron Howard's movie makes the story of Nash's life very compact and simple, omitting the Noble Prize-winning mathematician's earlier affair and love child, for which he denied financial support.  It also omitted the fact that even following his mental breakdown he continued to produce mathematical works, many of which Nasar bravely attempted to describe for us nonmathematical readers: in the film you'd think that all he did of significance was that prize-winning paper on economic equilibrium.  The book and the film each sought to sell a narrative about the life of John Forbes Nash, Jr., but even though the print version was obviously closer to the truth about him, by its very structure and nature it was still far from what really happened.  A life is lived one minute, one hour...one day at a time and attempts to make a narrative tale out of it that conforms to traditional storytelling patterns is bound to distort it.  Although I found the movie version to be much more suspenseful, endearing and entertaining (I even bought the DVD), it's a bit unsettling to see how far it diverged from the true life of this extraordinary and flawed human being after reading Sylvia Nasar's excellent account.  If you saw the film...or didn't, for that matter...A Beautiful Mind will be a great ride through history...not only of one special individual's life, but also of the social and historical context in which he lived.  Sadly, in 2015 both John Nash and his wife Alicia perished in an auto crash in Newark after returning from Norway, where he had been honored with an academic prize...he was 86... 

I got two significant take-aways from the book and film.  One is that it's not prudent to automatically accept the truth and accuracy of a work's narrative and characterizations, just because the author or producer claims it to be nonfiction or based on real events: the very nature of the story structure with the presentation of a moral theme and the aim to be interesting is bound to twist it.  Two is that I think almost all of us, like Nash, believe in nonsensical, irrational...and sometimes farfetched ideas but that for "healthy" people they understand the extreme nature of those beliefs and thereby tend to avoid communicating them to others...unlike Nash, whose narcissistic sense of self-importance precluded this.  But if within society certain wacky ideas seem to become more mainstream then an explosion can ensue with masses of the population expressing adherence to them...do you know what I'm talking about?

Podcaster Rob Dial Lays Out Some Thoughts for Pursuing Goals

A recent episode of Rob Dial's Mindset Mentor podcast had the title How to Turn Your Life Around, but its theme was more precise: how to pursue goals to successful outcomes.  He starts out by acknowledging the current world of instant gratification where someone can just pick up the phone and get most anything promptly delivered...or flick on the TV and choose from an incredibly wide variety of programming.  But making progress in our personal lives still takes time.  And going in the right direction.  And planning.  Dial quoted a motivational guru, Tony Robbins, who said that people overestimate what they can do in a year but underestimate what they can do in a decade.  Instead of expecting success to happen quickly and then becoming discouraged when it probably doesn't, it's better not to hurry but consistently work toward the objectives in the right direction.  And to assure that correct direction, it is necessary to know...as precisely as possible...where in their lives people want to be, say, five or ten years in the future...along with the even bigger picture of the end of their lives.  So, some serious, concentrated soul-searching is in order, as well as the need to sit down with pen and paper and start planning out the strategy to achieve the arrived-at goals.  And the host adds (a bit more colorfully than me), that failure is not messing up...it's a part of the success process...it's giving up that causes failure.  I like how Rob Dial distills and expresses stuff I already knew, but in a more organized, systematic form that I can refer back to...this episode should help me as I figure some things out...

Interesting Pro Golf Tourney in Orlando Today on NBC

Call it "Arnie's Revenge" if you like, but this year's PGA Arnold Palmer Invitational, played at the Bay Hill course near Universal Studios and Walt Disney World west of Orlando, has turned into one of the more interesting and entertaining tournaments I've watched over the past few weeks.  Generally noted for scores well under par, this year it seems that the winds are playing havoc with the golfers...as well as very treacherous putting greens.  I don't think I've ever witnessed so many missed short putts as well as putts shot too hard past the hole.  The leaderboard has been in continual flux as the tournament draws to its close.  It looked like Viktor Hovland at one point was going to run away with it, but his putting woes gave him two consecutive bogies.  Then Scottie Sheffler, who won a tourney just a while back, surged into the lead, only to be passed by Gary Woodland when he eagled...but Woodland would fall back on just the next hole with a double bogey.  The tournament was renamed in 2017 after Arnold Palmer, who passed away the previous year.  Palmer was known for his expressive antics when he missed important putts in years gone by...I've seen quite a few grimaces and head shaking today from pros who seem completely mystified by the tricky slopes presenting by the putting greens.  Yet Tiger Woods won this tournament eight times between 2000 and 2013.  It's showing right now on NBC...I really don't care who wins it, but I want to see how they accomplish it.  Sheffler is the only golfer among the leaders in today's final round that I know of, but I'm gradually accumulating a list in my memory of several golfers over the weeks as Sunday afternoon golf is becoming a regular TV habit of mine...

My Depot Park 5K "Non-Run" This Morning

I deliberately woke up at 6 this morning, making a pot of coffee and checking to see whether I really was going to drive out to Depot Park and run one of their weekly 5K (3.1 miles) races they hold there on Saturdays at 7:30.  After a few minutes of self-assessment I decided to go back to bed...and woke up a little past ten.   It's a bit ironic, I think, that finally after having worked on my off day for several Saturdays in a row that on the morning of one in which I am truly off from work all day I would choose to sleep in...you might think that I'd be more inclined to stay in bed on other Saturday mornings, seeing that I get off from work Friday nights at 10 and sometimes get overtime up to midnight.  But it's how the mind interprets situations, not the situations themselves, that determines one's course of action and here I am, late in the morning and that dang race has gone by me for another week.  The weather was forecast to be great, in the low 50s...a Goldilocks Zone for runners like me...but I might have put too much pressure on myself for considering trying to set a personal record with today's race instead of treating it as a "cover the distance" training run as I had for the previous ones.  There's another opportunity next Saturday morning for a Depot Parkrun, as they like to call it, and then looms on the 19th a ten-mile run in the wilderness south of Micanopy held by the Florida Track Club...that will most definitely be a purely "cover the distance" event...

Quote of the Week...from President Biden

The State of the Union is strong...because you, the American people, are strong.  We are stronger today than we were a year ago...and we will be stronger a year from now than we are today.

                                                  ---Joseph Biden, President of the United States

So concluded our president in his first State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress this past Tuesday evening.  Although I did not watch it, I later heard that it was widely regarded by the American public in a positive light, garnering a 78% approval rating in one poll.  He touched among a number of topics, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, infrastructure, voting rights, climate change and inflation.  His delivery from the highlights I did see later seemed good and he had a natural kind of folksiness that Democrats hadn't seen from one of their presidents since Clinton in the 1990s.  But his above quote, which he made at the end of his speech...while sounding appropriately optimistic in the setting of any State of the Union address...did not ring true to my ears.  I don't agree that the state of our union is strong.  Fascism is on the sharp rise, with a frightening level of the electorate poised to endorse their own party's overturning of any election result not going their way.  The cult personality worship of an incredibly flawed, authoritarian individual, namely Donald Trump, just won't go away as we approach the 2022 midterm elections in which he stands to gain de facto control of Congress if Democratic voters do what they are known to do every time they elect a president of their own party...which is to sit out the following election and passively allow the Republicans to win control of Congress and state governments.  And in light of the Covid-19 pandemic that has devastated our country (and the world) over the past two years, it has been very dismaying for me to witness the utter selfishness and disregard for public health on the part of such a broad swath of our population as they refused to wear masks in public or even vaccinate against this scourge that has to date killed nearly a million people so far in our country alone and caused many, many more long-term health problems.  Issues like global warming and racial reconciliation are now being treated as highly controversial by a major political party as we find ourselves as a country receding into backwardness, with anti-science and prejudice on the upsurge.  And people now tend to seek out the news sources that are biased to fit their own preconceived views while mass and social media accommodate this increasing refusal to face the reality of what is going on around them...

So no, Mr. President, although I support you and want you to succeed, I'm afraid and sad to say that it's we, the American people, who are going to let you down as we continue to slip further and further into weakness, not strength.  Sorry for the downer today, but I'm just calling it as I see it...you and Jill are still welcome to come over for some coffee and chat...

Music and Math, the Beatles and John Nash...and "Community"

I'm currently in the middle of two different projects, both concerning highly talented and competent people and their working relationships within their respective crafts.  One you already know about if you've been reading this blog: I'm watching the film version of the Beatles and their January 1969 "Let It Be" sessions that Peter Jackson has re-edited and renamed Get Back: it's being shown on the Disney Plus channel, to which I subscribe.  The other is the 1998 Sylvia Nasar biography of American mathematician John Nash, titled A Beautiful Mind and adapted as an Oscar-winning Ron Howard movie four years later.  In both works we get a glimpse into the interpersonal dynamics of those at the top of their respective professions and how the love of what they do often gets greatly distorted by their egos, jealousies, intrigues, suspicion and vendettas.  I don't think this sort of social dysfunction is just a trait of the highly adept and accomplished...I remember in high school how, within certain circles, the same situations arose between students.  And to be perfectly honest...in other social settings I've in which I've found myself as an adult...I've seen the same destructive kind of behavior.  Yet I'm continually being encouraged to seek "community" in relationships with others, something that not only I instinctively resist as a bona fide lifelong introvert but have also bitterly learned tends to be more harmful to me than keeping mostly to myself.  They say the mark of insanity is to keep repeating the same thing and expect different outcomes...I've seen enough in my life over the decades to be distrustful of "community". When I was in school and was found to excel in a subject or course, inevitably the faculty would take me out of my preferred setting where I was better than my fellow students and lump me in with the other "high achievers", immediately thereby canceling out the good feeling I had developed before from working so hard.  Likewise, I imagine that's how some of the musicians and mathematicians felt when in the immediate company of the standouts in their respective fields.  Unfortunately, although it seemed that those portrayed in the film and book seemed to love their work for its own sake, their primary motivation was to be seen as the "top dog" and universally acknowledged to be superior to their colleagues. I'm like this myself, but only to a point...I mainly just want to be considered as a legitimate player.  But it can get to be a little spiritually deflating to be in a field in which, by almost anyone else's standards I am very competent with even a history of achievements but not even recognized as an equal by others within my circle of interests...George Harrison would have understood this only too well as this accomplished and very creative musical artist sat for years, almost as an extra, across from John Lennon and Paul McCartney.  Also, in watching the Beatles film and reading the Nash book I noticed that these people's lives and their choices of projects seemed very chaotic...almost random, as if they were going about their business and relationships like pinballs in a machine, bouncing off one experience into another.  I wonder whether this was really what happened, or was an effect created by the stories' authors and editors.  After all, with both the Beatles and John Nash we have two different versions shaped and presented by third parties according to their own agendas...their real lives were most likely quite different.  Yet one truth did come out: the almost nauseating tendency of people to obsess about establishing hierarchical pecking orders among themselves whenever they meet and engage in "community"...

Weekly Short Stories: 1982 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I finish examining some 1982 science fiction short stories as they appeared in the anthology The 1983 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and featuring his choices from the preceding year.  I remember 1982 as the first year I really paid deep attention to Major League Baseball by watching it on TV: the Atlanta Braves were featured on Ted Turner's Superstation WTBS and I followed their Cinderella season with manager Joe Torre, finally rising from obscurity in the National League West with stars like Dale Murphy, Bob Horner and Phil Niekro to win that division by a game over Tommy Lasorda's Los Angeles Dodgers...a terrible late-season slump by the Braves had made it much closer than it might have been.  Well, here are my reactions to those final three tales in the book...

SOULS by Joanna Russ

Many hundreds of years ago a European abbey is besieged by a group of barbaric, conquering Normans, but the abbess in charge attempts to save her own people by offering the invaders a special deal, promising riches that they couldn't imagine as long as they refrain from violence.  Over the course of the narrative, it becomes clear that she is something quite beyond who she is pretending to be, in this world but not of it.  This novella reportedly was only a part of a larger work, but editor Wollheim included it in his anthology...to me it was only marginally science fiction...

SWARM by Bruce Sterling

In the future what is left of humanity is divided in a life and death struggle between the Mechanists who control the asteroids and the Reshaped, who dwell out by Saturn's rings. An agent of the latter is on a mission to a special star system populated by a swarm of highly interconnected organisms...he wants to take their genetics and generate a force of slave labor for his own people.  The unexpected ending is profound and sadly timely, reflecting on mankind's self-destructive nature through war. When this came out, the Cold War was ramping up again...and now with the invasion of Ukraine, here we go again...

PEG-MAN by Rudy Rucker

Reading like a couple of South Park episodes I know, a woman's husband has become something of a video game addict where he works as an arcade mechanic.  Only he claims there is more to his favorite game, "Peg-Man", than it seems. One day she and her old calculus professor pay him a visit at his workplace...like I said, it's like South Park (especially that fifth-season episode with Towelie and the Crab People)...

Next week I'll begin looking at 1983 science fiction short stories...

My February 2022 Running and Walking Report

In February I ran on all the days of the month, totaling 154 miles with the 13.1 mile Five Points of Life half-marathon (in Gainesville) on the 20th being my longest single run.  In the same span I walked a total of 105 miles.  With races, along with that half-marathon I ran a Depot Parkrun 5K (3.1 miles) race on the 12th.  My times for the half-marathon and 5K race were 2:33:51 and 31:28, respectively.  I feel that this past month has been very encouraging with my running, and in March I intend to enter a couple more races, one being for 5K and the other 10 miles.  Besides that, I'm wondering whether or not to speed-walk one Depot Parkrun 5K per month...they hold these races weekly and they're free. I'm also considering possibly adding swimming to my exercise routine...I'll need to first work things out with the gym of which I am a member... 

Podcast Presents 7 Ideas for Increasing Focus on Tasks

On his Mindset Mentor podcast, Rob Dial recently gave a talk on some of the ways he thinks will help anyone focus more on whatever tasks they deem necessary...he has seven.  The first is to stay away from your phone, an incredibly distracting device: I wonder if some folks are capable of that, as addicted they are to it.  Two, "prepare the brain"...the mind is resistant to a change in focus. Dial suggests some breathing exercises as well as a brief, light transitional activity leading into the task.  Three, eliminate distractions from others by communicating with them (if possible) the need for you to be alone for a little while, and physically isolate yourself by going into another room and closing the door.  Four, Rob Dial opposes multitasking as a general principle because it dilutes the effectiveness and focus of the involved activities and produces less progress and more slipshod results.  Five, keep a notepad with you at all times in order to quickly jot down any significant ideas that come into your head that may be unrelated to what you're trying to accomplish right now...otherwise they tend to play around in your mind, offering distraction.  Six, Dial recommends putting on headphones and playing long tracks of instrumental music to blot out incidental noises that might interfere with concentration.  Finally, he advocates the Pomodoro Technique, in which one works with focus on something for 25 minutes and then takes 5 minutes completely off-task...and then returns to work for another 25 minutes as the cycle continues: this is supposed to be more effective than simply working straight though a task.  As for me, I agree with Rob Dial on most of his principles but have a disagreement of sorts with his exhortation to avoid multi-tasking.  From my experiences his advice is only sound when applied to two similar activities: listening to a lecture while composing a letter produces a conflict but listening to a Mindset Mentor podcast while exercising poses no problem and makes efficient use of time.  As for "preparing the brain" and using headphones more, these are probably the two suggestions I need to focus on the most...what techniques do you use to be able to concentrate better on the task at hand?

Speed Golf: A Viable Alternative to the Original Sport?

I was watching yet another PGA tournament this Sunday afternoon...with yet another group of completely different golfers vying for the title...when it occurred to me what was missing from the sport: timing, which would add more of an athletic dimension to it.  I had all the rules for this new sport worked out in my head, a kind of golf that used the same course, clubs and balls but was much faster and more action based.  And then, just before I set out to write my article on this great invention of mine, I decided to do an online search using the words "speed golf"...sure enough, it's already been invented with professional tournaments going on for ten years already.  According to "their" rules, in an 18-hole round each golfer gets the usual score of total shots, to which is added the total minutes taken to run the course...giving the final composite score.  I don't know if they time the interval between holes...I wouldn't, timing only between the tee and hole.  Also, according to "my" version, I would completely discount how many shots are taken and only go by the time taken to accomplish it...and I'd have the golfers on a particular hole all tee off and play simultaneously...no tedious breaks with players analyzing and lining up shots!  I think that adding the element of timing would make golf more similar to tennis in that the tournaments would tend to go more consistently to the sport's stars instead of being spread out so much among so many.  And, of course, I think it would be a lot more exciting to watch.  Will speed golf ever catch on as a major sport?  I don't know, but reportedly its major tournaments are shown on CBS and ESPN...next time they show one I'd like to see how they do it...

Just Finished Reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

A few weeks ago I was listening to a Rob Dial podcast in which he referenced a book titled The Power of Now but failed to mention its author.  He is Eckhart Tolle, a German metaphysical philosopher and teacher now living in Canada who published the book, full title The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, in 1997.  Reviewing it presents a sort of quandary, in that Tolle maintains that people in general place too much store in their thinking, and that what endures within ourselves is what he says is the "observer", rooted in the here and now.  One's thoughts, he believes, are just so much noise that tends to obscure our true nature. So in reviewing this book of his, I'm giving in to my thinking "self"...forgive me, dude!  The book's format is very readable, in question-and-answer dialog form as the author covers the main concerns about his philosophy, which seems to bear some resemblance to Buddhism although he claims that the kernels of all religions proclaim essential truths...you just have to know where to look for them.  That's the only part of the book I had a problem with: Tolle tends to give his own interpretation of various religions' scriptures...of course, all the references and quotes he uses conveniently fit his thesis.  Lately the notion of "mindfulness", where one pauses during his or her daily routines and worldly endeavors and focuses on what is immediately around them in the present moment, gets star billing here.   Tolle maintains that true enlightenment can only come by shedding the notions of past and future and embracing the here and now where dwells our eternal nature. There is a lot to cover for a book that forswears too much thinking, but Eckhart Tolle isn't against thinking per se...just doing so excessively to the point where one confuses their thoughts with their own true essence.  A very interesting and thoughtful book, one worth going back to but with some accompanying discernment.  A thinking person's book that eschews thinking: sounds Zen, doesn't it...

Quote of the Week...from Leslie Nielsen in the Movie Airplane!

I just want to tell you both good luck.  We're all counting on you.        ---Leslie Nielsen, Airplane!

One of my favorite movie comedies is the 1980 farce Airplane!, a satire of the preceding decade's airplane disaster flicks.  Toward the movie's end, Leslie Nielson's "And don't call me Shirley" character Dr. Rumack is trying to encourage low-confidence stand-in pilot Ted Striker (played by Robert Hays) as he and his co-pilot, flight attendant Elaine Dickenson (Julie Hagerty) try to land the stricken passenger plane safely.  He starts out with the above quote...then keeps repeating it until the plane is on the ground...and then says it again!  To me that was one of the high points of an already side-splitting movie...and the race I just ran this past Sunday reminded me of how preposterous it was.  I was running a half-marathon and had just cleared the hilliest part, with just about three miles to go as my body was aching all over and starting to run out of steam.  And that's when it started, Airplane-style, with people standing on the side of the course repeating the same mantra: "You're almost there!"  Over and over and over and over again, each of them apparently unaware that I still had quite some distance to go while repeating the same tired old line up and down the road.  Finally, just when I turned left on NW 1st Street for my final stretch run, a young woman volunteer yelled out, "You're almost there! I'm telling you the truth!"...apparently, she somehow knew that this had been going on for miles on the course.  I half-expected somebody to repeat it after I had finally crossed the finish line as Leslie Nielson did in the movie...oh well, we can't have everything!  Have you ever experienced this sort of thing, where you keep hearing the same often well-intentioned line over and over again to the point where you're just about ready to slug somebody? 

Fascist Putin, Praised by Trump, Invades Ukraine

Fascist Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, as expected for weeks, today launched his country's invasion of neighboring Ukraine as tanks are rolling in and bombs dropping across this besieged nation.  Putin's biggest American buddy, fellow fascist Donald Trump...who tried to overthrow our dearly cherished free and fair presidential election a year ago...has been full of nothing but praise for Putin, calling his Ukraine strategy of aggression "genius".  And other right-wingers, most notable among them FoxNews' Tucker Carlson, have made no secret of their unbridled support for Putin...what has my country come to?  It's true that under Vladimir Putin and his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, Russia shed its previous aggressive communist ideology in favor of social conservatism...lining themselves up nicely with the political right on several ongoing issues in America.  But don't these people see what carnage, damage and disruption this military takeover of another sovereign nation is going to cause?  This isn't like some football game with folks choosing, say, the Rams or the Bengals...this is life and death, and some of my compatriots need to get their heads screwed on right and their hearts drastically changed.  As for my own heart, it goes out to the Ukrainian people in this time of crisis and suffering...

Weekly Short Stories: 1982 Science Fiction, Part 2

Today I continue my look at some of 1982's standout science fiction short stories as they appeared in Donald A. Wollheim's anthology The 1983 Annual World's Best SF, featuring his selections from the year before.  The prevailing national mood back then was a bit somber and gloomy, what with a deep recession going on, perceived loss of American industry to Japanese exports, and a scary return to the Cold War between Reagan and Brezhnev's successor Andropov...not to mention an explosive situation developing with Lebanon's civil war in the Middle East.  But here we still are, forty years later, with me reviewing four more sci-fi short stories...

PLAYING THE GAME by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann

Jimmy Daniels is a little boy living in a small town...whenever he wakes up from sleep, he discovers he is in a different alternative reality with a different home and parents who, ostensibly the same, have different personalities, states of health, and jobs.  He seeks out the town's cemetery as one of the few places that seem the same regardless which "universe" he finds himself in.  No one around him seems to think anything is amiss, and Jimmy is careful not to let on about his different realities...one of the best really short stories I've read recently and a great ending... 

PAWN'S GAMBIT by Timothy Zahn

An advanced alien civilization, fearful of other intelligent life in their area of space developing into an aggressive threat to them, selectively abducts representative individuals from various worlds and subjects them to board games while analyzing their tactics and ways of thinking to determine their species' threat level.  An Earthman gets kidnapped as well and devises a unique strategy of saving himself as well as his fearsome opponent from another system.  I thought the author hit the mark, revealing humanity's great strength of being able to forge alliances in times of external threat...

THE COMEDIAN by Timothy Robert Sullivan

A very brief tale with a very abrupt ending, it appears that a sick serial child abductor is on the loose with seven kids already disappeared...and it increasingly looks like the man responsible is out to add to the total.  Yet from his viewpoint he is doing good and is doing the bidding of a strange shape-shifting entity who likes to impersonate famous comedians.  It all seems very sinister and dark...turns out that it IS very sinister and dark, but not at all the way the author builds it up...

WRITTEN IN WATER by Tanith Lee 

After a planet-wide plague wipes out almost every human on Earth, the only survivor is an embittered hermit of a middle-aged woman who lives her solitary daily existence as if nothing has changed.  Then one night a star falls from the sky onto the black field adjoining her home...but it is no star, but rather a young alien man.  She helps him recuperate from his shock of landing and although he does not understand her speech the two reach a state of rudimentary mutual understanding.  How the story culminates was pretty disturbing to me, and demonstrates how rigidly people can adhere to their old habitual thought patterns even in the face of cataclysmic change...  

Next week I conclude my look at science fiction short stories from 1982...

TikTok as Forum for Diverse Ideas & Opinions

I have had the short looping video app TikTok on my smartphone for a few months now, never putting out anything on my own but rather just scrolling through the randomly appearing posts of others.  My use of it reflects how I used Twitter: to get people's brief reactions to what is going on around us as well as their general philosophies of life.  Before, when I used Twitter...and social media in general...what I saw was pretty much set in advance by my choice of people I followed and was thereby inherently slanted. When I flick through video after TikTok video (I don't follow anyone or participate in their interactive options of reactions to posts), I'm getting more of a cross-section of viewpoints about most anything, but weighted heavily in favor of current events and issues.  And since the people putting out these videos are for the most part neither celebrities nor anyone I personally know, I am not having to deal with inner conflicts about those individuals whenever I happen to disagree with a posting (and that happens a lot)...I can focus on the message, not the messenger.  Some of the videos out there do stretch the standards of modesty and propriety a bit, but I suppose in a free speech environment it's better to err in that direction than in that of censorship.  Speaking of censorship, just about every mainstream social media platform practices some sort of content regulation and TikTok has its own issues as well...seems that criticism of some autocrats has been suppressed in the past and there was a recent scandal in which a site urged students to vandalize their schools.  I also know that Trump hated TikTok and wanted it banned in the United States...had it not been for him I probably wouldn't have even considered it: thanks, Donald, in a backhanded sort of way.  Is this app perfect? No way...not by far...but it is always interesting.  TikTok as I see it presented is a crazy, chaotic kind of digital bulletin board, a welcome, more grassroots kind of entertainment to check in on whenever I get tired of the contrived and narrative-driven mass media news programs I see on TV.  I'm not necessarily recommending it for you, but I've seen it as a good source for independent opinions and information...although as with everything else it's crucial to be discerning in filtering it all through and not automatically accept everything I read or hear...

Ideas for Breaking Through Mental Barriers, As Related by Rob Dial

On a recent Mindset Mentor podcast hosted by Rob Dial, he laid out three ways to break through mental barriers...and he used for an example an area with which I am only too familiar: long-distance running.  According to Dial, a noted ultra-marathon runner is asked by someone to help his friend get over his running block: he can't surpass five miles for a single run without losing his energy and needing to stop.  The "ultra" man accepts the challenge to help him out but insists that he commit himself to three things: (1) repeat to yourself "I will never quit", (2) don't give your pain a voice, and (3) continually think of things in your life that you are grateful for.  The story goes like this: on their very first run together, the friend not only breaks his five-mile barrier but runs for 100 miles!  With the repeated mantra of never quitting, Dial explains that your body responds to the voice inside your head...another example is the placebo effect in which healing occurs seemingly because the mind is convinced that the ingested "medicine" is effective for the body.  With not giving pain a voice, the point is to not to focus on things you don't want, but instead to switch to emphasizing that which you desire.  And thoughts of gratitude cause the brain to release chemicals that benefit action and reduce anxiety and discouragement.  As for me, I employed these three principles during the half-marathon yesterday...and they worked, although had I not heard this episode of Rob Dial's podcast I think I still would have done all right.  Who knows, maybe I was already practicing these suggestions, albeit in a different form...

Ran Gainesville's Five Points Half-Marathon This Morning

 

This morning I ran Gainesville's Five Points of Life Half-Marathon, the sixth time I've run this event (2010, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018) and my overall thirteenth half-marathon.  Last year's race was cancelled due to Covid, and the 2022 edition features a modified course that winds through the city but in a different direction...although the NW 16th Avenue stretch of hills and the stadium run remain on the course.  I woke up at 5 and managed to get out there in plenty of time, parking in front of the Thomas Center and walking the few blocks to Bo Diddley Plaza in the heart of downtown where the race was to begin and end.  It was cold, in the upper thirties with high humidity, but once we started running the weather wasn't any bother.  The Five Points Half-Marathon uses pacers who run the race just to finish at a specified final finishing time: the one I selected, who incidentally is an ultramarathon runner, held the sign for 2 hours 40 minutes, five minutes slower than my previous half-marathon time in 2019.  She told us up front that she would alternate two-minute runs with thirty-second walks...that was fine with me since I like those brief walking breaks.  After the race began a few delayed minutes past 7, we headed east on University Avenue, turned south on East 7th Street and made our way to Depot Road, which we took to the trail that passes over US 441 just south of the University of Florida campus.  Then we passed through the area of the various UF medical buildings, crossing busy Archer Road and beginning the hilly part of the course.  Eventually we passed Lake Alice, made it back to University Avenue and then ran through the Florida football stadium before running through the heart of the campus.  After that we went north to NW 8th Avenue, cut through to 16th and ran east to 441 before turning right.  After that it was more or less a matter of going back to the downtown area where the finish line stood near the Hippodrome Theater.  I liked our pacer's run/walk strategy until we began to encounter some substantial hills...then I found it tiring since she'd often run up a hill and walk down another.  By the time we reached 16th...home of the really "bad ass hills" as legendary seniors marathoner John Wallace has termed them...I had decided to abandon following a pacer and employed my own strategy of tackling the hills: it worked and my finishing chip time was 2:33:51, more than six minutes faster than the pace I followed for the race's first half.  My feet got sore early on, and by the end I was essentially focused on putting one leg in front of the other until it was all over.  The police (who regulated the surrounding traffic) and volunteers were all very friendly and encouraging...for the last three miles of the run people on the side would keep yelling at me that I was "almost there": that kind of got tiring.  But the end was sweet, and Melissa and Will congratulated me on getting through it...I even got a photo op with Albert, the Florida Gator mascot!  And now it's time for my poor sore, crampy body to recover from the ordeal before I get ready for the next one.  Click HERE to view the race results...

The Burden of Relevancy in Academic Conversation

I have a daydream fantasy, one that I believe few others have.  It goes like this: along with all the inane radio talk shows hosted by political extremists, self-proclaimed experts on money or the law, paranormal promoters, and sports know-it-alls there is one program in which the host, a master of informed questioning, has as guests people who are knowledgeable and competent in diverse academic fields, ranging from medicine to physics to language to mathematics to agriculture to mechanics to economics...or anything else. In each interview they spend the allotted time exploring the actual content of the field for discussion, not necessarily its applications or implications to society or the guest's life history. Now I know this is just cognitive reverie on my part, but what if I were to become like that host and ask those around me about their own fields of expertise?  My guess is that they would mostly be reticent about sharing many details of their specialized knowledge, trying to steer the conversation toward their own life narrative or what career achievements they have won...and question my own rationale in asking them in the first place.  And simple curiosity and a desire to learn new things just don't sound like good enough reasons...there has to be demonstrated relevancy to push the topic forward.  On the other hand, since I haven't tried this how do I know that would happen? I do know that there is an increasing gulf in society between those "in the know" about science and technology and the bulk of the population, which at best takes it all for granted and at worst outright rejects science and advanced learning in favor of nonsensical notions...