Just Finished Reading Never by Ken Follett

Last year Ken Follett published his latest novel, Never, which quickly rose to the top of the best-seller list.  Stephen King, whom I follow on Twitter, highly recommended it and stated that it reminded him of what's going on in the world today, especially regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The characters...including the world leaders such as the American and Chinese presidents and others...are fictional but the countries and situations are painfully real, much of it taken straight from news of recent years.  The story's focus is triangular: (1) in Chad in northern Sub-Saharan Africa, the CIA has agents there to find the ringleader of a notorious international group of extremist Islamist terrorists, (2) a young top Chinese intelligence official in Beijing must maneuver between the hard-liners in his government and the wayward North Korean dictator to further his country's interests, and (3) the U.S. president, Pauline Green, must react in a measured but careful way to the escalating events falling like dominoes after a North Korean rebel military group seizes control of the country's eastern part, including its nuclear missile facilities.  The story is chilling: you can have rational people running different countries, folks who more than anything want to avoid nuclear war and the untold carnage and suffering which it would release onto the world.  Yet within each country, both democratic and autocratic, there are people and forces pressuring those leaders into conflict.  I know, at this time in early April of 2022, that no atomic bombs have been used in war since 1945.  Much of this I believe is due to the deterrence factor with the two main sides, the USSR/Russia and the United States, very much aware that either of them can destroy the other many times over.  But now with nuclear proliferation and regimes like North Korea and Pakistan in possession of nuclear warfare capability, the danger of one of them triggering a nuclear conflict has escalated.  And once something begins on a limited scale, can the escalation process be turned off...and who will take the first step in that direction without surrendering to their enemy?  A tough book to read with an even tougher ending...

Ran the Headwaters 5K This Morning in Gainesville

Gainesville has a relatively new municipal park, Headwaters, located on NW 45th Avenue between US 441 and Norton Elementary School...its name refers to the renowned Hogtown Creek that runs through the northwestern part of town.  Florida Track Club hosts an annual event there, the Headwaters 5K (3.1 miles), taking place in April.  I ran it last year, the first public race I entered since the Covid-19 epidemic broke out the previous year...and it was also the last one I ran before my thoracic surgeon, after ten years of annual testing, finally advised me to go ahead with open heart surgery involving both heart valve replacement and aortic aneurism repair.  That happened on 7/15/21, and today's race marks the sixth one I've run since recovery.  The conditions were perfect for running...well, I would have preferred a lower humidity...but the temperature was around 50 at 8 am.  There were plenty of folks there to brave the slightly hilly race through a very shady and pretty section of northern Gainesville...and the Florida Track Club people and volunteers were, as usual, the best with their friendliness and encouraging attitude.  We started on NW 45th Avenue near US 441 and went straight west, past Norton Elementary, to NW 24th Boulevard.  Then we turned north on it and went to NW 53rd Avenue, turning right again onto the cool, wide bike/pedestrian trail that runs all the way down to 39th Avenue...but we turned left at 45th and ran back to the park, where the finish line stood.  I deliberately worked from early in the race to establish a faster level of pace, and it worked!  My finishing time was 29:28, more than three minutes faster than that of last year's Headwaters run...and the first time in years I've broken 30 minutes in a 5K.  They were serving breakfast there following the race, but I wanted to get back home, wash up, and snooze a bit.  Click HERE for the race results.  I like the proximity of this race to my home and, already being an FTC member, it was free...I'd like to make it an annual tradition...

Quote of the Week...from Yogi Berra

Nobody goes there anymore.  It's too crowded.                       ---Yogi Berra

Hall of Fame catcher and slugger for the New York Yankees, the late Yogi Berra...who had a popular Hanna-Barbera cartoon figure named after him (not the other way around as I believed when I was a little kid)...had a Zen-like predisposition for making quotes that seemed self-contradictory: the above is a perfect example. Major League Baseball belatedly began its regular season yesterday after a prolonged management/labor contract dispute...thought I'd throw in something today "kind of" related to it.  Like some mathematical formulas I've encountered that at first look make no sense, Yogi's above quote actually is pretty profound...if you look at it more deeply.  I've concluded over the years that there is a large subgroup of the human race that is attracted, like swarming insects, to crowds...once a threshold is crossed they just keep on coming in droves.  That's why a place like Starbucks constantly has very long drive-through lines while other places like the Scooter's near my house go on and on without any line at all, even through their coffees and sandwiches are superior, in my opinion, with comparable prices.  There are local eating establishments that attract residents like flies even though their food and service are no better than with any other place.  I do not understand these people, and therefore...like Yogi...exclude them from my notion of "nobody", which he should have more accurately stated "nobody I know" or "nobody I think isn't a complete fool".  I've seen the long line phenomenon in stores as well...why is everyone in these long lines over here while, with a little walk over there exists a perfectly normal one that folks are avoiding?  Doesn't make sense, unless you conclude that there are "people" out there with a vastly differently perspective on things, including the idea that being immersed in a crowd justifies their existence...like a swarming insect, I suppose.  I guess the Woodstock experience, superchurches and other mass concerts are variations of this, as well as the thoroughly creepy Trump rallies that crop up from time to time here and there.  I don't know these people...

Just Finished Reading Atomic Habits by James Clear

Atomic Habits is a 2018 motivational self-help guide written by James Clear.  The use of the word "atomic" in the title reflects two points the author is trying to make here: habits that are very small and potentially very powerful.  Clear discusses how he came about his philosophy of habits when, one day during high school baseball practice, he was hit in the head by a bat, nearly losing his life after slipping into a coma and then gradually making a full, painstakingly gradual recovery.  He claims that people mistakenly pursue goals when they should be instituting and stressing systems, with forming the identity that they want being paramount in importance.  Also, by changing a multitude of small habits over time, revolutionary change is possible. There are four elements to habit formation: cue, craving, response and reward...they can apply to both desirable and undesirable habits.  The trick when trying to form good habits is to make the cue obvious, the craving attractive, the response easy and the result satisfying.  Conversely, when facing bad habits, the strategy is to make the cue invisible, the craving unattractive, the response difficult, and the result unsatisfying...the author gives examples to illustrate how to approach both good and bad habits this way.  And how does one start a new habit?  According to Clear, it's crucial just to get something going...if you're starting to run then put on your running shoes today...tomorrow you can continue the process, maybe jogging for a minute or two.  It's not so much how much you do at the beginning...of course eventually you'll be doing much more...but to get the notion of regularly responding to the positive cues and performing something to make the habit real.  Then once you're "in" it, it is much easier to extend the habit in the direction you are seeking.  Atomic Habits continues chapter by chapter with helpful suggestions about habits...it can get a little cumbersome, all the information here, but James Clear does make it more manageable by outlining the main points at the close of each chapter.  I liked this book, one reason being that it confirmed some of what I had already been doing in my life...for example, I already employ his notion of "habit-stacking" by combining a new habit with one I already have.  I think this book can be useful to anyone...Clear's main intention is to help you become the person you want to be...

Weekly Short Stories: 1983 Science Fiction, Part 5

Today I continue my reactions to stories appearing in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: First Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois and featuring his picks from those first published in 1983.  That was the year that...at least in my mind...marked the music video explosion, although MTV had been in existence since 1981.  Ted Turner decided to run a competing weekend music video marathon show on his Superstation, and I was hooked on it.  This was a period of great experimentation in videos, and although they weren't always good, they usually were interesting...unlike much of the crap that's put out today (well, that's just my opinion).  But back to those stories...

HARDFOUGHT by Greg Bear

This novella starts its narration out from the viewpoint of a young human woman, Prufax, in the distant future when humanity is in a life-or-death war struggle against an ancient race, the Serexi.  The adversary is gas-based with a completely different chemistry, and the story jumps to their perspective as well.  The problem I have with stories like this is that much of their mystery is in the deliberately cryptic way the author unravels their circumstances...eventually we discover exactly who...or what...Prufax is and how humankind has reached this state but, in the meantime, we're struggling to understand what the author is talking about.  Still, Greg Bear is a "hard" science fiction writer, and you stand to learn some interesting facts reading any of his stories...

MANIFEST DESTINY by Joe Haldeman

I'm not exactly sure why this story has been placed within the genre of science fiction...it's more of a historical western with a little prophecy thrown in.  A bold young man is determined to make his fortune in Mexico, back in the 1840s when they were at war with the United States.  He receives a fortune teller's message that he cannot die in Mexico...that's fine for him since he plans to live there for the remainder of his anticipated very, very long future life.  I myself anticipated the story's intended surprise ending, being cognizant of American territorial gains in that era, especially that often-overlooked 1853 Gadsden Purchase...

FULL CHICKEN RICHNESS by Avram David

I vaguely remember reading another story like this one, involving the same species of bird (not the chicken).  At a locally-owned burger joint, presumably in the U.S.A., they serve a great chicken soup...the protagonist thinks he remembers somebody very similar to the owner/cook from his European travels and decides to check him out to see what he's up to.  A time travel story with a hook that, well, seems too familiar to me.  Also, it just might be that Stephen King got some one of his ideas from it that he used in his own time-travel epic novel 11/22/63...

MULTIPLES by Robert Silverberg

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, following the blockbuster TV movie Sybil starring Sally Field, multiple personality disorder became something of a chic trend in psychology, with books and claims coming out that different people had "different people" within themselves.  Now imagine a future in which it's all not only true, but that it's no longer considered a disorder but rather something that makes people's lives more interesting and conversely paints "singletons" as being unattractive and drab.  A young woman with no multiple personalities tries to convince a "multiple" guy she's interested in that she's one as well...it's a comedic spoof on something that was a big deal in popular culture back then...

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

Congratulations to Gamecocks and Jayhawks for College Hoops Titles

Although at work for much of the championship tournament Final Four basketball action this past weekend, I was able to watch some of it...in the NCAA women's tournament South Carolina clearly dominated, suffocating Connecticut in the final game by thoroughly dominating the paint (with Player of the Year Aliyah Boston playing a major role) and getting one offensive rebound after another while crushing the Huskies on defense.  On the men's side yesterday, Kansas came from a 16-point first half deficit in which their opponent, North Carolina...at one point scoring 16 straight points...had built up an impressive halftime lead.  But the Tarheels came out in the second half shooting cold, and the Jayhawks lit up the floor with a succession of clutch three-pointers to first bring them back into the game and then take a small lead that they held at the very end.  Before the tournament I had picked North Carolina, Miami and Kansas as my favorites...they were undefeated against other opponents...but Miami succumbed to Kansas and, of course, so did North Carolina.  On the women's side I was rooting for Stanford, the defending champion, but they went cold as well against Connecticut in the semifinal round.  Now it's time to regroup and get ready for next year....and then start it all over again.  Before the women's final game on Sunday evening there was a short segment about Aliyah Boston, who is from St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands...Melissa and I stopped over there briefly during our cruise in February 2020 (just before all hell broke out with the pandemic) and we liked it a lot...especially the beach and winding mountain roads.  But you'd better watch out for the hordes of crazy, ravenous chickens running loose...

Motivational Coach Rob Dial Broadly Discusses Addiction on His Podcast

On one of his Mindset Mentor podcasts last week, life coach/motivational guru Rob Dial brought up the topic of addiction, explaining what he believes are its causes.  Dial takes a broad view of addiction, stating that most of us are addicted to something, not necessarily drugs (including alcohol and nicotine).  His examination takes us to our dual nervous system, split between the sympathetic that assumes dominance during high alert, fight-or-flight situations and the parasympathetic that plays the role of conserve and restore...the former involves tension with higher heart rate and the latter a more relaxed state.  When someone is addicted to something, they usually are trying to take a shortcut from being in the agitated, sympathetic state into the more agreeable parasympathetic...Dial refers to this process as "numbing".  He brings up that some who claim not to be dependent on alcohol still will take a drink or two at night to "take the edge off"...but what is the "edge" anyway and wouldn't it be better to find the cause and eliminate it up front?  Anything that one does to switch states...and this often involves running from ongoing problems instead of facing them...can be an addiction, and this includes excessive social media, television, binge eating, sex and even physical training workouts.  Rob Dial suggests that we take some time to just sit without distractions and do nothing, letting our own mind bring up the issues we have been covering up through other activities.  There's a book I just finished reading by James Clear titled Atomic Habits...it addresses addiction as well and suggests that the social and physical environment surrounding oneself can play a major role in its onset and perpetuation...as well as its elimination... 

About Will Smith's Incredible Hulk Moment at the Oscars

The Incredible Hulk was a popular TV series in the late seventies and early eighties.  Based on the Marvel comics character, Bill Bixby starred as mild-mannered Dr. David Bannister, a scientist who accidently exposes himself to such an excess of gamma ray radiation that, in times of extreme stress and anxiety, causes his body to transform into a raging monster, the Hulk (played by Lou Ferrigno).  Not exactly Jekyll and Hyde...Robert Louis Stevenson's character actually changed into a completely different personality...the Hulk retains Bannister's moral compass and compassion. It's just out of control, stuck in a fight-or-flight mode...much like that we experience in our own lives when we're under tense and difficult circumstances, became angry or fearful, and our sympathetic nervous system temporarily gains supremacy over our thoughts and behavior.  And although this period may only last for a few minutes, we're often left with the consequences of irrational and antisocial public behavior.  This is what I believe happened to Will Smith at the Academy Award ceremony the other night when he rushed the stage and slapped (and immediately thereafter cursed at) comedian Chris Rock for making one of his trademark insulting offhand jokes, this one aimed at Smith's wife Jada for her shaven head (she suffers from alopecia).  He was already center-stage and under the spotlight, a favorite to win Best Actor for his dramatic performance in the movie King Richard and most likely already was feeling a bit stressed out. Soon after the incident Smith was very contrite and apologetic for his impulsive action, but will continue to suffer its fallout.  Just who is Will Smith...the soft-spoken and congenial gentleman so many have come to appreciate or the creepy violent dude revealed in that unfortunate moment before the world?  Both, I imagine, just as each of us have this duality...I just think most of us, although probably unpleasant to be around in those moments of extreme anxiety and anger, don't resort to physically violent behavior.  Instead, dramatic and sometimes profane language, extreme passive-negative behavior, or a total shutdown from interaction can be common reactions to those experiencing personal Hulk transformations.  I do find the media reactions to it all interesting.  After realizing the other night that the Oscars were going to show because of the Red Carpet pre-ceremony show, with outfit after gawdy, tasteless outfit touted as high fashion, I made it a deliberate point to avoid the awards...finding out about the Smith/Rock altercation later.  The reactions were divided between those praising Smith for defending his wife's honor and those condemning his violence.  And then the media ghouls went to work, digging up items in both Smith's and Rock's pasts and citing things they had said before.  Different celebrities went to work giving their own feedback, and then the ghouls researched them, digging up even more negative news to promulgate over social and mass media.  What a media circus, and a macabre one at that!  

Are City-Wide Running Races Fading Into the Past?

In his autobiographical book Ultramarathon Man, distance runner Dean Karnazes relates how his first marathon run went.  He was in high school and there was a charity drive in which donors would sign up to pay...if my memory serves me correctly...a dollar for each quarter-mile track lap the participating student ran.  Most reasonable people saw themselves pitching in up to 5 or 10 bucks.  But Karnazes saw fit to run his first full 26.2 mile marathon that day, circling the track 105 times...and then presenting his flabbergasted fellow students with the bill!  It must have been an awfully repetitive run for him...yet that's pretty much how track and field events are conducted.  It certainly is vastly different from the marathon and half-marathon races the past few decades, which often run through the heart of cities and spotlight their own attractions for the racers and those accompanying them.  Typically, streets are marked off and policemen stand at crossings to halt traffic, letting the runners pass through without having to stop...this must cost a pretty penny for the organizers.  I think it also would tend to annoy a lot of folks who just want to go about their normal business without this kind of disruption and delay.  Over my running "career" since 2010...in which I've confined my races to northern and central Florida... I've completed 13 half-marathons and one marathon.  Of these, 6 half-marathons took place in the heart of Gainesville for the Five Points of Life event held in February, 2 races on the south side of Ocala, and 1 in the Tavares-Mount Dora area of Lake County...the others were deliberately conducted in predominantly rural settings.  Even the Ocala races took place mostly on country roads, although the traffic was high enough there to require a bit of police presence and management.  A few years ago the Ocala Marathon/Half-Marathon ceased to be, and in 2020 Gainesville's Five Points organizers switched the race site away from central Gainesville to southwest of town.  After Covid pre-empted the 2021 races, they resumed...back to the heart of town with a modified course that still had runners going through downtown Gainesville, the University of Florida campus (including the football stadium) and the famous hills of NW 16th Avenue.  But the marathon event was eliminated, leaving the half-marathon as the only long-distance event here in February.  Gainesville has another annual half-marathon they hold annually, the Tom Walker Memorial, which uses the rails-to-trails Hawthorne Trail in a there-and-back race emanating from Boulware Springs Park in the southeastern part of town...no police or city infrastructure needed here.  And that's the trend I see coming: races far from streets and set in rural areas and parks.  Furthermore, I see another trend in which half-marathons, marathons, and even ultra-races (longer than 26.2 miles) are being conducted in parks where runners go through multiple loops to achieve the distance they're seeking.  Next Sunday, the 10th, there will be such a race on the Hawthorne end of the Hawthorne Trail...half-marathoners will do a 6-plus mile there-and back on the trail twice, while those running the marathon will do it four times.  But then again, the overhead cost for staging this race is bound to be much, much lower than had they done it through city streets.  On June 18, Ocala has their own similar race planned at their southeastern Baseline Greenway Park...the course loop is a little longer than a mile and half-marathon runners will do it 12 times (no marathon race planned here).  Since 2019 (with a 14-month gap because of Covid), Gainesville has had its own weekly race, the Depot Parkrun 5K, with takes place entirely on park grounds and involves 4 laps to achieve the distance...but it's free and not very long.  The Hawthorne and Ocala races I just mentioned cost a bit of money...the question is whether runners will decide to forgo the adventure of the course in favor of getting a posted result.  As for me, I'm undecided.  I look on the Internet running calendars and still see races occurring in other cities across the country...maybe this drawing back from urban events is only a local phenomenon, who knows...

Quote of the Week...from Abraham Maslow

Education can become a self-fulfilling activity, liberating in and of itself.      ---Abraham Maslow

Abraham Maslow...today is his birthday (he'd be 124 if still alive) was a twentieth-century American psychologist who created the "Pyramid of Needs", the base of which represents people's physical needs and the very top comprising self-actualization.  He also emphasized that self-actualizing people tend to have more of the "peak experiences" in life that many long for, as well as develop an outlook leading to the longer-lasting "plateau experiences" of inner well-being.  I found his above quote about learning "in and of itself" to be an affirmation of how I also have regarded it over the years...and frees education from the tyranny of ego-based, hierarchical judgment that formalized school training tends to foist upon hapless students compelled to endure it, first through compulsory education in the K-12 years and then on to college for career preparation.  I have also tended to be something of a renegade with education, and this did not carry over well into the much more rigid structure imposed by teachers and curricula in school settings...but after leaving school I've experienced great joy at learning different things, without someone standing above poised to beat me down should I stumble in my exploration or diverge from a topic they were promoting.  When I was young, information was available but difficult to come by...nowadays the Internet has opened the door wide to knowledge, and with platforms like YouTube it is possible to learn to do just about anything and even attend virtual classrooms.  Sadly, there are lots of folks who only see the value of learning anything in how they can make money from it...I've been confronted in the past when such a person would spy me studying something that, to them, had no discernible "value".  The problem with their perspective is that they tend to see their own self-worth in terms of increasing wealth and social prestige...should they one day find themselves unable to continue that way, I'm afraid the whole house of cards that sustains their ego-based self-image could collapse.  But let's just skip over some of the psychological jargon I've brought up and cut to the chase: learning, simply put, is fun! 

My March 2022 Running and Walking Report

I'm not sure whether my increased running totals for this past month represent an aberration or part of a continuing process...I suspect the former...but I did have some higher figures: 290 total miles, I ran on all the days of the month, and 18 miles was my longest single run.  I ran in two races: the Micanopy 10 Mile hosted by the Florida Track Club on March 19th and a Depot Parkrun 5K the following Saturday.  I doubt that I'll be running as much as the weather warms further into the spring/summer seasons...I'm hoping to "step" up the walking, as well as begin some swimming workouts, to balance out the picture a bit...

On the April 9-10 weekend there are two upcoming local races.  On Saturday the 9th the Florida Track Club is holding another event, this one the Headwaters 5K that takes place near my home in northern Gainesville. I ran it last year and it's free with my FTC membership.  And then there is the "Run Your Buns Off" event the next morning, starting and finishing from the outlying town of Hawthorne and using a six-mile-plus strip of the Hawthorne Trail to simultaneously stage a number of races, ranging from 5K to a marathon. They accomplish these distances by having entrants undergo multiple there-and-back cycles...the half-marathon involves two and the marathon four, so you're basically covering the same territory over and over again.  The half costs $65 and the marathon a whopping $90.  I don't know...the prospect of spending this amount of money to run a half-marathon with such an unvarying, repetitive course just doesn't appeal to me, especially with the prospect of that free race the previous day (closer to home and with a more interesting course).  After that weekend the only local races I see in "my" Alachua County area are the Depot Parkruns that take place each Saturday morning...my intention is to try them out once or twice a month throughout the rest of the spring and summer.  I might try out some speed-walking in some of those races...I did walk for a total of 125 miles in March... 

Weekly Short Stories: 1983 Science Fiction, Part 4

Today, while keeping my emphasis on 1983, I am switching to the first book in a different science fiction short story anthology series: The Year's Best Science Fiction, First Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois and featuring stories that for the most part do not overlap the concurrent "year's best" series edited by Donald A. Wollheim that I have been examining.  My intention is to review stories from both books until Wollheim's anthology series concludes after 1989.  Here are my reactions to the first five tales appearing in Dozois' book...

CICADA QUEEN by Bruce Sterling

I recently discussed a 1982 short story by Bruce Sterling titled Swarm...this one belongs to the author's same fictional universe in which the solar system is divided between two competing human factions: the Mechanists who tend to be cyborgs and populate the Asteroid Belt and the Reshaped, who alter their makeups through biology and dwell around Saturn's rings.  They trade with an alien reptilian race called the Investors. In this tale an Investor queen has defected and established her own independent zone between the Mechanists and Reshaped...one of the latter in turn defects with his own agenda, that of terraforming Mars for human habitation.  Lots of political maneuvering here...

BEYOND THE DEAD REEF by James Tiptree, Jr.

At a Mexican resort by an underwater reef, a man hears another's tale of adventure and near-death, beyond a dead zone in the water. This is one of those stories citing humanity's abuse of the environment...in this case the pollution and despoiling of the ocean floor...and a possible if rather fanciful defensive response from nature...

SLOW BIRDS by Ian Watson

The best story of today's lot, on an island in Earth's future, generation after generation of the population...spread out among country towns...there is a racing sport involving skates and small sails, played on the round glass surfaces generated by explosions created by "Slow Birds", which are slow-moving missiles that randomly crop up from time to time, occasionally exploding and destroying whole areas, including cities.  One of the sport's athletes crosses his opponent after a race and the chain of revenge threatens his family, leading ultimately leading to the truth about the Slow Birds. I'd love to see this story adapted to the big screen... 

VULCAN'S FORGE by Poul Anderson

This is one of those stories about a computer taking on personality characteristics of humans, to the point where it is treated as sentient, intelligent life with feelings.  The setting is Mercury as a project is underway to study an asteroid, Vulcan, that is so close to the Sun that its metal surface is molten...an unmanned ship has been sent there to gather data, and it contains one of those computers whose memory history deeply bond it with its owner...  

MAN-MOUNTAIN GENTIAN by Howard Waldrop

This is a peculiar take-off on the Japanese sport of Sumu wrestling, in this tale popularized into the 21st century with a special spin in which Zen and paranormal elements enter the ring between the two contestants.  And the wrestlers have funny names, like in our popular phony pro wrestling: Man-Mountain Gentian, Killer Kudzu, Ground Sloth Ikimoto, Typhoon Takanaka, to name a few.  My one personal point of reference with Sumo wrestling is the scene early in the 1967 James Bond movie You Only Live Twice...had I not seen it I probably would be lost in this story.  Still, I didn't quite get its ending...

Next week I'll continue looking at 1983 short science fiction from the Gardner Dozois anthology ...

Women and Men's NCAA Final Four Teams Set for This Weekend

I have been pleasantly surprised recently at the general competitiveness in the women's NCAA tournament, at least in the Elite Eight stage.  Although South Carolina thoroughly trounced upstart Creighton by 30 points in their game, the other contests were pretty close and exciting, Stanford, Connecticut and Louisville coming out victorious and advancing.  I'm looking forward to watching the championship game on Sunday, but will miss the semifinal round this Friday on account that I'll be at work.  I'll be rooting for Stanford against Connecticut and South Carolina against Louisville.  On the men's side, the Final Four action starts on Saturday with an ACC showdown between North Carolina and Duke, and then Kansas vs. Villanova.  I'm with the Tarheels and Jayhawks...I really like that new North Carolina coach.  If you plan on watching any of the Final Four games, the women's games are shown on ESPN and the men's on CBS.  I tried listening to the play-by-play on radio of yesterday's women's Louisville-Michigan game and just couldn't visualize what they were describing...yet I remember back in 1968-69 as a twelve-year old kid experiencing the entire Miami Floridians ABA season via radio...never did actually see a game: go figure...

Podcaster Rob Dial Muses on Self-Belief and Action

On one of Rob Dial's Mindset Mentor podcasts last week, the motivational coach brought up an interesting topic: why do so many people nowadays think that they must possess supreme confidence and belief in themselves before they can even begin a self-improvement project?  Dial maintains that they have it all backwards...nothing inherently wrong with positive self-talk and affirmations, but first we need to act, throw ourselves into the fray, so to speak.  Then, as the results of our actions become manifest, we can act on them while at the same time gradually build up that sense of self-confidence and belief that we had erroneously thought to be a prerequisite to getting started.  It's a variation of Dial's maxim "Ready fire, aim", juxtaposing the last two terms of this common exhortation to emphasis the need for action up front, followed by adjustment.  It's also an indictment of the overthinking folks tend to engage in before they undertake meaningful endeavors, especially the ones in which ego and potential social humiliation could be involved.  One tool I use is the humorous disclaimer "Don't mind me, I'm just a tourist!"...even in my hometown...whenever I screw up: a sense of humor about oneself is certainly helpful.  And as we engage ourselves in the activities that are important to us, stumbling is often on the menu: get used to it and don't fear it to the point where it immobilizes you.  But as our host also often says, we don't fail when we mess up while trying...on the contrary that's inevitable for growth. Failure is only the result of either never starting or giving up...

Just Finished Rereading The Waste Lands by Stephen King

The Waste Lands, from 1991,  is the third volume of Stephen King's seven-volume The Dark Tower fantasy series.  The series, ostensibly based on a narrative poem by Robert Browning, features Roland Deschain, the Gunslinger, whose mission and quest lead him...with the aid of his ka-tet of fellow travelers...to that fabled dark tower through which all of reality is spun and governed.  Before I go on, let me warn you that this article is going to contain some plot spoilers.  Something is amiss in the Tower and Roland is determined to follow his ka, or "destiny" as four special characters...Eddie, Susannah, Jake, and Jake's little animal friend Oy (a "billy-bumbler") make up that group.  The first part of The Waste Lands, which I initially read in 2009, concerns the effort to bring in Jake from his old world, an alternative universe that is, in essence, our own...Roland's world (and most of the story's setting) is from a different reality.  That being accomplished, after much struggle naturally, the group goes to the run-down, post-apocalyptic metropolis of Lud, where Jake claims an insane train named Blain is there to take them to a portal that can lead to the Tower...no, I don't get it, either. There's a really bad, bad man in Lud named the Tick-Tock Man that they have to get past, and a nefarious character named Richard Fannin is later introduced.  The biggest impact the book made on me was its depiction of Lud and what happens to a society and its culture when the world has "moved on": the population loses its earlier connection with its legacy of technology and, worse, forgets the crucial social institutions that held it all together as a civilized, cultured and rationally-based society.  Now the people are governed by fear, violence and greed, quick to subscribe to the latest conspiracy theory around and to follow charismatic and ruthless strongmen...starting to sound familiar?  I'd recommend anyone read the second part of this book about Lud to see the direction we're going as a society and pause to reflect on how to turn it all back around.  Of course, a series like this builds open itself and you'd probably be lost if you didn't read the preceding material first, not knowing what had transpired in the narrative up to that point.  The next book in the series, titled Wizard and Glass and which was my favorite one the first time I read through The Dark Tower, would come out in 1997.  For now, though, I will take a short break from rereading this interesting if not rather confusing series to read Ken Follett's latest novel Never, which Stephen King wholeheartedly recommended recently on his Twitter feed...

Ran in Gainesville's Weekly Depot Park 5K This Morning

Gainesville has a cool, free weekly 5K race on Saturday mornings at Depot Park on 874 SE 4th Street...the Parkrun concept is spreading through the USA and other countries, now with some 48 locations here and many more abroad.  You sign up for it online and print out the barcodes they provide you...these will be scanned at the end of each event so that your times can be recorded and posted.  I signed up at the start of 2019...so far, with today's run, I have participated in seven races, with a fourteen-month period of no races held between March 2020 and May 2021 during the Covid pandemic.  My finishing times have never been particularly fast, even by my own past standards.  But I enjoy the positive vibes generated by the volunteers and other runners and the park is beautiful...I especially enjoy listening to the various birds singing around me as I run by the many trees there.  This past Wednesday and Thursday we received a lot of rain in northern Florida, but come race time today at 7:30 the sky was clear and the temperature a pleasant 49 with 90% humidity.  It was announced just before the race that several folks were running the Trail of Payne 10K the same morning in Paynes Prairie State Park a few miles down the road...I passed on it, unwilling to endure the rain-soaked ground and mud of that trail race.  My goal with today's 5K was simple: find a faster pace that I could feel comfortable running for a sustained distance.  I think I accomplished that, finishing in 30:45 with a pace slower than I was running, say, ten years ago but one more suitable to my advancing age.  I mentioned a few weeks back that I'd like to occasionally try speed-walking the Depot Parkrun. There's an incredible 79-year old who does this for longer races and I'm very impressed by his speed...ultimately I see my own future in distance/speed walking as well.  Click HERE for today's results...

Quote of the Week...from Stephen King

The big boy's face was one that Jake had seen before.  It was the face of a kid who would think it the height of hilarity to douse a cat's tail with lighter fluid or feed a bread ball with a fishhook planted in the middle to a hungry dog. The sort of kid who sat in the back of the room and snapped bra straps...and then said, "Who, me?" with a big, dumb look of surprise on his face once someone finally complained.  There weren't many kids like him at Piper but there were a few.  Jake supposed there were a few in every school.  They dressed better at Piper but the face was the same.          --Stephen King, from The Waste Lands

I'm currently rereading Stephen King's fantasy series The Dark Tower, and just came across the above lines in the third book The Waste Lands.  When it got to "Jake supposed there were a few in every school" I thought, yes, that's true...only there were more than a few from the school I attended in south Florida.  And my own bus stop seemed to hold an extremely high concentration of them, commonly referred to as "bullies".  When I was growing up through the 7th through 12th grades there was a nastiness of behavior among many of my peers that I have not seen remotely matched ever since I left this school.  In King's story, he was referring to one individual, namely pivotal character Eddie Dean's bullying and disturbed big brother Harry.  On the screen bullies are also often depicted as loners feared and scorned by the majority of "normal" kids around them.  But where I came from it was the bullies who were the stars of the show, and not only did other kids rush to adore and suck up to them...even collaborating in their persecution of whichever targeted victim was the focus of attention...but the teachers themselves either turned a blind eye to this behavior or held the aggressors in high regard.  One of the traits that bullies have is that, when confronted, they often claim that they were just "kidding around" and "can't you take a joke".  And there has been a kind of ethos perpetuated among both kids and adults that in bully/victim confrontations, it's always the responsibility of the victim to stand up for his or her self alone...as if this is a necessary rite of growing up (see the Andy Griffith episode about Opie's bully).  Stephen King has written a lot about bullies, and it's one of the many things I like about him...they stand out in the stories It and the The Body.  King also brought up an important detail about standing up to them: sometimes they're armed, and in today's world that is becoming more and more of a likelihood...try "standing up" to that.  I've seen celebrities long grown-up fondly look back on their childhood years and claim that they were bullies, laughing it all off as good-natured fun...Bill O'Reilly comes to mind in this regard.  The question I have is whether bullies in childhood, even after many years of being adults, are constitutionally capable of recognizing the hurt to others from their past behavior and have truly transformed themselves into more compassionate, empathetic human beings...from what I've seen so far with some of my old classmates I've yet to see this happen...

The Awkwardness of Talking About Mathematics

Many decades ago, back in late 1973, I was a teenager working at a Miami Shores firm as a records clerk.  Hank, one of the auditors there, one day randomly asked me if I knew about trigonometry and could explain to him the meaning of sine and cosine.  Having studied the basics of it all a year earlier, I patiently presented the concepts as I had learned them: starting with a circle of radius 1 and center (0,0) and then explaining cosines and sines as the x and y points on that circle where the line intersecting said circle goes through the origin and creates an angle with the x-axis (of which cosines and sines are functions).  But I didn't speak any of this by itself...I got pen and paper and illustrated it.  Ol' Hank then got very angry and said he only wanted to know about solving triangles using trigonometry (which I was on the way to covering) ...and I walked away, not in the least bit willing to accommodate that anger: screw him.  Hank was a contentious little so-and-so who would take history classes at the local community college just to argue with the instructor...a real ditto-head long before Rush Limbaugh would coin it and turn it into a dubious badge of honor.  I mention all this not because I carry any grudge or offense against this forgettable character, but because it happens to be the last time anyone brought up anything about mathematics to me away from school that went beyond simple arithmetical problems.  And since I did not become a mathematics teacher, engineer or scientist, I have never professionally used anything I have ever learned in this field beyond early elementary school, although in college I studied calculus, differential equations, probability and statistics, and linear algebra. Yet within the academic corridors mathematics reigns supreme, although it's not exactly a conversational icebreaker.  In fact, I find bringing up mathematics in conversation with anyone extremely awkward and random...after all, mathematics is the antithesis of ego: it exists on its own terms and cares not whether folks like it, understand it, or even find it interesting.  But I think I'm going to experiment around a bit and see whether or not I can get people to open up about how they feel about mathematics, and even delve lightly into its contents if that's possible.  My initial results seem to indicate that people are a lot more interested in talking about how math made them feel and affected their lives than discussing it on its own terms...

Weekly Short Stories: 1983 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I finish examining 1983 science fiction short stories as they appeared in Donald A. Wollheim's anthology The 1984 Annual World's Best SF, spotlighting what the editor deemed as the choice tales from the previous year.  Yet next week 1983 will continue as I switch to a new sci-fi anthology series, that one edited by Gardner Dozois.  But for now, let's look at the last three in Wollheim's book...

AS TIME GOES BY by Tanith Lee

This is a story of time travel paradoxes and second chances, its entire premise unique and bizarre.  You see, in this tale every star system in the cosmos exists in its own peculiar, different time frame...for travelers to interact between systems they must first go to way stations in which time does not exist.  It is at one of these stations that the captain of a ghost ship, supposedly destroyed in space but continually sighted, enters the bar and is confronted by a young woman...the story goes on from there.  The problem with stories like this is that as a reader I guess I'm supposed to be impressed by the paradox involved while at the same time meekly accepting the impossible "rules" the author has laid out concerning time and space.

THE HARVEST OF WOLVES by Mary Gentle

In a nightmare totalitarian future world in which people are only allowed to continue living if the State finds them useful, an elderly woman living in poverty must carefully maneuver around a young man...who she knows is an informant for the State...in order to preserve what little is left of her independence and life.  The moral of this story that has a twisted ending: we all do what we must to survive.

HOMEFARING by Robert Silverberg

In this novella, a man's consciousness is sent into the body of another in the future as part of a scientific experiment, but instead of landing within a human being just decades ahead as planned, he finds himself sharing consciousness with a highly intelligent, evolved lobster in the distant future.  Silverberg presents an intriguing look, not only of the possibilities for eventual intelligent life in the sea, but also a way that life forms could communicate through the medium of water by means of chemicals.  The story is also interesting because, in the second book of Stephen King's Dark Tower series...which I just finished rereading...the protagonist Roland walks through mysterious doors that lead to similarly shared consciousnesses with select individuals from different times.

Next week I continue my look at the year 1983 in short science fiction as I begin the "new" anthology series...

About This Year's NCAA March Madness Basketball

One of the problems with championship playoffs in various sports is that, unless you walk away with the title, your team's final game is bound to be a loss that will get under your skin for the entire off-season.  In each of the men and women's "March Madness" NCAA basketball championship tournaments for 2022, after so many teams struggled for so much in the latter part of the regular season just to "make" the tournament, the initial fields of 68 have been brutally whittled down to 16 in the span of five days...this weekend it will go down to 4.  I remember in 2014 when "my" Florida Gators, then under head coach Billy Donovan, made that Final Four and had visions of yet another championship.  But Connecticut, the eventual tournament winner that year, got hot and eliminated UF in the semifinal...I hardly ever hear of that wonderful season spoken in happy terms...why?  Because the Gators didn't win it all!  I for one did think of it as a glorious season...folks just have to get a better sense of perspective about what winning means...

On the women's side Florida bowed out early, 69-52 to the University of Central Florida.  But they had a great turnaround season with their new coach Kelly Rae Finley...I'm happy for them.  The men's team didn't make the NCAA championship tourney but were invited to the National Invitation Tournament, losing to Xavier in the second round...good for them, too.  Their coach, Mike White, left the team after their conference tournament to work for Georgia...Florida just hired San Francisco Dons coach Todd Golden to replace him after he led them to their first NCAA tournament appearance since 1998.  The Gators men's team, I strongly believe, has had issues for years about poor shooting...2022 was no exception.  Maybe the new coach can emphasize this need in his upcoming recruiting.  As for the remaining teams in the tournament, for the men my favorites North Carolina, Miami and Kansas are still in there...with the women the TV coverage is not only poorer, but there is much less parity between the elite teams and the rest of the field that has made the men's side more interesting to watch: sadly, it's always seemed to be that way. Well, come Thursday we will see the games resume with the Regional semifinals...