My June 2019 Running Report

In June I ran a total of 157 miles, missing one day with 9 miles being my longest single run.  It's been a struggle against the outdoors oppressive heat and humidity...and the heavy rainfall we've recently experienced has been an impediment to me.  Whether or not this trend of increasing mileage keeps up for me depends on how my body reacts to it all...I'm probably going to need to take more days off from running for recovery in the future as a set policy.  I didn't run in any races this past month, and although 5K free races are held at Gainesville's Depot Park every Saturday morning and July 4th will feature the annual three-mile Melon Park at Westside Park, as of now I don't feel any special desire to participate in any of them. Looks like it won't be until the fall before I run any public races...

Just Finished Reading Four Three Two One by Courtney C. Stevens

Usually when I visit my local public library (Millhopper on NW 43rd Street) I browse around the cart that contains "Play-Around" audiobooks. They are basically listen-only MP3-like small cartridges containing an entire book, with me only having to supply my own AAA battery and earphones.  The other day I ran across the 2018 young adult novel Four Three Two One, by Courtney C. Stevens, in this format and checked it out.  I just finished it and, although it probably wasn't targeted at my age group, I still came away from it thinking that it had a universal message that applies to everyone...

Golden, or "Go", Jennings is a seventeen-year-old survivor of a New York City bus bombing the summer before that killed nineteen...including the young psychopathic bomber...and spared only four, including Go.  The other survivors are her boyfriend Chandler from Kentucky, Rudy...who had flirted with her just before the disaster, and Caroline, the bomber's girlfriend.  One of the first-responders who helped save the four has started a college scholarship drive for them, had the destroyed bus rebuilt from its ruins, and is staging a reunion in New York to celebrate them and their lives.  The story line, told mainly from Go's point of view, examines how each of the four survivors struggle with the torment of guilt, not only of surviving the attack when others didn't, but also of their common believe that each of them in their own way contributed to the disaster and are therefore unforgivable.  It is the ongoing interaction...much of it in conflict...between these four and others that sets the theme of the story.  And Go's new friend Vicky gives a classic lesson on how to be supportive of survivors in situations like this.  It's a timely tale, very appropriate in this sad time of public shootings in schools and workplaces, and addresses the all-too-often occurrence of suicide on the part of survivors.  A good read, I recommend it...

Quote of the Week...from Charlie Daniels

So I jes' reached out an' kicked ol' green-teeth right in the knee. ---Charlie Daniels

The above quote...if you're from my generation...is probably one you're familiar with.  It's from the Charlie Daniels Band 1973 hit Uneasy Rider, one of the funniest songs ever recorded.  It relates the experiences of a long-haired traveler of the time who finds himself in a "redneck-lookin'" Mississippi bar, surrounded by hostile locals making disparaging comments about his appearance and looking for a fight.  The quick-thinking narrator, sensing his impending beating, thinks up a distraction and kicks one of the "regulars", then going off on a rant about green-teeth infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan and working undercover for the FBI.  It's good enough for him to escape and reroute his trip to L.A. "via Omaha".  This song came to me as I already knew that Joe Biden, although not possessing any green teeth that I know of, was destined to figuratively be kicked in his knee during last night's second Democratic presidential candidates' debate...the question was who would be doing the kicking.  I had thought Cory Booker would have gotten the assignment, but alas, he was separated from ol' Joe after being placed in the first debate on Wednesday.  So it turned out that California senator Kamala Harris did it, repeatedly and directly criticizing Barack Obama's hand-chosen two-term vice-president on the issue of race, even dredging up his opposition forty-plus years ago to forced school-busing.  The mainstream media reaction to their onstage exchange was that Biden had lost and Harris had rebooted her campaign, in which she had fallen nationwide to around the fifth-place level among the contenders.  Now don't get me wrong: I am not at all critical of Kamala Harris for her strategy of going after Biden...any more than the dude kicking that guy with the green teeth was wrong for using misdirection to get out of his own predicament.  My problem is with the spin going all around in the media about how great she was and not pointing out the so clearly obvious and cynical motivation behind her action.  One of Joe Biden's greatest assets so far has been his relative popularity above the other candidates among the African-American community...besting even Booker and Harris, both black.  The debate ploy that Harris used was intended to chip away, if not destroy, this level of support and bring green-teeth's Biden's polling numbers down and elevate her own among this demographic group.  Like I said, this is politics and I don't disparage her having done so...but I'm getting the feeling that the "fix" is on and the media talking heads out there don't want the former vice-president to be the Democratic Party nominee.  We'll see whether this turns into a trend and whether I begin to echo the current White House occupant that it's all rigged...

My General Reaction to the First Democratic Debate Last Night

I didn't hear all of the first Democratic presidential debate last night, which featured half of the field of twenty candidates achieving at least 1% in polling.  But I did listen to the first hour and as such got a pretty good idea about these ten people and their strategies with their respective campaigns.  Most of them seemed to feel that it was necessary to practically shout out their answers to the posed questions in order to establish their credentials as being passionate...Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Jay Inslee, Bill de Blasio, and Tim Ryan stood out in this regard. Beto O'Rourke and Tulsi Gabbard seemed clueless and unprepared...no surprise to me there.  And I appreciated the thoughtful answers from Amy Klobuchar and John Delaney, although the latter had an annoying tendency to go way beyond his allotted time and even ignored the moderator's call for him to stop.  A lot of people seemed to think Julian Castro did well...compared to O'Rourke I suppose he did. Most of the contestants seemed to be in a competition to assert their own far left ideological supremacy over the others...once again it was Klobuchar and Delaney who stood out in contrast to them with their own more reasoned, nuanced answers.   Personally, I think the debate helped Elizabeth Warren probably more than anyone else and put Beto O'Rourke in big trouble from which I doubt he will recover.  From what I did hear, I thought the panel of questioners did a pretty good job of sticking to the issues and away from personalities. Should be interesting to hear the rest of the field debate tonight...

Weekly Short Stories: 1948 Science Fiction, Part 3

I concluded my look back to 1948 at the year's best short science fiction with the final four tales from the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 10 (1948).  A dismal outlook on humanity's future and aberrant children are their themes...pretty standard sci-fi fare.  They're not my favorites, but each has its own message.  Here are my reactions...

IN HIDING by Wilmar H. Shiras
Timothy Paul is a thirteen-year-old boy who seems the prototype "average kid"...B-grades in school, doesn't isolate himself socially...but his teacher is concerned about Tim's growing absentmindedness and senses something's wrong, contacting Peter Welles, a psychiatrist.  Most of the story is about how Dr. Welles coaxes Tim to open up about his own life, and it soon becomes clear that he is at super-genius level and has been deliberately concealing that fact in order to avoid trouble with others in society...especially his own grandmother, who is now his guardian after his parents died years earlier from radiation sickness.  And here is where I see a major problem in society: someone begins to stand out with their intelligence and talent and others resent their superiority and set out to "put them in their place". I wonder how many of us as children employed Tim's strategy of concealment...and how many are still doing it, as adults...

KNOCK by Fredric Brown
Knock is a quirky short, little tale about a vastly different alien race that wiped out all animal life on Earth as a preparation for their own settlement, but before they doused the planet with poison spray they took samples of different species for their "zoo"...including two humans.  Walter Phelan finds himself being one of them and has been isolated for two days since the attack, other than his contacts with the strange conquering creatures, who treat him well in his confinement and whom Walter always calls "George".  The horror of such a disaster befalling our planet is only magnified when Walter discovers that since the aliens themselves don't reproduce sexually, many of their "samples" will die off since they don't have both males and females to perpetuate the species.  And he wonders about the other human left alive...

A CHILD IS CRYING by John D. MacDonald
Another story about a super-genius kid, the setting reveals what happens when he...unlike Timothy's concealment in the story In Hiding...openly reveals his talents: the military buys him off from his parents.  The officers, in the midst of nuclear tensions and conflict, seek to extract as much information from him as possible.  This is problematic since little Billy can mentally suggest people to hurt themselves if they get too aggressive...sounds a bit like Stephen King's novel Firestarter, doesn't it?  But when they discover that Billy's incredible reasoning ability gives him the power to predict the future, his interrogators cannot hold themselves back as they desperately seek to discover their own fates...

LATE NIGHT FINAL by Eric Frank Russell
Another conquering race from the stars...this one so humanoid in nature that they can pass for ordinary people, lands on Earth on the outskirts of a small Wisconsin country town in the form of several warships.  Their militarist commander wants the glory of forcefully subjugating the population, which confounds him by being friendly and hospitable.  His own men gradually lose their sense of discipline and loyalty as they encounter the locals and interact with them.  The reader may initially get the impression that this is all a story about the present time, but that's not the case at all.  It felt a bit like a "reverse" Mars is Heaven by Ray Bradbury, which I reviewed last week...but the ending is vastly different and carries a statement about where humanity's best chances for long-term survival lie...

Next week I begin my examining of the best science fiction stories from 1949 as I continue reading this anthology series...

Plan to Listen to Upcoming Democratic Presidential Debates

I have a choice with this ongoing presidential campaign between just sticking my head in the sand ostrich-like and trying my hardest to ignore all of the noise around me or becoming as well-informed as I can be regarding the different candidates and their character, ideology, and positions on the various issues. I've decided on the latter strategy and as such will be listening to the Democratic Party debates being held tomorrow and Thursday evening from 9 to 11.  Broadcast from Miami, each debate will feature ten candidates...drawn at random from those polled at 1% or higher...and will be shown on the NBC channels as well as being available with online streaming from NBC.com and other sources.  I said "listening" because I'll be at work or driving home for most of each debate's duration. Of course, I already know that my purely audio impressions often differ from those I get from both listening and watching, as they did during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and Trump's State of the Union addresses...

Even if you're not a Democrat and plan to support Trump in next year's election, you probably might want to tune in as well...I'm sure Limbaugh and the other conservative opinion makers will be doing so.  Looks like Cory Booker, Beto O'Rourke, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar will be headlining the Wednesday debate while Thursday's will feature Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris.  And the others, of course, will be looking to capitalize on their brief moment in the national spotlight to kickstart their campaigns and gain some recognition.  As for me, I've always liked Klobuchar for her intelligence, reason, and pragmatism and am repelled by a few candidates who are more into political correctness and emotionally manipulating the electorate...for now I'll leave these unnamed.  And I'm more than a little skeptical about those espousing pie-in-the-sky solutions to our nation's problems that have virtually no chance of becoming law during their administrations should they find themselves elected...

I'm also interested in hearing how the questions are posed and whether they are fair to the candidates or more slanted and tailored to play "gotcha" against one or more of them.  Yes, I'll be tuned in...how about you?

Working on Rebuilding Running Endurance

I've been increasing my outdoor running workouts as I gradually expand my own created course around my neighborhood and the adjacent ones here in far northern Gainesville.  Yesterday I covered 5.5 miles in midday 93-degree conditions while taking regular interspersed walking breaks along with a sports drink to sip on.  Although it got a little grueling at the end with the heat, I feel I made some good progress with my running and plan to go out again likewise tomorrow morning...maybe for a little bit longer as I continue to build up my distance.  I used to have a course that stretched through Northwood Pines, Northwood Oaks, the NW 53rd Avenue trail between 34th and 43rd Streets, NW 37th Street and the neighborhoods past that church, NW 43rd Street past Talbot Elementary and into the subdivision on 62nd Avenue, Felasco Park past the TV-20 WCJB station, NW 52nd Terrace, NW 53rd Avenue to the shaded, winding neighborhood of big homes off NW 57th Way...and back again.  Depending on how long I felt like running (or had some outside limit placed on me such as actually having to go to work), I could end up running quite some distance, topping 15 miles a number of times and achieving 26.6 once (at 4 hours 23 minutes).  But my long distance running endurance has admittedly dwindled a bit over the past three or four years and I'd like to return it to where I was running down all those convoluted roads and pathways and racking up the big miles: should be interesting...

Just Finished Reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac

My experience with beatniks has always been very limited...since they're pretty much extinct by now I suppose that puts me in a better position to discuss them than most people nowadays, although my "contact" was through the early sixties sitcoms Beverly Hillbillies and Dobie Gillis.  Yet the characters in these shows satirizing the Beat aren't all that far off the mark...I know because I finished reading Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel On the Road, which defined the movement.  The Beverly Hillbillies beatnik I remember the most from the two or three episodes that focused on them was the dude who just lied there on his back and never talked...now that's the acting role I was born for!  And in Dobie Gillis, goateed beatnik Maynard, played by future Gilligan Bob Denver, stole the show with his antics and speech.  So I had a pretty generally favorable view of the Beat Generation as people who had their own special lingo and appearance, were totally immersed in the present moment and people around them, and had a special thing for jazz.  That pretty much describes Kerouac's experiences as well as he...in the guise of narrator Sal Paradise...crisscrosses the USA...and later Mexico...hitching rides, taking buses, and using other means of locomotion while describing his friends and the land and people they encounter.  And of all his friends, it's Dean Moriarty who epitomizes the beatnik: totally irresponsible with his friends and lovers, he bounces off one experience into another...and then expects everybody else to follow him as he follows only his own whims.  Which they do, including Sal...much to my consternation: you see I have a strong antipathy to loud and aggressive personality types who expect me to fall in behind them as a passive follower.  So no, using the Beat movement's parlance, I didn't "dig" ol' Dean one bit...but it was interesting to see how others in the story kept forgiving him for his many offenses since he had such a charismatic sway over them...

With On the Road I was initially impressed by the author's vivid, detailed imagination of the different settings, characters, and experiences until I later read that he had actually pretty much lived through it all himself and that the "fictional" characters had real-life counterparts.  It all takes place around 1947-49 as millions of young men, back from World War II, are in states of flux and uncertainty about their futures, with the G.I. Bill being enacted around this time to subsidize their college educations and their eventual upward social mobility into conventional, middle class prosperity.  In the meantime, though, many just drift around, some even adopting the hobo lifestyle traveling by boxcars...something narrator Sal keeps expressing his desire to do himself without ever getting around to it.  There is a peeling away of some of the old gang from Sal and Dean as they marry, get stable jobs, and have children.  But Dean never seems to change as he "keeps the faith"...

The other night I saw a CNN show about the 1960s which examined the hippie counterculture movement in the second half of that decade and how it had its origins in the Beat movement of the fifties and early sixties.  But they also showed a clip of Jack Kerouac criticizing hippies, and I get what he was saying.  Beatniks were into experiencing everything on its own terms, not rejecting everything, while those in the later counterculture movement seemed intent on reinventing their own lives apart from the rest of the real world. Hippies were preachy and superior...beatniks were just cool.  I never did care too much for all that crap that went on in San Francisco and Woodstock, but I always kind of dug beatniks....but not Dean Moriarty...

Press and Rivals Playing Gotcha with Politicians' Comments

Did you ever see the 1970 movie Patton, starring George S. Scott as the brash World War II general?  There were scenes in it where he is allowing the press to ask him questions, and his off-the-cuff, careless answers are almost always taken out of context to paint him as a brutish villain who even sympathized with the Nazis...nothing could have been further from the truth.  I remember this film because I see something going on nowadays...not only with President Trump, whose offhand remarks have become his trademark, but also about politicians on the Democratic Party side.  Leftist freshman representative  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, already known for her flamboyant rhetoric and an outspoken critic of former vice-president Joe Biden on several issues, was recently asked in an interview a pointed question about his well-documented tendency in the past to get all touchy-feely-huggy out in public and that it disturbed some women. AOC...as she is commonly referred to...responded in what I thought was a restrained and respectful way toward Biden. Yet the later headlines made it look as if she were trying to resurrect the issue.  Biden was also criticized by rival Democratic candidate Cory Booker for having commented that even back when there were segregationist senators they were all able to get along better with each other than the broken, polarized situation in that body today...Booker failed to see the point of Biden's argument and instead accused him of praising segregationists.  Biden then angrily replied that he never had a racist bone in his body. Ocasio-Cortez then commented that it was Biden who owed Booker an apology for defending himself against his accusation.  Trump, of course, gets no respect and is even ridiculed for comments he makes that are obviously taken far out of context.  For example, he tweeted that the moon was part of Mars and the jokesters went wild with his supposedly incredible ignorance when all he was saying was that going back to the moon was to be seen as part of the plan of eventually going to Mars...to laugh at him for this reveals one's own stupidity, in my opinion.  Donald Trump may not like Bob Woodward's book Fear, which described the workings of the beginning of his presidency, but it fairly showed that he is tends to impulsively change his mind a lot, has a very short attention span, and is pretty sloppy with his speech and Twitter...all making it very easy for his critics to come up with material.  It's no secret that I dislike our current president...and I'm not all that fond of AOC or Biden, either.   But when they express themselves I try to understand the main ideas they are trying to impart and not just play "gotcha" while trying to distort their message into one that politically harms them...

Quote of the Week...from Stephen Covey

I am not a product of my circumstances.  I am a product of my decisions.   ---Stephen Covey

Stephen Covey is the author best known for his bestseller Seven Habits of Highly Effective People a few years ago.  He is a major advocate of people being proactive and not reactive with their lives.  In truth, the way I see it, we are products of both our circumstances and our decisions.  Albert Einstein once wrote, "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." In other words, genius begins with one's reasonable recognition of their own abilities and limitations...that's not being negative, for making such an assessment can point to the areas where their genius and talents can instead be fully realized.  Also, folks tend to get into the habit of living their lives according to narratives of self-victimization, that is they either dwell on mistakes others made in their upbringing or identify closely with a demographic group that has been (or still is) maltreated in society and, well, why bother trying when the system is rigged against you? My response is while discrimination has always been a problem and sadly will probably continue to be one, and just about all of us can find some negative things in our own personal pasts to blame someone else for, sometimes it's better to lay that aside and focus our thoughts and efforts on our own behavior.  For when I look back on trials and setbacks in my own life, my memory tends to focus more on how I reacted to them than the events and situations themselves...including those who may have perpetrated some wrong against me.  But that involves me, for the sake of effective living, ridding myself of the notion that my circumstances define me and instead orienting myself around my own decision-making, which in the long run by far determines who I really am and where I will go in life...

Just Finished Reading Ulysses by James Joyce

Back in the late 1970s, when I attended the University of Florida here in Gainesville as a student, I would go to the Reitz Student Union to relax...it's been rebuilt two or three times since.  But then on the first floor, on the west end of the building, was a student lounge area where we could sit back in big comfy cushioned swivel chairs and watch TV.  On the opposite wall was a painting that looked as if anyone at random had just taken their brush and thrown up different colors...an abstract work, but one that "experts" in the field no doubt thought possessed a high degree of aesthetic value.  That's kind of how I felt after reading Irish writer James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses: it's widely considered by many in the literary field to be one of the greatest works in English language literature...but it often left me scratching my head in confusion...and a little anger.  The main characters are compelling enough: Leopold Bloom, a Jewish Dubliner in his middle ages, is portrayed going through "a day in the life".  He knows about  his wife Molly's infidelity and hides from her suspected lover whenever their paths cross.  The secondary protagonist is Stephen Dedalus, who is frustrated with his manipulative roommate and struggles to make a name for himself as a writer and a scholar of Shakespeare.  Joyce presents these characters and others they meet by revealing their streams of thought...which usually meander in all kinds of directions, causing at least with me a sense of drift and uncertainty as to who is doing the thinking and often wondering what happened to the general story line.  Many times while reading Ulysses I had to stop and ask myself whether the narrative was the real progression of the plot or an imagining of one of the characters: Joyce seemed not to care how he presented his story, and I suspect he probably deliberately obfuscated it to encourage a sense of mystery and intrigue to provoke readers and scholars to analyze it more deeply.  Also, I was not in Joyce's Dublin at the time and do not know the different references to contemporary personalities nor the political and religious divisions and issues of the time, other than that Ireland had been seeking independence from the United Kingdom after an armed insurrection and was negotiating an agreement.  The language in dialogue is often steeped in dialect and as such difficult to comprehend. Much is made of Bloom's Judaism and his place in an Irish society with Catholicism being the dominant religious presence. Joyce named his novel after Homer's The Odyssey and the characters Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus supposedly correspond to Homer's Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus, respectively...and the book's chapter titles reference sections from the ancient Greek epic.  I had read The Odyssey beforehand, thinking that it would help me better understand Ulysses: didn't work...

All that having been said, I felt that there was a lot of humor in Ulysses, and I concentrated on following the sections of narrative in bite-sized chunks instead of trying to integrate everything I encountered into the larger story.  This book was initially declared obscene in the United States due to its often explicit sexual references, and although it was first published as a complete novel in 1922, it wasn't until the mid-1930s that it became available for general reading in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.  Well, if you're going to write with the view of recording people's real thoughts, then I guess you're probably going to throw in a bit of sexuality as well, humans being wired as we are...I had no problem with the sexual content, but then again I'm looking at it from the vantage point of 2019 and our society's values, not 1922 and theirs.  Ulysses is a difficult book to read, for sure...I'm glad I read it but am also glad that the other books I have read were mostly written with more consideration for me as their reader...

An afterthought: I mentioned before that Ulysses was about "a day in the life" of Leopold Bloom.  I wonder whether the late Beatles great John Lennon had been influenced by Joyce and his defining work, since he also had a tendency to play around with words, both in his own literature and his song lyrics...including, of course, A Day in the Life...

Weekly Short Stories: 1948 Science Fiction, Part 2

I continued my review of selected science fiction short stories from the year 1948 as they appear in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 10 (1948) with an interesting observation: the length of these stories tends to be quite shorter than those from earlier anthologies which at times were more novellas than short stories.  There are six listed below, all relatively brief...but that doesn't make them any less significant or worthy.  Here they are...

MARS IS HEAVEN by Ray Bradbury
The first ever manned expedition to Mars lands with its crew of seventeen...on a lawn of green grass.  Why, outside the ship it looks like one of the quaint small towns that Bradbury was always writing about, and furthermore, people are coming out of the houses to greet the long distance voyagers: their own deceased relatives and old friends, now looking quite alive and well.  The shock of experiencing this has its effect on the crew which is overcome with joy and abandon, and only Captain John Black begins to suspect something's amiss here.  While reading it I wondered to myself how clueless this crew must be and then I thought, that's the whole point...how many dubious things do we incorporate unquestioningly into our own personal narratives because they "fit" them and resonate with us on an irrational, emotional level?

THANG by Martin Gardner
For such a short, short, story (one page long) this is an exercise in imagining scale on an extremely large level. The title character is an entity who feeds on star systems...but that's not the end to it.  In my view, I get what the author was trying to express but sometimes a story can, well, just be TOO short...

BROOKLYN PROJECT by William Tenn
It's sometime in the future and, like so many science fiction scenarios, society has become more totalitarian with the State pretty much running everything, including science.  The big project at hand is to employ a time machine that can take pictures of its surroundings at intervals of millions of years...starting with the Earth's beginning.  A dissident group of scientists had warned of the consequences of meddling with the past like this, but of course they are all "silenced" in one way or another.  The time machine is activated and the observers note the pictures coming back from the past through each interval.  Only something isn't quite right...although none of them can detect it.  But it's pretty clear to the reader, which is what makes this story memorable...

RING AROUND THE REDHEAD by John D. MacDonald
This story delves into another common science fiction theme, that of entering into other dimensions of reality.  A tinkerer/inventor is on trial for murdering his next door neighbor, whose only remains seem to be small fragments of brain tissue in the shrubbery between their houses.  Our hero, convinced of his own innocence, knows everything that happened and insists on taking the stand, to the consternation of his own lawyer.  It seems there is a ring-shaped device that he came upon when a room in another dimension opened up suddenly, and through it he can explore other dimensions and extract things...and people (including a beautiful redheaded woman) through them.  Where does the neighbor fit into all this and what happens?  Guess you'll have to read it to find out...

PERIOD PIECE by J.J. Coupling
A man with memories of a past hundreds of years gone by is carted around from one social gathering to another off in the distant future and relates to his listeners what it was like "back then", as he is deemed a time traveler. Along the way he begins to entertain doubts as to why he is being handled in this way...and ultimately about his own identity.  I've wondered myself whether we can be truly certain that there ever was a past since we're all imprisoned in the present moment and our very memories of a supposed past are accessed in the "now" as well...

DORMANT by A.E. Van Vogt
It is the present...that is, it's 1948...and a U.S. Naval destroyer goes to a remote small Pacific island where they believe the Japanese had stored supplies for the war that just recently ended.  On it they discover a massive rocklike formation...and it seems to be moving up the island's mountain!  It's actually an alien creation that feeds on radioactivity...and wouldn't you know it, they've been testing atomic bombs in the Pacific.  And now this ominous thing is beginning to wake up from its dormancy of millions of years and resume its mission...and you really don't want to know what that is...

That's it for this week...next week I conclude my look at short science fiction from 1948...

Congratutations to St. Louis Blues and Toronto Raptors

Being a vicarious sports fan...meaning that I follow all these sports I never participate in myself...I have to congratulate a couple of teams for winning their respective leagues' championships a few days ago: the National Hockey League's St. Louis Blues and the National Basketball Association's Toronto Raptors, neither of them expected to go the distance.  The Blues struggled in their series against both the Dallas Stars (I thought Dallas was the better team in that one) and San Jose Sharks and were clear underdogs facing the Boston Bruins in the Stanley Cup finals...but came out on top in an exciting seven-match series.  As for the Raptors, most of the NBA's Eastern Conference attention was on Philadelphia and Milwaukee, yet under the leadership of Kahwi Leonard, along with a great supporting cast including the underrated Kyle Lowry, Pascal Siakam, Marc Gasol, Danny Green, Serge Ibaka...the list goes on...they overcame the 76ers winning the final deciding game of the series as Leonard broke a tie with time running out, shooting a three-pointer that bounced four times off the rim before settling in the basket.  Against the Bucks, the Raptors were even more impressive, earning the right to face twice-defending champion Golden State in the final series.  The Warriors, sadly, were hobbled throughout the finals: their star Kevin Duran was recovering from injury for the first four games and was out...in game five he played one quarter and blew out his achilles tendon and is now expected to miss the next season.  DeMarcus Cousins rejoined the squad for the series after his own injury and was effective in helping them to stay in it.  But what sealed the coffin for Golden State in their quest to win a third straight NBA championship was Clay Thompson's two injuries in the series, the last one leaving only Stephen Curry as the team's truly effective outside shooter and he could not overcome the Raptors' defensive pressure as Toronto won the sixth and final game 114-110 to secure the championship.  Both Toronto and St. Louis, although each franchise has a long record of regular season success, count this year's championships as their first ever...I'm looking forward to seeing how they do next year.  With the Raptors, their success may come down to whether Kawhi Leonard stays in town or moves elsewhere to play...

Some States' New Electoral Vote and Ballot Laws Seriously Misguided

When I heard of the movement of some Democratic-controlled state legislatures to enact laws giving their presidential electoral votes to the candidate receiving the highest popular vote total nationwide I initially thought that it was relatively meaningless, considering that all states passing these laws had clearly gone for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election anyway...it would only have teeth if swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Michigan would go for it or if the states with more Republican leanings would go against their political instincts.  In other words, I initially concluded that giving one's own state's electoral votes to the popular winner needs most of the country to go along with it to be truly effective, something that simply is not going to happen.  However, a more recent development has been going on in some states as they have passed laws barring any presidential candidate from their ballots if they won't release their income tax returns.  The U.S. Supreme Court in the past has struck down such restrictive laws and I expect (hopefully) that they will again.  But in the meantime, an ugly scenario is being created by the mix of these two different laws.  Let me explain...

Take a look at California, by far the most populous state in the country, and which has both the law giving its massive amounts of electoral votes to the popular winner and that banning a candidate from its ballot who refuses to reveal his or her tax returns.  Then even though voters will be able to write in that candidate's name on their ballot, the effect will be to artificially drastically diminish his or her vote total...not just within California but also for the entire nation's popular vote tally.  And all these other states are by their own laws depending on the viability of that popular vote figure to determine their own electoral votes.  If the tax/ballot restriction movement isn't quashed by the courts, then I fear that Republican-controlled state legislatures would pass their own retaliatory laws having the effect of banning top Democratic candidates, using their own criteria in doing this. These two different laws simply do not mix...frankly, I wish neither of them had ever been considered in the first place...

Enjoyed Watching the U.S. Open Golf Tournament This Weekend

I hadn't planned on watching any golf on TV this weekend...I hadn't done so in years.  But I was captivated by the beautiful Pacific Ocean, harbor, and beach background to the Pebble Beach golf course on the mid-Californian coast...where the annual PGA United States Open is held, one of the major golf tournaments.  The leader at the close of Saturday was Gary Woodland, who had only a one-stroke lead over Justin Rose and at age 35 was still looking for his first ever majors victory.  Brooks Koepka, who had won the U.S. Open the previous two years, was also in contention.  By the time the leaders reached the final holes today, Rose had faded while Koepka had surged to second place, finishing his round two strokes behind Woodland.  But Woodland, who was previously 0 for 7 when defending a tournament lead going into the final day, showed exceptional poise and consistency, getting a long birdie at his turn on the 18th to finish with a three-stroke win over Koepka...

I've never played any "regular" golf although I've always been pretty good at miniature golf...at 62 I'm probably not going to go buy a set of clubs at this point.  But it was fun to follow the sport, something I used to do when I was much younger and stars like Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Gary Player, and Tom Watson were consistently on the leader board.  And for some reason, as I watched golfer after golfer drive the ball off into the rough yesterday and today, I thought of the scene in that old James Bond movie Goldfinger when 007 plays a major prank on the title villain while playing against him.  Like horse racing or next month's Tour de France bicycle races, some sports I follow only during major events...maybe I'll be checking out golf like this, too.  Let's see...the next major tournament will be the British Open on July 18-21, to take place at Dunluce Course in Northern Ireland.  Now that I recognize some of the players it should be fun to follow...although I'm expecting the scenery to not be as good as Pebble Beach...

USA Women's Soccer Antics Remind Me of South Park Episode

I've watched the cartoon satirical series South Park over the years...most of the episodes, especially recently, have been off the mark but a few are ingeniously brutal in their lampooning of our society's various foibles.  The 2006 episode Stanley's Cup is a case in point: nine-year-old Stan Marsh needs his bicycle to earn money with his paper route, but one day it is towed away.  He goes to the bureaucrat-in-charge to plead it back, but is told he'll have to do the favor of coaching the local Pee Wee hockey team first.  So Stan tries to coach a group of very young children who can barely balance on their skates or even nudge the puck in the general direction of the goal.  At the end of this convoluted tale, they find themselves playing the final period of an NHL game against the Detroit Red Wings after the scheduled team, the Colorado Avalanche, put them in instead.  Detroit essentially massacres the helpless little Pee Wee players en route to a 32-2 rout...and with each goal the Red Wing players whoop it up with grandstanding celebrations, as if they were actually accomplishing anything worthwhile.  That's the kind of reaction that I and most other observers had when our United States women's national soccer team won their first World Cup group stage match against Thailand 13-0, scoring several goals in the closing minutes to run up the score and acting like "Cartoon Detroit" with their boisterous post-goal jumping, screaming, and hugging.  I'm not against them winning 13-0 since the first tiebreaker in the group stage is the three-match aggregate goal differential...I don't think Team America will need to worry about that anymore.  But there is a point when excessive celebration in the middle of a rout becomes poor sportsmanship.  No, the Thailand team wasn't at all like South Park's Pee Wee hockey...it was still a competitive contest in the first half and they clearly had their own skilled players.  One of the U.S. players stated that the Thailand players wouldn't have a problem with their behavior...I think it's a mistake to presume graciousness on the part of someone whom you may have offended, though.  I'm still rooting for the good ol' USA, but a little more decorum and maturity...and grace...would help them more in their public relations efforts to promote this sport that grossly underpays them for their outstanding talent...

Quote of the Week...from Maya Lin

Math...it's a puzzle to me.  I love figuring out puzzles.                 ---Maya Lin

Maya Lin is the architect and artist responsible for the design of the Vietnam Memorial wall in Washington, D.C., which was initially considered controversial but is now widely esteemed as one of the greatest memorials anywhere...Melissa and I were very impressed when we visited it last October. Lin's above quote resonates with me as I have always thought that mathematics was taught in schools incorrectly.  If the puzzle-like nature of this field were emphasized in school instead of making it all a solemn judgment of the poor student's abilities and work ethic, than I believe we'd see a lot fewer people...including those with a high intellect...suffering mental blocks over the subject.  As for me, whenever I do pick up one of my several Shaum's Outline Series books on mathematics...and this series covers just about every course imaginable...I regard their "problems" as fun puzzles to work out, and the answers are provided along with explanations as to how to solve them.  And since I'm not going to school, there's no verdict coming down on me being a dumbass because I got a wrong answer.  So many people nowadays like to do puzzles such as Jumble, Sudoku, Kakuro (my favorite), Hidato, Crosswords, and others... I'm also a fan of jigsaw puzzles.  But believe it or not, picking up a Schaum's book about a particular field in math and going through it can be its own kind of fun puzzle experience...and who knows, you may discover that you're not as mathematically-challenged as you thought.  But keep it secret if you do this, otherwise folks will be asking you what you're going to do with your new mathematical learning while if you stick with the more "standard" kinds of puzzles they won't bug you over it...

Rainy June

June has seen a huge upward spike in rainfall for the Gainesville, Florida area, especially after the pretty dry conditions we experienced the previous month.  I'm not quite as averse as other people to walking out in it for a few minutes without an umbrella, but I do have an issue with oversaturation of the ground, along with puddles and slippery roads...and the associated proliferation of potholes.  I tend to avoid running outdoors when it's raining or has been recently because road surfaces...sometimes mixed with oil from parked vehicles...can seriously interfere with traction and vision.  Another problem is the presence at times of lighting, which was in the news recently when a young Floridian man riding a motorcycle on the interstate was directly struck by a lightning bolt and killed.  A few years ago I was running along Daytona Beach when a sudden, severe thunderstorm swept through and it was a race for me to get back to my hotel with lightning crashing around...a scary experience I don't want to repeat.  So while I acknowledge that in my northern Florida area the ground conditions had been getting dry enough for folks to begin sounding alarms about potential forest fires and the recent rains have "dampened" those concerns, I'm still looking forward for some drier weather...although that's not going to come anytime soon if the prognosticators are right...

Weekly Short Stories: 1948 Science Fiction, Part 1

I continued on with my look back at excellent short science fiction from the past as I moved to the year 1948, using the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 10 (1948).  Here are my reactions to the first six tales from that book...

DON'T LOOK NOW by Henry Kuttner
"Don't look now" is the frequent comment made by what appears to be a very paranoid and delusional man to a reporter in a bar.  He is convinced that Martians have invaded and infiltrated Earth and are all around us...third eye and all, just like that old Twilight Zone episode made a few years later.  He uses the kind of fervent, detailed language paranoids use that often gets listeners hooked on their narrative, which can be pretty farfetched.  How it all ends...this story is pretty brief...I leave it for you to possibly read...

HE WALKED AROUND THE HORSES by H. Beam Piper
This is a story about an alternative history.  In 1809 Prussia a British diplomat traveling to Vienna in the midst of conflict with France's Napoleon walks around the horses at a stable...and disappears.  That causes enough consternation for the people around him, but from the perspective of the new, parallel world he has entered that has no Emperor Napoleon in it, the people there are just as confounded by his sudden unexplained appearance and historically absurd rantings.  It's a good history lesson if you're unfamiliar with this era and even delves back into our own Revolutionary War...

THE STRANGE CASE OF JOHN KINGMAN by Murray Leinster
One of those psychiatrists of the time who was into the trend of applying electroshock therapy to their patients has his eyes set on John Kingman, diagnosed as a delusional paranoid who has been a patient at a mental institution as far as anyone can remember.  The doctor goes back into the records and discovers he was first admitted in the late 1700s! And what about those six fingers on each hand and his tendency to sketch highly technical drawings that illustrate science and engineering principles yet undiscovered?  The story draws a line between true science and "pop" science and suggests that not knowing the difference can bring some regretful consequences...

THAT ONLY A MOTHER by Judith Merril
This is a somber apocalyptic tale about a young woman carrying and giving birth to her baby daughter in an post-nuclear war environment where a large percentage of the newborn have serious birth defects and infanticide runs rampant as a result.  The most disturbing story by far in this group...

THE MONSTER by A.E. Van Vogt
Earth has been decimated by war, wiping out all life.  Aliens bent on conquering the planet for their own can resurrect life from the ashes.  Looking for the causes of the catastrophe they keep trying to bring back people from the past, but none of them can provide any answer.  Finally they resurrect one of the most recent humans...and he instantly vanishes!  And then the fun starts...this is the only story I know of that paints an optimistic picture of humanity after its complete self-annihilation...

DREAMS ARE SACRED by Peter Phillips
The third story of the six about an paranoiac, an institutionalized famed fantasy writer has slipped into his own fantasy dream...unwakeable...and the attending doctor enlists the aid of his pragmatic friend to enter that dream and bring the writer back to reality.  Uh...does this possibly remind you of the movie Inception, which is based on people entering and messing with others' dreams?  Seemed like a great original idea when I first saw it, but Peter Phillips had already laid it all out back in 1948...

That's it for this week.  More sci-fi short stories from 1948 next week...

2019 Women's World Cup in Soccer Underway

The 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup in soccer has begun its group stage, with 24 nations divided into six alphabetized groups of four...the USA is in Group F along with Thailand, Chile, and Sweden.  Chile and Sweden begin this group's play today while the United States will face Thailand.  All matches in the World Cup will be held at various locales throughout France.  Sixteen teams will quality from the group stage to enter the knockout rounds, culminating in the finale to be held on July 7th in Lyon.  The American team features Megan Rapinoe, Carli Lloyd, and Alex Morgan and are defending champions.  I'm looking forward to following the matches and hope you are, too...

This morning on the United States Senate floor, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer decried the disparity in pay between the American men's and women's national soccer teams.  He pointed out that the men's team was rewarded with a $5.1 million bonus for getting into the Round of Sixteen in their last World Cup...not the one most recently held in Russia since they didn't even qualify for it, while the women's team was given a paltry $1.7 million after they WON the World Cup in 2015...one third of the men's take.  Furthermore, women have already won three World Cups. The men, by contrast, have never even come close to winning a World Cup.  And you see a similar discrepancy in pay for men and women's league soccer.  But then again, this relegation of women's sports as secondary to men's isn't just in soccer...in the recent French Open in tennis the women's semifinals were exiled to secondary courts in order to focus the primary ones on the men.  It's too bad we live in a world like this...I think we'll be hearing more about this gender-based inequity in the days to come as the Women's World Cup coverage intensifies...

Later: USA beat Thailand 13-0 with Alex Morgan scoring 5 goals.  I originally got the match's date wrong...imagine my surprise when I finally got off from an extended work day only to see it being replayed on FS1...