My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #35-31

Here are five more entries to my list of 500 all-time favorite songs.  They are all a bit on the "down" side, but that's just the way I like it sometimes.  And four of the five are deeply buried in the past as well, the one exception being a twenty-year old song I first heard ten years ago...

35 FUNERAL FOR A FRIEND/LOVE LIES BLEEDING...Elton John
Although this lengthy track from Elton John's 1973 Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album had been out for a while, my local album rock radio station began to seriously play it in early 1975...and it quickly became one of my favorites: I picked it as my "song of the year".  The "funeral" opening section is brooding, stormy, sad, and completely instrumental.  Elton eventually breaks in to singing as the tempo and mood both pick up...I regard this as his supreme masterpiece...

34 MORNING BELL...Radiohead
I'll always associate this sobering song from the British alternative band with long distance training runs in late 2010 and early 2011, and the areas I ran in west of my home neighborhood while listening to a shuffle mix of Radiohead songs on my MP3 player.  From Radiohead's 2000 Kid A album, their greatest in my opinion, its lyrics seem to be about divorce and the heavy toll it takes, especially in those cases involving children.  There's an alternate version of Morning Bell on their next album, Amnesiac...but I prefer the original...

33 LOVE IS LIKE OXYGEN...Sweet
Another "song of the year" on today's list, this one was from 1978 and represents one of those curious examples of a piece of music that stands very apart from the artists' other works.  I've never been much of a Sweet fan but in early '78 the album rock stations began playing this incredible song of theirs that does all sorts of interesting things with melody...and the lyrics resonated with me strongly at the time: "I walk the streets at night, to be hidden by the city lights"...back then I did probably more walking...day and night...then I have ever done before or since...

32 SCENTLESS APPRENTICE...Nirvana
This is a prime example of a song that the listener will either strongly love or strongly hate.  I get the rage embedded within it, the guitar work is phenomenally menacing and heavy metal, and I bet there will never be another artist with the guts to scream his heart out in the demented way that Kurt Cobain does it here.  It's from the Aberdeen, Washington band's 1993 final studio album In Utero, a work that I generally didn't care for all that much.  The lyrics are brilliant and very disturbing with a nihilistic bent...maybe you should skip this one if you're squeamish or prone to nightmares...

31 FOR NO ONE...the Beatles
This is a brief track from what I see as the Beatles' greatest album, Revolver, from 1966.  It's a "Paul" song with McCartney singing solo chiefly to the accompaniment of a piano...that is, until the mid-song break, highlighted by a French horn arrangement improvised and played by Alan Civil,  bringing to mind a similar contribution to the band's Penny Lane by trumpeter David Mason the following year.  For No One is a melancholic, pensive piece that has always matched up well with my general disposition...

Next week: #30-26...

Just Finished Reading East of Eden by John Steinbeck

I've been reading through some of American writer John Steinbeck's more famous novels lately...five years after reading his Of Mice and Men, I went through three last month: The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row, and The Pearl.  The last one was a reread: I had it back in '71 as a high school English class reading assignment.  And now I just finished reading my fifth book of his: the 1952 semi-autographical multigenerational family epic East of Eden.  Like his Grapes of Wrath, this novel was quickly turned into a successful film, one of James Dean's three celebrated starring cinematic appearances before his tragic accidental death in 1956.  Like most of the stories of his I've read so far, the setting is primarily in California...more specifically the agriculturally rich Salinas Valley where the author grew up.  According to the narrative he traces his ancestry back to the Hamilton family which, along with the Trasks form the focus of the story as it delves into three generations...with two generations of intense sibling rivalry within the latter family drawing forth the novel's title as an allegory on the Cain and Abel story from the Biblical book of Genesis.  So what we're seeing here is a mixture of the fictional with nonfiction...not that far removed from James Michener's long list of historical fiction novels, when you think about it...

East of Eden is very character-intense, with Steinbeck deeply exploring the personalities, history and beliefs of the various characters.  There is the Hamilton family with Irish immigrant Samuel and his hardy, blunt, and morally impeccable wife Liza and their many offspring...the Hamiltons settled into the Salinas area with little money and have always lived on near-subsistence level at their farm, this in spite of Samuel, a naturally good-natured, upbeat man, being an inventor/tinkerer and generally lauded in the area as an expert repairman.  The Trask family starts in Connecticut, where the widowed father of two boys has built a false aura of military expertise around himself, fooling the government into hiring him for consultation.  He favors his son Adam and neglects Charles...the latter resents the favoritism and takes it out on his brother.  Yet Adam, forced into the army by his father, grows to disdain him and...well, I can see I'm going to take up several pages describing the developing relationships.  Let me just say that Adam eventually moves to his own farm in Salinas with his psychopathic, pregnant wife Cathy...they have fraternal twin sons Caleb and Aaron.  The rest of the book takes off from there as the Hamiltons and Trasks go through their various life changes and crises...connected together conceptually through the philosophical and spiritual discernment of Lee, the Trask home's caretaker/cook who is a descendant of Chinese immigrants.  It is Lee who interestingly takes up a deep study of Hebrew scriptures and with the deciphering of the Hebrew word "timshel" learns the true meaning of the story of Cain and Abel, "east" of Eden...

East of Eden to me was an overly ambitious attempt to accomplish a lot of different things in one story, and because of this overarching reach it seems to sometimes lose a sense of coherency.  On the positive side, I took away from this reading experience the notion that we all have choices to make in our lives as long as we can still breath in the air. Our pasts, especially those things burdening us with guilt or resentment, will necessarily often weigh in on our present state, but we still always have that "timshel" that is divinely provided for us to be able to change.  And that's no small deal...

Just Finished Reading Devil in the Grove by Gilbert King

I just finished reading Gilbert King's historical work Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America.  Published in 2012, it won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction the following year.  It's an account, earlier in Marshall's career before his tenure on the United States Supreme Court, of when he was an NAACP lawyer defending blacks across the country, and of a case in Jim Crow-segregated central Florida in the late 1940s and early 1950s where four young black man were framed in a white supremist justice system for a rape that probably never happened.  Called the Groveland Four case after the southern Lake County town at the epicenter, King examines the deeply entrenched racism of the white community there at that time, with an extremely corrupt, racist sheriff and deputy who would stoop to any level to see to it that Charles Greenlee, Earnest Thomas, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin would be executed for their alleged crimes.  If Marshall represented the virtuous, rescuing hero of this story then Sheriff Willis McCall would be the archvillain, closely tied in with the Ku Klux Klan and illegal gambling operations in the area.  On one evening outside Groveland, a poor rural white married couple, the Padgetts, got their car stuck in the mud...Shepherd and Irvin were together driving by, and stopped to help them get their car free.  Unsuccessful, the husband, Willie, got angry at them and after insulting them got on the short end of a fist fight with Shepherd.  That was the incident that later was turned into a gang rape allegation...the other two eventual defendants were nowhere near at the time and were sucked into the case by McCall.  Thomas, hearing that he was being accused of this capital offense, fled to the north Florida woods while the other three, while in detention, were beaten and whipped into forced confessions by deputy Yates and his partner...with McCall looking on.  I'll save relating the fates of these four innocent black men, two of them brave, returning World War II veterans, in case you decide to read or research the case for yourself.  Instead I'll discuss how the author chose to present it...

Gilbert King split his analysis of the Groveland Four case into sections whereby he described Thurmond Marshall's philosophy of defense and his different partners and associates within the NAACP, as well as his communications and relationships with the FBI, Florida governors, and the judges and prosecution.  The endemic racism of the South...and of Lake County, Florida in particular...of that time was emphasized as King related incidences of previous horrific lynchings of blacks.  This was crucial to the story as it showed the defense strategy Marshall would employ in trying to save his clients from the electric chair.  The citrus growers would use cheap black prison labor in their groves...Sheriff McCall would see to it that he provided the necessary bodies. The author also presented the corruption and ties to the KKK of the local law enforcement as well as the inherent racism of the local justice system at the time through the principals involved.  And of course, the sequence of events that first led up to the arrests and what followed to the end was revealed through the course of the book.  This is not one of your "whitewashed" Yankee Doodle Dandy American history texts that paint our past in generally idealized terms, but rather is an important testament to the underlying reasons for the racial divisions still plaguing our society in this Black Lives Matter era...I recommend it although its content is very disturbing and pulls no punches about the extreme violence that happened: if you're white and grew up in Lake County back then you most definitely enjoyed a much different experience than if your skin had been of a darker hue...

Quote of the Week...from Michael Jordan

Always turn a negative situation into a positive situation.                 ---Michael Jordan

Of course, Michael Jordan is the all-time basketball great, the star of six NBA championship Chicago Bulls seasons as well as a NCAA championship season at North Carolina...many regard him as the greatest basketball player ever.  When in high school he was turned down for the team, but in reaction decided to put all he had into improving his game...and the rest is history.  Turning a negative situation into a positive one isn't just the option for famous, enormously talented individuals like Jordan; we can all benefit from his sage advice.  Unfortunately, for me I've often been in the habit of confronting negative scenarios by either avoiding them or just giving up...please don't tell this to Michael.  Going through personal storms with dignity and a purpose to make things better at the end is a major way to strengthen oneself and provide deeper meaning to life.  And sometimes if I'm not careful I can fall into the trap of perceiving a situation as being negative when it really isn't...holding off on reacting in an unproductive manner can help to turn things around in a hurry: in other words, sometimes it pays to just keep my mouth shut...

As a National Basketball Association team owner, former player, and a black man, Michael Jordan has recently served as an intermediary between the striking players and the rest of the owners on resuming the season in light of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, unarmed but shot in the back seven times, now paralyzed.  This is about as negative as it gets...to turn it into a positive situation will require a change of heart across our society...

Mail-In Voting

I happen to be a United States Postal Service employee and have been since 1987...I'm in the clerk craft section of operations and have always been involved in mail processing .  I don't intend with this article to get into its recent policies under the direction of new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, but I realize that with the current heated debates going on nationwide about expanded mail-in voting due to the COVID-19 epidemic screwing around with all our lives, I may have to refer to the USPS a little in passing...but it's not the gist of what I want to write about today.  No, I want instead to address the different perspectives that people on different political sides have about the process of voting and how this has influenced their views on today's questions...

Regrettably, in the United States...especially in the Jim Crow Deep South states...there is a history of voter suppression of different demographic groups, especially of blacks, intended to keep them out political power and in an underclass state.  After the Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965, the measures taken to disenfranchise certain prospective voters...such as poll taxes and literacy tests...have been outlawed...but there is still a sense nowadays that one side of the political equation wants to reduce the presence of blacks, who tend to overwhelmingly vote Democratic, at the voting booth.  So you see the accusations flying whenever Republican state legislators and governors sign into law new voter identification bills that reputedly are designed to protect the electoral process from voter fraud but are seen by the other side as discriminatory and an end-around to the Voting Rights Act.  Also, Trump's objections to the universal mail-in voting proposed in light of the coronavirus pandemic have been portrayed as voter suppression as well...he alleges there would be mass fraud with ballots flooding the mail system, many unasked for.  The President has stated that voting is an act that should involve an effort on the part of the voter...and in this I am in agreement with him.  To me, the more passive a voter is come election day the more able his or her vote can be manipulated by outside parties, thereby distorting the will of the people.  An example is this notion of ballot harvesting, illegal in most states but not in California.  In the 2018 congressional election held in that state there were a number of House seats that looked to be close Republican victories but after the "harvested" votes...overwhelming Democratic...were counted, they went to the other side.  Democratic Party operatives basically canvassed neighborhoods, avoiding registered Republican homes and going to those supporting their own party and collecting and delivering mail-in ballots to the elections offices.  Now the parties have always had their election day voting drives whereby they encourage voters and sometimes even drive them to the polling place and back...but you see, this still entails some sort of active effort on the part of the voter...

So in this discussion we're left with two seemingly conflicting philosophical approaches.  One side says voting should be as easily, effortlessly accessible as possible and the other says that it is an act of responsibility that necessarily involves initiative on the part of the voter.  As in most things there should be a reasonable middle ground...I think too passive of a voting electorate can tempt a destructive manipulation of the system while the rules for voting should be made careful to avoid making them too difficult for citizens in diverse groups to attain.  I like my Florida system of mail-in absentee voting whereby I take the active step and request a ballot either online or by phone or mail.  In California, on the other hand, they have flooded their state with ballots while in Texas one has to meet special criteria to vote absentee...even in the midst of this pandemic.  Only nine states currently have universal vote-by-mail, but the Democrats in Washington want to nationalize this process with legislation that is being opposed by Trump and the Republicans...and this is sadly the convenient reason they're making such a big fuss about the Postal Service right now, not because they care all that much about the institution in itself. As I've said before, back in 2009-10 the Democrats had control over the Presidency and both houses of Congress and did nothing to help it with its financial troubles, part of which are caused by the shrinking first class mail volume brought on by the digital revolution and part of which are caused by a burdensome, massive (and unique) 75-year pre-retirement funding mandate passed and signed by the Republicans in 2006...

Weekly Short Stories: 1962 Science Fiction, Part 3

Today I conclude my look back at the year 1962 in the realm of short science fiction as revealed in the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 24 (1962).  I liked all four of today's stories and there's no doubt that each carries with it a message for our own time although they all came out 58 years ago...

WHEN YOU CARE, WHEN YOU LOVE by Theodore Sturgeon
This is one of those stories that sound very romantic...that is, until the end when not only do you realize the extent to which the extremely wealthy can exert their power but also that your very perception of your own life as being one largely unfettered by the direct manipulation of others comes into question.  This is a story of a young man who, engaging in trespassing for fun, encounters such a powerful person...a young woman...and falls in love with her, arriving at an "ending' bearing a curious resemblance to the Matrix series of sci-fi movies...

THE BALLAD OF LOST C'MELL by Cordwainer Smith
I've already said that Cordwainer Smith was perhaps the most creative and innovative science fiction writer of his age...and I think he must have loved cats as well, since this story, along with my favorite The Game of Rat and Dragon, feature them.  But in this tale it is eons into the future and Earth, now just an interstellar stopping point, has genetically altered the remaining animal forms to resemble humans...as an underclass they take up the menial jobs "pure" humans deem themselves too good for. C'mell, genetically a cat but by all appearances a woman, teams up with a benevolent human leader to help the animal underclass achieve civil rights and social equality.  I hardly need to mention that this story is highly allegorical to our times...and the era in which it was written...

GADGET VS. TREND Christopher Anvil
This brief tale is a sequence of news posts stretched over a period of a few weeks after a new device has been invented that defends privacy and intrusion by setting up a force-field block.  It's bracketed by two pronouncements by a sociologist of that time (way off in the future during the late 1970s), the first passionately in defense of individualism in the face of pressures to conform while the last lambasts selfish individualism and promotes unity and cooperation.  Gee, what happened in between to change his stance?  Guess you'll need to read it to find out...

ROOFS OF SILVER Gordon Dickson
A planet off somewhere in the cosmos is seeded with settlers...with observers secretly dispatched to evaluate their progress toward civilization.  If they're suspected of regressing to animal-like behavior then they are frozen into quarantine and possibly destroyed...one observer, confronted with the information that his planet will face such a fate, objects and takes matters into his own hands.  Toward the story's end he makes a very profound statement while trying in vain to defend his "people" that I think applies to today: "But these people operate according to justice and conscience. It's not just taboo and ritual, not just--".  Who are the people today who operate according to justice and conscience and who are those who operate according to taboo and ritual?

Next week I began my look at the year 1963 in short science fiction...

Hurricanes and Conventions

This week is marked by two named tropical systems invading the Gulf of Mexico and making landfall, along with the Republican National Convention...taking place in a virtually televised format as was the Democratic Convention the previous week.  I studiously avoided the Democratic Convention and will continue in this regard this week with that of the Republicans...I've known for some time how I will vote.  The real question I have is how can anybody planning to vote this November NOT already have made up their minds?  Yet I am supremely confident that, as has been the case in the past five presidential elections, this one in 2020 will be decided by a relative handful of dunderheads who will still be undecided with less than two weeks to go and who will allow some contrived last-minute "news" story to manipulate their vote for one candidate or the other, thus tipping the election.  So already knowing this will happen, why should I waste my time and attention keeping up with the Trump and Biden campaigns, as if my awareness of what is happening will somehow influence anything or anyone?  My answer is that it won't, so I'm not.  If you want to get all bent up out of shape over what's going down and are filling your Facebook page with partisan political rants and posts...some of which were probably planted by Russian intelligence...then you can rest assured that I've already "unfollowed" you until after the election...

Just a few days ago the big story was how two twin hurricanes were going to hit land at the same time...possibly even the same spot...on the Gulf coast, an unprecedented occurrence.  Now, though, the two storms Marco and Laura have diverged a bit, both with their relative strengths and their trajectories.  Marco, at one time on Sunday with minimal hurricane intensity, got severely hit by wind shear and reduced to a manageable tropical storm level.  It only skimmed the Louisiana coast as it diminished to a depression...most of its storms were over southern Alabama and far western Florida.  Laura, which not only has been projected to reach level two hurricane status, is also on a different path than Marco, slated to hit land late Wednesday or Thursday in east Texas/west Louisiana.  Both Marco and Laura thankfully have been speeding along quickly and once Laura dumps its storm surge, wind, and rain on its targeted area, it should rapidly go on its way inland...no doubt unfortunately causing flooding and damage while dissipating.  I'm thankful that Florida is being spared...at least until the next storm comes around...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #40-36

All of the acts on this segment of my 500 all-time favorite songs list are well-known, established artists with maybe only one song being relatively obscure...they should all be famous since they, after all, are in my personal musical hall of fame...

40 I WON'T BACK DOWN...Tom Petty
Gainesville's late home-grown rock star temporarily broke away from his band the Heartbreakers in 1989 to make his solo album Full Moon Fever...that's why you don't see them credited for this track from it although Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell is strongly present.  I Won't Back Down, with lyrics like "No I'll stand my ground, won't be turned around, and I'll keep this world from draggin' me down", is the ultimate song of defiance and individuality in a culture that outwardly celebrates these expressions but actually tends to stigmatize those who do not conform to the "party line" of whichever group seems to dominate the setting, be it a small circle or a nationwide movement...

39 DARKNESS...the Police
From their brilliant 1981 Ghost in the Machine album, Darkness is a powerful mood piece of despair with a strong, blended instrumental component bathing over its entirety.  It's about the futility of trying to create or get anything done...and wouldn't anonymity be preferable? "Instead of worrying about my clothes, I could be someone that nobody knows"...I didn't get to know this song until about 15 years after it came out, but it quickly became one of my favorites of the Police.  But Ghost in the Machine is so good that there's another song from it that I think is even greater: stay tuned to this channel...

38 EVEN FLOW...Pearl Jam
I always liked this strong guitar rock performance by the Seattle band on their 1992 debut Ten album...but there's a different version out there getting radio play that I don't care for as much.  Lyricist Eddie Vedder sings his typically hard-to-understand words about a homeless man while guitarists Stone Gossard (who wrote the song's music) and Mike McCready deliver an epic performance.  A song sure to get your adrenaline going and one on which I automatically turn the volume up to high...

37 PEACE FROG...the Doors
Off their 1970 Morrison Hotel album, Peace Frog is a funky adventure for the Doors as Jim Morrison repeats the mantra "Blood on the streets" while he reminisces about the band's past experiences and recent history and pays homage to his favorite city, "Phantastic" Los Angeles....the break in the song's middle features a spoken poem he wrote years before about an eerie childhood experience he had while his family was stopped on the highway because of a fatal accident that had just occurred: Jim himself represented the "young child's fragile eggshell mind".  A beautiful...yet admittedly a little creepy...piece of art, this song is...

36 STRAWBERRY FIELDS FOREVER...the Beatles
Speaking of weird, artistic ventures in music, Strawberry Fields Forever was written by John Lennon and first recorded twice, each version at a slightly different speed than the other.  Lennon told producer George Martin to combine the two into one track and when Martin protested about the different speeds Lennon reportedly told him to fix it, or something of the like.  The result was a recording that at times sounds more like Ringo than John...the video shown on the Ed Sullivan Show in late 1966 (I was ten at the time) was my first exposure to this song: I didn't like it, mainly because everyone was suddenly sporting moustaches.  Of course, now I love Strawberry Fields Forever...

Next week: #35-31...

Books I'm Currently Reading

Sometimes I'm careless with my reading and let myself get stuck reading several books at once: now is a prime example.  I'm plowing...at a snail's pace...through James Michener's very, very long historical fiction work The Source while at the same time reading John Steinbeck's East of Eden and two nonfiction books: The Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New Generation by Gilbert King and The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack.  This is on top of my science fiction short story anthology reading.  Whew, I better watch it with these books and not let them get ahead of me.  I do think they're all very interesting, although with Michener's novels I tend to come away from them not quite sure what really happened and what was merely a product of his fertile imagination.  The Source, which I'm currently about halfway through, is probably going to take longer to finish than the other three, all of which I should be wrapping up (and later discussing) by the end of next week.  Once that happens I may just stick with Michener until his book's finished, maybe adding another author that recently had an entire Jeopardy! show category devoted to himself: children's fiction writer Roald Dahl.  Dahl is responsible for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, among several other works.  Should be fun examining his books, which are a lot shorter and, well, for kids...by the way, I've never seen any of the movies derived from his writings...

Miscellany on My Day Off from Work

Today has been a welcome day for me to be off from work...physically resting at home is exactly what I need.  It's been enjoyable to watch some of the TV sports now available, and I've been observing the progress of tropical storms Laura and Marco as they approach the Gulf of Mexico, where both are expected to intensify to the level of Category One hurricanes...and hit land at about the same spot, in Louisiana if the current models hold. And the House of Representatives was holding a special session to debate and vote on funding the postal service and restricting what some regard as political interference in the organization during this presidential election season...as I've mentioned before, I need to write an article laying out my own more detailed opinions on the subject.  But mainly I've enjoyed watching sports...oh, Melissa introduced me to a series that Amazon Prime is showing about "great races"...the episode we watched featured the Pacific island nation of Fiji as the race site, with contestants on various international teams from across the world biking, hiking, swimming, rafting, climbing...you name it, they had to do it. The funny thing I noticed was that the Fijians observing these supercharged athletes in action seemed to have no problem themselves getting around and seemed fitter than the actual contestants...

Anyway, I've been watching sports today, and that includes Mexican Premier League soccer, the NBA playoffs, baseball, hockey, horse racing at Saratoga...speaking of horses yesterday they announced that the Kentucky Derby, postponed because of the pandemic to September 5th, will not be allowing live spectators after all.  And speaking of soccer, I hadn't realized that our Major League Soccer's recently completed playoffs weren't really for the 2020 championship but rather it was all only a prelude to the "real" regular season that has just begun...wow, that's a letdown. Still, I plan to continue following it as long as they keep showing entertaining matches. As for the title of this article, I don't think I've ever used the word "miscellany" before, either in speech or writing, yet I saw the word many times during my childhood: our family regularly read Life magazine and they had a page toward the back called "Miscellany" in which they would feature random topics.  Well, Miscellany is back, at least on this blog...

Quote of the Week...from Mark Twain

Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.               ---Mark Twain

There is a temptation among some of us to take an ages-old quote and apply it, out of the temporal contest in which it was made, to today's world...the above statement by renowned and beloved American writer Mark Twain (Samuel Clemons) is a case in point.  Twain was said to have made it in jest after a reader with an unusual name asked him to change that of one of his same-named characters. Yet this quote has a much broader meaning as well, a reflection on the times he was living through...but he died in 1910, well over a century ago.  And I think a lot has happened between his time and ours...

Scientific, technological and social progress means that today's possibilities are greater than before...but from the vantagepoint of the future looking back, that same time we're now experiencing will seem limited by contrast.  Serious, debilitating and fatal diseases were running rampant in Twain's time with no immunization or antibiotics available while the era's medical practices, with modern sterilization procedures just beginning to be practiced and a limited ability to control infection after operations, seem barbaric in hindsight...think of all those Civil War amputations.  Communication and transportation were much more limited, and even with the spotlight placed nowadays on racial, ethnic and gender discrepancies in our society, they were much more magnified back then.  People were stratified in their social classes and forced racial segregation was an openly accepted norm of society...even endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court...as voting rights, employment, lending, housing, medical treatment, education and the halls of justice clearly meant entirely different things to people based on their class, race, religion, ethnicity, gender...and of course how much money they had: we're still obviously working on some of this today, but it was much more pronounced back then. Yet Twain could see that his own time...which spanned the latter half of the nineteenth century and the start of the next...represented a marked difference from what it was like before.  And why not? the vast nation was now connected by rail and innovations like the telephone, incandescent light and the electrical grid were radically transforming how people lived, and then here comes the internal combustion engine and cars... 

Everybody thinks the times they are living in are at the pivotal point in history, and to an extent they're right.  The "now" of Mark Twain's time may seem different than the "now" of ours, but everything that ever happens...or ever did happen...depends on the infinitude of "nows" that preceded it.  Maybe that sounds a little simplistic, but wait a decade or two and then see what that "now" brings...

Looking with Concern at Swelling UF Student Presence in Gainesville

I live in far northern Gainesville, and my workplace is on the far southern side.  I drive there usually on W 34th or 43rd Streets, but occasionally I'll stop by the Dunkin' Donuts store nearby my home and continue along W 13th Street (US 441)...which runs by the University of Florida main campus...to work.  During the past few months the traffic going this way has been relatively light, but as I approached the University a couple of days ago I realized that the students are coming back in droves...just as they are at colleges across the country.  I've been watching the news of late and listening to sports talk radio as well.  Here are some of the things I've taken from them:

--Many students are careful about masks and distancing but there are also many who completely disregard the coronavirus pandemic and its risks, not only to themselves but to those they come in contact with once infected...I'm hearing report after report of off-campus parties that are causing outbreaks among the student population.  Some colleges are either delaying their classes or deciding to hold the entire semester online.  At UF here in Gainesville it's going to be interesting as many are coming up from COVID hotspot South Florida...in-person classes are set to begin on August 31...

--The University of North Carolina is one of the institutions cancelling in-person classes and going back to an online format, yet they are still going to field a football team this season.  Other schools, though, are still planning to go ahead with regular classes but have cancelled their fall sports...doesn't seem to be a coherent policy here: some colleges even plan to allow thousands of live spectators at their home football games.  The Gators are still plowing full steam ahead with football...seems to me the athletes are probably better off in a more controlled environment playing the sport than they would be mixing more with the general student population.  But it all sounds like a big mess to me...

--I'm suspecting that Alachua County where I live will begin to see an upsurge in the COVID-19 infection rate as the University of Florida campus swells with its students...after all, they won't be functioning within any kind of bubble there: a coronavirus outbreak there means an outbreak for the community at large...

Although I have rarely visited the University of Florida campus during the years after I studied there and graduated, the fact that this damnable disease has forced it off-limits for me has caused me to reflect on how I, in the future after it has been contained, can use this nearby and valuable learning resource.  For one, I'd like to be able to use their library system and investigate how I could check out books from it.  As a UF alumnus I haven't really taken advantage of my status...joining their alumni group may be a good idea as well.  In the meantime I'm looking with some concern at the swelling Gainesville population this month with students flooding back in...some from COVID hotspot areas...and possible future repercussions for my community in light of other college towns' experiences...

Weekly Short Stories: 1962 Science Fiction, Part 2

Allegory is the common thread of these four 1962 science fiction stories from the anthology Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 24 (1962).  But that's commonly the case with this genre, which offers a politically safer forum to discuss pressing and sensitive social issues that would invite blowback and retaliation were the author's ideas expressed more directly and literally.  Here are my reactions to them...

HANG HEAD, VANDAL! by Mark Clifton
A procedure has been developed to derived unlimited energy through fission with ordinary elements...but since there's no way of stopping the process once started then Earth is off-limits to apply the process.  But with Mars...since it's presumed to already be a dead, uninhabited world far away from us...who would miss its demise in the name of progress? The key word here is presumed.  An allegorical story, written years before Earth Day and the advent of the environmental movement, about the unintended consequences of our sometimes blind march ahead with technology and "progress"...

THE WEATHER MAN by Theodore Thomas
The most intriguing story of the four to me, this tale creates the future scenario of Earth's weather being micromanaged...by specially constructed spaceships that navigate the sun's surface and selectively direct its energy toward Earth to provide the wanted effects.  Because of this ability, worldwide political power has been concentrated in the weather control bureaucracy with three divisions that mimic our own present society's institutions: the political Weather Congress, the scientific Weather Advisors, and the implementing Weather Bureau.  An ambitious politician high up in the Congress comes up with what seems an impossible project, and the Advisors and Bureau are challenged to see it through...

EARTHLINGS GO HOME! by Mack Reynolds
An ostensibly tongue-in-cheek story from the viewpoint of a future jaded Earthling who, bored with what his home planet can provide in the area of stimulation and interest, travels to Mars to live it up.  The then-notion of the "ugly American" going abroad with an attitude of entitlement is treated allegorically here, with the native Martians having to adapt to the Earth people's presence...but not liking it one bit...

THE STREETS OF ASHKELON by Harry Harrison
An atheist trader on a world heretofore untainted by humanity has befriended the native intelligent amphibian life and is gradually imparting a sense of the universe to them when a Christian missionary is forced upon him and his world, creating a direct conflict as to the direction of those native beings. As with time travel stories, I am weary (and wary) of science fiction tales that stereotype Christians the way this one does...I think the author, clearly on the side of the atheist and presenting the religious debate in overly simplistic terms, could have easily used greater subtlety to get his point across and his story probably would have had a stronger effect on the reader.  My least favorite of today's four...

Next week I conclude my look back at science fiction short stories from 1962...

Primary Election Day Today in Florida

Today is primary election day for the state of Florida if you're planning on on-site, in-person precinct voting...Melissa and I mailed in our ballots several days ago and, thanks to Alachua County's online ballot-tracking feature, we are confident that the elections office received them and everything is in proper order to process them tonight in the count.  I've noticed that my county provides Business Reply postpaid ballots for voters while others...neighboring Gilchrist County, for example...don't and have the voters put a stamp on their ballots.  And I wonder whether this simple convenience (or lack) will influence relative voter turnout, we'll see.  If you applied for and received an absentee ballot, I recommend that you drop it off at the local elections office (in Gainesville it's at 515 North Main Street) instead of using the mail if you still want to vote that way...the one here will be open for drop-off until 7 pm.  If you have your absentee ballot but haven't sent it yet and want to instead vote in person, take it to your local precinct polling place and surrender it for a new one and vote there...or simply show up if you never applied for a mail-in ballot.  This election is just a primary yet will essentially decide who will be our Alachua County sheriff along with two school board seats and a state representative race.  And since the U.S. House of Representatives District 3 seat always goes Republican due to the demographics of our area, whoever wins that party's crowded and increasingly mud-slinging contest will almost surely be the next representative here.  No president, governor, state cabinet or United States senatorial races are on the ballot so it's not as "sexy" as the one we're facing on November 3rd...even then, Florida isn't holding gubernatorial or U.S. Senate races in 2020.  Since I applied for absentee ballots for the upcoming general election I'm probably going to continue to vote by mail during this pandemic...

I'm hearing all this hullabaloo about the postal service being attacked by Trump as if it's something new...not only has he been railing against my employer for years but the Republican Party has been trying to privatize it for decades.  They pushed through an onerous bill that President Bush signed into law in 2006 compelling the USPS to prefund all of its employees' retirement for the next 75 YEARS..a deliberately backbreaking measure that no American business had ever been forced to operate under.  Yet just three years later we had a Democratic president, Senate, and House and for the two years they controlled the federal government from 2009 through 2010 they did NOTHING to help us out.  And now the same people are clamoring about the how the good old post office is under attack...but I think the main reason they're concerned is because they see it as a threat to the plan for universal mail-in voting that they are promoting, something that is currently being practiced in only nine states and which in all likelihood will not expand nationwide this year, pandemic notwithstanding.  I have my own opinions about the subject of universal voting and voting in general that I plan to share in a future article...

My 500 All-Time Favorite Songs: #45-41

And here we've arrived once again at Monday, meaning it's time for me to list the next five higher-ranked songs on my list of 500 all-time favorites.  One's relatively new...if you count seventeen year-old songs...and the others are buried deeply in the past.  Let me excavate them and bring them to your attention...

45 FATHER AND SON...Cat Stevens
From 1970, I didn't hear this poignant song by Stevens until '72 when it was played, of all places, during my eleventh grade English class...I've loved it ever since.  In it, the singer alternates the verses between a father and his son, deep-voiced for the former and higher for the latter.  Dad is full of time-tested, wise advice emphasizing patience while his restless son cries out for his individuality and freedom to determine his own destiny...an eternal generational struggle that as a teenager and young man I only understood too well for myself.  It's definitely a major tearjerker of a song...

44 CALCULATION (THEME)...Metric
There is a clear, literal interpretation to the cryptic lyrics in this unique, singular song by the Canadian band that I like to refer to as the "Blondie of our century"...I'll leave you to figure it out for yourself should you decide to give it a listen: I'll just say that this may be the ultimate science fiction pop song.  Instead what appealed to me so much in this 2003 track from the band's Old World Underground album that I first heard off the Internet six years later is the sweet singing of Emily Haines and the generally mystical mood of the song.  And the ending lines are pretty awesome, some of the best parting shots in a piece I've ever heard...

43 WHAT'S GOING ON...Marvin Gaye
From Marvin Gaye's groundbreaking 1971 What's Going On album with its themes of social consciousness, racial justice, the environment and opposition to the Vietnam War is the title track, released as a single into a monster hit during the springtime that year...I was fourteen at the time, finishing up a dismal ninth grade school year.  It's not just Marvin's message but also the brilliant backing vocals and instrumentation that make this one of my favorites...I also loved his Mercy Mercy Me and Inner City Blues from the same album, a masterpiece for the ages: "Right on, brother, right on"...

42 SCARBOROUGH FAIR...Simon and Garfunkel
One of the most incredibly beautiful harmonic pieces ever released, Scarborough Fair...referring to a locality in England...is a dreamy collage of lyrical images with a renaissance fair sensibility to it. It was originally an English folk song with Simon and Garfunkel recording it for their 1966 Parsely, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme album (the title a part of the lyrics) but became more known as a singles release in '68 to accompany the soundtrack for the move The Graduate (which we saw as a family that year at a local drive-in).  There's an extended version of this song: normally I'd recommend it but I think the single does quite well...

41 HUMMINGBIRD...Seals and Crofts
From the duo's debut Summer Breeze album, Hummingbird was a minor early 1973 hit, but to me it was by far my favorite song of the year...I thought of it for quite some time as my all-time favorite song.  I don't exactly know what Seals and Crofts meant by the lyrics, but I always viewed it as an inspiring exhortation to never give up on your dreams (the "hummingbird") in the face of adversity...I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for these two rather quirky, offbeat musicians and this sweet, encouraging song that has an epic feel to it...still think it's fantastic...

Next week: #40-36...

Enjoyed Watching Horse Races with No Prior Knowledge of Entrants

Yesterday afternoon I was surfing the different channels for live sports and came across one showing a race from the Saratoga Race Course in upstate New York...the race was the Saratoga Derby Invitational Stakes, for what that was worth.  All I know is that when I tuned in the horses were just being loaded up for the race's start and soon thereafter it was on...I didn't know anything about the horses or their odds other than what the screen was showing as they took off.  I quickly saw that the three favorites in this race, #2,4, and 6, had similar odds and kept my eye out for them.  The race was very close and exciting, and it ended with a photo finish...couldn't have wished for a more exciting couple of minutes watching televised sports.  Yet I knew nothing beforehand about the horses entered, nor had I even been aware of that particular race until I happened to click on it happenstance.  Today I watched a couple more races at Saratoga...FoxSports1 was covering their race day...and although I had to wait a little longer for the races to start I once again was entertained with highly interesting, gripping experiences.  This is a stark contrast to how, during the Triple Crown races like the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont, they'll go on for hours on end with boring background stories about the horses, trainers, owners and the respective tracks...just give me the race, please: I've tried to get enthusiastic about the pre-race hype but it doesn't work for me...

As for Saratoga, they have a no-spectator policy in place because of the coronavirus pandemic, and this past June's Belmont Stakes, also in New York state, was held without live fans on hand.  But the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs, postponed from May until September 5th, is at this writing going to take place before live spectators...I wonder how that's going to play out.  As for my view of the sport in general, I've known people who are crazy about horses and some who clearly have a weakness for gambling...sorry, but I've never been partial to either: I think the last time I gambled on sports was in a football pool in 1973 during high school.  No, I just like to watch races during the couple of minutes they take out of my day and then go on to other things...others can keep their money and horse lore...

Constellation of the Month: Sagittarius (the Archer)

Sagittarius, representing an archer (one of two constellations depicting half-horse, half-man centaurs), is prominent in the southern sky during the month of August in the evening. Although there are no first magnitude stars in it, there are plenty of second and third magnitude...but its main feature is that the Milky Way runs strong through it and there are many Messier objects...mainly nebula and star clusters...interspersed throughout.  I picked it as my constellation of the month over a couple of others because of the striking presence of the planets Jupiter and Saturn in its northeastern corner right now.  By the way, three of the names of Sagittarius's more prominent stars, Kaus Borealis, Kaus Media and Kaus Australis, are derived from two different languages...Arabic and Latin: "kaus" is "bow" and "borealis", "media" and "australis" translate to northern, middle and southern, respectively.  Sagittarius is the last of the brighter zodiac constellations that march across the sky...at least for a few months: its followers...Capricornus, Aquarius, and Pisces...are pretty faint as the autumn evening sky has few bright stars of note.  The above picture I drew just shows the brighter stars along with Jupiter, Saturn and the positions of some of the Messier objects...Sagittarius contains many more stars visible to the naked eye and encompasses a much wider area in the celestial sky than what I've shown...

Quote of the Week...from Thurgood Marshall

Each of you, as an individual, must pick your own goals.  Listen to others, but do not become a blind follower.                                                         ---Thurgood Marshall

I don't know where the above quote came from, but it sounds like a school's commencement speech, doesn't it?  Thurgood Marshall, a champion for civil rights in the twentieth century, is best known for his tenure as a U.S. Supreme Court justice from 1967 to 1991 as well as the attorney successfully arguing for the plaintiff in the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case that the same court ruled to outlaw segregation and overturn the earlier 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson "separate but equal" ruling.  But before that 1954 case Marshall repeatedly risked life and limb in the segregated Jim Crow south defending blacks against unjust charges, having to contend with lynchings, white-instigated race riots, police mistreatment of prisoners, and a general atmosphere of hostility toward his presence there as a black northern lawyer...of course he had to abide by the discriminatory segregation rules as he went about his business there as well.  I'm learning all this as I am currently reading Gilbert King's excellent historical account of a 1949 central Florida case he was involved in, titled The Devil in the Grove...very, very disturbing.  As for Marshall's quote, I picked it because it is so universal in application.  I'm afraid that more and more people these days are wasting their God-given ability to think for themselves and instead place all their beliefs in the hands of media gurus, celebrities, and politicians who seem to have a queer hold on them.  Also, in deciding how to behave during this pandemic I'm afraid that too many of us are like animals in a herd, knowing the right, publicly responsible thing to do but holding off on doing it for fear of rejection by the rest of the "herd" we interact with...in particular the alpha dog leaders who often espouse questionable tenets.  For me, no longer concerned about herds or alpha dogs, Marshall's quote had a deeper meaning to me.  I will be turning 64 in less than two months, and when it comes around to forming goals...especially those requiring a substantial investment of my time...this more advanced age may imply to some that my doors are closed in some areas.  But I'm not a blind follower of other peoples' dictates or views and instead hold to the notion that no matter where I am in this journey called life, I have the present moment to make my choices in...what the future holds for anyone is always going to be a mystery...

Biden's Pick of Kamala Harris as Running Mate

After months of speculation, presumed Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden has selected California senator and former presidential candidate Kamala Harris to be his vice-presidential running mate.  The choice wasn't unexpected; Harris was generally considered the frontrunner.  I wasn't too thrilled over the way she ambushed Biden in the first debate, but it's clear to me that when her campaign began to stall not very long thereafter she realized her mistake and was one of the first candidates to withdraw from the race.  Since his campaign's dramatic recovery in March she has been vocal in her support of Biden and because...unlike our current president...he has a forgiving, live-and-let-live gracious aspect to his personality, he buried their "spat from the past".  It brought to my mind the bitterly-fought 1980 Republican primary campaign between Ronald Reagan and George (H.W.) Bush.  Reagan was the clear odds-on favorite, but Bush came on strong early and openly challenged him, calling him an advocate of "voodoo economics".  I was living near the University of Florida campus at the time and, just before the Florida Primary that year, walked a couple of blocks over to Norman Hall to hear Bush's son Neil give a speech for his father in which he derided Reagan's opinions.  Yet in the convention later that year Reagan picked Bush for his VP and the rest is history...

The Republican Party and the Russian government supporting Trump had plenty of time to conduct extensive opposition research on whomever Biden would ultimately pick as running mate.  Kamala Harris would not have been my first choice as I preferred Georgia's Stacey Abrams or Florida's Val Demings...and I'm glad he didn't pick Susan Rice who, while very knowledgeable and intellectual, I feared might seem a little too distant to a lot of Americans.  But had Biden picked Abrams or Demings or Rice or one of the other leading contenders, you can rest assured that, like yesterday and today's immediate attacks against Harris, they would also have their supposed faults quickly exposed.  For this reason and others expect Biden to drop in the public opinion polls, tightening the race...that's no reflection on Harris but rather that Biden, whether you personally like him or not, was already going to be the generally more liked figure on the ticket regardless of his pick.  Also, expect people to criticize Harris for being aggressive and ruthless...just as Hillary Clinton was pilloried for her assertiveness and articulation in 2016.  To me that's sexism since male candidates generally get lauded for exhibiting the same traits...let's see, Trump's already wasted no time in calling Harris "nasty".  Should be interesting to see how the campaign progresses...

Weekly Short Stories: 1962 Science Fiction, Part 1

When the retrospective anthology I'm referring to here with my review of science fiction short stories from 1962 was first published in January 1992, co-editor Isaac Asimov was already seriously ill with kidney failure...he would die from it three months later.  So only Martin Greenberg is present in this volume...along with the final one covering 1963...with his commentary alone preceding each entry...so sad.  As for my own life in 1962, I was five going on six...which meant that I began the first grade in September of that year at Boulevard Heights Elementary School in West Hollywood, Florida.  Only a month later they marched us into the inner hallway and had the class line up and kneel down against the wall, our hands tucked over our lowered heads: it was a civil defense drill during the scary Cuban Missile Crisis...but I was unaware of this at the time and just thought of it as a weird fire drill...

THE INSANE ONES by J.G. Ballard
It's a crazy future scenario here with psychiatry as a profession banned world-wide to accommodate a sweeping political movement to remove insanity as a possible criminal defense.  One psychiatrist, recently released from his own three-year imprisonment for such an illegal practice, finds himself pressured to treat an obviously disturbed young man who is determined to commit a dangerously violent act.  This story puts forth the suggestion that what is ultimately a sane or insane act is largely determined by the context in which it takes place...sometimes it's the surrounding society that has lost its sensibilities...

CHRISTMAS TREASON by James White
A network of psychically-connected, precocious little children across the world are concerned about whether Santa Claus will be able to deliver his toys this season...they project themselves out in a search for his headquarters, settling on what turns out to be a nuclear missile installation.  High jinks abound as military guards keep encountering little kids in pajamas...a funny, seasonal tale with a hopeful ending...

SEVEN-DAY TERROR by R.A. Lafferty
Another tale about precocious children, as a little boy in a small town has built a "disappearer" out of spare parts he's found lying around and tries out his invention on the neighborhood...and its occupants...with disastrous results.  His big sister knows what's going on and offers her solution to the problem.  The final sentence thoroughly cracked me up in this short, short story...

KINGS WHO DIE by Poul Anderson
This is a story examining the possibilities of the human body becoming fused with high technology with a space war between the two Earthly superpowers providing the setting.  Here are warriors with bombs surgically planted in their bodies while the other side has discovered that the human mind can be fused with computers to provide a very effective operating system.  Anderson showed quite a bit of prescience here while at the same time writing a Cold War story with the antagonists extending their respective opposing ideologies far into the future...in his scenario the war on ground level is still "cold" while what was proxy warfare in 1962 among smaller nations on Earth has now been transformed into space battles.  I wonder if that's where we're heading with our respective "space forces"...

THE MAN WHO MADE FRIENDS WITH ELECTRICITY by Fritz Leiber
A man deliberately moves to a home with a noisy, crackling high-tension electrical tower nearby.  He claims to be able to hear the electricity speaking to him, and it can apparently understand his words as well.  And, it seems, the network of electricity that now spans the globe has come to its own conclusions regarding the way things should be.  A forerunner of the genre of science fiction that would give us movie series like Matrix and Terminator...

Next I continue my look back at science fiction short stories from the year 1962 as they appeared in Isaac Asimov Presents The Great SF Stories 24 (1962)...