My #4 All-Time Favorite Song: When the Levee Breaks by Led Zeppelin

WHEN THE LEVEE BREAKS by Led Zeppelin, the #4 song on my list of 500 all-time favorites, had an interesting history with me.  Since it came out as the final track on the British hard rock band's fourth, untitled album in the early 1970s it had been a regular staple on album rock radio...I would often listen to the lengthy, relentless instrumental buildup at the start, only to switch stations when singer Robert Plant finally broke in.  This went on for years until the band...already broken up for a decade after the death of drummer John Bonham...came out with their box set CD compilation in late 1990.  My local rock station, WRUF/Rock 104, decided to play the entire set and I listened to much of it, realizing in the process what a remarkably talented and creative band Led Zeppelin was.  Among several of the tracks that I liked a lot, When the Levee Breaks stood out and quickly became a song I couldn't get enough of...I crowned it my "song of the year" for 1991 twenty years after it came out and afterward also had it as my number one top all-time favorite song for some two decades.  The song was originally written and recorded by blues artists Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie following the devastating Mississippi flood of 1927...the broken levees around New Orleans due to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 brought on a revival of the Led Zeppelin cover on TV and radio.  Their version features brilliant harmonica work throughout, and the drumming is echoing and booming.  Sometimes I'm irritated by Plant's forays into high-pitched, screeching singing on many of their songs, but he's more subdued on this piece and fits in perfectly with the instruments.  The song speaks of a flood and broken levees, but it extends to all of the storms people experience and this year's pandemic is no exception.  There isn't a weak moment in it, from the drum, harmonica and guitar intro, Plant's verses, the riveting mid-song instrumental break with one of the all-time greatest harmonica solos, and that long, trailing conclusion.  By the way, When the Levee Breaks may well be the only song in my all-time favorite Top Six that you've heard...I have never heard any of the upcoming three songs on my list played on either radio or TV, although in my estimation they all should have been monumental hits...

Newspaper Archives a Fun Portal into History

With my ability now to research old newspapers at different times in recent history, I am afforded the opportunity to investigate how different ongoing events were being reported.  I'm compiling a list of some interesting times that I'm looking into during the next few weeks:

--Sunday newspaper opinion pages just preceding each presidential election

--The summer of 1914 after Austrian Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Bosnia, with subsequent events leading to the outbreak of World War I.

--Stories about Japanese-American relations in the weeks before Pearl Harbor.

--The early weeks in the Korean War, 1950.

--Civil rights stories in the 1950s and 1960s.

--The American reaction to the Soviets' Sputnik launch in October 1957.

--The Cuban revolution under Castro and early events of his regime in 1959.

--The Cuban Missile Crisis of  October 1962.

--Lyndon Johnson's statements about Vietnam as president in 1964, and the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

--The Democratic Party presidential race in 1968 up to the California primary and Robert Kennedy's assassination.

--George Romney's candidacy for president in 1968 and his disastrous "brainwashing" comment.

--Stories about the breakup of the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s.

--Any articles with "experts" predicting the future.

--Retroactively politically incorrect articles deemed acceptable in the times they were published.

Well, that's just a few of what I'm looking at...besides old comic strips, advertisements, and puzzles, that is.  Since I was a history major in college, this archival exploration is pure joy for me...must have been kind of like how old Gandalf felt in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring when he paid a visit to Minas Tirith's old library archives to read up about "magic rings" from the ancient past....

Some Pandemic Musings at Starbucks

Wednesday I was sitting at a Starbucks...the one here on NW 39th Avenue in northern Gainesville that I first frequented twenty years ago back in 2000 when it first opened.  As is the case around town...and I suspect throughout the country, Starbucks has for the time being banned indoor seating while keeping the outdoors open...my hindsight instincts tell me that this should have been their policy since the coronavirus outbreak in spring instead of completely closing down: of course, if local and state governments are mandating lockdowns, there's not a whole lot to be done about it.  The other Starbucks I go to...much closer to my home...a few weeks ago actually had gone as far as eliminating the spacing between their indoor seating that they had instituted after finally opening back up.  I had gone in there a few times and was taken aback at how close together people were sitting...always with several of them not wearing masks and no apparent limit on the number of indoor customers.  The last time I visited this place, though, they had closed their indoor area off.  I almost always order my coffee (venti iced with vanilla and cream) on my mobile app from home and then pick it up at the store, foregoing the line.  I also park as close to the store as possible...if all the outdoor seats are taken, I can just roll down the windows and drink (and write) in my car.  I'm hoping that these new vaccines will be effective and finally eliminate this need for distancing and mask wearing...although it seems that many people are still living their lives in a cloud of denial, social irresponsibility and callousness for their fellow Americans' health by refusing to do either.  It especially distresses me to see this utter disregard for others' lives with some people I regularly encounter who have stubbornly refused to wear protective face coverings, even though the number of positive cases around me and the country as a whole has drastically spiked. This pandemic experience has certainly opened up my eyes to the state of the society I'm living in as well as certain individuals I have to interact with, and I'm not liking what I'm seeing at all...  

Quote of the Week...from Carl Sagan

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.  We're no longer interested in finding out the truth.  The bamboozle has captured us.  It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken.  Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never give it back.                   ---Carl Sagan

One of the reasons I picked the above quote...which I once again first saw as a posting by WKTK Radio morning show personality Storm Roberts...is the frequent use of the word "bamboozle": I like it and plan to use it myself.  Carl Sagan was the astronomer who created the 1980s TV series Cosmos in its original run and did much to bring complex science to a level that the masses can understand.  He also seemed pretty adept at understanding how people think, for this quote of his directly applies in great measure to our present time here in 2020, 24 years after his death.  Last Sunday I was driving down NW 39th Avenue here in Gainesville...as I crossed over I-75 I saw several people on the sidewalk overlooking the Interstate, waving big Trump banners to the passing traffic below them.  Today it's more than three weeks after the election with state after state certifying Biden's victory over the sitting president, but Trump refuses to concede, claiming massive voter fraud although all of his legal challenges have been rebuffed in court.  Whether one voted for Donald Trump or not, any reasonable conclusion from his behavior is that he is a sore loser and never acknowledges defeat...but apparently some two thirds of his supporters are incapable of seeing what is right in front of them and have chosen to parrot the president's claim of mass election rigging.  This probably happens in every close election to some extent...I vividly remember disappointed people in 2016 after Trump won exclaiming "Not my president!"...but this year the degree of denial from the losing side seems to be have sharply accelerated. Why?  I think that, along with a very unhealthy personality cult here, it has a lot to do with what Sagan called "bamboozling". People have been fooled by politicians since time immemorable, but recently with the rise of social media like Facebook and Twitter many of the suckers have gone on public record with their views, for anyone to see.  While in previous times folks could just shrug off their betrayed faith in a political figure, nowadays it's probably too humiliating for someone, after so adamantly publicly supporting a con, to admit they were bamboozled.  So instead many just continue with their delusions, existing in an artificial social bubble of an alternate universe where Donald Trump easily won reelection and was cheated out of a second term by a vast, extremely elaborate conspiracy.  As someone generally skeptical of conspiracy theories, I agree with Sagan that it's probably a waste of time for anyone to attempt to steer any of these people back to reality...their pride is too painfully threatened...

Happy Thanksgiving Day to All

In the midst of a stormy time such as this, with the coronavirus pandemic causing so much death, suffering, worry and disruption among us here in America and in the world at large, as well as the seemingly polarized political divisions within our nation, it might seem a little unrealistic to take this day to express our gratitude for the blessings we have.  But it's precisely in such times of turmoil and despair that such an act is most needed to keep us grounded in our faith and values and to be able to continue walking down the straight and narrow path that will lead us through all the difficulties.  I am blessed and thankful for my wonderful wife Melissa as well as our two grown children Will and Rebecca, my sister Anita and her family, my extended relatives, my fantastic job with my amazing coworkers past and present, my church with its compassionate and caring congregation and leadership, my neighbors, and my old school classmates...what a blessing to see so many of them still around and enjoying the best of life!  With my gratitude for the good things in my life I extend it to a sense of hope that the future will contain many more things for which I can give thanks...including the multiple effective vaccines that have been recently developed to eliminate this pestilence from humanity.  So with gratitude comes hope, and a confidence that a much greater hand than we possess is shaping our destinies according to his purposes...

Weekly Short Stories: 1965 Science Fiction, Part 4

With my reviews of the following three stories I conclude my examination of some of 1965's finer sci-fi short stories, as selected by editors Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Clark for their anthology World's Best Science Fiction: 1966 (the series regrettably puts the year of publication in the title instead of the year of focus).  Unlike with the previous anthology series featuring Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg as editors which came out in the late 1980s and early 90s while covering much earlier stories (from 1939 through 1963), Wollheim's series offers no such distant hindsight, selecting their stories the very next year after they came out.  I bring this up because in a later article I'll be discussing the difference, but for now here are my reactions to the three final '65 tales...

MASQUE OF THE RED SHIFT by Fred Saberhagen

Yet another short story in Saberhagen's "berserker" series of ancient automated warships of mass destruction that have invaded our Milky Way galaxy, in this one there is a galactic human government with outbreaks of rebel planets fighting for independence.  While High Lord Nogora observes from his ship what can only be described as a black hole, a berserker has intercepted a ship transporting rebel prisoners to Nogora for interrogation.  Nogora's frozen, half-dead half-brother holds the key to this story of political intrigue while an incredibly Borg-like transformation of one of the prisoners steers it to its resolution...if I were into the series I probably would have liked this story more...

THE CAPTIVE DJINN by Christopher Anvil

A human mining engineer is being held prisoner on a planet populated by hostile feline humanoids who are at a lower technological level than humans and regard their enhanced abilities as magical.  The captive demonstrates this "magic" as he fools his captors into giving him all the ingredients by which he can make his escape.  I came away from Anvil's story thinking he was making an analogy to the attitudes many people have had toward modern technology and putting it out as a humorous satire.  This story had a Hogan's Heroes flavor to it, with the imprisoned running rings around the imprisoners without them knowing it...

THE GOOD NEW DAYS by Fritz Leiber

It's the future on Earth as the advent of robots and automation has created a situation among the swelling population where competition for useful jobs is prohibitive. The solution, instead of creating more leisure time among the population to pursue the arts, sciences, and other interests, is to create a plethora of new, essentially useless jobs with social status determined by how many jobs one has.  A family living in the slums...albeit provided with all the essentials to live...nevertheless cannot come to grips with the "way things are", especially the four grown brothers' feisty, stubborn mother.  And now it seems that the robots are beginning to malfunction...or is something ominous developing among a unified technology that humanity completely depends upon?  This story was difficult to read through, but its main points seem portentous...

Next week I begin my look back at the year 1966 in short science fiction...

Rereading George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire Series at High Speed

Anticipating, perhaps unrealistically, that George R.R. Martin's long-awaited next volume in his A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series, titled The Winds of Winter, will come out some time next year as he has expressed, I decided to reread the series' first five rather lengthy books.  In doing this I'm checking each of them out from my library on audiobook and listening to them at high speed...sometimes as fast as 2.7 times normal speed.  I can do this because I already read through the same material before...what I'm essentially doing is bringing what I already knew back up to date in my memory.  I've already gone through A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords, and have just begun the fourth book, A Feast for Crows.  Had this series come out, say...40 years ago, I would have been unable to play the audiobooks on high speed since they all would have been in analog form and speeding them up would have made them sound too high-pitched.  I never did watch the Game of Thrones television series on HBO, which went far beyond Martin's progress in writing his books and concluded everything...apparently much to the chagrin of both viewers who disliked the outcome and those, like myself, who were holding out for the books.  I don't know whether the author will conform to the TV series version or digress from it but I do enjoy his narrative and characters a lot...maybe I will read that 2018 prequel novel of his titled Fire & Blood if his Winds of Winter publication is further postponed...it's already nine years since the publication of Book #5, titled A Dance with Dragons, and Martin needs to finally get on with it.  Maybe when I've finished rereading these first five books I'll get down to sharing my reactions...with a notice at the top of that article warning about some serious plot spoilers contained therein...

My #5 All-Time Favorite Song: Time to Pretend by MGMT

TIME TO PRETEND, by the Connecticut-based indie band MGMT, was the opening track to their debut album Oracular Spectacular, which came out in 2007...but didn't begin to catch my attention until the following year.  My local alternative rock station, WHHZ/100.5/"The Buzz" by 2008 had completely abandoned their earlier indie/alternative format in favor of mainstream rock acts like Nickelback and Shinedown, which they had previously ridiculed, so I in turn abandoned them and listened instead to my TV cable service's Music Choice alternative channel...which is where I was introduced to Time to Pretend.  Eventually I got the album...Kids was probably the most famous track from it.  MGMT is essentially the project of college roommates Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, with others hired to complete the band.  When I finally got around to watching the video to Time to Pretend I was swept away...it's one of the great music videos of all time, playing off more on the song's wistful title than its much darker and more somber lyrics.  On one level the song talks of the notion of sinking into a fantasy life while on another...accompanied by some explicit lyrics...it deals in ironic fashion with young music stars who jump unreservedly into a drug-drenched hedonistic lifestyle and pay for it all with an early death: the final line is a severe slap in the face and reminded me a little of Bad Company's similarly-themed hit Shooting Star.  But I was much more intrigued by Time to Pretend's unique instrumentation with its special synthesizer accompaniment.  The song starts out sounding like an anthem but ends as something completely different...there are a lot of ways the listener can treat it: I strongly recommend its far-out fantasy collage video.  Back in 2008 I deemed it as my top song of that year and have always held it in high regard ever since...

The United States Presidents Who Owned Slaves

As I've mentioned in a few of my recent blog articles, I now enjoy an Internet service that allows me to rummage through old newspapers online...I've been focusing on October, 1956...the month of my birth...using the Miami News as my source.  Beginning September 27th of that year, they had a daily feature focusing on the American presidents, starting with George Washington and ending with the then-current one, Dwight D. Eisenhower just before the presidential election.  The insets...the above one is of Andrew Jackson...summarized each succeeding president and not only informed me of their respective lives and administrations, but also of the prevailing social and political climate of 1956.  For example, in none of the articles was it mentioned that a president owned slaves...yet with the first 18 presidents, 12...or two thirds...were indeed slave owners at one time or another, not to mention 10 of the first 12.  Here's the list of presidents who in at least one point of their lives owned slaves, as it appeared in Wikipedia:

GEORGE WASHINGTON

THOMAS JEFFERSON

JAMES MADISON

JAMES MONROE

ANDREW JACKSON

MARTIN VAN BUREN

WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON

JOHN TYLER

JAMES KNOX POLK

ZACHARY TAYLOR

ANDREW JOHNSON

ULYSSES S. GRANT  

Of the above, Jackson, Harrison, Tyler, and Polk were the most unapologetically pro-slavery.  Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, while hypocritically benefitting materially from their slaves, either allowed for their freedom following their own deaths or wrote and spoke in opposition to this onerous institution that violated every principle of freedom and justice that they proclaimed as Founding Fathers...and to his discredit Jefferson actually fathered children with one of his slaves.  Others had a more marginal connection with slave ownership, some supporting slavery's expansion into US territories and new states while others pushed restraint.  I'm not writing this to condemn these men...they lived in a different era when values that decent and reasonable people today abhor were more accepted in society.  But it does bear noting that in none of the 1956 articles I read did slave ownership among some presidents seem worth mentioning...and that does bother me a lot.  It also bothers me that "originalist" conservatives who are always trying to return to the Founding Fathers' thoughts when arguing their constitutional priorities gloss over their slaveholding while trying to depict the simple wearing of a mask for the public's safety in the midst of this dangerous pandemic as some kind of violation of their high and holy rights...oh, please...

Just Finished Reading Gregor the Overlander by Suzanne Collins

Before Suzanne Collins wrote her celebrated young adult science fiction series The Hunger Games, she produced a five-volume children's fantasy series titled The Underland Chronicles.  They feature young Gregor, a New York City boy who one day discovers a secret passageway to "Underland" through a hole in his family's basement laundry room.  This special hidden place under the Earth's surface is populated by humans and various human-sized, English-speaking animals like rats, bats, cockroaches and spiders...that aspect of it reminded me of Roald Dahl's 1961 children's novel  James and the Giant Peach while the underground secret world made me think of Neil Gaiman's 1996 adult book Neverwhere ...click on the titles' links to access my reviews of them.  I just finished reading the first book, Gregor the Overlander, from 2003.  Gregor, whose father mysteriously disappeared two years earlier, is stuck at home caring for his little baby sister Boots...the two accidentally fall through the hole and they're suddenly in the thick of all the ongoing drama, with a mysterious prophecy portending the unfolding of events.  I've always had a soft spot in my heart for stories with secret portals to other realities, but I wasn't too thrilled with talking roaches and rats...still, I get it: this is a children's series.  By far my favorite parts of the story were when Boots was featured, acting in such an endearing, spontaneous manner as a little baby full of wonder at the new world around her...and sometimes full of impetuous, selfish angry outbursts as well.  I'm planning on sweeping through this series in the next few weeks, spacing my readings between other books.  Collins wrote the installments quickly, to her credit: if you're a little kid and read the first book that came out, you don't need to be waiting three-to-five years for the next one: she finished writing the last book in 2007, a year before she began her Hunger Games project.  Yes, even at 64 years I'm a sucker for children's books and this series promises to be entertaining...

Quote of the Week...from Soren Kierkegaard

There are two ways to be fooled.  One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.                                                       Soren Kierkegaard

Soren Kierkegaard was an 19th century Danish existential philosopher, essayist and Christian scholar.  I found his above quote in a posting on Facebook by local radio (WKTK) announcer Storm Roberts: its message couldn't be more applicable in today's world of alternative facts, bizarre conspiracy theories, habitually-leveled accusations of hoaxes and rigging, insulated information bubbles within social and broadcast media, out-of-context reporting, gaslighting, cancel culture, retroactive political correctness, historical revisionism, and foreign-inspired disinformation campaigns...to name a few of the ongoing trends.  In his quote Kierkegaard distinguishes between two types of being fooled.  I think both are commonly in play in our contemporary society that is loaded with the aforementioned avenues through which deception is routinely conveyed.  But I think the Danish academic left out another important way to be fooled.  Talk show hosts on radio and TV...as well as Facebook and Twitter advocates...regularly present their own political and social philosophies in terms of well-grounded, appealing principles while attacking their opponents personally or through sound bites and anecdotes...the aim is present those "other guys" as having no principles at all.  The solution as I see it is for any broadcaster who wants to be seen as fair to allow for principled discussion of the issues in our time with an implicit understanding that the participants to lay off the personal invective.  We actually did have such shows in the past like William F. Buckley's Firing Line and the Dick Cavett Show...where the quests, regardless of their viewpoints, were afforded the time...without repeated interruption as is usually the case nowadays...to lay out their visions and philosophies.  I suggest that if you ever find yourself listening to talk radio or TV to practice discerning what they're up to...I actually am quite open to listening to people defending their worldviews by espousing the principles behind their beliefs. It's them tearing into their perceived adversaries that leaves me cold...a major reason why I steadfastly avoid late night "comedy" talk shows on TV. If you're letting them be your major source of news then you're fooling yourself...

Just Finished Reading Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick

Martian Time-Slip is a 1964 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick, the twelfth book I've read of his so far.  Its time setting is 30 years into the future, i.e. 26 years ago in 1994.  Mars has been explored and settled for several years and it seems humanity has transported its nationalism, prejudices, and mental illness straight over to the new world...which they have discovered is already inhabited by a human race called the Bleekmen: apparently both Earth and Mars were seeded with humanity around the same time by an outside source hundreds of thousands of years ago.  A repairman recovering from a schizophrenic episode on Earth has moved to the Red Planet with his family in order to find some mental peace from the masses of people crowding his planet of origin.  He finds himself drawn into a complex web of relationships between a bigoted wealthy businessman, that man's wife, his neighbors which include a trader in the thriving black market and his autistic son...and the psychiatrist treating the boy.  The narrative is presented from the various characters' perspectives, and this becomes pretty interesting when the autistic boy is featured...he suffers from the problem of dealing with a time that flows much more quickly for him than for the "normal" people around him.  Also, he is a precog, which is someone who can see into the future.  This piques the businessman's interest and he seeks to use the boy's talents for his own purposes.  Mars is presented as a bleak, unfriendly world where no one in their right mind should want to live...in this at least I thought the author probably got it right.  Dick, however, treated schizophrenia and autism in this story as two forms of the same thing and presented them as vehicles for enlightenment...from what I've read about him he, too, suffered some some kind of mental illness.  That he would have Mars already being colonized by 1994 isn't really surprising since transportation technology and exploration had been in a state of explosive growth during the span of the previous few decades...it's more far-fetched...and much more disappointing...to me that we're now in the year 2020 and haven't left low Earth orbit in 48 years!  Martian Time-Slip wasn't one of my favorite Philip K. Dick stories, but the idea of somehow becoming disengaged from the normal flow of time is an intriguing subject that he treated very well here...

Weekly Short Stories: 1965 Science Fiction, Part 3

Here are my reactions to four more short stories from 1965 appearing in the anthology World's Best Science Fiction: 1966, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr.  I found the below tales to be most interesting, especially the first one which blew me away.  I've been generally impressed with the editors' picks for the year's best...I just wished they'd synced the year on the anthology's title with the actual year the stories were released.  In any event, here are my reviews for this week...

TRAVELER'S REST by David I. Masson

One of the more intriguing science fiction stories I've read, this tale of a world on which the rate of passage of time varies by the distance to time waves radiating from a singularity high up in the mountains...where a vicious stalemate of a war for survival is ongoing against a ruthless enemy.  A soldier at the front is informed of his "retirement" and gets to live years of his life in peace while raising his family in the idyllic lower lands...while hardly any time at all passes high up on the front.  The conclusion to it all made me want to shout, "What, WHAT!!!"...

UNCOLLECTED WORKS by Lin Carter

An elderly literary critic is being interviewed, and he has a lot to say.  His most significant memory, though, is of a man not of letters but rather an inventor of a device that he claimed produced all the works of literature going back from the beginning of writing and up to the present...and then on into the future.  The critic knows that nothing can be proven, but what the inventor told him about the past discoveries of lost works has convinced him...after he initially rebuffs his outlandish claims.  This story has the ring of fatalism, whereby the future is predetermined and can be known in detail and far in advance with enough accurate data and the ability to process it.  Maybe the critic was convinced, but I'm not...still, an interesting premise for a story...

VANISHING POINT by Jonathan Brand

The Galactic Federation (yes, that's what they called it) has invited Earth's ambassador to meet its representative on a special world where the environment has been specially manufactured to mirror conditions on our home planet.  The diplomat, ship engineer and three other crew members meet a human there who speaks on behalf of the Federation and tries to make the guests feel at home.  But the engineer...who is later relating his experiences as a bedtime story for his two little daughters...begins to feel something amiss, especially during those times their host retreats off into the distance to pick some fruit.  The author's main point in this story was a bit difficult for me to visualize, but I got the general gist and thought it pretty inspired.  It all has to due with visual perspective and its effects on distant objects...

IN OUR BLOCK by R.A. Lafferty

This is a brief, funny tale about a run-down old street and the decrepit shanties lining it.  Two townsfolk, Art and Jim, can't figure out why the businesses there can do what they do with their limited space and material.  It's their own lackadaisical attitude about the strange goings on around them that's as quizzical as the unusual people they encounter. The obvious answer to the mystery completely escapes them as they are too stuck in their own comfortable thought patterns... 

Next week I conclude my look back at the year 1965 in short science fiction...

Constellation of the Month: Cassiopeia (the Queen)

Last month I was standing out in our backyard with Melissa one clear evening, pointing out the visible planets and some stars with their constellations.  She looked around and pointed to a close group of moderately bright stars in the northern sky, roughly shaped like an "M".  I answered that it was Cassiopeia, representing the queen and mother of Andromeda in the Greek mythical tale of Perseus...several constellations from this story dominate the autumn evening sky.  I picked Cassiopeia as my constellation of the month for November for that reason: its easy visibility, at least from northern hemisphere skies.  It's not that large as constellations go, but it represents the northern seasonal counterpart to Ursa Major's asterism the Big Dipper, which dominates in the springtime.  As a kid, I always learned to draw it as a sort of upside-down chair or throne including one of the fainter stars...my above pictured drawing reflects this.  Star maps usually "connect the dots" with it looking like a "W"...or "M" when it reaches its peak above Polaris, the North Star.  As you can see, the five M or W stars of the constellation are designated by the first five letters of the Greek alphabet, something that Atlantic tropical storm followers are probably well acquainted with after this record-setting hurricane season of 2020.  The additional star I connected is Kappa, and just a few degrees from it is located the remnants of one of the greatest observed supernova explosions in recorded history.  Officially known as SN 1572 for its year of occurrence, or Tycho Brahe's supernova after the famous astronomer of that time, it was around 8-9,000 light years distant but its peak brilliance reached a magnitude of -4, making it as bright as Venus back then, 448 years ago...the remnant is now only detectable through strong optical, x-ray and radio telescopes.  There are a couple of other constellations I could have picked out for November...let's see how long I can string out this monthly blog feature: I'd like to eventually cover all 88 of them...

My #6 All-Time Favorite Song: Firewood by Regina Spektor

FIREWOOD, by Regina Spektor, is my #6 all-time favorite song, but I wonder whether you've even heard of it.  It's from her 2012 album What We Saw from the Cheap Seats.  I have never heard it played on the radio, although it should have been a huge number one hit for several weeks. As a child Regina immigrated with her family in the 1980s to America from Soviet Russia and is a classically-trained pianist...that instrument dominates her recordings, including this masterpiece.  Firewood's lyrics seemed aimed at an ailing soul, in a hospital and thought to be dying...but what kind of affliction is it, mental or physical?  "Rise from your cold hospital bed, you're not dying...everyone knows you're going to live, so you might as well start trying".  This song has always been a treasure for me to listen to, but it's also been painful as it is the sort of song that can remind listeners of people they personally know in their own lives who have gone through really tough, tough times...possibly themselves.  It's yet another slow-moving song on my top ten list...and not the last Regina Spektor piece on it, either: another one ranks higher!  To me, Regina Spektor is far and away my favorite solo musical artist of this century and has seven studio albums so far...of course I own them all and am impatiently awaiting her next one.  The melody to Firewood is the kind of listening experience that a you might find yourself doing a double take on...there's something timeless to it, as if it had always been out there instead of only for the past eight years...

Trump's Presence to be Felt Beyond the Election and Biden's Inauguration

The rumor going around is that President Trump will be staging more mass public rallies in the next few weeks as he legally contests Joe Biden's close victory over him in the 2020 presidential election.  To me, not a Trump supporter...although I do support his stances on certain specific issues...this makes eminently good sense as he has always built up a great deal of popular support with these gatherings and obviously loves getting all the adoring, unquestioning attention in front of his many idolizers. And don't be mistaken, Donald J. Trump is indeed an IDOL to tens of millions of Americans, while I firmly acknowledge that many, many who voted for him do not share in their exaltation of this ordinary human being with his own peculiar, individual mix of faults and virtues. Of course these rallies, should they happen, would all be super-spreader events compounding the worst spike in COVID-19 we've yet experienced, but our current president seems unconcerned. I have a prediction: after he leaves office, Donald Trump will continue to hold these types of rallies, constantly insulting President Biden and his administration and running down his efforts as president while continuing his Tweetstorms full of conspiracy theories and false accusations.  Add to that continuing trips to the golf course and you have much of what he already was doing as president...albeit with his finger no longer on the nuclear button and no more authority to issue executive decrees, nominate officials and judges, sign or veto legislation...or hold up military aid to a besieged ally until it produces damaging material on his main political opponent.  But just because Trump will be out of the White House, don't expect any letup in the divisive rhetoric among our politicians: I'm confident that he wants to maintain tight control over the Republican Party and its elected officials in Washington, including the Senate...after all, a thumbs-down by him on anyone he perceives as personally disloyal can just as easily spell doom for their reelection chances as if he were still in office.  And looking at 2024, who knows, he may just want to jump back into it again...or even play the easier role of "kingmaker" by sitting in the background and picking his chosen GOP candidate.  Another possibility is that large segments of the population will simply deny that Trump is no longer president, just as they now deny climate change and the COVID pandemic...talk about alternate realities! Of course, all this is speculation...but if you think that voting Trump out of office equates to getting rid of him or that his conservative supporters for the past five years will now return in floods to their ideological principles and forsake this creepy, blind hero-worship, I don't think you're being very realistic.  I'm not writing this because I've returned to following politics closely but because I don't want anyone out there to be terribly surprised when what I've laid out becomes the new reality.  If you want to allow the media to manipulate you into feeling offense against the "bad guys" in the political world as they fight your "good guys", no matter which side you think "bad" or "good", then it's all on you...you don't have to listen to that crap and it just might behoove you to make an effort to see things for a change from the other guy's perspective.  For myself, I tune in to the half-hour CBS or ABC evening news and sometimes the local late-night news show at 11:  I'm letting the rest of it all ride, recognizing that much of the media...both social and broadcasting...has a vested interest in heightening division and passions among users, viewers and listeners: if you're into all that, then good luck with your outrage, now and in the future.  As was the case with this particular article, I'll state my political opinions from time to time while trying to space them apart more...

Four Astronauts Slated for Space Launch from Cape Canaveral Sunday Evening

Tomorrow evening (Sunday)  Shannon Walker, Victor Glover, Michael Hopkins, and Soichi Noguchi (pictured from left to right)...the last from Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency...are scheduled to take off from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida in SpaceX's Crew Dragon craft, at the top of the Falcon 9 rocket as it represents the second manned flight launched from United States soil this year, after the earlier successful May 30th launch which returned August 2nd.  Like that mission, this one will transport the astronauts to the International Space Station...the plan is for them to stay there until their return to Earth in the spring.  The launch was delayed from October 31st due to engine issues within the Falcon 9 rocket, and then again from tonight's planned launch because of concerns that high winds would interfere with booster rocket recovery...tomorrow's launch time is set for 7:27 pm Eastern Time. I'm going to try to see it from my backyard here in northern Gainesville if the weather permits.  I am gratified that America is gearing back up again for space exploration with astronauts and look forward to future missions to the moon and Mars.  Hopefully, the incoming Biden administration won't mess with our space objectives and allow a continuity of missions that has been sorely lacking in the past whenever one president left office and another stepped in.  And what about that Space Force begun under Trump? We'll see...

The above picture of the four astronauts on this flight is a public domain release by NASA that appeared in the pertinent Wikipedia article...

Quote of the Week...from Alex Trebek

I think what makes 'Jeopardy!' special is that, among all the quiz and game shows out there, ours tends to encourage learning.                                               ---Alex Trebek

Alex Trebek, the host of the wonderful Jeopardy! game show since it was brought back in 1984, sadly died last Sunday of pancreatic cancer, a condition that he had shared with his faithful viewing audience long before...still, his passing doesn't make it any easier.  I had watched the original Jeopardy! series (1964-75) while growing up through childhood and my teen years...Art Fleming was its very capable host.  On both runs, Jeopardy! was structured the same, with three contestants playing two rounds with different subject categories in each of them and a final, single answer round: "answer", because this quiz show phrases its questions in the form of answers, to which the correct response is a question... I always had a problem with that.  Say the "answer" on the screen is "Its capital is Caracas".  The correct response is "What is Venezuela?", but if I walked up to someone and asked the same question, that answer wouldn't help me at all.  Still, it has been fun trying to beat the ultra-smart and knowledgeable contestants to the correct answer.  And even if the category at hand is on a subject with which I am totally unfamiliar, the clues sometimes will steer me to get the "question" right.  I don't watch Jeopardy! every day because of my schedule, but if college football permits I can view it Saturday evenings at 7:30 on my local Channel 4 station.  It has been clear to me that Jeopardy! was a labor of love for Alex Trebek, and my sympathies and wishes are for his family and friends.  As for his above quote, the wide gamut of topics discussed on the show demonstrate...as well or better than any encyclopedia can...interesting areas that people can involve themselves in, including science, technology, music, literature, history, geography, language, mathematics...it goes on and on.  I hope that this show will always stay true to its high standards and never sink into appealing to vulgarity as do shows like Family Feud and Match Game...

Eta Striking Through North Central Florida Today

I have an app on my phone called Wordscapes, which is a scrambled word game.  One of the three-letter word combinations is a-e-t, from which you can form tea, ate, eat...and the Greek letter eta (small η, capital Η).  And Eta, incidentally, is the name of the current tropical system (Greek letters being used for names after exhausting the traditional list) that had been situated in the eastern Gulf of Mexico...although its bands have been affecting us in north central Florida for the last five days with rain and gusty winds.  Because of a cold front descending from the northwest, Tuesday evening the hotshot weather forecasters changed their projection to having it hit today around Cedar Key and as a strong tropical storm and then make a beeline for my Gainesville area.  Tuesday night's forecast had Eta slowing down until possibly even Saturday after passing over us in northern Florida, but subsequent notifications have had it entering the Atlantic Thursday night. Also, they noted on The Weather Channel yesterday that it seems surrounding dry air has been entering the storm and weakening it...for a while early yesterday it was classified as a weak hurricane. I haven't been too thrilled with the weather we've been experiencing lately, but it could have been a lot worse: just ask the folks in south Florida and the Tampa area. Eta, which earlier had developed into a Class 4 hurricane with 150 mph winds and struck eastern Nicaragua before emerging into the Gulf out of Honduras, then wound its way...first eastward and then northward...through Cuba.  Then it brushed (and flooded) south Florida and swung back into the Gulf of Mexico...and here we are now, stuck with this Greek freak of a storm.  I hear there's another one, named Theta naturally, brewing out in the eastern Atlantic while a new area of tropical disturbance is in the Caribbean where Eta once began its twisted journey, following its original path toward Central America: let's all hope its trajectory is straighter than Eta's..

As I mentioned, it's currently 9 in the morning and Eta's center is slightly northwest of Gainesville as it heads toward Jacksonville at 13 mph.  The rain and winds at this time are nothing for concern, and I expect conditions to have improved before I set off for work in three hours...    

Weekly Short Stories: 1965 Science Fiction, Part 2

Here are my reactions to four more short stories from the year 1965 as they appeared in the retrospective anthology The World's Best Science Fiction: 1966, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr.  Within the sci-fi genre, these tales span a range of topics from time travel to interstellar war and espionage to a repressive dystopian future to the rules for respectful engagement with extraterrestrials.  I found each one significant in its own way...although I admit to being tired of time travel stories...

OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODS by Clifford Simak

In 1896 an elderly couple live on their remote farm as two children, seemingly from nowhere, come up the lane and introduce themselves.  It's the identity of the children and their mission to these kindly people that may determine the world's fate.  Another one of those frustrating (to me) time travel stories that tend to handcuff people living in the past to a set fate, as opposed to them being allowed to exert their own free will in determining the future.  Still, I always love reading the tender way that Simak treated his characters...

PLANET OF FORGETTING by James H. Schmitz

There's another one of those interstellar wars going on with this story as the protagonist is sent on a mission to recover and send home to Earth a secret file detailing the enemy's strengths, weakness, and intentions.  Along the way he finds himself wandering around in an amnesiac haze on an unknown world where strange beasts are around him...gradually he recovers his memory as the pursuers from the other side close in on him.  And then he solves the mystery of his memory loss.  Reminds me of the the Gregory Peck movies Spellbound and Mirage...

"REPENT, HARLEQUIN!" SAID THE TICKTOCKMAN by Harlan Ellison

In a dystopian future when rigid punctuality is enforced with a shortened life span being the punishment, there is a free spirit, the "Harlequin", who deliberately goes about with his pranks designed to upset the extremely delicate and elaborate schedules that run the society.  The chief enforcer of the time rules, the "Ticktockman", is none too happy as he searches down his adversary.  I remember first reading this tale seated on a jet plane taking off down the runway...I think it was at Atlanta or Asheville in 2006...

THE DECISION MAKERS by Joseph Green

As humanity explores other star systems and settles their habitable planets in the future, there is a need for someone with the title of Practical Philosopher...having the ability to discern whether different new lifeforms encountered are intelligent.  If they are, the planet is to be left alone for them to develop for themselves without human interference.  On one planet, such an individual finds himself up against the established human economic interests there as he discovers that intelligence may transcend a certain indigenous otter-like animal's individual abilities.  I liked how this story presented a future in which humanity demonstrated respect for other life as they reached out into the cosmos while also acknowledging how economic expedience can cause some to compromise their values...

Next week: more about science fiction short stories from 1965...