Year-End Running and Walking Report

For December 2022 I ran each day of the month, amassing a good amount of mileage and keeping myself generally in shape.  I did run a public race, the 5K Depot Parkrun on the 10th, although due to online registration misinformation I missed running the Tyler's Hope 15K I had intended to run on the same day...sometimes I think that with the charity events, the organizers get so caught up with their admittedly worthwhile causes that they forget about providing reasonable conditions and pertinent information for the participants.  I had run this race twice in the past and, should circumstances permit, will seek it out next year.  As has been the case recently, my walking mileage comes naturally over the course of my day, especially with my walk-intensive job.  Unfortunately, my eating habits of late have created a creeping weight gain over the course of 2022 that interferes with my running...a few small habit-change corrections should solve that issue.  As for 2023, in January the Florida Track Club is holding a marathon/half-marathon/10K race on the 15th and the Newnan's Lake 15K will take place on the 29th...both on Sundays.  The Five Points half-marathon will not happen in '23, but they are still holding the 5K race in February...not that I intend to be in it.  I am a member of the Florida Track Club, and they offer a 10-mile run in Micanopy on February 11th...I ran it earlier this year, enjoying the course.  Being 66 and not getting any younger, I know that my finishing times in different distances aren't going to improve very much...most likely it's going to be a gradual slowing instead.  That's all right...one of the things I look for when scanning posted results of races that I just ran is to see who the oldest runners are...with this I'm usually among the "top" finishers.  Here are the races I ran in 2022:

DATE   RACE-NAME                          DISTANCE   FINISHING-TIME

2/12     Depot Parkrun                                5K                    31:28

2/20     Five Points Half-Marathon       Half-Marathon   2:33:51

3/19     Micanopy Ten-Mile                    10 Miles           1:48:24

3/26     Depot Parkrun                                5K                    30:45

4/9       Headwaters                                     5K                    29:28

10/15   Tom Walker Preview                     10K                1:04:55

10/22   Run the Good Race                       10K                1:03:20

11/06   Tom Walker Memorial              Half-Marathon   3:05:29

11/12   Depot Parkrun                                5K                    31:38

12/10   Depot Parkrun                                5K                    31:46

Note the six-month gap in the middle of 2022 with races...yet during that period I trained an awful lot.  I don't train because I want to run in public races, I run in public races because I train.  Still, it would be nice to run in a few more next year, although I'm disappointed that there won't be a Five Points Half-Marathon, an event that had become a strong Gainesville tradition since 2006, with only the Covid pandemic interrupting it in 2021, and one that I had run in six times starting in 2010...

My Favorite Songs in 2022

Today at year's end, I'm taking a break from my weekly Friday quotes feature to list my top ten favorite songs of 2022.  This year I derived most of my favorites from 2022 album releases by Regina Spektor (Home, Before and After), The Smile (A Light for Attracting Attention) with Radiohead members Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, Spoon (Lucifer on the Sofa), Arcade Fire (We) and Kasabian (The Alchemist's Euphoria).  I also liked listening to alternative rock band Metric's 2014 album Pagans in Vegas as well as pianist composer Ludovico Eunaldi's 2015 piece titled Night, from his Elements album. The songs below all come from those albums...there's a lot of good material on them besides what I have listed below.  With each top ten song I've included a brief commentary...they're all very good.  It's interesting that I heard none of these songs and their albums in the first half of 2022...it all began in July when Spektor released her long-awaited new album... 

1 SPACETIME FAIRYTALE---Regina Spektor...nearly 9 minutes long, a dreamy song that actually teaches you astrophysics (well, a little anyway)!

2 LOVEOLOGY---Regina Spektor...quite an accomplishment to elicit both tears and laughter within the same song.

3 THE OPPOSITE---The Smile...brilliant jazzy rock jam, every instrument spotlighted, along with Yorke's trademark voice.  

4 THE AGE OF ANXIETY II (RABBIT HOLE)---Arcade Fire...simple lyrics, powerful instrumentals, 7 minutes long.   

5 THE FACE, PART I---Metric...chiefly instrumental, this is a great wake up song, forceful and positive. 

6 WILD---Spoon...beat resembles Safety Dance from the 80's, lyrics are inspiring. 

7 THE SAME---The Smile...spooky, mysterious opening track on album with a universal message. 

8 RAINDROPS---Regina Spektor...a sweet love song I'd like to learn to play on the piano.

9 FORTUNES---Metric...Emily Haines and her amazing voice take over this somewhat cynical song.

10 HELD-Spoon...one of the best opening album tracks, a pounding beat, guitar riffs everywhere and energizing message. 

Honorable Mention:

Regina Spektor: Coin

The Smile: A Hairdryer, Waving a White Flag

Spoon: On the Radio

Metric: Cascades

Kasabian: Scriptvre, Rocket Fuel  

Ludovico Eunaldi: Night 

Enjoying Jigsaw Puzzles Over Holiday

 

A few days ago, Melissa bought a Christmas-themed jigsaw puzzle for us...together with our grown children Will and Rebecca...to work on as a collective, fun effort.  We had a good time with it, and it turned out that Melissa and Rebecca each in turn gave me new puzzles, both pet themed.  I enjoyed doing both the dog and cat puzzles...the three ranged from 550-750 pieces.  For me it's a lot of fun to discern different patterns out of the chaos of the unassembled pieces and making them all come together.  Guess I'll now take a short break before tackling some more...

Weekly Short Stories: 1988 Science Fiction, Part 6

Today I continue looking at short stories I've read from the year 1988 as they appear in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, 6th Annual Collection.  I'm not sure why, but as far sports are concerned, I have few memories of '88 even though I was a Florida Gator and Miami Dolphins football fan, and both the Winter and Summer Olympics happened then, in Calgary and Seoul, respectively.  I do remember, though, the Dolphins, with Marino as QB and Shula as coach, finishing in last place, failing to win a single game within their division...tsk, tsk. And that year's Super Bowl, held following the 1987 season in January of '88, featured former Bucs quarterback Doug Williams delivering perhaps the greatest championship game performance ever with his first half play for Washington versus Denver.  But enough of sports, back to those stories...

HOUSE OF BONES by Robert Silverberg

A man is selected as part of a science experiment to travel back in time to the Cro Magnon era, where he is taken in and assimilated into the nearby tribe. One day he is given an assignment that challenges his personally held ethics...and discovers something new about his new friends deep in the past...

DO YA, DO YA, WANNA DANCE? by Howard Waldrop

Not a part of the sixties-era counterculture, I was always amused hearing of others bewailing its decline and end. This story plays into that narrative as a 20-year high school reunion in 1989 promises to bring back an old rock band to restore the old spirit. What's sci-fi is the story's ending...

THE GROWTH OF THE HOUSE OF USHER by Brian Stableford

Reminding me of an old Star Trek Next Generation episode titled Tin Man, it's a few centuries into the future as architecture is evolving to use special bacteria in structures, making buildings more durable and adaptable to change. One architect, though, has taken "living buildings" to an entirely new level as a guest discovers...

GLACIER by Kim Stanley Robinson

Glaciers are quickly descending southward through America...a Canadian family has already been driven from Toronto to Boston, where they encounter social resistance to their presence. Alex hears of his father's employment struggles while trying to befriend their skittish adopted cat and exploring the massive glacier close to his home with bullies always lurking around. A good description of what a real glacier would be like...

Next week I conclude my look at science fiction short stories from 1988...

Just Finished Rereading Insomnia by Stephen King

Back in the first decade of this century (the "Aughts") I was tearing through nearly all of Stephen King's books to date, both novels and collections.  One of my favorites...the first time I read it...was his 1994 Insomnia, a story set in his imaginary, sinister Maine town of Derry, site of the events in his earlier tumultuous novel It but set in 1991, six years after that tale's climax.  The protagonist is 70-year-old retiree Ralph Roberts, recently widowed and spending his time hanging out with the loose association of fellow elderly friends they collectively dub themselves "the Croaks".  As the peculiar change in a younger friend, Ed Deepneau, shows him becoming a violent and dangerously delusional man, the issue of abortion takes center stage and Ed and Ralph's closest friends, Bill McGovern and Lois Chasse, become more and more prominent in the developing narrative.  Ralph finds himself in the unsettling position of falling asleep at night easily enough...but he keeps rising out of bed fully awake earlier and earlier each morning until, eventually, he no longer sleeps.  At the same time, he begins to see an enhanced hyperreality of auras and strange "people", among them three figures who seem to have both the power and duty designate who will be next to die.  Eventually, a lot...maybe a little too much...gets explained as Ralph gets sucked into the monumental struggle that King covers much more deeply within his Dark Tower fantasy series.  What appealed to me then...and now...about Insomnia was the attention that King paid to the elderly and their attitudes and concerns.  This aspect of the novel gets magnified each time I reread it...this is my third, the last in 2017 (click HERE to read my review from then)...and I'm only four years removed now from Ralph Robert's age.  Yet I have to admit that while I considered Insomnia in years gone by as a favorite, I didn't particularly enjoy it as much this time around...I never could get into Stephen King's Dark Tower universe although I read all seven core novels twice, as well as the associated Wind Through the Keyhole.  King himself has been critical of this novel, earlier stating that it diverged from his usual writing pattern as he atypically outlined the story in advance...and the Dark Tower series itself seems to distance its narrative from that in Insomnia.  But perhaps the most disturbing thing about this story is something that, if I bring it up, is bound to be a plot spoiler...so stop reading this article NOW and go no further if you're planning on reading Insomnia in the future.  Still sticking around? Okay, here goes...

Sometimes when I watch certain movies and TV series, especially the ones dealing with crime and violent acts, I wonder whether the writers who dreamed up these fictional scenarios were aware of the many mentally or morally disturbed viewers who might take those ideas and copy them in real life.  Insomnia has someone flying on a suicide mission in a plane with the intent of crashing it into a crowded building where a rally is going on.  I wander what Stephen King felt seven years later on the morning of September 11, 2001, when this idea was implemented on a much more massive scale.  Is there any concern felt by writers that the villains of this world might just adopt some of their material?  Not that this sort of thing was original in Insomnia: it goes back to the desperate Japanese suicide kamikaze attacks against American ships during the final months of World War II.  By the way, the excellent 1975 Robert Redford spy thriller Three Days of the Condor takes up this concern of life imitating fiction as well. Anyway, I've read Insomnia three times now...that's probably enough, especially considering all the other books out there waiting for me.  But I still think that King did a wonderful job with his characters and his empathetic treatment of the elderly...

Constellations of the Month: Aries and Triangulum

Even since I learned the constellations, their star patterns and locations back in 1964, I have always grouped small Aries (representing a ram) and even smaller Triangulum (representing, er...uh, a triangle) together as a combo deal.  They're just east of the dismally dim Zodiac constellation Pisces, although the two aren't endowed with bright stars, either.  They also tend to get overshadowed by the brilliant display of stars to their east, with Taurus (including the nearby beautiful cluster the Pleiades, visible to the naked eye as a smudge in the night sky) and spectacular Orion drawing the star gazer's attention away from them.  Triangulum does have a deep space object, M33, which is a spiral galaxy visible without binoculars, but only when the sky is very dark.  The three main stars in Aries also form a triangle, duh...I don't know why they didn't just graft what is Triangulum onto the Ram and make one more substantial star group, but I didn't live way back in ancient times when they came up with these designations.  As a kid watching the night sky, I always regarded making out Triangulum and Aries as a sort of visual test...this task is made easier when they pass nearly overhead this time of the year around 9 pm Standard Time, making them less susceptible to city lights.  Triangulum has a southern counterpart constellation, dubbed "Triangulum Australe"...I've actually seen star maps with it represented by a crude quadrilateral of connected stars...really???   And I can't finish this article without mentioning what you probably already know: Aries is a Zodiac constellation, so the elliptic, the imaginary celestial "line" representing the plane of our solar system through while the sun, moon, and planets seem to travel, passes through it...

Next month I'll pick another constellation (or two) to discuss...

Merry Christmas

I think I'll take a couple of days off from this blog as I wish you and your family and friends a most Merry Christmas.  Right now, as I am writing this the temperature here in Gainesville, Florida has climbed all the way up to 30 degrees...elsewhere in the eastern and central U.S. it is much colder with snow covering much of the land.  No snow here, but for a lifelong Floridian this is definitely uncomfortable, and it's supposed to get to about 20 tonight.  They say around the New Year, temperatures are supposed to be warmer than usual, but for me that's an awfully long wait.  Again, Merry Christmas!

Quote of the Week...fron Neil deGrasse Tyson

While casting shade on Elon Musk for what he's done, is doing, or will do, try to pause and remember that he made electric cars a normal thing in society and he commercialized space...for cargo, satellites & people. Count him among those who are inventing civilization's future.   ---Neil deGrasse Tyson

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you may know that I'm a fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson, science popularizer and astrophysicist, the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, the narrator of the Cosmos TV series after the death of its originator, Carl Sagan, and a strong advocate for space exploration, both manned and unmanned. I think he hit just the right chord with the above Tweet (I'm a follower of his) about the exorbitantly wealthy entrepreneur Elon Musk, recently much praised and maligned after buying and taking over this social media site. Tyson's politics are clearly far to the left of Musk's, who has signaled with some of his Tweets a willingness to pander to the Trump crowd and their conspiracy theories and agendas. Yet Musk has indeed pioneered the mass production of electric cars with his Tesla and worked with liberal president Barack Obama to develop a future manned Mars project under his SpaceX company...breaking the multi-year dependence on Russia to launch our own astronauts into space. There are two chief points I'd like to make. One, the very nature of being a public figure/leader, be it in any field like politics, business, sports, academics, or entertainment, jettisons one into public scrutiny and there will always be something objectionable about their behavior or views that comes out, either with their own consent or not. Two, we seem to be suffering lately from what I term the "Fonzie Syndrome" where just because someone is thought of as "cool" or thinks himself or herself cool then whatever they say is supposedly Infallible Wisdom and Truth...millions of Trump worshippers are totally into this fallacy: for them the Orange Man IS the Fonz. And I suppose super-rich folk can get a swollen head about themselves and pretend expertise in areas beyond their specialties...Elon's foray into Twitter I believe betrays this very human frailty. I wish he would focus his attention more on the transformational technology for which he will ultimately be honored in history instead of this current misguided detour.  The latest breaking news is that he just resigned as the company's CEO, although since he's still the owner I don't know how much that's going to change things...

Give Billy Napier the Time He Needs to Restore Winning Gator Football

I was just discussing with a coworker how he felt about University of Florida football head coach Billy Napier after his first season, going 6-7.  We both agreed that Napier had replaced previous coach Dan Mullen because Mullen was perceived to have done poorly with his recruiting...basically, the team that Napier was forced to deal with in his first season was Mullen's product.  The sports gurus who others think are knowledgeable about this sort of thing have just ranked the Gators as #12 in this year's recruiting, so maybe the new coach is performing as hoped.  Only real games, starting next year, with reveal the trend as my friend and I feel inclined to give Napier the time he needs to build up a higher quality football team.  After all, I reminded him, Charlie Pell went 0-9-1 in his first year coaching UF (1979).  As for my expectations for Florida football, I don't expect a national championship or SEC conference title every year, but I do want them to at least be in contention for the title game late in the regular season and finish with a higher than 2:1 ratio with their win-loss record.  If they accomplish that, then I'm happy...even if many of my prima donna fellow Gator fans aren't...

Weekly Short Stories: 1988 Science Fiction, Part 5

Today I continue looking at 1988 science fiction short stories as they appeared in the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Sixth Annual Collection and featuring Dozois' selections. They're all good stories with interesting premises...three of them are intimately connected with the future fate of animals on our planet while the others are split between a serial killer, an indigenous culture fighting submergence and a tribute to northern European mythology.  Sometimes with short stories it can take a bit of effort to figure out exactly what's going on...the second and third stories below fit that bill.  My favorite of the bunch? Judith Moffett's The Hob.  And now, to the stories and my reactions...

KIRINYAGA by Mike Resnick

The Kikuyu people of Kenya, like so many other groups, had to endure the oppression of European colonialism, not only dominated economically and politically but also socially and culturally, with the colonists' ethics and values supplanting their own.  In this story it's a future where humans are abundantly settling other worlds, and the Kikuyu are accorded their own planet...but the outside organization monitoring and supplying them is still bound to interfere whenever a traditional practice conflicts with their own values.  The response from the Kikuyu is traditional, sad...and effective...

THE GIRL WHO LOVED ANIMALS by Bruce McAllister

On our world in the future the extinctions of animal life have progressed to the point that going to a zoo is basically looking at holograms of the animals as they appeared in the past.  A young abused, low-IQ woman is pregnant, having accepted money to be a surrogate mother...but it isn't a human she is carrying.  The protagonist breaks her out of state custody for the sake of her own well-being and that of her growing baby in the face of adverse social and legal actions...

THE LAST OF THE WINNEBAGOES by Connie Willis

Sometimes the author in a story will quickly switch without warning back and forth between two different times and experiences...it can be a bit confusing, especially at the beginning when the reader has not picked up on the narrative's parameters.  That aside, this tale of the "extinction" of Winnebagoes and other RVs is dwarfed by the realization of a much larger extinction...as well as what can happen when one regulatory agency accrues too much power for itself...

LOVE IN VAIN by Lewis Shiner

A Texas D.A. travels from his home in Dallas to a town jail just outside Austin, where dwells an accused serial killer.  Only problem: Charlie has confessed to thousands of killings with detailed knowledge...killings he could not have possibly done.  As the D.A. digs deeper into this mystery, his own unraveling personal life is revealed.  I felt this could have been the start of a series, what with the personal back story...

THE HOB by Judith Moffett

A hairy, long-living humanoid group is coming out of its secluded hibernation in the remote Yorkshire heath country in northern England.  Elphi awakes first and discovers one of his fellow hobs has died...how to get rid of the body without arousing suspicion among the surrounding humans?  Along the way he accidentally encounters a young woman hiking through the area, and his story is eventually told.  Sounds like a fantasy story Tolkien might have dreamed up, but there is a real science fiction angle when space travel enters the picture.  A sweet story, well told... 

OUR NEURAL CHERNOBYL by Bruce Sterling

A tongue-in-cheek look, from the middle of our current century, at a genetically induced biological disaster as in the 1990s genetic hackers run rampant altering human's DNA through the use of the RNA involved in HIV.  If it had just ended messing up a few people's lives it would have been one thing, but the enhanced neural activity and markedly higher intelligence produced through one of the experiments inadvertently crosses species lines, producing the sometimes-comic effects the author seemed to have fun with...

Next week: more from 1988...

Podcaster Discusses Momentum

On his Mindset Mentor podcast yesterday, personal development coach Rob Dial brought up the subject of momentum.  Giving the word picture example of getting a car moving from a still position, he stressed that getting started in anything can be an arduous task...even becoming more difficult after the initial actions...but that once it all is in motion, that is, the habits begin to set in more and more, it begins to pick up momentum, which provides positive feedback and encourages more effort.  Then it is a matter of keeping with it and not interrupting the flow of your efforts, for once the car comes to a rest again, the whole process of getting it moving has to start from scratch.  I think that sometimes we confuse taking necessary small breaks from an endeavor, or even just a little rest, with walking away from it "for a season"...that latter break has a tendency to be a momentum destroyer.  Also, there is nothing like having people around you who see the intensity of your initial efforts in something as a kind of unhealthy fanaticism that must be curtailed and balanced...just contending with this kind of opposition can be discouraging: in my childhood I felt I was victim to this sort of negativity, with no recourse to the kind of personal boundary-setting that folks like Dial like to suggest.  But even without outside interference, it can be imposing to get started moving that "car" along, and not only that, but you're more likely to see how immense your undertaking is once you're finally moving down the road, with the possible inclination to put on the momentum-destroying brakes...

Interesting Winter Weather Hitting Gainesville as Christmas Approaches

Looks like an unusually wet and cold upcoming week in Gainesville as Christmas on Sunday approaches.  Whenever precipitation is forecast and the temperature is below freezing, the obvious inference is that it's gonna snow...such is the case this coming Friday, two days before the big holiday.  All I know is that in the next few days we're going to get a lot of water...in whatever form...falling from the skies and plummeting temperatures as the weekend approaches.  At last glimpse The Weather Channel has Christmas day's high in my hometown here in northern Florida at 45, bracketed with lows in the 20's.  My main concern in all this...and perhaps yours as well...will be potentially icy roads: hardly anyone here, including myself, is prepared to handle driving over them.  The last time that happened in Gainesville to any substantial degree was just before Christmas in 1989 when roads iced up overnight.  I was at work in the downtown post office in the wee hours of the morning and after my shift spent several minutes trying to clear my car's windshield of the thick ice.  Then the treacherous 6-mile drive home...I managed to make it nearly into my own neighborhood before the car began briefly to skid on the frozen road.  And then it began to snow in earnest while icicles formed all around my house.  Nothing like that has happened here since...until possibly this coming Christmas weekend.  Should be interesting...

Just Finished Reading Starry Messenger by Neil deGrasse Tyson

I've previously read two other books by astrophysicist and popularizer of science Neil deGrasse Tyson: Astrophysics for People in a Hurry and Cosmic Queries (cowritten with physicist James Trefil)...click on the titles to read my reviews.  Starry Messenger, just out, is the latest in a string of popular science books by Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City and Carl Sagan's long-time replacement as narrator of the recurring Cosmos TV series. As in other books of his, he presents a diverse set of perspectives in science and society, this time claiming a special perspective from the viewpoint of space, looking down at our planet.  In everything he extols objective truth, as opposed to the highly subjective personal and political truths so many of us adhere to, and also claims for it a kind of transcendent aesthetic beauty that enhances, not diminishes, what the subject of focus is.  Then he goes on to discuss how scale...the extremely fast/slow, large/small and distant...can distort our perceptions of reality.  Tribalism, a subject that I only sadly know too much of from my own life experiences, gets the Tyson treatment: seems we're in the same "tribe" on the subject.  How people like to label themselves these days goes beyond ethnic, national, religious and socioeconomic distinctions...sexual identity and even the ethic of being a vegetarian versus eating meat come into play and are subject to, well, subjectivity.  Finally, the author discusses the highly subjective nature of race, law and order, presenting as a whole a smorgasbord of topics under the perspective of seeing us from "above", either in a literal or figurative sense.  Since I tend to see eye-to-eye with Neil deGrasse Tyson, I suppose this is an instance of reading for the sake of picking up talking points, rather than to have my eyes opened to a differing perspective that would challenge my beliefs.  I enjoyed Starry Messenger...maybe you will, too...

Overslept for Depot Parkrun 5K This Morning, Checked the Park Out Later

 

This morning I had been thinking about going down to Gainesville's Depot Park for their weekly free 5K run, but since I get off from work on Fridays at 10 pm, I am already cutting into my night's sleep if I get up early to get ready and drive the 6 or 7 miles to the park for the 7:30 run...as it happened, I got up at 9:30!  Still, I thought why not go down there around 1 this afternoon and run there...so I did.  I was a bit shocked by how crowded the park was...I was lucky to find a parking spot.  And, you know what?  People were walking and running on the path in both directions, with me sometimes having to cut over the grass to avoid them...it was like the Matrix training program, if you've seen that movie.  Suddenly, I noticed there was a kiddie play area loaded with rides (and now, kids) as well as a wine/eatery place that had always hitherto escaped my attention.  I had especially wanted to see how I would react to running with heavier, but more padded, shoes: the jury is out on that, since I already was feeling a little out of sorts with so many people there...the above photo is at the start of the 5K run, probably the only time there weren't loads of people immediately around me.  If you only go to Depot Park early on Saturday mornings, I learned, you're bound to get a false impression of how popular it really is.  Later on in the day, it's more like New York City's Central Park...

Quote of the Week...from Ludwig van Beethoven

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly about how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius appears as a distant, guiding sun.                      ---Ludwig van Beethoven

No one is exactly sure...other than Charles Schulz's piano plunking little Schroeder from Peanuts...exactly which day the great classical composer Ludwig van Beethoven's birth falls on.  Heck, they're not even sure which year he was born in! But for the sake of this article, I'll bow to fictional Schroeder's high opinion of his idol and say it's today.  I rummaged through some of Beethoven's more famous quotes and found that they were a mixture of extreme narcissism and pride for his own greatness with times of self-doubt and recrimination.  The above one is actually right in the middle, and pretty profound at that.  I doubt there are few of us who were so specialized and extensively skilled and accomplished in our chosen life endeavors as he, so here's someone who knows what he's talking about.  The more skillful and productive you get in an area, the more knowledgeable you are about it and how painfully much you lack in ability to fully master it.  A little baby who finally learns how to walk may suddenly feel he or she can do anything, but artists, athletes, scientists, or anyone else or who have dedicated themselves to their special field can feel a deep personal lacking and feeling of shortcoming that others may be confounded at, seeing only how they excel.  Not that I am remotely as accomplished in any of these areas as, say, a Beethoven...I am horribly spread out over many areas and with my skills and works in any one of them much lower than if I had decided to concentrate my efforts. But it's true: pick up a beginning foreign language book and after the first two chapters you'll think you can speak the language... a couple of years later you may think you never will.  As for Schroeder and the rest of his Peanuts buddies like good ol' Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus and Snoopy, they were always on the front of my Sunday newspaper comic section as a kid, but I really got into the strip when I bought a couple of paperbacks featuring nothing but the oldest Peanuts comics going back to the 1950s.  I'm grateful both for Schulz and Beethoven...and others whose dedication to their crafts have enhanced my life's enjoyment over the years...

Artemis I Successfully Returns, Future Lunar Missions Scheduled

The Artemis I NASA mission to the Moon and back was finally completed with a successful splashdown return on December 11th.  It was unmanned and designed to test the SLS launch rocket and Orion spacecraft and systems, as well as the Earth-based command center.  After some delays lasting months, it was finally launched on November 26th, with the Orion craft eventually making many lunar orbits over a span of six days, performing various maneuvers and taking spectacular photos both of the Moon and Earth off in the distance before returning to Earth.  I'm happy to see this concerted return to human deep space exploration after nearly half a century of doing little more than go around Earth in low orbit.  The next Artemis mission is scheduled for May, 2024 and will featured a human crew that will also orbit the Moon and return...after that, the way should be open for the first human landing on our Moon the following year, for the first time in 52+ years.  This time around, hopefully, we'll keep our presence there permanent with a planned Moon base.  The media coverage for all this is scant, with little popular interest...I'm not sure that this is a bad thing after thinking about it: it's all those voices complaining about investing money, time and effort into space exploration instead of pursuing their agendas that has, in large part, created this unnecessary gap in human deep space exploration and settlement.  May the future Artemis missions continue to be successful...

Weekly Short Stories: 1988 Science Fiction, Part 4

As my reviews of short sci-fi stories from 1988 continue to the fourth week, I switch my focus to the Gardner Dozois anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction, Sixth Annual Collection.  There is a small overlap of stories with the Donald A. Wollheim anthology I had been covering for the previous three weeks: Peaches for Mad Molly (Harry Turtledove), Schrödinger's Kitten (Howard Waldrop) and Skin Deep (D. Alexander Smith) are in both books.  As I've stated before, I can't believe Dozois didn't pick Ripples in the Dirac Sea (Geoffrey A. Landis), but I suppose there's no accounting for taste, sigh. And now, here are my reactions to the first (non-overlapping) tales in Gardner's anthology...

SURFACING by Walter Jon Williams

On another planet presumably in a future of human space exploration and settlement, a man with a cynical, angry attitude toward life and others is using humpback whales that he transported into its seas to detect and understand the deep-dwelling, intelligent indigenous beings there. Meanwhile, a shape-shifting alien has landed there and then presumably left...but then suddenly a woman scientist arrives on the scene, alternately competing with the man over his project and seducing him.  I was frustrated reading all this and felt the author stuck too many diverse elements into the story, which could have been simpler and shorter...

HOME FRONT by James Patrick Kelly

Will is an American teen in the near future (from 1988), putting up with his two loser friends and trying to do well enough in high school to stay out of the military draft and be sent off to fight in one of the never-ending wars abroad. One of his friends is playing the lottery to see if he can't become the next "Johnny America", the starring soldier in a TV show glorifying war and actually serving in it.  And then there are the Selective Service sweeps through high school to pick up fresh soldiers.  Pretty cynical, but at least nowadays Will's dismal situation would be less applicable to Americans...but much more so to Russian teens, sadly...

THE MAN WHO LOVED THE VAMPIRE LADY by Brian Stableford

Gardner Dozois must have thought that every alternative history tale automatically belongs to the science fiction genre, because he has so many in his collections...here's another.  This "time" it's 1623 and vampires not only really exist, but they are the dominant ruling class.  A "normal" human, a mechanist corresponding to our notion of a scientist, has made a discovery that could threaten the vampires.  He suspects mortal danger for himself as his old vampire lover is paying him a visit, not good...

THE LAST ARTICLE by Harry Turtledove

Ditto with this story regarding my previous comments about Dozois, alternative histories, and sci-fi.  This one is set in the late 1940s as the German Nazis, winners of World War II, are replacing Britain as the new occupying power in India, setting up a confrontation between their ranking officer there and peaceful resister Mohandas Gandhi. But Gandhi is in for a rude awakening as he has believed that all occupiers are essentially the same and susceptible to nonviolent resistance...

STABLE STRATEGIES FOR MIDDLE MANAGEMENT by Eileen Gunn

This brief story reminded me of Kafka's Metamorphosis as a future business executive, having consented to bioengineering on her body to further her career, wakes up one morning to discover the many insect-like features she is growing. I guess this was supposed to be a funny satire on human failings and overdependence on science...I did like how the protagonist handled her boss problem at the end, though I would never recommend it...

IN MEMORIAM by Nancy Kress

It's discovered in the future that our own accumulation of memories is a major factor in our aging and eventual death.  But a method...the memory wipe...can restore lost youth and create a longer, more active life to those who choose this path.  An aging woman, faced with the pressures of her flagging health and her own family's urging, must soon make the crucial decision. The ending was sad, profound and surprising...

Next week: more reactions to 1988 stories in the Dozois anthology... 

Comments about Football and Football

In football, the Sunday night national stage...which has pretty much supplanted the famed Monday Night Football spotlight of decades earlier, "my" Miami Dolphins were in the spotlight as they were finally in a featured game, this one on the road against the "Los Angeles" Chargers.  I put that location in quotes because I still think of them as belonging to San Diego. It seems that ever since they went into general decline following Jimmy Johnson's retirement as head coach after the 1999 season, Miami has been pushed to the background with network sports attention, only getting coverage when something negative is going on.  But this year they are doing better in the standings with first year head coach Mike McDaniel being heralded as some king of genius (they say it, I don't) and quarterback Tua Tagovailoa seeming to hit his stride, with star receivers Jaylen Waddle and Tyreek Hill beginning to resemble Dan Marino's famed receivers of the past, Mark Clayton and Mark Duper.  NBC sports announcer Chris Collinsworth even went so far before the game to proclaim the Dolphins as Super Bowl bound...ha, ha, ha, I'll believe it when I see it!  True to form, the Dolphins, already known for being a poor road team on the Pacific Coast, quickly fell behind to the Chargers as Tua seemed to choke up earlier under all the media focus and the highly touted Dolphins defense found itself full of holes for San Diego Los Angeles to run right through.  Still, they nearly pulled the game out but now have lost two in a row, with a difficult road contest against Buffalo next week...

As for the other "football", that is, the sport that most of the world gives this designation, the men's World Cup soccer semifinals are set to be played: Argentina vs. Croatia at 1 pm today and France vs. Morocco tomorrow at the same time.  The overwhelming consensus has Argentina and France winning to play each other in the finale on December 18th.  I've written before about begin bummed out over excessive nationalism in sports, so I haven't been giving all this hoopla much coverage...or thought, for that matter.  I like more to watch different leagues play, most notably the English Premier League and Mexico's Liga MX with my favorite teams in them Leicester City and UANL Tigres, respectively.  On the league level, different teams hire their players across national borders and usually aren't so hung up about national divisions, the opposite of what happens with this highly politicized World Cup scene.  Since I happen to like Lionel Messi, I'm going to root for his Argentina team to win it all, but otherwise I couldn't care less about this tournament of nationalism and waving flags...

Just Finished Reading It by Stephen King

During that personally highly productive decade I've hitherto referred to as the "Aughts", I read most of Stephen Kings novels published to date, including the very, very long 1985 work titled It. "It"'s been adapted at least twice to movies as well as a TV series...after seeing on-screen adaptations of earlier King stories straying too far from the author's original narrative, I decided to pass up on them. Instead, I just finished reading It for a second time, after the more recently written King novel 11/22/63 has a scene taking place in It's setting of Derry, Maine, a fictional and bedeviled town that is also the primary location of his 1993 novel Insomnia (also a personal favorite). It is split into two parallel narratives, between the years 1958 and 1985.  The heroes are seven Derry children, self-dubbed "The Losers", who find themselves united through common circumstances against bullies as well as a sense of benevolence and genuine liking toward each other.  They make common cause against a murderous presence in the town, which takes different forms but primarily as a sinister clown named Pennywise...it killed George, the little brother of "Stuttering'" Bill Denbrough, and that set off the series of events leading to this gang of heroes forming in the strange local marshes called the Barrens.  It's already established at the novel's start that the seven all survived their childhood encounters with the evil entity, which not only kills but invades people's consciousness with negative and violent thoughts.  But whatever happened in 1958 did not lead it to It's demise, for it is back in Derry in 1985 as more people are turning up gruesomely killed...the seven are summoned in adulthood to finish the job they had begun 27 years earlier.  Stephen King delved deeply into the story's different characters, evoking little memories of my own past from snippets of the different children's experiences.  One different thing: the Losers were free to run around loose and form their own friendships, while my own parents were very restrictive and strict about me leaving the house to hang around others (although they, like King's "losers", had no such restrictions placed on themselves in their childhood).  Reading this thriller horror story the second time around was a wholly different experience, primarily because, naturally, I already knew how it would turn out.  One other thing without giving away the story: it was interesting how the protagonists underwent a general memory loss about not only their earlier experiences but also about one another.  I wander if the author was trying to convey something about human nature with this.  It is a good, albeit very scary novel, and requires a generous amount of time devoted to reading it.  My favorite excerpt comes at the very end, with a tumultuous bicycle ride downhill...who knew such a thing could bring tears to one's eyes?  I am currently rereading Stephen King's Insomnia, which as mentioned before is also set in Derry, but in the year 1991.  Not only was I impressed by the sensitivity shown to the elderly in this story, but it is also connected with the author's standout fantasy series The Dark Tower.   I've also been reading Neil deGrasse Tyson's latest popular science book Starry Messenger...I'll have a few things to say about it in a future article...

My #1 All-Time Favorite Album: Led Zeppelin IV

LED ZEPPELIN IV, my #1 all-time favorite album, came out in 1971 although I didn't hear all eight of its tracks for another nineteen years until the British hard rock band produced its first box set and my local rock station, WRUF-FM "Rock 104", played it in its entirety to my amazement.  What a group, and what an album, with guitarist wizard Jimmy Page doing his riffs and studio production, Robert Plant's soulful singing (and harmonica), John Paul Jones on bass guitar and keyboards and the late John Bonham pounding out the drums.  The album is technically untitled, but everyone pretty much refers to it as "Led Zeppelin Four".   My initial exposure to it was during my teens with the playing of the opening track Black Dog and then Stairway to Heaven on the radio...the former I never did care for while I became obsessed with the latter in the fall of 1973 as a strong consensus of its greatness had spread throughout the rock listening community.  During this time and subsequent years, I would also hear songs like Rock and Roll, Misty Mountain Hop, Going to California and When the Levee Breaks on FM album rock radio without taking much notice of them.  But in late 1990 I was ready for their music and the impact of that box set, along with the advent of stations nightly playing Led Zeppelin music at set times, converted me into a die-hard fan, ten years after they broke up following Bonham's death.  Although Stairway to Heaven was on Side One, it was the album's second side with four striking tracks that has elevated Led Zeppelin IV to be my favorite one for all-time.  Below I have its tracks listed by order of my liking, with a little commentary thrown in...

1 WHEN THE LEVEE BREAKS---In their early years the band had a nasty habit of lifting old blues songs without crediting the original composer...they rectified it later, including this rock arrangement of a 1929 blues piece by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy.  This is a relentless song about suffering through misfortune as Plant alternately wails and plays perhaps the most compelling harmonica piece I've heard. From 1991 until just recently I regarded it as my all-time favorite song and still rank it very high.  The opening drums/guitar/harmonica segment is matchless...

2 MISTY MOUNTAIN HOP---Making a passing reference to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, the lyrics are more a contemporary social commentary and a warning that "you better open your eyes".  Never heard a beat and lyrical buildup as in this ultimately sinister but beautiful Side Two opening track...

3 STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN---The first Zeppelin song I ever took to, I first got to like it a lot while lying in a hospital bed, recovering from surgery and listening to rock radio in October 1973.  The way the song transforms from a slow flute/acoustical piece gradually into a rousing hard rock guitar jam at the end has always impressed me...brilliant...

4 GOING TO CALIFORNIA---A mellow (for the most part) Robert Plant sings of goin' to California with an aching in his heart and looking for a woman who has never, ever been born.  Speaks of sometimes irrational, idealized sentiments that can cloud our own judgments...can I get an amen from anyone on that?  I loved the acoustical guitar on it and wonder how it would stand up instead as a piano piece...

5 FOUR STICKS---Some bands have specific songs in their catalog they avoid performing in live concerts because they are difficult to play... the Beatles' And Your Bird Can Sing, Rush's YYZ...and this one from Led Zeppelin: John Bonham thought Four Sticks was exceptionally hard on the drums.  It's kind of like When the Levee Breaks regarding the sense of deeply felt lamentation and an overriding mystical sense, and, yes, I'm a sucker for all that... 

6 THE BATTLE OF EVERMORE---An excursion into fantasy land as Plant sings of dire events unfolding in Tolkien's  Lord of the Rings setting.  He sings a pretty passionate duet here with Sandy Denny.  John Paul Jones dominates the song's instrumentation with the mandolin...

7 ROCK AND ROLL---Maybe the best anthem extolling rock and roll: exuberant, energizing, and happy.  Dang it, it's hard to hear it without just getting up and dancing around (while playing air guitar)...

8 BLACK DOG---Written literally about a black dog that had wondered into the recording studio one day, this is an exercise in jamming with the band members going off in their own jazzy/rock directions with their instruments and, in Plant's case, voice.  Never did care for it, though, although I can see how others would. Just seemed like they were showboating maybe a little too much here...

So that's it for my all-time favorite albums...guess I'll be cooking up some new feature for future weeks...