Goodbye February!

 

Four snowstorms, three feet of snow.

Six times up on the garage roof – that’s six and a half tons of slush my back shoveled off.

Two hard SF paperbacks put away. Another on WWII.

More of the self-writ epic outlined. It’s now gone from a blueprint to a basic Erector set.

Season One of a TV series re-watched as a family per Patch’s request.

Everyone still healthy and Wu Flu free.

Financial life improving, nice especially that college for Little One 18 months away.

What will March bring?

Thaw, hopefully.

Looking forward to traveling back to Middle-earth.

Have a neat little historical tome on a little-known subject to me, Venice (which will play into the self-writ epic).

Planning on focusing on Bach this month musically. Intrigued by Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations. Doing a little experiment to focus on one major classical composer and his compositions per month, my little part to save Western Civilization. March is Bach month.

And that’s that.

Bye Feb!

 

Book Review: Count to a Trillion

 

© 2011 by John C. Wright

 

Over the past two decades or so, as I meandered about the Catholic blogosphere on my journey to traditional Catholicism, I came across many references to the blog of one John C. Wright. Most, if not all, of the references were of the awestruck reverence variety. Those times I did come across those references of awestruck reverence I followed the links back to the source. And, lo, I too was struck with awe and reverence, and said I need to read this guy regularly. Oh he’s a Catholic and a science fiction writer, too? I gotta pick up some of his books.

Then, as always, life intervened.

And, just as always, I could punch myself for putting off my foray into the science fiction of Mr. Wright.

So back in November I spotted this novel on a used book shelf and immediately purchased it. After taking care of some other reading business first, I finally opened it about two weeks ago. Result? Right from the beginning I realized this novel is unlike any previous SF I’ve read.

How so?

The first thing that struck me was the presence of higher math. Higher math? In a novel meant for mass consumption? Now, we don’t go into strict detail, and there’s nary a formula to scare the gentle reader, but it’s there, and Wright undeniably knows what it is. Higher math is a secondary character in the novel, lurking always in the background, ready to pipe up at a moment’s notice. Whether to offer its insight into relativistic travel, the physics of antimatter energy consumption, artificial intelligence, global socio-politico-economics, or game theory on planetary levels, offer insight it does.

That alone intrigued me. Then I got to know the main character.

Menelaus Montrose, is the odd combination of gun slinging lawyer and mathematical prodigy in a post-apocalyptic Texas. Now, lawfare in the 25th century is conducted a bit different than it is today, most notably in the fact suits are settled Burr-Hamilton duel style. Only now there’s computerized armor, defensive flak and chaff, intelligent bullets that change direction, personal missiles that feint and jab. When Menelaus nearly loses to rival attorney Mike Nails, he realizes that it’s time to hang up the shingle and join that interstellar voyage to the Diamond Star, to decipher the Monument.

Now we slip into Arthur C. Clarke territory. The Monument initially reminded me of the Clarkian Monolith from 2001. However, instead of a one-story sized slab, it’s the size of a small, smooth moon. Writ upon it down to microscopic levels in alien hieroglyphs are equations to open up the universe. Can Man decipher them? And how was the Monument initially discovered? Orbiting the Diamond Star, a star of pure antimatter.

The mission is twofold: decipher the Monument (mapped off into Greek alphabet segments) and mine the star for its antimatter – the greatest, purest form of energy. En route, Menelaus decides to try something risky. Sensing something greater than Man – something Posthuman – would be required to understand the Monument, he injects himself with a brain altering drug –

And so the novel, which I could not put down and read dozens of pages at a sitting, unfolds.

Questions: What – or Who – would leave a Monument to a lesser species? Something good, or something, perhaps, evil? We always read, in these tales, of a benevolent alien civilization nudging us up the evolutionary ladder. But what if that wasn’t the case? And what if they can “see” us mining the Diamond Star? And what if our partial decipherment of the Monument leads us to be able to hoist our own selves up that ladder by our own bootstraps? And should we evolve ourselves into a race of heroes to defend against an invading force that is to us what we are to insects, or should we evolve into a race of – more efficient drones lest we be stomped out of existence?

I thoroughly enjoyed Count to a Trillion, which happens to be, thankfully, Book One of a series of six written to date. The next one, The Hermetic Millennia, is on deck for a mid-Spring reading.

Grade: A+

 

Rush Limbaugh

 

I was never a ditto head.

But, like many out there, it was listening to Rush that converted me to a lifelong philosophy of conservatism.

Well, that’s not exactly correct, at least according to an early memory I’m quite fond of that took place when I was about 12 or so. I was laying on the living room floor (no doubt paging through my Beloved Physics Book) while my parents watched the Reagan Carter debate. Whenever Reagan spoke, I simply felt good; whenever Carter said something, I felt the exact opposite. Now, it could be Reagan’s stage presence, his smooth voice and warm persona. But I felt safe and comforted listening to the man. Though the ideas discussed soared over my head, I knew Reagan and his ideas were … just right.

A few years passed, me blissfully unaware of politics, political theory and political theater (much more preoccupied with the shifting familial landscape of divorced parents), and before I knew it, I was at college. Where I was bombarded 24/7 with anti-Reagan propaganda and full-flung liberal ideology. Man! And this was the 80s! I truly feel sorry for what conservative students today must face.

Soon after, young idiot I was, I cast my first legal vote in a presidential election for Michael Dukakis. And then, like many indoctrinated liberal students, did not vote in any state or local elections for another four years. Then, I decided, after careful research and rumination, to cast my vote for this new up and coming politician: Bill Clinton. “Hey man,” I recall saying to a friend at the time, “Bush is just for big business, and Clinton isn’t!”

A couple more years passed with me preoccupied with friends, a semi-serious girlfriend, a full-time garage band seeking greater success, and business school at night followed by physics classes at a local university. Then, in the spring of 1993, I listened to one Rush Limbaugh broadcast in my car during my lunchbreak.

I’d heard of him before. My bassist, way back in 1989 or 90 or so, recommended me to him, but I brushed it aside. Conservatives were squares, man. Now pass me a beer, and don’t forget to book the rehearsal studio – gotta work on the new songs for the gig next week.

After my tentative first listen that brisk sunny March day, I felt a little weird. A small chink in the cornerstone of my belief system might have been quietly and softly knocked a little out of place. To reassure my liberal persona I made fun of Limbaugh to another friend, and we both had ourselves a good chuckle. This Rush guy certainly was no Howard Stern!

A little while passed – can’t say how long – but I listened again. And again, and again. I was listening in the car at lunch, and this soon followed with listening to him with headphones on the radio at my desk. My reversion to conservatism was soon barreling ahead and out of control.

In the fall of 93 I voted against New Jersey’s longtime senator, Frank Lautenberg. My candidate lost, but it was a major milestone for me. I voted Republican. And every election since, I either voted Republican or third-party.

Why?

Well, without digressing into a personal political treatise, what Rush said simply made sense. I felt he was for the little guy, the small businessman, the man trying to make a living for himself and his family, in ways more authentic than any Democrat talking point. I believed HE believed his message, and his message made SENSE to me. It echoed back to debate Reagan. It just felt right in my gut. And more importantly, I understood the logic of his arguments.

(Course, it didn’t hurt that I had a religious conversion around the same time. As long as abortion is a non-negotiable in the Democrat party platform, I will NEVER vote for them.)

Like I said earlier, I was not a ditto-head. There were only two periods in my life where I listened to him with any regularity. First was probably 94 to 96 or so. At this time I also bought and read his two books, and yes, they did shock me at the time. Primarily because they said things – Rush said things – that no one else in the media was saying. The second period was when I was out of work for most of 2010, when I was having my lung surgeries. During those two phases I listened to him a couple times a week, for most of the three-hour show. But the years in between I would only listen, perhaps, a couple times a year.

I admire his success. I admire his courage. And though he was lacking somewhat in the personal morality department, he was a firm Pro-Life advocate and did much and raised much money for charity. I enjoyed every hour spent listening to him, and thank him for letting me know it was okay to be a conservative.

Rest in peace, Rush.

Book Review: Red Mars

 

© 1993 by Kim Stanley Robinson

 

Verdict: A really, really good book I just didn’t like. Wish I did, though.

Ever meet somebody, maybe a co-worker or a client at a job, or someone you’re thinking about hiring to do some work on your house or finances, and discover that, through no fault of your own, despite your actively struggling against it, you find that you have zero rapport with that person?

Well, that’s kinda what happened when Hopper met Red Mars.

I wanted to like it. I really did. The book is chock full of nice meaty science – geology (areology), chemistry, a bit of biology, climate science and orbital mechanics, to name just a few broad topics delved into. It even has a Space Elevator, first conceived, I believe, by Arthur C. Clarke in his novel The Fountains of Paradise (reviewed elsewhere within these electronic pages)! There’re hints of a new religion forming on Mars, religion of any and all types of favorite interest of mine, and, of course, there’s sociology and politics as the red planet’s population grows from a hundred to something like a million over 575 pages.

There was plenty of intriguing science. I’m embarrassed to admit I know very little about terraforming, despite it being such a familiar topic in SF. A great deal of the novel revolves around the terraforming of Mars. Algae to introduce oxygen into the air, techniques to thicken the atmosphere and cloud cover to heat the cold planet, giant tunnels burrowed hundreds of meters into the ground to release the planet’s interior heat. Additionally, Phobos is hollowed out and manned, and Deimos’s orbit is “corrected.” All that was good, to say the least.

There were some nice other touches, too. I thought the names of two of the settlements, Burroughs and Bradbury Point, quite poignant in passing. And that artificial satellite, the one that anchors the space elevator, is named, simply, obviously and essentially, Clarke.

What I just couldn’t get on board with were the characters, the plot, and the writing style. And those are not a minor things.

I really didn’t like any of the main characters. One was perpetually grouchy, one acted like a middle school cheerleader, one was a flamboyant anarchist who’d never be allowed to colonize another world. Lots of bed hopping and petty high school jealousies. From the best and the brightest. It reminded me of the soap opera worlds of Ben Bova. A lot of the chicks – too many in fact, had a wee bit too much Mary Sue for my old dinosaur bones. And the only character I did actually like [spoilers!] is assassinated 25 pages in.

I found myself not enjoying was the writing style. Never having read Robinson before, I don’t know if the book was an exception or not. But to me it felt wordy. Wordy like Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which I had to read for a college lit class. Lots and lots of words describing the characters’ feelings and the labyrinths and wormholes where speculation on the possible meanings and implications of those feelings. More than a few times I felt myself lost in the woods, my mind thinking about upcoming chores or events of the day past as my eyes roved down the page.

And speaking of feelings, I felt Robinson would take a long, long time to come back to a point, or reveal a plot point, so long that I sometimes forgot what we (the author/reader partnership) were building towards. It got downright frustrating, and more than once I thought of putting the book down. See my previous post on why I dared not.

There was no sense of how much time elapsed between chapters and parts. I found out later that something like fifty or sixty years transpired during the course of the novel. And a little past the halfway point the story shifted abruptly from the challenge of terraforming another world to the politics of environmentalism and immigration and revolution – three things of which I do not find particularly interesting.

So I’m going to give Red Mars a bifurcated grade: A / C. A for the science, C for my enjoyment of the book. I neither recommend nor dissuade the reading of this book and its highly successful sequels. Hollywood has been interested in the series, since James Cameron expressed interest in the late 90s, but it’s been in development hell since. I’d be curious to see what a big screen adaption of the book would look like.

Red Mars

 

For twenty long years it stared balefully down on me: a mixture of regret, of shame, of condescension. How dare you place me, a Nebula Award winner for Best Novel, upon a shelf out of reach, out of sight. It glared out at me with spiteful accusation over two decades. Longer than the lives of both my children, longer than my marriage, over the span of four presidencies, over six jobs and three bouts of unemployment. With guilt I imprisoned it on that shelf as I moved from apartment to home to home office. Incomprehensible grief and anger washed down from it upon me, and the gulf between us, the void, was immense and impenetrable.

Then I decided to just read it.

The “it” is Red Mars, a meaty paperback by Kim Stanley Robinson. I must admit I picked it up solely based on that WINNER OF THE NEBULA AWARD FOR BEST NOVEL scroll above the title. Back in those halcyon days of 2001, pre-9/11, young engaged Hopper walked about all a-glow with sci fi plots and characters running rampant in his skull. I was to be a bestselling novelist! I would change the world! I would … well, writing’s hard work, and, uh, twenty years later my output is somewhat less than I’d have thought back then –

But that’s another tale! Back to Red Mars:

So I was all into science fiction – “SF” as we in the know refer to it – back in those pre-marriage, pre-home, pre-children days. I sopped up as much SF as I could as I worked the night shift at a tech Help Desk for a major corporation. I devoured works by Larry Niven, Philip Jose Farmer, Roger Zelazny, Gregory Benford, Samuel Delaney, Gene Wolf, in addition to the classics as those by Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Walter Miller Jr., and Jules Verne. I lived, breathed, and ate SF. And as part of my development, I autodidacted into Modern SF 401 and bought Robinson’s Red Mars one bright Spring day, and sat down to read it.

Right away I sensed something amiss. Instead of the easy pleasure I expected, difficult treading was encountered. Something blocked my path through the words, sentences, pages and paragraphs, and it became my worst nightmare: a deadening slog through something deliciously anticipated. I managed the 23-page Part I “Festival Night,” and then … put it on … the shelf.

But I am not one to quit.

Years ago in high school I put off reading Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities for an English class. As the night of the essay test approached, I just couldn’t crack the book. In desperation, I picked up the Cliff Notes and managed a B on the test. But it gnawed at my soul until, sixteen years later, commuting on a train into NYC for another tech Help Desk job, I read for the first time the real words spoken by Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton, and not some English Major’s interpretation of such.

With similar pluck, I plucked Red Mars off the shelf one cold Tuesday night of January 19. And nineteen brutal nights of sheer endurance I closed it, one cold Saturday night of February 6. Trembling, but satisfied I’d satisfied the karmic cosmos, I looked fondly upon the illustrations of man conquering Red Mars upon its laminated cover, and placed it in the paper bag by the door where I put all my library donations.

My verdict?

Return tomorrow and all will be revealed!

Super Bowl LV

 

OK, have to come clean. The family and I watched Super Bowl LV, at the wife’s suggestion. We haven’t watched much NFL since it became woke three or four years ago. Did not watch a regular season game or a playoff game over the past two seasons, and we did not watch last year’s Super Bowl. The Mrs. suggested it would be a fun thing to do as a family as we’ve been pretty much snowed in all week. We could skip the pregame, mute the commercials, and hold our noses should any nonsense seep its way in to the telecast. I reluctantly agreed.

I drew up a 10 x 10 betting grid to get the girls involved. Everyone penciled 25 nicknames for him- or herself into it and we drew numbers 0-9 randomly out of a hat. $5 a quarter for whoever had the last two digits of the score. This actually worked, and the girls watched the game intently. Patch won the first quarter, Little One the remaining three. Mom and I didn’t, and if we did, we’d “play it forward” and contribute our winnings to the next quarter. Still, “It’s not fair!” Patch cried, angry at her sister’s winnings. To which we had to laugh: “Actually, it’s extremely fair! – it’s completely random and based on the play of two teams who have no idea you’re betting on them.”

We thought of ordering wings from Biggies, but with the six inches we got (which ended only a little after 4 pm, after which we all had to go out and shovel), we decided against. Fortunately, during errands yesterday, we stocked up the freezer with TGIF snacks: potato skins, mozzarella sticks, jalapeno poppers, and French bread pizza. So we ate all that during the first half. Totally off my keto diet, but well worth it.

Now, the game itself.

It started off a little flat, but then the Bucs picked up steam and Kansas City just … didn’t. I haven’t followed football all year and not during the runup to the big game, but I do understand Andy Reid’s son got into a car accident a few days ago which left a little girl in the hospital. I do think that was a factor. But Tampa Bay came to play, did all their homework, had all the bases covered, and the Chiefs, well, I am reminded of that famous quote attributed to Mike Tyson: “Everyone has a plan until he gets punched in the face.”

It was a boring game, save for the valiant attempts of Patrick Mahomes to get any of his receivers to catch a ball. When he wasn’t being grinded down by Todd Bowles’s defense. That ankle must be killing him today.

And I can’t believe I am writing this, but, I have to admit, I am grudgingly coming to respect Tom Brady. Twenty years of hating him – his regular twice yearly humiliating thrashing of the Jets and the triannual whipping of the Giants (who seem to only be able to beat him in the Super Bowl) – that’s reason enough. I dunno, I found myself kinda rooting for him. Maybe it was the change of scenery away from New England and Belichick. Maybe it’s the fact he was considered washed up and he picked himself up and moved down south, took over another team, and brought them to a Super Bowl victory. Maybe, even, it’s because he has the courage to be a Trump supporter in these Soviet days of America. Maybe it’s because he decided conspicuously not to wear a mask.

It’s probably all these things, in that descending order of importance.

So congratulations, Tom. You earned it.

Curious that there were no kneelers on the sidelines during the anthem and that there were jets flown overhead. Were the players spoken to beforehand? Told not to offend half of America on its most important secular holiday? Or are we going to see a return to normalcy on the gridiron now that Orange Man Gone? I dunno. I’m exhausted of politics, and don’t even want to speculate.

But I don’t plan on watching the NFL next year.

Until, possibly, the Super Bowl. Maybe then those quarters in the Casa Hopper betting grid will be worth $10 a piece.

 

2675 Tolkien

 

One of the more pleasant surprises I love receiving is the shock of synchronicity. I’ll see something in one area I’m interested in that will instantaneously correspond to another seemingly unrelated area of study. A synchronicity event just happened to me last night.

If you’ve been reading the last couple of posts, you’ll note that I’ve gotten the itch to read some Tolkien again. I decided to re-read The Lord of the Rings beginning on March 1, once I’m finished with the current epics I’m working my way through. You’ll also note that while out shopping last Sunday in preparation of the blizzard I bought the current copy of Astronomy magazine on a whim. It’s become a pleasant habit to read an article or two in bed before lights out every night this week.

Last night I read an article that mentioned asteroids, and I looked up the entry on asteroids in Wikipedia on my cell phone. Skimming through it I see a link for notable asteroids. I click on that and soon it’s revealed that, out there some two hundred million miles distant, is an asteroid floating in the inner region of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, called 2675 Tolkien.

2675 Tolkien!

Normally, an asteroid is designated by a number and a name. The number originally was assigned in the order of discovery. Thus, the first asteroid discovered over two hundred years ago is known as 1 Ceres. Since over 100,000 asteroids have been discovered to date, I assume this numbering convention has been modified. Anyhoo, the discoverer is allowed to choose a name, which is then either approved or rejected by the International Astronomical Union.

2675 Tolkien was discovered on April 14, 1982, by British astronomer Martin Watt. It orbits the Sun every 1,202 days, and rotates about itself once every 44 days. A lumpy potato thing with dimensions something like 6 miles by 7 miles, it resembles, to my mind as I can’t find a photo of it anywhere, to be something like a rocky Rubik’s cube. It tumbles rather than rotates. It’s dark and has an absolute magnitude of 12.2, which means it can’t be seen by human eyes. You’d need something 100,000 times more powerful, like a 12” telescope.

I’ve read in several places (might be the same citation) that “Tolkien” was chosen because of the author’s lifelong interest in astronomy. I’m not so sure of that, never having read or heard of it before. There’s not much astronomy in his legendarium. So it seems to me the naming was more likely fan tribute. About a week after 2675 Tolkien was discovered Mr. Watt discovered another asteroid. It’s now known as 2291 Bilbo.

This is not 2675 Tolkien, but this is what it looks like in my mind ...

 

Snow Days

 

Well, the good thing about the New Age of Telecommuting is that we no longer have to risk our lives driving on snowy, icy roads to punch in at a clock at work at 9 a.m. The bad news is that you’re chained to your laptop at home.

It really isn’t that bad a trade-off, though.

My “office” is in the basement. I share it with the wife’s “office” and the ever-busy laundry room. After eight hours at the laptop, monitoring email crises and doing various projects with Excel and two or three reporting software, my feet are cold and damp, my clothes smell musty, and my ears ache from listening to my overly extroverted wife’s several “touch-bases” and zoom calls with her sales teams. The girls self-manage their school day from their rooms, and when they’re done watch TV, get their homework done, and play together on their cell phones or just listen to music.

Is it ideal? No, especially for the little ones. They need socialization desperately, and I fear for their lack of receiving it. I really do. I can tell it’s not healthy for them. But again, thanks in part to the boomers and panic porn purveyors and those who never let a crisis go to waste, this is life in 2021.

For nearly 48 hours we were pounded with the worst blizzard since 2016. My house seems to have got three feet of fairly heavy sloppy snow. We shoveled Monday at 12:30, Monday at 6:30, and Tuesday at 4. I went out onto the horizontal garage roof and shoveled four inches of heavy sloppy icy snow both at 10 pm on Monday and 8 am on Tuesday. As a result, my back aches in at least three spots (recall my back issues from earlier in the week), my neck is stiff (how did I do that?) and my left forearm is throbbing from shoveling right-handed. Thank God for the girls, helping their dad shovel for the first time. Yeah, I had to shovel out $10 a piece for their aid, but they assisted me without complaint.

Normally I go in to the office Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. I am writing this at 5:30 am on Wednesday, having been up since 4 am. I am not going to go in today. For one, the roads are still a bit snow covered, and I can see my car received yet another inch or so overnight. For another, my body just physically needs to heal. I’m tired and exhausted.

About the only person who’s in heaven over all these events is our dog, Charlie. This thing humans call snow is absolutely fascinating to him. He races out on the shoveled deck and leaps into the unshoveled backyard, plunging in and out of the snow like a porpoise trailing a sea liner, up and down, all across the white expanse behind our house. Once the wife lost sight of him behind shrubbery and started screaming for him, thinking he was buried under snow and couldn’t get free. But we wave his favorite blue towel by the door and he comes galloping in, tail wagging at supersonic speeds, for a rub down.

Fortunately we gassed up the cars and did some major grocery shopping – along with the entire state – on Sunday, so we’re well stocked. I’m making headway through my various books and still work on my novel outline in between email crises. Oh, and on a whim Sunday I picked up an Astronomy magazine at the grocery store, probably still having Tabby’s Star echoing somewhere in the uncharted regions of my cerebrum. Each night I read a couple of articles and find myself fascinated.

The hopping continues … as does life in this weird limbo existence we live …