A Journey Towards Totality

 A Journey Towards Totality

As most people reading this will recall, there was a total solar eclipse in North America on April 8, 2024. Mary Lou and I decided that the path of totality was close enough to home to justify a trip. This was our third attempt to see totality and our second successful one.

A good resource concerning eclipses is the website https://www.greatamericaneclipse.com/ , by the way.

The first was a total eclipse on August 21, 2017. At that time, I had not yet retired and it happened to be the first day of class. The UMKC campus was not within the shadow of totality, but totality was going to be roughly twenty miles away to the north or east. I was scheduled to teach that day. I went to my department head and asked for permission to cancel class. Unknown to her, I was carrying a letter of resignation/retirement effective immediately in a manila folder. She agreed with me that a total eclipse is a rare enough and spectacular enough opportunity to justify cancelling class. The letter stayed in the folder and was eventually shredded. I sent multiple messages to my students via email and other means announcing the cancellation and urging them to go to totality.

We decided to watch the eclipse from Liberty, MO. Clouds loomed from the west, and they didn't arrive until totality was nearly over. The corona was beautiful, and I feel lucky to have seen it for a minute or so. It was interesting to be in night-like darkness but to be able to see blue sky off to the south. 

Going to Antarctica has long been on my bucket list. When Lindblad Expeditions offered a cruise itinerary to Antarctica especially modified to be within totality on December 4, 2021, we jumped to reserve a cabin. From the voyage portfolio's daily report:

 "Captain Yuri and guest-expert Dr. Steve Croft had worked together to determine that a position of 55˚00‘S, 045˚22‘W would be the ideal place to witness this event." 

Except that it was cloudy. We watched the sea abruptly darken, be in total darkness, and then abruptly lighten. The highlight of the trip for me turned out to be South Georgia Island. On that island, you experience ice (less than Antarctica), enormous penguin colonies, history, mountains, seabirds, and sea mammals all within a fairly compact area. 

The April 8 eclipse was likely to be the last chance in our lifetime to see an eclipse without needing to travel an extraordinary distance. The closest place to go was Cape Girardeau, MO, but hotel choices were limited and the prices were four times the usual and customary price even eleven months before the event. That left me trying to decide between Arkansas and Illinois. I arbitrarily choose Illinois. With prices within totality being very high, I decided that we should stay at a motel in Columbia, IL (a bit southeast of St. Louis) and then decide which way to travel based on weather forecasts.

We ended up experiencing the eclipse in Pinckneyville, IL -- about a two-hour drive from our motel.  We ate breakfast at one of the smallest McDonald's I've ever seen. This time there was a thin layer of high clouds, but they were thin enough that we could see the corona throughout the totality experience. I was also able to make out two prominences and Mercury. Supposedly, a comet would be visible during totality, but I didn't see it.  We hung out in a grocery store parking lot and made friends with other eclipse enthusiasts prior to and during the partial eclipse. One friend had really great camera equipment and shared some of his past photos. I think the neatest one was a photo of a transit of Venus in front of the sun from about four years ago. 

Our eclipse glasses worked great during partiality, but partiality is only one percent of the sublime experience of totality. Most of our parking lot friends left when totality was over, but we decided to stay in our lawn chairs and relax for over an hour after totality was over to allow the traffic jam to clear and see partiality again.

One effect of being in the last third of your life is having the occasional realization that you will never do something again or that you've done something for the last time. This was probably my last solar eclipse. 

 A Christmas Story Christmas

I recently watched  A Christmas Story Christmas on DVD, and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.

This movie is a sequel conceived as a homage to A Christmas Story from 1983 and shown repeatedly in Christmas holiday marathons on some cable channels. The first movie is in some sense a movie about nothing: the plot is about a little boy ("Ralphie"), still young enough to believe in Santa, who wants a BB gun for Christmas. And yet it is about so much more. Jean Shepherd's narrator as the adult Ralphie looking back on his childhood captures childhood wonder, evokes nostalgia, and celebrates Christmas.  

If you love the original, you will probably enjoy this sequel. Conversely, if you don't care for the 1983 original, skip the 2022 version. The 2022 film rhymes repeatedly with the original: most of the child actors in the 1983 film play themselves as adults in 2022. Most of the action takes place in the fictional Hohman, IN (a lightly fictionalized version of Gary). We again see Santa in Higbee's. We see and hear the Bumpus hounds. Much of the music from the original returns. The adult Ralph narrates. The same types of scene transitions occur. The original house returns with most of the same furnishings -- even the shade from the leg lamp. Many events from the original find similar events in this sequel: we see again haggling over the price of a Christmas tree, childhood bullying, snowball fights, fuses blow, car troubles, and so on. Camera shots from the original are repeated such as a drawer filled with junk (originally the teacher's, but now a  publisher's). 

But a few things are changed. Scut Farkus grew up to be a nice man.  The Old Man is dead, and Ralphie's mother is played by a different actress. The plot is about Ralphie wanting to become a successful writer.

Events inevitably build towards a happy ending and I won't bore you with those details. If the original film is not among your holiday viewing favorites, this sequel is going to make you say, "Meh." And inversely: if you love the original, I think you'll like this one too.

Now for a spoiler: in the original book In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd, we learn that Schwartz died in World War II. Since this occurs after the events in the movie, we don't know about it when we watch the TNT marathon. But a number of years ago, I tracked down the book and read it. A little throw away comment on the last page of the book hit me like a punch in the gut. In this movie, I was surprised to see Schwartz alive in Flick's bar. Somehow this different version diminishes the written fictional narrative. I don't find myself crying over the loss of childhood and the waste of war.  

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

 The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

A beautiful woman, chef on a container ship, falls overboard. This novel is a flashback as her life passes before her eyes during her final minutes. Before shipping out, she was the innocent trophy wife of a disgraced financier whose crimes resemble the real-life story of Bernie Madoff. And she met that man while working as a bartender at a hotel owned by that financier. Glass in the hotel's lobby was vandalized by her brother. Everything ties together. Economically- and beautifully-written, Mandel's style of storytelling is a pleasure to read. However, I suggest you start with her earlier book, Station Eleven. If you like that one, continue to this book to explore this talented author's work.

Space Operas Used to Be So Entertaining

When I was younger, I avidly consumed space operas in both written form and television/movies. In my retirement, I've returned to some of those. Either I've become more sophisticated or they have not aged well. Or it could be both. One of my favorite authors was Robert A. Heinlein. Now I cannot understand how it was that I found anything interesting in his work; it just seems so sophomoric. Similarly, a portion of Isaac Asimov's work including the Foundation trilogy is definitely space opera, but Asimov's writing and plotting is so straightforward that it bores me.  I have a similar feeling when viewing various entries in the Star Trek , Star Wars, or Babylon 5 franchises. I enjoyed most of them (An exception is that odd-numbered Star Trek movies were always dreadful and remain dreadful to this day.) when they first came out. For perspective, realize that Star Trek: The Original Series was first broadcast when I was still in elementary school.  But today, I find it hard to believe that I once liked much of that stuff. There are exceptions: a few Start Trek episodes still pack a punch: "The City on the Edge of Forever" and "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" are both still worth watching. Others might be too but I'm not going to endure so many juvenile programs hoping for a couple more that have enduring value.

On the other hand, The Expanse (a fairly recently-published series of space operas available in both written and television miniseries forms) gives me something to talk about with my older grandson, and it is worth reading for that alone. 

Bottom line: I used to enjoy space opera a lot, but it doesn't do all that much for me anymore.

 Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

I cannot shake the feeling that I've misread this book. To me, it's a horror story involving human clones fated to spend and ultimately end their lives as organ donors. The way in which they passively await their destiny ("completion") alarmed me.  This was my second book by Ishiguro. Previously, I had read Klara and the Sun. Both books are written in first person with a narrator who seems to have an incomplete understanding of the world. Both books are set in an alternate timeline that varies slightly from our own. Klara seems to be in a near future, and Never Let Me Go is in an alternate past from just after world war 2 to the late 1990s. The narration is set in the 1990s, looks back over the previous couple of decades, and focuses on the relationship among three "donors" (Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy) as they grow up and become adults.

I feel as if I was missing something. Why did Kathy (the narrator) and her friends passively accept their roles? Why didn't they run? Initially, they misunderstood their situation, but even as understanding came they still didn't react. They were created to be organ donors, but there was never any exposition explaining why their choices were constrained. They were not confined. They were free to come and go and travel. What am I missing?

I found such films (and by the way, Never Let Me Go came out as a movie in 2010) as Parts: The Clonus Horror -- wonderfully adapted in the eighth season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 -- or its higher-budget remake The Island easier to understand. In these latter stories, a clone flees upon learning their purpose. I feel as if Ishiguro must have put in something that is escaping me.

Ishiguro is a master of the English language. Even as I was frustrated with the plot, I kept reading because I enjoyed consuming the fruit of his ability as a writer. If you want to sample the output of this Nobel Prize winner, consider reading Klara and the Sun or one of his other books. 

 Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Emily Mandel is an excellent writer. I just finished reading her 2022 book Sea of Tranquility, and I cannot stop thinking about it.  Having read her 2014 novel Station Eleven a couple months ago, I was looking for another book by the same author. I am glad to have found Sea of Tranquility and to have now read the latter book second. The two books are not part of a series, and yet they are tangentially-related. A major character in Sea of Tranquility is an author who wrote a highly successful book that is a lot like Station Eleven. 

I think both books are considered to be science fiction, yet Station Eleven doesn't contain any sort of fictional technology. On the other hand, Sea of Tranquility features time travel, air ships, lunar colonies, and colonies in the stars. Therefore, it is definitely in the science fiction category.  But definitely not a space opera. The plot moves from 1912 to 2020 to 2203 to 2401 and then swings back. Action takes place on earth, the moon, and A seemingly minor character keeps appearing and becomes more important. Similarly, unimportant events turn out to be important later in the novel and later in time; people's lives loop through time and intersect again; a passage in a novel becomes an event that happens in real life; a musical performance from the future is heard by someone in the past. I find myself reflecting on the interactions between different parts of the novel and between characters from different times.

Ultimately, this is all in service of the metaphysical idea that our universe is actually a simulation in some computer. But if it is, how would we tell and does it matter? 

I enjoyed both of these books so much that I intend to reread them both and also to look for more books by this very talented writer. There are six so far, and I hope she produces more.

 Blogs to Look At

There are certain places on the web I return to again and again. Some are blogs like this one, but others are regularly-posted comics and essays. Besides this web-log, take a look at these:

• https://www.cringely.com/

            A former columnist from InfoWorld, Robert X. Cringely continues to put out his thoughts on the world of silicon valley, startups, and information technology. He has been at it for nearly 40 years, using his many contacts in those worlds to continue to bring bold predictions and fresh insights. 

• https://aclownswifeabroad.wordpress.com/

            One of my daughters is now an ex-pat, living with her family in a small city in mountains east of Mexico City. Having moved out of the US during the summer of 2022, he shares her thoughts and observations concerning this new life.

• https://xkcd.com/

            This is a great online comic. You need to be a science nerd or else willing to do some research to get some of the jokes. He (Randall Munroe) generally puts out about three new comics a week. His books are worth purchasing as well.

• https://phdcomics.com/

            Another great online comic. So much of what it has to say about doctoral programs rings true to me. New comics come out about as frequently as new posts to this blog. That is to say: hardly ever.

• https://www.peopleiwanttopunchinthethroat.com/

            Imagine Erma Bombeck updated to our times, with a few F-bombs thrown in, and still very funny. That's Jenn Mann. Also, she writes funny books that make great gifts for people who don't mind occasional raunchy words. She lives in the Kansas City area, and she makes public appearances from time to time. She changed platforms not too long ago -- look for her on substack in the future.