A few random musings...
...nothing very profound, just some stuff that's been on my mind lately...
--I was recently served, totally unsolicited, a "senior soda" at McDonald's. How did this happen...?
--The more I study and read about him, the more I'm convinced that Babe Ruth is unique among athletes. Sort of like Shakespeare for genius, or Hitler for evil--off the charts, in a realm of his own. There's Ruth--and then there's everybody else, from Mays and Cobb on down. In all the other sports, it's obvious that the greatest player comes from the modern era, for all the obvious reasons. Not baseball.
--Miles Davis' *Filles de Kilimanjaro* album is just as great as *Kind of Blue*.
--There's something about the entire concept of "alien life" we're not getting, something just beyond our understanding. Fermi famously asked: Where are they? Drake and Sagan searched for radio signals, which seems about as likely to me as searching for a Chinese restaurant. There are UFO reports, which, whatever one makes of them--and I do not necessarily believe they have a "mundane" explanation--are, I think, unlikely to be "alien" in origin. It's a big universe. What's the answer? I dunno--if I knew, I'd get a Nobel Prize or something. But there's something we're not getting.
--Brattleboro, Vermont, is the loveliest town I've ever seen--even lovelier than Ithaca, New York, Middletown, Connecticut, and Brunswick, Maine.
--One of the things I hate about getting older is seeing things, people, who meant so much to me when I was younger, being swallowed up by time. For instance--Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle remain famous, and deservedly so. But Ellery Queen--to me, at least their equal as a mystery writer--is forgotten. In SF/Fantasy--Asimov and Heinlein remain famous; Leiber and Sturgeon are fading. "Tempus fugit" is the saddest of all proverbs.
--Reconciliation after a war is more important than strict justice.
--Alfred Hitchcock is the greatest of all directors.
--Liberal democracy will not, I think, survive in the US for more than a generation or so.
--I recently visited my boyhood home, a suburb of Washington. I was astonished--forty years have transformed it almost out of recognition. It isn't a flattened, soulless suburb with endless tract houses anymore; it's woodsy and green. It looks, in fact, remarkably like a traditional Maryland small city that happens to have a lot of traffic. I find this enormously encouraging.
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