It’s once again that time for me to be lazy and just ramble on about what’s going on in my life, as opposed to writing a post about a specific subject. ‘Twas just last month  that I did my first Currently post. My sweet wifey Lynndee turned me onto this idea, having ran across other bloggers who had employed it. Therefore, I am Currently…

Watching

Just last night I set up my DVR to record a series on one of Antenna TV, a channel that features classic oldie shows, going as far back as the 50s. The series Murphy Brown just celebrated the 30th anniversary of its 1988 premiere. For some unknown reason, I never watched it, but last night Antenna TV had a Murphy Brown marathon to go hand-in-hand with a reboot of the series on primetime with many of the original cast returning. What prompted me to check it out this time is the star who portrays Murphy, Candice Bergen. I’ll never forget the first time I’ve seen her. It was in the movie The Sand Pebbles, one of my all time fave which starred Steve McQueen, earning the Academy Award nomination for best actor, which he unfortunately lost for I believe this was his best performance ever, though The Magnificent Seven is also on my most favorite list.

A twenty-year-old Bergen portrayed the ill-fated love interest of McQueen in The Sand Pebbles. Though I’d seen her in several other of her movies over the years, The Sand Pebbles is the one I always remembered. But the first episode of Murphy Brown I watched last night was the pilot episode of the series, and it was hilarious!

A couple of movies I watched this past month were Tom Hanks’ Bridge of Spies, an historically based film about the swap of Russian spy Rudolph Abel for CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers who had been shot down over Russia in a U-2 spy plane. I’d heard the names of Abel and Powers for years, and knew of the U-2 incident, but had never done any research on it so this was an enlightening moment.

Another movie watched was 1969’s The Illustrated Man, based on Ray Bradbury’s fantastic book. Starring Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom, it featured three of the eighteen stories that comprised the amazing book. Surprisingly, being such a Ray Bradbury fan, I didn’t see the movie on its original release. But it was well worth the wait.

Reading

This past month has been full of books. Having not been to the library, bookstore, or Amazon lately, I’ve been browsing my own library which contains a collection dating back to the 1960s. Just like having favorite movies, I have an extensive list of favorite books, and I’m a total fool for rereading.

I have a vast collection of the late Carl Sagan’s works. Sagan was  an American astronomer , cosmologist , astrophysicist, astrobiologist, among a number of other things, including being the writer, host, and narrator of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. That was a 1980 thirteen-part television series on PBS.

Another great astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, met Sagan when he was a teenager in love with science, searching for his future school. Though a generation apart, they connected. And in 2014, deGrasse Tyson hosted his own series,Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a follow up series to honoring the original. I saw both series as well as reading Sagan’s book, Cosmos.

But one of the books I’ve reread over the past weeks was Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle in the Dark. This work dwells upon all the pseudoscience prevalent in society and the education methods needed to teach the necessary skepticism required to promote true science, a much-needed read for those who claim to have been abducted by aliens, and others who believe in such cockamamie things as UFOs, crop circles, so-called stone faces and canals on Mars, Bigfoots and Loch Ness monsters and Yetis (Abominable Snowmen), and such. ‘Twas truly such an eye-opening book, even for one such as I who has a great love of true science along with a persona of prove-it-to me skepticism. The basic tenet of this work is that science can be the light that guides the way through the domain of ignorance.

On seeing The Illustrated Man, I just had to dig into my pile of books and find Bradbury’s book. So I’ve embarked on reading it again, with the same wonder I had on reading it as a nine-year-old kid, the discovery which led me to read many of his great creations, such as The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451.

And I do have to add that seeing Bridge of Spies was a serendipitous moment, leading me to research and find another read, Strangers on a Bridge: The Case of Colonel Abel and Francis Gary Powers, a book written by the man Tom Hanks portrayed, James B. Donovan, who was Abel’s attorney, as well as the man who arranged the swap, and ghost writer Bard Lindeman: Strangers on a Bridge: The Case of Colonel Abel and Francis Gary Powers.

Another historical piece I reread recently was Goodbye Darkness, by another of my favorite authors, William Manchester. That is his memoir of the Pacific war which he served in as a Marine. And following that one, I reread My Father’s War, by Julia Collins, where she related the tale of growing up with a man troubled with his experiences related to his service as a Marine in WWII in the same unit that William Manchester served in. Manchester wrote of her father under a pseudonym in Goodbye Darkness, and on discovering the link, Collins was able to piece together the reasons for the traumatic life she and her father shared. In her story, we discover what came to later be known as PTSD, something those vets from WWII were never able to claim or be treated for.

Looking Forward To

An opportunity to re-enter the work force after having been retired for almost three years. All that I await is for my background check to be completed, which according to my storied life, should have taken them no more that half-an-hour. But, bureaucracy being what it is, rules the world, so I must be patient. Still, retirement ain’t all it’s cracked up to be and I’m ready to punch the clock again. Besides, I can’t spend every day on the golf course, as much as I’d love to. So I patiently await the phone call to set me on that daily grind again. So, until then, I’ll just continue being lazy and write lazy-man Currently posts…(“,)