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Hello, I’m Veronica

The sky is not completely dark at night. Were the sky absolutely dark, one would not be able to see the silhouette of an object against the sky.

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    Solitary Singles

    A recent study of lifestyles determined the eight healthy habits that can add the most years to a human life. It’s a list of what to do (four) and what not to do (another four) to live longer. All eight are fairly commonsense, but one in particular stood out to me: Surround yourself with positive social relationships.  You’ll increase your chances of a longer life by five percent, and you won’t be able to claim COVID-y words like “lonely” and “isolated”.

    Let’s not make this a sad blog post, okay?  I could spend the rest of my paragraphs talking about loneliness and isolation, but why bother when so many musicians have already done so before me?  “Lonely” songs go back decades.  In 1960, one of the biggest solitary singles was Roy Orbison’s Only The Lonely.  The same year, Elvis released Are You Lonesome Tonight?  And anybody who remembers the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby (1966) knows Eleanor’s story is all about loneliness.

    The 1960s is a little too far back for my purposes.  I’d rather focus on two more recent songs you know (from popular re-recordings) and another one you might know.  One thing’s for sure; all three play in my brain now and again, but especially when I’m “Alone” or “All by Myself”.

    Alone

    The power ballad made famous by Heart (and then Celine Dion) is not so much about being alone but about wanting to be with a particular someone else… but not being able to.  “Alone’s” lyrics voice the frustration of a romantic longing.  It’s more about how do I get you alone than actually being alone.  There’s even this suggestion of before versus after: Till now I always got by on my own.  But the song’s final lines – nothing but repeating, wailing, unsatisfied “alones” – gets me every time.  Heart’s version of “Alone” spent three weeks at #1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and still makes an occasional appearance on the radio.

    All by Myself

    Even though this was another Celine Dion’s hit (what’s with all the loneliness, Celine?), no one who lived through the 1970s would ever take “All by Myself” away from Eric Carmen.  The song hit #2 on Billboard’s Top 100 and sold more than a million copies (back when listeners actually purchased music).  “All by Myself” is also categorized as a power ballad; “a style of music that often deals with romantic or intimate relationships… usually in a solemn but poignant manner”.  The second verse is a good example:

    Livin’ alone
    I think of all the friends I’ve known
    But when I dial the telephone
    Nobody’s home

    Like “Alone”, there’s no happy ending to “All by Myself”. In fact, the lyrics are disconsolate from start to finish (yet somehow they work).  Also, trivia buffs, you’ll hear the song’s melody in the second movement of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s classical Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, which is odd but intentional.

    Alone Again (Naturally)

    I find it fascinating when a song sounds happy but really isn’t.  Maybe that’s why Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally)” has stayed with me all these years.  It’s easily the “loneliest” song of the three I cover today, and seems to take pride in being so from start to finish.  “Alone Again” manages to pack suicide, being left at the altar, wondering if there’s a God, and losing one’s parents into a single set of lyrics, layered on top of a merry duet of piano and guitar.  The song spent six weeks at #1 on the U.S. Billboard Top 100 and was re-recorded by several others, including two American Neils (Diamond and Sedaka).  But it’s Irishman O’Sullivan’s rendition I’ll always hear in my head.

    Regarding those healthy habits I mentioned earlier, I think my report card’s looking pretty good.  So good in fact, I can enjoy these chart-topping “lonely” songs without getting down.  I hope you can do the same.

    Some content sourced from the CNN article, “These 8 habits could add up to 24 years to your life, study says”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

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    Rocket Men (and Women)

    A year from today, we’ll all be glued to our televisions and tablets watching the Olympic Games in Paris. I will be glued, at least.  The Summer Games get me all fired up, especially the track and field events. Especially especially the field events. I mean, c’mon, you can watch running all year long, but how often do you get to see a javelin thrown, a discus tossed, or a shot “put”? (and how often do you even say “javelin” or “discus”?)  But one field event tops all others.  There’s simply nothing more gawky-entertaining than a human launched into space by a pole.

    If you live in a two-story place with a fairly flat roof, it might be a little unnerving to learn Swedish-American pole vaulter Armand Duplantis can jump over your house.  While the rest of us have to walk around at ground level to get to your backyard, Armand will simply sprint up your front path, plant his pole in your rose bushes, launch himself past the bedroom windows and between the chimneys, and make a splash landing in your swimming pool.  Armand can do this because he can pole vault 20.4 feet, a world record he set last February.  It’s the fifth time this twenty-something has broken his own world record.

    Duplantis

    Pole vaulting is a truly bizarre sequence of movements constituting an Olympic event.  The vaulter balances a long fiberglass pole in one hand while sprinting down a rubber-surfaced runway. Just before running out of runway he or she raises the pole overhead with both hands, stabs the leading end into a boxed area on the ground, and pushes… hard.  The ensuing bend of the pole and a whole lot of momentum hoists the vaulter into the air, feet first.  With gymnastic flair, the vaulter then rotates his or her body around to be facing a high horizontal bar, just as gravity counters flight.  The final flop back to Earth (and onto a giant cushion) is typically punctuated with a mid-air fist pump if the bar is successfully cleared.

    Armand doing what Armand does best

    Imagine that exhilarating feeling when a pole vaulter is at peak height, pointing skyward, feet above body, pole released, practically cruising into the earth’s atmosphere.  As Elton John sings “… it’s gonna be a long, long time ’til touchdown brings me round again…”

    Four Olympic field events involve jumping: 1) pole vault, 2) long jump, 3) high jump, and 4) triple jump (the ol’ “hop, skip, and jump”).  None of the last three hold my interest because they’re easy to do.  But not pole vaulting, not even close.  Launching my body even a few feet off the ground with a bendy pole?  Let’s just agree, I am no Rocket Man.

    Pole vaulting brings to mind two questions (or three if you include Why in heaven’s name does anyone do this?).  First question: What happens if the pole breaks?  Seriously, sports equipment fails.  Golf clubs break in two with enough swings.  Tennis racket strings get loose.  At some point a pole vault pole will bend one too many times.  Yikes.  Second question: How does the pole translate horizontal energy into vertical energy?  It’s a physics problem akin to the catapult, but I’d have to go back to high school to solve it.  No thanks.

    Leap of faith

    The origin of pole vaulting is a bit of a letdown.  My too-many-movies imagination pictured a medieval war, with soldiers clearing castle walls on long pieces of bamboo.  Instead, pole vaulting is a rough translation of an old technique used to scale narrow natural obstacles, like watery marshes.  Get a running start, plant the pole, and sail from one side of the marsh to the other.  But those poles don’t bend, and nobody cares how high you go as long as you make it over.  So you see, even the origin of pole vaulting is gawky. 

    The pole vaulting world record was eighteen feet in 1970.  Fifty years later it’s been pushed two feet higher.  Do the math; maybe we’ll be clearing one hundred feet by the year 2773.  But we’ll probably have flying cars by then as well, so any interest in humans launched by poles will be gone.  My advice: watch the Paris Games, especially the pole vault.  These rocket men and women won’t be around forever.

    Some content sourced from the CNN article, “Olympic champion Armand Duplantis…”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

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    Sphere Delight

    My wife’s sister and her husband just wrapped up a visit here in South Carolina. On the drive down from Colorado they made several sightseeing detours, but the trip back was pedal-to-the-metal… with the exception of one stop: the Moon Marble Company in Bonner Springs, Kansas. Moon Marbles stocks beautiful handmade wooden games and toys but c’mon, who braves the barren wastelands of Kansas for those? Marbles on the other hand, would draw me in like a bee to nectar.

    A marble is the perfect example of a sphere, isn’t it?  I love spheres (including the word itself; much more elegant than “ball” or “orb”).  Take a semicircle, revolve it a full loop around its diameter and voila! – a sphere.  Calculating the volume of a sphere involves cubing its radius but let’s stop right there with the math lesson.  Cubes and spheres just don’t belong in the same conversation.

    Lemons can be oblate spheroids

    Most of you readers are tuned in from the Northern Hemisphere, the half of our planet above the Equator.  I find it cool to think of Earth as a sphere (with “big blue marble” a close second).  It’s the biggest sphere we humans know (or have you been to Jupiter?)  At your next party, wow your friends by telling them Earth is actually an oblate spheroid: flattened at both poles and bulging at the Equator.  Ewwwww.  Not a very pretty sphere, now is it?

    Here’s the paragraph where I cop out and simply list a bunch of spheres, like oranges, Christmas ornaments, eyeballs, pearls, and the moon, but that’s just so three-hundred-blog-posts ago.  Spheres can be much cooler.  For instance, picture an atom (I’ll pause for those who need a microscope).  An atom is a spherical cluster of neutrons and protons (which are also spheres) encircled by whizzing electrons (more spheres).  Did you know your body is made up of over 7 octillion atoms?  That’s a lot of spheres.  You might want to lose a little weight.

    Glinda traveled to Oz in a sphere (photo courtesy of MGM)

    Soap bubbles are spheres.  Sure, you aim to create those giant wibbly-wobbly monsters but for the most part you generate a cloud of perfectly spherical transparent globes, born on a whisper of air and extinguished seconds later.  I’m guessing soap bubbles have the shortest lifespans of all spheres.

    When a college buddy visited several years ago, he brought a paperweight made by an artist near his hometown in New Jersey.  It’s a glass sphere with just the slightest bit of the bottom lopped off so it doesn’t roll off my desk.  I’ve picked up a lot of tchochkes over the years but I’m not letting this one go.  Did I mention spheres are cool?

    Three years before he wrote Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton authored a novel called Sphere.  It’s about a group of scientists exploring a giant spacecraft sunk to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.  In the spacecraft’s cargo hold: a mysterious sphere, determined to be extraterrestrial and literally mind-blowing.  Mark my words; spheres can be as terrifying as dinosaurs.  Read it.

    Dimples can be cute.  Not this one.

    Star Wars focused on a giant spherical colony – the Empire’s “Death Star” – but the air went out of my perfectly round balloon as soon as I saw the giant divot on its side, not to mention all those channels and openings pierced by the X-wing starfighters.  In other words, the Death Star was a decidedly less-than-perfect orb.  So I applauded alongside everybody else when Luke Skywalker blew this sphere to kingdom come.

    Here’s a place you wouldn’t expect to find a sphere: a Christian hymn.  In the first verse of This Is My Father’s World we have, “All nature sings and round me rings, the music of the spheres”.  The plural throws me off, because more than one sphere suggests more than just Earth (the entire solar system?)  Or maybe we aren’t singing about the planets at all.  A quote from August Rush seems relevant; the final line in the movie: “The music is all around us… all you have to do, is listen.”

    Coming soon to Sin City

    We’re starting to go round and round here (heh) so let’s conclude with the world’s largest sphere.  The Guinness Book writers will deem it so once the “MSG Sphere” opens in Las Vegas in a few months.  At 300 feet tall and 500 feet wide, the Sphere will dramatically change a skyline that’s already pretty dramatic, especially with 1.2 million LEDs on its surface generating all sorts of images and animation.  For concerts, sports, and the like, the Sphere can seat up to 18,000 spectators.  I plan to be one of them…  just as soon as I make it to Moon Marbles in Kansas.

    Some content sourced from the CNN Travel article, “This futuristic entertainment venue is the world’s largest spherical structure”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

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    Oliver Twist

    Because of the numbering system I use to save photos for my blog, I know last week’s dish on ice cream (ha) was my four-hundredth WordPress post. I’m not one to track statistics but unexpectedly, reaching this milestone begs the question: Will I make it to #500? Mind you, it’s not about staying in the game. Topics worth my exploration are endless and creative writing is a welcome escape. No, today begs a much more relevant question: What about artificial intelligence (AI)?

    If I could meet you readers face-to-face in the Amazon rain forest I’d whisper a secret password for all to hear.  Then when I use that password in a post, you’d know it’s actually me, Dave, the human, and not some updated version of HAL 9000 doing the typing.  Surely you wonder, as I do, when will AI get so good at authoring documents, so genuine, you won’t even realize you’re reading something untouched by human hands?

    “Hello, Dave.”

    Before we go any further, I think “AI” sounds awfully impersonal.  I suppose impersonal is appropriate for a silicone wafer and a pile of circuit boards.  I just think we need a friendlier word for it; something we humans can better identify with.  How about “Oliver”?  Oliver is the third most popular boy name of 2023.  Oliver Twist was one of Charles Dickens’ most beloved characters (and AI will certainly be a twist on the way we ask for and receive information moving forward).  Let’s nickname it (him?) Ollie.

    Wikipedia’s article on artificial intelligence (yes, there’s already an article) says one of Ollie’s primary goals is problem-solving.  Okay, that digests well.  But then you see goals like reasoning, learning, perception, and social intelligence and your stomach flips a flop.  My reasoning and perception are tools I use for this blog.  If Ollie develops those same tools, it’s only a matter of time before Dave 1.0 (me) is replaced by Dave 2.0 (machine).

    Let’s go back to ice cream for a second.  Let’s say you want to read an opinion piece on ice cream.  If you have AI at your disposal, you could say, “Hey Ollie, write me a post about ice cream, 600 words or so, with arguments in favor of plain old ice cream over sundaes, bars, and other frozen treats.  Reference a few commercial ice cream brands, a few local brands, and finish by talking about the most expensive ice cream in the world.  Oh, and speak the page back to me in James Earl Jones’s voice.”  Then you’d hit the ENTER button and who knows?  Your screen might light up with something remarkably similar to my last post in Life In A Word.

    Also consider, Ollie will have his own opinions on what you read.  After you ask about ice cream, he may spam you with posts on healthy lifestyle.  He also may counsel you about spending your time on more important topics.  Like world peace.  Newsflash, Ollie.  We’re all trying to figure out world peace.  How about you put your circuit boards together and come up with a post on that?

    Here’s my point.  If you have Ollie you don’t need me.  In fact, you don’t even need the WordPress platform.  You could simply slip on a VR headset and ask for a post with just the right topic, tone, reading level, length, and restrictions. It’s like placing an order at the drive-thru of a fast food restaurant.  Seconds later, what you asked for is right there in front of you (no paper bag necessary).  And if Ollie “reads” all four hundred of my posts, he’ll write it pretty much the same way I would. 

    At the rate I’m posting, I’ll publish blog #500 in about two years.  Two years.  Considering all we’ve covered today, how advanced will Ollie be in two years?  Enough to put WordPress out of business?  Enough to where you can generate your own Life In A Word posts by simply entering a handful of carefully chosen criteria?  I hope not.  I’m having a good time with you people (especially those of you who also write blogs).  Maybe all of us should pick up and move to the rain forest.  Then we could pass our handwritten pages around and keep this artificial intelligent party going.  Someone make sure Ollie doesn’t get an invite.

    Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

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    Cream of the (Dessert) Crop

    A week ago last Tuesday, Salt Lake City hosted its first ever drone show of “fireworks”, replacing the traditional explosives residents have come to expect over the downtown park. The drones create colorful shapes and animations in the sky – even giant words – as well as a pretty good impression of the blooms and starbursts of fireworks. But let’s be honest: drones don’t replace fireworks.  The same can be said for the frozen treats aiming to be more popular than, say, a simple serving of ice cream.

    On the heels of Independence Day, America has another celebration coming up.  National Ice Cream Day is the third Sunday of July in our country (and July itself National Ice Cream Month!) The “holiday” was signed into public law in the mid-1980s when Congress apparently had nothing better to do.  So how do you and I “celebrate” ice cream?  No clue, other than a Google search to figure out where to get a free scoop.  And if you think ice cream is a poor excuse for a holiday, consider, the first Saturday in February is Ice Cream for Breakfast Day… which pretty much confirms every day of the year is some sort of “Day”.

    A stroll past the freezers of ice cream in any grocery store boasts an impressive variety of spins, including cones, sandwiches, pies, and bites. Ice cream is split by bananas, cherry-topped into sundaes, blended into shakes, cloaked as “gelato”, and even fried into crispy-covered bites.  I ask you, who buys all this stuff?  Sure, as a kid I had a thing for Eskimo Pies (because my mom bought them) and later on I ate my share of Dove Bars (because my dad loved them).  But feet to the fire, I’d rather spend my pennies on the best version of plain ol’ ice cream.  I have my favorite brand (and you have yours) and time and again it ends up in my grocery cart instead of any of those other treats.

    For a few years there I got caught up in the Cold Stone Creamery concept, where your serving of ice cream is placed on a marble slab and combined with “mix-in’s”.  It was (still is) a trendy take on ice cream.  But after just a few visits I realized the draw was the mix-in’s more than the ice cream.  Safe to say Cold Stone doesn’t use a brand of ice cream anyone would consider “gourmet”.  They know what brings people through the doors: marble slabs and mix-in’s.  Cold Stone’s rival is even named Marble Slab.

    For anyone growing up on the West Coast in the 1970s, the one-on-every-corner ice cream parlor was Baskin-Robbins.  Their ever-changing selection of thirty-one flavors guaranteed slow perusing, even if the final choice was vanilla or rocky road nine times out of ten (okay, I’ll grant you peanut-butter-and-chocolate too).  Today, Baskin-Robbins is still going strong, but I think most people prefer the flavors of whatever local parlor is closest to their house.  And let it be said for the millionth time: Vanilla is and will always be the king of ice cream flavors.  Simple, delicious, and versatile.

    “Dreyer’s”, in fact

    As for the commercial brands in grocery store freezers, Dreyer’s “Grand Ice Cream” is trying very hard to make its offerings your favorite.  They smartly purchased www.icecream.com and dressed up the website as a tribute to ice cream, but let’s be real: they’re just pushing their own products here.  My favorite brand is still Haagen-Dazs but get this: Haagen-Dazs is now a subsidiary of Dreyer’s.  Whoa.  Give it a few more years and Dreyer’s may turn into the Amazon of ice cream.

    If you like to spend big on ice cream like I do (Haagen-Dazs is not inexpensive!) you might consider Cellato, a brand from Japan.  Cellato makes particularly fragrant gelatos, mixing in white and black truffles from Italy, champagne, and caviar.  Their “white night” flavor is topped with an edible gold leaf, two exquisite cheeses, and a sake-like paste.  The price of a single serving?  $6,380 USD, making it the most expensive ice cream in the world.  Might as well make the airplane seat to Japan first-class for a dessert like that.

    Cellato’s pricey “White Night”

    In closing, a very happy National Ice Cream Day to you!  However you choose to celebrate this Sunday, you don’t need Cellato.  You don’t need Coldstone Creamery either.  For me, the entire ice cream aisle at the grocery store might as well be reduced to the Haagen-Dazs flavors.  Those, and the choices at my local ice cream parlor satisfy my craving.  In other words, forget about the drones.  Traditional fireworks will always be better.

    Some content sourced from the CNN Travel article, “Don’t drop it: World’s most expensive ice cream costs $6,400”, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

About Me

The sky is not completely dark at night. Were the sky absolutely dark, one would not be able to see the silhouette of an object against the sky.

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