Addendum to Top 25 Alt-Rock songs
28. KD Lang, "Constantly Craving" (1992)
40. Alanis Morisette, "You Oughta Know" (2011)
Wednesday, September 13, 2017
TOP 40: Great Alternative Rock songs
40. Alanis Morisette, "You Oughta Know" (2011)
Saturday, September 9, 2017
Octophins of Europa/Chapter 2/Discovery
AFTER John Ginan was formally accepted for the Europa Colony Program (ECP) in early 2015, his first order of business was to spend at least three days in a NASA psychiatric facility. That was where he got the "Spoonman" moniker.
NASA's Europa-colony recruiters had suspected he was bipolar psychologically during the "First Wave" colonist-selection process; but his intelligence and physical-endurance assessments had registered at the top of the scales. In addition, stigma over most mental health conditions had not been a barrier to NASA employment for more than a century.
Spoonman stuck as a nickname because of all the ingenious spoon inventions that he created in the Cape Canaveral Behavioral Health Unit (BHU). Like the plastic knives and forks that patients received with their BHU meals, spoons were considered potentially dangerous objects; and patients had to ask for spoons if they wanted to snack between meals.
In general, John Ginan loved to eat sweets; in particular, he adored ice cream. Finding ways to enjoy his favorite dessert without asking for a spoon had fired the flames of his imagination.
First, he discovered no spoon was required at all when raiding the BHU's refrigerator-freezer, which was always stocked with vanilla and chocolate ice cream. The seemingly endless supply of frozen temptations in the freezer box were packaged in small, tub-like paper containers. The soon-to-be-dubbed Spoonman had realized quickly that he could pull off the little containers' lids, then tear off about half of the containers' remaining paper to consume the delicious contents without using a spoon.
Second, this 26th-century man followed in the cheesy footsteps of a 20th-century pop icon -- old fashioned television's Angus McGyver. Spoonman's grandfather, Daniel Ginan, had a favorite joke about McGyver that he would spring on anyone around him whenever necessity became the mother of invention: "McGyver could make a hand grenade out of a potato and a tampon!"
John Ginan discovered several other ways to craft spoons in the BHU:
- He could combine the paper lids from two or three of the little ice cream tubs to make a rudimentary spoon, which was particularly effective if he had the patience to allow the frozen treat to melt a bit.
- He extrapolated from the paper-lid-turned-spoon invention to other forms of utilizing readily available thick paper, including tool-making with manila folders.
- He realized that the index, middle, and ring digits could form an effective spoon -- ideally with a sink nearby to wash his sticky fingers.
They all dutifully honored his request, and the Spoonman sobriquet stuck like glue.
Opening positions in chess /Wikimedia Commons image
Jim Pappel
Unlike Spoonman, who had no awareness of his precarious mental state before he was recruited for the ECP, Jim had known he was bipolar for more than a decade. He just chose to ignore it.
Unlike Spoonman, who grew up in a relatively stable neighborhood in Manhattan, Jim grew up in a low-income housing project in the perennially tough North End of Hartford, Connecticut.
Unlike Spoonman, who could trace his ancestry to the Mayflower Pilgrims and had such a fair complexion that his skin was almost transparent, Jim could trace his ancestry to the slave trade in Nigeria and had such dark skin that he was "out-of-Africa brown" as his grandmother Angela Pappel would often say.
Unlike Spoonman, who had no children, Jim had sired his first son when he was 16.
Spoonman had an itch to play chess from Day 1 of his confinement in the BHU, and he defeated two staff members handily, so his confidence had been transformed to hubris. Jim was game for the challenge on Day 1 of his three-day stay in The Unit.
The pair met over breakfast on Day 2 of Spoonman's BHU stay.
"One of the psychiatric nurses says you have rolled over two pretty good chess playahs on the BHU staff," Jim said, making his first move of the psychological game-within-the-game of chess.
"I am on a roll. If you want to play, why don't you go ahead and take white. I'll give you the first-move advantage," Spoonman replied, brimming with confidence as he gestured with his pancake-laden plastic fork to the chess board and pieces he had set up at an empty table in the nearly empty BHU cafeteria.
"Alright, but don't think you are going to play teacher and preacher on me. You are probably in the BHU because you don't know who you are; and I'm not interested in hearing any lecturing from anybody in this place."
"Sounds like you are bringing your 'A game' to this match, Jimbo!"
Jim quietly moved himself and his breakfast tray to the cafeteria's de facto chess table, then made his second move in the psychological game-within-the-game. "Nobody ever called me Jimbo in the hood. Your move," he said, advancing his queen's pawn two squares.
"It's about time somebody here challenged me for the middle of the board," Spoonman said, matching Jim's opening move by advancing his queen's pawn to block encroachment into his side of the board.
"Didn't you hear me when I said no teaching and no preaching? Are you going to play this game, or are you just gonna to talk about it?" Jim said in a serious tone as he advanced one of his knights to bring more force to bear in the center of the battlefield. "I'll say this: I don't care whether I win this match or not. I'm playing this game to figure out how you play, so I can definitely beat you in the next game!"
"Maybe I should start focusing on my A game," Spoonman replied, pushing his king's pawn forward one square to help brace his shiny black pieces against the growing potential of a bloody onslaught from his apparently skillful opponent.
"You're not listening. You're talking. I'm not bringing my best 'game' to this match. I already told you what I'm doing, and I'll tell you again. This round is all about figuring you out -- discovering how you play the game."
Jim's harsh rhetoric took hold on Spoonman as he pondered his next move. "Alright, alright, I'll focus on the game. Why don't you tell me where you're from?"
"I thought you wanted to focus on the game; but if you really want to know where I grew up, I was born in New London, Connecticut, and grew up in Venice, South Carolina.
Spoonman fell silent, realizing that he had probably lost the game-within-the-game and that he was at least one move behind in the mounting struggle to control the center of the playing field. The next hour of the match was fought hard, move-by-move, with barely a word said.
After the inevitable blood-letting in the center of the board, Spoonman conceded, "I'm not going to win this game, but I can play you to a stalemate."
"That's the first nearly intelligent thing you've said since we sat down to play," Jim said, pressing his advantage in the game-within-the-game.
"We're playing for a stalemate now," Spoonman replied.
"No, I can still win. You're playing for a stalemate. You really don't have a clue of who you are, or why you are here in the BHU, do you?"
Spoonman managed to fight Jim to a stalemate, but the effort was exhausting and emotionally raw. "I get it now," he said to his more-than-worthy chess adversary. "You were my teacher and my preacher."
"No, you don't get it at all," Jim said flatly. "This match wasn't about teaching, or preaching, or even chess. It was about your overblown ego and cocky attitude."
"I learned at least one thing, Jim: Over confidence can get me killed."
The next day, which was slated to be Spoonman's last in the BHU, he requested to spend one more day in The Unit.
On Day 1, all Spoonman wanted to do was get out of the BHU, but he had come to appreciate the group therapy sessions and coping skills he was learning. Additionally, the Day 2 care-team meeting after his humbling chess encounter with Jim had been an Earth-shattering eye-opener: He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
The diagnosis spurred both shock and relief in the blond-haired, blue-eyed wonder man.
The revelation that he had been bipolar for more than a decade was shocking.
When his NASA psychiatrist, Dr. Zeppelbaum, announced the diagnosis during his daily care-team meeting, Spoonman felt like he had looked up and saw a piano dangling in mid-air above his head. How, he asked himself in that moment, had such a dangerous condition develop without his considerably capable intellect being aware of it?
The relief associated with discovering his bipolar disorder was equally heavy with gravity: Much of his struggles and triumphs as a young man now made sense.
In terms of size and mass, Jupiter dwarfs all of its moon, including Europa. /NASA image
Tuesday, September 5, 2017
Octophins of Europa/Chapter 1/Going Home
THE year is 2517, and half of the United States has surrendered to the advancing glaciers.
The front line of America's desperate struggle against mountains of ice stretches 3,000 miles, coast-to-coast from Hilton Head, South Carolina, to San Francisco. The summer is over, and the entire nation is bracing for yet another brutally cold winter.
John "Spoonman" Ginan has not seen his father, Goodman, since he began terrestrial-exploration training at Cape Canaveral on his birthday, Jan. 2.
Spoonman could fly no further north than D.C. to get as close as possible to New York City, which was home to him in many ways. The Modern Ice Age had made Reagan International Airport the last bastion of U.S. aviation north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
The last leg of Spoonman's journey home is a bone-chilling trek on every snow machine imaginable. At the Reagan airport, the bevy of vehicles available to most travelers with family or professional business in The Big Apple is a menagerie of machinery. The collection at the airport's ground-transportation depot ranges from 100-year-old Arctic Cats, trailer-equipped snowmobiles, and the speedy anti-gravity Snow Devils that the U.S. government started deploying nation-wide in 2508.
Traveling in the trailer of a relatively new model snowmobile seems like the best value, so Spoonman tosses his backpack next to the spare gasoline canister and gingerly slides into the trailer's unexpectedly comfortable banana seat.
Goodman Ginan
When Spoonman emerges from the subway station in Hoboken, New Jersey, he does what he always does when he comes home -- gaze at the greatest walled city of all time. When it had become clear around 2220 that the Modern Ice Age had begun in the prior century, the citizens of NYC faced a choice: fight or flight.
Manhattan had decided to accept the Herculean challenge, designing then constructing walls of reinforced concrete 50-feet wide and 50-feet tall. The inhabitants of the great city's other three boroughs fled south.
Spoonman decides to take a creaky Arctic Cat with two other travelers across the long-frozen-solid and glacier-covered Hudson River to The Great Wall's Pier 45 Parapet. After tipping the Cat's driver generously, he looks at the parapet's entryway with mixed emotions -- this would be his last visit to the first city he had ever known. Like his wife and most of the other astronauts, engineers, and builders in Earth's first wave of Europa colonists, Spoonman's fate was to die on Jupiter's ice-clad, water-world moon.
The Pier 45 Parapet is one of seventeen 70-foot-high titanium towers that interlock The Great Wall and help protect America's financial center from the Northeastern Glacier's megaton pressure. After passing through the parapet's base, Spoonman re-hitches his backpack and scampers two blocks to the Christopher Street subway station. His next stop would be where he could always find his father in the hour after dawn -- atop the Battery Park Parapet.
Before he could feel his father's warm embrace in the chilled air that blankets the city, Spoonman climbs the hundreds of artfully crafted stairs that spiral up the inner wall of the Battery Park Parapet. In addition to being relatively close to Goodman's apartment in Greenwich Village, this rook-like outpost has unique commanding views. To the north, all of Manhattan is visible. To the south and east, feet-thick ice cover the once-bustling harbor, Long Island Sound, and the vast frozen expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.
Spoonman opens the exit door at the top of the spiral staircase silently, hoping to surprise his father. He sees his dad's back, which is covered by a bright orange parka. Goodman had been surveying the icy wasteland surrounding the city since dawn. Now, he is deep in thought about his son's months-long journey to Europa, Jupiter's ice-clad satellite.
"The day is always darkest before the dawn," Spoonman says, borrowing a catch phrase that his father has told him at least dozens of times.
Goodman spins on his heels in an instant, the sound of his son's voice breaking the spell that the mysterious moon had cast upon him.
"Son! I was beginning to think I would have a frost-bit nose by the time you showed up," the older man says.
Father and son then hold each other in a bear hug, swaying gently as puffs of their flash-frozen breath flow from their fur-lined parka hoods.
After 30 seconds that alternately seem like an eternity and an instant for Spoonman as his father holds him close, Goodman leads his son to the parapet's edge.
"The Northeast Glacier is still inching its way up The Great Wall, you know," the retired mechanical engineer says.
"I know," Spoonman says, staring intently down the concrete slope of The Great Wall to the meters-thick sheet of ice and detritus that has encased the city since before he was born at Mount Sinai Hospital in 2483. "New Yorkers are lucky they listened to you and grandfather instead of Reginald Thump."
The son sensed his father's back stiffen reflexively at the mention of the Ginan family's arch nemesis.
"Thump's plan for The Great Wall would have heaped cataclysm on top of disaster," Goodman says flatly, using his favorite turn of phrase when describing anything related to the real estate magnate and disgraced former U.S. president's ill-conceived scheme to save Manhattan.
"If that decrepit ass-hat had had his way," he said, looking over his right shoulder at Thump's frost-covered golden tower, "the glacier would have razed the city decades ago."
Goodman and his father were both outstanding mechanical engineers.
Thump's brilliance was limited to the mechanisms of turning a fast profit, usually on assets that were leveraged with debt to the hilt.
To be effective, Goodman's father knew years before the first gargantuan bucket of concrete was poured that The Great Wall would have to be the biggest public works project in the history of civilization. While he was president, Thump's minimalist approach to construction of the glacier-barrier wall would have saved U.S. taxpayers about a trillion dollars, but it would not have saved the city.
Thump could not help seeking the limelight and being a slave to his self-interest. Single-minded selfishness was the root cause of Thump's scandal-shortened single term as president of the United States. Narcissism doomed his presidency to impeachment in the House of Representatives and removal from office in a landslide vote in the Senate.
The trillionaire's attempt to cut corners during the final phase of The Great Wall's construction probably sealed his fate as the worst president in U.S. history. He had rarely emerged from his golden, 58-story monolith since Marine One had delivered him to the helipad on the skyscraper's roof in 2500. The city's vibrant tabloid press called Thump the Hermit of 5th Avenue.
"I am a compassionate man," Goodman says, draping his right arm across his son's broad shoulders, "but I can't wait much longer for that shit-heel to draw his last gasping breath."
Artist's conception of Europa's frozen surface, Jupiter, and the Sun /NASA image
Genevieve Ginan
AFTER talking for two hours about the great city of New York, The Great Wall, and Spoonman's impending great adventure, father and son made the slightly dizzying decent down the Battery Park Parapet's spiral staircase.
Before they parted outside the titanic tower, the men gaze at one another's faces through their parka hoods. "I'll be alright, dad," Spoonman says.
"I know, but I also know that this is the last time that I will see you in the flesh."
Neither of the engineers wanted to cry, so their last-ever clutch is short and sweet.
The astronaut-engineer is hankering for lunch before starting his journey south back to Cape Canaveral; but his eagerness is fueled by love, not hunger.
The Battery Park Parapet is only three blocks from the Golden Orchid, the Thai restaurant where Spoonman first met Genevieve Leigh.
In the summer of 2514, the then-bachelor had arrived at the eatery before his future bride, whom he had met online through the NASA astronaut online community. Through the restaurant's thick plate-glass window facing the street, he had watched with amusement the beautiful and brilliant woman's confusion as she tried to open the locked door that led to an apartment above the Golden Orchid.
He sensed the native New Yorker's embarrassment as she walked toward their table wearing a tight-fitting blouse and a smile that betrayed her nervousness, and her dismay over picking the wrong entryway door.
"Genevieve, it's great to see you," Spoonman said, attempting with great difficulty to pronounce his lunch-mate's name with a French accent.
"I'm so flustered," the tall brunette with dark-chocolate eyes said as she took her seat opposite from Spoonman across their ornate dining table.
"Your agitation is nothing compared to how I feel about butchering the pronunciation of your name."
"Please call me Genie," she said, quickly signally to a waitress before the conversation spun out of control into premature intimacy,
"The curry dishes are amazing here," Genie said, hoping to change the subject.
"I love Thai food, so pretty much every kind of curry they have here will work for me!" Spoonman said, with the prompting of his empty belly and gratitude for Genie's abilities as a conversationalist.
She had been recruited to be among the first Europa colonists for her communications skills, which were essential to overcome the 40-minute audio-signal delay over the 390-million miles separating Earth and Europa.
Communication skills also would be essential if the colonists encountered intelligent life on the Jovian moon.
After its awkward beginning, the rest of the soon-to-be couple's first date flowed effortlessly. The topics of conversation ranged rapidly from growing up in Manhattan, to the rivalry between their respective high schools, to the Europa colonist selection process, to what the pair expected when their spacecraft arrived at the ice-encrusted moon as it orbited the solar system's largest planet.
The curry had been very good.
Their first kiss outside the Golden Orchid was much more satisfying.
Sunday, September 3, 2017
Top 25: Great Alternative Rock songs
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