Since my birthday hike last September, when I discovered that the road up to Mount Gleason had been closed since the Station Fire, I've been tempted to try making the entire trek from the road closure point to the summit - a round trip of about 20 miles. I even had this weekend marked on the calendar to try it - an open weekend in my choir calendar, with a near maximum of daylight and before the real heat of the Southern California summer set in.

Fortunately, circumstances gave my better judgment a fighting chance. My friend Emma is still in town, and she'd been wanting to see the desert, so instead of making an insane marathon march, I picked her up and took her to Vasquez Rocks, world-famous setting of many TV shows and movies - most notably Captain Kirk's battle with the Gorn on Star Trek.





I went there once before, but I'd been thinking about making a return visit. The Pacific Crest Trail runs through the park, down into the southern section that most people don't visit, until it reaches a wildlife tunnel under the Antelope Valley Freeway.



After that, we started circling back toward the rocks, but at one point we took a wrong turn and wound up having to climb over a large hill to get back on track. A typical hiking incident for me, but a first for Emma. I told her she earned her official hiking merit badge after that. Eventually we made it back to the rocks everyone recognizes, and climbed up to take in the view.



By that time, the clouds that had been sprinkling on Los Angeles since the morning made it all the way to the desert, so we called it a day and headed off to a surprisingly good Mexican restaurant in the little community of Agua Dulce. And today, I'm very glad to have had a good adventure - without feeling too stiff to move afterwards!

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What did you pray for as a kid? Even if your family didn't have any religious practices, you must have prayed for something somewhere... you know, "just in case." Did you ask to get what you wanted for Christmas? For your favorite sports team to win the big game? For a miraculous escape from something bad that was happening to you?

Do you ever pray for those things now? Come on, it's okay to admit it. I catch myself doing it from time to time. Whenever I realize that I'm asking for something selfishly, I hear Janis Joplin in my head, singing "O Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz...?"

It's dawned on me recently how often my thoughts, prayers and musings focus on the things or abilities or qualities that I don't have. I don't write quickly enough or I can't get myself out of the day-job world or I'm not good at self-promotion. My writing isn't vivid enough or "meaningful" enough or whatever, my management skills can't keep something in the workplace running smoothly, or my social skills can't spare me from feeling awkward or uncomfortable at times. And I don't even have a Mercedes Benz.

There's a blessing one of my priests gives - she says she got it from Bishop John Shelby Spong. "Lord, send us anywhere you would have us go, only go there with us. Place upon us any burden you desire, only stand by us to sustain us. And break any tie that binds us, except the tie that binds us to you." It makes me think we get our a lot of prayers backwards. We ask God to intervene and make something different for us, when perhaps we should instead be asking God to show us how to handle the way things are.

My first attempt at writing prose fiction was a Doctor Who story for the original line of Virgin Publishing "New Adventures" in the mid-90s. I got rejected, but my rejection letter was two pages long written personally by the editor - which, in the publishing world, means I really got their attention. One thing she told me was that my writing style looked more like the old Doctor Who novelizations for children than what they wanted. Rather than go into a funk about that, I decided to run with it, and that's how I got into writing novels for kids.

BUT (And there's always a "but," isn't there?) that wasn't some kind of miraculous cure to my problems. I still struggle with my writing, all the time. And most of the time, it's about the qualities my writing doesn't have. There are very few aspects of the human condition that can be solved in a single moment, like flipping a switch. We have to face our demons every day - and instead of asking God to take those demons away from us, we should be asking Him to stand by us and help us face them.

I've come to the conclusion that my writing is never going to be "literary." I don't have it in me to bring out any deep insights about the human condition or anything like that. If there's any kind of consistent theme to what I write, it's "HEY!!! Let me tell you about this NEAT STUFF I found out about!" Which, actually, is a recurring attitude I have in my life anyway, so I suppose it's fitting. It'll never win me a Newbery Medal, but it has its place in the world.

And something else happens when we stop focusing on what we don't have - we become more grateful for what we do have. I may not have a Mercedes Benz, but I really like my Prius. Even our hardships can lead us to things we can be grateful for, even if we don't see it in the heat of the moment.

One of the most important life lessons I've learned is the importance of giving up resentment. Resisting the urge to dwell on or worry about or pray about things we don't have is one of the keys to doing that. I'm not an expert at it yet, but I'm working on it.

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Between El Niño and a sore foot, my 2016 hiking season got off to a later start than the past couple of years. But now things are really rolling along. After taking my old Saturn out for one last adventure, two weeks ago it was time to take my new Prius out on its first trip into the Angeles Forest.




I was heading back to Magic Mountain - the real one that the theme park is named for - to get another look at the old Marquardt facility where they tested the reaction control thrusters on the Apollo spacecraft. As I had done at San Vicente Mountain Park, I wanted to get some video for a presentation I'm doing this summer. I also wanted to get a look at some areas of the facility I'd skipped before, especially downhill below the test stands.



When I got back to Bear Divide, I found a bunch of "muscle car" guys showing off their macho sports cars to each other. They didn't seem very interested in my Prius.

This weekend's hike was something different. My friend Emma is visiting Los Angeles from London. I've known her online for many years - met her on LiveJournal back in its glory days, in fact - but this was the first time we met in person. She asked me to take her hiking, so we went up to one of my favorite areas, exploring San Gabriel Peak, Mount Disappointment and Mount Lowe.





I don't normally hike with other people, so this was kind of a new experience. Emma notices different things from me. I could tell that already from her writing, but it was fun to be out there and see what she was seeing. It gave me a new way to see trails that I'd already hiked and places I'd already visited. I tend to read about the history of the places I go to, and then look for what I've read about, to see them for myself. I also look at the geology and the wildlife. Meanwhile, Emma was fascinated by all the plant life, which was different from what she's used to in Europe. Unfortunately, I was no help telling her what any of it was (except for the yucca plants), but we did find some information when we stopped at the nearby Native American cultural center on our way back.


My next available weekend is in two weeks, and that will probably be my last hike before my annual July 4 Indiana trip. I've got something pretty ambitious in mind - perhaps too ambitious. I'll have to see what the weather looks like. If I decide not to try that one, there are plenty of other places to explore.

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This past weekend marked Trinity Sunday on the church calendar. So naturally I thought of fractals.

What, that doesn't seem natural to you?

The Holy Trinity is possibly the most obscure thing a Christian ever has to explain. Most Christians don't even understand it themselves. And I can't offer a completely convincing description myself, but I do see something of an illustration in the fractal set known as the Sierpinski Triangle.




See how it's drawn? You start with an equilateral triangle (that is, one where all three sides are equal), then draw lines connecting the midpoints of the sides. You get three little triangles with a hole in the middle. Draw lines connecting the midpoints of the sides on those three little triangles, and you get three more sets of three triangles with holes in the middle. Keep going forever, and you have a Serpinski Triangle. Program it on a computer, and no matter how far you zoom in, it will always look the same. It is self-similar, which is a common feature in fractal sets.

So now we get back to the Holy Trinity - the Three in One and One in Three. Just like the Sierpinski Triangle. It also illustrates how an infinite God capable of creating the universe can still interact personally with every one of us. Self-similarity. No matter how minutely you zoom in on one area, it still looks exactly like the whole.

Okay, I already told you it wasn't a completely convincing description, but it works for me.

I've come to some conclusions about religion and spirituality over the years. First and foremost is the idea that since all religions - including my own - are human inventions, they are thus all just approximations. No amount of human effort can attain perfect and complete knowledge of an infinite God. This is not to say that "all roads lead to God," but rather that God is able to steer any road to Himself, if the traveler on that road is willing. My particular faith community and traditions work for me, but other people may need different imagery or a different narrative. Which ones are "right" and which ones are "wrong?" How would I know? But if I had to guess, I would say that those who favor compassion over judgment, forgiveness over resentment and humility over selfishness are on the right track.

The second conclusion I've reached is that the universe reflects the nature of God, and shows us a God who is more imaginative than we can even imagine. I remember reading a book sometime around 1980, where the author claimed that humanity would discover and understand all the laws of the physical universe within the next hundred years. Then the first pictures of Saturn came in from the Voyager space probes, showing us complex weirdness no one had even dreamed was possible happening out there. I imagined God laughing and saying, "Oh, so you think you'll get it all figured out, do you? Well, explain this!"

And third, I'm getting a sense for how I'm supposed to "be a witness" for God in the world. Back during the unfortunate three years when I tried being an Evangelical, that was a very big deal. There were entire books written about how to share the Gospel with people, sales pitches for Jesus. I was never comfortable with that. My approach is a lot more subtle, and my goal is a lot less concrete. I figure that if something I do - through my music, through my writing, through my photography or just through my life in general - if something in my life inspires someone to open themselves up to spirituality in their own lives, that will be enough. God can take care of the rest. I don't have to do His job for Him - which is good, because I can't. He knows just the right way to reach out to every individual. I certainly don't.

Yes, I'm weird. I know that. But you've got to admit that Sierpinski Triangles are more interesting to talk about than people's bathroom phobias, don't you?

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The Apollo 11 moon landing was the defining moment of my childhood. I was a couple of months shy of my fifth birthday, but I still remember my parents getting me out of bed at some unbelievably late hour (9 or 10pm, actually) so that I could see Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin climb outside their Lunar Module and bounce around on the lunar surface.

But the landing itself wasn't the only thing that caught my attention. I was just as interested in the people reporting on the mission from back on Earth, especially Walter Cronkite and his expert commentators. I remember either Walter or Bob Keeshan (aka "Captain Kangaroo") in a white jumpsuit, walking around on a mock-up of the landing site, explaining what was going to happen and what it would look like.

And so began the two paths my life has taken, which at times have seemed opposed to each other but may actually be more like partners. I like the exploration and discovery in science, but I see all that not in terms of facts and figures as much as in terms of stories. It's not enough just to know how the world works - I've got to know how we found all that stuff out and what it means.

There I was as a kid in the 70s, watching shows like Nova and paying attention to how the narration worked as much as anything. Then when I was in high school, along came Carl Sagan (who I'd already seen on Nova) and James Burke. There was a time when I saw Cosmos and Connections and thought, "Yeah, that's what I want to do!" Maybe it was all those teacher genes I inherited making their presence known.

Well, as you know, that's not where I ended up. It's only been in the past few years that I was able to get my math/science side and my writing side working together. I've written a science-based story in Lunar Pioneers and math-based stories in The Mathematical Nights. Now I want to see if I can do the complete package, writing stories that cover a broader math/science field. Hey, STEM is big in education these days. I might have a decent chance with it.

And meanwhile, there's a new generation of "science explainers" (or "boffins," as the British call them) to check out - Neil DeGrasse Tyson, of course, but others as well. None as good as Carl and James yet, but you never know.

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For a time after the movie Titanic came out, my sister was intensely interested in the history of the real disaster. I remember her showing me some of the books she had read one time when I was visiting. It must run in the family, because I get that way about things to one degree or another all the time. (Sometimes, I even get a book out of the experience.) And one thing that has held my attention more than most is the Chernobyl nuclear accident, which happened thirty years ago today. You could say that Chernobyl is my Titanic.



On April 26, 1986, I was about to graduate from college, dealing with finals and a summer of putting the Vanderbilt yearbook together, worrying about my future because the hopes I'd had of going back to the You Can't Do That On Television set had fallen through. Chernobyl only appeared on the edge of my personal radar. I knew it was bad, but I didn't know how bad. It wasn't until much later, when A&E's 2008 Life After People documentary went to Pripyat, the abandoned city near the accident, that I began to take a real interest, and to discover how fascinating the story of the disaster is.

In some ways, Chernobyl was a case of incomprehensible stupidity. A poorly conceived test was run on a badly designed reactor, by incompetent workers who screwed things up badly. But there were also feats of incredible heroism and bravery. The first responders rushed in with just as much courage as our own heroes of 9/11, and many of them paid the same price. But at Chernobyl, it went on for weeks, in some cases literally requiring suicidal efforts from people in order to contain the disaster. Some impressive on-the-fly engineering, too. The "sarcophagus" that was built over the reactor may not look like much, and it may be crumbling now, but it's a miracle they were able to build anything at all in a lethal radiation environment and with 1980s Soviet technology.

A recent episode of the CBS show Scorpion took its characters to Chernobyl. A few things in it were accurate, although their method of saving the day - imploding the sarcophagus on top of the reactor core - is actually the worst thing you'd want to do. At least it was better than Chernobyl Diaries. A Russian TV series from a couple of years ago was partly filmed on location in Pripyat, no small feat given the current political situation between Russia and Ukraine. In it, the band of teenage heroes go back in time and avert the disaster, changing history to create a glorious Soviet Union of the 21st Century. Make of that what you will.

A huge new containment structure is being built a few hundred yards away from the reactor. When it's finished next year, they'll roll it into place on rails. Not only will it contain the radiation for at least a century, but it will also allow work crews to go inside and begin cleaning up the ruined reactor. Chernobyl will still be with us for a long time to come, but at least we're making progress.

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You may recall that a few weeks ago, I was trying to decide what to do about my car situation. I ended up getting a new Toyota Prius c (that's the smaller version of the Prius), which I like very much - but parting with my Saturn has still been tough. Luckily, fate stepped in and gave me the perfect way to find some closure. I'm going to donate the car, but there's some paperwork to be cleared up first. Since it was still here this weekend, and still had more than a quarter-tank of gas in it, I decided to take it out for one last adventure.



I started the day with a side trip to look for Ballard Mountain, a relatively obscure peak in the Santa Monica Mountains. It was just named Ballard Mountain a few years ago, after John Ballard, a former slave who came west and settled there in the 1800s. Before that, it was called "Negrohead Mountain." (And before that, it had a considerably less polite name.) I'm drawn to obscure places with interesting back stories, so I wanted to see if there was a hiking route up to the peak. Alas, there didn't seem to be one. But there is a plaque.



From there, I went back to "Dirt Mulholland" - the section of LA's famous Mulholland Drive that was left as a dirt road - and hiked the 6-1/2 miles up to San Vicente Mountain Park, formerly known as Nike Missile Base LA-96C. I wanted to shoot some video for a presentation I want to give this summer, and I'm also testing my distance limits for a much longer hike I want to try in a few weeks. The weather was perfect, with just about the best visibility I could remember.





And with that, I brought the Saturn home for the last time and pulled it back into its parking space with a much more satisfied sense than I'd had a couple of weeks earlier. Closure can be a very good thing.

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In some ways, A Ring of Endless Light is my favorite Madeleine L'Engle book, even over A Wrinkle in Time. It's not your typical YA novel. On the surface, it's about a girl who discovers she can communicate with dolphins. But in reality, it's a meditation on death, and how it affects people spiritually and psychologically. In the last chapter, the first-person narrator is in a semi-catatonic state that makes it hard to tell what's going on. Painful, difficult things happen, for which there aren't easy answers.

A dozen years or so ago, the Disney Channel made a movie version of A Ring of Endless Light, starring Mischa Barton and Jared Padalecki. It's still about a girl who can communicate with dolphins, but the similarities don't reach very far beyond that. The theme of death is shoved to the background, replaced by a story in which the meddlesome kids try to save the dolphins from getting caught in the drift nets of evil, greedy fishermen.

And the amazing thing is that both stories work. That is to say, each one does what it's intended to do. The book is affecting and thought-provoking. The movie is an entertaining Disney Channel movie.



I've written screenplays and I've written novels, and trust me, they're completely different things. They have different goals and different requirements. They have completely different groups of people involved. Sometimes a story can make the transition with few changes (William Goldman tells a story about the adaptation of The Maltese Falcon that I've never forgotten), but a lot of stories can't.

Lately I've found myself trying to make that same point in a lot of anime discussions lately. It started last year with Hibike! Euphonium, and this year it exploded with the closing episodes of ERASED, where the warning, "Manga Comparisons Forbidden" had to be added to the discussion thread header. Now, just one episode into the new series, Flying Witch, there's already been a dust-up over some kind of comparison to the manga it's based on. I don't know exactly what it was about because the moderators deleted it.

On her new show, Full Frontal, Samantha Bee did a bit where she's teaching English to refugees, and teaches them all sorts of pretentious yuppie things to say like, "I can't have gluten." One of the other things she teaches them is, "I liked the book better." Maybe it's just a fad, and people will get bored or find something else to complain about before long.

If I'm ever fortunate enough to have Hollywood take an interest in one of my books, my plan is to take the money and run. Let them develop it however they want - maybe I'll like it and maybe I won't, but either way it will have nothing to do with me. My story would be their foundation, but whatever they did with that would be their story, not mine.

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For all practical purposes, I've been driving the same car for almost twenty years. I bought my original Saturn Coupe in November 1996, and drove it for more than 100,000 miles before it met its end in a freak 2005 accident while it was being serviced. By another strange twist of fate, the dealership just happened to have an almost identical car on its used lot - five years newer and red instead of green, but otherwise a perfect match. I've driven it ever since, and now it has 253,000 miles on it.

But now I'm at a crossroads. My Saturn still runs great, but it needs some work done and will need new tires by the end of the year. Do I want to put more money into it and try to keep it going for a couple more years, or is it time to find something new?

Here's the problem with that question - There's very little new out there that I like. There are no more Saturns. After the 2002 model, GM moved them out of their original Spring Hill TN factory and started treating them just like any other GM brand. The quality went away, the sales tanked and GM ended up getting rid of the brand when they restructured. It's very hard to find a stick-shift any more, unless you want a sports car or a muscle car, and that's not my style. But the hardest thing for me to believe is that just about anything new on the market would cost me more on gas. Yes, my 2002 Saturn with 253,000 miles on it still gets better gas mileage than most of what you can buy new.

At this point, you may say, "How about a hybrid?" Good suggestion! That's where I've been looking. But there's a problem with that, too - one that's more cultural, really. A Midwesterner like me has been raised to think that it's your patriotic duty as an American to buy American cars. I can still hear my grandfather even now. But Americans don't build small cars any more - just big cars and SUVs and trucks. Even the American car companies build their small cars in Mexico or Canada or overseas. So I guess I don't really have a choice about it, do I? At least there's that.

Anyway, after a lot of internet researching, I have an appointment to go check something out this afternoon. Either I'll like it or I won't, at which point I'll go ahead and get my Saturn fixed up. I can try again in a year or two and see if anyone has come out with something I like better.

Stay tuned.

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I've become a big fan of BBC Radio 4's documentary podcasts. They're the perfect length for my lunchtime walk around the industrial park. Sometime late last summer, I listened to one called "Time Noodles." With a title like that, I thought it might have been about something cosmological or Doctor Who related, but it wasn't. Instead, it was about a traditional Japanese form of storytelling called Rakugo, and how it was being given new life in the modern world.

Then January came along, and with it the Winter 2016 anime season, which included Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju, a historical drama about Rakugo performers through the middle of the 20th century. I stumbled onto it more-or-less at random, and was completely blown away by its double-length premiere episode.



Here in April, with three more anime seasons left in the year, it's ridiculously early to be picking the Best Anime of 2016, but... in all likelihood, Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju is the Best Anime of 2016. This show isn't about a bunch of giant robots battling each other. It's not about a bunch of cute high school girls and their wacky hijinks, either. This is a grownup show, about grownup characters and their grownup lives. (And I use the word "grownup" deliberately, to avoid any potential confusion from using the word "adult.")

The story centers on two Rakugo performers, Kikuhiko and Sukeroku, beginning with the time they both become apprenticed to a Rakugo master named Yakumo. They grow up together, learn their craft together, and in time develop their own unique personalities and storytelling styles. They are something of an Odd Couple, with Kikuhiko being more uptight and serious while Sukeroku is more freewheeling, and they need each other to be at their best. As time passes into the post-WWII era, they realize that Rakugo will have to adapt if it is to survive, and they promise each other that they will find the way forward.

Then, into this mix comes a young geisha named Miyokichi, and the Love Triangle beings. Except it's more of a Love Rectangle. (To quote Cookie Monster, "It's a wreck, and it's a tangle!") Sukeroku loves Miyokichi and Miyokichi loves Kikuhiko, but Kikuhiko is largely an aromantic who would rather live for his Rakugo. He does feel something for Miyokichi, though, and his indecision over how to handle his inner conflict creates a whole world of trouble.

The three main characters in this story are well-rounded and believable, each with strengths and weaknesses. You could blame any one of them for how things turn out - but at the same time, you don't really want to blame any of them. From my own personal viewpoint, Kikuhiko reminded me of myself more than any character I've seen in a very long time. In fact, I usually avoid writing such characters, because I don't want to project that much of myself into one of my stories.

Another thing I couldn't help noticing about Rakugo Shinju is that the online discussion of the show seemed to mature in response to the show's more mature storyline. Despite the love triangle at the center of the story, there were no "shipping wars" between factions of viewers, as happens with countless other shows. There were also no big cries of outrage over whether the anime was being faithful enough to the source material, as happened with another of this season's top shows. But that doesn't mean the discussion was boring. Quite the opposite - having deeper characters fueled more complex and nuanced conversations.

The best thing of all is that there's still another half of this story to come. The series ends at the halfway point of the manga it's based on, and the sequel series has already been announced. In it, we'll see a 60-something Kikuhiko, who has inherited the Yakumo name and stands as pretty much the last relic of Rakugo's glory years. He hasn't forgotten the promise he made with Sukeroku, only now if he wants to fulfill it, he'll have to rely on Konatsu, the daughter of Sukeroku and Miyokichi, and a reformed ex-con named Yotaro, who saw Kikuhiko perform at his prison and went straight to beg for an apprenticeship on the day he was released. He also has to deal with his old friend's ghost and the unresolved feelings he has about his past. It should be quite a ride.

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My younger brother lives the life that I was supposed to live. At least in our mom's eyes, anyway. I was the one who was supposed to get the PhD in some scientific or engineering field from a top-rated university. I was the one who was supposed to get the highly specialized job and have a career doing things that would change the world. I was the one who was supposed to find the equally brilliant wife and give Mom brilliant grandchildren.

I have done none of those things. Good thing my brother was there to take care of them all for me. And just in these past couple of weeks, he's been named Director of the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He develops very tiny bits of technology, most of which are used to make solar panels work better.

Lest you think I'm expressing jealousy, I'm not. This is a good thing, and I'm proud of my brother. He deserves it. I'm not jealous of his life because I deliberately chose not to try for one like it myself. I could have. I was in the upper ranks of my Engineering class at Vanderbilt. I even had an offer from one of my professors to work in his lab for one summer, a job that would have given me valuable experience and connections. But instead, that was the summer I went to Ottawa and worked on the set of You Can't Do That On Television. It was my fork-in-the-road moment. I made my choice, and I've never regretted it.

That said, I do feel a touch of sadness in times like this, that my life hasn't met expectations, somehow. Whose expectations, you ask? I was in therapy long enough to know that the expectations are my own, that they belong to the gremlins we all have in our heads that tell us we're not good enough. The gremlins react to someone else's recognition by the world, and tell us that we should get that kind of recognition, too. But we can't control how the world sees us. We can only control our own decisions.

I think the hiking I do symbolizes the way I've come to approach life in general. Each mountain I ascend is its own challenge, and when I reach the summit, there are few, if any, people around to see it. But that doesn't matter. Meeting the challenge is what counts, and once I've met one, it makes me eager for the next. And yeah, I'll admit that I wouldn't mind having those accomplishments recognized every once in a while, but I'm not going to stop striving for them if they're not.

My brother has his mountains, and I have mine. He's just reached one of his summits. My next one is out there waiting for me. Time to go climb it.

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I'm coming to the end of an absolutely fantastic four-day Easter weekend.

I take Friday and Monday off from day-job land every year, Friday so I can sing in the Good Friday service at All Saints and Monday so I can get some rest after the Holy Week marathon. Those went well, even with a little excitement on Friday from a fast-running clock that made everyone think the service was running behind when it really wasn't. Last year, I skipped the Saturday night Easter Vigil service to go down to Long Beach and check out the Formula E race. This year, I was back in the chancel - which was a good thing, because I was the only tenor apart from our soloist. Two of the altos had to switch over and help us out. Our associate organist, new this year and in charge of music for the Vigil for the very first time, was so thrilled that we could balance the other sections that he hugged us all during rehearsal.

Just doing well musically would have made the weekend a success, but somehow I did so much more. Time seemed to stretch out for me, giving me more than I needed for everything. I've finally gotten my latest manuscript started, and it's looking good so far. (It's my third manuscript start since September, actually. More on that in a future post.) I had some interesting discussions online about the Winter 2016 anime series that are wrapping up. (More on that in the near future too, once Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju wraps up on Friday. Spoiler alert - This particular show will easily make my list of all-time favorites.) In the evenings, I've been listening to the second Doom Coalition set of Big Finish Audio adventures for Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor. In fact, once I finish this post, I'll be listening to the final episode, which guest stars Alex Kingston as River Song. How does River Song manage to work with the Eighth Doctor when he's not supposed to know her yet? That will be an interesting thing to find out.

I even had time to get my eyes checked and my car serviced in the middle of all that. The former are in better shape than the latter. Not that my car is on death's door or anything, but at 252,000 miles it needs some work if I'm going to keep it running, and I've got to decide whether I should invest in something new instead.

One thing I haven't done much this weekend is think about day-job land. How wonderful that was! But alas, now I'll have to go back. Nothing good lasts forever in this world.

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I got a very important reminder today.

Rocks, dirt and grass don't care about Donald Trump.
Lizards don't care about Ted Cruz.
Cows have nothing to say about the possibility of a brokered convention.
Birds don't worry about voter turnout.

Here, take a look at the ridge line that forms the southern wall of Las Llajas Canyon.



These mountains were here, looking pretty much the same, for thousands upon thousands of years before Donald Trump was born. They will still be here, looking pretty much the same, for thousands upon thousands of years after Donald Trump is dead and gone.

Wherever you live, do yourself a favor. Get outside from time to time between now and November. Surround yourself with an entire world of things and creatures that don't care about our silly elections.

You'll do your sanity a world of good.

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Hey Mr. Trump, I love the poorly educated, too. In fact, I love them so much that I want them to get a better education. Maybe then they'll know better than to vote for you.

Of all the crazy things Trump has said, none have stuck with me more than his declaration that he loves the poorly educated. It was so enthusiastic and so spontaneous - and so revealing. The poorly educated have never been given skills like how to weigh evidence or evaluate claims. They've never been taught how to distinguish fact from fiction. When someone tells them that climate change is a massive conspiracy or that the President is a secret Muslim from Kenya, they don't have the tools to check those claims out for themselves.

Donald Trump reminds me of far too many people I've worked with over the years (especially a certain VP of Operations I worked for in the 90s, but I can think of many other examples). He tries to make everything happen through the force of his will. If he can't do it by charming you or bamboozling you, he'll try bullying you instead. Of course he loves the poorly educated! They're sitting ducks against someone like him.

I think about that a lot. My writing is intended to educate as well as entertain, and the more I've gotten into my mathematical stories, the more I've felt like I shouldn't be writing about numbers and equations as much as about mathematical thinking - the logic and reasoning skills that can help people in other parts of life, not just in math. We need those skills more than ever these days. Donald Trump will eventually fade away, but there will always be more where he came from. Giving my best to write my stories might be the best thing I can do to work against them.

Meanwhile, today Hillary Clinton said something stupid at Nancy Reagan's funeral, and now I've seen posts all over Facebook from people saying they're done with her and won't support her again. They're hurt, and I don't blame them for that. What Hillary said was stupid, and she's admitted as much herself. But it seems like even the slightest misstep on her part costs her support.

Some politicians say stupid stuff, and people just laugh. Trump says stupid stuff, and his poll numbers go up. Why does Hillary have to be so freakin' perfect? Is it because she's a Clinton? Because she's a woman? She's not as skilled a politician as her husband, but she tries her best - and then after all the work she does to formulate her message, she gets criticized for being too calculating. Let me tell you, I don't agree with Hillary Clinton on everything, but lately I've been feeling a lot more sympathy for her.

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I showed up early in day-job land yesterday, so I could slip out for a couple of hours and go over to Juan Lagunas Soria Elementary School, just south of the Oxnard Airport. The kind book enthusiast who owns Mrs. Figs Bookworm in Camarillo had put out an email to the local authors she knows, alerting us to a fun opportunity. Soria School was looking for guests to come for this year's Read Across America Day.

The theme of the day was evident from the moment I walked in the door.



Read Across America is an annual event sponsored by the National Education Association. It's actually held on March 2, the birthday of Theodor Geisel aka Dr. Seuss, but for some reason Soria School was holding it on the 7th. There was still plenty of Dr. Seuss gear around, including "Thing 1" and "Thing 2" (and beyond) t-shirts on all the school staff. Nobody was wearing the big stripey hats, though. They were ready for their authors, and even had a nice table of water bottles and snacks for us. I was the first one on the schedule, and they were especially glad to see me because normally they only got authors of books for younger kids. Authors who write for middle schoolers haven't been as common.

One of the assistants took me out in the school's central courtyard, heading to the multi-purpose room so I could set up. One thing that still strikes me as odd about Southern California schools is the way many of the classrooms open directly to the outside instead of to an interior hallway. You could never do that in a Midwestern winter - and maybe even in a Southern California winter, because just as we stepped outside, a big gust of wind blew a sudden rainstorm onto us. The arriving children scattered in all directions, and my escort dashed off to handle the situation, leaving me standing there under an awning, wondering what I was supposed to do. Eventually, I found my way to my venue, a large room that serves as gymnasium, auditorium and cafeteria.



I'd prepared my presentation two ways, both with and without a small PowerPoint presentation, because I didn't know what sort of computer resources would be available. As it turned out, I could have included the PowerPoint very easily, but I'd had a technology glitch at home that kept me from bringing it. I was able to call up my author website on the screen, but otherwise I was completely old school. Fortunately, they did have a flip-chart I could use to work math problems. My version of Fibonacci's rabbit problem (using gremlins instead of rabbits) was as successful as it had been when I tried it on my niece Leyna's class back in November. My attempts to use the math subjects the kids were studying had mixed results. My ratio problem for the seventh graders went well, but my exponent problem for the eighth graders fell kind of flat. Something to learn for next time.



I didn't sell any books, although I did donate my complete Royal Fireworks range to the school library. We're talking about doing an evening book signing event with all the authors, partnering with the school and/or Mrs. Figs Bookworm, but that's a discussion for another time. That particular day was about getting kids interested in reading and writing and learning. In these times, with one of our major political parties being taken over by an authoritarian who loves "the poorly educated," I've found a new sense of purpose in what I do. All learning is valuable, but my books in particular are about using logic and reason and facts to solve problems and make good decisions. Helping people discover how to do that may be the most important contribution I can make right now.

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I would not have been a friend of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. I know people have been talking about what a swell guy he was, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg was his best buddy even though they disagreed 93% of the time. It wouldn't have worked out with me. Not because he was so conservative. I have friends and even family who are conservative. No, it's because he loved to argue, and did so forcefully. I'm not into that. I tried to be when I was younger, but I've lost the appetite for it now.

For people who love to argue, the argument is as much - if not more - about the strength of a person's will than the truthfulness of the argument. If you can assert something forcefully enough, who cares whether or not it's true? But getting to the truth was always the most important thing for me - once I realized it wasn't necessarily the most important thing for others, I lost interest in the game.

You can probably imagine, then, how I feel about the political noise machine, where asserting things forcefully without caring whether they're true is standard operating procedure. Barack Obama's a socialist! He's a Muslim! He was born in Kenya! Iraq had weapons of mass destruction! Saddam Hussein helped Osama bin Laden plan 9/11! On and on it goes, as if saying them loudly enough and repeating them often enough will magically make them true. And the worst part of it is how often that actually works, how many people are willing to believe such fantasies.

So now I find myself with a predicament. The Republicans Party is about to nominate Donald Trump for President - the most vile, repulsive major party candidate I've ever seen. "The American Mussolini" is what I've dubbed him privately. His campaign cannot be allowed to succeed. We can't possibly be foolish enough to put someone like that in charge.

But here's the problem. The practice of trying to make things true by saying them loudly enough and forcefully enough and repeating them often enough is the foundation the entire Trump campaign is built on. It's the culmination of everything the Republicans have built over the last twenty-odd years, and it's been horrifyingly effective. And while I do get a small sense of satisfaction right now at the way this monster is turning on the very people who made it, for the most part I just feel revolted. I can't even listen to Trump for more than a minute. I can't listen to people talking about Trump for very long. How am I supposed to keep myself informed about something so repulsive?

I do not want this election to take over my life. I've got books to write, music to sing and mountains to climb. Oh yeah, and a day-job, too. Already I've felt it creeping in too far, and there are still many months of this mess to go. I've got to find the right distance to keep myself from it, and then figure out how to preserve that balance, all the way to November.

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I watch most of my anime through Crunchyroll now, but there are still a few fansubbers out there doing shows that Crunchyroll doesn't carry. The BitTorrent site where I find them always has these banner ads for a company that sells... er, stuff... to anime nerds (aka "otakus"). Given what some of these ads look like, I don't think I want to know any more about them. But a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the anime girls in these ads had started wearing some very familiar hats.

So... what are we to conclude? Does this company think otakus love Donald Trump? Did they do some market research about it, or are they just guessing? Or is this just some Japanese company latching onto whatever they think is trendy? Inquiring minds want to know!

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One reason I haven't been posting so much lately is because the things going on in the world just aren't much fun to write about these days. I'm something of a pessimistic optimist, or maybe an optimistic pessimist. That is to say, I have hope things will work out in the long run, but think we're in for a rough ride to get there.

This summer, it will have been thirteen years since I moved out here to Ventura County, and I still drive the fifty miles back to Pasadena to sing with my choir at All Saints Church. This is the point in the season when that drive starts to wear on me. We're doing extended rehearsals to prepare for Easter, which means I don't get home until almost 11:00 at night. There's been construction at one point or another on the freeways for more than a year, too. From time to time, I've entertained thoughts of finding a new church out here, but there just isn't another choir like the one I'd be leaving. Not just the quality of the music, but also the people I sing with. They're the closest I have to a surrogate family around here.

And this week, I've realized something else. I'm not very demonstrative about my religion. (Um, that's not what I just realized - I've known that for a long time.) There are plenty of people, of all faiths, who can join together and pray during times of trouble, or do other things to express the depth and emotion of what they believe. I just don't do that. Maybe it's my Midwestern heritage or my Episcopalian upbringing, but I'm just not built for that kind of thing.

Except in one place.

The choir loft is my Safe Zone. It's the one place where I can let those kinds of emotional forces out. I can channel them into the music and bring more of my full self into the experience. It doesn't work if I'm just in the congregation. Maybe it's my sense of organization at work. The choir loft is where I'm "supposed to be" expressive, and so that's where I can be. Whatever the case, it's something I need. I'm missing a vital part of myself without it.

And so, at a time when crazy things are happening in the world around us, to the point where sometimes it seems like people are losing their minds left and right, I need a strong faith foundation under me and around me - sustaining all of me, including the parts that don't get out very often. So it looks like I'll keep making that long drive for a while yet. At least gas prices are down these days.

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Yes, I'm still around. I don't think I've gone this long without posting here before - and it's not just here. I've been less talkative overall lately.

I'm still working through my thoughts of what I want to write next, and I don't want to kill any ideas by talking about them too much. That happened a lot in my Buffy fanfic days, and it still gets close to happening again even now. But there's more to it than that. My thoughts swirl around in my head, and I can see the connections between them even when they're still half-formed - but at this stage of the game, trying to explain those thoughts or connect them in a way that would mean anything to anyone else would take more time and words than I have to spare at the moment, and would probably just run those thoughts into the ground anyway.

There was an article in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago - "How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off." Its author cautions the parents of "gifted" children not to "try to engineer a certain kind of success" in them. "Creativity may be hard to nurture," he warns, "but it’s easy to thwart." As someone who was considered "gifted" as a child, I found myself nodding along with a lot of what I read.

And at this point, I feel a need to defend my parents (and not just because my family sometimes reads this journal). They have always loved me and always tried their best for me. But they're also human beings, which means they weren't perfect. And to be fair, I'm a human being too, and I'm not perfect either. My mom had some very specific ideas for how I should turn out, and we had some rough years when I started to go in a different direction.

(Interestingly, my younger brother's life has turned out looking very much like what Mom wanted for me. Some psychologist would probably have a field day with that. But I digress.)

Things are better now, but there are still times when I feel the aftereffects of those days. At times when I go through the kind of creative regrouping that I'm in the middle of now, I can get especially frustrated, telling myself that I must not be trying hard enough. I was supposed to be "gifted," after all, but maybe I messed all that up by insisting on my own path. In those times, it's hard to think that I'll probably never have as big an audience as I did when I was writing You Can't Do That On Television at age 20. I ended up in corporate America after all, and I couldn't even get that right, leaving Dacor back in 2001 when I could have gone much farther up the ladder instead.

Fortunately, another article came along this week, addressed "To Anyone Who Thinks They're Falling Behind In Life," and reminding us that, "We have to put in our best efforts and then give ourselves permission to let whatever happens to happen--and to not feel so directly and vulnerably tied to outcomes." At this point in my life, most of the time I know that stuff already - but it's good to have someone else reminding me at times when I need that kind of reminder.

I could go in a number of different directions from here, but it's late and I have a lot of reading I want to do tomorrow. But I'll try not to let my journal go neglected for so long again.

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It was a few years ago, during my family's Thanksgiving gathering, and I was settling down to watch the Vanderbilt football game. My oldest niece, who was almost seven at the time, came along and decided she was going to watch the game with Uncle Bob. I thought, "Yeah, right. She'll sit here for five minutes and then get bored." But she didn't. She stayed for the entire game. And she still likes football to this day. She sat watching it with all us guys at this year's gathering. She's probably getting excited about this Sunday's conference championships, although she'd be a lot more excited if her New York Giants were playing.

But football has a dark side that we've only really started hearing about recently. This week, there was an interview with former Indiana University and Pittsburgh Steelers star Antwaan Randle-El, who now wishes he'd gone pro in baseball instead of football because of the post-concussion symptoms he suffers from. And he's just the latest. But on the flip side, this past fall I spotted Austin Collie playing in the Canadian Football League, after he suffered so many concussions with the Indianapolis Colts that I'd hoped he would quit the game while he still had his mind. He insists he's fine now. Who are we to disagree? I certainly don't have the medical expertise, so I'm just left wondering.

In the case of Austin Collie, it's really none of my business. He's a grown man and can make his own decisions. They all can. In this day and age, they can't say they weren't warned of the risks. If they choose to accept those risks, it's their right to do so. But there's another wrinkle to the story from my perspective. I write for middle school kids - and that includes kids who may want to play football, who may be arguing with parents about whether they should play football, who have parents who may be worried about their children playing football. Would it be irresponsible of me to write a story that could encourage kids to play football?

This isn't just some random hypothetical question. I've been working on a story setup where a group of kids use math to help their school's sports teams. It was inspired by my own experience as the football team statistician when I was in high school. I enjoyed that experience very much - but it was one where I stood safely on the sidelines while my classmates took all the risks. This week's report on Antwaan Randle-El made me wonder if I should be encouraging today's kids to take those same risks, even if I did so indirectly or inadvertently.

Maybe I just think too much. I honestly don't know. But I think I'm going to set this idea aside for a while. I have other projects to work on, and there are other stories about using sports statistics that I can tell. I can afford to wait until the public has more time to hash out the issue. Don't you think so?

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You may recall my entry last month about the award I didn't win. Well, now the winners have been announced, and in my category... nobody won. They named a couple of "Honor Books" that were published before last year, but in the Grade 6-8 age group, they decided not to give an award at all for books published in 2015.

Losing to someone is one thing. Losing to no one is quite another. When you lose to someone, at least you have a benchmark you can aim for in your efforts to improve. When you lose to no one... what the heck is that even about?

My publisher's reaction to the news was short and to the point.



Naturally, I told myself I wasn't going to let this turn of events bother me, and then I promptly let it bother me. But I think I managed to keep my panic short-lived this time. I'd already been having trouble with the two manuscripts I'm working on. They've both felt flat and directionless, and I've just been hoping one or both would get some traction if I kept pushing them forward. Maybe now I can give myself permission to try something else.

I'm not taking on any new projects, but I think I'm going to shuffle my priorities a bit. A couple of things I thought about doing later may get tackled a lot sooner. The projects I've been working on may get put on the back burner. Of course, once I started thinking along those lines, I quickly came up with a way to fix one of the stories that's been giving me trouble. The writer's mind is a curious thing.

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For me, anyway, 2015 was a largely forgettable year in anime. That's not to say there were no good shows. Plenty of them were enjoyable enough, but only the spring season's Sound! Euphonium left a lasting impression. But here we are, just a little more than a week into 2016, and I've already seen three new shows that could stick with me for a long time.

The only one of these not available on Crunchyroll is Haruta to Chika wa Seishun Suru, or HaruChika for short. It's a high school series about a boy named Haruta and a girl named Chika who are "childhood friends" now playing together in their school's tiny but dedicated concert band. You'll find setups like this every anime season, but there are a couple of big differences this time around. First, in addition to playing music, they also solve mysteries. Second, they are most definitely not destined to become a romantic couple - instead they are rivals for the affection of their teacher, with whom they are both smitten. Yes, Haruta is gay.




People who know a lot more about anime than I do say it's very rare to have a gay male character in a mainstream show (i.e. not a "boys love" story) who isn't a joke. If it turns out to be just part of his character and not treated like a big deal, I'll consider it a big plus for the show. I checked it out because it sounded like a cross between the above-mentioned Hibike! Euphonium and Hyouka, a 2012 show I liked a lot. The book series on which the show was based is written by a mystery novelist, and is considered to be in the "nichijou no nazo" or "everyday mystery" style. I've been trying to learn how to write that kind of story myself, so I'll definitely be paying attention.

That was the show I was expecting to follow. The other two were big surprises that I just happened to check out.



No sooner had I finished watching the first episode of HaruChika that I took a look at Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju. It's a historical show, set sometime in the 1960s or 70s, about the traditional Japanese storytelling form called Rakugo. I'd heard about Rakugo from a BBC Podcast a few months ago, so I took a look. And WOW. This is a grownup show, about grownup characters.

The story centers on a convicted petty thief who sees a Rakugo master perform at his prison, and is so impressed that after he does his time, he tracks down the man and asks to become his apprentice. The man sees something in him and takes him in, and we then follow the now ex-thief as he learns his new craft. Sharing the Rakugo master's home is the daughter of his late partner, who blames the master for her father's death. She wants to be a Rakugo master herself, but is frustrated by the patriarchal society of her time.

The first episode is twice the normal length, and features a fascinating ten-minute scene of the ex-thief giving one of his first significant performances. Moving forward, it looks like we're going to get the back story of how the two Rakugo masters met and got their start, presumably leading to how the partner really died.

The third show I checked out seems to have the most buzz in the anime world. ERASED tells the story of a struggling manga artist who uncontrollably time-leaps backwards in order to prevent calamities. He doesn't know why it happens or how it works. Back when he was a kid, a girl in his class was kidnapped and never found, and he was convinced that the man convicted of the crime was innocent. One thing leads to another, and the man finds himself time-leaped back into his preteen self in 1988, just before the kidnapping occurred.

It's an intriguing setup, but I was left feeling disappointed by the thought that the present-day world we'd been shown is now going to disappear. Maybe it won't. I guess I'll have to wait and find out.

There are four distinct anime seasons in a year, which means we've got three more after these shows finish their runs. Who knows what else is on the way?

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All through high school, I was a math and science kid, so you might be surprised to know that one of my favorite and most influential teachers belonged to the English department. C.J. Foxlow, or "Jim" to those who weren't too intimidated to call former teachers by their first names, was a school fixture, someone my parents already knew well by the time I reached his classroom. We never talked about my writing aspirations, because I didn't really have any at the time, but over the years, the lessons he taught me have been the strong foundation on which all my writing rests.

Yesterday, I learned that Mr. Foxlow (yes, I'm in the "too intimidated" camp) passed away just before the New Year. I believe he was 92, but I'm not entirely sure. Somewhere in the low 90s.

Mr. Foxlow's command of the English language was better than anyone else I've known. He was an advisor to the school newspaper as well as a teacher, patiently working with our small handful of kids who wanted to run an issue every week. I can't count the number of small but important technical points I learned from the markups he made on our articles. And that command was borne of love - a love for literature and a love for sharing his love of literature. Even when you didn't share his appreciation of something (I never got "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" myself), you could tell how much he appreciated it, and that at least made you give it a try.

My senior year, I took his "Satire and Parody" class, and he referred to one story I wrote for it as a "burlesque." I had to look that word up, because I'd only ever heard it used in connection with strip shows, and I was pretty sure he didn't mean it that way. He meant it as a story that "ridicules a subject either by presenting a solemn subject in an undignified style or an inconsequential subject in a dignified style." I liked that concept, and today you could apply that same definition to many of my stories. So Mr. Foxlow was shaping my writing career even before I knew there was going to be one.

But there was more to him than just language. Mr. Foxlow was a good man - gentle but strong, passionate and confident without being arrogant, comfortable with who he was. I haven't yet reached the age he was back when I knew him, but I'm getting closer. He gave me a good role model. When I get there, I hope I'm as good an older man as he was.

This morning an old friend of mine, upon learning this week's news, wrote, "One of the fallacies of youth is to believe that the important people in your life will be around forever." How true that is. I should have kept in touch with Mr. Foxlow, especially once I started to get books published, but I always let myself be too busy with my own life. Fortunately, my parents did at least some of my job for me. Here's a note Mr. Foxlow wrote them after reading a copy of Liberty Girl they'd given him.



The note is so like him - written with a fountain pen, telling stories, remarking on things he'd noticed in the book. I wouldn't be surprised if it smelled of pipe tobacco when it was first delivered.

C.J. Foxlow is gone from us in body, but he's definitely still here in spirit. It's a safe bet that he'll always be with me.

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It's another long holiday weekend, and without any singing to do, I'm hoping to make some progress on my manuscripts. But before I do that - and also as a way of getting myself into a writing-friendly mindset - here are a few things that happened across my TV or computer screen in the past year. I stopped calling this a "Best of" list a few years ago, because I don't really watch enough stuff to have an opinion on what's the best of everything. These are just a few things that I liked.




For the Best Hour of TV Drama, I'm choosing the season finale of WGN's Manhattan, which recreated the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb. How do you create suspense around a historical event that everyone knows happened? Manhattan found a way, using the season to set up two characters who wanted to stop it, and then giving those two characters a free shot at stopping it. We know they won't - but why won't they? I have to nitpick a little about the dramatic license taken at the end (no one would actually have been able to stand outside staring at the explosion with unprotected eyes), but that's not enough to spoil the hour that precedes it.

And while I'm on the subject of Manhattan, John Benjamin Hickey's role as Frank Winter has got to be my favorite character of the year. I really like Peter Capaldi's run as the Doctor on Doctor Who - he may be my favorite Doctor of the new series - but liking the Doctor comes naturally to me, so I wanted to go with a less obvious choice.



The Best Half-Hour of Anime was the final broadcast/streamed episode of Sound! Euphonium. An earlier episode of this show made the internet explode, but the finale was special to me because I've never seen anything that captured the experience of performing music so well. The school concert band finally performs in the competition they've been preparing for throughout the series, and we go along for the ride through the eyes of the various band members. They even showed us that astonished sense of "What the heck did we just do?" that comes after you really nail a performance.

Sound! Euphonium also includes my favorite anime supporting character of the year, Sapphire Kawashima. At first glance, she looks like just another "moe" character, complete with an even more nauseatingly cute look-alike little sister. Under the surface, though, lurks a musical warrior, with fond memories of the time a blister popped in the middle of a performance and she bled all over her score. From the middle of the series on, the fingers on her left hand are covered with an increasingly intricate web of protective tape, all without much attention called to it. It's just there. I like little touches like that.



He's here, he's there, he's everywhere - Hiroshi Abe, one of my favorite Japanese actors, starred in two dramas I really liked this year. In the TV movie, Ichiban Densha ga Hashitta, he played an engineer trying to get Hiroshima's streetcars running again after the atomic bombing in 1945 (something that really happened, by the way). In the series, Shitamachi Rocket, he played another engineer, this time in charge of a small factory (about the size of the ones I've always worked in) trying to survive in the often corrupt and hostile world of big business. I should mention that Shitamachi Rocket was the #1 show of Japan's Fall 2015 drama season. Imagine that, a show about a factory designing and making things, doing their jobs and loving what they're doing, without a bunch of sleeping around and other nonsense. This is why I watch Japanese TV, because a show like this would never even get on the air in the US.



She's here, she's there, she's everywhere - Nicola Walker showed up three times on my computer this year. I already knew her as Liv Chenka, current companion of Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor in the Big Finish audio dramas. This year, the Eighth Doctor wrapped up his Dark Eyes series and began a new one, Doom Coalition, with Liv Chenka still along for the ride. Meanwhile, Nicola showed up on two different short British crime dramas. On the BBC's River, she played the ghost of the title character's murdered partner, and on ITV's Unforgotten, she played the lead detective investigating a forty year-old murder case.



Lastly, there's my favorite sports moment. It was a year when a lot of my teams finished second - Vanderbilt baseball, the Indiana Fever, the Ottawa RedBlacks - and considering that every other team but one didn't even make it that far, those can all be considered highlights. But the biggest of them all came in November at Martinsville Speedway, when Jeff Gordon battled his way to a victory and earned a spot in the NASCAR Sprint Cup championship race a few weeks later. This was Jeff's farewell season, and while he didn't win the championship, the way he got there was a moment of racing glory. One of racing's all-time greats got to go out on top.

And with that, we say goodbye to 2015. Time to see what 2016 will bring us.

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BBC America ran a Doctor Who marathon through the entire holiday weekend, and I believe they've got another one set for New Year's Eve. The experience taught me a couple noteworthy things.

First, Doctor Who just isn't the same with commercials thrown in. Second, it turns out that I'm not really a "binge watching" kind of person. I liked the old "stripped" syndication format, where they ran one episode per day, but all those episodes back-to-back isn't really my thing.

Besides, it's not like there wasn't plenty of other Doctor Who stuff going on. The latest season just ended a couple of weeks ago, and this year's Christmas special came right on its heels. And that wasn't all - but I'll get to that part in a moment.


If I had to name one complaint about the modern-day Doctor Who showrunners, it's that they're too enamored of the companion characters they create. Their companion has to be the one the Doctor loves most, is willing to do anything for, or mopes and grieves over the most once they're gone. Russell Davies did it with Rose, and now I feel like Steven Moffat has done it with Clara. It causes all kinds of problems. I mean, the Doctor has already had a whole boatload of companions. What makes this one so special? And what does that say about the next one? Because we all know there will be a next one. Singling out one "pet" companion isn't fair to all the others, and can create friction with the audience. Fans don't want to be told, "This companion is the best, so you'd better like her." Fans like to be shown what makes each companion special, and allowed to choose their own favorites for themselves.

With that in mind, I'll say that while there was plenty to like about the final three episodes of the Doctor Who season, I also had problems with it. All the melodrama around Clara's departure bent the rest of the story out of shape. We could still have had very good episodes featuring many of the same essential plot points (Ashildyr, the Time Lords, the Hybrid, etc.), and written Clara out in a much cleaner fashion. In the original series, companions like Jo Grant and Sarah Jane Smith and Romana got terrific and memorable exit scenes without all the histrionics. I would love to see Doctor Who go back to that style.

Which brings me to the Christmas special, "The Husbands of River Song," which does exactly what I was just saying. You can never be absolutely sure that we've seen the last of River, but this episode has all the signs of it being her farewell. And it's terrific - sometimes fun and comical, sometimes poignant and sad, and all without being so overblown. The Doctor knows that River's time is nearing its end. He doesn't spend four billion years punching walls over it, and he doesn't snatch her out of time and shoot Time Lords to run away with her. He spends one last memorable time with her, and then it's done. Best companion exit since, "You were the noblest Romana of them all!"

Meanwhile, this month Big Finish released its first set of audio dramas starring John Hurt as the War Doctor. I think a lot of people were hoping this series would happen. The first set does not disappoint. It helps that Steven Moffat created such a good character in the first place, and it helps that an actor of John Hurt's caliber plays him. It also helps that John Hurt really seems to enjoy the role. He even gets to have his Doctor-y Doctor moment in the third episode, when he strolls into the Dalek control room as if he owns the place.

I only have two nitpicks about the set. First, one reason it's good we have such a well-written and well-played Doctor is because we have very little else in the way of familiar references to grab onto. This could very easily have been just another installment in Big Finish's old Dalek Empire series, with a bunch of characters we've never met fighting a bunch of Daleks we can't distinguish from any other Daleks. It would be nice if future installments included references to or even appearances by some other characters we already know. Big Finish has done stories with Ace training to be a Time Lord, plus there's Leela, two versions of Romana, and various characters from the Gallifrey and Doom Coalition series. Were they still around when the Time War started? I wouldn't mind finding out.

The other nitpick I have is the business of the War Doctor refusing to call himself the Doctor. Everyone else still calls him that, so he's always getting mad at them and telling them not to. Are we supposed to believe that's been going on for all the ages he's been fighting the war? I was getting tired of it by the second episode, so it's hard to imagine anyone putting up with it for centuries. Plus he never gives anyone an alternative, other than "John Smith," which a Time Lord would never use. Does he really expect all the Time Lords just to call him "Hey, you?"

The year ahead could be another big one in the Doctor Who universe. There's a new companion to introduce, plus it will be Peter Capaldi's third season and that means the rumors about his imminent departure will start to fly. Heck, they're already flying. I'd love for him to stick around longer, but three seasons is the typical tenure so we'll just have to see. Over at Big Finish, the War Doctor's story continues, Lalla Ward joins Tom Baker for this year's season of Fourth Doctor Adventures, the "classic" Doctors will meet some monsters from the new series, the Eighth Doctor will meet River Song, and David Tennant and Catherine Tate will return as the Tenth Doctor and Donna Noble. We may need to develop time travel just to have time for it all.

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