Randy’s Blog

A couple of weeks ago was a birthday/furlough/vacation extravaganza. I was on furlough for the week, which happened to coincide with my birthday, so Wendy used vacation time to take the week off of work. I opened presents, we had a delicious birthday carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, and we also explored some hiking and biking trails we'd never been to before.

Somme Woods

We started off by visiting the hiking trails at Somme Woods in Northbrook. Unfortunately, they were a big disappointment. The trail was very narrow, with weeds as tall as me on both sides. Although the woods were pretty, I did not enjoy walking through giant weeds. After a quarter of a mile we gave up.

All was not lost, though. We left Somme Woods and drove to a nearby city park (the kind with playgrounds and freshly mowed grass and no man-sized weeds) where we had a nice picnic lunch. Then we went across the street and got ice cream from Graeter's, which is an ice cream chain we first visited in Cincinnati last year on our trip to the Serpent Mound (see this post).

Sun Lake Forest Preserve

The next day we went on a hike at the Sun Lake Forest Preserve in Lake County. This trail was very wide, much more my style:

We went on a 2.5 mile hike, stopping at one point to take a picture of Sun Lake way off in the distance.

The only drawback to this hike was the heat. We didn't realize how hot it was when we started, and were both beginning to melt by the end. Now that I think about it, there really weren't that many trees for a so-called forest preserve. It would have been nice to have a bit more shade on this hike.

Long Prairie Trail

The next day we went for a bike ride on the Long Prairie Trail, and it was fantastic. The trail was mostly flat and the weather was perfect (sunny, in the 70s, with a cool breeze). We rode through a couple of small towns, past a lot of cornfields, and through numerous "tree tunnels" that provided lots of shade. The trail is 15 miles long, but after 7 miles we decided to take a short break and turn around, so we rode 14 miles round trip. That's our longest ride of the year.

Here's the start of the trail:

One of many tree tunnels:

One of many cornfields:

I really liked how the trail had little rest stops off the main trail, so you could take a break without being in the way of other bikers.

We saw several of these "Farm Crossing" signs. I guess it's where tractors and other farm equipment can cross over the trail.

Even though it's a 45-minute drive to get to the trail, this is easily one of my new favorites. I hope to go back there sometime soon and hopefully one day ride all 15 miles of it.

In my recent blog post about Turtles, I mentioned an article I read about the Loch Ness monster. That article had several references to the blog lochnessmystery.blogspot.com, which I hadn't heard of, so I started following it via my RSS reader.

Saturday afternoon I read the latest post from the blog, about an unidentified object in a recent photo of Loch Ness, which most people thought looked suspiciously like the head of a snorkeler. Shortly after reading that I decided to go for a walk around the neighborhood. That article must have put me in a Loch-Ness frame of mind, because as I walked along the large pond near our house, I saw a long thin neck and head of a bird sticking out of the water, and I thought "That's funny, that looks almost exactly like a small Loch Ness monster." I also though it was unusual, because the birds we usually see on the pond (ducks, geese, herons, swans, egrets) always float on the water, never underneath.

The neck and head then disappeared underwater. With my curiosity piqued, I pulled my phone out and started recording a video, waiting for the bird to reappear. About 15 seconds later the head and neck reappeared, and eventually the bird's body surfaced and it flew away.

After I got home, I asked Wendy, who has become the resident bird expert in our household, thanks to the 2 bird identification apps she installed on her phone, what kind of bird it might have been. She plugged in the facts I reported into one of the apps, and said "It was probably a double-crested cormorant." After looking up more information online, that sounds right.

First, here's a close-up of the head and neck as it reappeared:

And of the bird as it flew away (it stayed just above the water as it flew):

When I looked up more information about cormorants, one of the first things I read was from this article:

They can dive up to 25 feet deep in pursuit of prey or cruise just below the surface with only their long necks and heads above the water — giving the appearance of a periscope or a cross between snake and bird.

That describes exactly what I saw! The article also mentions that cormorants nearly went extinct due to "pesticides and persecution": because they eat fish, cormorants were viewed as pests by commercial fishermen and fish hatcheries. In 1974, only 12 cormorant nests existed in Illinois, all in 2 trees along the Mississippi River. But, after the pesticides were banned, they've become common again in the state. By 2018, there were 40,000 nesting pairs in the Great Lakes area. That's quite a comeback!

I also read this article ("Cool Cormorants") that had some neat facts:

• Cormorant feathers are not waterproof. Instead, they get waterlogged, which helps them sink and dive better.
• After exiting the water, they sit in the sun with their wings spread open, to help dry their feathers.
• Their short wings are great for use as rudders under the water, but it comes with a price: "cormorants have the highest energy cost of any flying bird".
• After eating they regurgitate pellets containing fish bones and other indigestible parts.

This evening, Wendy and I went for a bike ride around the neighborhood. At one point, we passed by the pond and there happened to be a cormorant sitting in plain sight on the shore:

It seemed fairly oblivious to what was going on. An SUV stopped briefly so the driver could get a good look at it. A couple out for a walk stopped to watch it, and then Wendy and I parked our bikes next to it so I could take the picture. The cormorant seemed completely unconcerned about all the attention. I then remembered that as I was walking around Saturday afternoon, I saw the dead body of a dark-colored bird floating along the shore. Now I wonder if it could have been this cormorant's mate.

Finally, I'm not the only one to think that cormorants look like a small Loch Ness monster. A quick Google search turned up several other articles making the same observation, including this one from, funnily enough, The Oklahoman.

Last week I read this article from Scientific American, which talks about the 3 types of neutrinos. Bizarrely, as a neutrino particle flies through space it actually oscillates between all 3 types. If you could fly along with it, you would see the particle shifting between each one. Even more bizarre is that scientists now think there's a 4th type of neutrino that may be a link to dark matter, and if you were were flying along, you would see the neutrino disappear as it shifted into this new type, then reappear some time and distance later when it shifted back. And, ranking as the most bizarre of all (the taking of the bizarreness cake!), all of this is eerily similar to a story Alvin Schwartz told in An Unlikely Prophet, which I didn't have room to share in my original blog post about the book.

The story is how something called laminar flow (a concept from fluid dynamics) caused the FBI to censor Superman.

In the early 1940s, Alvin Schwartz was writing the Superman comic strip for daily newspapers. He'd created a boring, "by-the-book" physics professor who refused to believe Superman could fly faster than the speed of light because it violated Einstein's theories of relativity. Schwartz wanted Superman to prove the professor wrong, but he couldn't think how to do it. He was stuck. 

One weekend, while visiting his wife's family in Canada, he turned on the TV to pass the time. A BBC program happened to be on, which showed an experiment demonstrating laminar flow. I couldn't find an online video of exactly what he saw, but I did find one that was very close. I've embedded the video below, and I recommend watching it now. It's only 2 minutes long, and it is wild. Here it is (and here's a direct link):

In the experiment Schwartz watched on TV, there was a beaker filled with a liquid (glycerine), with 1 drop of black ink on the surface. As the beaker was stirred the drop spread out into a long thin circle, and then disappeared completely. When stirring was reversed, the long thin circle reappeared, and formed back into the original drop of ink.

Watching that experiment caused Schwartz to have a mystical experience. He understood that "the universe was always a single whole" and "that nothing was ever lost". He says:

In other words, a particle could disappear into the whole and then reemerge a moment or possibly even centuries later.

(That sounds strangely similar to the neutrino article!)

The "universal totality" Schwartz experienced also gave him a sense that time does not exist. And if there's no time, the speed of light is no longer a barrier. And that gave him an idea on how to solve his Superman story. He had Superman stand inside a particle accelerator (called cyclotrons back then). When the professor saw that Superman was unharmed by the smashing of atoms, he was finally convinced that Superman existed beyond the laws of physics.

But there was one other thing Schwartz intuited from his mystical experience:

I had also seen something else in that timeless and universal all into which I had plunged as I watched that [BBC] experiment. I had seen, coming out of that cyclotron, an explosion greater than anyone had ever seen before on earth.

With the story wrapped up, Schwartz sent it to the editor and that was that. He didn't bother reading the comic strip as it was printed in the paper. But, years later, he read an article in the New York Post called "Superman Had It First". He learned that the FBI had censored the end of his Superman story before it was printed, because the Manhattan Project was still "the world's most carefully guarded secret" at the time! The FBI even interviewed Jerry Siegel, one of Superman's creators, but neither he nor the publisher wanted it known that Superman was being ghost written, so they never told the FBI who the real author was. And then they never bothered telling the author that the FBI censored his story!

I tried finding an online copy of that New York Post article, but wasn't able to. I did find this clipping, though, from an unknown newspaper. It claims that instead of printing Schwartz's ending, the publisher had Superman step out of the cyclotron, say he "never felt better", and then go to a baseball game where he played all 9 positions.

So far this year I had only ridden my bike around the neighborhood. But this extended-holiday weekend I made two trips to a bike trail. Thursday I went for a 6.34 mile solo ride on the Prairie Trail, and Saturday Wendy and I went for a 7.11 mile ride on a different section of the same trail.

Both days were hot and sunny, but I/we avoided the worst of the heat by going in the mid-morning. On the Thursday ride, there was a tree company trimming trees along the trail, so I had to navigate around trucks and men in hard hats grinding up branches. There were no such obstacles on our Saturday ride, but there were a lot of other people out riding and it seemed like everyone was in a friendly, cheerful mood.

Here are some photos from both rides:

Season Totals:

• Distance = 54.07 miles
• Total Time = 5 hours 56 minutes.

Since the middle of March, I've been tracking the daily COVID-19 statistics for Illinois in a spreadsheet. When I started doing this, I would watch Dr. Ngozi Ezike (the head of the Illinois Department of Public Health) announce the numbers for the previous day at the governor's daily press conference. Over time, those daily press conferences ended, but the numbers are still posted online each afternoon. So each day I get those numbers and plug them into the Google spreadsheet I created, and a bunch of formulas churn out all the data points I'm interested in.

My main reason for doing this is so I can create the charts I want to see. Now that I've got about 3 and a half months worth of data, I thought I'd share those charts.

I started out by charting the number of positive cases each day:

It's an interesting chart, but one day Dr. Ezike said that when you see a day or two of decreases, you can't assume it's a trend. To detect trends, you really need to look at weekly data. So I made a chart summarizing the data by each week. I have to confess it took me a really long time to figure out how to make the chart and get the axes labeled correctly. So here are the positive cases in Illinois summarized by week:

As you can see, we reached a peak the first week of May, and its been steadily declining until this week, which saw a small increase (up 17% from last week).

Here's the weekly data for COVID-19 deaths in Illinois:

It also peaked the first week in May.

Lately I've been reading articles about other states having a record high number of positive tests. What I really want to know when I read those stories is what is the percentage of positive tests in those states and is it changing? I recently created this chart to see what that looks like for Illinois:

Outside of one 47% outlier, Illinois peaked in the low to mid 20% positive range. For the past couple of weeks, Illinois has been steady at 2-3% of tests being positive.

At one point, Illinois saw a jump in the number of positive tests, which caused some concern among the public. The governor and Dr. Ezike assured everyone that it was okay, because the percent of positive tests was staying the same. The high number of positives was just because we ramped up the number of tests being performed. Last I heard, there were 3 labs in the state, one in north, one in the central, and one in the south, which were running tests 24/7. Here's a chart I made just now, looking at the number of tests performed in Illinois:

For the most part, Illinois has done 20-30,000 tests per day, but the past 3 days have all been over 30,000.

Finally, I've been keeping track of the numbers for McHenry County. Here are the weekly totals for positives and deaths.

Both peaked the first week in May, and this week saw a sizable 35% increase in positive cases.

It will be interesting to see how all of these numbers change in the future.

On Sunday, Google Photos gave me a "Rediscover This Day" notification, showing pictures I'd taken exactly 6 years ago. On that day, my parents were visiting us, we went to a car museum, and we saw a big turtle crossing our yard:

Getting that notification was funny timing, because I planned on starting this blog post talking about October of last year, when my parents were visiting us (they rode the train from Arizona!), and we encountered a big turtle while on a walk around the neighborhood. We thought the turtle might be dead at first, because it was so motionless and it appeared to have an injured eye. But we did see it move, so it was alive:

Continuing chronologically, in February Wendy and I went on a cruise to the Caribbean. The ship's auditorium had a huge wrap-around screen, and one day we watched a video presentation about life in the Caribbean, which featured a segment on sea turtles.

I didn't know that sea turtles swim all the way across the Atlantic ocean, then all the way back, and that females find the same spot of beach they were born on to lay their eggs. You can watch a video of the segment here.

One of the stops in our cruise was the Dominican Republic, where we went to a monkey habitat and had squirrel monkeys sit on our heads! While we were there, I bought a wood carving of a sea turtle.

As I was checking out, a woman said she bought one just like it once, and hung it on a wall in her house. That's a good idea, but I didn't think to ask what she used to hang it up. So for now it sits near the turtle carving I bought at the Serpent Mound in Ohio.

Another stop during the cruise was St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, where we rode a tram to the top of Paradise Point. On the way up, we talked to a couple who had just been snorkeling with sea turtles. If I had known that was an option, I might have done it! Here's the view from Paradise Point:

A few weeks after the cruise, I was reading the latest issue of the JSE (The Journal of Scientific Exploration -- I wrote about it long ago), and there was an article where the author proposed a cryptid (unknown) sea turtle as an explanation for the Loch Ness monster! Sea turtles match the existing data better than the usual explanation of plesiosaurs, because turtles are active in deep water, near the surface, and on land. I did not know there have been numerous sightings of the Loch Ness monster on land! The author proposes searching for the remains of egg nests along the beaches of the loch as a possible way to prove the theory.

Continuing right along, in April Wendy and I were walking around the neighborhood when we encountered a big turtle. I wondered if it was the same one I saw with my parents last fall, but it was so muddy I couldn't tell if it had the same damaged eye:

And finally, we reach today. This afternoon the remnants of tropical storm Cristobal arrived, bringing rain and strong winds, and causing the power in our house to flicker just enough to make all the electronics reset. As I waited for the internet router to boot up, I went downstairs and saw a big turtle crossing our yard!

Truly, 'tis the season of turtles!

A quick note: At work this week they've been selling some leftover books to raise funds for the United Way. Today I was looking through them and found a graphic novel collecting old Superman comics. One of them was written by Alvin Schwartz! It's funny how those things happen.

I bought the book, of course.

Lately I've been reading books about comic books. I started with Mutants and Mystics by Jeffrey Kripal, which was a fascinating history of comics books and science fiction, showing how authors have incorporated their paranormal experiences into their stories. It was so good that part of me wants to re-read it and take copious notes.

But before doing that, I decided to read a book discussed in Mutants and Mystics, called An Unlikely Prophet by Alvin Schwartz:

Schwartz wrote Superman and Batman comics in the 1940s and '50s. Decades later, in his eighties, he had a kind of awakening, where he realized how often Superman and the paranormal intertwined during his life. The book describes how he came to that realization. It's marketed as an autobiography, but it very effectively weaves in his imagination. So much so that it's hard to tell which parts are real and which aren't, and that's probably the whole point. For me, this was the most profound, reality-shattering book I've ever read. I immediately read it again, taking lots of notes the second time.

Schwartz says that late in his life he was contacted by a man claiming to be a tulpa: a living person created entirely out of pure thought by someone else. In other words, a fully materialized thought form. The tulpa says he's there to help Schwartz finish creating his own Superman tulpa, a process he unknowingly started while writing Superman comics early in his life, but never finished.

This is crazy, right? Schwartz agreed, telling the man such things aren't possible. People in the twentieth century know better (the book was published in 1997). The tulpa says:

"But what you call the twentieth century, Mr. Schwartz, is only an atmosphere--or a climate. It does not reach everywhere. The forces that make up each climate are never quite the same."

After that he talked about how complex reality is. He used the word as though it had quotation marks around it. He said reality had many levels of which we in the West knew only a single one.

... Thongden's response was that the body itself is a composite and has no essential reality. A so-called out-of-body state, he said, is no different from any kind of in-body state that incorporates flying or any other unusual abilities. Thongden insisted that one such state is no more likely than another except that there seems to be, in our Western culture at this particular time, a consensus that the nonflying state is the "real" state.

"I'm beginning to realize we live in a very strange world, Kay. We pass our everyday lives as though it simply weren't so."

The tulpa keeps pushing Schwartz:

"Mr. Schwartz, have you ever wondered why one cannot see from the inside? Is there a law that keeps you bound to the outside--to the external? Is there a law that says you are fixed in just one moment of time, at one moment of your age, at one place only? Your purpose in being here today is to abandon that prejudice by entering the Path without Form."

At my day job, I deal with a lot of books. Last Friday, late in the afternoon, I stumbled across, purely by accident, a book called After Life: Ways We Think About Death. It was a short book, written for middle school students, and the description said it "examines the history, beliefs and customs surrounding death in cultures around the world". That sounded interesting, so I opened it up and started reading.

I was startled almost immediately when I saw the book was dedicated to 2 people: one named Wendy, and one named Joy! What a strange coincidence, I thought. I know people with those names. In the back of my mind, I hoped it wasn't some kind of ill omen, a sign that I should read it because of some impending death.

I put those thoughts aside and skimmed through the book. A note at the beginning said that not talking about death to kids can make it bigger and scarier for them, so the author hoped to open the door to discussing it, by looking at how science and culture look at death. I liked that the first chapter started by talking about how we are all made of stardust, and how the atoms of all living things get recycled into other living things over many years. Overall, it was an interesting read.

To be honest, though, I never got the idea of the ill omen out of my head. It gave me an ominous feeling for most of the weekend. That feeling was replaced with shock when the news broke on Sunday that Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash. After the initial shock wore off (and it took a while, because, boy, that was a big shock!), it occurred to me that maybe the strange coincidence and ominous feeling were really a kind of premonition. Who knows.

What I do know is that I became a Kobe Bryant fan by way of Coach Phil Jackson. Way back in the '90s, I was a big fan of Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and the Chicago Bulls. As I watched them win championship after championship, it dawned on me that it had to be more than Jordan and Pippen. They must have a really good coach, too. At some point while I was in college, I looked around to see what I could learn about their coach, Phil Jackson. I bought a copy of his autobiography, called Sacred Hoops: Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior. In it, I learned that his lifelong quest was to merge basketball and spirituality. That was such a bizarre goal that I became an instant fan of him as a coach.

After the Bulls dynasty ended, Phil took a year off and then became head coach of the Lakers, with superstars Kobe and Shaq on the team. Thus, I became a big Lakers fan, and from 1999 - 2011 (I can't believe it was that long!) I cheered for Phil, Kobe, Shaq, and everyone else on the team as they won championship after championship, but also as they endured drama after drama (and boy, was there a lot of it!).

In hindsight, no wonder I was so shocked at Kobe's death. I spent an entire decade reading and watching and rooting for all things Lakers.

To come full circle, here are some random, interesting things I learned from the After Life book:

• During the plague, "doctors wore masks with birdlike beaks filled with dried flowers, herbs and spices, which they thought would protect them from the disease". I've seen drawings of plague doctors wearing those masks, but I never knew why they wore them.
• At a nursing home in Rhode Island, a cat named Oscar always knew when people were about to die. Ever since he was young, he would jump on a bed and cuddle with someone, who then died a few hours later. It got to the point that the nursing home staff would call family members as soon as Oscar jumped on someone's bed. A doctor wrote about Oscar in a medical journal.
• When talking about cremation, the book noted creative things people have done with cremated remains, like turn them into fireworks, artificial diamonds, and even underwater reefs. I'm reminded of my previous blog post, where a comic book writer requested his remains be turned into a comic book.
• The book ended with a section on grief. It mentioned the five stages of grief, but said the problem with it is that it implies a linear approach, where you come out the other end suddenly feeling better. The book suggested a different idea, the shape of the number 8, where grief is more like a cycle. The positive feelings are on top and the negative on the bottom, and you can move around in any order, at any time.

The book was an interesting, but rather somber, read.

When it comes to comics, I love cosmic stories and cosmic characters. My favorite superhero is the Silver Surfer, who roams through space on a surfboard:

And my favorite comic book story is the 6-issue limited series The Infinity Gauntlet, in which Thanos the Mad Titan uses the Infinity gems to gain control over the entire universe.

(The plot of this series inspired the recent Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame movies.)

Back when I collected comics, there was another cosmic superhero who had his own series: Quasar, wielder of the quantum bands.

I would have loved to read more Quasar way back then (the early '90s), but I didn't have the funds to do so. After my deep dive into Darkhawk a few years ago (which I wrote about here), I started thinking about doing the same with Quasar. I went to ebay and found someone selling the entire 60-issue run of Quasar comics. The price was a bit too steep, though, and I didn't even know if the series was any good. All I knew was that I liked cosmic characters, and Quasar was one. So I didn't buy it.

Months later, I discovered the comic-book writer J.M. DeMatteis and went down a deep rabbit hole of reading his works (see this post, this post, and this one too). At some point during all of that, I came across a comment he made about Quasar. I can't find the exact quote, but it was something like this:

"Quasar was the best writing of Mark Gruenwald's career."

And I am here to tell you that I LOVED it. All 60 issues. It was cosmic to the max. The writing was outstanding, and it was worth every penny. Apparently Gruenwald had realized that none of Marvel's cosmic characters were human (even the Silver Surfer was from another planet), so his goal with Quasar was to do cosmic from the human perspective. Well, it worked out great.

I looked around for other comics written by Mark Gruenwald, and I learned that he considered his 12-issue limited series The Squadron Supreme to be his magnum opus. It was available through my Marvel Unlimited digital subscription, so it went on my reading list. I actually started reading it last year, when flying home from Phoenix. I got through 3 and a half issues on the plane, but for some reason never kept reading it afterwards.

I was thinking about all of this last week, as Wendy and I were getting ready to fly to Phoenix to visit my family. So I started reading The Squadron Supreme again a few days before our flight. For whatever reason, I was hooked this time. I got over halfway through the series before our flight, and I just barely managed to finish reading it on the plane: I read the last page of the last issue right as our plane pulled up to the gate and the door opened!

The Squadron Supreme, although it wasn't cosmic, was still really good. It's about human civilization being on the brink of collapse, and a group of superheroes installing themselves as world leaders with the goal of solving all of humanity's problems: crime, poverty, hunger, war, disease, even death itself. As you can probably imagine, things go horribly wrong.

On the flight back from Phoenix, I read the much-shorter sequel, also written by Gruenwald, called The Squadron Supreme: Death of a Universe. It actually had a cosmic plot, and it was fantastic. Even better than the original 12 issues, in my opinion.

All of this is to say I am now a huge fan of Mark Gruenwald, but I am very sad to report that he died suddenly in 1996, in his early 40's, due to an undiagnosed heart defect. He was such a huge fan of comics, though, that he requested his ashes be used to make a comic book. To honor that wish, when the 12 issues of The Squadron Supreme were collected into a graphic novel, Mark's ashes were mixed into the ink used for printing.

How crazy is that!