29 May 06
The Story of Baseball is the Story of America. Discuss.
A story on the BBC this week looked at the induction of 17 black players in the Hall of Fame from back when baseball was segregated. Buck O’Neil, who is now 94, was offended by the suggestion that baseball was merely a “game.” The story of baseball is the story of America, he insisted. He lived through segregation and the negro leagues and narrowly missed a spot in the Hall of Fame. Buck O’Neil is the consummate player and gentleman.
Okay.
If the teens gave us the frontier spirit, Ty Cobb, and the best pitcher possibly of all time getting poisoned by gas on the Western Front, the twenties gave us the excesses of Babe Ruth and the flappers, if the thirties gave us soup kitchens and Lou Gehrig, if the forties gave us Ted Williams and war, and the fifties ditto and the dominance of the Yankees and the rise of the West Coast, if the sixties gave us an expanded strike zone and a scramble and Haight Ashbury and the seventies Pete Rose and expansions and Watergate, if the eighties gave us Reagan and free agency, the nineties gave us the fall of the alternate superpower and the rise of the big sluggers—McGwire, Bonds, Sosa—what does our current decade augur for the fate of the United States?
Overpaid players juiced on steroids. Megalomaniacal baseball commissioners. Parents screaming when Little League kids miss ground balls. Sound familiar, anyone? And who gets to call a time out?
28 May 06
Packing Up
We went over to Bodega Bay yesterday and this morning where we helped Pica’s Mum pack up the house in anticipation of her great move to Maine. Pending the completion of the house sale, this will happen some time in the middle of June. This probably was my last visit to the place, so I did a few sketches in commemoration.
27 May 06
Little League Game
My friend Donna invited us along to see one of the Little League playoff games this week. Her husband coaches the Texas Rangers. They started off pitching well but were let down by fielding errors. We left when the score was 15-2 or something dreadful…
The talent in these teams is quite uneven and I think the challenge is to raise the general level of skill but not lose heart when every single infielder pulls a Bill Buckner through-the-legs routine. Unfortunately that’s very, very difficult.
Helps when you have Indian takeout, though. (And yes, that is a Pawtucket Red Sox cap in her hand.)
25 May 06
New Use For Health Plan Documents
They make good pads for Morse code practice. At least the blank bits do—Section 400 of this one (Eligibility, Enrollment, and Termination) has 12 pages of dense text and I can only squeeze in one row of practice groups at the bottom. I wonder how many of these 90 page documents go straight to the recycling bin.
24 May 06
A Way of Being in the World
I co-taught a class yesterday on Culturally Inclusive and Non-violent Language as part of the Diversity Awareness Series here at UC Davis (and also the Communications Series).
It’s the third time Karen and I have taught this together, and every time we get a new surprise. It’s very powerful to have a group of people brainstorm a huge list of expressions that are loaded in some way but that are such a part of everyday speech we rarely question them or even, in some cases, know what they meant originally (a good example here is “rule of thumb,” which refers to the girth of a stick with which it used to be permissible to beat one’s wife—if it was thicker than a thumb, presumably a man’s, it was illegal).
To raise our awareness of how our speech affects others and transforms the world is one of the things addressed in a post by Rana over at Frogs and Ravens. She draws the distinction between Political and political. It’s a good post. Please read it.
23 May 06
Artichoke Dreaming
Pica has planted a couple of artichokes in the garden by now, and we’re hoping that they give fruit that is as delicious as what Karen gave us from her community plot the other day.
22 May 06
A Frenzy of Seeds
I put the kettle on this morning and took the remainder of yesterday’s artichokes (thanks, dear Karen!) out to the compost. We had rain yesterday, a late soaking rain that has perked the California poppies up along with everything else.
I’ve pretty much finished the fence around the garden to keep out jackrabbits and bunnies. (It will not work for squirrels and I’ll have to figure that one out; they apparently love tomatoes.)
I looked in, admiring the artichoke plants I’ve almost certainly planted too late in the season.
My heart sank.
There, in a puddle, were a bunch of seed packets. Wet. Well on their way to germination.
I tore open the packets and started spreading them, pell mell, on the moist good soil. Parsley. (Parsley is not a garnish for me, it’s its own food group.) Mesclun. Spring onions. Arugula. Yard-long beans. Sunflowers. Turned around to get a new packet; it was parsley. The parsley I had planted was, in fact, jalapeño chiles.
I am willing to be entertained by what happens in all this…
21 May 06
Enough Already
Now that Barry Bonds has tied Babe Ruth’s home run record, must every story about the San Francisco Giants be about Bonds? The headlines in today’s Yahoo! Sports baseball section about the Giants’ game reads “Bonds stays at 714 homers, Giants win”. It’s not until four paragraphs into the story do we learn that Matt Cain pitched the game of his lifetime, allowing only one hit and throwing a complete-game shutout. The Giants won 6-0.
This evening we watched half of the episode that deals with the Babe Ruth era, the 1920s, in the Ken Burns baseball series.
20 May 06
Truth and Beauty
We returned this morning to Cold Canyon for a journal entry workshop. The person leading it, Ed Dawkins, wanted us to focus on Truth and Beauty. My immediate reaction on seeing the workshop advertised was Keats: a romantic’s view of the universe, but there are worse ones… but Dawkins’ counterpart was Whitehead, talking about half-truths and how truth is impossible without beauty.
The first part we were to focus on the beauty within ourselves, and how that shapes our truths. The second section was dwelling in the moment. I was hearing wrentits and hutton’s vireos and, toward the top of the trail, black-headed grosbeaks but we were encouraged to eschew specificity for general input. It was hard, but it was useful.
My mind kept turning to Abu Ghraib. It was inevitable. What role has beauty there? Or truth, for that matter? How will the people who survive that experience—captors or captive—ever experience either truth or beauty again? When Truth, a half-truth informed by ill-informed religious belief, starts to run the world, we are all in for a nasty shock. And worse, if we are at the butt end of a rifle or cigarette. Evil will reign.
Yet there is something here, something that calls. The gray pine—digger pine, foothill pine, ghost pine, pine of more names than we can utter, most of them unuttered by any human—sits in that canyon and is. Is beauty. Is truth. Our job is to attend to it. Otherwise it’s all smoke and mirrors, or dogs in torture chambers.
19 May 06
Conservation Commons
I heard a seminar today by Tom Moritz, who is a librarian who has been at the American Museum of Natural History and prior to that the California Academy of Science and has just taken up a position at the Getty Research Institute. Tom is a great proponent of the Conservation Commons, the purpose of which “is to ensure open access and fair use of data, information, knowledge, and expertise on the conservation of biodiversity for the benefit of the global conservation community and beyond.” The idea of the Conservation Commons has grown out of the Creative Commons movement, the idea of the latter being to give creators a spectrum of possibilities to license their work between full copyright and the public domain, “a some rights reserved” notion of copyright. There have been many endorsers of the Conservation Commons to date, but the idea of open access to data is still a difficult one for a lot of folks to work with.