Scholarship Competitions.

Sorry.

This is another sports post. Some people write about crafts, some about their new children, some about their wildly exciting travels. I just moved to a new state and structured activity doesn't start for a while, so the Orioles 12-0 win over the Yanquis of former New Amsterdam is the highlight of my day.
Let's be clear that being a fan of the Orioles is not a lighthearted undertaking. They haven't been good in 10 years, and their owner is not willing to spend on the players it takes to compete against my least favorite professional sport franchises (the Yanquis and the Red Sox, who have formed themselves into a slightly cuter incarnation of the Yanquis). Since firing Sam Perlozzo, an inept manager if ever I saw one, the O's have been above .500, recently taking series from both of the aforementioned Atlantic seaboard baseball vampires. This makes me happy, and a 12-0 win against the New York American league ballclub, viewed in HD at home, made my week.
Pity me if you must, but I'm happy.

756

I don't really want to write about 756. Everything that could possibly be said about it has been said several times in recent weeks. It's an incredible accomplishment by a guy who is the best player of his generation, and in the pantheon of best ever. Ty Cobb and Pete Rose weren't real nice guys either, and Gaylord Perry and Whitey Ford cheated, so it seems to me that the expectation that Barry Bonds has to be nice and clean is a bit misplaced. I reserve the right not to root for him, and exercise that right routinely, but 756 is an incredible achievement.

Big Country and I witnessed .13% of Barry's home runs. It was an inside-out, opposite field shot off of his fists in Camden Yards, against Rodrigo Lopez. Maybe he had some help making it go so far, but making good contact and driving that pitch is a feat that very, very few baseball players ever could have pulled off, and one that drugs cannot perform for you. Congratulations, BLB.

Thanks, #8.

Skip Prosser

Skip Prosser was one of the good guys.

garden state variety post

Just some odds and ends this time, with numbers next to them to give the illusion of organized thought.

1. Baltimore's road back to baseball decency certainly includes Jeremy Guthrie. Incidentally, since I just got internet service here, today's game was the first I've listened to since leaving Berkeley. I listened to it while making...
2. Seared wasabi-glazed tuna, with cold soba noodles and edamame on the side. This, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the finest meals I have ever cooked, and it was on the cheap too, thanks to Trader Joe's fine selection of frozen fish. The whole meal for two clocked in at about 10 bucks.
3. 9 of the 10 dumbest traffic patterns I've seen in my life are in New Jersey, a state I've lived in for 2 weeks.
4. Other than #3 and absurd state bureaucracies that make everything take longer than it should, NJ is great. The summer weather is nice, but not oppressive, NYC is right there (cheap options for getting into town have been located and will soon be explored), and it's on the correct coast. The apartment is excellent, and I feel like a king in my new kitchen (many readers may not know until this post that I love to cook).
5. K and I have visited two churches here so far. At the first, they had us, as newcomers, present the elements for the Eucharist. The one this morning removed the epistle and replaced it with a contemporary spiritual text. So far the first one is the favorite. Paul's not my best friend, but I think churches need to come to grips with him.
6. The Sunday NY Times is fun for the whole family. K and I enjoy the excellent reporting and the day-long process of perusing it, and the cats find it to be an excellent place to take a nap.
7. As a veteran of several different stores in the chain, I can safely say that IKEA is what hell would look like if we let Swedes design it and fill it with largely practical and attractive furniture. It provides the illusion of escape at all times. The Elizabeth, NJ location is right next to the turnpike and Newark airport, and yet mysteriously hard to get to.
8. I read articles in last month's Harper's about the greening of urban spaces in Detroit and also about the "topography of resurrection" in NOLA. Even given the melodramatic slant of both articles, I've been daydreaming about the next phase of urban development in the US, post-whatever. Jurgen Moltmann (rightly, I think) cautioned a recent audience not to confuse the end of our society with the end of the world, so I'm not labelling anything apocalyptic.
9. UNC's basketball recruits for the '08-'09 season are nasty.
10. I'll be back more often now that I'm settled in NJ and have reliable access to the interwebs.

Take care.

Road Trip update...

Exhaustion and lousy wifi have kept me from updating thus far, so here's a quick update.
Day one of the drive took us through the Sierras, the state of Nevada (the northern part, which is huge and desolate), and into Salt Lake City. Nevada still creeps me out, since I-80 takes you through Reno and then 410 more miles of pretty much nothing before dumping you into Utah and the salt flats, which I thought were way cool. Salt Lake seems like a nice place, and predictably enough, does not present many dinner options at 9 PM on a Sunday.
Day 2 included the Wasatch range in Utah (which is really just an amazingly beautiful state) and then Wyoming. Wyoming is like Nevada, but greener; long, generally pretty, and with hardly any towns. My coastal brain doesn't cope too well with being 50 miles from the nearest town. K and I stopped in North Platte, Nebraska, which had the lowest budget local news I've seen (the library is getting new carpet, and swimming lessons are a good way to keep your kid from drowning this summer), but seemed like a nice quiet place.
Day 3, yesterday, ended in Davenport, Iowa, after crossing the rest of Nebraska and Iowa. K and I ate at a brewery downtown and walked along the Mississippi (Davenport is the biggest town on the Big Muddy without a levee). It was a nice way to spend and evening.
Today we crossed the river, Illinois (including the Chicago southland), Indiana, and most of Ohio, ending up here in Cleveland. We went to Jacobs Field to see the Indians-A's game, which had gotten out of hand before the weather got ugly, chasing us back to the hotel.
Tomorrow, we'll drive to Cherry Hill, NJ, so K can get licensed to work in the Garden State, and will drive from there to NC on Friday. It's been a nice trip, though we're tired of driving, and can't wait to relax in NC. Current mileage total is 2200 and some change. We're on Eastern Standard Time again, it's humid, and there's a thunderstorm outside. It's funny to realize all the things we've missed on the left coast...

baseball addendum

So the Orioles fired their manager, Sam Perlozzo, a couple of days ago. I think it was the right call- he made several game-losing decisions this year that violated all rules of common sense and baseball strategy. You can't have the manager losing games for you. Today Joe Girardi, the O's first choice for the job, turned down the job. This is fine with me, and here is why:

According to the Baltimore Sun, Davey Johnson is interested in the job. Davey Johnson has managed a world series team, but that's not why I like him. He played for the O's during the good times, which helps. He managed the O's to consecutive playoff appearances, including the wire-to-wire first place run of 1997, after which he was named AL manager of the year. Davey left amidst a conflict with Peter Angelos, who is a poor man's George Steinbrenner. Angelos, though, has just hired successful baseball man Andy MacPhail to be the Chief Operating Officer, and it seems that Andy has control of baseball operations. The time is right for Davey to come back, as Angelos is currently eating the crow which has been carefully prepared and seasoned during the past 10 consecutive losing seasons.

Davey Johnson is one of the only managers around who actually adds wins to his team. A good manager usually just doesn't get in the way, allowing the team to run its natural course. Davey understands players and also holds a friggin' degree in math, meaning he can make use of statistical analysis, which the Oakland A's and Boston Red Sox have proven to be a very good way to strategize and win games (see: Moneyball, 2004 World Series). Hiring Davey will make the team better.

The other named being kicked around for the job is Dusty Baker. I will probably develop a stutter if the O's hire him. Just get Davey. Do whatever it takes to get Davey.

Best get moving.

The big move is nigh. K had her last day of work on Tuesday, and we are in full-time packing and logistics mode. This, I think, is probably the worst part of a cross-country move. The numbers of i's to be dotted and t's to be crossed seems to multiply exponentially as departure nears. The City of Berkeley gets some props, though, as the staff at their permit center was actually very helpful in the process of acquiring the necessary permits for parking a moving truck on our city street for several days. Their paperwork, like all government agencies, was still a special vision of hell, but the people were very nice.

ENORMOUS props go out to my parents and sister. The whole gang, including my brother, was out here last week, and we had a good time being Bay Area tourists and visiting Yosemite. The truly clutch aspect of their visit came when my parents and sister took our cats back to NC with them on their respective flights. Taking a cat on a plane is not the simplest of endeavors, and it made their traveling considerably more complex. Now, though, our cats are happily in the 'boro, eating, drinking, pooping and being merry, and K and I get to make the transcontinental road trip sans felines. This means we can get out of the car when we stop for lunch, can stay in any hotel we find, and have more freetime at night. We plan to attend at least one baseball game on the way out, and will explore our options as we go. Our drive out here was not so much fun, because we had an unhappy cat singing the blues in the back seat. This will be much better.

In the department of looking beyond the tip of my own nose, the best news this week has to be the birth of Tadpole Taco Country, son of Big and E Country, good friends of ours in NC. That's one lucky baby, getting to have parents like them. We'll get to visit the Countries and meet the baby in a couple of weeks, which is something I am looking forward to a whole lot, on several levels.

Assuming that they have internet access in our hotels next week, look for some incredibly self-indulgent posts from the road. As a quick prelude, though:
The desert scares me. Wyoming is sparsely populated. Nebraska is long and flat. Iowa is like Bill Bryson said it was. Chicago! Toll roads suck. Jacobs Field is a nice baseball park. Woohoo, we're back on the right coast! Relaxing in NC.

Dear ESPN,

Please stop labelling as "top plays" or "web gems" plays in which an outfielder playing in the HHH Metrodome reaches over the wall to bring back a would-be homer. Torii Hunter is a great center fielder, but the left and center field wall in the Homerdome is seven feet high. Torii is 6'2". Yours truly, a profoundly non-athletic 6'0" beanpole, could "rob someone of a home run" in the Homerdome without leaving my feet. My considerable 12" or so vertical leap would allow me to haul in a ball that would have cleared the wall by nearly two feet. If I could do it, it's not a top play. Thanks,

SJL

If you thought the pig was gross...

...you should see the pictures I could have taken at the Bay to Breakers race in SF on Sunday. K wanted to check out the race for her birthday, and many of the city's sedentary consumers of pizza and beer showed up in their commemorative birthday suits. After about 20 minutes, though, you stop noticing them, and the costumes really are great at Bay to Breakers; imagine Halloween in Chapel Hill on acid and with warmer weather. My personal favorite was the group of people that dressed up as a school of salmon and then went the wrong way on the course.

The presentation of K's birthday present is delayed until Friday, when her twin sister gets here. The suspense about the present is palpable in the arranging your lamp household this week.

I received an empty diploma holder and an inside out hood on Friday at graduation. Grades should go final in the coming days, thus making my status as a Master of Theology official. It's nice to have a break from the academic grind, as I worked right through Winter Break and really haven't relaxed since last summer. The primary goal now is to move to New Jersey.

Thanks to those who participated in the hat survey earlier this spring. I received a Lookouts hat as a graduation gift. K says it looks like an Elmer Fudd hat. I think it's just fine.

Sacre bleu!

Click on the pig to see more creepy ads.

Teach your children well

Smoking is now on the list of things that can get a movie a more restrictive rating. I wonder when murder, pathetic female role models, misrepresentation of Native Americans and Virginia geography, bondage, or implied doggy-style sex will affect such matters...

Hi Roger,

Welcome back to the American League. Please feel free to choke on your overbloated ego any time you'd like to. Also, if you could criticize some marginalized group or make some really lewd comments, I'd appreciate that more than you could know. I don't like you, and I hope you have a terrible season, followed by an overweight retirement. Thanks,

SJL

This is Greensburg, Kansas today.
I used to have nightmares about tornadoes.
This is why.

Good Sign, Good baseball.

As an Orioles fan, it's been a while since I heard one of our players say something like this. Let's hope Peter Angelos understands that he needs to keep Nick Markakis around for a long time. "You got to love it, being in that situation, the game in your hands," Markakis said. "I was just up there looking to hit a fly ball or hit it through a hole, and that's what happened." He tied the game in the 8th, and won it in the 10th.
I watched a certain local NL team play last night, and greatly enjoyed their "clutch" hitting in the 7th and the 2-out rally in the 8th (which was started by an ill-advised 2-out intentional walk of Barry Lamar). Good baseball, even if it was against Philly.

Yesterday in a seminar class, we devoted the class time to our term papers. Each student took a few minutes to present their topic, and got feedback from the faculty, of whom there are 3, and the other 9 students. Mine went well; I got compliments on the development of my topic, and in general I feel fine. Another kid, and this post is really about him, blew my mind. He wanted to analyze the use of Tillich's treatment of the concepts of eros and agape, and the subsequent criticism of Tillich in feminist tradition. Don't worry if you're not up on that stuff; you're not alone.
He got Tillich wrong. He actually was incorrect about what Tillich said. Then, he got all three of the feminists he dealt with wrong. In short, every aspect of his paper was wrong, and everyone in the room told him so. Faculty, students, all of us told him that he had misread every source for his paper.
I felt a little ballsy because I had written 10 pages of mine before presenting the topic to the class, but I figured I could fix it if I needed to. My fellow student had already completed his paper, and handed it in. The professor he handed it to said, "Oh, wow, you're handing that in already? You have another week to make revisions. Are you sure you want to do this?" His reply was just spectacular. "Yep, I have no intention of making any changes." I just had to mention this on the blog because it's probably the dumbest thing I've seen someone do in my time at school, including undergrad and high school. We shredded that paper, and he had a week to fix it. Instead, he insisted that he was right, even though the people who will grade the paper disagree, and arrogantly handed it in. The same kid added a year onto his M.A. program because he didn't get in to any of the schools he applied to for a Ph.D.. Two of his academic references teach the class I've been talking about. It's not looking good for him.
I know this post sounds trite and pompous, but I still can't believe that this actually happened, and I actually think it's funny. 25 more pages of writing and I'm out of here.

Professionalism

Since I now know that at least one practicing journalist and a couple of journalism junkies read this blog, I'd like to submit the worst piece of writing I've seen published by a major media outlet in a while. Just remember, someone got paid to write this piece, which I am quoting in its rather brief entirety off of ESPN.com. No stone is turned, and no detail is left clarified.

Tom Brady has already made a connection with Randy Moss.

The Boston Globe reported on Tuesday that the quarterback restructured his contract to create cap space so the Patriots could acquire the receiver.

On Sunday, the Patriots sent their fourth-round pick, the 110th selection overall, to the Raiders for Moss. With the draft choice acquired in the deal, Oakland drafted cornerback John Bowie from the University of Cincinnati.

Moss

Brady

ESPN's Chris Mortensen reports that Brady did not take a pay cut; rather, he restructured his current deal that runs through 2010.

As part of the trade, the Patriots were required to take on the $9.75 million that Moss was scheduled to earn. After the deal, Moss tore up his old contract and signed a one-year, $3 million deal that could be worth up to $5 million with incentives.

On the second day of the draft on Sunday, the Patriots received permission from the Raiders to speak with Moss about a possible trade.

Derivative Post

I like Big Country's list of his favorite beers, and think that parroting him would be an apt way to unwind this evening. Without further ado:

1. Left Hand Sawtooth Ale. The Springs of 2004 and 2005 were good times, and the discovery of this beer during that time means it will forever be associated with good times and confusing minor league baseball schedules. It's also a fine, well balanced beer by a Colorado brewery that can do no wrong. This is probably my favorite beer that comes in bottles. Disc golf is probably my favorite sport to play while drinking a one that is cold.
   
2. Tie. Dogfish Head 90-Minute IPA/ Drake's IPA. Two India Pale Ales, crammed full of hops, pretty strong, and somehow creamy. Dogfish Head is made in Delaware, Drake's is made in Oakland. Neither is from India; IPA knows no geographical bias.
3. Fuller's 1845. My junior year of college, a parent in the youth group I led gave me a sizeable gift certificate to Whole Foods for Christmas. I was 20, so I scouted out the single bottle beers and gave my roommate a shopping list, including a decent amount of whatever he wanted to drink. The winner of the batch was Fuller's 1845, a bottle conditioned ale from England. Bottle Conditioned means it has active yeast in the bottle- no preservatives needed, and the beer actually improves with age. This was the first beer I tasted that I thought was complex in a good way.
4. Tie. Moosehead Lager/Saranac Black&Tan. Moosehead was my first favorite beer, and Saranac was the first dark beer I liked. Most of the bets I won in college were paid off with one of these two beers. You know who you are.
5. Red Hook ESB. I get a little too excited when this stuff goes on sale at the store. I just like it a whole lot.
6. Brother David's Triple Abbey Style Ale. Here be dragons. This stuff comes in a big bottle, and clocks in at 10% abv. I had already had one beer, and poured this while I watched a baseball game... alone. My wife came home to find me having had a reversal of fortune (in the proper receptacle) and then passed out on the couch... alone. You mess with Brother David, and he lays your ass out.
   

I was an English major, after all.

So it's term paper time here, and I get to write a total of 60 pages for the end of the semester. One paper is already written, and work has been done toward a second, which will put the lion's share of the writing behind me, and a summer of non-academic pursuits will become reality. I'll write something a little more worthwhile at some point, but for right now I'll cop out and quote someone else.
For Christmas 2 years ago, my grandfather gave me a volume of poetry by Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish/Lithuanian poet who had died about a year before, and who spent much of his career here in Berkeley. When I read from this volume, Second Spaces, I feel like I'm stealing something. Milosz, with a lot more miles on his bones than I have, pours his wisdom into these poems. I particularly like this one, entitled "Werki," after a place in Lithuania.

An English Horn, a drum, a viola making music
In a house on a hill amidst forests in autumn.
A large view from there onto the bends of the river.

I still want to correct this world,
Yet I think mostly of them, and they have all died.
Also about their unknown country.
Its geography, says Swedenborg, cannot be transferred to maps.
For there, as one has been, so one sees.
And it is possible even there to make mistakes; for instance,

to wander about

Without realizing you are already on the other side.

As I, perhaps, just dream those rusty-golden forests,
The glitter of the river in which I swam in my youth,
The October from my poems with its air like wine.

The priests taught us about salvation and damnation.
Now I have not the slightest notion of these things.
I have felt on my shoulder the hand of my Guide,
Yet He didn't mention punishment, didn't promise a reward.