Sportsball

We had a sport-filled weekend, and I have to confess it was good to take a bit of a break from the madness of the world.

The joy of sports is that they are utterly meaningless. It’s a game, and you can get caught up in what’s going on and cheer for one side or another – especially if it’s Your Team, or just a team you happen to like for whatever inscrutable reason one decides to like a team – and the action goes this way and that until the game is over and then you just move on with your life. Nothing of any significance has changed. The sun rises the next morning, the state of the republic remains whatever it was prior to the final score, and all that happened is that you got a couple of hours of entertainment out of it.

More things should be like that.

It’s still early in the semester and this spring I only have one class going (versus the five that I had last semester), so there’s not much grading to do. I got Monday’s class prepped first thing Saturday morning – none of the various Sportsball events I wanted to see had started when I came downstairs, so why not – and the weekend was mine.

First up: Premier League soccer.

I watched the Premier League for over a decade before deciding to settle on a team to cheer for, mostly because I like the logo and their coach at the time reminded me of Ser Davos from Game of Thrones. The Onion Knight is still coaching in the Premier League, though on his third or fourth team since leaving, but I still support Wolves whenever I get a chance to watch.

On the plus side, I have discovered that this gives me a surprising amount of credibility among soccer fans here. The conversation is always the same. We get to talking. We discover that we share a fondness for watching Premier League soccer (while I have no particular issue calling it football, I’m American enough to default to soccer). They ask me what team I support, fully expecting me to say one of the Big Names (Liverpool, Man City, Man United, Chelsea, or Tottenham) and when I come back with Wolves there is a little pause as they decide that maybe I’m not just some bandwagon casual. Not many Wolves fans here in the US, I suppose.

On the down side, Wolves have pretty much already been relegated this year – they have a grand total of one win since the season started in August – and it will be a lot harder to watch them next year. So I try to catch them when I can.

Yeah, they lost. But they played hard and that has to count for something. As a Philadelphia sports fan, that’s all I ask.

Next up: the Olympics.

I generally prefer the Winter Olympics to the Summer version. Yes, I enjoy watching the track and field events and the soccer games and some of the random Weird Sports that they insist on adding every four years, but there’s nothing to compete with a Sportsball Festival that includes hockey, luge, and curling. I’ll watch the figure skating because it’s fun to see what people can do and even the skiing is entertaining for a while, but give me the sliding sports, the hockey games, and the sheer absurdity of curling any day.

C’mon baby, put the rock in the house.

I saw a couple of the women’s hockey games – both Canada and the US beat a determined and hard-working Swiss team that held them pretty close for most of the two games – and I’m looking forward to more of that. The mixed doubles curling event has been fun to watch and since Oliver and Lauren were curlers for several years back in the day and I went to my share of bonspiels, I actually know what’s going on when I watch. And I saw some of the luge runs, because that’s just astonishing that people are allowed to do that unmedicated. Skeleton coming up!

Kim and I did watch large chunks of the figure skating, and it’s really amazing how much better the skaters are than they used to be.

And finally, here in the US it was Super Bowl Sunday, the biggest secular holiday on the American calendar after the Fourth of July and the only day of the year where Americans are legally obligated to have junk food for dinner.

On the one hand, most of the usual parts of this were kind of meh. My team was eliminated early in the playoffs so there wasn’t the Home Town Interest to keep me focused on the game, and to be honest I can’t remember a Super Bowl where the game was so much of an afterthought. There was almost no hype for it leading up to the game that I noticed, and there were times last week when it was actually hard to remember who was going to play. And then they got to the actual game and, yeah, suddenly that made sense. If I had just woken up from a coma and you told me this was a week three preseason game I would have believed you.

Both of those teams played like they knew the winner was going to have to go to the White House afterward.

Even the commercials were uninteresting this year. There was only one that I thought was even remotely funny, in a gross sort of way, and even the good people who make Doritos clearly thought there wasn’t any point in spending their money this year so that was disappointing. From what I could gather from the ads, the American economy is being held together by cryptocurrency, AI, and prescription drugs right now and this does not give me much hope for the future.

Two bubbles and a list of side effects do not a prosperous era make.

I have to admit that I enjoyed the halftime show. I wanted to see an accomplished American with strong artistic skills and a finger on the cultural pulse of the nation, so naturally I watched the Bad Bunny show.

No, I wasn’t going to spend my time watching the Right Wing Safe Space Consolation Halftime Show featuring a has-been lip-synching about having sex with children, which is apparently what conservatives consider a comforting these days. It seemed a bit too much on the nose here in the Age of Epstein if you ask me.

So Bad Bunny it was.

As JJ Watt said later, “Did I understand a word of it? No I did not. Was it a vibe? Yes it was.”

The songs were interesting. The staging was phenomenal. The message was inspirational. The impotent rage it inspired in Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves was deeply satisfying. Pedro Pascal was there in the background, which is always a good thing. And apparently Mr. Bunny ran more yards while carrying a football during that halftime show than the New England Patriots did during the actual game. Win all around, I say.

I also loved the fact that the plants were played by actual people in costumes. For everyone who played Tree #3 in their elementary school musical, this one’s for you.

And then we went back to the Olympics. 

A Wedding in February

One of the better things I’ve done in my life was to get ordained online because under the laws of the State of Wisconsin this means I’m legally allowed to officiate weddings.

A proper wedding is a time of joy. Two people declare their love for each other and set off for their future together, and while you don’t necessarily need to be married to do that it is a fact that rituals matter in life and it is a lovely thing to mark the occasion with a ceremony.

I got to officiate a wedding today.

I’ve known Camrin and Jacob since they were in grade school. Camrin, in fact, invited Oliver to her birthday party when they were both in kindergarten. We’re all adults now and I consider both of them to be friends, and when they asked me to be the officiant for their wedding, well, of course I said yes. It would be a pleasure and an honor.

I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

It was a short, simple ceremony with just family in attendance. They’re planning a larger Celebration of Marriage ceremony for later but this was an important date for them so they wanted to have the actual wedding today.

There is much good in this world, and sometimes we get to be part of it.

Congratulations to Camrin and Jacob! May you know joy and love together all your days.

News and Updates

1. I forget – was the release of the three million or so pages of the Epstein files (still only part of the whole and thus still not compliance with federal law) that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is a pedophile who would likely not last three hours in prison before the other inmates fed pieces of him into a shower drain supposed to distract us from the continuing Fascist occupation of Minneapolis by poorly trained jackbooted ICE thugs who have kidnapped and trafficked citizens and immigrants alike, tried to arrest cops for being Brown In Public, actually did arrest multiple journalists because apparently the First Amendment only counts if you’re supporting the government, and publicly executed two American citizens in the streets while being filmed and then tried to lie about it both times or was that the other way around? Are both of these things supposed to distract us from the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump still talks about invading a NATO ally even though he “negotiated” a deal to get us exactly what we already had in Greenland before he decided to do Putin’s dirty work? Is all of that meant to distract us from the fact that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves are openly calling for the federalization (read: “partisan control”) of American elections in direct violation of the US Constitution? It’s hard to keep track. Are we great yet?

2. The madness of these times is exhausting, but we press forward because there is no other option. Fuck those clowns. It’s my country. They can’t have it.

3. So … yes, but aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

4. One of the strangest disconnects in my life right now is the simple fact that we are all living in the Worst Timeline Ever while at the same time my personal world is actually going along pretty well. Yes, this creates an obligation to use that privilege in the service of creating a better timeline in general and I do my best to fulfill that. But on a day-in, day-out basis, things are going well in my little corner of the world.

5. The semester is going along pretty well so far, a week and a half into it. My Zoom class is asking questions and seems engaged with the material so far – they’ve already asked me a couple of questions that I couldn’t answer, which I regard as the hallmark of a good class. Most of my advisees are enrolled though there are a few stragglers who apparently enjoy filling out forms to try to do that sort of thing after the deadlines have passed. And I seem to have found myself on a hiring committee where the candidates are all pretty good so I think we’ll be okay there. So far, so good.

6. I’m still not managing to read much, even though the book I’m currently working through is really good. I get to it when I can focus.

7. In these parlous times you just have to do things that make you happy no matter how ridiculous they are, and that is why there is a 5lb block of Cooper Sharp cheese in the fridge in the basement now, waiting for me to take it to one of the local supermarkets to be sliced. I am a happy Philadelphian.

8. I am currently avoiding the OS updates that Apple is pushing out to both my phone and my computer because from what I can tell both of them are poorly designed interfaces full of useless AI and I’m waiting until a) they figure out how to make updating at least not a step backward and/or b) I have no choice because they break the older OS that I’m using enough that I can’t do anything anymore. I have already noticed that the login shortcuts for both devices only work sporadically these days. We’ll see how it goes.

9. It’s getting back to more normal winter temperatures here – yesterday we nearly hit the freezing point, and it’s nice to have temperatures with real square roots – which means that the snow and ice melts a bit during the sunshine and that’s lovely but it also means that the salt on the roads gets picked up by the now-liquid water and splashed about by every car on the road and now both of our cars are white. I’m trying to think of it as camouflage.

10. The other day Kim and I were driving through Our Little Town when we noticed that there was a turkey sitting on the streetlight. This seemed odd. We took photos. And then we noticed the second turkey on top of the building behind the streetlight. As Les Nessman once noted, “It’s almost as if the turkeys were … organized.”

A Selection of Memes on the Current Crisis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Dissent

Back in October, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, an executive order that basically overturned the First Amendment to the US Constitution.

Anyone who criticizes fascism suddenly became a “domestic terrorist.”

Anyone who criticizes the policies of the federal government in any way was likewise declared a “domestic terrorist.”

Anyone who criticizes “capitalism” – a term which I sincerely doubt Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump can actually define – was also a “domestic terrorist.”

Anyone who criticizes Christianity as defined not by churches or clergy or even individual believers but by Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, and slaves, is also a “domestic terrorist.”

Anyone who isn’t a bootlicking toady for the current administration is now labeled a “domestic terrorist.”

This is an attempt to criminalize dissent.

The Founding Fathers understood that this was tyranny. They understood, as George Washington said, that “If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the slaughter.”

Yeah, no.

I am a goddamned American patriot. I have devoted my life to the study of this country’s history and I literally have a PhD in the Founding Fathers to go with that. My family has been here for two hundred years. I have at least three ancestors who fought on the correct side of the Civil War, for the republic created by the Founding Fathers and against the treason of the slaveholding South. During World War II the United States of America gave medals to my ancestors for shooting Fascists and we called them The Greatest Generation. I will be damned if I will disgrace their memory by kowtowing to these fucking losers now. 

This country was built on dissent. This country was built by people who looked at the shit being thrown their way and told the people throwing it that they could go to hell. It’s an ongoing process and we have a long way to go before we reach our aspirations, but there is only one way to get there.

I dissent.

To Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slave, I dissent.

From your cruel and inhumane war on American cities, your rogue personal army, your executions in the street, your kidnapping and trafficking small children, and your tyranny, I dissent.

From your promotion and defense of bloodshed as long as the people you hate are the ones dying, I dissent.

From your equally cruel and inhumane war on the immigrants who are here making lives and communities, following the processes and still being kidnapped and trafficked to foreign countries for pretend offenses in direct violation of legally binding court orders, from your campaign of ethnic cleansing in a nation of immigrants, I dissent.

From your Fascist “show me your papers” policies, from your use of a small child as bait, from your lack of ethics, morality, humanity, and decency, from your violent authoritarianism and small-minded bigotry, I dissent.

From your reckless assaults on education, your totalitarian attempts to rewrite history to suit your ideological demands, your refusal to accept the absolute fact that this country has always been a multi-cultural, multi-lingual nation with great virtues and great flaws standing side by side, I dissent.

From your obvious white supremacy and white nationalism, your soul-destroying racism, your brutal ignorance of actual Americans and the people living here, I dissent.

From your assaults on democracy, from your overt attempts to rig elections, suppress votes, and overturn results that don’t support you, from your weaponizing voter rolls as a tool of authoritarian control, I dissent.

From your eviscerating the US Constitution and its system of checks and balances, its limits on executive authority, and its safeguards against tyranny, I dissent.

From your destruction of American standing in the world, your attacks on allies, your coddling dictators, your clear subservience to a foreign power, your destructive trade wars, your catastrophic abandonment of everything that has made the United States a reliable ally, your refusal to recognize the contributions of American allies and your callous and ignorant dismissal of their losses, I dissent.

From your cruelty to the poor, the outcast, and the powerless, I dissent.

From your blasphemous twisted version of Christianity, I dissent.

From your eagerness to see hungry people starve, sick people die, and poor people suffer, I dissent.

From your overt war on women, on women’s health care, on women’s political and economic rights, on everything that the majority of the population might do that marks them as separate from breeding stock, I dissent.

From your desperate protection of pedophiles, all the way up to Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump himself, from your willingness to start wars and invade American cities to distract from the fact that you are now over a month late in releasing the Epstein files as required by federal law, from your lawless immorality, rampant perversion, and twisted sickness, I dissent.

From all of this and more, from the mere fact that you have installed yourselves into positions of power and are systematically destroying everything that better men and women than you have built over generations of sweat, blood, and effort, from everything that you are and everything that you represent, I dissent.

I am not alone.

We outnumber you.

We will not be intimidated.

We will be here when you are just a negative example in a textbook.

I dissent.

Christmas, Part 3 - Wisconsin

We had our last Christmas celebration on Sunday.

We’re a family that likes to stretch these things out, what can we say? I will admit that it was a bit more stretched than we’d planned since we were supposed to do this the previous Saturday, but the weather forecast looked snowy and Saturdays, it turns out, are not that great when you have multiple people who work as bartenders so it got pushed back a week.

Naturally it snowed Sunday too. But nobody was bartending, so we had that going for us.

We all met at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, with me and Kim coming up from Our Little Town while Lauren and Shai drove in from Main Campus University. Oliver was already off at school and rather too far away for a quick visit so he was unable to make the event, but we have reached the point where we just try for the maximum number who can. Rory and Amy and most of their group were there, as were Justin and Christine, and we had a lovely time.

There is a certain pattern that happens at these events. For the most part we cycle between hanging out, eating, and gifts, and as far as patterns go it’s a pretty tough one to beat though given the prevalence of snacks laid out – heavy on the home baked cookies but not limited to them, of course – the line between eating and any of the other activities can be pretty thin.

Good food in good company – that’s the secret to life.

So we hung out for a while.

Eventually it was dinner time, which is a fairly amorphous sort of thing with this group since it involves a constant swirl of people sitting, eating, leaving, and being replaced by others doing the same thing so specifying a precise beginning and ending point is probably more trouble than it would be worth. It starts with the Call For Borscht and spreads outward from there into a feast of Ukrainian food and if you left hungry well whose fault was that?

This was followed by the gifts given to those who were not playing the Dice Game, which is mostly the younger children and Uncle Randall these days. It was a joyous swirl of paper and things and a good time was had by all, even those who had remained at the table to fill in the edges a bit.

This was followed by further hanging about because we could.

And then it was time for the Dice Game. This started years ago as a way for the people in my generation on both sides of the family to cut down on the chaos of Christmas shopping and has since become something of a rite of passage. Only the younger kids do the regular gifts these days – when you’re old enough, you’ll play the Dice Game. And play it we did, with abandon.

You never really know what you’re going to end up with when you play the Dice Game and that’s most of the fun. Also, it’s nice when people like the stuff you brought. I was pretty happy that the gifts I brought got traded for a few times. After the dust settled I gave away both of the things I ended up with to people who wanted them more which at this point in my life is a good way to end the game really.

This was, of course, followed by more hanging out.

Though not too much more, since we had to get home. Lauren and Shai came back as well since she had an appointment the next day that was easier to get to from our house than from Main Campus University. The snow had mostly but not entirely ended for the drive home and while it was a sloppy drive (and Kim and I had to stop to get more washer fluid about halfway home) we all got back without changing the shape of anything on the road.

We ended up in the living room for a while, just sitting and talking and sampling the ginger and hops flavored mead that I had received for my birthday from a friend. It was very tasty, and a nice way to end a good day.

Time and Tide

My dad would have been 87 today.

He’s been gone for almost a decade now. There are still days when I think of things that I’d like to tell him, mostly little things like finding a wheat cent in change or going over whatever the Eagles did in their most recent game. We didn’t have any big things left unsaid, after all.

The ghosts accumulate as you get older.

My grandmother – my dad’s mother – died forty years ago exactly, a hell of a birthday present for my dad when you think of it. My other grandparents both died in 2000. My mom died a bit over four years ago. Julia’s been gone for over a decade.  Uncle Ed. Mr. and Mrs. Watts. A small but growing list of UCF friends. Various colleagues. Some old friends. Some new. So many people. Time and demographics only flow in one direction, and all we can do is be there for the time we have with those we care about.

You think about these things more with each passing birthday.

And each year there are new people to hold in your life as well. Family. Friends. Even just passersby who take a small moment to share some humanity. It’s a cycle.

It’s been a while now and for as long as there are people who remember he will be with us still. I do my best.

Happy birthday, Dad.