Wonderful Matters

Last night the Dodgers and Giants played their baseball game, there at the Los Angeles stadium where the Dodgers regularly play. As you may know it was "Pride Night" for the Dodgers, and this month every single major league baseball team is having one except one, the Texas Rangers. I mean, what is wrong  with them those bigoted Nazi homophobic Neanderthal evil EVIL EVIL!!!  Texas Rangers! We should all remember to incessantly call them names and insist that the New York Times writes most disdainfully of them. Anyway, out front of the stadium were a few hundred protesters, I think it was about that many, who blocked roads and entrances to the stadium. They were holding up signs along the lines of how much the grotesquely nun-attired sodomist-oriented PR group is ruining the idea of the Roman Catholic faith, by ridiculing it with such insensitivity and all the rest of it. Good job good crusading Christians! Make that statement! Except that the Dodgers and this nun-dressed group...

I will confess right here and now. I am a passionate San Francisco Giants baseball fan . I grew up in the California Bay Area, and my dad took my brother and me to a number of Giants games. We sometimes went with our Little League teams. Being at Candlestick with them and watching Mays and McCovey, even Maddox and Matthews play ball was transcendently enchanting. When they finally won San Francisco-residing World Serieses in not only 2010 but 2012 and 2014, it was rapturously delightful. What is even more agonizing is I will never stop rooting for them. I still occasionally peek in to see how they are doing there in the standings, hope they're doing okay -- indeed right now they are a winning team and this weekend taking on the hated Dodgers. Of course I actually like the Dodgers but only if we clobber them often enough. It is no good to play ball against nobody -- you've got to have a bitterly detested archenemy to loathe with all your guts . The Los Angeles Dodgers are that f...

I am a bit of a sports fan -- well, more of a fan of particular sports teams.  I've been a San Francisco Giants fan since my first attended game as a kid in 1971. Mays and McCovey, even Dietz and Fuentes and Speier were my heroes. I've also been a rabid Kansas City Chiefs fan since my forebears settled and thrived for years in Kansas. Yeah, this does involve a bit of appreciation for what the particular sport itself is, but my impassioned fandom requires me to temper my attention. I work at least modestly successfully to maintain what I call a sports celibacy,  just looking at nothing about it all. To be honest it is serving me pretty well right now. The world of high-level professional sports has gotten extraordinarily ugly, however, and that makes it hard to keep some items out of the news stream for me to have to witness. Some of those items here in a minute, but I'm blogging now to introduce my latest home page piece over at my webzine, one on the real meaning of self-...

There are so many things I'd like to blog about, sometimes I actually get around to it. Thing is I'm so busy with work and family. I regularly work 10, 11 hour days, and on Friday nights my son plays high school football. His team has a bye week this week, so I'm able to sit here at the computer for just a bit. Another thing I've been doing is struggling to keep my sports celibacy. Since 1998 I've sworn off watching seeing reading following any sports stuff, simply because I get too emotionally involved. Really, sounds melodramatic, but I just do. Too many heartbreaks just get me. I actually do pretty well, I really do... But yes, often I'm weak. Like this week. I have to tell you, I'm a Kansas-born boy who was raised in the San Francisco bay area. I now live in the Los Angeles area so my favorite pro sports teams are the Chiefs, Giants, Royals, 49ers, and Angels. If you follow any of this at all, you'd be able to figure how I've been overw...

I realized something just the other day. That it is 25 years ago today that I heard the most spirit-blasting message from the pulpit that I've ever heard. I remember the day because it was a Sunday when after the church service, my buddies and I had gone to Candlestick Park to see the Giants play the Astros. I count this Sunday as that very day's anniversary even though the actual date was interestingly September 11. One of the striking things about that game, the particular thing that kept this day in my memory, was what happened a few minutes before the game began at its 1:05 scheduled start. A few thousand people were already filling the seats and a good number of them were listening on their radios to the 49ers game in New York just finishing up. It was a close affair and with a minute left the football Giants had taken the lead. After the 49ers got the ball back deep in their own territory, Joe Montana threw a perfect strike to Jerry Rice stre...

My niece has been over this weekend, and she's exactly the same age as my daughter. It was a great opportunity to see Wreck-It Ralph , and it was a terrific movie. It was actually kind of slow to start, and I started to see some of the same formulaic plot devices that you see in all the Pixar movies. But the key message is one I want to share with you here because it relates exactly with the subject of my latest home page piece . I want to start by sharing with you something you may already know. I am a rabid San Francisco Giants fan. So it may go without saying that when they won their second World Series title in three years last Sunday night, I was ecstatic. But I realized something a while ago that is quite profound about this ecstasy, and it is one of the most perverse facts of life that there is. For you see, the splendidly wonderful wonderfulness of that whole thing wouldn't mean a thing if there weren't The Los Angeles Dodgers . And not just the Dodgers, b...

I use this blog to write a lot about what I see going on in the World around and hope to do a decent job of articulating how much more wonderful the Kingdom is. But tonight I simply have to get into the official open record a truly wonderful matter I've been waiting forty years for. It is simply this. My favorite major league baseball team, the San Francisco Giants, are indeed WORLD CHAMPIONS. I can't even believe I'm writing those very words, but I can officially, fully, completely, and truthfully write in great big superfont capital letters WORLD CHAMPION SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS. I'm not going to go into all the splendid thrills of rooting for this team, nor detail the incessantly turgid of despair waiting for our team to finally get a ring, or as my good friend and I have always said, to do the dance on the mound. (And for those who'd say the Giants already have world championships, those were in New York. Just not the same.) I just want to share with ...