Wonderful Matters

I'm thinking about things that have happened or are happening here at the beginning of November that are worth mention. I think about November 2, the date Adrian Veidt aka Ozymandias executed that ultimate act of Agency enforcement against World inhabitants. Imaginations catastrophized into a quasi-catatonic state stir people to fiercely concoct "peace" while hyperviolence still festers in millions of souls. I think about November 5, the date Guy Fawkes was supposed to carry out the designs of his unknown superior even if he didn't have a clue as to what he was doing. Zealous rage against the state cleverly invented and widely advertised keeps rebellious people riled up. Funny how this year's November 5 featured a disturbed army psychiatrist shooting up his base. I thought about why we must have an army base at all--why can't Fort Hood just be a wonderful sports camp where people discharge their emotions on the field and later yuck it up over a beer. It ...

I was thinking about that time, just shy of ten years ago actually, when I wrote one of my impassioned rants about how the professional sports I once loved had been decimated by what I've termed competitive duplicity. I likened myself to Orpheus, the Greek guy who desires to rescue his beloved from hell, hoping that enough would see the truth about things and desire to see competitive integrity fully instituted. Alas, it would never be, something that I sadly knew then. That piece, by the way, is here , and in it I made some predictions about what I thought would happen over the next ten years. Surprisingly (or not suprisingly, I imagine), some of them did indeed come true. I remember making wild predictions about who would actually appear in the World Series' to come, and except for being off on the Dodgers, those were reasonably on. (The Dodgers predictions didn't come true, I noted, because of the exact thing I wrote that Peter O'Malley warned then owner Rupert Murd...

I'd written a lot about how major league baseball was a scam because of free agency and something I've called "competitive duplicity," the idea that the powers-that-be in baseball set things up so that certain teams are guaranteed to have an unfair competitive advantage to ensure the continued viability of the game. (Just as a heads up, some of my work is at EEEEEE! a San Francisco Giants fan site run by a very good friend, and my seminal writing is here .) Recently lots has come out about major leaguers using steroids. Indeed just today former Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte confessed he's used them, but not to build up but to better heal from an injury. I think the first thing that I feel, being a Giants fan and, as such, a great admirer of Barry Bonds, is how silly the whole asterisk thing is now. I was hurt every time someone would blithely speak about an asterisk next to Bonds home run achievements, and then laugh as though they were all above it. Now it is re...