Not America's national pastime? Not even remotely?

There's a curious silence in the major media when it comes to college baseball.

They love college football. Dwell on it, obsess on it.

Ditto college basketball.

Sweet sixteen. Bowl games. National rankings. BCS National Championship. Traditional rivalries. Cinderella teams. Even recruiting scandals and sexual assaults. All you can read, or watch, or hear, or stomach - day in, day out; in season and year 'round.

But not baseball.

Today, for instance, the finals of the NCAA Division I Baseball World Series will begin. UCLA vs. Mississippi State, in a best of three struggle.

Look for it in the New York Times, for instance. Look hard. I just did, and no mention of it at all. Okay, an occasional AP wire service feed, but nothing about UCLA making the finals, let alone the match-up for the finals. Not even today, with the game scheduled to start in just four hours. No discussion of the teams, or their players, or their chances.

But the Times does have an article in today's paper about how the Wallabies are suffering from three injuries as they prepare for the "all important" second test in the British and Irish Lions series in Melbourne. That's Melbourne, as in, Australia. And I think the game is rugby. Which I've never heard described as America's national pastime ... although perhaps I've missed something the Times editors have grasped?

Not in the Washington Post, which does, however, have an article on the "under 20 World Cup" in Turkey.

Not to the single out the Times or the Post: you won't learn much about the CWS (College World Series, lest you not recognize the reference) from any other major media source, either.

Why is that? College ball has become a major training ground for major league baseball, just as it has for football and basketball? Why the silence?

Strange.



P.S. For the record, I'm rooting for the Bruins ....

People Power in Istanbul

I'm watching with great interest and concern the current developments in Istanbul and elsewhere throughout the Republic of Turkey. 

I have long distrusted the government of Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP). Most of that comes from my general wariness of politicians who exploit conservative, religious populism, and not from any personal knowledge of Turkey. 

But following the increasingly alarming news being reported in the better press outlets available in the U.S., I have become more and more troubled. It has seemed to me that much as rich American ideologues pull the strings manipulating both the seemingly similar strains of right-wing, religious populism in the Republican Party, so it is seeming that Erdogan and the corporate interests and investors backing him are using pious conservatives and traditional to advance a political and economic  far removed from the interests of the masses providing the AKP with its votes.

That said, it is extremely heartening to see the multitudes mobilizing to resist Erdogan and the AKP, and I wish them well. (I also wish we saw their like in the U.S.!)

But don't listen to my views. Turn to the reports flowing from Turkey, from the people challenging the autocracy of the AKP ... flowing, it must be said, through social media; the AKP controlled and intimidated formal media of Turkey have been all but ignoring what is happening under their very noses, while the mainstream press of the west is only beginning to pay attention.

On that note, I recommend recent postings by a dear friend who brings intimate personal knowledge of Turkey combined with considerable wisdom and scholarship, in her own blog, Reflections and Meditations on the Path. 

Limits

Limit. 

Noun. A prescribed maximum or minimum. Websters.

Not a difficult concept.

Except, perhaps, when used as in the photo above.

Well, folks, that's meant as a maximum. Definitely not a minimum.

No matter what a lot of drivers believe.

Okay, the numbers. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 2009 there were 10,951 speeding-related traffic fatalities in the U.S. That's roughly comparable to gun-related homicides (CDC reported 11,078 of those in 2010).

We've heard a lot about guns and homicide, but the tragic reality is that speeding is just as deadly. That means trying to get to that next red light a little quicker. Using the gas pedal to express your frustration with the complexities of life. Or your failure to deal sensibly with schedules. Or voicing your contempt for some other driver by leaving them in the dust. Or doing the same thing, to stroke your ego.

Speed kills. It really does. Often. Much too often.

More numbers. Traveling one mile at 45 mph takes 1 minute, 20 seconds. The same distance at 55 takes about 14 seconds less. Fourteen seconds - worth raising the risk of killing someone?

Even over a longer distance, is the difference that important? A hundred miles at 60 mph takes an hour and forty minutes. Seventy saves less than 15 minutes. That's maybe the time spent dawdling over a cup of coffee, knowing the clock is running but pretending it's not. Is the life of that stranger in that Chevy, or maybe your lovely spouse sitting next to you, worth that little time management faux pas?

How much time is your life worth? Your spouse's? Your kids? Somebody else's kids? Believe, me, they're all worth a lot more than the few seconds you're trying to shave.

Driving a school bus, I see it all the time. Drivers rushing to get around me, and up to that red light moments before I do. Racing to get ahead of me before the road narrows to two lanes. Or running up behind me, flashing their lights to speed me up. (Sorry, a single speeding ticket would cost me my job, to say nothing about how speeding might endanger "my" kids.) Even cursing me for going "too slow" (yes, it's happened).

Slow down, you move too fast. You got to make the morning last.

That, and the lives of the people you endanger. Including your own.

Oh yeah, and you'll also be saving money, a lot of money -- on the tickets, on your auto insurance, on taking the taxi after your license gets suspended. Maybe on repair costs, medical bills, lawyers' fees and court judgments, too. Speeding can cost you a lot, an awful lot, and I'm not talking just money.

Besides, do the limit and driving becomes so much easier, 'cause all the fools passing you by invariably leave the lane empty in front of you. And you can listen to your music in peace.



P.S. One more set of numbers. In 2010, 197,616 drivers got speeding tickets in Virginia. That's three and a third per cent of all Virginia drivers. Why chance being one of them? Especially when running all the risks won't gain you much?

I Like Ike

There's been a lot written by the punditry on the Republican Party's generation-long lurch rightward and the bankruptcy of their ideology. But few have said it better than the last Republican President to seek consensual governance, Dwight Eisenhower.

Commenting on his party's right wing, Ike said ....

     "The Republican Party must be known as a progressive organization or it is sunk. I believe that so emphatically that I think that far from appeasing or reasoning with the dyed-in-the-wool reactionary fringe, we should completely ignore it and when necessary, repudiate it." 

     "I don't know why anyone should be a member of the Republican Party." 

Such a tragedy that the Dwight Eisenhowers of our era don't exist, having been replaced by the likes of Ted Cruz whose fealty is to their radical ideology and personal fortune, and not our common nation.


----------------------
Source: Quoted in Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower in War and Peace, Random House, 2012, pages and 672 and 649, respectively.

Robbed by the bulldozer

I live in an area now experiencing the emergence of Brood II of the mid-Atlantic's famed 17 year cicadas.

Or, to be more accurate, I live in an area that should be experiencing Brood II's emergence.

I hear them in the forest behind the school where I park my bus. I hear them in what's left of the forest near the local elementary school. I suspect I'll hear them if I go hiking this weekend. But I'm not hearing them where I live.

Why not? That's a good question, but I'll be it has a lot to do with the fact that this community (if I dare use that term) didn't exist in 1996, when they last emerged. This area was mostly farm and forest back then, but nearly all the farms are gone, and only vestiges of the forests remain. All else has been churned up by bulldozers, transformed into a landscape of cookie-cutter townhouses interspersed with variations on the McMansion theme.

Did the bulldozers wreak so much havoc that they annihilated Brood II? That's my guess.

Sad. I miss the beady-eyed little critters. Along with their incessant song. And the farms and fields that have disappeared, too.

---------------------------------------
Update: A wayward cicada flew into an open window on my bus and landed near a first grader. She wavered between disgust and fascination, so I leaned overand asked her age. "Six." I mentioned that the next time she saw one, she'd be 23. She looked puzzled, as though the very idea of ever being that old was utterly incomprehensible. To me, that's fundamental to the sense of wonder these insects engender; they stretch our sense of time beyond the constraints of the ordinary.

Update: The photo above replaces the "borrowed" original; this one was shot in the forest remnant bordering the lot where I park my bus.

The best of it, and otherwise

School's nearly over, and a lot of elementary kids mark the fact by giving their teaches and their bus drivers little gifts. On my morning run today, one gave me a little cup full of candy, and a note:

Thank you for driving me to and from school safely! You are the best bus driver ever!

Makes you feel good, y'know?

As for the otherwise .... Substituted on a kindergarten run for a colleague who was out today. Looked back in the mirror to see two boys rolling on the floor, one holding the other in a hammer lock. Ugh. Separated them and asked them if their teacher lets them do that in class.

     "No."

Does their bus driver let them do that on the bus?

     "No"

Then why were they doing it now?

     No answer.

Assigned them seats some distance from the other, but a couple of minutes later they were in the same seat, punching each other.

Sigh.

So sometimes I wonder why I ever step into that big yellow box. But that "best bus driver ever" note, and kids like the one who wrote it, answer the question ....

Sure wish a real Democrat would step forward

Virginia's gubernatorial race has two Republicans entered, but no Democrats.

The right wing Republican, Ken Cuccinelli, wants to lower taxes on corporations and the more affluent individual taxpayers. He proposes to cut the personal income tax from 5.75% to 5%, but this won't affect low-wage workers at all. He also proposes to cut the corporate income tax from 6% to 4%, which would be better news for stockholders than stockboys.

The "moderate Republican," Terry McAuliffe, will be listed on the ballot as a Democrat, but he isn't one. His tax proposal calls for eliminating or reducing a variety of business taxes. Again, nothing for low-wage workers, or even moderate-wage workers.

If there were a Democrat running who wanted to cut taxes, she or he would be looking at cutting the taxes that burden low-wage workers. Like the sales tax on food. Like extending upwards the lower income tax rate ceiling and floor, providing a break to low income Virginians without much affecting the rich ones. A real Democrat might also propose providing a property tax benefit for renters. After all, renters do pay property tax, if only indirectly; landlords certainly aren't paying such taxes out of their own pocket.

But no, there aren't any Democrats running in the state's gubernatorial contest.

I sure wish there was a viable third party who represented the bottom 80% or so.