Stephanie E. Yuhl: A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston
Thomas Frank: What's the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America
Thomas E. Ricks: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Thomas A. Desjardin: These Honored Dead: How The Story Of Gettysburg Shaped American Memory
Richard D. Porcher: A Guide to the Wildflowers of South Carolina
James Hillman: The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling
Bruno Bettelheim: The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
Lynne McTaggart: The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe
William Irwin Thompson: The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light
William Greider: Who Will Tell The People?: The Betrayal Of American Democracy
Jerry Bledsoe: Death by Journalism? One Teacher's Fateful Encounter with Political Correctness
edited by Kristina Borjesson: Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press
"In 1903 (Rube) Waddell had a good season; once he finally bothered to show up in June, he won twenty-one games and led the league in strikeouts (with 302). It was a busy year in other ways, too: he also starred on vaudeville; led a marching band through Jacksonville; got engaged, married and separated; rescued a log from drowning (he thought it was a woman); accidentally shot a friend; and was bitten by a lion. Throughout his career, Waddell skipped games to go fishing and skipped debts he found annoying. Among his more respectable hobbies were chasing fires (he adored fire engines) and wrestling alligators; he once taught geese to skip rope. Hughie Jennings, manager of the Tigers, used to try to distract him from the sidelines by waving children's toys."
FRIDAY 5: Fan's Guide to Spotting Baseball Pitches from Dan Conover on Vimeo.
You can get the whole thing over at my Friday5 blog, but here's the video I cut today on how to recognize five different baseball pitches.
Oh, and this week's cartoon contest features a geek action hero.
Have at it, nerds. ;-)
On the recommendation of friend and fellow distance runner, Cara Finnegan, I recently read Pam Reed’s The Extra Mile. Finnegan and I have individually played around with the idea of trying a few ultamarathon events at some point in the future and Reed’s book, subtitled One Woman’s Personal Journey to Ultrarunning Greatness, seemed to be a great place to start thinking a bit more seriously about it.
Ultramarathons are loosely defined as any race going beyond the normal 26.2 (and change) miles required by a marathon. When distance is the defining characteristic, normal ultramarathons are 50 and 100 miles (although there are odd numbers and some are much longer). When time is the defining characteristic, ultramarathons are normally set at 24 or 48 hours with the “winner” being the person who covers the most distance during that time period.
There are a number of aspects of an ultramarathon which make it interesting, especially as you get a bit older. For one, my times in half-marathons and marathons are going down rather than up. I see no feasible personal records in my future. As a result, an ultra would give me a different way of judging myself. Given that there are so many of them of so many different lengths and on so many different terrains, I imagine I would never have a personal standard against which to judge.
Secondly, there’s just something romantic about the idea of such long distances. I find myself particularly attracted by the idea of the “timed” race, even if it means going around and around on a track. I can imagine the brain working in extraordinarily odd ways in such a race, and I can imagine a very strong sense of community between those who finish such a run.
It was with a mind like this that I approached Reed’s book, then. While I expected that her words would only add to the romanticism with which I was approaching ultras, there are ways in which Reed’s book—and subsequent reading--work against such romanticism.
Yes, yes, I know it's true of more teams than Vanderbilt--including UNC--but no one expected it to be true of us. And since I may not be able to say this a week from today, I want to say it now: We're perfect. 16-0. That's 16 wins. Zero losses. Life is so good.
Of all the sports clichés that I dislike—and there are more than a boatload of them--the one that bothers me most is “Act like you’ve been there before.” Someone inevitably makes this claim each time a home run hitter celebrates his ball going over the fence and each time a wide receiver makes a one handed end zone catch and celebrates wildly. That is, every time a player does what he or she is supposed to do, and takes a moment to celebrate it, someone will ask them—or at least ask the player on their television--to act as if it’s a routine day at the accounting firm.
This phrase has never made sense to me, and it makes less sense the more often I think about it.
On the emotional side, it doesn’t make sense because I’m the type of fan, the type of person, who simply enjoys big emotions and larger-than-life personalities. I want players to celebrate wildly, to physically show how much fun it is to feel like they are the greatest, if only for the moment. I love big personalities and big moments befitting those personalities. I’ve never like the accountant approach to sports in which a player is supposed to act as if their great moments are mundane. Hell, when I have a good day of teaching, or write a good line in an essay, I jump up and down and shout. Why shouldn’t the athlete do so as well?
Last weekend, my Bonnie and I were playing Taboo with another couple and their nine year old son. For those who haven’t played it, Taboo works like this: one member of a team draws a card and on that card, there is a word you’re trying to make your teammates say out loud plus five words that you cannot use to help them. For example, if the word is “James Bond,” you couldn’t use clues like “007”, “Sean Connery” “Roger Moore,” and so forth.
During one round, we had all the males on one team, and I was drawing cards, attempting to get my friend Trey and his nine year old son to guess. When I drew the word “Steroids,” I immediately said, “Barry Bonds.” Within a half second, both Trey and his son shouted their first guesses. Trey was wrong with his guess of “home runs.” But his nine year old son, who will be thinking about Barry Bonds long after Trey and I are put out to pasture . . . well. . . he guessed the word correctly.
Think about it: a nine year old kid hears “Barry Bonds,” and the word that immediately comes to his mind is “Steroids.”
Say it ain’t so, Joe.
Marion Jones has fallen from grace. I’m sure we’ve all read the reports about how, after years of being one of the most vocal athletes to defend herself against the armada of allegations assailing her, this record holder and Olympic medalist confirmed everyone’s worst suspicions. Marion Jones cheated. She was doped up. She not only admitted to taking performance enhancing drugs, but of knowing that she was taking such drugs even while she continued to compete, while she knowingly beat multiple drug tests, and while she knowingly denied every suspicion. Sadly, such stories have become familiar this year, which has had many terrible sports stories. She’s just another athlete who did something they shouldn’t have done, denied and lied, and then apologized in disgrace.
I really liked Marion Jones. Witty, easy to listen to, confident, and, of course, an amazing athlete who seemed to find exuberance in every powerful lunge toward the finish line. And I admit to feeling disappointment and anger over her cheating. I’m not willing yet to give in to cynics who can only say, “I told you so.” I still want to believe in athletes and the amazing things they can do. But I also can see the traces of writing on the wall. This cascade of athlete betrayals is making it increasingly difficult to maintain optimism. Nevertheless, there is a spark of difference in Marion Jones’s cheating story that has rekindled some of my belief in athletics and those who compete.
Last Saturday, I ran in a half-marathon in my hometown of Asheville, NC. The half-marathon is my favorite distance and, while this is not my fastest race given the many hills, it’s perhaps my favorite given the many nostalgic moments I have on the route. Even on this, my fourth time to run it, I had memories during the race of different stories from my youth—roads where friends and I had walked, places where I had worked--that sorta thing. This time, however, the race itself added a memory that will be added to my stock of stories.
The story begins the same way almost all of my racing stories begin: I started out too fast. My personal record for a half marathon had me coming in at just below 7 minute miles (a 6:59 average in Nashville’s Tom King Classic). My primary problem is, as hard as I might try to start out at a reasonable pace, I generally begin at close to a 6:30. On this particular morning, after I hit the two mile mark, I discovered that I was indeed running a 6:35 pace. As always, the pace felt surprisingly good, so I didn’t slow myself down . . . well, not as much as I should have.
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