Yes, it’s been an awfully long time since I’ve posted here. Sorry.
It’s the first day of December when I write this, and I’m feeling blah. SAD? Well, maybe just a little. (I recently heard a wag somewhere point out that when we whine about SAD, we’re really just talking about the bloody WINTER!)
It gets dark so early nowadays–at least in the northern hemisphere. It is the very lowest point in the baseball year, as well. The World Series finished over a month ago, and the winter meetings have not yet begun. Spring training is still many weeks away. Continue reading ‘The Long-Night Doldrums’
A week ago, March 30, it was cold and cloudy in Washington, DC. Nevertheless, Barbara and I dressed warmly and went down to Nationals Park for the official opening game of the Nationals’ 2008 season. Although it was around 49 degrees all day long, we got to the park at 3:30 for an 8:15 game, because the President of the United States would be throwing out the ceremonial first pitch. Security lines would be forbidding, we were told, so it was a smart idea to get there early.
Continue reading ‘Nationals Opening Day’
After our arrival home from Florida on Wednesday night, Thursday was a free day for me. I decided I’d go downtown into DC and take a look at Nationals Park.
Looking back at the archives of this blog, I am astounded to note that it has been a whole year since I was last down at the ballpark site with my camera. I have been following the progress of construction on the construction cam (to which I won’t link, since it might not be online for very much longer), but I haven’t seen it in person since March 17, 2007.
I expected it to be different–and it was. Where there were once deep pits in some blocks of the neighborhood, there are now high-rise buildings emerging.
Continue reading ‘Back Home–the New Ballpark’
Today was the last baseball game of our trip. We’ve had kind of a bummer experience watching the Nationals play so far. They lost to the Dodgers on Saturday, the day we arrived. Then on Sunday, while we were exploring the American space program at Kennedy Space Center, the Nats were in Ft. Lauderdale losing egregiously to the Orioles 11-3. (Alas, yes, it was 11-3, not 8-2 as I reported on Sunday.) Then yesterday they lost rather decisively to the NY Mets, 7-3.
So it was with a bit of trepidation that we drove across the Florida peninsula today to Lakeland to watch the Nationals take on the Detroit Tigers–a formidable team, the American League champions of 2006–in the Tigers’ spring training camp in Lakeland.
Continue reading ‘Day 4–Nationals at Tigers, Lakeland, Florida’
We got an early start today and got over to the Nationals’ spring training site, Historic Space Coast Stadium in Viera, about a half an hour from our hotel in Melbourne. We thought we were early, but we were not at all the first ones there. Today being March 17, there was a St. Patrick’s Day thing going on–everybody (besides us) seemed to be wearing green. Even the teams wore green caps. We thought that looked pretty doofy, but I guess we were in the minority.
Continue reading ‘Baseball in Viera–and the Nats Lose’
Day #2 of our Florida trip was devoted to driving to the Kennedy Space Center. The Washington Nationals, our real reason for being here on the coast of central Florida, were playing the Baltimore Orioles in Ft. Lauderdale. (They lost the game 8-2.) Ft. Lauderdale is many hours down the coast from here, just north of Miami, and so we decided to skip that game. When I looked at a map of the Grapefruit League teams, I noticed that Ft. Lauderdale is the spring training location farthest removed from any of the others.
Instead, we got up relatively early for being on vacation, and prepared to drive up the coast. Continue reading ‘Outer Space–Up the Coast’
About a year and a half ago, my wife suggested it would be a fantastic vacation if we could travel to Florida for spring training for our beloved Washington Nationals.
This year, Easter is early enough that my spring break from schoolteaching coincides with spring training. So here we are in Melbourne Beach, Florida, about a half hour away from the Nats’ spring training camp in Viera. Continue reading ‘Spring Training Trip–Day 1′
As I was writing my post on my Shake-spearean crisis, I went to the website for Mark 
Anderson’s biography of Edward de Vere, “Shakespeare” by Another Name. There I found the link to his podcast. That reminded me that I had heard a promo for this podcast a couple years ago; I think that may have been what started me thinking about the whole “authorship question” once again.
Episode 1 of Anderson’s podcast is an excellent nutshell summary of the anti-Stratfordian argument. It also sets the stage for Anderson’s Oxfordian argument, which is developed in both his book and in subsequent editions of his podcast. (The entire podcast series is nine episodes long.)
Anderson also has a blog in which he presents the latest developments in the Shake-speare debate. I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed for the blog as well as to the podcast. In one blog entry he mentions a performance by my new podcast friends the Reduced Shakespeare Company.
I’ve mentioned before here that my wife and I have season tickets to the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC. I’ve also been an actor in the past, and have played several roles in Shakespeare in professional theatres.
This past year I came to a Shakespearean crisis point. Or perhaps I should say a Shake-spearean crisis point. That hyphen in Shake-speare is deliberate. I have come to believe with very strong conviction that Shake-speare was a penname, and that the actor guy from Stratford-upon-Avon never wrote a word of those plays. Continue reading ‘My literary-cultural crisis’
I’m sitting here in my high-school German classroom at the end of another week. It’s about 6:15 PM. I’ve been here in the school since before 8:00 this morning. That makes it…let’s see now…a 10.25-hour workday. That’s how most of my days have been the last two months.
I’m a German teacher outside of Washington, DC, in Loudoun County, Virginia–a county that still offers German at all its high schools and just about all its middle schools. This is a good place to be. The famously wealthy Fairfax County, where I live and where my children graduated high school, is letting German die off slowly and quietly in its schools. Continue reading ‘Constant fatigue’