A middle-aged baseball fan waiting to see what he'll be when he grows up
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’
Well, I’ve not been here. I notice that the last post I wrote was right after the Blacksburg shooting. Since then, my daughter has matriculated at Virginia Tech, my house has undergone a major renovation, and I saw a lot of baseball games.
Nothing much that many people will be interested in, I guess–but plenty has gone on. Baseball has consumed a lot of my attention this summer. The Washington Nationals had a much, MUCH better season than anybody predicted, finishing with a record of 73-89. That doesn’t sound so good, unless you consider that the major sports press predicted before the season that the Nationals would be “historically bad.” For example, Gary Graves in USA Today compared the Nats with the 1962 Mets. Continue reading ‘Hey, where ya been??’
I have been on the sidelines of quite a number of handgun deaths in my life. Thank God, I haven’t really been in the crossfire, nor has any member of my family. But gun violence has come close enough to me to be very unsettling.
In the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student in German at Vanderbilt, a German exchange student, Thomas Weser, was gunned down in a parking lot on campus in the very early morning hours. The murder seemed to be a robbery gone wrong. It became a murder because the mugger had a handgun.
This past weekend was the middle weekend of April. That’s the time universities put on dog-and-pony shows for students who have been admitted, to help them make up their minds.
My daughter has been admitted to several universities, and she managed to narrow it down to James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and Virginia Tech. Somewhat at the last minute, she decided she needed to see both campuses to make her final decision.
So on Saturday she and my wife drove down to Blacksburg from our suburban DC home, about a four-hour trip. They stayed near Blacksburg and then spent Sunday in Tech’s pre-orientation sessions.
I had the pleasure this evening of “interviewing” the two leading lights of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, Austin Tichenor and Reed Martin.
I put “interviewing” in quotation marks because we really just shot the breeze for awhile. Neither they nor I really had any particular question points or theme in mind.
While Red Rock Canyon is a marvelous example of how the Southwest changed over millenia, the Hoover Dam is a Wonder of the World that was built in less than five years.
The dam is on the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona, about 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas. (We like to tell our friends that we walked to Arizona–across the dam.) It created Lake Mead, one of the largest man-made lakes in the world, and it provides irrigation water and electric power to a good portion of the southwestern United States.
The dam is reached by one road and one road only: U.S. Highway 93, which runs through Boulder City, Nevada to the river.
Okay, strictly speaking what I’m about to share with you is not in Las Vegas, per se, but it is just outside of town and is generally considered a “must-see” destination for folks who can tear themselves away from the casinos.
Red Rock Canyon is just on the western edge of Las Vegas. It is reached by driving straight out Charleston Boulevard to the west, until there is no more Charleston Boulevard. As the road continues into the hills, one enters the Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. Just a few minutes after the straight road began to curve, we realized that we were in real, live desert.
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