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.

My Nationals did make a trade with Florida for a couple of decent players. Scott Willingham will swing a decent bat and probably play outfield (left?) for the Nats. Scott Olsen may well be the Nats de facto pitching ace now. If he can stay out of trouble (the kind of thing everyone was saying about Elijah Dukes last year), he’ll be good.

I have a new desktop/screen saver on my iBook laptop which is reminding me that it’s winter. It’s called EarthDesk. It shows a more-or-less real time image of the earth, centered on whatever spot you want, and showing the world map in whatever projection you choose. It also shows the sunlight and the darkness–which has made me very aware of the difference between winter (in the north right now) and summer (in the south).

It’s a bit depressing to see how short the days are in North America right now. But looking at the very long days down in southern Argentina and Chile reminds me that summer will come once again.

Many other bloggers and journalists have covered the game. I did not photograph any of the game because I wanted to see it and keep score. But I did photograph my first real experience being inside the stadium.

It was thrilling to walk around the ballpark whose construction I have followed since the spring of 2006. As we emerged from the Metro, Half Street greeted us as festively as a major construction site can do.

Right now Half Street is bounded on one side by a recently-vacated Metro bus garage on the right and a construction site for two high-rise buildings on the left. It’s rather ugly now, but in a couple of years it ought to look magnificent.

The tone of the opening-day festivities resembled in many ways the “Grand Re-Opening” of RFK Stadium two years ago, when the Lerner family took over the team and did some remodeling. There was a red carpet leading to the centerfield plaza, musicians played, the Racing Presidents greeted fans. But once we got inside the stadium, we knew we were in something special and new.

The field looks magnificent from the stairs up to the Red Loft Bar in center field. When we arrived, the Atlanta Braves were starting batting practice.

When we went into the Red Porch restaurant to explore, they were not yet open for business. They were, however, happy for us to come in and look. One of the most surprisingly emotional moments for us was seeing the ceiling of the Red Porch. It is decorated with pennants from the old Washington Senators teams–the teams that were taken away from Washington baseball fans twice. We are not even native Washingtonians, but seeing these pennants brought feelings of nostalgia we did not expect.

Our season seats are just below the pressbox in section 311. That is at the right of this picture. They’re in the fourth row from the bottom, four seats in from the right in this picture. I take a tiny bit of pleasure in the fact that we are closer to the field than the reporters and TV announcers.

Our view of the field is as good as we could have wanted for what our tickets cost. These seats are very similar to the great seats we had in RFK Stadium for two years.

We did not, of course, sit in our seats for two hours until the game started. Instead, we explored the park in the cold wind as we strolled around. Most people arrive at the stadium through the centerfield gates. By about 6:00 PM the crowds were starting to build on the centerfield plaza.

The stadium is a wonderful addition to a formerly run-down neighborhood in Southeast Washington. However, a lot of critics have expressed the misguided complaint that the monuments of the Nation’s Capital are not properly visible from the seats. I don’t get this. My own friends and family who come to DC tend to go to the National Mall to see the monuments. I will go to Nationals Park to see baseball. In any event, I’m here to report that our seats in section 311 do have a view of the Capitol dome–albeit somewhat obscured by a lighting tower.

At a few minutes before 8:00, our television color analyst, Hall of Fame pitcher Don Sutton, took the field dressed in his finest to lead the on-field opening ceremonies. (Because the game was carried on ESPN, Don was not working on the air on the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network that night.)

Reflecting the opening day of the Nats’ first season at RFK Stadium in 2005, the DC Air National Guard spread two large American flags on the outfield. The RFK opening featured one gigantic flag. I wondered about this until the Nationals’ starting lineup ran onto the field through the centerfield gate between the flags.

Despite published reports, the stadium was full. The announced paid attendance was 39,389–a couple thousand less than the stadium’s capacity of 41,888. However, as you can see from this photo taken at about 8:10 PM, the house was full. Approximately 2,500 tickets were given away to dignitaries, team guests, DC politicians, and so on.

President George W. Bush threw out the ceremonial first pitch. He got on the field quickly, threw the ball (rather well, high and outside), and got off quickly to a chorus of boos. No, I did not boo. I think very little of Bush as a president, but the tradition of the presidential first pitch is one that needs to be established in Washington, DC. I found the booing of the president to be rude and out of place.

The game? Well, it could not have gone much better. The Nats got out to a 2-0 lead in the first inning. Atlanta’s Chipper Jones hit a solo homer in the fourth inning and there it sat for most of the game. It was a pitcher’s duel between the Nats’ Odalis Perez and the Braves’ Tim Hudson–meaning it was a short game. (Remember, it was cold!) In the top of the ninth the Braves tied it up at 2. Then in the bottom of the ninth, with two outs and nobody on–and with two strikes–our star third baseman Ryan Zimmerman hit a walk-off solo homer into the Red Porch to win the game. It was as if the game were being played according to a movie script.

We went home happy. The team headed to Philadelphia for their second game on Monday. The Nats would get out to a good start by winning three in a row. Then they dropped the next four games. They’ll play their second game in Nationals Park against the Florida Marlins on Monday, April 7. They bring a 3-4 record into their first real homestand. We hope they have a home-field advantage in their fantastic new stadium.

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.

The Navy Yard Metro station is accessible (right now) only at one end, the entrance by New Jersey Avenue. Even here, the view is quite different from one year ago.

The first place I stopped was at the new Starbucks Coffee shop in the Department of Transportation building on 3rd Street. This was under construction last year, and has now been open about a year. It’s about three blocks from the stadium.

The site about which many people are concerned is the Metro entrance closest to the ballpark. This is in a new building under construction by Monument Realty on Half Street. The building (with its retail and restaurants) will not be open this year, but the Metro station should be open next week, in time for Opening Day. The Metro entrance is in the corner of the building, at the left of this picture.

It’s the signs at the stadium that make the prospect of attending games so real. We are being guided to the places we need to go, as you can see here, at the corner of N and South Capitol Streets, the corner of the west parking garage.

The Nats, of course, hope we will spend many of our dollars at the team store, which is in the opposite corner of the west garage.

Here’s where most of us will enter the stadium: the centerfield gate at the base of Half Street. This is a short walk from the Metro station in that building under construction.

The Red Porch restaurant on the centerfield plaza is a unique feature of our ballpark. There are seats available in the Red Porch and the Red Loft, but most folks will just order food in the restaurant itself–which is open to the ticket-holding public.

I’ve heard that the HD video scoreboard is huge. Our seats are in the upper deck, directly opposite the scoreboard. This is what it will look like from the centerfield seats of section 102.

The Grand Staircase at Potomac and 1st will probably be the least-used entrance to the ballpark–at least until water taxi docks are available on the riverfront. The people arriving by boat will walk up these stairs. Nevertheless, the Grand Staircase is a strong feature of the architecture.

The banners of the Grand Staircase depict Nationals players. I’m very impressed at the fact that our new centerfielder, Lastings Milledge, is already depicted in action in a Nats uniform. This means that the team’s photographers have been very busy in Viera, Florida at spring training; and that the team staged some photos down there in regular white uniforms (not the blue uniforms worn during spring training).

The walkway up to the home plate gate has a number of important dates of Washington baseball history embedded in it. 1859, the first year seen, is the year organized baseball was first played in DC. Plaques explaining the meaning of the dates are next to the sidewalk.

The press and the general public in the Washington area seem to be freaking out because there won’t be suburban-style parking right next to this urban ballpark. (Eyes rolling in bemusement.) Well, if you aren’t a bigwig who gets to park in the garages, or a season-ticket holder who has paid up to $35 per game for parking in the neighborhood, or a Metro rider, then you can ride your bike to the stadium and lock it to a bike rack. There are about 250 of these bike racks on all four sides of the stadium.

Yes, the stadium is still under construction. This sign for the left field gate was not yet installed when I strolled the stadium neighborhood. Since I would never again have an opportunity to touch it, I laid my hands on it just before taking this photo. It was installed the very next day, above the entrance.

There are now eight days until the opening of the stadium. The exhibition game against the Baltimore Orioles is one week from now. This afternoon, George Washington and St. Joseph’s Universities played each other on the field, with a couple thousand people looking on from the lower seating bowl. Baseball is about to return to its own home in DC, and I’ll be there on Sunday, March 30.

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.

The Tigers have had their camp in Lakeland for something like 72 years or so, since the 1930s. The stadium in which they play, Joker Marchant Stadium, was built in 1965. This is a spring training camp with a history. I don’t know whether I expected something old and run-down, but Joker Marchant Stadium (named for a parks and recreation director of the city of Lakeland) was a real treat.

The drive into Lakeland off Interstate 4 takes you along Lakeland Hills Boulevard through a suburban residental neighborhood. There’s a Honda dealership adjacent to Tigertown, the Tigers’ spring training camp. The sign depicted above greets you at the entrance.

The stadium complex is my idealized image of a Florida spring training facility. There are palm trees everywhere you look, and the architecture is that peach-colored Florida mission style.

The atmosphere is a combination of midwestern-polite and southern-cordial. There are Tiger fans everywhere you turn, but unlike the fans of Philadelphia or New York, these fans wear their pride with quiet dignity, not with braying bravado. Marchant Stadium is designed for baseball fans who want to have fun.

One of the most remarkable features of this park is the left-field berm. We strolled out there during batting practice. Because of the wind and the strength of some of the Nats’ batters, a number of batting-practice home runs came out to the berm. There was a mad scramble for each ball hit out there, and just about everybody except us had baseball gloves on. I understand from the Tigers’ website that “seats” in the berm section cost $7.00 each. This is one of the great bargains in baseball.

Barbara and I had never seen the Nationals during batting practice. At home games at RFK stadium, the stadium gates opened too late for most people to see any of the home team’s batting practice session. Today, of course, the Nats were the visitors, and I think Marchant Stadium’s doors were opened early anyway. We got a rare close-up look at our guys in action. This somewhat made up for our missing the morning workout yesterday at Space Coast Stadium.

The game today was apparently a sellout. The announced crowd was something like 7,900 or so. We did not see any sections with empty seats.

Ah yes. The game. Well, it was televised nationally on ESPN, and we Nats fans are so glad of this. The A-team was playing today: Nick Johnson was on 1st base, Lastings Milledge was in center field, young prospect Justin Maxwell was in left, Cristian Guzman was at short, Dmitri Young (who was dropped ignominiously by the Tigers two years ago because of his questionable behavior at the time) was the designated hitter.

In short, the Nats smashed the Tigers. Going into the ninth inning, it was 9-0 Nats. Our closing pitcher, Jesus Colome, gave up a meaningless two-out home run to Marcus Thames of the Tigers, but that was just a way for the Tigers to retain a bit of dignity.

And the Tigers had their A-team on the field today, too. Curtis Granderson, Ivan Rodriguez, Edgar Renteria, Jeremy Bonderman pitching. The Nats had their way with these guys. Nationals starting pitcher Tim Redding (pitching with the flu) held the Tigers scoreless through five innings, and relievers Joel Hanrahan and Ray King held them through the 8th. The Nats’ bats were hot today. Lastings Milledge did what we wanted to see when he hit a mighty homer. Justin Maxwell had a massive three-run shot himself, and Ronnie Belliard knocked in two runs with a tape-measure shot to the berm. Dmitri Young had an RBI single, as did Nick Johnson The sixth inning looked like batting practice for the Nationals.

I’m not really a baseball photographer, so this shot of Guzman swinging is pure luck on my part. I don’t think this at-bat was meaningful in any way; Guzman scored one run in the game, had one hit, and did not knock in any runs. But the Nats as a team were whacking the ball all over the field, drumming Tigers’ reliever Tim Byrdak in the sixth inning by scoring seven runs.

And the beauty part is that the national broadcast on ESPN showed the whole country the Nats as we hope they will play this season.

We left the stadium proud of our boys, and sad to be leaving spring training for 2008.

We hoped to see some of the major league players working out, and to maybe meet them and get some autographs. When we drove up at about 10:30 AM, the Nats were on practice field #5. By the time we got parked, the team had gone into the clubhouse. Bummer.

We were delighted, however, to note that the Nats have renamed that practice field in honor of their All-Star from last year, the National League Comeback Player of the year for 2007, Dmitri Young.

It really is true that you get closer to the players and personnel at spring training than you do at the stadium during the season. Even if you’re not there for the workouts or don’t have a press pass, the barriers between the players, managers, and executives are much less forbidding.

As we walked up toward the stadium and team store, we ran into pitcher Chris Schroeder, who had lagged behind the rest of the team going in. He nicely autographed a baseball for us, and then we saw pitcher Jason Bergmann coming out toward the practice field to do some running on the warning track. He signed a couple of baseballs for us as well.

Parked just next to the team store outside the stadium was a row of golf carts for manager Manny Acta and general manager Jim Bowden, I guess to make it easier for them to scoot from one side of the stadium to the practice fields or the minor league training site. It is a pretty big area, and you have to go across a large parking lot to get to the minor league camp, so I guess it’s worthwhile for the big guys to have their own (named) carts.

The game itself was not so great for the Nationals. Mike O’Connor was the starting pitcher, in what might have been a last shot at making the big-league rotation before the season starts. After a rough first inning in which he gave up a run, he held in there pretty well until the fifth, when he gave up another four runs. Three strikeouts, only one walk–but the Mets hit him all over the park.

And the Nats’ bats just could not get anything going until late in the game. Dmitri Young, in either his first or second start at first base, went 1 for 3 with a single that put him on base and in position to later score the Nats’ first run. Catcher Will Nieves and center fielder Justin Maxwell got important hits, and our favorite third baseman, Ryan Zimmerman, had an RBI single today as the designated hitter.

But as Barbara said, the Nats generally did not look as though they were having much fun. The final score, 7-3 Mets, seems to reflect that.

It’s cool to watch the players running drills after the game. We couldn’t figure out exactly who was in on this. It wasn’t all the players who had played the game, and it included some people who didn’t play a minute–but it seems to be a regular thing: a few light runs, made all together in a group, about the length of a baseline.

Tomorrow we’re off to Lakeland, about two hours across the state, where the Detroit Tigers have had their spring training camp since the 1930s. The game is in Joker Marchant Stadium, which has been in Lakeland since 1965.

Instead, we got up relatively early for being on vacation, and prepared to drive up the coast.

Incidentally, we have nothing to complain about with regard to our hotel. We wake to sunrise views like this one. I took this picture out our window this morning. The Atlantic Ocean provides the white noise to which we sleep.

The drive to Kennedy Space Center takes about 45 minutes from Melbourne Beach. You drive up state highway A1A (known to me for being the title to a Jimmy Buffett album back in the 1970s), through Patrick Air Force Base and Cocoa Beach (where we actually saw I Dream of Jeannie Way) up to Port Canaveral. Then you have to drive back inland, over the Indian River, and enter the center from the west. It was a much longer drive than we expected, but not bad at all.

The KSC is located on Merritt Island, which is a huge wildlife preserve. That was another surprise to me. I’m not sure what I expected, but I didn’t expect this quasi-military base to be in the middle of a wildlife refuge. You drive for miles and miles and eventually come to the visitors’ center. The visitors’ center is somewhat like a theme park with free parking.

When we went in, we immediately saw an IMAX movie about the space station, and then we prowled around the visitors’ center area. Our big organizing event of the day was the bus tour throughout the space center, but on the way to the bus, we saw this interesting stone-and-water sculpture of the heavens in global form. Barbara has the universe in her hands here.

For a couple of Baby Boomers who lived through the Space Age as children and teenagers, this visit to the Kennedy Space Center was fascinating–and at times very emotional. The first stop on the bus tour was to a place called LC39, where there was an observation gantry. It took awhile for us to understand that this was the site of the launch pad for the Apollo missions to the moon. The view was great–but even greater was standing on the very spot where these trips to the moon began.

Next to the road on which we drove is the crawlway. This is a road that looks like two gravel roads with a grassy median. In fact, this road is designed to carry the space vehicles from the Vehicle Assembly Building

to the launch sites. The crawler is a huge platform with eight tracks, like those of military tanks, that slowly “crawl” the assembled vehicles to the launch sites. Here you can see a crawlway that leads out to LC39B, one of the two sites from which the space shuttles are launched. You can see the superstructure of LC39B in the background. It’s several miles away. This is as close as “normal” people are allowed to get.

The bus drove us from the LC39 observation gantry to the Apollo/Saturn V center. We saw a short movie about the three-man Apollo missions, then we went into a control room. We gasped in excitement when we were told that this room was not a mockup, but instead the actual control center for the flight to the moon.

A film showed us the moon landing, including shots of the control guys who were in this very room sweating bullets as the Lunar Module landed on the moon’s surface. And while the film was running on the screens, the various relevant seats and control stations were illuminated, and the various stages of progress were indicated on a big board to the side. For me the most intense moment was at the end of the countdown, when the rockets fired but before the vehicled had lifted off the launch pad. The indicator light for that moment said “COMMIT.” Yes, I guess that was truly a moment of commitment. Whew!

The Saturn V rocket was a huge thing. Here’s a picture of me standing beside it in the exhibition hall.

By the time we got to the International Space Station Center, we were tired and a bit overwhelmed. The Space Station is a fantastic thing: an international science laboratory permanently installed in space. It represents the efforts of many different countries to use zero-gravity for scientific experiments. Even the Russians–our arch-rivals, the fear of whom drove the space race in the 1960s–are active participants.

But there is much less of a “whiz-bang” effect with the space station. The station itself does not look like something from Star Trek, but rather like a military base in space. When I say that, I mean the architecture is that blah, bland, purely functional look of squareness and sheet metal one sees on any military base. And the science that is conducted there is way above our heads, we poor little German teacher and arts administrator couple.

Nevertheless, we remain huge fans of the space program. We found our way to the KSC with a GPS system in my BlackBerry, and we drove in a Toyota Prius. These are technologies that would not have existed without the space race.

One final curiosity: we have never seen and heard so many Germans in any American tourist attraction as we saw yesterday. We expect to hear a lot of Spanish in the U.S., but only occasionally German. Yet we were surrounded by Germans everywhere we turned–both families with small kids and older folks.

At first we understood this to be a reflection of the fact that the U.S. space program was mostly created by Germans in the 1950s and 1960s, led by Wernher von Braun, who had helped the Nazis with the V-1 rocket. Germans were essential to the development of space travel, and I’m sure this is a point of pride for Germans of our generation.

But later on, at dinner, we realized that this is also a very cheap vacation for Europeans. The Euro is currently worth over $1.50 U.S., so European tourists are probably going to be all over the major American tourist attractions this year. We, however, who are traveling to Europe this summer, will not be buying many souvenirs there.

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.

We had planned to fly out of Baltimore early on Saturday, March 15, and catch a home game against the Los Angeles Dodgers at Space Coast Stadium in Viera. But when we checked in and made it to the gate, we discovered that the plane designated for our flight was stuck on the ground in Columbus, Ohio, fogged in with zero visibility. There was no hope, we were told, that we would leave earlier than three hours late.

That, of course, would mean that we would miss the entire game against the Dodgers. But a gate change, and an apparent addition of a plane located in Baltimore, allowed us to leave earlier than we thought we would. So we flew to Orlando and got there without much trouble.

But then we wasted another half hour waiting for an apparently non-existent shuttle bus to the car rental agency. When we finally got our car (a Prius, much to our pleasant surprise), we drove straight to Viera, to Space Coast Stadium, and made it for the last two innings of the game. The Nats lost to the Dodgers 6-1, and we saw hardly any Nationals players we recognized, but we were there.

A stadium full of Nats and Dodgers fans had already enjoyed seven innings of the game when we got there. Our seats were very good, pretty much right behind home plate.

I have to admit, I don’t really know who is batting here. I got into the game so late I had no idea who was on the field. I didn’t get the lineup, and I’m sure it had changed two or three times before I got there. But this is a decent shot of an at-bat. the only player I’m sure of is former Nationals backup catcher Gary Bennett, who’s behind the plate for the Dodgers. This shot would be in the bottom of the 8th inning.

Because we saw veteran ex-manager Tommy Lasorda on the field for the Dodgers, and because we couldn’t see any of the regular Nats in the dugout, we assumed this was a split-squad game, with Dodgers manager Joe Torre and Nationals manager Manny Acta on the road with the other half of each team. But no, this was the only game the Dodgers and the Nats played yesterday. Still, it was a treat to see Lasorda relatively up-close.

Here are two people who are really relieved to finally be in Viera. One of the ticket-taker ladies at the gate in the stadium told us her daughter was stuck in Atlanta until Sunday night due to the extreme weather. The pilot of our flight must have flown far around northern Georgia’s terrible weather, because we didn’t suffer from much turbulence at all.

Since the Nats are playing Baltimore on Sunday at Fort Lauderdale–the farthest removed spring training camp from Viera–we chose instead to visit the Kennedy Space Center, about 40 minutes up the coast from our hotel in Melbourne. We’ll get back to all-baseball-all-the-time on Monday.

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.

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.

I’ve had serious doubts about the authorship of the plays by the Stratford guy for many years. Although Stratfordian scholars argue with amazing vehemence that William of Stratford was the author of all those plays, even they have to concede that there is no evidence that he ever wrote anything more than his name in his own handwriting. I don’t think this observation is an anti-working-class judgment or snobbery or anything. There just isn’t any sample anywhere of his own writing–no notes, no letters, no diary entries, nothing. Just his signature on his will and a couple other legal documents.

Last spring I picked up a book in my local Barnes and Noble while waiting to be seated in a restaurant. It was “Shakespeare” by Another Name, written by Mark Anderson. This is a biography of Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, who is considered by many anti-Stratfordians to be the true author of the works. In this remarkable book, Anderson shows a great number of parallels between de Vere’s life and the details of Shakespeare’s plays.

It is Anderson’s contention that these connections are so strong they cannot be ignored. He makes a very convincing case. As Orson Welles once said, “I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you don’t agree, there are some awfully funny coincidences to explain away.” After reading Anderson’s book, I completely understand Welles’s point. The Italian cities mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays, for example, are those known to have been visited by de Vere in 1575 and 1576.

I’m now in the middle of my second, deliberately more skeptical reading of “Shakespeare” by Another Name. This time I am being very careful to ignore, or at least devalue, any assertions made in the subjunctive mood. For example, in chapter 2, Anderson describes Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Cambridge University in 1564. He mentions the entertainment that might have been enjoyed by the queen:

A troupe of players from the university, however, followed the queen’s train. De Vere, who probably departed Cambridge with Elizabeth, would have watched as these presumptuous undergraduates overtook the massive convoy of horses and carts. The players begged Elizabeth to let them perform just one masque. After some pleading, she finally consented.

When Anderson uses constructions such as “de Vere…would have watched…”, it feels like pure speculation. But even skipping past all these “what if” passages, the concincidences are indeed very funny.

The debate about who wrote the plays of Shakespeare (or Shake-speare, which Anderson and other Oxfordians posit as a pseudonym for de Vere) has been going on for a couple centuries at least. I’m only just now getting into it. The thing I find most surprising is the heat and blind passion of the defenders of the Stratfordian position. Their strongest argument seems to be that William of Stratford must have written the plays because his name is on them. In other words, they don’t even admit that a publication could ever appear under a penname or the name of a frontman. (Anybody who knows about Hollywood in the 1950s knows that authors use frontmen quite often.)

The next most common critique of the Stratfordians against the Oxfordians is that they are stupid. Or at least lazy. For example, David Kathman, in a 1999 letter to Harper’s magazine, accuses Oxfordians of engagement in conspiracy theory, of pursuing pseudo-science and of observing a double standard with regard to Oxford and William Shakespeare. Sometimes, as on the Stromata blog, they seem to resort to simple name-calling. (Because Roger Strittmatter’s Ph.D. dissertation has a very long title, as dissertations usually do, Stromata calls it “ponderous.”)

What the Stratfordians are unable to convince me of, though, is that William of Stratford absolutely has to be the person who wrote the plays, and that no one else could have done it. The basic incongruence is just so strong. Where is anything else the man wrote, other than the core canon of English literature? Where are the letters? Where are the notes? What of William of Stratford’s own life is reflected in these works? Why does the First Folio seem to appear out of nowhere, with William Shakespeare’s name on it?

I think the reason this matters so much to me is that after reading Anderson’s book and other resources, and after thinking about the question for several months, I want to know that the plays and poems were written by a real human being. I want to know that they reflect the personal experience of a person with a life story. I don’t want to keep accepting that William of Stratford, human history’s epitome of accidental and natural genius, received these works from Heaven above just as the New Testament authors received the Word of God.

Come to think of it, the standard Stratfordian point of view does seem somewhat like a religion. Perhaps in this day and age when even religious Christians can begin to think about the real life of Jesus of Nazareth, students of English literature can start to think about the real life of the author of the Shake-speare plays.

Last week, when I attended The Taming of the Shrew at the Shakespeare Theatre, I found myself squirming in my seat, feeling like a heretic or a traitor for even entertaining these Oxfordian thoughts. Weird.

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. That’s really shameful, if you think about it. Fairfax considers itself in many respects to be the “home of the Internet.” Network Solutions, which was the sole registrar for all .com, .net, and .org domains through the 1990s, has its headquarters in Herndon, on the northwestern edge of Fairfax County.

German is the second-most frequently used language on the Internet, after English. Fortunately, Loudoun County, home to AOL and Dulles International Airport, is not as parochial as Fairfax, and still offers German widely. This means I am sure to have a job here for a long time.

The downside of this, however, is that I have five, count ‘em, five course preparations this year. Because I am the sole German teacher at a new school, I teach every level of German that is offered by the county: levels one through five (fifth-year being an Advanced Placement course). I know very few other teachers who have this pleasure. Whenever a school has more than one teacher, invariably somebody is doing two or more sections of the same course–two sections of second-year Spanish, for example. That means any given teacher’s five-class teaching load is divided up between, or among, only two or three different courses. But I get one class of each and every level. That’s the situation for most German and Latin teachers around here.

If you’ve taught school before, you’ll know what I mean when I say that I have to do five completely different shows every two days. Teaching is like the most demanding performance anyone ever gave. A teacher on the block schedule has to hold an audience’s attention for 90 minutes. That’s the standard length of a Las Vegas show. The difference between me and a Las Vegas show, however, is that there’s only one of me, while even a “one-man” show in Vegas has a whole crew of people behind it.

Oh–one other difference between me and a Las Vegas show: I get paid a teacher’s salary. And I get three personal leave (i.e., vacation) days during each school year. True, I get the summers “off”–but that means I have free time to take courses, lead student tours to Europe, and write and plan the county curriculum.

I am exhausted right now. That’s why this post is so long. I don’t have the energy to stop typing.

Think I’m going to go home and drink wine and watch the baseball playoffs now. The whole thing starts up again Monday morning, bright and early.

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.

The sports geniuses at ESPN.com had the Nats losing anywhere from 93 to 113 games. Sports Illustrated’s own geniuses predicted the Nationals would be dead last among all 30 major league baseball teams.

I am happy to report that all these “experts” were so wrong it’s laughable. The Nationals finished just better than four teams in the National League and four in the American League. The Nats were very important in the New York Mets’ collapse at the end of the season.

So, yeah, 73-89 is a mediocre record. But we gave at least a couple teams–Philadelphia and the Mets–a lot of heartburn in the month of September. And we made a bunch of sports pundits eat their predictions.

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.

On Christmas Eve 1991, I was living in the Belmont Heights section of Nashville, a cozy suburban neighborhood near several university campuses. My kids were very young. We got along well with our neighbors. There were families all around us.

Diagonally across the street from us lived two brothers. They got into an argument in the middle of the night after much alcohol had been drunk. One brother fetched a loaded handgun and killed the other. Without the loaded handgun in the house, this argument would probably have remained a drunken fistfight, maybe a stabbing.

In February of 1997, our family accompanied my wife on a weekend trip to New York City. My wife had to attend an arts conference, and I was left to explore the city with the kids. On Sunday afternoon we wanted to go to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, but we weren’t sure whether we should wait until Mom got finished with her afternoon meeting. We decided that I would go ahead and take the kids up to the top while Barbara was in her session.

After we returned home to Northern Virginia, we learned that a man had opened fire with a handgun on the Empire State Building’s observation deck later that afternoon. Seven people were shot; one was killed, in addition to the gunman, who committed suicide. If we had waited for Barbara, we might well have been there to experience the shooting firsthand. Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani blamed weak gun laws for the rampage.

America’s latest adventure in easily available firearms is, of course, the massacre at Virginia Tech. As I have mentioned, my wife and daughter, who had visited Blacksburg the day before, missed this one by about 18 hours.

The world press paid close attention to this shooting for a long time. It was front-page news in just about all the newspapers of the world for four or five days. As I write this, nine days after the attack, major papers in Germany, Austria, France, and other countries are still reporting the aftermath.

The one thing the world press has emphasized, without exception, is their absolute bafflement at the U.S. gun laws–or lack thereof. We are the laughingstock of the world in this department. People from civilized countries around the world look at the apparent American fascination with guns and cluck in disapproving astonishment. The unifying theme is something like this: how can a great country such as the U.S., the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, continue to allow this to happen?

After all these years and decades, I cannot come up with an answer. The National Rifle Association seems to have our congressional legislators in a deathgrip. One mass murder happens after another, all carried out with handguns or assault rifles, and yet nothing changes.

The morning after the Virginia Tech shootings, I heard Washington Post sports reporter John Feinstein on WTWP. I wish I could find a transcript of his remarks. Essentially what he said was this: when gun owners and gun fans complain about the inconvenience or unfairness of having to register these deadly weapons, he is sick of hearing about it. Since 9/11 we have been subject to a series of ever more humiliating and inconvenient searches of our persons and property at airports. Nobody really complains, because that’s just the way the world is.

Well, the world is also selling deadly handguns on the Internet to psychotic young men, who then commit mass murder. Couldn’t we endure just a little inconvenience to combat such madness?

I am very angry now at our American stupidity. I am angry at the weak will of the majority of Americans who want stronger gun controls, yet who will not raise hell with their congressmen or senators about it. I am embarrassed to have to try to explain to my European friends and colleagues why Americans are still allowed to buy and carry handguns.

The cartoonist Pat Oliphant has captured my sense of befuddlement and rage.