Myspace is dying, isn't it?  

Repeatedly upon many times there were men named John. But once upon a single time there was a man named John who became the servant of another man named John who was getting ready for a long and dangerous journey. The second John had just joined a group of English outcasts in the Netherlands and was preparing for a long and dangerous journey. This particular long and dangerous journey was unprecedented and was timed to take advantage of a window of opportunity that a certain king name Jimmy was giving him and 100 of his best friends to avoid execution by fleeing to a far away land. They went by boat and encountered many storms on a huge, unfriendly ocean.

Once and only once during this trip a man was knocked overboard. It happened during an especially fearsome storm and, as you all know, storms are not good times for extranavicular activies. The man who took the plunge was the young servant John, about 20 years old at the time and yet to procreate. As he and all of his unduplicated DNA sank beneath the waves he managed to cling to a topsail halyard which hung overboard. Defying the howling winds and rough sea, his fellow sojourners pulled on his rope to bring him back to the surface and hauled him in with a boathook. To say that this pilgrim cheated death would be a gross understatement. As his body was pulled back onto the deck of the Mayflower, shivering as much from fear as from the ocean chill, I wonder if anyone understood the monumental significance of the twist of fate which had twisted that thin length of rope into the hands of young John at his moment of desperate need. Exact copies of portions of John's DNA, almost lost forever at the bottom of the sea, are entwined in the nucleii of every cell in the body of our sitting president.

Have you ever tried to write a blog when you don't really have anything to say?  Well, I'm going to try.

Let's see, last night a happy conjunction of long-developing conditions and short-range circumstances put me in a position to watch a silent film.  I then predictably submitted to this fateful coincidence as we half-conscious mortals are wont to do.  I don't think I've ever seen a silent film before, except for a few brief Charlie Chaplin excerpts.  The first thing one should know about silent films is that they are emphatically NOT silent.  Some dude played a piano solo through the whole movie.  This carnival sound sort of demanded your attention and I suppose was necessary to keep members of our species focused on the issue at hand.

In this case the issue at hand was a movie was called "It" featuring a brief, "silent" (not even a reader card) appearance by Gary Cooper who looked to be the only one young enough to stick around and become famous in the "talkies."  I remember watching the old movie "Sunset Boulevard" (I think William Holden is in it) a couple of years ago and in it some washed up, narcissistic actress from the silent film era elaborated vainly on how much talent was required in the silent films because you had only your face to communicate with.  I can sympathize with this comment a bit more now.  Anyway, she was basically in self-imposed exile in her house because she couldn't bare the thought of going out into the world that had moved on to the talkies and forgotten her.  It is fascinating to consider how quickly silent films were exiled to the Kuiper Belt in the solar system of popular culture.  To prove my point I'll venture to guess that we've all seen the Wizard of Oz.  The Wizard of Oz came out only a decade after "It," which was quite famous in its day and which none of you have ever heard of.

The second thing one should know about silent movies is that they can be quite well done and "It" was a lovely little romp about romantic love.  It ("It") was 90 minutes long, but was not at all boring or sophomoric, though it was definitely dated.  I guess I imagined that silent films were not only technologically embryonic but were also artistically unsophisticated, but this one defied my expectations.  Anyway, the most interesting theme in the movie related to unforgivable female manipulation.  We'll save that for another blog.

I've been urged by powerful forces to redevote myself to blogging.

I thought I would start off by offering a short paper.  I write lots of papers which will languish drawers never to see the light of day, but I wrote one for today's class which I deemed worthy of your attention.  I was asked to right a brief "self-reflective essay" on my view of religion and the role my own religion plays in my "work" in medieval history.  Perhaps you will find it provocative.  I'm the primary one to be blamed for the content of my paper, but the form and readability were greatly enhanced by the rhetorical genius of the inimitable Alexis Youngs.

My religious faith is the most important aspect of my life.  It influences my thoughts, desires, and actions in countless ways.  As an aspiring historian, I have been aware that although my faith inspires and strengthens me in times of sleep-deprived panic over paper deadlines or when I feel lost in an academic miasma, it also can hinder me from assessing historical figures fairly and accurately.  This paper will explore some of the ideas I've developed in an attempt to overcome this.

 

I have believed in God for as long as I can remember.  At first this belief was primarily informed by my involvement until about age 13 in the Baha'i faith.  My exposure to the Baha'i faith coupled, I suppose, with my own innate religiosity has made my experience of God essentially personal.  I have never thought of religion in corporate terms.  This alone puts me at an obvious distance from many medieval Christians.

           

Though many aspects of my early faith and my communication with God remain the same, I experienced a profound change at age 19.  At this time, through an obvious conspiracy of circumstances, I became a Christian and have remained one for the last 11½ years.  Though I was eager to learn about my new faith, I maintained an independent approach to religion.  At first, my exploration of the bible and Christianity was aided and influenced substantially by Christians around me, but I still felt I was on a personal quest for truth. ("The individual search after truth" is one of the tenets of Baha'ism.)  Individualism is a trademark of our society and perhaps also of western civilization.  The fact that I breathe this modern, individualistic air is what has piqued my interest in medieval corporate Christianity.  It seems to be something fundamentally different from my own experience, eliciting in me something like heterosexual attraction.

           

If someone were to interrogate me to determine my religious faith, one would probably conclude that I was Protestant, fundamentalist, and evangelical.  I believe in the sovereignty of God, the divinity of Christ, the power of the Holy Spirit, and the uniqueness and inerrancy of the Protestant bible.

 

I also agree with the Apostle's Creed in averring that there exists a "holy catholic church."  Because of this I believe that there are unique and fundamental similarities which are shared among those who are true believers, whether they are medieval or modern.  These similarities transcend the boundaries of time and space.  Thus, when I look at medieval individuals, many of whom seem to share my core beliefs, I am often tempted to explain or justify their actions with the assumption that I know their intentions.  In these situations I am often torn between a sense that I truly understand these people in a way that others are not able and a sense that I might be completely enslaved to my own bias.

 

In an attempt to deal with this and other difficulties I have come to understand religion as a complicated mixture of two powerful catalysts: personal religion and institutional religion.  Personal religion is intuitive and arises from the individual search for connection with a higher power based on a sense of cosmic loneliness.  Personal religion is interactive and constitutes how a person thinks about and connects with the divine when in a state of isolation from other human beings.  As a side note, an instructive and interesting dichotomy could be drawn between this kind of relationship with the divine and superstition, which has more to do with detached manipulation of the divine.

 

Institutional religion, as opposed to personal religion, has public, social, doctrinal, and cultural dimensions, all of which give it both durability and respectability.  Its social dimensions force it to establish rational and doctrinal formulations of a religion in order to create a shared basis for meaningful spiritual interaction between adherents.  As an example let us consider the doctrinal statement that "man is sinful and is therefore cut off from God."  If this doctrinal formulation explains sufficiently the aforementioned sense of cosmic loneliness felt by many people, it follows that these people can form social and spiritual bonds with each other based on their logical agreement, whether or not their intuitive sense of cosmic loneliness is identical or affects them in the exactly the same way.  If, as in medieval Europe, enough of society is persuaded to accept a doctrinal system based on a constellation of similar statements then the culture will also be affected.

 

Personal religion and institutional religion develop in tandem and influence each other in highly complex ways.  I have now come to acknowledge that even though I may share core beliefs with many medieval figures, it may be true that we will differ on some important religious beliefs based on interaction with our respective institutional environments.  This has served the double function of allowing me to maintain my belief in the "holy catholic church" while helping me to be less presumptuous about medieval motivation.

 

This also helps me to view institutional religion in a relatively detached manner.  Whether it is medieval Catholicism or the Presbyterian Church of America, I view institutional religions in much the same way that I view any human organization.  Though they may serve important spiritual functions with some degree of success, they are still messy, fallible human institutions much like any other and I feel free both as a Christian and a historian to treat them thus.

 

We all have our biases and I have felt particularly vulnerable to a historically familiar kind of bias, that of the committed Christian.  I have learned to deal with it in a way that I feel is appropriate, but I am all too aware that it may show up in new ways in my work.  The good news is that the best historical work is done in dialog with other historians, who would be in a position to point out my shortcomings.

can you imagine anything sexier than ending a sentence like this?

...will stumble inevitably down the path of intelectio ad absurdum until we are sitting cross-legged in a kiddie pool of tapioca pudding, waxing eloquent on the way in which Zeus and Buddha begat Britney Spears, completely unaware of how batshit crazy we've become and the utter foolishness (and brash impudence) with which we make our grand proclamations.

 

I just saw Elton John and Eminem holding hands on television.  I rushed to my blog to tell you.

My sister recently lamented the paucity of intrepid blogoneers on Myspace and since today is her birthday I feel it my duty to heed her clarion call and become part of the solution.  Here goes.

I will start by noting that part of the problem with myspace is that it is like cool-whip.  Everyone knows that it is an artificial and uninspiring dessert topping but they buy the product anyway because it has wide appeal, puts guests at ease, and doesn't cost much in time or money.  Blogspot on the otherhand (a site to which many intrepid bloggers are turning) is for the blog connoisseur.  It is like the all natural whipping cream I was handed at a recent dinner which caused me to pause, peer inquisitively inside, and ask myself if it was really worth the risk of pouring out what appeared to be a white liquid onto a dessert I was anxious not to ruin.  Apparently that's how the other half does it.  True bloggers turn to blogspot because they know that's where the best blogging can happen.  The problem is that other people don't feel at ease there.  There are no flashy commercials, no consistent formats, fewer pictures, and it appears you actually have to learn html code to configure it.  So even if the blogging is better it becomes hard to attract a wide readership and you get stuck in an elitist milieu. (really? Did you just use the word milieu in that sentence about elitists? Get over yourself)  Myspace may be inferior in many ways but it keeps you connected to the masses, like my sister. (Shh, she never reads this far.)

Now about my day.  In some ways typical.  In some ways not.

Tuesdays and Thursdays involve going to work (two buses) working for an hour and a half, racing back to school (two buses) and then racing back to work (one bus)  and eventually going home.  (one bus)  This is very inefficient, but it's the price you pay.  

While racing back to school I broke a sweat for the first time today.  I actually took three buses because I thought I had enough time to pick up my hat which I thought I had left at the ew ork Burrto (sic) a week ago.  This is a nice, clean restaurant in a very nice area of town but they apparently have a problem keeping all the letters on their sign up at one time.  These are not little black sign board letters, but large two foot metal letters, which must have caused quite a stir when the fell.  I think I especially would have been afraid of the "N."  Anyway, the ew ork Burrto (sic) has a New York theme, serves Mexican food, and is run by very nice Chinese people.  These facts would, of course, be cannon fodder for the average proletarian myspace blogger, but I will yet again take the high road and refrain from making any comments on the total incomprehensibility of this combination. 

Instead I will simply point out that Chinese food seems to me to represent the platonic ideal of what food could be, but is very rarely cooked with its potential in mind.  In most Chinese restaurants it is given lackluster attention as if they know you'll eat it anyway just because it will still remind you of how good Chinese food could be.  Besides that, afterwards, my stomach usually tells me that there was some serious hygenic breakdown somewhere in the process.  So I will only say, if you are a Chinese person who can produce clean and stomach friendly Mexican food (shoddy sign notwithstanding) why on earth wouldn't you open the only clean Chinese restaurant in town and make fistfulls of dollars.

After class I raced back to work and did my deliveries and then met a man who was to unload 6 pallets of new cupcake boxes at our saintly storage unit.  He was late.  It was now 1:20 and I had a 2:45 dentist appointment.  This was a frightful scenario because I'm pretty sure no one reading this blog (except for the several of you with high level security clearance) had heard the name Valerie Plame on the date of my last dentist appointment.  The delivery guy had apparently gone to the wrong storage unit and when he finally got to the right one I went into high gear, breaking a sweat for the second time today, and unloaded two pallets directly into the cupcake mobile while he casually unloaded four more with his motorized pallet jack.  (The sad thing is that I know he's getting paid way more than me)

When I got back to cupcake central I broke a sweat for the third time unloading  boxes into the storage space by myself because everyone else decided they couldn't help because the boxes were too heavy.  During this process I speant several minutes frantically trying to fix the dolly which had been sorely neglected because bakers apparently don't understand how nuts and bolts go together.  Then everything was in place and I looked at my watch, hoping against hope that I would have time to make it to my dentist appointment.  It was 2:37.  No problem, right?  Wrong.

I was on 17th and Flanders.  My dentist is on 6th and Hall.  I had eight minutes.  My teeth were desperate for the attention of a hygenist and they clenched in their anger towards my sluggish box-transfering performance as I set out on the 25+ block odyssey.  At one point I met a bus heading in the right direction and though it only took me down about six blocks, at least it did broke up my fourth and fifth sweats.  I arrived at the dentist  breathing very heavily, with a wad of personal belongings under one arm, freshly washed hair frizzing out in all directions, and sweat pouring from my body and soaking my shirt.  Yes, the fifth sweat was probably the juiciest.  The dentists were very nice and thorough and had nice white masks on, which hopefully kept my B.O. out along with my germs.  The good news is that they were very impressed with the state of my teeth and no procedures will be necessary at this time.  Whee doggie!

Then I watched the 1941 movie "Sullivan's Travels" with a bunch of history geeks and my dad.  Great movie!

Happy birthday Sara!!!

Well my last blog didn't seem to provoke much response (one word to be exact) but they tell me that people are reading it.  I wonder if myspace just fudges the number of "views" you are getting to make you think people are paying attention to your blog.

Well, anyway it's time to blog about public transportation.  The main lesson public transportation teaches you is to expect the unexpected.  Like last night some guy in the back of the bus started whistling, not any sort of pleasant melody, but a punctuated succession of sharp, strident blasts which seemed to get louder each time.  He (or she) spaced them out just enough that it took about four or five before I realized he was going to be making a habit out of this and turned around with a probing glare trying to sniff out the perp.  Just when I thought my furrowed brow had been enough to make him cease and desist the whistles started again.  I was about to speak up when I reminded myself of the manifold ridership of the bus.  In many situations you can trust yourself to be surrounded by conformists who will accept criticism of their whistling ability, but on any given bus (except the 94 and 96) there are lots of crazies, punks, drunks, and other people with nothing to lose. (except their bus pass)  So I thought to myself, rather than descend to their level and offer some shrill protest I will just ignore it like everyone else seems to be doing especially since my stop is coming up.  I did want to offer a service to the couple of dozen remaining victims so I walked to the back of the bus to deboard and glared at everyone who looked like a punk or a lunatic, thinking that I would scare them into relenting.  I don't know why, but I fancy myself as capable of intimidation.  But I realized as I was getting off the bus that my attempted intimidation was probably hindered by the fact that I was still wearing green tights from my ultimate frisbee game.  ah well.

And the other top four run-ins in the last week are...

4) sitting next to a girl who seemed to be calling every friend she had to tell them that her boyfriend tried to shoot her (she was clearly exaggerating) and was now in jail (she thought).  Why you would want to broadcast these facts to a busfull of strangers is beyond me.

3) Air guitar boy - this guy is great.  He looks like a cool, well-groomed, and pretty normal guy with longish dark hair in his early twenties but the careful observer will notice one small quirk: He has serious air guitar issues.  Whenever I see him, at least every three minutes he will break out into an air guitar solo.  It wouldn't be so noticeable if I had just seen him once because he wears headphones and looks rather normal, but he obviously is a habitual wanna-be because he does it every time i see him.  He spreads his hands wide and low as though playing a low slung, long necked bass and bobs his head to the beat.  He doesn't really move his fingers on his left hand making it appear that he's actually ever fretted a guitar before, but he certainly has the posture down pat.  I'm sure if he could channel this nervous energy into actual guitar practice he would be the next Les Claypool.

2) Drunk idiot - this guy is new on the circuit and I've only seen him twice.  The first time I almost sat next to him, but right before sitting down I began to detect his lunacy and changed course finding a more subdued benchmate.  Anyway, he dinged the bell for his stop and got up and when the bus stopped he stumbled (I think somewhat on purpose) into the lap of a quiet Latino sitting along in the front.  He began engaging him in "conversation" for a full 30 seconds before actually getting off the bus and the busdriver didn't seem up for the challenge of expediting the process.  His conversation, most of which took place while still partially on the other guy's lap, consisted of mumbled phrases highlighted with two phrases delivered as if they were declamatory injunctions.  One was "U.S.A." which seemed to be his way of telling the Latino that America is great (as if he didn't know, I think in Portland the number of Latinos who love America vastly outpaces the number of whites who do)  The other phrase was "Jesus Christ" (again delivered as if he was a laconic alcoholic successor to Rudyard Kipling trying to educate the uncivilized masses - Again I thought it interesting that there are probably a higher percentage of Latinos in Portland who believe in Jesus Christ than there are whites.)  He finally left the guy alone and got off and I shook my head and shared a smile with another Latino who I was sitting next to hoping that he didn't understand what the drunk white guy had been saying and feeling hopeful that our wordless connection had been a small step toward healing the giant rupture that had just been created between whites and Latinos who ride the 12.

1) This is two separate instances of blantant prevarication which I find quite troubling.  The first one happened a couple of days ago in the morning on the way to work.  I heard the lady next to me call someone and explain that the bus was running late and she would be there a little late.  I knew for a fact that the bus we were on was not running late.  She may have been referring to her previous bus, but I find that the buses really aren't late that often and I constantly hear people using the transit system as the scapegoat for their tardiness.  I have heard countless conversations like this and it's starting to make me mad, because this smear campaign against public transportation is giving a bad name to a system that actually works pretty well if you show up to the bus stop on time.  I decided then and there to write this blog and inform my extensive readership that the bus is actually pretty reliable and all these people blaming the bus for their lack of punctuality are blatant liars!  And what is more they don't even mind if everyone else on the bus can hear them lying!  I was given further impetus to address this issue on my way back from work that day when I heard yet another irritating loud cell phone talker tell his friend "I'm on the MAX and I'll be there soon."  I wonder if there were others besides me who heard that comment and looked around briefly, frightened that they had somehow accidentily gotten on the light rail, and then realized that, no, this was in fact the 17 bus and that guy was totally lying to his friend.  A few moments later he modified his lie and said "Well I'm not actually on it, I'm just outside of it."  "Just outside" of course, means to me that a MAX just pulled up and you are about to board it.  We were still on the 17 and getting anywhere near a MAX stop would take at least another 5 or 10 minutes. 

So the moral is, don't ever trust a busrider.  He probably just made all of this up to sensationalize his blog and attract more "readers."

Why do such pointless blogs turn out so long.

"Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman."  G.K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy

 

"Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw." G.K.C. Heretics

 

G.K. Chesterton, near the end of the greatest chapter in any book ever written*, briefly sums up something he calls the "poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence," which is partially an argument that people only truly appreciate things when they are scarce and the best way to appreciate something is to treat it that way.  He points out how one of the most exciting parts of the book Robinson Crusoe is simply the "list of things saved from the wreck."  Why is this so exciting?  Because to each item is added remarkable value by the realization that we might have had to make do without it.

 

In history we usually view with baffled disdain the prejudices and actions of previous eras and peoples.  I've read quite a few medieval chronicles and have been surprised to see how otherwise intelligent and spiritual people seem to consistently see Christendom as the one positive thing in the world and those outside of Christendom as thoroughly corrupted enemies of all that is good.  Isn't it great that our society is so progressive and that we're so much smarter than all the idiots who have gone before us?

 

Or are we?  I think one of our most egregious collective errors in the post-industrial age is a lack of appreciation.  I think this might be highlighted by a consideration of our attitude toward our dear friend petroleum.  Cheap access to oil is something we consider to be a natural human right.  This may be true, because at this point if oil were suddenly cut off or controlled by a few brilliant and malevolent individuals, the resulting panic would probably plunge our smug, progressive society into a kind of nightmarish anarchy worse than Sierra Leone, Darfur, or North Korea. 

 

It seems that once we make something a human right we fail to appreciate it and only notice its absence, but I'd like to argue that we adopt a different attitude about oil.  Maybe if we all knew a little more about the history of oil we would be a bit more appreciative.

 

543 million years ago something happened called the Cambrian Explosion in which 50-80% of all animal phyla ever to exist were created.  Of the more than 70 phyla known to have existed then only a little more than 30 remain today.  (As an aside, I would just like to point out the obvious, which is that hosts of animals "exploding" onto the earth makes more sense when one believes that God creates things at specific times for specific purposes than when one goes along with our modern evolutionary assumption.)  After the Cambrian Explosion there were shallow seas covering large portions of earth and the body types of the animals dominating these post-Cambrian shallow seas were ideal for eventually being transformed into black gold.  The way this happened was that their dead bodies were buried by sedimentation and tectonic activity and then heat, pressure, and time turned them into tar, and eventually into oil.  Microbial activity then begins turning this oil into methane. (natural gas)

 

Sedimentation and tectonic processes then have to lay down porous rocks to hold the oil and non-porous sealer rocks around it to keep it in.  Otherwise the oil would leak out and be too thinly distributed throughout the earths crust to be easily extracted.  Furthermore, the timing of the post-Cambrian entombment of critters was such that we are living at the optimum time to make use of it.  In the entire 4.5 billion year history of the earth we are living at the moment in which most of these fossils are in their most useful form (oil) instead of still being tar or having already decayed into methane.  Furthermore, the underground reservoirs which have been formed by tectonic process have mostly not yet been ruptured by those same tectonic processes which created them.  It almost seems like God planned to give us this gift.

 

But do we treat it as a gift?  I think not.  Rather than appreciating oil like Anton Ego appreciated his Ratatouille, we treat it as would an obese glutton who seizes food to satisfy the basest of urges.  We are consuming it in a crescendoing paroxysm like an oblivious binger, unconcerned with the consequences of his lusts.  Should we not rather appreciate this miracle by gathering the leftover pieces of bread, rather than presumptuously expecting another miracle?  Should we not consider the fact that this miracle, like the feeding of the 5000 may only happen once?

 

From now on when you or I take a trip in a car, a bus, a plane, or cruise liner let's thank God for his gift.  "Blessed art Thou O Lord our God who bringeth forth oil from the earth."  Unlike a prayer before meals this is prayer for a resource that is not renewable.  This is a different kind of miracle than chicken alfredo, because fossilized mollusks are no longer capable of reproduction.  When we fire up our internal combustion engines we are taking advantage of a resource whose origins date back a half a billion years and we are using 10 gallons of gas which will never, ever be available to anyone ever again.  That ought to be something to thank God for, but also a fact which might change the way we live.

 

So I suggest we all gather around the pump the next time we fill up and lay hands on it.  We can say a prayer thanking God for post-Cambrian critters just like we often thank him for the barnyard critters we eat for lunch.  The gas station attendant might see you as the mad prophet of a new sect, but perhaps this world needs another John the Baptist.  And besides, this will not be a new sect.  We are those who appreciate the giver by appreciating the gifts and our tribe has been here for millenia.  History, I am sure, will be kinder to you for your madness than it will be to your era for its madness.

 

References

"Patroleum: God's Well-timed Gift to Mankind" by Hugh Ross

http://www.reasons.org/resources/connections/200409_connections_q3/index.shtmlpetroleum_gods_well_timed_gift_to_mankind

"Cambrian Flash" by Fuz Rana

http://www.reasons.org/resources/connections/2000v2n1/index.shtmlearths_crafted_crust

Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton

 

* Think.  You know what the asterisk is for.

Fame is funny thing, which generally surrounds a person like a halo and changes completely the way many people interact with you.  I've learned to hate this and after about age 17 I stopped standing up at Blazer games when Clyde Drexler dunked, I quit screaming wildly at concerts, and I began to act indifferently around beautiful women.  Perhaps I was jealous, perhaps I wanted to help them feel normal, or perhaps I just think too much.

Anyway, my brushes with fame have been few and far between, but as I rode the bus downtown yesterday I was unaware that I was on a collision course with one of the most famous people in Portland.  Could I treat him just like anyone else?  Would I back down from our destined confrontation in the face of his fame and charisma?  These are the questions that were NOT plaguing my mind.  I was asking myself questions like "Can I still ride this skateboard without looking stupid?" "How can I get my sister and brother-in-law to start playing frisbee with me?" "Should I bail out from academia and become a circus clown, or a bus driver, or a songwriter?"

Anyway, I deboarded the bus at 10th and Jefferson and headed toward Montgomery and my date with destiny.  As I arrived at our ultimate frisbee field I noted that there were perhaps 300 athletes throwing around the pigskin and several dozen spectators watching.  I double-checked to see that we had the field reserved and then realized that it was I who would need to stand up for the dozen lanky huckers who had showed up for our 1 o-clock game.  So I started thinking about who was in charge of these menacing atheletes.  And then it sunk in.  There was a new football coach in town and he was no ordinary football coach.  If I was to speak up for the frisbee boys I would have to locate a cowboy hat under which walked a legendary football coach: Jerry Glanville. 

First order of business: ditch the skateboard.  I've never seen guys in cowboy hats riding skateboards or hanging out at skateparks.  Second order of business: find the cowboy hat.  "Man, that guy's short.  Is he really the great Jerry Glanville?"  I walked up behind him as he was holding court casually with three young athletes and stood there, waiting for my chance.  What would I say to him?  "Did you really leave game tickets in will-call for Elvis even though he was dead?"  "Why on earth did you trade Brett Favre?" "Will you sign my chest?"  Probably not good opening gambits.

"Excuse me sir, sir?  Ah, I'm the president of the Ultimate Frisbee Club and we have the field reserved at one o-clock.  Is there some kind of mix up?"  He apparently felt there was.  They were planning to be out there until 2:30.  They were having a look at high school football players from Oregon, Washington, and California.  I looked out again at the sea of muscle and noted that I wasn't aware of a single person out there who would have trouble beating me up.  I told him we could play elsewhere, but wondered if this was going to happen again.  He said "no."  And I said "darn right, Mr. Glanville, 'cuz you must respect the disc" or something like that.  Then he said he liked Ultimate Frisbee and so I invited him to play with us.  He said he would bring his dog to catch for him.  And I thought to myself, "Hey, look, I'm joking around with Jerry Glanville, wow!"  Needless to say, we played elsewhere because I wasn't about to compromise my newfound friendship with Mr. G for a few spindly hucksters.  The End. 

On a sadder note, my grandpa died last week.  My dad, My uncle, and I were with him.  We will miss him, but we've seen it coming for a long time and I'm very thankful to have had him living with us for the last six weeks.  He was a man of some note in Salem so the Salem newspaper did a brief article about him on the front page a couple of days ago.  Here it is.  http://www.statesmanjournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070712/NEWS/707120331