Oakland Athletics prospect Grant Desme is retiring from baseball to enter the priesthood, Desme announced on Friday, Jan. 22, 2010.

I was poking around on a website called Creative Minority Report.

Check it out. Baseball is an interesting sport and different from the others. Here is another story about this rare phenomenon.

It reminds me of a time a few years ago when I was wandering around the NFL Hall of Fame and Museum in Canton Ohio, just down the road from The Best Damn Cheesemaker in Ohio and perhaps the USA.

I turned a corner and ran into an alcove with nothing in it other than an Army dress uniform with a number of medals and the name Tillman above the right jacket pocket.

I guess football is also an interesting sport.

Donna Healy, one of my favorites, writes about snowflakes here. She does mention that old saw about no two snowflakes being the same, but as my wife points out, How can they know? Some good pictures of snowflakes too from Kenneth Libbrecht, a physicist from Cal Tech,  who specializes in snowflakes. Who knew that was possible? That is one of them to the right. I didn’t know they could be so large and so beautiful.

Jim Gainan shows he has more to say about life and living than just making our gardens more attractive here. What an asset to our community.

Ed Kemmick, in his usual wry clever way, has a long article on obituaries worth reading here. When you turn to the obituary page—you all do, don’t you?—you find at least a couple of interesting lives well chronicled. And moreover, the Kemmick article mentions an obit written by Sue Hart, professor of English at MSUB: I wonder, how exactly do we get Sue to write our obit? Hmm? As the time gets nearer, I wouldn’t mind taking a course in how to write a decent obituary. Any others?

The Op-Ed page has George Will on it, almost always worth reading. And finally, the letters to the editor section, not usually one of the Gazette’s high points, has a couple of interesting letters. What the heck: buy the paper.

Sunday afternoon matinee at Billings Studio Theatre allowed all of us elderly still continent and mostly ambulatory folks to have some fun with a classic small town satire—unlikely to be meant as affectionate originally—but now even the nasty slurs our friends from Texas assign to us small town folks these days are laughed off because we’ve become used to the bombardment from the partisans at MSNBC and Saturday Night Live.

Besides, we’ve seen Vint and Jeff do this before, in the 80s and the 90s, and probably in the noughties as well. Most of the audience thought they were getting better as they get older, though there still are a few inevitable timing problems because of all the costume changes required when Lavinder and Boschee play all the parts. They really do well, especially with the old lady parts. Excellent costumes and especially great hair pieces made things a little more believable.

This is still playing up to 23 January and tickets are still available. So get over there to have a laugh at yourself. It’s healthy.

For more info on BST go here.

For more info on Greater Tuna go here.

Of course we know it is weather. But eventually all those weather thingies add up to climate don’t they?

This comes from this interesting website.

This was a marvelous musical show with a lot of attention to detail. It was an inspired telling of our Christmas story with enough of the joy-filled mystery of the Incarnation to satisfy a theology professor and enough pure entertainment schlock to satisfy the ordinary Hollywood pagan. Wow. Check these folks out when you get the chance.

Mr Pack has ovbiously been paying close attention to his surroundings while growing up and well into adulthood. He apparently grew up in Roundup and at least some of the story seems to be autobiographical. The narrator is anxious to get out, first of all to Billings and then to Silicon Valley. Recent history is deftly woven into the story.

Most of the characters are wounded in one way or another and they manage to pass along their hurts to the next generation or those around them. I am worried that some of these characters might have played around with some of my savings in the 80s and 90s. If there is any truth to the story and I suspect there is, then I didn’t realize the connection between big money and sex, which observation probably confirms that I haven’t been paying close attention.

Recommended.

I was starting to get a little worried that maybe global warming or our recent financial messes had, like the swallows failing to come back to Capistrano, caused the annual migration of Salvation Army bell ringers to move somewhere else. But I was wrong. I saw my first Bell Ringer at Albertson’s on Rehberg and Grand on I think it was St Juan Diego’s Day. The cheerful ringer told me he was from Arizona and he enjoyed the cold weather.

This is a kind of liturgy but in stone rather than word and song.

I first saw this Pieta at the New York World’s Fair in about 1964. It seems to me we were on a moving sidewalk and just zipped on by. The genius of Michelangelo could not be hidden by the quick look though.

More on Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception.

The next time I saw it was in St Peter’s Basilica during the Christmas season of 2007-8. It is hard to take your eyes from it. The statue on the obelisk to the right is in one of the many splendid squares of Rome. I’ve forgotten where exactly.

But a quick look in my bloglist revealed this nice entry with a meditation by Benedict XVI and another picture of the obelisk with the Immaculata on the top. Amy Welborn says this one is found in the Piazza di Spagna. This is worth more than a look.

2 December 2009

This was a fun book to read. Especially if, like me, you were alive and paying attention to the peculiar presidential political melee during the summer and fall of 2008. There were a lot of dogs that didn’t bark and thus the whole thing was more than a little puzzling. This book appears to be an effort at explaining some of those puzzles. It does not speak to the main puzzle however, which was the almost total absence of any journalistic efforts to tell us commoners who Barack Obama was, other than he was somewhat black and spoke like a white man most of the time.

The main-stream media masters that I have heard, and their lesser kin out in the boondocks, obviously did not read this book. They say she didn’t write the book; that one of her editors did. And yet, the book sounds very much like Governor Palin talks, whether you like that or not, and as far as I know, almost every writer except for a few politicians always give credit to their editors.

Governor Palin is a journalist in the sense of writing journals for much of her life. She draws on these for a summary of her earlier life: Normal kid growing up in normal places, and yet they were exciting places—at least in her memories and in her journals, and would probably be that way for the rest of us if we had been smart enough to write in them and keep them for later use—weren’t all of our childhoods exciting places and times? Then she got interested in local politics after a normal education and a normal early family life. Eventually she became the mayor of Wasilla Alaska. Then, a little later she ran for governor against the good old boys of Alaska, and she won.

Probably the high points of the book are her descriptions of her feelings when she discovers she will be the mother of an extra-chromosome baby boy (Down Syndrome) and then soon after, another bolt of lightning strikes when John McCain picks her for a short and tumultuous life as a vice-presidential candidate.

I thought at the time it was a brilliant choice because Joe Biden had already been chosen to be the Democratic choice for vice-president. What a splendid contrast: old Senator Jack S Phogbound from one of the corrupt one party states of the East versus the bright young reformer Sarah Palin from small town western America. While writing the last sentence it suddenly occurred to me that just as we have heard some institutions are “too big to fail,” maybe there are some states that are too small to avoid corruption, in that their cities and the lordly people that congregate in them tend to over balance the more ordinary rural folk, where much of the common sense of the country resides.

But even better, of course, was the fact that the vice-presidential candidate for the Republicans had more real experience at governing than the presidential candidate for the Democrats. This was delicious irony or so it seemed to me. Of course, with our main-stream media (MSM) in bed with Obama it was difficult to make that clear, though Palin did make an effort at the convention when she likened being mayor of Wasilla as something similar to a “community organizer, though with actual responsibility.” That might have been the best line of the campaign. No wonder our MSM types really had to scramble to put down this upstart nitwit from fly-over country. Well, you know what I mean.

The peculiarities and deficiencies of the campaign, which made some of us wonder who was actually playing the part of The Manchurian Candidate, are explored, at least from Palin’s point of view. We are all waiting for some explanation from the McCain point of view. Well, maybe not.

8 December 2009

I meant to get up early today but I forgot to set the alarm last night. So it wasn’t until about 8:30 am that I got over to Borders’ book store to check out the crowds coming to see Sarah Palin, perhaps give her some encouragement, and get their copy of her book signed.

The crowd seemed fairly normal and moved along steadily and cheerfully I thought, with a few signs, but mostly just bundled up against the bitter cold temperatures. If nothing else these temperatures may well have kept at least some of the riff-raff huddled in the nearby coffee-shops. At 8:30 am the crowd, about 3-4 abreast stretched back from the front of the Borders store to the entrance to the IHOP restaurant. It may have gone back even further than that before they started moving around 8 am when the store opened.

It looks like a lot of Billings people are going to make room on their mantles this Christmas for a copy of Governor Palin’s book, alongside the Bible and their guns of course. Or maybe they will put a small bookshelf alongside the gun rack in the back of the pickup.