If you are reading this...

I have been having problems with this blog. The entries don't come up for weeks at a time sometimes. So if you are reading this weeks from now, then make sure you click on the month listings and there the entries might appear.
At least that is what I hope.

My short history with the Boston Red Sox

I have been a Red Sox fan for a long time. It seems strange to like a team from Boston, but I do. It all started in 1975 when the Red Sox played the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series. I was 10 at the time and I hated the Reds. Why? Because they always made the Atlanta Braves suffer so much. I guess I liked the Braves, since they were so close to Tennessee and were on tv all of the time. But in 1975 I was rooting for the Red Sox. My father let me stay up that year to watch all of the games. I saw an amazing series, generally considered one of the greatest of all time. In the end, the Reds won in seven games, but I loved the Red Sox at the end.

In 1975, I had never heard of the Curse of the Bambino, so I didn't realize the Gods had cursed Boston for all of eternity. Then came 1986, I was in college, and lo and behold the Sox were back in the Series. That was a bad year. I had a neighbor who was a Mets fan, and I was poor, bored with school, desperately pining for a woman named Laura, and looking for a bit of good news in my life. Surely the Sox would provide me those good feelings. Wrong! They lost in seven and I trashed my dorm room. Everyone was surprised at my outburst, including me. A few months later, I joined the Air Force. I really think the loss of the 1986 series affected my decision. It was a good choice in retrospect, but a very tough one at the time. I think it came out of a lot of the confusion and despair I felt during that fall of 1986. I ended up dating that woman, but then I left for basic training and we kind of broke each other's hearts.

I moved to Boston in 2000. I had friends there, but the fact that the Red Sox played there really made it all the better. What a horrible year that was. I actually loved Boston and would happily go back in a heart beat, but I taught there and that was the worst thing that could possibly happen to a person. Then I fled America, and haven't looked back.

I am now in my fifth year in Kuwait and Boston has won the World Series twice in those years. Oh joy! They did it again today. It made my heart go all flitter flutter. I was shocked in 2004 when they won, but today I was just happy.

So God bless Beantown! Maybe I will return to you someday. More than likely I will just watch you from afar, through Red Sox games.

Year of the Golden Pig Reading 20: "The Spread of Islam in the World 20: A History of Peaceful Preaching"

It might come as a surprise to many, but Islam wasn't spread by the sword. Sure there has been violence in its history but its success has mostly been through missionaries (which every man and woman in Islam can become) or through traders. This book clearly spells this out.

I must say I usually don't read books from 1913(the first edition was actually published in the 1890's), but I made an exception for this one by Thomas Arnold. He almost lost me at the beginning with the long passage in Latin, but I kept going and really enjoyed what I learned. He seems to have really had a deep respect for Islam and this shows in his analyse of all of the positive reasons there are so many Muslims in the world. I am not sure why he wrote this work, but it really seems like a call for Christian missionaries to do a better job at getting to know the locals better, something that Muslim traders always seemed to do. In comparison with Protestant and Catholic missions, this was quite a radical approach.


Today of course we are often presented by aspects of Islamic life which are if anything difficult to rationally support, like violence against non-believers. Arnold talks a lot about them in this book, but mostly to show that their brand of prostelitization was unsuccessful. It was only in peaceful ways which Islam spread.


It has been interesting to read a book like this since Arnold still use anachronistic terminology like Muhammadans for Muslims, and Negroland for parts of Africa. But it is still very readable. It could use an updated edition, since all of the sources (including much of the text) is in the original Latin, Dutch, German, French, etc. I think the modern reader might not have a command of this many languages. However, the Arabic is always translated. Reading books like this really show how scholarship has changed over the last 100 years. If you read books back then, then you were most likely highly educated. There were no casual readers of the day, unless they had a command of a variety of European languages.

I really liked a quotation near the end of the book by the French writer Ernest Renan, who wrote (I will translate): "When Muslims are in prayer, I see this without any emotions, except the sadness in knowing that I am not a Muslim myself." That was quite a liberal translation, but if somelike like me with two years of high school French can so freely translate a passage, then why can't authors more educated than me do the same. I still remember throwing down Edward Said's "Orientalism" in disgust after coming across a whole page in French (I never picked it up again). I will forgive Arnold, because of when he wrote the book, but it is hard to forgive a modern writer when he knows the world of readers no longer has a command of five or six European languages. I see it only as academic arrogance, when authors write in Latin or French in this manner. You would never see text like that in Japanese or Arabic, but authors still get a bit snoody when "nous ecriton en francaise."


You might be hard pressed to find this in the West, but it is readilly available in the Middle East. So if you need a copy let me know.

What I need

I need to go home.

I need to eat dinner.

I need to take a walk tonight.

I need a sandwich.

I need a wife.

I need some new shoes.

I need some cool nights.

I need another Diet Coke.

I need a longer vacation.

I need more money.

I need some clothes that fit.

I need to lose fifty pounds or more.

I need to need less.

I guess I could start doing all of these things. But first: I need to go home.

The burning of Atlanta

Perhaps Sherman had it right the first time. It looks like Atlanta is going to burn to the ground again. I have been reading about the drought that has been haunting Georgia over the last few years. My father always talks about it. But now things are serious. Atlanta will run out of water in three months unless it rains soon! Run out of water. All of Atlanta. One of the largest cities in America. Can you imagine the chaos? I don't know what will happen if it occurs. Forget Katrina; that will be nothing compared to Atlanta burning to the ground again.

But then again, I guess it could rain someday soon. I wonder what the government plans to do to alleviate this mess. Hopefully they have a plan. Hopefully it won't be like our plan to get out of Iraq.

I used to really like Atlanta. It was a city full of trees. Then tons of people moved in an turned it into a smaller version of Los Angeles, el suck of cities. I guess maybe nature will have a chance to reclaim what it once owned.

Now I wonder what is going to happen to my dad.

Al Gore equals O regal! Anti-Christ!!

So almost 7 years to the day (misses it by three) in which the Supreme Court ruled against him in the 2000 election, Al Gore is set to accept the Nobel Prize for Peace. Of course this means only one thing: Al Gore is the Anti-Christ (but now with a warning label in Britain). This also means I will be looking forward to December 10th when he accepts the award and finally announces his candidacy for the Presidency. Of course he might wait those three days for so he can announce on the seventh anniversary of his symbolic wound on the head. Oh if only people would listen to me.

But of course, maybe I am a little paranoid. I had an Al Gore as Anti-Christ dream in the year 1999 or 2000. I definitely couldn't vote for him after that. So I will be interested in seeing what kind of mayhem he comes up with next. We seem to only be a few years away from computer chips in our hands, so maybe the author of Revelations knew what he was talking about after all. Or maybe this is me being a crazed right winged loon (would fly in circles). And I don't even consider myself a Christian. I guess it is hard to escape one's mythology.

But one has to admit: an Al Gore presidency would be much nicer than a Hillary one, even if he is the Anti-Christ. I mean the world has to end right? It might as well be with a Tennessean in control.

Well there you have it: my Cassandra-esque warning.