Die verfickte vuvuzelan.

I'll be back tomorrow with my observations on this year's World Cup Finals. But before that, my friend Mr. Schickelgruber had some observations to make on the ubiquitous droning horns we've been hearing every game:
I'm the Fire Direction Chief and I endorse this message.

Fucking vuvuzelas.

Window dressing

Trying a new look. What do you think?

I like the more colorful blogface. I wish they had a "rain" background, since, hey, this is Portland, Oregon, it's what we do. But the mountain forest works for me, too.

The only think I'm not sure about is the light type on the gray background. Seems a little eye-strain-y.

Please feel free to slag off in it - I'm not sold yet.

Update 6/15: I've brightened up the post text - I like the yellow better. How's that?

Posted

I've just finished posting the grades for my community college class. It is the last I will ever teach. While I enjoy teaching, and the students, I loathe the time-suck that it demands, and I hate the adjunct faculty system that allows the community colleges to avoid giving real jobs to the instructors that they currently pimp out for convenience store-clerk wages.

I had a great last class; lively, fun, and funny. Many of them did well, too, which I always enjoy. Some didn't, which is the nature of what I do. I once read a long-winded whinge from a community or junior college English instructor in which his snivel was that instructors like us were the

"...academic button men. (We) roam the halls of academe like a modern Coriolanus bearing sword and grade book, “a thing of blood, whose every motion / Was timed with dying cries.”

Um, yeah.

Word, dude, that's what teachers, instructors, and professors DO. Not everyone can master the Next Level, and if the Next Level - high school diploma, associate's, bachelor's, master's, or doctoral degees - is to mean anything it is going to be out of the grasp of an increasingly large number of people.

And so in that sense we're not "button men" but sensei, the blind man with the staff that hits the younglings and makes them think, makes them quick and alert, makes them good - that is, surviving - swordsmen and -women...or teaches them that they will be hewers of wood and drawers of water all their lives because their intellectual swordfighting skills are a danger to themselves and others.

That's teaching and learning and has been since the first australopithecene taught his kids to throw rocks.

Now, mind you, I do think we're doing a lot of this teaching and learning thing the wrong way, but that's fodder for the next post.


But tonight I didn't want to natter on about education. I just wanted to come to a full stop, a night's caesura, and mentally sit on the ground and think over the students I have stood before over the past seven years.I have loved some of you and hated some, too. You have frustrated and angered me, but you have also delighted me, and even enlightened me. I have grieved for some of you, lost souls you were in the howling midnight of a world you couldn't understand. And I have celebrated for the way some of you pushed yourselves high into the hills, above where you thought you could climb.

It was always a climb; sometimes a scenic one, sometimes a grind, always a challenge for you and for me. A climb worthy of us and our labor. But now I turn my back on the hills with no regret.

The light in the window tells me my family is home waiting up for me. I am longing for their silly laughter and their love, I am weary, and grateful for the gentle path down to the warmth, light, and love, knowing I will not walk these hills again.

One Thousand

"It's early days yet, but I'm hoping to use this place to talk about politics, soccer and adoption. Hang on while I get myself organized and I'll be back."

That was Monday, the 17th of July, 2006. 1,423 days ago. Three years, ten months, twenty-three days, some hours, minutes, and seconds ago.1,000 posts ago.(Almost exactly 7/10s of a post per day, for those of you keeping count, BTW...)

I would say that I've fulfilled the promise I made to talk about politics and adoption. Soccer? A bit. Birding? Not so much. But bike racing and music and cool things in North Portland and geology and parenting and kiddos and travel and love and fear and success and failure. I hope that all that has been worth coming around for a read now and again.

As for us, along that way we lost a dog, lost (or perhaps never really had...) - and then gained - a daughter, aged three years and change, retired from the Army after 22 years, changed jobs, changed cars...

It's been quite a ride.

I have no idea how much longer I'll keep doing this. I suspect that I may have a few more posts in me. But as long as I continue to enjoy it...and as long as there are a few friends along to upbraid me and keep me straight...I will be here doing business at the Fire Direction Center, perhaps for another thousand posts.And let me just, for a moment, turn this back on you the readers. I've gained more than I've given over the past 1,423 days from your comments and observations. I will always regret and miss those of you who no longer visit; Atomic Mama, Wicked Witch, Millicent and Floyd, Beeb, wzgirl, Dee, holly. And I treasure, and enjoy, those of you who still do. If this place, this thing, this "blog", means anything, it is in the interaction between you and I, between what I write and what you write back.

I had a conversation recently with someone who was contemplating removing herself from Facebook - not all that horrific an option, IMO - but compared it to the "epistolary friendships" of the Nineteenth Century. And so this has been, in a way, a long conversation carried on in writing, between those of us who have visited here and elsewhere.

So, in honor of this 1,000-mile mark, of you all, and of myself, a pint raised to us; who's like us?

Damn few.

And they're all dead.

Thanks for the last thousand. Hope we're here for the next thousand more.

The strong do what they can...(Israel-Palestine edition)

The latest "controversy" over Israel appears to concern some remarks made by Helen Thomas about the Israel-Palestine conflict. The McClatchy article quotes her as saying:

"Any comments on Israel," an offscreen voice asks Thomas.
“Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine,” Thomas says.
“Where should they go?” the offscreen voice asks.
She responds that they should go home to Germany, Poland or the United States."

Thomes has been forced to resign as a reporter for the Hearst service (a delightful bit of hypocrisy, given the Hearst papers historic tradition of lying about foreign affairs). She has also been forced to issue the usual boilerplate statment of contrition:

"I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon."

Her sudden disgrace is now so complete that even utterly demolished media whores like Judith Miller can take swings at her, ringing in with her American version of Schindler's Law*: "At least she offered Jews some options other than Auschwitz."OK.

You all know my opinions about Israel in general and our role in its creation in particular. And, in this case, I'm getting a little pissed off about this slagging off on Thomas. She had an opinion and expressed it. That's pretty much the essence of "freedom of speech", one of the fundamental principles of this country. Speaking freely doesn't mean you're senile, it doesn't mean you should retire. Even less does it mean that the U.S. government should apologize for the opinion (Gibbs, the White House flack, had to make sure that We the People know that Obama loves him some Zion: "...those remarks...do not reflect, certainly, the opinion of, I assume, most of the people in here and certainly not of the administration.") Jesus wept, are we THAT spineless and timid?It would appear so.

Thomas' is not a popular opinion here in the U.S., where we've spent pretty much the whole 60 years since Truman's day trying to pretend that the entire business that ended up with a Jewish state on the eastern Med wasn't the result of a bunch of dirty deeds done dirt cheap by the imperialist Brits and ratified by a bunch of Americans all guilt-ridden about the Holocaust.

But to wish the Israeli Jews gone, to wish the entire enterprise of Israel undone, is certainly no more "offensive and reprehensible", no less muttonheaded, than the notion widely expressed in Israel and by Israel-lovers all over the world that the Arab residents of the former Ottoman provinces of Palestine should just "get over it", take their lickings, forget their past and just accept that a bunch of European Jews and their descendants get their and their father's and grandfather's land and all their stuff.I don't have a solution to the problem of Israel. I don't think there IS a solution; two groups of people want the exact same place. But frankly I wish the starting point of this issue wasn't a damn job-lot of head-wagging about how senile and messed up Helen Thomas is because she says straight up how you or I would feel if a bunch of foreigners had invaded our land in our grandparent's day, kicked us out and told us to suck it up and get over it.

We're grownups and need to start acting like it. We live in a world of polities; nations, states, provinces, tribes. Within those groups there are "rights" and "wrongs", laws and agreements that regulate what we can do to each other.

But between polities there are only the collision of values, morals and relative strengths. In a perfect world these would be just and fair. In our real world, the "bad guys" win as often as not.The Normans weren't "better" or "more worthy" than the Saxons, the Europeans than the Aztecs or Shawnee or Inuit, just technically, tactically, or politically more capable.

We need to stop pretending that the people we "like" are always good, decent, just, right and deserving. Just because Israel is a western democracy doesn't mean that its existence is an unmitigated good to everyone, or that its actions are always good and right. If we believe this, or refuse to listen to anyone who tells us differently, or base our actions on that belief, then we are fools and we will act in foolish ways based on our foolery as often as not.

The Israelis - down to the 10th generation - have, and will have, exactly the same "right" to the place that we white folks have to the U.S. We took it from the original owners and keep it by force. So did they. It makes us, and them, strong.It doesn't make us, or them, "right".

Or the Native Americans - or Helen Thomas restating the opinions of the original owners of Palestine - offensive, or reprehensible, or illegitimate, or foolish, or wrong for not liking that.

*(Schindler's Law: "As any discussion on Israel grows longer, the probability of equating dislike of the ideal of, the fact of, or the actions of Israel with the kind of murderous anti-Semitism that resulted in the Nazi extermination camps approaches 1."

Corollary to Schindler's Law: "Once such an observation is made, the discussion is finished and whoever mentioned Nazis, death camps, or the Holocaust has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress.")

Bastards out of Carolina

An ex-friend of mine used to like to say at stressful moments in his soccer coaching career: "Soccer is a cruel game."I tend to believe that. And I think that is why I love the game the way I do.

Football is combination gladiatorial game, circus and reality TV serial. Baseball is a Norman Rockwell picture painted in greed and statistics. Basketball is modern U.S. urban life dissected into 12-minute quarters.

But at bottom they are just games, intended to be lively, diverting and fun. They are intended to titillate the spectator with displays of athletic showmanship highlighted with lots of scoring.

Soccer has some aspects of that, obviously. But soccer is also the one major sport that often features long stretches of play without scoring. There is no shot clock, no downs, no outs...if you want to and can you can spend a lot of game time passing the ball about aimlessly.And soccer is a game that features many, many moments of agonizing disappointment. For every wondrous goal the true fan will see many, many more wide shots, rebounds off posts and crossbars, pure misses, ugly tackles, errant passes and crosses...perhaps the most characteristic sound the real fan hears isn't the roar of celebration but the moan of a great shot tipped round the post, the outraged bellows of clumsy gift goal to an inept opponent.

Here in Portland I have become, for the first time, not just a fan of the game in general but a fan of a particular team. And have discovered the special cruelty the game holds when you really care about what a bunch of other people do with a round ball.

Tonight was a good example. I met my friends Brent and Julie for drinks and dinner and then went to the game between our Portland Timbers and the oddly-named Carolina Railhawks at Civic Stadium. The Shed End, the north end of the old barn where the Timbers Army stands, was its usual raucous self. We sang and chanted, shouted encouragement at the Timbers and imprecations at the enemy and had an all-around noisy, comradely time.

The Timbers have hit a bad patch lately, losing games to bad teams and giving up bad goals late in tight games. My personal feeling is that the current coach is one of these people who have good people and technical skills; he seems to be good at assembling teams and picking players. His teams always seem to arrive at the pitch well prepared.And the 2010 Timbers seem well designed to succeed in the USL; they have a good mixture of young and veteran players, strong, tough players and fast, tricky ones. They have their strikers, their distributors, playmakers and defenders. In all, on paper the 2010 squad looks well.

But so far these talents haven't produced on the field. After a great first three games the Timbers have started losing to poor teams - they tend to play down to the level of their opponents - and giving up late goals in games they should be winning.

And tonight was no exception. The team ran out looking better than they had in weeks. Great ball movement, with short, accurate passes replacing the ugly long lobs that had been the standard. Great action up from from the delightfully named Bright Dike at forward. Many great chances and finally a goal from the explosive Ryan Pore in the 61st minute.

But...by the 75th minute I got that sick feeling; play was swinging against the Timbers, that the team was tiring, that things were going wrong. Passes started going astray. Marking got sloppy. And this is when Coach Wilkenson's inability to figure out game situations came into play. He made one substitution, and that one a poor choice, pulling the only one of our forwards that had been troubling the Carolina defense all night. With the pressure off up front the Railhawks began to push forward...and, again, the coach didn't pull his team behind the ball or put in fresh legs on defense.

So the tired defenders were outrun, a chippy little ball spun into the 6-yard box...and the Timbers ran off with only a one-point draw against a team they should have dominated from whistle to whistle.And we stood stunned, songs and shouts dying around us, staring out at a great effort gone to waste, 90 minutes of good play gutted in the 91st. We didn't even have the heart to join in singing "Rose City 'Til I Die".

Cruel.

And it's like we sing; I AM Rose City 'til I die. And that means being there to chant, sing and cheer, in the hard times as well as the good, for the draws and losses as well as the wins, for the lost chances as well as the made ones. That's part of being a true supporter.

And beyond the commitment of a fan soccer as a game is a good thing; it reminds us that life is often cruel, that heartbreak and disappointment are as or more common than success, that being nice and playing hard and believing in yourself often end up with you lying on the rain-soaked turf watching the bastards out of Carolina celebrate an undeserved goal and reflecting that if you stand around waiting for life to be fair some rotten bastards will come along and snatch it out from within your hands.

Rain

"The sky seems to ride fast upon the madly rushing rain; the
water in the river is loud and impatient; women have hastened home
early from the Ganges with their filled pitchers.
The evening lamps must be made ready.
O child, do not go out!"from "The Rainy Day" by Rabindranath Tagore