Game 1: Marlins 3, Damn Yankees 2

…justice begins.

This is a sad story about the deterioration of small town life in West Texas. Yeah, the piece is technically about football, but it’s as much about these communities as it is about sports. I’ve been a lot of places, and there is definitely nowhere quite like the isolated little towns along the Pecos River. As much as we liked to whine then, I think our years as Golden Cranes were pretty good for most of us.

Along with some of you, I grew up in this area in what now seem like the last days before the slow death of life as we knew it. I know the beginning of the end technically came in the 80’s, but there was still some sense of vitality and normalcy when I headed for College Station with Crane in the rear view mirror ten years ago. I guess there wasn’t enough of that to keep any of us there, and I think we could more or less see this coming. But it’s still sad to read about it. The article doesn’t mention Crane, but it mentions every small town within a sixty mile radius — McCamey, Rankin, Monahans, Imperial, Grandfalls, and a few more.

I do not like the Yankees, Sam.
I do not like them, Thad I am.

I do not like them in the Bronx.
I do not like them o’er the Sox.
I do not like to see them win.
I do not like to see them grin.

If I should see them on the screen,
I’ll call them something none too clean.
If I should see them on the street,
I’ll spit and kick them in their seat.

I do not like the Yankees fans.
I do not like them in the stands.
I do not like them jumping ’round.
I’d rather see them gagged and bound.

If I should meet a Yankees fan,
I’d promptly kick him in his can.
If he should turn to kick me back.
I’d run like hell (I’m little, Jack.)

I do not like the Yankees, man.
I’m sick to death of that high priced clan.
They have a payroll six miles high,
And titles only cash can buy.

I will not give them any due,
I would not, could not give a poo.
I’ll root the Marlins on to win,
Damn Yankees must pay for their sin.

I do not like the Yankees, Sam.
I do not like them, Thad I am.

I honestly had no idea what I was onto. If you run a google search for “pimp cars,” we’re the third hit. With “pimp outfits” we roll in at number ten. Fo shizzle my pizzle.

This is too much.

I have a stat service that tracks how many hits I get on this site as well as providing me some other useless information. One thing it tracks is “referrers,” or what websites send people to my site. I don’t get many of those because most of the traffic here is primary traffic, meaning you all know about the site and come straight to it instead of seeing it linked somewhere else. Most of the referrals I do get are from search engines after someone takes a wrong turn in looking for real information. The stat service will actually tell me what the search terms were and what engine referred the poor soul to this site. I’ve seen some that were interesting, but this one is by far my favorite so far….

If you run a yahoo search on “rappers outfits,” my site is the fifth hit on the list. I’m not sure if it was from this post or because this site is just generally off the hizzle.

God is a fan of sex….in case you hadn’t heard

Christianity Today has excerpted a section of Phillip Yancey’s new book (Rumors of Another World) for an article entitled Holy Sex: How it ravishes our souls. You should read it. It’s exceptional and important. A few crumbs to entice you….

Schizophrenic is the best way to describe modern society’s view of sexuality. On the one hand, scientists insist that we are organisms like any other animal, and that sex is a natural expression of that animal nature. The pornography industry (which in the U.S. grosses more money than all professional sports combined) happily complies, supplying sexual images of the famous and the anonymous to anyone willing to pay.

But when people truly act out their animal natures, society frowns in disapproval. John Nash (A Beautiful Mind) gets slapped for telling the truth. A few states in the U.S. allow legalized prostitution, but no parents encourage their daughters to pursue such a career. Hollywood may glamorize adultery onscreen, but in real life it provokes pain and a rage sometimes strong enough to drive the wounded party to murder the rival or jump off a bridge.

The root cause of this schizophrenia is the attempt to reduce sex between humans to a purely physical act. For humans, unlike sheep or chimpanzees, sex involves more than bodies.

And then….

When a society loses faith in God, lesser powers arise to take God’s place. “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God,” said G. K. Chesterton. In modern Europe and the U.S., sex has a near-sacred quality of mythic, numinous power. We select our sexiest individuals and accord them the status of gods and goddesses, fawning over the details of their lives, broadcasting their bodily statistics, surrounding them with paparazzi, rewarding them with money and status. Sex no longer points to something beyond; it becomes the thing itself, the substitute sacred.

Mmm…Chesterton. One more….

I dwell on the church’s severe attitude toward sex because I believe we Christians bear heavy responsibility for the counter reaction so evident in modern society. Jesus treated those who had fallen into sexual sins with compassion and forgiveness, and reserved his harshest words for the hidden sins of hypocrisy, pride, greed, and legalism. How is it that we who follow him use the word “immoral” to signify sexual sins almost exclusively, and reserve church discipline for those who fail sexually?

Perhaps worse, though, the church in its prudery has silenced a powerful rumor of transcendence that could point to the Creator and originator of human sexuality, who invested in it far more meaning than most modern people can imagine. We have de-sacralized it, in effect, by suppression and denial, and along the way our clumsy attempts at repression helped to empower a false infinite. Sexual power lives on, but few see in that power a pointer to the One who designed it.

Uptight Christians forget the fundamental fact that God created sex. Having studied some anatomy, I marvel at God laboring over the physiology of sex: the soft parts, the moist parts, the millions of nerve cells sensitive to pressure and pain yet also capable of producing pleasure, the intricacies of erectile tissue, the economical and ironic combination of organs for excretion and reproduction, the blending of visual appeal and mechanical design. As the zoologists remind us, in comparison with every other species, the human is bountifully endowed.

A connected view of life assumes this is God’s world, and that despite its fractured state, clues of its original design remain. When I experience desire, I need not flinch in guilt, as if something unnatural has happened. Rather, I should follow the desire to its source, to learn God’s original intent.

And that’s all from the first half of the article. He goes on to mention that guys like Martin Luther seemed to understand all of this better than we do today, even though Luther didn’t have to deal with MTV and endless photos of Britney and J-Lo and Anna Kournikova. Good stuff.

Read the rest. You’ll be glad you did.

Oh, and who’s missing the ad robot about now?

I’ve been planning to start this little series, and the events of the past few days have inspired me to get on it. We’ll start here:

Ready or not, you’re a Dad #1

You’re on the last leg of a two and a half week Christmas trip preparing to tux up for the wedding of one of your best friends. After spending the day before the wedding with your friend, dispensing all kinds of wisdom about how his life will forever change the next day, your wife shows up to bring you the rehearsal dinner outfit. When she gets you alone, she says, “Hey honey, you know how the doctor said it could take several months for us to get pregnant when we started trying…” [your eyes start to lose focus and you half nod to acknowledge the memory of said medical advice] “…well, it didn’t.”

Here’s another to help you get a feel for what I’m doing…

Ready or not, you’re a Dad #213

You’re standing at the toilet taking care of routine business when the boy sneaks up behind you, uses the backs of your pant-legs to pull himself up, plants the top of his head squarely against your backside (in such a position that he can watch the goings-on by looking between your legs without risking any sort of mess) and says, “Hi.”

The world’s richest 360 people have the same amount of money as the poorest 2.4 billion people.

I’m not exactly sure what that means, but it sounds pretty screwed up. I’m pretty sure I don’t fall into either demographic, although Amy recently took over the family budget so I don’t really know. For those who might be wondering, we have a better shot at staying out of the latter group with Amy keeping track of things. She’s about 2.4 billion times more organized than I am.

Either way, if you’re one of the 360, what say you show a little love to the 2.4 billion? In fact, even if you’re not one of the 360, show a little love.

Since it appears I’m having a conversation with myself here these days and no one is around to call me cruel or heartless, I’ll go one step further on this tiger nonsense. Now Roy’s buddy Siegfried is telling us that the tiger didn’t maul Roy, but that Roy fell down and the tiger was trying to (ahem) help him offstage.

“A tiger, when he grabs you, it’s the strength,” Fischbacher said. “He thinks it’s another tiger, and another tiger has [thick] skin like this, and the fur.”

This is all starting to come together now. A few notes from the previous article about Roy and his tigers:

• A modern day Dr. Doolittle who called the cats his children
  
• Horn has been on hand for many of their births.
  
• “The first voice they hear is mine, the first touch they feel is mine, the first human face they see is mine,” Horn said in an interview in late 2000. “They just think I’m a strange tiger who walks on two legs.”

Note to tiger-men worldwide: don’t fall down in front of a tiger.

Let me preface this by saying that I’m neither happy nor amused that this guy got chewed up by a tiger. It’s tragic and sad. I mean that. However, it never ceases to amaze me how easily we’re amazed by stuff that shouldn’t amaze us. What’s amazing, really, is that it took forty years for one of these big cats to get fed up with being dragged around on a leash by guys with fifteen hundred dollar hairstyles and too much makeup. A tiger is a tiger is a tiger, and I’m relatively confident that God didn’t make them to live and work on a stage in Vegas. I’m just as confident that God didn’t make humans to live in community with wild animals capable of biting them in half. Again, what happened to Mr. Roy is very sad, but sometimes this stuff satirizes itself. What’s sadder — that the tiger fought back or that this guy thinks the chief end of his life is to live in harmony with Mother Nature by doing yoga with white tigers who prefer their meals bloody and raw? Both are tragedies, but I submit that the latter is of greater eternal significance than the former.

(….chalk this one up as an attempt to squeeze out a nomination for PC blogger of the year.)