Game Over

The Super Bowl is over. My family once again welcomes me back into the realm of eye contact on Sundays and Monday nights. And Thursday nights. And the occasional Saturday. It was a fun season, culminating with a championship game full of intrigue and stories: Brother versus Brother, a pair of quarterbacks looking to break through into that elite group of winners, Beyonce knocking out out the power in the building, and Ray Lewis.
If you're a casual football fan, you know who Ray is. He was the "emotional leader" of the Baltimore Ravens for the entire span of his seventeen year career. This hard-hitting linebacker came into the league in the Ravens' inaugural season, and played with them until he won his second championship with them. And now his storybook ends.
But what about that whole murder-aggravated assault thing back in 2000? "God has never made a mistake. That’s just who He is, you see. And if our system – it’s the sad thing about our system – if our system took the time to really investigate what happened thirteen years ago, maybe they would have got to the bottom line truth. But the saddest thing ever was that a man looked me in my face and told me, ‘We know you didn’t do this, but you’re going down for it anyway.’ To the family, if you knew, if you really knew the way God works, he don’t use people who commits anything like that for His glory. No way. It’s the total opposite." These were the words he had for the victim's families of that night in Atlanta during an interview with former teammate, Shannon Sharpe. Ray paid for his sins. With cash money. Isn't that enough?
Well, there was the other penalty he incurred. When he won most valuable player of the Super Bowl a year after the murder for which he was acquitted, the folks at Disney didn't ask Ray to spout their traditional affirmation. That honor went to Ravens quarterback Trent Dilfer. Trent got to tell the world that he was going to Disneyland. That must have been a very humbling experience for Ray.
And now, as the sun sets on the football life of one of the biggest personalities of the NFL, we wonder about the legacy of Ray Lewis. I wonder what His plan will be.

Future Stuff

Okay, now that the election is well and truly over, I can tell you the truth. I kind of liked Newt Gingrich's straight-faced assertion that he would colonize the moon. Okay, so maybe Newt was a tad(pole) jingoistic in his sentiments that it would have to be an American colony, but I really did like that bold "to infinity and beyond" vibe. I have always felt that the exploration of space is a much better way to stimulate a moribund economy than finding a war in which to immerse ourselves. Perhaps we could even turn our economy around from a military-industrial complex into a space-industrial complex.
Maybe we could even do it without Newt. The European Space Agency study is investigating how practical constructing a manned base on the moon only using 3D printing technology could be, given that it would rely primarily on lunar dirt for building materials. Printers? These aren't your dot-matrix dinosaurs you may have hidden under your desk. These are the real deal: future stuff. And if you bring along a few reams of some of Boise Cascade's X-9, you'll be ready for any eventuality.
In the meantime, we wait. Patiently for the next visionary to step up and declare this a valid goal for our troubled world. Imagine a cooperative global effort that would take all our earthly frustrations and set them aside for a decade or so until the first condos become available. Maybe Newt could settle down there with wife number four.

Take A Picture - It Will Last Longer

There have been a lot of photos of Barack Obama that I have enjoyed. I was especially fond of the picture of him playing with one of his staffers children who was dressed as Spider Man. That was the good sport president. Then we had the loving husband president from the end of the campaign, just a quiet moment with Michelle captured by thousands of camera phones and his personal photographer. If you needed more evidence, then there's always the Kiss-cam shot taken at the USA-Brazil basketball game last summer. How about the commander in chief testing his arm at Soldier Field? This guy's going to have quite the Tumblr page by the time he leaves the Oval Office.
And then there's this. President Barack Hussein Obama shooting at clay pigeons with a shotgun. How can a man who is putting forth a new anti-gun agenda that threatens to take away our Second Amendment Rights by so hypocritical? Unless his legislation suggests that "gun control" will now refer to using both hands to ensure better aim, what could possibly be going through this guy's head?
I dunno. How about: "Limits." This is not an assault weapon. This is precisely the thing that the National Rifle Association should applaud. The chief executive is showing responsible use of firearms. I would have to imagine that image would be framed and hanging behind David Keene's desk. I don't remember anybody asking for guns to be outlawed, in spite of the bumper stickers suggesting the obverse.
Owning a machine gun and stockpiling ammunition isn't in the picture. Fear of the zombie apocalypse may be keeping everyone nervous, but as we all know from watching "Zombieland," the most important thing isn't going to be how well you're armed. It's cardio. Besides, you really only need a shotgun to protect yourself from somebody like this. Or this.  

Hizzoner

The Mayor is dead. Long live The Mayor. Ed Koch died last Friday. The man who served three terms as the chief executive of the busiest city in the world had to relinquish his title of "Mayor For Life" at the age of eighty-eight. I was never a New Yorker. Why should I care about this guy?
When I was growing up, I knew the name of my city's mayor for minutes at a time, but I always knew who was running The City That Never Sleeps: Ed Koch.
Let's put it this way, no mayor of Boulder, Colorado had a bestselling autobiography that was turned into an off-Broadway musical. On the biggest stage, he was able to make his particular brand of politics and showmanship work. Even though his terms in office were marked by racial tensions, corruption among many of his political allies, the rise in AIDS and HIV, homelessness and a high crime rate, he is also the guy who pulled the Big Apple away from the brink of insolvency,  to a level of prosperity that was the envy of other U.S. cities. Even Boulder.
He walked the streets. He hosted Saturday Night Live. He asked anyone who would stop and listen, "How'm I Doing?" The answer is, at last, not open for debate. Ed has moved into his last apartment in Manhattan: a nice little plot in Trinity Cemetery.
Aloha, Mister Mayor.

XLVII

What might have been. What could have been. What isn't. This isn't the Sunday on which I wake up before dawn, wishing that kickoff would be just a few hours earlier so that my exquisite torment would end. Instead, I had that experience about a month ago. That was the last time that my team, the Denver Broncos, took the field. I spent four hours and agonized through two overtime periods to be given the news: The Broncos would not be playing in the Super Bowl this year.
Since then, I have appreciated all the kind words and sympathies from those who know of my strange affliction. Many of these folks live in the Bay Area, and so the solace came from a place that I understood. Last year, the San Francisco Forty-Niners missed a trip to the Super Bowl themselves because of a few unlucky and very untimely bounces. Now the team from across the bay is back, and show all kinds of promise heading into The Big Game. Not that those kind words were less than sincere, but Niner fans can afford to by polite at this moment. They have already won a Super Bowl or two. Or five.
For that matter, so have their adversaries, the Baltimore Ravens. Not this century, mind you, but since we have yet to crack the half-century mark on the NFL's biggest spectacle, the six championships that have been won by San Francisco and Baltimore represent a pretty good percentage of the total number of the Lombardi trophies handed out since the game's inception.
The Denver Broncos have won a pair of those trophies. But that seems like a very long time ago. A lifetime, in fact. My son's. The first two years of his life were celebrated with orange and blue. He was brought into a world where the NFL champions were his team, at least by association. To his everlasting suffering and credit, he has hung on with his father as we have waited the past decade and a half for a return to the Super Bowl. When we sit down on Sunday, we will be sorting through our rooting interests: for the conference? for the Bay Area?
We're just hoping for a good game. Next year.

ghoti spells fish

It started with a visit to a second grade classroom. A list on the chart paper clipped to the easel began with the words, "scent, listen, dodge, answer." I looked at them, puzzled for a moment. I knew that the basis for many of the vocabulary lessons in our language arts curriculum was for kids to find connections between a group of words. Vowel sounds, double meanings, that sort of thing. I was briefly stumped, so I asked my good friend, the teacher. She told me, in a helpful second grade teacher way, to say the words out loud. That's when I realized what the words had in common: "They have extra consonants."
"Silent consonants," she pointed out.
This brought up my issue with teaching the English language. First of all, my wife's name is Kristen. I don't call her "Krissen." You can hear that T. Somehow, the conventions that surround the name and the word for hearing attentively were issued different rules. And that "scent" thing. There are three words that sound exactly the same, but have three different spellings. Think how much thinner our dictionaries would be if we could just add an additional definition or two at the bottom of the "sent" entry and leave the other two off to save space. Then there's the problem of two.
By the time you get to be fifty, it all starts to seem normal. I before E except after C when you have words that don't conform to that convention. We spend a lot of time in my elementary school filling kids' heads with rules for reading and writing that don't turn out to be true after they encounter a certain number of words. The happy part of that is we do tend to create questioners: "Why does it sound like that? Shouldn't it be 'thuff?'"
And so it goes. We leave it to middle school and up to explain the exceptions. No wonder our kids get grumpy after lunch.

Rising Son

When I walked out of the basement, pushing my bike, the sensor light on the side of the house clicked on. It was still dark. Above me I could hear the sounds of bustle in the kitchen. The morning flurry had begun for my wife and son. Breakfast, preparation, finding lost items. For a moment, I paused. I felt the little pang of regret that I sometimes get when I realize that I have rarely, if ever, stood on the porch and watch my son go off to school. Dad is the one who is out the door first, testing the waters, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally when it's raining. I let that go and pushed on into the dawn.
As I made the big turn to head up the hill next to our house, east into a sunrise that was awesome by comparison to the past few months of dark and gray. This was a blaze of oranges and pinks, set of by a cool, deep blue that stretched to the other horizon. I suddenly found myself on the smug side of things, relishing the sky that was mine and mine alone. This was the prize for getting out of bed and riding into a new day. With each pedal stroke, the colors began to fade. I thought of George Harrison: "Sunrise doesn't last all morning," sang my favorite Beatle. The oranges were now pale yellows. The clouds that had seemed so vibrant had become merely tufts of white. The sun continued on its journey in a vain attempt to catch the moon which was just beginning to set in the west as I pulled up in front of my school.
Another day had begun.