It's all over

Yesterday was the last day of the regular season in baseball, the last game for my beloved Houston Astros. They won't be going to the post-season again this year. The fact is, they ended the season with the worst record in baseball - 55-107.

This is the second year in a row they've earned that dubious distinction. The good news is that it makes them eligible to make the top draft pick again next year. For a team mostly stocked with 20 - 24-year-olds, that could be important. They are rebuilding from the ground up and the more talented young players they can latch on to, the better their chances of catching lightning in a bottle.

You might think that a team with a 55-107 record had a deadly boring season. You would be wrong. April and May were good for the team. They played well and showed what they were capable of. Unfortunately, those two good months were followed by three mostly bad months which wiped out the gains they had made. But throughout it all, the kids - and they are mostly kids - played hard, played with enthusiasm and never gave up. The mistakes they made were mistakes of eagerness and inexperience, but they were never dull.

In late August, they changed managers and the team responded by playing some of its best games of the year over the last six weeks of the season. The last week of the season, their last road trip of the year to Milwaukee and Chicago, saw them win four out of six games and their pitchers pitch three shutouts. Surprisingly, they also hit about 15 to 20 home runs in those games. It gives their loyal fans hope for the coming year.

If we need further encouragement, we need only look at the lineup of teams in the playoffs this year, teams that also were mostly built from scratch. It's heartening to see teams like the Baltimore Orioles, Washington Nationals, and the "Moneyballing" Oakland Athletics get their chance to make it to the World Series.

The most amazing post-season team has to be the Oakland As. At one time in the season, not so very long ago, they were 13 games behind the Texas Rangers in the American League West. They came all the way back to tie the Rangers for the lead and, yesterday, in the final game of the season, they beat the vaunted Rangers 12-5! They are the American League West champions!

The As are a team of nobodies, has-beens, never-wasses, and rookies, but they had a vision, starting with General Manager Billy Beane all the way down to the greenest rookie in the dugout. They believed if they played hard, played right, they could win. They did.

See that, Astros and Astros fans? It is possible.

Go Oakland! Go Atlanta!

Countdown to 2013 season: 180 days.

Wordless Wednesday: Backyard birds - Downy Woodpeckers

Celebrate the freedom to read

This is the thirtieth anniversary of the American Library Association's Banned Book Week. This year it began on September 30 and will run through October 6. Around the country, libraries will be calling attention to the freedom that we have to read what we choose, and they will be highlighting those books which have caused the greatest amount of controversy for library systems and have had the most challenges within the last year.

The ten most-challenged books within the past year are these:

1. ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
   Reasons: offensive language; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
2. The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa
   Reasons: nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
3. The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins
   Reasons: anti-ethnic; anti-family; insensitivity; offensive language; occult/satanic; violence
4. My Mom's Having A Baby! A Kid's Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler
   Reasons: nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
5. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
   Reasons: offensive language; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
6. Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
   Reasons: nudity; offensive language; religious viewpoint
7. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
   Reasons: insensitivity; nudity; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit
8. What My Mother Doesn't Know, by Sonya Sones
   Reasons: nudity; offensive language; sexually explicit
9. Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar
   Reasons: drugs; offensive language; sexually explicit
10. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
    Reasons: offensive language; racism

Most of these are children's or young adult books, and those who challenge them probably have the best of intentions of protecting the young from things which they feel might upset them. The most common reasons for challenging a book seem to be anything related to sex or anything with a religious viewpoint. 

Although I freely admit that I am not familiar with some of the books, I'm willing to bet that kids and young adults are tough enough to survive reading them without harm. I'm also willing to bet that most of them see much more upsetting and wholly inappropriate scenes on television every day.

The only one of these books that I've actually read is To Kill a Mockingbird. Brave New World has been on my "to be read" list for a while and I will get around to it one of these days. A few months ago, my younger daughter gave me The Hunger Games to read. Maybe in honor of Banned Books Week I'll read that next. 

But first I have to finish reading The Canterbury Tales. Now, talk about your offensive language, sexual explicitness, religious viewpoint, insensitivity, violence and nudity, they are all here! That Chaucer was one bawdy old fart!  

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje: A review

“There is a story, always ahead of you. Barely existing. Only gradually do you attach yourself to it and feel it. You discover the carapace that will contain and test your character. You find in this way the path of your life.” - The Cat's Table

Michael Ondaatje insists that this novel is not autobiographical and why should we doubt him? Even so, the intimate and poignant tale certainly feels autobiographical and Ondaatje admits that the story has parallels with his own. 

The central event of the book, an eleven-year-old boy's voyage on a big ship by himself from Colombo in what was then called Ceylon to England in 1954, was a journey that the writer himself made at that age. In the end, I suppose the argument could be made that all fiction is autobiographical in that it springs from the writer's imagination and that imagination is a product of his/her experiences. Discerning the autobiographical bits becomes a circular and rather pointless exercise, I think. Better to just relax and enjoy the book. And there is a lot to enjoy about this book.

Eleven-year-old Michael sails alone on the Oronsay on a three-week voyage at the end of which his mother is to meet him in Tilbury in England. He had been living with an uncle in Colombo and going to school there. Now he will go to school in England. 

Although he is alone, there are a few other people on the ship who are known to him: his older cousin, the beautiful Emily; Cassius, a boy of his age with whom he had attended school; a family friend, Flavia Prins, who the family asked to keep an eye on Michael. 

On the ship, passengers are assigned to particular tables at which to take their meals. The most prestigious, of course, where the elite eat, is the Captain's Table. The least prestigious, farthest away from the Captain's Table is the Cat's Table. Michael finds himself assigned to that table with two other boys his age, the rambunctious Cassius and the quiet Ramadhin. Others at the table included a botanist, a tailor who never speaks, a pianist who claimed to have "hit the skids," a retired ship dismantler, and a woman called Miss Lasqueti, the pigeon lady.

The three boys quickly realize that their very insignificance causes them to be disregarded and overlooked. They are “invisible to officials such as the purser and the head steward, and the captain.” Michael, whose nickname on board has become Mynah, has already been “trained into cautiousness” in the Ceylonese boarding school he attended with Cassius. There “a fear of punishment created a skill in lying, and I learned to withhold small pertinent truths.” The boys put those skills into full play in their adventurous ramblings around the ship.

They find that they are able to observe the adults on board and to learn to read them. They make friends with several of those adults and they expose the boys to the worlds of jazz and literature, as well as to some of the seamier sides of life. The boys also gather at night to spy on a shackled prisoner being sent to England for trial. His crime and fate are mysteries that will haunt Michael forever. 

Michael's story is told from the vantage point of adulthood after he has become a writer and moved to Canada. Intertwined with the boys' story is the story of the adult Michael and how the events of that three-week trip affected his passage into adulthood, how he perceived the world and how he lived his life. As he got older, he found that he understood more clearly many of the things that happened between the adults that he observed so closely on that long-ago voyage. Snippets of memory come back to him to enlighten his way, like the beam of a flashlight in a long dark hall. People that he met on the voyage keep popping up at unexpected moments. That brief voyage has turned into the voyage of his life.

Perhaps the main lesson that the boy Michael gains from his experience is the knowledge that "“What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.” Places like the Cat's Table. It's a fine place from which to observe life, a fine place to learn the craft of telling a story, of writing.

This is a lyrically written book that shimmers with anticipation from one page to the next. It is seductive in its power. It draws the reader in and makes one wish that it will never end. As I turned the last page and realized that I had finished the book, I immediately felt a sense of loss that I would not be hearing more from the life of Michael, in which I had invested so much emotion.

Ondaatje is a skillful writer who has given us an elegantly beautiful book that is a joy to read. I think it may well be the best book I have read all year. 

A little Saturday music

Here's something to end our week on a positive note.  The singer is Mary Black, with Emmy Lou Harris on harmony. Enjoy.



By the time it gets dark lyrics
- By Sandy Denny

Baby, every cloud has a silver lining
Baby every dog really has his day
And it matters to me to see you smiling
Why don't we blow all your cares away ?

Yesterday is gone and will be forgotten
And today is where every new day starts
Got to be free as the leaves in Autumn
You may be sad but it never lasts.

And maybe, by the evening we'll be laughing
Just wait and see
All the changes there'll be
By the time it gets dark.

We could go walking out in the sunshine
Look at all the people out in the street
Hurrying away to a business luncheon
Waiting for a taxi for aching feet.

Light up your face, baby, let's get going
Want to see a change in those weary eyes
We'll have some fun, take a boat out rowing
Why on earth should life be so serious?

And maybe, by the evening we'll be laughing
Just wait and see
All the changes there'll be
By the time it gets dark.

The rational approach to handling teen pregnancies

At my book club meeting yesterday, the conversation veered off-topic as it often does, this time into the charged arena of teen pregnancy and contraception. One of the attendees commented that she had read that schools in New York were giving out condoms to students. Another member remarked that they would let them have condoms but wouldn't let them have "Big Gulp" soft drinks! At which point someone said, "Yeah, their priorities are a bit skewed." And I thought, but did not say, "No, I'd say their priorities are about right."

The rate of  teenage pregnancies has been falling in this country as a whole, but it is still a very serious problem, especially in the most conservative states in the country. States like Texas. Or Mississippi. A map showing the rate of teenage pregnancies in the various states very clearly shows this. The map shows the rates as shades of red ranging from near white (15 or less births per 1000 women aged 15 to 19) to darkest red (55 or more such births). Most of the darkest red states are those along the southern border of the country, the area that also tends to be most politically conservative.

Why should this be? These same red states are the ones that give the loudest lip service to the idea of chastity and postponing sex until after marriage. So why doesn't their reality conform to their stated values? Probably because teenage hormones are more powerful than dry lectures on the importance of chastity.

Most of these red states do not require schools to teach contraception. In fact, many of them prohibit schools from even mentioning sex. Several do not require any type of sex education and many that do ostensibly permit such a course require the teachers to stress abstinence and advise children to wait until after marriage. In a hyper-sexualized society such as ours, that's a bit like advising a person standing in a pond and dying of thirst not to drink any of the water that is all around him/her.

Indeed, studies have shown repeatedly that abstinence-only sex education is not as effective at reducing teen pregnancies and births as is providing practical help and information to teenagers about how to avoid unwanted pregnancies. So, I say good on New York for facing reality and making contraception and even morning-after pills available to students. Let's hope that some day Texas and the other red states will be enlightened enough to follow their lead. Unfortunately, it won't be before many more thousands of promising young lives are blighted or ruined by an unwanted pregnancy.

As for those huge soft drinks, if I ruled the world, they would be totally banned!

The new Know-Nothings

I was reading a story about Bill Nye, the Science Guy, a couple of days ago when I came across a sentence that literally made me groan out load. It said, "In June, a Gallup poll revealed that 46 percent of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago." So much for science and the fossil record. So much for critical thinking. These people prefer to accept the Bible as their scientific and historical text and not worry their little heads about any more complicated explanations. Oh, well, I guess we should just be relieved that the percentage wasn't even higher.

As the story pointed out, the United States stands alone among modern industrialized states in this Know-Nothingism. It's only in the most backward and theocratic places on earth that you would find such a high percentage of people who refuse to acknowledge evolution as settled science.

The same disheartening assessment can be made regarding human-caused global warming. The United States is the center, the hotbed of denialism.

Indeed, a denial of evolution and a denial of global climate change seem to go hand-in-hand. Both refusals to accept the facts established by science involve a kind of magical thinking. Dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time and Noah carried two of them onto the Ark! God is looking out for us and will not allow the earth's systems to be destroyed by human negligence; therefore, global warming cannot be happening. Both thought processes, of course, absolve humans of any responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

In this march back to the Dark Ages, Texas Republicans proudly lead the way. Earlier this year, they came up with a party platform that sought to ban the teaching of critical thinking skills in schools! Their reason was that critical thinking causes people to focus on behavior modification and, according to them, it has "the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."  Heaven forbid that a fifteen-year-old should be forced to reexamine his/her "fixed beliefs" or that s/he should question whether father really knows best. 

This refusal of a large percentage of Americans to think critically and rationally about issues facing them and the country certainly goes a long way toward explaining many of the problems which our society has. It truly is enough to make one despair of the future. In fact, Bill Nye himself seems to despair of the adults whose brains are already ossified, but, in a video that is making its way around the Internet, he asks them please not to impose their beliefs on their children.



It seems a reasonable argument to me. Let the kids think for themselves and make up their own minds. Somehow, though, I doubt it will be persuasive to that 46 percent that the Gallup pollsters counted.