World Series and Aristophanes

By the time I turned on the game, Boston was up 5-0 in the 5th. I love the World Series, even when I don't have a team in the game, everything's magnified to the degree that everything means something.

Spencer and I watched the Red Sox clinch against Detroit Saturday night in Salt Lake City. We hadn't meant to, we just turned on the TV and there it was, and 3 hours later there we were and Boston was going to the show. Detroit could have won that game. Max Scherzer, the Tiger pitcher, is a tough guy. You can just tell. I don't know anything about him, and his team lost the game, but even from the TV you could tell that he'd been through tougher experiences than pitching in a playoff-game where if you lost you were gone. Buchholz, Boston's pitcher was tough too, his toughness looked physical on TV while Scherzer's looked mental.

I used to take a transitor radio to school when the World Series was happening. If the Dodgers were in, and they were in a lot in the early 1960's when they had Koufax and Drysdale and Maury Wills, the teacher would let us listen in class somtimes. When they weren't, we could listen on the playground. It's where I first heard the name Ted Kluszewski said out loud. I had his baseball card. He was a big guy who posed in a sleeveless jersey. If he were around today he would have been tested for HGH, but he died in 1988 of a massive heart attack.

In between innings of the World Series, I pushed my way around the TV universe. ESPN had an NBA game, Celtics vs. the Nets. Hubie Brown said that now days NBA teams only play 8 pre-season games and that in the old days they played many more "because we needed the money." Hubie said that sometimes they played "7 games in 10 days" in pre-season.

I love the Celtics but Rondo wasn't playing, so I turned to C-SPAN. There was a panel discussion with 4 men who'd been in the administration's of 4 different President's as either Under Secretary of State or Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Eric Edelman, who served under George W. Bush and is a former ambassador to Turkey, was talking about our new national unwillingness to be involved in foreign affairs, whether they be strategic or humanitarian, and criticized Obama for not taking a clear position in Syria--holding the Assad regime responsible and explaining the complexity of the situation, vis-a-vis Iran, to the American people. Hmm, I thought, like the American people would understand or even be interested...

I'm reading Aristophanes, "The Clouds." Athens is a mess, reeling from wars, corruption, the Sophist's etc. Socrates, the first Jesus Christ, the wisest man in the world, is alive and all Aristophanes can do is to make fun of him. It's great fun reading Aristophanes and realizing that all this stuff has happened before and that it's ok to see it as funny as long as you know how much it hurts to laugh.

By the time I turned back to the World Series, the Red Sox were up 7-0 in the 7th inning. I could either watch a movie or read more in "The Clouds."