What Would Thoreau Say?

As an old jock I have a different calendar than the rest of the world.  Mine is predicated on what sports are being played at what time. Fall is nice with college football... I like summer when the pennant races heat up... But nothing beats right now when Major League Baseball is in full swing and the NCAA baseball and softball regionals and championships are upon us.  MLB for me is simply painful.  The Cubs have the worst record in baseball, again.  Painful.  But with the Major League TV package (see past blog about watching Derek Jeter) I get to watch other games and that's fun.  TV is full of games too.  And with the internet package I can even watch the games with the other Team's announcing crew so I don't have to listen to the Cubs broadcaster, Len Kasper, who talks more about rock music and the other games going on than ours.  (I'm about to begin a one person petition campaign to get that guy farmed out to the Boise Hawks he makes me so angry.) But if I&

Some years ago I was on an airplane coming back from Barcelona where my girlfriend at the time and I had spent about ten days in the driving rain.  She had a meeting so I was going to have lots of time to explore a beautiful city (especially the artist I had always been fascinated with, Gaudi') and Citicorp was going to pay for everything... then the monsoons came and it rained literally the entire time we were there.  Gaudi' and I got really, really wet. But anyway, on that plane I was reading and finishing the best book I ever read, David McCullough's  biography of John Adams.  McCullough has the ability to write history as a novel and the entire book had me riveted.  I remember being quite sad it was ending. The fact that I loved this book was strange, really, since Adams became quite the enemy of my hero Thomas Jefferson.  Yet what I loved about the book was how McCullough so beautifully explained the power of the early American world and the men and women that made