The Inconsequential Parts Of The World

Real Men Play With Pink Bats
This notion of pink bats is obscene. Especially when you consider it's on 'Mothers Day'.
"Mommy, come see me play with my PINK BATS"
"Stop that rastus, you'll go blind!"
I am led to believe believe Scott Rolen said he won't play with pink bats and that his mother knows he loves her, even if he doesn't play wth pink bats.

Anyway, the pickie above is Mark Ellis of the Oakland Moneyball A's using one of those bats on Mothers Day. I just wanted to share that with you.
Just look at it will you? Freud is laughing his head off.

In The Wake Of Godzilla
The Yankees won two of three from the Oakland A's but the one that got away was an ugly, ugly 6-1 from the Big Eunuch.


Yep, that's him barking at an ump arguing balls and strikes. Not gratifying.
The fact that the A's were also depleted by injury kind of helped as the Yankees squeezed by. Of course they lost 4-2 behind a solid Moose to the Texas Rangers yesterday (and Chacon is throwing the game away as I write this entry but what the heck), but Juicin' G hurt his neck; so the offensive vacuum left by the absence of Sheff, Matsui and Juicin' is starting to look like a big gaping hole. Anyway, Johnson's struggles really aren't helping.

UPDATE:
I found this photo where Derek is telling Randy,

...Get yer shit together, man!

Combat Wombats
Both my fantasy teams in both AFL and MLB are called Combat Wombats this year.
It's quite a tense league in my AFL league. My team took its first loss to SLEIGHTY. SLEIGHTY and UN Peacekeepers are now the only two undefeated teams. It wasn't even close; my team got spanked. I just want to point out that my all-important Hawthorn duo Luke Hodge (the pickie above) and Peter Everitt had a crap weekend. Thanks Hodge and Everitt, you sure picked your timing to stink it up. 44 rating points a piece! What were you guys doing out there?

Meanwhile my baseball fantasy teeam has crept up to third but I just lack the oomph to crack the top spot. Top team My Time To Shine is starting pull away again. I've picked up Austin Kearns who is having a good season to replace Matsui, but it's just not convincing. We'll see how that one goes.

Working On A Song

There's a World Cup competition going around over at iCompositions for a song for a country. I guess it's meant to be anthemic, but my first gut teaction was to look at Group F:

Brazil
Croatia
Japan
Australia

I don't know about you, but that's a murderous pool to be in if you're not Brazil. Croatia is soccer elite; Japan's Asia champion by a decent margin; and while Australia can beat up on Oceania, perhaps it was a little lucky to sneak by Uruguay this time.

So I'm going to write a song about how all our best football players are playing the wrong code ("Up There Cazaly!"), and that is why we won't win the World Cup. Stay tuned.

Current Reading Material
I have a stack of books next to my bed. Here are some titles:

'Cowra' Teruhiko Asada's first person account
Wagtail - 52 'Watermark and other poems' by David Musgrave
'James Stinks (and so does Chuck)' by Nick Riemer
'Seven Pillars of Wisdom' by T.E. Lawrence
'The Civil Wars' by Appian
'Gilgamesh' a new English translation by Stephen Mitchell
'Cities in Flight' by James Blish

Some thoughts:
I read poems from the two poetry books and then kind of wander over to read passages from other books. It's amazing there's even a poetry publishing concern going in Australia, but there are; and that's encouraging for the future of Australian Literature. Australian Literature has been undone by the Australian Publishing and is going to take a few years to recover. So seeing these works published is very encouraging indeed. The thing about poetry is that you can be 100% sure it wasn't written for profit, and therein flourishes art.

The Cowra book is flat-out depressing. With the recent script, we've received some feedback that the patriotism and nationalism espoused by the Japanese characters seem really superficial. When you actually read these accounts of the men who were in Cowra you realise how superficial, shallow and unedifying was the Nationalism espoused by the real life people.
It's depressing because the breakout is a logical consequence of many, many unimaginative people doing very silly things on both sides. And in some ways, it needs to be told that way; so that a contemporary audience can look at it and feel the immense frustration we feel when we look at how events transpired.
In turn, one realises Nationalism is simply not a big enough idea to justify going on a suicide run. It's just not worth it, boys and girls!

The other point is, to do the sort of thing that happened in Cowra, you can't really have a profound interest in your own culture and traditions; you actually have to be a bit of a shallow brute. It's latter day liberal values that want these characters to not be stupidly nationalistic. The fact is, they were, because they had so little alternative.

T.E. Lawrence was a kind of madman. The description of him in that movie where Omar Shariff's character Prince Faisal asks him if he is another Englishman who is in love with desolate landscapes, is spot on. He is that very kind of Englishman.

I'm yet to open the Appian, but I do look forward to it. I'm so underdone on my classics.
The new translation of Gilgamesh is very lush. The whole lay-out of the book is lush. Considering it's so little text, it's actually kind of resplendent in its luxurious redundancy. It leaves the Penguin Classic edition behind for dead. It's also quite a good poetic translation.
So astoundingly even to myself, I find myself reading poetry.