Random Notes

An unbelievable thing happened yesterday. Little Southern Nazarene University defeated the Oklahoma Sooners 8-4 in a men's baseball game. The Crimson Storm of the NAIA don't meet up with NCAA schools very often. Everyone knows I am a diehard Sooners fan except for those extremely rare times when they meet up with my beloved alma mater SNU. This was SNU's first major victory over a major college power since they revived the baseball program in 1997. Stunning. What a big win for the Storm!

Well I got my braces yesterday and it wasn't that bad. No pain...just an annoyance. I'm sure I'll feel some pain when I go in for adjustments and tightenings. It is a pain to have cut up my pizza into little tiny pieces. And it's taking my five minutes to brush my teeth well. Hopefully I'll get faster with practice. Flossing is a nightmare. Two and a half years to go. Hope its worth it.

The Countdown

28 Days until school's out.


2 days until I get braces.




2 weeks until snorkeling lessons.



4 weeks till Radiohead plays Dallas.



8 weeks till I lay on the white sand beaches of the Bahamas.

Go Memphis!

Tonight's NCAA championship game is the twentieth anniversary of one of the most traumatic experiences in my sports-watching life. It was in 1988 when the Kansas Jayhawks defeated the Oklahoma Sooners in the national title game. The Final Four was being staged in my hometown of Kansas City that year. It's hard to describe how excited the city was...especially since nearby KU was in the semifinals.

To make it worse both my parents are Jayhawk alums. All my friends, teachers and enemies were Jayhawk fans. I was one of a few sparse Sooners in K.C. it seemed. I was feeling pretty confident...cocky actually. OU had the highest scoring team in NCAA history. They had defeated Kansas three times that season (twice in the regular season and once by 23 points in the Big Eight Tournament). Kansas was lucky to get into the tournament that year.

My Dad and I attended the final Final Four practice session at Kemper Arena which was free to the public and jammed packed. It was exciting to be ten rows from the floor to watch Duke, Arizona, Kansas and Oklahoma do their last practice sessons. That night I videotaped the game (which my parents confiscated after I wished to delete it from existence) and almost had a stroke when KU pulled off the upset. It only got worse.

The next day everybody in the high school raked me over the freakin' coals. My KU Alum high school band director forced me and another OU fan to lead the clapping to the Jayhawk fight song in front of 120 jeering band students. Pretty traumatic stuff for a freshman. By the end of the day I lost my cool and when a guy named Harry jeered me in the hallway before sixth period going up the staircase I punched him in the head. The jeering went on for months. Months! Even football season didn't bring the normal respite because nobody cared about football in Kansas at the time.

The shame was that OU had one of the greatest college basketball teams of all time that year. Mookie Blaylock, Stacy "Sky" King, Ricky "Amazing" Grace, David Sieger and Harvey "General" Grant...one of the best line-ups of all time. But that is all forgotten since stupid Danny Manning and his cast-offs got lucky the fourth time they played the Sooners.

Yes, I'm over it. That was 20 years ago. Especially when my band director emailed me to apologize two years ago. But I tell you this...getting over it doesn't mean I won't be rooting hard for the Memphis Tigers tonight. Sorry Mom and Dad. With all due respect I hope the Jayhawks go down hard. That's the beauty of sports...love for a team doesn't go away easily (go Royals!). But neither does hatred for a team go away that easily as well. Go Memphis!

Favorite Music

A student asked me the other day what my favorite songs of all time were. I hadn't thought about that in awhile so I decided to make a list...I love lists. These are my current favorite rock/pop songs of all time. I limited a group to only one song...so a group like the Beatles or Zeppelin only get one song despite singing many of my favorite songs. The list is constantly changing so this is simply a snapshot.

My top twenty (in no particular order) favorite songs at the moment.

Lazy Boy by Brazzaville
Sleepwalker by Santo and Johnny

Holiday by Weezer

D'yer Maker by Led Zeppelin

I Can Hear Music by The Beach Boys

Here Comes the Sun by The Beatles

Hook by Blues Traveler

Candela by Buena Vista Social Club

Waiting For My Lucky Day by Chris Isaak

Sweet Jane by the Cowboy Junkies

Do You Realize? by The Flaming Lips

Monkey Wrench by Foo Fighters

The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News

Blue by The Jayhawks

Here Comes Your Man by the Pixies

My Iron Lung by Radiohead

Don't Look Back in Anger by Oasis

Since I Don't Have You by The Skyliners

Blue Moon by The Mavericks

Invisible Touch by Genesis

photo: Jackson stealing one of my CDs

The Perversion of War

Earlier this week France's last surviving World War I veteran died at the age of 110. Shortly before he died he gave an interview where he said... "You shoot at men who are fathers. War is completely stupid."

This week I have been reading The Histories by Herodotus. He relates the story of Croesus, king of Lydia (in present day Turkey) who made this cogent observation in the fifth century BCE about how war is essentially an artificial and un-natural invention of man.

"In peace sons bury their fathers. In war fathers bury their sons."

photo: Kimberly, me and Jackson at his first birthday party last January.

Bodemania!

Bode Miller has won his second overall World Cup Championship. This is an amazing feat for an American that will probably generate little interest in the media which is still ticked that Miller blew off their Olympic predictions in 2006 by failing to medal. Many thought Miller was done after 06...he left the U.S. Ski Team to compete individually. However, he blew everyone away by winning six races this year. Last year he won the World Cup title in the Super G...this year he wins the Super-Combined and the Overall titles. He broke Mahre's American of career World Cup victories and he still has those two silvers from the 02 Olympics. He is no doubt the greatest American skiier ever and he probably won't get any mag covers for it. America would rather talk NASCAR. An American beating the Swiss, Austrians and Germans in skiing? Unbelievable.

Birthday? What Birthday?

So yesterday I was a bit blue as I felt the relentless march of mortality as my birthday (today) drew nigh.

I had to make a late night stop at Wal*Mart and I ran into one of my former students working in the electronics department. He updated me on his life and told me he had just gotten married, was graduating from A&M Commerce in May and was about to begin student teaching. He is majoring in World History and is going to be a History teacher. He said that I was the prime inspiration for him getting into teaching and that everyone told him you had to coach to be a history teacher in Texas. He said, "I always told them that wasn't true since I had a World History teacher in Kaufman who didn't coach. He just taught and that's what I'm going to do."

Wow. You don't hear that kind of feedback very often. I was a bit happier after that. Then tonight, we stopped at a restaurant for dinner and ran into another former student with her parents. She's on spring break and told me she was finishing her junior year and is also going to be a high school teacher. Again...wow.

So I am blue no more.

Jackson Walking

Yes...you read that right. Jackson is walking. He began taking several steps in a row last Friday. And now he's very proud of himself. Here's a series of short video clips of the little walking maniac.

Quantum of Solace

So there is a bit of an uproar over the title for the newest James Bond flick coming out this November. Seems people don't like the title "Quantum of Solace." Doesn't sound Bondish (or Bondian?) enough for them. But to real Bond fans, those who enjoy both the books and the movies, the title is a pleasant surprise. 007 movies have always been fun...but now they can be smart. "Quantum of Solace" was the title of a short story in the Ian Fleming penned anthology "For Your Eyes Only." The other story in "For Your Eyes Only" is "The Hillderand Rarity."

When I was a columnist for my college newspaper, The ECHO, in the early nineties I actually stole (or borrowed since I did make reference to Fleming) those titles for one of my columns. That particular column piece was entitled "The Laundromat Rarity Leads to a Quantum of Solace." The column was a pitiful little essay on mulitculturalism in the United States. I had just finished "For Your Eyes Only" and liked the titles to those short stories so much I appropriated them for my little read column.

How I miss that weekly column...it was called "Metaphysically Sober featuring Dave White and the 42nd Street Insomniacs." I'm quite sure it looms quite negligably in the memories of those ECHO readers at Southern Nazarene University between 1992-1996. It made no real contribution to the intellectual discourse of the campus yet allowed me to release those inner demons of a desperate pseudo-intellectual.

Anyway, I never thought the 007 producers would be daring enough to use the titles on an actual movie. But Bond has moved into the 21st Century as the ultra-cool "Casino Royale" proved. I believe we have the Bourne movies to thank for that evolution. So as a true Bond afcianado...I think the title "Quantum of Solace" is freakin' supercool.

Radiohead in Big D

I am superfreaking stoked because my wife just scored tix to the Dallas Radiohead concert this May. The tickets sold-out in ten minutes. They have not played Dallas in ten years...1998 the last time they graced Big D. The old Starplex is not the best venue in town...but I'd see Radiohead anywhere. Yeah...I'm counting down the days.

Are you Kiddin?

As a Mavericks fan I guess I'm supposed to be excited about the Jason Kidd trade. I would have been seven or eight years ago. But now I see the Mavs trading away their future (Devin Harris) for an old (he's almost exactly my age for crying out loud) wife-beating punk. Sure he may still have skills...but at what price? Maybe I'll think differently if they win the title. But that's the only way this trade will be considered a success...if the Mavericks bring home the trophy they should have brought home two years ago.

Photo: Me (wearing my supercool retro Mavs hat) and Grandpa

The Death of Mass Politics

My European History class has been discussing the rise and effects of mass society/politics in the 1880s through World War I. The enthusiasm of the working classes must have been intoxicating. Concurrently I just finished Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" and his description of the euphoria flowing through the working classes of Barcelona was visceral. His description of the bitter in-fighting that destroyed the republican coaltion and doomed the loyalist fight against fascism was equally depressing. So our discussion ran into a comparision of that time with our own. The class pretty much surmised that we live in a society that deludes itself into thinking it dictates the direction of society but in reality follows along like the lap dog the lower and middle classes have always been.

Their raw and basic evidence is...

1.) Pitiful voting turnouts...50% at most for presidential elections and considerably less for the local elections which have a much greater impact on your every day life.

2.) Celebrity driven news cycles. How much of the news is driven by Paris Hilton, Jamie Lynn Spears, Lindsey Lohan the cult of the celebrity (i.e. the death of the Heath Ledger). At 6:30 pm on the local broadcast networks in Dallas, Texas your choices include...Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Extra, TMZtv, The Insider and Inside Edition. The elites drive fashion and issues of morality in our culture.

3.) Corporate control over the major television media conglomorates.

4.) Out of control campaign finance and lobbying influence on the poltical process.

The tragedy is that in the United States the people could have a greater say in government if pulled away from their myspace accounts, video games, meaningless addictions etc. Americans are not shackled by fascism or an authoritarian poltical system. The mass of Americans shackle themselves by laziness, ignorance and apathy. Stand in line at your local Wal*Mart to see that in first person.The tragedy, as recognized by my students, lies with the inevitable truth that freedom taken for granted is freedom lost and worse yet lost voluntarily...yet there are many throughout history and the globe that risk life and limb to attain a mere fraction of our political freedoms.

Mass politics is dead in America and has been for some time. Its death (or more optimistically, hibernation) is due to the same laziness that allows for sub-prime mortgages to spiral out of control and for the United States Government to run massive deficits which destroys the worth of the dollar around the world. Hopefully we won't turn into Orwell's proles of 1984 and remain asleep. Hopefully we'll wake up before we've lost our souls to atrophy.

Jackson's Favorites

Jackson's favorite book is "Where's That Duck" by Dan Crisp.

More amazingly he really likes The Arcade Fire. I think that is his favorite band. He dances everytime I play them on the stereo. One year's old and already into some supercool stuff.

Here's a short video clip of random Jackson time.

Another Edition of...Overheard in Class

Overheard in class (an A.P. class no less)

My students are convinced that Tony Romo is the best of QB time despite not winning a single playoff game. They think he's better than Montana, Unitas, Favre, Marino...

and I said..."What about Terry Bradshaw?"

They said "who...the announcer?"

"Yes, the Steeler who has four superbowl rings."

And an A.P. student, in all seriousness, asked..."What did Terry Bradshaw steal?"

Bode's Back!

Good to see Bode Miller back on top of the skiing world. He's won two downhill races in a row and defended last year's victory at Wengen, Switzerland this past Saturday. Very rare for a skier to win the same course two years in a row. With this week's victory Miller ties Phil Mahre's record of 27 world cup victories by an American. He should blow by that record being that he's only 30 years old and skiing better than ever. Too bad most Americans only know him for his failure to medal at Torino. He's one of the greatest American athletes in the world who is doing unprecedented things on the World Cup Circuit. Back in the U.S.A. people are more interested in Tony Romo's Mexican vacation with Jessica Simpson.

The 2007 Reading List

Well here's the list of books I made it through in 2007. The number (19) may not be impressive to some voracious readers...but I think it's pretty amazing considering 2007 saw the wondrous arrival of my son and I didn't have much time to read. It's quite an eclectic list with a lot more U.S. History and economics than usual for me. It was a good year of reading material.

• The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
• Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
• Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
• Banker to the Poor (Microlending and the battle against world poverty) by Muhammad Yunus
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Tristessa by Jack Kerouac
• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• Collapse by Jared Diamond
• Dining with the Devil by Os Guiness
• 1776 by David McCullough
• Satori in Paris by Jack Kerouac
• Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick
• Candide by Voltaire
• The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
• The Hot Kid by Elmore Leonard
• The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
• Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl

Good Times to Be Bad

My favorite baseball team, the Kansas City Royals, have been a laughingstock for some time now. But if there is a silver lining behind the black cloud that has been the Royal's performance these past ten years is that they picked the best time in baseball history to have a horrible slump. They have no legacy sullied by the Mitchell Report. They have no records worth putting an asterek by during the steroid era. They have nothing to defend despite the fact that some of their players (Hal Morris and Wally Joyner) were listed in the report.

All signs in Kansas City point to improvement under GM Dayton Moore. Unfortunately they did just sign Jose Guillen, a notorious malcontent and HGH/Steroid user. But if you're going to have gone through the worst ten years of your franchise's history...the steroid era was the time to do it. The Yanks, Mets, Astros, etc...all have besmirched records their diehards will have to justify with pathetic and doomed-to-lose arguments. The Royals have nothing to justify during this time span.

Do You Believe your Truth or Not?

Huckabee has gotten some negative attention for asking during a New York Times interview if Mormons believe Satan and Jesus are brothers. First of all, I can't believe the question was entirely "innocent" as Huckabee described it. Huckabee's too smart for that and was certainly trying to raise doubts about Mormonism in the minds of voters. I have no problem with someone's religious beliefs being part of the public discussion of a candidate's background. However, why did Huckabee have to apologize?

If that's what Mormons really believe...what are they afraid of? Why do their beliefs have to remain secret? If Mormons truly believe that Satan and Christ were among several sons of God...then why keep that a secret? Why not stand by your convictions? No Mormon or religious expert has said the Huckabee was wrong. So what's the issue?

The issue obviously is that Mormonism is a cult founded by a convicted fraud that miraculously receives convenient new revelations for political expediency (i.e. renouncing polygamy to gain statehood and being a theologically rasicst institution until 1978). Hey...I respect your right to belong to a cult...but don't hide the facts of your faith and pretend to be something your not.

I won't hide the facts of my Christian faith...and there are some who categorize Christianity (incorrectly in my opinion) as a cult or as an archaic mythology. But I'm not hiding anything and I stand by my beliefs. My faith should be transparent. I know many great Mormons who are among the finest people I know. Some of my top students are Mormon. But Mormonism's repeated attempts to keep their doctrine and practices secret only proves the cultlike nature of their "religion." There may be a lot of criticisms of Christianity...but a lack of transparency cannot be one of them.

Magazine Cover of the Year

Time magazine ranked this magazine cover as one of the ten best of the year. Rarely does a magazine cover make me laugh out loud...this one did.

First Christmas Tree

Here's Jackson seeing our Christmas tree for the first time...