7/9/02
Softball: Le Role des Philosophes
Dear People,
Congratz to all on last week’s scrumptious Barbie of mirth-filled gregariosity, preceded as it was by that stirring 21-15 exploration of the frisky independence that can so ironically sully a perfectly loyal player’s own aerobic competence. To be sure, I am not looking for cheap excuses to explain my own team’s debilitating malaise, but I would gently suggest that Franklin’s performance at shortstop was somewhat less than helpful, especially for those key later innings when it appeared as if he were somehow playing with a boxing glove rather than the more traditional fielder’s mitt.
In fairness, of course, this soft-spoken superstar had many things on his mind that blistering July 4th Day, and thus when I gently asked him how he somehow let 17 grounders in a row ricochet off those normally viscous limbs, tears welled up in his corneal emotimitters as he forlornly explained how the holiday had gotten him thinking about John Locke's seminal influence on the essentially democratic underpinnings of athletic empiricism.
"You have to understand," Franklin insisted, "that Locke said that we do not actually experience an object such as a rolling ball, but only one discrete aspect of its ballness at a time, ranging, for example, from direction and speed to size and textual leathertude. Our minds compile all these individual sensations, and only then produce a complex thought, which is of course our IDEA of a bouncing ball, but it's not the ball itself! It just isn't!!!"
At this point, Franklin started to gesticulate like a crazed hippo and in all candor, I felt like slapping him upside the face. For not only had he clearly cost my team the game, but he had shamelessly invoked my 14th favorite philosopher as a kinesiologic pretext for what was clearly his own conceptual misunderstanding of the pernicious Shortstop's Paradox. Indeed, Heisenberg’s theorem clearly shows that an athlete can not field an orb in Newtonian motion if the very act of playing reveals that he is simply going to suck for the rest of that particular game, and thus in retrospect, I should have had him expelled before things became so utterly pitiful. As the youth say, ‘My bad.’
In any case, and as most of you know, this July 14th is the 213th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, that fateful day in Froggy history when the commoners of the Third Estate finally threw off the yoke of the despicable anti-aerobic Bourbon monarchs. As a softball-playing people, we of course honor the fact that many of the revolting peasants used wooden stick weapons called "Les Battes," and in so doing, they laid the European roots for what would eventually evolve into the modern American sports of Baseball, Nude Cricket and Twister. And therefore, there will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11AM, IF I get enough commits by this Friday noon….Ray
7/12/02
Softball: A Harmless Week to Tarry
Dear People,
There will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11AM, and of now there are still SIX slots left. Due to the eerie drop in demand, you are welcome to commit any of your cherished friends, sundry acquaintances and contemptuous paramours, although you must be willing to vouch for their integrity, and if necessary, pay for their forced sedation.
Please bring $2 for the field, which for this week only, includes a wide selection of seasonal greens, organic yak milk and non-porous grouting crud…..Raymond 845-7552
PS: Nanci, a vital member of our community, will be celebrating her birthday by having her own softball game after ours, and a barbecue after that. She has told me to let you know that you are all welcome to join her group. If you have questions, her email is headroomproductions@earthlink.net
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