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April 11, 2012

The Truth About Baseball

Nawaaz traveled to Los Angeles and was taken to see his first baseball game. He was nine years old, accompanied by his aunt Lopa, a school teacher, and her friends, Wilbur and Veronica, a scholar and a writer. Nawaaz, not being American, knew nothing about baseball, so he asked his hosts: the teacher, the poet and the intellectual, to explain the game to him. Here is what each one said.

The teacher: A baseball is a round ball, and the object is to go ‘round the bases, running counter-clockwise. The innings when the two teams switch positions also go around nine times. So just remember three bases to touch before they let you come back across the plate plus three strikes, that’s when you swing and miss, plus three outs before the sides trade makes nine, the number of turns in each game. It’s really simple!

The intellectual: That’s quite true, but there’s also a leverage thematic problem-based dialogue transforming pitcher and batter, the real-time stakeholders, that operationalizes metacognitive enabling to enhance visionary risk-takers and strategize, even synergize, disintermediate interactive systems. Baseball embraces multidisciplinary objectives assessment to facilitate and orchestrate transformative paradigms by reinventing critical thinking mechanics and extending articulation to benchmark engagement structures, to target cross-contextualized proactive facilitators.

The poet: Baseball is the search for the lost soul’s return home. The foul lines continue into infinity embracing the universe and linking all playing fields, players, spectators as pseudo-players, and imagined or remembered childhood experience mythologized into a legend of the self. The traveler earns his/her reward by overcoming physical limitations and contrasting enemies to arise victorious or fall in shame and disgrace, symbolizing the angst of human endeavor and the metaphorical literature on our Creator-construct. It’s a dance, a ritual, a faith that informs everything else.

Nawaaz nodded and smiled as he enjoyed the game through to the end. Then he went home and called his parents. “Aunt Lopa took me to a show called baseball, and I got three explanations, but I couldn’t understand a word. It was the worst three hours of my life. Please let me come home, so I never have to watch another one of these things ever again!”

Happy trials, Martin

Mutt: Wanna play twenty questions?
Jeff: No, I don’t.
Mutt: Number one: What's the longest piece of furniture in the world?
Jeff: Seriously?
Mutt: The multiplication table.
Jeff: When does a boat show affection?
Mutt: Dunno.
Jeff: When it hugs the shore.
Mutt: Let’s save time by giving the question and the answer.
Jeff: Even better. Why are rivers always rich? Because they have two banks.
Mutt: Why did the little fella sleep on the chandelier? Because he was a light sleeper.
Jeff: Why do cows wear cowbells? Because their horns don't work.
Mutt: Why does lightning shock people? Because it doesn't know how to conduct itself.
Jeff: Why is your hand similar to a hardware store? Because it has nails.
Mutt: Did you hear about the dyslexic Satanist? He sold his soul to Santa
Jeff: How do crazy people go through the forest? They take the psycho path.
Mutt: How do you get holy water? Boil the hell out of it.
Jeff: What do prisoners use to call each other? Cell phones.
Mutt: What do the letters D.N.A. stand for? National Dyslexics Association.
Jeff: What do you call a boomerang that doesn't work? A stick.
Mutt: What do you call four bull fighters in quicksand? Quatro sinko.
Jeff: What do you get from a pampered cow? Spoiled milk.
Mutt: What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire? Frostbite.
Jeff: What is a zebra? 26 sizes larger than an "A" bra.
Mutt: What lies at the bottom of the ocean and twitches? A nervous wreck.
Jeff: Was even one of those funny?
Mutt: Yeah, one.

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