5/15/02

Softball: Verbiage

Dear People,

Congratz to all on last week’s joyously stark 22-12 reminder that what we do as a people is still fraught with peril to both ego and corpus. Indeed, that no fewer than four of us left battered and bruised is a testament to our inherent communal courage. For starters, my perfectly innocent shoulder blade and Dave K’s tender lower dorsal structures suffered frightful assaults, and while I can’t speak for him, I found that the impact of an all-leather softball striking me at 50 miles per hour triggered spontaneous communications with the Messiah that I had never experienced before.

In the 7th inning, Darryl’s misfortune while blazing toward first taught me where the "hamstring" actually is, and while his game-ending injury was unfortunate, it failed to carry the raw fervor of emotion that Nanci’s own gallop produced a bit later, with two outs in the bottom of the 9th. In fairness, the bases were loaded, and even though my own team was down by 10, I believed with every fiber of my being that she was the one to bring definition and tone to our still incipient rally.

Sure enough, Nanci swung for the stars on a blistering 4th-strike courtesy pitch, and right after, that inscrutable orb rocketed half way toward the pitcher’s mound. Meanwhile, she was off and running, but alas, the intensity of the moment must have been too much, for three feet from the batter’s box she tripped, screamed, and then fell flat on her face, bringing closure to the game, disgrace to our team and a slight abrasion to the delicate skinning of her darling little leggy-pooh.

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In any case, and for no particular reason, I would like to mention that just a few hours ago I happened to be doing some research at the law library where I occasionally toil when I came across some hearty Germanic legal texts. My own linguistic background is in the romance tongues, and thus you can imagine how annoyed I was when I found myself reading the words "Krankenversicherungsunternehmen" and "Ruckversicherungsunternehmungen" in the same ghastly paragraph. No, I don’t pretend to know what the fuck this writer is trying to say, but frankly, I think we can all agree that there is a conceptually compelling reason why units of meaning are divided into phonemes, words and sentences, and at the risk of being snippy, I would gently suggest that the monstrosities above make a mockery of the division in question.

Indeed, and to add to resonance from your own experience, allow me to point out that the English sentence "My stupid-ass gerbil ate Terri’s bat" is actually shorter than the German word "Ruckversicherungsunternehmungen." Of course, it is not for me to cast syntactic aspersions, although I will certainly work for compounding reform whenever I find myself in the halcyon villas of my Bavarian youth. And therefore, there will be a game at Codornices this Sunday at 11AM, IF I get enough commits by this Friday morning…..Raymond


5/17/02

Softball: Taciturn

Codornices, Sunday at 11/$2/TWO slots left…….Raymond 845-7552

5/19/02

Softball: 9:58AM: Game Cancelled ;-(

This is SUCH a piss-off; Latest Doppler suggests hours more of rain---cold, wet and utterly indifferent to your recreational yearnings….