Of mind, heart, and Tron

This morning started like every other morning at Seminary.  Like a zombie I turned off my alarm clock at 6:30am and then groggily checked my email on my iPhone.  This is the first time, however, that I let out a desperate cry of “NO!.”  There the email sat in my inbox: “Report: Ron Santo dead at 70.”

The last few years I always made it a point to listen to a few more Cubs broadcasts than I normally would.  We all knew that Pat and Ron wouldn’t be together for much longer.  We knew Ronnie’s body was failing him again and again.  With each road trip he missed, we started to catch a glimpse of what life without Ron on the radio would be like, and I’m certain that’s only making the grieving harder today.

There’s a lot of people who don’t understand our love for This Old Cub.  They would poke fun at his on-air shennanigans, his forgetting a name, a team, or simply melting down along with the club.  But it was those Oh No’s, the Oh Geeezzz’s, and the periods of extended silence that made us love Ron Santo.  Ron Santo loved the Cubs, and we loved Ron Santo for it.  Ronnie spared nothing in his love and devotion to the Cubs, and in doing so exemplified the hearts, hopes, wishes, pain, and disappointment of generations of Cubs fans.  He was a voice of our joys and our miseries.  But more than that, he felt the way we desperately want all of our athletes to feel.  We want them to love the team the way we love the team.  We want them to hate the other team when they beat us.  Above all, we want our athletes to care.  Ron did.  And that’s why we care so much about his passing.

If this was all we lost, the mourning and grief would be great.  But Santo was more than just the Cubs biggest fan.  He was also a man who heroically endured overwhelming suffering.  This made his love and passion even more poignant.  Santo battled diabetes since the age of 18, and eventually lost both of his legs to the disease.  A Major League Baseball season is long and grueling, even for the media who covers it.  For the last 8 years of his life, Santo persevered through a 162 game schedule (plus a few more) on two prosthetic legs.  That, in and of itself, is amazing.  But he didn’t stop there.  He also walked for a cure of diabetes, which we were reminded of every time a Cub walked too.  (We thank Walgreens for that).  As I write this I’m certain I’ll probably burst into tears after the first Cub gets walked next season.

Santo’s heroic spirit in the face of such suffering is why more than Cubs fans should be mourning today.  Cubs fans lost his voice, and the rest of the world lost his soul.  We can thank God, however, that Ronnie’s body, which always failed his incredible spirit, is finally at rest.  May we all share a firm hope that Ronnie is clicking his heels once again.  Goodbye number 10. Though you never got a plaque in Cooperstown, your memory will always be in our hearts.  Isn’t that the best way to be immortalized anyway?

I initially posted this blog last year.  In light of last nights perfect game robbing error, thought reposting it would be timely.

http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=2&entry_id=2748

A very interesting debate is going on in the blogospehere about QB Ben Rothlisberger’s Civil sexual assault lawsuit and ESPN’s (lack) of coverage:

http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2009/07/21/last-word-on-espns-civil-lawsuit-policy/

He rips Tiger a new one.  I love this column!

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?id=4347419

One thing keeps sticking out to me the more I watch coverage of the death of Michael Jackson: Pure and complete awkwardness.

Usually when a legendary celebrity dies the first thing media outlets do is trot out friends, family, and anyone who has somehow been in the orbit of the departed for their “heartfelt” reaction.

That was all well and good, but the problem is this wasn’t an honorable, well-beloved, non-controversial celebrity. This was a man who had been accused of (and acquitted of) some very heinous crimes against children. This was a man who was obsessed with his appearance in such a way that he literally disfigured himself into the version of the man whom we have come to see and know over the last 25+ years.

And if you’re a respectable media outlet, there’s no way around talking about that. But if you’re a good host to your guests how do you conceivably bring that point up without it seeming in incredibly poor taste? How do you bring it up without the audience cringing with a “too soon” feeling?

So we’re kind of left with this incredibly awkward coverage of a man who was as infamous as he was famous. What an incredibly strange legacy for one to leave.

More soon on some final thoughts on the whole thing..

Back in the democratic primary Hillary Clinton aired a now infamous campaign commercial that questioned the strength and resolve of Senator Obama.  Clinton questioned Obama’s ability to swiftly and forcefully deal with a threat to America should he be on the other end of a fateful 3AM phone call to the White House.

At the time I thought it was a terrible ad.  Then again at the time I was wholly opposed to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.  However I thought the ad was tacky, corny, and more importantly I did believe that Obama would have the strength to make the tough decisions….
“The Iranian people are trying to have a debate about their future.”  A debate…..?
This is the president who pledged to bolster America’s moral standing and leadership in the world.  The president whose message was heard by throngs of those in Europe and in the middle east who crowded squares and streets to hear him speak.
And yet here we are, in what can only be described as the most significant moment that many of us may ever experience in our lifetimes and our president is falling completely on his face.
His statements today were barely strong.  Barely.  And mind you, he’s had a week to strengthen them.  As both he and the woefully incompetent press secretary Robert Gibbs (tangent: how could a president who is such an amazing communicator pick the worst press secretary in the history of that post?) have stated that the Iranians are in an enthusiastic and “vigorous debate.” Mr president let me just remind you of something:

People.
Are.
Dying.
This isn’t vigorous debate.  This is the voice of people crying out for freedom.  For justice.  Who are literally begging us (why else are their protest signs in English?) to simply say that we STAND WITH THEM.  Note that Mr Obama has only dared convey those words in written form and not actually speak them with force and strength.
Now Vice President Joe Biden and then democratic candidate once said that when Obama gets into office, he will be tested.  Again, this was a campaign tactic that I didn’t quite agree with and thought it was a desperate attempt by a deperate candidate.  And yet North Korea has made some of its boldest moves yet.  And we have still come back with soft rhetoric and a nearly cowardly tone…

And so here it is, a week after the Iranian election and we have a statement from the president that barely comes close to promoting liberty and freedom, and still does nothing to honor the courage of those who are protesting in Iran at the risk of their very lives.

A week.

It makes me wonder and maybe fear what happens when Mr Obama and his speechwriters don’t have the luxury of a week or even 15 minutes.  It makes me wonder what happens when those who threaten us – whether radical jihadists, or nuclear threats like Kim Jong Il– do something that makes that phone ring.  Maybe this isn’t the man I want to be on the other end of the line after all…

My first impression of the Wii Motion Plus was “so that’s it huh?”

I took a few swings as Tiger, my swing was faithfully represented and I was on my way through my first three holes.

“Feels good, plays good but what’s the big deal”

It wasn’t until I actually stopped and thought about it did I realize really how amazing Wii Motion Plus was … oh and until I switched over to Disc Golf.

See the Wii Motion Plus does what the Wii should have ALWAYS done, or at least, what we all thought the possibilities would be. Instead the last few years the Wii has languished in the land of the waggle. Developers realized they couldn’t get the levels of precision out of the hardware, so they crafted their games in such a way that a simple waggle would achieve the desired result. Case in point: my 4 year old nephew can do amazing things with Wii Sports Bowling simply by waggling the remote in a certain way. There’s no precision to what he does, just a brute amount of force and voilla, he’s bowling like a champ (and yes, maybe some of this is sour grapes for his consistent ability to kick my ass)

But the Wii Motion Plus finally gets it right. It’s fluid, smooth, and works amazingly well. I remember back to when I first played Wii Sports and said to myself “Man I can’t wait until EA gets their hands on this, imagine what they’ll do with Tiger Woods, baseball, and the like” But after playing the first two incarnations of the titles I was seriously unimpressed with the control. This year, this year is amazing.

While the swing feels great (and so does putting by the way) you really don’t realize how great Wii Motion Plus is until you try out the disc golf. You see developers have also gotten good and “guessing” what the Wiimote was doing. Sure it wasn’t faithful 1:1 movement, but developers (the good ones anyway) realized how to gloss over the shortcomings of the hardware and still make it seem like everything “just worked.” Often times this was the case in Tiger Woods, until you actually tried to swing the wiimote like a true golfclub, in which case you may have already sold your wii already – because it was awful.

But after spending about 60 seconds with Disc Golf, I was truly amazed at the precision of the Wii Motion Plus. Disc golf shows a transparent hand holding the disc to throw. When you use Wii Motion Plus it literally feels and looks like your hand has somehow reached into the television (or wall for those of you who are cool like me and have a HD projector) and is moving around in free space. I then detached the Wii Motion Plus, and the change immediately noticeable. What once was a perfect representation now made me look like I had some form of severe and crippling disease.

Seeing, and playing, is believing with this accessory. And it brought me back to a few years ago when I thought “Imagine the possibilities” with the Wii except now, they actually can become a reality. But then I got smacked upside the head with reality: This is an ADD ON accessory. I really fear that developers will be FORCED into developing their motion controls for gamers with and without the accessory (as of right now only one future release will require the accessory, that’s Red Steel 2). This is obviously going to cause some problems as developers may never be able to realize the full potential of the hardware as they will still have to craft their games to “gloss over” the Wiimote sans Wii Motion Plus.

So I still stand here thinking “Man, imagine the possibilities” and I still have that same fear that they may never truly be realized in this console generation. I suppose only time will tell.

A little background. The player in question has a heart condition. He was allowed back into the sport because he has a device that acts as an automatic defibrillator (that’s what his leg movement was… the machine basically shocking him back to life)

This is pretty incredible.