a sad day at UMass

http://www.boston.com/news/health/blog/2009/01/dea_rejects_uma.html

Just think…someone actually growing marijuana legally in Amherst…I guess it was just not to be…

Congrats Jim Ed Rice!

It took 15 years but Jim Rice was elected to the Baseball hall of fame today. Jim Rice was my first real baseball hero. I grew up watching him, reading about him, and collecting his baseball cards. Every day I went to the Globe not only to read about the game from the night before but to read the box score and look at Rice’s stats.

It’s amazing what you recall 25-30 years later, but I remember quite vividly watching Rice play left field, and I still to this day disagree with those who found Rice to be slow. After all, Rice did have two straight seasons of 15 triples in 77 and 78. That 78 season was a bittersweet one with the loss to the Yankees in a one day playoff, but it solidified Rice in my mind as the hero of my Red Sox youth. 46 home runs, 135 RBI’s and a .315 average were great numbers, and something more…my original fantasy baseball passion. Yes, Jim Ed helped me enjoy math, enjoy stats, and enjoy the game behind the game.

Congrats Rice, it never should have taken 15 years.

it’s nice to be back

Sometimes you just need to take a break, or you have nothing to say, or perhaps you follow that old adage, ” If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” For me, I am partial to the first or second, and don’t find I often follow the third nearly enough…but I am trying.

Happy New Year! Hope your Christmas was merry, that the stress of the holidays didn’t get to you, that Santa was good to you, and that you made a New Year’s resolution to lose weight.

I actually had a hard time thinking of what to write for a good month this fall because i found myself so caught up in the election that I was not sure where to start.

First, when I started writing this blog it was just random thoughts about the commute, about life bullshit, and about any other smarmy topic I had an opinion on. Writing about an election didn’t seem apropo AND certainly didn’t seem to be in line with what I normally wrote about. 

But I realized that perhaps one of the reasons i had nothing smart alecky to write was for a while I wasn’t feeling that little edge inside. 

For the first time in about 7 years when it came to national leadership I felt hopeful. Not over joyed, not merely positive, but hopeful, about national leadership, about direction, and about how engaged EVERYONE seemed to be in this election.

So where do we go from here?

I think I’ll keep writing from the train when it hits me, but I also want to engage in a new dialogue and see what people might have to say. So I am starting a blog entitled: “What I see in America”.  It’s run on WordPress also, but I  also bought the website www.whatiseeinamerica.com and you can reach the blog there.

The title isn’t meant to be cornball.  There was a little elementary school notion there that I felt was important to note. The title felt a little like the start of a fifth grade essay – which is fine, because I’d be happy to have a fifth grader give an opinion here.  It also conveyed to me something simple in a different way…ownership.  I’d like to have you give your thoughts and opinions, no matter whose corner you stand in, what corner you stand on, or even what ever corner you are sent to.

I hope you’ll join me.

www.whatiseeinamerica.com

 

john