Follow-up to my earlier posting on baseball attendance, from SI.com's daily newsletter:

Baseball's declining crowds are hardly a secret. Attendance is down 3.2 percent from this time last season -- and that was down 6 percent from 2001.
But some places have it worse than others. Milwaukee, for instance. Only two
seasons after Miller Park opened, crowds are averaging 17,300 -- some 4,400
less than last season. At the same time, the season-ticket base has dropped
below 8,000 full-season packages, a level not seen since the mid-'90s at old
County Stadium. It's so bad that team officials are thinking about shutting
down the upper deck. "Yes, we're looking at it," Richard Cox, the Brewers'
vice president of stadium operations, told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.
"But there are lots of implications. We are reviewing our options and we'll
explain them to our staff." The action would mean moving about 400
season-ticket holders from the upper deck to lower sections. Tom Olson, who
heads Sportservice, the Brewers' concessionaire, is all for it. "I say let's
concentrate on where the people are," said Olson. "If there are a few
hundred people up there, let them move down." No word if this affects Bernie
Brewer.

Also, I'm a sucker for random baseball stats, like this one from the SI newsletter: The Texas Rangers swept the Yankees at Yankee Stadium last month for the first time in their 43-year history.

Etymology Today from M-W: jettison \JEH-tuh-sun\
1 : to throw (goods) overboard to lighten a ship or aircraft in distress
2 : discard

"Jettison" comes via Anglo-French from the Old French "getaison," meaning "action of throwing," and ultimately from the Latin verb "jactare," meaning "to throw." The noun "jettison" ("a voluntary sacrifice of cargo to lighten a ship's load in time of distress") entered English in the 15th century; the verb has been with us since the 19th century. The noun is also the source of the word "jetsam" ("jettisoned goods"), which is often paired with "flotsam"("floating wreckage"). These days you don't have to be on a sinking ship to jettison something. In addition to literally "throwing overboard," "jettison" means simply "to get rid of." You might jettison some old magazines that are cluttering your house. Or you might make plans, but jettison them at the last minute.

- Previous E.T.

My latest B&C writing:
Why there will be sidewalks in heaven, featured at ChristianityToday.com
http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/web/2003/jun09.html
See also my book on heaven, in progress

Blog: the rising prison population, plus the limits of knowledge.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/weblog/030609.html

My B&C blog archive

My latest B&C blog:
May news in review and May book review roundup. Enough reading to kill a week of lunch breaks or wipe out a weekend.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/weblog/030602.html

- My B&C blog archive

I've been doing a lot of thinking, and plan to do some writing, on how belief is (in part) socially constructed, including how belief (in the markets, individualism, self-redemption, etc.) is disseminated in American culture. So I'm wondering about this quote from Os Guinness I found in an old issue of B&C (see this too). Do you think it's true?

"Of the roughly 20 civilizations in the course of human history, if you take on Toynbee's reckoning, Western secular civilization is the first that has no agreed-on answer to what is the meaning of individual life."

More on looking for meaning in life in Chapter 1 of my book in progress and tracing the social roots of belief in my letter to an athiest

Thought of the Day: Poe and The Matrix
My editor trimmed this from my Matrix blog at B&C a couple weeks ago, and rightly so--it was too muddled. I've tried to resuscitate it here; see if it makes any sense...

What would Edgar Allan Poe make of The Matrix? For Poe, the most haunting evil lay within the mind and the reality it perceives. The Matrix, whose first sequel opened [last month], was just the latest example of a very different (if equally paranoid) philosophy of evil and reality. It holds that the greatest dread is not Poe's belief that the reality we perceive is poisoned by evil, but rather the possibility that this reality is only an illusion, and that evil itself lies in another dimension. Ostensible reality is not evil's torture chamber that serves an obviously ominous purpose, as in Poe's stories and poems; instead it is evil's inviting playground that serves an elusive purpose.

(Now I'm wondering how this all jives with my Calvinist belief in total depravity ... I need lunch.)

Previous Thought of the Day: Why atheism is a faith

Moment of lucidity from a recent left-wing boilerplate syndicated column:

Now what you hear in Washington, just as among the exhausted and confused American officials in Iraq, is, "But we overthrew a horrible dictator!" That is both true and, in its own way, virtuous. But does that mean that we take on the Burmese junta, the Rwandan mass murderers, the Turkmenistan prisons-keepers, the Congolese militias, the Syrian and Iranian torturers, the ...? (Sorry, running out of space.)

One of those homespun, simplistically populist (in the case of #2) but not totally useless e-mail forwards (here's another one [um, try here]):

Twelve things you should learn by age 40:
1. Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
2. For every action, there is an equal and opposite government program.
3. If you look like your passport picture, you probably need the trip.
4. Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of checks.
5. Junk is something you've kept for years and throw away three weeks before you need it.
6. Eat well, stay fit, die anyway.
7. Men are from earth. Women are from earth. Deal with it.
8. A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand.
9. Opportunities always look bigger going than coming.
10. By the time you can make ends meet, they move the ends.
11. Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
12. Middle age is when broadness of the mind and narrowness of the waist change places.

E-bayers wouldn't shell out more than $154,000 for Johnny Carson's boyhood home, only a few thousand more than the home's owners just paid for it.

See also this feature in AARP magazine on Carson's post-"Tonight Show" seclusion by a former writer on the show.

Highlights:

- "Pat McCormick was the only other staff member who seemed to play by different rules. He came and went as he pleased and was on and off the staff many times. During the streaking craze of 1974, Pat once raced across the stage—buck naked—during Johnny's monologue. Afterward, Johnny refused to let NBC fire him. (I'll always remember Pat not for his tush but for a classic joke he wrote after a major California earthquake: "Due to today's earthquake, the God Is Dead rally has been cancelled.")"

- "The first thing Johnny did each day was review five or six sets of jokes—usually about 20 jokes per set—submitted by each of the writers. He took pride in deciding almost instantaneously which ones to put onto cue cards for the monologue, completing the entire process within minutes. Frankly, I always thought that rush to judgment was the main reason some of those jokes died."

Etymology Today from M-W: banausic \buh-NAW-sik\
: relating to or concerned with earning a living -- used pejoratively; also : utilitarian, practical

>Each summer, countless college students set aside their books and turn to more banausic tasks, such as waiting tables, to earn tuition and spending money for the coming year.

The ancient Greeks held intellectual pursuits in the highest esteem, and they considered ideal a leisurely life of contemplation. A large population of slaves enabled many Greek citizens to adopt that preferred lifestyle. Those who had others to do the heavy lifting for them tended to regard professional labor with contempt. Their prejudice against the need to toil to earn a living is reflected in the Greek adjective "banausikos" (the root of "banausic"), which not only means "of an artisan" and "nonintellectual," but also "vulgar."

- Previous E.T.