I got home from the water park, and had dinner with MK Tuesday night. We got back in time to see the last part of the All-Star game, from the sixth inning on.

Baseball is just about the last professional sport in which I've managed to maintain any interest whatsoever. I'm not a huge fan, but I do go to a game every now and then, and generally will turn on the radio here in the office while I'm sitting in front of the PC working on something. So, I was enjoying a hard-fought game, where it seemed that the players were truly going all out- there were some great defensive plays. My man Lance Berkman had a good showing.

And then the commissioner calls it quits in the eleventh inning, ostensibly because one of the pitchers, a starter, mind you, said his arm was too worn out to go on, after pitching a whopping two innings. There were no pitchers left on either roster.

I haven't been left this high and dry since I was, well, doing the Deed of Darkness for the very first time, with a girl I'd been desiring a very long time. The feeling was mutual - it was simply a matter of finding time and opportunity - she lived in another city. Just as things were reaching the climactic moment, the door bursts open, and a person who was a Most Unwelcome Sight rolled in. Another long story for another time.

Anyway, I'm aggravated. Mostly at the players, to tell you the truth, after listening to them all comment on the stoppage as a Good Thing, we can't get hurt, blah-blah-blah. But also at the managers, who have caved in to this "everybody has to play" pressure, and Selig, who had any number of options other than ending the game.

He could have told the managers that they had to find a position player to take the mound, and put the poor old tired pitcher out in right field. He could have allowed them to put position players back in the game - an already existing special All-Star Game rule allows a catcher to come back if needed due to injury. (This may have been tough, though, as by all accounts most of the starters, the Sosas and the Bonds, had already left the stadium, not caring even as much as the fans did to see the outcome of the game) One of the managers even suggested a Home Run Derby to decide it.

The way it was handled made perfectly clear the hierarchy of concerns the game has - tied and battling it out for supremacy are the owners and the players, while the fans that make it all possible are sucking the very Hindest of Hind Tits.

But that's OK. It's only baseball, just a game. It's not nearly as worth getting worked up about as the things that really matter in our personal and public lives - how we balance the demands of work and family, how we deal with the menace of terrorism, how we walk the fine line between civil liberties and law enforcement, how we gracefully integrate ever more powerful technological innovations into our culture, manage our planetary natural resources, and continue the march of human culture from ignorance and repression to knowledge and freedom.

Sure, baseball and other professionally played spectator sports fill a real need in the human psyche - we monkey people have to have some leisure in our lives. But those needs can be filled in many other ways.

So, when and if there is a stoppage of play this season, as seem ever more likely, we should recall this. Baseball, as much as we may like it, is just not important. Let the millionaires on the field and the millionaires that own the teams fight like the Kilkenny cats until every last dreg of life left in the sport has been drained away. Let them fight in a vacuum of public opinion and attention - one that mirrors the total lack of concern that they have shown for the fans of the sport.

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Renaissance festivals are a wildy popular pastime here in the States. It's not uncommon for TRF to draw well over thirty thousand patrons on a single Saturday, and several faires in other states are nearly as large. Obviously, something about them appeals to large numbers of folks. As the new season draws near, I've been pondering just why they work so well.

First, it seems the popularity of faire is a manifestation of our universal human need to once in a while have a season, a festival, in which many of the constraints of normal living are temporarily set aside, and let bacchanalian merry-making (mis)rule the day.

Spring Break, Mardi Gras, Carnival in Rio, and to a lesser extent, renaissance festivals are all the inheritors of the tradtions of Rome's Saturnalia, and the Dionysia of the Greeks. They give us a socially permissible excuse to act the way we might like to all year-round.

They have a harmlessly earthy ribald flavor that can be found nowhere else, I think. Where else in this lawsuit conscious, priggish world of ours can a man call a woman a "saucy strumpet," and have her like it? Or be mugged by a kissing wench?

Make no mistake, however. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. These festivals are not simply an excuse for reactionary male chavinist pigism. Women, too, enjoy the release from mundane social constraints, both behaving and dressing in ways that would nowhere else.

I can think of few other places where a "normal" self-respecting woman would perform "kilt-checks," which involve verifying that a kilt-wearing man is indeed "going regimental." Without going into too much detail, the properly performed procedure will leave the woman with few questions as to the kiltees, ummm, uh, stature.

Second, at faire, no one pretends that gender doesn't exist, chivalry abounds, manners matter, (if you're that type of character) and the performers and the patrons all willingly work together to bring about a suspension of disbelief, to create the flavor of an earlier time.

It is interactive entertainment of the type you do not see at say, Disneyland, where there is a distinct demarcation between the entertainers and the entertained. Indeed, it is not uncommon for the average person to mistake an elegantly dressed and bejewelled patron for one of the paid cast members. The crowd is part of the show.

There is also to be considered the joy of putting on a costume, and being another character for a while. (Halloween, too, has become more of a popular holiday for adults, for this reason) That was one of the things I enjoyed most as an actor. The fierce concentration required to convincingly become a completely different character necessarily gives birth to a release from the thoughts and cares of the mundane world. When on stage, the self shrinks down to nothing, in order to leave room for the role. I think that this applies, in varying measures, to be certain, to every performer, cast member, and garbed patron at fair.

Finally, even those patrons that do not choose to immerse themselves whole-heartedly into the play that is a renaissance festival enjoy the chance to see and learn history acted out before them - a much more palatable way to learn it. I've entertained hundreds of people, as Hawke Leekeman telling the tale of the leek on my cap, a story that if presented to them in their freshman history class, would have bored them to tears.

The old adage for starting a successful business is to "find a need and fill it." It seem to me that renfairs fill a gap that is missing in any of the other forms of entertainment our contemporary culture offers.

They offer a the patron the chance to join in a shared historical illusion, and to participate in the life of a world where many of the modern social restraints never existed.

Huzzah to that.

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This is hilarious...

Sample bite from:

www.coldfury.com

"Frodo Baggins of Bagshot Row, Hobbiton, The Shire, Middle Earth, has been called before the International Criminal Court to answer charges of war crimes brought by Sauron the Dark Lord and Saruman the White in a joint filing."

and later on...

"Baggins was responsible for casting the Ring of Power (otherwise known as the One Ring or simply the One) into the fires of Mount Orodruin in Mordor ("Where The Shadows Lie!" according to the Mordor Tourism Board), thereby destroying both the Ring and Sauron's long-standing hope to bring heretofore fractious and inefficient Middle Earth under the central political control of the Dark Tower. Without the Ring, Sauron's legions (defensive in nature and made necessary by the Lords of the West's aggression, according to Barad-Dur spokesmen) of orcs, wolves, trolls, and "evil" Men lost the will to fight and became helpless in the face of the armies of the West. Millions were slaughtered as a direct and immediate consequence of the destruction of the Ring."

When the Europeans realize that to sign the ICC treaty would require the President to seek a Constitutional Amendment allowing foreign judges, not answerable in any manner, however indirect, to the American voters, to have jurisdiction over American citizens, (and this will be hard for them to do, as most of them don't have a Constitution, or a Bill of Rights) and the odds of that amendment getting the needed two-thirds of the States to ratify it are about the same as Osama dancing in a thong in the next Britney video, maybe they'll quit carping about it.

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