It’s always an exciting time for me whenever Kellen Clemens starts. The best QB to come out of Oregon, my favorite school, since Akili Smith gets the nod for rookie Mark Sanchez.

Sanchez continues to bicker about how he can play this week but coach Rex Ryan is completely shutting Sanchez down. Sanchez will not even travel with the New York Jets to Tampa for their game Sunday.

I love it when Kellen gets his opportunity to show what he can do. You can’t tell me he hasn’t gotten shafted over his first three seasons.

Obviously, in his first season he wasn’t going to get much playing time with Chad Pennington being there and his dirty hands having a solid grip on the starting job in the Mangini regime. He did get to play a little toward the end of that season but it wasn’t very much time.

His second season he started half the year but didn’t have anyone to throw to and had little experience. He completed 52 percent of his passes.

His third season, he gets screwed by the Jets picking up Benedict Brett in a trade from the Pack. Naturally, Kellen isn’t going get the starting job in 2008. Maybe he should have started the last half of the season for the Jets because Favre collapsed down the stretch.

Then this year, he loses the coach that drafted him in the second round a few years back. Then, the Jets decide to go out and waste a first-round pick when they already have a QB in waiting. Sanchez then proceeds to come out of the gates hot this year after “earning” the starting spot.

Now Kellen gets his chance against a garbage Tampa Bay Buccaneers team that has a rookie QB of their own in Josh Freeman. Clemens now has some experience under his belt. I hope he destroys life this Sunday and never relinquishes his QB spot. Otherwise, I’ll take him on the Raiders.

I enjoyed seeing Whoopi Goldberg give Mike Huckabee a fistbump on yesterday’s View. She defended Huckabee’s controversial commutation of cop killer Clemens.

Zest Fully Clean!

Yay!  I’m finished with the book!  This post covers pages 631 to 723.  It finished up touring the rest of the Holy Land.  Then they explore parts of Egypt but by then they are all tired of touring the world.  So they go home, and Mark Twain writes a few letters to the editor and then a book that is surprisingly called “The Innocents Abroad.”  That is the overview.  I will write some specifics now.The Holy Land in this section mainly consisted of Jerusalem, which most every street and hill has Biblical significance; but also Bethlehem and surrounding areas, which Twain talks very little about.  I was stuck by there is a particular place for everything in the Bible.  You may believe that that is obvious; if the events of the Bible are true, then they had to have happened in particular places.  Yet I’m sure that for many events they can approximate where it happened but not exactly pinpoint.

Therefore, I think that there were tourist traps even in Mark Twain’s day.  I am not sure that temporary resting places for the patriarchs like Bethel (Genesis 28:19) can ever be pinpointed, yet Twain went to a place that tour guides called Bethel.  On the other hand, Twain went to ruins of Jericho as well that can be authenticated.

The most absurd case of tourist traps happened in this section.  There were indentions in the wall in Jerusalem that the tour guides said where when Jesus fell.  Also here is some absurdity (after finding a stone that looks like a human face worn by kisses from a whole lot of pilgrims):

The guide said it was because this was one of “the very stones of Jerusalem” that Christ mentioned when he was reproved for permitting the people to cry “Hosannah!” when he made his memorable entry into the city upon an ass.  One of the pilgrims said, “But there is no evidence that the stones did cry out– Christ said that if the people stopped from shouting Hosannah, the very stones would do it.”  The guide was perfectly serene.  He said, calmly, “This is one of the stones that would have cried out.”  It was of little use to try to shake this fellow’s simple faith — it was easy to see that. (633)

In relationship to my previous post where I wrote that Twain does not think highly of the Israel, here is another quote that sums that up nicely.  It is in response to a quote from Life in the Holy Land, one of the tour books that Twain and company used.

Which all of us will freely grant.  But it truly is “monotonous and uninviting,” and there is no sufficient reason for describing it as being otherwise. (671)

On a more humorous note, this quote is about salt from the Dead Sea after swimming in it:  ”We scrubbed it off with a coarse towel and rode off with a splendid brand-new smell, though it was one which was not any more disagreeable than those we have been for several weeks enjoying.” (658)

The book ends with several chapters that could have been endings.  However, like the Lord of the Rings, it kept going.  (However, I do like the Lord of the Rings but the third and final movies does have a few whiteouts, a few blackouts, and one map-out.)  Twain evidentially got tired of writing to.  On page 699-701, he writes a long list of “I shall not describe” this or that.  If he did expound on these topics, I could easily see him writing for two hundred pages more.  Maybe he just didn’t like writing about much in Egypt, I don’t know.

He also republishes what he wrote to the editor in pages 713-718.  He calls it a “complimentary” letter but it’s really not that complimentary.  I don’t think of this book in so favorable terms as well.  For if you read the letter to the editor, you have no need to read the book.  You probably will get as much out of it.

This covers the book pages 451 to 630. The most prevalent thing about this part is the use of Scripture for explaining the importance of the places gone to. Even before this section, Twain talks about the seven churches when he visits “Smyrna”, which is modern day Izmir, Turkey and Ephesus. From Izmir, he takes a major land trip south to Israel.

Syria and Israel are not all that beautiful to Mark Twain’s eyes, both dwellings and landscape. Consider this quote: “She was the only Syrian female we have seen yet who was not so sinfully ugly that she couldn’t smile after ten o’clock Saturday night without breaking the Sabbath.” (516) This is quite sad. However, due to the pitiful state of her son, Twain says that “we were filled with compassion which was genuine and not put on.” According to Twain, frequently they would come to crowds in the villages asking for “bucksheesh.”

Also the landmarks aren’t impressive.  Listen:

Nearly every book concerning Galilee and its lake describes the scenery as beautiful.  No– not always so straightforward as that.  Sometimes the impression intentionally conveyed is that it is beautiful, at the same time that the author is careful not to say that it is, in plain Saxon. (556)

Twain also is quite snide about the contrasting views of the guidebooks. The group of people that Twain calls the “Pilgrims” see the world through the lenses of the guidebooks according to Twain. Twain says, “I can almost tell, in set phrase, what they will say when they see Tabor, Nazareth, Jericho, and Jerusalem– because I have the books they will “smouch” their ideas from.” (557)

Finally there is something humorous.  This is talking about some non-canonical books that were considered at one time (on page 588):

There is one verse that ought not to have been rejected, because it so evidently prophetically refers to the general run of Congresses of the United States:

199.  They carry themselves high, and as prudent men; and though they are fools, yet would seem to be teachers.

So there you have it: another post about this book.  I am very tired of this book and still have until 723!  I got another nonfiction about this “Seabiscuit.”  I think I am probably not going to read that one and go back to fiction.

LNF*

• Elephants are the only animals that can’t jump.

• Americans on the average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.

• On average people fear spiders more than they do death.

• Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour.

• The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as substitute for blood plasma.

• Dentists have recommended that a toothbrush be kept at least 6 feet away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles resulting from the flush.

• American car horns beep in the tone of F.

• Donkeys kill more people annually than plane crashes.

• Barbie’s full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.

• On average, 100 people choke to death on ball-point pens every year.

• 7% of Americans will eat McDonalds today.

• All porcupines float in water.

• In Muncie, Indiana, it is illegal to carry fishing tackle in a cemetery.

LNFs on This Day:

1865 – Samuel L. Clemens published “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” under the pen name “Mark Twain” in the New York “Saturday Press.”

1928 – The first successful sound-synchronized animated cartoon premiered in New York. It was Walt Disney’s “Steamboat Willie,” starring Mickey Mouse.

1978 – In Jonestown, Guyana, Reverend Jim Jones persuaded his followers to commit suicide by drinking a death potion. Some people were shot to death. 914 cult members were left dead including over 200 children.

1987 – U2 opened for itself by pretending to be a country-rock group called The Dalton Brothers during a concert in Los Angeles

1994 – Cab Calloway died at the age of 86.

*Why LNF? Why Plain White Shirt? Read Rorschach’s Ribs and all will be understood.

This blog is about the start of volume II (page 315) to page 450.  This section of the book had a lot of interesting parts.  It covers when Mark Twain visits parts of Italy such as the buried city of Pompeii.  I guess part of Italy’s explorations such as Venice’s waterways and the Tower of Pisa were written in the pages of my second post.  However, I didn’t comment on how interesting these parts were.  They truly make me want to travel to parts of Italy.  These parts makes me endure the overwhelming majority of the book that is boring.

The most interesting section was when the governments thought that the American ship was up to no good and quarantined it.  Mark Twain and several others sneaked ashore at Athens in the middle of the night!  For a good story, read pages 363-375.

Here are a couple of quotes that I enjoyed.  The first one talks about Pompeii when the ash came.

Let us remember that he was a soldier — not a policeman — and so, praise him.  Being a soldier, he stayed — because the warrior instinct forbade him to fly.  Had he been a policeman he would have stayed also — because he would have been asleep. (355)

If you want dwarfs — I mean just a few dwarfs for a curiosity — go to Genoa.  If you wish to buy them by the gross, for retail, go to Milan. … But if you would see the very heart and home of cripples and human monsters, both, go straight to Constantinople. (383)

But what object could they have had in view? — what did they want up there?  What could any oyster want to climb a hill for?  To climb a hill must necessarily be fatiguing and annoying exercise for an oyster.  The most natural conclusion would be that the oysters climbed up there to look at the scenery. … An oyster is of a retiring disposition, and not lively — not even cheerful above the average, and never enterprising.  But, above all, an oyster does take any interest in scenery — he scorns it. (447-448)

This is my second time blogging about this book.  I am now on page 311: done with volume 1.  This post covers 198-311.

Right off the bat, Twain has more criticism about mustached women.  Listen: “The more immediate scenery consisted of fields and farmhouses outside the car and a monster-headed dwarf and a mustached woman inside it.  … Alas, deformity and female beards are too common in Italy to attract attention” (198).  There seems to be no more mentioned of this in this section of the book.  See my former post: Regarding “The Innocents Abroad”, Part 1.

This section also has some unfavorable descriptions of people groups like the last.  An example is on page 270-271.  Here is an excerpt:

This Civita Vecchia is the finest nest of dirt, vermin, and ignorance we have found yet….  It is well the alleys are not wider, because they hold as much smell now as a person can stand, and, of course, if they were wider they would hold more, and then the people would die. … They are very uncleanly– these people — in face, in person, and dress.  When they see anybody with a clean shirt on, it arouses their scorn.

There is more good stuff in here.  Twain talks about them grabbing for flies (“They have no partialities.  Whichever one they get is the one they want.”) and also about the women wasting clothes all the time but not becoming any cleaner.

There are more interesting pages that I documented such as Twain and others messing with the guides by most feigning disinterest and one feigning stupidity and ignorance.  I got a good laugh out of these pages (304-307).

Generally, this part of book was more interesting then last.  Twain tells about visiting Venice, Rome, Pisa and other cities.  He also tells about the history and legends behind these cities.  I guess I felt excitement about learning this, whereas the pages spent on the voyage to Europe and earlier stops were boring.

Well, the last time I went to the library, I got two non-fiction books.  One of these is Mark Twain’s (or Samuel Clemens’s if you prefer), “The Innocents Abroad.”  It chronicles Mark Twain’s trip to Europe and is 723 pages long.  Currently, I am on page 198.  I think it is fairly boring.  It seems to have not have any climax that it is building towards.  I guess I like fiction books a lot more.

However, there are a few passages that are interesting such as Twain’s description of people groups and particular characters.  Yes!  This took me a while to find again, but read this:

They were like near all the Frenchwomen I ever saw — homely.  They had large hands, large feet, large mouths;  they had pug-noses as a general thing, and mustaches that not even good breeding could overlook;  they combed their hair straight back without parting;  they were ill-shaped, they were not winning, they were not graceful;  I knew by their looks that they ate garlic and onions; and lastly and finally, to my thinking it would be base flattery to call them immoral.

I’m not sure about the last line but I like what I bolded especially mustaches.  This quote is the best but he also have some unkind remarks to say to the Azores natives, a doctor that always argues wrong and makes up fake ancient authors to support his claims, and other characters or people groups.  (The Azores is an archipelago close to Europe in the Atlantic Ocean.)

Even though this book is boring, I will continue reading it.  I write down where the interesting quotes are when I come to them.

NFL legend Brett Favre was subjected to a cathedral of catcalls and jeers when he took the field for the Minnesota Vikings against the Green Bay Packers, the team with whom he made his name. The fans at Lambeau Field had waited two years and two aborted retirements to vent their frustrations over the way Favre seemingly extricated himself from Green Bay after the 2007 season.

Favre was Green Bay’s favourite son. He bought the city a Super Bowl triumph in 1996, broke numerous NFL records as a Packer and provided more dramatic finishes and comebacks than any other NFL player. But when he retired in tears in 2007 only to unretire within weeks to play for the New York Jets, some of that goodwill was extinguished. Yesterday we found out just how much. While there were pockets of appreciation for Favre when he took the field, they were drowned out by swathes of booing each time he was involved in the action.

Always one for a flair for the dramatic, Favre got the last laugh, throwing for 244 yards and four touchdowns as the Vikings triumphed 38-26 over his former team. In honour of Favre’s return to Green Bay, the Sports Bloke takes a look at more sporting stars who turned their backs on their teams and examines what happened when they returned to their former homes.

Paul Ince
Say what you like about fans of Premier League football club West Ham United, but don’t deny they have any competition when it comes to holding grudges. Self-styled ‘Guv’nor’ Paul Ince was a product of the club’s youth academy and an England star in the making. In 1988, he decided he wanted to play for a bigger club. Rather than go the traditional route of lodging a transfer request, Ince instead chose to pose for the newspapers in a Man U shirt long before the deal had been finalised. Having forced West Ham’s hand, Ince got his big money move to Old Trafford. He probably didn’t anticipate the two decades of dogs abuse, incessant booing and Judas chants he faced whenever he played against West Ham for Manchester United, Liverpool and Wolves.
Hammers fans didn’t even let it go after Ince retired as a player. He received his now-traditional welcome as manager of Blackburn Rovers when he bought his team to Upton Park in 2008. Before this game, Ince commented that he felt, 20 years after his minor indiscretion, that the abuse was almost good-natured now. Sorry Paul, you’re wrong. You’re still hated at West Ham and here’s a measure of how much. When I was last betrayed by a good friend, I changed his name in my mobile to Ince. And it stayed that way for two years until things got sorted out.

Kevin Pietersen
Some players are reviled for turning against their clubs, cricketer Kevin Pietersen was accused of turning against his own country. Frustrated by the lack of international opportunities available to him in his native South Africa, KP moved to Nottinghamshire to play county cricket. Once he qualified to represent England, it seemed fitting his first major one day series came in his homeland. Every time Pietersen walked out to bat in the series, he received a barrage of boos, jeers and catcalls by sell out crowds of up to 50,000 angry South African fans. It was his reaction to the abuse marked him out as a special player. The caludron of hate didn’t make him quake, it merely strengthened his resolve. Pietersen reeled off scores of 108 in Bloemfontein (where the crowd turned their backs to him when he returned to the pavilion), 75 in Cape Town, 100 of 69 balls in East London and 116 at Centurion.

Sol Campbell
Sol Campbell was so revered by Tottenham Hotpsur fans that it’s probably fair to say that, faced with staying with the under-achieving North London side or moving to a more successful team playing Champions League football when his contract expired, there wouldn’t have been too many complaints if he’d chosen to leave. After all, he’d given Spurs over a decade of loyal service. He could have gone to Italy or Spain and Tottenham fans would have wished him well. They might have grumbled a bit if he’d signed with Manchester United or Liverpool. The only move that would provoke anger would be if he signed with London rivals Arsenal. But that wasn’t an issue because Sol had already said there was no way he could ever play for the Gunners given his long history with Spurs.
And then he signed for Arsenal. The reaction to Campbell when he returned to White Hart Lane as an Arsenal player was bitter and abusive. It continued whenever he went back, culminating in fan arrests over a chant directed at the England star which contained the delightful rhyming of the phrase ’swinging from a tree’ with the insult ‘Judas C*** with HIV’. Campbell is a lying traitor to Spurs fans, but that chant is all kinds of wrong.

Roger Clemens
In 2001, Bill Simmons wrote an ESPN column explaining why, in the eyes of Boston Red Sox fans, pitcher Roger Clemens was the antichrist. After 12 seasons in Boston, Clemens slapped Red Sox in the face by moving to Toronto for money and then holding a press conference in which he failed to make a single reference to his former club. The slap in the face became a full boot to the nether-regions when he forced Toronto to trade him to New York in 1999 to play for Boston’s hated rivals the Yankees. And don’t forget, when the 2000 MLB All-Star game was played at Fenway Park, Clemens again ignored the obvious chance to pay tribute to his former fans, choosing to wear a Yankee cap instead of a Red Sox one. And so, Clemens was given the bird by Boston fans every time he stepped foot in Fenway over the next eight years. Post-retirement steroid and adultery accusations ensured they got the last laugh.
Simmons sums up the feelings to Clemens by saying “No athlete ever let me down quite like Roger Clemens did. Fortunately, we can take solace at the potential sight of Clemens standing on the field at New Fenway, maybe 40 years from now, being introduced on Old Timer’s Day 2041 … and getting showered with boos from Red Sox fans. “I can’t believe they still haven’t let this go,” he’ll mumble to himself, a thin smile spread across his face, oblivious to the bitter end, still waiting for the fans to come around. Not a chance.”

Elton Brand
It remains to be seen what kind of reaction NBA star Elton Brand will get when he eventually returns to Los Angeles to play against his former team the Clippers. It’s probably a good bet he’ll get booed out of the building. Here’s why. Brand was instrumental in convincing Baron Davis, then starring for the running and gunning Golden State Warriors, to move to LA. As soon as Davis inked his new contract, Brand announced he was off to Philadelphia to play for the 76ers after his negotiations with the Clippers broke down for vague, unspecified reasons, leaving Baron without help on one of the NBA’s most cursed and under-achieveing rosters.
Is there karma at work on this one? Maybe? After a rickety start with Philly, Brand went down injured and disappeared for the season. The 76ers played better without him. The Clippers recorded just 19 wins but won the draft lottery and picked up college phenom Blake Griffin. Of course, it being the Clippers, Griffin was injured in pre-season and is currently on the DL for the next 20 games.

Big Mac is back

Mark McGwire may not be headed to the Hall of Fame, but he’s back in baseball as hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals. Tony La Russa, who agreed to return as manager on a one-year contract, made the decision to bring back the former juicer to work with his hitters. If Albert Pujols’ average drops to .193 next season, you’ll know who to blame.

McGwire has stayed out of the public eye since his appearance at a congressional hearing on steroids in 2005, when he famously declared, “I’m not here to talk about the past”. Funny, because no one talks about McGwire’s past either, like when he hit 70 homers in the magical summer of ‘98. Then again, most people were pretty sure he was cheating back then already.

Who knows? Maybe McGwire’s hiring will pave the way for the rest of our juiced up former heroes to return to the game. Don’t be shocked if Sammy Sosa signs on with the Cubs as hitting coach or if Rocket Roger ends up back in Boston as pitching coach. Maybe Brian McNamee even catches on with the Jays as strength and conditioning coach — after all, Vernon Wells looks like he could use some ‘roids.