We just received our schedule last Thursday….of course, this was promptly changed on Sunday evening. The embedded google calendar below contains what should be the final version of the schedule. You don’t have to view it in this message - you can access it directly at this link - then you can print it off, subscribe to it via RSS, send reminders to your phone, have it engraved in the finest alabaster….whatever floats your boat.

This year we are in the Hot Stove League, Boys G League. This is a league for 11 and 12 year old boys. We have 12 boys on our team, with a fairly even split between 11 and 12 year olds.

One of the major differences between this league and H league is that stealing is now always allowed; players can lead off and steal at any time. The dropped third strike rule is enforced, as are balks. Games are 7 innings in duration, with a 10-run mercy rule applied after 2 hours or 5 innings when a team is ahead by more than 10 runs. Based on my experience last year games will usually last roughly 2 to 3 hours.

Directions to the away fields will be on the MYBSL website at some point in the future. However, home games will either be played at Nimisila Field, which is behind the Manchester Local Administration building located between SR 93 and Pearlman, or at the Manchester A’s Field, which is behind the Manchester Middle School located on Nimisila Road. Weekday games start at 6pm; Saturday games start at 4pm.

We hope to see you there.

I’ve had a fascination with submarines since I was nine. I can even pinpoint the source - when my mother was in the hospital to give birth to Corey, I spent several days at my Grandmother Schmidt’s house. Back then - like now - I read quite a bit, and I had run out of books to read. Grandpa gave me a copy of a book on the WWII American Submarine war against Japan called Pig Boats; I managed to finish the book inside of a week, and by the time I was done I was hooked on submarines. As an aside, I recently bought online a used copy of that book (now out of print); it’s still as engrossing now as it was then.

Continuing that theme a quarter of a century later, I’m listening to a book about the loss of the USS Scorpion on my iPod. The book - Scorpion Down - advances the theory that the submarine was sunk by the Soviet Navy, with the sinking being covered up by the Navy. The author is fairly persuasive, and the story he tells - happening during the paranoia of the Cold War - is entirely plausible.

Of particular interest to me is one part of the book that describes the SOSUS network of underwater hydrophones. This system was used to track Soviet submarine and ship traffic throughout the Cold War. The SOSUS network evolved out of the work of Dr. Maurice Ewing, a physicist who (family tie-in here) did research on the USCS Joseph Henry, a ship that my Grandfather was a mate on, during the final year of the war.

Grandpa always called the project “Big Ear”, although it appears that the actual name of the project was “SOFAR SHADOW”. The project involved dropping special charges into a layer of the ocean known as the SOFAR channel. There is a mention of this project on this web page by the Jo Henry’s Battery Captain:

PS; an Interesting footnote:

During the last few months of my Command, the JO HENRY receive an assignment to the US Navy, “I’m not making this up ! ”

The Navy had some special work for which they had “no suitable” vessel! In early 1945, a delegation of Officers from the Bureau of Ships came to Boston to investigate our capability to install cable and hydrophones in a deep water sound ranging project being developed with Oceanographic people from Woods Hole, Mass. The War Department had said “OK” since we had completed all new cable work for the CAC.

It was decided that we could do the job, and the JO HENRY left Boston on 6 April bound for Norfolk, Va. and then on to an operating base in Miami. From 23 April until 2 August, our work was like a summer (cruise) in the Bahamas. The forward base being in Nassau and the cable area being off the East Coast of Eleuthra Island. The JO HENRY returned to Boston on 11 August.

This project, if successful, had important application to future wartime operation in the Pacific Theater as the war with Japan progressed. Operation SOFAR SHADOW offered lifesaving by sound

The detailed Navy article on the SOSUS system (available here) confirms this:

On the basis of these experiments, Ewing proposed in 1943 that the Navy develop a system for communicating over long ranges by detonating time-coded explosive charges in the sound channel itself. Accordingly, during the spring of 1944, he supervised a major sea test in which USS Buckley (DE-51) steamed outward from a stationary receiving ship, periodically dropping small explosive charges fused for various depths. These explosions were still clearly discernible until Buckley had to break off the trial at a distance of 900 miles. By the end of the war, the Buckley experiments had led to a subsequent effort to develop an air-sea rescue system known as SOFAR – for Sound Fixing and Ranging. In the SOFAR concept, downed pilots would drop small explosive charges to the depth of the deep sound channel, where their sound output could be expected to travel for thousands of miles to deep, bottom-mounted hydrophones and triangulated to locate the survivors. At the time, however, exploiting the SOFAR channel for submarine detection at long range seems not to have been suggested, although by mid-war, the U.S. Navy was already using ray-tracing methods tactically for sonar performance prediction.

I can’t find mention of the ship employed for the SOSUS tests in 1949/1950 but I see mention of an Army Cable Ship which would tie in with my Grandfather saying that he knew the Jo Henry had gone down to Bermuda a second time years after he left the service. Also, the place where they tested (Grand Bahamas) also ties in where the SOSUS tests were done (Eletehura in the Bahamas) and is also where the first SOSUS nets were deployed later in the 50’s. Somewhere, rolled up in a tube, I have the charts of the Grand Bahamas that my Grandfather plotted the course the Jo Henry took while working at the direction of Dr. Ewing.

Frank never referred to the operation as SOFAR SHADOW - he always called it BIG EAR (at least when he talked to me about it). I wonder if - despite the official military report above - that they were starting to view this an anti-submarine asset more than a B-29 lifeguard asset even at that point? If you think about it, by the first 3 months of 1945 Iwo Jima had been taken; this allowed US Bombers to have P51 coverage on missions into Japan. Also, the Japanese Navy had been more or less wiped off the ocean so the submarines could loiter around the home islands to provide lifeguard support. Of course, this is all just conjecture on my part and probably wrong. The interesting thing for me is that my Grandfather was involved at a very early stage with a system that helped keep the uneasy peace during the Cold War.

In his remarks at Yankee Stadium, Benedict reminded Catholics that obedience to the authority of the church is the foundation of their religious faith. Am I the only one who thinks that this call by the pope to essentially “Respect my Authoritay!” is a bit misguided?

I’m no expert, but I would say that the abuse suffered by many, many children at the hands of the priests and nuns came about in large measure because they were taught that the clergy were called by God. By reinforcing the blind obedience to the church Benedict has set the stage for this to happen again.

As I mentioned in my last post, I know many Catholics who would just love to push this scandal away and blame it on a media conspiracy. My good friend James had a discussion with several ardent Catholics a few months back - in addition to denying evolution, one of these stalwart defenders of the faith told James that there were “no pedophiles” in the Catholic Church. It’s this sort of attitude, coupled with the place of trust the various members of the church hold in communities that contributed to these molestations.

Several of the articles hosted at Bishop-Accountability.org give credence to this argument. Take for instance this part of an article about Gilbert Gauthe, a parish priest who molested over 30 victims in the 70’s and 80’s.

In a deposition taken last October by Lafayette attorney J. Minos Simon, who represents one victim.s family in a civil suit, Gauthe said his victims numbered 35, 36, 37, something like that.. But Abbeville lawyer Paul Hebert, who began legal proceedings against the church on behalf of victims in 1983, believes otherwise. He cites a report by Dr. Kenneth Bouillion, a Lafayette psychologist who screened victims at Hebert.s request. Bouillion declined to be interviewed, but Hebert told The Times that, based on Bouillion.s report, .Our suspicion is that the number of victims Gauthe molested in his career as a priest could well exceed 70 children, many of whom are now over 18..

Why did it take so long.more than 10 years.before Gauthe was stopped? Consider his role in those young lives: He was a man before whom they saw their parents kneel, showing deference, receiving communion; a man to whom parent and child alike confessed sins; a guest at family dinners; a surrogate father and figure of consummate authority.

The emphasis is mine…and it’s the part that bothers me. The church put these pedophiles in a position of trust; the pope’s recent call to obedience just reinforces this position of trust. Also, note that this story came about in 1985 - twenty three years ago. Why didn’t the last pope express his shame and dismay then? Reading through the resources on this site, I’m struck by how the abuse victims were treated; ignored, minimized, blamed….these are the type of responses from the church and from the bishops who hid the monsters who perpetrated these acts.

I’ve mentioned it before and will do so again - I’ve personally known a number of good men in the priesthood. Most of these priests worked at my high school; all of them felt that they had a calling to the ministry. I may disagree totally with their theology and philosophy, but I cannot fault their dedication, intelligence, and compassion. The simple fact of the matter is that there are evil, twisted people out there in every walk of life - including the clergy.

What about the wider implacations of Benedict’s remarks? Let’s pick another of the Church’s outdated, medieval doctrines - birth control. I think I can safely say that less than 10% of Catholics I know (and I’m probably being conservative) follow the teachings of the Church. Of course, over in the developing world and Latin America the teachings of the Church are followed more slavishly, including this prohibition on birth control. How much suffering can be linked right back to obedience to this ridiculous doctrine? How many unwanted children; how many cases of AIDS; how many children are born only to starve?

Isn’t it pretty obvious that blind obedience to church authority and dogma is a recipe for disaster? History is full of examples; unfortunately for everyone Benedict wants to keep making them.

When I was about 7 or 8 years old I had a book that contained a story about a magical fish who could grant wishes. That was almost 30 years ago, and details are somewhat understandably sketchy in my mind. I do remember a few things, though. I can still picture the illustrations - they were rough black and white line drawings; and I can remember that the fish - who was in immenient danger of being fried by the other main character, a woman with an attitude and a frying pan - kept granting the woman wish after wish.

The first few wishes were for simple, useful things around the house. After that she got a bit greedy….she wanted to be mayor, then king, then emperor, and finally pope.

It was that last bit that confused me back then; I remember asking my Grandmother why this was. Was the pope more powerful than an emperor? I can’t remember exactly how she answered, but I know she parrotted the Roman Catholic party line on this and told me how important the pope was and that even presidents, kings, and emperors have to submit to his authority.

The same thing happened at St. Columbkille - during religion class I asked our teacher the same question, and she went into whole “God’s representative on earth” schtick. She then explained - in a simplified way; remember I was only in 2nd grade at the time - how the hierarchy of the church worked. Then she added the piece that has been bugging me of late, namely how all the men and women in the church were “called by God to serve in the church”. Later on, in high school, I read about church history and how, in many ways, the pope’s power extended way into the temporal world in addition to the spiritual. Being a Catholic School, this was all rationalized as being a “good thing”; after all, the pope was Christ’s representative on Earth.

This last week the pope has made a visit to the US, and has placed the Catholic Church’s sex scandal front and center. He’s vowed to not include pedophiles in the priesthood; he’s expressed his sorrow; he’s “deeply ashamed”. All of which are positive things, but speaking as someone who was raised Catholic and spent 12 years in Catholic school it’s a bit too little too late. They’ve known about this too long to fall on their swords and spin it away.

As a child I was taught that the parish priest was a direct line to God; I was taught that I had to honor and respect the priest; that he was called to his position by God; and that I should listen to what the priest and act on his advice. I was a naive, trusting child up through the fourth grade. I shudder to think of what would have happened to me if I had been unlucky enough to be around a pedophile priest.

When I was in college I used to have arguments with friends and family about priests; people would claim that, by nature of the enforced celibacy, Catholic priests were perverts who would bugger altar boys at the drop of a hat. I would mount a strident defense; even though I wasn’t going to church I still believed that these were good people who were called to a higher good.

Then the sex scandal hit, and I watched in disgust as it became apparent that this was something the church had been hushing up and covering up for years and years. Older Catholics I knew would pretend like it didn’t exist; younger Catholics would express dismay and astonishment about it, but in the end do nothing. The whole time this went on all I could think about was the kids who’s lives were - if not ruined - affected by this; and the church hierarchy that sat complacently by and let this happen. It amazed me to hear the rationalizations and the charges of a media conspiracy to inflate these “isolated incidents” to damage holy mother church. There was an inability to recognize that maybe these priests weren’t the paragons of virtue we were brought up to believe they were. Maybe the pristhood was just another career path and not some special sacrament? Maybe it’s all just like, you know, made up?

And it stays the same. Watch the coverage and listen to what the pope has to say about it. Devout catholics will eat his words up; cafe catholics will listen with one ear and continue on their way; other people will nod sagely at this holy man who is working so hard for good. Another group of people - myself included - will wonder why so many people are willing to give this old man in a funny hat the free pass he is getting on so many issues.

With today being April 4th, NPR predictably had a few stories on Martin Luther King, Jr earlier this morning. This started me thinking - would you believe that I was a sophmore in high school before I realized who MLK was and what he had done? This stands a bit in stark contrast to Alex, who was learning about the Civil Rights movement back in 2nd grade. Not sure if that was a sign of the times I grew up in, or just a function of my insular Catholic education to that point, but it is definitely odd.

I’ll be honest, I’ve managed to forget 90% of what I was taught in my theology classes at Walsh. Of course, I’m willing to wager that my theology teachers’ therapists have helped them forget 90% of my time in their classes. That being said, I do remember a interesting discussion we had in my sophmore theology class with Father Ryan who told us about taking part in the Civil Rights movement back in the 60’s. The man wasn’t all that good at selling the whole theology thing, but he was damn eloquent when talking about marching with Dr. King. He spoke about MLK’s presence and his charisma, and about how he made you feel like you could make a difference.

Listening to his speeches, reading his words, and seeing the effect he still has on our culture and politics 40 years later reinforces Father Ryan’s words. If Alex is any indication, children today have a much better grasp of his accomplishments than I ever did at that age. Hopefully this will translate into an erosion and eventual eradication of the casual racism that has pervaded society through most of my life.

Like anyone else, MLK had his warts. Charges of academic plagarism and extramartial affairs are most likely true. To me, this does nothing to diminish his accomplishments. Rather, it makes them all the more impressive once you realize that he was a man, not the abstract monument he is sometimes made out to be.

On this anniversery of his death, one can only wonder what Dr. King would have to say about the current state of our country and the world. The quote that comes to my mind follows.

“Freedom is one thing. You have it all or you are not free.”