The End of the Good Old New York Yankees: An Impression of Derek Jeter’s Announcement of His Retirement at the End of This Season

Early this morning, I found Derek Jeter’s announcement of his retirement at the end of this season on his Facebook page. I knew that this day would come soon, but it is completely different between what I expected to be and what it actually comes to be.

I wrote about my love for the New York Yankees in the 1990’s in the entry “Goodbye My Good Old Yankees.”

The Yankees in the 1990’s was the most brilliant team that I have ever seen, so I was really happy to watch their games. Now I can clearly remember how Paul O'Neill, Bernie Williams, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, and Derek Jeter played in the Yankees Stadium at that time.

Of course, Captain Jeter is great, but young Jeter was more impressive for me.

In the twenty-first century, it was a bit sour to be a Yankees fan, because I had to watch the old good Yankees collapsing. Paul, Bernie, Andy and Jorge retired one by one. Although the Yankees bought expensive players instead of them, they were not the old good Yankees at all.

In the last season, Mariano was gone from the field, and in this season, Derek, the last old good Yankee, finally will step out. At the end of this season, I will also stop being a Yankees fan.

A farewell to Captain and the old good Yankees.

PS

Masahiro Tanaka MUST take Captain to the world series!

Reality Is Cruel: An Impression of Super Bowl XLVII

The football season is over.

I had believed that this season must have been Peyton Manning’s one, but in the end that didn’t happened.

Seattle Seahawks completely beat Peyton Manning’s Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII. Seattle Seahawks didn’t allow Peyton Manning and the other members of Denver Broncos do what they planned at all. Everybody, including Seattle Seahawks themselves, didn’t expect this big win over Broncos.

Peyton Manning is one of the legendary quarterbacks. He used to play as a member of Indianapolis Colts and he won Super Bowl in 2007. But in 2011, he got neck surgeries, and Colts believed that he couldn’t play as well as before, so they kicked him out.

In 2012, he got signed on with Denver Broncos and he brought his team to the playoffs. This season, the 37-year-old Peyton Manning achieved the best performance in his life and got the regular season MVP.

I dreamed that Peyton Manning would win the Super Bowl title at the end of this season and it make his big comeback perfect.

But reality is cruel.

Seattle Seahawks literary destroyed Denver Broncos and my dream.

It is really painful for me to imagine how this defeat hurt Peyton Manning’s heart.

Al-Qaeda as “Bandits”

I’ve read the book Eric Hobsbawm “Bandits,” again.

In this book he wrote about the history of “Bandits” around the world. He insisted that groups that were called “bandits” appeared in the age between the demise of tribal societies and the formation of modern capitalized society.

He described the phenomenon “bandits” as follows.

Social banditry of this kind is one of the most universal social phenomena known to history, and one of the most amazingly uniform.
…
… this uniformity is not the consequence of cultural diffusion, but the reflection of similar situations within peasant societies, whether in China, Peru, Sicily, the Ukraine, or Indonesia.
…
… Socially it seems to occur in all types of human society which lie between the evolutionary phase of tribal and kinship organization, and modern capitalist and industrial society, but including the phases of disintegrating kinship society and transition to agrarian capitalism.
…
At the other end of historic development, modern agrarian systems, both capitalist and post-capitalist, are no longer those of traditional peasant society and cease to produce social bandits
…
… In a broader sense ‘modernization’, that is to say the combination of economic development, efficient communications and public administration, deprives any kind of banditry, including the social, of the conditions under which it flourishes.

When I read this passage, I was reminded of Al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda has two faces. The first is the globalized organization using the Internet to instigate terrorism, and the second is the aggregation of small groups revolving in remote areas, such as the tribal area in Pakistan and the mountain area in Afghanistan.

The second face of Al-Qaeda has many features in common with “bandits,” which Eric Hobsbawm focused on. His study showed that “bandits” couldn’t be wiped out by officials but they disappeared through losing their social and economic basis. In fact, Al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan is surviving even though the U.S. Army attacked them using their modern weapons.

It might be more efficient to eliminate Al-Qaeda through realizing “the combination of economic development, efficient communications and public administration” in these areas.

Although I don’t know well about the progress of the study about “bandits,” it must be quite important to deal with Al-Qaeda, especially, the study about “bandits” in the globalization and the Internet age.

I Found Spring Coming in Cold Winter

Last weekend, it was really cold but sunny, so I took an hour walk to Mejiro-teien, which is a small Japanese garden.

Since I got started on Instagram last year, I have been enjoying taking photos. The sunny day was good for taking clear photos with my iPhone 4S.

When I arrived at Mejiro-teien, I couldn’t find anything to take a photo with. There were no flowers blooming and no leaves on the trees.

After I looked carefully at some details, I found a bunch of small buds on branches. I zoomed in on the buds as closely as possible to capture the vitality, which was condensed in them.

Spring was coming even in cold winter.

"If winter come, can spring be far behind."

How to Look for a Book in the Stone Age

I have written a series of entries, which I call “the Stone Age series.”

Everyday life has been changed drastically by the spread of the Internet, but sometimes I feel that the life with the Internet is so natural, because I forget the life before the Internet. In order to remember how was the life before the Internet, I wrote some entries about it. In these entries, I call the age before the Internet “the Stone Age.”

In the Stone Age, we could survive without the Internet and cell phones. I wrote about the devices that we could use in the Stone Age in the entry “I could survive in the Stone Age.”

In these days, people managed to meet friends with public phones and “real” message boards. If you interested in how they met friends, please read my entry “How to Meet a Friend in the Stone Age.”

Today I’d like to write about a way of looking for a book without amazon.com.

If I were looking for a newly published book, at first I went to a bookstore. Now, in the Iron Age, I can check the stocks in a bookstore with the Internet, but at that time the only thing that I could do was just going to a bookstore. If there were no stocks of the book that I was looking for, I went to another bookstore.

I don’t have to worry that the digital book that I want to read will be out of print, but paper books often became out of print so quickly. In the Stone Age, I had to buy the book that I would read someday as soon as possible, and there were a pile of books on my desk, which I myself didn’t know when I could read.

Paper books are heavy and bulky. It was really hard to bring a shopping bag that was full of books from a bookstore to my house. My room was filled with a lot of books, which I could no longer put together. Sometimes I bought again a book that I had already bought, because I couldn’t find it from a pile of books in my room.

In the Iron Age, I can get a book just with “1-Click” from Amazon.com on my kindle.