There you go. That’s this week’s big piece of news, which might come as a surprise, or might not. I’d always viewed marriage as an outdated institution – you’re either committed to a person, or you’re not, and the presence of a ring isn’t going to make the slightest bit of difference. But try telling that to the immigration people here in the States, who are clearly an old-fashioned bunch.

No matter how long I live with my one true love, I’d always be at the mercy of my temporary work residency – were I to be fired from my position as webmaster of trashcity.com, I would theoretically have to leave the country immediately. Though since said employer is also my one true love (for immigration purposes, concepts like “joint partners” aren’t any good either), I like to think I have a certain amount of job security.

It will also allow Chris to become a McLennan, divesting herself of another remnant of her previous marriage, a nightmare she is otherwise reminded of every time she signs a cheque. Changing your name any other way is, I’m told, a somewhat troublesome process, but announce you’re getting married and it all kinda happens by default. Think the kids are going to hang on to their names – well, they are used to them – which might lead to some interesting times going through immigration. Yes, these are my kids. No, they don’t have the same name as me. Nor their biological mother.

As I write this, Chris is looking into booking venues for the wedding and receptions, with her customary fervour. It’s probably going to be back in Britain, but she’s used to long-range planning, having previously co-ordinated parties, including a surprise one for me, with the aid of much furtive maneouvering and a copy of the London Yellow Pages. Plotting a wedding from 5000 miles away should be a piece of cake – albeit a large cake, with two little figures on the top of it.

Part of me begrudges the money. Many venues appear to work on the principle that bickering over the odd thousand for your daughter’s wedding would be churlish, but we are actually paying for the damn thing ourselves. Hell, you could buy a really big plasma screen – or even two – for some of the prices we have heard: we just want to feed and water a few guests, not buy them cars and start them all up in business. I would be happy with a few sausage rolls and a six-pack of Irn-Bru – as long as we got the his and hers pair of plasma screens, of course.

So I come to the end of my first year in America: selling beads for a living, engaged to be married, and perfectly content to be both. How life does change…

The one thing the above lines teach us, is that Rudyard Kipling knew jack about sports fandom. Because, having sat through both in the past week, I have become painfully aware of the difference. Wednesday and Thursday night saw the Diamondbacks lose World Series games in heartbreaking fashion, not once but twice, in virtually the same way. Comments I made previously, specifically, “How people like our 22-year old Korean pitcher, Kim, will cope, I dread to think,” seemed like the work of Nostradamus. For in both games, he (and by extension, we) needed just one more out to defeat the Yankees; instead, a home run yanked the fluffy shag-pile carpet of victory from under our feet, replacing it with the hard and chilly lino which is defeat.

The second one in particular was heart-breaking. Just ask Chris, who felt like a baseball widow that evening as I struggled to contend with feelings of unfairness, loss and disappointment which… Well, Bill Shankly once said, “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death…I can assure you it is much, much more important than that,” and the same goes for baseball. Uncomfortable though it is to say it, I felt more upset than I was over the World Trade Center attack.

Yet just when all seems lost… Last night, we crushed the Yankees 15-2 – merely setting a new record for World Series hits, and handing the foe their worst loss in 294 post-season games – and all is once again right with the world. It’s three apiece, and we head tonight towards the deciding seventh, with everything on the line. I just hope I have enough adrenalin to cope.

Why does fandom – and sports fandom in particular, since few other kinds can match the tremendous roller-coaster of emotions – exert such a terrible toll, making you care less about the deaths of 5000 people, than a white ball going over a fence? It’s a sense of direct connectness, perhaps; every day since March, the guys on the team have been a part of my life. I know Luis Gonzales has triplets. I know Matt Williams likes Rush. I know Craig Counsell’s nickname is “Rudy”. These are things I don’t know about our next-door neighbours.

Sports is the ultimate unscripted soap-opera. Perhaps Kipling had a point; in any season (especially one with 179 games in total), there will be ups and downs, wins and losses, injuries, triumphs, mistakes and everything else you can imagine. It’s a true microcosm of life, and we live it through the players. Their success becomes ours; their failures become ours too. At one point, I found myself wondering if moving from the office to the living-room to watch the final moments had caused the defeat somehow, in an inexplicable butterfly-in-the-Amazon way.

They’ve done studies into this (your tax money at work in a useful cause, for once), and one suggestion is that it recreates the emotions from back when humanity lived in tribes. “Our sports heroes are our warriors,” said psychology professor Robert Cialdini of Arizona State. And studies have shown that testosterone levels rise after a victory and fall after a defeat by over 25% – Chris will testify to this one, since I think my line on Thursday night was, “I just want to be held…” 🙂

Just a few short hours to go; for the moment, anything is possible. In my best dream, I see Kim back on the mound, successfully getting the final out this time, and being carried off on the shoulders of his team-mates as the stadium erupts. Where else is such redemption possible? But whatever happens, it’s going to take me a while to get to sleep tonight.

[And verily, in the bottom of the 9th innings, Arizona were losing 1-2, and they did swing mightily and scored two runs. And there was much joy in Phoenix, and much gnashing of teeth and weeping and wailing in New York. Kim never did get to pitch though…]

As American ground-troops storm into Afghanistan, I suppose I could perhaps continue to comment on world affairs. But frankly, I can’t bothered, because it really now just seems like another world squabble that has no impact on me – see Kosovo, Somalia and East Timor for further examples. And you’re probably fed up with it all too: even Chris didn’t peruse my last rantings, because, as she said, “it had nothing about me in it”. Time to put the career as a world-renowned political commentator on the back burner for a bit.

Slightly worrying phone message this morning. A little while back, we registered girlswithguns.org, though so far, we’re still trying to accumulate a sufficient volume of appropriate material – such as the Anna Nicole Smith double-bill DVD (bought in an inebriated state, I have to say in mitigation). But picked up the following on the TC voice-mail today:

“Hi, I was calling about a domain name that’s listed to you, that’s called girlswithguns.org. We have a small women’s marksman’s group and we’re looking at doing a new website and we were wondering whether or not that name might be available. So please call me at ______. Just ask for Laurie.”

Certainly woke me up, and at least it made a change from people quibbling about non-delivery of beads. Politely-worded and very friendly though the request might have been, I remain very British in my attitude to guns, and my sole experience of them, outside of movies, remains a Valentine’s present of a session at a shooting range bought by my one true love [there, that’ll get me at least one reader this week!]. When someone who likes guns – enough to join a club for them – goes to the bother to find out your telephone number, you listen. And then probably cave in and give them whatever they want.

Actually, an amicable solution is not hard to find, since Chris fortunately had the foresight to also acquire girlswithguns.net. So we can probably transfer that one over – and then go back to hiding under the mattress, while girlswithguns.net launches an all-out assault on evil dodgy porn site, girlswithguns.com. We’ll buy up the movie rights to that one, though knowing our luck, it would probably end up starring Anna Nicole Smith.

Or perhaps Emily, our daughter, who is currently making a film in the hallway with her friend, our video-camera, and a bowl of food-coloured syrup. They are currently having to deal with the problems of low-budget film-making, e.g. the family dogs meandering across the “set” (a.k.a. said hallway), and the inevitable “Who’s going to turn the camera on since we’re both sleeping?” problem. Naturally, with Halloween only eleven days away, it’s a horror movie, though I’m wondering if we really should have taken her 13-year old self, to see prostitutes being viciously slaughtered in From Hell. Guess we’ll have to wait and see the finished product before deciding whether she is in need of psychological counselling…

So now we’re bombing “military targets” in Afghanistan and lobbing cruise missiles in there. S’funny how little attention was paid to this here: no baseball games were cancelled, and TV schedules were only disrupted for about two hours at most. There’s a sense of divine retribution here, and so the inevitability of it meant there was no sense of outrage or shock. And after all, any casualties aren’t American, so who cares?

It also was a damn sight less photogenic; the coverage of the attacks seemed largely to consist of green blobs moving about a screen, like a particularly retro computer game, rather than footage from ever-more explicit camera angles, shot by a myriad of amateur cameramen. There’s only so much you can say about fuzzy lights that might be anything from a truck to a cruise missile, before going back to your regular diet of ex-soldiers, former directors of the CIA and all the other pundits who were having a field day during this all-you-can-eat buffet of talking heads.

Perhaps the most disturbing events, however, were the pulmonary anthrax cases in Florida. They were the first reported cases in America for over twenty years, and even more bizarrely, took place in the buildings where most of America’s scuzziest supermarket tabloids (such as The National Enquirer) were published. They have effectively become one of their own stories, but it’s hard to see why any terrorist would attack a bunch of newspapers possessing not an ounce of credibility. Well, not with anyone whose brain-cell count surpasses three. In idle moments, I speculate that the contamination was maybe actually carried out by an unholy cabal of Tom Cruise, Oprah Winfrey and Prince William.

Whoever is responsible, it has hardly been a major disaster. That form of anthrax, though hardy as hell [there’s an island off the coast of Scotland – Gruinard – which was out of bounds for decades after germ warfare tests], isn’t actually contagious, and there have only been three people so far confirmed as exposed. However, there is a grim precedent here. Nine months before their attack on the Tokyo subway, the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan had a “trial run” for their Tokyo subway attack, releasing sarin near the dormitory of three judges presiding over a case involving Aum.

Incidentally, they also dabbled in bioweapons, such as Ebola, and in June 1993, attempted to release anthrax spores from their office building in Tokyo… What this means in the current context, I don’t know. But it helps make more explicable the reports I’ve heard of people “holding” tap water for a couple of days before drinking it, in case it’s been contaminated – effectively, using the rest of the population as canaries. On the plus side, we must acknowledge that even an extremely well-funded and organised group such as Aum had only very limited success with chemical and biological warfare. Hopefully this means that Florida marks the end and not the beginning.

Standard conspiratorial practice for any event where responsibility is uncertain, is to ask, “who benefits?”, because people are likely to action that helps them in some way or another. In this light, examination of the destruction of the World Trade Towers throws some surprising characters into the forefront of any investigation:

• The owners of the Empire State Building. When built, it was the tallest building in the world. Last month, it was no longer even the tallest building in Manhattan. Somehow, outfitting the building in a giant clown’s hat to reclaim the title seemed like cheating… And now, it’s back to dominating the New York skyline. Coincidence?
• Todd McFarlane. In 1998, Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs, shattering the 37-year old record for such things. The creator of Spawn paid $3 million for the ball which was hit for the 70th home run. But just three years later, Barry Bonds is making a serious run at the title. What better way to defend your investment than plough aircraft into buildings, and get all baseball cancelled for a week?
• Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broad. These three New York Times journalists had a new book to plug – Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War – but the first printing was only 15,000. The date of its initial publication: September 11th. The second printing will be 100,000 copies and it’s currently the #3 best-seller at Amazon.

Okay, these suggestions are clearly not serious, but there is a serious point in there, namely that there is no more actual evidence for these suspects than there is for Osama Bin-Laden. The American government say he is responsible, but they have been curiously reticent at telling anyone – even their NATO allies – what proof they have that this is so. They cite fears about the security of their intelligence sources, but still demand that everyone joins in their war on terrorism. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” said Bush. I guess asking to see any actual evidence puts me with the terrorists then.

There is, mercifully, a growing resistance to a world view that sees the bad guys wearing black hats. Even people who last week were demanding that fire and brimstone be rained down on the heads of everyone, are now saying that we should go after the actual perpetrators. This is certainly a more sensible approach, and will probably more successful too. However, there is still a huge potential downside: in both America and Britain there is wide public support (85% of Britons, in one poll) for compulsory identity cards – and I remain entirely unconvinced that such cards would make the slightest difference. Anecdotal evidence of how useless they are, comes from the July escape of a convict from jail in LA, using an id card with a picture of Eddie Murphy on it…

And who knows what other measures will be introduced? A USA Today survey showed almost half wanted special IDs for Arabs in this country, including Americans of Arab descent – perhaps we should simply make them wear yellow stars… And extending this metaphor a little further, there are uncomfortable similarities between the events of 9/11, and the burning of the Reichstag in 1933. The day after the event – without bothering to wait for evidence – a decree was signed which allowed the Nazis to outlaw virtually all opposition. It’s perhaps TOO uncomfortable to follow that road.

But if you want an interesting slant on “who benefits”, take a look at The Konformist and their answer…