Your “first place” is your home. Your “second place” is your work. Sociologists are noting the resurgence of what they are calling “third places” where people can hang out, socialize, where everybody knows your name, etc. These are neighborhood diners, bars, and (increasingly) coffee houses. This is a healthy development, say in the sociologists, in our society of alienation, rootlessness, and so on. See Satisfying a Craving For Someplace Familiar - washingtonpost.com.

This is indeed good to return to, working against that opposite trend of bowling alone. In the past, though, people tended to belong to lots of groups, but this is a start. (Small town Americans might be amused that this is a new trend, since we have been hanging out at such places all our lives. It must be due to our bitterness.)

So, do you have a “third place”? What lifts it above the merely functional, the place to get something to eat or to grab a cup of coffee?

Does the church function as a “third place”? Could it? Should it?

The front page, top of the fold story in the Washington Post: McCain: A Question of Temperament . The story is about John McCain’s notorious temper, insinuating that he might not have the “temperament” to be president. We await a story on Hillary Clinton’s notorious temper.

Still, what do you think about this issue, which is bound to get hit hard in the general election? According to the story, the main target of McCain’s wrath has been fellow Republicans who renege on Senate deals or who indulge in pork barrel earmarks, which McCain consistently opposes. The story also cites other presidents who had incendiary tempers, including Harry Truman, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, and (yes) Bill Clinton.

Is there a danger that McCain might get angry at some foreign leader and get us into war? If we go by the niceness, even-tempered standard, I guess Barack Obama is our man. Is there a danger there too?

As I learned in Australia and as I have blogged about before, cricket is a great game, with many of the virtues of baseball. The teams from India are notable practitioners of the sport. A new league there is trying to modernize the sport, not just by a new three hour version (Twenty20), as opposed to a match normally taking nearly a WEEK, that perhaps might be a version suited to the American attention span. . . .but also by commercializing it and sexualizing the game.

One team has brought over the Washington Redskin cheerleaders into that famously modest nation to gyrate before delighted male cricket fans who, it is said, will have never seen so much female skin before their marriage. See Redskins Cheerleaders Shake Up Cricket In Modest India - washingtonpost.com.

The bringing of the aptly-termed Skins cheerleaders into cricket, with the rest of the accompanying spectacle, including rock bands and laser shows, is being associated with India’s newfound wealth and the over-arching goal of being like the Americans. Killer quote:
“Sexuality and cricket is the way forward. And it’s time India wakes up to the fact that it’s a different society. It’s a modern society. There’s no use keeping it all under wraps.”

The way forward for India is sexuality and cricket!