I rather liked this message from Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria which I read earlier this morning, so I’ve decided to replicate it completely on my site…
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Christmas is here again despite all covert and overt attempts to wish it away. The celebration in remembrance of the love of God in giving the Saviour to the world is so important, it cannot be wished away.
Though few human beings rejoiced at the birth of the baby Jesus, the Gospels tell about multitudes rejoicing in the heavens, about a bright star leading wise men to worship the new born king, and they also tell about the trouble his birth brought to those unwilling to have him as their Lord and King.
The incarnation is the divine condescension. The birth of Christ which we celebrate is the decisive divine intervention into human history. By it, history is measured and judged. Before the birth of Christ, all of history is categorized as era ‘Before Christ’ (B.C.) and since then, we have been in the era of ‘the year of Our Lord’ (anno domini, A.D.)
Today, multitudes of human beings join the angels to rejoice. Christians shining as light lead many to Christ and there still exists, great trouble among those who would not have Jesus. Efforts to turn Christmas into a mere holiday season continue unabated all around us. ‘Christmas Greetings’ are replaced with ‘Season Greetings’ as if it possible to have a Christmas without Christ. ‘B.C.’ and ‘A.D’ are changed to ‘B.C.E.’ (Before Common Era), and ‘C.E’ (Common Era) all in an attempt to conceal the fact that Jesus came to save an erring world from sin and eternal condemnation.
The cross of Christ which is the main reason we boast (Gal. 6:14) remains a stumbling block and a symbol of offense to those unwilling to receive God’s free gift of salvation. (Romans 9: 33) Under the guise of political correctness, symbols of Christianity in our daily lives and history are being challenged and subtly removed. All these subtle and calculated attempts of the non-believing world to mislead the unsuspecting believers and make them deny Christ should not deter us from celebrating for we are confident the efforts are bound to fail. As we celebrate Jesus’ birth this year, let us be mindful of the activities of the first celebrants; the joyous angels who while celebrating proclaimed the Good News to the shepherds.
We should also be bold to proclaim to an increasingly secularized world, the good news of the Saviour-born. We call on all Christians in positions of authority and indeed all ministers of the Gospel to vigorously resist attempts to remove Christ from Christmas and His centrality and importance in human history. We should be vigilant and avoid being misguided and misled by their seemingly innocent and socially acceptable philosophy. In being politically correct, we should not join in denying Christ his rightful place. Let all of us unashamedly proclaim the news of the greatest gift of all, the love behind the gift and peace the gift brings to all. Jesus the Christ is our Saviour, Lord, King and the best gift ever given by God to humanity. (John 3:16)
May God incarnate, give you true joy as you celebrate Him this Christmas and throughout the coming year.
Every Blessing,
Signed
The Most Revd. Peter J Akinola, CON,
Archbishop, Metropolitan and Primate of all Nigeria.

I know a lot of baseball sites run “open game threads”, where people watching/listening to the game can have immediate responses about what’s going on. I toyed with that a year ago, and decided against it – I don’t think I have enough of a following to pull that off. Having just a couple of posts in an “open thread” for a game is pretty sad.
Anyway, something that’s become more prevalent the last couple of years is sports game blogging. I’ve seen a lot of newspapers sports blogs do that kind of thing. Now for the most part it’s not individual play by play level of blogging (that’s what the aforementioned open threads tend to do), but there are generally a lot of reports from games anymore. I always wondered what the various leagues thought of that type of thing, as a lot of them (Hello NFL, and a wink to MLB) tend to frown on almost anything that they don’t control themselves.
To that I read this article tonight saying the NCAA wigged out and told people to stop liveblogging their games. At one point, they actually ejected someone from the stadium, and revoked their credentials. That seems a bit bizarre to me, even with some of the overly anal things I’ve read about the NFL doing.
It does make me wonder when the leagues might take a stance against that kind of thing. The article mentions the ejected guy’s lawyer arguing against the concept, claiming that it was commentary, not a simulcast, which would probably be in violation of something, although I’m no expert.
It probably won’t actually come to pass, but the concept of a league deciding that liveblogging is something to be stopped can’t be completely ignored, either. Go read the article, some nice food for thought.

I’ve been doing this site for awhile now, and over that time, there’s been several sites that have been helpful in my collecting of info. I’m not talking about Texas Rangers specific stuff (like the Newberg Report, Baseball Time in Arlington, etc), I’m talking about larger scope sites, but not things on the level of ESPN & MLB’s site itself. I use a feed reader for almost all of my “site browsing” anymore, as I like them all in the same place (It’s Google Reader for the record).
Anyway, it occurred to me this morning as I was doing my reading that I should take a moment and point them out. If you’re reading my site, and have for awhile, you’ve probably heard me talk about them, but I wanted to take a moment and draw some attention. They are:

• MLB Trade Rumors: This site is run by a guy by the name of Tim Dierkes. This is kind of like what I used to enjoy watching on ESPN’s Trade Rumors page before it went behind the pay wall. MLBTR is a collation of trade rumours, news, and other player movement rumors. Granted – they put “rumors” right in the name, but don’t let that fool you. A lot of good news has come from there. I know some more “serious” writers tend not to like sites like this, but I love this place. They have really broken it down in detail by team and by player. You can actually get an RSS feed or a category down to an individual player. For example, click here for a news archive on rumors related to the pitcher we just signed, Kazuo Fukumori.
• The Biz of Baseball: This site is run primarily by Maury Brown. This is a site that speaks to something that has grown in my personal interest the last few years. The business side of baseball. This site has a wealth of obscure information relating to, well.. the “business” side of the game. As the game had an income of something like six billion (cue Dr Evil pinky finger) dollars last year, there’s a lot of “business” to be talked about. From payroll lists, to contracts you can read, the site includes other fun such as stadium deals and info, drug policy info, basically anything relating to “not on the field play” (although some of that is touched on from time to time). This is a great site if you’re into the back end of the sport. Most definitely worth a read. BTW, the domain name has confused me a few times. The name of the site is “The Biz of Baseball”, bizofbaseball.com – without the “the” in the URL. That’s burned me a few times – I thought the site had disappeared. :)
• MLB Contracts: A really cool blog run by a guy who doesn’t ID himself on the site, but some emails have said is Jeff. This is a site that exists to detail contract numbers for every player that you can think of. It’s not 100% all inclusive, as his info appears to come from submissions and watching the news, but it’s RARE that I go there to look up a player and can’t find the info. This isn’t one I visit regularly like a news site, but it is an awesome reference site.
• Baseball Reference.com: Most everyone should know about this one now. This is the king of obscure information – I’ve been linking to this site for years. If you’re looking for some weird piece of old information, then this is where you want to be. In more recent years it’s gotten fairly current as things are happening, but to me, this is where you go when you’re trying to think of a team’s record from 43 years ago – who played on that team? The depth of information at this site is spectacular. A surefire don’t miss.

I’ve added these four sites to a new sidebar block on my site called “Favorite Sites”. Again, this does not mean that I don’t think any of the local Rangers related sites are not “favorites”. This is for non Rangers specific sites.
Let me know if you use / know of these sites in the comments. Thanks!