Of the Weekend

The play of the weekend was A-Rod’s ninth-inning homer Friday night to tie Game 2.

The quote of the weekend was uttered by Larry Michael during the second quarter of this afternoon’s NFL game in North Carolina:

Carolina’s offense is the most inept we’ve seen, and we know ineptitude when we see it.

The melancholy moment of the weekend was when I ran down 33rd Street in Baltimore for the first time since 1995, and, intead of laying eyes on Memorial Stadium, I saw an unmowed field.

The history lesson of the weekend is:

In 1904, the first modern war broke out.

Russian and Japan fought over disputed territory. They used machine guns, mine fields, torpedoes, and telephone communications. All of the fighting took place in neutral territory, either in Korea or China.

It could have become a world war.

President Theodore Roosevelt had been in office for three years. He engineered the Treaty of Portsmouth, which brought the Russo-Japanese War to an end and led to forty years of peace between these two world powers.

In 1906, the year after the treaty was signed and the war ended, President Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.