Indian Summer

We had a frost last week that trashed my tomatoes, basil and zucchini. Then it turned warm again, downright summery actually. I'm still harvesting broccoli and basil and, somewhat remarkably, a tomato plant up by my house -- a volunteer that appeared after I rinsed out the compost bucket -- was unscathed. Apparently the frost was patchy and only affected the field, which is a bit downhill. I'm in a valley so lower means colder.

I had a grilled veggie sub for lunch consisting entirely of vegetables I grew myself. I still have zucchini in the fridge, plenty of onions left, and I harvested the broccoli this morning. It's the side shoots that appear after the main heads have been cut, which happened a while ago. You won't find those in the grocery store, but they're worth it for home gardeners. 

Anyway one lesson is that I'm going to build a cold frame, which can protect tender plants from an early frost and take hearty ones right into the winter. I have a lot of plexiglass panels harvested from converting a sun porch to a four season room, so I might as well use a couple. I'm also going to do proper preparation of the garden beds for next year. I'm basing my plans on The Vegetable Gardener's Bible, by Edward C. Smith, which I definitely recommend. 

If civilization collapses I'll be ready, at least by next July.

Don't take life for granted

A deputy fire chief in our small town, who is also the former first selectman and is obviously very widely known here -- a town with more cows than people -- was at the firehouse last week with his backhoe. I need to be fairly circumspect here and not say more than the family has made public or is generally known. He was planning to dig a trench for a new waters supply line.

For some reason, he started the machine while he was standing on the ground. This should be impossible -- that kind of equipment has a switch that won't allow it to start if there's nobody in the operator's seat. Evidently for some reason it had been disabled. I don't know why -- I own a backhoe and I can't think of any reason why I would want to start it from the ground, and I'm happy for any and all safety features. Anyway the machine moved forward (which also shouldn't happen even if it starts) and ran him over. He's been in the hospital for the past week in critical condition. I'm guessing if he hadn't been at the firehouse with the ambulance crew right there the outcome would have been even worse.

So this got me thinking, as I often do, about human nature. Workers who are instructed to wear safety equipment -- gloves, eye protection, face shields -- often stop wearing it after a while. When I was a youth I once worked in a factory where a procedure included dipping radiator elements into a bath of molten tin. One guy stopped wearing his face shield and you know what happened -- somehow there was water on the coil and tin exploded. I worked in another factory where they used hydraulic shears to cut blocks of paper. The machines require the operator to put both hands on widely separated buttons before bringing the shear down with a pedal, but the guys would put weights on the buttons. 

I could go on but you get the idea. Familiarity with dangerous tasks makes the danger recede from our consciousness. I've done this 100 times and nothing bad has happened, and I'm sick of this minor inconvenience so to heck with it. In the case of the backhoe it wasn't even an inconvenience -- he still would have had to get up on the machine. What's the point of starting it first except because you can, because you were clever enough to bypass the safety switch? 

So, slow down, think, don't do anything foolish. Somehow evolution made us careless.

Duh Sawx

Well, to be honest, right now Duh Sawx sux. (BTW it's Duh Sawx and Dah Broonz. Do not question matters that you were not meant to understand.) The owners ordered a salary dump, and they traded away all their best players for pretty much bupkis, marginal prospects. The only exception is pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez who is out for the season with heart damage from Covid-19, and no doubt if he were able to play they would have traded him too. So they're fielding a AAA team with no pitching and they're in last place, by a lot.

Whether this is part of a long-term plan to rebuild on a more cost-effective basis, or just momentary greed, I can't say. The plan was in the works before the pandemic but it sure was well-timed since people aren't paying much attention to baseball anyway and duh Sawx suckiness doesn't really matter. This reveals something basic about baseball as a product: more than any sport, it depends on the collective event of spectatorship. Basketball, football, hockey, soccer -- they're more fun when the arena is roaring with excited fans, but they're watchable without. Baseball really is not. The pace is so languorous, the action so sparse, that you need the electricity of the audience to keep interest alive.

This is probably especially true of the Red Sox because Fenway Park is very unusual in being right in the city, in a real live neighborhood with residences and businesses and a subway stop. Game day is a big event, with people and families of all stripes thronging the streets and pubs of Kenmore Square and the Fenway area and the east edge of Brookline, street vendors, ticket scalpers. Inside, the park is infused with folkways. Its scale is relatively intimate, and the crowd is as much a part of the action as the players. The gameday experience is part of the lifeblood of the city and region, a big part of what knits it together. Sure, dah Broonz and the Celts (who get a properly pronounced article) do that in the area of Boston Garden, but on a much smaller scale. And the Pats play out in the wilderness of Foxboro. 

There are costs of the present catastrophe that cannot be measured.