Washington and morality

And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion...reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

- George Washington, from his Farewell Address

I have said many times that morality, indeed any issues of right and wrong, must have a God of some sort behind them. Without an objective norm to fall back on, any and all questions of good and evil, even issues of simple prudence, are nothing more than your word against mine. In such a case, problems would be resolved only through might makes right, whether at the hand of a single tyrant or that old saw consensus, which is but a name for the tyranny of the majority. We must do right because it is right on its own terms as instituted by the Creator of the natural law.

Consensus cannot make something right. Consensus is merely what the majority of the people at a given time happen to want which they are able to subject upon the minority. I have been told further that morality 'develops' as people 'discover' what works and what does not; that sounds like consensus in a varied form, and little more. Do we honestly believe that such is the best way to create good law and rational public policy?

Obviously it is not. We require a Supreme Being, a supreme and final Law, in order to do well and avoid evil. To those who object, which God?, I say, the one whom philosophy as much as religion insists is there. From that point we can safely speculate on how such a being would expect us to act. It is then when we start to cross into religious principle because at that point we begin to realize that people are special, that doing wrong against them is an evil in itself because it is an affront to their dignity as individuals. A dignity they have by virtue of their humanity, as given them by God. It does not come from them or anything they do.

So there is no reason to base morality and law on anything slippery such as convention, which can and will change as generations do. We need that eternal sense, that eternal reality, if we are to make a good society, and become good people. For any ideal of dignity must come from the religious ideal that everyone deserves proper respect. That cannot come from any simple human act. It can only come from above, overarching each individual. We recognize that and live accordingly, or we slowly perish.

Cloyce and locks

That old employee, friend, and erstwhile compatriot of me Grandpa Joe, the one I call Cloyce just to give him a name, was, shall we say, dense. A few straws shy of a bale. A brick short of a load. A bubble off plumb. A good guy, just not particularly smart. He was as sharp as a bowling ball. He had a room temperature IQ. He...you get it.

Years ago, Joe had bought a new trailer for carrying welders, pipe threaders, and other equipment around. But he had nowhere to put it, and wanted it as safe as could be. So he decided that the thing to do would be to get a heavy chain and solid lock, and chain the trailer to a large elm in his back yard. He went to the hardware and purchased the necessaries. On return, he sent Cloyce to lock the trailer up. "Lock her up tight!" were he last instructions to Cloyce. Cloyce went off to attend the chore.

After work that night, Joe was sitting on his back porch with a smoke and decided to go admire his new trailer. He walked up to it, looked it over, and walked around it just for pleasure. When he was half way around it, he saw that it was not locked to the tree. The chain however was wound as tight as could be around the trunk of the elm, the lock glistening in the evening sun and forced right up upon the trunk itself. That tree weren't going nowhere.

Joe got the key and rectified the situation, stopping occasional to wipe the tears of laughter from his eyes.

Locking nothing

You see things, obviously, when you take regular walks around the neighborhood. Some stay the same, some change, and some are downright odd.

For weeks now I have passed a house with not one but two sections of fence missing. Why they were removed I don't know, but I'm guessing it was to allow the owners to park their truck inside their yard. Even at that, I don't see why two sections of fence needed removal as the truck clearly could fit through one open section.

Be that as it may, what really puzzles me about this is that there is a gate one standing fence section down from the missing ones. On that gate is one big, honking lock.

I wonder, did someone miss a memo? What's the point of a very sturdy lock on a gate with a wide open yard? Oh, maybe there is some reasonable explanation. But it's more fun to presume it's stupidity, isn't?

Be honest. It is, isn't it? And hey, maybe it is stupidity after all.

Spending someone else's money

Yeah, I know I've said that I wouldn't dabble into political issues much here, and I meant it. But I did reserve the right to do it every now and then. Well, today is now. Or then, take your pick.
I am a political conservative. Why? For many reasons, really, yet one does kind of stand out. I think we have to be very careful about taking other people's money and spending it however we like. The essence of government spending is exactly that: taking other people's money and spending it however we like.
I'm not arguing against any and all forms of taxing and spending. We need government, and government does need money in order to work. Still, the idea that something should have public money spent on it simply because I want it spent, because the majority of voters want it spent, that way, is hubris, even arrogance. No matter how good of an idea it might be on certain levels, and especially no matter how good of an idea you may think it is, it doesn't automatically follow that you should force other people to pay for it.
The simple guideline is that government should generally only spend for a substantial public interest. I would look at the 18 basic ways of public spending as outlined in Article 1 of the Constitution as a good guideline. After that, we really shouldn't be too quick to demand, yes, demand, that individuals cough up their cash for what someone else believes right and just. Simply put, that is the tyranny of the majority. That's as bad as the tyranny of a king.

Cloyce and the broken welder in Rochester

Grandpa Joe rented arc welders, some of which were powered by six cylinder gasoline engines. He had a mechanic, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who worked for him part time. Cloyce was a very good mechanic, to give him his due. He also didn't drive. He also drank profoundly. One day when a welder was on the fritz in Rochester, about 30 miles north of Detroit, and no one else was available, Joe had me drive Cloyce out to fix it.

We loaded some tools and a box of commonly used repair parts into a pickup truck and off we went. I was a rather naive young lad of 16 and had only been driving for a couple of months. Consequently I was slow to read the signals that something was going seriously wrong.

At first it wasn't much. Cloyce had begun, well, not quite slurring his words but drawing them out. When he would speak to me he would start sentences with, Mawr-ty, and then say whatever he had to say. It didn't matter to me. I was just doing my job. Then he said with an odd emphasis, "Mawrty", almost like a command. I turned and said, "Yeah, Cloyce?". He was pointing his cigarette lighter, which looked like a pistol, at me. He made the sound of a gunshot - pschew - as he pulled the trigger, lighting a flame at me. "Funny, Cloyce", I said. But at the time I needed more than a simple clue that things were amiss. I needed to be hit with a pile of bricks.

The bricks fell on me when we were almost to our destination. "Mawrty," I heard, "Could you pull over to that pawrty store so I can get some Coke to mix with this?" I looked over to see him displaying a half drained fifth of vodka.

"Put that away Cloyce! Do you know how much trouble that could get us into?" I half screamed. By us, I meant me. I was the driver who knew what the law said about open intoxicants. And then I remembered, I'm 16. I don't know anything about fixing welders. He's got to get that thing working.

What to do, what to do? All I could think was to get him to the job and hope for the best. So that's what I did.

We arrived, and I made Cloyce stay in the pickup while I found the foreman. He came out of his trailer office and directed me to where the machine sat. It was on the other side of an eight foot berm. Great.

I drove over to it, got the tools and parts over to the welder and then got Cloyce and hobbled him over the berm next. He commenced to stumble around the machine, doing this and that and I don't know what while I prayed he would somehow get us out of the mess we faced. I faced. In a few minutes the foreman came along to check on our progress. He couldn't help notice the state Cloyce was in. He leaned towards me and whispered, "Is he okay?"

"Oh, yeah," I answered. "He's just got a neurological disorder." It was all I could think of.

The foreman looked at me with a skeptical raised eyebrow. But right then we heard the roar of an engine. Cloyce had gotten that welder running, Lord knows how.

The foreman pursed his lips and patted my head as if to say, all right kid, we're good, problem solved, but I know all you just did was give me an excuse in case I get asked. He walked away. I got Cloyce and the tools and parts back over the berm and started home gratefully. But the next time I took Cloyce to a job, I made certain there were no hidden bottles in the truck.

Another Black Friday

Once there was a day called Black Friday. It was meant to launch the holiday shopping season, and was known to start as early as 4 or 5 in the morning on the day after Thanksgiving. Yet that, it seems, was not good enough. We have reached the point where the sales are encroaching so far into Thanksgiving itself that there are stores opening as early as 3 or 5PM Thursday afternoon. We are now faced with Black Thursday.

There is something seriously wrong with this picture, something which speaks to a serious ill in American society. Why do we need these sales? Why do people think they have they right to them? And before all the rabid libertarian free marketers go livid about it (no one makes them do it, what about freedom?) let's ask you two things: aren't some folks (if not most involved, quite frankly) being made to do things?, and, isn't their freedom thus being sacrificed?

It is hard to imagine that the bulk of sales and support staff at stores would rather be working than at home with their families and friends on a major holiday. The same can be said of those working arenas for sporting events as well, or even at television stations and entertainment establishments. Why do we think we have the right to expect those people to have to work for our leisure?

This isn't capitalism. It's consumerism, and it's the worst example of bacchanalia. It is the time of year when we least like free markets, and perhaps the best time to remind those who do preach them that economics aren't everything. Simple, unfettered economics may well infringe on someone's freedom as well as any government attempt to stifle a reasoned liberty. Yet there is a difference. There's at least a small chance that, with a bit of discipline at the voting booth door, we might actually stop government. Is there any way we might stop the Invisible Hand?

Anything which does not practice a decent amount self examination and a reasonable self discipline will become a devil. The free market is no different. Yet it does create quite the hypocrites among its defenders, doesn't it? They express a disdain for coercion. Yet they sure don't mind the coercion which the markets force upon people.

That strikes us as violence against the person as hateful as any government encroachment upon the person. But the free marketers won't see it. They have their own god attending to their business. And it is not constrained by care for humanity.

Thanksgiving 2017

Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me to "recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:"

Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions; to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us), and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.

George Washington's Thanksgiving Proclamation, 1789

Anyone who claims that we weren't founded on Christian principles, read these words well and carefully. And have a wonderful and happy Thanksgiving in that light.

Non-denominational is good

It's all about the Benjamins, the saying goes. The Benjamins are cool, yes. But so are the Georges, the Abrahams, and the Andrews. Money comes like religion: by denomination. I have been paid by several denominations, often in a nice mix. Sometimes those payments have been a bit unusual.

Yesterday a customer's order came to $140.00. He said, "I hope you like change," and paid me in all five dollar bills. Yep, 28 Lincolns. Another time on a $470.00 tab a guy from Canada gave me 47 tens. He said it was what they gave him at the currency exchange. Hey, I don't care. It all spends.

But about 40 years ago Pops was paid off in the most unusual way I've seen so far. For a $1900 dollar machine he was paid with 1890 singles and a ten dollar bill. Yessir, One Thousand Eight Hundred Ninety dollar bills. The customer owned several laundry mats and most of income was dollar bills, from change to run the washers and dryers to buying the single load boxes of detergent from the self service machines. He lived on singles.

Pops didn't even bother to count it. The stack was impressive enough that he took the guy at his word. And it all spent.

Canada vs. The United States

While channel surfing yesterday I ended up watching a few minutes of the Toronto-Saskatchewan Canadian Football League playoff game. It was on ESPN News, so there must not have been much news to report.
Hey, my many Canadian friends, I joke!
Anyway, it reminded me of all the relatively minor differences between the two games, the NFL here with the CFL there. Let's see how many I can list:
Three downs instead of four.
A one yard neutral zone between the offensive and defensive lines.
12 men on the field per side rather than 11.
Numerous men in motion on the offensive side of the ball, and towards the line of scrimmage (that takes getting used to).
Red penalty flags instead of yellow.
The 'rouge', the single point a defensive team gets if the offense can't get the ball out of the end zone on a punt or kickoff return.
A longer field (110 yards) with deeper end zones (20 yards). They don't have a 50 yard line but a centre line at the 55 yard mark.
A wider field (not sure by how much).
No fair catches on punts, but a five yard halo to allow the catch.
A three minute warning at the end of the half or game. Apparently it takes longer for Canadians to see to their needs (Hey, I joke again!).
Is there more? Maybe. This is what I remembered, and without the help of Wikipedia I might add. Feel free to tack onto this list or correct me. And remember, this is what's starting your Monday off right.
By the way, Toronto won 25-21.

Baby it's cold outside

It's that time of year. That time where I have to ask myself how much longer I can take morning walks. Beyond there being snow and ice on the ground I have no hard and fast rules about when to give up the daily constitutional. But today left me thinking about when I should stop.

There were snowflakes wafting by me this morning. The skies were gray and the air chill, though the sun did try to sneak through the clouds. It was, at the risk of understatement, dreary.

I'll not quit for a few weeks yet, to be sure. So long as I can layer and not feel too much frost on my nose I'll keep going. Part of the trouble is that walking's become my favorite form of exercise. It offers change with continuity if only on a small scale, something regular readers will know I value. Sure, we have a motorized treadmill and an exercise bike in the basement. But man, they're dull, even with the TV or radio on, or a CD playing. At least walking through even the same neighborhood varies a bit: you can wind around it differently. And walking by itself feels like progress. Staying in the same place feels just like that.

So we'll see. Last year I made until the first significant snowfall, which happened in mid-December. December 11, I believe, was my last walk last year. So my goal is beat that. Otherwise, to the exercise bike!

At least, that's my mantra. Making it into reality will be the actual challenge of course.

Alternate universes

You see some odd things in my world. Let me see if I can paint you enough of a picture to understand a recent instance.
A customer brought in three eight foot lengths of drain cable to be repaired. No surprises there: we fix drain snakes. Yet instead of bringing them in singly or in a box, he had connected them together, so that they were in a circle with a twenty-four foot circumference. Oh-kay.
But he went farther than that. He twist looped that large circle into a figure eight, then folded that figure eight into itself to form a smaller circle. He tied that circle together with wire. After that, he looped that second circle into another figure eight, folded it into a still smaller circle, tied that one up with wire, and wrapped it up in four places with duct tape.
Of course, we didn't know all that until we went to fix the cables. The truth spread itself before us on the shop floor as we made what might be described as an archaeological dismantling of the circled cables. We wondered why this guy would go to such bizarre extremes. My brother Phil asked it best: "In what universe did he think this made sense?"
Indeed.

This is sympathy?

As many of you know I'm not curling this year. I'm afraid my vertigo might be a problem while playing.

I was talking about this to my son Frank a few days ago. "I'm afraid I could fall and hurt myself, or hurt someone else while I'm out on the ice," I lamented.

"Yeah. Or you could burn a rock!" he remarked, a little too enthusiastic on the point. Or perhaps too critical, eh?

You cannot touch a curling stone in motion. That's called 'burning' the rock, and is illegal. If I were to become dizzy and fall, touching the rock at all, it would violate the rules. Still, can I live with such sympathy?

Mud flap Cloyce

An old friend of the old man's, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, was from Tennessee. One day when he wanted to visit home, he asked if Pops would like to tag along for the ride, so Pops did. Cloyce took the first shift driving, so Dad settled into the passenger's seat and promptly feel asleep.
He was eventually woken up by an odd sound. It was kind of between a rhythmic slap and thwap, slap-thwap, slap-thwap, slap-thwap, all in pretty quick succession. He raised his eyes to see that the noise was caused by the mud flaps of the truck in front of them. Cloyce was cruising along at 60 miles per hour about eighteen inches behind a semi trailer.
Pops was self aware enough to not shout out and maybe cause an accident. He raised himself, yawned, and asked pointedly, "Hadn't you better back off a bit, Cloyce?"
"I'm fine."
"I'm. Not." Pops had responded just like that, two one word sentences. He then continued similarly. "Back. Off."
Cloyce backed off about two feet.
A restaurant soon loomed in the distance, and Pops said to pull over, he was hungry. When they parked, he demanded the car keys. "Why?" Cloyce demanded.
"Because I never want to see a speeding truck that close again on purpose!" Dad drove the rest of the way to Tennessee, and home too. I'm not sure he was ever again a passenger of ol' Cloyce.

A tribute to drain snakes

I sell drain snakes. My mind is always in the sewer.
I get a lot of miles with that quip, yet it's sometimes not well received. My cousin Patty slapped my shoulder after I told it to a Dominican nun who is a common cousin. "You can't say that to a nun!" she exclaimed. Oh, I don't know. Sister Veronica seemed to think it funny enough. Patty was laughing too, so I'm not sure it was all that bad.
I'm actually wondering if I could profitably open a museum of drain cleaning equipment. I have several unique things already in my possession, and there's quite a bit more variety to drain snakes than you might think. At one point there were over 15 manufacturers in the US alone, although I'm not sure that's still the case. I know one company for certain no longer in production; actually two now that I think about it. Each company has or had many different models of their own too. It's not as though there have been only one Electric Eel for example.
Shameless plug time: if you need a snake, you need an Electric Eel. I say that because I sell them. But I also firmly believe they're the best drain cleaners out there. That's because they are.
There are all kinds of cutting heads too, and there are water jetters and drain inspection cameras as well. There surely is a varied enough array of equipment that a small building could house many items. And I could finally achieve my life long dream of being a docent.
I'll try to keep my mind out of the sewer for long enough to give it real thought.

Newark, North Carolina

I spent a few precious hours over three days last week with my son's family in relatively rural Ohio. There is a large cornfield right outside their back door perhaps 15 feet from the porch, just, and I mean only just, past their driveway. Once in particular I stepped outside and looked across the lightly rolling country, over the currently plowed up cornfield, and I smiled reflexively. I was ambushed by an old feeling, one I hadn't felt in years. I felt like I was back in North Carolina in my youth, looking out over the 13 acres of my grandfather's small farm. You could step off his back porch and spy a similar sight.

What goes around, eh? I find that the older I get the more often I am overtaken by old sensations, even those now decades old. This is not a bad thing. I wonder if it's what keeps us sane; there's something good to be said about continuity within cycles, of similarities with differences. We have the seasons, each distinct (in much of the world anyway) yet returning. It allows us change while also grounding us. We need change. But we need constants too.

So I had the opportunity to remember what it was like to be with me old Grandpaw Hutchins, up early and checking out the crops, if only for a relatively fleeting moment. I found in an instant a connection between my oldest son and the great-grandfather he only met once, and that as a six month old infant. We have a picture of them somewhere; I need to find it.

Anyway, what goes around. Life is good.

Jake Redux

While we nowadays do most of our own pickup and delivery for the Shop, at one time we had most things shipped. This meant that our large orders came truck freight. One day as we unloaded a shipment out of the trailer of a semi, the driver asked me Pops, "What are these things?"

Dad answered, "Drain snakes, parts and accessories. What people use to open drains."

"Oh." the man replied. After a pause he asked, "Know a guy they call Jake the Snake?"

Dad answered questioningly, "Yeah?"

"Ya like him?"

Pops figured by then the fella must know old Jake. Still, he responded tactfully, "I don't care for his company."

"Neither do I. None of the family does. I'm Ron; I'm Jake's brother." Ron went on to explain the family excluded Jake from all and any functions because all he would do is disrupt them in any way he could.

Blood runs thick, but apparently has its limits too.

Dad and Jake the Snake (not the wrestler)

Me Pops could hold his temper very well. He held it often when he would have been within his rights to lose it. Still, when he let it go, you were impressed. He let it go once on a guy known as Jake the Snake. And not the wrestler.

I'm not sure exactly how Jake earned his moniker, but I have a suspicion. He argued everything. If a part was available in red he wanted to know why it wasn't scarlet. If told cables were readily available in twenty-five foot increments he'd cry he had to have one thirty foot long, nothing else would do. Yet most of all he argued price. He argued price until the day Pops was sick of it.

Jake came in for some ten dollar part. "Ten dollars," Dad told him.

"You give it to me for seven," Jake countered, demanding rather than asking.

That set Pops off. He slammed the part back into its bin and yelled, and I mean yelled, "Get out of my Shop. I don't want your business!"

"You throwing me out?" Jake asked, appalled. "I can buy you out ten times over!"

Pops barked back like a drill sergeant, "The Hell you can, 'cause I'm not selling. Now get out of my Shop!" Jake stomped out, and Dad stomped into his office.

You could get away with a lot with Pops. But you could still push him too far.

Hillbillies from the north of England

Now, me Irish heritage Pops, he married a hillbilly. A proud hillbilly. So being immensely proud of her meself, I'm a half proud hillbilly, me maw being from the western hills of North Carolina. And I do indeed wear that half badge fully proudly.
Now also me Pops grew up in the mixed village of nearly downtown Detroit. So mixed in fact that even a few pure Englishmen still survived there back in the day, when me Pops were young. One of them whom me Pops knew well was Mr. Britton. That be no joke, pun, nor misdemeanor. His name be Mr. Britton. Mr. Britton was a true, fine son of Olde England. And, having committed himself to the northern United States, he (to his shame) hated American hillbillies.
They was the scourge of the earth, them rapscallions of the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern U-nited States. He spewed venom at them always, everyways, and many ways in between.
Well, it happened that a long, tall, thin son of England, every bit of six foot one as it be, one appropriately monikered Slim, an emigrant himself of England as Pops recalled, delivered product to me Grandpa Joe's shop. And one fine morning, he came by with a truckload of fine product. And one morning, me Pops happened to see Mr. Britton opening his garage that he might take his fine Chevy out on a morning trek.
"Mr. Britton,' me Pops called, "I have here a son of your land."
The two exchanged greetings, after which old Slim asked, "So where are ye from?"
"Birmingh'm", answered Mr. Britton proudly, forgettin' the vowel.
"Ah, bloody hillbilly are ya?" responded Slim immediately. Apparently English folk from Birmingh'm were, in English parlance, hillbillies.
As Pops told it, Mr. Britton yanked his cigar from his mouth, tossed it angrily on the ground, stomped its flame out, and, falling into his Chevy, sped away. But Slim, he merely opined, "Ah well".

Mr. Hannah, teller of tall tales

Old Charley Hannah wasn't a bad sort of fellow. I always fancied he thought himself a storyteller. He was more a teller of tall tales, quite frankly, and at the heart of it I think he just loved to hear himself talk. That lead to certain lapses in continuity when he spoke.

He was in the Old Barn one day years ago while Dad was off somewhere. As I worked on his machine and my brother worked nearby Charley remarked, "I bet I'm about as old as your daddy."

"Could be, Mr. Hannah," I replied. "Pops was born in 1936."

Old Charley began wistfully, "Nineteen thutty six,' and I felt a story was coming on. He continued, "I was fidteen years old in 1936..."

I don't remember the tale. I spent the whole time thinking, 'But, you said you were about Dad's age, but now say you were 15 when he was born, and that's not that close, so how could you, why would you think...'

About that time Charley finished the story and broke into a laugh. I read the signal and laughed too. But I don't recall a thing about what he told. I only remember my confusion.

Stay off the streets, pedestrians

I wish I owned the roads as much as a lot of pedestrians seem to think they do. I am sick and tired of folks walking in the middle of the road, only begrudgingly giving way to vehicular traffic as it approaches. Approaches slowly, mind you, because if Heaven forbid you hit them it's on you, despite the fact that they're where they should not be.

The lack of consideration for drivers as well as their own safety is appalling. This morning two people were blocking the farthest right driving lane walking towards me on a main artery four lanes wide, while the sidewalks alongside had no obstructions whatsoever. I could cut them slack if they were in the curb lane and the walks overrun with snow or debris or what have you, but they were clear and easy to step along. Why were those two idiots in the road? Then one woman, a phone to her ear, wove in and around cars at an intersection. You can't move when can't be sure of where some moron's walking next.

It's actually worse on side streets. I've come along high schoolers walking five abreast in the middle of the road, blocking it completely. Before you dismiss this as simply younger folks not thinking, I've seen it with adults all too often. Then, as I said, they'll only grudgingly part enough for your car, and I mean only just enough for your car to pass by, sneering at you as you do. They act as though you're the one intruding on their space.

I've been offered explanations but, quite frankly, none pan out. A guy told me it was to keep off the walks for safety; someone might run out from between houses and grab or rob them. Sorry, my friends, that's just grasping for justification. Why couldn't someone run from a crouch between cars and get you? Perhaps the walks aren't clear? But we've addressed that. It doesn't wash, either.

The short story is that it's arrogance. They walk in the street because they can, and it's a way of showing they own you. If you have a better explanation, I'm all ears. Until then, I hold that they ought to be smacked upside the head and told to be considerate of how the road was intended to be used.

The World Series

To Hell with the Super Bowl. To Hell with that very fictional college football championship. This is the summit of sports. The peak. The. Highest. Point.

Baseball is the peak. The point all others strive for, vainly. The Houston Astros sit there.

This is baseball.

No city, locale, region, no vaguely defined area, wants a Super Bowl more than they want a World Series championship.

Houston now has it. J. J. Watt is a great man. But he did nothing compared to what the Houston Astros just did. The Texans can now rot.

Houston won a World Series.

This is life. This is good. Life begins again in late February, when the first pitch of the Grapefruit League is thrown. See ya then.