Wither Baseball

All sports carry within them grains of absurdity. I mean that. That doesn't make them wrong; it doesn't take any fun away from them. Yet the absurdities, be honest, exist. I'll use my beloved baseball, the world's greatest game, for an example.

Let's have two people, we'll call them Cloyce and Boyce to give them names, standing out in a field. Cloyce has a ball in his hands. He begins to ruminate. Eventually he instructs Boyce, "Go stand over there, maybe sixty feet away from me."

"Why should I do that?" Boyce, reasonably enough, asks.

"I'm going to throw this ball towards you."

Boyce demands, "You're going to hit me with that ball?"

"No, no, no," Cloyce assures his friend. "Towards you, that's all. But hold that thought about hitting you. Maybe if my throw is too close we might invent dodgeball. But I won't throw at you, only towards you."

"What's in it for me?" the every prescient Boyce responds.

Momentarily uncertain, Cloyce soon says, "Pick up that stick over there. Now, when I throw the ball towards you, you swing that stick and try to hit it. If I get it past you, good for me."

"All right," Boyce allows skeptically, "But what if I hit it? What exactly am I trying to do?"

Growing just a bit exasperated and impatient Cloyce says, "You see Fred way out behind me?"

"Yeah."

"You have to hit it past him."

"What?" Boyce cries out incredulously. "He's maybe 400 feet away!"

"Just try. It'll be fun." 

Boyce, beginning to appreciate the logic of it, says, "Okay. And if I manage to I win, right?"

Cloyce can't see any way his buddy can do it. Yet he adds a wrinkle just the same. Putting four rocks, including one at Boyce's feet, into a diamond shape he instructs, "No. You drop the stick and run, touching each rock until you touch them all."

Boyce then started to lose incentive. "I think I need to go home and paint my house or something."

"Don't do that. Fred'll chase the ball and throw it back to me while you run the, run the, bases. Yes, bases."

"So?" 

"So if I catch the ball from Fred," Cloyce patiently explains, "I'll try to touch you with it before you touch all four rocks. If I do, I win. If I don't, you do."

Pondering the idea for a moment, Boyce finally says, a wide smile growing across his face, "All right, Cloyce, I'm in. But only if I get 27 chances at it."

Boyce never got his house painted. He had a new passion.

Drill, Baby, Drill

The Detroit Free Press once editorialized on the bad things about gasoline ever falling back to around two bucks a gallon. Among other things, the paper lamented that it would make people less inclined to conserve natural resources.

Fuel conservation, outside of genuine need (and I mean need on the scale of World War II nationally, or harsh personal finance individually) is really a rather pessimistic principle. You conserve because you have no option (personally), or because you have no hope in the future or see that great or unusual restraint is necessary (nationally). While we each have to deal with our own situations the best we can based on our personal resources, as a nation we can do more. We can tie into the traditional American belief in herself, that someone or something given the opportunity will find us alternatives when the time comes. We can believe that with the freedom we have come to rely on we will find new fuel sources for our cars, homes, and businesses. We can see that if the government would just get out of our way we will get over any over-reliance on limited means. Something will be developed or found or invented to alleviate the current pressures on our current natural resources.

Or do we think that once the oil is gone, we're toast, as though oil is our only fuel option ever? That's what the liberal 'government is the answer' thinkers apparently believe.

That is patently absurd, unless we allow it to become the case. Still, we do need certain pressure to keep it from becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy. And the surest pressure to prevent that is exactly what may seem, at a glance, the lousiest choice.

Drill that oil. Process it. Burn it up in our cars. Because if you want something to take the place of oil, then get rid of the oil. Where there's a buck to be made and a need to be filled, someone will satisfactorily address the situation if given the freedom to do it.

So pump that oil out of the ground and into your tank. As P. J. O'Rourke said in one of his books: "Fat lot of good its done lying in the ground for billions of years."