Columns

Baseball fans got good news earlier this month — or at least as good can be expected during COVID-19.
Major League Baseball approved a plan to go forward with Spring Training, also known as the Grapefruit League. Fans, who may or may not be allowed to watch the games, think that the reference to grapefruits evolved from the Florida camps where citrus grows in abundance.

The relentless airbag recall notices concerning my mother’s old truck have progressed from a mailbox-clogging nuisance to a grim reminder that our unresponsiveness has felled more trees than Paul Bunyan in his prime.
Okay, I realize more consumers should be conscientious about product recalls, for the safety of themselves, their families and mankind in general. But when you’re a husband, father, son, inventory clerk, writer and Sunday school teacher, arranging your schedule around somebody else’s screw-up is not necessarily Job One.

One of my favorite allegories is the one about the frog in the pot of water, who got used to the slowing rising temperature of a warming pot and ended up boiled to death.
In some ways, I feel as if society has been on the menu for quite some time now. But here we are, in 2021, and life is very different from the way it was when I was born in 1961. It all happened incrementally, while very few of us noticed that the temperature was rising in the societal pot.