“NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!”

Hot today, huh? I mowed this morning: it was only going to get hotter. I left ten percent unmowed. I felt like collapsing.

I lent the mower to our neighbor, and he mowed his lawn and felt like collapsing. When he returned the mower he told us about his recent excursions to Kroger. The security guard there embroiled himself in a dispute, and a half-dozen shoppers slipped away without paying. Another shopper loaded a hundred dollars’ worth of meat into his cart and fled without paying. Our favorite worker got fired for shoving someone in a dispute; he’ll get rehired, our neighbor expects. Our neighbor “almost got into it” with the butcher, then with the deli worker. Then he “almost got into it” with the worker who shelves the sleeves of bread (who’d nearly run him over in the parking lot). “Sounds like you need to chill out,” I told our neighbor. We like him, we get along great, but the better we know him, the more people he tells us he’s “almost gotten into it” with. He’s a chill guy, he assures us.

I worry that our Kroger will close down, because that’s something that happens to less-than-upscale supermarkets like ours. Please pray that it doesn’t close down. We love and need our Kroger.

Freddie Freeman, pt. 2

John-Paul: “Children, what should I blog about?”

Samuel: “Blog that we’re getting a new brother – ‘Pip’.”

A heartwarming answer.

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Let us again salute Freddie Freeman, who has homered in every game of this World Series. (As I type, it’s the third inning of Game 3.)

Freeman looks just like Mike, my next-door neighbor. Talks like him, too.

I mentioned it.

“It’s been pointed out before,” Mike said. “It’d be nice to be him.”

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Is it strange that I want to read a 900+ pp. textbook of British criminal law?

Is my anglophilia/​crime lit appetite out of control?

Today I learned of Lon Fuller’s “speluncean explorers” (1949), which I am a little ashamed not to have come across before. I had read about R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) and Philippa Foot’s “fat man stuck in the cave mouth” (1967), a sort of Lon-Fuller-Meets-Winnie-the-Pooh scenario (see p. 7; Foot says the case is “well known to philosophers,” although I confess I don’t know who previously discussed it).

Similar cases involve the shipwrecked guys who fight over a plank; and, in Candide, James the Anabaptist, whose plight, perhaps not interesting to the theorist, is (I hope) especially poignant to the person on the street.

Borders; World Cup prospects; a bargain; a first mowing

Samuel has been asking me to (a) “write” (i.e., draw) countries, (b) write down their names, and (c) “write” any “connecting” (bordering) countries. Not so bad when the country is Ireland or Spain; pretty taxing when it’s Russia. Or France, which is much more than just Metropolitan France.

Some facts:

Because France magically borders countries in Europe and (via its Guiana) South America, every World Cup winner but one – England – is part of an unbroken chain of land-adjacent World Cup winners.

Habilitate the sea borders, and England joins the chain.

All the finalists also form an unbroken land-or-sea-adjacent chain. (Sweden and Germany share sea borders, as do Italy and Croatia.)

So do all the semifinalists but South Korea. (Russia/​USSR borders Poland by land and the USA by sea; Serbia/​Yugoslavia touches Bulgaria, which touches Turkey; and Morocco, Africa’s sole top-four finisher, borders Spain.)

The moral: If your country is several steps away from the chain – if you’re in, e.g., Malaysia, Australia, or Subsaharan Africa – you won’t get to the last stages, not for a good while anyway. India probably is too far removed as well. Sure, only China lies between it and Russia, just as only one country (North Korea) lies between top-four-finisher South Korea and Russia, but goodness, you’d have to slog over the Himalayas and through Tibet and Siberia and over all of European Russia and make the leap to Kaliningrad just to get as close to the center as Poland, which last played a semifinal in 1982.

These are my profound thoughts this evening.

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Our next-door neighbor, Mike, buys stuff in abandoned storage units and sells it at flea markets and garage sales. Today, he sold to me, for $2, a copy of Janson’s History of Art, which I’d been pining after for decades. I never could bring myself to order that beast of a book through the post.

It may not be the wordiest volume I’ll ever read, but it’ll probably be the heaviest.

I looked at the pictures with Samuel. I left him alone with the book for two minutes, and he started to color in it. He was bitter when I removed it to a high shelf.

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I mowed for the first time this year and now am sore.