Little League All-Stars

There comes a time in life when, after years of elementary-school triumph and perfect-attendance awards, you make your peace with the idea that you'll probably never win another trophy.

Then, along comes a summer in D.C. that sees you winning two.

First, "Tuesday Heartbreak," my motley crew of a Stetson's Pub Quiz team, goes the distance to win the summer league and take home the coveted [somebody somebody] memorial cup. Which we promptly ask to be filled with beer.

Then, one week later, I learn that across town at the Stanford Softball awards banquet -- an event scheduled against pub quiz -- Coach Chris announced this year's Rookie of the Year and, lo and behold, it's me:

Full disclosure: As the only rookie to string together enough appearances to qualify for, and then actually attend, the season's year-end tournament, I consider this a victory by attrition. Put it this way: it helped my chances that I effectively had no real competition.

Still, to victory, dear readers. To victory.

A Few Historical Fibers

I finished James McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom" earlier this week (the same day, coincidentally, that Gov. Mark Sanford announced that he was continuing the long South Carolinian tradition of seceding from unions).

Commuting in D.C. is very compatible with listening to audiobooks, and at just under 40 hours, Battle Cry had been my faithful companion for around two months. Though focusing a little more singly on military history than I was expecting after David Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought (the preceding volume, covering 1815-1848, in the still not-yet-completed Oxford History of the United States series), Battle Cry was especially readable in D.C., given its helpful ability to breathe life into the area's statues and placenames. (I will now forever think of Farragut North as the "Damn the Torpedos!"-Metro Stop, for instance. "Full speed ahead!")

Double-bonus, the book also contained some pretty solid explanatory trivia--it's 1861 and the North needs thousands of new military uniforms; you're in the textiles business, but you're short on wool. What do you do?

To fill contracts for hundreds of thousands of uniforms, textile manufacturers compressed fibers of recycled woolen goods into a material called "shoddy." This noun soon became an adjective to describe uniforms that ripped after a few weeks of wear, shoes that fell apart, blankets that disintegrated, and poor workmanship in general[.]" (p. 324)

And just like that, a new word is born.

Beautiful.

Cataclysm Made Vivid

When Novarupta exploded in 1912 it reportedly sent enough sulfuric ash into the atmosphere that:

"At nearby Kodiak, for two days a person could not see a lantern held at arm's length,"

and

"Acid rain caused clothes to disintegrate on clotheslines in distant Vancouver, Canada."

From: U. S. National Park Service Website, Geology Fieldnotes - Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska, April 2000.

Both facts are oddly compelling. Especially given that there's no real reason why either couldn't happen again tomorrow.

(Given enough time, something similar almost certainly will.)