Bits and pieces, tidbits and gewgaws

That is my way of saying that this post has no central theme. It contains unrelated minutiae, perhaps even ephemera. But trivia? Never!

If you don't know what ephemera means, follow Rowan and Martin's advice from Laugh-In days and look it up in your Funk & Wagnalls. For the record, we never owned a set of Funk & Wagnalls. We owned a 20-volume set of The Book of Knowledge and a 20-volume set of the Grolier Encyclopedia. At school I used the World Book Encyclopedia or the Encyclopedia Americana or the Encyclopedia Britannica, but even the school library didn't have Funk & Wagnalls. You can safely assume, therefore, that I have never looked up anything in my or anybody else's Funk & Wagnalls.

Be that as it may, it can now be revealed that north Georgia is having its second snowfall of the season today as we speak. The first one occurred about two weeks ago and any trace of it has long since disappeared. Our area receives a lot more rain than snow in wintertime, and if the temperatures dip at the same time, we often get ice on the roads and the sidewalks and the trees and the cars. When it gets really bad, branches and even trees come crashing down. Life often comes to a complete stop until the ice melts and the debris is cleared away.

Moving right along, our oldest grandson turned 20 years old today and is no longer a teenager. On top of that, he is currently "batting a thousand" on his college's baseball team. I'm not kidding:

Sorry for the blurriness. I think my hand must have been shaking upon this momentous occasion. The baseball season has just begun and the team has won all three games played to date. Since Elijah played on the Junior Varsity team last year (which his school calls the Varsity Reserve), none of those Freshman-year statistics are included. Batting 1000 (that is, 1.000) is a very rare thing that cannot be sustained for very long. Ted Williams of Boston Red Sox fame, one of the best baseball players who ever lived, finished his career with a .344 batting average, meaning he got a hit about once out of every three turns at bat. In 1941, he posted a .406 batting average, making him the last Major League Baseball player to bat over .400 in a season.

The snow has turned to sleet. It may be a while before Elijah's career can resume.

P.S. -- This is my 1,500th post. It took only 8 years, 4 months, and 12 days to get here. The celebrating may now begin.

Just when you think you’ve heard it all

...along comes The Homeless Man With The Golden Voice.

This sort of heartwarming story -- there have already been more than 15,000 comments on the original article, and the video itself has gone viral on the internet -- usually comes along just before Christmas, sending me into a “We’re just being manipulated by the media so that we can feel all warm and fuzzy about ourselves at Christmas before we go back to ignoring people in need during the rest of the year” rant, but this story waited to surface until the first week of January.

Somehow I don’t feel like ranting as much in January. Perhaps this year the “peace on earth, good will to men” message of the Christmas season actually penetrated my subconscious. Better yet, perhaps it has a residual effect that can never be displaced.

Come to think of it, I didn’t even go through my usual “Bah, humbug!” phase in December.

I must be slipping.

P.S. - The man in the video has a name: Ted Williams (not the famous major-league baseball player who died at the age of 83 in 2002 but whose body his children have had frozen in case he can be revived one day; another Ted Williams. I don’t really know how much demand there will be in the major leagues of the future for a revived formerly 83-year-old player, but then I don’t follow sports all that closely).

Here’s Ted Williams the baseball player in his pre-frozen days:

P.P.S. - Actually, in churches that observe the liturgical year, most of December is known as Advent. Christmas starts on December 25th and lasts twelve days, until the Epiphany on January 6th. And if you are a member of an Eastern Orthodox community, you celebrate Christmas on January 6th anyway because of differences in the Eastern and Western calendars.

Hey, no wonder this story of the other Ted Williams has such a Christmas feel to it. Today is January 6th! It’s still Christmas!

There’s still time for my rant, after all.