Time Marches On

We're right smack-dab in the middle of "The Dog Days of Summer", though you wouldn't know it from the weather. Today the marine layer burned off just before noon. On the Noon News, the weatherdude said: "Today will be the warmest day of the week" Good! It was toasty hot out in the Diggins in mid-afternoon when I was making up some PVC irrigation piping.

Usually these hot August days seem timeless...just lazy afternoons in the shade with a cool beverage and some diversionary reading material...a Beach Read perhaps. Nothing to give the impression that time is even passing.

Unless you're a radiohead like me. Reality served LIVE every half hour. News...Weather...Traffic...Tic-Tock...

Today I was reminded before I was even out of bed that Time waits for no man. Today the morning AM chuckleheads were talking about the Beloit College Mindset List for students entering college this fall.

This is the list, published every Back-to-School Season since 1998, that gives the sociological fun facts about this year's crop of eighteen-year-olds. Over the past decade that the Mindset List has been in my consciousness, It's put the period on the passing of the Dial Telephone, Betamax, and Answering Machines.

This year it's the Wristwatch...cell phones have clocks...Clint Eastwood is a sensitive, respected film director to the Class of 2014, and not Dirty Harry Callahan.

I've been paying attention to the Mindset List since I first heard of it. Why? Because I work with a new crop of eighteen-year-olds every season. They come to My Mountain to work and/or play instead of going straight to college after high school. Over the years I've found many of these kids to be enigmatic...what are they teaching these kids in school anyway?

Let me just say that not once have I ever stood on my front porch and yelled: "Get off my lawn, you kids"!

These kids "don't know what they don't know" as the saying goes. They are possessed of high self esteem...though I suspect it was drilled into them rather than earned the old fashioned way.

In all fairness, many of these kids aren't going to college...ever. More Americans heading off to the job market...no more, no less. This is still America, so we may hear of one of these kids some day, and buy their music, patronize their restaurant, see their movie, read their book, or use their revolutionary gizmo that adds more familiar old tech to the Mindset List's Gadget Graveyard.

History Rears It's Head
On the baseball diamond...

I've really been enjoying my San Francisco Giants this Summer. There's been a "Playoff Atmosphere" to their games since the All Star Break, as the team has really come together. The last time I had this much fun with the Giants was when I was a kid and the Giants battled the Dodgers right down to the wire. The Pennant was decided in a tie-breaker series...that the Giants won...Game Three of the three game series. They went on to lose the 1962 World Series to the New York Yankees.

While I watched today's game against the Philadelphia Phillies, the news came that Bobby Thomson passed away. On October 3rd, 1951, Thomson hit "The Shot Heard 'Round The World", the game winning home run that gave the New York Giants the National League Pennant over the Brooklyn Dodgers in their pennant playoff series. That hit is arguably the most famous home run ever hit.

The radio play-by-play of the hit also gained fame. Russ Hodges screaming: "The Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant!" has become immortal, too. Russ Hodges came west with the Giants and Dodgers in 1958, and I listened to his play-by-play in 1962, when the Giants beat the Dodgers for the pennant on October 3rd again...eleven years after "The Shot Heard 'Round The World"

As a ten year old, I'd never heard of "The Shot Heard 'Round The World"...now, 48 years later, I can't remember the first time I heard that famous play-by-play. It's part of me now...just like baseball.