The Night Before Easter

I have seen two spiders today so far.

Both were inside the boundary between my space and the outside. They appeared hours apart and at different boundaries.

Bases loaded and 2 outs. Hang on, I’m gonna watch this…struck him out!

The first one came in with the cat while it was still light outside, and I think it immediately saw that I had spotted it and instantly regretted trying to come in.  It was tough to find at first hiding under the blue entry rug, and then in the tiny space between the jamb and the tile, but I finally got it to walk onto the Ace Hardware loyalty card on my keychain and gently dropped it (as gently as one can drop something) onto the fuzzy orange doormat outside.

Didn’t give it another thought until later when I spotted from the window the web stretching in the late afternoon sunlight from the gate to the garage.

Later, as I was taking out the trash, I saw the second one scurfuling out of the convenience trash bag that hangs on the garage door handle.  This one also spotted me, but there are many more places for a spider to hide in the garage, and it was already dark outside, so I’m not sure whether this one ended up inside or outside the border wall.

Hang on, Trout’s up,  gonna watch…struck him out.

And as I’m settling back in my chair, I think to myself, “Hey, it’s a little early in the season for spiders that big.” I mean, each o’ them little buggers was just smaller than a dime toe-tip to toe-tip. How big they going be at Halloween? I mean, How Bad Can It Get?

Major League Baseball has a rule book that’s 188 pages long. The 2019 additions include what happens when a pitched ball touches jewelry worn by a batter (doesn’t count as HBP), a few about catchers and collisions, and lots of tweaks to the rules governing visits to the mound. I don’t believe any of this year’s changes are as revolutionary as the designated hitter, or instant replay, or touching the line of your putt, or the Filibuster Rule.

The MLB Rule Book begins with the Objectives of the Game (6). Then it covers where the game is played, what it is played with, how it is played, what the players cannot do, what the umpires must do, and how we’ll measure and report quantitatively what happened in the game.

The MLB Rule Book would be shorter, except it has lots of examples mixed in, and there are also rules for calculating stats such as earned run average, which is a quantitative metric, but does not affect the strategy of the game IMHO. But it’s fun to argue metrics, especially which metric is more important and whether new metrics such as WAR are meaningful enough to stick around.

Civics, Government, Politics, they’re like a game with a Rule Book for how we’re all going to agree on the balance of metrics that provides the “greatest good for the greatest number.”  Working backwards, we start with What goals and objectives do we have? Safety? Security? Health? Safe Spaces? A Winnebago? Land a man on the moon and bring him back safely to earth? Build a Great Border Wall? Not to have to accommodate those who we don’t like, or who don’t live on this side of the boundary, or who cannot keep up with us on the metrics we think are important?  I think we settled on Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, in that order, and elaborated Us vs. Them from there.

Once we know our goals and objectives, we explore how to accomplish our objectives and thus attain our goals, which usually means agreeing how we are going to pay for it, which devolves into who is going to pay for it, after which the weak among us question the objective and even the goal like a fox who cannot reach the grapes.

And when we do somewhat agree on how to pay for it, then we decide who is going to make it happen – collect the money, invest it wisely, spend according to budget, hire the sub-contractors to manufacture the o-rings – and we hold them accountable for execution.  We don’t like potholes or crime or forest fires or invasions.

We also hire people to make sure everyone plays by the rules.  Think of them as the umpires. They know the rules, and they watch the game, and if it’s not clear to everyone what the outcome of an event is according to the rules, they tell us. To help ensure we can trust the umpires, we have a section in the Rule Book about their behavior as well.

For years, the umpire’s word was gospel.  You could have arguments about a call, but in the end, that pitch was a strike because the umpire called it a strike. It was your Mom saying “Because I said so, that’s why.”

Only then, we got Instant Replay in which the call on the field had to be overturned when and only when there was conclusive video evidence to the contrary. And now we can all see even what the umpire might have missed, but we can argue only with the replay official, who is usually nameless and in a dark room thousands of miles away watching a monitor like those drone pilots we used to read about during the Middle East Wars.

Let’s Review:

• Agree on the rules of the game.
• Play by the rules.
• Hire somebody to enforce the rules and someone to arbitrate the rules, and ensure their impartiality.
• Trust them, unless there is conclusive evidence to the contrary.
• Don’t change the rules willy-nilly or you’ll ruin the game.

Now, where have I been reading a similar story?

And I still think it’s too early in the season for spiders that big.