Tired of important issues? Try this one on!

Is it not time we took off those seed corn caps? At least while indoors? Or at least while in a restaurant? Or at the very least while not alone in bed?

Of course they are useful! If, for instance, you need a bit of shade or shelter from the rain, and a hooded sweatshirt will keep your neck warm, a seed corn cap is marvelous. Some of us know that the brim of a seed corn cap is just a handle for the yarmulke that fits very nicely where our hair used to be.

But the days of the seed corn- or baseball-cap are numbered. Baseball players ought to be wearing batting helmets, and not just while in the batter's box. Ask Justin Morneau about his concussion!

All right! Baseball caps are good caps, especially for baseball players. But millions of obviously non-athletes wear them, their bills rolled tight like soda straws, because . . . because . . . No, I am just tired of seeing them everywhere. Especially in bed. Even in restaurants.

I honestly did not recognize a good friend, just for a moment, one morning, because he had taken off his billed cap. It was like seeing a macaw without his bill. "What is that critter?" I had a flashback to the time when, in the gym shower after exercising, I did not recognize a years-long colleague because the shower water had overcome his habit of combing his ear hair up over his bald spot.

Wearing a ball cap all the time--indoors, outdoors, backwards, bill bent back, rolled like a spy glass, washed or unwashed--creates a personna other than the glorious critter god created: the bald one, or naked one, or uncombed one.

Caps and hats are fine, but not when glued to one's head; not super-glued to one's head. Caps are costume, but more than just one costume is even better, lest we become the costume.

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The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

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