THANKS A BUNCH, JOHNNY DAMON

Cashed in my Father's Day treat a week late and went to the Reds-Yankees game at the Stadium this afternoon with my sister's family, and no sooner had I settled into my seat than...

...say, that foul ball could be headed this way. Right this way, in fact. Maybe I'd better try to OW OW OW OW OW MY LEG MY LEG MY LEG SON OF A better calm down my seven-year-old niece is right behind me and cursing shan't be done.

I may be the only person in the 85-year history of the Stadium to take a foul ball off the shin while sitting in the front row. Nice shot, Johnny. Bet you a week's pay you can't do it again.

And there I was hoping for a moment that I'd have a souvenir for the kids and a story to tell. If that welt gets any bigger I'll at least have the story part. My sister springs for the 12-dollar beer and I'm using it as a cold pack, and meanwhile the fat schlub next to me is showing off the ball like he was Mattingly scooping it backhanded out of the dirt. Oh, give it a rest.

Reds 6, Yanks 0 by the way. The Yanks sure are lucky Cincinnati only comes to town every 30 years or so.

THAT PILE OF MULCH CAN DO WHAT?!

So today yours truly was attacking the massive pile of mulch I created last month, spreading it about on some of the recently-cleared stretches of low-lying ground, when...is that smoke?

Turned out it wasn't, or whatever it was stopped doing whatever it was that made whatever it is look like smoke - but apparently, large mulch piles can indeed catch fire...

The wood chips that comprise mulch break down anabolically, much the way compost does, said Jim Taylor, owner of Taylor Recycling in Montgomery, who learned the hard way that mulch can be a menace in big piles. Though the pile sizes at his place conformed to state fire codes, he said, the codes were outdated and didn't allow for what could happen to fine-grind mulch. He estimated that of the eight or so fire calls he had to make – along what he called a painful learning curve – half of them were the results of spontaneous combustion.

Awesome! Continuing...

Hosing down a big pile of mulch might actually increase chances of combustion, he said, since water increases the anabolic breakdown.

And that's great, too! I think the writer meant to use anaerobic (as in this piece), but still. That large mulch pile is now a much smaller, non-critical-mass mulch pile.