Zach Hively

The daylight hours are getting short, and all consumer goods from hot dogs to Honda Accords now come with pumpkin spice flavoring. But not everything this time of year need be tainted by such doom and gloom.

For instance, autumn is also the season when plants die. In their stead, they leave behind delicious plant babies for us humans to eat. Home gardeners today share in a long-running tradition with humankind’s original farmers. The experience is precisely the same, except that, to our pioneering forebears on the “Oregon Trail” computer game, failure meant dysentery and to us, it means eating peanut butter with a spoon…

Superstitions are, by definition, bunk. Knocking on wood, crossing fingers, pinching a black cat over your shoulder after spilling salt on a broken mirror: any rational person with a sound understanding of causality will disregard these practices. Baseball traditions, on the other hand, are universally sacrosanct and supported by hard science.

There is no room for mumbo-jumbo voodoo magic in baseball, which is driven by statistics—what old-school managers refer to as their “gut instincts.” If an aspect of the game cannot be tracked in tiny rows of numbers on the back of a bubblegum card, it is removed from the rulebook and offered to another, more interpretive sport, such as figure skating or chess…

As you college freshpeople, including my youngest sister, set off on your first college semester, there’s something you should know. Your parents (and other people who “just don’t get it”) may fail to treat you like the adults you are.

I get it. You have dreams, and you are going to change the world! You are spreading your fledgling wings, like young hawks coasting on a stiff nor’easter and tens of thousands of borrowed federal dollars. Yet the older adults in your life keep nagging. I recommend that you put up with them as best you can, because they have tender, loving reasons for their hovering, pestering behavior: they don’t trust you…

Remember a few weeks ago, when people everywhere started dumping ice water on their heads to raise public awareness of people dumping ice water on their heads? Those folks bullied into the so-called Ice Bucket Challenge were required, according to entirely arbitrary rules, either to drench themselves in an arctic shower or to donate money to the ALS Association.

I, alone among humankind, refused the challenge when put to it…