The Writer's Life 4/8 - Life's Carousel

In today's NY Post Larry Getlen devotes his article to an interesting phenomenon detailed in a new book: Beep: Inside the Unseen World of Baseball for the Blind by David Wanczyk. That's right, the blind are playing the national pastime. How? By using a baseball that beeps. Each team fields six blind defensive players and a sighted pitcher who throws to his own teammates from just over 20 feet away. First and third base are four-foot-high pylons. There is no second base. The appropriate pylon beeps when a ball is hit. The batter must run to that base before the defense, which searches for the beeping ball, safely fields it. Players are hit by balls all the time and shrug it off just as major leaguers do. There will never come a point in human history when one may safely say: "Now I've seen everything." Here's a pic:

Here's a sign of the times from a blurb in Michael Goodwin's op-ed column in today's Post. A few days ago a man behaving erratically was waving an object that people mistook for a gun. He was shot dead by cops. In a bid at damage control, the police department released the following statement: "One was African-American and fired three rounds; a second was white and fired two rounds; a third was white and fired four rounds; and the fourth was Indian-American and fired once." Bean-counting has been a part of the nation's life for decades, and it may never end. Here's a Daily News pic of the suspect in action:

Folks in Sinclair, in northern Maine, believe they've created the world's largest ice carousel on a frozen lake. About 100 volunteers cut a circle 426.5 feet in diameter, and used four outboard boat motors to get it rotating. Augurs, chain saws and other equipment were used to bore more than 1300 holes in the 30-inch thick ice. The people then waited for warmer weather to get it spinning. They claim it beats the old record held by a town in Finland. Here's a pic:

And here's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI3YhWMV98k

Things were back to normal today at the floating book shop after a stellar seven-day stretch of sales. My thanks to the woman who purchased Paris in the Fifties by Stanley Karnow and Annette Karnow. Special thanks to whomever downloaded Killing to Kindle this week at Amazon.

My Amazon Author page: https://www.amazon.com/Vic-Fortezza/e/B002M4NLJE

FB: https://www.facebook.com/Vic-Fortezza-Author-118397641564801/?fref=ts

Read Vic's Stories, free: http://fictionaut.com/users/vic-fortezza