THE DIAMOND SQUARELY IN THE CROSSHAIRS

"Speaking for myself, baseball would be more interesting
if the batter could choose to run to third base or first base
depending on how they happen to feel at the time..."

--Mahatma Gandhi

The "totalizing" urge, where one sums up the known universe in ways that are both comprehensive and simplistic (a state of existence whose poles of being score near the maximum on any test for "mutual exclusivity") seems to have become--to keep the conundrum oven-fresh--the norm of all exceptions.

The delightfully overweening comic-strip that doubles as a chronicler and meta-critique of mass delusion using its distorted lens of science-through-the-looking-glass, xkcd.com, has both embodied and lampooned this tendency for "totalization" with the accompanying "visual aid." All of us, despite our attempts at special pleading and the usual knee-jerk exceptionalism that rises up like spring weeds in old pavement, are encompassed in this diagram, where politics, aesthetics, and baseball all go to conflate themselves.

What this diagram tells me is that I am always going to try to go from first to third on a single. And I hope you will too.