My great-grandfather recognized that weather is never perfect for agriculture for an entire season; a full chapter of his memoir is dedicated to this observation. In his 60 years of farming he wrote that only one season, his final crop of 1937, had close to ideal weather. Like all other farmers of his time and ours, he learned to cope with significant, ill-timed fluctuations in temperature and precipitation.

But at least here in the Midwest, weather fluctuations have been more significant during my time than in his, the Dust Bowl notwithstanding. The weather in our area has become demonstrably more hostile to agriculture, and all signs are that this trend will continue. Minnesota’s state climatologist, Jim Zandlo, has concluded that no fewer than three “thousand-year rains” have occurred in the past seven years in our part of the state. And a University of Minnesota meteorologist, Mark Seeley, has found that summer storms in the region over the past two decades have been more intense and more geographically focused than at any time on record.

No two farms have the same experience with the weather, and some people will contend that ours is an anomaly, that many corn and bean farms in our area have done well over the same period. But heavy summer weather causes harm to farm fields that is not easily seen or quantified, like nutrient leaching, organic-matter depletion and erosion. As climate change accelerates these trends, losses will likely mount proportionately, and across the board. How long can we continue to borrow from the “topsoil bank,” as torrential rains force us to make ever more frequent “withdrawals”?

Funny what Midwest Energy News had to say:

Another coastal elitist yammering on about climate change. That is, if you consider fourth-generation farmers to be elitists, and the Minnesota River to be one of the coasts.

That doofus over at Al’s Rambling’s would probably just say the farmer should have planned better. Can climate change skeptics just go away? Take their looniness somewhere else?

“At times, you’re going to say, ‘Why are you running so much? Why are you getting thrown out trying to take extra bases?’” Roenicke said. “It’s going to happen, but that’s the style I like to play. I’ve seen it win a lot of ballgames over the years. We’re going to be aggressive from third base scoring, we’re going to be aggressive from first to third and, at times, we’re going to get thrown out. But over the course of the season, I guarantee we will score a lot more runs being aggressive.

“Plus, what it does for the players. The players, when you let them be aggressive, they have more confidence. That’s what this game is all about — confidence.”

This is one of the things most uber-sabermetric nerds just don’t get about baseball… the right frame of mind and confidence make players better hitters in the box than Macha’s grey style. I dig this guy so far, can’t wait until free agency heats up and 2011 is on its way.

Whoop-e-whoop! Watch out world, Jarrod’s on his way back! You know this is would be a perfect Doug Melvin hire: crafty, undervalued, retired, and below average. Maybe he can toss up another 4.75 ERA for next year’s pitching staff.

From the start, it was a bad case.

A battered 21-year-old woman with long blond curls was discovered facedown in the weeds, naked, at the western edge of Miami, where the neat grid of outer suburbia butts up against the high grass and black mud of the Everglades. It was early on a winter morning in 2005. A local power-company worker was driving by the empty lots of an unbuilt cul-de-sac when he saw her.

Watch exclusive behind-the-crime-scenes video from the case.

And much to his surprise, she was alive. She was still unconscious when the police airlifted her to Jackson Memorial Hospital. When she woke up in its trauma center, she could remember little about what had happened to her, but her body told an ugly tale. She had been raped, badly beaten, and left for dead. There was severe head trauma; she had suffered brain-rattling blows. Semen was recovered from inside her. The bones around her right eye were shattered. She was terrified and confused. She bent English to her native Ukrainian grammar and syntax, dropping pronouns and inverting standard sentence structure, which made her hard to understand. And one of the first things she asked for on waking was her lawyer. That was unusual.

Miami-Dade detectives learned that she had been living for months at the Airport Regency Hotel, eight miles from where she was found. It is one of those crisply efficient overnight spots in the orbit of major airports that cater to travelers needing a bed between legs of long flights. She was employed by a cruise-ship line and had severely cut her finger on the job, so she was being put up at the hotel by her employers while she healed. The assault had begun, she said, in her room, on the fourth floor. She described her attackers as two or three white men who spoke with accents that she heard as “Hispanic,” but she wasn’t certain. She remembered one of the men pushing a pillow into her face, and being forced to drink something strong, alcoholic. She had fragments of memories like bits of a bad dream—of being held up or carried, of being thrown over a man’s shoulder as he moved down a flight of stairs, of being roughly violated in the backseat of a car, of pleading for her life. Powerful, cruel moments, but there was nothing solid, nothing that made a decent lead. When her lawyer soon after filed a lawsuit against the hotel, alleging negligence, going after potentially deep corporate pockets, the detectives thought something was fishy. This was not your typical rape victim. What if she was part of some sophisticated con?

I wonder how many times this story has been played out on Law and Order, CSI or Criminal Minds.