Wasps, Baseball, and Google

The Temptations had a hit song 55 years ago, “Ball of Confusion (That’s What the World Is Today).” It feels as if it were a prediction of the last week around here.

I’m not talking about geopolitical affairs. I’m talking about things with which I was personally involved. (Though it applies to geopolitical affairs, too — but I’m not going to talk about them, being perilously close to overload already.)

Somehow through no real effort of my own, I’ve been juggling three balls of confusion, none related to either of the others. It really has been like the song, on a personal level.

So, where to begin? The wasps, I suppose.

Every autumn, paper wasps appear in my house, almost all of them in my office, a dozen or two a day. They lack the vim and vigor of summer wasps, which can fly over, sting you, and be gone before you’ve had time to offer your opinion. These wasps show up, fly around kind of half-heartedly, hang out on the windowsills, on the floor, and on especially attention-gaining places like doorknobs. You feel something land on the back of your neck, say, and reaching around you realize what it is and through instinct launch it into the bookcase.

They have arrived, this last half of October.

I have two entire vacuum cleaners here for the sole purpose of collecting insects. The one in the bedroom is small but surprisingly powerful. Its job is to collect the hundreds of Asian ladybugs that somehow get in on sunny, warm autumn days and sunny, warm spring days. There were none last spring and few last autumn, leading me to think that my spraying the house with a soap-and-borax mixture had dispatched them. (This fall that doesn’t seem to be the case, but then again I didn’t spray this year.) The other machine is a cheap, powerful, and reliable shop vac — $29 at Lowe’s on sale 20 years ago — for wasp incarceration. I’ve gotten pretty good at sucking ‘em up even on the wing. I also have a few pair of foot-long surgical forceps — “tweezers” to the non-technical — that I also use, especially when the wasps are near things that I don’t want transported to the vacuum cleaner bag. I’m a dab hand with those, too.

Until yesterday, when after 20 years I looked it up, I was pretty impressed with myself for never having gotten stung while conducting my office insect control. According to what I found online — no, I didn’t test it and won’t — the wasps that invade my home each year are males, and male wasps can’t sting.

Which is to some extent beside the point. The Asian ladybugs and horrible marmorated stink bugs (also an Asian import) don’t sting, either, but I still don’t want them in my house, and in all cases I want to know how they’re getting in so that I can seal it up and have done with them.

Which as I said has nothing to do with the other weird situations that have popped up.

A few weeks ago I discovered that I could receive a Japanese-language streaming station, Nippon TV. I do not speak Japanese, and the language has defied my attempts to learn it. Nevertheless, I found that I enjoyed watching it from time to time. I became taken with Japanese golf, watching with amusement as a player — and these are pros — hit his ball from the tee deep into the woods, from the woods across the fairway into the sand, and from the sand onto the green and into the hole for a birdie.

But my favorite is a show called “Dramatic Baseball.” It is ordinary baseball, no more or less dramatic than other professional baseball games. I decided that I was for whoever was playing Tokyo, for the same reason that here I’m for whoever is playing New York. The players are good. They don’t whine or throw fits or play while festooned in jewelry as if they’d gotten into their mother’s dresser drawer and were playing dress-up, the way American players do. And not speaking Japanese, I don’t have to listen to the announcers, who in the U.S. seem to be paid by the word.

Japanese news in English doesn’t say much about Japanese baseball, though it says a lot about Ohtani Shohei, the Japanese star now in the U.S. playing for the Dodgers. There were bulletins all night long when Ohtani achieved the 50-50 club (of which he is the only member, so why it’s called a club is a mystery): hitting 50 home runs and stealing 50 bases in the same season. While that particular achievement didn’t impress me as much as it seems to have impressed others, it was clear that he’s a remarkable player. He also got into the news when his interpreter stole and gambled away more than 15 million of Ohtani’s dollars.

Having a fondness for Japan and feeling bad that its star baseball player, who came to the U.S., had fallen victim to theft, I paid passing attention to him and was glad that the Dodgers won the pennant, there no longer being any U.S. team that I much like, nor baseball itself due to the ruination of its rules. (Japan plays a purer version of the game and only now has introduced pollutants such as the designated hitter.)

He is also a pitcher. On October 17, during the playoffs, in one game he struck out 10 batters and hit three home runs. He might be the best baseball player ever.

So I thought I’d catch a World Series game or two. The Los Angeles Dodgers are playing the Toronto Blue Jays. (“Expansion team,” I harrumphed, “and not even from here.”) In a News Nation conversation with Chris Stirewalt, human baseball encyclopedia George F. Will said he was looking forward to the series, which he said would be the Blue Jays against Ohtani Shohei. (I should mention that in Japan names are surname first, given name second, and I have adopted that usage on the theory that people are likely to know their own names.)

I didn’t see the first game, which Toronto won. I did see the second. The hero was from Japan and a pitcher, but it was not Ohtani. Instead, it was Yamamoto Yoshinobu, who pitched a complete game, the first one in American baseball in many years.

(This is why I think modern baseball is kind of a weenie game. Anyone who knows me well will know, too, what I’m about to say. There used to be a real baseball team in St. Louis, called the Cardinals. They were in the 1967 World Series. I was there — it was a treat for my sister’s birthday — on July 15, 1967, so my family witnessed it in person when Pittsburgh Pirate Roberto Clemente hit a line drive into the leg of pitcher Bob Gibson. The ball went straight up, very high. Gibson got up and continued pitching, but soon he went down again, having discovered that pitching is very difficult when you have a broken leg. Yes. Yet when the World Series began on October 4, 12 weeks later, Bob Gibson was on the mound. He pitched a complete game and won. He also pitched and won a complete game 4. And a complete game 7. Three months off a broken leg, he came back to pitch three complete games in the World Series. Pitching a complete game was expected of pitchers when baseball was real. So when they go on and on now about a pitcher throwing a complete game — Yamamoto’s was the first in a World Series in 10 years! — I think that modern baseball is kind of wimpy.)

That brings us to Monday night’s game; well, technically, Monday night’s and Tuesday morning’s game. It was to modern baseball what Tuesday in Jamaica was to hurricanes. It was 18 innings long. Those of us who watched it all will forever be a band of brothers.

The game began at 8 p.m. civilized time and ended more than six and one-half hours later. Ohtami, as is typical, set a new record, hitting two home runs and two doubles before Toronto began walking him on purpose. By the end of the game he had reached base nine times; the previous record was six. The Dodgers used 10 pitchers, one of whom was young Sasaki Roki, from Japan’s Chiba Prefecture. He wore a terrified expression, but that was misleading — he pitched five outs, brilliantly. The soon-to-retire Clayton Kershaw was brought in to pitch to one batter: the bases were loaded with two outs. He got the batter out and ended the inning, in what was probably his last appearance in professional baseball.

A little-known pitcher, the neck-bearded Will Klein who before Monday night had pitched a total of 22 innings his entire career, then pitched a four-inning shutout.

What’s more, Yamamoto-san actually went to the bullpen to warm up and had the thing gone another inning he would have pitched the rest of the game — on one day’s rest. The alternative would have been to put in a position player, a shortstop or something. In a World Series game!

It was a most remarkable game. Which isn’t to say everyone — anyone, actually — was happy to see it go as long as it did. There were no runs scored between the seventh and 18^th^ innings. The booth announcer pointed to Klein’s beard and said he had been clean-shaven when the game began. About 300 balls were used in the game. When there was a foul ball into the stands in a very late inning, the announcer said it was the billionth souvenir that night. “Some people have several.”

I had finally made progress in curing my insomnia, but the game made short work of that. I got to bed at about 3:30 a.m. No idea if George Will stayed up for the whole thing, which might have been more satisfying had the game begun at noon instead. (The less said about Tuesday’s game, the better. Ohtani pitched — beginning about 18 hours after the previous game was over. It didn’t go well for him or for the Dodgers in general. But this series will forever be about the Monday game.)

That’s two. I promised three.

Monday morning, I saw an article that was alarming, not just because of me but because of my many friends who trust Google and the online world too much.

The initial claim was that login credentials of 183 million GMail users had been stolen. Google denied this, though the explanation is strange. “The inaccurate reports are stemming from a misunderstanding of infostealer databases, which routinely compile various credential theft activity occurring across the web. It's not reflective of a new attack aimed at any one person, tool, or platform,” was the explanation. Fair enough, I guess, but saying that no, it didn’t get stolen now but instead was being stolen all along is not all that comforting, is it.

Credentials collected from everywhere are joined in some master list of stolen information and it’s not just GMail. But that just reminds us that most people pay no attention to their online security. Presumably these people do tend to have curtains on their windows and locks on their doors, so they’re not baka across every aspect of their lives.

I will give Google this: there probably is no particular vulnerability; instead, people have released their credentials themselves because they pay no attention to what the risks are, or how they jeopardize themselves and others through their ignorance.

Google is an advertising company and collector of information to further that business. When you do business with Google you have given the company permission to gather information about you.

There are numerous companies, some of whom admit it and some of whom don’t, that gather information about you and sell it to others. And they monitor your web activity. Want proof? Install NoScript and, when you visit a website click on NoScript’s icon in your browser’s toolbar. All those companies then listed are gathering your information, without your permission. (The piece of a screenshot shown here shows all the information attached to the web page of lifehacker.com devoted to browser extensions that we should have installed to block those very privacy thieves and otherwise preserve your online privacy. Which is kind of ironic, though I recommend that list anyway.)

I’ve said it before and I will keep saying it: If you want privacy online, the first stop ought to be with the Proton suite of applications. (Read the whole page at the link.) Proton’s applications for desktop and mobile devices comprise an excellent VPN, a very good password wallet and generator, a fine cloud storage and document-sharing regime, and most famously ProtonMail. These are encrypted and secure. Not even Proton can get into your stuff. There are free versions of most or all of it, with extra features available for paid subscribers. (I get the paid version of everything, because I consider it as important as fire insurance. It doesn’t cost that much, very little compared to the potential cost of getting cracked. And yes, I pay for it myself. I gain nothing except the satisfaction of giving good advice when I mention the company and its products.)

Rush to do those things, get your online devices all buttoned up, and . . . you’re still not safe. Why? Because you surely communicate with people and companies who haven’t done those things. When I read that 183 million accounts had been compromised I shuddered a little, because I communicate with many people who pay no attention to security and privacy issues at all. So when I send them email or anything else, I’m potentially sharing it with the world. They give access to their contacts to any damn application that asks for it. They don’t think they’re at risk until something demonstrates to them, too late, that they were at risk after all.

I don’t text. If I have a short message to send and want it kept private, I use Signal or Molly. Yes, they can be made unsecure through user error, but presumably most people are not dimwitted ink monkeys overly impressed with themselves. The safest car in the world is not safe when a reckless driver is behind the wheel.

All of which I’ve busied myself with this week, passing it along to friends and relatives who probably won’t pay attention. Yet.

So yes, there have been three balls of confusion occupying time around here recently. If only I could say they were Just My Imagination. Well, except the baseball game. That was pretty good.