Flash Floods and Baseball Bats
In the monsoon, that old journalistic idiom—dog bites man is not news, man bites dog is news—changes into man fells tree is not news, tree fells man is news. It’s a news report that appears with sickening regularity: large branches suddenly break off and fall, wrecking parked cars (which can be repaired) or a passing pedestrian (who can’t). A conservationist tells me that this can occur with even the first rain because while trees in a real jungle get all the nutrients they need from the soil, those rooted in our concrete jungle do not.