Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

...in this article about snowshoe softball.

• In the headline "- that is not a typo."

What would be the typo? "Snowshoes"? What's it a typo for?

• Wisconsin

Of course it's Wisconsin.

• But then, halfway to first, it happens: The batter trips up over his snowshoes and falls face-first into a pile of sawdust. The dust gets everywhere -- into his mouth, up his nose, inside his shirt. He crawls the rest of the way to first, smacks the bag with his right hand and laughs until he can't breathe.

• Well, in the 1960s, town chairman Ray Sloan had an extremely wacky, very simple and possibly brilliant idea for warm-weather snowshoe baseball: Just pour a bunch of sawdust on the local ball field.

• "It's a lot more entertaining [with the snowshoes]," - much funnier with the square brackets

• "Guys would dive headfirst and then their feet would come up and the tails of the snowshoe would come forward and hit them on the head," Punches tells me. - this is two laughs, one for the mental image of what's being described and one for the fact that this is being said by a guy whose surname is Punches. His whole name is Cole Punches, which is way too close to Hole Punches for him to have had a good time at school.

• "The first-timers have a rough time, they wanna run too fast with [the snowshoes]. You tangle up and you fall down, and that's exactly what the people wanna see. Someone's gonna fall."

• "Just flopping around, trying to run, and once you start losing your balance, there's no way to regain it. You're gonna go down. The flailing, shoes and arms flailing, and eventually you eat sawdust."

• The hardest part is that outfielders can't just spin around on a fly ball hit over their heads. Punches says you have to do more of a "three-point turn" with your shoes and by the time you've done that, you've either fallen on your face or the ball is way past you.

• The other reason the people come? "Pies, the pies are almost as big as snowshoe baseball," Punches says. "They come for the pies and stay for snowshoe baseball."