Farm News 08-19-07

Farm News

Setting up an email system is a pain in the backside. I thought I could just give gmail, the google mail service, a list of user names and they would set up the accounts. Nothing is as easy as it appears before you have done it a few times. Nevertheless, the system is almost ready to run.

Everyone who registers on GeezerNet is welcome to have up to five email addresses, free of course. However, to get one you need to contact me, by email: jim.ware@GeezerNet.com; or by telephone: 785 863 2615. For each account I will need a user name, (make it simple for your own convenience), a password of 7 to 20 characters, and your first and last names.

The weather has been warm, probably too warm for it to be safe to go ice skating. Last Sunday was the first day it went to three digit temperatures, it hit 100° by about 11:00 am and stayed there until 7:00 pm. There is plenty of humidity in the air, so all this thermal energy should cook up some storms sometime soon.

I can recall two times I have been in hot fogs: foggy with temperatures in the high 70's. Anything that is fixing to start stinking is going to stink vigorously in those conditions. It's hot, wet, still, and smelly. Between the house to the barn are bands and patches of extra wet, extra hot, extra stinky or some combination. My daughter spent some time in the South Pacific and her descriptions of tropical islands made them sound like places where hot fogs were plentiful. So much for paradise: it has mosquitoes, cockroaches, and it stinks when the wind isn't blowing.

Students Return to River City

On Wednesday Paula went to Lawrence for a few hours. She returned complaining about the craziness now that the students are back. It appears to me that much of the bizarre behavior one sees in River City when the students return is being acted out by high school, not college, students. All of those unmated high school males are bound to react when their territory suddenly becomes host to a few thousand extra unmated young males. They're young and dumb, so they act out all kinds of mildly anti-social behavior trying to protect their territory.

Young male chimps will occasionally find a large metal can left behind by some expedition. The young male chimps will often take two sticks and, driving the can ahead of them by banging it with sticks, run around screaming on the forest floor. Mothers who have raised children of both sexes will probably agree that young male primates have tendencies to raise a large ruckus for no reason except to impress themselves. As the young chimps mature they learn that such behavior does not win them any points in the clan, and that winning points in the clan is the only route to mating, so they ease off on the displays.

Few people realize just how difficult it is to be a male primate. Humans have a cultural heritage method of finding mates for the adult males, an interesting solution: the modular mind developed the ability to develop a method. Knowing that society has provided a way for most young males to find a mate does not do a thing about most young males' testosterone levels. Friday night in River City, in August, when it is hot, humid, still, the mating calls of cicadas a pervasive susurrus, the pheromones drift through the air like strange wisps of magic clouds, clouding students' minds with dreams of sex before study. Young unmated males frequently experience strong reactions in such an environment, resulting in displays of bizarre, inappropriate behavior.

Human mating displays frequently involve either vehicles or balls. That's interesting. Games with balls might have some part in survival of the fittest, but why motor vehicles? One theory is that the motor vehicle provides your private, protected, moving display ground. I like that theory because it has an element of sex, and sex, or, more correctly, desire for sex, is the primary motivator of the adolescent male.

Automobiles make a lot more sense if you see them as displays and roads as leks. Like grouse, all males are free to display on the lek, and, like grouse, they are unable to choose to not display. But why vehicles? The security and portability factors rate high, as does the capacity to make loud noises, but I suspect that there is something else making a vehicle a desirable part of an adolescent males display kit.

1955, part 1

I graduated from high school in 1955, Wichita East High School, located in Wichita, Kansas. There were 700-900 in my class, I think, but I remember the names of only three, and two of them are dead. Of the two dead ones, one died in prison and the other one probably belonged there. But, in 1995, we were friends, and they had not yet entered into serious criminal careers.

In the fall of 1954, when I began my senior year, I wore blue jeans, with the cuffs rolled up, and the waist pulled down until it barely covered my butt. Above that was usually a plaid shirt, and then the haircut. Mine was a ducktail, with a small pompadour in the front, long sides sweeping back from the temples, all terminating two parallel vertical lines of up swept tips. I held it all in place with styling gel, a necessity because I drove a convertible.

My car was a 1941 Ford convertible, with most of the chrome trim removed, the remaining holes filled with body putty, and the whole thing painted flat primer gray. It was lowered in the rear, had dual pipes and fender skirts. That was a very cool car in those days. I should have attracted young women like honey attracts ants, but they didn't come around much. Maybe it was because I was obviously drunk whenever possible, drove like a madman, and was generally considered to be bound to turn out bad. Actually, I didn't break the law very often, and then only traffic offenses. I didn't have any traffic tickets that year, nor the year before, and was stopped by the police no more than four or five times.

Of course I would turn out bad. I would graduate from high school, be drafted into the army, go to Korea, and freeze my feet off. When the Korean War first ramped up, somebody in the Pentagon decided that Korea was a tropical country, and all the troops were issued tropical gear. Frostbite took off more limbs than did weaponry. There was no avoiding it; it wasn't until the next stupid war, Viet Nam, that evading the draft became popular. In 1954, everyone expected to go, and going to Korea meant slogging through frozen mud in tropical gear until your feet froze off. At one point there was public discussion of the Army's policy on what percentage of a soldier's feet had to be frozen before he was eligible for evacuation from the combat zone. There are worse things than losing a foot, but losing a foot is definitely within the realm of 'turning out bad'.

I wanted to skip the country and go join Fidel in Cuba. Fulgencio Batista, the dictator of Cuba before Fidel, ran a government that could not be favorably compared to that of Zimbabwe today. Fidel wasn't a Marxist, then, or at least he wasn't saying so publicly, and he certainly seemed like a better choice than Batista, (an opinion I still hold). Alas! I was young and ignorant, couldn't speak a word of Spanish, and didn't know how to get to Cuba or find Fidel when I got there. Nevertheless, skulking around in the tropics sounded a lot better than facing Hordes of Red Chinese. I hadn't heard of Viet Nam, yet.

Wanting to join Fidel was an excellent example of testosterone poisoning. Why would any sane person want to go fight in a war in another country when being captured by the enemy meant torture and slow death? That's crazy. Sure, Batista was an sadistic pervert employed by the American Mafia to operate their winter resort, but that was no reason for me to go down there. I wanted to be a cowboy, go save the life of a grateful Cuban matron, and then find release, joy, and rum with her 17 year old daughter. Testosterone does things like that to your mind.

Too young, too dumb, and no money. Fidel went ahead without me, I stayed in school, sort of, and drank. During the first semester of my senior year I would cut out at mid-morning between classes and have a beer or two. The same applied to lunch and mid-afternoon, and as the day progressed there was a decreasing likelihood of my returning to school after a quick beer or two. I had already discovered marijuana and barbiturates, neither of which impressed me as a lot of fun, but I'd try anything that was offered. Mostly, I was just a plain beer drunk.

Marijuana was sold by the match box full. Not the boxes that hold wood kitchen matches, the 'penny' matches that came in a box about the same size as the boxes containing Matchbox Toys. I think a penny box of matches cost a nickel then, but I don't remember; I didn't use matches, being cool, I used my chrome plated Zippo lighter with my initials engraved on the case. Anyway, a match box of muggles, the name it frequently carried in those days, cost $10. I never noticed that a match box of marijuana did much to me, it was not very good pot.

I smoked Pall Mall cigarettes, which I lit with my chrome plated Zippo with my initials engraved on the case, drank Schlitz or Millers, I thought Elvis Presley was a pretentious phony, I liked the Big Bopper, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Ahmad Jamal. I spent most of my time trying to find a young woman who would fornicate with me. I looked like a reasonably healthy young male, especially after I traded the convertible for a Mercury sedan and got a haircut, but that was all illusion. I was a crushed, shredded remnant of a human being drowning in the depths of testosterone. My first thought in the morning, last at night, and almost all in between, were of sex.

With the second semester came a major step to freedom. I only had to take one class to graduate, and it could be any class. I took typing in the afternoon and enrolled in Friends University as a freshman. Suddenly, I was a College Man, and every afternoon I was in a high school class where three fourths of the students were females. I changed to slacks and blazer costumes and did my best to be super cool. None of it did any good: I didn't get laid. Friends is a Quaker school and, although they didn't make a lot of fuss about being religious, most of the students at that time were very religious, studying for a divinity degree. As far as I can recall, Friends was the only school in Wichita at that time offering a B.D. for budding clergy. I decided it was the religious influence that was keeping me from getting laid and carefully avoided churches after that.

Friends was a pleasant place. Most of the classrooms and offices were in a beautiful old building where the stone stairs showed the wear of years of students' feet. I took two classes: Introductory Speech on Tuesday and Thursday, and College Algebra five days per week. I still suffered from serious childhood shyness, and would become almost paralyzed when I tried to speak in front of a group. Taking a speech class was difficult, and that difficulty was multiplied by two other factors: most of the males in the class had been preaching already, filling in for their home church clergy, and there were two knockout babes who always sat on the front row, both seriously infected with the most rigid, unyielding form of religion. They knew I was a sinner, and they glared at me whenever I was trying to speak.

College Algebra was much more pleasant. The instructor was a nice young woman, about whom I had erotic fantasies, and, to my great surprise, I liked the subject matter. She never allowed me to slowly remove her clothes as we laid beneath a blooming apple tree and drank mead from bronze cups, but she did teach me to use logarithms. At that point in life I had to take what was offered and be happy with it.

log₁₀100 = 2

I still drank beer, but I waited until my classes were over at Friends and then I had a beer or three with lunch at a nearby bar. Cool college men aren't supposed to be staggering drunk before lunch but I was sometimes a bit off-balance for my afternoon typing class. Several people asked my why I was drinking so much. What could I tell them? To have talked about Korea would have made me seem like a coward. If I had told them that the world was overrun by lunatics they would have sent me to a psychiatrist. I'd already tried several psychiatrists and found them generally untrustworthy.

Somehow I survived the spring of 1955, graduated from high school, received an 'A' in College Algebra and an 'F' in Speech, and traded my convertible for a 1951 Mercury sedan.

The Korean War was stopped, if not over, Fidel was surviving, and I was out of a job, so I joined the US Army. I was going to be drafted, anyway, and by joining for three years I greatly improved my chances of staying out of the infantry. I signed up to become a tank mechanic, figuring I could handle spending three years up to my elbows in grease.