Farm News 03-30-08

Sunday morning, after chores, 47°

Weight: 206 lbs. Progress? Yes. But achieved at the cost of not drinking. Bah!

Barn News

The bunnies have started learning about the world. They have visited the dentist's office, made several trips to the library, been to the chiropractor's office, and had two exciting days in the elementary school in the past week. They have been very busy little bunnies.

Sally spent Wednesday night with Bucky, so she should have baby bunnies by Monday, April 28. Sally was quite happy to spend the night with Bucky, unlike Suzette, who is as sour about mating as she is about everything else.

I've been caring for the goose eggs in the incubator. They have to be turned every day, soon it will be twice a day, and they have to be watered. Goose eggs expect to incubate in a humid environment. In nature, the mother will take a daily bath and return to the nest with damp breast feathers. I keep a pan of water in the bottom of the incubator which has to be filled every few days.

The vultures are back. The carrion eating birds commonly called buzzards, not a rock group. Now the dead animals that have been lying around stinking will be cleaned up. It's easy to tell the difference between eagles and vultures: the vultures fly with their wing tips lifted, their wings forming a shallow V; eagles fly with their wings perfectly flat from tip to tip. They are the only large, black birds that you might expect to see. Juvenile eagles are all black and don't develop white heads until they are several years old. Usually the eagles, young and old, depart for the long days and good fishing of the northland by the time the buzzards appear. In the fall the buzzards fly south, usually just before the eagles return from the north.

The Wichita Umbrella

Hippies were not wanted in Wichita, but they were there, most of them home grown. Wichita is not the kind of place to which you run, it is the kind of place from which you run, thus most of the hippies were home grown. There were a few from Kingman and other places west of Wichita, but not many.

Being the kind of city it was, hippies had a hard time in Wichita and needed a place like the Ecstatic Umbrella, so we went about helping organize one, the Wichita Umbrella. Nobody was ecstatic in Wichita. The first step was to identify and enlist a group of people with sufficient political clout that they could make the cops think twice about simply assassinating the Umbrella staff. You think I'm exaggerating? No. Wichita was that kind of place and had that kind of cops.

Working through our network of clergy, we identified about a half dozen clergy in Wichita who weren't on the side of Pontius Pilate. They, in turn, helped us identify about twenty other people in the community who might be helpful. We spent several months on this process – if only we'd had Google. Finally, we were ready to enlist the board of directors for a no-for-profit corporation that would funnel money to the Wichita Umbrella. I nominated two people, Don Pedroja and Sam Nunemaker, to be co-directors, went down to Wichita, got stoned with them, and talked them into taking the job.

To begin enlisting the members of the board I had to clean up a bit. The first things to wash off were the cops who kept following me around in their spare time. I had somebody drive me to the KU Med Center where I got out of the car carrying a suspicious looking brown paper bag. Sure enough, two guys got out of a car behind me and started to follow me into the Med Center, probably hoping to be able to bust me for carrying drugs across a state line to the lab for analysis. I went in the door a bit ahead of them, cut to the right, slipped into a stairwell, went down one story, changed stairwells, and went down to the first sub-basement. There, I took off my pants and shirt, slipped into the pants and shirt I was carrying in the bag, and then walked through the tunnels to another building, where I came up one level to a barber shop. I had them give me a short haircut, slipped on a pair of horn rimmed glasses, and walked out the other side of the Med Center, clean as could be, took a cab to the bus station, and got on the bus for Wichita.

Once in Wichita I started talking to various respectable citizens about how we needed to help the poor lost children on the streets. I checked into a hotel where I had a reservation under my favorite name, Joseph Grogan, and felt safe for the first time in months. The recruiting went well, and soon I was ready to go back to KC. The evening before I left I met secretly with Bear (Don Pedroja). We smoked a couple of joints and he gave me a little ball of hash. On the way back to the hotel a cop car slowly cruised by me a couple of times, so I took out the hash and cleaned up by swallowing it.

When I got to the hotel I went to the elevator and punched the button. The doors opened, I started to step in, and realized that there were two DEA agents in the elevator. I also realized I was getting high. Those guys never blinked. They knew me as a long hair, not a guy in slacks and white shirt, with short hair, wearing horn rimmed glasses. They got off on the floor below mine, I went on up, went to my room, turned on the TV, laid down on the bed, and soared off into outer space for the next five or six hours.

The first home of the Wichita Umbrella was a huge old house that looked haunted in the daytime and was very spooky at night. One of the residents, brought in by Sam to scare off normal people, was Palmer, a guy about six and a half feet tall who weighed maybe 150 pounds, looked like he had never been exposed to sunlight, and had stringy black hair hanging down to his shoulders. His costumes fit his appearance – the first time I saw him was in a dimly lit hallway and he scared the crap out of me. Palmer didn't talk, he sort of croaked, and his favorite language was one he made up as he spoke it. Sam figured Palmer was a fake filter, people who were faking a freakout would take one look at Palmer and leave, but people who were really freaking out just thought he was part of their delusions. The only time the cops came busting through the front door Palmer delayed them in the hallway for twenty minutes or so, giving the residents who didn't want to be found by the police plenty of time to escape out the back.

The old house had been condemned, and the authorities soon forced the Umbrella out. Their next home was an old church, complete with a large adjoining parish hall. In the sanctuary, behind the altar, was a large zinc tank formerly used to wash away the sins of the faithful. Sam and Bear thought it was a fine place to put groups of stoned youngsters who needed to have their heads rinsed out. They equipped the tank with a candle and left the trippers to their heavenly visions.

The more interesting drug users entertained in the parish hall. I sat in there for three or four hours one night listening to two who had been shooting speed and sniffing toluene describe the battle going on in the middle of the floor between Jesus and the devil. In KC we seldom saw any inhalant use, but in Wichita it was widespread. Three day speed runs were rare in KC and common in Wichita. Few KC hippies carried weapons and most Wichita hippies carried some sort of protection. In KC you had to watch out for the cops, in Wichita you had to consider everyone dangerous. Different worlds.

Late one night, a few months after the Umbrella moved into the old church, a bunch of unmarked cars showed up and discharged about twenty cops, all in plain clothes, off duty, and armed with pistols and shotguns. They quietly surrounded the buildings, then woke everyone up, and shoved them outside into the driveway between the church and parish hall. There, they lined them up against the wall of the church, lined up in front of them with shotguns pointing, and told them they had one week to shut down the place and leave. Bear said he didn't think they'd try that again, so there was no reason to leave. Sam said he couldn't count to one so he wouldn't know when the week was up.

It couldn't last, though, and everyone knew it. The Wichita Umbrella was a tiny thorn in the skin of Wichita, but without active civil rights organizations to help protect it, it was doomed. Bear started over-using speed and opiates and Sam, who had never been too stable, became too erratic to function. Slowly, the organization crumbled, but it sure was interesting for a while.

Books

The FOOLs held their Spring Book Sale this past week. Being the Chief Fool, I helped supervise the old women who sorted and put out the books for sale. That gave me the opportunity to snatch treasures and bring them home. Among the treasures is a copy of Roadside Kansas, which I recommend for anyone who is traveling in Kansas. I already have two copies, my first needs to be rebound, and will give this copy to anyone who would like to donate $5 to become a FOOL.

Bankok 8 by John Burdett

I've really enjoyed Burdett's books. Bangkok 8 is the first of the series, followed by Bangkok Tattoo and Bangkok Haunts. Highly recommended.

The Tombstone Conspiracy by Tim Champlin

This is a good western and is available in a large print edition.

Travels with Zenobia by Rose Wilder Lane and Helen Dore Boylston, edited by William Holtz

In 1927 Rose Lane and Helen Boylston, accompanied by Yvonne, their French maid, set out from Paris bound for Albania in Zenobia, their new 1927 Ford Model T, a very modern Model T in that it was painted maroon instead of black. It was equipped with carbide lamps for headlights and was started with a hand crank. Rose Lane, the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House books, was an idealist seeking a society of noble savages in Albania.

The book is a compilation from the journals the two women kept during the trip. The writing is clear and light, bubbling with good humor, like a glass of champagne on a warm day. A preface and an epilogue by Holtz sets the stage and closes the book with affection and understanding. I think it is a delightful book, and I'm very glad I happened upon it at the library book sale.

Farm News 03-23-08

Sunday morning, after chores, 40°

Weight 210, no progress

Barn News

The bunnies have their eyes open. They aren't ready to jump out of the nest box, yet, but that will probably happen this week. Jesse, a young man who helps me occasionally, has Sally, his beautiful Red Satin rabbit, in my rabbitry. He hasn't been able to find a good Satin buck, so we're going to breed her to Bucky this week. More bunnies should appear in 32 days.

On Wednesday and Thursday Lucy and Hop goats escaped from the pasture. Few animals are more destructive than a goat, so I've been trying to contain them. Hop is now tethered with a rope, he has learned to jump over fences, a very bad skill for a goat. I called today to schedule a date for him to be butchered, but they are booked up until May 12. Hop is going to get used to being tethered over the next six weeks.

Jesse has agreed to buy Lucy. He is a good hand with animals, gentle and caring, and he has a cute young cousin who will help him spoil Lucy. Lucy expects to be praised and fussed over by young girls.

The geese, who are at Jesse's place, have been exhibiting some courtship behavior but he hasn't yet seen any actual mating. I miss them and would like to have them home soon, but first they need to have mated so they will produce fertile eggs. There are nine goose eggs from Jesse's geese in my incubator at the moment, due to hatch about April 20, the first day of Passover.

No eggs from the ducks, yet. They are showing some courtship behavior but don't seem to be too serious. I have three hens and three drakes, now, but who knows how many will be eaten by predators before I can hatch some more. Ducks are very suicidal.

The Worst Morning of My Life

At 71, looking back, I can see that some of the most erotic nights of my life occurred in Paris, thanks mainly to the antics of Solange, but Paris was also the scene of the very worst morning of my life, due, somewhat, to the absence of Solange. Solange LeCoq was a nice young woman with a spectacular body which she displayed five evenings per week in a night club on the Champs d'Elysées. Her job was to stand around, topless, holding a tray of cigarettes and matches for the patrons. She was the greatest encouragement to the development of lung cancer I have ever seen.

When I was in Paris Solange would usually come to my favorite bar after she got off work, about 1:00 am. We would have a few drinks and then go somewhere and engage in various activities which placed no burden on organs above the neck. We weren't lovers, really, just friends, and she was a very engaging friend. Occasionally, Solange wouldn't appear, which usually meant she had met someone willing to spend a lot of money enjoying a late night with her. Solange wasn't a prostitute but she was smart enough to sometimes skip me for someone who would treat her to breakfast at a great restaurant. I never asked her if she had sex with other men because I didn't care, I would have settled for the crumbs any time. We were in Paris and the morals of the American Mid-West were as alien as those of another planet.

By 3:00 am on the worst morning of my life, I had decided that Solange wasn't going to appear. I drowned my sorrow and frustration in a few more drinks and went out to my car, intending to sleep in it that night. My car was an Izard TS400 coupe, a tiny, tiny, elegant and rare sports car. It had its idiosyncrasies, like all rare cars. The doors locked only by inserting the key in the outside door handle and turning it; there were no internal gadgets for unlocking the doors. Once locked the doors could be opened from the inside, but from the outside the key was required.

The car was parked on the street in front of the bar, a very narrow street with room for a row of parked vehicles and one lane of traffic. When I left the bar I went to my car, locked the passenger door with the key, then opened the driver door, locked it with the key, climbed inside, and closed it. I opened the window on the passenger side about an inch, tilted the seat back, and passed out to dream of Solange.

Four or five hours later the sun was up and I woke up feeling the effects of a night spent drinking. I grumbled a bit and decided that only a cup of coffee would save me. I started the car and pulled out into the single lane left for traffic, and realized something was wrong with the car. I opened the door, stepped out, slammed the door closed behind me, and walked around the car. The problem, I saw, was that the right rear tire was flat. Then I discovered the BIG problem: the doors were locked, the engine was running at an idle, the only key was in the ignition switch, and the car was blocking the only lane of traffic. Moments later the first truck driver began loudly and forcefully commenting on my ancestry.

After what seemed to be hours, I realized that the right window was open about an inch. A short distance down the street I was blocking an old woman was using her broom to sweep the steps to her door. Slowly, slowly, my poor befuddled mind realized that, with great luck, I could insert a broom handle through the gap in the right door window and then use it to possibly open the driver's door. Suddenly, it seemed to me, I was intelligent, again.

After less than five minutes of trying to explain in my execrable French that I wanted to use her broom, the woman either understood me or decided to yield to whatever stupidity in which I was engaged, and handed her broom to me. Aha! I grasped the broom by the handle in my right hand and the bristles in my left, inserted it through the gap in the right window, and began trying to open the left door. That was when I realized that the old woman had been sweeping dog shit off her steps, and that much of that dog shit was now in my left hand. Being hung-over and stupid, I switched hands so that everything would be even, and then, miraculously, managed to pop open the left door.

God smiles on the helpless, except in Paris. I returned the broom to the old woman, who sniffed in disdain at the dog shit on the handle, me, and Americans in general, and I set about trying to find something to use to wipe my hands. All I could find was a small paper napkin in the gutter, but by rubbing my hands on the sidewalk and then wiping with the napkin I was able to remove the worst of the shit. Finally, I could reach in the car and turn off the engine.

Next, I had to change the tire. Sacre bleu! The spare was inflated. Changing the tire was a quick job, even though I had never changed a tire on this car before. I lowered the jack, finished tightening the lug nuts, jumped in the car, started it, put it in gear, went about ten feet, and the engine died. It was out of gas. Another truck driver began loudly and forcefully commenting on my ancestry. French truck drivers have no pity.

Bars outnumber gas stations in Paris by about 10,000:1. I couldn't remember ever seeing a gas station in Paris. The truck driver shrugged. (I had pushed my car out of the way, he moved his truck to the spot my car had occupied and was unloading it.) I asked a taxi driver and he shouted something unintelligible and drove away. Finally, a car turned onto the street and stopped behind the unloading truck. When the driver of the car had finished loudly and forcefully commenting on the ancestry of the truck driver, I asked him if he knew where I could buy gasoline. He gave me directions in English!

It was a long walk, and, when I finally arrived at the gas station, I spent a considerable amount of time trying to explain what I needed. I think the operator understood me immediately but was amused by my attempts to explain in French. Finally, I was trudging back to my car with a small can holding one liter of gasoline. I reached my car and poured the gasoline into the filler tube. That was when I discovered that the car had a reserve tank, and, by simply turning a valve, I could have started the car and driven away.

Three days later I could no longer detect the smell of dog shit on my hands.

Books

Dakota by Martha Grimes

Dakota is the sequel to Biting the Moon, books in which the central character is Andi Oliver, or Olivier, a young woman who wakes up in a motel not knowing her name or anything of her life prior to her waking. She thinks she has been raped during the night but doesn't remember. In both books she fights cruelty to animals, a peripheral battle in the first book and a central issue in the second. I recommend reading the books in sequence, just so you know how she deals with the person she thinks has raped her, which is at the core of the first book.

Farm News 03-16-08

Sunday morning, after chores

Barn News

Suzette has four bunnies, I miscounted the first time. Three of them are spotted and one is all black. They are now becoming round little balls instead of long sausages. They have their own fur and kick off their covering of Suzette's fur when the weather is warm.

Dave Ware, my brother, died this week, and I am not up to writing the weekly Farm News. I'll have something written for next Sunday, I hope.

Books

Biting the Moon by Martha Grimes

An Unfortunate Prairie Occurrence by Jamie Harrison

Farm News 03-09-08

Sunday morning, after chores, 32°

Weight: 207 lbs.

Farm News is on the web at http://idfafarmnews.blogspot.com/ Click on the link and it will take you there. Use the Favorites or Bookmarks menu to save the location. If you know how to register it as an RSS feed, you can get it that way, also.

Barn News

On Friday, Suzette started pulling fur. When pregnant rabbits are about to have bunnies they start pulling fur from their chest and stomach and lining the nest box with it. Of course, bits of the fur go everywhere, sticking in all the water dishes in the rabbitry. They pull out an amazing amount of fur. Her nest box is 9” wide, 11” high, and 14” deep, and she manages to pretty well fill it with fur and still have enough left over to drift all over in the rabbitry.

I suppose that pulling the fur from their stomachs makes it easier for the babies to nurse, but, when I look at Suzette, the only bald place is a spot about the size of a dime on her chest. Rabbits have a lot of fur.

Friday night was one of the coldest nights of the winter, a great night for having babies, but Suzette didn't do it. Saturday afternoon Caitlyn came over from next door and asked to check on Suzette. We went to the rabbitry and I saw the fur moving around in the nest box, a sure sign that there are wiggly things under the fur. We looked at one bunny and I counted at least five. Hurray! Baby bunnies!

Free Rice

I think I've mentioned this before. Go to www.freerice.org and improve your vocabulary.

The Ecstatic Umbrella

After telling a group of clergymen that Kansas City needed a place where hippies could find a place to spend the night, or find a free meal, or recover from a bad drug experience, I met with them four or five more times. Vann, a Methodist, was the spark plug, and he organized a not-for-profit called Young Adult Projects to collect and distribute money for the project. The Methodist Metropolitan Planning Commission provided several thousand dollars and rented a house near the Westport area. Paula, Terry, Bob, and I agreed to live there and operate it for $150 per month each, and we were suddenly in business.

We needed a name, and, somehow, The Ecstatic Umbrella was chosen. Among the very first people to spend a night on the floor was a nice young couple from Canada. The guy was a good artist, and he drew a picture of a cat sitting under an umbrella and smoking a hookah, which we adopted as our logo. It became obvious that we weren't going to be able to live on $150 per month, so we increased our pay to a whopping $200 per month, where it stayed. We installed telephones with two lines, had business cards printed with the address and phone numbers beside the logo, and started passing out cards and fliers to hippies on the streets.

After a couple of months Bill came by to visit. Bill was president of NACHO, the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations, a national fairy club. Bill explained that gays had many of the same problems as did hippies and needed a central information center. We installed a third phone line and started becoming familiar with community resources for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and other perverts. And then we got into our first battle.

The telephone company would not put an entry in the yellow pages for homophile, homosexual,gay, queer, or anything else that might identify an entry for a gay organization. I thought that was a very narrow minded attitude and started trying to tell them so. As anyone who has had a mistake on their phone bill knows, telephone companies tend to have exceptionally poor hearing. Southwestern Bell, the company in Kansas City at that time, was almost completely deaf.

We called, we went to their offices, we yelled, we screamed, and we threatened, but they didn't seem to be able to hear us. It peaked out when a young lawyer went to pay his phone bill, with no intent of joining our protest, and he was shot by one of the armed guards the company kept to protect themselves from people armed with flowers and long hair. That incident made the point for us that the phone company was not going to budge unless we resorted to violence, which we were unwilling to do, and we dropped our campaign for an entry in the yellow pages.

A lot of hippies were coming in with bags of pills or white powders and asking, “Is this good dope?” The easiest way to find out was to take some and see what happened, but that occasionally produced undesirable side effects. At that time the KU Med Center library was open to the general public, so I took advantage of this and, for months, spent most of my free time sitting in the library trying to learn a bit of psychopharmacology. It was time well spent.

I learned, for instance, that the national hospital for drug addicts at Lexington, Kentucky, published an annual report that talked about the improvements in their treatment methods. When you looked at the numbers they published to support their claims of improvements, though, you would see that there had been no improvement in results for over ten years. That was an interesting bit of information.

I also found and read the first (and only) report of the International Conference on Ethnopsychopharmacology. Now that was interesting. It was a collection of papers on what sorts of things various ethnic groups used to get high. That was where I first learned about such exotic drugs as bufotenin, myristicin, and yohimbine. None of them sounded as pleasant as good old LSD, but it was interesting to read about the rituals associated with the use of other drugs. Ritual, I realized, was an important part of psychedelic drug use.

While sitting in the library I met a pharmacologist, and I described to him the problems we were having helping hippies identify their various pills and powders. A few months later he came up with the money to hire a chemist to work in the pharmacology lab analyzing pills and powders. I recommended a chemist I knew who needed a job and had been overly industrious in using our 'try it and see' method of analysis.

Steve was a good guy, but he was a gay, drug-saturated, schizophrenic, which often made him miserable. Psychedelic drugs are not good for schizophrenics, so I figured he would be in good hands working in a pharmacology lab, where he could receive expert attention when he needed it. People would bring samples of their powders and pills to the Umbrella, and I would take them across the state line to the KU Med Center, where Steve would then make an attempt to analyze them. I tried to keep the samples small enough that Steve would use chemistry instead of ingestion to analyze them.

The drug analysis service was working out fairly well, so well, in fact, that it attracted the attention of the Feds. They came by the Umbrella and informed me that I was violating federal laws by carrying drugs across a state line, and they would catch me and put me in jail if I continued. Then they said that I could take the drugs to the Midwest Research Institute, in Kansas City, Missouri, without violating federal laws. They even gave me a tour of the lab at MRI

What a joke. As we walked into the lab there was a large flask full of a yellow liquid on a shelf with a strip of masking tape on it marked “THC”. There was a similar flask marked “LSD”, and so on. As an initial test, I sent them a sample of pure cornstarch; the report I received said that the sample contained heroin, LSD, amphetamine, and strychnine. Why do so many intelligent people act completely stupid when they work for the feds? For real analysis, I continued to use Steve at the Med Center.

The streets of Kansas City were overflowing with runaway kids who were easy prey for the various carnivores who hunted there. The prevailing public attitude was that runaways were a problem for the police. The police recognized the problem, but offered no solution that was acceptable to the kids. American was at war with her children at that time, mainly, it seemed, because the kids didn't want to be drafted and sent to Viet Nam. Whatever the reason, lots and lots of kids were running away. The kids needed a safe place to live.

I went back to the preachers and made a pitch. They came through with a big house, which we named The House at Pooh Corner. It took about a week to fill it up. The first rules were simple: (1) no drugs or sex in the house, (2) keep it cool and don't attract attention, and (3) allow us to call their parents and tell the parents the kids were safe. We wouldn't tell the parents where they were (that was before caller ID), but we would assure them that that the kids were safe, clothed, and fed. I quickly realized that the easiest way to get through the conversation with the parents was to tell them that I was a minister and that the kids were in a church supported facility.

Well, I was an Acid Priest, but that didn't really make me a minister, and I didn't like lying to the parents. The solution was that a group of clergy came to the Umbrella, put their hands on our heads, and ordained us. We all took it fairly seriously. I thought about it and finally decided that the Golden Rule, taken in the proscriptive sense, i.e. don't do things to other people you wouldn't want them to do to you, applied to all people, but ordination required you take it in the prescriptive sense, that you should do those things that you thought should be done. Not that we had much time for philosophical and ethical speculation, the place was a mad house a great deal of the time.

We were receiving calls from people considering suicide, calls from people who were lost and frightened, calls from people who wanted to know where to buy some pot ( we didn't help with that), calls from people needing a place to stay, and calls from people who were having various sorts of psychotic episodes. The psychotics provided some exciting moments. One of the most exciting occurred when a guy came in the front door, ran through two rooms to a large, closed, window, leaped through the window, scattering glass everywhere, ran back out to the street, and slammed into the side of a police car that was driving by slowly to see if they could cause trouble. The two cops jumped out, pulled their guns, and arrested the guy on the spot. I'm sure they were real sympathetic to his problem, whatever it was.

Whoops! Out of time for this week.

Books

Morgan Valley by Lauran Paine

This book is about middle-aged men coming to terms with the fact that the West is changing. There is one shootout, but it serves mostly to bring the characters together at the right time. The plot is a bit convoluted. I read the large print edition and, like most large print editions, it wasn't carefully proof-read.

The Janissary Tree by Jason Goodwin

Whew! Talk about complex, convoluted plots, this one takes the prize. Given that, I still think it is one of the best books I've read in a while. It's set in Istanbul in 1833. [Kate, you have to read this one.] Yashim, the central character, is a eunuch who acts as an investigator for the royal household. Being a eunuch, he has access to the harem, and the Sultan's mother relies on him for information. This is Byzantium, and plots swirl within plots in a truly byzantine maze.

My favorite character is Preen, a trans-sexual eunuch. She is silly, flighty, and swishy, but, like many trannies, a loyal friend.

I recommend it, but be prepared, it will send you to the dictionary. I'll help you get started: Phanariots are the Greek families of Istanbul who were living there prior to the conquest by the Ottomans in 1453; a tekke is a place where Sufi mystics worship. Wikipedia was of more help than the printed dictionaries when I read this book.

There is a sequel to this book in the library, but it is checked out. I hope it comes back, soon.

Dude, Where's My Country by Michael Moore

I've been wanting to read something by Michael Moore, and this one was good enough. He's pissed off at the establishment, and especially George W. Bush. I can understand that. Like most pissed off people, he tends to get carried away with the rhetoric occasionally, but he makes some good points, too. He sometimes conflates the actions of George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, which weakens his arguments.

He says that if we lived in a world with justice, George W. would be called to account for starting, and then horribly mismanaging, the war in Iraq. Well, I agree with that, but I know that justice isn't always available.

The book is outdated, now. It was published in 2003, and now George W. is about to leave office, I hope. It will be interesting to find, in a few decades, who the historians will call the worst president, George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, or Lyndon Johnson.

Farm News 03-02-08

Sunday morning, after chores, 68°

Weight: 207 lbs.

Barn News

Lucy the goat is sweet, friendly, and provides baby goats, but I think it's time for me to give up keeping a goat. Lucy is for sale to a good home, preferably someplace where she will have a nice young girl to scratch her head and talk to her.

Suzette is due to have bunnies this week.

The three geese are now without a gander after a coyote took away Sarge and Butch and are starting to show signs of sexual frustration, so I'm going to try to find them a lover.

Flock

Flock is a customization of Firefox, the web browser, that attempts to make the 'web experience' feel more like interacting with friends and colleagues, instead data and text. I tried it and I like it. You can download it from Download.com by clicking here for Flock.

Flock will be my primary web browser for a while, a load on startup, always ready program. It will have its box down on the system tray, and when not using it I never close it with the red 'X', but minimize it with the '_'. When I get the GeezerNet Server running again (the server is sitting next to me with its cover off and a stack of Network Interface Cards lying next to it), I will investigate the possibilities of configuring Joomla, the system I used to create the GeezerNet.com web site, to make use of some of the special features of Flock.

I'm looking at Flock to see if it has the potential to bring together the web services most useful to seniors: managing the online family photo album, email with photos and videos, voice and video chat, reunion planning, and genealogy; and do it gracefully.

The Road to the Ecstatic Umbrella

After being escorted out of Illinois we crossed Missouri at night, arriving in Lawrence shortly after sunrise. We staggered into a friend's house and fell asleep, waking up in time to turn on the TV and watch the Chicago police trample the constitution. Mayor Daley, acting for his friend, Lyndon Johnson, turned the police loose on the anti-war protesters gathered in Chicago. The National Guard was called in to surround Lincoln Park, where most of the hippies had gathered. The Guard left only one exit, and that was through a double line of club swinging Chicago cops.

We were grateful that we had been raided in Chicago and left early, but ashamed that we weren't there standing beside our fellow Americans who were under attack by the forces of evil.

I was furious. This was my country, a nation in whose military I had served and to whose constitution I had given my allegiance. Those goddamned cops were beating people who had committed no crime, who were only exercising their constitutional rights to free speech. I had given three years of my life to supposedly protect this country from the godless communists, and now the cops were acting like they owned this nation, like Americans with long hair weren't really citizens. The lawless cops that I thought were mostly confined to Alabama and Mississippi were running Chicago, too.

I wanted to take it easy, smoke some dope, and enjoy the flowers, but that wasn't going to be possible. It was time for real Americans to stand up and try to take back our nation. I didn't know how to start a revolution and didn't care; Tom Paine didn't know, either, but he did it. But, and there is always a 'but', most of those cops who wanted to kill me, and who I would maybe have to kill to start a revolution, had little kids at home, and I couldn't live with killing a kid's daddy. My father died when I was eight, and that shouldn't happen to any kid.

Somehow, I ended up in Kansas City, Kansas, working as an electrician's helper at the KU Med Center. It was a reasonable job and I sort of enjoyed it. I was living in a house about a block from the Med Center with David, Fred, and Terry, fellow hippies, and Fred's sister, Paula, who insisted on moving in with us. The house was a dump, but handy, because Terry and I were both working at the Med Center.

Terry was a CO, a conscientious objector, who, instead of being drafted into the Army, was doing alternative service at the Med Center for two years. He was thinking about going to seminary and becoming a minister, but first he had to satisfy his alternative service requirements. There was a draft, then. You were drafted into the Army and went to Viet Nam to kill people with yellow skins, you went to Canada to live, or you did alternative service as a CO. To be a CO you had to prove that you were, and had been, a member of a religious group, such as the Mennonites or Quakers, who didn't approve of killing people. Most Christian denominations approved of killing people as long as you did it in large groups.

Terry was sort of religious, and some religious holiday came up, I think it was Easter. Terry had been working in his room for several weeks on a secret project. The morning of the holiday, as I said, Easter, I think, Terry erected in the front yard a cross, a black cross. Crucified on it was a pink Easter Bunny, and, stabbed through the bunny's heart, was an American flag, with red paint running from the wound down the front of the bunny. Just in case no one happened to notice, Terry called the newspapers and told them about it.

Terry's bunny was on the front page of one paper, which was more than enough to get us evicted. We were able to leave before they burned the house down around us.

We found another home, in a more desirable area, although it was farther from the Med Center, which didn't make any difference, because we had been fired. Our new home, on Southwest Trafficway, was a big, stately place with many bedrooms but no furniture. It was wonderful. We found several very old-fashioned wooden wheelchairs, which, in such a large house, were ideal furnishings. Steve moved in with us and brought a super huge stereo system, Dixie joined Fred on the third floor, David bought a hundred hits of LSD, I picked up a bag of good weed, and we were ready to live like good hippies. Not a single one of us had a source of income, but, what the hell, we were hippies.

Spiro Agnew came to town. Never heard of Spiro Agnew? He was Richard Nixon's Vice-Presidential running mate. Later, before Richard Nixon resigned from office, Spiro Agnew resigned (first things first) after it came out that he had been receiving brown paper bags full of money. Spiro was the source of such great quotes as “nattering nabobs of negativity” and, my favorite, “effete intellectual snobs,” both referring to people who could read a newspaper without moving their lips. There was, of course, to be a protest of some sort; I have no idea who organized it, but I sure as hell intended to attend.

I was leaning up against a parked car, occasionally shouting slogans at the hotel where Agnew was staying, when some guy in a suit came up and leaned up against the car beside me. “I'm a minister,” he said, “and some of us ministers would like to know what we can do to help the hippies who are coming to Kansas City. Will you come and talk to us?”

It all sounded like bullshit, but the guy seemed to be sincere. I talked to the rest of the people in the house and, after ten or fifteen minutes of deep thought, we decided to accept his invitation. We were to meet with him and some other preachers at 7:30 pm on a Wednesday evening at St. Paul's School of Theology in Kansas City. I called him at the phone number he had given me and accepted.

At about 6:30 on the appointed Wednesday evening I took one of the hundred hits of LSD David had purchased, and at 7:30 Terry and I showed up at St. Paul's School of Theology to talk to some preachers. There were eight or ten various preachers there, and they all seemed to be fairly decent sorts. They didn't ask to start with a prayer, which made me feel better about the whole thing.

We all bullshitted around for awhile, talking about the war and hippies. Then the subject of drugs came up. I told them I was, at that moment, quite stoned on LSD and becoming more stoned by the second, but, as their wives weren't there, I wouldn't rape anybody. That announcement stirred up a little interest, but, as I wasn't doing anything weird, they relaxed and went back to acting like preachers.

Finally, one of them asked me what the hippies in Kansas City needed. I pointed out to them that there were thousands of hippies on the streets, most of them with nowhere to spend a night, no idea as to where they could go to make a free phone call to their parents, and no place to find a free meal if they were broke and hungry. That lit a spark.

That evening, at St. Paul's School of Theology, a seed was planted that would, in a few months, become the Ecstatic Umbrella.

Books

I've been reading quite a bit this week. Maybe that has something to do with my lack of success in losing weight.

Dust by Martha Grimes

Martha Grimes is one of my favorite mystery writers. The early Richard Jury mysteries were lightweight and funny, but they accumulated depth as the series continues. Dust, the latest, is interwoven with the novels of Henry James, only one of which I have ever read and I don't remember anything about that one. My ignorance of James didn't keep me from enjoying the mystery, though.

Grimes's books almost always include a child and a dog as central characters.

The Time of the Texan by Lauran Paine

Lauran Paine has written over 900 books, and most of them a generally worth reading. The Time of the Texan is full of Texas jingoism, scornful of the Mexicans, and generally a bunch of nonsense, but it has strong men, a pretty woman, and daring deeds, so it's worth reading.

Stranger in Paradise by Robert B. Parker

This is a Jesse Stone mystery, and a good one. I had to work in the library for Paula right after I finished it and I picked up another one. It doesn't seem to be important to read them in the proper sequence.

Death in Paradise by Robert B. Parker

The last one was so good I decided to read another.

Amelia Peabody's Egypt edited by Elizabeth Peters and Kristen Whitbread

Elizabeth Peters, who has a Ph.D. in Egyptology from the University of Chicago, wrote a delightful series of novels featuring Amelia Peabody, an outspoken early suffragette. The books are set in the 1880 to 1910 period in Egypt, where Amelia and Emerson, her husband, are early archaeologists. Amelia Peabody's Egypt is a coffee table book, full of interesting photos and engravings, that covers the history and geography of Egypt during Amelia's times. Even if you don't read the Amelia Peabody books, this one is worth having.

Summer of the Drums by T. V. Olsen

This is a good adventure story for boys, set in western Michigan Territory (now Wisconsin) during Black Hawk's last war. There are no six shooters here, just muskets and a few flintlock rifles.