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.