Farm News 03-09-08

Sunday morning, after chores, 32°

Weight: 207 lbs.

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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.