Farm News 04-06-08

Sunday Morning, after chores, 54°

Weight: 211 (grumble)

KU plays Memphis for the championship Monday evening!

Barn News

Jesse has put one of his ganders in my barn. It's a nice looking white bird with a foul disposition. After it killed one of Jesse's ducks he decided to put it in jail until he can sell it, jail being a stall in my barn. Unless ganders are hatched in an incubator and strongly imprinted with the idea that a human is mother, they can be very mean and hard to handle. This gander obviously thinks that humans are not mother and acts accordingly.

Jesse candled the eggs in the incubator and found that only one was developing. These were early eggs and we didn't expect them to all be fertile. We'll add more eggs soon and see how they develop. Jesse candles the eggs by going into a dark room and shining a flashlight through the egg. After ten days in the incubator you should be able to see a network of blood vessels inside the egg.

Dr. M. News!

Dr. M, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and US Army Captain, now has another accomplishment: she is a mother. Friday, after a great deal of effort, she produced Zachary, a fine looking boy. Congratulations to Dr. M. and Andrew (who was involved in some manner).

Garden

Jesse did the bulk of the tilling and, as usual, Paula did all of the planting. There are onions, peas, and potatoes planted. More news next week.

The Ecstatic Umbrella

Even though the phone company wouldn't allow us to have an entry called 'Homosexual Services' in the yellow pages, we still had a lot of people of alternative sexuality coming through the door and on the phone. We hired Scoop, a cute gay guy, and he moved into the house with us and started helping deal with the gay people. It had an added advantage in that Scoop didn't have the same preferences in entertainment as we did, so Scoop could keep the lights on and the phones answered while the hippies all went to a rock concert.

For Paula and me, the annual Jefferson Airplane concert was a required pilgrimage, and White Rabbit an important anthem. At the first Jefferson Airplane concert we attended the entire audience seemed to be well stoned. When Grace Slick came out on the stage the spotlight lit her, and an audience member stepped to the foot of the stage and held up his arm. Lying in his had was a syringe, filled with something. Grace looked down at it, smiled sweetly, and said, “Not right now, thank you.”

The Velvet Underground didn't come to KC, so for that we substituted the American Ballet Theatre. Those who didn't understand how the American Ballet Theatre fit into it had never seen Swan Lake while on acid. Great ballet immerses you in beauty, a pleasant experience without acid and a mind-blower with it.

I stayed home and minded the store the night Jimi Hendrix came to town. Someone had a good sized delivery van which we filled with hippies bound for the concert. Everyone except the driver took a hit or two of LSD before leaving and they were all taking off by the time they got to the concert hall. Hours later, the van returned. I opened the back double doors and a cloud of hippies gently floated out.

Paula and I had close to the front seats for the Iron Butterfly. Again, we had prepared chemically for the experience, and when they launched into In a Gadda Da Veda we also launched. Forty minutes later they were still In a Gadda Da Veda and we were in a distant place.

There was more going on than just getting high and listening to the music. The music was our political speech. Young people were being killed by cops and national guard troops, not for throwing bombs, but for carrying signs or walking on the streets. They were being executed for not wanting to kill in Viet Nam.

Books

The Snake Stone by Jason Goodwin

This is the second book in the Investigator Yashim series, set in Istanbul in the 1830's. This guy is a good writer, and one with an amazing vocabulary. For instance, do you know what it means to riddle a stove? It means that he shook the ashes down through the grate into the ash box, leaving the coals on top. This book sent me to the dictionary, and beyond, many times. It also sent me to online maps of Istanbul and surroundings. I didn't have to do the lookups to understand the book, the book just kept piquing my curiosity. So, I finally learned that the Fener district of Istanbul used to be the Phanar district, and is the source of the term Phanariot, referring to Greek families that had resided in Constantinople from before the Ottoman conquest.

Byzantium was a Greek city, conquered by the Romans and renamed Constantinople, and then conquered by the Turks and renamed Istanbul. Modern buildings stand on streets that were laid out 2,000 years earlier. The book brings all that history into focus. Goodwin studied Byzantine history at Cambridge University and wrote a history of the Ottoman Empire before he started writing fiction. I think The Janissary Tree, the first of the series, and The Snake Stone are well worth reading (especially if you like Istanbul, Kate).

Sam Chance by Benjamin Capps

This is a different kind of cowboy story. It is told as a biography of a Texas rancher, without gunfights except for a few skirmishes with Indians. It's an interesting book with a few lessons for us about the problems we face today. Also, it's in large print.

If we didn't have large print westerns in the libraries half the old men in this county would forget how to read.