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.

Farm News 05-13-07

Sunday morning, after chores


Grandson

Grandson Julian Alexander DeWolfe arrived Monday, quietly and purposefully, according to my daughter. She claims he's cute. He definitely looks like the sort of baby that will make women warble out, “Oooooohhh,” the universal call made by a human female when she sees a cute infant. Quite a few men will make a similar sound, but from males there is a briefer call with less warbling.

Julian was born with the ability to utter a call that attracts the attention of all adult females within hearing and leads them to display behaviors indicating anxiety if it continues for any length of time. Within twenty four hours of birth he will have trained an adult female to be completely devoted to his well-being and general happiness. That's a hell of a good trick that might help him get through life as an adult male.

I haven't met Julian, yet, but I'm sure he smells funny, all infants do. Women generally think that infants smell wonderful and are able to distinguish their own infants from others by smell alone. Men, if they have any sense, don't mention that the baby smells funny. Several times every day the baby will develop a very strong stench, meaning it is time for a diaper change. Women use the occasion to engage in even more cooing and warbling while they clean up the mess and put fresh diapers on the baby.

Sometime close to the end of this month I hope to travel to Boulder to inspect Julian and make certain he is suitable as a family member. Although my standards are less strict than those of Leviticus, still, a family needs some sort of standards. Generally, I like to check to see that he has hair instead of scales and that his pupils are round. My daughter has assured me that he meets these qualifications but I know better than to believe everything a new mother says about her baby.

Julian developed a slight jaundice shortly after birth, but he has recovered and is now ready to grow up. I'm looking forward to when he becomes a teenager.

Bostonians

A reader writes:

Hopefully I'm not jinxing anything by saying this early, but everything has gone so according to plan so far that I think (hope!) it's safe--huge congratulations on the impending arrival of your latest addition to the farm! (I know his parents will insist he really lives in Colorado, but that's just a technicality, really.)

Meanwhile, to distract you from the suspense of waiting, I will tell you of my observation of a few weeks ago. You have both been to Boston, so you know that Bostonians are very friendly people who will cheerfully help a complete stranger of questionable intelligence, say, load a free kitchen table into the back of a Toyota (not that I would know anything about this personally), or attempt to give you directions to wherever you are trying to go, even though the phrase "You can't get there from here" most likely originated here. (The original would have been something more along the lines of, "You really shouldn't try to get there from here, because if by some miracle you don't end up in Rhode Island, some piece of tunnel or overpass will probably fall on you on the way.")

Despite what I believe is genuine native good-heartedness, there are two instances where Bostonians cannot seem to help becoming homicidal, and those are: a) If you are wearing a Yankees hat or any other item of Yankees apparel, and b) When they are behind the wheel of a moving vehicle. One Friday afternoon a few weeks ago, I was on Memorial Drive, which as you may know runs along the river in Cambridge. Traffic there normally travels at least 20 mph over the speed limit, but in this instance it suddenly came to a screeching halt. I assumed there'd been an accident or perhaps a pothole had suddenly evolved into a sinkhole (quite possible, local road "maintenance" being what it is), since I couldn't think of anything else that would stop traffic so dramatically. What it turned out to be, though, was...a family of ducks. A whole group of Bostonians who would never stop for pedestrians to cross, not even if they were blind and in wheelchairs, waited patiently for the whole duck family to waddle across three lanes without even a tap on the horn from anyone. I remembered then that Boston is, of course, the town of Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings, and the man clearly knew his setting. In the book, a policeman stops traffic for the Mallard family, but I now know this was unnecessary--everyone would have stopped anyway.

What was especially strange about the whole experience is that I realized I have now been in Boston long enough for this to actually make sense to me, although I couldn't explain it to someone who doesn't live here--stopping for ducks when you would never pause for a pedestrian, I mean. I would like to think that I'd still stop for at least the folks in wheelchairs, but I also know I would definitely check my rearview mirror first to be sure that wouldn't get me killed.

Success, Finally

There are two computers in my office, a two year old Dell, running Windows XP, on which I do most of my work, and an old Micron, upgraded several times with new drives, memory, and, once, a motherboard and CPU, and now running Linux. The old Micron is becoming my server, and I will be moving both Geezernet.com and Geezernet.us to it.

Linux is the operating system which most servers use. Apache is a web server, a program that sends web pages out to people who want to look at them, and I now have it installed and working on the Micron. Last week, I finally successfully installed MYSQL server, a database program for servers. Next will be XOOPs, and then the web sites. Geezernet.com will by my personal web site and Geezernet.us will hold the web sites of the Neighborhood Network project.

It feels very gratifying to have learned so much that I didn't particularly care to know. Linux is a pain in the butt to install and configure but, once it is running properly, it is fast and flexible.


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