Farm News 05-04-08

Sunday morning, after chores, 47°

Weight: 205 lbs. Hah!

Barn News

Thursday, I took Bobby and the two younger goslings out of the brooder box to see a bit of the world. Auntie Beth, the oldest goose, is very maternal and has been staying near the goslings most of the time, talking to them often. Beth became excited when I took them out of the box, making a lot of noise, which alerted Albus, the gander, who came charging into the barn to rescue his flock. Like most ganders, Albus's behaviors remind one of the back end of the white horse the hero is riding.

Beth, unable to stand the confusion, retreated to her nest, complaining of a headache. Albus looked around wildly for a foe to vanquish, saw one of the goslings, and gave it a hard pinch. The gosling, unhurt, scampered out of reach while Albus searched for the next foe. It is difficult to maintain a heroic life when guided by only testosterone and a bird brain.

I picked up the three goslings and put them back in the box. Albus left the barn to see if there were any threats outside, and Beth left her nest and went back to watching the goslings. The goslings need grass. Geese are grass eaters, normally consuming large amounts of roughage to obtain small amounts of nutrition. The three goslings are living on a 17% protein grain ration, all they want to eat all the time. They are growing rapidly, which is good, I guess, but I know they like grass in their diet. If I put them out in the yard with a dish of their ration, they will spend more time time eating grass than they will eating the 17% ration.

Inside, covered and sheltered from the wind, the goslings can easily tolerate 50° temperature.

Yesterday, Jesse candled the eggs in the incubator. None of the thirteen goose eggs were developing, and only eight of the duck eggs. Bebe goose and Babette goose are each sitting on one egg. Beth goose isn't broody, yet, and I haven't counted her eggs. This is why day old goslings can cost $16 each.

Sally's bunnies are a week old, now. In a few more days they will open their eyes. Will they, like humans, be very nearsighted at first? Based on my inexact observations, the goslings are very nearsighted when first hatched. Is that a natural result of the way our type of eye has evolved? Seems probable to me that, at least in birds and mammals, natural selection has provided an eye that is nearsighted when it begins functioning.

I read somewhere that the eye has evolved seven different times. Octopuses, for instance, evolved with an eye that is as unlike ours as is the rest of their anatomy. Are the eyes of baby octopuses nearsighted? There are a lot of different kinds of animals around here, but no octopuses. Could it be that nearsighted infant eyes are found primarily in species in which the young are dependent upon the adults during an early period of development? Such an adaptation could serve to focus an infant's attention upon their caregiver by excluding visual stimuli except those less than a few inches distant from the infant's nose, a way of our genes saying, “You must learn, right now, to recognize mama, and then you can learn other stuff.”

Shotgun's kittens have their eyes open and are growing fast. I've moved the kittens to a more easily accessed spot, so we can start socializing them. If I moved them to anywhere inside the barn, Shotgun would have simply move them back, or, worse, hid them somewhere in the hayloft. So, I moved them to the back porch, hoping she will leave them there, where they will see lots of human traffic and receive occasional tidbits.

The Oskaloosa FOOL Web Site

Trying to impress a bunch of old women, justify my continued tenure as Chief Fool, and add accomplishments to my resume, I created the FOOL's web site, www.OskaloosaFOOL.org. I enjoy boasting of my successes, especially when they are sufficiently esoteric that very few people have any understanding of or interest in the object of my boasting. (Farm News is actually a long note from me to my grandchildren, and their grandchildren, in which I can brag of my accomplishments, safe by age from any critical analysis.)

One of the computers given to the library by the Gates foundation lost its power supply, (in the sense that 'losing one's heart' is equivalent to having a fatal heart attack). It is a fine machine, with a 2 Ghz Pentium 4 CPU, 512 MB RAM, a zip drive, a large hard drive, and a big, well ventilated, case. I suggested to the FOOLs that we have our own web site, and, instead of paying a hosting service, we run our web site on our own server and have the ability to host other web sites. The old women who run the FOOLs all listened intently to my suggestion, figured it was something the Chief Fool might actually be able to do, and voted to set up a server and to spend $35 for a new power supply to make it work. I ordered a a new power supply, installed the power supply when it arrived, and set about creating a web server for a bunch of FOOLs.

First, I erased the hard drive, partitioned it, and installed Ubuntu Linux 7.04 LAMP server edition, the operating system. Then I configured the internet connection with a static IP address, borrowed from NEKLS, the North East Kansas Library System, obtained by using my overwhelming masculine charm on a pretty young grad student who is also a techie for NEKLS. (She's bright, doing tech support work for NEKLS while she finishes a PhD in Library Science, and pretty enough to make me feel all warm and friendly to her when I see her.)

When I finished, the server had Apache2 web server, PHP5, and MySQL database, installed and working together. Next I installed Joomla, a Content Management System. Joomla takes care of things like registering to use the site, menu buttons, and all that stuff. Other than occasional tweaks for maintenance, Joomla will create web pages as they are requested on the internet, called www.OskaloosaFOOL.org/ sometimes with something after the '/', and Apache2 will then send those pages over the internet to the web browsers which requested them. In order to make all that stuff work right, I needed some development and management tools, and some additional parts and pieces of software for Joomla.

I recycled a module that placed a NewsFlash of the Day in the upper right side of the home page, to placing a Quotation of the Day there, instead, and populated the list of quotations with dark sentences from Little Davey Sunshine, a friend. I added the frameworks for an online 'Yellow Pages', classified ads, photo albums, personal blogs, and book reviews. Then I added some more management tools to help me keep all that stuff working together. Finally, I wrote a couple of paragraphs called, “Getting Started,” and published the site on the web.

Currently, I'm working on adding voice and video chat, messaging, and mail. I'm also looking for tools to help manage FOOL memberships. I hope to merge the paper member records into the online FOOL membership list and use the technology to broaden and strengthen FOOL membership services. My goal is to have at least a 10:1 ratio of non-resident to Oskaloosa resident memberships.

Anyway, that's what I'm doing in my Chief Fool disguise that has made me so pleased with myself. Aren't you glad I told you all that?

Books

Three westerns this week.

Call Him Amos by Vic J. Hanson

One of the nice things about reading large print books is that you always have something good to say about the book. This one was in large print.

Return of the Fast Gun by Lauran Paine

Another large print western, but this was a decent read and it only required a few hours of reading time. Lauran Paine is a reliable writer, a descendant of Thomas Paine, the revolutionary radical. Lauran Paine is twenty years older than I am and still writing.

Friends by Charles Hackenberry

Another large print western and a good book. If you like westerns, you will probably like this one.

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 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 04-29-07

Sunday morning, after chores

Goslings
Two goslings hatched under Bebe Friday night. She has two more eggs which hadn't hatched yet by Saturday evening. I knew Bebe had babies when she attacked me Saturday morning as I started chores.

Sexual Orientation and Wiener Dogs
The nice young woman who is married to the young man who lived next door when he was in high school now works in the veterinarian's office. She and her nice young husband gave Weasel to me, Weasel formerly being the dog of the nice young man's deceased grandfather. Well, that nice young woman was so tasteless as to list, on the official Veterinarian's records, that Weasel was a wiener dog mix. Nonsense! Weasel is a Labrador Low Rider, an extremely rare breed known for being bilingual.

Anyway, thinking about wiener dogs led me to wonder about the Freudian connotations of lesbian couples owning wiener dogs. I know a lesbian couple who own two wiener dogs named Sigmund and Siglinda. How Freudian is that? They are, by the way, both bitches (Sigmund and Siglinda, not the lesbians). They (the lesbians, not the dogs) remind me of the first openly lesbian couple I met.

I was but a lad in high school, living in the early 1950's America, and wondering why it seemed that everyone else was crazy. I tried to solve this problem, the one of everyone else seeming crazy, by consuming lots of beer. One evening these two old women, old to me, perhaps, but only in their 50's, came bouncing into the bar where I was consuming beer.After they had been there a bit one of them crooked a finger at me, beckoning me to come over. I did, they asked me to join them, and then bought me a beer. That's enough to turn any half-drunk teenage boy into an admirer.

It wasn't until I had known them several months that they mentioned that they were lesbians. That was extremely interesting information because, prior to that, Lucille had related many stories and shown pictures of the days when she was a high-priced hooker. Sometime prior to 1920 her first client hired her to accompany him on a trip to North Africa. She had a wonderful time and showed us a picture of herself standing with a pleasant appearing portly older gentleman in front of a pyramid. Another client took her on an around the world cruise and, at the end of the voyage, presented her with the deed to the small cottage in which she had been living. After all that, an announcement of homosexuality was not shocking in the least.

Sandra, her partner, did not particularly approve of Lucille's penchant for educating teenage males, but was gracious enough to not be unpleasant about it. Lucille never offered me sex, of course, but she told me how a young man should behave toward any woman kind enough to do so. They fed me several times, teaching me that proper dinner conversation was more important than using the proper fork. Lucille taught me how to sit in a chair, stand, walk across a room, and pour a glass of wine.

In the 1950's lesbians were not recognized by the general population as possibly decent people. I don't think I had ever come across the word 'lesbian' at that time, and Lucille never used it. She simply told me that she and Sandra were lovers. That seemed alright to me, because I really wanted to learn about being a lover. Today I recognize the greatness of spirit they had which allowed them to be open about their relationship.

They were a fine pair of ladies, but they were not the ones who own Sigmund and Siglinda. The owners of the wiener dogs are contemporary lesbians, not nearly as romantic to me now as were Lucille and Sandra, but very nice ladies. I asked them once if Sigmund was named for Freud. They said that both dogs were named for Freud, Sigmund because that was Freud's name, and Siglinda because Freud was a cross dresser. I think those two women just need a good man to straighten them out.

Existential Crises
Do as many young people today feel as alienated as many of us did fifty years ago? It seems like a far smaller segment of the populace now falls into what we called existential crises, those periods when life seems pointless. It is pointless, of course, but in my day we used to despair over that and call it a problem. Why doesn't it appear as a problem to young people today?

Colin Wilson wrote The Outsider, an excellent book about existential crises and such. I have recommended it to several young people who were caught in the depths of despair and emptiness. It doesn't offer any solutions (now I now there aren't any) but it does show that the situation isn't new or unusual. Sort of like when I first saw the film Rebel Without a Cause. Up till then I thought I was the only one who knew everyone else was crazy.

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