Heard a funny true story from a hunting buddy of mine, ol’ Ray L. Roeder, who’s retired from the career with the railroad.
On opening day of the upland bird season, Ray and a group of friends went pheasant hunting in northwestern Kansas and stayed at a great Bed and Breakfast that catered to hunters. They had great success in the field, harvesting close to 50 roosters, and Ray said the meals they ate were fantastic.
Well, one evening of their three-day stay the group ran out of ice for their favorite beverages so Ray volunteered to drive a friend’s pickup to town and buy more ice.
Since the place they were staying wuz out in the country a bit and since it wuz pitch dark, on his return trip Ray got hopelessly turned around and couldn’t find his way to the B&B. To top his predicament off, he couldn’t remember the phone number of the B&B.
When he called the pickup owner’s cell phone to get directions, the phone rang only on the dashboard’s wireless phone system. Finally, Ray had to call home and get the cell phone number of another member of the hunting party. That person answered his call for help and managed to give him directions back to the after-hunt party.
Needless to say, Ray’s hunting buddies did what any self-respecting group of hunting buddies would do — they harassed and hassled him for the rest of the hunt and all the way home.
And, after he related the story to me, I reminded him that his buddies would never forget to tell and retell that story — and that it would get better and better over time.
With a sigh, Ray agreed with me.
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California! Ah, good ol’ California! You can always depend upon the Golden State to supply grist for the column mill.
Now I read that despite all it’s really important problems to solve, California is set to tackle a really big environmental problem. It’s going to regulate the methane gas derived from dairy cow flatulence.
You heard me right. The New York Post said it more plainly in its September 21 headline: “California regulates cow farts.”
The story goes on: “Dairy farmers will be required to reduce methane emissions from manure to 40 percent below their 2013 levels by 2030, with the help of $50 million from the state’s fee charged to polluters, known as cap-and-trade. The money will help a handful of them buy dairy digesters, which use methane from manure to generate energy that’s sold to electrical utilities. The law also allows the Air Resources Board to regulate cow flatulence if there’s viable technology to reduce it.”
Such nonsense makes it easier to understand how California votes the way it does. Perhaps it should spend that $50-million preparing for the “Big One,” that geologists insist is bound to happen somewhere along the San Andreas fault-line.
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But wait! That’s not all the wonderful research going on in the Silicon Valley State. Groups of researchers are trying to find way of turning “gloop” into “food.” The Financial Times reports: “After phones, cameras and taxis, Silicon Valley is looking to disrupt a rather more mundane American mainstay: fast food. Start-ups are trying to revolutionize the food industry and have received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from venture capitalists to do so. Many are motivated by a desire to wean humanity off meat and other foods that have big environmental and social impacts … The Soylent company, now based in Los Angeles, says its ‘intelligently designed’ food offers ‘affordable, complete nutrition.’ A serving of its deliberately tasteless gloop costs as little as $2.”
Yum! Yum! I seriously doubt the $2 of tasteless gloop would be as satisfying to me as the $5 burger I recently purchased at Brahm’s in Emporia that contained 2/3 pound of ground beef and all the trimmings.
I don’t thing I’ll be investing in any of these fake-food start-ups. I’ll invest in ocean-front property in Kansas first.
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My family got a good scare from the forest fire inferno that engulfed parts of Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, Tenn., this week. Our daughter and family were smoked out of their home in Pigeon Forge and evacuated to a hotel for one night.
They were able to move back and start airing out their belongings the next day. We are thankful our kids and grandkids only got smoked, not burned.
Many of their friends lost homes and businesses in the fire. The fires were a disaster in many ways, both large and small, but they did emphasize a point: Building homes in the forest is wonderful, but does carry an automatic fire risk. Eventually some kind of fire clears the forest. Over time, it happens every time. We have a similar risk with our home in the Flint Hills. We think an out-of-control grassfire couldn’t get to our home, but that’s not a sure thing,
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I’ll close with a few words of wisdom about camping. An e-mail tells me that camping is when you spend a small fortune living like a homeless person. That sums it up pretty well. Get your Christmas shopping done early and have a good ‘un,
