Creative Endeavors

Found myself looking for a statistic this day, but I could not find it.  It was on the American Farmer, I am doing this from memory, it went something like this, “The American Farmer feeds himself and _________ so many other people.”  But I could not remember if it was his family and 46 others or his family and 125. 

Anyone know which one of the two it might be?

Just north of Okie City up on Seventy-Four highway there is a little town in Logan County by the name of Crescent, Oklahoma.  Small, rural farming community on the plains, nothing all that special about it, except that some of my family lives there.  Wheat farmers and cattle ranchers. 

My mother grew up there with her brothers; they used to walk to school on sandy roads, looking over their shoulders at the fresh footprints in the sand, and marveling at how they looked.  Poor kids, depression raised Okies.  Living in an America when shoes were worn for church, visits to town, school, most of the time they went barefooted.  Not a whole lot of money, grew what they needed, and lived off the land.

This week I was thinking about the CO-OP in Crescent, what a big deal it was when it first was established.  A CO-OP is a co-operative for all those who are not farmers or perhaps not familar with the term.  I was thinking this morning how forming a CO-OP benefited these folks.  How it helped the farmers in the area, and brought new prosperity to their little town.  All the farmers in that town (actually in that surrounding area, other towns too) got together and formed a CO-OP and things gradually got better for them. 

The point being that “pooling their resources paid off for the majority” and it improved the quality of their lives.

One of my apparent drawbacks in life is that I have a fertile mind and over active imagination, if you haven’t noticed by now.  So I am thinking.  “Why do we put up with this S*** from all these two-bit countries around the world that happen to be sitting on vast pools of oil. When we are sitting on this breadbasket of wheat, corn, barely and other agricultural products.” 

Why aren’t we making these American products “a valuable commodity in this so-called world market.”  Especially when the government of the United States gives out ample farm subsidies each year to the American Farmer and U.S. AG Business. 

LET ‘EM EAT THEIR OIL.

If they want to eat beef, if they want a bushel of wheat, corn, maize or soybeans, then let us trade for it.  You give us the oil, and we will help you with the groceries.  We are the world’s largest producer of these products, why aren’t we taking full advantage of it.  Other grain exporting countries such as Argentina, the Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, France and certain areas of the U.K. could join in … We could form a Global CO-OP and trade for what we need.

Which would be a lot better than rushing over and “begging for it” as been the case here lately. This, in my opinion, would certainly beat this form of Texas Chainsaw Economics we have now, which is feed and protect these foreign nationals, while “they bank huge sums of money” and we go farther in the hole.

Before we had a money system in this world, before some banker or politician invented paper money (backed by nothing) we “traded for what it was we needed.” (Barter Systems)  Perhaps it is now time to go back to that, this world banking situation doesn’t seem to be working in our favor.

Last year, Syria imported 890,000 metric tons of corn and maize, 147,000 metric tons of wheat, 483,000 million tons of soybeans.  Our good buddies over there in Iran, they came shopping for 1.8 million metric tons of soybeans, 1.8 million tons of corn/maize, and 231,000 million tons of wheat.  This is just two of the many countries that visited our breadbasket, you can add to that:  Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Nigeria and Russia even came knocking on our doors, all of them calling for enormous quantities of grains from the United States to feed their people.

Clearly I do not advocate starving people for oil, but why not, trade for what we need?  Here is the rainbow in the entire idea.  Doing this would not sufficiently increase the cost of products to the American consumer at all.  As much as I hate this expression … It is a Win/Win kind of thing.

A global CO-OP makes good sense.  Especially when it is apparent that we have so much of it with which to trade.  Why aren’t we taking full advantage of this obvious tilt on the scale in our favor?  Taking it one step further, I guess the next question would be:  “Why aren’t we doing it right now?”

In case you missed it … Here it is again …. Let ‘em eat their oil, get a taste of what it is like to be on the “receiving end of some of this” like the rest of us. 

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The Mayan Calendar only runs to the year 2012 and then abruptly stops.  Good news for anyone who owes a lot of money on Credit Cards, if you can just hold on a little longer, your misery will soon be over. 

Bad news for all those people who are selling Mayan Calendars.

Started my morning re-loading my music program, the sucker was locked up and I naturally assumed that it was a “hardware problem.”  When I find I have a hardware problem, it is usually located “directly between MY ears” and not in the hard drive. 

Humans are not hard-wired for this stuff, and as we tend to think of ourselves as perfect, somewhat omnipotent, we always assume it is the computer …. Not so.  Vince Gill playlist has a glitch in it and that was the problem, which is by the way, something that “I PUT TOGETHER” and not something that was already on the computer to begin with.  Computers!  I just wanted some Musak to soothe my jagged edges …..

Let me ask you something?  When you are writing a post, article, comment, and that little red flag appears up there on the screen and it informs you that you have a comment, do you go up there immediately or keep on working?  I am just curious.  Often it is awfully hard to just ignore the thing.  I see it, it is as if it is almost screaming at me like a baby that is hungry or something, but I usually resist, until I can wrap up what it is that I am working on. 

Some people have discipline and some do not.  In which camp do you reside?

The other day I am at the barbershop and my cellphone goes off in my pocket.  Not wanting to answer it, I just ignore it, knowing full well that it will drop them in voice mail, it is no big deal to me.  This guy sitting there is bothered by it ringing, he says “You gonna answer that?” and I reply, “Naw, it will go to voice mail.” 

He says, “It might be important, answer it.”  Which kind of irritated me, I mean, “Who is this bozo to telling me to answer my phone?”  I reply, “no big deal, don’t worry about it.”  He then says, “It might be your kids.”

Jeeeze, how in the world does this complete stranger even know I have kids … I just wanted to get my ears lowered and read my paper.  Trying hard not to just stand up and strangle the guy, in a nice, calm voice I reply, “Listen, when you start paying $49.60 per month for this little marvel of technology, then you can tell me what to do with it.”   End of conversation.  I guess I am just technically challenged or something. 

Role Call!  Answer up when you hear yo’ name …. Cell-phone impaired?  … Yo’ here sir!

While we are at it.  Women and cell phones crack me up.  They see a number on their telephone and they do not recognize the number, so they then call the number, and ask who it is on their phone?  Never fails.  I can’t get enough of that, it just amazes the fizz out of me.  I have misdialed numbers and women call me and ask who I am and why am I calling them. Wanting to know if I am personally entered into the Charles Manson early release stalker program or something. 

Jeeeze Louise, it was a wrong number.

My wife yesterday had two of calls of this nature.  She was given wrong numbers by people at work, so the women call her up and ask her what is going on.  And on top of all this … She explains it to them!  This is insane.  I find two or three; sometimes even more numbers on my telephone routinely. 

And I just delete them.  That is a man for you.  Pragmatic … To the point, most always. 

The Lone Ranger has an episode on today with a female sheriff ……  What is this world coming to for crying out loud?  Bad news for Comanche Joe and the folks in Gunstock!  I seem to be on some kind of estrogen rush this morning.

A man in Texas used a loaded gun to scratch his back Thursday and ended up shooting himself. He wasn’t unhappy though; that day he had lots of gold-bond powder in his underpants.  Thinking along these same lines, “If Dick Cheney attended the recent wedding in Crawford, Texas, would that qualify it for the misnomer of a shot-gun wedding?”

Hmmmm Kemo-Sabe … A female sheriff in Gunstock?  Who would’ve ever thought …

I get letters ….. lot’s and lot’s of letters.

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Unrelated: (But very good)  The Lone Ranger

One of the sites that I read is “Radio Girl” she is a gal up in the Northern Rockies of Canada.  Her webpage is well laid out, interesting.  Some real nice outdoor shots and photo’s, you ought to swing by and take a gander at some of them, they are eye-candy for the soul.

“She reports this Monday that we drove about an hour to a nearby campsite.  We lit a fire, ate smokies (hot dogs in the lower U.S.), drank beer and fished.  I don’t have any good “action shots,” but we did catch one fish that was HUGE.  We finally landed him he swallowed our entire beer cooler, then burped, grinned viciously and belly flopped back into the water.  I all happened so fast.  Too bad we didn’t get a picture.”

It is not so much in the catchin’ of the fish, but rather in the tellin’ of the story. 

 Weather today was drop-dead gorgeous, a good day to go fishing.  Check out the site:  (http://bikininerd.typepad.com/theradiogirl/) or simply click the widget for Radio Girl to the right.

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