The Oil We Eat.

I usually try to post original material. Stuff I wrote, to entertain you.
But I read an article this morning. Wow.
If you've ever read and appreciated the science book A Brief History of Everything, you know how writing things you (for the most part) already know in an easy to read way makes them many times easier to understand.
That is this article. This guy can write.

I could go on, but I don't really want to try to tell you what it's about. Just that you will learn something, if you read it. It's a little on the longish side, but well worth it. Copy and paste into your Word equivalent if the narrow format bothers you.

The Oil We Eat. - By Richard Manning

Cow Bio - Cassanova Frankenstein

Cassanova Frankenstein is five days old. His (he is a he, or so the pee origins do suggest) poop smells like all new calf poop. Worse than awful. That brown spot on the blanket under his chin is not chocolate. He has a fu manchu made out of stringy black whiskers. His color is purple brown. He is a giant pain in my ass.
He was less lively than the other (now 13 other) calves by far. A day after Cassanova Frankenstein was born I found him sprawled in the pasture back by the woods, no mother in attendance. So I went and found her, which was easy because she's the only brown cow and he's the only brown calf. But she didn't magically fix anything so I had to pick him up and carry him down to the barn, distressed mother in tow.
Ever since, I have been his source of nutrition, as opposed to his bug-eyed mom. He's been too weak/disinterested to find her udder himself. She'll be dry from disuse in another couple of days and feeding him will become my forever project. Pain in ass. Cassanova Frankenstein is a sickly weak runt of a calf. But he's also cute, he does have that going for him. That and his name. Thanks noodle.

Gabe is a Winner.

Nothing much going on. Cows are calving. Eight as of this morning, but one isn't doing so hot. Spring is here so Ohio threw snow all around. Found an ultimate team to play on in Columbus for spring club games. Games start on Saturday. Built a potato gun, but haven't yet fired it. Starting I think tomorrow Uncle Doug and I will fix the main barn where the roof is falling in. Darwin is still scared of everything. The groundhogs have all so far eluded me. I saw a giant muskrat in the creek the other day.

There is a new link under Goodness. Some of you received an email from me asking people to vote for my UWP friend Gabe for a position as a TJ on the Travel Channel show 5 Takes. He got the spot and is currently filming. That kicks ass. He defeated a Threadless contender no less. Gabe is funny. Unconventionally, unintentionally, Ian funny. So, watch, participate, enjoy.

t.A.T.u.

The story behind my tattoo.
There isn’t one. It has no meaning. The girl that has the same tattoo will tell you the same thing. I don’t know if she is lying or not. I, however, am not lying. My tattoo has no meaning. It’s just pretty.The story behind the fact that there is a girl with the same tattoo that I have.
*I probably wouldn’t objectively believe this account, were it told me. But, it’s still true.
I had wanted a tattoo for a good bit of time. But I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what I would want permanently embedded in my flesh. Then my muse hit me upside the head. Screw nautical stars and skulls and flames and those emo birdies that rip off sailor art. Screw all that, I’ll get big black honking squares on my arm that mean nothing. Ha! Glorious tattoo.
I regret not going right out and getting it put on. Because between thinking it and getting it (a gap of almost a year) I was pointed to a fashion/fetish website (NSFW) which prominently featured a girl by the name of Apnea. It was worth the extra dough for the higher-end muse, because this cheap one was evidently recycling ideas, which is fine in ancient times, but nowadays, internets! Apnea is on the cover of magazines, was a prominently featured suicide girl, and has her own website which has recently been turned into a soft-core pay site. And she has my tattoo. It was her first and only (visible) one for quite some time. She is far more famous than I.
Timeline: She got it, I thought it, I saw her, I talked to her about it, I got it.

She also sent me a link to a crazy good tattoo artist in france. Someday.

The Greening of Ohio.

Farmers talk about the weather. I don’t know many other farmers, so I’ll tell you. It was cold and then it was really warm and rainy and thunderstorm-like. And now it’s cold and really windy.
Two days of 65+ degree weather and Ohio changed her clothes. Someone whispered in her ear: green is the new brown. And despite the snow today, everyone knows it. The birds are talking, the frogs are serenading, the flowers are bulbing, the skunk cabbage is stinking, the fake ladybugs are multituding, and the cows. The cow council (hereafter referred to simply as the herd) decided to send one calf out into the world to see if the situation is prime for being alive. Preliminary reports are leaning towards yes.

Teh Intrawebs.

Because I’m tired of bovine posts.
I don’t remember if I introduced you to the links in my sidebar when I put them up. So here goes (again?).
Wikipedia. This one is self-explanatory. A collective, hence wiki, web-based encyclopedia, hence pedia. It will have Google rivaling penetration of murricans everyday awareness within a year. Good for resolving bets. See also: Snopes.
BLDG BLOG. maps. architecture. housing. mining. the future. smart people. pretty pictures. movie and novel plots. design. transportation. mind boggly.
Steve Talbott doesn’t update much anymore. But his searchable archives are phenomenal. Working third shift, I printed off over one hundred of his essays. Also, I read them. They’re ostensibly about technology and at a glance they come off Luddite, but they cover everything from a singular, well thought viewpoint. Steve is my hero. Don’t take that lightly.
If you’d read any Steve Talbott you’d know that Kevin Kelly is his arch-nemesis. The best thing about Kelly is his cool tools sections that is regularly updated with the most bestest stuff around. Also he used to be the editor of Wired.
Glenn Greenwald may be flash in the pan, but currently he’s one of the hottest political bloggers on the left of the spectrum. His focus and expertise is with First Amendment rights and he’s currently heading up the blogosphere anger concerning the NSA scandal. Of all my links, feel the freeist to ignore this one.

Two of the three badness headed links have complained of their title. They however haven’t figured out a way to bribe me to change it yet.
Dave has been doing this blogging thing far longer than the other two. He’s got his sea legs under him and writes some pithy posts on the current state of retail management, the lack of perfect men wandering aimlessly around uptown and bar stools.
If Steve has a theme to his posts it could only be not having a theme for his posts.
Jon lets you know what you are in for by naming his blog with instructions for use. He writes copy as his day job so in theory he is double-plus proficient at stringing the words together to make-um sentences.

Of all the friends I am still in contact with, I do believe this constitutes all the blogs that they have and still update. Discounting, of course, all MySpace blogs. As a blogger blogger, I am biased.

Tongues are Amazing.

The calves don't have any access to water so when it rains and the gutter leaks they line up to drink from the fountain of roof.

Cow Bio - Fat Joe

Fat Joe is teh cool. She has singular markings and that means I can tell her apart enough to name her. Or let Rusty name her. But neat-o markings are the least of my favorite calf.
She has something she wants to discuss with me. A couple of months ago she ran up to me, to stand about an arms length away. Calves usually run away or ignore you, they don't often seek out human interaction, so I asked her what was up? And she tried to tell me. She had a bone to pick about something, something to do with the food service people or the shit cleaning people, I couldn't quite make it out. She opened her mouth as wide as it would go, made a noise from the bottom of her throat and shook her head violently. Fat Joe wants to communicate something but the lack of a developed voice box is frustrating her efforts. It's too bad, I'd like to hear what she has to say.
She's done this talking bit a few times now. The other day she was weirded out by a 5-gallon bucket that was sitting in the middle of the barnyard. She wouldn't go within 25 feet of it. I don't know if she thought it possessed or if she had eaten the shrooms off the bottom of the cowpies. But she flat out refused to walk past the bucket till I walked in and took it away.
Rusty named Fat Joe when he first tried to talk with her after I told him she wanted to say something. Not knowing Rusty, but sincerely wanting to talk she waited for him to approach but would lean back when he put his hand out. He decided that only a one named Fat Joe should lean back. And so she was dubbed. Also, like the Fat Joe who infests music video channels, my Fat Joe isn't completely black.

From a Basement on a (small) Hill.

Our little patch of land is wet. Officially I think it all falls under the 'protected wetlands' gov't designation. There are numerous dinky springs scattered all over the place. When it rains it gets really muddy. A couple of the fields down in the valley need tile to carry away the excess water. As Peaches says with panache and style, "it's wet, wet, wet."

The biggest spring lives under this building:
The clever name we have for it is the springhouse. You can see the spring leaking out the back there and running into our crick, Job Run. When Dingo was alive, this was also her doghouse. We do things big on the farm.
Our old house sits about 5 feet to the right of the edge of this picture. In the mud-floor basement live the water pump, water air bladder tank for pressure, and hot water heater. These are all oversized, as they were installed when we were a dairy farm and dairying requires a great quantity of water. The basement is bricked in with unmortared and uninsulated sandstone. When the wind blows and the temp drops, pipes crack. Last cold snap cracked one again. And then the old Myers pump kicked the bucket. I spent a goodly portion of this last week wrestling with old pipes. A plumber I am decidedly not.
As this basement is holding up two very empty stories of house, you might be wondering why do I even need to worry about the water for it?
Because The Watering Hole.You see, our spring produces some phenomenal water. Peerless. Water of the Gods and all that. I don’t even like water, but this stuff is good. Leaving the farm in 2000 I found I had turned out to be a mean water snob. A few years ago my dad decided to see if we could make a little bit of money and do the water-poor surrounding community a favor by selling the stuff. He cut a hole in the garage, stuck in a hydrant, drain and coin slot, called it a business. Twenty-five cents a gallon, BYOB. Sold like hotcakes. Good water is a very hit-and-miss affair around Knox County. I live less than a quarter mile from this exquisite spring and the water from our taps is simply undrinkable. We’ve got our weekly regulars that show up with dirty station wagons stuffed to the brim with plastic (we recommend glass to preserve the true taste, but they’re hard to come by) bottles. We get a line of bikers filling their bottles when a couple bike races go around the corner in the spring. It’s not worth driving long distances for, but it beats Wal-Mart’s reverse osmosisified tap water. In the fall of 1999 some tin-foil hatist came and filled a five hundred (or was it thousand?) gallon tank for fear of the upcoming Y2K crash. My dad chuckled and refused his money.
Our water customers were left without recourse for a full 5 days. That’s too many. Sorry water customers.

Nothing to do with water:
The bulls will hereby be known as Franz (smaller one) and Ferdinand (the not smaller one). The down and now up and previously nameless calf is now known as Caeser. Coming up soon I’ll do a cow bio on my favorite calf! Yeah, I’ve been here long enough now to have a favorite.