LIFE IN A FLYOVER STATE: Blogging, Despair, John Stuart Mill, and a Great Horned Owl

Friday, November 5, 2010

Blogging, Despair, John Stuart Mill, and a Great Horned Owl

I don't know if you are familiar with Despair, Inc. We get their hard copy catalogue. Clever concept and it's worth a visit to the site if you enjoy cynical, on-the-money points of view.

Anyway . . .there is a poster devoted to Blogging. It says "Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few."

Perhaps. I prefer to think, though, all the blogging taking place on the Internet is really just the 21st century's version of John Stuart Mill's marketplace of ideas.

And the following picture has nothing to do with what I just wrote, it's just a cool picture of a great horned owl that I took Thursday morning. He was waiting for the chickens to be let out of the coop!

Happy blogging.

Can you spot him? If you look closely enough, you
will see two glowing eyes. Picture taken 4Nov2010
west of Fletcher, OK.

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We can see the beautiful Wichita Mountains from our front yard. People make fun of the fact that we call them mountains, but they are one of the oldest ranges in the United States. The Wichitas are just lying on their collective side. Frankly, I would be lying down also if I were over 500 million years old. Time wears us all down eventually. Even granite!

There’s a lake one mile to the west of us, but it is best viewed from a distance. It is still the ugliest lake I’ve ever seen and though I am fond of this area, my opinion about that lake has not changed over the years.

When we moved here 30 years ago, there were not the neighborhoods just to the south of us that there are now. Our neighbor to the north -- and that neighbor is one-half mile away -- runs cattle on her pasture. The pasture across the road from us is owned by the school district. That land is rented out for farming and grazing. Deer still surprise us and an occasional bobcat or coyote grabs a chicken from our coop. Our Suffolk sheep walk up to our dining room windows and peer in every once in awhile, baaing.

There is a military post on the other side of the Wichitas. If we go out at certain times of the day, we can see rockets streaking across the sky. Also, we will hear booming cannons firing on the practice ranges. It’s especially loud in the winter time when the humidity is low and troops are training on the east range. Once five Chinook helicopters hauling Army tanks flew low over our pasture. The post is the only fort built during the Indian Wars that is still active today. It was staked out on January 8, 1869. Its history is a rich one.

We can walk the same stretch of road everyday of every year and always see something different. We have to pay attention some days to see the changes, but we have the time.