We're starting to see our first serious stretch of sunshine after nearly eleven inches of rain up here on the mountain. I woke to find an article, "Cow tipping? Probably bull," in today's Roanoke Times. The story pulled me into another time and place.
It brought back memories of my first up close and personal experiences with cows. I had just bought our first few head of cattle from the guy who sold me one of our farms. Cows being what they are, they immediately broke through some fences and got mixed up with the neighbor's dairy cattle. Our first chore was to separate the two herds. I should have stopped right there and given the cows to the local dairy farmer, but I didn't. We eventually got rid of those cows and enjoyed a relatively cowless time in Nova Scotia.
As today's (09-06-06) Shoe cartoon indicates, I don't think my memory was very good even then. My wife, Glenda and I moved to New Brunswick. We ended up with nearly two hundred head of cattle. Most years we saw between 60 and 70 calves born. I was there for many of the births. We actually ran that farm for nearly ten years until we dispersed our cattle herd in the fall of 1981.
I shoved more cattle through handling chutes than I care to remember. I once had a bull that stalked me for a couple of months until I tricked him onto a truck headed for the slaughter house. We had mostly purebred Angus cattle, but over the years we had experience with Charolais, Herefords, and even a Guernsey which I milked for several years.
Anyone that tells you he's done cow tipping is full of bull. First off, no cow that I've ever met would let you sneak up on them. Secondly most that I've seen would either run or run after you if you tried to hit them anywhere. The cow tipping reminds me of the tractor tipping in Cars, the movie, which I wrote about in my post, "Cars- A great movie." Tractors are pretty darn stable unless you drive them on a hillside where most SUVs would have already turned over.
While cow tipping is a pretty easy mystery to clear up, I've been looking for some more explanation on the George Allen "Macaca" incident. I was born in North Carolina and have spent much of my life wandering the south from Tennessee to Virginia. I've never heard the term "Macaca" until the news reports of this event so I was a little mystified. Of course I don't travel in the circle of those who keep a hangman's noose on display.
Last night I read an article, "George Allen's 'macaca moment’" in the The Week Magazine. It offered up a pretty good explanation.
“Macaca,” derived from macaque, a genus of monkey, is a racial slur used in France against foreigners with dark skin. Allen—who has a French Tunisian mother and speaks French fluently...
Naturally the French are to blame. :)
The rest of the article went on to highlight some interesting points about Allen.
The irony here, said Michael Scherer in Salon.com, is that the man Allen insulted is a native-born Virginian of Asian Indian heritage, whereas Allen, the son of legendary NFL coach George Allen, grew up wealthy in California. Since then, however, he’s been wearing cowboy boots, chewing tobacco, and wooing the Republican Party’s right wing as a “down-home” champion of the “‘real America,’ the one without homosexuals, movie moguls, or Ivy League professors who want to ban guns and burn flags.” Hey, it worked for George W. Bush, said Mike Allen in The Washington Post.
Well with this news "Florida's Katherine Harris won the Republican primary despite dismal poll numbers, a subpoena in a bribery investigation and droves of campaign deserters," I think it might be time to stop reading the news for a while.
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