Tag Archives: half-track

The Buffalo Whistle

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Many of you long time readers remember that *The Institute has its own fully domesticated herd of North American Buffalo. You can see them in the picture above coming in from The Institutes high country where they summer. These are Buffalo not bison which so many of those so-called naturalists keep insisting is their correct name. Those nattering nabobs of negativity constantly repeat this misnomer. They have even gotten it into some scientific writing, by having made up a scientific name for the animal. It is “Bison, bison” as if repeating it over and over makes it so. Look it up, they have even assigned a bunch of Italian words to its Scientific Classification. Like bringing Europe into this is going to make them right.

Remember when you were young and you went to the movies. What did every single Indian and a lot of white guys call these animals? That’s right Buffalo. Sometimes Tontonka but that a story for another time. Why would they lie? All through our history, our ancestors, who couldn’t all be lying, have used buffalo in song and story. “Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight, come out tonight, etc.” It’s buffalo, they’re called buffalo just deal with it. Wild Bill Hickok didn’t hunt bison. He was a buffalo hunter. He’d a probably shot you for calling him a bison hunter. They were touchy about things like that.

But we digress. This is just a small part of our bison Buffalo herd. We decided to bring them down from their high country pastures because of the storm brewing back there on the mountain behind them. We bring them in so they don’t get wet. They become irritable when they’re wet and even though we have them trained they become peckish and out of sorts when damp.

It also gives us a chance to trim their hooves, comb them out and remove as much tartar from their teeth as possible. That all works best when you have dry buffalo to work with. Each of the mature buffalo has its own monogrammed blanket which we put on them to ward off the chill. Woe betide the intern who places the wrong blanket on the wrong buffalo. You only do that once. That’s when we bring up the interns assistant to make the change from the wrong to the right buffalo. Sometimes we have to bring up several assistants in a row to get the job done. Cardinal Rule: Watch Which Blanket You Put On Each Buffalo.

We had a moving post card from one of our young readers concerning Buffalo. Here it is.

Dear Mr. The Director, Isn’t it hard to handle Buffalo when they’re alone? How do you do it with a whole big herd? Do they bite, or kick? I’ve seen stories about buffalo on TV and they make a lot of messes all the time. Who cleans that up? I think buffalo are neat and I would like to have one. Do you ever sell them? If so I know where Mommy’s credit cards are and I could send you the numbers. Would that be all right? Sincerely, Towanda Clarice Malachowski, from Green bay, Wis. P.S. If you send one don’t send it on the weekend, that’s when my dad’s home. I don’t think he likes buffalos. Love, Towanda.

Well Towanda, thank you for writing and liking buffalo as much as we do. We can answer your questions. It is hard to handle buffalo when they’re alone and it’s really hard when there’s a bunch of them, which we call a herd. They will bite and kick but only when you do something the buffalo doesn’t like, such as tightening the blankets straps to tight. If you get one, don’t do that. It makes them grumpy. Yes Towanda they do make messes but it depends on how much you feed them. If you get one we will send along a pamphlet to explain their care and feeding. As for who cleans all that up we have a new intern here that does that. Her name is Hane Fonda and you can write to her if you want. Just send your letters to Hanie the Scooper % of The Institute.

The big question you didn’t ask, Towanda, was how do we get them to come when we call them and behave when they get here. That’s our big secret about handling buffalo. And it involves a special invention that we created right here at The Institute. Our staff at our “Inventions Made To Order While You Wait department” made it just for handling buffalo. It’s ours and no one else can have it. It’s called the “Buffalo Whistle”. When we blow it our specially trained buffalo come running to be first in line to get out of the weather. And also to do other things like tricks and synchronized dancing. We have a great big special one that we mount on a half-track ( A great big truck thing that hauls guys to places where they can shoot other guys. Ask your Mommy about War,) and when we blow that one, you can hear it in Kansas, it’s really, really loud. If there are any buffalo out there they’ll hear it and come running for sure. If you get your very own buffalo, and you said you know where mommy’s credit cards were, we’ll send you your very own buffalo whistle with your name on it. It has a hole in the top for a chain so you can wear it around your neck. None of the other kids have one of those we’ll bet. You ‘ll be the most special kid in school. Just think of show and tell day when you get to show off your new pet. We’ll send you a phone number where one of our special friends in Mumbai will help you with mommy’s credit card numbers. Then just sit back and wait. Before you can say “Holy Mackerel! That’s a big buffalo” there’ll be one at your door. Thank you for writing Towanda and you might ask some of the other kids if they like buffalos too.

We here at The Institute love to receive mail from young or old so keep those cards and letters coming in. Email too. We like Emails. We’d like to stay and chat longer but we have to get down to supervise the tartar removal process. That’s a complex process that needs a lot of supervision. It takes several interns to hold the buffalo’s head while we drill and fill as our resident dentist likes to say. Stay tuned.

* Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Nevermind. Return to your daily activities. Thank you for your support.

Half Moon Day

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The other morning when we had the interns removing the tarps from the roof of the Sunset viewing tower here at The Institute they began shouting “Boss Look, the moon, the moon, boss. It is out! And it is day. What does this mean?” At least that’s what we thought they were shouting. It’s kind of hard to hear when they’re 350′ up in the air and the wind gusts are peaking at 55-60 miles an hour.

We let one of them come down so we could understand them better and the babbling began to make sense. They had seen the moon in the sky during sunrise and in their simple superstitious minds thought this was the end of the world. They were getting ready to jump off the roof in an effort to keep something terrible from happening to them but we were able to drive their messenger back up the tower to convince them it was alright. Nothing terrible was going to happen to them unless they came down before the tarps were removed. The last thing we needed was some replay from Homer “and when the rosy fingered dawn occurred the interns fell from the sky etc…” That would take up half the morning getting that squared away.

It turns out that this particular batch of interns included a bunch from rural Greece and each one of them had the Selenophobia gene. Selenophobia is the fear of the moon. Yeah, we know, that is weird but we got this batch from Interns-R-Us and they have a no return policy that is airtight. You can’t even donate them back. If you leave them on their front stoop with a refund request Interns-R-Us will simply put them back on the shuttle and send them to your front gate again. They’re yours and that’s that. You have to send the half-track down to go get them, otherwise they mill around down there by the front gate which is right on the highway, throwing stones at passing cars, ripping the shrubbery out of the ground, writing what can only be some kind of rude graffiti on our mailboxes. They smeared something terrible on the lens of our security cameras down there so we couldn’t see what they were doing. It makes The Institute look bad so we gird our loins and go cart them back here. It is not easy running an organization as complex as the Institute.

We immediately set our xeno-anthropology department to work developing a program to treat and cure these interns of their Selenophobia. We are lucky enough to have Margaret Mead’s great, great cousin’s Aunt by her second marriage, grandchild, Curtis Leroy Moonboy, on our staff to head up this program. Mr. Moonboy or as he is known by his peers, twitchy speaks a dialect of the interns language or at least we think he does, he’s hard to understand sometimes, so he’ll be perfect for this project. We just hope Maggie’s genes kick in and help him get this together. Although the odds in the weekly pool have him down as 460 to 1 that he’ll be able to pull this off.

We need to cure these simple but unresponsive interns because we here at The Institute have a simple code ‘Fix ’em or Cull ’em’ and we need them well and functional. For their health and because we cannot get anyone else to go up there on the tower roof to put up and take down the tarps. So twitchy better get something going otherwise he’s going up there himself. The image above shows the moon clearly out in the sky as the sun comes up and lights the clouds in a rosy hue. We all think it’s pretty but then we don’t have Selenophobia.