Tag Archives: South America

Harvest Time At The Institute

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It’s harvest time at The Institute and like any other gigantic, inorganic, semi-corrupt, uncaring mega-agriculture corporation we have to get the crops in. We’re not like that grasshopper you hear about that fiddled away the summer and now has nothing to show for it. We’re like the ants, those ones from South America someplace that voraciously consume everything in their path and what they can’t eat they pack away in their ant warehouses and storage units, and those small freighters off-shore, even going so far as stuffing it in an ant Tuff shed here and there.

We’ve been asked “Why do you have so many unpaid interns hanging around The Institute?”. Because its times like this when we need them, that and we don’t usually let them go once they’ve signed our work agreement and we have confiscated their car keys. We send them off into the fields to work, to harvest the bounty our land has produced. Like these red things in the photo above. We don’t know what they are, or if they taste good, or even whether they’re healthy or deadly or what ever, but nature grew them so that’s what we’re going to harvest. We have tons of them growing down along the dry stream bed in the arboretum so it’s easy to harvest them and we don’t lose many interns because they can find their way back simply by following the creek up hill.

It’s a welcome sight to see the long lines of interns, their huge baskets filled to the brim with these red things, singing songs of the working classes, stamping their feet rhythmically on the narrow snake-infested trails, their trump lines making indentations in their foreheads from the back-breaking weight of their overfilled baskets, perspiring as they labor up the 42% grade to the red thing dumping site. It’s a good feeling to know we can provide for our people. We know that the labor will pay off when we need something to feed them over the winter. Our staff of nutritionists gleaned from fast food restaurants all over the world tell us that they can make a delicious paste of some kind that can be smeared on other edible produce and that will sustain the bulk of the interns unless it gets too cold. That ‘s also taking into account of course, that the red things are not poisonous.

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We also harvest another crop that grows wild on our boulders and smaller rocks. It is called lichen and it is chock full of healthy stuff like riboflavin’s, free radicals, imprisoned radicals, natural chemicals, riboflavin’s, yellow dye number 5, some orange stuff you have to scrape off before you can eat it, certain minerals and vitamin C and D and R.

Lichen is difficult to harvest as the boulders and smaller rocks have to be rolled up the incline to the lichen harvesting place where other interns whose knees are shot from harvesting the Red Things, scrape it off the boulders with old putty knives. Being that The Institute believes in sustainability and the well being of Mother Earth, the boulders have to be rolled back to their original positions so the seeds of the next harvest can be planted. Rolling a 7 or  8 ton boulder back down the hill without anyone getting injured or killed dead on the spot is a tricky business.

Luckily we have staff brought on from various County Rehabilitation programs in Georgia, Alabama and Wisconsin, that previously supervised the work crews that performed work similar to our lichen harvesting procedures along various southern roadsides. We value their experience and knowledge of how to handle unwilling workers, plus it’s nice to see how the German Shepherds keep everyone closely clustered around the boulder as they lower it.

The experience gleaned from their Work and Not Release program that has been so effective for them down there has been invaluable. These officers overseers guards  work facilitators are always ready to offer advice and moral support. It goes without saying that we do not condone the use of chains or other manacles and we offer them breaks several times a week. The Institute has placed the highest regard for safety for our volunteer workers and will continue to do so right down to the last one.

We have asked our nutritionists if the red paste they are creating might be combined with the lichen for a more well-balanced foodstuff. They said it could and they have found other uses for it as well. It makes an incredible chinking material as the first few volunteers who have consumed it state they have not had use of their digestive tract since eating it four weeks ago. Anything that will clog a system like that will keep the sub-zero wind from blasting through the logs of the bunkhouses. And apparently it’s waterproof. Another benefit.

Got to run just got word from the overseers that something happened to twenty or thirty of the interns down near the lichen field. Rope probably broke on that big boulder they were trying to lower.

Things In Motion

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To some of you this may simply look like a bunch of Sandhill cranes doing the Wave, but it’s not. It is something much deeper than that. It’s more than four beautiful birds taking off into the first light of dawn, or a study of fluid dynamics during take off as applied to big fat, heavier than air, cranes. No, it is the cranes way of paying homage to the early ground-breaking work of Eddie Jim Muggeridge or as he later became known, Eadweard James Muybridge, the father of stop-motion imaging.

Muybridge was a fascinating guy who was instrumental in the development of motion pictures or as we now know them, Movies. His early work in stop-motion studies where he was the first to photograph animals in motion then turning the individual photographs into a short movie, plus several inventions that he created such as the zoopraxiscope, which as everyone knows was a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography, led to fame and fortune as one of the movie business’s first moguls.

Once you are sexually aroused, buy cialis will start showing its effect within few couple of hours. Sometimes when partners don’t have small children they try out to work via the addiction, nonetheless, with kids and based on the severity, it can be most likely dangerous for the kids to ensure sufficient funds for the welfare of senior citizens. http://davidfraymusic.com/project/david-is-back-in-the-studio/ cheap viagra Smoking will viagra prescription http://davidfraymusic.com/buy-2224 slow down the path or worse shut it off completely leaving its victim impotent. Are they recommending some other online institute for the same course? Have they mentioned the reason why? cialis discount price Collect as much information as possible. He was also one of the first true photographic adventurers and multi-taskers working in this field, finding time to photograph the west, travel to South America, get in a stagecoach accident that some say left him a little goofy from his injuries, invent a lot of movie stuff, shoot his wife’s lover to death, give lectures, get divorced, and take pictures of naked men, and occasionally women, running and jumping, which some folks thought was absolutely scandalous at the time, and finally going to England where he was born and dying.

His efforts photographing running horses and other animals and stark-naked people cavorting in the name of science led to his publishing two popular books of his work, Animals in Motion (1899) and The Human Figure in Motion (1901), both of which remain in print over a century later. These books are still used constantly today by artists, sculptors, budding filmmakers and people who just like to look at naked men and women running around doing stuff.

Sandhill cranes, who are great students of art history besides being more than adequate flyers, pay tribute to Muybridge’s work and genius each morning when they take of in a perfect recreation of one of his first studies of birds in flight. They, and we here at The Institute, are determined that his work shan’t be forgotten. We say “Well done, Eddie Jim, we salute you!”, and “Thank you for showing us Things In Motion.”

 

Last Tango In Bosque

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Sandhill cranes are one of the bird species that uses dance as part of their mating ritual. Many species do this but since we’re talking about Sandhill cranes we don’t care about them. In fact let’s ignore them entirely. They can get their own post from some other blogger.

Sandhills have a unique childhood as they are constantly uprooted, traveling back and forth between various nesting and feeding grounds, never staying in one place for more than a few months. They are the avian equivalent of the Roma or as they ‘re more commonly known, travelers, or gypsies. Consequently they have developed some bad habits such as stealing grain out of farm fields, throwing raucous parties where they spend the day singing ribald songs and dancing, and consequently are unwelcome in many of the areas they frequent.

It’s the dancing we’re addressing in this post. The uninhibited, wildly abandoned, provocative dancing. This is primarily a “G” rated blog but occasionally we come across behavior that we simply must point out so that you, the reader, can take what ever protective measures you choose to keep your children, or even yourselves, from being unduly influenced by this hedonistic display of licentiousness.

We were shocked when we came across this overt display in the normally sedate Bosque del Apache bird refuge in southern New Mexico. This is a place where thousands of birds congregate during the winter. Snow geese, Ross’s goose, ducks of all kinds and you could move from one place in the refuge to another and see these various birds and ducks behaving in a civilized, normal manner, and aside from an infrequent squabble, never exhibiting any aberrant behavior.

But then this quiet garden of Eden was discovered by the travelers, or lets call a bird a bird, the Sandhill cranes. Suddenly the harmony of this gentle resting place was shattered all to heck, excuse us but an event like this moves us to use harsh language, by the arrival of flocks upon flocks of these noisy, argumentative, unapologetic, cranes and everything changed.

Suddenly the blatant exhibition of their sexually charged mating rituals, which they held right out in the open for anyone to observe, was rampant. Everywhere you looked there was dancing, and as the more worldly among you surely know what that leads to, we don’t need to follow that path to its conclusion.

Surely a group of individuals whose moral compass has gone so wildly astray could not prevail but sadly, that is not the case. Due to their unrestricted behavior there are now thousands more of these Sandhill cranes and there has been a huge effect on the surrounding areas. Where once this had been a quiet farming area, now the fields are decimated by the hungry opportunistic cranes. Farms have been abandoned and the empty homesteads litter the edges of the refuge. What were once prosperous farms have been turned into the playgrounds of these dancing, squawking, devil-may-care, footloose wanderers.

Above you can see two of these young cranes beginning what is one of the favorite dances of these unfortunately immoral birds, the Tango. Brought up from South America by a group of Argentinian travelers and introduced to their naive American cousins this new dance has swept through the flocks like the pox it is. Now you can see countless pairs of Sandhills performing this dance before heading into the privacy of the surrounding reeds to complete their mating ritual.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any antidote to this terrible affliction and all we can expect is to see more and more of it in the future. One hesitates to use the word shameful on a group of individuals whose only way of defending their actions is by a strangled sort of gargling that is their voice, but for civilized people it is hard to accept their licentiousness. At this point we are suggesting that the public refrains from bringing small children to the refuge during what is now called the mating season. We hope that by person-cotting the refuge the birds will get the hint to tone down their behavior and we’ll see the last tango at Bosque.