Come on, you don’t want to end this year reading what an aging aggie like me thinks the “Best Stories of 2009″ are. Easy as it might be — health care, global warming, cap-and-trade, Uncle Honey…
What, I already wrote about all those things?
OK, how about what you wrote on what I wrote to tell […]
One of the worst meals of my life occurred on a stormy June evening in the early 1980s at Milwaukee’s Pfister Hotel. The main course that night was a stringy, tasteless filet of me that my bosses at Successful Farming magazine served up to an unhappy advertiser, Allis Chalmers.
The sin that put me on […]
It was more a wavering non-waiver than another government oldie-but-goodie, a non-denial denial.
Still, nothing in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Dec. 1 delay to grant the ethanol industry’s request to boost the current 10 percent ethanol limit in gasoline to 15 percent suggested it won’t happen — and soon.
“It is vitally important that the […]
If you asked unimpeachable sources such as St. Peter or former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee why so many pretty average people often choose journalism for a career over, say, rocket science or particle physics, the simple, one-word answer you’ll likely get is “mathematics.”
Please understand, we journalists do arithmetic reasonably well — addition, division, […]
Longtime readers may recall a Thanksgiving column years ago that featured a dinner entree provided by Orlie, the gainfully unemployed younger brother of our farm’s two hired men, Jackie and Howard.
How did we end up with three brothers, all bachelors, living together in a provided house on the farm along with their widowed mother? […]
If idle hands are the devil’s workshop, idle thoughts are, what, the product of a devil’s advocate?
Maybe, but one election result from early November leaves plenty of room for thought, idle or otherwise.
On Nov. 3, Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved Issue 2, a statehouse-directed ballot initiative to create a “Livestock Care Standards Board.”
The […]
The final Saturday in October swept me three hours south for lunch with my parents and nearly-new grandniece and, later that Halloween afternoon, backwards about 40 years for visits with some ghosts on the farm of my youth.
It began as an afternoon drive from my parents’ home in town to the Bottoms, that black […]
Almost before her first cup of government coffee cooled, Christine Varney, the antitrust chief at the U.S. Department of Justice since April 20, tossed the Bush Administration’s antitrust guidelines — described as toothless — out the window.
New collusion cop
There’s a new collusion cop in town, she explained May 9, and DOJ’s “Antitrust Division will […]
If the generals and admirals within the concentric walls of the Pentagon — hardly a bastion of greenie weenies — view global warming as a “serious threat to national security,” exactly who does the American Farm Bureau Federation view as the enemy in its latest Astroturf war against climate change legislation?
For its part, the […]
In the transition from farm boy to student to journalist, I skated and stumbled through several academic departments at the Big U.
For example, at the height of Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, I studied political science. A visit home during fall harvest that year, however, cured me of that silliness; I missed the […]
