Moments that restore faith in humanity

I was coming back from town this morning, and just as I'm rounding the last curve before my driveway, a woman jumps out on the road in front of me. She's parked her Audi sedan on the other side of the road with the four-way flashers on, and she's blocking traffic on this side, wildly gesticulating with what appears to be a golf club in one hand, maybe a 3-iron by the looks of it. I was obviously going to stop anyway, but as I pulled over I realized what she was so excited about. This well-dressed, well-turned-out gal who tools around with a set of golf clubs in the trunk of her high-end foreign car, was shepherding a mamma snapper across the street. It's that time of the year when the snapping turtles come out of the marsh to lay their eggs. There must be something in their DNA that makes them have to cross at least one road before they can lay their eggs, because helping them across the street is pretty much a local past-time. I pulled into my drive and walked back out with my snow shovel, still leaning against the stoop even though snow's been gone for two months. I tell the woman this shovel has ferried many a snapper across the road. Between the 3-iron and the snow shovel we got mamma snapper safely to the other side. I find it a beautiful thing that random strangers passing by will make an effort! Snapping turtles are awesome. They can live well over a century, and the females are still laying eggs where they've layed them the last fifty or sixty years. A mamma will drop a dozen or more eggs and bury them. Generally, the 'coons have dug them up and eaten them by morning. But, if you're dropping a dozen eggs a year for 75 years, a few will always get through. They successfully keep the species alive. I told her my neighbour, an ex-army guy, just picks them up and carries them over. I won't try that for the same reason I'm not an ex-army guy; fear! Those snapping turtles are a vicious piece of work. There's reasons they survived pre-history when nothing else did. They'll survive the coming Nuclear Winter too.

The gentrification of Ontario's cattle country

For as long as I can remember, northern Grey County and all of Bruce County were considered "cattle country." The official mascot of Bruce County was "Big Bruce," a beef cattle-beast, whose twelve-foot-tall likeness still welcomes you at the northern approach to the town of Chesley.

A hundred acre spread up the road just came on the market at $1.5 million. A hundred acres let's you graze a dozen cow-calf pairs over the summer, plus grow the hay to overwinter them. In a good year, those twelve calves will fetch $12k at sale. Out of that you pay for your inputs. Hayfields need to be rejuvenated, equipment must be maintained and replaced, and veterinarians will occasionally be called upon. Your hundred acre beef farm might reliably return five or six thousand dollars in the course of a year.

Do the math, and you quickly realize that farm up the road won't be bought by a beef farmer. 

Instead, it'll either go to an absentee investor who will separately rent out the house and the pastures, or an affluent urbanite looking for a weekend retreat and a retirement option.

To the untrained eye, the landscape will remain the same. There'll be cows grazing in the fields, because neither the investors nor the affluent urbanites care for farming, and are happy enough to rent their pastures back to authentic farmers.

And that's an endangered species, the authentic beef farmer. The only young farmers getting into beef around here are kids who are inheriting the family farm and are debt-free. Not all farmer's children want to live the farm life, and as time goes on, more and more farms end up owned by non-farmers.

That's just common sense, given current market conditions. The guys who graze their cattle on my farm are a father-son team who own a couple farms of their own, inherited mortgage free, rent a few more, and have a herd of 150 cows. My guess is if you divided their total net annual income by the hours they put in, they'd be shy of making minimum wage.

On the other hand, they could cash out, pocket at least three millions for throwing in the towel, and the next generation of their family can live the good life in an exciting city somewhere. 

As much as they love what they do, you know what's going to happen eventually. 

On the plus side, the Audis, Porsches, and Land Rovers give you a nice break from watching nothing but pickups and John Deeres going by.

The car of the future won't need a driver

No doubt you've heard about the Google experiments with driverless cars. And it ain't just the geeks at Google. Audi, Mercedes, Freightliner, and pretty much every other big name in over-the-road transportation is figuring out how to make cars and trucks that won't be driver-dependant.

That's gonna be a massive bummer for those of us who actually enjoy the task of piloting a motorized vehicle. Alas, those days are coming to an end.

The geeks are winning.

And not only are the geeks winning, they seem to be tied in pretty tight with the Big Dogs in what we might loosely term the "military-industrial-prison-education-agri-chem-NGO" complex.

After all, where would Bill Gates be without those guys?

Or, Zuckerberg, for that matter.

If you're old enough to recall the pre-digital era, you'll remember that files got filed, stuff got done, everybody had a job, and nobody got hacked.

After thirty years of Microsoft/Apple progress, all files get corrupted sooner or later, much less ever gets done in spite of ten times the investment, hardly anyone has a job, and everything gets hacked.

And we are led to believe that this is the result of something called "progress."

But make no mistake; progress continues its progress...

In a few short years you'll get into that driverless Uber-ride that slides up to your apartment within minutes of you having pushed the "need ride" button on your smart-phone.

You can be half or three quarters or even 100% in the bag, and you'll still get to your destination, because in the post-driver era impaired driving will be an impossibility!

It'll be like the old days, when Festus wobbled outta the saloon three sheets to the wind, tumbled into the back of the hay-wagon, and had the horses walk him home while he was passed out in the hay.

Yup, we're progressing so fast, we're almost back to that...

Except tomorrow, when you pass out in the back of that driverless Googlemobile, Uber will have scanned the data-base for outstanding outrages in your digital history.

That's when you'll find out that you can't get out of that handy-dandy driverless car till you've taken care of your outstanding library overdue fines and whatever else might be outstanding on your digital record:

• traffic tickets
• overdue bills
• tax arrears
• alimony
• child support payments

Yup, that brave new world driverless car gonna be way more than a car!