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Unregistered
Bull
Choice gleanings
from 45-plus years of Unregistered Bull
A very dull book could be written about the traditional
relationship between the petroleum industry and agriculture.
When oil and gas producers make money for themselves, they
make money for landowners whether they want to or not.
Everybody knows that a great many farmers and stockmen have
been made rich, or at least tided through hard times, by oil
payments, mineral leases, payment for damages resulting from
exploration, etc. |
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Doc
Blakely
Pokin' Fun
Someone once told me that Latin was good to know
because you could study words and get at their root meaning.
For instance, politics is taken from the Latin
"poly" (many). I couldn't find ticks, but everybody
knows that is a little bug. So, it stands to reason that ours
is a system with many little bugs in it. |
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Monte
Noelke
Shortgrass Country
For the few woolie operators left in the shortgrass
country, February opens the shearing season. Pasture-wise,
prospects look good for spring lambing. Winter weeds cling
close to the ground. After 11 years of dry weather, sheep and
cow’s lips and teeth calibrate down to skimming the dirt
line to harvest the tiniest fragments of nourishment. Cattle
are few, yet the survivors know how to conserve strength by
not bending over to graze in the long empty spaces, but to go
direct to the prickly pear cactus to salivate over the thorny
pads and build balls of indigestible fiber. |
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Baxter
Black
On The Edge Of
Common Sense
In a recent fictitious survey taken at the
International House of Sheep Producers (IHOSP), the following
answers were given in response to the question, "Why are
you in the sheep business?" |
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Linda
Mussehl
As
I See It ...
I don't mind house cleaning when I can see where
I'm going. Cleaning stuff that's already clean always seems
pointless to me. Dusting the living room just because it's
Tuesday makes no sense. Dusting because someone wrote their
name on the top of the piano is a more reasonable use of my
time. |
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Lee Pitts
Its The Pitts
Some of my earliest memories are of gopher funerals
presided over by my Uncle Mac. He wasn't really my uncle,
although any young kid would have been proud to call him one.
Uncle Mac was the retired railroad man next door who tickled
me with his wit and his bushy gray mustache. Mac was crippled
and walked with a pronounced limp, the result of a
catastrophic railroad bridge collapse in which many men had
died. Perhaps that was why Uncle Mac valued life so dearly,
because he felt lucky to be alive. |
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Dale
Rollins, Ph.D
Wildlife
By Design
It's generically referred to as a "blob," but
relax, it's not the protoplasmic pseudopod that engulfed
everything in its path and mortified you as a teenager in the
early 1960s at the La Vista Theatre. This blob is a cross
between a blue quail and a bobwhite. And yes, it is genuine,
unlike the taxidermy-conceived jackalope. |
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D'Ann Ducote
Palabras
Dawn Breaking ... Walking from the barn
in the crisp coldness this morning, I see dawn breaking
through the night. It is but first light, still I am captured
by the stark reminder of how light breaks through darkness,
life pushes death away, and that my brokenness is made whole. |
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Charles
Rodenberger
The
Computer& The Cowboy
President’s day starts ENGINEER’S WEEK, which is
fitting, because George Washington used mathematics and
science to do surveying work. Thomas Jefferson invented a
number of devices to help his farming operation. But, do you
know an engineer other than me? They are pretty much
invisible. |
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