h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This looks a good cowshed; solidly built in stone and tiles. I suppose they had to cope with some severe weather.

It once stood high up on a mountain, so even if it was not used in winter it still had to withstand large amounts of snow.

How very amazing. I am peering at this interior, this photo, as if its something I've never ever seen before in my entire life. heheh. That's true. I've never seen an alp before. Or even heard of one.

So .. the Alps. An alp ... so .. I'm interested in the origins of the word, have to go check me etymology. As one does.

So, in an alp, right, what could be the maximum amount of people/cows in there at any given time? I'm just visualising here, imagining myself in the space ..

Thanks Tavaron! Great pic! Lots of thoughts ..

sooo... I obviously also photographed the info sign at this specific building:
it once stood on an altitude of 1700 meters and was built in 1641. There was space for 80 cows and it also had a basement for storing milk and cheese. It was in use until 1977. Next to the cheesery (on the picture) there were also a small dining room and sleeping spaces.

Makes me think of a satirical song, "K K K Katy". When the m-moon shines over the cowshed, I'll be waiting at the k k k kitchen door.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAAkrI-aaOE

And here's the same song, as sung by the one-man quartet Julien Neel;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EMhfPAUcBc

80 cows??? Interesting info. Thanks. heheh. (I like photographing info boards also.)

80 cows. That's an interesting amount of cows to share one's living space with. I guess one gets wakened early, no need for an alarm.

Well, the cows were the reason to be up in the mountains. Also it is possible they did not all belong to the same farmer.

The practice of having alps was obviously already common in the bronce age. By keeping the cattle (also goats and sheep) up in the mountains in summer the meadows down in the valley can be used for making hay, which is used to feed them in winter. This way you can support a much larger number of animals.

When the cattle moves down from the mountain in autumn there's usualy festivities involved and some of the cows get their heads decorated with flowers and branches. They make most of the way on hooves of course, so in the end you get large amounts of animals moving through alpine villages on their way home.

Which is the origin of the English expression 'till the cows come home', meaning a long time.

Interesting. I have never seen the inside of one of those.

'till the cows come home' reminds me of once putting up my tent on the village green somewhere in the French Vosges region, when someone told me to stick to the side of the green, as the cows would cross it next morning and they wouldn't move aside for something as flimsy as a tent.

Putting animals in high pastures for the Summer makes me think of the two guys who tend sheep on Brokeback Mountain. I grant you that it may be atypical, but who can say whether gay love might have bloomed in some reals cenarios?

Well, an awful lot of the original cowboys were gay...and smoked weed. Things they didn't put in those Western movies.

I'm imagining the cows knocking over your tent, Caiman.

My parents never actually told the complete story because dad finds it embarassing, but there obviously once was an issue with a cow at an alp sitting down or standing on dad's VW beetle..

I love it!

That would have gone viral nowadays.

A friend of mine had trouble with a sheep trying to climb his tent (it was green) It went through instead.

I can't even imagine how you knew that the original cowboys were gay, Dmitri. Gay is a modern concept, I believe.

Anyway, they likely didn't have women to have sex with. This would be like modern people in prison. Are they gay because of their inclinations, or because of availability of female sexual partners?

I suggest you do the research on your own. There were lots of gay people in the world before the word 'gay' was invented. And no, it wasn't always because heterosexuality wasn't an available option.

The suggestion of some researchers going back to when I was in college was that, like seafaring, cattle-herding was an attractive profession for gay men exactly because of the isolation from an aggressively heteronormative society.

A surprising number of things were common on the frontier, not all of which were discussed openly in popular literature. Such as drug use. Check out Alan Lomax's folk song collection.

Here's a good general article on the subject.

http://truewestmagazine.com/old-west-homosexuality-homos-on-the-range/

I thank you, Dmitri.

Another career choice that seems to be attractive to gay men is the priesthood.