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

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/02/04/funny-pictures-infiltrates-bread-factory/

There are conspirasee genst wheat or wut?

Keller’s Kove Restaurant and Bar- Lake Norfork, Arkansas

The restaurant is by invitation only. While this sounds exclusive, don’t overdress. They just want you to call in advance because they need to know how much prime rib to cook and because too many biker gangs were showing up and getting into drunken brawls.

The prime rib is very large and tender, rubbed with a thick coating of black pepper. The menu still says the meat is hand cut by John, but this seems improbable since he has moved back to California. You get horseradish sauce without asking.

The restaurant décor is rustic, as befits a fish camp on Lake Norfork. The overworked owner/waitress had a new tattoo on her arm. We wonder what she's not revealing.

Paul and I ate there during the week. We killed two bottles of Merlot at dinner and brought home about half of the huge chunks of tender prime rib that arrived on our plates.

We were looking forward to the blackberry cobbler, but the boomers have been complaining about getting the seeds stuck in their dentures so they switched over to cherry cobbler.

The lake is at record levels with all the spring rainfall. It’s been a tough spring with days of downpour and one tornado that carved a record 120 mile swath of devastation between Clinton and Gasville.

I’ve found a really good blog that adds a lot to the racial dialog occurring all over America. It’s called “Stuff White People Like” and includes extensive in depth analysis of this often misunderstood minority. Subjects include old t-shirts, San Francisco, Barrack Obama, whole foods, "The Wire" on TV, St. Patrick’s Day, yoga, expensive sandwiches, hybrid cars, microbreweries, having gay friends and foreign educations (Europe is good, bu Tibet trumps everything).

We drove down to Conway yesterday to help Carolyn and Jason get their house ready to sell. I got to drive a big Toro lawn mower. It was pleasing to see the Barrack Obama stickers on the back of Jason's SUV. His friend Chris had one on his SUV too.

The wheat fields are "greening up" nicely. We've had a little moisture and when Mother Nature waters, it does much more good than pivot irrigation! The spring trees and flowers are beginning to put on a show now too.

We are approximately 25 minutes from I-35, if you are interested in making a pit stop--or we could meet you somewhere along the line for lunch.........let us know. We don't go too far away from home.

West Mineral, Kansas

We are alone with Big Brutus in the gathering darkness on the windswept plain. Tornados and three more inches of rain are expected tonight. We’re microwaving TV dinners tonight. If a tornado approaches, we need to run 100 yards and stand between the treads of Big Brutus.

The treads of the Bucyrus-Eire earth mover are seven feet high and five feet wide. You could surround this thing with German 88’s, fire at will, and be perfectly safe between the treads. Each tread is powered by a 250 HP DC motor. Brutus has a top speed of .22 MPH and each of the four treads had 2,200 gallons of gear oil. If you look closely, you can see me standing by a tread.

http://picasaweb.google.com/Phred.Firecloud/BigBrutus/photo#5187711069583506018

I stood inside the scoop. It measures 12’x 15’x15’. One scoop holds 90 cubic yards or 150 tons of coal. The power plant provides a peak of 15,000 horsepower to drive the various electric motors. Brutus is 160 feet tall and weighs 11 million pounds. I climb into the machine and explore. The walkway to the tip of the boom is no longer accessible because of insurance.It took 52 men a year to assemble Brutus in 1963. The parts came in on 150 railroad cars and cost $6.5 million dollars.

But these are just dry statistics. Tonight at midnight, Mrs. Phred and I will climb to the top of the boom and kiss the sky while the lightning bolts and tornadoes stalk the land. We dress in black and recheck our climbing equipment.

Keller's Kove Plaky No Steaky Cafe Eastbourne ... ... only kidding ... heheheheheh ...

although I am in a very icky sticky internet cafe in Eastbourne ... have been busy and somewhat stretched and challenged by family matters ... but hoping to return to full erm .. poetic .. glory soon ..... hmmm

....can't backtrack on this sticky machine, and coffee-addled flaky no-steaky memory is running slow ... heheheheh ... so all attempts to respond in an informed and intelligent way to your recent informed and intelligent thoughts ... like I usually do .. heheheheheh ... are reduced to a hazy zeroic heroic zero .... heheheheh ..

... I don't think zeroic is a word ... hmmm .. tis now ..

...but I do remember a strange bunny in a bread factory .. and descriptions of the wheatfields of Kansas ... and NYC and Kellers Kove Cafe .. and kayaks and lakes and the road is a river of light, or a vein in my head ... depending on diet and protein levels ... ...

what??

and Hyp saying she might be in England in the Autumn? yay !!!!!there's a song in there ... see you in England in the Autumn ...shall we meet again in the healing poppy garden ... where we met so long ago ....

gotta go.

speak soon

Hehehehehehelen

It's a shame the the google earth coverage over west mineral isn't too good otherwise you'd be able to see Big Brutus given it's size.
While the resolution is good where I live and work, the photos are rather old so you don't get to see the building I work in (it's only been here now for 4 years).
Stay safe in the storms Phred.

Wichita, Kansas

Mrs. Phred and I dress in black and check our equipment list:
- 200 feet of rope
- Stakes
- 3 foot planks with attached ropes
- Laser pointer
- Protractors
- Night vision goggles
- Camera

We decide on dinner at the Texas Roadhouse before heading out to the wheat field. It’s really crowded for a Thursday, so we drive west of town and find an empty restaurant called the Siesta Lounge for dinner.

After dark we park the Toyota and unload our gear. It’s going to be hard minimizing footprints in the muddy field. I follow her and step where she steps.

Suddenly, we look up and see a huge saucer shape materialize. I snap this one picture.
http://picasaweb.google.com/Phred.Firecloud/KansasWheatField/photo#5187956028748266146

We feel a strange floating sensation and lose consciousness. When I wake up I find myself naked and strapped facedown on what appears to be an operating table. A group of small gray creatures with large black eyes approach. One appears to be holding a probe of some sort.

Somehow we can understand their thoughts. They are tired of being blamed for cattle mutilations and crop circles. We’ve been swept up in an alien crop circle interdiction program. They implant devices will make us very sick if we even think about making crop circles again

We lose consciousness once more and awake next to the Toyota. We dress and go back to the RV. “Everybody Loves Raymond” reruns are on. the TV.

sitting here in Kellers Kove Flaky No-Steaky Internet Cafe ...somewhere in the centre of the Mandala that is the winking blinking twinkling Third Eye of Crop-Circle-Tattoo Designs Inc .... somewhere in the centre of a swirly wheatfield in the vortex of all things extraordinary ....

I think about it all again ... many things I almost remember, and yet everything I almost forget ...

many things ... quite so quite so ....

hah!

and hah! again ......





oh yes .....

end of intelligent posting ...

heads off to watch Columbo DVDs ... well I would if I was at home ... ah home ... ah home ....

Texas Roadhouse is crowded every night. It's a popular place. How was the food at the Siesta? Haven't eaten there.

Sorry about the abduction, but the KS aliens take their crop circle making seriously. Be sure to check out the Keeper of the Plains while in the area. It isn't as big as Big Brutus, but it's rather nice.

The first time we saw BB, it was in operation. Since it was electrically powered, you only heard a hum. You can drive a standard sized pick up into the scoop and open both doors with room to spare on each side.

Nice pictures.

Hi Lady Chattingly. I've been thinking about you and how to apologize for not stopping in. We had the one day (we have to be in Salt Lake City by May 21 for a flight and have lots of stops planned in between) and we wanted to see as many Wichita museums as possible...we saw the insides of three and the outsides of two more.

The art museum is a real gem. I really did enjoy it more than the Louvre in Paris. The Coleman Camping Equipment Museum and Factory Outlet was fun too

You've picked a lovely city to live in. The traffic is light and easy to negotiate. We ate lunch in a Sports bar and grill next to the Museum of World Treasures in the "old city". The food was very good.
The Great Plains Transportation Museum is closed on Friday. Maybe next time.

Heading for Dodge City this morning. I remember Marshall Dillon and Gunsmoke on Saturday night TV.

Pictures of Wichita museum stuff;

http://good-times.webshots.com/slideshow/563071419vuTjuC;jsessionid=abcSgTtUqcPpD8CYzXcLr

Colemans !!!! lots and lots of Colemans!

and a big green Coleman truck!!!

this is ...

into the mystic go we ..



gotta go

laters laters ....

Thank you for the posting of the pictures of the Museums in our fair city. There is also an Aviation Museum near McConnell Air Base and the Cosmosphere (space exploration) is in nearby Hutchinson.

I especially enjoyed the photos of Dale Chihuly's glass sculptures. We've seen his work in Oklahoma City and Louisville, Kentucky as well.

Drive carefully. If you come back this way, our door is always open.
Lady C

Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado

We’re not in Kansas anymore. We’re at 8200 feet in the middle of a huge high valley surrounded by the snow-capped Rocky Mountains.

We spent yesterday looking at Dodge City in Kansas. The main employer seems to be Cargill Foods. They truck in 10,000 head of cattle a day to be slaughtered and processed. There are giant cattle concentration camps everywhere where cattle are packed in feedlots to fatten up amid gigantic piles of stinking black dung.

Dodge is a poor, sad, shabby place now. The saloons and bawdy houses are gone. The buffalo hunters, steely eyed lawmen, gamblers and cattle drive cowboys are only a memory. The old Front Street stores and saloons burned down long ago.

We visited the Boot Hill Museum. The old gravesites have been preserved. It’s the kind of place you go to see to be sure you haven’t missed anything. The answer is no. That’s about it for Dodge.

This morning the stars are out, the sky is clear and the moon is down. I glance up and see the Dipper, the Navigator’s Triangle, the Milky Way burning a swath across the sky and Sagittarius in the South.
The temperature warmed up into the seventies yesterday and dropped to 22 F. during the night. The dunes here are the tallest in North America. They are most beautiful at sunrise and sunset when the colors and shadows form strange shapes.

We’ll do some hiking in the Park today and then take the Toyota on a daytrip to Taos, New Mexico Tuesday.

Mrs. Phred said she loved me last night after I got the satellite tuned in so she could watch tennis. She reminded me that I had threatened to make her set up the satellite because I thought it was a bad idea. “Right! Like that’s going to work!” I told her. We laughed.

With longitude, latitude, azimuth and altitude precisely established in three widely separated locations, I can easily find the satellite now from anywhere. A couple of pictures of the Great Sand dunes are here.... http://thefirecloudreport.blogspot.com/

great piccies .. love the dunes ..



looking cool there, pal, in your jeans jacket .. even though you appear to be behind bars .. heheheheheh ...



daytrip to Taos?? nice ... what about The Taos Hum then? all theories and authentic recordings please to be posted here ..



have you been spotting the ISS during your stargazes? Chris is obsessed .... everywhere we go .. we have to stand in carparks and watch spacestations speeding over the sky ... mixed with the Taos Hum as soundtrack .. we could make a movie ..

hmm

am I allowed to post ads here .. from YouTube? must show you this ad of the moment in UK .. but don't know if can ...

let me know ..

H

Had no idea we had dunes like that around. America is a place. Thanks for posting it for us.

The wind outside is gusting to about 50 mph. We’re back from Taos and parked next to 30 square miles of 700 foot tall sand dunes. It’s a recipe for a sandstorm. Turns out that sandstorm sunsets are nothing like the lovely pollution inspired sunsets of coastal Florida. They are more of a two-tone blue over brown.

We invented a new sport yesterday while hiking the dunes. We call it ass-boarding (pictures below). It’s marginally more fun and much less controversial than water-boarding.

It’s tough to climb up a 700 foot sand dune at 8,200 feet. You breathe heavily. Sand gets in your sneakers. You think Lawrence of Arabia. You think camels. You think "Flight of the Phoenix". You start singing...

All day I've faced a barren waste
Without the taste of water, cool water
Old Dan and I with throats burned dry
And souls that cry for water
Cool, clear, waterHe spreads the burning sand with water…

So today we got up early and went down to Taos in New Mexico on the edge of the Taos Indian Reservation.. The most interesting thing we saw was the Taos Pueblo. The Pueblo has been continuously inhabited for 1,000 to 1,200 years. It’s hard to exactly date the construction. Regardless it’s the oldest continuously inhabited community in North America.

The buildings are divided by the Red Willow Creek, which flows down from the sacred Blue Lake in the mountains to the East. Only members of the community are allowed into the Reservation area that includes the lake. The only modern addition to these buildings is doorways. The original adobe structures were entered through holes in the roof. Ladders were pulled up when invaders appeared.

The Taos Indians closely guard their language and traditions. They revolted against Spanish rule in 1680 and remained free for about 30 years. In 1847 they attempted to over throw the U.S. Government and managed to kill the first governor of New Mexico, Charles Bent. Retribution was swift.

We had lunch in the Doc Martin’s Restaurant near the Taos Plaza. We both ordered coffee and Lamb Wraps. Tomorrow we head for the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park.

http://thefirecloudreport.blogspot.com/2008/04/ass-boarding-in-america.html

I think you can post ads here...only a very small select group reads to the end of a 7,000 post conversation anyway...Probably not a yikester in the lot.

Ass Boarding???

Nothing new under the sun. We used to "ass board" down the chats on pieces of tin--even more fun in the winter when we had experienced one of the Midwest's famous "ice storms"!

Of course that would be "ass tinning", wouldn't it?

That would be tin-boarding. Ass-boarding has no artificial aids.