Damn, now I got the itch too.  Here is a little taste of the Snake to get us both through the day:

""

"I said, 'Wait a minute, Chester, You know I'm a peaceful man...'" Robbie Robertson

have the entrance to Karnak.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

That means a lot!

On San Pablo Ave. at Univesity Ave.

You seem as drawn to young women as I am.

That's why I won't give you my usual café's address :-)

Though I would extend it to women - "young" being just a temporary state - and I would add (just in case) that I do show them the picture :-)

"What can I do, What can I write, Against the fall of Night". A.E. Housman

Turns out you can read "transforming friendship" yourself.  
http://www.archive.org/details/MN41580ucmf_4

It was written by a Methodist clergyman and printed by University of Chicago.  Christianity as pop sociology.  My father was on his way to becoming a Lutheran preacher and the problem of keeping Christianity relevant was becoming acute 11 years into the Great Depression.  So these sorts of books were quite common.  He had shelves of them by the time I came along.

As for the farms shots--I love them too.  At full size, they are amazingly detailed.  Note in the threshing picture, the assembled neighbors have only one internal combustion engine and it is driving the threshing machine.  

"Remember the I35W bridge--who needs terrorists when there are Republicans"

you are the media you consume.

Couple of additional points here.  This is Kansas!  It was probably 40°C when that picture was taken.  Also, threshing machines were VERY loud.

I am just old enough to have seen a threshing crew in action.  The work was very hard but this is the harvest--there is a joy that a growing season's worth of effort has paid off.  The amount of food it takes to keep the threshers fed is staggering so in addition to the crew you see--there is another crew of mostly women who cooked from dawn until late at night just to keep them going.

So threshing is about cooperation between neighbors.  It is mostly just hot dirty work but there is also an incredible amount of skill on display--social organization, mechanical maintenance, understanding when plants are perfectly ripe for harvest, etc.

Seeing threshing crews in action affected my political outlook.  When I was a university student studying political science, I had an arrogant prick for a professor who one day asserted that Marx had made fun of "the idiocy of rural life."  I thought of myself as a radical leftist in those days but at that moment, I knew I was NEVER going to be a Marxist.  Rural life was a lot of things but idiotic was NOT one of them.  Not surprisingly, the failure to properly organize agriculture was a chronic problem for the Marxists.

"Remember the I35W bridge--who needs terrorists when there are Republicans"