Exactly so! The horror and depravity of the “invisible box” bit goes back to ancient times, at least in the Hebraic tradition. Don’t try to tell me you never heard of King Solomon’s Mimes?
No! Holy Cow!
Ah, the agony agony.
It hurts. See? I’m hurting
Come gather ‘round hippies
Wherever you roam
And admit that the glass walls
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be trapped all alone.
If your voice to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start talkin
Or you’ll be mute as a stone
For the mimes they are a-changin’.
Huh. Maybe Scylla’s right.
Daniel
Bound to happen sometime.
:mad: Doesn’t that just totally suck?
And a hush fell across the room. Shortly after teh agonized groans of the gallery were heard the world over. 
I’m trying to think of a way to do justice to this story. Shortest version - an escaped steer was shot by campus police on the lawn between Mrak Hall (the UCD Admin building) and Putah Creek. Much talk and hand waving ensued.
The first information given to the public was confused due to a conflict of spins between student animal lovers and the university administration.
The animal was a bull. The animal was a steer.
It was running down the arboretum path and had menaced passers-by and a baby carriage. It was standing still, but it was near lunch and a herd of, let’s say agriculturally challenged* students and secretaries were about to pour out of the building.
The police had to shoot it. Animal Control should have captured it. And on and on.
Then a columnist from the Sac Bee did some phoning. Unlike the Davis press, he called both the owner of the steer (it was a steer - a crossbreed between a brahma and something else) and the Cole Facility (from which the animal had escaped). He wrote an absolutely hilarious send-up of both the event and the Davis reaction and coverage.
Seems the steer was at the Cole Facility for a carcass summary, to see how that particular cross put on meat under a specific feed regimen. Seems the owner was with it and had given the police permission to shoot it. Seems even capturing it humanely wouldn’t have bought it more than, say half and hour.
And it seems that Animal Control had no alternate way of dealing with the animal beyond, as the columnist suggested, “herding it downtown to the jogging statue in hopes that it would put it’s eye out”. I was eating lunch with the Animal Control guys at the time and read the column to them out loud. When I got to that line, I nearly choked on my tongue laughing. They loved it.
They also tried to get the university to buy them a dart gun with nicotine darts, which they said was the quickest, safest way to kill a large animal - with the bonus that casual watchers might think it was just sedated. The university didn’t go for it.
Oh, and it had been just standing there. No menacing involved other than being big and horned.
*As evidence of agricultural challenge: Animal Control had, the month previous, gotten a phone call from an earnest freshman reporting that some of the ducks in Mrak Pond were beating up smaller ducks and that they should go put a stop to it. (For the city folk amoung us - ducks aren’t gentlemanly when they mate.)
Was there a city councilwoman running around in a carrot costume?
Was it an all-natural, chemical-free diet?
You’d think that after living in Segundo, the smell of the cow barns would diminish sympathy for the cows. I certainly cared less about the pigs after having a math class out by the stys in the hot summer weather.
100% card carrying hippie here, I even smoke American Spirits.
Now, this is unfair. There are several reasons hippies prefer natural products, and there are many cases where they prefer synthetic products.
First of all, there is the whole naturalist aspect of it. Many people feel more comfortable wearing a pair of natural hemp pants than they do synthetic nylon ones :-p
Second, one part of the hippie community, those that live in communes, like to be self-sustaining.
Third, when some day someone figures out how to make synthetic meat, there will be a vast divide between the vegan hippies and omnivorous hippies.
Fourth, the reasoning behind “natural” or “free range” or whatever products is actually rather valid. Much mass market meat these days comes from hormone injected stock bred mutants of animals. Similar to the reason I hate those assholes who breed cats and dogs for fashion and the little thing can’t walk and disintegrates instantly in sunlight (if it ever sees it in its short lifetime), I just like being nice to animals. And you’ve clearly never been to a mass pig farm, the ones where they keep them in cages stacked on top of each other stuffing them, letting them crap on each other, and having that flow off into water supplies (I remember this happening in South Carolina in the late '90s, there was a breakout of disease from the pig farms)
Fifth, as far as natural veggies go, well, quite frankly, we’ve been genetically engineering food since the day we figured out that planting something makes it grow. Everything from maize to peas to potatoes has been engineered to be bigger and better for the past 10,000 years. Now we’re just adding in some other genes. The worry there is mostly that we’re creating long-term health hazards (see: lead piping).
… I dunno. I was raised in southern California, where when you were out in the summer you broke off a bit of an aloe vera plant and gooped your skin. I recall being treated rather well by a nice cup of distasteful yet amazingly helpful tea. Yea, I could go to the store and buy cold medicine, but why do that when there is a natural alternative that is cheaper?
Plus, you have to remember that hippies are against giant mega-corporations. The medical industry in America is one of those. If something is natural and free, it is certainly better than whatever Pfizer puts out.
I don’t get vegetarianism either, so I can’t comment here.
Hippies are anti-farming? I must have missed that in the newsletter.
Hippies actually prefer backyard gardens. Hippies help keep smaller farms that don’t do the whole chemical/genetic altering thing operating.
I assume you’re talking about slavery… or the Indian genocide… I must have missed that newsletter too. It isn’t so much making you feel guilty, as remembering where we’ve come from and what we might revert back to.
Dear** Razishlyat**,
I know four pages is a lot to read, but if you had you would have saved yourself some time.
I’m not against hippies. Left_Hand_of_Dorkness and I went around and around with this for some time, on this very page even. What I’m against are idiots who don’t research what they believe before they start proselytizing. See my previous example of the man, the cat, and the eucalyptus oil. From time to time, it is idiots of the hippie breed that piss me off. Hence, this thread. But, I do not discriminate between idiots.
If you like, I will address your message directly:
Hemp is not the only natural fiber. I wear cotton all the time. I knit with wool from three different animals. I don’t care about their clothing preferences.
Are safely secured away from me, so I don’t care.
Actually, hormone injection is not all that common because it increases the cost of production and labor. If you don’t make your money back, it’s not worth doing. Many farmers don’t. Even on dairies, where hormone use is slightly more common, owners are more likey only to supplement only their best cow in order to get the most out of her they can. The problem, though, is then they have to label all their milk as bST supplemented because they don’t seperate out that cow’s milk from all the cows who didn’t have the hormone. But, see previous posts about the bST not actually occuring in higher levels, yadda yadda yadda.
Yes, I have. I’ve even seen intensive egg-laying poultry farming. Pigs are not kept in the manner you describe, not even intensively. Egg-laying hens are kept in stacking cages, but they are prevented from defecate on one another (usually by placing a metal sheet between the cages) to prevent the spread of disease. Producers with hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in animals are going to do everything they can to keep them healthy. The creepiest places I’ve seen are small producers who don’t know what a bird in respiratory distress looks like, so the bird just suffers and dies and makes all it’s neighbors sick too. Also, good producers aren’t going to let their waste ponds run into the water system if they can help it. I doubt the farms you heard about are still in business.
And “free range” does not always equal nicer for the animals. This cite talks about birds unfit to go for meat because of various reasons. The farm type with the highest condemnation rates were those that raise their birds on vegetarian diets. But, you’ll also notice that birds from free-range farms were condemned partly for mutilation. The buggers tear each other apart when they’re in groups of more than 10.
Actually the story of Romans going crazy because of lead poisoning
has been debated.
How do you know the tea cured you?
Really? If part of what makes it better is that it works, then why didn’t Pfizer find out? Poor bastards wasted a lot of money when what they could be using wouldn’t cost them.