This weekend will be a big one at Sweet Seasons Farm.

We will be breeding Bonnie.

The first attempt didn’t catch, so hopefully the second time will be the charm.

I have purchsed semen from “Shady Walnut Conn,” a top new Bull.

If you click on that link, you can see all kinds of statistical information about this bull. His daughter, on average, will give about 1600 more pounds of milk per lactation that the mother. This isn’t the best; 43% of proven Ayrshire bulls will push more milk to their progeny. But check out the fat and protein percentiles. If I get a heifer, she will give rich milk.

The other trait I was particularly interested in was the calving ease number. 95% of heifers bred to Conn gave birth without assistance. I really hope Bonnie will be part of the 95%; I have books on how to assist a delivery and it scares the bejesus out of me.

Here is an ad page for Conn.

If bull proofs interest you, here are your tax dollars at work.

Air Marshall,

I assure you that I don’t sit around on the farm cackling maniacally and plotting nefariously to bump your posts. It has all been coincidence and I assure you that readers will scroll down and eventually find your Redskins graphics.

My father-in-law has been an incredible help lately. My wife is taking several classes in the evening and she has to leave before I get home from school. John has been coming down and watching the smallholderette for us.

I came in from watering the cattle last night and he was cooking liver, onions, and bacon with baked potatoes on the side. Liver from our land. Potatoes from our garden. Only the bacon was imported from outside the Sweet Seasons Republic. Tasty, tasty, tasty.

And I can proudly report that my wee daughter loves liver and onions.

Skippy is a pansy.

He shaves his beard. Ha. I laugh at his effeminacy.

I let fourteen-year-olds shave my beard and my entire head yesterday.

My children had a 100% pass rate on the Virginia Standard of Learning tests last year. This is not bad, particularly when you consider that many of them are not very proficient in the English language.

I had promised them that they could bare my pate if they studied hard and pulled through. They did and I lived up to my bargain.

My twenty-two month old daughter was a bit puzzled by my looks. When I arrive home, the nightly ritual is for her to run screaming “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” from the living rom and bear hug my legs. She turned the corner of the living room last night and the screaming came to an abrupt halt. She gave me the most hilarious look. Think a toddler’s silent version of “who the heck are you?!” She eventually warmed up to me and spent the rest of the evening rubbing my smooth skull and saying “Uh-oh!”

What really surprised me was the reaction of the cattle. When I went to move them to a new pasture, they were quite standoffish. Normally they run over for scratches and the fresh grass. They initially started off this way - I called them and they came running over. But they skidded to a halt about ten feet away and looked at me dubiously. Finally Bonnie walked over and into the new pasture, but wasn’t interested in any affection. I backed off a bit and the boys eventually followed their herd leader into the new field. Weird stuff. Who knew that cattle pay attention to our hair styles (or lack thereof)?

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader periodically solicits pithy quotations from his Ministers which will become the rotating tag lines at the top of this page. If you’ve never noticed them before, take a moment and hit the refresh key on your browser and read a few.

Today the AirMarshal sent me a few unsolicited tag lines. One of them struck me as funny enough that your Maximum Leader is going to make it into a t-shirt design.

Behold the newest NakedVillainy.com Product, the “Well Hung T-shirt!”

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader will, first, apologize to the AirMarshal for writing a long post and pushing his posts towards the bottom of the page. But, since the day is here, this must written now.

Many of you know that the Big Hominid is the Poet Laureate of the Mike World Order. He has on occasion been known to sing the praises of your Maximum Leader, and even tell of your Maximum Leader’s heroic origins.

Allow your Maximum Leader to return the favour.

As we have all learned from Joseph Campbell, there are archetypes within the various religious and spiritual traditions of the world. After much careful research, your Maximum Leader can now illuminate for you, his dear minions, the similarities in the Big Hominid creation myth from the various world traditions.

According to the Nordic tradition, from the Ginnungagap (the emptiness) came Audhumla. Audhumla was the first creature, the primeval cow in fact. From Audhumla’s teats flowed the four rivers of milk which fed the next creature, Ymir the frost giant. Ymir spawned many frost giants who inhabited the world and became the enemies of the gods. During the time of the frost giants Audhumla found a salt lick to sustain herself. As she licked the salt, she created the first man, Buri. In time Buri found a mate and their child Bor was the father of the god Odin (Wotan for you Wagnerians out there). But after the creation of Buri, the tale of Audhumla fades. Your Maximum Leader has pieced together ancient runes and discovered that after creating Buri from the salt lick, Audhumla became constipated. She wandered throughout Midgard and Asgard seeking relief. After the Gods defeated the frost giants, Audhumla was found near Valhalla by Thor. Seeing her constipated state, Thor struck Audhumla on the flank with his hammer. A great torrent of manure flew from Audhumla. The manure mixed on the earth with her life-giving milk and formed a great boiling pit. Seeing the festering pit, the god Odin foresaw the eventual coming of a great being who would alternately use his powers equally for good and ill. Odin foresaw that the lquid would coalesce into a child. A child who would be known by his nom-de-blog, the Big Hominid…

According to the Greco-Roman tradition, Cronos (the titan and ruler of the heavens) ate the children he produced with his wife-sister Rhea. But Rhea determined to save one of her children. So she gave a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes to Cronos. Cronos, distracted by Gaia the earth-mother doing a striptease, ate the stone thinking it was his newborn son. The son grew to be Zeus. Zeus, in a fit of teenaged pique, faught his father and forced him to vomit up his siblings (Poseidon, Hades, Hera, Hestia, and Demeter); who joined Zeus in deposing his father and becoming the ruling gods. The little known postscript to this tale is that after vomiting up the siblings of Zeus, Cronos shat out the stone he’d eaten believing it to be Zeus. The feces-encrusted stone fell to the earth and it landed in the sea. The titan feces mixed with the same sea foam that would later spawn Aphrodite. The floating morass of titan feces infused sea foam drifted across the seas. It caused the destruction of Atlantis, and helped keep the sea monster Kraken entombed in the sea. But its greatest creation would come much later. That creation/spawn was to be the scatalogically preordained being, the Big Hominid…

According to the Indian tradition, Vishnu was walking one day and a lotus flower blossomed from his navel. Brahma sprung forth from the lotus blossom and set about creating the world. The oft forgotten part of the story is that after the lotus flower sprang forth from Vishnu’s navel, a Titan Arum blossomed from his anus and from that odourous flower were sprung a line of men who would join together the world of spirituality and scatology. It is said that this line of men continues to this day, and that the Big Hominid is known in some parts of rual India and Nepal as the 69th incarnation of the Rectali Lama…

Now you all can see the similarities of the various Hominidal creation stories. Accept them for what they are. And be joyous in your celebration of the anniversary of the birth of the one and only Big Hominid.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader congratulates Dr. Rusty Shackleford for a wonderful edition of Bonfire of the Vanities. He does it 80’s style. Here is the link for you all.

As many of you know, your Maximum Leader loves the 80’s. And Dr. Rusty helps remind us why there was so much to love.

Carry on.

Just a matter of days.

Can’t help but notice that the color scheme here is a lot like Burgundy and Gold.

I know that MaxLead, SmallHolder and the Foreign Minister are all Fathers, as am I.

So I was discussing baby issues with a Female co-worker. I won’t go into details, except to say it was a poop related problem. The co-worker has no kids, and no practical baby experience. Yet she saw fit to lecture me on how to deal with this particular issue. And this is a common thing. At a cookout at a friends house on Sunday I was talking about our 7 week old baby, and when telling someone about the poop issue, I got the standard Mother response. “Did you try A? Did you do B? C works?” forget the fact that I was telling the story to set up a joke, I get the “You’re a Dad, and an idiot, and you need to be lectured” attitude. Granted, she didn’t mean it that way, but the undercurrent is there.

Many women seem to assume that they know more about dealing with any child then any man. Not ALL women, of course. And I do my fair share of second guessing other parents, but I think that’s normal.

A friend of ML’s and mine tells a story along these lines. Details may be sketchy on my part, but the gist is what’s important. He’s at a mall with his two daughters. One is fussy. A mother near by comes to “help him” calm his daughter down, and tries to take her out of his arms, seemingly assuming she could deal better than he with it. Now seriously, who do you think a fussy 3 year old would prefer? Her father, or some stranger?

Now I accept that many women, indeed most mothers, know more than I about Children in general. But there is only one person to whom I will deferwhen talking about my own children, and that is my wife.

The French are dealing with Terrorist/Kidnappers protesting a French Law. The law in protest effectively bans religious symbols in schools, including crucifixes, and skull caps. In this wonderful land, with our First Amendment rights, the law would probably be unconstitutional, but this is the French we’re talking about. So ban those hats, and scarves and crucifixes. Truth be told, I doubt they’d enforce it with regard to Catholic symbols.

However, how best to protest the law? How about kidnapping a couple of Frenchman and decapitating them on Al Jazeera? Sounds like a plan. Despite the fact that decapitation may actually improve a Frenchman’s odor, this truly is deplorable.

If France gives in, and repeals the law (which would be the right thing to do, for other reasons) then Europeans will have once again emboldened terrorism. If France doesn’t give in, then of course, we’ll be blames some how.

But I really wonder what the Terrorists are hoping to achieve. I believe that in their minds this IS a cultural war, and they hope to “defeat” the west in some way… yet there are no tangible goals. The terrorists cannot hope to win in any absolute sense, and ultimately they will lose, it’s just a question of when. They can still inflict real dammage on us, though the most serious consequences are probably outside their realm of comprehension.

I think the worst thing they can result from this, for America, is a reduction of Civil Liberties resulting from things like the Patriot Act. I don’t know if we’ve gone too far yet, but I could see it hapening. Paradoxically, the worst thing the Terrorists could do from their point of view is stage another high profile attack. Such a thing would result in US public oppinion shifting squarely behind retaliation, and a thorough ass kicking would be the result. Throughout Afghanistan and Iraq, the US Military “kept it’s gloves on”, being very careful to do its best in selecting targets, and attempting to reduce civilian casualties to a level never before seen in warfare. At some point, I get the feeling we’d say “fuck it” and just kick ass.

And maybe that’s not a bad thing.

So I post, and then Small holder feels the need to post barely 6 minutes later. What’s more, he’s blathering on about how many problems he has posting. If you can’t cut and paste, then maybe you should go back to fertilizing your fields.

At least wait a respectable amount of time before you post.

You’ll see… I’ll wait until you post one of your long winded rants on Bovine artificial insemination, or whatever, and then I’ll snow you under and blast you into the archives.

Every time I cut and paste into the blogger posting box, the displayed post has all sorts of funny symbols replacing the punctuation. I don’t have this problem on my other blog so it must be specific to Nakedvillainy’s blogskin. Maximum Leader, PUHLEASE ask Francey to help solve this problem. It is really annoying to have to go back into the post editor to individually change dozens of punctuation marks.

It makes me feel like an ant.

Silly me, I thought ML was posting about SHAKIRA, so I was looking for some hot, latin, booty shaking pics. Oh well. Now that women’s beach volleyball is over, I guess I’m in withdrawal.

Anyway,

Islamic Courts have no place in a Western Society, as they exist in the Arab world, and isn’t that the only precedent we have? Maybe they can function here in a fair way, but I strongly doubt it. First of all, and last of all, there is no precedent for a recognition of anything secular. If an Islamic Court were to function in the West in a healthy matter, it would have to understand it’s place in a Secular society. It can’t.

What an Islamic court will do is create a sub society living according to Islamic laws within a western culture. Ok, fine. Philosophically it’s their right to live as they want, however offensive we may find it. However, Sharia governs every aspect of life, doesnit it? So eventually these two sets of rules will clash. What if a non-Muslim steals from a Muslim? What if the Muslim demands justice in an Islamic court. In America, or Canada, that’s not his right. What if an Islamic court in Ohio decided to hang an Islamic teenager for making out after the Football game? Could we allow that to happen in America? No freaking way.

I believe that Islam, as a whole, is lodged in a medieval mindset, and this is one of the main reasons behind all the crap that the Middle East faces today. Not the only reason by a long shot, but Islam as a whole has the brakes on any process that can improve the lives of the Billion plus people living in poverty throughout the Arab world. It doesn’t help that Arab leaders are universally corrupt despots living a feudal lifestyle. Would the world tolerate Europeans living, and ruling, like the Saud family? Maybe. I don’t know.

Greetings, lloyal minions. Your Maximum Leader read Michele’s post Understanding Lyrics That Were Not Meant to be Understood and loved it. What makes it more interesting is that your Maximum Leader was just listening toLed Zeppelin III on Sunday. Funny.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader read this over at IMAO. So it is likely that most of you have already read over it. But wow! First Saudi Arabia, now Iran! What is up over there? Next thing you know those pan-arabist types will want to be exporting Sharia to the west.

Oh! Wait! Too late.

Carry on.