I am certain that some will think this story is much a moo about nothing, but I think it behooves us all to consider the implications of what at first blush seems like a simply grazy observation. Zoologists Sabine Begall and Hynek Burda of the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany have made the startling discovery that two out of every three cows standing in fields all over the earth have steered themselves along North-South magnetic lines, like big oversized leather covered compass needles. We don’t know for certain yet if they are headed for the North Star or aiming with their dairy-air, but we now know that those of us with frontal mental lobes, single chambered stomachs and just two teats apiece have been missing the meat of this story. 
The word “cow” derives from the Latin word ”caput”, meaning the head, which is the ancient way of counting cows, as in “Me and Tex are driving five hundred head to Abilene”. Clearly it was the head of the living cow that Gandi was thinking of when he wrote, “The cow is a poem of pity…She is the second mother to millions of mankind.” She is also, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the source of 18% of the world’s methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. And almost one third of the world’s oversupply of cow burps (the primary source of methane) comes from India’s 280 million sacred cows. They belch so much because they re-chew their cuds, regurgitating and re-digesting the cellulose over and over again. The first secret of cows is that every cow is bull-imic.
The life of the average Daisy or Bessie The Cow has been described as comparable to a potato on sedatives. But complexity was always just beneath the hide. The American Humane Society has taken note that if one herd member is shocked by an electric fence, the entire herd avoids the wire. English bull artists have noted that cows moo in local dialects and inflections. And it has long been common knowledge that ungulates form their own bovine breakfast clubs. Three or four females establish lifelong bonds, a cow herd within the herd, or a “curd” if you will. Daisy enjoys a rich emotional life, nurturing animosities against each other, developing friendships and even mulling over the bovine equivalent of the Stephen Sondheim conundrum, “Is that all there is?"
This shared arrogance of our two species matches the obsession of Bessie with a subject familiar to many obsessive humans; sex. Eric Idle has described cows as the “…librarians of the animal world; mild by day, wild by night." And John Webster, a professor of animal husbandry at Bristol University in England, describes cows as “gay nymphomaniacs”. The “curds” constantly cowlick one another. And a single Bessie in “heat” can set off a Daisy chain of cow girls “mounting” herd mates in riot of bovine dominatrix behavior. Unseen by inattentive humans, a pasture of grazing Gurneys is in reality a seething mass of bored libidos on steroids. It gives a whole new meaning to the term “pasteurization”.
Few have ever denied that individually cows process a certain personal magnetism. Their sheer bulk demands respect, if not religious devotion. These are not cuddly creatures. The one point three billion cows alive at this moment are ponderous moovers and shakers, and udderly unimpressed with humanities’ crème-de-la-crème, logic. Every dairyman has herd that cattle tend to face uphill, into strong winds or turn their flank steak to the sunny side on a cold morning; and that all seems plausible. But the idea that these cow hides might be sharing some kind of mystical, new-age ferris sensitivity seemed until recently to be an oxymoron. But scientists seeking out the magnetic orientation of hills created by the European ground mole (Talpa europaea), stumbled over the realization that perhaps larger mammals might also be influenced by something other than human magnetism.
German researchers examined Google Earth photographs taken at the same local time of day, observing some 8,510 individual cows in 308 separate herds on five different continents, at essentially the same moment. And the humans stumbled upon this udderly amazing fact; cows got magnetism. Generally, at any given moment 70 % of the cows in any herd are standing about five degrees off of true North-South orientation. In Oregon State, closer to the North Pole, the deviation of cows is all of 17.5 degrees. In the southern hemisphere (Africa and South America) the alignment was slightly more north-eastern, south-western. Still, adjusted for latitude, 70% of all cows point toward the magnetic pole, and this is much too large a percentage to be a mere homogenized coincidence. The next question is, of course, why have cows got magnetism? Cows are not migratory, but they once may have been. Cows share a common ancestor with whales, the “Pakictids”, which 53 million years ago had a whale’s ear and a cow’s teeth in a really ugly little dog’s body, sort of a Mexican hairless with hair. Could this ancient mongrel have been the source of the current magnetic deju moo? It could.
So it might seem, upon rumination, that we owe the cows an apology, that to err might be human but to forgive could be bovine. But stop the stampede for animal rights. My guess is we could be apologizing to Daisy and Bessie “auf die Ewigkeit warten”, as they say in Germany, and it would make no difference because Daisy and Bessie are not particularly interested in our moo-tivations, because cows are just as conceited as we humans are. And in the final rendering the squeaky veal always gets the oil. Holy, cow!
P.S. Photographs of adventure cows are from “The Secret Life of Cows” by Glen Wexler.
The word “cow” derives from the Latin word ”caput”, meaning the head, which is the ancient way of counting cows, as in “Me and Tex are driving five hundred head to Abilene”. Clearly it was the head of the living cow that Gandi was thinking of when he wrote, “The cow is a poem of pity…She is the second mother to millions of mankind.” She is also, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the source of 18% of the world’s methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. And almost one third of the world’s oversupply of cow burps (the primary source of methane) comes from India’s 280 million sacred cows. They belch so much because they re-chew their cuds, regurgitating and re-digesting the cellulose over and over again. The first secret of cows is that every cow is bull-imic.The life of the average Daisy or Bessie The Cow has been described as comparable to a potato on sedatives. But complexity was always just beneath the hide. The American Humane Society has taken note that if one herd member is shocked by an electric fence, the entire herd avoids the wire. English bull artists have noted that cows moo in local dialects and inflections. And it has long been common knowledge that ungulates form their own bovine breakfast clubs. Three or four females establish lifelong bonds, a cow herd within the herd, or a “curd” if you will. Daisy enjoys a rich emotional life, nurturing animosities against each other, developing friendships and even mulling over the bovine equivalent of the Stephen Sondheim conundrum, “Is that all there is?"This shared arrogance of our two species matches the obsession of Bessie with a subject familiar to many obsessive humans; sex. Eric Idle has described cows as the “…librarians of the animal world; mild by day, wild by night." And John Webster, a professor of animal husbandry at Bristol University in England, describes cows as “gay nymphomaniacs”. The “curds” constantly cowlick one another. And a single Bessie in “heat” can set off a Daisy chain of cow girls “mounting” herd mates in riot of bovine dominatrix behavior. Unseen by inattentive humans, a pasture of grazing Gurneys is in reality a seething mass of bored libidos on steroids. It gives a whole new meaning to the term “pasteurization”.Few have ever denied that individually cows process a certain personal magnetism. Their sheer bulk demands respect, if not religious devotion. These are not cuddly creatures. The one point three billion cows alive at this moment are ponderous moovers and shakers, and udderly unimpressed with humanities’ crème-de-la-crème, logic. Every dairyman has herd that cattle tend to face uphill, into strong winds or turn their flank steak to the sunny side on a cold morning; and that all seems plausible. But the idea that these cow hides might be sharing some kind of mystical, new-age ferris sensitivity seemed until recently to be an oxymoron. But scientists seeking out the magnetic orientation of hills created by the European ground mole (Talpa europaea), stumbled over the realization that perhaps larger mammals might also be influenced by something other than human magnetism.German researchers examined Google Earth photographs taken at the same local time of day, observing some 8,510 individual cows in 308 separate herds on five different continents, at essentially the same moment. And the humans stumbled upon this udderly amazing fact; cows got magnetism. Generally, at any given moment 70 % of the cows in any herd are standing about five degrees off of true North-South orientation. In Oregon State, closer to the North Pole, the deviation of cows is all of 17.5 degrees. In the southern hemisphere (Africa and South America) the alignment was slightly more north-eastern, south-western. Still, adjusted for latitude, 70% of all cows point toward the magnetic pole, and this is much too large a percentage to be a mere homogenized coincidence. The next question is, of course, why have cows got magnetism? Cows are not migratory, but they once may have been. Cows share a common ancestor with whales, the “Pakictids”, which 53 million years ago had a whale’s ear and a cow’s teeth in a really ugly little dog’s body, sort of a Mexican hairless with hair. Could this ancient mongrel have been the source of the current magnetic deju moo? It could.So it might seem, upon rumination, that we owe the cows an apology, that to err might be human but to forgive could be bovine. But stop the stampede for animal rights. My guess is we could be apologizing to Daisy and Bessie “auf die Ewigkeit warten”, as they say in Germany, and it would make no difference because Daisy and Bessie are not particularly interested in our moo-tivations, because cows are just as conceited as we humans are. And in the final rendering the squeaky veal always gets the oil. Holy, cow!P.S. Photographs of adventure cows are from “The Secret Life of Cows” by Glen Wexler.- 30 -
What I do have is an increasingly low tolerance for stupidity, which makes me less and less willing to be entertained by fools, even ones claiming to have collected a dead Big Foot in their freezer. I even confessed to my wife last night that for years I have found “COPS” to be dull and predictable and I don’t want to watch it anymore. I have given up all hope that one night a COPS contestant will pull yet another package of meth or crack out of a suspect’s front pocket, hear the same old tired “It’s not mine” excuse once to often, and just snap. I don’t want the cop to shoot the addict. That would be too “Hollywood”. Instead, I had hoped to see the officer lock the idiot addict in the back of his patrol car, call for a taxi cab and just go home. And never go into a police station again as long as he lives. We could call it “Ex-Cops”. It is not a hunger for justice that burns in my heart anymore, but a simple desire for novelty. Honesty on television would be something new. This is a very dangerous feeling to have as the political conventions approach.
I feel the same way about “American Idol”, “Survivor”, “The Nanny” and every hackneyed “reality” show on cable: except, of course, for “Dirty Jobs”. I could watch Mike Rowe read the phone book, as long as he had never read it before. But I do worry that my dissatisfaction with the current state of American culture could be a portent of doom. Except I have even lost faith in doomsday.
The Mayan Calendar predicts that the world will end in the year 2012. In fact the Mayans world ended about the year 1100. If they were smart enough to have created a calendar that recorded the end of the world a thousand years after their culture had already been reduced to hot chocolate and chewed cocaine leaves, how come they overlooked the importance of 1492, when a bunch of unwashed Euro-trash showed up on their doorstep with bang sticks and no concept of public property? The Mayan super priests missed that little Armageddon, but they are still on track for a 2012 prediction? It just sounds like something else Wolf Blitzer will be droning on about as the date approaches. “Is the world scheduled to end in the year of 2012? We will hear from the experts on both sides of the issue, right after the break”. I am forced to remind Wolf that there are no “sides” to insanity. It is not an arguable position. It is not a defensible position. It is a medical condition.
According to the Washington Post and the New York Daily Tribune, on May 18, 1910, sixteen year old Jane Warfield of Aline, Oklahoma came within a seconds of being sacrificed by a group calling themselves The Select Followers, to appease Haley’s Comet, which was about the end the world but for the spilled blood of a virgin Okie. According to the Cherokee Republican of May 27, 1910, the group’s leader, Henry Heinman, told the Select Followers that “…the world would end on the 18th day of May, and the comet now in the sky would sweep with pestilential gases across the earth eliminating all animal life…He gave out that he had received a revelation that he was to sacrifice the girl and thus avert world calamity. Sheriff Hughes has placed the girl in the hands of safe parties and Heinman will be held to await action by investigating officers.”
The story turns out to have been a fraud, a concoction of a newspaper editor named Ed Marchant. According to research brought together by historian Guy W. Moore, on the web site “The Virgin and the Comet”, there is no listing for a “Henry Heinman” nor a “Jane Warfield” in the 1910 Oklahoma census. And in 1910 the sheriff for Major County, where Aline, Oklahoma is located, was Lewis Burwell, not the mythical Sheriff Hughes. In other 
But there is a difference between a tale of a virgin sacrificed on the plains of Oklahoma and a gorilla suit covered in pig’s entrails stuffed into in a freezer, or a bill of sale for Nigerian Yellow Cake uranium ore. One is a story told for the sheer joy of the story telling; it is told to illustrate a larger truth. That is what is called fiction. The other is a story invented out of greed - greed for money or greed for power. It tells no truth except the truth about those who tell it. That is what is called a fraud.
And, upon reflection, what I really hunger for is not novelty, but truth; honesty in advertising, candor in news gathering, sincerity in politics and just a little authenticity in the lies we tell each other to get through the day, like you are the best team on politics. 
Major Fleet (personal motto, "Nothing Short of Right Is Right") immediately called the Curtiss Aeroplane Corporation on Long Island and ordered conversion of twelve Jenny’s - replacing the front seat controls with mail bag storage, changing the 90 hp engine with a 150 hp one, and adding fuel tanks to increase the range. Curtiss promised to deliver the planes to Belmont Park airfield on May 13. 
At the aerodrome inside the Belmont Park race track Major Fleet found his modified Jennys had been delivered as promised – but still in their crates. The mechanics and pilots spent the next two days desperately throwing the required six planes together. Two newly assembled Jennys were flown to Philadelphia. Two more planes were ready to go from Belmont. And early on the fifteenth, Fleet, exhausted and bone weary, flew the last plane assembled (Number 38262) from Philadelphia to Washington, landing at Potomac Park at 10:35AM, with barely twenty-five minutes to spare before the 11AM takeoff deadline, as per the press release.
The First Lady and President Woodrow Wilson arrived. The previous day Wilson had placed his hand on a cannon barrel still hot from having fired a salute. His right hand was wrapped in a bandage. Franklyn Roosevelt, the under-Secretary of the Navy, arrived: as did the Postmaster General and the Secretary of the War. But where was Lieutenant Boyle? 
As he struggled to keep Boyles' attention Major Fleet was interrupted by a wail of sirens. A mail truck, carrying 140 pounds of First class (24 cent) Air Mail in four bags had arrived. The photographers were momentarily distracted, getting pictures of the bags being loaded into the Jenny. 
Meanwhile the flight from Belmont Park had gotten off on time, and arrived at Philadelphia two hours later. But after waiting for Boyle for almost another hour, the Jenny bound for New York took off from Philadelphia without any mail and headed north. When it arrived on Long Island everyone was so excited they forgot to ask where was the mail. But beyond that , where was Boyle? The answer to that question arrived an hour later.
After finally getting into the air Boyle came to the depressing realization that he could not read a map to save his life. He mistakenly followed a branch line of railroad tracks for 20 miles to the southeast from Washington. By the time Lt. Boyle had realized his error, and tried to figure out just where he had gone wrong, he had almost run out of gas. On crash landing near Waldorf, Maryland, the chastized Lt. Boyle flipped his Jenny onto her top. Boyles’ mailbags were eventually delivered to Philadelphia the next day by another pilot. But thankfully, the wartime press corps chose to bury the lead of the story. And that should have been the end of that.
And it would have been the end but the Postmaster General urged Major Fleet to give Boyle another chance. Which is why, on May 17th, Lt. Boyle took off from Washington yet again. This time he was following another pilot who guided him north out of the capital and up the four track main railroad line toward Philadelphia. Boyle followed the guide plane for fifty miles. But eventually the other plane turned back, which was when, finally alone in the air, somehow the dashing but incompetent Lt. Boyle managed to get turned around yet again. Boyle ended up flying for three hours and fifteen minutes to the south, eventually landing on Cape Charles, on the very Southeastern tip of Virginia.
Determined not to fail this time, and having missed the Atlantic ocean by a hair's breath, Boyle bought gasoline out of his own pocket, got directions from a farmer, took off again and this time actually made it to Philadelphia; where he crash landed on the Philadelphia Country Club golf course, sheering both wings off his Jenny and bending the landing gear. 
P.S.; Major Fleet went on to fame and fortune in the air plane industry, leaving his name on the Air and Space Museum in San Diego, California. But so far I have been unable to find out what ever happened to the intrepid Lieutenant George Leroy Boyle, after his dismissal from the mail service. All I know is that Margaret and George did marry, (date ?) and had a daughter named Josephine. In 1928 Margaret and Josephine were living at the Willard Hotel in Washington. D.C., with her parents. The family later (1930+) applied for Josephine to enter the school at the Cours de ifAssumption in France. I have posted the question on a number of billboards. If you hear anything, I would be very grateful in learning the story of George L. Boyle’s, Margaret McChord-Boyle or Josephine’s Boyle's later life.
If you read the advertising for Userdom you will eventually uncover the stark details of the brave new conflicts arising on the Isle; electrical charging beach parking (1.80 Euro a day), boat hires, restaurants, bars, hotels, umbrella and sun lounger rentals, volleyball, windsurfing and sailing schools, playgrounds, sandy beaches, public sanitary facilities and nude areas – plenty and plenty of nude areas. 
As 63 year old Stanislawa Borecka, bemoaned loudly, “What a cheek, sunbathing naked! Directly on the coast …where normal people walk! What am I supposed to tell my grandson now?” Poor Stanislawa had just crossed from Swinoujscie (the Polish side) to Swinemunde (the German shore) and was so unhinged that she swore not to return until the swinehunds cover their sausages. 
And before Pooty-poot turned out to be more like Staly-Stalin (and George Bush more like Georgie-porgie), the uproar over bare naked frau and fruenden might have been enough wedge politics for a weasel like Zajac to mine for a generation or two. After all, every brave nude world provides politicians with brave new her-eyes-ons.
