Nebraska Farmers

I have lived next to a farm my entire life. I’ve seen my uncle go through the fields in a combine. I’ve gotten lost in a field of corn. However, I’ve never given this farming thing a second thought. It seems simple, right? You plant, you let it grow, and then you harvest. You would think that having close family members involved in the business that I would actually know something about it, and I do know some things. I know the old saying about corn: “knee high by the fourth of July.” I know that rain is good. Really good. And that drought is really bad.
There’s another thing I learned from growing up around farmers: farmers are rarely optimistic. Whether its drought, plague, locusts, or any other sort of crop endangerment, farmers always have a lot to worry about. It seems that no matter how much rain there is, they still are worried about the outcome. There is some sense to this because the farmer is so dependent on uncontrollable forces that there is always something that could come up to greatly change the product. This year, though, with so much rain, the farmers are really optimistic about this years crop turn out.
At the Husker Harvest Days, a yearly get together of farmers from around Nebraska for farmers to look at the newest in farm equipment, apparently the biggest thing going around is not the newest combine, but, as Art Hovey reports, is the optimism. Living in a time when everyone is so pessimistic about the weather with global warming and things of that sort, it is actually encouraging to hear from those who are so dependent on the ever changing weather, that this year actually turned out better than normal. The crop looks abundant, the price of corn is high, and, for this year at least, the farmers seems to have a smile on their faces.

Post 2: The telephone

It seems that we often take the mystery of the telephone for granted. Like most technologies that we grow up with, we accept them as if they were just as natural and normal as the act of speaking itself. However, to look at the telephone from the perspective of those people who were around at the telephone’s conception, this piece of everyday technology is quite interesting.
Before the telephone was the telegram. Before the telegram there was the simple act of writing letters and sending messages via the written word. Now we have cell phones, text messaging, and email that instantly send information from one point to another in what seems to be no time at all. All of these developments are a part of our society and culture, but, if viewed from the perspective of those living before these advancements, these inventions would seem like they have come out of an out of this world novel by some crazy writer.
The telephone seems like such a simple device. It transmits audio from one area to another. This seems so simple and even natural to those living today. Everyday we verbally communicate over small and great distances. We find nothing fantastical about speaking with a person who may be located on the opposite side of the globe. However, from those living around its debut, even from the perspective of the telephone’s inventor Alexander Graham Bell, being able to communicate from one room to another using this device was absolutely astounding.
As this technology changed and evolved, people kept being amazed at this piece or equipment. Soon people were being able to speak to each other from different parts of their town. Then after that, people were able to go to special booths to make long-distance calls, which had the best technology that could connect people who were many miles apart. From there, the telephone developed and changed shapes into the integral communication device that we are familiar with today.