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Celebrate this amazing timeBy Larry Dreiling As I sit here at my trusty PowerBook G4, I'm just a day away from a day off to celebrate Oktoberfest in my adopted hometown of Hays, Kan. The city will swell with thousands of visitors coming to a local park to participate in the celebration of the harvest that goes back to the ancestral lands of many of the town's residents--yours truly included. We've got a lot to celebrate. This year's wheat harvest, at least for most folks west of here, was the best in seven to 10 years. The crop markets are looking great on the boards in Kansas City and Chicago. The cattle markets are pretty good, too. Even though some in Washington are using this one year to show that we don't need a farm bill out here in farm country, there's still some trepidation about what a new farm bill will hold, yet we have to trust that farm state senators will give the American producer a farm bill that will protect their livelihoods, the land they care for and the people who consume the food we make. Let's hope they come through. I also think about the incredible time we live in. How we are able to celebrate this bounty in ways I never dreamt possible when I was a boy. Forty years ago was much the same as today. Despite an unpopular war, there was a lot to look forward to. Men were getting ready to go to the Moon. The culture reflected it. On television, there was Batman. He had a cool Batcave with a super Batcomputer and a system where he could map and track the Joker and the Riddler. Funny, all that information is now available on the Internet. We can even track our tractor paths, store them in a computer and use those tracks again and again to save fuel, seed and fertilizer. Then there was Star Trek, where Captain Kirk could flip open a hand-held device and communicate with Lt. Uhura up on the U.S.S. Enterprise. I can do that kind of cool communicating stuff now on a cell phone. Green Hornet had a tracking drone he could launch out of the Black Beauty, his fancy car driven by manservant Kato. Today, I can fly a radio controlled airplane and see on a monitor everything a "lipstick camera" mounted to the airplane sees. Lost in Space had a robot that warned "Danger Will Robinson!" Today, handicapped people are testing robots to assist them with everyday chores. In the non-fiction world, we'd sit and watch Walter Cronkite interviewing Leo Krupp, the "test astronaut" for the Apollo command module's contractor, who was explaining the one megahertz on-board computer the astronauts would use to do a programmed landing into the Sea of Tranquility. The computer I'm writing this on has a one gigabyte processor. I'm no computer genius, but I think I'm 8,000 times more powerful on this keyboard then Neil Armstrong was on his Eagle. Yes, we live in an amazing time. We have a profitable agriculture again. We have seen fiction become useful fact. This is an amazing time. Celebrate it. Larry Dreiling can be reached by phone at 785-628-1117 or by e-mail at ldreiling@aol.com. 10/15/07 Date: 10/10/07
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