Siesta, si!

I finally got to see Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” at the February 21 showing in Hawley—I must have been one of the last folks on the planet to get around to watching it. (Kudos to Kathy Dodge and the folks at Waynepeace and Northeastern Pennsylvania Audubon for organizing the series of showings.) So it was delightful to hear that it won the Oscar for Best Documentary—and to hear the little prank Al and Leonardo di Caprio pulled at the awards ceremony, when Al almost declared his candidacy—only to be cut off by the orchestra and walk off giggling with di Caprio.

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Everything’s cool

I spend my nights alone in a small basement office, my shoulders hunched over a keyboard. My face illuminated by a flickering computer screen. I cross tasks off of a to-do list, which is left for me, neatly on the desk.

The tasks are mostly technical, non-creative stuff: export this file, capture this footage, lay it back into the movie.

The clock on the wall silently ticks the time away.

When the list is completed, I pack up my stuff, shutdown the computer, take out the garbage, lock the door and return home.

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Support your local dairy farm

By DAVE WILLIAMS

Looking toward the future of agriculture in the Northeast can only be achieved by taking a journey back in time to understand where we have come from.

The local dairy business began to thrive in the late 1890s, due to the rail connections to New York City. As we passed through the decades since then, we went from horses to tractors, from milking cows by hand to milking machines. In the 1940s many farms only milked 15 to 25 cows. Today, the average herd is around 80 cows. In Pennsylvania, the average herd in the 1890s only produced 4,000 pounds of milk a year. Today, production on the order of 20,000 to 25,000 pounds a year is not uncommon.

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