I’m off to participate (in a minor way) in a local historical reinactment this afternoon. Have to dress up as a beet farmer.
Like a dog that finally caught the car, my recent audition for a part in a local play resulted in my getting the part. Good god, what have I done?
Lamentations on Chemistry 
Beet farmer?
Might be your new career after the currency collapses. All the lies of our society are coming home to roost at once.
I’m presently in a dark and misanthropic mood. I’ve been reading about politics again.
http://www.alternet.org/election08/100551/mad_dog_palin_/?page=entire
I guess it better than being a pig farmer – well, at least it probably smells better.
Can you generate hooch from beets? That might be a growth industry – there’s an awful lot to desire escape from.
Actually, I grew up on a pig operation in Iowa.
Out here sugar beets are a major crop. I’m told the beets have something like 15 dry wt % sucrose. They’ll be harvesting beets soon. These things are the size of a football. They stack them up in certain locations nearby for the processing campaign.
Turns out that during WWII, German prisoners of war imprisoned in the area helped with the local beet harvest. One of my colleagues from the theater wrote a play based on this historical curiosity.
Sorry. I figured it would smell better but I don’t hjave anything against pig farmers – I eat bacon.
It’s hard to conceive of German POWs in the middle of the US (though I guess we interned lots of people so that’s no big suprise). It’s kind of like Depresssion history – I know it’s there and I know roughly what happened but how it affected how people lived and died is sort of fuzzy.
We also had German POW’s here in Minnesota. It actually made a lot of sense. First, they were in the middle of nowhere, so even if they did escape, how would they get back to Germany. Second, the state was heavily settled by Germans. Many people still spoke German until they “forgot” it after hostilities broke out. Nonetheless, they still could overhear anything that the prisoners were talking about.
It makes sense (more so than leaving them in England, say, or Greenland, where there probably wasn’t much infrastructure), but the experience of having POWs here just seems alien to me. I know it in theory, but I have no experience in reality that is comparable.