This one was too precious not to share
By Bill Duncan
I have a friend, a former student I taught in writing classes, Caralyn Northcroft, of Tenmile, Ore. who sends me e-mails with the heading: "This is too precious not to share." The precious words she sends never have an attribution and I always live in fear of being accused of plagiarism if I dare use the material.
Today I am going to throw caution to the wind because this annonyous contribution showed up on my e-mail and it is "too precious not to share," even though it did not come from Caralyn.
Just remember, I did not write it:
"A Montana rancher was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture when suddenly a brand-new BMW advances out of a dust cloud towards him. The driver, a young man in a Bryony suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the rancher, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"
The rancher looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, ‘Sure, Why not?’
The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.
"The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.
Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored.
"He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.
"Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the rancher and says, ‘You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.’
"’That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,’ says the rancher.
"He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.
"Then the cowboy says to the young man, ‘Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?’
"The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, ‘Okay, why not?’
"’You’re a Congressman for the U.S. Government,’ says the rancher.
"’Wow! That’s correct,’ says the yuppie, ‘but how did you guess that?’
"’No guessing required.’ answered the rancher.
"You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked.
You tried to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don’t know a thing about cows…this is a herd of sheep. Now, give me back my dog.’"
Now back to Bill Duncan, the plagiarist. I could never spin such a clever yarn because I am often lost in the cyberspace of all the technology mentioned. I was just going to forward it to Carl Sampson, managing editor of The Capital Press, who traditionally ends his on-line newsletter to staff with a farm related joke.
But this was just too precious not to share.
(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470, or by e-mail at elderstatesmansblog@yahoo.com)