Flat is Boring

Michigan is pretty flat, although not as flat as Illinois and Indiana. We don't have any real mountains, just enough hills to break up the monotony. Well, there are the Porcupine Mountains in the U.P. I have never seen them, but I'm sure they don't hold a candle to the Rockies or even the Appalachians. I think most of our hills were formed by the glaciers when they gouged out the Great Lakes because they are mostly sand. In the hilly areas, most of the farming is done on the bottom lands and the sandy hills have been allowed to revert to forest. In the flatter areas, it is the high ground that gets farmed because the lower land is generally too wet for that.

Beaglesonia is about half swamp and half "uplands", the difference in elevation being only a foot or two. You can't dig a hole anywhere on the property more than three feet deep without hitting water. We had to haul in sand and raise the grade three feet to build our house, otherwise the crawl space would have flooded and the septic system would not have worked.

They grow some corn in Michigan, mostly in the southern part, but not on the scale that Illinois and Indiana does. There are a few dairy farms around here that raise corn to feed their own cows, but they don't even try to combine it, they just chop it for silage, stalks and all. Our growing season is usually too short to allow the corn to dry out sufficiently for combining.

Those little weasels thrive in the forest, but I think they do just as well in the farm country. I think badgers prefer open fields to woods. I have only seen one since I moved up here, and I was surprised to see that one. Minks, which are also weasels, live on the shores of lakes and streams. I see them frequently when I'm fishing on the Cheboygan River right in town. Wolverines are rare anyplace, but they are usually found in remote mountain areas like the Rockies. I believe there is one known to be living wild in the U.P. There used to be a different one, but it was found dead shortly before this second one appeared on the scene. They both probably drifted down from Canada, as did the timber wolves, which have proliferated to the point where limited hunting of them is allowed. The antis fought it for years after the feds took the wolves off the endangered list and turned them over to the states, but the will of the people eventually prevailed, at least for now.

You mentioned the other day that the Higgs-Boson was still theoretical, but I seem to remember hearing or reading that somebody had recently isolated one. Maybe it turned out to be fraudulent, like the occasional claim that cold fusion has been worked out. It never ceases to amaze me how something can be all over the news for a few days or weeks and then you don't hear any more about it. Lately it's been all about White cops shooting Black people. I wonder how the stats compare with Black cops shooting Black people, or Black cops shooting White people, or White cops shooting White people.