Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Resident Suzanne Squires' short story read during public comment at last night's meeting...

A Montana cowboy was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture when suddenly a brand-new Blue Gas Guzzling Hummer advanced out of a dust cloud towards him. In the area @ a Conference, the driver, a gray fox in a Brioni suit, Rolex Watch and assorted designer Jewelry, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, 'If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?'
The cowboy looks at the gray fox, obviously a person of ‘means’, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, 'Sure, why not?' The 170K a year Salaried Fox whips out her iPad, Connects it to her iPhone, and surfs on the Internet, where she calls up a GPS satellite navigation System to get an exact fix on her location, then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo w/expensive video editing software…the iPad begins processing the data

The young gray fox then opens the digital photo in Final Cut and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, she receives an email on her iPad that the image has been processed and the data stored.

She then accesses the database (through a Newly installed Super Server in the basement of the City) and Produces a 3D holographic Excel Spreadsheet with email on her iPhone. She prints out a Fat full-color, 550-page report and turns to the cowboy and says, 'You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.'

'That's right number, all right. Well, I guess you can take one of the little ones,' says the Cowboy. He watches the young gray fox select one of the animals and looks on amused as the ‘gal of Means’ stuffs it into the back of the blue hummer.

Then the cowboy says to the young fox, 'Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my animal?' The fox thinks about it for a second and then says, 'Okay, why not?'

You're a tri-lingual elected public official, says the cowboy. 'Wow! That's correct,' says the young gray fox, 'but how did you guess that?'

'No! guessing was required.' answered the cowboy. '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!



Later, Pearl Oliphant, sycophant to Mayor Waterman who has had more names than some small town phone books, cited this as an example of the public not showing respect to an elected official. She said that she didn't understand it, but the reference to someone who spoke three languages surely referred to Mayor Rachel Waterman.