SeniorJunior

The First Trillionaire It's gotta happen. One of these days somebody - probably a Bahrainian you never heard of - will become the world's first trillionaire ( Wired Magazine says it will be Bill Gates). Imagine if whoever it is has Bill and Melinda Gates's charitable sensibilities! Let's see, a trillion is a thousand billions. A billion is a thousand millions. A million is a thousand thousands. So a trillion is a thousand thousand thousand thousands. That's a lot. It looks like we will spend even more than that on W's war. (I've been interested in how little Americans seem to realize how much a mere $billion is. Even our newscasters seem to phumpher around with the difference between a bil and a mil.) The best commentary I've seen on wasted trillions is in today's Christian Science Monitor (one of my favorite newspapers). Commentator Woody Tasch makes the fine suggestion "If Iraq is worth $1 trillion, let's allot just as much to ben...

Old roads are frequently abandoned for new ones. The old ones sometimes just sit there, aging, cracking and succumbing to weeds. Grass and trees take decades or more to reclaim the ground. On the old Duffstead, we just finished dealing with a new-road-for-old situation. Driveways, actually, but same same. The new one has better drainage and gives us a better shot of getting up a steep hill when it snows. The old driveway cut across a corner of our land, isolating a good quarter of an acre from the rest of the meadow. So we decided to recycle the dern thing. (We are committed recyclers of metals, paper, glass, etc.). First we contributed the gravel and basecoat of the old drive to the new one. The road builder scraped it down to the dirt, moving all the rock to the new drive. Then we disc-ed the old roadbed with our mighty tractor. Then we cut the seed heads – a big grocery sack full – from several of our wild grasses just as they were releasing their spring seeds. And we bought 10 poun...