Folks,

Dux:

Yorkshire. Bucolic land of the world-famous James Herriot and the delightful setting of all his captivatingly rustic books, TV shows and movies. Yorkshire was as much a contributing character in all those bestsellers as was Siegfried or Tristan. I wonder if anything else goes on there these days worth mentioning ...besides birding, that is?

Squire, your candor is as amazing as is your incomparable longevity. Reading your post, one can only marvel at the Utopian-like working conditions that must exist today upon your Derbyshire estates. If only word would somehow leak out, certainly this should be the model for Mr. Brown and all his colleagues toward which to aspire. If such a laudable work ethic were thus instated across the length and breadth of the British Isles and the shrinking Commonwealth, Britain would once again climb to its rightful and lofty place among the forward thinking nations of the world. You, sir, deserve to be commended for your high social conscious and bold humanitarian efforts.

C51 writes that he became lost in the wilds of the Canadian tundra this past weekend. Apparently he went for a long hike in unfamiliar territory and somehow he took a right instead of a left at the second Polar Bear. Then when he failed to find the large igloo with a flagpole he realized that he might be lost. The sky was tediously overcast and a diffused sun was devilishly hard to locate for the purpose of determining West. By the time his insulated Starbucks cup was almost empty of coffee he found himself completely disoriented. Stumbling about, he finally chanced upon a little squirrel busy hiding his nuts in the snow. Why Canadian squirrels do that is a mystery to me. Anyway C51 asked the squirrel where he was. If you think about it that makes perfect sense. Squirrels always seem to know were the nuts are, right?

To make a very long and cold story short and perhaps a bit warmer, the sun came out for 30 seconds, C51 got his bearings in a tick and stopped tramping about in circles. Suddenly, he spied a large and familiar shape on the far side of a broad, snowy field. He hurriedly made deep tracks in that direction, and in no time, he had safely covered the 50 feet to the snow plow that he had so wisely rented to get him out there into the Torontian wilderness. Soon he made the rusty old diesel engine cough back to life and with a loud rumble of steel tracks he was homeward bound.

Best of all, nary an ear was even slightly frostbitten as our intrepid Canadian Bushman pulled into the nearest Starbucks parking lot for another steaming hot cup of joe.