Hogs Are On The High Side Today

What I love about driving across country is that you find out how the rest of the country isn't like you. Nowhere more than on the radio. The stations play a lot of the same music heard in Cleveland or San Francisco or whatever, but it's interspersed with earnest discussions of hog prices and bean futures. There was a report delivered so quickly that I couldn't quite follow, which sounded much like a stock report only not. "September lean hogs at 4 3/4, down two" and so on. Which made the landscape I was shooting through seem even more fascinating. In Iowa, one's thoughts are on corn-- that's what you see for miles and miles, spreading away from the road in evenly spaced rows that play that little pop-art game with your eye. Fabric metaphors come to mind. It's beautiful. I know from Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma that I'm zenning out on what is actually a problem-- the mono-crop that's destroyed American farming--but still, beautiful.

I made a detour to look at Fairfield, Iowa, home of the Maharishi University of Management and Vedic City, the "world's first city to be designed and built according to the ancient Vedic science of architecture and city planning according to Natural Law." Hmmm-- I got a press release from the Trancendental Meditation (imagine the registered trademark sign here--it always follows) folks that hundreds of yogic flyers had come to town to initiate world peace. Disappointingly, they seem to have settled down.  ¶ 3:23 PM