From the editor’s manger
Dear readers, kids, and the one tourist who asked whether Labor Day is a livestock holiday:
It is not. Labor Day is a human arrangement invented so people can argue about lakes versus fescue. The goats have already voted. The vote was unanimous and involved shade.
Tomorrow the Webster County Fairgrounds will fill with people who want to learn how to keep a hog, a hen, a wheel of cheese, and a conscience under the same tin roof. That is a noble ambition. It is also a lot of boots in one place on the hottest first week of September since some of us were yearlings. If you are bringing a demonstration animal, bring the water you think is ridiculous and then bring the other tub.
The public record this week is a mixed ration. Seventy barn souls in Boone County found homes before the coffee cooled. Two bottle kids in a Kansas City trunk got names that sound like ski towns and a foster kitchen that learned to mix milk replacer at 2 a.m. The riverfront goats are back at their third season of civic landscaping, which is the only public-works contract I have ever admired. And out on the ridges the hay lofts are opening early because the grass quit pretending.
Perryville is still a month out and already practicing the sentence that keeps the peace: sequins yes, dogs no. Howell County has a date on the docket September 28. This paper prints the summons. It does not print a verdict, and it will not dress that file up as a story.
The Arkatype Farms crew — Buttercup “Scoop” Nibbles (field), Buckminster “Inkhorn” Hayward (features), Nanny Belle Quill (society & costume), and Button (who still believes a notebook is a kind of mineral feeder) — have been turned loose on this week’s facts with the usual orders: be interesting, be kind, and do not invent a fever a goat did not earn.
I have edited their copy with a red grease pencil and the patience of a wether who has seen one too many inflatable arches. Any remaining puns are my responsibility. The heat is not.
Keep the mineral feeder full.
Watch the kids on the midway.
And if you are in Marshfield Friday morning, stand in somebody’s shade and mean it.
— Professor Gruff
Editor-in-Chief
The Bleat Sheet
“All the news that’s fit to chew.”