HAT TIPS
Hello,
I’ll admit, I watch more TV than I should. Well, I don’t actually watch a lot of TV, but I have TV on a lot. Mostly I run the clicker, because I am bigger than my wife. I switch channels constantly, hoping to come across a show that will rekindle my flickering interest into a bright flame. I try to watch football, but I was figuring the other day … Each team runs about, and this is just a guess, 50 plays a game. Fifty. Now, each play takes about six seconds. So, that makes a hundred plays at six seconds each. That would add up, and again I’m guessing, to about 600 seconds. Now, using my Berthold Bomber math, that would be about ten minutes of football. In a three hour game. You have to click.
And if you start to watch a TV drama in the evening, I think there is actually about 24 minutes of movie in an hour show. Again. Click. So, a lot of the time I am left to watch Gene Autry reruns in the middle of the night. Or the Antiques Roadshow. Or maybe the Pawn Stars. Pawn Stars, not porn stars.
But I probably spend more time watching the History Channel, or the Discovery Channel than anything else. I watch these programs and wonder why I didn’t pay more attention to my science and history teachers 40 or 50 years ago. I admit, it would be a little hard to follow even then. The names of the countries that I was forced to memorize are no longer in existence. The capitals have changed. Our friends and enemies have changed. I now know that although “Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492,” someone else discovered our continent centuries earlier. And that doesn’t even count the Native Americans, who they say walked here from Asia.
And with that rather long and boring introduction, I get to the subject of this week’s tale.
North of Belfield, near Fryburg, there is a large earthen structure on the east side of Highway 85. I’ve often driven by it and wondered from whence it originated. And I have inquired from some of my happy hour friends if they knew. They did not. So, I have fantasized about its beginning. Could it have been formed by a civilization that paralleled the Egyptian builders of the pyramids? Could it have been some distant relatives of the Aztec or Mayan cultures that formed this huge symmetrical pile of earth? And how long ago could it have been formed?
Then one night, as I was watching the History Channel and a story of Ancient Aliens, it dawned on me. It was a landing site created for a flying machine of ancient aliens! I was ecstatic! The mystery was solved.
Then, a couple of nights ago, I was sharing discourse (happy hour, you know) with a gentleman who lives in the area. I mentioned the earthen structure. He was well aware of it. I told him of my conclusion that it was a landing site for ancient aliens. He thought I had gone over the deep end. He insinuated that if “my IQ got to 50, I should sell.” He said, “I had delusions of adequacy.” He thought, “I had been working with glue too much!”
So, I asked him what he thought the hill was. He was emphatic. We had been there quite awhile. “It is where they used to mine Ukrainians!” I said, “They mined what???”
“Ukrainians. I mean Ukeranians,” he replied.
“Uranium?” I asked.
“That’s what I said, Ukeranian.”
But, I am going to stick with the uranium mine. But maybe it was the aliens that mined it.
Later,
Dean