Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Galapagos Islands -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 2MAR$ who wrote (35292)	4/1/2003 7:29:55 PM
From: Alan Smithee	Respond to of 57110

Ode to Omaha I won't say I wish the air would smell like cow shit again, but I have to admit something in me misses it a little. It's only masochism to the extent of nostalgia as I'm an Omaha native and before I could drive or work a minimum wage pizza job I knew what a hot summer day smelled like, humid and sharp across tennis courts and backyard hide and seek games, not choking yet definitely rank when the winds stirred the stockyards like thick soup, those truckloads of scorching cows at 30th and Q, more cows than anyone but an accountant could count, mooing and sticking to the air. And the air itself became an abstraction reminding Omaha about function, industry. You can't walk through Silicon Valley and smell computer chips, along Wall Street you can't catch a strong whiff of stocks. But the cows don't come to Omaha now. Steaks around town taste fine, though the wooden pens are empty like an old movie set; the cows stop somewhere else, letting Omaha smell like Denver, Saint Louis, or Seattle, generic USDA prime city air out there: traffic, river, power plants, train station, bakeries, dumpsters, mown grass, sweat. It was never "Hog butcher to the world," not in reputation at least, but dreams fill out big here, blooming and bursting; it's a city we move away from to Make It Big and return to when that's not enough, a few blips along I-80 without pine forest or mountains, no Disneyland, Graceland, canyon, or Rushmore; it is basic, it is simple, and from here the world still looks amazing, a spectacle, carnival, magical frontier to touch and smell and still feel content to return home from. novia.net