Word: farmer
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...Casta?o's men led us past the kitchen, where the farmer and his family were commandeered to cook for the surprise guests. They looked scared; even in Colombia it isn't every day that a death squad shows up for dinner. Casta?o was upstairs in a spare room with a desk and a few chairs. The mystery woman was just leaving the room. She was smiling, slyly grateful. Casta?o shook our hands, forcefully. He was short, a foot smaller than his bodyguards, but they obeyed him as if he were a minor god as he snapped out orders...
When Americans cannot be trusted to save themselves, the government does it for them--at least that's the story of mandatory car insurance, seat-belt laws and smoking bans. But when it comes to preventing disasters, the rules are different. The message, says Paul Farmer, executive director of the American Planning Association, is consistent: "We will help you build where you shouldn't, we'll rescue you when things go wrong, and then we'll help you rebuild again in the same place...
...Before buying the business three years ago, the gnome farmer's most relevant experience was laying concrete paths. As Myers puts it, he was "bored of doing nothing." But these days his hands are full. Once a figure is sold, he'll make another by pouring concrete into one of the fiberglass molds in his Aladdin's cave of a shed. People will also bring in broken statues. "This one here is unrepairable," he says, lifting the head off a gnome that was recently retrieved from a garden. "He's been knocked around-knocked around with a sledge hammer. Buggered...
...There's hardly an exhibit in the Beck Museum-housed in a hangar and shed beside his home at Mareeba, 60 km west of Cairns-that the retired farmer doesn't have a story about: from the recoilless cannon built for a Russian czar to the empty 250-kg chemical bomb from Australia's World War II stockpile, to the Vietnam-era Centurion tank...
...sheep and wheat man whose home is near Geraldton, 2,500 km to the south and west, Peter Burton, 63, has grown very fond of the Kimberley. "If you live here and die here you have to go somewhere else," says the wiry farmer, rolling a cigarette. "Because you've already been to Heaven." Some district cattlemen consider him a blow-in, but Burton is finding this stage of his life busier than he expected. "Supposedly ret-ired," he says, with mischief in his eyes. "I was happy catching crayfish and sinking piss." But now he's living at Springvale...