Word: farmerly
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Robert Burns was born 250 years ago, on January 25, 1759, in Alloway, Scotland. His father was a tenant farmer and his mother never learned to write, but Burns read voraciously and managed to secure a fairly thorough education. His family had very little money - when his father died, he left the family bankrupt - which inspired the egalitarian, anti-authority themes that would appear in Burns' future works...
...switched from poems to songs, and produced a number of tunes still famous today: "A Man's a Man for A' That," "A Red, Red Rose," and of course the New Year's Eve jingle about old acquaintances. Unfortunately, Burns had a weak heart, and strenuous requirements of a farmer's life took their toll. He died in 1796 - on the very day that his wife gave birth to his last child. Poets are dramatic like that...
...With the movie (whose actual title is just My Bloody Valentine) being shown in 3-D on more than a thousand screens, director Patrick Lussier and writers Todd Farmer and Zane Smith had to devise some stuff that jumps out at you - like the opening money shot, in which the killer slams a poker through the back of a guy's head and its comes out through his eye, the orb jutting into the audience like the garnish on a kebab skewer. Kudos for that, and for the variations the filmmakers run on the mischief a pickax can work...
...establishment hated Wyeth for much of his career. He was a regionalist and a realist when the vogue was abstract expressionism, a plainspoken farmer among chain smoking wildmen. He was the country mouse; they were the city mice. He had nothing new to show them, and they had no time...
...There has been development, of course. But even success stories are full of problems. The U.S. has built new schools, but there are not enough teachers, and salaries are so low that nobody stays. On a trip to Helmand last summer I met a farmer who had been offered a water pump that would have enabled him to turn his desert-like property into a field of wheat and vegetables. He declined it, fearing that the Taliban would find out he had accepted a gift from foreigners and would execute him as a spy. (See pictures from Prince Harry...