My favorite type of person is the old crank. We’ve got one here in Silver Spring, with a 500-acre farm that’s been in his family for 250 years. Lester Miller is fed up with McMansion developments sprouting all around him, and by golly, they’re not getting his place.
He’s 80 now. Seeing the end coming, he’s put his and whatever adjacent land he can buy into a conservancy. Nothing but organic farming can be done on it hereafter. He was just outbid on 53 acres next door, which Bobby Essis is subdividing, and now Miller’s being sued over a trailer he parked on the property line, the first piece of equipment he’s bought for a new enterprise he’s considering, S.S. Hog Farm.
“I am going to put a hog farm here because I think it is the best way I can stop development. Nobody is going to want to spend $350,000 for a 10-acre piece of land to build a $1 million home looking at a pig farm,” Miller said.
UPDATE from the reporter: Actually, Miller was not outbid on the parcel Essis bought.
He never even knew it was for sale. Miller surmises that is because of his previous efforts to stop the former owner from building 50 homes there.
Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.
From Robert Heinlein’s “Notebooks of Lazarus Long”.
Posted by: Chuck Dupree (Belisarius) on July 8, 2006 10:26 PMOnce upon a time I lived in a single-wide mobile home, downwind of a hog farm. Farmer Miller is definitely on to something; that home became mobile after only a few short months.
Posted by: andante on July 8, 2006 11:23 PMHe's my hero.
My kind of guy. Let the oinking begin.
Posted by: Bendra on July 9, 2006 10:50 AMGrowing up in the midwest, caught between the aroma of hog farms out in the country, and the stockyard's slaughter houses in town, I learned to cherish corn fields and kitchen gardens. Miller has a dandy idea there. I wish him luck.
Posted by: Cranky Daze on July 10, 2006 4:09 PM