Beard-Stroking Internet Fun

So, what has happened in the world that has caused seven people to land here in the last couple of days after searching various engines for some combination of "carrot", "stick", "donkey", and "dangling"? I recall a similar thing happening right after I wrote this. The searchers that last time were all from Great Britain or Germany, and all came knocking in the space of two or three days. This time around, I have been visited by folks from some disparate places as:

Florida International University, Miami
Peterborough Regional College, Reading, England
Detroit
Dallas
Australia
Utica, New York
and
William Beaumont Hospital, Detroit

Is NPR mis-using the term again? Was there some sort of Correspondence Course homework assignment? Why this confluence?

A picture I am glad I did take

Can you come up with a story for this?

Pictures I wish I had taken

There are many more than I can remember, but this is one:

On Belair Road a few blocks north of here there is a senior citizen day center called Paradise. Beth and I were walking one October Saturday--without the camera, carelessly--soon after we moved up here, to get a look at the neighborhood. This day center is a one-story storefront place, looks like it was built sometime between 1955 and 1972, with a big glass window angled a little inward from the street toward the glass front door. The inner workings of the place are concealed behind an off-white curtain. On the inside of the big window are several narrow, full length glass shelves. On the shelves this Saturday were lots of little plastic and plush Halloween souvenirs: black kitties, pumpkins, little tulle bags of candy, etc..., all spaced neatly and fairly wide apart--a lonely distance from one another--and on the window itself was a banner reading "Welcome To Paradise".

Do you have a photograph you wish you had taken?

Ika?

Or toro?

So, what can I expect from this toilet?

I don't know what you look for in a toilet figuratively, but this is pretty literal.

I wonder about the "quotes", but I am crystal clear about the action on this sucker.

Although, I could see a reasonable person standing there, in need, reading this and wondering whether this model worked with gravity or against it.

I mean, I've seen enough fighter pilot movies that the words "eject" and "seat" indicate an upward trajectory.

A free baby picture for those who supply alternative titles for this post.

Old Field Succession

The barn is white with a slate-green roof. The hayloft window has dark streaks flowing down the outside, pointing and fading away just above the big barn doors below. The roof is beam-broken, saddlebacked. The vane stands atop one of the onion-dome roof vents. This vent, on the broken roof, tilts severely but easily. The vane points ever up to the above. No longer does it register horizontal, earthly weather. It responds to another, constant climate.
Starlings nest in the barn, its only inhabitants. When the barn was new the ancestors of these birds, a handfull or two, lived in Central Park--brought there because a man from Northumberland once wished to torment the King of England, and because a poet wrote it down.
They swirl around the broken barn, wonderful, unwanted birds.

Governed productivity has migrated from this place: it is no longer a farm. The fields now grow cedars in the open, sumac umbrellas, brambles and little pines. A parcel has been squared off and inexpensive homes built, with vinyl siding and vinyl windows and white aluminum carports, but these are far from the barn, and there are hundreds more acres left alone. An old small cemetery, with no more than twenty inhabitants, sits hard by the highway: a square of memory surrounded by wire pasture fence.