"A STORY FROM THE LONG PADDOCK"

A POEM OF SHAPE AND MYSTERY

It was dry and hot, the drought was relentless and a

Cattle drover was droving his herd of cattle

along the back roads in outback N.S.W

AUSTRALIA

In what is known as the long paddock.

When suddenly a brand-new BMW...

Advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.

The driver, a young man in an Amani suit,

Gucci shoes, Ray Ban Sunglasses and YSL tie

Leans out the window and asks the drover,

"If I tell you exactly how many ewes,

lambs and rams you have in your herd...

Will you give me a lamb?"

obviously a yuppie public servant type

 then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers,

"Sure, why not?" 
 
The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Mac notebook computer,

Connects it to his new wiz bang wireless Bluetooth Mobile phone

 and surfs to a page on the Internet,

where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation System

to get an exact fix on his location

which he then feeds to another satellite

that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.
 
The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop

 and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany .
 
Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot

 that the image has been processed and the data stored.  
 
He then accesses a MS-SQL database

 through an ODBC connected Excel Spreadsheet

 with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.
 
Finally, he prints out a full-color,

10-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer

and finally turns to the drover and says,

"You have exactly 1,586 ewes, lambs and rams."

"Fair dinkum Tat's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves."

The drover watches the young man select one of the animals

and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.