CLEVELAND: I’ve been out wandering around the countryside the last week or so, and today I ended up here on the shores of Lake Erie. The sun is shining and it’s mighty warm for November.

Everyone is smiling, not because of the sunshine, but because the Cleveland Browns beat the Ravens in Baltimore. It was their second win this season over Art Modell’s Super Bowl champs.

The entire month has been nothing but sunshine and warm weather in this part of the Midwest. Folks hardly know how to act without the usual clouds and cold rains. This November sunshine is quite a blow. Many football fans wore shorts to the college games yesterday and missed the opening kickoff applying sunscreen.

Farm meetings have kept me on the move recently. I’ve been hitting the small towns: Edon, Elliston and West Alexandria in Ohio, and Flatwoods in West Virginia. You know, farmers are never thrilled about getting dressed up to go to a meeting, especially if there’s still grain to be harvested. But if they’ve got to, they prefer going where they’ll get a good meal in a friendly setting, and where there’s no stop lights, one way streets, or parking meters. The local school gymnasium or church rec hall or country inn suits ’em fine… anywhere that’ll seat five or six hundred. When you add some patriotic songs by a school choir and door prizes from local businesses, the jokes by an out-of-town speaker are generally well received. It sure helps when the election is past, and the political speeches are limited to “Thanks for your support.”

In Afganistan, this war is moving so fast Secretary of State Colin Powell is getting concerned. After the Taliban is run off, he doesn’t want to trade one minority rule for a different minority rule. Well, I got a suggestion for him, turn the whole country over to the women. They make up at least half the population, maybe more since the men been killing each other off for hundreds of years.

Now I would never make a such a serious suggestion to our diplomats without running it by a few people first. So I mentioned it in my talk to the men and women at Elliston, and I can assure Gen. Powell that it received wholehearted and rousing support, from half of them.

P.S. In case some of you football fans were wondering… it is true, I never met Art Modell. I never met Steve Spurrier either. Both of these men have been successful in football, so I doubt I would have much to lose by accepting an invitation from either of them.

Historic quotes by Will Rogers:

“Farmers spend more time at Conventions than they do plowing.”
“(President Coolidge) says, “There is lots of people worse off than the Farmers.” I don’t know how anybody could be worse off than the farmer, unless it’s the fellow who holds the Mortgages on the Farms.” WA #158, Dec. 20, 1925