Artemis Alliance Inc.

The Collateral Damage of Greed

And so the king was granted his wish and whatever he touched turned to gold, He ran through the palace with joyful purpose – touching this and presto! Touching that and bingo bongo! Into the garden he raced and reached for a rose. Shazam! The most exquisite gilded beauty … and then he put it to his nose. Oh. No scent. Too bad. So sad. Oh well.

Seeing his beloved daughter in the garden by the fountain, he reached out to kiss the soft blonde curls on her forehead. And lo! There before him a fearsome monument to his own avarice. Forever. No undoing it. No changing his mind. No rethinking the consequences. Once and for all time his daughter was lost to him. Her beauty, her innocence, her laughter, her love, her warmth, her glow, her breath – her life.

Would that she died and could have been buried, the king might have grieved her as lost through a nasty accident – a trick of fate. But no. She was to remain ever before his eyes. Still. Golden. Not dead, but not alive. How terrible to live with the consequence of one’s aberrant choice. Too late to correct or repair – time only for remorse, regret, recrimination. A lifetime of hell. (more…)

Free Range Business

What do free range chickens, Jack Russell terriers and the colour beige have to do with the intrinsic nature of business? Well, this: Every aspect and particle of the universe – animal, mineral, or vegetable – even man made – has a nature of its own – characteristics of behaviour.
This morning, pre-coffee, my Sweetheart and I were talking about the move to the new house. We got kidding about how the stand-alone screened room would make an excellent chicken coop and we could create our fortune breeding free range chicks. I told S that we used to have free range chickens – Rhode Island Reds – the whole wheat of chickens, if you will, on our farm when we first moved to King City. The problem with free range is that weasels are also free range and it is their nature to ‘ferret’ out chickens and tear their little throats out.

S opined that clearly our dogs weren’t tough protectors. Not so much. Golden Retrievers are bred to be soft mouthed, obedient – if not brilliant – and uncompromisingly happy and silly! Jack Russells on the other hand and most of the terrier breeds are fearless – chase anything moving despite size – like Mack Trucks; are barky to the extreme – so as to be found by the farmer after they had tunnelled down badger burrow – and in many cases, more cunning than humans give the cute little things credit for as they shove them in a pink Burberry puppy carrier! (more…)