Wednesday, October 2, 2019

2019 - Day 275/90 - Wednesday...Fourth Estate...

Exactly what in the hell is going on in Williamson County, Texas. First, we got the road re-done. We have lived here almost eleven years, and it has been a dirt road the entire time. I have a new burden now, that I am not sure I am ready for, and that burden is getting the car washed on a regular basis. I have been roundly insulted on many occasions because of the exterior of the car, and the response has always been "I live on a dirt road!" Can't do that anymore. NOW, as if turning our road into a REAL road was not enough, they have replaced an electric pole up by the road. NO, we do not have underground utilities at the Edge of Nowhere. We have electric poles up and down the roads. It is not exactly like a developing country kind of electric pole...there is only one wire on the pole. The one wire goes a long way, and it occasionally detours to (in this case) a single house, maybe a couple houses. BUT, bottom line, I am not sure I can cope with all this change. Next thing you know, we will have cable television. Ugh!

Fourth Estate -- Noun. the public press. "We should all be concerned," the senator asserted, "about the plight of newspapers and the consequences of a weakened fourth estate on our democracy."

Did You Know? It might be news to you that the term fourth estate has been around for centuries. In Europe, going back to medieval times, the people who participated in the political life of a country were generally divided into three classes or "estates." In England, they were the three groups with representation in Parliament, namely, the nobility, the clergy, and the common people. Some other group, like the mob or the public press, that had an unofficial but often great influence on public affairs was called the "fourth estate." In the 19th century, fourth estate came to refer exclusively to the press, and now it's applied to all branches of the news media.

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