Even cows get the blues

We were watching European Journal on one of the local public TV stations, and saw a bit on a couple who run a small dairy farm in the north of Finland, above the Arctic Circle. It is so dark and cold there in the late fall and all of winter that they have to illuminate the cow barn where their 18 cows reside, dimming the lights at night. The wife commented that the cows get depressed if the light's too low during the day. Just looking at their environment bummed me out. The wife said they were running the little operation because there was no other way to make a living up there. No doubt true, unless you had a fleet of snowplows. Grim. Maybe it's better in the spring and summer, maybe they like the isolation. We saw another bit set in Finland on EJ last week, which related the tale of an unexpected fortune a women's group came into when some old stock their group had inherited and ignored since the 1950's recently burgeoned as - Nokia. Several millions, which, astoundingly, the Marthas - that's what they called themselves - invested in the construction of public housing in a pleasant area of Finland that they thought would be a nice place for people to live. Interesting folks, these Finns. Can you imagine some women's group in this country doing something so unselfish? Maybe an American Friends Society group, but it's a challenge to think of anything similar happening in this land of materialistic junkies.