Dwain Walden is editor and publisher of The Moultrie Observer.

My friend, The Earl of Stumpworth by the Ochlocknee, and I were discussing the presidential race when suddenly the conversation derailed abruptly. I guess you could call it an Amtrak moment.  All of a sudden we were talking about “cow tipping.”

I’m not sure, but such a drastic switch in conversation might well be some kind of poetic device that illustrates the comedic nature of this year’s political scene. Just a passing thought.

Anyway, The Earl asked me if I had ever “tipped a cow.” I told him I had not, and I had never seen it done.  I did have one to tip me one cold, wet morning. I was standing in the feed trough emptying a sack of feed when a heifer put her head between my legs and tossed me across the feed lot. This was not a pleasant event. Cow lots tend to be saturated in wet manure, so I sort of splattered. I guess technically the cow didn’t tip me. She “launched” me.

Now the question about cow tipping came up because on a television show the night before it was posed by a physicist that cow tipping was not “physically” possible. And this might also be one of those “poetic” moments to describe the “enlightening” offerings we have available on all of those many cable television stations. Cow tipping or gator hunting? You pick.

In my opinion, cow tipping falls into a category I would call “rural legend.”

Now I’m not saying that someone might not have touched a cow at exactly the same time it decided to lie down. I guess that could happen.

Maybe we could put cow tipping into the file with crop circles. By the way, I haven’t heard a lot about crop circles lately. Obviously they have happened. We just don’t have confirmation on what caused them. I once made a crop circle when a tie rod on the front of the tractor came loose. I couldn’t blame it on a UFO though, because I had to leave the tractor where the damage was.

The conversation got even further away from the political scene as The Earl asked me if I believed that someone could “talk warts” away. Again, I’ve never seen it done, and I’ve never had it done to me. And having studied science in various venues in college, I have never read of any physiological connection between a virus condition, such as a wart, and the spoken word — not even if someone spoke in “tongues.”

I have known people who claim to have had warts “talked” off them.  My dad said one of my aunts could talk the horns off a Billy goat. But he was smiling when he said it.

 The same goes for “divining rods,” I told The Earl. Some people swear that they work — that you can find water with them. I had a person to try to illustrate that to me once when we were going to dig a well at grandma’s house. The forked stick pointed down for some reason. And he said that’s where we should dig. But  we needed to dig the well at one end of the back porch. So we dug it at the back porch and hit a good spring of water.

 The fact is, we could have dug about the same depth anywhere in the back yard and would have hit water. So at best, the divining rod on that day was a moot point.

That said, maybe cow tipping is a “moo” point. Go figure.

(Dwain Walden is editor/publisher of The Moultrie Observer. Email: dwain.walden@gaflnews.com)