A backyard gusher? Only in my dreams

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: project was growing wheat in order to bake bread “really from scratch.” Well, his first crop, with less than 100 square feet of space in his Hudson Valley garden and a few dollars worth of seeds, yielded 20 pounds of wheat. Sounds great!

But then came the threshing and winnowing - two words that had little meaning for him before he set out. “My wife and I spent six hours beating the daylights out of our wheat with various instruments of violence generally seen only in S&M. movies,” he said, “and before it was all over, I understood only too well why the Latin word for the threshing board is ‘tribulum,’ which has the same origin as tribulation.”

He said that at the end of the day, his wife, Anne, “collapsed onto the lawn, exhausted, and had just one request: ‘Promise me you won’t grow cotton next summer.’”

Naysayers everywhere I turn.

So here’s my plan: I’m going to trade futures, because it means never having to get my hands dirty. People in Congress are saying that the speculators are the ones driving the price of oil. The price increases certainly could not be a result of the simple laws of supply and demand, or of limited production capacity and bottomless need for resources in the developing world.

Because I always believe what my members of Congress say, I have to figure that the speculators are getting rich. So why not me? I found a site on the internet that promises to teach me how to make a lot of money without having to do much work. Sounds perfect!

Meanwhile, I’m going to hang a bell in the backyard and ring it every morning, or invite some buddies in to do it for me. Grasso seems to think that job is worth millions. Maybe it will pay for that online course. If the neighbours complain about the bell, I’ll just explain how narrowly they missed the greensand marl pit, the rice paddy and the pigsty.

I’m sure they’ll be grateful.