Bills, Panthers And Peaches

When you spend most of your working life as a journalist, planning for the future is crucial.

Like most of my colleagues in the writing, editing and photography fields, I've always kept my retirement strategy simple.

I'll just write a book that becomes a movie that becomes a franchise.

Or, if I don't ever quite find the time to come with an idea for that book, much less write it, adapt it as a screenplay and accept a few statuettes for the trouble, I figure I will probably go out in a fashion that is dramatic and leaves a robust corporate entity liable in the eyes of a jury. Maybe selflessly shoving a young mom and her blonde 4-year-old twins out of the path of Jason Aldean's tour bus.

Something like that.

But the prospect of spending my golden years making slightly sauced appearances on late-night talk shows between cameos in the latest movie based on one of my best-sellers is growing dimmer, what with technology and all.

So I've decided to diversify, by adding something more stable to the portfolio:

Fruit farming.

Staba Orchards launched earlier this summer with a single apple tree, albeit that yields three different kinds of apples. Maybe it was four. I should probably check on that.

That first planting is still alive, so today, I picked up a couple of peach trees (pictured above).

They were on sale for $12.88 each. Once we recoup that investment, it's all sweet, sweet profit.

Not that any of this has any bearing on today's meeting between the Buffalo Bills and Carolina Panthers, other than to show the lengths I will go to avoid the various pregame shows.

In my day, the network pre-game shows were 30 minutes long.

And they starred a possibly drunk gambler.

Yes, there are multiple story lines involved today -- Buffalo's still-suspect run defense against a Panthers' running game that averaged more than five yards a carry against Seattle and C.J. Spiller trying to get untracked against a Carolina defense that stuffed Marshawn Lynch, to name two.

Mostly, though, it's about the quarterbacks, with E.J. Manuel, in his second NFL start, needing to outplay Cam Newton, who has thrown for more yards in his first two season than any quarterback ever, for the Bills to avoid going 0-2.

If you want to know more than you need about the game, there's this:

As ever, your thoughts on Manuel v. Newton, the state of media, gambling and peach trees are welcome in the comments below.