Forget the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate; this is one of those inexplicable, seemingly miraculous moments in history when all of the planets are aligned, the gods on Mount Olympus are in unanimous agreement, and everyone is in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

Think about it: CBS desperately needs a hit show to fill its late-night time slot. (We all know why, don’t we?)

And, with the Kremlin threatening to do to YouTube what Paramount just did to Stephen Colbert, Vladimir Putin may need to find a new spot for his favorite Canadian purveyor of propaganda, Arend Feenstra.

Well, I have the obvious solution for everyone’s problems. How’s this for an opening worthy of Saturday Night Live:

“And now, from historic Nizhny Novgorod, it’s . . . Farming Those Faraway Fecund Fields With the Feenstra Family.”

All right, the lead-in may need a bit of work, but you get the idea. We’ll still be losing Colbert’s incomparable, dry humor; but in place of political satire, we’ll be gaining Arend Feenstra’s ability to talk forever about the most fascinating aspects of building a successful working farm from a barren field in the middle of Nowhere, Russia, with your own two hands (and those of your wife, eight children, and a slew of Russian neighbors and experts who occasionally appear out of nowhere).

In the past year and a half, I have already learned so much from Arend about plowing, planting, harvesting, construction, fencing, post-hole digging, waterproofing, machine repair, crop rotation, milking, egg incubation, sheep breeding, protecting poultry from marauding foxes when you’re not allowed to own firearms (sadly, learned the hard way), bartering in a foreign language, and how to tell the difference between a milk cow and a future hunk of pot roast . . . not to mention the administrative nightmare of doing business in rural Russia.

I firmly believe that everything happens for a reason, even though we may not understand that reason for a very long time, if ever. And I now comprehend why the fates arranged for me to stumble across the Feenstras and follow the story of their abandonment of life in free and happy Canada in order to take their chances in the historically autocratic land of Tsarism, Communism, and Putinism.

And that reason is to give Arend Feenstra, and all the little Feenstras, the big break they deserve: worldwide fame and fortune. They’re naturals on camera; they’ve worked hard; and they’ve earned recognition. So in May, when Stephen Colbert says his last good night from the glitzy studios of CBS-TV, his replacements will be ready to step in with the premier of “Farming With the Feenstras.”

As their agent, I’ll only charge the standard 15 percent . . . in U.S. Dollars or Euros, not Rubles, please.

So that’s what we have to look forward to in the spring. Insomniacs of the world . . . rejoice!

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
7/29/25