The Maledictory Matriarch

The Great Plains! The words alone create a sense of space and a feeling of destiny--a challenge. But what exactly is this special part of Western America that contains so much of our history? How did it come to be? Why is it different?

quote from: The GEOLOGIC STORY of The GREAT PLAINS
By DONALD E. TRIMBLE
GEOLOGICAL SURVEY BULLETIN 1493
United States Government Printing Office, Washington : 1980

The answer of all three questions is as obvious as the nose on my face. The Great Plains, that special part of Western America, creates a sense of space and feeling of destiny because it is the only place on this blue planet where there is an actual, working matriarchal society - of humans. Of course, there are many matriarchal animal societies. These social societies include ants, bees, elephants, and killer whales, but only one for humans.

The first Matriarch I remember was my great-grandmother, Sophie G. When I turned ten years old I could look her in the eye, which was an immeasurably disturbing experience because she would look right through a person ... just to read the newspaper behind them. She was born in Norway, came to the Short Grass Prairie in a covered wagon, loved to play Canasta, and kept the Devil off the doorstep with a "Hot Toddy" every now and then ... or so. That was a mix of skills that impressed the fire out of a ten year old too. When the north wind blew and the cards turned against her, she'd curse in Norwegian and make it sound almost like singing. She ran the family until the day she died. She ran "the business" too, and she ran it well. She lived in the very first three story house built in Stevens County, Kansas, and to this day it's the only such structure in her tiny town.

The next matriarch in my life was my father's mother, my Irish grandmother, Momo. She was the kind of grandmother that every kid wishes for ... and a little more. She let school in the seventh grade. She eventually met my grandfather, Popo, in an oil boomtown in southeastern Oklahoma in the 1930's. He was a hard worker and very strong. He had a team of mules and made a living hauling drill pipe out to the rigs working the oil patch. She had a gift for organization and accounting. Together they turned that mule team into a truck and trailer, and then into a fleet of trucks with caterpillars and motor graders, and then into a major oil field service business.

Although he always had time for his grandchildren, his love was "the business". My grandfather was a man of his times. He drank, smoked and told a story from time to time. He was built of the same genetic stuff that most every male in my family is, and died early because of it. Momo lived to be 92 and had her wits about her to the very end. She taught me everything (well, almost everything) I know about "the business", and I am forever grateful for that.

She was an eccentric character who never did anything half-way. She was a red-faced hatchet lady marching with the Prohibitionists in the 1920s. She served the Church and helped the Relief efforts during the worst times of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. She and my grandfather worked together during the 1940s during World War 2 to build the Municipal Airport at Pueblo, Colorado. She was an ardent anti-communist in the 1950s. She was a community activist and politically involved during the 1960s. In the 1970s, she founded a health food store and bought the first waterbed in Stevens County from a slick, hippie, full-color catalog. It set tongues to wagging, and some even speculated that what happened in it was the root cause of my grandfather's third heart attack. In the 1980s, she was a Reagan Revolutionary. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton was elected and she became convinced that the end of the world was at hand. After George W. Bush was elected, it was absolute proof that she'd only been wrong about "when".

The last matriarch I've known is my other grandmother; we called her "Mother" because "a 19 year old can't be a grandmother". The deal was that she'd had her 19th birthday about thirty times when I heard that line for the first time. She always had something to say. When I was 7, I asked her why she and my grandfather slept together while Momo and Popo slept in separate beds. She told that they did that because they were Republicans. I suppose this is why Democrat's have more fun. She was loud, proud of being a "yellow dog" Democrat, and never owned a house with very thick walls - a fact which made living with my grandfather and her occasionally ... ahem ... uncomfortable.

She was a unique woman. She could curse up a blue streak, out drink most men, and then give an old fashioned beat down to the others. She insisted upon the strictest sort of table manners - enforced by a long handled wooden spoon. She loved riding horses as much as she hated Dick Nixon. I suppose that made her the quintessential Short Grass Prairie Woman.

I heard a professor of psychology at Harvard named Steven Pinker talk about "the stuff of thought" on CSPAN (9/17/07). I'm certain that Pinker got everything he knows from an interview with my grandmother ... because the subject of the talk was about cursing. She is such an accomplished swearer that "The Maledictory Matriarch" should be carved on her headstone. For your enjoyment, I offer into evidence the different categories of swearing outlined by Pinker.

1. Dysphemistic swearing - the substitution of a disagreeable, offensive, or disparaging expression for an agreeable or inoffensive one. The difference between shit and feces or fuck and copulate. Same ideas really but different acceptibilities.

There are 34 euphemisms for feces in contemporary English usage. All of which with my grandmother was intimately familiar. I think she used a few of the noun forms of that to fill out labels for Christmas gifts one year.

2. Abusive swearing - used to intimidate or humiliate someone.

She was especially fond of this type of swearing. It was through this that I not only learned that our Lord Jesus Christ rode a bicycle, but why. She used this one very cleverly to describe the Protestant relatives engaged in undignified sexual activities, usually with small animals.

3. Idiomatic swearing - terms where it is completely unclear where the referent of the word came from in the current context.

These dripped of her like sweat on a July afternoon. Shit out of luck, get your shit together, pissed off, all kinds of terms used strictly for emotional impact.

4. Emphatic swearing - Used to add emphasis to a particular point.

One of her favorites was Fuck-O-Roni. I think that some people call that the San Francisco Treat, but I couldn't swear to it in court. Another one was "shit a brick". Pinker says that this category of swearing is used "to advertise their reactions to life's frustrations and setbacks", but I think it's much broader than that.

5. Cathartic swearing - strange phenomena where the topic of the conversation abruptly turns to sexuality or excreta. A response cry that is communicative and informs bystanders of her current state of emotions.

This is why everyone knew when SHE was in the confession box, but then again, it's about the only time you'll hear a priest talking this way.

Wikipedia says that "no matriarchal societies are known". I can't imagine anything further from the truth.

Hairy Cherries, Fidel

The ducks morning swim was interrupted by some political news from Cuba. President 4 Life and Butthole in Chief, Fidel Castro, announced that he did not aspire to nor would accept the Presidency of Cuba (or any number of other positions ... most of which have been photographed by the CIA). This called for a celebratory lap around the old pond.



This is not a political blog, and I hate to make it so, but I make an exception for Fidel Castro. There are few people in the world who have done as much damage to a nation as Fidel Castro and his gang have. Even though this isn't the end of his corrupt ideology, it is the end for him. It's about time too. Hopefully it won't take too long for the world to be finally free of this monster. Until you're finally in Hell, Fidel, have a hairy cherry.

The Dapper Dogs of the Great White North

Some friends of one of the Winged Monkeys of Software are touring the White North now. One of the points of interest in their adventure vacation was the 25th Running of the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race. Here's a picture from the starting line.



The race course runs from WhiteHorse in the Yukon Territory of Canada all the up to Fairbanks, Alaska. The website says that the race follows the historic Gold Rush and mail delivery dogsledding routes from the turn of the 20th century. It takes two weeks to finish. The dog teams have fourteen dogs pulling. The terrain is frozen rivers, lakes and mountains. In addition to the just stupidly cold weather, the teams must also deal with unpredicatable wildlife along the way.

You can follow the teams along the race at this website: http://www.yukonquest.com/.

Here are four additional pictures they sent back to us. You know I always had this image in my mind about dog sleds and the teams that pull them. It was right of Jack London's "Call of the Wild". The protagonist hero of that story is Buck, a 4-year-old, 140 lb St. Bernard/Scotch Shepherd mix, with the stature of a large wolf and the machismo of Norse god. The dogs pulling these sleds today aren't anything like the fictional Buck. These dogs are svelt, even dapper in their booties and James Bond jackets. Don't these dogs look like their racing to dinner at the Ritz? All they need is a tie to be seated.









Many thanks to Ben's friends for the images and the story.

Voodoo Bumpity-Boo

Had another voodoo bumpity-boo with our favorite red-headed Financial Voodoo Priestess this afternoon. She was showing off her newest shrunken head - fresh off the shoulders of a Front Office Yutz whom she'd caught using the "corporate" charge card to rent chairs for an office party.

ME
Chairs? Why would anyone rent chairs?

HER
So the strippers would have a place to sit.

Damn, she's good. I never even saw that one coming. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the company of women who are smarter than I am. It's just that whenever she shows me her necklace of shrunken heads during a meeting, I get this feeling that I should have worn a catcher's mask and a cup.

She told me that her husband has a website that I and the other Winged Monkeys of Software should see. A wet dread ran through my veins. She wrote the URL on the back of my notes for the meeting. It had the word GAMERZ in it. That could only be something evil, I thought, something so evil I wouldn't dare open a link to at work - especially not with this being contract renewal season for our resident network nazi - Earl, The Son of Santa. Let me quote ... "Ho, ho, ho, Mother F*cker. I gotcha now" ... For him Renewal IS the 'come to Jesus' event from the movie Logan's Run. The only difference is that in Earl's version of the movie, he gets renewed by throwing the bodies of enough network users onto the big red bug zapper. He detects the offense using his "proprietary computer forensic methods" and *poof* the victims connectivity privileges vanish in puffs of smoke.

After the meeting, I was thinking about how I should spin this for the ol' blog. I visited the restroom to try to wash off the dirty feeling I get from gatherings like this. As I was drying my hands I noticed some graffiti in the mirror. Someone had left me a sign ... Flush twice; it's a long way to the main cafeteria ...

Here's a link to the Voodoo Priestess' husband's website.

http://welovegamerz.com/

They've got a screenplay (and who doesn't?) they're trying to get noticed. There is some interesting and fun original material, even a music video love song to a video game. I'll have to take a look at it again in a few days when the monetary "shock and awe" from today's meeting with the Priestess has worn off.

A not-so-work-related email

On Friday I received an email at work that wore this disclaimer as a footer:

Caution: This message may contain competitive, sensitive or other non-public information not intended for disclosure outside official ... corporate ... channels. Do not disseminate this message without approval. If you received this message in error, please notify the sender by reply e-mail and delete all copies of this message.

I just hate this sort of legalese for two reasons. First, no one ever bothers to turn it off when they are going to send out messages that are clearly not work related. Second, there are three people with the same first and last name as me working for ... this ... corporation, so I routinely get email that is not intended for me. Sometimes it has an even more extravagant version of the legalese in it. Being the Working Class Hero ... ahem ... that I am, I try to follow the instructions in the email footer exactly. I have taken great pride in forwarding the email back to the sender ... and to our network security ... when the email contains pornographic images.

The email in question on Friday was not intended for me appearently, but I neither notified the sender by e-mail nor deleted all copies of the email. Nope, it was too much fun for that. Here's what it said:


Air Force Test

This will drive you nuts!! Have fun!

The object of the game is to move the red block around without getting hit by the blue blocks or touching the black walls.

If you can go longer than 18 seconds you are phenomenal. It's been said that the US Air Force uses this for fighter pilots. They are expected to go for at least 2 minutes.

Give it a try but be careful...it is addictive!!

PS. I survived .952 seconds.


Here's the accompanying link:

http://members.iinet.net.au/~pontipak/redsquare.html

Start me up, Sniffy the Kitty

Humans don't own cats I'm told. It's the other way around. So, here's the story of the last cat that owned me, Sniffy the Kitty. Saying it so makes it even more appropriate because Sniffy was a very naughty kitty and much like his auntie, Spitty, who lived in the fiberglass under the trailer house where I was raised. The High Plains of Southeastern Colorado is a pretty barren place, some would even say God Forsaken, and it's probably true since it was literally East of the mountainous Eden one would visualize upon hearing the word - Colorado. Others would describe the blue grama-buffalo grass prairie as being just about beautiful. The truth is always in the middle, you know, so my cynically bitter with just a twinge of happiness autobiography should probably then be, "Little Doublewide on the Prairie".

My stepfather, Dick, was a farmer. Farming more than 160 acres of land earned an enterprising soul a deferment from the Draft because, as it turns out, both are equal forms of involuntary servitude and slavery. We raised wheat, Milo, cattle and pigs on the farm. We always had a dog. Our first one was a German Shepherd and a tramp, so all of the succeeding generations were part Coyote. There were other wild visitors who came to eat things we raised on the farm like rabbits, antelope, deer ... and kangaroo rats ... and the Western Diamondback Rattlesnakes that ate them.

My mother had always wanted a porch and wouldn't stop until she got one. So my stepfather built one for her. He used a bunch of cinder blocks for it, unintentionally creating the only spot warmed by the sun for miles around. It turns out that the cold blooded Western Diamondback Rattlesnakes really cherish those sorts of structures, so every summer day we had a buzzing welcoming committee at the front door. It was Hell on the traveling salesmen, but since our nearest neighbor was just a few miles away, it didn't dampen our socializing much at all. For some reason, my stepfather was deathly afraid of snakes with their flickering tongues and strange, scaly bodies. He was also afraid of chickens with their three-toed feet, savage gumption and feathers ... but I digress. When he saw two of the pigs in the pen fighting over the corpse of a snake that they had killed, he let all of the pigs loose to live in the yard. They were hard on the buffalo grass and liked to eat the garden hose. My stepfather fed the pigs in the pens but during the cold Colorado winters, they preferred to live right there under our happy little doublewide.

My stepfather wasn't much of a plumber, so when he cross connected the hot and cold water lines, it made for several unnaturally warm spots under the trailer and the pigs congregated there. It had some upsides too, don't get me wrong. Since the cold water line to the toilet now was filled with hot water, your backside was always nice and cozy during that morning constitutional no matter how stupidly cold it was outside. The downside was that since the wheels of the doublewide went flat and the trailer wasn't mounted on blocks, we lost a little elevation over the years. It would seem that the trailer was about three inches shorter than the average standing height of healthy Poland-China sow. So that morning walk to the toasty warm commode was done by stepping over the humps that the pigs backs had raised in the fiberboard floor of the Little Doublewide on the Prairie. Sometimes the humps were still in the process of being raised, and you'd hear a pig down there squealing "get offa my back you heartless monkey bastard."

Connectedness. Consequence. Cause and Effect.

Pigs "taste test" their environment. That environment included the cats, so that's why Spitty the Kitty lived in a hidey-hole bungalow in the fiberglass under the Little Doublewide on the Prairie. Spitty would scratch at just about anything that passed by. Over the years, the fiberglass got into her respiratory system and she developed a rattling wheeze meow. One Spring day, my stepfather called a plumber out to finally dis-cross connect the hot and cold water lines under the trailer. The plumber was fat, bold and brave. He told me that he wasn't afraid of rattlesnakes because he had developed a slide move technique in the Army and that talent got him where he needed to be under trailer houses like mine without disturbing any of the wildlife. The plumber laid on his back and inchwormed his way under the trailer toward THE spot where God himself had banished Satan into a little plumbing Hell. Unfortunately plumbing Hell was just north of Spitty the Kitty's hidey-hole bungalow. Spitty gave her rattling wheeze warning, and the plumber kept a coming. No, he didn't stop until she reached out and sank her claws into his fish white belly. Then he came out of there like a shot. He never came back to post a bill for his labor. In fact, no plumber ever came back, and we had toasty warm backsides until the day we moved.

When we moved, it was downhill to Kansas. About a thousand feet in elevation downhill to be exact, but it was much closer to my stepfather's mother's place. My step-grandmother Blanche was the first Earth Mother type I'd ever known and just about the most wonderful woman ever to grace the short grass prairie of the American West. She made filled cookies that were absolutely to-die-for good. She was also the only person I'd ever known to have a wax fruit display. She liked them so much that there were wax apples in nearly every room. She told us that they couldn't be eaten, and one of my brothers took that for a by God challenge, as he was apt to do, only to lose a wobbly tooth in proving her right.

Sniffy the Kitty was born a poor black kitty, a runt that no one wanted. My stepfather felt sorry for him and brought him home. Young Sniff was nursed into health and soon grew into a strong and prosperous cat. When it was time, Sniffy lost his testicles, as all pets should be either spayed or neutered to prevent overpopulation. My stepfather personalized the surgery for some reason and thought that such a loss would prove psychologically unbearable for Proud Sniff, so he asked the vet to replace the missing nards with some kind of substitute. This being Kansas and all, there just not were enough nards to go around. So he looked around the shop for something of equal value as a replacement. All he could find were two little pink plastic baby Jesus figures and a canine "prosthesis". My stepfather couldn't go for having the tiny pink and welcoming arms our Savior forever adorning the back of Young Sniff even though it would have been at a substantial discount. Instead, he chose the dog-sized faux-nards and instantly made Proud Sniff the vainest kitty in Stevens County, Kansas.

Sniffy had some bad habits. He loved to eat human food from the trash. He would dive right in, wallow and eat to his fill. Then he had to go outside and de-stink. One day, my stepmother (yes, I didn't finish with the same parents as I started with - through no fault of my own - it's a story I don't care to tell, so don't ask.) prepared a filet of beef, you know, the kind where it is important to tie it with string so the whole thing cooks more evenly. It was a delicious meal indeed, especially so for Sniffy the Kitty. He discovered the chunks of fat, drippings of gravy and all that meat-flavored string. A day or so later, Proud Sniff had a little white nub hanging out of his midnight black backside. One of my brothers, always attentive to details like that, asked my stepmother was it was. She said that it was just the string from the roast and not to worry because it would pass "naturally". My brother decided he couldn't wait for that and he just had to pick that nit offa Sniffy the Kitty. He grabbed the string and immediately had Sniffy undivided attention. He pulled on it. The string came out a little and Angry Sniff growled like a wildcat. My brother pulled a little harder on the string and Sniffy tensed up, digging his little kitty claws into the carpet. Now my brother had worked with string before. He was something of an expert really. He had a stubborn baby tooth that wouldn't come out, and he asked me to pull it for him. I am the oldest of six, so that sort of thing was apparently my responsibility. I wiggled on the tooth and my brother cried like a schoolgirl, so I told him that he had to pull it himself and that the easiest way was to tie one end of a string around the tooth and other end to a doorknob. Then you just slam the door and presto out comes the tooth. Wouldn't you know that he popped that old tooth out on the first try. That recollection gave my brother an idea. Maybe he just oughtta yank that string out of Sniffy the Kitty just like he was pulling out a tooth. My brother pulled the string taught and Nervous Sniff clenched that carpet as hard as he could. Then in one smooth motion my brother yanked that knotted string like he was pull starting the lawn mover. Sniffy the Kitty got power from all four churning legs, and the angry fist-knotted string popped right out Sniffy's butt. He was out of the house like a rocket. He climbed a tree and didn't come down for about three days.

Now I've read on the internet that there are some people who like that sort of thing, but from Sniffy the Kitty's reaction, I can't imagine why.

A divine Feelsky

Happy Lunar New Year everyone!

Well, where I work the old uber-boss is gone and the new one is coming. It's ironic, don't ya think, that we are waving goodbye to the Year of the Pig and are now welcoming the Year of the Rat.

I had a meeting late this afternoon with red-headed lady with low-heeled, sensible shoes from our Financial Department today. How did it go? It STARTED with her explaining that the V.P. part of the Financial V.P. sign on her door really stood for "Voodoo Priestess". Then she told me that because "our" business ...

Strange how it magically becomes "our" business when fecal matter hits the rotary oscillator in sizeable chunks, but when things are going well it's somehow a seamlessly-integrated, vertically-inspired structure delivering the very finest goods and services to the customer with an absolutely maximal profit stream and is the work product of ONE AND ONLY ONE manager, but I digress ...

Yes, because "our" business was going suffer a $250 Million loss this year, "I" was going to feel the Hand of God upon me.

You know, of all the things I've felt at work, THIS has got to be the worst. I thought it was bad enough occasionally being screwed by the "Man Who Holds Us Down". Now, apparently I will suffer the indignity of a divine Feelsky too.

Happy Fat Tuesday ya'all!

Happy Fat Tuesday ya'all! Hope yours was as happy as mine. Starting tomorrow, Ash Wednesday, the Lent season is upon us. Now everyone does something a little different for this period of time that will end on Easter. Many people use this time to pause and reflect on their faith. You've probably heard of people trying to give up one thing or another because of Lent. Phooey! Before I figured out what it was *really* all about, I'd been guilty of that sort of Lenten-limp too. One year, I really thought that my incredibly honed sarcastic bitterness would be a noble sacrifice. The next year I swore off being cynical. The very next year, still having crawled no closer to enlightenment, I decided to go for the spiritual double-dip and give up both bitterness and cynicism - at the same time! In the six excruciatingly LONG weeks of silence that followed ... I had time to rethink my whole outlook on the faith. I had time to do service projects for people who really needed help. I even had time to put others first, and it changed my life.

So at our last writers' group meeting, a friend asked what I was doing for Lent this year. I had a hard time answering because I hadn't worked out the details for myself yet. It takes a little lead in to explain it, and this is the first time that I've ever told anyone ahead of time, about what Lent means to me. Because you asked Katie, here it is.

About eight years ago now, one of my brothers died. I'm the oldest of six and Jeff was the third. We were close and did a lot of things together growing up. He was a wild one with fire engine red hair. He was almost always in some sort of trouble. He liked sports and excelled at football and track. He eventually got a scholarship and played football at University of Kansas (when they were really, really bad). He finally found a very good woman in the Houston area and married her. They had four children. She was still pregnant with the fourth when he died.

During High School, we had a band. I think everyone did back then. It was Jeff and I, a neighbor named Dave, and a drummer named Weeds (for reasons I can't possibly fathom). Our band played mostly for petty cash, beer, girls and fun. The biggest crowd we ever played to was about sixty people and we brought the house down with a mix of covers that featured some old Deep Purple tunes. I still remember the songs we played that evening. They were mostly three chord wonders, but a few were more complicated. It was a lot of fun.

Later, when Jeff moved to Houston, I'd travel from central Oklahoma down to Houston as often as I could. He had a job that paid pretty good money and gave him the run of a very big, but mostly empty warehouse where they fixed vending machines by day and stored candy and capsules of toys for the route men. Jeff saved up and bought a beautiful Ibanez guitar and a couple of new pedals. After closing time, we'd bring out of guitars and amps and play whatever we wanted just as loud as we wanted. I remember one night after a Ronnie James Dio concert we sat in that garage for hours until we had figured out "Holy Diver" and "Rainbow in the Dark". After Jeff got a route of his own, we'd still get together and play even though that meant going all the way to Atlanta, Georgia, to do it. That was how I remembered playing guitar. It was a lot of fun. When Jeff died, I put the old Fender Stratocaster case into the closet and haven't been able to pick it up since.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine named Walt, said that he'd heard from some buddies at work that I played guitar. He said that he had bought a DVD and was learning how to play. He wondered if I would come over and play sometime. I told him no right away. The more I thought about it, the more I thought about Jeff. I came to realize how much Jeff's death effected me. It's effected my faith in a way that I've not been able to really overcome. When Walt asked again, I thought that maybe instead of giving up something for Lent, maybe I should be doing something for Lent. Maybe this will help work though things and reconnect me to the faith. That's what I'm hoping anyway. So I said yes.

When I reached for the Strat, I just couldn't do it. So in order to make this happen, I dug my old acoustic out of the closet. It's a 1961 Silvertone.



You're probably thinking that there's nothing special about these old guitars that they sold through Sears, but there really is. They have a soul of their own. Guys like Muddy Waters, Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup and even Jimi Hendrix once played an old Silvertone guitar. They were inexpensive, but well built. They have a twangy, bluesy sound. The neck is super comfortable in the hand and they just ring when you run your hand across the strings. Silvertone sold them from 1915 until 1972. I know there are just tons of better guitars out there, but I've always liked this one and its feaux-Western looking case with the printed cowboys and Indians vignettes all over. I know mine is a '61 because the guy I bought it from (back when Jimmy Carter was President) had left in the case an instruction booklet that came with the guitar when his parents bought it for him. He'd penciled in the date March 25, 1961, on the cover. The guitar always had a problem with the low E tuning peg. It was bent when I bought it. So I ordered a set of replacement tuning pegs on eBay and got them installed. Of course the strings were dead after all these years, so I went to the store to buy a new set today. I used to love my old Ernie Ball strings, but the guy at the store said that the DRs were very popular now. I just had to get a pack of red and white OU picks also. I'll string it up tomorrow after our writers group meeting and see how it sounds. More on that later.

The Snowbirds of Super Tuesday

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday and our weather forecast looks to be a bad one. That usually means low turn outs at the polls unfortunately. I want to encourage everyone to get out there and vote your conscience. That's only vote a person can cast without remorse. Many places will have other issues on the ballot like school bond elections and sales tax proposals. Please consider these issues carefully. Because so many people won't bother to vote at all, the vote you cast is very important indeed.

The last time the weather forecast was like this, we had a nice skiff of snow to show for it. The birds at the pond didn't mind it a bit. Here are some pictures to the birds enjoying the snow.






Now that they've seen me, or should I say the sack of cracked corn I'm carrying, I'm becoming popular.



Can you tell that we've got a several newcomers there. I'm trying to find out what they are and I hope to have more pictures soon. I've been trying to almost five years now to get a good picture of the blue heron that picks the occasional sunfish out of the pond.

Another couple domestic (farm) geese have decided to join our happy community. I don't mind if you bring your birds by and let them join the family. Please consider the adoption FINAL, once you close your car door and drive away. We will feed them and care for them from that point forward. We do not appreciate it when you bring our birds home with you for ... dinner on Easter Sunday.

Salami-otomy

1. the surgical removal of all or part of a ... um ... salami.
2. a strategy employed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War to take over Europe “slice-by-slice” with no one slice so grave as to compel the West to respond militarily.
3. A particularly disturbing method of moving a horror story forward, a catalyst.

Have you ever had a story leave you speechless? I really wanted to mean that in the good way, but something happened that ... whittled down ... my estimation.

The short story "Noodlers Nab Naked Nymphs" by Steven E. Wedel is read by the author and presented in video format. It's a meaty twenty-two minutes and thirty-five seconds long. It's a free stream from the fearzone.com folks and joins a number of other stories presented by their authors on that website. Be warned, this is about horror and they take their genre seriously.



It's the story of some backwoods boys who visit the Kiamichi Wilderness in Oklahoma, or "kiamish" as the locals call it. They want to go fishing in the Glover River, which is actually the last free-flowing (undammed) river in Oklahoma. These red-dirt rednecks are the kind of folks that "upstanding" Oklahomans will go a long way to not have to acknowledge as kin. Because it is a Wedel story, the dialogue is crisp, the setting is beautifully painted, and the characters exceeding realistic. From the word "GO", the language they use is decidedly NOT family friendly.

Once they arrive at the river, they are attacked by a crazed man who mutilates one of the boys and uses his severed penis to summon a river nymph. Now, nymphs in general are like fairies, except they are female and scary. I leave what happens next your imagination, but count on bloody spectacle, shock and awe.

Technically, the story was very well done. All of the elements that should have made it great were there. It just got weighted down by the harsh language and the "salami-otomy" that happened in the first few minutes of the story. It's a good, but long listen. Check it out, but be prepared for the R-rated content.



"Seven Days in Benevolence" by Steven E. Wedel is everything that you would expect from a master storyteller with a few of style points deducted for disturbing content.

Just through a painful divorce, Dena and her two daughters are ready for a new life in Benevolence, Oklahoma. Even though Dena has a found job, moving to a new town poses challenges. The family needs a place to live. The oldest daughter, Rebecca, will attend public school, and the youngest, Brianna, needs day care. Her ex-husband still wants Dena and the children back, but can't have them for reasons that are brilliantly developed through context, action and dialogue.

When Dena finds an old house that's just the right size for the family and has the perfect yard and a basement, she doesn't realize how much more than a home she is getting. Like every really good ghost story, the setting is a character unto itself, and this one is very well drawn. The seven days the family spends in that setting are told in this novella length story. There was enough meat on the stiff old bones of the house on 12th Street to have made a novel that really measured up.

Have you ever been swept along by a story so much that your "willing suspension of disbelief" was so utterly suspended that, like a rodeo cowboy, you didn't realize that things were going wrong until you were bucked off and being stomped on by a very angry nineteen hundred pound bull? That is this story. There are two things about the story that bothered me enough to deduct a few style points. It's disturbing to read a story that emphasizes the forcible amputation of a human penis as a method of salvation. It's quite beyond that to have that penis intended to be used as a weapon against an infant with "her small body stripped of all clothing, her arms and legs splayed so that she looked like a pale, stranded starfish" (p.97). This was an unfortunate choice and compromised the ending of what had been a very good story up to then.

The Duck who walked on water

There once was a duck who walked on water. Yes, I know this is a limerick struggling to be born. It's also a fact, or more precisely, exactly the same as a one - only different - and that makes it perfectly true in every sense of things. That shouldn't make sense, but I'm very sorry to report that where I work it does.

Technically speaking, it is completely true that while ducks can float on water, so far none have really mastered walking on it. However, if one were to give the duck years of spiritual guidance, an understanding and mastery of the basic tenets of the universe, and a warming spark of enlightened human values like compassion, love and kindness, then take the duck to a place like Galilee where there is at least an historical precedent of walking on water, you just may actually get a duck to pull off a miracle.

On the other hand, modern corporate greed and ineffectually enforced contracting rules have joined forces to create another possibility. You take a large sheet of ice and submerge it in the water. Sprinkle cracked corn round the middle of the ice sheet. Then gently place the duck on the center of the ice. As the duck walks around the block of ice pecking the corn, take a witness and put them in a viewing booth just far enough away from the water so that they can't see the ice, but are still close enough to see the duck walking ... on what appears to be the surface of the water. Then quick as can be done, get a check collecting drone in procurement to pass around the approval documents and a pen. Take check to bank before anyone is the wiser.

For the sake of argument, let's suppose that your team is very busy with a real project and a deadline that is right around the corner. Out of the blue, something like this happens...

BOSS
Hey ah, we've got a little problem.

YOU
(inner monologue)
"We" means you and the mouse in your pocket, no?
(external vocalization)
Problem?

BOSS
The Contracting Officer just called and he needs one of the engineering leads to go over to a Brand X Contractor's corporate office for a meeting. You'd better hurry and get over there ... because the test started about ten minutes ago.

So on the way over to the Brand X Contractor's corporate office, you read as many of the technical documents as you possibly can. The Brand X Contractor has proposed and been granted approval (and tons of bucks) for a requirement that so closely resembles getting a duck to walk on water that you want to scream.

The meeting not only goes badly, but another person from Corporate, appropriately named the Chief of All Things, publicly denounces the idea that this is a duck walking on water. It is, as everyone can plainly see, much more closely related to a poke - a small sack or bag and is the origin of the word pocket. No, it is obviously has no feathers at all either, but is more porcine because of the extreme cost of the program. Q.E.D. - a pig in a poke. Everyone congratulates the Chief of All Things for his snappy banter, quick thinking and cat-like reflexes.

During a break in the meeting, one of the Brand X Contractors approaches you stealthily. He reminisces about a temporary duty assignment he had with a certain female employee of the corporation. He wonders if she still works there. Naturally she does - she works for you in fact. He whips out a business card, scratches his business phone off the front and writes in his personal cell number. He says that she promised to sell him an Ostrich egg and asks if you knew how her side business was going.

You finally return to the office. You have to talk to your boss. You find him talking to a Vietnamese lady. Her name is Thuy - pronounced "twee". Your boss says that even though the employee's mother intensely disapproves of it, he thinks it would be great if she married Mr. Byrd from Central Accounting because then her name would be Thuy T. Byrd. Neither of them laugh when he says it.

You interrupt the conversation to say that you think the corporation needs to buy a new piece of safety equipment for the office. Your boss looks deeply disturbed. You are unaware of a pending Workman's Comp claim in the office by one of the employees who sat down without looking backward first, thereby missed planting his butt into his chair, where upon gravity kicked in sending the vegetable-minded employee crashing to the floor and fracturing his tailbone and two ribs in the process.

BOSS
What kind of safety equipment?

YOU
A shower to help get rid of that dirty feeling you get from dealing with our contractors.

You follow the boss into his office where he writes (yet another dammit!) piece of paper for your personnel jacket.

A loving tribute

This evening Janie Turnbull asked me to bring a book to my friend Katie. Of course, just having the book in my hands was temptation enough to open the cover and take a look around. Inside the cover is a wonderful inscription from Janie to Katie, so with each turn of the page thereafter, it felt more and more like I was "stealing" a glance at the pages rather than simply reading. What I found on those pages was truly remarkable. I hope that you will find this book, "A Place Called Home", as rewarding as I did.

"A Place Called Home" is a collection of photographs by William J. "Bill" Turnbull. Janie Turnbull filled the remaining spaces in the 64 page book with a description of their life in Cameron Parish, Louisiana. Janie's deft touch amplifies the beauty of Bill's photographs of wildlife, landscapes and shipping in this part of southern Louisiana the way it was when the photographs were taken between the hurricane storms named Audrey in 1957 and Rita in 2005.

My favorite image is "alligator along a Creole nature trail" on page 12. It's an impressionist rendering of a steel blue alligator gliding through the forest green swamp water. The alligator is tipped in silver and dollops of blue borrowed from shelves of Claude Monet's studio in Giverny. Mottled twists of thick sap greens make the alligators focused eyes even more menacing.

"Evening at Rutherford Beach" is a study in glorious blue. It occupies the whole of page 25, and is counterpoised with a study in orange named "Pogey boat at sunset Rutherford Beach".

It's a great book and loving tribute to Bill's photography.

Published by:
Turnbull Ink Press
Box 720447
Norman, Oklahoma 73070

ISBN-10: 0-9799057-0-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-9799057-0-4

A kinetic grab bag

"Realms Of War" is a kinetic grab bag of twelve war stories edited by Philip Athans. It is a cross of dark fantasy and old fashioned sword and sorcery fiction wrapped in the world of the Twilight War trilogy. If you haven't read these Forgotten Realms books before, you'll find that this collection both stands by itself as good reading and is compelling enough to make you want to dive into the Twilight War books by Paul S. Kemp.

Each of the stories in Realms of War is a quick thirty pages long and packed with bigger-than-life heroes, (mostly) pretty girls, exotic places, strange and mysterious villains. These are action stories loaded with magic and they don't disappoint. With settings across "all the lands 'twixt bustling Waterdeep and the sparkling waves of The Sea of Fallen Stars" you get to sample bit-sized pieces of the very best this world has to offer.

The very first story, Continuum by Paul S. Kemp, is magnificent. It's character's are very well developed and are expertly woven into their world. The blend of intrigue, magic and action is only topped by an ending that zings with a really appealing twist.

The other stories in the anthology are also very good, but a couple of them stand out. Changing Tides by Mel Odom has an undersea salvage operation, a titanic sea battle, fiercesome creatures seeking flesh (or simply meat as they call it) and a strange alliance of humans and magical creatures. Chase the Dark by Jaleigh Johnson takes the concept of battle, cause, effect and consequence to an entirely new level. Very well done!

"Realms Of War" is a fast, fun read and doesn't require having read the first two books in the Twilight War trilogy - Shadowbred and Shadowstorm - to slip into the action and enjoy the ride. After reading "Realms Of War", you'll probably find that you'll want to check out Shadowbred and Shadowstorm sometime before Shadowrealm is released later this year.

The stories in the anthology are:

Continuum, Paul S. Kemp
Weasel's Run, Lisa Smedman
The Last Paladin of Ilmater, Susan J. Morris
Black Arrow, Bruce R. Cordell
Too Many Princes, Ed Greenwood
The Siege of Zerith Hold, Jess Lebow
Mercy's Reward, Mark Sehestedt
Redemption, Elaine Cunningham
Changing Tides, Mel Odom
Chase the Dark, Jaleigh Johnson
Bones and Stones, R.A. Salvatore
Second Chance, Richard Lee Byers

Red State Blues

Signs. They're everywhere when you notice them. Like William Shatner in that Twilight Zone episode, sometimes you find they are staring back at you when you look through the window. Other times they are a little further out on the wing, so to speak.

Signs. Sometimes they are as noticeable as the cows in the field behind my neighbor's house. Sometimes it's the Coyote standing at the end of my driveway when I wheel the dumpster out on Monday morning. I tip my hat and say "Breakfast is served." Sometimes its the op-ed piece in the newspaper that tells me that I live in a really, really RED state. But the obvious ones aren't the signs that bother me. Nope, it takes a little more than that to get me.

Signs. Sometimes they show up where you least expect them. We had a Steering Group meeting for the part of the business I work for here that just wrapped up. People come from all over the country (and a few other places too) to get a dose of this quadrennial pestilence. Tradition has it that on one evening of the three day shindig, we hold a dinner event downtown. Excellent food is served. Adult beverages are consumed. Good times are had by all. Life is good ... until I visit the men's room.

There are three urinals uncomfortably side-by-side. No one else in the place, so I take my half out of the middle. Two guys walk in and pull up on either side of me. They've been drinking - a lot. They not only break the unspoken rule and speak - across me - they continue their conversation - painfully oblivious to my presence.

Rulebreaker #1
Oh man, your wife is really drunk.

Rulebreaker #2
That damn vodka.
(a resigned beat)
You know the last time she did this,
(in a gently metered redneck ADAGIO)
she came home pregnant.

I washed my hands and left the city.

Cuba Libre or Mentirita anyone?

"The Powers That Be" is an ambitious and intoxicating first in the new Room 59 series.

Room 59 is an independent, ultra secret, black operations agency that goes places and does things that governments can't or won't. Once a mission has been approved by the International Intelligence Agency, the Room 59 operatives, lead and chosen by Kate Cochran, act to eliminate global threats arising from the gritty reality of counterterrorism, international crime, and intrigue. Since Room 59 was designed to operate independently of all known governing bodies, if something - anything - goes wrong, there is no one to call for help.

To accomplish a mandate this big and make a story worth reading, the plot must be well researched, believably set in real places, pay attention to detail, be technically accurate, be built of images that are powerful and yet familiar, and delivered with a directness that pulls no punches. With that accounting, "The Powers That Be" succeeds admirably. This story is complex and necessarily so. The cast of characters is large. The level of technical detail and accuracy adds a clarifying granularity. The imagery sucks you into the story, spins on the bottle cap shut behind you, and locks you in right up to the very last page. It starts the prologue with the search and interrogation of a political prisoner in a Cuban prison, and ends on a deserted beach in Florida with the incoming waves removing any evidence that anyone had been there at all.

The action in this story is positively breathtaking. With simultaneous operations in both Cuba and Florida, there is plenty to keep the pages turning. When a historical complication from the early Sixties is twisted into the mix, events really get rolling.

This is not a tidy "Mission Impossible" sort of story with a neatly compact team of characters. The plot is richer than that. It is dark, gritty and executed with the number of characters (both good guys and bad guys) to realistically pull it off. That number of characters can be challenging to follow at times. The richness of the plot redeems it and would make an excellent foundation for a solid summer blockbuster movie.

A simple twist of lime is the difference between an ordinary rum and Coke and a "Cuba Libre". "The Powers That Be" also has a defining twist. Further, it has the imagery and detail that make it really compelling. One example of that is wrapped in this question: What is the difference between Cuba Libre and a Mentirita, and why is that important to me a world away from the sandy beaches and crowded cities of Cuba? The answer is on page 94 of the book. All the other pages of the book are pretty good too.

Satisfying, quick and fun ... again

"The Cost of Honor" by Sally Malcolm picks up where "A Matter of Honor" left off very well. The story seeds planted in the prequel have some very surprising results as well as consequences. Rather than following military protocol and asking permission first, Colonel Jack O'Neill mounts an unauthorized rescue mission of SG-10 using the stolen gravitational technology to slip through the crushing grasp of a black hole. This "breaking faith" becomes a thematic conflict for all of the characters. One by one they must come to terms with the relationship that they have broken faith with, and how, if it is possible at all, they can redeem themselves. The plot that emerges from that conflict is very well done. It makes this novel the strongest story written in the SG-1 line so far.

A simple truth is that the hardest thing in the SG-1 universe for an author to do is to get the characterizations right. Sally Malcolm did an admirable job bringing our favorite Jaffa, Teal'c, to life in the pages of this book. The mannerisms were spot on. His subtle humor was natural and effectively presented. I liked her presentation of General Hammond very much, especially in her deepening of his character through his struggles with the central theme of the story. She perfectly captured the basic weasel in Senator Kinsey's character, and kept him squirming through to the very last page.

In three places in "The Cost of Honor" the author missed the characterization mark. The peek that we get into Samantha Carter's head very early in the story is especially uncomfortable. It is one thing to wonder if she will "fall apart", but another entirely to deny the military bearing and professional demeanor that we've come to expect from her character. She is military and would focus on the mission first, there would be time to second guess decisions made along the way and mourn later. Along the same lines, Jack O'Neill is NOT a "kill or be killed" kind of guy. He is a military man and a professional. That means that he is a principled warrior. We've seen that aspect of his character consistently over the years and we've come to expect better of him than a mere "law of the jungle" player. We expect him to behave consistently on other matters too. On page 308 when Carter "dies", Jack O'Neill does nothing to her killer even though he is standing right there with a gun against the killer's (Koash) chest. Even though this "death" isn't real (an illusion because of the sheh'fet), Jack would have certainly shot Koash first - before he had the chance to injure Carter like he did, and if not, then certainly afterward. Consistency is expected of all the characters, especially from the heroic characters of Daniel Jackson, Teal'c, Samantha Carter and Jack O'Neill. The SG-1 canon has never wavered on that point. Taking liberties with the heroic nature of these four characters is -- CHEATING. Don't do it! These miscues are the only weakness that mattered to me in the story because the storyline is so strong and (otherwise) well done.

This book is definitely worth a read, even if you have to hold your nose to cross these few bad paragraphs. All the rest of the 362 pages of "The Cost of Honor" are a pleasure to read.

Tails Up!

Ray R. Kepley’s "Tails Up!" is an epic, first-person Western that is unexpectedly rewarding for such a familiar genre. It is a complex and sweeping tale set in 1868 in the short grass prairie of western Kansas and eastern Colorado. It is an unflinching look back in time through the intimate prism of history, geography and human behavior.

After reading Harpers Weekly and other publications describing the wonders of the West, Jack "Caroliny" Reynolds leaves North Carolina seeking adventure. He gets a job with a wagon train in Kansas City, Missouri, and follows the Santa Fe Trail west. The freight wagons Jack will drive are owned by Tom Powers from Missouri. One of the most interesting things about the journey is how the vast landscape they travel through transforms from unnoticed backdrop into a fully developed character. To the very end of the story, the expansive prairie never relents. It compels every one of the other characters to adapt to it or it kills them.

Tom Powers elects to stop a few miles east of (Fort Dodge) Dodge City, Kansas, and settles in a sod house. Jack and a friend named Bid McClaine stay on to help Tom build a ranch. Of the many challenges that face Jack, Bid and the other hands at Tom Power's ranch, the one constant is the harsh and untamable nature of the environment. Life changes permanently for them when Bid buys a mule that he is compelled to name "Old Satank". With mobility comes new opportunity. Jack and Bid aren't very good at farming, barely competent at ranching, and it would seem that they only excel in adventuring and scheming ways to make money. That leads them to the hay meadows and into deadly confrontation with the Native Americans.

The final third of this story is spent with Jack and Bid enlisting into the U.S. Army as civilian scouts. Along with fifty other men, Jack and Bid soon find themselves in one of the most important battles that ever took place on the prairie - The Battle of Beecher Island on the Arikaree River in what is now Colorado. Since the story is told in the first person, many of the key details of the battle and the important players in it aren't revealed. On the other hand, the painstakingly researched details and first-person account makes this battle gripping, even terrifying at times.

There were a couple of things that I really liked about this story. The geographical detail and simple truth in the characters were very appealing. The language the author uses in narrative to describe the area where I grew up is spot on ... on the high flats of eastern Colorado, in sight of the lonesome Two Buttes ... somewhere in the unknown past it has all but lost its way in the jumble of shifting sand hills ... (page 304), and later ... the better known and more impressive Two Buttes in Colorado ... (page 449). Having traveled extensively in Kansas, his descriptions of and references to the land there are equally well done.

The language the author used in the dialogue is sometimes difficult to read because it is spelled phonetically - as the author believed the characters to have actually spoken. It makes their creative combinations of curse words all the more potent as period-appropriate punctuation.

The three pieces of the story could stand on their own as separate novellas. Together, the story is very good, although long at 466 pages. The ending was abrupt. It left me wanting to know how the characters grand plans for a cattle ranching operation of their own grazing Texas range cattle on western Kansas short grass prairie would have turned out. That's a testament to the strength of the characterization and energy in its plot.

Unfortunately, we'll never get to read that last component of the story. The author, Ray R. Kepley, died Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2007, in his hometown of Ulysses, Kansas, at the age of 99. He wrote the book “Tails Up!" when he was 70.

Definitely worth a read!

Publisher: Elliott Printers (1980)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0960424806
ISBN-13: 978-0960424801

Mel Odom does Geekerati Radio

Local author and writing instructor, Mel Odom, appeared on Geekerati Radio. Mel has written more than 150 novels and can always be counted on for a great interview.



The Geekerati folks entitled tonights forum: "Fantasy on Film: From the Printed Page to the Silver Screen". The teaser read like this ...

The new millennium has seen a resurgence of fantasy on the silver screen. Some of these films have been spectacular, and financially successful, but others have failed to bring the audiences studios might have expected. Are we at a crest on a roller coaster of quality, or is it a sign of more good fantasy to come? Join the geeks and our guests, fantasy/sf author Mel Odom and Medieval Literature professor Richard Scott Nokes, as we discuss our favorite fantasy films.

They finally got to Mel with just 15 minutes left in the show. Mel was in fine form. I had to make some notes along the way ...

Hawk the Slayer? Wow, now that one takes me back. I didn’t think that anyone had seen that picture. AND a plug for a “Portrait of Jennie”! Nice. It’s my absolute favorite. Oh and then he goes into a discussion of Buffy the Vampire Slayer ...

To wrap things up, the moderators tossed a curve ball at him. The moderators had some prize to give away, so they needed a trivia question to make a contest of it. So, they let Mel come up with the trivia question. The first person to answer at geekerati@gmail.com wins the prize - a one sheet movie poster from "The Golden Compass".

The trivia question he asked was - In the story "Mysterious Island", Captain Nemo supposed got blown up and the Nautilus was damaged and sank to the bottom of the sea. What popular fiction author supposedly revealed the resting place (location) of the Nautilus?

Now that’s quite a trivia question. Do you know the answer?

Once a Femme Fatale ...

Was reading the latest post at the "Noir of the Week" blog and followed a link through to a link and then another link that popped a picture of Lizabeth Scott at me.



If you don't know who Lizabeth Scott is, you're not alone. She was an actress who made twenty or so movies in the late 40's and 50's, and then quit. With only a couple of exceptions, she hasn't done anything in public for years. A full three-quarters of her pictures were dark and gritty noirs. When the popularity of that genre faded, the blonde femme fatale tried but couldn't move into the future.

The future is a strange place that's built out of the past. Somewhere between the time that Led Zeppelin discovered Kashmir and Frampton came alive, my great uncle and his family moved back to the Great Plains from California. That part of my family fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930's and actually did find work in southern California. So they stayed and put down roots; that is, until the souring economy of the 1970's brought them back to southeastern Colorado to work for my stepdad on our farm.

My great uncle married early and had two children, Dave and Linda. Linda was in her twenties, pretty and a lot of fun. She never really adjusted to southeastern Colorado. The climate was too dry. There weren't any trees. Worse still, there weren't any eligible men. She had won a car on the "Price is Right" television game show. That made her just about the only celebrity anyone from Baca County had ever seen.

Dave was in his twenties also. He was the first person I ever met that was truly "cool". He had long blonde hair and listened the kind of music that my Mom called "hippie shit". There were a lot of "hippies" in those days and she refused to suffer anything about them or their culture. I was thirteen and was oh-so-ready to rebel. Dave taught me how and in exchange I taught him how to drive the tractor, work the combine, take care of cattle, move irrigation pipe, service the wells, and how to properly order a sandwich at Stella's Grocery in the booming metropolis of Two Buttes, Colorado, with a population was 67 at the U.S. Census 2000.

My great uncle was a bull of a man. He had wide, strong hands and a tireless work ethic. He knew nothing about farming. He drove a truck and did some mechanic-ing in southern California. He had remarried somewhere along the way after finding a beautiful Lebanese woman named Sharon. She was great. She cooked food no one had ever tasted before, and it was great. She was the first cook I ever knew that didn't have a ceramic jar next to the stove for bacon fat. She had a keen sense of humor and was the first person I ever heard say the word "penis". Her son Ricky actually knew what that meant too. My brother Jeff and I didn't dare confess we didn't know what it meant. Just as soon as we possibly could, we were picking through a Funk & Wagnell's to find it. My stepdad's name was Dick and that was pretty much everything we needed to know about that word. Just goes to figure that you learn something new everyday.

My great uncle John was able to rent a house about five miles away from our farm. That house needed a whole lot of work, so John got it for free provided he make the place livable again. After it was fixed up, then he paid a small rental for it and everyone was happy. The house came with full rights to use the barn and the stock corrals. John put them to use right away when he picked up some calves from a feedlot in Johnson City, Kansas. His idea to bring out a Jersey or a Guernsey for milking never panned out though.

As it turned out John and my stepdad had something in common. They didn't mind bending an elbow to toast something. After a while their elbows were bent most of the time. The "Irish Disease" is fairly common where I'm from.

One day John asked me go around to take care of his cattle because Dick and he were going to take Dave to the Two Buttes Anchorage, which was codespeak for a ramshackle beer joint beside Two Buttes Lake. There was water in the lake in those days. The jukebox there still had Shambala by Three Dog Night. There was tons of Country music also, and in those days, it was mostly just bad music to drink and get drunk by.

John wanted his cattle fed a special mix of packaged feed, grain and hay. He stored the packaged feeds in the barn, but he hadn't told me where in the barn he stacked the 50 pound sacks. While I was searching I found a fat leather photo album that was like something out of a movie. It was three feet tall and two feet wide. The cover was dusty and thick. I opened the album to the first page and saw a black and white picture of this pretty blonde woman stepping off an old propeller driven airplane. She was surrounded by guys in Perry Mason suits and hats. Another one of the pictures had this woman waving to a crowd. I turned page after page. She wore other dresses in the other pictures. She was always beautifully dressed and elegant. Some of the pictures were movie stills, others were publicity shots. Some of them were obviously staged, but others were spontaneous and there she shined most brightly of all. Not only did the camera love her, but she was full of confidence and had fun with all of this. A few of them were candid shots of her getting into a car or trying on some sunglasses. She must have had a thing for sunglasses because there loads of those pictures. There were some newspaper clippings stuffed into the album also and that's how I learned that the woman was Lizabeth Scott.

I found the feed sacks and took care of the cattle, but a couple days later, I asked my great uncle about the photo album. He told me that he had found it in the barn when he was cleaning it out and that I shouldn't look through things like that because some of the pictures "weren't very good". He reserved those words for sins of the flesh. That didn't make sense of me because I had looked through them all and hadn't seen anything indecent about any of them. He was sincere about it, so I didn't ask again, but every chance I got, I always went back to look at those pictures just in case one of them "wasn't very good". I even volunteered to take care of his cattle.

One day I went into the barn and found the leather photo album stuffed into a trash barrel. When I had the chance I fished it out of the trash and hid it in the pickup I was driving. I finished the chores for my great uncle and rushed home. My great uncle came over that evening to visit. He suspected that I had taken the album. He took it and burned it in our trash can while he and my stepdad drank and talked.

To this day I don't know who took those pictures of Lizabeth Scott or why. Somehow Lizabeth Scott had made her way into my world - in the darkest corner of Colorado. In my own "coming of age" noir, she was a femme fatale again. It was a role for which she received no credits, but certainly one I'll never forget.

The Poulan Predator

After the ice storm hit, I went to three stores to buy a good saw to help removing my trees. Of course, the gas powered chainsaws were sold out, and naturally the electric ones were also gone, but these people had picked the shelves clean of every type of saw - no matter how ridiculous ... I called around, I even went to the stores in town that had no power. I was hoping that in those suddenly "cash only, no credit cards" stores, maybe there would be one left. Nope, nope, and hell no ...

One of my neighbors had a visit from a tree service company. She only had one mortally wounded Bradford Pear tree in her yard. They gave her a quote that covered bringing down the part that was still standing, chopping all the wood, and piling it up within five feet of the curb - all for the low, low price of $600. Gouge, gouge, gouge. I have three trees, so the survey says ... $120 more or less for a chain saw and some sweat beats a $2,000 drumming!

On the third day of looking, the happy Walmart voice told me that two more skids of chain saws just came in and they would have them out on the floor in about an hour. I rushed over to the store, had to parked a mile away from the door, and sprinted in (so what that it looked like a ruptured hog on ice!?!). I found the chain saw pallets in a sea of people. I got my saw!



It's a Poulan Predator. It has a powerful, but compact 34cc engine that didn't complain too much starting for the first time in 28 degree (F) weather. The instructions for starting the chainsaw are in pictures by the handle. The instruction manual was a little more technical, but cold starts are a snap. You pull the handle five times, then pump the little primer bulb 6 times, then pull till it starts.

It's got an Anti-vibration handle on it that really makes for comfortable operation of the saw. It is small, but you can feel its 11.8 pound mass after welding it for a couple of hours. The vibration is very low. The "sweet spot" on the cutting chain is right where you'd expect it to be. It is noisy, so wear ear plugs. The operation of the saw is cleaner than I expected. It directed saw dust away from me, but some dust did accumulate in the area where automatic chain oiler works - not an excessive amount, but it was noticeable. You definitely want to wear eye protection when using this or any saw. The instruction manual spends a lot of time discussing kickback. If you are careful and pay attention to your technique, you can minimize kickback and other problems. There is an inertia activated chain brake on the saw just in case though.

This saw is small and inexpensive. It's got plenty of power too. It fits well with the type of work that I need it for. I cleared the very large Bradford Pear tree that was split open and dead in my front yard in just an hour and a half. Highly recommend it for odd jobs and occasional work.

It does come with a one Year Guarantee too. Unlike many other items sold in Walmart, the Poulan Predator is Made in the USA.

Rocking the Bird-spa

I was lucky enough to be able to find and buy a chainsaw yesterday. Everyone in the area needs one to clear the downed trees. The weatherman says that it will snow this weekend, so it's a rush to get at least a little cleaned up in the yard before then. Here's a look at my front yard:



Down at the Pond, life has taken a turn also. One of our intrepid Homeowners calls in the ducks and farm geese whenever the weather gets bad. He bribes them to come into his garage with a hefty sack of cracked corn. There he locks them in for the duration with a plastic kiddie pool of water, a mountain of Homeowner's Association Cracked-Corn and a good dose of warmth from his central heat and air. None of them has ever complained about the Homeowner's Association "Bird-spa", but the wadding pool gets a little funky after a couple of days.

A couple of things happen whenever the ducks and geese are rocking in the "Bird-spa". The one that almost always makes the newspaper begins with an unusual noise complaint - which leads to a police visit - which leads to an investigation - which leads to "THE MAN" discovering the lounging ducks - which leads to a citation for "Harboring domestic livestock within the city limits" - which leads to a court appearance, and finally which leads to a $120 fine. Since judges are retained by popular vote in this state, I urge EVERYONE to please vote to dump every judge (except for Lucas and Heatherington) at the next general election.

The next thing that happens at the pond is Evil. Everything is super quiet down at the pond ... until Nature elects to fill the ecosystem vacuum left by the vacationing domestic ducks and geese. Such vacuums are usually filled by poo-chumming Canadians.

The incredible self-pruning Bradford Pear

The ice storm that roared through this weekend did quite a job on the trees in the Homeowners Association. All three of my trees were killed by the storm. Two of them were completely destroyed. The one in the front yard had on limb still standing, but at a dangerous angle toward the house. All of my trees were Bradford Pears. Yes, I know that the wood is very, very soft, but these trees grow so well here and they have that perfect gumdrop shape. One of the downsides to this type of tree is that they are "self-pruning" in even moderate breezes; that is, whenever the wind blows, they shed leaves, twigs and even branches. Toss on several hundred pounds of weight in the form of ice and you have a disaster like this:

Before:



After:



Another Angle:



Hrothgar motored through the neighborhood taking pictures from the toasty comfort of his ultra-deluxe, 3 miles per gallon SUV. As soon as the power came back on, he emailed the images out to everyone - along with this note:

It looks like we have a lot of clean up! The trees that incuurred the most damage are the bradford pears, the river birch trees and the cottonwoods. The bald cypress, hackberry, red maples, and the sycamores had the least damage overall. The trees that still had their leaves were hurt the most.

I'll post up a few of those later this week.

OK, this is the last one of these ...

OK, this is the last one of these quiz things. I know, they are stupid and a total waste of time, but this one fits my world view so very well that I couldn't resist. Here's to hoping this is true. Cheers!

How will I die? Your Result: You will die while having sex.   Your last moments in this life will be enjoyable indeed...hopefully. Do not fear sex. Try not to become celibate as a way of escaping death. You cannot run from destiny.
You will die in your sleep.
You will die from a terminal illness.
You will die while saving someone's life.
You will die in a nuclear holocaust.
You will die of boredom.
You will die in a car accident.
You will be murdered.
How will I die? Create a Quiz

What kind of reader are you?

Well, now I know. Here's the answer I got. How about you?

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Dedicated Reader You are always trying to find the time to get back to your book. You are convinced that the world would be a much better place if only everyone read more.
Literate Good Citizen
Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm
Book Snob
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

Armadillo Jailbreak

Titus the Armadillo almost lost his freedom last night. Maybe the fear it caused and the work it took for him to break out of this Armadillo Jail drove home the point. Maybe that was enough. Maybe Titus will stay out of my backyard. I hopse so. I fixed the bent and broken aluminum trap, and then took it into the attic and put it away. Even though it was a safe catch and release trap, the armadillo wouldn't lose his freedom tonight - even if just for a few hours - because of me. He would have to choose that himself.

This evening a friend of mine told me some sad news. I couldn't stop thinking about it. This is the first time I've ever seen tears in her eyes. It was heartbreaking to see her heart breaking. Later, when I got home, I tried reading to put it out of my mind. I came upon an article called 'Thinking About Freedom' by Robert LeFevre from back in 1983. I've appropriated and contextualized it the questions that follow.

If an armadillo stalks into someone's backyard and lightning strikes well manicured Bradford Pear tree which falls on the armadillo, pinning him to the ground, has the armored beastie lost his freedom? No, he has lost his mobility, although some would call it ... justice. He is still free in the sense that his plight arises between himself and the laws of nature.

If an armadillo is cornered in the someone's backyard by a hungry lion, has the armored demon lost his freedom? No. He is merely confronting a hostile manifestation of nature, although some would call it ... justice. His battlefield is one ordained by nature - through a choosing of his own.

If an armadillo is felled by a virus and ends up flat on his back in a beautiful hedgerose flowerbed, has he lost his freedom? No, his health is imperiled. Although some would call it ... justice, he is still free. Again, the arena is a natural one - the armadillo doing what Nature intended for him to do.

If an armadillo chooses drugs over the beautiful wife he promised to love and to cherish, hasn't he already lost more than his freedom? Hasn't he lost everything?

Putting up the lights

Finally got the lights up.

Merry Christmas ya'all!