May 12, 2004
We got a heat reprieve. Quite nice and cool out here in the morning (low 70s). Went for a walk about seven, met Kathy on the road up by the old Van Horn arena. Buddy Boze Bell had run off and wouldn’t answer or come back. Called and called, looked and looked. Finally I said I had to go to work so I walked home and there the big twit was, sitting in the front yard soaking wet (he evidently ran ragged all over the desert, came home and jumped in the pool). So I drove him back up to where Kathy was walking with Peaches, down close to the creek.

Kathy said, “Oh, you are a nice dad, to bring him down here,” and I said, “I didn’t do it for him, I did it for you.” She laughed and admitted she couldn’t relax on the walk imagining the worst: that the big galoot was spread out on some breakfast buffet table in a den of hungry javalenas.

Got a complaint on our latest poll: “How can one pick between reading old west history, reading a western novel, and seeing a western movie. Assuming all of the above are quality, impossible!”

Yes it is, but go check out the latest stats which are quite illuminating. You can click right here.

Our intern Robert Chenal is attacking several projects, including a press release on Allen Barra’s piece on why the Alamo flopped.

Warning: obscenity ahead. For the past week I’ve been working on the narrative of the John Wesley Hardin vs. John Selman gunfight. Prior to the fight, Hardin is quoted as saying, “I’ll go and get a gun, and when I meet you I’ll meet you smoking, and make you shit like a wolf around the block!”

Is it just me, or does this convey odd imagery? I can’t help picturing some poor wolf trying to do his business, but this smoking guy is chasing him all around the block and the wolf finally stops and says, “Hey, I’m trying to go number two here. Could you cut me some slack?!”

It’s probably just me.

We have borrowed an idea from Phoenix Home & Garden magazine. They put a critique form in everyone’s box when the new issue comes out and ask specifics on how the employees would rank the cover, the editorial, the photography and what could have done better? Currently, we are ranking the June issue (with Wild Bill and Keith Carradine on the cover). Feel free to join in and make me go poo-poo all around the block.

“The king is the man who can.”
—Thomas Carlyle