August 16, 2005
Tomorrow will be my 1,000th blog. Hard to believe. It actually feels like much longer. Ha. I'll have the stats you need to know.

I forgot to mention that Jeff Hildebrandt and the Westerns Channel also won a Golden Boot and it was great to see Jeff get the recognition he deserves. The director of the show confided to me that their attendance had been on a long, slow slide to oblivion until the Westerns Channel began to run pieces on the awards show. Last year they saw record attendance and this year it was packed also. Producer Rob Word and Michael Emerson are to be credited as well. It's all for charity and they do a ton of work for free. But hey, when you love the West like these guys, it ain't even work, because as the Old Vaqueros were fond of saying:

"It's only work if you'd rather be some place else."

On the way home from Hollywood Dave and I stopped at the George S. Patton museum at Desert Center (east of Palm Springs and west of Blyth). For one thing, every trip over, we were tired of looking at those three big pipes coming out of the mountain, just east of there and wondering, "What the hell is that thing?" We wondered the same thing last year, and as Dave pulled off the freeway I said, "Are you tired of driving by here and not knowing?" Dave laughed and we went inside and paid our $8 and found out the skinny.

According to the woman who runs the museum those three big pipes are part of the Southern California water project, which pumps water, out of the Colorado River at Parker Dam, then right through the mountain and into LA. Amazing.

Enjoyed the museum. I love George's line, "I'm not training you men to die for your country. I'm training you so that someone else will die for his country." Now that's profound. I also didn't know that "Old Blodd and Guts" survived a ton of battles but was killed in a traffic accident in Germany several months after the war. All that risk and then Kpow, he gets T-boned by a bad driver? Too ironic and humiliating for my tastes.

"Responsibility is the price of freedom."
—Elbert Hubbard