January 29, 2008
All five washes between our house and town have been running for two days now. That is a record for our stint out here (22 years). A Ford Escape got stuck in Grapevine Wash and was stranded there overnight. It's gone today. Clear out now. Brisk and cool.

Booth Bound
Believe it or not I have never been to the South, proper. That will change in April when I am one of the featured artists at the Booth Museum's "Captured On Canvas! Gunfighters and Outlaws by Bob Boze Bell and Thom Ross" The exhibition will open April 1 and run through June 22 at the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville, Georgia.

Thom Ross and myself will join a dozen other Old West authors on April 10-12 at the museum for a True West Weekend. More later.

Jabbing Jobs (see quote from yesterday's post)
"Even assuming Steve Jobs didn't pull his number out of thin air, which is to say, one of those Johnny-doesn't-read horror studies that are published periodically -- and which no one pays any attention to but Steve Jobs, who was in any event more interested in smashmouthing a competitor, Amazon's Kindle ebook reader -- consider this: if 40 % of 301 million Americans (current population according to the CIA website -- the spooks couldn't find weapons of mass destruction, but they found us) read one book or less, then 60 % read two books or more. Sixty percent of 301 million is 180.6 million readers, if you run a library, or customers, if you own a book shop.

"Amazon's $400 Kindle ebook reader may fail to find a market, but for reasons other than the fact that America doesn't have enough readers. I prefer traditional books. You can scribble in them, floss with the page edges, and, best of all, line them up on a shelf so as to appear more well-read than you really are.

"Consider also the numbers of Americans below 14 -- 20 % -- and the number so old that they -- well, let's not get into that approaching category. That is, the 40 % who read one or less book a year is inflated by the number of people too young or too infirm to read anyway. In other words, they're not part of the equation to begin with.

"Bottom line: 60 percent of Americans read two or more books a year.

"Now, what they read, that's the scandal. Have you been in an airport book store lately? It's enough to make Jacques Barzun cry. By the way, Barzun, the doyen of New York intellectuals, turns 101 this year and is now living in San Antonio, Texas.*
—Dan Buck

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/22/071022fa_fact_krystal

I finally got an address where you can send your get well cards to Pistol Packin' Paula:

Dee Dee & Gary Trichter
8777 FM 2828
Bandera, Texas 78003

I made a great batch of green chile on Sunday and I'm going home to have a bowl for lunch.

"Don't be afraid to take a big step. You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps."
—Daivd Lloyd George