December 21, 2009
Several have asked me how the birthday dinner went and I have to say, those chicken fried buffalo steaks are just the best (check out buffaloguys.com). So much leaner than beef, with all the taste. Bud and Carole Glenn joined us and Carole took this photo of us after dinner:

Yes, that homely little tree I bought at the Christmas Tree Lot at School House Road in downtown Cave Creek. Paid $50 for the runt. It was in the back, nobody wanted it. I knew it was just right for our house. We love it.

Dan the Man and I continue to jam on the train cover. One of our problems is that damn ISBN box which we have to cram into the design, in this case in the lower, left-hand corner. The painting of the horseback riders I did compromised that space and it became a problem.

This weekend I was looking at old posters and I ran across this early, John Wayne poster:

I especially like the design of the torn element slashing down the left side. This gave me the inspiration to create a similiar butte with a train robber, or two coming down off the bluff, and then hugging the side of the bluff is a film crew, filming the train, like this:

By the way, it has always amused me that we have this image of horseback riders attacking a train. You can do that to a stagecoach, but it doesn't really work on a train. In fact train robbers either blocked the train with boulders, or branches forcing it to stop, or they pulled out the rails, like the James Gang did at Adair, Iowa (killing the engineer in the subsequent wreck, by the way), or they commandeered the engine by sending a bandit over the coal tender (who usually boarded the train at the previous stop) and into the locomotive to accost the engineer. Then, the robber in the locomotive ordered the engineer to pull the train forward to a prearranged spot where the gang was waiting. In spite of this, in movies like Shanghai Noon, the bandits meet on the top of a hill and then ride down toward the train firing their guns. Never happened. Very silly, but we accept it visually for some reason.

"Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know."
—Michel Eyquem de Montaigne