Phony Fellini's 8 1/2 vs. Wyatt Earp's Flood Dud

 November 6, 2026

   I've been watching a few classic movies in the evening and this was one of them.

Fellini's 8 1/2

   I didn't know this, but the number with the fraction refers to the amount of films he had done up to that point in his career. Get it? Eight-and-one-half. Typical cartoonist humor and, in fact, yes, he was from my tribe. Didn't know that either.

Marcello Mastroianni plays Fellini, as a film director who fears he is a phony. So he has Claudia Cardinale tell him as much.

   I can relate.

   What I would pay to call a number and get a live person answer the phone! I have been trying to make a doctor's appointment after an ER visit last Tuesday which turned out to be a kidney stone. But the pain of that encounter—and it was excruciating—pales against the layers of Phone Hell that are currently smothering any kind of doctor's visit.

   Another sneak peek at our next Tombstone Epitaph doubletruck which is almost ready to go to the printer.

The Flood Dud

   Sadie Earp got it in her head that she and Wyatt were going to get a big payday for his life story and she had two prerequisites for the story: it had to be clean and the story had to have "zip." To write up this cash cow, the Earps tasked their friend and mining engineer John Flood to write it all up. Every Sunday they met at the Earp's rented bungalo in LA and after many sessions they produced a 348 page bloated piece of pap. They even had their friend, Tom Mix, send an endorsement to the Saturday Evening Post, but there were no takers. The Flood Manuscript was a complete dud. Which proves one thing: a good engineer can save a structure, but a bad writer can't save a good story.

The Cave And the surrounding ridges are soaked with Rainwater and look at that lush growth in the foreground!

"The monster doesn't see a monster in the mirror."

—Old Vaquero Saying