Category — Interesting Stuff

The leaders fly into the River Quay. In about one second they will pass where Dinkeldorf's Deli was located.

It’s no secret that I have a kind of love-hate relationship with my hometown, Kansas City, Mo. It was a wonderful place to grow up, but as I got older, it became a more foreign place. After Billie and I moved to Boulder in 1983, we have never looked back.

But I have to admit to feeling a huge sense of civic pride in my old hometown on Sunday afternoon as I watched the final stage of the Tour of Missouri wind through the hills, parks and boulevards of downtown Kansas City on my computer.

Part of this is just utter fascination with the sport of bicycle racing. I stopped watching all televised sports several years ago, but about the same time we began watching the Tour de France, a ritual that Billie and I have enjoyed since 2002. This year, thanks to cable coverage of the Vuelta a Espana (the three-week-long Spanish version of le Tour), and online videos of the seven-day Tour of Missouri, which ended in Kansas City, I have been able to indulge my bike-racing obsession much as I used to do with football, golf, baseball and tennis.

It was just mesmerizing to watch many of the same cyclists I watched bike their way through more than 2,000 miles of France in July fly down streets that I remember intimately from the first half of my life. The aerial footage was astonishing, and I got a much better sense for distance. In their 10-mile circuit, the riders passed three buildings where I worked, including the place where Billie and I met, and the Star/Times complex, where I spent the first four years of my journalism career.

The riders head up into Penn Valley Park past the Liberty Memorial.

The race began on Grand Avenue at Crown Center heading south and wound around past Union Station and through Penn Valley Park to 31st Street before turning north down Broadway to Southwest Boulevard and up Summit Street to the downtown area.

After passing the Folly Theater at 12th and Central streets, where I worked from 1977-79 during its reconstruction, the riders turned north on Main Street at 12th Street and took off for the River Quay. They passed the building at 512 Delaware Street where Dinkeldorf’s Deli was located, the place where Billie and I both worked and where we met. The camera took us past where Nick’s restaurant  and Yesterday’s Girl were located, the parking lot that used to house Sam Aron’s warehouse and the parking lot where Poor Freddie’s stood before the riders passed the City Market and took off east for the river bottoms past the ASB bridge.

They came back up into the northeastern part of downtown, finally cresting on Eighth Street before turning south on Grand, where they had a wide two-kilometer boulevard straight to the finish. By the time they passed the building that houses the Kansas City Star and Times at 17th Street, where I worked in the late 70s and early 80s, they were literally flying.

One thing that’s hard to appreciate about bicycle racing is how fast these guys ride. Knowing the distances involved, I was able for the first time to realize just how fast they really are, especially as they wound through Penn Valley Park, for instance, or how fast they went up that hill on Summit from Southwest Trafficway into downtown. These guys are good.

There was a nice hill to climb after coming down Grand Avenue to the Crown Center finish.

Crowds were enthusiastic, especially on Summit Street, cowbells were ringing, guys with paint were running alongside offering encouragement, and Kansas City looked gorgeous from the air. For the first time in years, I felt a kind of civic pride about the city I grew up in. Now if they would have just gone past Winstead’s …

Forty years ago this weekend I was driving out of New York, where I had spent the summer as a counselor at Camp Pioneer on the shores of Lake Erie in Angola, New York, on my way back to Kansas City. It had been an exciting summer. We looked up at the moon on the night Neil Armstrong walked there. I had played guitar and performed for the first time and bought the Crosby, Stills & Nash album while there.

About the time two of my counselor colleagues and I hit Pennsylvania, we heard on the radio about a music festival northwest of New York City that was closing roads and causing mass confusion.

The Life magazine special-edition version of Woodstock. I spent hours looking at the large photos.

News and photos of the event were ubiquitous, especially after pictures came out of nude, stoned hippies celebrating the rain, the music and seemingly, life itself. Newspapers and magazines, including Life, Rolling Stone and The New York Times, covered the event.

Seven months later, on March 26, 1970, I stood in line for opening night of Woodstock, the movie, a sprawling documentary that celebrated rock music, peace, love and dope as well as an audience of hundreds of thousands enduring a monsoon, food shortages, bad acid and impossible conditions. The film seemed as long as the festival itself and featured some of the most diverse, celebrated artists of the period at their peaks — Jimi Hendrix, Joe Cocker, Janis Joplin, Santana, Sly Stone, Crosby, Stills and Nash etc. – in brilliant color and dazzling, close-up camera angles. Woodstock literally made the careers of everyone who appeared in it. I went back the second night and saw it again, my enthusiasm stoked, and I bought into the hype hook, line and sinker, as you can see from a letter I wrote to my best friend after seeing the film for the first time.

As I began learning more about the background of the festival and the forces behind it, I began to realize that there were actually two events. The first was the three-day gathering itself; the second was the documentary that showed it. The latter was one version of what happened, but it was a carefully edited version, and for those of us who weren’t there, which is most of us, it’s really the only version.

Was it an important gathering of the tribe? A cultural milestone? Proof that the hippie generation could live in peace and love no matter the obstacles? Yes and no. For some it was blissful; for others, not so much. Mike Jahn, the Times rock critic who covered the festival, wrote recently:

“Woodstock was far from the mythological wonder, but that 90 percent of the attending were miserable and would have left after the first night had transportation been available. I spent time with them, not with the celebs backstage where it was dry and there was food and drugs. They were huddled under blankets in the rain, looking more like those photos of the fields of bodies at Gettysburg than like the nudes prancing in the lake or the celebs shouting ‘far out’ at one another and gabbing about the wonder of it all.”

Actually, for anybody watching at the time, the euphoria over Woodstock’s wonderfulness faded rather quickly and dramatically. It should be seen in the context of another outdoor event that took place less than four months later. On December 6, 1969, a festival headlined by the Rolling Stones at a speedway near Altamont, California, also captured with cameras, showed the darker underbelly of the peace-and-love subculture. The cameras caught Mick Jagger, then the king of rock, pathetically trying to calm an unruly crowd that had gotten ugly and confrontational. The resulting film, Gimme Shelter, showed one homicide, but there were other drowning deaths, and two others killed in an automobile hit-and-run. It wasn’t pretty, and it dampened the enthusiasm I felt about Woodstock Nation.

Woodstock wasn’t really a celebration of the Sixties as it was a harbinger of what was to come. The marketing of the event began almost immediately. I bought a Life special issue with lots of large photos of the event in the fall of 1969 (see photo). Posters of the event proliferated. Many of those who appeared in the film and on the album became superstars. The release of the Woodstock album, which featured two records of selected music from the festival, certainly caught the ear of my generation, but more importantly, caught the attention of record executives eager to cash in on the burgeoning rock phenomenon. Add advances in touring sound and stage technology, and Woodstock helped usher in the era of rock superstardom, big tours and even bigger money.

The myth of Woodstock is that we think we remember the event when we actually only remember the movie. And the truth is that Woodstock was much less about the decade it closed down than the one it begat.

Could you tell if this Fanner 50 was a toy at fifteen feet?

PRINCETON, N.J., June 3 (UPI) — Princeton University students were cleared to resume normal activities Wednesday after reports of a campus gunman were determined to be false, officials said.

Upon questioning, it was determined that the suspected handgun was only a dark green plastic toy that could be confused with an actual weapon, they said.

I read this story with interest. I once would have laughed at the stupidity, but after a toy-gun situation of my own, I’m not quite as glib about the subject. I wrote a column about it for the Colorado Daily, and I thought it was worth reprinting in light of some of the jokes I’ve read already about the Princeton situation.

Disarming Situation

It was all so innocent.

Saturday afternoon I was in Denver working with my partner Gil Asakawa on the introduction to a book we’re writing about toys of the fifties and sixties. After a couple hours, we decided to take a break and go out to a local antique store to look for the real thing—research purposes, you know.

I came away with a treasure from my childhood: a Fanner Fifty pistol. Mattel’s signature gun from my adolescence and the inspiration for my part of the Western gun-and-holster section of the book. The Fanner Fifty trademark was an elongated hammer that allowed you to “fan” off a series of caps with a staccato motion of your other hand.

I seem to remember about half my childhood spent in the crouch you had to take to fire off the Fanner. Besides being a fine specimen of toy workmanship, it had a special place in my heart (and often , under my pillow, next to my head at night).

So Saturday we were in front of Gil’s apartment, he carrying the other games we had bought and I walking behind him with the Fanner, aiming out ahead at the wall of the building and pouring off rounds against the same imaginary Black Bart I battled in my imagination as a kid.

At the same time, a Denver police officer was passing by in a cruiser. When I turned around after seeing him out of the corner of my eye, the Fanner in my hand, I found myself face-to-face with a police car as it slipped over the curb and   came right at me.

Officer Dennis Moon came out of the car with his gun drawn, now aimed directly at me. “Drop the weapon.” Both of us were wearing sunglasses; neither could see the other’s eyes.

“It’s a toy, it’s a toy,” I yelled, kind of laughing and playfully holding the gun up for the officer to see.

“Throw the gun down and raise your hands,” he ordered.

I threw the gun down and raised my hands heavenward. He told me to turn around. I did, kind of grinning incredulously at Gil, who looked as amazed as I at the sudden turn of events.

I couldn’t believe what was happening. Thoughts leapt crazily around in my head — but the main one that took over was that I had just thrown down one of my favorite childhood memories into the grass, and in exchange a real pistol was aimed directly at my heart.

I’d never had a gun drawn on me before. My obsession with guns ended with my Fanner; I’ve only handled a real gun once or twice and never shot off a round of real ammunition in my life. I never even had a BB gun. I have no problem with the constitutional right to own a gun, but I am disturbed at how easy it is to purchase a deadly weapon in the United States.

And I’ve read all those stories in the papers about a police officer accidentally shooting some idiot brandishing his little brother’s toy assault rifle. But I never thought of it as being anything that would ever be of concern in my life.

That changed forever in an instant. As Moon realized the situation and lowered the gun, my first reaction was of anger at being singled out for such a minor thing. After all, goddam it, it was a toy. What flashed through my mind was that I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

It was his first reaction, too. “It’s shit like this that can get people killed,” Moon said, in a flush of anger. For all he knew, it could have been a hostage situation, the way I was playing with the gun behind Gil’s back.

I couldn’t argue with that. The Fanner looks authentic enough, especially from a distance, and we were in an area where there is a lot of police traffic.

And my anger turned to complete embarrassment as the overwhelming reality of the situation crept up on me. What was I doing waving this gun around like a fool? How could I be so stupid?

I think Officer Moon felt the same way. He asked for our I.D.s and called in on his radio. He seemed relieved, and in what seemed like less than a minute, several other cruisers arrived at the intersection.

“We’re writing a book about toys,” I said in a deliberate a voice as I could muster. He laughed, and the other officers engaged in some good-natured police banter at his expense about the incident.

We promised him a copy of the book, and he replied that he hoped he didn’t ruin our day and added that he was really thankful we didn’t ruin his.

Gil and I went upstairs to his apartment, and for a while we were kind of hysterical. It was funny, we kept telling ourselves. What a great story, we thought. It was, to use our own journalistic catch-phrase, good copy.

But then reality crept in, this time the fearful, fitful kind that takes awhile to settle in your brain. It almost wasn’t a good story, I keep reminding myself each time I think of what might have happened if I had innocently pointed my cap pistol at the officer while telling him it was only a toy. Or if he hadn’t kept his cool with the finger on the trigger.

I’m thankful he maintained his composure. The entire situation wound up being nothing more than an embarrassing mistake. So why was I still uneasy? The line between fantasy and reality, which had always been clear in my mind, grew fuzzier in those seconds.

I’m sure Dennis Moon has thought about that more than once since then, too. We were bonded together irrevocably in those moments when I was in his sights, my future in the twitch of his fingers.

I drove back to Boulder with the Fanner in a paper bag. I’m going to keep it down here in my office in the basement with my other toys from now on.

Colorado Daily
August 29, 1989

Everett Ruess's remains might have been identified, but he's still on Twitter.

So I’m sitting at my computer yesterday and I get an email. It’s from Everett Ruess. He’s on Twitter, and he announces that he’s following me. So I checked his profile, determined he wasn’t a threat or a security risk, and now I’m following him.

Ruess, of course, is the wanderer who disappeared into the Utah badlands in 1934, became a Western environmental icon and whose remains were recently identified and now reside no more than a half mile from my house on the CU campus. Twitter is the popular mobile internet messaging service that allows you to say anything you want as long as it’s less than 140 characters. (Which, if you’re wondering, is exactly the length of that last sentence.)

Wonders never cease. We spend two vacations chasing Ruess around Utah’s hinterlands, and now I’m following him down here on my computer. So far he just quotes (pithily) from his own works, but I’m hoping he’ll start answering some of the many questions left by the discovery of his remains. I won’t hold my breath.

Perhaps this is part of a new social networking trend. Doing some research for “Roots and Branches,” the Americana radio show I host on KGNU, I found that Gene Autry has a MySpace page, where he lives on even though the Singing Cowboy died ten years ago. With the right social networks, you no longer have to die – you can live on in MySpace, Twitter and Facebook. Maybe someone will develop a special app for that.

If you don’t know about Ruess’s disappearance and discovery 75 years later, it is a compelling story. National Geographic Adventure takes far too much credit (one headline reads “After 75 years, National Geographic Adventure solves mystery of lost explorer), which is really stretching it, since the story belongs to a Navajo family who tried to tell people the real story to no avail.

But the magazine’s coverage is excellent, with a short video of the pre-excavation, a photo gallery documenting the site and cache and Dale Roberts’ story about the discovery.

For some journalistic balance, however, The Navajo Times puts the tale of the discovery into its proper context without the Geo hype.

And my own personal feelings about the discovery and its connection to one of my favorite Dave Alvin songs.

Gene Autry is still singing about cowboys and riding Champion on his MySpace page.

A CU scientist used forensic science and Photoshop to identify the remains of Everett Ruess, missing since 1934. (Photo by Dorothea Lange)

Amazing news today that CU scientist Dennis Van Gerven has identified the remains of Everett Ruess, the eccentric young vagabond who, with his two burros, disappeared in the Utah desert in 1934, leaving behind a short life, a few snapshots and a sheaf of letters and paintings that have inspired naturalists, environmentalists, wilderness lovers and one of my favorite songwriters.

I’m happy for Ruess’s family, which finally learns the answer to a mystery that must have vexed its members over the decades. And the discovery is an astonishing story that will no doubt show up as a future episode of CSI. The mystery was solved through a captivating combination of ancient oral Indian family history and modern-day forensics technology and Photoshop.

But I feel a twinge of sadness about the discovery, too.

I came across Dave Alvin’s song “Everett Ruess” while working at KCUV (remember Colorado’s Underground Voice?) in 2004 when Ashgrove, the album it first appeared on, was released. Ashgrove was, to these ears, a concept album, a group of songs loosely arranged around the concept of growing older and learning to accept that fate. The title track was an unabashed look back at the former Blasters’ guitarist/songwriter’s days at the storied Los Angeles folk club where, as an underage teenager, Alvin was schooled in the ways of the great blues and folk musicians who inspired him. “Nine-Volt Heart” is a nostalgic memory of an older man’s youth, and “Man in the Bed” a penetrating snapshot of an aging man in whose dreams he is a young man again.

But “Everett Ruess” sealed the deal for the concept. Alvin had obviously read Ruess’ letters, and his song, written in Ruess’s own voice, tells the young man’s story as he builds a case around a notion that nags us all as we age.

I was born Everett Ruess
I been dead for sixty years
I was just a young boy in my twenties
The day I disappeared.
Into the Grand Escalante Badlands
Near the Utah and Arizona line
And they never found my body, boys
Or understood my mind.

Ruess was twenty when he disappeared after leaving Escalante, Utah, in late 1934. But Alvin notes that among the many mysteries about Ruess is that there was no particular rebellion involved in his journeys. He wasn’t leaving because he wanted to get away from his family but because he found something particularly fascinating and illuminating about the wilderness.

I grew up in California
And I loved my family and my home
But I ran away to the High Sierra
Where I could live free and alone.

And folks said “He’s just another wild kid
And he’ll grow out of it in time,”
But they never found my body, boys
Or understood my mind.

Ruess traded prints with Ansel Adams, studied with Edward Weston, Maynard Dixon and Dorothea Lange and sent letters, drawings and poems of his travels to his friends and family beginning with his first Southwestern pilgrimage in June 1930. Though his 1934 journal wasn’t found, he never stopped writing. Were it not for those letters, nobody would have known or cared, and today’s newspaper headline would never been written.

I broke broncos with the cowboys
I sang healing songs with the Navajo
I did the snake dance with the Hopi
And I drew pictures everywhere I go.

Then I swapped all my drawings for provisions
To get what I needed to get by
And they never found my body, boys
Or understood my mind.

Alvin speculates convincingly upon Ruess’ continuing detachment from civilization.

Well I hate your crowded cities
With your sad and hopeless mobs
And I hate your grand cathedrals
Where you try to trap God.

‘Cause I know God is here in the canyons
With the rattlesnakes and the pinon pines
And they never found my body, boys
Or understood my mind.

Everett Ruess and his two burros prowled the desert Southwest in the early 1930's.

Ruess left Escalante, New Mexico, on November 11, 1934, and was last seen by two sheepherders near the Kaiparowits Plateau several days later, who reported that he said he was heading for the Hole-in-the Rock area, a Mormon landmark where the Colorado River could be crossed.

Ruess’s burros were found in Davis Gulch, and the search for his remains was centered in that remote area of the Escalante. Most theories were that he was killed by cattle wranglers, fell to his death, took his own life in that same area or on Kaiparowits Plateau or disappeared and is living in Mexico. One major problem with any benign death theory is that his paintings, paint kit, journal, cook kit, food and money were never found.

This lends further credence to the Ute Indian murder story. His body was buried about thirty miles east of the area where the burros were found and the search for Ruess took place, so he must have crossed the Colorado and headed toward Monument Valley, which he had visited before. Without his burros, food or supplies, it would be difficult but not impossible to reach the Bluff area where his body was finally found.

Alvin weaves in several theories about Ruess’ death before putting everything into context in his last eight lines.

They say I was killed by a drifter
Or I froze to death in the snow
Maybe mauled by a wildcat
Or I’m livin’ down in Mexico.

But my end, it doesn’t really matter
All that counts is how you live your life
And they never found my body, boys
Or understood my mind.

You give your dreams away as you get older
Oh, but I never gave up mine
And they’ll never find my body, boys
Or understand my mind.

Billie and I visited Escalante, Utah, in 2005, where we first came into contact with the Ruess saga. There we bought Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty, the W.L. Rusho biography that included his writings. At times we felt we were following him around the wild areas in Escalante where he went missing, all the while staring in majesty and wonder at the same mind-boggling vistas that captured his imagination.

Reading Ruess’s words, and Alvin’s poetry, especially the lines “all that counts is how you live your life,” “you give your dreams away as you get older” and “they’ll never find my body, boys, or understand my mind” put a spin on his story that I still find deeply compelling. I really liked the idea of Ruess being lost, and staying lost. One part of me wished that he would remain unfound, a mystery – “they never find my body, boys.” Today’s news means that I will now only be able to take comfort in knowing that we will still never “understand his mind.”

Sam Zell answered questions from students and the public at CU Law School this afternoon.

It was close and registration was free, so I went over to CU, where Sam Zell, serial entrepreneur, infamous dealmaker, owner of the private investment firm Equity Group Investments and, according to Forbes, the 68th richest American, was speaking today at noon at the Wolf Law Building.

As advertised, Zell, a gregarious man with a big smile, pulled no punches whether talking about the characteristics of a good entrepreneur, the economy and our current administration’s efforts to control it or the state of the journalism industry, all things he spent time expounding upon during his one hour and eight minute interview session conducted through the Colorado Law School.

Zell began in the real estate industry, but among other things, he created Jacor, a radio broadcast company with many stations, which he sold for a hefty profit to Clear Channel Communications in 1999. His Equity Group is the largest owner of apartment buildings in the United States, and as Prof. Scott Peppet pointed out in his introduction, he sold his Equity Office Properties Trust for $39 billion last year on the day before the stock market started going down.

He had taught a class earlier in the morning, and he reiterated what he told students then: the three years he spent in law school were the most incredibly boring three years of his life, but law school taught him to think, to learn how to ask questions, skills he says he uses every day of his life, something a room full of law students certainly wants to hear.

When asked what makes a good entrepreneur, he said that failure cannot be part of your vocabulary. He said self-confidence (“whether justified or not”) was important, but even more significant was to be able to identify problems and come up with a solution. The two most underrated traits of entrepreneurs, he explained, are the ability to execute, whether by yourself or by delegating to someone who can, and building relationships with the people with whom you work.

Zell said he thinks the economy is “flattening — that’s different than recovering,” he added. He called Barack Obama “a president in training” and unsuitable for the job. And he targeted Senator Barney Frank, who he said pressed Fannie Mae to ease credit requirements in 2000, as the trigger to the current crisis. He also denounced the speed with which Congress was working to make changes, arguing that there will be many unintended consequences. “We need a period of relaxation,” he said.

Of course the subject came around to his ownership of the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Cubs and which, given the amount of debt he took on to buy Tribune, has been criticized as Zell’s worst decision.

Zell doesn’t see it that way and took particular pleasure skewering journalism and newspapers. “People are just finding out how profitable newspapers were,” reminding everyone that until recently it wasn’t unheard of for newspapers, which had a monopoly on information at the time, to show profits of 30-40 percent.

Today, he says, you can get the same information from other places, and besides, newspapers, still thinking as a monopoly, have become incompetent and arrogant. “It’s a business that has made little progress,” he said, “and is using metrics that are no longer relevant.” One of those is home delivery. There is still a market for home delivery, he said, but not according to the current structure. Selling a newspaper at a machine for 75 cents but delivering the same product to your doorstep for half that price is insane, and a business model that will have to change in the future.

He questioned the future of newspapers sharing content with the Associated Press because, he says, AP, which today sells that same content to Yahoo and other search engines, is actually a competitor. When asked what newspapers should focus on, he said a couple of times, “local, local, local. I’m not going to the Chicago Tribune for news about Afghanistan. But for news about the Cubs, I would.” He said that, despite journalist’s objections, shorter stories were better because newspapers’ own research indicated people didn’t like longer stories and wouldn’t read them.

He got some good laughs out of a story he told about his plan to put ads on the front page of The Los Angeles Times. “I thought that God was going to strike me dead,” he said of the response from journalists, “and the building would fall down around us,” he said to applause and laughter. “But we did it, and we’re still putting papers out every day, as far as I know.”

When asked if newspapers should be charging for content, he said that could be a model, but not until newspapers decide what they want to provide that nobody else can. “Newspapers need to understand who their customers are and appeal to their customers.”

Norlin Quadrangle, CU campus, 4:10 p.m. April 20, 2009.

I started a little before four on my bike for the 4/20 4:20 Smokeout up at CU. I had never attended this event, which has been held for umpteen years on this particular day each year. A few minutes later, crossing under U.S. 36 along Bear Creek, I noticed that traffic was backed up to the bike path. Smoke-out traffic from out of town.

I thought it was being held at Farrand Field, but when I stopped there, it was completely empty, so I just followed the crowds and my nose to Norlin Quadrangle.

By the time I got there a little after four, the Quad was jammed ass to elbow, so I locked my bike and waded into the crowd to take some photographs and soak up the atmosphere, so to speak.

Norlin Quadrangle, CU campus, 4:20 p.m., April 20, 2009.

A literal sea of people took up every available square foot of the entire quad. Looking across at Old Main, where students were standing on the south steps cheering, I thought of the iconic photos of student protests in the 1960s. At 4:18 great cheers went up for a guy who made it almost to the top of a tree in the middle of the Quad. Another guy near me tried to maneuver his way into another tree with a large drum. Some young girls walked by dressed as a large set of headphones.

There were a lot of smiles, and beginning just before 4:20, a great cloud of smoke arose over the quadrangle, and the masses cheered and coughed their approval. Three or four vintage airplanes were circling low enough that they might have gotten a contact high during the five minutes of intense puffing.

What I didn’t see a lot of were police. As I walked back to my bike, I found a couple of Boulder officers standing along a rail and laughing, looking more curious than authoritative. I asked how many people they thought were jammed into the Quad, and they said it was 10,000 last year, and this year it looked like more. After hosting a well-received conference over the weekend about marijuana, what were school officials smoking when they put out an e-mail asking students not to attend?

What would the Smokeout be without treehuggers with drums?

But the real point I got watching this is that, after decades and billions of dollars spent each year to stop it and half a million people imprisoned, here and at many other places around the country, thousands of people, most apparently with their own stash, gathered and smoked marijuana. I’m only half joking when I say that given the size of the cloud, perhaps the government should consider how much money it can make by controlling it like alcohol.

Since Congress isn’t known for its common sense, I’m not expecting that to happen. But the complete hypocrisy of the drug war and everything it represents was on display this afternoon.

The Elvis statue at the homestead takes on another spring storm, this time thundersnow.

So I was taking a nap this afternoon about 3:30, when there was an enormous boom of thunder. This was the kind that claps off and reverberates for several seconds – what my father once called The Tator Wagon – rattling the house at its foundations. It usually happens in July before a thunderstorm.

But on the first of April in Boulder, after the clap, it turned dark very quickly, and by the time I opened the shade, it was snowing like crazy and the wind was wailing, with the flakes moving quickly, almost horizontal north to south. Old Testament in its force and intensity. The breath of Yahweh.

Turns out we seem to be in the middle of a good old-fashioned thundersnow. Wikipedia, if you trust it, says of thundersnow, “It commonly falls in regions of strong upward motion within the cold sector of extratropical cyclones between autumn and spring when surface temperatures are most likely to be near or below freezing. Variations exist, such as thundersleet, where the precipitation consists of sleet or ice rather than snow.”

That pretty much nails it, since the Front Range is home to “strong upward motion” that brings our major precipitation events each year. Our part of the country lives on this moisture.

Silvio, my Belgian Turvuren named after Mr. Dante, and a breed often used as police dogs by many law enforcement agencies, hustled off downstairs, where I found him huddled in a corner of the basement office. He doesn’t know what thundersnow is, but he doesn’t like it.

Nor will commuters along the Front Range, who will find a snarling, punishing drive home. And we were going to see music in Lyons tonight.

I think I’m going to make some coffee.

I spotted this supernatural scene in my backyard just a few minutes ago. Perhaps I should sell it on E-Bay. What do you think?

The statue depicts the young Elvis wearing one of the old Elvis’s Vegas costumes. The snow, which you can see is really coming down now, shrouds the El in white and gives him a kind of Marge Simpson do, which I think is a nice touch.

"He talked about unbuckling that old Bible belt and light out for some desert town." – Gram Parsons, "The Return of the Grevious Angel"

This AIG ad, in the Dec. 2005 issue of National Geographic, claims "50 million customers" who rely on AIG to secure their financial future.

Fairfield, Conn. — Longtime pillars of the community are now pariahs living in fear, hiding behind locked gates and security guards amid the public outrage over bonuses paid with taxpayer bailout money.

Payouts by American International Group Inc. appear to have put a face on the economic struggles the country faces, and the anger targeting AIG executives living in this ritzy area of Connecticut is palpable. Death threats have been pouring in since the brouhaha broke, the company said, and its workers are taking no chances.

“It’s scary,” one executive said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he feared retribution. “People are very, very nervous for their security.”

– Associated Press, March 21, 2009.