Yesterday I was doing an art search for a guy on Gab (couldn’t find the piece), and did a search for “frontier art“. Gold mine! Regrettably this genre doesn’t generally have the artist’s name attached to it, but I think it’s worth celebrating regardless. I’ll try and put down a list of names as representatives of the style at the bottom of the post.

I said I struck gold with the search because it is the style I love: Lots of cats, dogs, people, cows, wolves and sunsets and bold colors! A ton of arrows and gunshots and knife attacks! Good stuff. Art that tells a story. Gets you involved in it. I look at a picture like that and wonder what’s going on? What’s their story? Sometimes I refer to it as ‘puzzle art’. The type you see when you go searching for jigsaw puzzles.

Here’s the official description of the type of art that bores me: “A still life (plural: still lifes) is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter”. Do you see the contradiction? ‘Still life’ depicting mostly inanimate subject matter? How can it be “life” and “inanimate” at the same time? Makes no sense. Landscape artists that paint mountain after mountain, forest after forest, with absolutely no sign of life in their pictures make no sense to me.

Charles M. Russell

Kyle Carroll

Steve White

Robert Griffing

by Charles M. ‘Kid’ Russell

Oh my God I’m so slow! “construct a huge $155 million dollar complex of retail, housing, hotel, and parking garages” – this is another taxpayer funded boondoggle to benefit commercial developers again! I am so stupid, I didn’t realize what was going on. I just thought this was the Council’s never ending quest to snarl traffic. This is like when the taxpayers built Ada Hayden, so Friedrich could sell lake front homes (which have a 200% premium).

This morning I was thinking how in the hell is this half a billion dollar project (they say $155 million and when has a project ever come in at budget?) ever going to benefit the city of Ames, what it will cost? Then I looked up the impact besides the roads. They talk about hotel, retail, housing, parking garages… why in the sam hell is the taxpayer footing the bill? Then I remembered what I had figured out 30 years ago: The City of Ames (and its taxpayers) exist to enrich commercial developers.

I can’t believe how stupid I am! That’s the only reason we exist. To funnel money to the Council’s friends and benefactors. Getting old getting slow. Follow the money!

The other thing about these projects is the Council never puts any time clauses in the contract! So they just let the developers dilly dally around with half finished projects that inconvenience the taxpayers for years!

See in the old days like with ‘Lake Panorama‘ down by Perry, the developer became very wealthy selling “lake front” homes, but he had to build the lake. Well that didn’t sit well with other developers. So they cooked up this scheme with County Boards and Town Councils to “build regional water centers“. This way taxpayers would pay to build the lake, and all they had to do was build the homes, at double the price because they were now “lake front“. So the taxpayer footed the bill, and the developer takes all the profit. That technique is called “public risk, private profits”.

It sounds like the Lincoln Way boondoggle is proceeding full speed ahead. They already turned south Duff into a parking lot and decided to do the same for Lincoln Way. You know something that disruptive, something that expensive, something that stupid, could have been put up as a referendum for the people to decide. But then, that’s why Council elections are held on odd years, you don’t WANT the public’s input.

Only in Ames could they be stupid enough to take a 4-lane highway and make it into 2 lanes and a bike path. Just incredible. They have it set up for parallel parking on a U.S. Highway. They are that stupid. One lane of traffic and its all going to come to a screeching halt because Grandma has to parallel park on Lincoln Way. These people are morons, and I can’t leave. I’ll die with these stupid people. At least I don’t have to be buried here. Stupid for eternity would not go well.

Everything will be fine on a Sunday morning. But not during weekday rush hour. They never bothered (or cared) that when they did that at 16th & North Duff, 4 o’clock in the afternoon saw that stop sign saw traffic backed up for 3 blocks. When there had been no backlog with 4 lanes.

Modern city planning has become a torture test to see how much citizens can endure, not to improve their lives. They are going to use taxpayer dollars to make our lives worse. Ames has always been full in on Agenda 21/30/40. Any idiotic idea that comes down the pike they’re for.

Part of it is that bureaucratic fear that if they don’t spend all the money, they’d have to give a tax refund. They take the roads that cars paid for, and give them to bikes.

So the other night I’m ordering blue jeans and a hat from Walmart.com because Amazon was insisting I take Prime. As hell hasn’t frozen over yet that wasn’t going to happen. So I went to Walmart.com. The two items total $34.97 ($18.98 + $15.99). .03 cents shy of free shipping (how the hell do they do that?). You wanna play that game? They have these little flashlights for a dollar that are real handy to have everywhere around the house, in the garage, in the car, they’re just a handy little light. So I order one of those to make up the .03 cents to get the free shipping.

They deliver the blue jeans at 10 am using FedEx. They deliver the flashlight at noon using an Uber driver. Two separate deliveries. For a $1 dollar flashlight. How they are going to compete with Amazon doing stuff like that I don’t know. On an order from them a couple of weeks ago I ordered some masking tape along with some other stuff because cause you cannot find masking tape in a store in Ames right now. So I ordered 5 rolls at $2.97 a roll. They didn’t deliver it with the rest of the stuff, they used a separate driver again! Sure I was glad to get it the next day, but you’re going to compete with the King of Logistics doing that stuff? Be curious to see where they are at in 10 years.

I read a comment under this video where a guy was saying “Walmart ruined small towns and small town business“. I understand the sentiment, and it certainly doesn’t matter, but tax policy and shortsighted “main street” businesses could be said to have signed their own death warrant. Tax policy makes it just as advantageous to take a vacant building as a tax loss, as to have a renter. So they charge outrageous rents, then if they don’t get the rent they want, they can take it as a loss on their taxes.

If two people choose not to do business, that’s one thing, but for government to actually incentivize it is another. So potential businesses on main street either end up paying outrageous rents, or there are a lot of vacant buildings. And when Walmart went to Chinese made products, small business owners didn’t have the god given sense to beat them with American made goods and top notch service. They didn’t scramble and fight for it, they took a “you owe me” attitude.

I was working sporting goods at Woolco in 1978 and knew something was screwed up when I had to call twice to get a check cleared (in the old days a check over $100 had to be cleared by a manager). I got chewed out for saying “2nd call for check clearance” on the public address. I wanted to tell the manager, “You moron this man is trying to give us his money and you’re making him wait??” When they closed down 10 years later I was not surprised.

To me all this has a great amount of irony attached to it. We lived about 10 miles from Des Moines, the “Big City”. This was back in the early 60’s. K-Mart came to the east side of Des Moines on Hubbell Avenue. We’d never seen such a thing! Clothing! Hardware! Sporting goods! Home furnishings! Cafeteria! Blue Light Specials! What the hell! My older brother got a job there. They even had an automotive garage where you could get your car fixed! All this in one building!

Back then the tags on all the products said, “Made in Taiwan“. This was about 1966. Little did we know what was coming. The first mall in Des Moines was only 7 years old at this point. The collapse of the American economy hadn’t happened yet. Where we forced industry overseas by bureaucratic edict emanating from the EPA to reduce sulfur emissions. Like China which didn’t give a shit about pollution, was somehow going to do a better job with heavy industry and the environment.

Walmart started up in about 1978. K-Mart and Sears didn’t see that their days were numbered. Kind of like when manufacturing left the U.S. for Mexico. Business said, “Hell we’re still paying these guys a buck or two an hour, if we’re going to go where its cheap, let’s go where its really cheap!” And China became the world’s manufacturing powerhouse. You really can’t outbid the cheapest bidder in a dive for the bottom.

So within about 50 years two “giants” of retail were vanquished. And god knows how many “mom & pops”. Retail never looks any further ahead than the next holiday.

“I confess it, I love the camera. When it’s not on me, I’m not quite alive” – Bujold. Those were the days. Two of my favorite people just played on TCM in Obsession (1976), Cliff Robertson and Bujold. For those not familiar with the movie the wealthy Robertson is obsessed with the memory of his deceased wife Elizabeth, that Bujold is the spitting image of. They call this Brian De Palma’s homage to Hitchcock. I call it Bujold’s best movie. Okay half kidding there. Kind of like Grace Kelly in Rear Window, that moment in time when she was at her peak, De Palma was, and the composer for the score Bernard Herrmann was at his absolute best. In fact there’s a funny little story involving Herrmann and Bujold I’ll put below:

“Composer Bernard Herrmann became infatuated with Bujold after seeing her performance in an early cut of “Obsession“. His feelings were heightened by Bujold’s surprise visit to the soundtrack recording sessions in London in July 1975, the only time the two met in person. Herrmann’s friend Charles Gerhardt recalled, “As she spoke to Benny in a heavy French accent I could tell he was about to get the hanky out. She told him of all the trouble she’d had with Cliff Robertson because he spent all his time in makeup and didn’t make their love scenes meaningful. She said, ‘Mr. Herrmann, he wouldn’t make love to me – but you made love to me with your music‘. And Benny started to cry. He would tell that story over and over at dinner, and start crying again every time”. After Herrmann’s death five months later, his widow found a photo of Bujold in his wallet.”

Oh! Wonderful story! (turns out from research Robertson was a pain to work with the whole time. He was just coming off of Three Days of the Condor and Midway, maybe he was too big for his britches?) Every critic acknowledges the films melodramatic tendencies and overall silliness, but to a man they all loved it! I wonder if part of the reason for that is the same as mine? Bujold? They say that in the next 10 years or so she had films of questionable quality, but that through her efforts the performances often rose above it (‘Earthquake’?).

French-Canadian, born July 1, 1942. She was 33 at the time of filming for Obsession. When I did my “10 Most Beautiful Women of the 70’s” post, I didn’t include her. I had seen Obsession in the theater when it had come out 46 years before. The only other film I remembered seeing her was in 1984’s ‘Tightrope‘, in a really strange pairing with Clint Eastwood, when she would have been 42. Only having seen the movie once, my memory tells me it wasn’t the “Bujold vehicle” that obsession was.

De Palma certainly did right by her. Basically all her shots were in soft focus with the best lighting. I suppose he would have when you consider that in the mid 70’s she was a very valuable commodity. I imagine if you took a survey of men back then they would have all had favorable impressions of her. A woman with a French accent is an automatic aphrodisiac for a man. Sexiness or attractiveness is a hard thing to figure out. I have the feeling she would not have had the career she did without that wonderful French accent. Sorry, but I think it’s true. 5′ 4″, coquettish I would say. She could definitely turn it on for the camera.

I don’t know, call me crazy. But I certainly don’t understand or rather I am unable to explain “fame”, “star power”, “likability” or whatever. I do remember her vaguely in ‘Earthquake’ (1974). She was the young hottie Charlton Heston was having the affair with unbeknownst to his wife (Ava Gardener). Great scene when he knowingly in a futile effort leaves behind a distraught Bujold to jump into the raging water to try and save his wife. All he has is a last look into Bujold’s eyes of, “I have to try”.

‘Appeal’ is a strange phenomena (without spellcheck no less). So I had seen Bujold in 3 movies, although it was nearly 50 years ago. Compared to Rachel Ward who I only ever saw once, and did include in my “Most Beautiful Women” series.

Genevieve Bujold spent her first twelve school years in Montreal’s oppressive Hochelaga Convent, where opportunities for self-expression were limited to making welcoming speeches for visiting clerics. As a child she felt “as if I were in a long dark tunnel trying to convince myself that if I could ever get out there was light ahead.” Caught reading a forbidden novel, she was handed her ticket out of the convent and she then enrolled in Montreal’s free Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique. – IMDB

That upturned nose and that down turned mouth. It’s an attractive combination. Do you realize from that IMDB story? She nearly spent her life as a Nun! That’s fascinating to me. She always seemed to have an impish or childlike quality to her. Even though she turned 18 the year after I was born, it’s just hard to imagine her ever being old.

The “Cadillac of guns“. Just kidding. Anybody who knows guns knows that term might apply to Kimber, Sig, Springfield, Glock, FN, HK, Walther, but definitely not Taurus! But that’s being mean. Shot my G2s for the 1st time this morning. Initial impressions: Its the heaviest “20 ounces” I ever felt. Despite that it’s snappy. It will punish your hand. I didn’t want to shoot much after 150 rounds. And I shoot 3 times a week. Trigger not bad, darn near good. Safety works great, not too stiff, not too easy. Ran 3 different loads perfect. No holler points yet. Compared to a pocket gun, you feel like you’re handling ‘up’ in size like a compact. Definitely not a micro compact. Slide release works well. Accuracy? (unsupported at 25 yards with old eyes) A foot size groups. Not bad sights. In a way it fits a really good niche. 7+1, smallish yet big enough to draw well. Most of a 3-finger grip. Feels like a solid gun. Probably wish they would a put a nice wide feed ramp like the G2c, but this one functioned fine.

If you have to have the perfect carry gun! This probably isn’t it. Will it do that? You bet. Is it the perfect range toy? No, but its fun to shoot. Could it work for home defense? It has a rail for a light and 8 rounds so yes. At $229 its hard to go too wrong. Taurus has had great success with their G2 c/s series, and this acts like its going to be a good gun. Those real nice guns I mentioned? You’re looking at a minimum of $600 ‘out the door’. And that’s being generous. It would most likely be $650 to $700 and on up! So its pretty hard to be to hard on Taurus when you can buy 2 to 3 of theirs vs one of the others. (And I know ‘cheep cheep’, I own a SCCY) If you have the money, buy one for each job (range, carry, home).