If there’s one thing that always upsets me, it’s when the generic term cowboy is used to describe somebody who’s an obvious out and out villian.
You can suffer bad work from a ‘cowboy builder’ and be told to watch out for cowboy mechanics but convicted murderers being described as ‘an old cowboy’?
That was the way lawyer Thomas Phalen described Viva Leroy Nash - “the oldest death row inmate in the United States, who spent most of his life behind bars” - who has just died of natural causes at the age of 94.
Phalen tells the NZ Herald:
“He was born in 1915 and he was sent to prison in 1930,” Phalen said.
“Think about it - he had 15 years of life in southern Utah, at a time when Utah and Arizona was the wild, wild West - and he went to prison in 1930, and he remained in prison for the next 80 years, more or less.
Not the kind of guy I would have wanted to bump into down a dark alley!
Apologies all for the 2 month hiatus from the blog - I moved house again for the second time this year and have been slowly sorting out all the associated chaos that brings with it.
I’ve also been working hard to source a supplier for the Cowboy Country Owners Packs in NZ who can offer good quality veg tan leather to produce further portfolio packs for new owners. Despite the country’s reputation for lots of livestock it’s proven harder than expected!
So, as of tomorrow, I’ll be calling a pause to orders for 2009 and revamping the product offering ready for Feb 2010 (January is pretty much written off down here I’m told, much like August in France).
Many thanks to those of you who’ve ordered the pack this year - be sure to tell your friends or colleagues about the unique gift but please advise that ordering won’t be back up and running until the new year.
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Enough product promotion! The real topic of this post is news of a major new wild west themed computer game launching in 2010 - Red Dead Redemption from Rockstar Games, the company behind the often scandalous Grand Theft Auto series.
The London Times explains how programmers have to date always found horses and gunsmoke hard ‘to do’, well it seems from the trailer video below they have cracked that problem.
The game, featuring ‘John Marston’ - who looks a lot like a spaghetti western era Clint Eastwood - is due out on 27 April 2010 on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. I can’t say I’m a big console gamer but the video promo looks superb and may entice me into shelling out the dollars required. But which platform to buy? Recommendations welcome.
Red Dead Redemption video trailer
Like it? Love it? The game’s got everything a wild west buff could want: red butte landscapes reminiscent of Monument Valley; railroad trains with cowcatchers charging across creaking wooden bridges; dusty one horse towns; even Mexican bandits and pueblo architecture straight out of The Magnificent Severn.
Going to pre-order my copy come January. In the meantime, a Merry Xmas to all!
Today though I may have to eat my hat - it appears there’s genuine logic in undertaking training in a horsey environment.
Just look at the fine folks at Cowboy Leaders, 50 miles west of Salt Lake City, Utah, who have launched an Anti-Tweet Business Retreat for executives strung out on information overload, looking for a way to improve their leadership skills:
The American West was shaped by cowboys. Cowboys are tough, hard-working, say-it-like-it-is people. They understand the value of hard work and see everything through to completion.
To get work done the cowboy must trust his ability to build strong, working relationships with his horses and his fellow cowboys. We will teach you the tools of the trade and help you understand how this will make you a better leader.
With courses titled Cowboy Up & Lead, Saddle Up for Success and Ride For the Brand I want to be sent on some management training, cowboy style.
And when they say ‘No tweeting allowed’ at the ranch, they mean it - just watch the video to see technophobe Deuce in action:
Social media and social networking are two very web popular 2.0 buzzwords that have been making waves for quite a while now online. Do you Tweet? Personally I don’t have the time to check my emails let alone connect with people I’ve never met but I may be an exception to the buzzword action.
I do however love Facebook as a tool to keep-up with what friends, relations and former colleagues are up to.
Is this a social network too far? It would appear not judging by the frantic postings of members keen to brag about their first dressage show or sell or trade a horse to interested parties. It sure beats the old Exchange and Mart!
HorseTweet.com bills itself as ‘the social network for equine enthusiasts’. As someone keen on the idea of horseriding but none too accomplished I’ll leave more qualified readers to judge that statement.
Oh and here’s media-spokesperson-cum-glovepuppet-horse-reporter, Hoof, to introduce the site. Saddle up partners!
Some days you just stumble across those website classics and today I’ve followed a great stream of consciousness style tangle of links covering the lowly varmint.
There’s a gem of dialect out of the Wild West. In hundreds of cowboy movies, the man in the white hat — from William Boyd to John Wayne — scowls at the rustlers and the gunfighters and excoriates them with varmint, the meanest, dirtiest, most lowdown word permitted by the prim self-censorship office then run by Will Hays…
The word had appeared in P. T. Barnum’s 1854 autobiography as an imprecation — “ye young varmint!” … and as the title of a 1910 Western novel by Owen Johnson. It is a dialect form of vermin, rooted in the Latin for “worm,” and encompasses animals of cunning… that cause revulsion or anger in humans.
Why am I so focused on a word that ‘reeks of Western lore filtered through a cowhand haze’? Well today I stumbled across the world of rogue taxidermy and, more precisely, Richard Nadeau’s Custom Squirrels.
Not for me the more exotic oddities of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists - Pygmy Tarsiers and Monkey Faced Piglets. No, I’m into stuffed ‘characters’: military attack squirrels in brightly coloured berets clutching assault rifles with cigarettes dangling from their lips.
Read the full St Louis News interview with this Mitchell, Illinois resident and you’ll be amazed at the industry that’s grown up around mounted varmints on eBay. I know I’d be more than happpy to receive a Texas Hold ‘Em playing cowboy squirrel for Fathers Day:
a reassuring sign that the cowboy is a global icon recognised wherever you are
What I didn’t realise some 8 months ago, stepping off that plane at Auckland airport, was that instead of opting for the City of Sails I should have set up home down in Cowboy Paradise in Hokitika in the South island!
Who’d have thought that all the way down here I’d be able to dress up and shoot real bullets and real guns just like a gunslinger from the Old West!
Whether you’re travelling around the South Island of New Zealand catching in the beauty of the mountains, planning a corporate team building excursion or a professional marksman/markswoman, Cowboy Paradise welcomes you.
You don’t get much of a chance to shoot the pistols and rifles of the Old Wild West in South London, that’s for sure. I’m heading to grabaseat.con.nz as you read this…
