UPDATED and bumped to the top.

It's time to change the recommended reading in the sidebar, so I thought I'd go with something completely different from the last book.

I'll just say right up front that this is the best western novel I have ever read.  Clair Huffaker (1926-1990) was an author of several books, and also wrote for many 1950s and '60s movies and TV series (such as Rawhide, Bonanza, and The Virginian).  Unlike just about every other "western" writer of her time, she was a woman.

When I first read this book, I assumed it was written by a man who had a name that sounded like a woman's name.  I assumed Huffaker was male because it was a western, and I had never heard of any female western authors.  Also because, even if a woman did write westerns, she wouldn't write them like this.  Feel free to accuse me of sexism if you wish.  When I first wrote this review, I wanted to make sure my assumption was correct, so I did some Googling and every reference I found said that Huffaker was female.  I was recently contacted by another fan who read my review who gave me some information that shows my initial assumption was correct:  Clair Huffaker was a man.  He lived in Santa Monica, California, and his wife's name was Norma Lee Fink.  Here is his picture:


I first read this book in junior high, when I friend of mine found a copy and loaned it to me.  Many years later, I was lucky enough to stumble across an identical paperback edition in a used book store, and was nearly giddy with delight at finding it.

The Cowboy and the Cossack is about a village in Siberia that needs cattle, so they buy a herd of 500 head from a Montana ranch.  The cowboys from the ranch drive the cattle to the coast where they are loaded on a ship, then take them across to the Siberian coast where they are met by a group of independent cossacks employed by the village.  The book begins just as they are about to make port in Siberia.  The cossacks make it quite plain that the cowboys' job is finished, and that the cossacks will take the herd from there.  The cowboys are just as adamant that their job isn't finished until the herd is delivered to their customers.  Eventually they decide to accompany each other into the Siberian wilderness to deliver the cattle.  At first they generally distrust each other, but as time goes by deep friendships are formed.  This is the kind of book that can make you laugh on one page and cry on the next.

The story is told in first person by a young cowboy named Levi Dougherty ("Ma wanted Levi and Pa wanted Strauss.  Ma won.")  He is the youngest, and seemingly according to his own opinion, the least experienced of the group.  During their journey, they encounter hostile and barbaric Tartars, Imperial Cossacks who work for the government and are therefore enemies, and a variety of dangerous and hostile wildlife.  The cowboys come to have a deep respect for the dedication and skill of the mounted, sword-bearing cossacks; likewise the cossacks come to respect the horsemanship and marksmanship of the Winchester-armed cowboys.  It also becomes clear that Levi isn't as incompetent as his self-effacing manner makes him out to be.  The leader of the cowboys always chooses Levi to perform especially difficult and dangerous tasks, and he always seems to succeed.

It seems that every book by Huffaker is out of print.  Even used copies command a high price online.  If you happen across a copy of this book in a used book store, you should buy it.  Don't even think about it, just buy it.

I think I should also mention for some of my readers:  this book has language that some may find objectionable.  Just so you know.

I spent some time today hunting down more anime/manga graphics.  I'm still hoping that someday I'll find a really good one of his cross in action.

I don't usually make this kind of announcement because my reading habits tend to fluctuate, but what the hey.  I don't remember how I stumbled across this blog, but I marked a few posts to go back and read when I had more time, and found them interesting.

Time to Shoot is a new blog, begun this January, with only 12 posts thus far.  But its author is one of those gunbloggers who writes about the nuts & bolts & history of guns, rather than the politics.  And you know, sometimes it's really refreshing just to have fun reading something informative instead of constantly trying to keep with with the continual assault on our rights.

Anyhow, check it out, and you might find it interesting also.

Oh, I almost forgot.  Since I read everything with Bloglines and never actually look at a blog unless I want to leave a comment, this won't really bother me, but he has some kind of popup ad thing installed.  Firefox with Adblock seems to take care of it, though.

Getting all caught up this weekend since I have nothing better to do, and I finally noticed that the National Hurricane Center's newsfeed has become active again.  And, while I wasn't paying attention, the first named storm has already come and gone.  It was Andrea.

Fodder prompted me to look myself up on the Wayback Machine.  My earlier websites never got archived for some reason, but the link is to some sites from 1999.  My first web page was on AOL in 1995.  We are probably fortunate that it is lost forever.

I was amazed at what was still there.  I created two Doom *.wads back when I was a Doomer, and they are still there!  Amazing.  It would have been really cool if all the images and backgrounds were preserved by Wayback, but I guess that would be too much to ask.  The home page had a background that I made by scanning some blue jeans with a hand scanner.  And I always thought my Doom page was especially artful.

I was really surprised by this find:


I remember submitting this to AOL's old user gallery, and it was rejected because it didn't show my entire face.  Yet, they happily publicized all those raunchy looking you-know-whos with no hesitation.

There's also this, which was sort of an early attempt at blogging before I had ever heard of or understood the phenomenon.  But then it was at least 10 years ago that I wrote those things, so I guess there wasn't really much blogging going on anywhere back then.

It seems the solar system is "bullet shaped":

The system travels within a bubble of solar wind—made of charged particles from the sun—called the heliosphere.

The edge of this bubble collides with the Milky Way galaxy's magnetic field at a distance some 200 times farther from the sun than Earth is.

A research team led by Merav Opher at Virginia's George Mason University found that, just outside the solar system, this interstellar magnetic field is inclined at a 60-degree angle relative to the plane of the Milky Way.

The solar system takes on its streamlined shape as it strikes the magnetic field at this angle, Opher explained.

"The shape of the solar system, this bullet, is really shaped by what lies ahead of us—the interstellar magnetic field," Opher said.

Calculate the ballistic coefficient on that.

Interesting article here, Docs Change the Way They Think About Death:

As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller "How We Die," the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn't receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can't be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. "After one hour," he says, "we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong." In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later.

But if the cells are still alive, why can't doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed. It was that "astounding" discovery, Becker says, that led him to his post as the director of Penn's Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine's newest frontiers: treating the dead.

Good news for those who believe there is no afterlife.  Could prove quite a quandary for those who do.  Believe it or not, I have actually had a discussion about Trekkie transporter technology and the preservation of the soul.  Only possible when two or more Christian sci-fi nerds get together.

We might have to re-define the term "pro life."  Not only will there be disagreement over when life begins, but even when it ends.

Fortunately it's most likely not a problem I'll have to deal with in my...uh...lifetime.

How exactly do you get a ringtone from a medium that has no audio?

That "Extreme Shock" ammo recently got some press.  Well, I am automatically suspicious of all gimmicky ammunitions, and this one is gimmicky out the yang.  I did a Google of "nytrilium" and found this on The High Road:

[Quote:]  I doubt that the intended test subject can tell the difference between those and an old reminton or federal slug.

[Reply:]  There you'd be wrong.

It's a little known property of "Nytrilium-Tungsten composite material" that if it impacts a solid surface the subatomic reaction thus generated is actually strong enough to open a small, temporary rift in the space-time continuum.

This rift allows the subject's incapacitating agony on impact to be transferred back in time through his embryonic self in the womb to his mother. the poor woman.

That agony would also be simultaneously transferred forward in time if the "ExtremeShockTM Explosive Entry tactical defense rounds" were not so uniformly lethal as to leave the subject unable to procreate and thus leave no progeny to feel the forward-projected pain.

Heh.  (Misspelling in original).

Fits has some comments also.

UPDATE and bumped to the top:  Now that Blogspot has taken its Ex-Lax and Fits is able to post again, re-check the link above.  He has a link to a very interesting analysis of this ammunition.  Snake oil salesmen, hucksters, charlatans.  Even "liars" would not be too strong a word.  And Shooting Wire got sucked into it.  [shakes head sadly]