Rip Snorter's Blog

The ambiguities of tribal sovereignty, the difficulties thereby created for State regulatory scrutiny of Native American casinos (at least, in NM, but likely also in other jurisdictions) create a target-rich environment for house cheating on all games without fear of being snagged.  Players would be well advised to recognize this fact and watch carefully what happens around them.

The following 'poem' describes an event as it actually happened in a casino in New Mexico.  I was sitting at that single-deck blackjack table, $3 minimum, $75 table max.  The names of the casinos in the poem are changed, naturally.  NM casinos are NA owned, but Rocco manages them, if you get my meaning.

Jack

 

 

 

Familiar Spirits

Arroyo Seco fortune shifted
First hand after Mary,
Toothless Navajo vieja,
Wrinkles doubled under weight
Of  old pawn turquoise
And silver squash blossom
Groaned into second base
3 dollar minimum
Single deck felt
Behind her walker 

Plunked down three white chips
 
Cards turned

Three green button table max,
Weathered gamblers
Plus Mary and the dealer
All drew blackjacks in a single hand
 
"Ha."  Steel grip on walker
Hand raised in 'How!' salute:

"Ha!"  Plowed brown field surrounds
Frozen narrowed slits of eye

Players, dealer, pit-boss, hangers on
Transfixed on sunlight shaft
In silent forest
Only birdsong
Slot machines
Endure
 
"The tables have an evil spirit!"
 
Chairs emptied
Puzzled drink server
Stands with tray
Two cokes and one black coffee
Vacant gazing search
For missing thirst

Superstitious 
Laguna, Navajo, Acoma,
Mexican and white
Play down the road at Desert Fox
 
Although they've burned sage
Purged the evil
Cleansed the spirits

No dice
 
Four aces only
In an unenlightened
Single deck

 

From Poems of the New Old West

Copyright 2002, Jack Purcell

 

 

 

 

 

The men in this picture, those of them who are still alive, are now enjoying their sixth decade of life.  But, this picture finds them a lot younger, somewhere along the Han River in Korea, a few days after the assassination of President John Kennedy.

Most of us (I’m behind the camera, not one of the uglies down range) were drafted, or had enlisted during the Berlin Crisis of 1961, thinking there were a lot of Russians about to be in need of killing. 

Thinking we were just the guys to do it.

By the time of picture we were a lot less gung-ho.  We were getting ‘short’, and most of us had a jaundiced view of the whole US attempt to save the world from itself.  The only firing we’d done with those M-14s had been a month earlier, at the Division Honor Guard down in a rice paddy below us one night, while they fired their own M-14s and a .30 caliber machine gun back at us.

A case of mistaken identity following an incursion across the DMZ a few miles north of us by an unknown number of ‘bad guys’.

However, despite our best efforts, nobody killed, nobody injured.  A good time was had by all after we changed our underwear.

Today, despite the fact the poverty we saw in Korea is gone, despite the fact the ROK has a healthier economy than the US, along with a fine military force, despite the fact the International Communist Conspiracy died following Vietnam, despite the fact the Russkies packed up their tents and went home to contemplate their navels in peace, young Americans are still over there.

Maybe they’re standing right there where Zeke Rapoza’s squatted, sneering into a camera held by another GI, thinking similar thoughts to those the young old men in that picture were thinking a few days after the world changed.

But today we’re no longer having to save the world from Communism.  Instead, the world is trying to think of ways to save itself from us.

Bye, bye Miss American Pie.

Jack

 

 

I figure this is going to be a subject that's going to be beaten to death all over the internet for a while, so I might as well muscle up to the trough early.

I usually try not to give current news events more attention than they deserve.  However, someone sent me an email saying there were terrorist attacks in London, suggesting I turn on my TV.  When I responded that I don’t have a TV along came a link to Fox News.

I pondered this a while, wondering idly about the magnitude of the event, wondering vaguely about whether it was time for an addendum to my gratitude affirmations for being old enough to have been inoculated against smallpox.

Gradually my curiosity got the better of me and I found myself clicking the link to the story.

Seems there’s been some Englishmen and other Brittishers who won’t be living as long as they’d supposed as a result of a series of coordinated explosions.  These explosions were particularly loathsome because they were the actions, not of good Christian Catholic IRA terrorists, which the Brits are accustomed to, but rather by nasty Muslims with absolutely none of the milk of Christian human kindness and brotherly love coursing through their veins.

Still, careful reading of the story assured me the attack wasn’t on a scale of, say, the German Luftwaffe WWII bombing of Coventry or the US/British bombing of Hamburg.  None of those theater nukes sold off the back doorstep of the Soviet Union flattening half of London yet.  No need, just yet, to examine the pucker left by the old smallpox vaccination of my youth.

Likely as not they’re saving those theater nukes and vanished-from-the-laboratory smallpox bugs  for a more savory, delicious target elsewhere.

Measured in terms of body counts he US and the European nations have grown accustomed to a relatively economical kind of warfare.  From the Falklands to the Gulf War(s) they've sat at home cheering the evening news, applauding scenes such as the one in London this morning happening to human beings located on elsewhere geography. 

It's puzzling the USSR in Afghanisomething-or-other, even with overwhelming force, superior weaponry and cold willingness to use napalm on a civilian population never had such a long run of luck.

And, make no mistake.  A long run of luck is what it's been.  Those explosions rocking London today might well mark a shift in the wind direction, a preview of coming attractions.

A man I used to know had been a Hungarian tank commander on the Eastern front during WWII.  (He bore a strikiing resemblence an aging to Robert Shaw in his role as a German tank commander in Battle of the Bulge).  He was there for the Axis invasion of the USSR, all the way to the suburbs of Moscow.

I asked him once about the experience, knowing he was unrepentent, knowing he was an unreconstructed Nazi who'd escaped to South America after managing to surrender to American forces.

"Those were heady times," he smiled, "Kind of fun, actually.  Going up against infantry and squadrons of Soviet cavalry in an armored vehicle.  Sometimes you might kill a hundred men before breakfast."

He stopped and pondered a moment.

"Then they got the T-34.  That took a lot of the fun out of it."

Jack

The Great Tick Migration

Dateline, Socorro, NM

It’s sad, but they have to migrate: there’s no good water in the Rio Grande anymore.  It’s all sewage passed downstream from Albuquerque and other towns. 
 
This was almost home to them. Their ancestors arrived with the first cattle drives from Texas in the 1880s. But finally they’ve had enough. Lemminglike they’ve decided as one to return home, Lone Star Ticks to the Lone Star State, same as those Confederate Texas humans had to finally stagger and stumble home when things took a turn for the worst..
 
This far south they’ve just begun to gather; just started to come out from under the grassleaves, the treebark, stragglers still coming out of the brush. The main migration gathering is further north in the Isleta lands, Lost Lunas, and up by Belen. 
 
There they’ve mostly already grouped. They’ve dropped off the rats, cows, deer, dogs and coyotes. The earliest ones are drifting south ahead of the others. They’re the lucky ones. Those got far enough south yesterday to find a stray muskrats along the river and get a little something to eat. The stragglers will find it hard going.
 
It’s sad, but hopeful: tiny seed ticks huddling close to their mamas at night, the great herd constricting in the cold dark, mama and daddy ticks worrying about the great crossing of the Jornada del Muerto, about the dearth of animals on the Jornada. But also knowing in their tiny network of neurons passing for a brain, that once further south, things will still not be easy......the migration there, the gathering will have already emptied the countryside of hosts, bloodmeals will be a rarity.
 
When those Isleta and Lost Lunas ticks get as far south as Socorro, the southern ticks will have eaten away everything available. Fishermen will know something’s up by then; they’ll be staying away from the river bottom country sensing some new thing, some change in the atmosphere near the river, hectored by the early gathering; the dogs, the feral cats, the rodents, all driven away from the river bottom by the strange new presence of so many tiny pests. 
 
The animals left will be sucked dry. Probably when the latecomers reach Socorro they’ll have to take their chances in town. Maybe they’ll find pets or townspeople for a last meal before they try to cross the dreaded Jornada del Muerto.
 
Some of them will drift up onto the freeway to find broken-down motorists with flat tires or dead batteries. Truck drivers stopped to urinate by the road or unsuspecting drunks sleeping with the window opened a crack to release the foul tobacco smoke from inside the car will save a few. Maybe an unlucky hitchhiker sleeping under a bridge or one of the frequent escapees from the prison or jail; some hapless hobo along the railroad, waiting for the next train.
 
If the motorist doesn’t get bitten by too many at once there’ll be a chance for a jump south by vehicle across the Jornada and avoiding the hard crossing....a quick ride to Cruces, or Truth or Consequences, or El Paso for a small group if they don’t get greedy and just take it easy on the driver. But so many of these younger ticks want everything now. 
 
It might be hard going for them when they get down toward Cruces. That’s where they’ll first meet the newly arrived fire ants. Also, those deep southern ticks will resent their presence, nudging their little fat grey bodies aside as they scramble in a fold of flesh for a foothold and a meal. And ahead, Texas.

The ancestral homeland.

Renewal.
 
Yes, it’s sad, of the hundreds of millions of ticks starting home; tens of millions won’t make it. There’ll be stained smudges on the freeway where they try to cross, but many run over by recklessly speeding cars. Thousands clogging the river with their tiny carcasses where the water rose unexpectedly during a crossing, catching many unaware, the long march, the trail of tears, the trek home; so many dead, so many lost, the seed ticks, the mama ticks, the large swollen soft ticks shriveled and wrinkled with hardship....so many friends left back there along the trail, so many loved ones, lost, so many seed ticks lying there in the massive killing fields along the route. 
 
But they’ll do as they can, do as they are able, do as they must, heading south on that lonely migration that long dusty trek, always knowing they won’t be welcomed by their distant kinsmen. The plethora of ticks in Texas, those hungry, selfish younger generation ticks will push and shove on the hosts, fighting for the best positions in and behind the ears, high on the necks where teeth cant reach, tiny skirmishes and struggles for position everywhere; on cows, on dogs, on rodents, in the thick hair of women and unreconstructed hippy men in cowboy hats..
 
As always, those selfish Texas ticks will not agree to share their bounty. They’ll fight despite the sad happiness of the return of their distant relations. 
 
Jack

 

 

 

 

 

Pendulum Star

Pendulum star
Swings to and fro
While maggot-earth
Digests his legions
Tick tock
Tick tock
 
Minute-hand moon
Tugs tick tock tides
Through Paleozoic hours
Quaternary days
Pleistocene weeks
Tick tock
Tick tock
 
Sub-microscopic
Parasites
Scurry flourish
Scratch peel
Posture
And rot
Tick tock
Tick tock
 
Pendulum star
Swings to and fro.
Minute-hand moon
Tugs tick tock tides
Maggot-earth digests
Tick tock
Tick tock

Copyright©2003 Jack Purcell

 

 

 

That locomotive you see in this picture isn’t a locomotive, of course.  That smoke you see pouring out of the stack isn’t superheated water under pressure being released while huge pistons turn steel wheels.  The locomotive is just a rock, the smoke is a contrail made by wingtip vortices of a man-made machine flying at high altitude.

That rock’s been standing there in the same position for uncounted millions of years, eroding into the shape you now see.  Prior to a century and a half ago no human would have thought to notice how much it resembled a steam locomotive because locomotives weren’t yet a chunk of the reality created by the human mind.

So what does that have to do with numbers?

Those numbers you see on your radio dial, on your cell phone, on vehicle license tags, on mile markers, currency, clocks, compasses, and at the bottoms of the pages of books are all inventions of the human mind, artifacts.  Ways of converting that rock into a locomotive, representing hundreds of avenues of human experience and trying to nail those experiences down into something measurable, something more easily understandable.

But at the foundations those numbers have little more connection with anything absolute than that giant of a rock has to some other masses of rocks superheated, molded into form, hammered and bolted together to create the artifact this piece of geology now strives to imitate in your mind.

Numbers don’t exist in nature.  They didn’t exist in those barely human creatures we see in museums and anthropology texts, our genetic ancestors.  Numbers are a relatively recent invention of the modern human mind, an artifact created to measure, to record, to guide, to identify. 

And the human mind abhors randomness in much the same way nature abhors a vacuum.  By their very nature numbers are the antithesis of randomness.  They are a system more elaborate in their construction than a locomotive, created with the precise intention of driving randomness from human reality.

If those MM numbers last night appear to the result of non-random forces, energy or events, you might consider asking yourself how it could be otherwise.  Saint Francis once observed, you can’t train a wolf to prefer bread over meat.

 Jack

 

 

 

The only earth changes we really notice are those pertaining to humans.  Most of the others happen too slowly for our racing brains to register.

Madrid, NM, was a coal mining town until locomotives went to liquid fuel....the town belonged to the Santa Fe Railroad.  When coal died after WWII, Madrid died with it.

Then during the 1960s, Madrid became a Mecca for hippie communes, held on again for a while... gradually it became a generally biker/counter-culture community housed in the old mining offices, shotgun shacks, even in a tunnel mine.

The cemetary sits on a hill overlooking the town:

As you move north along the mesa newer graves appear:

Derby Don got himself a plate steel derby mounted on an auto spring.

 

 

 

 

Larry Titus - Gone for gas

 

 

 

 

Jack

 

 

 

 

Riding on ahead

Cemetary on the mesa overlooking Madrid, NM

Mining town, died, reborn

 

MM quick and dirty

Test

2	10	21	30	40	50
3	18	25	31	41	52
4	16	26	39	49
8		29	35
		24

I have to tell you this.  I feel I owe it to you.

Cabazon, July 4, 2005

One moment everything was going fine.

 

Then, a moment later:

 

As you can see, instead of squeezing itself down the tube, it rolled off the side.

This is both disgusting and disturbing.  I've no idea what the long-term consequences will be for weather, chaos butterflies and El Nino hole in ozone global warming new ice age nuclear winter trends.....  Deeply concerned here, for the future of this nation.

Jack

Edited in:

All the smoke and ash in the air that I've been whining and complaining about incessantly for the past week or so, I learned yesterday, isn't good New Mexico forest fire smoke.  It's those Arizonians again.... fire burning out of control over somewhere near Phoenix.

Now, you furshlugginer Arizonians, listen up. 

It ain't that we don't appreciate the thought, but if you can't keep your fires under control, flush the smoke and ash down that mile-wide-mile-deep copper mine that keeps causing you to have to move Morenci over to make it bigger.

Or get all those wheezer snow-birds doing heavy breathing pointed west and send it to California.  They'll never notice the difference.

 

 

Seems appropriate to offer up some pittance of acknowledgement that this country has a history.  That we're a wide and varied people with lots of breadth in our views.  So here it is, folks.  What you've been waiting for.

Highlights of US history, plus some current stuff thrown in to keep you interested:

This flag flew at the little doodad/jewelry stands pulloff where I40 passes through the Laguna Rez a couple of years ago on the 4th.  It's a US flag with an NA on horseback waving a spear superimposed across the stripes. 

Maybe it was flown there to demonstrate the need for Americans to familiarize themselves with their history a bit more than  they're in a habit of doing.  The Laguna tribe hasn't fought anybody much except Navajos (between 1695 and 1865) and the occasional alley-brawl with an Acoma, between then and now.

But there you are.  History.

 

This proud structure was once the Headquarters for the Confederate Territorial Governor of the Territory of Arizona. 

It sits on the plaza in Mesilla remembering past the time when Billy the Kid used to make a nuisance of himself around here, remembering a time when most of the officers of the US Army serving in the West left their posts and went to Texas, then on home to serve the Confederacy in the East. 

A season or two later some of them returned with the Texas Mounted Rifles, which I'll tell you a bit more about.

This part of the ruin of old Fort Craig, guarding the passage up the Rio Grande.  Kit Carson and Canby were caught unready for the invasion of Texans here.... Canby, cunning mind he was, sawed some logs to appear to be artillery along the walls.... a lot of artillery.  Convinced Sibley, the Texas commander, he didn't want any of Fort Craig for the moment, so he bypassed it.

 

Measured in percentage of casualties of combattants on both sides, the second bloodiest battle of the Civil War was fought just at the foot of that black mesa.  US Army and NM Volunteers tried to keep the Texans from crossing the Rio Grande there, while a lot of the Texans were still struggling to get off the mesa.

They crossed.  This battle and Glorietta, further north, were the basis for the Civil War battle scene from the movie, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.

 

This model of maybe a Curtiss Jenny serves as a windsock at a little desert strip near Columbus, NM.  It's a reminder of the airplanes used in the fracas following an attack on the town of Columbus in 1912, by Pancho Villa.  Villa celebrated his success by doing a lot of killing and burning for three days, then the US Army chased him all across Northern Mexico using planes like this one for scouting.

A lot of complacent Americans aren't aware of it, but these robots are the only thing standing between them and an invasion of aliens from the planet something or other located in that cluster in the belt of Orion.  This little-known defence installation is located on the Plains of San Augustine, west of Magdalena.

 

This is happening while you sleep!

Happy Birthday America.

Jack

 

 

 

 

 

I debated whether to roll that big plastic box on wheels out to the road last night.  Surely, thinks I, they won't make those guys work on July 4th. 

But, I'd rolled it out Memorial day eve thinking it was a wasted effort, but sort of hoping inspite of hating to see guys with one of the lousiest jobs in creation having to work a holiday, that they'd pick up because of a sweet boquet wafting up from it.  Sure enough, 7:30 am that old monster noise truck came bumping up the pike, had the cats scrambling indoors knowing as always, there's a place for them down at the Sandoval County Landfill.

Had those guys working Memorial Day, Sandoval County did.... Or Waste Disposal, Inc.

And here they were again this morning, right on time.

Hope those folks are paying him double time, I do. 

Jack

You've been fretting and worrying when old Sol's gonna plunge down the smokestack of Cabazon.  That's today.... July 3, maybe an hour ago.  Tomorrow should be the day, though it will be a hair to the north of center.  Should take two days to clear customs and head on South.

I'm fond of this one.... works fairly well, but it's been up some months and I've got another one on the assembly line .... need the pole.

Here are some numbers I'll let you guess what they're for.  They ain't PB:

 

2	10	21	30	40	50
3	18	25	31	41	52
4	16	26	39	49
8		29	35
		24

 

Someone's burning up a lot of powder and ball out there tonight.  Village popping like a hot frying pan.... Cats satisfied to stay inside underneath almost anything...  San Felipe Pueblo (Hollywood Casino) to the north is popping a few I can see when they clear the mesa,  Santa Ana (Hyatt Resort) burned a lot of ammo last night, but must have saved a bit.  That's right down the bombsight (Las Huertas Creek) from here seven miles, so they can't keep any secrets.

Ahhh.... That Venus/Mercury horserace I've been reporting on.... still out there, but Mercury pulling away a bit...slightly ahead, slightly more than a fingerwidth South.

 

So here we are, independent from those limeys at last.

Congratulations, old conglomeration of confusion.  I hope you last a while longer.  Keep those cars and leaders coming.

Jack

 

 

 

 

 

After giving a fair amount of weight to the admonitions of Lantern on the threads concerning the major lotteries, and the advice of Four4me concerning his experiences with analysing the numbers, as well as the comments of JAP69 on the Mystical thread, I decided to take a bit of a break, not work the numbers so hard as I've been doing, not buy a lot of tickets.  See how things worked out.

So I gave it a quick and dirty.... maybe an hour, maybe two of work.  Came up with 15 unique numbers, which I played on five tickets.  Pulled them out of the obvious patterns within the last 10 draws or so.

When the numbers were posted tonight here's what I found:

Spread out on those five tickets among those 15 numbers were four of the five white ball numbers.  Missed entirely the red ball.

So I'm back to believing that this is a worthy effort, though I believe I'll never spend as much time working the numbers as I've done in the past.

Maybe tonight was an accident, an anomalomalomalisimo grande.  But I'm just going to have to prove it to myself, learn the hard way.

Jack

 

Went down to Bernalillo a bit ago to get my tickees for tonight... found myself talking with a guy about my age sitting outside with a bicicycle... two wheel thing with pedals... with a pack and all manner of water jugs.  Guy had a helmet shaped like a horizontal teardrop he wears... point facing backward, along with a stretchy black short legged suit made of something that might have been a tailored wetsuit.  Distracts from the conversation a bit, talking to a likeable sort of person wearing something like that, wondering what the hell THAT's all about.

He's gearing up to ride that two wheeler from Newfoundland to Mass in a couple of weeks... old guy.  Put some chin whiskers on me, take away my cavalry whiskers, make me a bit uglier and longer winded, hell, the guy might have been me.

Anyway, I've wandered off the purpose of this entry.  Coming back up the hill leaving Bernalillio I was stopped at a red light.... car on my left had it's window down....(incidently, that car resembled a 1947 Dodge sedan scaled down to maybe 2/3 size.... we used to call the trunk of the car the 'turtle' because of the looks of those post WWII sedans)... A spanking new futuristic looking 1947 Dodge sedan is how I'd have described it if the guy turned out to be some kind of whatchacallit, drive-by shoe salesman and I had to give a description to the law.... anyway threads of music coming out the window nearest me sounded to be strangely familiar, though it had a chipmunks ring to it.

Then it struck me.... this song was popular during the Berlin Crisis of 1961 when I was a bootcamper at Fort Jackson, SC....... no chipmunks in those days....."I'mmmmmm just a soooooldier...A loooooonely sooooooldier, so far from home with no something of my ooooooown, etc".

Whew.  I haven't heard that song in 40 years or more, haven't even thought about it.  Coming out of a brand shiny new 1947 Dodge sedan.  The chipmunk sound made it even eerier.

I'm enlisting next week in a parallel universe.

Jack

Incidently, the guy in this picture is me, 

Not some handsome movie actor or famous somethingorother. 

I thought I'd better make that clear to end some confusion.

 It's been suggested to me that's a lousy choice of people to have at the bottom of my blog.