The Sun, The Moon, The Star
The best little Basque restaurant in Elko, Nevada
From bum darts to an annular eclipse, featuring a blazing ring of fire
Large Fodder’s Rule: Get Naked or Get Out
Randy, a husky old crust in a tall hat and a striped, blue western shirt, sits on a stool at The Star Hotel and Bar — since 1910 the social crossroads of downtown Elko, Nevada — drinking a glass of bitter Picon punch, a specialty of this traditional Basque restaurant. It’s three PM on a Friday, the hour of indolence, and he’s telling me bawdy stories from an era which has ended, it seems, most everywhere but here. It’s not the frontier era (corporate gold mines sustain this region now, although there are still teeming sheep herds in the mountains, tended by immigrant shepherds from Peru) though it does have the feel of an older way of being — elemental, earthy, alkaline. It’s a spirit I associate with Elko as I do no other western town, and why I visit every year or two to fill up on lamb or seafood at The Star, gamble in the Stockmen’s Hotel Casino, and fortify my depleted animal spirits.
As three …
Six Gallons of Molasses
Aim for the most juice and the least weight
’Hawney, we’re blood’
We do the best we can with the tools we have.
“Over or under?”
The old timers are taking bets on how much juice there’ll be after we run the Dale variety sorghum, tall and straight and stark naked in the front field, through the hundred-year-old press they’ve rigged to a 1952 Ford 8N tractor.
“He says eighty gallon. I say sixty. Where you at?”
I’m dressed like the others in a pair of second-hand Pointer brand bib overalls, a deep green long-sleeved waffle shirt, and a faded Westwind work jacket I found at a yard sale last winter in Virginia.
“That’s a dangerous game.” I put on rubber-grip work gloves and watch my breath disappear. “I’ll take seventy and split the difference.”
If we get seventy gallons of juice, we can hope for maybe six gallons of sweet, earthy sorghum molasses (it is sorghum, and not molasses which comes from sugar cane, but we call it what we call it and don’t fret over technicalities). I ask God under my …
WAGs Get Swag
The instructive tale of Devil Baby
Digital dating delirium promises a pro athlete for the pot of every Instagram babe
Spoiler: they’ll wind up with a nurse from Minnesota, not you.
Recently, during a late-night doom scroll of the Daily Mail, I came across an article about a 22-year-old British OnlyFans model who calls herself “Devil Baby.” The model, whose real name is Orla Sloan, was recently sentenced to twelve weeks in prison for stalking Mason Mount, an English soccer player with whom she had a one-night stand after a party. She pled guilty to harassing not just Mount, whom she repeatedly called from 21 different phone numbers threatening to “destroy” him, but also two fellow Premier League stars, one of whom she claimed had gotten her pregnant and forced her to have an abortion, though they’d never been intimate.
The circumstances preceding the stalking are standard for dating and hookups in the digital age. Sloan had an Instagram with 80,000 followers and a lot of bikini shots in Mykonos and Bali. She attracted the attention of one of the footballers, who in turn invited her …
