Moon Landing – County Highway

You Only Live Once

Kinky in Dreamland

A member of the Johnson Family tries to climb his last mountain

A white-linen Jew at the Carnegie Deli and a bona-fide cowboy at the Grand Ole Opry

‘Fuck ’em, if they tried to do our jobs they would have OD’d on cocaine ten years ago’

By Ted Mann

Wallace Creek runs through Echo Hill Ranch, which has been property of the Friedman family for over half a century now. A hundred years before that, the land belonged to “Bigfoot” Wallace, a legendary pioneer and Indian fighter who rode with Colonel Jack Hays and his Texas Rangers. “How’d he get his ranch?” is a common question in Texas. A not uncommon answer, true in Bigfoot Wallace’s case, is “he took it.” There’s a story about Bigfoot Wallace and how he got his name (mistaken identity), and a lesson (myth resists change): Bigfoot wore size nine. Stories about Bigfoot Wallace, Flacco the Lipan Apache Chief, Stephen Austin, Sam Houston, Jack Hays, and the founding of the republic of Texas are all part of the mythologized history that nourished Richard “Kinky” Friedman growing up on Echo Hill Ranch in the heart of the Texas Hill Country. On the far side of Wallace Creek, across from the lodge where Kinky lives and where he grew up, there are hundreds of Neolithic artifacts — …

Jeremiad

Nobody Knows

Take it from me, Mr. Doesn’t-Know-Anything

Indeterminacy rules, to hell with what the statistics and the rule books say

If you believe half of what you read, and a quarter of what you see, you’re being deceived

By Ian Frazier

How far is it from New York City to Cleveland, Ohio? Nobody knows. Some people will tell you it is a specific number. A satellite measured the New York–Cleveland distance as 465.03 miles, or 739.01 kilometers, but that was before the pandemic — in other words, today nobody really knows. How long is the Lincoln Tunnel? As it happens, we do know the answer to that. The Lincoln Tunnel is about fifteen hundred miles long — or 1,498 miles, to be exact. But if the Lincoln Tunnel is that long, as we have discovered for ourselves by driving through it many times, how can the entire distance to Cleveland, in a completely different, Midwestern state, be shorter? And how can the width of the Hudson River, which the Lincoln Tunnel goes under, be less than half a mile? The answer to that is: Nobody knows. One thing that nobody knows is the trouble I’ve seen. It’s my own trouble, and even I do not know the trouble I’ve seen. Now, I can say, “I’ve seen a lot of trouble, especially with leaving …