The Old West
I would have hated to lived in the Old West and been a cowboy or a gunslinger or a gambler. Everything was dirty and
smelly and hot. Everybody shooting one another all the time.
The worst part would have been the clothes. Everytime I see a Western, I swear, those people wore more clothes than anyone
else I ever saw. Jeans, boots, big old shirts, hats, scarves, gloves, chaps, vests, ties...and every time they bathed they
had on long johns. This would be fine for Montana or the Dakotas where it's all snowy, but this is even true when you see
then in Texas and Nevada and New Mexico. And everything's leather. Isn't this the desert? Aren't those guys dying in all those
clothes? And that's not even counting the big old scratchy beards, and the not bathing for weeks on end, and all the weird
crap they had to eat.
Everyone rode horses back then. I've never spent a lot of time around horses. There's a reason for that. I've never spent
a lot of time around pigs or cows, either, and for pretty much the same reason. I can't imagine a town of a hundred people
all riding horses, but of course on TV you never see turds in the streets.
It took a long time for a lot of those places out there to become states, and they were a long ways from any Federal
Government, so a lot of times a local Sheriff or Marshall was all they had to keep order. That would totally suck. What if
the Marshall was crooked? What if there was more than one person who wanted to kill him?
I just don't see it myself. The Old West was a dirty, smelly, hot, disgusting place . There was no soap, nothing was
paved, no electricity, no plumbing, no phones. Dirt was flying everywhere. You'd have to work your ass off to make a living.
If you ever got hurt they'd saw off a limb. The music sucked. And if you weren't a man and you weren't white and you didn't
want to shoot people all the time, you were pretty much screwed.
There's a whole genre built up around it though. Folks can't get enough of it.
I know what people like about it, though. Since there was no law, a man could pretty much do what he wanted to. Men like
to imagine themselves standing above the crowd and doing their own thing and making their own rules.
The problem is that this is so much crap. This is the crap that makes kids join gangs today. It didn't work then and
it doesn't work now.
You got a problem with a guy? Shoot him. Bored? Rob a bank, or a train. Hungry? Eat some beans. Or meat.
I guess the best thing I can say about the Old West is that it's sometimes fun to watch on TV. But as familiar as it
all is, I don't think most folks ever really think about the Old West or what it was really like. It seems really big, like
its a place you might could still really go to. But not only is it long gone, it didn't even really last that long. What most
folks consider the Old West was really just about 30 years.
You never see accountants in the Old West, or farmers or soldiers or politicians. And if you ever saw anyone even remotely
like that, they probably carried guns and shot one another just like everyone else did.
I wouldn't want to live there.
The Flintstones
There's just absolutely no way the Flintstones was real. Fred is supposed to be, what? Like 35? 40? And then they have
Pebbles, and Pebbles grows into a teenager, and Fred is...what? 35? 40? To look at this show, the average caveman had a life
expectancy of like 400 years.
Scientists tell us that dinosaurs didn't live at the same time as man. You wouldn't be able to tell by the Flintstones,
though. They used dinosaurs for everything from drawbridges, airplanes, record players, can openers. Little dinosaurs lived
inside cameras and chiseled pictures of what they saw.
And of course there was Dino. The dog-type dinosaur. I always thought Dino was cool, til I saw Jurassic Park
and I became convinced that he was a velociraptor. On The Flintstones, everything was dinosaurs. There were no actual
dogs or chickens or horses or lions: There were dogosauruses and chickasauruses and like that. There were tiny little birds,
mastadons, and everything else was dinosaurs.
Except the people.
Now, if you're going to believe that dinosaurs lived at the same time as man, it only makes sense that they lived at
the same time as dogs and horses and monkeys. And yet everything (and I mean everything) on The Flintstones
was a dinosaur.
If you were a Biblical scholar, especially if you're a Creationist who believed the account in Genesis chapter one to
be literally true, then the Flintstones should make perfect sense. Because Creationists believe that man did live at the same
time as dinosaurs, and that before the flood man lived to be hundreds of years old. The Flintstones might have actually have
lived in the times before Noah.
Clearly, something happened between the time of the Flintstones and today. Something changed, some enormous catastrophe
befell the earth. How do I know? Let's examine the facts:
- On The Flintstones everyone was named "Rock" or "Stone" something. The trend doesn't continue today. Was it just
a fad? Or did all the "rocks" and "stones" die out?
- People during the Flintstones' day had advanced animal-training techniques that went far beyond anything known to
modern man. They could train a bird to sit on a shelf until it was needed to open a can or spin a record player.
- And finally, of course, at some point between then and the rise of the city-states of Carthage and Sumer, civilization
collapsed and all the dinosaurs died out,
Was it a meteor? A great flood? Or Something else?
