Jocko said:
My second favorite. It gets much better soon afterward, when he and his pal try to stake a claim on an ore strike. The law says that for such a claim, they must improve the land, so they construct a "house" out of twigs that was so precarious they chose to sleep outdoors instead. All moot, really, since he then relates how the very next day he accidentally starts a forset fire that wipes out thousands of acres.
Who else could make something like that funny?
We were on foot. The reader will find it advantageous to go horseback. We were told that the distance was eleven miles. We tramped a long time on level ground, and then toiled laboriously up a mountain about a thousand miles high and looked over. No lake there. We descended on the other side, crossed the valley and toiled up another mountain three or four thousand miles high, apparently, and looked over again. No lake yet. We sat down tired and perspiring, and hired a couple of Chinamen to curse those people who had beguiled us. Thus refreshed, we presently resumed the march with renewed vigor and determination.
I wish I could write like that.
I still want to know why evildave is such a prong, though.
It seems to be a point of honor with some people. It's like they're afraid that if they find something good to say about the U.S., people will laugh at them, and they don't want people to take them for suckers or something. So best to take a see-no-good, hear-no-good, speak-no-good attitude. The Fool seems like that most of the time.
Used to have a friend - a GOOD friend - who I knew was as far to the left as I am to the right, approximately where evildave is. I carefully avoided arguing politics with him, because we were friends and didn't have to.
But after I left New York, and after he got email, he started sending me left-wing diatribes that I either ignored or rebutted briefly. But then one day just before the Iraq invasion he sent me a copy of Twain's "The War Prayer", and we got into a serious exchange of long emails. I was vigorus, I thought, in my defense of the prospective war, without crossing the border over the line of civility. But he took serious offense at one email and asked me to never write or call again. I tried sending one last email, pointing out I had never initiated the political disputes, hadn't wanted to, and asked if he didn't think life was too short and friends too scarce to be throwing them away so casually.
Never heard back from him again. It still bothers me to this day. I google/lurk him now and then on a Beatles news group he hangs out at, and see he still finds ways to compare Bush to Hitler, and blame us for September 11. I once fixed his toilet for him. Isn't that more important than political disagreement?
