
I woke up this morning to an award from Dear Kitty, Some blog. I want to thank this very talented blogger for making the mistake of nominating little old me. You can find her at this link; https://dearkitty1.wordpress.com/ , although I don’t know how to process a link on WordPress any more so that you can just click on it.
The maker of this award wrote that these are the rules for it:
For the award, post the picture of it in your post and thank your nominator while linking to them. Tell the blogging world 5 things about yourself and/or your blog. Select 5 nominees, name and link to them. Put their names in a list then hi lite them and go to the top of the editor and see the chain link, click that and paste their homepage URL. Then send a copy of your finished post’s URL to each person in their most recent post and you are all done.
So, five things about my blog;
- I didn’t start it myself. This blog was set up for me by I-Universe to help me market the book I published with them in 2013, Catch a Falling Star. Began blogging by following the directions my marketing adviser gave me, and it took me at least a year to discover she was all wrong about her suggestions. I have made a total of $16 from I-Universe on a book I invested in to get published. It is, however, still available from I-Universe, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. My blog is no longer ignored the way it originally was, but my novel still is.
- I use my blog to publish the cartoons, artwork, and seriously goofy poetry that I am also guilty of creating. As an old, retired school teacher, I am quietly going to seed with nothing better to do than this silly blog. If you would like to see a gallery of my artwork, go to Google and do a picture search of the words “Beyer Paffooney”. Hopefully the result will not make you insane or blind or both.
- Students in my classes often didn’t realize it, but I communicate primarily with humor. I guess if you don’t laugh at your own joke while telling it, they don’t catch on that it is a joke. Still, I consider this blog a humor blog. Yes, even if it doesn’t make you laugh.
- Since 2013 I have posted something on this blog 838 times. I posted every single day in 2015. 8,542 visitors have seen my blog, and no one has prosecuted or incarcerated me for it yet. I have 790 followers. I know all this is hard to believe, but I swear that it is true according to the WordPress statistics page.
- I continue to blog about my writing and have at least two more novels seriously invested in the pipeline to be published. You can read about them in my blog.
I will nominate 5 bloggers in the comment section below.





























The Cowboy Code
When I was a boy playing cowboys and Indians with cap pistols and rubber tomahawks, we all knew that cowboys had a code. The guy in the white hat always shoots straight. He knows right from wrong. He only shoots the bad guy. He even shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand if he can. Westerns are about right and wrong, good and bad, and the unyieldingly good knights of plains.
And boys believe what they see on TV and in the movie theaters. People who make television shows never lie, do they? In fact, Wyatt Earp was based on a real guy who really lived and really shot the bad guys at the gosh-darn real OK Corral.
Daniel Boone was a real guy too. He faced the opening up of new lands full of deadly dangers. And when Fess Parker played him in 1964, wearing Davy Crockett’s coonskin hat, he walked the earth like a guardian angel, making everyone safe by the end of the episode. He even knew which Indians were good and which were bad. Mingo was always on Daniel’s side. And when they spoke to each other about the dangers they faced, it was never about killing the people they feared. It was about doing what is was right, about helping the community at Boonesboro to survive. Being encouraging… looking forward to a more settled future created by following the cowboy frontier code.
So, I am left wondering what ever happened to the cowboy code? I listen to Republican presidential candidates talking about dipping bullets in pig’s blood to kill Muslims, and building walls against Mexican immigrants, and why our right to carry assault rifles is sacred, and I wonder what happened. Didn’t they experience the same education from the television versions of the Great American Mythology? Didn’t they learn the code too?
I am old enough now to know that cap guns are not real guns and you cannot solve problems by shooting somebody. But that was never the point of the cowboy code. We need straight-shooters again in our lives, not to shoot people, but to tell the unvarnished truth. We need wise people who can tell who are the good Indians and who are the bad We need them to shoot the weapons out of the bad guys’ hands. And I know that’s asking for leaders to be larger than life and be more perfect than a man can actually be. But Daniel Boone was a real man. Myths and legends start with a fundamental truth.
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Filed under autobiography, commentary, cowboys, humor, insight, philosophy, politics, Uncategorized
Tagged as autobiography, childhood beliefs, cowboy code, Daniel Boone, humor, politics, Red Ryder, Roy Rogers, Wyatt Earp