
When The Crackers Have Gluten, And Gluten Makes Your Date Homicidal



Actually, Santa wasn’t the one lacking that year. The UT Zeta house hosted a Christmas party for needy children, and a makeshift Santa proved too svelte for the outfit. It does make you wonder if folks left out perfectly good milk and cookies for Santa during the lean years.

The irony is that the tradition didn’t even START until the lean years. In an era of such economic hardship, many parents used the gesture as an example of generosity and gratitude for the gifts they would receive on Christmas Day. The Greatest Generation indeed.

It’s Halloween of 1949 at the University of Texas at Austin, and Nautical Nellie is excited to see the ghoulish costumes of her peers.


Just a girl and her horse. That seems normal, right?


Four-year-old Trent Petersen enjoys three parts corn to one part cat at his family’s farm in Exira, Iowa.


What a blessing has Johann Inauen, and I don’t mean his pipe. Son Reto could not be more smitten with papa, enjoying a childhood on a small Appenzell dairy farm in Switzerland. Idyllic indeed.



*CMR created over 2000 Old West paintings, such as the one above.

What’s a male peafowl got to do these days to catch a lady’s eyes? Even I, a nonbird, am impressed by such brilliant plumage. She is, in effect, pococurante. Hint: it doesn’t mean “a little bit current.”


Back before climate change, we had winter, and folks use to ski in water that would freeze and make snow. People used gravity to ski from the top of the snow to the bottom of it. Sometimes they snapped their shins or skied right into a tree and died, but other times, they caught the wind under their skis and soared, ever briefly, high above the crowds, catching the cold crisp air beneath their feet, alighting upon the soft snowy incline and gliding to the stretch.
