All Entries Tagged With: "San Juans"
Snoring Machine Perfected
(Ouray) A gasoline-powered, alternate current device is ready for the assembly line according to inventor Melvin Toole, of Red Mountain Town. The contraption, created from rusty, discarded mining tin, brass pipe, circular fans and dangling tin foil, sports tiny speakers and a heat detection gadget that sets it off when intruders, human or otherwise, approach.
“It sounds exactly like snoring,” said Toole, “with woofers and tweeters pushing compressed oxygen into the pipe caverns and the fans taking it from there.”
Toole plans to market the product to people who want to keep bears and other predators away whether out in the woods or at home. The machine requires simple installation. It can be mounted on one’s structure or easily staked into the ground adjacent to a tent.
“Right now our main focus is the audio,” said Toole. “It has to sound authentic or the bears or they won’t be detoured in their marauding. It has to sound like another animal is on the premises. My apparatus is easily the best precaution for the dollar. It beats expensive security systems and is more streamlined than armed sentinels.”
Toole told The Horseshoe that the machine would cost approximately $400.
“That,” he said is cheap compared to the destructive capacities of local bruins. “After the fact, when it’s usually too late to prevent damage or violence people are always surprised at what one of these beloved monsters can do to a kitchen or patio.”
“One resident up here has his entire deck destroyed by a large sow in search of food. Another woke up to find his car completely totaled after an angry bear was denied entry into a freezer and threw a tantrum,” he explained.
“People who are confronted with nosy bear while sleeping in a tent could face even more serious consequences,” he said. “We just want to make the night safer for people.”
“I’m a great putter. I just can’t seem to get the ball to go into the little hole.”
-Danny the Druid
The Ouray Solid Muldoon – What you need to know
The following was lifted from August 14, 1885 issues of the Ouray Solid Muldoon with the verbal approval of David Day’s ghost. The format is loose, concise and to the point.
Chauncy Brandelberry, who is credited with having two wives living is now in jail in Montrose charged with bigamy. On May 20 the Muldoon contained an account of the trip of Mrs Brandelberry No. 1 as far as Ouray from a town 80 miles north of Ogden, Utah, in search of her child left in the care of Bradelberry. She alleges that on her arrival here she found that her husband had remarried again without going through the usual form of procuring a divorce. She accrued the services of deputy Cuddihy of Montrose who went in search of the too-muchly-married man and found him living with Mrs Brandelberry No. 2 in the Paradox Valley. Cuddihy took possession of the husband and the child and started back to Montrose. However, on the way Bradelberry escaped, but was recently captured and now languishes in the Montrose bastille. Mrs Brandeberry No. 1 is now in Montana awaiting developments.
You don’t find false teeth in the soup of some of the Ouray hash dives, as was the custom a few years ago, but the table butter is still a home for aged and decrepit cockroaches and bed bugs with high water pants.
Joe McCormick was arrested here last Saturday, and is now in jail on the charge of horse stealing. McCormick hired the horse at Dallas, and sold it here in Ouray to Frank Hopkins, giving him a bill of sale for the animal.
Frank James has invited Sam Jones to call his way and squirt religion at the unbelievers. Missourians, with their six-shooters attached are not calculated to enthuse the latter day parson. The acrobatic sky pilot of the Brooklyn tabernacle has returned from Europe and the great dailies will once more have special telegrams of his sermons–sent by mail.
Old man Hope of Red Mountain believed until recently that Kansas was made up of nothing but Republicans and grasshoppers. Now he is of the opinion that a few Democrats inhabit that land.
The number of plain and fancy drunks that could have been docketed at Fort Kayser yesterday morning were not called owing to the leniency and goodness of the heart of the justice. As a town agitator a $20,000 fire is a howling success. It’s hard to decide which was most disastrous, the fire or the drunk.
The Muldoon wishes to say once more that it will publish anonymous communications or personal grievances. If you have it in for your neighbor write him a letter yourself and tell him what a disreputable cuss he is and sign your name to it. This will throw the responsibility on your own shoulders and give vent to your pent-up feelings. This way of sneaking around to a newspaper office and getting in your spite work through the publisher, who has no interest whatsoever in your quarrels, is not only cowardly but vicious, and we won’t have any of it in ours. If you want to go over to your neighbor’s and give him a clubbing, set his house on fire or murder his family, we will detail a reporter to write up the affair, as it then becomes a public matter and of considerable import as a news item. Otherwise keep your skeletons in your own closet and give us a rest.
The snow is a foot deep over in Silverton while here in Ouray the song of the mocking bird in the magnolias mingles with the soft sighing of gentle southern zephyrs. Blessed Ouray.
A fight to the finish with two-ounce gloves is to come off Monday night at Wright’s Opera House between Jack Davis of Ouray and Billy Rae of Arizona, for $100 a side. As many of these encounters are mere hippodromes to get the gate money Mayor Rowan, before giving permission for the fight, extracted twice that sum from unnamed promoters at the north edge of town.
General Palmer and party, all stockholders in the Denver & Rio Grande, were in town this week and went over to look at the mines in Marshal Basin.
The card in the Plaindealer last week from Rev. Long, denying the allegations set forth in the Muldoon, that he did not refuse to hold services over the remains of Dave Selby and that he did not work and make noise while the funeral services were in progress at the church opposite, should not have been written if the revered gentleman believes the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We now report that he not only refused to hold services, and made the noise as stated, and have a number of reliable and prominent citizens to bear us out in our statement if he sees fit to call for proof.
Otto Mears’ private car was anchored in Ouray last night.
Iranstan continues to hold out on the big bodies of ore cut a few weeks ago and promises to be one of the best and biggest shippers in the Red Mountain district.
God bless the hayseeds. They are great people.
Free fight among the Cornishmen at the Sheridan Mine on election day.
Annex extension of Terrible has cut a foot of ore that assays 727 ounces. The claim, that bids fair to the great shipper is owned by Wm. F Maher and John N. Caldwell, among others.
The Ute uprising has petered out and our boys in blue can play soldier again.
G.T. Whittemore, a miner working on the Terrible, fell over the dump about November 1 and ruptured himself. He was brought down to town on Tuesday from the mine and placed in the hospital, where an operation was performed by Doctors Rowan and Mayfield, who found the man to be in a state of advanced gangrene.
Congress OKs cardboard cutout attendance
(Freeze-dried files-Soggy Bottom) Putting off what many consider more pressing legislation the US Senate today passed a less than steadfast attendance bill allowing cardboard cutouts to replace Congressmen in the House and Senate chambers.
Dubbing the action a safety precaution in the face of Coronavirus-19, backers of the decree insist that elected officials should be deferred from showing up to a poorly ventilated room where, despite social distancing and regular testing, threatens the well-being of the nation’s leaders.
“It will also free up elected officials to campaign, schmooze with donors and have lunch with lobbyists,” said Marigold Finn, who has been employed as an organic gardener at the Capitol since 1979.
“Just because the temporary president eats his meals out of a cardboard box doesn’t mean we should all follow suit,” she said.
Cardboard cut-outs are cleaner, safer but even more irrelevant say detractors who call the move “slothful, loathsome and seriously misleading.”
Although procedurally questionable the edict looks certain to become law.
“It’s a matter of national security and besides baseball is doing it,” said a hoax-monger from the Great Midwest. “Now what could be more American than that?”
Critics called the move “cosmetic and toothless at best” slamming this emerging modus operandi as “another attempt to distract the public just as the Congress votes on another pay raise next week.
One billionaire politician from Georgia says she’s only in it for the glory…and the money…and the benefits.
“I am honored to serve my country,” she murmured. “I can just catch up with any missed governing on C-Spam. All we have to do is show up in a tie or nice dress every so often. What’s the rub? It’s all partisan voting anyway”.
– Steely Headlands
Election commentary on the road
What will these Snowflakes think of next? This clever (and progressive) billboard concisely reminds voters of Donald Trump’s Russian collusion (Sickle and Hammer anyone?) while lauding the benefits of a Pro-Choice platform. What a refreshing commentary. Even the Statue of Liberty, still the hope of refugees everywhere, looks to be cracking little smile. (Toole Photo Service)
Massive Libido Detected Near Alpha-Omega
(Gunnison) Researchers here have discovered what they believe to be a giant libido floating merrily along in confined space reserved for other previously unknown, non-luminous bodies. The celestial patterns, of exotic non-baryonic form (stars and hot gas), not only dominate the charts but are growing each day at a rate beyond human comprehension.
At present the libido, unlike rogue meteors, ozone debris and haughty elliptical solar systems, poses no threat to the earth. Some conspiracy theorists insist the meteor is hovering nearby until it can determine the status of Covid-19 on earth.
The mass, within the optical radius of known galaxies, yields a non-dynamical estimate for density and powerful gravitational force. Measurements of disc rotation curves out to this optical radius, taken from earth, show a completely different universe with clusters of libido matter. It is not clear whether these clusters have had sufficient time to properly digest the virulence common to their internal motion.
“In layman’s terms this means we have been invaded by a potent dose of energy from what we like to call the pleasure zone,” said Alfalfa Romeo, senior analyst at Western State Colorado University. “We have been watching the libido form for three years but until now we did not know what to make of it. Photos sent back to our laboratory indicate the colonization of other star patterns by the encroaching libido which translates as a love/hate, hostile takeover.”
Romeo would not say what this presence might do to the billions of libidos now operating on the earth or how earthly preachers might rationalize the presence of other-worldly reality within the parameters of their own tired religious philosophies.
“Whether the mass will serve as an energizer port for human instinctual and biological drive is not known but I’m sure as hell going out on Friday. Most of us here feel that the manifestation of sexual drive will be most apparent at street level,” he explained. “Not much has changed yet. People still seem friskier on Saturday night than Monday morning.”
Intense gravitational attraction coupled with animal instinct could translate into less inhibited social encounters all over the planet. Behavioral standards might be lowered as population increases and pressure gradients explode. People will still flirt despite health concerns and social distancing.
“We know that when a large star has burnt all its fuel it explodes into a supernova. What is left collapses down to a dense object known as a neutron star,” continued Romeo. “We have seen these objects with the telescope and observe linkage reaction on earth and in Grand Junction.”
Scientists have longed believed that the effects of heavenly bodies can be observed immediately within a control group. The moon has a strong influence on the sea while the sun dictates temperature and light patterns. This latter theory, called the Halter-Top Postulate, helps explain increased animal attraction in the spring and why people are in such a rush to get married in June.
“That’s one reason that the level of most libidos rises after dark,” smiled Romeo, a former Uruguayan race car driver with a reputation as a bit of a rascal. “If libidos are pulled by the remarkable gravitational force it may reduce the need for small talk, you know, when boy meets girl.”
Reluctant to share data with government over fears that puritans may attempt to have the libido shot down, researchers remain at odds with military intelligence teams from Malta to Manchuria.
Scientists at Chile’s Observatorio Cerro Paranal near Antofagasta, which boasts the most powerful optical array on the planet, say they have been tracking the libido since 2018 but thought it was only the camanchaca (ocean fog along the desert coastline) playing tricks with our eyes. The barrels of pisco (potent brandy made from distilled grapes) weren’t helping with intricate calculations either, according to a one scientist.
“We already have giant libidos here in South America and didn’t realize that the gringos would be making such a big deal out of what is normal. We just continued to watch the formation of the libido, minus the cosmic strings. We can’t understand what our neighbors to the north are getting all worked up about. The libido is up there and we’re down here. We’re not going to worry about why. It’s a Latino thing.”
– Kashmir Horseshoe
Solitaire Legend to Host Workshop
(Montrose) A complimentary clinic conducted by solitaire great Pinky Diamond and sponsored by the Laser State Continuing Education Department will be held at the Montrose Pavilion on Tuesday, August 25 according to the Uncompahgre Lonely Hearts Club. The program, open to the public, will consist of seminars, an autograph session and footage of classic matches covering Diamond’s 48 years in solitaire.
A second session will be held at the Daughters of the American Rationalization Hall in Manana which will be invitation only and presented in conjunction with a cocktail reception and marginal dining experience.
“This may break the stranglehold that bingo has had on this community since World War I,” said Ginn Rooney, a one-armed blackjack dealer and highly recognized authority on parlor games that is credited with the invention of the poker chip in 1932. Rooney recently moved to Montrose from Las Vegas for the nightlife.
Once the second-ranked solitaire player in the world, Diamond reportedly mastered the demanding game on long, cold nights while working as a sheepherder on California Mesa in the 50s. In 2001 he retired from professional solitaire to pursue a doomed career as a Tango singer in 2013. These days Diamond raises miniature emus on his 10,000-acre ranch high above Colona and where he still plays cards.
“We’re real lucky to have him in town,” said Rooney, who will perform card tricks until someone has a better idea of how to spend the evening. We’re actually neighbors up near Buckhorn. He’s a lot more fun than those surfers that used to live up here,” she said.
“He’s not used to playing solitaire in front of all these people,” smiled Rooney. “We hope he won’t let the crowd rattle him at tense moments of play.”
A native of Iceland, he changed his show name from Avril Balboa Bergstol to Pinky Diamond at the end of the Spanish Civil War. After that he enjoyed great success coaching and now has embraced organic education. Most recently he has gained attention for his failed efforts to convince livestock as to the benefits of Daylight Savings Time.
“We fervently hope solitaire will gain the attention much deserved in the arena of international sport and recreation here on a local level,” quipped Rooney. “It may be the last chance we get to bring quality entertainment to the provinces.”
– Pepper Salte