Sheep, Cattle, and Agricultural Science

I was looking through some of the movies I’ve purchased on Amazon recently. I don’t buy a lot of movies, but some are just a little harder to find and worth having on hand. Two of them are western comedies- A Million Ways to Die in the West and Rustlers’ Rhapsody.

What struck me is that both movies have the same core conflict: cattlemen versus sheepherders. It’s a trope that shows up a lot in Westerns, and it often plays like a joke—something about smelly sheep, or cattlemen just finding sheepherders annoying. But in some movies, it feels like there’s an underlying ethnic tension. In Rustlers’ Rhapsody and maybe a few others, the sheepherders seem to be coded as Eastern European, maybe Jewish. That’s an interesting layer, but at its heart, the cattleman-sheepherder rivalry has a real, practical foundation.

It’s agricultural science.

Sheep and cattle graze in the same places—grasslands. Grasslands are great because they’re a stable food source. You put cattle or sheep on a big open range, and they eat. Simple, right? Not quite. The problem is how they eat.

Cattle munch. They eat the blades of grass, chewing it down, but leaving the roots intact. The grass grows back quickly. Sheep, on the other hand, yank the whole thing up—roots and all. Over time, this destroys the grasslands. Eventually, the grass can grow back, but not fast enough for cattle to return within a reasonable time.

So when a cattleman sees a sheepherder moving in, it’s not just a personal grudge—it’s survival. If sheep go through an area, the land becomes unusable for cattle, maybe permanently. That’s the real reason you see this conflict show up again and again in Westerns. It’s not just about smell or stubbornness—it’s about the land itself.

Gay Cowboys of Fallout: New Vegas

The days are getting longer, the temperature warmer, and the snow is less than three feet deep.  It’s almost spring time here in New England, and that means my mind and gaming habits turn towards raucous outdoor adventure.  I recently fired up Fallout: New Vegas, a game as much about surviving in the wilderness as it is about blasting mutants, and was greeted by the mustachioed face of my smiling, badass, gay cowboy.

Yes, you read that right.  Fallout: New Vegas is a game that rewards you for playing a friendly gay cowboy (mustache optional) in a world where cowboys and rangers are fighting Imperial Rome over the Las Vegas strip (yup, that’s more or less the whole plot).  Here’s how you do it:

First, be Good Natured.  Taking this perk at first level deducts points from all of your combat skills while increasing many of the important non-combat skills like First Aid, Speech, and Barter.  Sounds bad for a gunslinging cowboy, but you are only going to want the cowboy-oriented combat skills (guns & melee) so it’s easy to move points around to get all the wild west wasteland shootin’ and stabbin’ skills you need.

  

Second, you should be into dudes.  Serious.  By second level, if you are male, you can take the perk Confirmed Bachelor which rewards you for your intimate familiarity with the male body to give you +10% damage to the same sex (and a good chunk of your enemies are men), plus the chance to flirt with an occasional wasteland wanderer.

Third, make sure to get good at shootin’ and stabbin’, because by level eight with 45 points in guns & melee you can take the Cowboy perk, giving you +25% damage done by dynamite, hatchets, knives, revolvers, and lever-action guns.  

 

From there you can add in perks like quick draw, gunslinger, and a host of other gunfighter & survivalist perks to round out your cowpoke.  By building a gay cowboy step by step, you get a whopping +35% damage to some of the best some of the coolest weapons on your most common enemies.  Certainly this was a crafty plan of the writers, and I love them for it.

Cowboys; or, What I Learned About Testicles While Researching a Novel

Just over a year ago I decided that I would address a long standing item on my bucket list and start writing a short novel.  The novel would be a western, of course, and I decided that it should have all of the things that I like to read in westerns- vast landscapes, a love of the wild, eroticism, and occasional gunplay.  A few different plotlines came and went, and eventually I settled on a story of small scale range war and two cowboys, once pards, now foes, who fought that war.  Details came together, but one problem emerged when I just couldn’t wrap my head around writing a female character. What the heck, I know that there is a dearth of good female characters out there, but I would go about solving that problem on my second novel- I just had to write one for now.  So there’s the characters, the conflict, the plot, the gunfight, the sex… ah, now we get to the problem with this novel.

I tend not to write things in order, so I just hopped around the outline filling in pieces.  It hummed along pretty well at first, drawing on memory, personal experience, and other western books and movies.  A hike through Oak Creek Canyon stood in for one location, a shootout from Encore Westerns filled in the gunfight in one chapter, and so forth.  I kept skipping the sex scenes, though, because I couldn’t quite wrap my head around how they would work.  There were clear points in the story where the sex scenes should go.  There was a tense almost kiss in the early pages that was easy to write.  I’ve kissed before, and lips are lips.  I took almost all of it from an odd encounter with a friend who may in retrospect not be so lesbian, at least not after a half dozen cocktails.  But the sex?

It doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out what dudes do with other dudes.  Tab A, slot B, etc, etc.  Easy enough to find out what it looks like in the vast pornographic engine of the internet.  I could probably write bouncing genitalia, but what I really want to write is characters and how they feel.  This is, alas, a rare problem that is not solved by internet porn.  There was always the option of asking gay friends, but I couldn’t think of anyone I knew well enough to ask real details from.  There is a big difference between having someone over for dinner and asking that someone “so what do you think about while you do it with another dude?”  Finally, I decided to go to the source, as it were, and bought a book of erotic short stories about gay cowboys entitled, appropriately enough, Cowboys: Gay Erotic Tales. 

I learned two important lessons from reading these stories that I will take with me in my writing.  First, gay men (or the straight women that read gay porn) have a much different view of genitalia than I do.  I figured that there would be some exaggerated descriptions of extraordinary phalluses, and there were a few.  What I was not prepared for was the focus on testicles.  At least once in each story there was a loving description of a cowpoke’s balls: hairy or smooth, high & tight or low & wrinkly, hefty, large, or epic in scope.  There are apparently no small testicles in the land of gay cowboys.  The bigger, the better; I had no idea.

The second lesson that I learned was that even the hack writers that contribute short stories to erotica anthologies are better writers than me.  Really, these things are almost all well written considering that they are essentially porn.  It is amazing the kind of character development that you can spin out in a dozen pages, particularly when half those pages are devoted to fucking.

While I learned a few bedroom (or haystack) gymnastics and some alternate views on genitalia, what I really got out of reading Cowboys: Gay Erotic Tales was the notion that short erotic fiction is still fiction, and you can leave the pages feeling like you’ve been inside the characters, so to speak, even if you did leave those pages a bit sticky.

Slap Bacon

"Slap some bacon on a biscuit and let’s go!  We’re burnin’ daylight!"

-Wil, The Cowboys, as quoted in the 2011 Daily Bacon Calendar