Smart, Horny, Foolish, Outdoorsy

I started writing in this blog years ago as a way to define what I liked most about westerns.  While my enthusiasm to write regularly has waned, my enthusiasm for westerns has not.  My definition of a “western” is quite wide, meaning almost anything taking place between the late 17^th century and the early 20^th century on a North American frontier.  It was while reading The Dakota Cipher, third in William Dietrich’s series about Napoleonic era rapscallion Ethan Gage, that I stumbled upon the recipe for a perfect western.  A perfect western should take place in the time and place described above, and have a hero who is smart, horny, foolish, and outdoorsy.   

Allow me to explain.  A good yarn should allow the audience to identify with the characters and at the same time have elements of wish fulfillment. 

I have a fondness for main characters that are smart and horny, because, well, that’s me.  It sounds pompous to say that I’m smart, but it’s true (despite what a lack of solid proofreading in this blog might suggest).  As to horny, a quick tour through this blog (particularly anything tagged Randy Cowpoke) will show that is an apt description as well. 

Foolish?  Let’s instead call that prone to acting with without thinking, and the start of the wish fulfillment phase.  I typically think before acting, drink very little, never gamble, and rarely exceed the speed limit.  Frankly, it’s boring, and in fiction I love when otherwise smart characters leap into danger without forethought as I long to do, especially when their boldness is rewarded when danger slaps them upside the head.

Let’s turn outdoorsy into at home in the wilderness.  The older I get the more handy I become in the woods, the desert, the mountains, the river, and with a kayak, tent, fire, and axe.  I’m still no mountain man and would probably go under after a week alone in the woods (mostly because of my cardiac issues).  In my dreams, though, I read the wilderness like the back of my hand as I stride through the plains and can capably fell deer and owlhoots alike with a smokestick, tomahawk, or my bare fists.

So let’s take a look at some of my favorite characters and how they stack up.

George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman

Smart, stupidly horny, undoubtedly foolish, but although his adventures often take place in far flung frontiers he is much more at home in the parlor. 

Any hero in a Louis L’Amour story

Smart and outdoorsy to a man, but rarely horny and seldom foolish.

Robert E. Howard’s Breckenridge Elkins

Somewhat horny, very foolish, so outdoorsy he barely fits between four walls, but Breck can hardly be considered smart (I’ve mapped him out as a D&D character many times, never with an intelligence greater than 7).

William Dietrich’s Ethan Gage

Now this is the stuff.  Gage is smart.  He’s a savant, a scientist of the Ben Franklin persuasion, known as a master of electricity in a world still lit by candles.  After a spell at Harvard he spent time as a fur trapper in the Great Lakes, learning woodscraft, sharpshooting, and tomahawking.  Gage then made his way to Paris during the Revolution, and picked up the habit of leaping into danger, usually also involving first leaping between the legs of whatever woman happened to available at the time.

Gage is “lazy as an aristocrat, but without the manners,” and finds himself in various adventures across the globe, often as not tied to ancient mystical conspiracies.  In one spectacular tale (the aforementioned Dakota Cipher) Gage tumbles in and out of Louisa Bonaparte’s petticoats before hightailing it to the wilderness of North America, running from cultists and British spies while searching for, of all things...

 

Don't fuck with Thor's hammer

Sadly, I don’t believe that Dietrich managed to take Ethan Gage back to North America over the course of the series, which was cut short at eight books out of a planned fifteen.  Gage does set a high bar for the smart, horny, foolish, outdoorsy hero that I love to read about.

General Lee Would Have Hated the Confederate Flag Bikini

To celebrate the 150^th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and the collapse of the Confederacy, I’d like to share some facts about the flag we today think of as the Confederate flag.

First, the flag with two diagonal blue stripes on a red background commonly believed to be the flag of the Confederacy is NOT the flag of the Confederacy. It was the battle flag of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and was later incorporated in part into the Confederate flag in 1863.

Second, Robert E. Lee was a deeply conservative man who would probably object to women wearing his battle flag as a bikini. 

Third, as much as people take pride in the battle flag today, your ancestors probably didn’t.  Desertion was a huge problem in the Confederate army, described as “more damning than slaughter” to the CSA’s fortunes.  Over 100,000 Confederate soldiers, some 10% of the troops in uniform, deserted, and many more wanted to desert or tried and failed.  If you have ancestors that fought for the Confederacy, there is a good chance that they either deserted the army or wanted to, so wearing a Confederate battle flag isn’t honoring them, it’s representing a symbol of a system that trapped them.

Fourth, the secession of the Confederate States may have been about States Rights, but the only states rights issue that mattered in the 1860’s was slavery.  Name me one other that ever came up in the antebellum debates in the 1840’s &1850’s; the arguments of apologists from the 1920’s “glorious cause” era and forward don’t count when compared to the statements of people who live in the time.

Fifth, no matter what you think you are symbolizing when displaying a Confederate flag on your wall, your truck, or your body, it is at its heart a racist message.  The man who brought the battle flag into the main national flag put it on a white background because, “As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause.” —William T. Thompson (April 23, 1863), Daily Morning News

Quickshots- Yellow Hill: The Stranger's Tale

I really tried to like this short film but... ugh, it is terrible.  Brutal, ugly, painful, no fun at all.  Which is a shame, because it stars Bai Ling, an actress that I really enjoy and don't see nearly enough on the screen.  Yellow Hill is a 15 minute short tale of revenge and people doing horrible things to each other.  The schtick is that it involves a Chinese woman in the West, rather than the white woman who is usually victimized in twisted and ugly revenge tales, but that variation alone doesn't rescue the film.  It can be seen over at Vimeo, on Facebook, or the vid below, but why would you want to?  If anyone out there likes it, let me know why.

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.