In his personal account of life with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), award-winning author Ken Patterson richly illustrates the way in which the symptoms of ADD curtail the ability of an intelligent man to succeed in the most ordinary of life's events. He reveals the subtle complexities of coping with situations most people take for granted.
Bored with the usual cattle mutilations and earthling abductions, The Alien Captain and his daring, gray explorers head to Kansas to participate in a crop circle contest. Unfortunately, due in part to a gray navigators poor self-esteem and hereditary earwax problems, another crewmates random Tourettes-driven outbursts, and The Alien Captains obsession with meeting William Shatner at an upcoming Star Trek convention, the grays unintentionally pilot their flying saucer into The Shite Black Hole. Transported back in time the hapless travelers crash in a remote spot in Americas southwest. Having no other options, the grays accept an offer from the Roswell Airfield intelligence officer, Major Marcel, to stay in the bases plush, underground quarters. It soon becomes apparent, however, that Marcels seemingly generous offer comes with a condition: the U.S. Army wants the grays to build a working flying saucer. Initially, they accept this offer, but soon find they are not up to the task of constructing an interstellar spacecraft. The grays also quickly discover they are not actually guests, but prisoners. Their hosts promise of free room and board and all the bowling they can handle is not everything it is cracked up to be. Wanting to return to their home planet of Gliese 581 c., the grays feign the need for a break from spaceship building. They convince Major Marcel to take them on a day trip to Carlsbad Caverns, where they commandeer an army air corps bus and escape to Santa Fe in hope of contacting Gliesean kinfolk manning The Emergency Earth Operations Center for Stranded Graynauts. This is a story of what happens when a happy-go-lucky space trip turns into a not-so-happy-go-lucky road trip. It is the story of barbecuing under a million stars with a ray gun. It is the story of visiting a roadside museum in the desert where sometimes visitors are put on display. It is the story of what it is like to make a mailbox that looks like a UFO. In short, it is the story of what it is like to be an alien in an alien world. But most of all, it is the story of what really happened at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.
One of the world's top players addresses nearly every aspect of the popular 5-string banjo style known as clawhammer or frailing. Chapter themes include fundamentals; advanced and experimental techniques; arranging and backup; how to play reels, hornpipes, jigs and other fiddle tunes; how to approach such genres as ragtime, bluegrass, klezmer, blues, calypso, and a wide variety of national and regional music; alternative tunings; setup and accessories; and historical background. Features 120 tunes along with numerous exercises and musical examples in crystal clear tablature; all tunes illustrated by author on two accompanying CDs.
Ingemar Johansson's right hand--dubbed "The Hammer of Thor"--was the most fearsome in boxing, and Johansson's three fights with Floyd Patterson rank among the sport's classic rivalries. Yet most fans know little about the Swedish playboy who won the world heavyweight championship with a shocking third round knockout of Patterson and held it for six days short of a year (1959-1960). During his reign, the raffish "Ingo" hit fashionable nightspots on two continents, romanced Elizabeth Taylor, and refused to kowtow to the mobsters who controlled boxing. This first-ever biography of Johansson chronicles his fistic triumphs as a Goteborg teen prodigy, his humiliating disqualification for "cowardice" at the 1952 Olympics, his storybook romances with Birgit Lundgren and Edna Alsterlund and his post-career life and tragic early dementia.
At the low-water bridge below Tom Miller Dam, west of downtown Austin, during the summer of his tenth or eleventh year, Ken Roberts had his first encounter with cedar choppers. On his way to the bridge for a leisurely afternoon of fishing, he suddenly found himself facing a group of boys who clearly came from a different place and culture than the middle-class, suburban community he was accustomed to. Rather, “. . . they looked hard—tanned, skinny, dirty. These were not kids you would see in Austin.” When Roberts’s fishing companion curtly refused the strangers’ offer to sell them a stringer of bluegills, the three boys went away, only to reappear moments later, one of them carrying a club. Roberts and his friend made a hasty retreat. This encounter provoked in the author the question, “Who are these people?” The Cedar Choppers: Life on the Edge of Nothing is his thoughtful, entertaining, and informative answer. Based on oral history interviews with several generations of cedar choppers and those who knew them, this book weaves together the lively, gritty story of these largely Scots-Irish migrants with roots in Appalachia who settled on the west side of the Balcones Fault during the mid-nineteenth century, subsisting mainly on hunting, trapping, moonshining, and, by the early twentieth century, cutting, transporting, and selling cedar fence posts and charcoal. The emergence of Austin as a major metropolitan area, especially after the 1950s, soon brought the cedar choppers and their hillbilly lifestyle into direct confrontation with the gentrified urban population east of the Balcones Fault. This clash of cultures, which provided the setting for Roberts’s encounter as a young boy, propels this first book-length treatment of the cedar choppers, their clans, their culture and mores, and their longing for a way of life that is rapidly disappearing.
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