I spent a large part of the weekend working on rodeo pictures, both for the paper and for here. In my usual style, it'll mostly be pictures.
OK, do you want to be a cowboy? Here's some of the stuff they do. First up, a really wild bronc ride. First the horse arches his back ...
... Then his legs fly out in all directions ...
... and then he stretches out in classic rodeo style ...
... and the cowboy has to hang on and complete 10 seconds. This guy did a very good job.
Of course, sometimes the broncs chalk one up. One cowboy, going down!
Here's a cowpoke whose horse decided to be a pogo stick--he basically kept jumping up and down. And how about that hang time!
Even if the cowboy survives 10 seconds, he then has to find some way to dismount safely. That's where the pickup men come in, giving him a hand ...
One of my favorite events is the calf-roping, because it requires a lot of skill, both from the cowboy and his horse. Here, the cowboy has thrown out a perfect loop, and the calf is running right under it ...
In this one, the calf is still running, but he's about to reach the end of his rope. Meanwhile, the cowboy's horse has slammed on the brakes, and the cowboy is already dismounting. He had a good time on this one.
And then there are the bulls. This was a wild ride, but the cowboy survived to the end of his eight-second time. The bull bucked, pitched, jumped, spun, but the cowboy hung on.
Two of our three performances this year were at night, and young Abe Lincoln (the one who became president) wouldn't have been able to read by the light of the fairgrounds lighting. Here's a shot I got Friday night, after dark ...
But thank goodness for digital cameras! A little work on the software, and here's the same picture ...
Now you can see that the cowboy is in a little trouble--his hand is still caught in the rigging, and the bull is, shall we say, displeased. The bull has a big size advantage and is spinning.
But riding to the rescue are the rodeo bullfighters, moving in to distract the bull and give the cowboy enough time to get free and get to safety. This cowboy got free and was able to laugh about it later.
Finally, I know some of you ladies wanted to see some nice sexy cowboys. But though it was in the 90s, cowboys wear long-sleeved shirts all the time. But finally I got my chance. During the bull riding Saturday night, one of the cowboys had to scramble up on the fence to get away from the bull. Presto ... one cowboy butt!
Well, he's a working cowboy. You just have to use your imagination a little.
***
I had a rather comic time of it Sunday night, trying to put together a little blog entry. It wasn't much: The past week, what we did (and didn't do) over the weekend. An anecdote or two. Nothing out of the ordinary.
But somehow I deleted a good part of it. Deleted the part that I worked the hardest on and liked the most, too. And by now it was beyond midnight and I was getting tired and I didn't want to make that great a mental investment a second time. So I just shut down for the night and went to bed.
I think it was a lot of excuses why I didn't write an entry for a few days. The last one is that TCM had a series of Buster Keaton shorts on late Sunday night, and I was distracted by them. I'm a major Buster Keaton fan, you know. And they were very good ones. And they distracted me. Enough, apparently, to accidentally delete a large part of that entry.
So in a paragraph or two: Went out to visit my mom on Saturday and got her a few things. She got her copy of "The Cutting Edge" with the English subtitles, so she can enjoy the witty repartee between the hockey player and the figure skater before, during and after they fall in love. It's one of her favorite movies, but she's getting a little hard of hearing.
Wife, son and I saw "Cars." It was better and more thought-provoking than I had expected. (But then my expectations were low; there was something for adults to ponder, after all.)
And we got a little rain in Sunday. Just a little, but enough to create puddles on the street. It was raining while I was trying to write that blog, so maybe that was distracting me, too.
By the way, I've got a few other rodeo pictures to show you. Just in case you think these guys have it easy.
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