Knight By-Line

While Sir Hook was busy drawing a blank the other day (and while I was busy all day with the image of actually “drawing” a “blank”), Sir Paul of Lyon was being published in his local paper. Well, actually his article appeared in the Sunday edition of the Princeton, Kentucky Times Leader.

Paul drew on his experience as a nature volunteer and hiker to give us a glimpse into the natural beauty of his little section of this great kingdom: Land Between the Lakes, Kentucky. It's always great to see words of our Knights pop out of the Moleskine (or whatever journal you use) and into the public eye.

I hope you all take the time to read it:

http://www.timesleader.net/articles/stories/public/
200804/06/4KII_sports.html

And don't forget to visit Paul and Sonja's Sugar Tree Valley; It's a great Knight get-away. Check out their site at:

http://www.sugartreevalley.com/

Sir Bowie of Greenbriar

The Good, Bad and the Cowboy Knights

Once again Sir Dayvid of Oxfordshire reminds us of how small our world really is and that England and America share much in common, especially when it comes to beer drinking scoundrels and those fortunate enought to live life to the fullest.

"Sir Hook. It seems the scion of my relatives from the Carr family... that got washed up on your shores...were not just content to get shot for throwing snowballs at the Redcoats in Boston, but instead got on their horses and rode West and made a bit of that thar gold in them there hills. Records show that one of the Carpetbaggers made it as far as Cripple Creek, Wyoming where he appears in records to be partners with a guy called Kuykendall and became a Stockmen, owning vast tracts of land, ranches and cattle in 1884, even having their own cattle brand that I have found in an old book of Western Cattle Brands in a second hand bookshop. Remarkably it seems that old habits die hard and Carr decided to use the shape of a shield as his brand to mark all his cattle.

Kuykendall and Carr became so rich that they started a transportation firm of stagecoaches, and when the railroad came overland to California they not only purchased track but sold huge amounts of their land for use by the railroads.

My search peters out a little after that, but I do find archival records that the predecessors of Carr and Kuykendall, possibly their fathers or uncles, John Carr and Matthew Kuykendall, joined the US Army in Wyoming and fought at the Battle of San Jacinto just after Alamo in 1836. At this point I find out that John rather let the side down and became a deserter. Hey, he wanted a beer and a bit of peace to drink it in...fair play to you John...

Americas short history is a mighty landscape to search through. Ride em Cowboy!"

Sir "Buck" of Oxfordshire

Hitting the "Save" Key on a Moleskine

I want to take the opportunity to thank the founders of this extraordinarily good blog for giving me the opportunity to contribute. I hope to write my best and offer my best--or as Hemingway put it: "All I have tried to do is write the best I can... some times I get lucky and write better than I can."

At any rate, I was writing on one of my Moleskine cahiers today, going about 120 mph and at one point it seemed like my hand wanted to automatically reach for the Ctrl+S key combination and save what I had written. Of course, this comes from a long history of losing stuff I typed back in the day. I started working with computers when DOS was 1.o, and the best thing you could get on a PC of the day (possibly a x386 if you were lucky) was WordPerfect. Remember WordPerfect? I remember losing a great deal of typing--research papers, love letters to a certain senorita South of the Border, my letter of intent to join the U.S. Marines back in 1985, etc. I lost it all, and I mean all. All you had to do was try to print your document without first hitting F10. If you were lucky, you could do both things, and all was right with the world. Forget to hit F10 before hitting F7 and you could be in for the ride of your life in the "Wordlight Zone." Nowadays, I hit Ctrl+S just about every other even-numbered second or so.


And writing down my thoughts today when in reality I was supposed to be paying attention at a conference proved the ultimate test: listen to what was being said, write the next great American novel, listen to what was being said, write the next great American novel.... and every few seconds or so, hit Ctrl+S on my Moleskine! Cheers mates!

Sir Joseph Gould of Exeter