THE REAL LONE RANGER

Some weekend reading...

THE REAL LONE RANGER. “Give me your hand, Bass . . . I want you to accept my revolver and scabbard as a present and you must accept them. Take it, for with it I have killed eleven men, four of them in Indian Territory, and I expected you to make the twelfth.” So goes one of the many tales of Bass Reeves, whose exploits were so legendary they often sound like myth. But the historical record corroborates many of the most stunning details. Some criminals were so afraid of Reeves they turned themselves in as soon as they heard he was after them. He stalked others in their nightmares… To me, Bass Reeves is the greatest frontier hero in American history—bar none. I don’t know who you could compare him to. This guy walked in the Valley of Death every day for thirty-two years and came out alive.” Texas Monthly

BETTER THAN BABE RUTH. Ohtani is a once-in-a-century player in a year when we need to be awed, inspired and distracted. Comparing him to the Babe is no longer enough….A coronation is scheduled for next week. The most amazing baseball player of our lifetime will be crowned as such. Ohtani will take part in the All-Star Home Run Derby next Monday and—if baseball has any sense of justice and theatre—he will pitch and hit in the All-Star Game the following day. He is the first player ever to be selected as an All-Star hitter and pitcher. He will be the star of stars. This is his time. Sports Illustrated

TRYING TO OUTFOX THE GIG ECONOMY. Yanking open the passenger door of the getaway car, he thrusts in his left leg, which gets battered with punches, and then swoops in to ride shotgun with the thieves. God, farther from my kids! Fang starts yelling, “Give me back my phone!” and pushes the door wide with his right foot in hopes of smacking a parked car. The thieves, apparently deciding that some Huawei Mate 20 X phone isn’t worth all this, hand Fang his cell. He jumps out, panting, and then runs and speed-walks the two blocks back to his parking spot. The van is gone… Compatriots speak of Fang as a sort of gigging folk hero. He was one of the top drivers in the ride-hailing industry’s hometown. The guy to emulate. Yet here he is, age 39, in the middle of Jackson Street, screaming and dialing 911. Wired

AMERICAN VIGILANTE. After he killed two people in Kenosha, opportunists turned his case into a polarizing spectacle. The New Yorker

AMERICAN BATTLEFIELD.(A reminder of this one from earlier last year which focused purely on the events in Kenosha). Last summer, in a small Wisconsin city, the country’s fiercest differences collided in the streets—and a teenager named Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire, shooting three people. In the aftermath, a disquieting question loomed: Were these among the first shots in a new kind of civil war… Kenosha had become a battleground for some of the most committed warriors on both sides of America’s ideological divide, and Rittenhouse was now in the midst of it… Behind them loomed Death. Not the Grim Reaper, but rather the demonstrator in the skull mask—the one who had been burning American flags in protest at the Civic Center earlier that night. From this man’s neck chains dangled a last shred of the Stars and Stripes. In the moment captured by the photograph, Death reached toward the Americans with a single black-gloved hand. It was impossible to tell if Death was trying to help or making a claim. For even though Grosskreutz would survive, Death is patient. In the end, all men and nations are owed unto him.  GQ

MAKING AN AMERICAN. One of the earliest beliefs that I still cling to in life is that I was born an American trapped in an Englishman’s body. That is the kind of story you manufacture about yourself when you grow up in a place like Liverpool in the 1980s. The city felt apocalyptic back then—a rotting, dilapidated carcass in grim decline. To survive, I feasted on everything American I could lay my hands on—movies, television, music, books, clothes, the occasional pair of knockoff Ray Bans. They all made America feel like a land where life was lived in glorious Technicolor , as opposed to my bleak reality in the North of England, which was lived in black and white. I know some of this will sound trite. How could I love a nation based on the largely fictional stories, images and myths that it peddled about itself? But that knowledge doesn’t diminish the awesome power they held over me as I was coming of age with the Stars and Stripes and the Manhattan skyline painted as a mural on my bedroom wall. I eventually made the self-deception real by moving here, having an American family and, finally, becoming a newly minted U.S. citizen a year before the pandemic struck. America has played roughly the same role for me that ballet played for Billy Elliott, inspiring joy, hope and laughter. I am who I am because of the lessons about life I gleaned as a kid from that star-spangled flood of pop culture streaming across the Atlantic. As a tribute to my new country on Independence Day, here’s what I learned. WSJ

ROCK IN CHINA. I visited Dusk Dawn Club on a warm spring night in 2019; Xiao Wang, a local riot-grrrl band, headlined. Lead singer Yu Yang howled her indignation in Mandarin, eyes obscured beneath serrated bangs, clawing at the coiled tiger on her tank top. The audience lunged toward her, amber bottles skittering like pinballs between their feet. Outside, the bartender slung cheap cans of Great Leap beer, the sanest choice; the well cocktails were almost farcically heavy pours. Most people drank the beer; a few not-so-subtly slugged from their own bottles of baijiu, a grain alcohol that dates back to the Ming Dynasty and burns like regret incarnate. A shouting match erupted outside, and two men circled each other like prizefighters, scanning each other warily, before bursting into laughter and slamming into an embrace. Later, a DJ put on Motown records and a thicket of bodies danced for hours. It was calamity and euphoria, and I never wanted to leave. This was my last of many nights spent immersed in Beijing’s indie-rock clubs, which teemed with a deviant, madcap passion unlike anywhere else I’d experienced.  Rolling Stone

CALIFORNIA’S SNOWPACK IS 0% OF AVERAGE. Here's what that means. It's another sign that California is in a drought with a historic crisis looming. The state's snowpack, a crucial source of water for the state, is at 0% of average for June 1 after a historically dry winter, according to the California Department of Water Resources.... while the dwindling snowpack is concerning, what's even more alarming is the low runoff levels. He explained that the snowmelt is being absorbed by a parched landscape rather than pouring into rivers and reservoirs. "Based off the snowpack we had at its peak in March, we would have expected more runoff to date," he explained. "A lot of that runoff was sucked into the ground. It never made it into the reservoirs. It got sucked up by the plants and the trees and the shrubs. The runoff we would expect in a normal year didn’t make it into the rivers and reservoirs." SF Gate

WHERE THE WATER GOES. An excellent and highly readable book you should add to your summer reading list."Water is never only about water."A few years ago, at one of Hoover Dam's scenic pull-offs, I stood beside a handful of strangers looking out over Lake Mead. The dam was impressive, but all I could see was the pale ring of bare rock that betrayed how low the water had fallen. Everyone around me was quiet; I thought they were bored until a woman whispered, "So that's it?" and I realized we were terrified.We were right to worry. In Where the Water Goes, David Owen notes "the lake today contains only about thirty-eight percent as much water as it did in 1998," and it will only get worse: Contrary to American ecological inertia, water's a finite resource. It's a particularly pressing concern for the Colorado River, legislated so intensely by water-rights claims that more of its water is spoken for than actually exists. NPR