Good Ol' Rick Perry!

"Sure, Perry has created thousands of jobs. I'm working three of them."
— joke currently circulating in Texas

LOL! I saw a study that showed the job in growth in Texas is pretty much entirely due to population growth, it's been mostly in the area of required government services: teachers, police, fire, etc.

The sad thing is that it's also true up here. I stopped at a gas station at 4am this morning to get some caffeine on my way to the observatory, was complaining to an acquaintance working there that I don't function well on three hours of sleep. She tells me that she's working three jobs.

We have a very basic problem. The easiest way to add jobs is to expand manufacturing capacity, and we've off-shored most of ours. With the recession 2-3 years ago, a lot of companies found that they can still be profitable with a smaller staff, so they're not seeing a huge need to add more people on when there's no guarantee sales/profits are going to go up. I just read that Bank of America is laying off, as have many other major banks. The country was led down a heck of a rabbit hole, and it's going to be a very long and tough crawl to get out of it, if ever we really do..

Bruce Boxleitner and Cowboys & Aliens

I was in Phoenix a couple of weeks ago for a friend's birthday dim sum. While chatting afterwards with him and his wife afterwards, they mentioned that Bruce Boxleitner, Commander Sheridan from Babylon 5, had written a couple of science fiction westerns. Phoenix and Tucson being what they are with having one of the best used bookstore chains in the country, was able to supply me with one of them. Las Cruces, also having an excellent used bookstore chain (Coas, not that you're likely to come out here), supplied me with the other.

I'm almost done with the first book, and I saw Cowboys & Aliens again yesterday. The similarities are quite significant.

* The hero has no memory.
* The hero has unusual skills (but no alien blaster)
* He remembers a woman
* He has flashbacks
* A woman with full memory helps him
* The aliens are very nasty and will take over the planet


The aliens in Boxleitner's book are more like Predators, they want to hunt and eat humans and THEN strip mine the planet, but still, very close. Boxleitner does a very realistic feeling Tombstone, complete with Earps, Clantons, and Holliday.

Bruce only wrote two books, Frontier Earth, and Frontier Earth: Searcher. I'll be finishing the first in the next day or so and immediately starting the second. They're pretty good stuff, could definitely lay the groundwork for a Deadlands scenario or campaign around them.