Author: Tom Darby

The morning sun rose crisp and bright, fooling a man into believing things might go his way. Folks around here congratulated themselves on surviving Friday the thirteenth without a hitch.

Not me. I’ve learned the hard way that the real trouble starts the next day, and Saturday the fourteenth had a habit of knocking me down and kicking me for good measure.

Today’s plan seemed simple enough—on paper. We’d haul the portable panels and a new chute down to Whiskey Draw pasture, gather the herd of three hundred fifty pairs, and hold them overnight in the permanent corral.

Come morning, we’d start preconditioning the bull and steer calves. But simple plans rarely survive contact with real life, and this plan had folks like Elmer and Clyde Dinkman steering the ship.

The Dinkman brothers were new to ranching, having come into money after selling off some tech company. They’d bought the place with stars in their eyes and boots that still squeaked when they walked. They weren’t bad–just green enough to make the grass jealous.

Things began to unravel early. Charlie, one of the hands, pulled up in his old pickup with a flat tire and no spare.

At least it gave us an excuse to leave the truck parked by the chute where we’d need it the next day. He jacked it up, muttering curses, and left it on the jack while the rest of us set up panels.

“I’m telling you, this layout ain’t gonna hold,” Frank, the foreman, grumbled as he jammed a pin through the end of a gate. “You run that many cattle through here, and they’ll knock it over like a card house.”

He wasn’t wrong. Elmer had drawn up the plans, and it looked like something he’d copied off a YouTube video. When the Dinkmans rolled up in their spotless truck, we’d gone rogue and switched to Frank’s design.

“You boys been busy,” Clyde remarked, leaning against the tailgate.

“Elmer, Clyde,” I said, tipping my hat. “We figured this setup might hold together a little better.”

Elmer gave the corral a long look, then nodded. “If Frank says it’ll work, we trust him.”

Frank stayed behind to finish while I got stuck taking Elmer and Clyde out to the east end to gather. They were eager to play cowboy, even if their riding made me wonder if they’d taken lessons from a carnival pony ride.

We hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards when Clyde’s horse stepped into a prairie dog hole and dropped hard. Clyde hit the ground with a grunt, his hat rolling into the dirt.

“You all right?” I asked, pulling up my gelding.

Clyde waved me off, wincing as he climbed to his feet. “Nothing broken, just my pride.”

“Well, don’t let the romance of ranching get you down,” I drawled, catching his horse. “It only gets more romantic from here.”

By the time we reached the far end of the pasture, the sun was riding high. Elmer tried to help out, but his shouting and the waving of his hat scattered the herd.

“Elmer,” I called, “why don’t you hold up here and keep these cows pointed toward the fence? We’ll work the strays back around.”

“Got it!” he hollered, though how he handled his horse made me doubt it.

As Clyde and I worked the hillside, I caught sight of RJ coming down from the ridge. He had a bunch of cattle I’d meant to pick up, which saved us the trouble. I was about to breathe easy when two old cows bolted southeast, dragging half the herd behind them.

“Damn it all,” I muttered, digging my heels into Sorrely’s sides.

The horse was quick, and we nearly cut them off when he stepped into a badger hole. The world turned upside down as he stumbled into a second hole and went down, rolling over my leg.

“Hell!” I growled, trying to bail, but my spur caught in the cinch, and suddenly, I was getting dragged across the rocky ground like a sack of feed.

“Whoa, Sorrely!” I shouted, but the old fool had panic in his eyes and wasn’t stopping.

“Elmer! Clyde!” I roared as I tried to kick loose.

My spur finally tore free, and I tumbled into the dirt, every bone in my body screaming in protest.

The Dinkmans came galloping up like cavalry in a B-movie.

“Stay down!” Elmer yelled, throwing himself off his horse.

“I ain’t dead,” I grunted, waving him off. “Get back to the herd before they scatter clear to Utah!”

“But—” Clyde started.

“Now!” I barked, levering myself to my feet.

They hesitated, then turned their horses and rode off, leaving me to find my hat and dignity. Frank showed up a few minutes later, leading Sorrely, who looked about as ashamed as a horse could manage.

“You all right?” he asked.

“I’ve been worse,” I said, groaning as I climbed back into the saddle. “Let’s get this damn herd penned before anything else goes sideways.”

We got the cattle in just as the sun kissed the horizon. The next day, I worked the chute with a limp that reminded me why badger holes and greenhorns are a deadly mix.

A trip to the doctor confirmed I broke nothing, though it was a wonder. As I swallowed the first pain pill, I tipped my hat to Saturday the fourteenth and muttered, “Here’s to surviving you, you miserable son of a bitch.”

A Bag of Bad Decisions

VIRGINIA CITY, Nev.–The desert has never been kind to the reckless or the stupid, and Caleb Harman, 31, of Las Vegas, appears to have been both in spades when he rolled through Storey County in the early hours of February 10 with expired tags, a revoked driver’s license, and enough narcotics to tranquilize a minor-league football team.

The Storey County Sheriff’s Office, ever the vigilant custodians of Nevada’s backroads, pulled Harman over for what should have been a routine registration violation. But this was no mere bureaucratic oversight—no, sir.

When the deputies ran his name, the wires lit up like a Reno slot machine: an extraditable felony warrant out of Sparks. The man was already wanted and yet trundling along with brazen optimism.

Then came the pièce de résistance.

A search of his vehicle turned up 25 pounds of marijuana and a baggy of cocaine—an amateur mistake. It’s the kind of haul you expect from a failed drug peddler who thought the rules of reality didn’t apply to him.

If you’re going to drive around with enough contraband to make a DEA agent sweat, you should at least have the common sense to fix your goddamn registration. But no—Harman took the scenic route straight into the jaws of the law, and now he’s cooling his heels in the Storey County Detention Facility, booked on enough charges to keep him tied up in court until the next presidential election.

His rap sheet reads like a cautionary tale–possession of a controlled substance, possession of marijuana, an outstanding warrant from Sparks, driving with a revoked license, and, of course, the ever-classic expired registration. One can only imagine what was going through his head as the cops turned his ride into an evidence locker.

Perhaps it was a moment of clarity, a recognition that he had officially lost the game. Or maybe, just maybe, he was wondering if a store down the road sold license plate stickers and how things might have been different if he’d just made that one simple stop.

It is a well-known fact that what goes up must come down—unless, of course, it’s the price of gasoline in Nevada, in which case the natural order of the universe takes a holiday. While the rest of the nation enjoys a delightful phenomenon known as lower gas prices, Nevada has boldly refused to partake in such foolishness.

Why should we follow the herd when we can march proudly in the opposite direction—right into the loving arms of highway robbery?

According to the fine folks at GasBuddy, the national average for a gallon of gas has daintily plopped itself at $3.09. Over at AAA, they are feeling more generous, setting the average at $3.139. But here in Nevada?

Oh, no. Here, we scoff at such trivial numbers. Our gas prices have chosen a loftier existence this week, climbing 7.6 cents to a comfortable, aristocratic $3.66 per gallon, says GasBuddy, and a downright majestic $3.767 per gallon per AAA. Some might call this an outrage.

We, the proud citizens of Nevada, call it Tuesday.

Now, one might wonder—how does this happen? What divine force compels Nevada gas prices to behave like a hot-air balloon when the rest of the nation is sinking like a rock?

Are we dealing with a supernatural phenomenon? Is there some secret cartel of mischievous oil barons meeting in the back rooms of Vegas casinos, cackling over our misery?

Or perhaps the state enjoys the reputation of being that one guest at the party who refuses to leave even after the lights are off and the host has gone to bed. Whatever the reason, Nevadans have learned to accept their fate. We’ll keep shelling out for overpriced gasoline while our neighbors in the Midwest start seeing their prices drop.

But worry not, dear fellow citizen. We are a hardy people, a resilient people.

And when the day finally comes that our gas prices do go down, rest assured we will celebrate the occasion properly—by waiting in line for hours to fill up before they rise again the next morning.

YERINGTON, Nev. – It was a bad day to be Jason Klipple. The 44-year-old, already branded with the ugly distinction of a Tier 3 sex offender, found himself in the crosshairs of the Lyon County Sheriff’s Office last Friday. Deputies sniffing around a suspicious car like bloodhounds on a hot trail stumbled upon Klipple and discovered he was knee-deep in legal quicksand—failing to register in the county like the law demands.

That wasn’t all.

Further digging revealed that Klipple, a man already on active parole, had been treating his conditions like mere suggestions, racking up violations with reckless abandon. The hammer came down swiftly. He got cuffed, hauled off, and booked into the Lyon County Jail on a cocktail of felony charges: failure to register as a sex offender and violating parole conditions—each one a nail in the coffin of his so-called freedom.

For those keeping an eye on the darker corners of Lyon County, where shadows crawl with the worst of them, the Sheriff’s Office wants your intel. If you have a lead on non-compliant sex offenders lurking in the region, drop a line to the Sex Offender Task Force at SOTF@lyon-county.org.

Keep it sharp, keep it clean, and maybe—just maybe—you’ll help bag the next one.

The bones lay where they had fallen, off Yankee Jims Road, down the embankment, past the reach of careless eyes. They had been there a long time. A woman without a name and no past that anyone could find.

She was twenty-one when she disappeared. Halloween night, 1989. Wendy Abrams-Nishikai. That was her name. They know that now.

For years, the case sat cold. The Placer County Sheriff’s Office tried, but the tools weren’t there. The years passed. The world moved on.

Then, in 2023, they tried again. New eyes. New hands. New science, DNA, and forensic genealogy. Things they didn’t have back then. The California Department of Justice Laboratory found something—a relative. Someone who had been waiting, even if they didn’t know it.

The Sheriff’s Office made sure. More tests. More comparisons. Then, in January 2025, Jane Doe was gone, and Wendy became rediscovered.

The case isn’t over. Not yet. The law doesn’t know how she died or who left her there.

But her family knows now. They have a name. They have something to hold on to after thirty-five years of not knowing.

The Sheriff’s Office wants answers. If anyone has them, they should speak. PCSOTipLine@placer.ca.gov.

A Most Unforgivable Crime

The Storey County Sheriff’s Office, that noble institution dedicated to the science of poor press release writing, has sounded the alarm on a new and terrible scourge: people driving their automobiles in the general vicinity of the road.

Yes, dear reader, it appears that motorists have taken to such reckless behaviors as “drifting within their lanes” and “mountain driving,” two activities so horrifying that one wonders how humanity has survived the last hundred years without simply perishing en masse at the wheel. It goes without saying–if you dare drift in your lane, not out of it, mind you, but within it, you are placing yourself and all of Storey County at risk of some unspeakable calamity.

And, of course, there’s the matter of passing in no-passing zones, which is a crime so egregious that the penalty could run as high as $415—a sum which, when handed over to the government, immediately makes the roads safer through some sort of mystical bureaucratic process we are not meant to understand.

But this raises a question: do these same rules apply to the Sheriff’s deputies, who have been known to drift outside their lanes at unremarkable speeds on official business, like pursuing a sandwich before the lunch special ends? And what of the mighty delivery trucks, which double-park on dear old C Street as if claiming the land in the name of some foreign empire, forcing the rest of us to swerve, dodge, and pray to whatever deity oversees the affairs of hapless motorists?

But let us not forget the fair neighbors of Sparks, where the City Council has a grand plan to address distracted driving. Yes, the good lawmakers of Sparks have taken a bold step forward in declaring war on the deadly practice of doing anything other than driving while driving.

Eating? A menace! Talking to passengers? A criminal offense! Adjusting the radio? Why not drive the car off a cliff and be done with it?

According to the Nevada Highway Traffic Safety Administration, distractions contributed to 3,308 deaths and 289,310 injuries in 2022. One assumes this includes people who sneezed at an inopportune moment or perhaps had an errant thought while behind the wheel.

The Sparks Police Department, ever vigilant, reports countless cases of “unsafe driving due to distractions,” However, it remains unclear whether all the flashing lights in one’s rearview mirror are a distraction when one fails to stop at an arbitrary sign.

The council may pass this ordinance, or they may reject it, or they may send it off to some committee where it will grow old and die, as all good legislation should. But if it does pass, rest assured: the good people of Sparks will finally be safe from the existential threat of sipping a coffee while driving to work.

One thing remains certain—if there’s a way to take the ordinary business of driving and make it more difficult and expensive, you can trust our fine elected officials to find it.

You ever sit at a bar and listen to a guy ramble on about how he’s got it all figured out? That’s what this feels like.

A declaration of beliefs wrapped in the idea that if you don’t agree, you must be either stupid or evil. So let’s take a stool, light a cigarette, and dismantle this sermon like a bad hangover.

“I believe a country should take care of its weakest members.”

Great. But who gets to decide who’s “weak”? And what happens when everyone suddenly becomes “weak” because the system rewards dependence? Charity is noble. Forced charity is theft.

“Healthcare is a right, not a privilege.”

Rights don’t require someone else’s labor. You have a right to speak, but not a right to make me listen. You want doctors working for you at gunpoint? That’s not a right—that’s a hostage situation.

“Education should be affordable.”

Maybe if universities weren’t bloated cash cows stuffed with useless degrees and tenured leeches, tuition wouldn’t be a lifetime mortgage. You want free education? Ask why it costs so damn much in the first place.

“I don’t believe in taking your money and giving it to people who don’t want to work.”

And yet, here we are. “Fair wages” are just a way of saying “let’s let someone else handle the problem.”

“I’m fine with paying my share.”

That’s cute. You and how many others? Because last I checked, the government wasn’t exactly known for using tax money wisely. You’re okay with it going anywhere but “lining corporate pockets”? Have you met the military-industrial complex? The bureaucratic black hole? Your money doesn’t fix things. It just disappears.

“Companies should pay a livable wage.”

Great. So when the price of everything shoots up to match that “livable wage,” are you still going to be cheering? Or will you demand another raise because your “fair wage” doesn’t go as far anymore? That’s the problem with economic justice—math doesn’t care about your feelings.

“I am not anti-Christian.”

And yet, somehow, the only religion that needs to stay out of politics is Christianity. You’re not mad at faith. You’re mad that it’s not your faith being legislated. And before you bring up Sharia Law—let me tell you, this country’s got enough red tape to make that impossible.

“I don’t believe LGBT people should have more rights than you.”

No one does. But when “equal rights” turn into forced participation, speech policing, and lawsuits over wedding cakes, it’s not equality anymore—it’s special treatment.

“I don’t believe illegal immigrants should have the world at their feet.”

Nice pivot, but when you start ranting about “humane ways” to handle it, you’re just sugarcoating open borders. You want to be compassionate? That’s fine, but don’t act shocked when a system built on law collapses when laws don’t mean anything.

“I don’t believe the government should regulate everything.”

And yet, you do. You don’t trust corporations, but you trust politicians to keep them in check? You don’t want bureaucrats in your personal life, but you’re fine with them in boardrooms? The government doesn’t solve problems. It is the problem.

“I believe our current administration is fascist.”

Ah, there it is. The big bad “F” word. It used to mean something. Now it just means “people I don’t like.” Fascism is government control over industry. You demand that the government control industry so congratulations, you played yourself.

“I believe systemic racism and misogyny are worse than people think.”

Says who? Legacy media? College professors? The same people who profit off convincing you that the world is against you? If everything is oppression, then nothing is.

“I am not coming for your guns.”

Sure, but you want “common sense” regulations. You know what’s common sense? The Second Amendment. Because when someone knocks on your door in the middle of the night, you don’t have time to call your senator.

“I believe in political correctness—aka social politeness.”

No, you believe in social control. Politeness is voluntary. Your version has HR memos and social consequences for stepping out of line. That’s not politeness. That’s a leash.

“I believe in sustainable energy.”

Cool, build a wind turbine in your backyard, and let me know how it works out. But don’t act surprised when the billionaire oil guys pivot to becoming billionaire solar guys and nothing changes.

“Abortion is a right and women’s healthcare.”

Not to be an asshole or anything, but aren’t you glad your mom didn’t hold the same opinion as you?

“I believe women should be equal.”

No argument here. But here’s a thought—maybe stop framing everything like women are helpless victims in a world run by mustache-twirling men. Want equality? Stop demanding special rules.

Now, take a breath. Finish your drink. You believe a lot of things. Good for you. But believing something doesn’t make it true, and ranting about it doesn’t make it reality. The world doesn’t run on slogans. It runs on power. And the people with power don’t give a damn what you believe.

The Nevada State Police is at it again, teaming up with the Joining Forces coalition to yank impaired drivers off the road. Sounds noble enough, but you start peeling back the layers, and it reeks of a well-funded sting operation. They throw money at other agencies, like a drunk at a slot machine, hoping for a jackpot that never comes.

Six percent–that’s what roadway deaths have climbed this year, even with all the extra hands on deck. More checkpoints, patrols, and taxpayer cash funneled into a program with results so thin you could roll a cigarette with them. But they keep it going anyway, this time rolling on through February 23, because once a machine starts eating money, it won’t just stop.

Officials say impairment is one of the biggest killers on the road. Ain’t no argument there. But their big plan? More “awareness,” more “education.”

Like another press release, billboard, or public service announcement will keep some washed-up drunk from slamming his truck into another person on the way home from the bar. Meanwhile, the coffers swell, the tickets pile up, and the numbers keep climbing.

Well, I must’ve stirred up quite the hornet’s nest at breakfast this morning. There I was, buttering my toast with all the innocence of a newborn lamb–when I saw my dear wife eyeing me through the tines of her fork.

Naturally, being a man of curiosity—and perhaps a touch of foolishness—I asked her what she was doing. She didn’t miss a beat. “I’m reminding myself,” she said, calm as you please, “what prison might look like.”

A lesser man might’ve dropped his coffee right then and there, but I sipped mine a little slower and made a mental note to sleep with one eye open for the foreseeable future.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — There is a certain beauty in destruction, poetry in letting the whole rotten machine sputter, lurch, and collapse under the weight of its hypocrisy. And if Senator Andy Kim and his Democratic cronies have the spine they claim, they might do the one thing that could make America great again: shut the government down.

It’s almost too perfect. The Democrats, self-styled guardians of bureaucracy, suddenly rediscover the power of sabotage—wielding it like a drunk swinging a lead pipe in a bar fight. Kim is openly toying with the idea of refusing Republican demands to keep the government funded, citing Trump’s apocalyptic gutting of federal agencies as the excuse. USAID, the Department of Education—useless appendages, according to the administration, and if they go under, so be it.

And maybe that’s the angle here. Let them crash it. Let the whole thing fold like a cheap card table in a hurricane. Kim whines about “dismantling the government,” but that’s the point. The bloated corpse of a system has been groaning under its weight for decades, held together by red tape, fear-mongering, and the trembling hands of bureaucrats too cowardly to let go of the illusion.

If the Democrats followed through—if they let the funding dry up and the wheels seize—they’d be doing the work of their supposed enemies. Trump and Musk, those two madmen bent on reshaping America into their images, wouldn’t even need to lift a finger. The government would crumble under its contradictions, a beast too sick to keep dragging itself forward.

And yet, there’s a pitiful inevitability to all of this. The Democrats will hem and haw, threatening to hold the government hostage, only to cave at the last minute like they always do. The Republicans will bungle their way into some Frankenstein’s monster of a budget, filled with half-measures and bloated nonsense, ensuring that nothing ever truly changes.

But if they don’t—if they finally embrace the chaos, if they finally say “fuck it” and let the ship sink—then maybe, just maybe, America might finally get the bloodletting it so desperately needs.