Lunch Post: The Meanest Guy in Town [UPDATED]

I’m a sucker for genre media and am continuously thankful the Boy is enjoying them too. Monsters, robots, heroes, villains. I was lucky, growing up in Chicago, to have Channels 32 and 44, low-rent stations that filled their air time with a junkfood diet of B movies, 1960s re-runs, like Lost in Space, Johnny Quest, and Batman, and Japanese imports, like Ultraman and Space Giants. One staple from my childhood that the Boy hasn’t gotten into is Westerns. I loved the cheesy earnestness of Bonanza and the Rifleman (although, my father’s son, I always rooted for the underdog Indians), loved the desert landscapes, the trappings of spurs and quill-work beads, the imperfect weapons that lodged in trees or ricocheted off rocks. I haven’t had many opportunities to introduce Ben to the Western yet, though we’ve watched the Ray Harryhausen glory that is the Valley of Gwangi several times. Its bizarre combination of cowboys, Hollywood-y pseudo-Gypsies, and dinosaurs, is not to be missed.

Uh oh! Beard Dude! I shoulda known. I asked Ben why he wasn’t wearing a cowboy hat and he answered, “He IS; it’s under his long hair.”