I read with amusement a story about the Roswell, NM, Police Department’s new logo which incorporates the town’s identity with a famous UFO incident and aliens. If you’ll recall, U.S. Army Air Force officials at then Walker Air Force Base in Roswell reported that an alien spacecraft had crash landed on a ranch northwest of the city on July 8, 1947.

The Air Force quickly debunked the story, claiming the debris found on the W.W. Brazel ranch was from a crashed weather balloon. That quickly spiraled into conspiracy theories that continue today about “little green men” and alien spacecraft visiting our planet.

As you can, see the department’s logo promises to protect and serve “all those that land here.” As someone who is sensitive to the proper use of grammar, I did notice that the logo used the word “that” instead of “who,” which to me was used in deference to possible otherworldly beings or spacecraft that might want to visit the southeastern New Mexico city again.

This reminds me of the statue in Winslow, Arizona, that is “standin’ on the corner…” from the Eagles song “Take it easy.”

As the song goes:

“Well I’m-a standin’ on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, and it’s such a fine sight to see. There’s a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford, slowin’ down to take a look at me.”

My very good friend Joel Diemer, a retired professor at New Mexico State University, had a similar idea to help capture the spirit of a town’s character with a project linking historic Route 66 with Tucumcari, NM.

Tucumcari is about the halfway point on the “Mother Road” of U.S. 66 which ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. It’s a legendary highway that has had much written about it along with various songs.

Although Interstate 40 now dodges Tucumcari, the old path of U.S. 66 runs through the town. Joel’s idea was to have a section of the old highway paved with unique tiles that would include a person or group’s name and link to a technical method to replay a recorded message of their memory of U.S. 66. Visitors to the site could have heard many fascinating stories about their personal link to the “Mother Road.”

“It would have made Tucumcari more of a destination,” he said.

Current travelers along Interstate 40 mostly zoom by Tucumcari these days, maybe only stopping at an easy off-on exit for gas or snacks. With Joel’s idea, Tucumcari would have been more of place you’d make time to see and hear about.

I even traveled with Joel to Tucumcari several years ago to talk with local officials about the idea. They seemed to like the idea, but unfortunately, it did not make much progress and seems to have died. It may have been too futuristic for some people to grasp but more likely as Joel said, it was about the money.

“It seems like in New Mexico, if you don’t have a good source of up front money for ideas like this, they won’t go far,” he lamented.

Maybe we could incorporate a similar idea in Roswell, where people who claim to have been abducted by aliens could have their recollections recorded in tiny space capsules placed inside one of the old hangars at Walker Air Force Base. And don’t forget that Elvis Presley’s old private jet haunted the former air force base for years. Maybe we could even conjure Elvis back from the dead to record…

No wait, that’s a little too farfetched. I’ll let Joel come up with the good ideas.

A single wheel cover from a 2000s vintage Ford van or Super Duty truck has been languishing on our street for the last two weeks with no takers. It seems to be in decent shape and I suspect a new one would cost more than $200. With the number of Ford vans and big pickups I see roaming around our town, I’m surprised no one has picked it up.

It reminds me of the time our friends, Dave and Gloria, had a nice Volvo that was missing a hubcap/wheel cover. There was a place in Albuquerque called Hubcap Annies that sold all sorts of hubcaps and wheel covers that had been found along a road or turned in from an owner who bought fancier wheels for their ride. I found a perfectly matching Volvo wheel cover, which needed some refurbishing, so I bought it for not much money, spiffed it up and installed it on their Volvo. The car looked great. But the next time I saw Dave, he told me that the wheel cover flew off shortly after it was installed during his trip back to Santa Fe. So much for doing good deeds.

Anyway, I’ll keep hoping that someone rescues this wheel cover to reunite it with an appropriate truck or van.

_________________

It’s a never ending story. When I was a kid in elementary school, I was known for the number of jackets I lost there. My exasperated parents finally ended up always buying me the cheapest jacket they could find, hoping it would be warm enough to keep me from freezing during the cold Ruidoso winters.

On our trip to Ruidoso last week to check up on the Trout in the Classroom project at White Sands Elementary, I found this box in the school hallway.

I think kids this age just get distracted when they dash out to the playground or scramble out of the classroom to catch the bus at the end of the day. Again, nothing ever seems to change for some of us who have short attention spans.

________________

Our church has been asked to help a border ministry serving immigrants who have come into the El Paso area in recent months. The specific thing they were requesting this time was footwear for men — especially larger sizes. I picked up a pair of inexpensive 11 1/2 athletic shoes at Wal-Mart and took them to the church to deposit in a box with other shoes that had been donated for the cause. When I looked in the box, I found these.

I’m sure these will be especially helpful to a 275 pound guy trying to wade the Rio Grande or trudging across the desert near El Paso.

_______________

And finally, I’ve been sort of offended by recent mailers I’ve been getting about the need to buy my burial plot or pay up front for cremation services. It’s called target marketing, and I am clearly in the old geezer target segment now.

A couple of weeks ago, I got another mailing equally annoying regarding my advancing age. It was inviting me to be a “UFO.” To become a UFO, you have to be a pilot of more than 80 years old and join a group called the “United Flying Octogenarians.” While I’m several years away from that 80-year mark, I could still claim membership now as a member of the “Auxiliary Wing.” Once they discovered that I am a hot air balloon pilot, I doubt they would let me participate anyway, so I think I’ll pass for now. However, identifying myself to people as a “UFO” does have some conversational appeal.

Okay, I know you’re getting tired reading about my Trout In the Classroom project at White Mountain Elementary in Ruidoso, but I have a really great story about my checkup on the school last week.

My wife and I were planning to drive up to Ruidoso for the day last Friday to see if we could help with anything and to pick out a date when the fish might be released from the aquarium in the third-grade classroom of teacher Michelle Thurston. (Under the Trout Unlimited Trout In the Classroom program, students raise fish in an aquarium in their classroom, then release them at the end of the semester in a nearby stream or lake.)

Before we left, I got a message from another teacher, Rachel Lutterman (known by her peers as the “Trout Queen”), that they had somehow misplaced or lost the two larger sizes of trout food that was needed immediately for the now inch-long rainbows darting around the tank. It’s a very specific food, and I was pretty sure goldfish chow from PetCo wouldn’t work.

Then I remembered that the Mescalero Apache Tribe has had a trout fish hatchery for years and it was on my route from Las Cruces to Ruidoso. I’d heard that tribal fisheries programs often operated at arms length from state and federal fish agencies, but I thought I’d give the hatchery a call to see if they could spare some size two and size three trout chow.

To my great pleasure, the people at the Mescalero hatchery were eager to help out with the problem in getting food for the fish in Ruidoso. They agreed to let me have a small bag of the second and third size of trout chow that I could pick up on the drive to Ruidoso. When I got there, the two individuals I dealt with were extremely helpful and supportive. They even gave me some stickers to give to the students at White Mountain Elementary and urged me to invite the students for a tour of the facility in the future.

The two helpful individuals were Tori Marden, assistant manager of the facility, and Robert Morgan, administrative assistant. It was really rewarding to have such great cooperation between our organization, Trout Unlimited, and the Mescalero Tribal Fish Hatchery.

Next, it was on to Ruidoso, where we got to school just at the end of the school day with the appropriate trout food ready to go into the tank before the weekend.

Before we headed home, we got to take a look at what the third graders have done during the Trout In the Classroom project. Their work is pretty amazing. There’s an entire wall in the school dedicated to the project, shown below, that shows their artwork, some stories they wrote about trout and a timeline for development of the fish.

It was also fun to read the students’ stories they wrote about what they thought it would like to be a trout. One of the kids was conflicted about the matter, saying he liked to eat trout, but obviously didn’t want to be someone’s meal. Another wondered what it would be to be like swimming in the tank with weird creatures staring at you all day. And another thought she would find it entertaining to play in bubbles in the tank that are formed by the aerator.

Although the one of the teachers said they would avoid giving the fish names “because they’re not pets,” some names have come up. Among them, “The Big Kahuna,” for its large size, “Big Eyes,” because of its oversized eyes and “Baby Shark,” because it seems to be constantly nipping at some of the other fish in the tank.

As one of the kids’ stories read:

“Hi, my name is Baby Shark. I got this name because I started biting my cusins (sic) and sisters botums (sic). (Because I am the king of the Trout, or at least I was for about two seconds.)”

And for anyone who may be worried about what’s going on in public schools these days, you would feel very encouraged by the enthusiasm of the six third-grade teachers who took on this project. They’ve done a great job in teaching kids about fish, the environment and taking responsibility. I would have been proud to have my own kids in their classrooms.

I wrote in an earlier blog that I my father once told me that Lincoln — honoring the former President — was being considered as the name for our state. I was never able to confirm that story, but I wondered what it would have been like to call the historic town of Lincoln “Lincoln, Lincoln.” With apologies to David Letterman, it was kind of like his line: “New York, New York, a town so nice, they named it twice.”

I recently searched on Newspapers.com recently for any more clues about this matter and found none. But I did find some interesting stories from 1884 about the town in a long-defunct local newspaper called the “Lincoln Golden Era.” There were only three editions I could find, all within the months of July and August of 1884, a few years after the end of the Lincoln County War.

The first story which caught my eye was this two-sentence entry into the editor’s column:

“The village blacksmith’s horse ran away Monday evening. The result: No one hurt but the horse, and he seemed awful sorry of it.”

There was no further explanation of why the wandering equine was “awfully sorry of it.”

There was also a story about a “trout fishing party” that had come to the Lincoln area from Las Cruces. Accompanying them were officials of the Mescalero Indian Agency and about 25 students from the Native American school in Mescalero. The newspaper said of the students:

“They were well dressed and quiet and as well behaved as the average civilized kid.”

So much for political correctness in the 1880s, I guess.

Also in the “New Era” was a depiction of the brands for several local area cattle ranchers, among them Pat Garrett, the sheriff who killed the infamous Lincoln County War outlaw Billy the Kid at Fort Sumner on July 14, 1881.

There was also a brand for legendary western cattleman John S. Chisum, shown below:

A colorfully worded letter to the editor also caught my eye. The writer was venting against an individual who had somehow spread rumors against him. The nature of the rumor was not disclosed in the letter, but the contents leave little doubt of how the writer felt:

“Mr. Editor: I hope you will allow me space in your valuable paper to reply to this low, cowardly ear of curs who has not got the courage to come face to face and tell what he has to say, but goes behind the press for a shield. Ladies are unprotected from the vile wrath of this low bred, narrow-minded, water brained, red head Ananias.”

I had to look up Ananias, and discovered it referred to “an early Christian struck dead for lying.” And once again, in the old West, so much for pleasantries.

But what really piqued my interest was an editorial in which the newspaper owner announced that from this point on, his publication:

“…may be set down as a Democratic organ in the future, devoted to the interests of the party and laboring the best it knows how… “

He goes on:

“Heretofore, we have been a Republican, but as numerous members of the party have done, we repudiate the nominees on the national ticket*, believing that in the event of their election (which the Lord forbid), no greater calamity could befall this free and glorious country of ours.”

Didn’t I just hear something like that last week — from politicians of either party? So here we are, 130 years later, and nothing much has changed.

*The Republican nominee for President in 1884 was James G. Blaine, who was defeated by Democrat Grover Cleveland.

On Memorial Day a few years ago, I wrote a blog about Lt. Hans Chorpenning, a cousin of my wife’s mother*, who died on his first mission aboard a B-17G bomber shortly after D-Day in 1944. It was a tragic story of a handsome young man, willing to serve his country in a job that had very low chances of his survival. It’s not unlike thousands of other stories of brave young men and women who died in World War II.

We recently started watching “Masters of the Air,” a series streaming on Apple TV about men in the 100th Bomb Group of the U.S. Army Air Corps who flew B-17s over Europe during World War II. The series, produced by Tom Hanks, Stephen Speilberg and Gary Goetzman, is based on the book of the same name by Donald Miller and is similar in presentation to the series “Band of Brothers.”

Hans’ squadron was the 349th, which was part of the 100th Bomb Group. I highly recommend the series for anyone interested in World War II, especially to learn about the bravery and almost insurmountable odds of survival these young men faced during their missions to stop the Nazi war machine.

In my first blog, I said Hans was navigator on a B-17G named the “Terrible Termite.” My wife did some more research and discovered that the plane’s name was “Pack of Trouble.” We originally thought that the plane was hit by fire from a German fighter plane on June 12, 1944, near Dunkerque and exploded over the English Channel. Further research by my wife showed that the plane’s right wing was instead hit by German flak which started a fire between the No. 3 and No. 4 engine. The right wing broke off, but one crew member, George Sherback, was able to parachute out of the plane before it exploded. He was captured by German soldiers, held in a prison camp and later liberated.

In a memory of the event written by Sherback, he noted that Chorpenning asked him to wait a minute before bailing out to see if a crew member who had been injured in the foot could be helped. When the injured man said nothing more could be done to save him, Sherback bailed out. Chorpenning apparently hesitated a little longer, possibly still hoping to save his buddy, and died seconds later in the explosion. In “Masters of the Air,” there is a similar scene where a crew member trapped in the B-17’s ball turret could not be released by another crew member who concluded he could no longer help and bailed out. That plane crashed a short time later and the ball turret gunner died but the crewman who parachuted lived. It seemed that the slightest hesitation, for whatever reason, could cost you your life during these dangerous missions.

Chorpenning was posthumously awarded the Air Medal and Purple Heart and his body is in the “Tablets of the Missing” section of the Ardennes American Cemetery in Belgium.

We have not finished the series yet, but we’ve concluded that it’s highly likely that Chorpenning knew some of the men of the 100th Bomb Group who were featured in “Masters of the Air,” even though he was on duty in England such a short time before his life was cut short. We hope to learn more as the series continues.

A humbling lesson that I’m getting out of the series is the amount of bravery and sense of duty these men possessed to fly these missions day after day, knowing that the odds were stacked against them.

And another takeaway is the sadness that we still have to face wars around the globe because of men like Hitler who think they have the right to rule the world.

*He may have been my wife’s “second cousin, once removed.” Someone once tried to explain “second cousin once removed” to me and I looked it up online. I’m still confused and probably got it wrong. I guess I should just say Chorpenning and my wife Margo were “related.”

My wife and I drove to the site of old Fort Cummings in Luna County northeast of Deming this week. We’d heard about it in the last few years and learned more about it from good friend Jack Wilson. Jack is a retired archaeologist, historical researcher and author who submitted a nomination to have the site placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. * The fort was established in 1863 primarily to defend locals and travelers from Apache Indians who roamed that part of southwestern New Mexico. It was abandoned in 1873, then occupied again briefly in the 1880s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Cummings

After reviewing several articles on the Internet about the old fort and looking at Google Earth maps, we set out Wednesday in our four-wheel-drive GMC Sierra pickup along with our dog Chester. As several of the internet articles warned, the road was very rough and not fit for normal passenger vehicles. Nevertheless, after a few miles of jolting bumps over large rocks and small gullies, we came to the site and discovered many interesting things.

All that’s left of the old fort are some crumbling adobe walls, some rock walls and the cemetery. All of the soldiers buried in the cemetery were later re-interred at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and there is only one gravestone left. It tells the story of four soldiers who were killed by Apaches on an excursion to get firewood.

The Fort’s site was chosen because of the location of Cooke’s Spring, one of the few reliable sources of water between Mesilla and Tucson. And old well house is still visible, along with a rock corral used by the Butterfield Overland stage that also went through this spot.

The spring and site was found by the Mormon Battalion, which began in 1846 at Council Bluffs, Iowa, and ended in San Diego, CA, in a march by the only religious detachment in U.S. Military history. The battalion, which served in the Mexican-American War, was led from Santa Fe through southwestern New Mexico by Philip St. George Cooke, who en-route named Cooke’s Peak, and the spring at the southeastern end of Cooke’s Range, after himself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_St._George_Cooke

While I was a journalist in Santa Fe in the 1970s, I knew Cooke’s great grandson, also called Philip St. George Cooke (III), who worked as an information officer for the New Mexico Parks Department. He was an interesting and memorable character, as I am sure his namesake was. The elder Cooke became a Union general in the Civil War.

As I mentioned earlier, the spring was also the reason for a stage stop along the Butterfield Overland Mail stage route through the southwestern United States. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfield_Overland_Mail

This route eventually became part of the Wells Fargo stage route, and for many years, I worked for Wells Fargo and helped bring replicas of the famous Wells Fargo stagecoaches for events in New Mexico.

Another Interesting thing we discovered in researching our trip was that the son of John Butterfield, who established the Butterfield Overland Mail stage route, was credited with writing the music for “Taps” which is the military bugle song played at the end of the day and at military funerals.

Also of interest is that at Fort Cummings, “Buffalo Soldiers” — black soldiers — were stationed there and at Fort Selden just north of Las Cruces. One of those soldiers was Cathay Williams, a woman who disguised herself as a man to serve from 1866-68 at Fort Cummings. She is believed the be the first black woman to serve as a soldier in the U.S. Military in the 19th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathay_Williams

And we discovered this final interesting personal connection. At some point during Fort Cummings history, an attempted mutiny was staged. When the soldiers who attempted the mutiny were put on trial, their attorney was Thomas B. Catron, the infamous “Santa Fe Ring” lawyer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_Ring who represented Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall during Teapot Dome scandal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_B._Catron

My wife and I knew his great, great grandson, Fletcher Catron, when we lived in Santa Fe in the 1970s. As I recall, Fletcher frequently took time to defend some of the suspect dealings in which his great great grandfather was allegedly involved.

It just goes to show that when you start poking around with New Mexico history, you’ll never know what you might find.

And of course, the only history that interested Chester was the trail of where a jackrabbit might have run across the desert earlier that day.

*Jack says the Bureau of Land Management, on whose land most of the old fort rests, never took action on his proposal to place the property on the National Historic Register. The BLM has placed some signage with historical information around the property but a more robust interpretive display along with a better preservation plan would be appreciated by visitors.

I frequently skim through weird things in the newspaper that I suspect most people never look at. One of them is the list of new patents granted to New Mexico businesses or individuals that is posted in the Business Outlook section of the Albuquerque Journal.

Last week, a couple of things in that listing caught my eye.

One was for a patent for “Phosphorylation of Syntaxin 17 by TBk1 controls autophagy initiation.” Wow, that left me speechless and wondering what the heck it was.

I looked up Phosphorylation and found it is “the addition of a phosphoryl (PO₃) group to a molecule.” Okay, I’m still in the dark.

But here’s what a phosphoryl group looks like, if you’re interested:

 Got it now? Nope, me neither.

I did a little more research and found that Syntaxins are “nervous system-specific proteins implicated in the docking of synaptic vesicles with the presynaptic plasma membrane.”

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere — I think.

I looked up autophagy and found it was “the natural, conserved degradation of the cell that removes unnecessary or dysfunctional components…”

Given that this patent application went through the University of New Mexico’s Rainforest Innovations center and thinking that it has something to do with human cells, I suspect it is a medical advancement helping to clean up something bad in your body — probably cancer.

Here’s a link to the UNM Rainforest Innovations Center if you want to look at some really interesting research underway:

innovations.unm.edu

But the great juxtaposition of this scholarly research next to the following patent approval really got my attention.

It was for a guy from tiny Pie Town, NM, who had been awarded a patent for a “hose manipulation instrument.” Really, that’s what the listing said.

I kind of recall that someone had already invented something like that. As a matter of fact, I think I have two of them. But I certainly don’t have anything that “controls autophagy initiation.”

For the third year in a row, our dog Chester made the wrong pick about who would win the Super Bowl. He picked the San Francisco 49ers over the Kansas City Chiefs — although he did dither for a few moments before running off with the red ball that was the 49ers token.

I tried to talk to him about how he made this mistake, given that he had spent so much time analyzing statistics, past records, results of the Puppy Bowl and the Taylor Swift factor.

This is how he responded:

Yes, that is a look of remorse for failing to guide you, good readers, on where to put your money for the big game. I think it was the Taylor Swift factor that threw him off. Chester, of course, loves everyone, and goes bonkers when he sees someone he really likes. We think he concluded that Travis Kelce would do the same when he saw Taylor Swift in the sky box at the game and would be unable to focus on his duties as a tight end.

Now, we’re having to deal with a bewildered dog wondering what his true purpose in life might be. Oh wait, he just got a treat — everything is forgotten now.

Next, he’ll probably be pondering the Chicago Cubs chances of winning another World Series in 2024. Good luck with that, Chester.

The Albuquerque Journal had an article recently about a contest to name snowplows in the New Mexico Department of Transportation’s fleet. After the NMDOT reviewed almost 1,600 suggestions — many that had a New Mexico twist — I’ve included some of the ones that made the cut:

• Sleetwood Mac
• Darth Blader
• Bis-Snow-Chito
• Mr. Snow-It-All
• Better Call Salt
• Billy the Skid
• SnowZobra

So If we can name snow plows, why not garbage trucks?

How about:

• Landfill Filly
• You Only Take Me to Dumps
• Flies with Ten Wheels
• The Sheriff of Rotting-Ham
• Dump Blonde
• Trash-A-Rito
• Waste Away from Burritoville
• I Am Your Mother (Cleaning Up After You)
• Trash Gordon
• Smelly Sally
• The Crap Nebula
• Dump Bunny
• Garbager Harbinger
• Trash Bandicoot
  

And from the Rock Group collection:

• Trashing Pumpkins
• Trash Mouth
• Garbage (Yes, there was really a band named that)
• Trash Test Dummies

And from the financial sector:

• Trash Cow
• Trash Flow
• Trash is King

Okay, these are pretty cheesy. I’m sure you have better ones. So send me your suggestions and the winner will get a plastic bag of our last week’s kitchen garbage and I’ll repeat your suggestions (nothing too political and assuming I get some) in a future post.

(And a trout update)

I sense that many of you have been huddled around your computer in the last few days anxiously awaiting the news that Chester, our rambunctious Goldendoodle, has made his annual Super Bowl pick. Well, your wait it over.

As you can see below, Chester took this task very seriously. The photo below shows him just minutes before making his selection, contemplating the odds of each team winning, analyzing team data and statistics and most importantly, contemplating whether the Taylor Swift factor was going to come into play.

As usual, Chester is given a choice between two differently colored squeaky balls to grab after they are tossed to him in our back yard. This year, the Kansas City Chiefs were represented by a yellow ball and the San Francisco 49ers were represented by a red ball.

The video attached below shows him in action. The sound is bad because it was so windy the afternoon of Chester’s pick.

As you can see (sort of of) Chester went for the red (49ers) ball first, although he did dither back and forth between it and the yellow ball several times after his initial pick. In the end, he ran off with the red ball, no doubt hoping we would chase him down and reward him with a treat.

And now for the complete disclosure: Chester has failed to correctly pick winner of the Super Bowl in the last two years.

Let your conscience (and your bookie) be your guide.

                   ______________

And now for the trout update. The alevin have now grown into fry at the White Mountain Elementary School “Trout in the Classroom” project. They have been moved from the nesting baskets into the main 55-gallon aquarium and are starting to swim around.

Teacher Rachel Lutterman sent me a video, where she says you can see one of them swimming, but I could not see any movement. However, I’ve attached a clip from the video where you can clearly see the outline of a fish on the bottom of the tank.

Stay tuned for more developments.

Wave The Wonder Dog, who fetches the tee for the New Mexico State University Aggies after every football kickoff, is entering the transfer portal and plans to go to Vanderbilt University.

Yep, you heard it here first. I completely made that up, but let’s see if it ends up in social media somewhere. Heck, it might even come out in the Presidential Campaign.

Wave even has his own Facebook Page, so if he’s already so famous, why couldn’t he go for a big NIL (name, image, likeness) deal with his own dog food chef, a limo to get him to games and a comfy couch on the sidelines to rest on in between kickoffs.

https://www.facebook.com/WaveTheWonderDog/

His fame is well deserved. At the 24th Annual American Kennel Club Humane Fund Awards last year, Wave received one of five awards for “hard working dogs that have significantly improved the lives of their owners and communities.” Not only that, Wave is also a member of the Mesilla Valley Search and Rescue Organization.

So after NMSU football coach Jerry Kill and Aggie quarterback Diego Pavia scampered off for greener pastures in Nashville at Vanderbilt, why shouldn’t Wave have that same opportunity?

I asked my good friend, retired professor Dr. Jim Peach and former faculty athletic advisor Jim Peach, about the rumor.

“That would be awful,” he said, clearly understanding that I had made up the whole thing and understanding the significance of such a dire possibility.

I’m sure it won’t happen. And after what seems like almost everyone in Aggie football heading out to the transfer portal, Wave might be the only thing we can look forward to during the 2024 football season at NMSU. That’s assuming we score and get to kick off to the opponent at some point during the game.

As my friends know, I’ve been a BMW fan for years. We purchased our first one, a metallic red 2002, on European delivery back in 1975. We picked it up at the factory in Munich and drove through Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and France before dropping it off in Paris to be shipped home.

Since then, I’ve owned a dozen more in various models and sizes and currently have two — my 1975 hobby car below and an X3 driven mostly by my wife.

BMWs can be expensive to maintain, particularly if you have an older high-end model out of warranty and you don’t want to do some of the work yourself. Luckily, the last three that I’ve owned have been virtually trouble free.

The car that made the most nervous was a used 1988 735i, a beautiful cruiser for long distance touring. It had a strong reliable engine, graceful suspension and responsive transmission, but it was manufactured at the beginning of use of a lot of electronic features which had not yet been completely sorted out by car makers. When the car was first parked, you could hear a two-minute cycle of multiple ventilation doors somewhere deep inside the dash closing and opening. Beneath the back seat and in the trunk was a collection of electronic black boxes that I had no idea of their function. Troubleshooting the electronics for the ventilation system and then repairing any one of the malfunctioning doors would have meant hours of dashboard removal at a cost that would easily have been more than $1,000. A fellow BMW owner told me he had once spent more than $1,500 to repair the electronics on a power seat on his 735i, and that was at least 20 years ago when that amount was not just a drop in the bucket.

I finally decided to sell it when the reader board at the bottom of the instrument cluster randomly began giving out instructions in German.

“Bitte schließen Sie die Tür,” it instructed me one day. (I was later able to translate it to “Please close the door.”)

“Sie haben wenig Benzin” was another instruction warning me that I was low on gas.

Analyzing what was wrong with the then primitive electronics was not something I could do myself, and it might have cost more to fix the reader board than the car was worth at that time. So I parted ways with it, hoping that the next owner would find the occasional lapse into German amusing and not frightening as I did.

I mention this because I spotted a funny post a few days ago that a very expensive new Porsche model was having difficulty in translating from German to English.

Or maybe Porsche has developed a new feature that surrounds drivers with pads occasionally to give them a “break” if they decide to take a nap while using driverless cruise control. But apparently the feature only works if you’ve changed the “brake” pads in your $150,000+ German sports car.

When I first got news that the first few trout eggs hatched at White Mountain Elementary School in Ruidoso, I was very excited that the project was coming to fruition. The teacher told me: “We have Alvin!!”

I think she meant to say they had “alevin,” which is the word for newly hatched trout or salmon. But I though it sounded cool to say that the kids had named one of the first fish “Alvin,” so I passed that along as fact.

I offer my apologies for the scrambling of words, but I’m glad to announce that all but maybe two of the 35 eggs have hatched and will soon be transferred from their nesting baskets into the large 55 gallon aquarium.

I’ll keep everyone posted as the “Trout in the Classroom” project moves forward.

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And on another important note, be sure to watch for news of the dramatic moment when Chester, our Goldendoodle picks the winner of the Super Bowl. We toss him two squeaky balls, each one in the color of the two teams competing, and the one he picks will be the winner.

So far in the last three years, he hasn’t picked the winning team. So if you’re a betting person, I’d put your money on the team that Chester doesn’t pick.

But since both teams’ colors are primarily red this year, he might actually make the right pick this time.