Yes, you read that right. Here’s the story, and it’s not as sordid and you might have been wanting.

In my freshman year of college at the University of New Mexico, my fraternity brothers learned that Playboy magazine was going to be on campus to do a photo shoot for next year’s male college fashions. The magazine was conducting interviews at the UNM Student Union for student models to wear clothes that were expected to be the “in” look for the following fall.

I went to the interview with another member of my fraternity and spent a few minutes talking to a rather voluptuous woman from the magazine staff, then left. After my fraternity brother completed his interview, he told me that the woman confessed to him that she had found me “darling” looking. I would have hoped for “handsome” instead.

At any rate, I got a call the next day that I had been selected for the photo shoot and would be paid a whole $50 for my services. That was about a semester’s amount of beer money at the time, so I jumped at the chance.

The clothes they gave me to wear were hideous. It was a moss green corduroy set of pants and a matching top, with leather lacing on the chest. I looked like Robin Hood without the triangle cap and a protruding pheasant feather. Errol Flynn would have laughed hysterically.

I was matched with two young, wholesome looking, fully-clothed coeds and stood on a rock while one of the girls twiddled with my lacing and the other hugged my arm. I struck a serious pose while hiding disdain for my sartorial trappings. I am attaching a photo below to prove this actually happened. I often wondered what happened to the two coeds who posed with me. Having to explain that they had been in a Playboy photo shoot carried much more baggage for them than me.

The magazine came out the following fall and I was a bit of a celebrity in my family and in the fraternity for a brief period of time. Then the memory mostly went away and the beer money was long gone.

However, it was always a useful topic in later years when at “get to know your co-worker” sessions, you would be asked to reveal something about yourself that others would never suspect.

I had told the story about 40 years later to one of my skeptical co-workers, Valerie, who thought it was hilarious. While I had no proof of my claim, she set out on a mission to find a copy of the magazine with my photo in it. Some time later on a business trip to Seattle, she came across a store that kept old magazine issues and after digging through stacks of musty publications found the September 1966 issue.

I still have it as proof of my hidden salacious background. And if everyone has one minute of fame and this was mine, it was pretty lame.

For several years, my long-time fly-fishing buddy Bill and I used a guide on the San Juan River who was quite the character. He would work on his guitar music in the winter, then guide on the San Juan in the spring, summer and fall, living in what we suspect was not much more than a lean-to on the banks of the river. He was a philosophical and gentle soul, and we wonder what has become of him.

One of his passions was Marilyn Monroe, and on one of our outings, he proudly announced he had accumulated a “buttload” of photos and other paraphernalia about her. We interpreted the word “buttload” in the most pejorative of meanings and I have used the word since them to describe a large amount of mostly noxious “stuff.”

Well, it turns out that buttload is a real word. I discovered it by accidentally flipping through an online news post the other day describing things that you probably never knew.

Here’s what I found online from some source I’d never heard of called “Ponder Weasel:”

“A Buttload is an Actual Unit of Measurement. Okay, the measurement isn’t actually a buttload. It is the “butt” that carries historical measuring significance. From the Italian word botte, the word for cask or barrel, the word butt came to into being as a unit to measure wine and other alcoholic beverages.”

There are lots of other citations on the subject on Internet if you choose to waste more time reading them after already wasting time on my post, but suffice to say, it was an unexpected find for me.

Full disclosure: The word does NOT appear in my 10th edition of the Merriam Webster Collegiate dictionary.

So in the future, when you want to sound just a little bit spicy, you can use the word “buttload” in normal conversation. Once the shock to your listener is over, you can then initiate a follow-up conversation to prove how erudite you are about the word’s meaning and origin. And you can thank me a “buttload” for this valuable information.

Last week, police in Roswell apprehended a California man on charges of kidnapping, robbery and carjacking. Taken to the police station to face further questioning, the suspect — wearing a blue jumpsuit from the Chaves County detention center — managed to break free from officers and run away.

About two hours after the escape, police issued an alert saying the suspect had been spotted on a security camera no longer wearing the blue prison jumpsuit, but a red skirt and a colorful scarf on his head. In addition, he was carrying a pink purse.

A photo of the suspect in the Albuquerque Journal shows him sporting a mop haircut and a distinctive red beard.

At the time of this posting, the suspect is still at large, apparently still making a fashion statement in Roswell.

It’s said that most pilots can sense the smallest nuance of change in the performance or “feel” of their aircraft. Being attuned to these clues usually results in quickly identifying the source of the change so necessary safety measures can be taken, if necessary.

I experienced one of these incidents many years ago while flying my hot air balloon on a ride I had offered to a local newspaper editor and his son.

While hot air balloons are not nearly as complex as fixed-wing or rotor aircraft, they do give the pilot signals when something is not quite right.

When you engage the burner of a hot air balloon, you often feel a bit of a jolt in the basket from the blast of propane-fueled flame. Burners are the incredibly powerful engines of hot air balloons, producing millions of BTUs and enough heat to raise the temperature inside the balloon’s envelope to more than 200 degrees in a matter of a few minutes.

On this particular flight, I could feel a much stronger jolt each time I hit the burner, followed by a quivering sensation on the floor of the basket. My first instinct was to check the rigging between the basket and the envelope, then the fuel system and its various components.

I saw nothing, but continued to feel the sensation. Not quite ready to declare an emergency, I looked around once more and observed my passengers — and there was the problem.

It seems that the younger passenger — probably 10-11 years old — had a fear of heights he had not been aware of until he was flying in an open basket several hundred feet above the ground. Each time I hit the burner, he jumped slightly, then began quivering in his knees until the sense of doom temporarily subsided. I assured him and his father that all was well and that we would land as soon as possible.

With that assurance, the jolt and quivering seemed to subside significantly. After a few more jolts and quivers, we found a nice open field in which we landed safely. I believe the young passenger literally leaped out of the basket upon landing. If he could have done so without embarrassing himself, I’m sure he would have kissed the ground.

The City of Sunland Park, located on the Mexico-New Mexico Border just west of El Paso, has gained a bit of a reputation over the years as the poster boy for bad local government.

Because of constantly changing managers, elected officials, clerks and police officers, stability has not been a phrase used to describe city government staff in the small community.

Perhaps its most memorable chain of staffing events occurred about seven years ago when the mayor at the time admitted to signing contracts on behalf of the city while he was intoxicated. Then later, apparently oblivious to the fact that there were convenient airline connections between nearby El Paso and Washington D.C., he drove a city car cross country to the capitol, got lost at one point and ended up in New York, then completely missed the meeting he was scheduled to attend. He still billed the city almost $2,400 for his trip. Figuring that the jig was up, he resigned and the city council appointed a successor.

The successor, it turns out, had previously been convicted of bribery, extortion and taking kickbacks. Because of his conviction, he could not be allowed to receive the oath of office from the sitting town clerk.

Undaunted, the city council tried again, only to select a successor who had to resign 10 days later because the meeting at which he was appointed did not follow proper procedures.

I’m wondering if some day, the Sunland Park City hall will have to add a new wing for a wall large enough to contain the names and photos of all the previous mayors — and maybe a “most wanted” poster board.

On Monday of this week, I received mail from an organization called the “Neptune Society.” My first thought is that because of my interest and involvement in fly fishing that it might have some connection with fly fishing for bonefish or permit in the flats of the Caribbean. Okay, I thought, I’m intrigued and I’ll take a peek.

I guess I should have been a bit suspicious because it was postmarked from Kutztown, Pennsylvania, a town I had only heard about because of a rugby team my NMSU squad once played in a collegiate tournament. As I recalled, the town (and Kutztown University of Pennsylvania) were hopelessly landlocked somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania, nowhere near an ocean.

Upon opening the mail, I discovered it was a solicitation for cremation services.

“We provide simple cremation at an affordable price without any of the unnecessary services many people don’t want,” it proudly announced.

This triggered many questions. How “affordable” would it be to ship my body to Kutztown? What are “unnecessary services”? Return of my ashes to loved ones once you’re torched? A container other than a Ziplock bag to hold what’s left of me? Burning my corpse over a buffalo dung fire to save the expense of gas or electric utilities?

What was also concerning is how they had somehow identified me as someone close to kicking the bucket. They had my correct name and address and got it from some mailing list that I suppose was labeled “Persons ready to check out at any minute,” or “Has been in the hospital fairly recently for heart surgery,” or “Anyone over 70 who lives in an area with a high COVID-19 infection rate.”

They offered to send me their “latest version of our cremation book” which I think I’ll skip. I’m not that desperate for reading material right now. I do, however, appreciate the mailing because it gave me something to write (and think) about.

Stay safe, and I hope you don’t get any mail from the Neptune Society. Your number could be up soon.

In the chaos surrounding our election, you may have missed the story about a French bulldog named Wilber being elected as mayor of the town of Rabbit Hash, Kentucky.

https://apple.news/AGRIqeVrVRWm0lkgvtjCUdw

Well, Rabbit Hash, Kentucky has nothing over Vaughn, New Mexico in efforts to empower four-legged furry friends.

In 2012, a police offer in the tiny central New Mexico town stepped down after he pleaded guilty to charges of assault and battery.

Then, to make matters worse, the police chief was charged with selling a rifle owned by the police department and pocketing the money for his own use. He was forced to resign.

That left Nikka, a certified and deputized drug sniffing dog, as the only remaining official member of the Vaughn Police Department.

I’m not sure how long Nikka stayed in her position of acting chief and what crimes she may have solved during her tenure, but the pooch probably saved town a lot of overtime pay by just accepting a few Milk-Bone treats now and then for her duties. And it’s not clear she ever learned how to drive the town’s squad car. If she did, I’ll bet her growl and a bark were more effective than the unit’s siren.

In the past several weeks, I had been thinking of calling my long-time friend and banking colleague Tom Mobley to see how he was doing. I also had a bit of an ulterior motive, wondering if he might need me to do grunt work at his ranch in the fall to help sort cows for vaccinations, help with branding or test them for pregnancy.

It was, as my son once said, a chance to go to a fantasy cowboy ranch for a day, to get real cow **** on my only occasionally used roper boots and wear ranching duds. (I only wore a baseball cap, not a Stetson).

But the real reason was that I really liked being around Tom, hearing him talk and learning from him. He was, in the most sincere terms, one of the most genuine person I’ve known.

Tom died of COVID-19 on Monday. He was a few years older than me, but he was not one of those people who get an asterisk by their name suggesting it was caused by “underlying conditions.” He was in good health, worked harder physically than I’ve probably done in all my life and didn’t deserve to die at his age. It is a real tragedy that he is gone.

Tom had more integrity than about any other person I’ve ever met. He was a stickler for details, could be bull-headed with his opinions and he and I knocked heads more than once on issues. In retrospect, I realize he was usually right on the position he took.

He was the person who unlocked the door at the bank for me on the first day I reported to work. He helped my wife sort through some details on how to deal with her family farm in Nebraska. He was good humored about my constant teasing about him being an “agricultural relic” to be considered as an exhibit at the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Museum.

I could go on and on, but everyone who knew him has a story. I’ve attached a link to his obituary below:

https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/lcsun-news/obituary.aspx?n=thomas-noah-mobley&pid=197044415&fhid=7156

But the real point of this blog is to urge you to call someone if you’ve been thinking of them lately. Tom would have appreciated my call to catch up with him. I didn’t make it, and I feel sad about that.

In 2012, a sheriff’s deputy in Luna County spotted a battered vintage Honda Civic driving erratically and carrying four passengers — one of them rather unusual looking.

He stopped the very small car and found two men in the front seat and another man in the back seat. The man in the back seat was clutching a 220-pound calf in an already cramped space.

The sheriff’s deputy promptly arrested the three men for suspicion of cattle rustling. I’m assuming the calf was released on its own recognizance and hopefully returned to its rightful owner in an appropriate and cow-dignified ride — something like a three-quarter ton a Ford F-250.

Assuming the already marginal Honda Civic was seized during the arrest, I’m sure the cost of cleaning up the interior far outweighed its value. And speaking of weight, I’m sure its springs were shot too.

No, I’m not that old — well almost. Read on.

In the late 1960s, New Mexico became a hot spot for “hippie” dropouts, most of them ending up in communes near Taos and Santa Fe. As you might expect, many of these people had interesting stories about why they joined the counter culture and moved to the Land of Enchantment.

As a journalist during that time, I wrote several stories for United Press International about the communes and the people who lived in them, including one about a character who lived in a commune near Placitas north of Albuquerque. He claimed to be Ulysses S. Grant, re-incarnated.

This self proclaimed Grant, after having fought in the Civil War and served as President of the United States in the 1800s, said he had come back from the spiritual world to run for Governor of New Mexico. So being a journalist whose job was to provide coverage of all things political, I drove to Placitas with my college roommate at the time to interview the candidate. He met me outside his adobe and wood hut, one of several in the compound, introduced me to his wife and then agreed to be interviewed. He had long hair, a scraggly beard, a twinkle in his blue eyes (as if hiding a secret we had already guessed) and wore blue and yellow-striped U.S Cavalry pants of the Civil War era.

The interview took place as he walked though the pinon and juniper sprinkled landscape of the Sandia foothills. At one point, he decided he needed to relieve himself, stopped in the middle of his conversation and took a leak in a large open space where anyone could see him. I politely stood behind, understanding that his moment was staged for shock value.

I don’t recall a lot of his political platform, except that he vowed that the state would build no more roads under his administration as governor.

“We already have enough roads,” he declared.

When I tried to dig into his “real” past and where he had come from, I got nowhere. Several people who seemed to know about him suggested he had been a professor of history at some Midwestern liberal arts college and left when his views became a little too radical for the school to tolerate.

We concluded the interview, and then he announced that he was not going to be able to do much campaigning in the future because his horse “Blue” had contracted the flu and couldn’t travel very far. As expected, his candidacy never made much of an impact other than generating the occasional headline about oddball things in New Mexico.

I wrote the story, forgot about him and then several weeks later he unexpectedly showed up at our apartment in Old Town Albuquerque. How he got there wasn’t clear, since Blue wasn’t anywhere to be seen. My roommate (who was a bit of a pot-head and had arranged for the visit unbeknownst to me) drove the General around Albuquerque in his spiffy Triumph Spitfire sports car. When he came back from the tour, he announced that my roommate’s ride was “way cooler than Blue” and wished that he had that kind of transportation during the Civil War. I went to bed, a little bit worried. They stayed up late and I think they smoked pot together, which is what I believed was the main reason for the visit. When I got up next morning, he and the elusive Blue were gone. My roommate, still snoring in his bed, missed yet another class.

About a year later, police reported that “Grant” was being sought as a suspect for a murder in his compound. It seems someone else in the commune had been involved in a romantic incident with his wife, and in the heat of an argument with his wife’s suitor, fatal shots were fired.

Grant disappeared and as far as I know, has neither been seen again in New Mexico nor arrested for the shooting. Someone speculated that he shaved off his beard, trimmed his hair, put on a tweed jacket, whipped out his PhD to return to the academic world. Maybe he found a fixer like the guy in Breaking Bad who could send anyone into permanent obscurity.

In the 1970s when I was Santa Fe Bureau Chief and State Political Editor for United Press International, I covered eight sessions of the New Mexico Legislature. I met and wrote about many colorful characters and incidents during that time.

One of those that stands out occurred when the Senate was debating a proposed law to ban certain pornographic materials and in the course of that debate, began sliding down the slippery slope of defining what exactly constituted pornography.

A long-time Democratic Senator from San Miguel County (Las Vegas) stepped up to introduce an amendment to correct what he considered to be a typographical flaw in the proposed legislation. The lawmaker, Junio (not Junior) Lopez, was probably keen on correcting spelling errors since his name had probably been misspelled many times by those who thought there should be an “r” at the end of his unusual moniker.

One section of the bill said pornography could clearly be detected if any photograph or artwork showed “pubic” hair. Lopez proposed an amendment to correct the spelling to “public.”

When a fellow lawmaker pointed out that the word “pubic” was indeed the word that was intended, a somewhat embarrassed Junio withdrew his amendment to the sounds of muffled snickering in the senate gallery and on the floor of the Senate.

I can’t recall what finally happened to the proposed legislation, but I know the lawmakers did “get the L” out of the bill. In retrospect, maybe Junio was just trying to make sure that “public pubic hair” was something most of us didn’t want to see.

My WordPress program, which I use to create my website and post blogs, does not have an easy way to go back to read earlier blogs. You can do it, but it’s a cumbersome process. You have to go to the oldest blog that shows on the blog page, open it, then click on the “previous post” link to see the blog that was posted previously. Then to get to one from a few weeks or months back, you have to keep repeating the process. As I said, very cumbersome. I am working with WordPress to see how I can make this easier, but so far, I have not been able to figure it out.

In the meantime, I’ve attached links on this page to some of the blogs which received the most response so you can look at them again or for the first time if you’re new to my website and blogs. Let me know if you have any comment at:

patrick@aero-cordero.com

Previous Posts:

https://wordpress.com/post/aero-cordero.com/261

https://wordpress.com/post/aero-cordero.com/267

https://wordpress.com/post/aero-cordero.com/9

https://wordpress.com/post/aero-cordero.com/322

https://wordpress.com/post/aero-cordero.com/427

https://wordpress.com/post/aero-cordero.com/416

https://wordpress.com/post/aero-cordero.com/488

https://wordpress.com/post/aero-cordero.com/512

https://wordpress.com/post/aero-cordero.com/613

https://wordpress.com/post/aero-cordero.com/805

Some of you may remember a blog I wrote a few weeks ago about a good friend of ours who stunningly discovered she was dead, even though she felt very much alive and looked just fine to us during a Zoom meeting. It turns out that an online ancestry search listed her as having kicked the bucket in 2011. Luckily for all of us, we’ve confirmed that she is still breathing, ambulatory and in good spirits. The mystery of why she ended up in the “reduction in population” column is still unresolved.

Well, perhaps this happens a lot more than we thought. A recent article in the Albuquerque Journal says a woman riding a bicycle along city streets last week was struck and believed killed. An officer investigating the incident even went to far as to check the “deceased” box for condition of the victim on the official report he filled out about the accident.

It turns out that the woman was rushed to a local hospital in critical condition — maybe proclaiming “I’m not dead”* on her ambulance ride there — and this week was listed as “recovering.”

If you read between the lines of the Albuquerque Police Department response, it suggests they may have told several people that she had died before determining she was actually still with us.

“Due to an error in the report, we would like to extend our apologies to the family and hope she makes a full recovery,” a police representative sheepishly announced.

As far as I know, our good friend still has not received a similar apology from the ancestry site which said she had expired. I’m glad she and the bicycle rider are still with us.

*See the Monty Python and the Holy Grail clip in my previous blog below: https://wordpress.com/post/aero-cordero.com/805

About a month ago, residents of our quiet neighborhood learned that the city was planning to cut down a large number of trees growing along an iconic street that is a beautiful gateway to the area. The trees overhang the street, forming a canopy that is especially refreshing in the hot summer and spectacularly colorful in the fall.

After residents heard about the plan and complained, the city hastily put together a Zoom presentation (leaving little time for citizen input) justifying their decision to start cutting by the end of this month. The trees, they explained, were dangerous, rat infested and interfered with utility lines and a small irrigation canal along the street. My suspicion is that the utility company’s desire to reduce its maintenance costs had more to do with this than citizen complaints. It was interesting that representatives of El Paso Electric were in attendance during the Zoom meeting, but remained silent during the presentation.

Before the residents were invited to the presentation, we noticed a small number of trees marked with ribbons and later spray-painted with orange dots on the trunks. At first, we assumed these trees would be the ones that would be cut down — again, working from no previous information about the project and hearing rampant rumors about its scope. The dots and ribbons, as finally explained, were showing only the trees that would be saved. By my best estimate, I suspect that about three-quarters of the trees along this stretch of Conway would be felled by axe or chain saw.

The city has now backed off a bit, vowing only to initially cut down the dangerous or dead trees along the route. I’m okay with that — there are some that clearly need to be removed or pruned back. But there are lots that are not marked — meaning they likely will be cut down eventually — that look healthy and valuable to the landscape of this neighborhood. We are now told there will be a first phase and a second phase of tree removal. We will have the opportunity to provide “input” on phase two, as I understand it from city officials.

So here’s my thought. What if neighbors bought a can of spray paint and spritzed an orange dot on the trunk of each and every tree along the street? Now please understand, I am not condoning this activity and do not plan to participate in something like that. However, it makes you wonder what might happen. At the most, it will just serve to confuse and slow down the process. At the least, I hope it would give the city a chance to reflect about the process in which it was not entirely forthcoming about the plan to perform an “agent orange” tree removal in a very lovely neighborhood.

In the meantime, I can tell you where to buy cans of orange spray paint.