"Not killed. It was only a gut shot. I'm stronger now with less appetite. " - Pete Hutter, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.

A horse is a horse. Of course. Unless it's a paper mache State Fair ribbon-winning sculpture. Then it's not a horse at all, is it?

I was changing the laundry in the bathroom while The Boy washed the sticky parts of his dinner (pizza) off his normally grubby face.

“Give me your badge and get outta here,” he said, with all the authority a five-year-old Sheriff of the Back Seat can muster.

Huh? I don’t need no stinkin’ badges.

Then I realized. The Boy was quoting a sheriff on The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., which just turned up. It turned up at my house after Amazon.com used their creepy-psychic purchase software to make me drink a glass of merlot (from the Latin roots Mer meaning sea, and Lot meaning how much The Mrs. and I had while chatting that Saturday night) and order this one on impulse.

Dang you, Internet, for catching The Mrs. and I when we were weak and vulnerable consumers. We’re victims, do you hear?

Anyhow, The DVD’s showed up the other day, and I brought them home. The Mrs. looked at them and said, “oh, yeah. I remember that.” We’d pre-ordered them about a month ago.

For background, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. was shown on Fox over a decade ago, and cancelled after one season. It was the funniest Harvard lawyer-turned bounty-hunter to avenge his father’s death science-fiction-western ever. It starred Bruce Campbell, which is fitting for the subject matter.

I pulled my prized DVD out and showed The Boy. “Do you want to watch a DVD with cowboys and horses and trains?”

“No.” Duh.

After duct-taping him to the couch, I put the first episode of Brisco on. The Mrs. went off to work at her job teaching wayward salmon how to swim upstream and spawn. The Boy watched the episode with me. And then we watched, at his request, the second episode. It's now his favorite show to watch, no duct tape required.

The following night, we watched another episode. Given that there are 27 or so hours on DVD, we’ve got several weeks of western geek fun (what other show has a black-hat villain extolling the virtues of realism while demeaning expressionist painting while commenting on a rock that a painter is painting a landscape on so a train will think it’s the track and run into it, a la Wile E. Coyote?) we can start again.

Brisco is eternally optimistic, searching for “The Coming Thing,” his term for new technology and ideas that will create opportunity and wonder in the new century (the show is set in 1893). Alaska’s state nickname is “The Last Frontier,” and here’s to hoping that The Boy spends his time looking for, and creating his own opportunity and wonder in this century. And learns not to shop while sipping merlot.

Quote of the Day: "Nobody's had hot chocolate today. Why are there mini-marshmallows stuck to my shirt?" - The Mrs.