In the classic "Folsom Prison Blues," Johnny Cash sings:

When I was just a baby
My Mama told me, son
Always be a good boy
Don't ever play with guns
But I shot a man in Reno
Just to watch him die
When I hear that whistle blowin'
I hang my head and cry

My friend Doug Shaker asks: Why, if he shot a man in Reno, is he, as he puts it in the prior verse, "stuck in Folsom Prison"—a California State penitentiary?

This sounds a bit like a criminal procedure exam question: Explain all the reasons why he could have ended up in California prison. There are many possible explanations.

I thought at first that this was pure poetic license—Cash needed "Reno" to rhyme with something else. But a look at the verse shows that's not correct (although it does provide a kind of false rhyme with "blowin'"). He could've used any two-syllable town name (with the emphasis on the first syllable—what the poets call a "trochee"): Merced, Fresno, Jackson, or even Tahoe. [Tahoe would be a good one—it borders Reno, leading to the intriguing possibility that the shooting took place right at the border, with the shooter in California and the deceased in Reno (or vice versa), leading to a nice jurisdictional battle between the two States over who can prosecute him and where he can be prosecuted.]

An alternative explanation is that he wasn't actually charged with a crime for having shot a man in Reno (just to watch him die); he's in California prison because of some subsequent offense committed in California, and he's just reflecting, as country singers are wont to do, on his evil life and evil ways.

And there's another geographical curiosity in the song. The first verse goes like this:

I hear the train a comin'
It's rollin' 'round the bend
And I ain't seen the sunshine
Since, I don't know when
I'm stuck in Folsom Prison
And time keeps draggin' on
But that train keeps a-rollin'
On down to San Antone.

I'm thinking: down to San Antone? A train a-rollin' from Folsom, which is just outside Sacramento, and ending up in San Antonio?

It reminded me of "The Great Western and Pacific Railway Company"—the stock market scam that is one of the great 19th century British novels, Anthony Trollope's fabulous "The Way We Live Now." The G.W.P.R.C. was raising money ostensibly for a railroad line from San Francisco to the Gulf of Mexico at Veracruz, though actually no one had the slightest intention of laying a single mile of track—the point of the enterprise was just to issue stock and to fleece the unsuspecting public.

To my surprise, though, it turns out that there is indeed such a line—the old Southern Pacific (now part of the Union Pacific Railroad Company), which ran a line in the 1860s from San Francisco to San Diego, and which was extended in 1883 all the way through San Antonio to New Orleans. So there you go.

bp
<part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com>

On 12/6/2020 4:39 PM, Steve Jones wrote:

I head a man was shot in Reno just to watch him die
On Sun, Dec 6, 2020, 6:38 PM Bill Prince <[email protected]> wrote:
I heard a man was shot in Reno, just for hawking some cheap sump pumps.
bp
<part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com>
On 12/6/2020 3:31 PM, Steve Jones wrote:
Half the stuff comes out of the same warehouses or the websites are owned by the same parent company. Sumpumps.com makes you feel like you're dealing with a dedicated sump pump expert. It's all just some housewife in Reno running multiple sites between domestic batteries.
On Sun, Dec 6, 2020, 4:23 PM Ken Hohhof <[email protected]> wrote:
I expected that to be cooking tongs, not snake handling equipment.

From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Bill Prince
Sent: Sunday, December 6, 2020 4:11 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] OT good eats

You can get it for about $22 at Amazon, or $17 if you get it for Kindle.

(https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Jason+Schreiber&ref=nb_sb_noss_2)

We buy our snake tongs at Midwest Tongs (https://tongs.com/)
bp
<part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com>
On 12/6/2020 1:51 PM, Ken Hohhof wrote:
Things have gotten very specific. Not sure I’d buy a $32.50 book of just fruitcake recipes. You’d have to really, really, really love fruitcake.

There was an article the other day in the paper about how flasks have become very popular during the pandemic. The author bought some at, you guessed it, flasks.com.

And I just got a popup ad for exit signs from a merchant that sells nothing but exit signs, something like theexitstore.com.

Maybe I shouldn’t poke fun at them, now that I think about it, I have bought stuff from very targeted online stores. I order sump pumps from sumppumpsdirect.com, and I ordered a kit to fix squeaky floors from squeakyfloor.com. But 75 recipes for fruitcake seems extreme.

From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Bill Prince
Sent: Sunday, December 6, 2020 11:53 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] OT good eats

If you don't like the fruitcake you can buy, get this book and make the fruitcake you want.

Fruit Cake

Food stylist Jason Schreiber has transformed his lifelong love of baking and high-profile stints with Martha Stewart and celebrity cake king Ron Ben-Israel into a visually stunning and somewhat game-changing first cookbook about the role of fruit in cake.

Featuring 38 different fruits and 75 tantalizing recipes, Schreiber's "Fruit Cake: Recipes for the Curious Baker" (William Morrow, $32.50) re-imagines the much-maligned fruitcake in modern recipes that use fruit to enhance flavor and moisture.

Chapters are organized by cake category, such as "Soaked," and recipes run the gamut from winter-perfect polenta pound cake with spiced mandarins (Constant Cravings) and banana tiramisu (Soaked) to passion fruit lime Pavlova (Showstoppers).

You'll never think of fruitcake the same way. Now, it's fruit and cake.
bp
<part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com>
On 12/6/2020 7:53 AM, Chuck McCown via AF wrote:

Latin Bible is called the vulgate.

Sent from my iPhone

On Dec 6, 2020, at 7:07 AM, Ken Hohhof <[email protected]> wrote:

Vulgar, from Latin vulgus meaning the common people, the masses, the rabble. If you’re not vulgar, does that mean you’re elite?

From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Steve Jones
Sent: Sunday, December 6, 2020 12:59 AM
To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] OT good eats

If I were a vulgar person I would ask about deez nuts, but I'm not, so I wont.

On Sun, Dec 6, 2020, 12:44 AM Forrest Christian (List Account) <[email protected]> wrote:

I'm allergic to pretty much all nuts, there are of course a few things that people call nuts but really aren't, like coconut.

But yeah, macadamias and brazil nuts are out. Peanuts which are in a different family are also out.

Of course, it's been a long time since we figured out what I was allergic to, so there is always the possibility that we missed testing one, and that I'm not allergic to it, but the set of nuts I know 100% I'm allergic to is large enough and contains enough of the "tree nut" family that I'm not eager to go re-test all of them...

On Sat, Dec 5, 2020 at 9:02 PM Ken Hohhof <[email protected]> wrote:

Are you allergic to all nuts? What about macadamias or Brazil nuts? Just curious.

FWIW that recipe I found on foodnetwork.com looks like you could easily just leave out the pecans. But it looks like too much work - for half the effort, I have a poppy seed bundt cake recipe I’d make.

From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Forrest Christian (List Account)
Sent: Saturday, December 5, 2020 8:40 PM
To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] OT good eats

From Good Eats:

Say, have you heard the one about the end of the world? Everything's destroyed and there's nothing left but rats, roaches and a giant pile of fruitcake. Guess what happens? They all starve to death.

Now in fairness I like a the right fruitcake, but since I have that pesky nut allergy, I have to basically bake it myself. And yes, those scary candied fruits are in recipe.

On Sat, Dec 5, 2020 at 4:19 PM Chuck McCown via AF <[email protected]> wrote:

Orgasmically good fruitcake from Costco.

<image001.jpg>

Sent from my iPhone

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Re: [AFMUG] OT good eats

If You Shot a Man in Reno, Why are You in California State Prison?

Herein of "Folsom Prison Blues" and criminal jurisdiction.

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