Skip's Metal Art Shop

09/06/2026

Virgil and Hector and Chickens, Oh My!

Here’s another episode of the adventures of my old friend, Virgil and his mystically old dog, Hector, taking a sideways view of things in our high desert valley. . .
__ __________ __
"The difference between involvement and commitment is right there on your breakfast plate of bacon and eggs. The eggs show that a chicken was involved - but the bacon proves that a pig was committed.” ― Wil Rogers
__ __________ __
Virgil stopped-by the other day.
As he drove-up my driveway I could see that his dog, Hector, was sitting in the bed of the truck instead of in his usual seat, riding sh***un with his nose out of the window. And as Virgil opened the driver’s door to alight from his truck I could see that he had about a half dozen chickens sitting uneasily on Hector’s sh***un seat. Virgil quickly shut his truck door before any of them could fly out.
I walked around to the back of the truck and helped old Hector down off the tailgate as Virgil mounted my front porch stairs and settled into his favorite chair beside of the card table.
“Those are my dad-gummed Service Chickens!” Virgil exclaimed heatedly without preface. “And nobody ain’t gonna take them away from me without paralegal undue process or abridging my gaul-durned Hippa Act or something!”
I climbed the stairs of the front porch with Hector and sat down opposite a still visibly agitated Virgil. Hector took his place under the card table.
“I think one of your service chickens just laid an egg on the sh***un seat of your truck Virgil,” I said.
“Does that egg have a baby rooster in it?” Virgil asked.
“I don’t know”, I said. “I don’t think you can tell at this stage. anyways, and who cares? They all taste the same.”
“Well, if that dang egg has a baby rooster in it then we’re both in some kind of double jeopardy ‘cause in this county roosters are even more objectionable than hens. Their loud early morning crowing wakes neighbors up and give away your secret chamouflaged backyard chicken coop to the gaul-durned code enforcement revenuers who are always in the prowl for illegal fowl,” Virgil said, looking apprehensively up and down the road and peering up into the sky.
“Virgil, code enforcement has a lot more on their plates around here than bagging your fugitive chickens.” I said. “And anyways, your truck of passenger chickens is more likely to be flagged by a vigilant Flock camera first as it’s such an attention-getting novelty. I recon by now your feather-strewing truck is known by the whole dang Flock Safety Cloud from here to Kansas City!”
Virgil just sat there, looking defiant while I scratched Hector’s ears and asked, “Hey, shouldn’t Hector here have a dog license?”
“That . . . Just . . . Chinches it!” Virgil exploded, slapping the table with each word. “Cats can roam all free and easy, day and night, while dogs are all locked-up, leashed, and licensed! New laws and fees are just piling up right and left these days! Soon the dad-gummed Groundwater Authority will add an expensive new line to my property tax bill and, to top it off, some out-of-town carpetbagger will be allowed, despite our objections, to put a massive desert-spoiling data center in the Valley to light up our night sky, suck our aquifer dry, and spoil our air all they want!”
“And before you know it”, Virgil continued hotly, “you won’t be able to drive my own pickup truck, with or without chickens in it anymore because it’s not AI-integrated with all the other electric robot vehicles on the road!”
And as Virgil was hollering and slamming the card table, Hector snorted and got out from under it and ambled down the porch stairs out to the pickup truck which he barked at several times.
If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t have believed it. The truck engine suddenly fired-up, it grinded into first gear, the clutch engaged and the truck slowly moved down the driveway like it was being driven by six fugitive chickens who knew how to handle an old 265 V8 with a Borg-Warner 4-speed.
Chickens will always find a way.
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Skip Gorman ([email protected])

08/25/2026

Did you know the City partners with local individuals and volunteer groups to host multiple clean-up events each year?

Do you or your group want to host a local clean-up day?
The City and WM will work with you to help with coordinating your event and clean-up location, as well as provide:

🧤 Gloves & litter pickers
🗑️ Trash bags
🚛 A large roll-off dumpster delivered to the site
📣 Promotion for your event

A huge thank you to the incredible volunteers and local organizations who have already stepped up and shown up!

Submit your clean-up request using the QR code or the link below:
https://www.ridgecrest-ca.gov/clean-up

08/23/2026

Desperate Times and Desperate Measures

Here’s another weekly potpourri of thoughts and observations about breaking news and Valley things both great and small . . .
__ __________ __
"Fairy tales are more than true:
not because they tell us that dragons exist,
but because they tell us
that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman
__ __________ __
Virgil stopped-by the other day. He was driving a strange looking pickup truck though and had a big black poodle with him instead of his usual old dog, Hector, who is an ageless shaggy golden. But as he climbed down out of the truck and allowed the odd looking poodle out, I could then see that it was really one very annoyed old Hector with a very very bad haircut. And Virgil had somehow colored his buff coat coal black.
And I could see that Hector, a normally affable old dog, was not in a mood to have his head affectionately patted as he ambled past me without a glance directly to my front porch.
“Virgil,” I said, “I see that you wall-papered your pickup truck.”
“That I did!” Virgil admitted, “but I may have gone a bit too far with poor old Hector.”
“See, it’s those pesky Flock cameras all over the place!” Virgil said (hotly). “We can’t go hardly anywheres without being watched by some snoopy cat-loving overweight Karen who probably doesn’t approve of non-electric vehicles like my old truck and unwoke geezers like me. So we’ve gone incognito! NOW let them guess who we are!”
“Well,” I said, “your truck is now unique in the whole known universe but you really ought to change poor Hector back to like he was. I don’t think he’s happy as a black poodle and anyway I don’t think Flock cares about dogs as much as it cares about kidnappers and bank robbers.”
“It was Hector himself that started all this!” Virgil said. “See, while I was over at Denny’s a couple of weeks ago having breakfast, Hector jumped out of the back of the truck and went over to sniff around one of the Flock poles nearby. Now, I don’t know if my old dog had an urgently full bladder or if he was making an artful editorial act of defiance but when he raised his leg to baptize the base of that Flock pole he must’ve shorted out it’s electrical system and it went off like a 4th of July Roman candle.”
“We skedaddled from there using side streets and dirt roads back up to my place and have been lying low ever since wondering how to sneak out of the Valley without Hector here being impounded (or worse!). Hector wasn’t crazy about his new look but as the black shoe polish fades and his fur grows back, I think I’ll try to make him look like a Saint Bernard next with a little wooden wh***ey cask tied around his neck. I’ll put some spray paint over the truck’s wall paper and get myself some tattoos. See, the Flock image recorders will forget all about us after 30 days and if Hector can learn to control his bladder, we could get back to almost being normal.”
“But until then,” Virgil said, We are incognito. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Right, Hector?”

__ __________ __
That has been this week’s audio blog, and this is Skip Gorman ([email protected]) returning you all now back to a quieter and gentler place. . .

08/16/2026

June 16, 2015
RECYCLING IN THE FATHERLAND

Here’s another weekly potpourri of thoughts and observations about breaking news and Valley things both great and small . . .

Ein Platz fur allies und allies hot sein Platz. (A place for everything and everything in it’s place)

So I and my first wife have been in Germany for the last couple of weeks. Our daughter and her family lives there in a little Bavarian village not entirely unlike ours. So on this trip I very deliberately compared everything I saw with Ridgecrest. It was kind of fun.

First, I found out why there are no bathroom jokes in Europe. For one thing the formal word for “bathroom” in Deutsch (a language which typically names things by precise function) has twenty-seven syllables and is a full paragraph in size. A literal translation might be “the compact single-purpose hydraulic room with the two-stage toilet, miniature sink and Geneva convention defying toilet paper”. While that sinks-in I also found out why there are no “breakfast” jokes in Germany either but I’ll explain that in another blog.

Germany is all about recycling. Seriously. That’s what this particular blog is mostly about. “But we recycle!” you may retort. Sure you do, but listen. The difference between German recycling and California recycling is like the difference between a strapless gown and a gownless strap. Oh, we wave at recycling in a perfunctorily manner but our hearts aren’t really in it. Not really. Even if we are conscientious about putting glass and plastic and yesterday’s newspaper in the blue can and everything else in the green can, we are pikers when it comes to recycling. Want proof?

We have a dump.

Oh, it’s a serviceable dump and I’m sure it’s properly maintained. And now it’s a high mountain over what started out many years ago as a deep hole. And as the years go by it’s growing and spreading like a WalMart customer’s average butt size. I go out to our dump occasionally to toss some broken thing from my pickup truck onto that odoriferous pile. And I am always a bit distracted by the throbbing disquiet radiating from that truly terrible mess. There are dumps just like it all over the state and the entire nation. We’re used to it. We think this is normal. Now I’m not too sure.

Now, don’t take this wrong, but I discovered that in Germany they don’t have dumps. Apparently there are no mountains of trash to bury. And it all starts in the kitchen. There is no kitchen trash can as such but there are a half dozen or so other containers (each of which has a tongue-rupturing multi-syllable Deutsch name). Each container exists to accept a precise kind of kitchen waste. Drop a cat food can into the compost bin or some printer paper into the aluminum bin by mistake and Gott Himself will sour your kraut but good! Indeed, there is a household array of color-coded outside bins (each is carefully weighed on pickup), community dumpsters down the street for glass (just don’t dump any in there on quiet Sundays) and a large comprehensive Village Recycling Yard nearby at the train station. Once you properly recycle, there is nothing left to bury.

They do NOT have a dump (Quod Erat Demonstrantum).

I visited that recycling yard. My daughter was my interpreter. I met about a half dozen uniformed proud and industrious fellows that facilitate unloading vehicles, placing the recyclables into the appropriate bins and keeping the whole place neat and clean. I learned that it’s all a money-making enterprise. Everything is sold to companies that convert the material into new product. The municipality could not afford to bury their trash! It would be wasteful and inefficient.

I know it’s a cultural thing. I wish we had somehow headed in that “nothing gets buried” direction long ago. I think it’s a bit too late now. We have a shifting and moderately transient population here in the Valley. Recycling all refuse is essentially a monolithic and ingrained way of life, not a hodgepodge of statutes cobbled together by a detached bureaucracy in Sacramento. Anyway, we in California have other worries just now. And word is getting around. I wondered into an English book store in East Berlin (Saint George’s Bookshop, Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin) and chatted with the proprietor, Jenny (from Bakersfield!). When she learned I was from Ridgecrest she asked how we were holding up in the drought.

That has been this week’s AudioBlogColumn, and this is Skip Gorman ([email protected]) returning you all now back to a quieter and gentler place. . .

08/15/2026

BOXING WITH POP

Here’s another weekly potpourri of thoughts and observations about breaking news and Valley things both great and small . . .

This AudioBlogColumn is brought to you by Sepia-Toned Childhood Memories. Yes, all that sweet-smelling, evocative, forever amber stuff that’s left over once life’s heavy baggage is resolved, forgotten or abandoned.

Back when I was a kid (around 1955) television’s only reality show was professional wrestling. My father hated professional wrestling because “it was all phony!” I paid close attention to my father so I didn’t like wrestling either (I was around ten years old). But he really liked professional boxing and thus so did I. It was real, not phony. So he and I found ourselves in front of the TV on most Friday nights eagerly anticipating the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports featuring announcer Jimmy Lennon (uncle of the Lennon Sisters!) at the Olympic Auditorium in L.A.

I suspect Pop may have been in a few fistfights in his youth. He was an athletic-looking Irishman who in his youth put-in a stint as a grave digger. Back in those days graves were dug by hand (no backhoe!). Pop once said that digging his first grave took him all day and almost killed him. But after he “got used to it” he could dig three or four graves a day - no problem. So as a young man he had the body of a Greek god. I much later came to suspect that his avid interest in boxing was perhaps informed from pugnacious experiences in his past which he never spoke about. He knew the boxing language and all the punches and tactics and quietly followed many professional boxers and trainers. Now, we were a growing Catholic family (six kids!) but for some reason I alone shared Pop’s enthusiasm for professional boxing and, as my identity was gradually subsumed among a crowd of other kids, it turned out to be the only thing we (he and I) shared with any filial intimacy. I liked that. And I liked boxing because back then boxing was fascinating.

We once watched transfixed as a good fight went terribly wrong. I don’t know what year it was exactly but Pop was really looking forward to it. Welterweight champion, Benny “Kid” Paret and a dangerous opponent, Emile Griffith, were about to meet again in the ring at Madison Square Garden and “it was going to be a Pier Six brawl!” as pop said. They had been exchanging insults since the weigh-in and “the Kid” was eager to defend his title though he had only recently been roughed-up by scrappy Gene Fulmer (who my Pop insisted was “a street thug with loaded gloves”).

I’ll never forget that fight. Kid Paret had Griffith in serious trouble early-on but the bell saved him before he went down. It was in the twelfth round that Emile Griffith staged a furious comeback and crowded Paret into a corner with a flurry of blows one of which tagged the Kid on the chin and turned his legs to rubber. Now Benny Kid Paret was all but defenseless and out on his feet but was being held up by the corner ropes as a berserk Emile Griffith hit him in the head more than twenty times. By the time the referee finally pulled Griffith off to stop the fight the damage was done. Kid Paret slid to the canvas and never woke up. He died six days later. I think later Pop was a little embarrassed I saw that. I think he caught hell from Ma about it. But I knew boxing was serious business. I kept thinking, “Wow!”

It didn’t seem all that serious though when Ray “Windmill” White was scheduled to fight. Pop enjoyed “The Windmill” but kept predicting that someday some angry opponent is going to knock White’s head clean off his shoulders and into the fifth row. See, Ray “WindMill” White was a lanky light heavyweight out of Ventura who fought at the Olympic. He always packed them in. His tremendous reach held most opponents at bay and he was skillful enough to actually do some comical grab-assing as he fought. He did his patented windmill punch at least once in every fight and often did a behind-the-back punch which delighted everyone (except his opponent). He went on to hold the state title and, as far as I could learn, is still erect and lucid helping out at a gym in Ventura.

Gene Fulmer died several years ago. Learning of his demise actually started this thread. I never liked Gene Fulmer as a boxer. He wasn’t at all flashy and clinched a lot. Pop didn’t either but respected his street-wise caginess. Pop had me watch carefully as Fulmer “clinched and mugged” over and over again. He said Fulmer hit his opponents more with his elbows and the top of his head than with his fists. Now, I know that out of the ring Fulmer was probably a good man (a family man) but in the ring his opponents were often badly cut and he won a lot of fights by TKOs. Pop said that he was a dirty fighter though so I didn’t like him back then. Now, I don’t know. I learned he had a rough life after boxing.

There’s more to share about boxing and my father but space and time are limited. Whenever a name like Jose’ Luis Martine Del Campo (the biggest name in boxing!) or Sugar Ray Robinson or Floyd Patterson (who Pop thought was the finest pure boxer who ever lived) come up, I always think of those special Friday nights long long ago. Just mostly me and Pop. Special memories.

That has been this week’s AudioBlogColumn, and this is Skip Gorman ([email protected]) returning you all now back to a quieter and gentler place. . .

08/13/2026

Local Economic Indicators

Here’s another episode of the adventures of my old friend, Virgil, and his mythically old dog, Hector, taking a sideways view of things in our high desert valley. . . .
— ———————- —
Virgil stopped-by the other day. The old fellow seemed unusually animated as he clambered down from the cab of his pickup truck and encouraged his old dog, Hector, to join us. “I think that I found a novel economic metric”, Virgil proudly announced. Hector looked up at me with a perfunctory half-hearted wag of his tail hoping perhaps that Virgil’s exciting news actually meant something to me, because it sure meant nothing to him. I suggested that we get out of the Fall desert wind, have some hot chocolate and hear all about it.
Once inside, Hector went directly over to his rug by the swamp cooler vent and settled-in for a cool afternoon nap. Economics meant little to him. But Virgil had barely sipped his drink before launching into his newly discovered market trend metric. “It’s all about noticing stuff that other people sort of ignore and then nosing around on the internet for calendar-corresponding economic moves” he said. “Then I just link them up and maybe get an on-camera interview with Maria Barteromo on Fox Business.”
I must’ve been staring at him with enough obvious google-eyed open-mouthed stupification that Virgil felt the need to elaborate. “Do you remember years ago somebody discovered that the popular length of women’s skirts was a predictor of coming economic trends? Yes? Well, this is the same thing! And, you don’t have to understand the connection to squawk about it and then somehow cash-in on it. Nobody cares!”
“Listen, for instance, did you know that there was also a Necktie Width Indicator and a Baby Diaper Rash Indicator and a Buttered Popcorn Indicator (just to name a few)? Serious people high up in corner offices way over in New York City follow stuff like this and place big money on certain stocks if midwesterners complain enough about the mosquitos in Indiana or if Sports Illustrated selects a female model for the cover of their Swimsuit Edition. I don’t think anybody understands why any of these or, say, the Inverse High Heel Index works as a reliable economic predictor but as long as it does, there’s money to be made.”
“Now, Hector and I have been driving around Ridgecrest since Hector was just a pup. We in the IWV are not only just a little red island in a vast blue ocean politically, we are also a splendidly isolated economic test tube. See, stuff happens here that isn’t influenced by any adjacent communities. That’s because there aren’t any. We are literally all alone and are thus naturally organic. That’s the key! I’ve noticed things that might serve as local economic predictors and here are a few of them. First, there is the ‘Adrift Shopping Cart Correlation’. This tracks a rising local economy two whole quarters in advance. The shopping carts from several local businesses in town have been relentlessly massing at the little recycling yard near my shop. Folks wheel them in loaded with plastic bottles or aluminum cans, turn that in for money, and then saunter away abandoning their requisitioned carts nearby. I think there’s about a dozen gathered there by now, huddling near a sympathetic power pole.”
“Second, there’s the ‘Turn Signal Indicator’. Now, in the past this was just an annoying affectation of numbskull Ridgecrest drivers before I discovered that the number of middle finger flip-offs issued for neglecting to use one’s turn signal is a reliable indicator of a falling Dow Jones Index for that week. Remember, you don’t need to understand it to make money off it. Another Indicator I’m noticing is the ‘Ridgecrest Road Work Gyrator’. We (Hector and I) have been noticing that vagrant hopscotched stretches of our informally paved streets are being torn-up and repaved. City officials deny that this has been a grant-funded search for Jimmy Hoffa’s long lost body. Be that as it may . . . the total in-work frontage (in linear feet) along the boulevard (normalized to the overall distance between Ridgecrest Boulevard and the Base Front Gate, expressed in furlongs) is sinusoidally proportional to the odds of the Federal Reserve raising it’s interest rates this year. I expect a call from Jerome Powell on this soon.”
“Finally, there’s the ‘SGMA Sigma’ for those of us who have begun to pay attention to Governor Brylcreem’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act and it’s resultant alphabet soup of bureaucracies, adjudications and dueling town meetings will ultimately affect us just plain folks who aren’t growing pistachios, are not properly lawyered-up, lack a voice and feel otherwise under-represented on water decisions. The extent to which these poor schmucks get saddled with vastly higher water rates and/or effectively have their domestic wells confiscated is predictive of a very hot Summer next year. Remember - You heard it here!”
— ———————- —
Skip Gorman (Oct 28, 2024)
([email protected])

08/10/2026

May 12, 2025 (The F-word)

Army Drill Instructors must have been ordered to “watch their language” when cussing out the troops in basic training back in the mid-sixties. I was there at Fort Ord on the Monterey Peninsula and I noticed it. But the artistic creativity the DIs resorted to in delivering their subsequent “profanities” was truly remarkable (and even more effective).
I don’t remember our DI’s name but he remonstrated with some poor distracted schlump in our training platoon with enough high-volume and energetic alacrity (without using one cuss word!) to bring him almost to tears. Listen.
“YOU USELESS, MISERABLE, STONE-DEAF, UNCOORDINATED, SLACK-JAWED, SKEETER-KNEED, TOILET-BRAINED, BUFFALO-GUT, PILE OF BLOODY DOG VOMIT!!!”
Heady stuff, that. But those sepia-toned memories of the dim past, back when we strove to maintain an awkward modicum of civility even during our divisive Vietnam morass, are now, right here in Ridgecrest, causing me to wince in shock by contrast to the profane signage I saw on public display last weekend at the corner of China Lake and Ridgecrest Boulevards yesterday.
I have always disliked the F-word. It’s one of George Carlin’s famous nine words (later affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court) that are still illegal by federal law to use on network television or radio during times when children are likely to be listening. I have to assume the “protesting” female, blithely seated on the Northeast curb at the intersection of China Lake and Ridgecrest Boulevards, holding up the F-word signage (in caps one foot tall) for any and all to see (and be repulsed by), feels she’s exercising her constitutional right of free speech in profanely insulting president Trump.
I don’t know this “protestor’s” name but if I had an opportunity to chat with her I would no doubt feel tempted to ask her about her particular choice of words in this case. I would ask that question the way Cyrano DeBergerac famously did except that I would offer her a much more thoughtful and creative selection of words to use instead of that tired old drab meaningless F-word. Sadly, I suspect that she probably wouldn’t have a clue what I was talking about. Too bad.
Publicly displaying obscene words is arguably actionable. But I would be reluctant to task our local police with issuing misdemeanors for this behavior alone. See, our cops have many more serious activities to attend to around here. And I suspect that the intersection’s Flock cameras may have already identified the f-word Lady (as she’s now known) so perhaps the offended public can conceivably seek recourse as they may.
So what can we do? To my mind, acquiescing (perhaps with a helpless shrug) to overt public profanity is like accepting public defecation, spray paint graffiti, and creeping blight. These are the early symptoms of a deadly cultural cancer that will ultimately suck the life out of any community.
F-word Lady - I get it. You hate Trump. The F-word should have nothing to do with that. Please stop with the profane signage.

Skip Gorman
May 12, 2025

03/15/2026

03/14/2026

We did breakfast this morning at the Inyokern Cactus & Flame eatery. So far we have had several dinners and a lunch there. All have been pleasant and rewarding eating experiences. This was our first breakfast there and it did not disappoint. My first wife had waffles and I did Country Eggs Benedict (CEB).
We both noted that their coffee is outstanding! My CEB was (as is the case with many of C&F’s offerings) surprisingly different from the Hollandaise sauce drowned EB one is typically served at most other breakfast eatery’s. So in lieu of emulsified egg yolks, clarified butter, lemon juice, cayenne pepper and a prayer, C&F’s “Country” EB involves white sausage gravy over perfectly poached eggs and sausage patties on English muffin halves. It was a tasty delight!
Both my CEB and Denise’s big waffles came with what I shall call “evolved roasted potatoes” (almost as good as properly cooked hash browns - that nobody in this valley can do) which we both enjoyed.

02/21/2026